Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [64]
“You’ve no worries on that score,” Deborah assured her. Anything to get their agreement, she thought. “And really, I do want to stress that nothing may come of this anyway. I don’t make the decisions. I only do the research. I create a report, take pictures to accompany it, and everything goes to London. The people at the production company decide what will be in the film.”
“See?” Nicholas said to his wife. “No worries.”
Alatea nodded but she didn’t look convinced. Still she gave her blessing with the words, “Perhaps you should then take Deborah to see the project, Nicky. That seems like a good place to begin.”
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
When her husband had left with the red-haired woman, Alatea sat for a moment looking at the fan of magazines on the table in the bay window’s alcove. They had been gone through. While this shouldn’t have been odd, considering the woman had been waiting for Nicholas to fetch his wife for an introduction and it was natural for one to flip idly through magazines while waiting, there was nonetheless very little that did not set Alatea’s nerves on edge these days. She told herself that it meant absolutely nothing that Conception was now on the top of the stack. While it was a little embarrassing that a stranger might conclude that Alatea was obsessed with the subject of the magazine, it hardly meant anything would come of her conclusion. This woman from London was not here to talk to her or to wander through the labyrinth of her personal history. She was here because of what Nicholas was doing. And it was likely that she wouldn’t have been here at all had Nicholas been just some ordinary individual trying to develop yet another way to help addicts turn their lives around. The fact that he wasn’t just some ordinary bloke, the fact that the misdeeds of his misspent youth had garnered him so much publicity because of his father… That was what made the story a good one: the son of Lord Fairclough, self-redeemed from a life of dissolution.
Alatea hadn’t known about the Baron Fairclough of Ireleth part of Nicholas’s past when she’d first met him, or she would have run from his presence. Instead, she’d known only that his father was a manufacturer of everything imaginable that one might find in a bathroom, a fact that Nicholas had made light of. What he hadn’t mentioned was his father’s title, his father’s service to the cause of pancreatic cancer, and his father’s subsequent position of prominence. So she’d been prepared to meet a man prematurely aged by his son’s having thrown away twenty years of his life. She’d not been prepared to meet the vital presence that was Bernard Fairclough. Nor had she been altogether prepared for that way Nicholas’s father looked at her through his heavy-framed spectacles. “Call me Bernard,” he’d said, and his eyes had gone from her own to her bosom and back again. “Welcome to the family, my dear.”
She was used to men’s eyes on her bosom. That had not been the problem. It was natural. Men were men. But men didn’t usually then gaze upon her with speculation on their faces. What is someone like you doing with my son? was the unspoken question Bernard Fairclough had asked her.
She had seen that look each time Nicholas had introduced her to a member of his family. To them all, she and her husband were unsuited and although she wanted to make her physical appearance the reason for her unsuitability as the wife of Nicholas Fairclough, she reckoned it was more than that. They thought of her as a gold digger. She was not from their country, they knew nothing about her, her courtship had been disturbingly brief. To them this meant she was after something, undoubtedly the family fortune. Especially did Nicholas’s cousin Ian think this, because he was the man in charge of Bernard Fairclough’s money.
What Nicholas’s family didn’t think was that she could possibly be in love with him. She’d so far expended a great deal of effort to assure them of her devotion. She’d given them not a single reason to doubt her love for Nicholas, and ultimately, she’d come to believe she