‘I’m your great-aunt, yet you mean as much to me as if you were my own daughter. What is it, love? Something’s bothering you, and it isn’t just a hankering for a rich boss who sounds a bit too attractive for his own good.’
Steeling herself, Magenta said, ‘I had a fling with him once. That’s what’s wrong. It was six years ago, and all mixed up in that period of my life that was wiped out after my brain haemorrhage. His doctor said I might have blanked it out subconsciously.’
‘His doctor?’ Josie Ashton noted. ‘That sounds like this Andreas is a man with a mission.’
‘Perhaps,’ Magenta murmured, unable to explain to her aunt just what she thought Andreas Visconti’s mission might be. ‘But apparently his doctor’s a bit of a specialist in the field. Anyway, things are coming back—although I still can’t remember everything about what happened between Andreas and me. From things he’s said, I don’t think it ended very amicably, but one thing I do know...’ Magenta hesitated, inhaling deeply before she went on to impart, ‘Theo’s his, Aunt Josie.’
There was a long pause at the end of the line before the disembodied voice replied, ‘I guessed as much.’
‘What do you mean?’ Magenta asked. Her aunt was continuing to surprise her. ‘How could you? Even Mum didn’t know. I mean...she thought...she said...’
‘She said that during the time you’d obviously conceived, which was just before that part of your life you’ve never been able to remember, you’d had several purely casual boyfriends.’
Magenta cringed at how she had ever allowed herself to be convinced of that, although her mother obviously believed it to be true.
‘I know.’ Josie Ashton let out a sigh. ‘I’ve suspected that it was Andreas somebody-or-other for a long time—though your mother was under the impression he was no one special even when I raised the question with her as long ago as when you were in that hospital. But to me there’s nothing casual about a man whose name is on a woman’s lips when she’s still drugged up, floating in and out of a coma.’
‘Why didn’t you ever say anything?’ Magenta queried, amazed that she could even have spoken his name when, after regaining full consciousness, she hadn’t remembered a thing about him until that night he’d walked into that bar.
‘I did. Once or twice. After you came back to live with me when you came out of hospital. But you seemed to deny all knowledge of him, so I gave up asking after a while.’
And she probably didn’t remember that, Magenta thought, because she’d been in a kind of daze, with her body still repairing itself, at the time.
‘Have you told him?
Josie meant about Theo being Andrea’s son.
‘No.’
‘But you’re going to?’
It was more than a question coming down the line.
‘I can’t, Aunt Josie. Not yet.’
‘Why ever not?’ The woman’s tone was incredulous. ‘Doesn’t the man have a right to know that he’s fathered a child? Doesn’t Theo have the right to know who his father is?’
‘Of course he does. But I have to do it in my own time.’ She could hear her son’s eager little voice in the background, begging his aunt to let him have the phone. ‘You won’t say anything to him, will you?’ Magenta begged, panicking. ‘You won’t tell him? Not until I can?’ There was an almost desperate edge to her voice now. ‘Promise you won’t.’
‘Of course I shan’t tell him,’ Aunt Josie placated her.
‘What won’t you tell me?’ The little boy had obviously scrambled up on to the woman’s lap, as he did with Magenta sometimes when she was on the phone, and was trying to reach the mouthpiece. ‘What won’t she tell me, Mummy?’
‘Nothing, poppet.’ Magenta’s voice became gently protective. ‘Now, more importantly, what have you been doing? Did you go riding this morning, as you said you were going to?’
It was with a suppressed sigh of relief that Magenta realised the little boy had forgotten all about his aunt’s conversation with his mother, and was giving her a breathless account of how the little Shetland pony that the local farmer had said he could ride had been lame.
‘Oh, darling, there’ll be another time,’ she consoled, hearing the disappointment in his voice. ‘When you come home Mummy will see what she can do about sending you for lessons.’
A movement by the door brought her head whipping round. Andreas was leaning against the doorframe, listening to every word she was uttering!