Nor was she the fluffy, girlish type to dispense them.
‘Of course,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll make sure that I...rearrange my weekend plans...’
Which were what, exactly? Gabriel wondered.
‘Good. In that case, twenty minutes to eat, and then let’s carry on...’
CHAPTER FOUR
ALICE HAD NOT been out of the country on a holiday for a while. She knew that this wasn’t going to be a holiday—the opposite. But she would still be leaving the country and how hard would it be to take a little time out and explore some of the city on her own? Even if it meant grabbing an hour or two when they weren’t entertaining clients or working.
And her mother had taken it well—better than Alice had expected, in fact.
She had been down in Devon, as usual, at the weekend and had decided, before she had even stepped foot in her mother’s little two-bedroom cottage in the village, that she would break the news when she was about to leave.
Pamela Morgan lived on her nerves. A highly strung woman even in the very best of times, she had become progressively more neurotic and mentally fragile during the long course of her broken marriage.
Still only in her mid-fifties, she remained a beautiful woman, beautiful in a way Alice knew she never could be. Her mother was small, blonde, with a faraway look in her big blue eyes. She was the ultimate helpless damsel that men seemed to adore.
But that ridiculous beauty had been as much of a burden in the long run as it had been a blessing. Growing up, Alice had watched helplessly from the sidelines as her mother had floundered under the crushing weight of her husband’s arrogant, far more flamboyant personality. She hadn’t seemed to possess the strength to break free. She was the classic example of a woman who had always relied on her looks and, when the going had got tough, had had nothing else upon which to fall back.
When Rex Morgan had begun to lose interest in his pretty wife, she had not been able to cope. She had desperately tried to make herself prettier—had done her hair in a thousand different styles, dyed it in a hundred different shades of vanilla blonde, had dieted until her figure made men stop in their tracks—but none of it had ever been enough. In the end she had given up, choosing instead to remain passive as her husband’s philandering had beome more and more outrageous.
She had cowered when he had bellowed and waited without complaining when he had disappeared for days on end, reappearing without a word of explanation but reeking of perfume.
She had sat quietly and in fear as he had sapped every ounce of her confidence so that she could no longer see a way out, far less find the courage to look for it. And she had not complained when he had told her that, if it weren’t for the money, he would have walked out on the marriage a long time ago.
The fact was that he’d been financially tied to her. There was still a mortgage on the house, too many bills to pay, and if they divorced and she got her fair share he would have ended up living in something ugly and nasty, no longer able to live it up with his various women.
So he had stayed put but he had made sure to make life as unpleasant for his fragile wife as he could.
Whenever Alice felt a little insecure about the way she looked, she would sternly tell herself that good looks brought heartache. Look at her mother.
And look at those girls Gabriel dated, the Georgia lookalikes. Who said that a woman with beauty had it all?
Rex Morgan was dead now, in a car accident that had released his wife from her captivity, but he had left a telling legacy behind him. Pamela Morgan was housebound and had been for a while. The thought of leaving the four walls around her and venturing outside terrified her. Over time, and in small but significant stages, she had gradually become agoraphobic and was fortunate now to live in a small village where people looked in on her during the week to make sure that she was okay. In a city, where their house had been, she would have been completely lost.
At weekends, Alice would gently try to ease her out into the garden and, a couple of times recently, actually down to the nearest shop, although that had been a lengthy exercise.
She paid for professional help, which cost an arm and a leg, but recovery was tortoise-slow and uncertain.
Weekends, Alice suspected, were her mother’s favourite times, so Alice made sure to reserve those weekends for her, whatever the personal cost.
And, after a year and a half of treatment and regular weekend visits, Alice felt like she was beginning to see a slightly different woman in her mother. She seemed less tentative, more open to a short walk. Of course, the treatment would continue. In conjunction with the occasional pep talk, Alice felt confident that at some point in time she would be able to have more than just the odd weekend away from her mother’s side.