‘Really, Angelo? Like what?’
‘Oh, friendships can be such fiendishly fickle things, especially among the rich and beautiful in London. And how demeaning for you were word to get around that you were finding it hard to cope with the misery of rejection, that you were willing to creep around trying to make trouble for me long after the event. You might even find yourself being portrayed as somewhat unbalanced, and the whiff of emotional instability is a major turn-off when it comes to friends, I would have said. No one likes a stalker. ‘
Some of the confidence was draining away but Georgina still managed to maintain eye contact with him, while Francesca watched in fascinated silence.
‘Stalker?’ She dropped her eyes and when she next looked at Angelo it was with contrition. Francesca had never seen such a rapid transformation of facial expression. The woman could have been nominated for an Oscar. ‘How could you accuse me of that? Don’t you know that I’m only here because I really care about you? And don’t want you to be seen as a laughing stock?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Georgina, and I don’t intend to waste any more time listening to the rantings of a jealous woman.’
‘I’m not ranting. Ask your girlfriend about Birmingham and that unfortunate brush with trouble she had. I’m sure she’ll only be too happy to tell you what I’m talking about—to fill you in on why exactly she won’t be marrying you. Ditched for the second time, Angelo…how degrading for you.’ She pushed herself away from the window ledge and slanted a malicious smile at Francesca. ‘Well, I’ll be off now. Hope you haven’t too many pieces to pick up, Angelo.’ She left as she had entered, in a swirl of elegant complacency.
‘Care to tell me what that was all about?’ Angelo swung round so that he was facing Francesca.
The house of cards had finally come crashing down. She took a deep breath and met his cool, curious gaze steadily.
‘It’s something I should have told you a long time ago. When we first met, in fact.’
‘Which is?’
‘When we met, Angelo, I was a model, working in Europe, a glamorous person without any roots anywhere and no past. Or rather, no past that I felt I could let on to you.’ And the bits that I did fill you in on were creations, little figments I never thought would come back to haunt me…
‘And why would that be?’ Angelo had gone very still but that was only for a moment. Then he walked across to the sofa and sat down.
‘That would be because…because of who you are, someone huge and important, moving in all the right circles, mixing with all the right people.’ Francesca looked down and was surprised to see that her hands were fluttering nervously on her lap. She didn’t feel nervous. Just numb. ‘The truth is that you never really knew me at all, not the real me.’
‘The real you being…?’
‘The real me being someone who grew up on one of the roughest council estates in Birmingham, ran with all the wrong people. My mother died from a drugs overdose when I was eight and at sixteen I left school altogether to take care of my father. He was an alcoholic, you see, and—well, somebody had to take care of him so that’s what I did. I didn’t mind. I was fed up at school anyway. They tried to get me back but I wasn’t having any of it. Dad was on benefits and we had enough to just about struggle through.’
Angelo, sitting in complete silence, was trying hard to equate the glamorous model he had met, dated and loved with the person she was now describing. She had always avoided questions about her past but the impression she had left him with was of someone who had lived a fairly ordinary middle-class life. Her revelations now were peeling off the layers of what he thought he knew and exposing the face of someone who was a complete stranger to him and always had been. It left a harshly sour taste in his throat, the sour taste of deception.
‘Then Dad died, quite suddenly, and I was left with nothing. I had no education to speak of and, anyway, it was too late for me to think of going back to school. Where I grew up, people didn’t think about going to school, they thought of ways to get out of it. Even if I had wanted to, I would never have been able to, the peer pressure would have been too much.’ Francesca watched Angelo’s expressionless face with a sinking heart. Maybe if she had given him some indication in the past that her life had been troubled, then he wouldn’t now be sitting there, looking at her as though he was seeing her for the first time.
She took a deep breath and ploughed on. ‘Jack was one of the lads in our group and my best friend. I didn’t have many girlfriends. They didn’t like the way I looked, but Jack and I were mates. It was his suggestion that we just clear off, head for London. It seemed a good idea at the time. I was seventeen by then but I knew that with Dad no longer around, the Social Services might be inclined to get involved and I didn’t want to go down that road. The minute Social Services get involved there’s a good chance that you’ll end up worse off than you were to start with.’