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With a sigh she put the gravy boat down and he immediately removed his hand and picked up his knife again, a smile ghosting around the corners of his mouth.
She scowled at him, and he tilted his head in mocking acknowledgement of her unwilling surrender.
‘No disrespect to the dead, but I don’t suppose you can claim that we really knew Sebastian,’ Dot said in her usual brusque fashion, her short helmet of grey hair gleaming under the overhead lights as she leaned over to pass Paula’s home-made mint sauce to Dave. ‘I mean, think of it—a week a year for five years is only five weeks out of nearly three hundred. For the other two hundred-odd weeks he could have been an axe-murderer for all we knew.’ Dot had been too strong-minded and opinionated to get along well with Sebastian.
‘Dot! Sebastian was a doctor!’ Paula cried.
‘So was Crippen,’ Rafe pointed out drily.
‘Rafe!’ Paula reproached him with a reluctant smile.
‘Who was Crippen?’ asked Celia, whose blank, fresh-scrubbed face showed her lack of years as well as her lack of knowledge of forensic history.
‘He was famous as the first criminal to be caught by police using a radio-telegraph,’ supplied Rafe. ‘Hanged in 1910 for poisoning his wife. No, you’re right, Paula, I guess there’s no similarity—Sebastian’s method of getting rid of his wives was strictly legal. Divorce may be more expensive than murder when you’re wealthy, but it’s a lot less risky in the long run.’
Celia looked intrigued at the mention of wealth. ‘How many wives did your father have?’
‘Let’s see...’ From the corner of her eye Jennifer was infuriated to see him pretend to count on his fingers, knowing he was deliberately tormenting her when he suddenly shook his head and started counting all over again.
‘Four,’ Jennifer interrupted flatly, deciding to take a leaf out of Rafe’s book and mislead with the literal truth. ‘He was divorced four times.’
‘No kidding!’ Dave and Celia exchanged looks, and Jennifer could see them wondering, from the supreme confidence of their youth, how anyone could screw up that many marriages.
With a pang she wondered whether, if her engagement hadn’t collapsed under the weight of her brother’s death and her mother’s long convalescence, she and Michael mightn’t have been divorced by now, too. She had loved him, and had passionately committed herself to the belief that their love would last a lifetime, but Michael’s feelings had withered in the face of early adversity, leaving her nothing but false dreams and empty hopes.
‘What’s it like having that many mothers?’ Celia wondered, her journalistic curiosity tweaked.
Jennifer went cold as she realised what could happen if Celia got wind of the bizarre story that was happening right under her very nose. Would she be able to resist the lure of another profitable scoop?
‘TEST TUBE FATHER IS STEPBROTHER OF HIS OWN CHILD!’
It was the kind of story that tabloids and talk shows could play up for weeks—years, even. The second most precious gift that Sebastian had given Jennifer, after her baby, had been privacy, but that would be well and truly blasted into smithereens if anyone in the media got hold of the details.
Rafe didn’t seem to find Celia’s question intrusive, but then he asked some unnervingly intrusive questions himself.
‘My own mother divorced Sebastian when I was four, and he didn’t marry for the second time until I was in my teens, by which time I’d long since lost the desire to regard any of his changing guard of consorts in a maternal light.’ He gave a quick glance at Jennifer that brought a little sting to her cheek. ‘Fortunately for me, as it turned out, because all their motherly instincts were already focused on their own children.’
There was a neutrality in his voice that spoke volumes to Jennifer.
‘So were you brought up by your mother or Sebastian?’ wondered Paula.
Jennifer’s eyes lowered to her plate as she tried to conceal her interest in his reply. Although Sebastian had often spoken about his son, it had usually been in the form of some grudging boast of his achievements, or a complaint about Rafe’s refusal to show proper filial respect. Suddenly she wanted the knowledge she had previously rejected. While the father of her child had been anonymous it hadn’t mattered, but now that he had become a force in her life she needed to know the things that had shaped his personality, if only to enable her to correspondingly shape her defences.
‘My mother, thank goodness—she’s Italian and has very firm feelings about mother-son bonding.’ Without looking at him, Jennifer knew he was smiling. ‘My father, on the other hand, worked hard and he played hard. He liked to bask in the image of himself as a family man, but the reality was that he couldn’t hack the boring, everyday routines of parenthood. He couldn’t be bothered with children until they became old enough to behave like real people. He liked the world ordered to his own liking, and children, of course, are notoriously allergic to order...’
A distant low boom made them all look towards the window, where the brooding hulk of volcanic rock and ice that was Ruapehu was still just barely visible against the spreading inky stain of night. A little earlier the thick mushroom cloud of ash and steam haloing the summit had looked like boiling red dye, the falling particles of ash absorbing the refracted rays of the setting sun and diffusing them into a brilliant red-orange haze that had made the whole mountain look as if it had caught fire, the permanent ice on the highest ridges blushing a fluorescent orange-pink while the lower snow-clad slopes dropped away into deep violet-blue shadows.
Another faraway crack and Dave, who had busied his mouth with food rather than conversation, pushed his plate away, wiping his beard with his napkin as he jumped to his feet, crackling with energy.
‘I think that’s our cue. They must be pretty huge blasts if we can hear them all the way down here. I hope you don’t mind if we take off.’
‘We have no idea what time we’ll be back,’ said Celia,
running a hand through her bubbly blonde hair. ‘I mean, it depends on what’s happening out there...’
‘We’ll leave the key in the front door for you,’ said Jennifer, smiling up at them. ‘So you won’t have to worry about waking us up when you come in.’
Rafe looked startled at the suggestion. ‘Isn’t that a bit risky?’ he asked as the couple departed. ‘Leaving the place unlocked at night.’
