Page 36 of Far from Home
It did. ‘When you love what you do, I suppose you just have to accept the risks in any job… even forex.’
‘Have you decided that that’s what you’re going to do? Are you going to carry on trying to kill yourself in a stressful job until you succeed?’
‘I hope not. I certainly don’t want to kill myself. No job’s worth that.’
‘Have you thought any more about what I said, about maybe jacking in the high finance job and settling for a more relaxed life over here?’
‘Only every day for the last few weeks!’ She looked up at the perfect blue of the sky and down again at the sunshine dappling the paving slabs at her feet. ‘I love it here in Sant’Antonio. I love l’Ospedaletto, I’ve made some great friends, like you, Adam and Pierpaolo for example, and in so many ways it would make a lot of sense for me to move here.’
He grinned back at her. ‘And that way you could be close to Adam, couldn’t you?’
‘Assuming he comes back.’
‘He’ll come back, he always comes back.’ She could tell that he was trying to sound positive for her sake. ‘And when he comes back, Pierpaolo and I both agree that you’re the best thing that could possibly happen to him.’
‘You do?’
‘Definitely. Up till now he’s been solely focused on his job. He needs to slow down and take life a bit easier, just like you do. You’re made for each other.’
At that moment his phone started ringing and, when he answered, she immediately saw the relief on his face. He murmured a few times and repeatedly said ‘Thank you’ and finished up with the words, ‘So is he coming straight back now?’ He nodded and thanked the person at the other end of the line once again before the call ended. Dropping the phone onto the bench beside him, he reached across, caught hold of Amy and hugged her to him, spilling her coffee onto her shorts as he did so, but she didn’t mind.
‘Adam?’
‘Yes, just like I said, he’s reappeared. Apparently he and the other two members of his team along with their local guide had to hike for days and days through virgin jungle. I bet he’s got some stories to tell!’ In spite of the delight in his voice, Amy could see tears of relief glistening in his eyes and she felt the same way herself.
‘What happened? I thought they were travelling by boat.’
‘That’s what he told me, too, but I presume something must have happened to it. The guy on the phone from the Canadian embassy in Brazil was a bit short on detail. Anyway, understandably, Adam and the others are sleeping it off for twenty-four hours and then he’ll be on a flight back here, arriving Sunday afternoon.’ He beamed at her. ‘Didn’t I tell you he’d be okay?’ He glanced down. ‘Sorry about your shorts, shall I get a cloth?’
‘Don’t worry about it. They needed washing anyway.’ She drained the last dregs of her coffee and leant back, feeling a smile on her face as she stretched her legs. ‘Well, that’s a bit of good news.’
He laughed. ‘Pierpaolo’s right, you English and your understatement. It’s not only good news, it’s absolutely fabulous news. We’ll need to celebrate when he gets back.’
Amy jumped to her feet. ‘Definitely. Why don’t the three of you come round to my place on Sunday night and I’ll see if I can get my new kitchen to start paying for itself?’ She waved away his protests. ‘Be sure to tell Adam when you talk to him. Seven o’clock on Sunday, okay? See you then.’
Chapter 21
It took Amy a long time to get to sleep that night as her mind turned over and over all sorts of thoughts. In particular, she found herself thinking about her mother. She remembered the bitterly sad time at the hospice where her mum had spent her final days, during which Amy had burst into tears more times than she could recall Every day she had got up late and every night she’d gone to bed at nine o’clock, but she had still felt exhausted, drained by her emotions. Her mother’s death had reduced her to a state of near desperation for some time, but now, as the months passed since it had happened, she felt she was finally able to come to terms with the loss and start looking forward, not back. The discovery of her real father – even if she had never seen him – somehow helped. And, to a great extent, this new-found optimism was the best possible gift her father could have given her. It just hurt so bitterly that he had been prevented from ever meeting his daughter.
The news that Adam was alive and well came as a welcome relief, but she couldn’t help mulling over what Danny had said about him and his job. She and Adam were more similar than she had thought and the upshot of this discovery wasn’t heartening. What if she were to give up her job in London and move here to be with Adam, only to find that he insisted on carrying on with what sounded like a very risky occupation? Thinking about it, that was exactly what her mother had done when she had married a soldier. She had presumably entered into that relationship with her eyes open, realising that there was a chance that every time her man went on active service he might not come back. And, of course, that was exactly what had happened. Was she herself prepared to enter into a similar relationship?
Of course this was all pie in the sky for now. She liked Adam and she felt pretty sure he liked her – and certainly his brother appeared to confirm that. But that was as far as it went, at least for now. There was every chance that he would return from Brazil to tell her that he had no intention of settling down with her or any other woman. Maybe there already was another woman, unbeknown to her or even to his brother. The fact was that so much about Adam was still a mystery and she gave herself a mental reality check. She barely knew him and yet here she was hypothesising about a future together when they barely had a present.
Next day she carried on cleaning, looked on as her new washing machine was installed, and then took Max for another walk, her mind still elsewhere. After a salad lunch, banishing thoughts of her mother or Adam, she turned her attention to the man she now knew to be her real father. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she had no image of him apart from his passport photo, but this was so stern and expressionless that it could have been of anybody. Adam had told her that she had the same colour of eyes as her dad, and various people had told her that he had been a good-looking man, but she really needed a decent photo.
Because of his reputed mistrust of technical things, she knew there was little point looking on the Internet. She had already tried, starting with his publishers, but there had been no photos of him at all, no doubt because they didn’t want the truth of his identity to leak out, seeing as he had been a man writing as a woman. It occurred to her that he might have some photographs hidden away amongst all the papers in his study, so she went upstairs to look. His desk had been moved to one side to allow the plumber and electrician to work and it was still covered with a dust sheet. She pulled this off, sat down in his chair, and started looking through the drawers.
She was there for almost an hour and by the end of it she had found only three photos of him. All of them were of a man in his fifties or sixties, nothing earlier. One was of him in tennis gear receiving a trophy of some sort, one was of him at a formal dance in a dinner jacket, and there was only one of him relatively close up, sitting out on the terrace alongside the house. She sat and studied it carefully, starting with the eyes, which were, as Adam had said, the same grey/blue colour as hers. He had chestnut brown hair, not dissimilar to hers, and he had broad shoulders and strong forearms. He was wearing a plain white shirt and her eye was suddenly drawn to an object lying on the bench beside him. It was, without question, a woman’s handbag. Presumably this meant that the photo had been taken by the owner of the handbag, which implied that at least on one occasion he had had female company here at l’Ospedaletto. Alas, there was no clue as to the identity of his female companion.
She got up and was about to leave the study when her eye was drawn to a slim cardboard folder squeezed in between three or four tall books on the bottom shelf of one of the bookcases. She pulled it out and opened it to find that it contained a couple of dozen photographs. She glanced through them and got a shock. They were photos of her. She sat back down on the chair and sifted through them, quickly finding that they were in chronological order, starting when she must have been seven or eight. The first photos were of her school nativity play and she still remembered how excited she had been when the teacher had chosen her to play the part of Mary holding a doll dressed up as baby Jesus. There were three photos taken at different moments of the performance, presumably with a telescopic lens from some distance as the rows of heads of the audience partially obscured the stage. Her father must have sneaked in at the back, so as not to be seen by her mother.
These photos were followed by others – a couple of her at school prize-giving as a teenager, one of her in black-and-white, clearly taken from the local newspaper when she had received her Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and the final handful were of her graduation day. Once again, these had been taken from a discreet distance and she could imagine him skulking around, desperate to see his daughter while making sure her mother didn’t spot him. It was tragic and she felt the tears once again on her cheeks. It was a considerable time later that she stirred and went downstairs again, still clutching the three photos of her father. She propped these on the shelf beside the fireplace and stood for a minute or two studying them before letting herself out and heading across the road to see if Max wanted a walk. Needless to say, he did.
As they walked up the hill, she called Lucy to give her the news about the photos and she heard immediate interest and sympathy in her friend’s voice.
‘That’s amazing, Amy. Poor man, having to creep around like a criminal.’ The exasperation in Lucy’s voice was the same as Amy herself had been feeling. If only her mother had realised the hurt she had caused. ‘But at least it means he did see you – even though he never got near you – so he must have had that satisfaction at least.’
‘I suppose that’s something.’
