Where You Belong. Barbara Taylor Bradford
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front of her. He wrapped his arms around Fiona and gave her a big bear hug, then hugged Moira and Rory.
Bringing me forward into the group, he introduced me. ‘Fiona this is Val – Val Denning.’
‘Hello, Val,’ she said warmly in a soft voice, and she gave me a small half smile and thrust out her hand.
I took hold of it, and said, ‘Fiona’, and inclined my head, trying not to stare at her. She had a lovely face, with high cheekbones, a dimpled chin and smooth brow. Her skin was that pale milky white which Irish redheads seem to be blessed with, liberally peppered with freckles across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones. Her hair, cut short and curly, was flame-coloured and her eyes were dark, black as coal. A true Celt, I thought.
‘I’m so glad you were able to come to London,’ Fiona was saying to Jake in her lilting brogue that bespoke her heritage. ‘To be honest, I’d worried that you might both be off on assignments, that you wouldn’t make the memorial service. Thanks for coming.’ She looked at me, and then back at Jake and said, ‘So you’ll be joining us at the house to take a bite with us?’
Jake hesitated uncertainly, gave me a quick glance and said to Fiona, ‘Val hasn’t been feeling well since we got here last night, have you, Val?’
He had adroitly thrown the ball into my court and I had no option but to go along with him. ‘Er, no, I haven’t, not really. I think I must be coming down with something.’
Fiona’s face dropped. ‘Oh, that’s such a disappointment, ’tis indeed, Val. And here I was wanting to give you both something of Tony’s. As a memento, you know. There’s so much at the house, all of his possessions collected over the years. I thought you could choose something, Val, and you Jake, something personal like a camera, or maybe a pair of cufflinks.’ She paused and shook her head, and a wry smile touched her mouth. ‘Well, as far as Tony’s concerned, there would be nothing more personal than a camera I’m thinking, since every camera he ever owned was part of him.’
‘We do want you to come, Jake, you worked alongside Dad for so long. And you should come, Miss Denning,’ Rory cut in, looking directly at me. ‘If you feel up to it. It’s not a real wake, you know. It’s a sort of…well, it’s just a gathering of friends remembering my father with his family, in his home –’
‘It won’t be the same without you,’ Fiona interjected. ‘Why, Jake, you were so close to him these last few years I thought at times that you were joined at the hip. Please come to the house. It means so much to me and the children.’
Jake said something but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead I was staring at Fiona. And I knew with absolute certainty that she was not Tony’s ex-wife. Fiona was still his wife. Or rather, his widow.
I
‘Tony came to me at the end of July and said he was divorced. Why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t?’ I asked as evenly as possible, trying to keep my voice level and controlled.
‘Because I didn’t know he wasn’t,’ Jake answered, returning my stare with one equally penetrating.
‘But why didn’t you know? You were his best buddy, and you seem very pally with Fiona. You must have known something, known what was going on in their life together!’ I exclaimed, my voice rising slightly.
Jake did not answer.
We stood facing each other in my room at the Milestone, where we had returned after leaving the Brompton Oratory. When truth and reality had suddenly hit me in the face at the church, I had hurriedly excused myself to Fiona, hinting in a vague way that I really wasn’t well and had to leave. Under pressure from her, Jake had finally agreed to go to her house once he had dropped me off at the hotel. On the way here in the car, he had tried to talk to me, asking me why I had rushed out so abruptly. But I’d hushed him into silence, explaining that we must wait to have our discussion in private.
Now we were having it. He suddenly reached out, as if to take me in his arms. But as he moved towards me, I took a step backwards. ‘Don’t try to comfort me right now,’ I said swiftly. ‘I’m not in the mood, Jake, and anyway I want to talk this out with you.’ I shook my head. ‘I always thought you were my friend, my best friend, actually, but now…’ I let my sentence trail off.
Instantly I saw that I had annoyed him. His mouth tightened into a thin line and his bright blue eyes, usually so benign, had turned flinty and cold. ‘Don’t you dare question my friendship and loyalty!’ he cried, sounding angry. ‘And stop being so damned belligerent, Val. I haven’t done anything to hurt you, I’m only an innocent bystander. Now listen to me for a moment.’
‘I’m listening. So go ahead, shoot.’
‘Okay, okay, and just let’s settle down here a mite.’ He took a deep breath, and went on in a slightly milder tone, ‘Although Tony and I were close, he never confided in me about his private life, only ever hinted at things. I knew there were lots of women –’ He cut himself off, looked chagrined, and eyed me carefully before continuing.
I knew Jake would never wilfully hurt me, and I guessed that he was now worrying he had just caused me a degree of pain. But that wasn’t so. ‘It’s okay, Jake, keep going,’ I said in what I hoped was a reassuring voice.
He nodded. ‘Val, you have to face up to the fact that you weren’t the first, there were others before you. But he never left Fiona. She was always there in the background, his childhood sweetheart, his child bride as he called her, and the mother of his children. She was inviolate, in a sense. At least, that’s what I believed. As I told you, we never discussed his marriage or his love affairs, just as I didn’t talk about my personal life or my divorce from Sue Ellen. We only touched on those things in the most peripheral way. Very casually. Then he got involved with you last year, and eventually I began to think the unthinkable, that he was going to break up with Fiona. Not that he ever said so. Nor did he discuss you. However, when he came to Paris in July he announced, out of the blue, that he was divorced –’
‘And you were gobsmacked, as the English say,’ I interrupted with some acidity.
Ignoring my sarcasm, Jake continued: ‘You’re right, in one sense, yes. Because he was such a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic I’d always thought a divorce was out of the question. And then again, he’d done something I’d never expected him to do. Mind you, Val, I understood on another level why he would want to be free. It was for you. Yes, I understood that aspect of it very well.’
‘He lied to both of us. He wasn’t divorced.’
‘We don’t really know that,’ Jake answered in a reasonable tone.
‘Oh yes we do. At least I do.’
‘I’d like you to consider a couple of things. Firstly, think about Fiona and her demeanour today. She isn’t playing the grieving widow. She seems a bit sad, I’ll grant you that, but she’s not distraught. And secondly, she’s only having a small gathering at the house, just a few friends. In other words, she’s not making a big deal out of the memorial.’
‘I don’t think those are very good arguments.’
‘Are you making the assumption they were not divorced just because she talked about Tony’s possessions being at the house, and because Rory spoke about Tony as if he lived in the bosom of his family, and very happily so?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But those things don’t add up to Tony still being married to Fiona when he was killed. Think about it, Val. Even if they were divorced, no one would bring it up today, least of all his son. It just wouldn’t have been appropriate or very nice, and anyway there was no reason to do so. It was a memorial service given by people who loved Tony, and