Pagan Adversary

There was a cot in Nicky’s room and he was standing up in it, gripping the bars with small desperate fists, his face swollen and blubbered with weeping. Yannina sat on a chair facing him, her motherly face contorted with a kind of despair as she talked to him in a swift monotone. A congealing cup of milk on a side table, and various untouched fruit drinks, bore mute witness to her attempts to find some form of pacification. As she entered the room, Harriet’s foot turned against something soft and she looked down to see Nicky’s teddy bear. She bent and retrieved it. Hurling his beloved toy across the room was the ultimate in despairing gestures as far as Nicky was concerned.

He was quiet as Harriet approached the cot, his whole being indrawn, intent on producing the next explosion of anguish at the maximum volume. And then he saw her. He screamed again, but on a different note, and his arms reached for her imperatively.

As she lifted him, he clutched at her fiercely, clinging like a damp limpet.

‘Thespinis Masters, I am sorry, so sorry.’ Yannina was almost weeping herself. ‘He wanted nothing and no one only you.’

Harriet gave her a reassuring smile and began walking up and down the room with Nicky, holding him tightly and crooning wordlessly to him, as Becca had done when he was teething. Slowly the convulsive sobs tearing at his body began to weaken until he was quiet, except for the occasional hiccup. Gradually one hand relinquished its painful hold on her neck, and she knew instinctively that his thumb had gone to his mouth. His weight had altered too. He seemed heavier because he had relaxed, and Harriet knew that he was probably more than half asleep.

Confirming this, Yannina whispered ‘His eyes are closing. Thespinis, may God be praised! Ah, the poor little one!’ She moved to the cot and began straightening and smoothing the sheets and blankets and shaking up the single pillow.

Harriet turned and began another length of the room, slowing her pace deliberately. As she did so, she saw Alex standing in the doorway watching her, his brows drawn together in a thunderous frown. She bit her lip. Clearly her methods with Nicky did not have his approval, so why then had he sent for her? She ventured another glance at the doorway and saw that he had gone.

When she was sure that Nicky had slipped over the edge of drowsiness into actual slumber, she carried him to the cot and placed him gently in it, smoothing the covers with care over his small body His face was still blotched with tears, she saw with a pang. She straightened with a sigh, and went to the door where Yannina was waiting for her, looking round first to make sure that Nicky hadn’t stirred.

She had been too eager to get to his side to take much notice of her surroundings previously, but now she realised that she was in a large sitting room, off which the other rooms presumably opened.

A waiter had appeared with a trolley, and Harriet saw to her astonishment that covers were being whipped deftly off an assortment of delicious-looking sandwiches and other savouries, and that there was a bottle of champagne cooling on ice.

Alex was lounging on one of the thickly cushioned sofas, but he rose as she came rather uncertainly into the room. He had stopped frowning, she saw, but the rather formal smile he gave her did not reach his eyes.

‘Champagne is the best pick-me-up in the world,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are as much in need of it as I am.’

Harriet thought wryly of the other two occasions in her life when she had drunk champagne—at Becca’s wedding, and Nicky’s christening. She had always regarded it as a form of luxurious celebration rather than a tonic, but she was willing to be convinced.

She chose a seat on the sofa facing the one which Alex was occupying, and pretended she did not see the expression of derision which flitted across his face.

He tipped the waiter and dismissed him with a nod.

‘Please help yourself,’ he told Harriet courteously. ‘I hope you like smoked salmon.’

Harriet murmured something evasive. She was damned if she was going to admit she hadn’t the faintest idea whether she liked it or not. And that bowl full of something black and glistening—surely that couldn’t be caviare? There were vol-au-vents too, filled with chicken and mushroom in a creamy sauce. It was all a far cry from the scrambled eggs on toast she had planned for supper. And she was hungry too. Her tea seemed a very long time ago, but at the same time she knew that Alex’s presence would have an inhibiting effect on her appetite.

She took the tall slender glass he unsmilingly handed her, and sipped some of the wine it contained, wishing for the first time in her life that she knew enough about wines to appreciate the vintage.

She tasted a little of everything on the trolley, aware all the time of the sombre scrutiny of the man who sat opposite. He ate nothing, she noticed, merely drinking his wine and refilling the glasses when it became necessary.

Alex broke the silence at last. ‘I tried several times to telephone you this evening.’ His brow lifted sardonically. ‘I began to wonder if you had taken advantage of Nicky’s absence to spend the night with your lover.’

Aware that she was being baited, Harriet smiled sweetly and confined her reply to, ‘No.’

‘Nevertheless my summons to you must have upset your plans in some way at least.’

Harriet thought without regret of the scrambled eggs. ‘Only slightly.’

‘You are fortunate. I had to postpone an appointment this evening.’

Another relaxation session with his beautiful redhead? Harriet wondered.

It was probably the champagne which made her say, ‘Never mind, Mr Marcos. I’m sure she’ll forgive you.’

A faint smile touched the corners of his mouth. ‘Now what makes you think my appointment was with a woman? You should not believe everything you read in the papers.’

‘I don’t,’ she denied with more haste than dignity. ‘Read the papers, I mean—or at least read about you in them.’

‘You surprise me. Judging by some of your remarks to Philippides, I imagined you had made a lifelong study of my way of life through their columns.’ Narrowing his eyes, he held up his glass, studying with apparent fascination the bubbles rising to its rim.

‘Eavesdroppers,’ Harriet said sedately, taking another smoked salmon sandwich, ‘rarely hear any good of themselves. How did you know my telephone number anyway?’

He sighed. ‘I made a note of it as I was leaving yesterday—in case of just such an emergency as this.’

‘Well, I hardly imagined it would be for any other reason,’ Harriet snapped.

‘Have some more champagne.’ He refilled her glass. ‘Perhaps it will sweeten your disposition.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Nicky gets his temper from my side of the family.’

‘You alarm me. The Marcos temper is also supposed to be formidable.’

‘Poor Nicky. He may never smile again,’ Harriet said cheerfully.

‘That is what I am afraid of,’ he murmured. ‘Will he sleep now until morning, do you suppose?’

‘I think he will.’ She looked round for her bag. ‘I—I really ought to be going.’

‘I think not,’ said Alex. ‘In my opinion it would be far better if you were here when the child awakes.’

Harriet didn’t meet his gaze. ‘You mean—you’d like me to come back first thing in the morning.’

‘I mean nothing of the kind,’ he said irritably. ‘I am suggesting that you stay the night here.’

Harriet continued to stare at the carpet. ‘I really think it would be better if I went home.’

‘And I cannot formulate one good reason why you should do so.’ The dark eyes glittered wickedly. ‘Why so reluctant, Harriet mou? Are you perhaps afraid that the bed I’m offering you is my own?’

She decided prudently that she had had enough champagne and put the glass down.

She said, ‘No, I’m not, but I admit that remarks like that aren’t very reassuring.’

His mouth twisted. ‘Is that what you want—reassurance?’

She said wearily, ‘I don’t want anything from you, Mr Marcos. I came here tonight because Nicky needs me, not to indulge in verbal or any other kind of battles with you. I think I’d better go home.’

‘No, stay,’ he said, and there was the authentic note of the autocrat in his voice. ‘I admit it amuses me to make you blush, but I have no designs on your virtue. And if I was in the mood for a woman tonight, I would choose a willing partner, and not a frightened virgin,’ he added, the dark eyes flicking cruelly over her.

Harriet hadn’t the slightest wish to afford him any more amusement, but she could do nothing to prevent the betraying colour rising in her face. He made being a virgin sound like an insult, she thought fiercely, and knew a momentary impulse to categorically deny she was any such thing which she hastily subdued. He was in a strange mood tonight, and she already knew to her cost how unpredictable he could be.

Trying to sound composed, she said, ‘Thank you. Do I share Nicky’s room? I saw there was a bed in there and….’