CATHY WILLIAMS - A Thorn In Paradise

He was still venting his anger when she settled him into bed at nine that night.

He had carried the letter around with him for the entire day, and the last thing he had done before she had left his bedroom was to pull it out and wave it in her face, with a scowl.

‘I shouldn’t be subjected to this at my age!’ he told her. ‘I should be taking things easy, not getting worked up like this. You know that. You nag me often enough about my blood-pressure.’

‘Yes,’ Corinna said, perching on the side of his bed and watching while he took his capsules. He had a mild heart condition and the tablets were necessary for his health. He hated taking them though, and she had got into the habit of waiting till he did just in case he got it into that stubborn head of his to dispose of them after she had left the room.

‘Yes what? Yes what? Don’t just sit there and say yest!’

‘You’re not doing yourself any good with all this ranting and raving,’ she said soothingly, removing the glass from him and handing him a mug of cocoa, which he stared at in loathing.

‘Take that away from me,’ he muttered ferociously. ‘Bring me a proper drink. A gin and tonic! A whisky! Some brandy!’

‘He may not even come,’ she said, ignoring that request. ‘Did he tell you when he’d be arriving?’

‘Not in so many words. Knew I’d make sure the house was locked and bolted, probably.’

‘Then if he hasn’t told you definitely when he’s coming, he probably won’t turn up. Why is he planning on visiting after all this time, anyway?’

The old man shrugged and took the mug from her. ‘Didn’t say. Just said some rubbish about wanting to discuss a few things with me. What’s there to discuss after all this time? Twelve years to be precise? What’s there to discuss?’

Corinna gave that some thought and frowned. ‘Who knows? Anyway, don’t worry so much about it. Even if he does come, I’m sure you’ll find that he’s nothing like you remember. People change, after all. Life mellows them.’

‘Stop philosophising. I hate it when people philosophise.’

She laughed and patted his hand affectionately. ‘Go to sleep and wake up in a better temper.’

‘You’re going red from that sun.’

She laughed again and said drily from the door, ‘Goodnight. Sweet dreams and don’t forget the blood-pressure.’

As soon as she was in the downstairs drawing-room, she closed her eyes and settled comfortably in one of the chairs with her book.

This, like much else, had become a pleasant habit. Her girlfriends, whom she saw regularly at weekends, invariably asked her how she could stifle herself in the Surrey countryside when she had spent years working and living in London. They couldn’t understand how peaceful it was at Deanbridge House, for all Benjamin Silver and his tempers. It suited her. She loved waking up to an absence of traffic, she loved the clean air, and she saw a great deal of London anyway, when she visited her friends. Most of them worked in busy London teaching hospitals and she constantly saw first-hand what she had left behind. True, there wasn’t the constant rush of adrenalin as casualty cases were brought in day and night, needing urgent treatment, and maybe one day she would really miss all that and long to return to it, but right now this was just what she needed.

She had originally decided to do private nursing because she had become over-exhausted in her work, and for emotional reasons she needed to get out of London as well.

She stared down at the pages of her book but she wasn’t seeing the fine black print. She was seeing Michael’s face. Dear, sweet Michael to whom marriage had seemed almost inevitable. They had known each other from children and it had become accepted, over the years, that they were meant for each other. It had been a tacit understanding and it was only last year, at the age of twenty-two, when she had looked at him, with his good-natured smile, his undemanding amiability that she’d realised, quite suddenly, that she couldn’t possibly marry him, however much a part of her craved that placid, undemanding security that he could offer.

She tried not to remember how upset he had been. It had not been an easy time. Her mother had been aggrieved. ‘Darling,’ she had said in that vaguely theatrical voice of hers, ‘but you’re so well suited. ’ Both so dull, Corinna had read behind the words. Her mother had a knack of insinuating an insult. Corinna had become accustomed to that, but at the time it had still hurt. She had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s tempestuous, flamboyant personality. It had had the effect of making her overly cautious, mature beyond her years, practical, down-to-earth, and a part of her knew that that was just how her mother liked it. That way, her daughter could never be a threat to her.

Beyond coping with her mother’s disappointment, though, she had had to cope with herself, with her own gut-wrenching suspicions that she was not built for love if she could not bring herself to love a man who was as kind and caring as Michael had been. Was something wrong with her? she had wondered.

She snapped shut the book and began prowling round the room, her eyes skimming over the tasteful drawing-room with its eighteenth-century wood panelling, its ivory, floor-length silk curtains, its marble mantelpiece. Very soothing colours. The furniture was fairly worn, but the warm, mellowed upholstery gave the room a pleasant glow, as did the small tables, dotted around the room, which were sprinkled with books of all kinds. It was one of Edna’s bugbears that she liked neatness while Benjamin insisted on leaving a trail of books behind him wherever he went.

‘My eyes,’ he was fond of telling her, ‘are about the only useful things I have left. I might as well use them.’

In fact, her own position in the household, which was technically that of private nurse, was really more of a secretary-companion. Benjamin’s health was poor, but not so poor that he really required any real nursing treatment, apart from ensuring that he took his tablets as prescribed and his blood-pressure was kept down. What he really wanted was someone who would take him for walks, talk to him, and help him with a historical piece of writing which he was doing on the house. With anyone else, Corinna acknowledged, it might have become boring, but Benjamin was too demanding and too intelligent for that ever to have been a problem.

Her thoughts turned to his son. Antonio Silver was the invisible presence that still filled Deanbridge House after all these years, although Benjamin would have been outraged if she had ever suggested as much. He liked to think that his son was little more than an aggravating memory, but it had been clear to Corinna from the very start that the old man ranted with the rage of a wounded bear.

Sometimes she thought that Antonio Silver couldn’t possibly be as black as Benjamin portrayed him, but other times she felt an odd, protective anger against this unknown man who still had the power to hurt his own father. What kind of son was it who could cut the strings and leave without a backward glance?

In a strange way she could empathise with Benjamin. She, too, had been the victim of desertion. She only had dim memories of her father. He had left, after all, when she was still a child, left without a backward glance. For years she had wondered whether it was something she had said, something she had done. Maybe she had disappointed him. He had been so dramatic, so much larger than life, just like her mother, two people born to thrust daggers into each other until the effort of removing them had become too great—she had never been like that, passionate and extrovert. Had her own timid nature driven him away? Later, she knew that she had been a fool to have imagined any such thing, but a child’s dark worries lingered far beyond the limits of sensible reason. She couldn’t comprehend anyone who could relinquish their family ties the way Benjamin Silver’s son had done. She knew from the occasional remark tossed in by Benjamin that he had divorced his wife somewhere along the way, and Antonio had left England to live with his mother in her native Italy, but would that have caused such a deep rift?