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‘Annie, there’s nothing between Candy and I.’
‘Don’t.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Don’t go there, Iosef. I don’t care if you ended it tonight, I don’t care if it was almost over... ’
‘We were never together.’ He watched as she shook her head, eyes half-closed, a tired smile on her face at the futility of it all, that still he thought she might believe his lies.
‘Do you think I’m weak or stupid? I’ve seen you together!’ Her voice was rising, anger fizzing through her body now. ‘I was there when your own mother—’
‘Have you ever heard my mother address me in English?’ He halted her tirade with a seemingly meaningless question. ‘The one time she spoke to me in English it was for your benefit.’
‘My benefit?’ Annie gave a perplexed frown. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘So that appearances were kept up, so that when the nurse spoke to her friends, or to the press or to anyone, she would say that Candy was Iosef’s girlfriend.’
‘And she is.’ Annie started, then stopped, a tiny glimmer of something appearing in her mind, something so impossible, so improbable she shot it down in a second, didn’t even give it a second glance, just blasted him with the facts. ‘Your own mother sent for her, your own mother said that you needed to be with her. She rings you all the time, turns up at work crying and begging to see you. You left me the morning after the wedding and went to lunch with her—I saw the photo in the paper—and you lied to me and said that it was old!’ She was shouting at him now, hurling the facts that at the time she’d tried so hard not to see! Hurled them at him so the truth might hurt him as much as it had hurt her.
‘I took her to see my father.’
And the vision she’d glimpsed was taking shape now— taking impossible shape, before he even said the words.
‘Candy is my father’s mistress...wasmy father’s mistress.’ And Annie’s world stopped for a few moments while everyone got off and she was left standing there, her mouth opening, eyes widening as she stepped in the impossible place Iosef had inhabited. ‘My father has always kept a mistress...’ He just stood there and said it as she just stood there and tried to take it in. ‘My mother turned a blind eye...’
‘But, surely, I mean, how did your mother put up with it?’
‘We don’t have those sorts of conversations in our family. We don’t talk about our failings or our fears— we just deny, deny, deny. We just cover our tracks and bury whoever is in our way.’
‘Not you,’ Annie whispered.
‘Yes, me.’ He nodded. ‘Because I put you through hell all those weeks.’
It was too much to take in, her mind too muddled to even feel relief at the fact that he and Candy had never been involved with each other. ‘Why on earth couldn’t you tell me?’
‘How “on earth” could I?’ His eyes held hers. He let the question sink in for a moment before he elaborated. ‘I kept telling myself to ignore how I felt for you, not to go there, just to wait until...’ He swallowed hard. ‘It was not my secret to tell—and one secret revealed leads to another. At what point do you land someone with all your baggage, Annie? At what point do you trust someone enough to tell them secrets that are also other people’s secrets? I trust you now, but then... That night, when the baby was abandoned, I came so close to telling you, I actually thought you might even understand, but when you said it didn’t matter anyway, that I made things worse for you, I just couldn’t go through with it.’
‘I wasn’t just talking about my body, or keeping up appearances... ’ Annie shook her head in disbelief that he couldn’t see it. ‘Iosef, I thought you were seeing Candy.’
‘I should have told you.’
‘Yes!’ She blinked back at him but her certainty changed to a frown as she saw things from his perspective. Howcouldhe? Their relationship had hit like a thunderbolt without warning, ripped into their lives with no time to prepare and she recalled the first time they’d made love, the slightly desperate note in his usually strong voice as he’d stared up at her.‘Why now Annie? Why do you do this to me now?’
Lovehadcome along when they’d least expected it.
‘So did you always know about the other women? Did your mum not mind?’ She closed her mouth on a stupid statement—could still see Nina in her mind’s eye on the night her husband had died, a woman who had refused to leave her husband’s side, taking a breath of fresh air to allow the man she loved time with the other woman he had loved, too. Of course she’d minded.. .of course she had. And yet somehow, deep in grief and anger, she’d put her husband first.
It really wasn’t for her to judge.
‘I remember rows when I was a child, knew my father had upset my mother at times...’ Iosef filled in the silence, explanations coming that now weren’t really needed. ‘But when I came back for Levander and Millie’s wedding it was clear my father did not have much longer to live and when he started to get sicker, we were talking one night and I asked him if there was anything I could do for him.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t really prepared for what he asked. It turned out that Candy wanted to see him and he wanted to see her. Reputation is everything to my family—the last thing they wanted was the press exposing the affair. What the world sees and what actually happens are two entirely different things with my family. My father was too ill to drive one night, so I did—that was how it started really. There was a small piece in the paper that I had come back from Russia and was dating her, and it sort of blew up from there. We never actually sat down and discussed it, but from that day on sometimes my mother would suggest I bring Candy over, or Candy would come and see me and ask if I would mind taking her for lunch... ’
‘I wish you’d been able to tell me,’ Annie said, ‘but I understand why you couldn’t.’ Like a reflex gesture, just a bodily reaction that happened whether you wanted it to or not, she reached for his hands. ‘No more secrets.’ She frowned at his wry expression..
‘I said the same to Levander this morning.’ Grey eyes that had enthralled her from the start were moist. ‘He told me that, yes, there were things I would never know, things I really didn’t need to, and finally I can accept that. If he can accept his dire past, then so can I, so long as from now on...’
‘You make it right.’
‘We all make it right.’
‘We will.’ She managed a tiny laugh. ‘So I’m not your mistress.’
‘No.’
