Meeting Andreas in that restaurant. Laughing with Andreas. Making love with him.... Where, it didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered then. She pressed the heels of her hands against the wells of her eyes, her breath catching as a heated and desperate desire took hold in her mind. Why had it been desperate? She shook her head to try and jolt herself into remembering. She had to remember...
There was a big man. Sullen. Andreas’s father! And Maria. Maria was his grandmother! Oh, but there had been such ill feeling! She recalled feeling the lowest of the low. There was shouting now. Andreas was shouting at her. Telling her she was shallow-minded and materialistic. Telling her she was no good—just like her mother.
In a crumpled heap beside the toilet she relieved herself of the nausea that remembering produced and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. For the first time she was glad that Theo was spending part of his school holiday in the country with her great-aunt. It would have distressed her little boy to have seen her in such a state.
Winding her arms around herself, she ached for him, missing him as much as on the day when she had woken up from that coma to realise she’d lost not only two months of her life, but also the baby she’d remembered carrying. It was the only thing she had remembered. Except that she hadn’t lost him...
She started sobbing with all the same poignancy with which she’d sobbed that day when her widowed aunt, Josie Ashton, had brought her healthy eight-week-old son into the hospital and laid him against her breast. Dear Great-Aunt Josie, with her abrupt manner and her outspokenness, whom Magenta hadn’t seen for at least ten years. But the woman had had no qualms, she remembered, about answering her mother’s cry for help when a sick daughter and the arrival of a new grandson had been too much for Jeanette James to cope with.
She was sobbing equally, though, for the way her mind had blanked out her child’s father. How could she have forgotten him? she agonised, feeling the loss for her son, for the lack of a father figure in his life, rather than for herself. What had he done that had driven her subconscious into shut down so completely? What had she done? she wondered, suddenly seized by the frightening possibility that she might somehow deserve his condemnation.
For heaven’s sake, think! she urged herself, desperate for answers.
But the floodgates that had started to open refused to budge any further, and by the time she arrived at her interview the following week, she felt worn out from the effort of trying to force them apart.
‘I see from your CV that you only acquired your qualification in Business Studies over the last eighteen months, and that you didn’t work anywhere on a permanent basis for the preceding four years,’ said the older of the two women who were interviewing her.
There was a middle-aged man there too, who suddenly chipped in with, ‘May I ask what you were doing in the meantime?’
‘I’ve been bringing up my son,’ Magenta supplied, relieved to be able to say it without any hesitation in her speech, especially when she felt as though she were facing an inquisition.
The interview was for the post of PA to the marketing manager of a rapidly expanding hotel chain, and Magenta had gone for a totally sophisticated image. With her hair up, and wearing a tailored grey suit and maroon camisole, with the stripes in the silk scarf around her neck blending the two colours, she didn’t think she could have looked smarter if she had tried.
She was desperate to get this job to help her pay off her mounting debts so that she could stay on in her flat and give her child all the security and comforts she herself had never had. For that reason she had chosen not to disclose everything about herself when she had applied for this position three weeks ago, certain that the reason she hadn’t been offered any of the endless list of the other jobs she had applied for was because she had been too forthcoming with the truth.
But this job looked as if it was hers—particularly as the older woman on the other side of the desk was making no secret of the fact that she favoured Magenta over the only other candidate on the shortlist.
‘And you won’t find it a problem dividing your time between the demands of the office and those of a five-year-old?’ The younger, fair-haired woman, by the name of Lana Barleythorne, was challenging her. ‘He can’t have been at school very long...’
‘Well over a year,’ Magenta supplied, proud of how bright and advanced for his age her little boy was. ‘And I do have very satisfactory childcare.’ She didn’t tell them about Great-Aunt Josie, who had shown her and Theo such unconditional love when they had needed it most.
Her answer seemed to please her interviewers, because the more matronly of the two women was now explaining that the marketing manager for whom she’d be working was attending a conference that day but had asked if Magenta would be prepared to come in and meet her later in the week.