The Eden Inheritance (41 page)

On this occasion, however, she had weighed up all the factors and decided that the extravagance was justified. She simply could not face the journey any other way.

The in-flight meal was served –
haute cuisine
on bone-china plates – but Lilli ate only a few mouthfuls before pushing it aside. She had hardly eaten, either, in the last two days and now the smoked salmon and chicken á la King tasted like cardboard and stuck in her throat. She leaned back in the comfortable seat, closing her eyes and giving way to the mêlée of thoughts that chased one another around her sleep-starved brain.

Overlying them all, of course, was concern for her father. The devastating news that he was desperately ill had dominated her thoughts and emotions waking and sleeping ever since she had spoken to Ingrid. As she had made her arrangements the only thing that had seemed of any importance at all was that she should get home to be with him as soon as possible. Perhaps, she had thought, she might be able to persuade him to undergo surgery where Ingrid and the doctors had failed. If so, time was of the essence. And in any case, she simply wanted to see him, to be near him. The distance between them had suddenly been unbearable and she wavered between the totally irrational hope that simply by being there she could avert disaster and the sickening fear that if she did not get home quickly she might be too late. If Josie had not written to her he could have died without her even knowing he was ill and the realisation of how long it had been since they had been close had awakened urgent longings which had negated all her reasons for leaving the island.

Now that she was actually on her way, however, all the other implications of returning to Madrepora were there too, silent ghosts creeping up on her almost unawares and jangling her already taut nerves. Would Jorge be on the island? He wasn't always. He divided his time between Madrepora, Venezuela and Florida. But if her father was ill the likelihood was that he would be there, overseeing his business interests, and Lilli felt a shiver of apprehension at the thought of seeing him again.

Dear God, I still love him! she thought. In spite of what he is, in spite of what I now know about him, he still has the power to make me want him so much it hurts. I can despise him, fear him even, and it makes no difference. I still turn into a jelly of desire, as if my bones were melting, just thinking about him.

It had always been that way and Lilli was beginning to be afraid it always would. She had thought that leaving Madrepora would cleanse her, exercise him from her heart, but it hadn't. True, she had been able to put him out of her mind as she had put him out of her life, but the memory of him was still there, not dead but only lying dormant, and she knew in her heart that when she saw him again the attraction he held for her would be as potent as ever.

How will I cope? Lilli wondered in panic. What will I do if he still wants me? And how will I be able to bear it if he does not?

She had been just five years old when she had first decided she wanted to marry Jorge, and the memory would have amused her now if it had not been such a presentiment of what was to follow.

In her mind's eye she saw him now as she had first seen him, in the company of her mother on the veranda of the villa in Madrepora. The sun bad fragmented through the hibiscus-covered trellis to dapple him with light and shade, a tall, strongly built man in a white shirt and bleached cotton jodphurs. It seemed to her now that he had not changed one iota in all the years, but she knew that was simply because she was superimposing the face of the forty-four-year-old man he now was on to the image. Or perhaps he really hadn't changed. Perhaps he was one of those people for whom time stands still between maturity and old age. Certainly she was sure he had always had those hard lines between nose and mouth, etched deeply into his darkly tanned skin, the colour of mahogany, the texture of leather, and the pouches beneath his eyes which suggested too much hard living, but which seemed oddly to enhance his amazing good looks rather than detracting from them.

She had looked at him that day and felt a strange excitement building inside her. She had been far too young to identify it of course, she had only known she wanted to go to him, to join him and her mother on the veranda, more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. She had skipped out through the archway, her sandalled feet slapping on the tiled floor, then stopped, shy suddenly.

‘Lilli!' her mother had said. ‘I thought you were down at the beach with Patsy.'

Her voice, low and musical, was tinged with surprise. She was sitting in one of the rattan chairs, wearing a sarong-style sundress. Her hair, long, loose and dark, flowed over her bare brown shoulders, her slender legs, emerging from the brightly coloured silk, were crossed so that her gold high-heeled mule hung away from the delicate arch of her foot. Between the gold leather straps Lilli could see the vivid red varnish on her toenails. Her mother was, she thought, the most beautiful woman in the world, and she longed with all her five-year-old heart to be like her. Sometimes she crept into her mother's room and stole the bottle of scarlet enamel, painting her own nails with careful precision, then sliding some of Magdalene's jangling bracelets on to her wrists, pretending she was grown up and every bit as beautiful as Magdalene herself. Now, however, she had eyes only for the man, and she looked at him as she answered her mother.

‘We came back. Patsy had a headache.'

‘Really! I shall have to have words with her!'

Magdalene sounded annoyed and Lilli leaped to her nurse's defence.

‘She couldn't help it. You mustn't be cross with her, Mama.'

‘No, you mustn't be cross, Magdalene. It doesn't suit you.' There was a slightly sarcastic note in the drawling voice but Lilli was too young – and too entranced – to recognise it.

‘Go and play in the garden, Lilli,' Magdalene said.

Lilli's face fell.

‘Do I have to?'

‘Let her stay. She's not doing any harm.' The man stretched out a lean brown hand and rumpled her hair.

She ran over to sit on the veranda step, drawing her knees up beneth the gathered skirt of her dress, gazing enraptured at him as he and her mother talked, content simply to be in his presence.

It was an enchantment that was to continue through all the years and she felt it now, strongly as ever, as she remembered the way it had been.

‘Coffee, madam?' the air hostess asked. Lilli opened her eyes, surprised almost to see the glossy figure hovering at her elbow. For the last few minutes her mother, dead these last fifteen years, had been far more real to her. Her mother – and, of course, Jorge. Always Jorge. Lilli gave a small shake of her head.

‘No, thank you.'

Then she closed her eyes again, continuing her voyage to the distant past.

Jorge had spent a great deal of time on Madrepora that summer and the winter that followed it. Lilli was not clear about why he had entered their lives so suddenly but she knew that he was some kind of business associate of her father's. Often they would disappear together into the room at the villa her father used as a study and sometimes they would drive off together in her father's car – the only one on Madrepora – headed, she thought, for the south-east side of the island where the locals lived in a shanty town of tin huts and corrugated-iron shacks. But one day when she watched the car from the top of the rise at the edge of the estate she saw it turn north, not south, before it was lost to sight behind the thick band of lush green woodland. Lilli had no idea where they could be going. She had no idea what lay on that corner of the island, for though Madrepora covered in all only five square miles she had never been there.

When Jorge came to Madrepora he flew in, piloting his own light aircraft and landing on the tiny airstrip which had been constructed on the flat coastal plane. This made him appear even more glamorous in Lilli's eyes. He did not stay at either her father's villa or the hotel, but in one of the handful of private villas on the island, a pretty pastel-pink house with wood-shingled roof set on one of the wooded slopes and reached by stone steps flanked by sweet-smelling hibiscus and oleander. The house always reminded Lilli of the tale of Hansel and Gretel – and not only because the walls looked as if they were made of sugar icing and the fretwork of white marzipan. She thought that Fernando Sanchez, who owned it, and whom she was supposed to call ‘Uncle Fernando', was a sort of man-equivalent of the wicked witch. Fernando was tall and slim as a whippet except for a beer gut which overhung the waistband of his trousers. He had a hook nose and a shock of prematurely white hair and his skin was like a polished walnut. But it was the livid scar on his throat that Lilli could never tear her eyes away from, the puckered flesh falling into a discoloured crater which both fascinated and repelled her, and his voice was a kind of urgent husky whisper with a rasping edge to it.

Fernando had been shot in the throat, her father had explained, and he was lucky to be alive. The bullet had severed the vocal cords, passing downwards at an angle and lodging in his shoulder.

Lilli had shuddered.

‘Did it happen in the war, Daddy?' she asked. She knew her own father had been in the war.

‘I expect so, yes,' Otto had replied vaguely, and it was only many years later that Lilli had realised that could not be true.

But though she felt sorry for Fernando Lilli could not bring herself to like him and was always glad when ‘the gingerbread house' was shut up and Fernando went home to South America.

‘Why does Jorge stay there?' she asked her mother one day. ‘Why couldn't he stay here with us? It would be much more sensible.'

Magdalene's scarlet lips had twisted with amusement.

‘What do you mean – sensible?'

‘He wouldn't have to walk all the way over here to see Daddy. He could have the room next to mine and our cook could get his breakfast.'

Magdalene had pretended to consider this.

‘Yes, but Jorge has his own cook. She would be very upset if Jorge didn't want her to get his breakfast any more.'

‘She's not
Jorge's
cook,' Lilli objected. ‘She's Uncle Fernando's.'

‘But Lilli, that comes to the same thing,' Lilli looked puzzled and Magdalene went on: ‘Uncle Fernando is Jorge's father. Didn't you know that?'

‘No,' Lilli replied, shocked. She could hardly believe that a monster like Uncle Fernando could be anyone's father, much less Jorge's.

‘Uncle Fernando is your father's business partner,' Magdalene explained. ‘You know that. Well, Jorge works for him. Sometimes Uncle Fernando is not well enough to do all the things that people have to when they have a business to run, so Jorge is doing them for him.'

Lilli's heart lifted. It sounded as if Jorge would be spending quite a lot of time on Madrepora. She wondered what Magdalene would say if she were to tell her she planned to marry Jorge, but decided to hug the secret to herself for a little longer. Instead she asked the question she had asked many times before. She always enjoyed listening to the answer and now it had special significance for her.

‘Tell me how you came to meet Daddy.'

Magdalene tossed her black hair a little impatiently.

‘Oh Lilli, you've heard the story so often you must know it by heart.'

‘Tell me again – please!'

‘Your father's family were coffee importers back home in Germany. Their coffee was drunk in all the finest coffee houses in Europe, from Berlin to Vienna. But they suffered very badly in the war. Their family home was bombed and their business destroyed. Your father came to South America to make a fresh start. My father – your grandfather – helped him. They knew one another because of the coffee trade, but Grandfather Vicente had entered politics so he was able to arrange for your father to get the necessary papers. When he came to Venezuela we met and fell in love. He was much older than me, of course, nearly forty years old, and I was only seventeen. But that did not matter to us and my father was very happy that I was to marry his old friend.'

A small smile curved Lilli's mouth. That was the very best part of the story – that Daddy had been much older than Mama and that Grandfather Vicente had been pleased because Otto was his old friend. It would be the same for her and Jorge, she thought. It had happened to Mama and Daddy, why not her top?

‘Tell me about how you came to Madrepora,' she insisted.

‘There's nothing to tell. Grandfather Vicente arranged for Daddy to lease the island from the government and later we bought it. We came here and opened the hotel and Daddy was able to go into business with Grandfather Vicente and Uncle Fernando.'

Lilli did not ask what the business was – that, she thought, was boring.

‘What about Jorge? Did you know Jorge then?'

A faint wash of colour tinged Magdalene's cheeks.

‘I have always known Jorge, ever since we were children.'

She should have guessed then, Lilli thought, recalling now with startling clarity across the years the look on her mother's face when she had said it. But Lilli had only been a little girl. To her, Mama and Daddy were an item, an indivisible unit. It had not occurred to her then, or later, that Magdalene and Jorge had ever been more than friends who had played together as children because of the close relationship between their families.

Those were the really idyllic days, Lilli thought, remembering, the days when she had taken love and happiness and security for granted. The days before Mama died.

It must have been about a year after she had first set eyes on Jorge, Lilli supposed, and the horror of that night had never left her.

She had been awakened, she remembered, by some sort of commotion – voices raised, not in anger, but in agitation, and the awful sound of someone wailing, Lilli's heart had begun to pound both from fear and from being shocked out of a deep sleep. She knew instinctively that something terrible had happened. She garnered her courage, fought her way through the entrapping folds of the mosquito netting and padded to the door. The voices were coming from downstairs. Lilli crept down, holding tight to the wooden banisters and peeping through. She could see her father in the salon but his hands were covering his face and he did not see her.