There was one picture at the end, when she had posed with the driver in his brown bowler and grey velvet jacket that handsomely set off her peacock blue.
‘There he is again — the same bloke!’ said Jamie.
‘The driver?’
‘No, silly. The guy in the other picture. Look, he’s there in the background, leaning against the scaffolding beside the Stephansdom.’
Donna studied the picture. ‘It’s just someone wearing a similar jacket.’
‘No, look at his face. Where’s the first picture?’
They compared them. Certainly the two jackets were identical and the faces looked similar, pale in colour with gaunt cheeks and deep-set, shadowy eyes. In each picture, they were fixed on Donna.
‘Your secret admirer,’ said Jamie.
‘I hope not. He looks weird to me. Anyway, I’ve got an admirer.’
‘And he doesn’t make a secret of it,’ murmured Jamie, sliding his hand over her left knee.
She let the photographs drop on the carpet.
After they had made love on the sofa, they drank iced Perrier water. Donna decided that if any moment was going to be right for a confession, this was it. ‘Darling, I haven’t been entirely honest with you. I feel very ashamed. I’d like to tell you about it.’
‘Don’t worry, angel,’ he answered with consideration. ‘If it’s about the past, forget it. I’m a realist. I can’t believe someone as pretty as you would have got to twenty-four without experience.’
‘That isn’t what I mean, Jamie.’ She looked into his confident blue eyes and prepared to see them swivel with amazement. ‘I married you under false pretences. All that stuff I told you about working as a company director in the family business wasn’t true. I’m an out-of-work actress. When I go up to town, I don’t really go to work in the City, I do the rounds of the theatrical agencies.’
Jamie smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘Darling, that’s nothing to be ashamed of! I’d much rather be married to an actress than a boring old company director.’
‘My family isn’t in business. We don’t have a country house in Cheshire,’ she went on, determined to clean the slate. ‘Daddy wasn’t a Master of Foxhounds, he was a tobacconist in Balham High Street. When I was twelve, he had an affair with one of the girls from the supermarket across the street. My mother divorced him and went to live in Scotland.’
‘I married you, my sweet, not your parents,’ Jamie pointed out with durable good humour.
‘Yes, but you still don’t know the truth about me. My cottage in Devon doesn’t exist. I invented it to impress you. I don’t have any furniture of my own. I’ve lived in furnished accommodation since I left school.’
‘School? You mean Cambridge University?’
She sighed. ‘Darling, that was another fabrication. I feel so terrible telling you all this. I didn’t go to public school or university. I was at a tin-pot drama school that didn’t even put us in for CSEs. All I got there was a plummy accent from the elocution lessons. It didn’t even get me any parts worth having. It simply fitted me for what I am — a con-artist.’ She lowered her eyes. The penitent look was something else she had learned in drama school.
Jamie had let go of her hand. He was sinking under the torrent of revelations, but slowly. He was still thinking about the cottage in Devon. ‘You don’t possess any property, then?’ he said slowly. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘Not a brick. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Jamie. I’m a wicked liar. I wanted you so much that I lied through my teeth to get you.’
She watched him with wide, fearful eyes. In her mind, she had acted out this scene a dozen or more times and endured every kind of retribution from obloquy to a physical beating.
He said in a voice that was still struggling to come to terms with what he had been told, ‘But we agreed to share everything, our property, our money, everything.’
‘Yes. And I have nothing except the few things I moved in with.’
‘But you have some money of your own. We agreed to open a joint account. Surely you have a bank account?’
‘An overdraft,’ admitted Donna, thankful that she had found the courage to tell him everything.
The colour had drained entirely from Jamie’s face. He stared into the fire for a long time.
Donna moved closer to him and said, ‘I love you. I lied because I love you. I could see you were unhappy living alone and I wanted you for myself.’
The last statement was true. She had met Jamie through an escort agency. It was a classy place that employed a lot of actresses between shows. They treated you like the Civil Service and sex was definitely not in the contract. The clients were mostly wealthy businessmen like Jamie who needed to socialise and paid everything with Diners’ and American Express. When Donna had filled in her form with a couple of other girls she knew from drama school, it had all seemed a huge joke, and she had laughingly invented posh parents and a cottage in the country. But when she had met Jamie, the joke was over. He wasn’t fat and middle-aged, like most of the clients. He was the most eligible guy she had ever met, tall, twenty-seven, good looking and, above all, rich, rich, rich. He was a widower, and it was practically written all over him that he was desperate to marry again.
She wondered whether this was the moment to sway towards him and solicit a forgiving kiss. His blitzed look was not encouraging.
He said in an expressionless voice, ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’
Donna decided that the appropriate action for a remorseful wife was to remain downstairs and spend the night on the sofa. A few hours’ sleep would probably bring Jamie round.
She washed in the kitchen and fetched a car blanket from the Mercedes. She would sleep in her underclothes tonight.
While she was arranging the blanket, the bare sole of her foot touched something cold on the carpet: one of the honeymoon photographs. She picked it up. It was a flashlight shot taken in one of the wine gardens — what did the Viennese call them? — Heurigen. She was in the sweet little black number with the diamante brooch and the reckless plunge. With her long, blonde hair, she always looked stunning in black. That evening, people had turned to stare as she had walked among the scrubbed pinewood tables. She hadn’t imagined it; they were there in the photograph casting sideward glances at her. One, she now noticed, looked remarkably like the guy in the tan-coloured jacket in those other pictures. But this one was in a dark brown suit.
Well, Donna told herself, he wouldn’t wear the same thing all the time, would he?
She had to be sure. She went to the sideboard drawer and took out the magnifying glass that Jamie kept there. She examined the photo minutely.
It was him. It was definitely him, that washed-out, cadaverous face, those hollow eyes, watching her. She shuddered. Even here in the security of her new home, she felt creepy. He must have been following her around Vienna. How else could he have appeared in three photographs taken in different places? A pulse was beating in her forehead.
Suddenly, irrationally, she felt afraid to spend the night downstairs alone. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders and hurried up to their bedroom without even turning out the light.
In bed, she pressed dose to Jamie’s broad back and the fears receded.
He said, ‘Are you all right? You’re shaking.’
She didn’t tell him the reason. It would have seemed like a cheap bid for affection. Naturally, he was still brooding over her deceit. She murmured, ‘It’s a reaction, I expect. Darling, will you forgive me?’
He was silent for an agonising interval before he said, ‘At least you had the decency to tell me the truth.’
‘You were bound to find out soon,’ admitted Donna. ‘I should have told you before the wedding, but I was so afraid of losing you.’