Barbara Taylor Bradford - Where You Belong

‘I know that. Maybe in a couple of weeks,’ I murmured, and surprised myself with this answer. Two weeks was not so far away; I’d actually planned on taking three months off, and here I was shortening it. I was amazed at my unexpected response to him.

‘Well, that’s great!’ Mike was exclaiming down the wire. ‘You’re sorely missed around here. But listen, sweetie, the reason I called is because Qemal, the brother of Ajet, got in touch with the agency today. He asked for you , so he was put through to me. He wanted you to know that Ajet’s safe. In Macedonia.’

‘I’m so glad to hear that!’ I cried, genuinely relieved and pleased to have news of the young Kosovar at last. What had happened to him, what his fate had been, had troubled me and Jake for weeks. When we’d attempted to reach his brother there was never any reply at his Paris apartment. ‘Jake and I thought Ajet had been killed, Mike,’ I explained. ‘Where has he been all these weeks? Did his brother say?’

‘Yes, he told me Ajet had been wounded the day he was with you outside Péc? Apparently he left the wood where he was waiting for you with the jeep, once the fighting started. He actually went looking for the three of you, but he was shot before he could make contact. He was left for dead in the streets, but later he was rescued by some of the locals. They went out into the countryside a couple of days later and found soldiers from the K.L.A., who were able to get medical help for Ajet. The Kosovar soldiers then took him to Albania, God help him; I’ve heard the hospital conditions there are primitive. Eventually Ajet got to Macedonia, although his brother didn’t say how. You’d written the agency number on a bit of paper and given it to him, and the kid kept it. He asked Qemal to let us know he was safe. He especially wanted you to know that, Val.’

‘I’m glad he’s safe, and recovered. It was a fluke he made it.’

‘I know, I know. Everything’s in the lap of the gods in the long run. That’s my belief, at any rate. As Bogie once said, it’s a cockeyed world we live in.’ Mike half sighed, half coughed, and hurried on, ‘I gotta go, honey. Let’s talk next week, or when you feel like it. I’m here if you need me, whenever you need me, day or night. Just give me a shout and I’ll be there.’

‘Thanks, Mike, for everything, and especially for caring about me, and for your friendship…’ I found myself choking up and left the sentence unfinished.

‘Feel better soon,’ he murmured into the phone.

We hung up and I lay back against the pillows. Mike Carter was one of the good guys, one of the best, and he’d seen it all. After knocking around the world as a photojournalist, he and several of his colleagues had founded Gemstar, an agency very similar to Magnum which had been started years before, in the late 1940s, by Robert Capa.

When Mike’s beloved wife Sarah had been killed in a freak automobile accident outside Paris, he had given himself a desk job at Gemstar in order to stay put so that he could bring up his two young children himself, with the help of a nanny. He was no stranger to sudden death, to unspeakable loss. And grief and sorrow were old companions of his, as I well knew. But he somehow managed to hide his pain behind the gruff heartiness and a genuine warmth. Still, I knew how much he had suffered after Sarah’s unexpected and untimely death ten years ago.

Now my thoughts turned to Ajet and that fateful day near Péc the memory of it still terribly vivid in my mind. Almost immediately, I pushed the violent images away, smothered them. I closed my eyes, needing desperately to sleep. That was the ultimate refuge from heartache, and now I craved it. Very simply I wanted to blot out everything, everyone, the whole damn world.

I must have dozed off and slept for a very long time, because when I awakened with a start the room was no longer filled with the bright sunlight of early afternoon.

Grey shadows lurked everywhere, curled around the bookshelves and the big Provençal armoire, slid across the ceiling and spilled down onto the walls.

The overwhelming greyness gave my normally cheerful bedroom a gloomy look, and involuntarily I shivered. Someone walked over my grave, I thought, as gooseflesh speckled my arms, and then I couldn’t help wondering why I’d thought of that particular and rather morbid analogy.

Glancing at the bedside clock, I saw that it was almost six. I couldn’t believe I’d been asleep for over four hours. Slipping off the bed I went and looked out of the big bay window.

The beautiful Paris sky of earlier was cloud-filled now and darkening rapidly, the sunny blue entirely obscured. Rain threatened. Perhaps there would be a storm. I turned on the lamp which stood on the bureau plat , and sudden bright light flooded across the photograph of Tony in its silver frame. It had been taken by Jake last year when we had been on vacation together in southern France. I stared down at it for a long moment, and then I turned away, filled with sadness.

Sometimes I couldn’t bear to look at it. He was so full of life in this particular shot, his hair blowing in the wind, his teeth very white and gleaming in his tanned face, those merry black eyes narrowed against the sunlight as he squinted back at the camera.

Tony stood on the deck of the sloop on which we were sailing that vacation, the white sails above him billowing out in the breeze. How carefree he looked, bare-chested in his white tennis shorts. A man in his prime, obviously loving that he was so virile. You could see this just by looking at the expression on his face, the wide, confident smile on his mouth.

I sighed under my breath and reached out to steady myself against the desk, and then I moved slowly across the floor, retreating from the window area.

His son Rory had taken possession of Tony’s body once it had arrived in England, and the boy had taken it on to Ireland. To County Wicklow. There Tony had been buried next to his parents.

Rory would be at the memorial service, wouldn’t he?

That question hovered around in my head for a moment. Of course he would. And so perhaps I would finally get to meet the son Tony had had such pride in and loved so much.

I lay down on the bed again, and curled up in a ball, thoughts of Tony uppermost once more. Absently I twisted his ring on my finger, then glanced down at it. A wide gold band, Grecian in design, set with aquamarines.

‘The colour of your eyes,’ he’d said the day he’d chosen it, not so long ago. ‘They’re not blue, not grey, not green, but pale, pale turquoise. You have sea eyes, Val, eyes the colour of the sea.’

Pushing my face in the pillow, I forced back the tears which were welling suddenly.

‘Mavourneen mine,’ I heard him whisper against my cheek, and I sighed again as I felt his hand touching my face, my neck, and then smoothing down over my breast…

Snapping my eyes wide open, I sat up with a jolt, got off the bed and hurried into the bathroom. Pressing my face against the glass wall of the shower stall, I told myself I must pull myself together, must stop thinking about him in that way…stop thinking about him sexually. I’ve got to get over him, he’s not coming back. He’s dead. And buried. Gone from this life. But I knew I couldn’t help myself. I knew that his memory would be always loitering in my mind, lingering in my heart. Haunting me.

I took off my dressing gown and the rest of my clothes and stepped into the shower, let the hot water sluice down over my body, and then I dumped loads of shampoo on top of my head and thoroughly washed my hair.

After stepping out of the shower and towelling myself dry, I wrapped a smaller towel in a turban around my head. And then I examined my wound. I did this every day. There was a funny puckering around it, but that would go away eventually; that’s what my doctor here in Paris had told me.