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‘So everything was lovely?’ she prompted as his voice faded away.
‘For a while.’ He looked at her and when he spoke again his voice had grown hard. ‘My mother had a friend called Amelita, and she and her husband had a son about my age. Vicente was like the brother I’d never had, and the two families used to do everything together. We skied in the winter and hit the beaches in the summer. We ate Christmas dinner around the same table. We were all like one great big unit.’
He paused, not sure why he was telling her all this. Not sure that he should. Was it because she had shared her secrets with him and something was telling him that he needed to redress the balance? Or because he suspected that she was insistent enough to keep probing if he didn’t?
‘Go on,’ she said.
He stroked her hair. ‘I developed a love of speed early on and my father built a small go-kart circuit on our property for me to practise on, which was pretty innovativ
e at the time. Vicente and I spent hours bombing around that dusty trail. Then at sixteen, I moved away to the San Luis province so that I could use the famous Potrero de los Funes track. I didn’t come home that often, but when I did, things seemed different. I thought that my father and Amelita had grown...close. Closer than was right. I used to see the way she looked at him. The way she dressed around him. For a while I managed to convince myself that I must be mistaken, because I wanted to be mistaken. And she was my mother’s best friend.’
He swallowed. His own sexual experience had been at a fledgling stage—he was barely out of single figures himself at that time. But he had been hit on often enough to realise that his mother’s best friend really was coming onto his father. He remembered trying to talk to him about it and being shocked by the old man’s sudden spurt of rage; his gritted threat to punch his only son. He had allowed himself to be placated by the furious denials which had followed, because hadn’t it been easier that way, even if deep down he had known the words to be lies?
‘And then one afternoon I rose early from my siesta,’ he said slowly. ‘The day was so still and so hot that I felt I could hardly breathe. I walked outside, seeking the shade of the trees, but it was no better there. There was no relief to be found anywhere. And then I heard a sound, something which seemed out of place in my home. I found myself walking towards the summer house and that is where I found them. My father and Amelita...’
Carly’s hand flew over her mouth so that her words came out muffled. ‘And were they...?’
‘Not quite,’ he said, repressing a painful shudder of recall. ‘Amelita was in the middle of some kind of tacky striptease at the time, while my father...’ His voice shook with rage. ‘And all this while my mother slept in the house nearby. It was the lack of respect as much as the betrayal which made me want to kill him.’
He stopped speaking and she didn’t say anything. She moved her hand to his face to try to comfort him, but he shook it off as if a fly had landed there.
‘It all came out, of course. These things always do,’ he said. ‘I suspect Amelita made sure that it did, since my father was one of the richest men in Argentina. And predictably, it blew everyone’s world apart. My mother never really recovered. She felt the sting of the double betrayal, of being cheated on not just by her husband, but by her best friend, too. She moved out of the ranch and bought a place in the city, but she stopped eating. Stopped caring, really. She used to stay in her rooms, afraid to leave, haunted by the fact that people would be looking at her and mocking her. Didn’t matter what I did or what anyone said, she refused to listen, and she died just three years later.’
‘Oh, Luis. I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.
He shook his head as he tried to hold back the tide of dark emotion which he had battened down for so long. But for once in his life, it kept on coming and some instinct told him that maybe it was better this way. He had never told anyone, and if he told someone who ultimately didn’t matter, then couldn’t he loosen some of his own dark chains? Because one thing he knew was that Carly would never go anywhere with this. He could see the makings of the doctor in her already, not just in her firm but ultimately gentle care of him, but in a moral compass, which was rare. She would not need to swear the Hippocratic oath to have her discretion guaranteed.
‘You want to hear the rest?’ he questioned bitterly. ‘Because it doesn’t make for a particularly happy bedtime story.’
‘I want to hear it,’ she said.
‘The husband of my father’s mistress also felt humiliated by the public laughing stock he’d become, but he sought a different remedy than the self-imposed isolation of my mother. He took what he thought was the only honourable way out. He put a revolver to his head and blew his brains out. It was Vicente who found him.’
She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Oh, Luis.’
He stared up at the ceiling again. ‘So there you have it. Now do you see why I don’t believe in family life and happy ever after, Carly?’
There was a pause. He could almost hear her thinking aloud as she sifted through all the possible words and tried to find the right ones to say. Except that there were no right words. He knew that.
‘Not...really,’ she said tentatively. ‘I mean—those were terrible things which happened, but they weren’t really anything to do with you, were they? None of that was your fault. Just because of the way your father behaved, doesn’t automatically follow that you would do the same. Infidelity and betrayal aren’t hereditary, you know.’
He turned to look at her again. He could see empathy clouding her eyes and he couldn’t help admire her kindness, as well as her perception. Because Carly was clever, he realised. Clever enough to realise that there was more.
‘But I’ve lived a life on the racing circuit,’ he said simply. ‘And I’ve seen what it does to men—especially to champions.’
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘There are characteristics which make men like me succeed. We’re driven—literally—by the desire to win. We spend years in pursuit of the elusive perfect lap and when we achieve it we want to repeat it, over and over again. There aren’t many of us at the top, but when you get there you realise that it is both a seductive and a dangerous place to be. People revere you. They want a piece of you. Especially women.’
‘Women who are “as interchangeable as the tyres I used to get through”?’ she quoted quietly.
‘Exactamente.’ His face tightened. ‘I have seen the strongest marriages break down under the strain of all the temptations the sport has to offer. When the adrenaline is flowing and some sexy little creature puts on a skirt the size of a handkerchief and presses her breasts against your windshield, most men can’t say no. Most are arrogant enough to feel they don’t have to say no.’
‘So.’ She sat up, folding her arms across her naked breasts. ‘What you’re really saying is that world champions get given so much forbidden fruit, that they find it impossible to exist on normal fare like most normal people?’
He shrugged. ‘If you like.’
‘But you no longer race for a living, Luis,’ she said. ‘So how does that even apply?’
