‘This is different. And, as I said, unlikely to happen again.’ Elena flickered her eyes to one side, towards the children in the next room. Gordon was right, but she didn’t want him to see he’d hit a painful raw nerve. Feeling his eyes still on her, she added, ‘This isn’t just about my past closeness to Lorena, or perhaps me reading too much into the worried look in her eyes. It’s also the atmosphere in the house and with the Ryalls that tells me something is wrong.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well…’ She grappled for the right words. ‘Tense to say the least — which perhaps you’d expect given the nature of our visit. But I couldn’t help feeling that something was being hidden. And Cameron Ryall came across as a complete control guru.’
‘Isn’t that also what you’d expect from someone in his position.’ Cameron Ryall’s status warranted only sidebars in the financial pages of the national press, but locally he was big news: Chelborne’s Bill Gates.
Elena shook her head. ‘No, it went beyond that. Nicola Ryall had obviously been primed, but I got the strong feeling that she was actually afraid of him. As she sat there, hardly daring to answer or interject, all I got was a picture of my mother sat there in a similar position.’
‘Oh, right.’ Gordon exhaled, a slightly defeated sigh. So now finally they were getting to the root of the problem: her father.
Gordon looked down awkwardly, toying with the rim of his wine glass. Just when he thought that finally her father’s shadow had gone from her life, inevitably it would rise again, like a phantom. The all-controlling figurehead who had guided — or would a better word be destroyed — so much of her life. Whose hand could be seen in practically every major step or decision she’d ever made: forcing her to have an abortion when she became pregnant at sixteen, and then the growing gap between them finally leading to years of rebellion — leaving home early, the bed-sits and hippie communes, the protest marches and ‘discovery’ trips to India and Marrakech, where she’d ended up living for two years: days where the edges became increasingly blurred in a euphoric haze of dope and dabbling with LSD — before she woke up to the fact that she wasn’t just rebelling against everything her father stood for, she was also punishing herself.
Eleven years she’d spent pursuing ‘alternative’ lifestyles; they’d met three years after her return from Marrakech when she was working in her Uncle Christos’s import business, and they’d married ten months later. Their adopted boy they’d named after her Uncle, who — though Elena would be reluctant to admit it — everyone else saw as partly filling her need for a father figure; but one that understood her, loved her. Christos was also what she would have named her aborted child had it been a boy. Then later her desire for another adopted child, a girl, and the resultant urge for her to do more for other orphaned children.
But hers wasn’t the only life she’d felt had been scarred by her father’s over-dominance. She blamed him also for the suicide of her younger brother, Andreos, who had knuckled under her father’s influence, yet in the end felt he’d not only betrayed what he truly wanted to do but, regardless, would never have been able to live up to his father’s demanding expectations. Andreos opted out in the most dramatic way possible.
Her father had died five years ago, but the scars still ran so deep that she’d refused to attend the funeral. But more than anyone else in her family, Gordon felt that she’d kept her father’s memory alive with her every action through the years, and now his ghost was back again in the shape of Cameron Ryall’s dominance over Nicola Ryall and Lorena.
Certainly, on the surface at least, there were similarities with Ryalclass="underline" her father had parlayed a 1950s Cypriot-Greek trading company into Britain’s ninth largest merchant bank. But any link between them, real or imagined, only returned Gordon full circle to one of his first concerns.
‘Has it struck you that the reminder of your father might be making you read too much into it all, seeing demons where they don’t exist? You see the surface signs with Ryall, then fill in the gaps to suit.’
Elena shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no. It’s more than that with Ryall.’
‘Like what?’
Elena stared back levelly. As much as she’d carefully skirted around the issue, it was back squarely in her lap. But she could never tell Gordon what had really happened with her father: too many years now she’d spent not only telling the lie, but living it. She reached across and touched Gordon’s hand.
‘There were a lot of things I never talked about with my father. Nothing significant, just small things, which is probably why they hardly seemed worth mentioning. You know, it’s like you when know someone’s unbalanced way before they start wildly swinging an axe.’ She looked down briefly at the table for inspiration. ‘You see it first in the tense way they grip a coffee cup, or their reaction to someone saying something out of place or wearing something they don’t like. Small things. And it’s things like that I see now between Ryall and his wife. It’s… it’s hard to put my finger on. Maybe no more than a hunch. And maybe you’re right — that hunch could well be wrong.’
Gordon held her gaze for a moment before she glanced away. He could tell that she was deeply troubled, and while the analogy made sense, her finishing on the note of so casually casting off her previous concerns made him suspicious. He took a fresh sip of wine, and suddenly the uneasy thought hit him like a thunderbolt.
‘My God… don’t tell me your father was molesting you?’
Elena threw he head back and laughed out loud at the suggestion. She subdued it quickly. ‘No, no. My father might have been a monster in every other way… but he wasn’t molesting me.’
Gordon raised his glass and smiled. ‘Now you’ve got me at it. Seeing demons where they don’t exist.’
Elena was glad of the light relief to suddenly dead-end their conversation. But her half smile as she raised her glass to clink with Gordon’s also conveniently shielded the bitter irony: what in fact had happened with her father was in many ways far, far worse.
Elena became increasingly agitated as the days counted down to her going away.
Clinging to the hope that Nadine would call with fresh news from Lorena’s school or GP, or that Lorena herself would phone again. But as Gordon had pointed out when he’d picked up on her agitation, ‘Surely best if she doesn’t call. At least one sign that Ryall is doing what he’s been told and is keeping away from her room. Or that her first call was a false alarm.’
But the comment only made her focus more on why she remained uneasy: the abject fear she’d read in Lorena’s face in that brief moment. She was concerned that even if the problem with Ryall re-surfaced, Lorena might be too frightened to raise the alarm again. Also, she was Lorena’s only possible ally, yet now she was heading off. Deserting her.
The last day was particularly tense. She thought of putting in a last minute call to Nadine, then wavered against the idea before finally going ahead, only to discover that Nadine was out on calls and unavailable. Then work and final arrangements took over — checking rosters and schedules, last second calls to synchronise their travel over — and she was headed for a midnight shuttle in a van loaded to the brim leading the way for the main 2-ton supply truck behind.
The long drive over gave her some moments to think again about Lorena, probably too many, and at one point her diver, Nick — twenty-eight, square-jawed, who looked like he’d stepped from a jeans advert despite his years of wild debauchery as a roadie — asked her what was wrong.
‘One of the kids I placed with an English family a couple of years back. I’m worried about her.’
‘Is she ill, or just a bad family?’