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‘You look more like your father every day.’ It wasn’t a compliment.
‘Mama.’ He suppressed a grimace and sat down on the low stool beside her. ‘You look well.’
‘That’s very kind of you,cheri.’ Her tone made it clear that she didn’t find him kind at all. His mother made a study of ill health and excelled, but Akil found it hard to indulge her when, thanks to his volunteering work, he saw real ill people in the overstretched public hospitals. ‘But my head has been bad recently. I thought you knew, but of course you are so busy, how could you remember such an insignificant detail?’ Her sigh was perfectly calculated to sit midway between heartbroken and plaintive.
It should be perfectly calculated. She’d worked on it long enough.
Nerea Ortiz was still nearer fifty than sixty, her dark hair owing more to nature than her hairdresser’s art, her figure still slim and toned, her face unlined. But she reclined as if she were a Victorian great-aunt, a small, fat lapdog snoring at her feet, a shawl around her shoulders and a selection of herbal remedies cluttering up a small table that also held a china cup half filled with weak tea and a matching plate holding two wafer-thin biscuits. A water bottle sat on another table—that was if it was water. Early as it was, it could easily be gin.
Not for the first time, Akil thought that his mother lived in entirely the wrong era.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said with the patience born of long practice. ‘But I’m here now and I can assure you that you have my full attention.’
Akil managed a dutiful hour by his mother’s side before pleading work duties and taking his leave. As he left the room his eye was caught by a photo. His mother at twenty, beautiful and glowing, full of life. It was easy to forget that when Akil had been young, very young, she had been that vibrant young woman. But years of his father’s disapproval and dislike had worn away all herjoie de vivreuntil ill health became her only defence against her husband’s scathing tongue. His weapons were anger and contempt, sarcasm and noise, hers tears and shrinking, martyrdom and illness.
And drink. Never spoken about, never acknowledged, all too often present.
No wonder Akil had spent as much of his childhood and now adulthood elsewhere, only coming back to the Ortiz ancestral home when duty commanded. Now he was the head of the family he had to visit more often but had resisted moving back to the place where he had been so unhappy, his father’s disappointment still reverberating in every room. Although, since recovering from the heart attack that had felled him eight years ago, his father now spent most of his time in the family’s Swiss villa.
Apparently not alone.
Akil sighed. Thoughts of his father were always complicated: guilt, dislike and yet, still, that frustrating, inexplicable and yet ever-present need to make him proud—and to beat him. To show that Akil had everything it took to be the Duc, the head of the family, to bear the Ortiz name. His father had always urged Akil to marry tactically. ‘Don’t let your head get turned by some pretty lightweight like I did,’ he’d told Akil more than once. ‘Marry a woman who brings influence and power. Who can further the family cause.’ Who better than the Crown Princess?
The beep of his phone recalled him to his surroundings and Akil paused on the top of the wide stone steps that led from the grand double-height entrance way down to the curved driveway. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and glared at the screen, the tension leaving his body when he saw the name on it.
Elixane.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ He walked slowly down the steps, an invisible load lifting more with every inch he moved away from the house. His car was right in front of him but he carried on, turning onto a gravelled path that ran across the front of the house and into the walled garden, which had been Akil’s favourite hiding place as a small boy.
‘I meant to return your call before now but things have been crazy,’ his sister said. ‘Everything okay?’
Akil hesitated. He’d called Elixane right after Arrosa had—possibly, maybe—suggested he consider becoming her Prince Consort, desperate to talk the conversation over with someone, but the more time passed, the less he felt able to articulate what had been said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ He paused. ‘I’ve just visited Mama.’
‘How is she?’
‘Much the same.’
She sighed. ‘That’s not good. I did try and suggest she drank less last time I saw her, but she pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about. It isn’t even the quantity I worry about, it’s the drinking alone. How about Papa?’
‘Last I heard he was much the same too.’
‘You mean he’s also drinking too much and eating too much and probably spending too much time with the mistresses we’re not supposed to know the old hypocrite has, while you fulfil his dreams for him?’
She had a point. ‘He nearly died.’
‘Of bad temper. Eight years ago.’
‘Early retirement was the best option.’
‘For who? Not for you, that’s for sure. I still can’t believe he guilted you into dropping your studies to take over from him.’
‘Elixane,’ Akil said warningly. ‘I made my own decisions then and I make my own decisions now.’
‘Which is why I’m the one doing a surgical residency in New York?’
‘And I couldn’t be happier for you.’ He stepped through the small, hidden archway that led into the garden and the last of the tension left him as he entered. Old, twisted fruit trees covered with fresh green leaves, blossom petals carpeting the grass, little winding paths darting between them, wildflowers populating the grass.
‘Now what can I say to that?’ Elixane complained. ‘Maybe you are better off as a politician. You always know what to say.’
