Elena smiled tautly at the ‘just’, as if it was a far lesser worry than illness. She didn’t want to go into detail with Nick. ‘That’s what we don’t know yet. We’re hoping she’s mistaken.’
Nick half-shrugged, sensing Elena’s reluctance to elaborate. ‘Hope it works out.’
‘Thanks. Me too’ She looked to one side, losing herself momentarily in the darkness of the endless line of fir trees bordering the autobahn.
One of Nick’s favourite Ry Cooder tracks was playing on the CD, and he turned it up a notch. Elena found herself slipping into cat-naps with the repetitive scenery, and their small talk didn’t return for a while, with Nick by then alternating with some of Elena’s favourites: Santana and Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac.
When they arrived in Bucharest, the hectic turn of events pushed all thoughts of Lorena into the background. A seven year old boy at the Cerneit orphanage with a prolonged headache and eye strain was finally diagnosed as having meningitis. Two more suspected cases were discovered over the next few hours, and Elena was caught up in a maelstrom of activity: treatment for the three cases and organizing vaccines for the remaining children, with frantic calls back to London for wired funds to cover it all.
The boy’s condition worsened on the third night, and she kept up a bedside vigil for five hours holding his hand and praying that they didn’t lose him. It struck her then: Gordon was right. These children needed her, this is where her main focus had to be. She didn’t have time, nor the mental or emotional space, to be divided on two fronts.
The boy rallied well the next morning, and Elena headed off with Nick, a day behind schedule, to the orphanage in Brasov. Approaching the Carpathian mountains, dusk was falling. They looked dark and foreboding at the best of times, often shrouded with mist, ideal fodder for the shadowy myths and legends surrounding them.
But staring into the rising wall of darkness with the last dusk light as a pale trim, Elena was suddenly gripped by recall of the chine — the one and only time she’d taken Lorena there on a day out to introduce her to the area before she settled in with the Ryalls.
She’d taken Lorena to see her home, then they’d gone down the steep wooded bank into the chine. As they’d reached the bottom of the chine and the darkness of the steep wooded ravine and the dense foliage above enshrouded them, she’d gripped Lorena’s arm tight and asked her to listen, ‘Listen?’
It was eerily silent and cool, and after a moment of them standing stock still, they could pick out the sound of the brook running gently through the bottom of the chine towards the sea.
‘You hear that?’ she prompted. ‘It’s magical down here, isn’t it? Like some secret hideaway from the rest of the world.’
Lorena hadn’t answered, and at first Elena thought the trembling where she gripped Lorena’s arm was because of the coolness of the chine. But the shaking became rapidly worse, and Lorena muttered tremulously, ‘I don’t like it down here… please let’s go. The darkness, the water, it…’
Lorena lurched forward, practically dragging Elena, and within a few paces they’d hit a run. They followed the bottom of the chine close to the running brook, bursting through the branches and foliage as they ran frantically, breathlessly, towards the light of the sea horizon ahead. Lorena’s increasingly laboured breath started lapsing into strangled sobs. Their legs pumped hard and their lungs ached with their rasping breath — but the light never seemed to get closer. The dark, dense foliage remained all-enveloping, suffocating, the light at the end still distant, out of reach, except for a single shaft which seemed to burn through, intensify, as if trying to…
‘What…?’ Elena sat up, startled.
‘Are you okay?’ Nick repeated.
Elena shielded her eyes from the searing headlamps of an oncoming truck. She’d fallen asleep; it was now pitch dark. Catching up after her vigil with the boy last night.
It took her a second to adjust back to her surroundings. They’d in fact burst through to the light of the open beach quite quickly, their breathlessness lost on the fresh sea breeze, and Elena had hugged Lorena tight and kissed the tears from her cheek, muttering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She hadn’t realized that the chine might remind Lorena of her sewer days.
Suddenly the image was back of Lorena standing alone at her bedroom window, deserted. Despite Gordon’s wise words and her own rationalising of the past forty-eight hours, she couldn’t help wondering if that was what Lorena wanted from her now: to once again help her out of the darkness towards the light.
But when eleven days later Gordon called to tell her that Lorena had phoned again, it threw her into turmoil. Whether through once again becoming absorbed in the plight of the orphaned children, or clinging to rationalisation that nothing was happening or, even if it was, it was no longer her problem — Elena wasn’t sure. But part of her wasn’t surprised at the call, and she wondered why she hadn’t stayed with trusting her instincts. Why she’d allowed herself to so easily get pulled with the flow.
‘She said that Ryall stayed away from her room for a while, but now he’d started coming back. And that she needed help. No doubt your help.’
Slightly numbed, Elena said simply, ‘I suppose I’d better call Nadine Moore again.’
A few seconds’ silence with only the faint static line hiss, then Gordon asked. ‘When are you heading back?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later today when I know.’ She’d decide after she’d spoken to Nadine Moore whether to fly back straightaway or wait out the five days left of her trip. ‘And Gordon, I…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s okay.’ She bit lightly at her bottom lip. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you soon, anyway.’ It just didn’t feel right pouring out her heart over this faint, static charged line; even though the distance, not having to face him, might have made it easier. And perhaps when she got home, having harboured the secret now for so many years, it still wouldn’t feel right.
Signing off, Elena found that she was trembling. She knew now why she’d so readily clung to rationalisation, and it had little to do with refusing to accept the worst after everything Lorena had already been through in her troubled past. It had to do with her own past — the wall of lies she’d so carefully constructed throughout her life, to Gordon and everyone else, but most importantly to herself. What lay at the core of their adopting Christos and Katine and her decision to work with strife-torn, orphaned children. She’d feared from the outset the gap in her psyche that this incident with Lorena threatened to open up, and part of her, despite her raw instincts, had tried to push it away. Now, having to face it square on, meant admitting that the founding principals of half her life had been wrong. There was nothing left to stop the wall crumbling.
FIVE
One single incident now threatening so much. Practically everything he’d planned and worked towards these past five years. It hardly seemed believable. Jean-Paul Lacaille shook his head as her looked through the long French windows towards the courtyard. The windows were almost twice his height, in keeping with the spacious, high-ceilinged room: one of four sets along its thirty-eight foot length.
At the room’s centre was a long refractory table with fourteen Louis XIV chairs surrounding. The ‘power room’ where practically every key decision of the Lacaille family had been made over the past three decades.
When his father had bought the house in ‘65, the courtyard had been enclosed only on three sides, with views over a formal Italianate garden on the fourth. But with their growing family — three generations of Lacailles under one roof at the same time — increasing workload at home, and finally the addition of a stableblock and gym, his and Roman’s respective play areas — ten years ago they’d built on the fourth wing in the same style to enclose the courtyard. As Roman keenly pointed out, the addition had also done much to improve security: there was no longer open access to the ‘power room’, and at the time of their battles with the Cacchione’s six years ago, Jean-Paul had moved his bedroom to the back of the house. But none of their precautions were to help save Pascal; he’d been the last they’d thought Cacchione would target.