‘It depends how you define the term,’ Emily answered. ‘I know quite a number of men, if that’s what you mean, but I don’t regard any of them as my exclusive property.’
‘You’re not in love with any of them?’
‘Not really,’ Emily said. ‘They’re just ordinary men.’
‘Most of us fall in love with ordinary men!’ Margaret exclaimed crossly. ‘What’s special about you?’
‘Nothing,’ Emily admitted. ‘But there’s nothing special about them either.’
‘Well, you’d better think up somebody special before you see Father!’
Emily got into the front passenger seat with a disdainful shrug. ‘I’m not sure—’ she began.
‘The whole family is relying on you!’
Emily didn’t say anything. She would wait until she had seen her father by herself, she thought. ‘What’s wrong with Father?’ she asked.
‘Been working too hard. Mother’s on at him to sell the business, or to take a partner, but he won’t, of course, unless he can find exactly the right person. Only he has to do something because the travelling is getting too much for him. There’s some chance of a merger with another firm that’s also in the import/export business, but I don’t think they specialise in the eastern end of the Mediterranean as Father does.’
‘Does Father want to retire?’ Emily asked.
Margaret nodded. ‘He said so last night. I suppose he’s getting old.’
Not very old, Emily decided mentally. She wished she knew more about what he did, or that Patrick had joined him in the firm as her father had always wanted, or even that Peter had shown a spark of interest in the business world. Should she herself have accepted his offer to train her to take over from him? But the business world had never been hers. She had always wanted to teach Home Economics until she could save enough to open her own restaurant, perhaps in her own home town, and she had done well at it—very well. It wouldn’t be long now before she could think about resigning from her present post and starting out for herself.
‘If he retires,’ she said aloud, ‘he could take an interest in my restaurant. I can’t imagine him doing nothing.’
But Margaret refused to take her seriously. ‘Surely you’re not still on about that old chestnut? You’d do far better to find yourself a husband who would help Father instead of expecting him to help you! It’s funny that you should be a Thorne, Emily. You’re not at all like the rest of us. You’ve always been the selfish one.’
Emily raised her eyebrows. ‘Have I?’
‘You’ve always gone your own way and taken no notice of the rest of us! Well, this time it’s your turn to do something! Father needs cheering up and you’re the only one who can do it!’
‘I’ll see,’ Emily compromised.
She had time before they drew up outside their parents’ house to open her handbag and run a comb through her dark hair. She reapplied her lipstick, staring at herself in the tiny mirror of her flapjack as though she had never seen herself before. Was she selfish? Perhaps she always had been. It was certain that she looked a Thorne, having the same black hair and the same grey-green eyes as her brother and sister, but she had always been quieter than they, her movements more gentle and her interests more serious. Did that mean she was selfish? She gave a little shake to her head, refusing to consider the matter further.
Margaret stopped the car outside the front door. She put an anxious hand on the sleeve of Emily’s coat.
‘Please do something!’ she begged. ‘It’s not a lot to ask of you. Couldn’t you pretend to be fond of someone for a while, just to make the old boy perk up and take interest again? Surely you owe us that?’
Emily could not honestly remember either Patrick or Margaret ever having done anything for their father, but she had not been home much recently and perhaps circumstances had changed. She suddenly wanted to see her father very badly for herself. She would know the minute she saw him if things were serious or whether her sister was exaggerating as usual. She had to know!
Mrs. Thorne greeted her youngest child with absent-minded affection. ‘It’s too bad of Patrick not to be here over the holiday to help entertain your young man,’ she murmured. ‘He’ll feel lost, poor boy, with so many women all round him and your father having to rest all the time. What are we going to do with him?’
‘Emily says she hasn’t got a young man,’ Margaret announced from the doorway.
‘Not?’ Mrs. Thorne looked concerned and grief-stricken. ‘Have you quarrelled with him too?’ she demanded of Emily. ‘Well, you’ll just have to make it up again if you have. Peter and Margaret are quite quarrelsome enough for one family. Bicker, bicker, bicker, all the time!’
‘Not any more,’ Margaret assured her cheerfully. ‘I told you, Mother, we’ve broken up.’
‘So you may have. He’ll be here for his portion of turkey all the same,’ her mother retorted with unusual insight. ‘But what are we going to do about Emily?’
Emily laid her plastic bags down on the kitchen table, rescuing the more fragile edibles from their travelling containers.
‘Do you have to do anything about me? Father will understand. He knows how you all embroider on real life—’
‘Emily!’
‘We do not!’
‘No?’ Emily transferred a crumb of brioche from its bag to her mouth. If they ate it for tea that afternoon it wouldn’t be too bad. ‘Someone must have thought up this mythical boy-friend of mine.’
‘You did!’ her mother claimed firmly. ‘He rang up here last week and asked to speak to you—and if you didn’t give him this telephone number, who did? I can’t remember his name now, but it had a foreign sound. He sounded enchanting!’
‘But I’ve never heard of him!’ Emily felt winded and she sat down hastily on the nearest chair. ‘He rang up here and asked for me?”
Her mother nodded. ‘Miss Thorne—’
‘That might have been Margaret,’ Emily protested.
‘Not for nearly a year!’ Margaret triumphed. ‘Besides, he knew all about you.’
‘He can’t, if I don’t know anything about him. Mother, you must have got it all wrong. He can’t have asked for me!’
‘Ask your father, dear. He was in the room when I took the call. He may even remember the poor man’s name. Go and ask him, Emily dear, and stop fiddling with those cakes and things. I’ve been meaning to have a word with you about that for some time now. You’re too old to think about nothing but food. Still, never mind, this man will be a nice new interest for you.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Mrs. Thorne managed a brave smile. ‘I’m glad you’re here, child. I’ve done my best to nurse your father back to better health, but I’ve never felt at my best in the sickroom. Why don’t you go and see him now and find out if he feels well enough to come down for tea?’
Emily needed no second invitation. She ran lightly up the stairs to her father’s room, tapping her fingernails against the painted door.
‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ she asked him as she crossed the room in answer to his brief command to come in.
‘Didn’t they tell you? I collapsed in the office and had to be brought home in an ambulance. Now I’m busy resting and getting on your mother’s nerves! There’s nothing for you to worry about, Emily. I can cope.’
Their eyes met. ‘Sure?’ Emily insisted softly.
‘Quite sure. I felt better the instant I heard you were thinking of getting married soon. He rang up here, did your mother tell you?’
Emily nodded, feeling cold in her middle. ‘I’m not sure—’
Her father looked up at her, smiling. ‘Is he?’
Emily conjured up a vision of the Greek stranger on the train. ‘He’s always sure—about everything!’ she said in an aggrieved voice. ‘Sometimes I don’t like him at all!’
‘But he means to have you?’
‘I don’t know. I think so.’ Her tongue felt several sizes too large for her mouth. ‘I
’m not banking on anything yet.’
‘No?’ It was obvious her father didn’t believe a word of that. ‘What is he like?’
‘He has a golden look,’ she said abruptly. ‘He never smiles and he thinks women were made for men to order about. He has black, curly hair and very light eyes. He isn’t handsome—his nose is too big for his face, but one can’t forget what he looks like. He has a little scar on his jawbone—’
‘My word, you have looked at him, haven’t you? Your mother said something about him being a foreigner?’
Emily hesitated, then nodded. ‘He’s Greek. Very Greek!’
Her father’s interest was caught. He looked at his daughter with a decidedly speculative air. ‘And what does he do, this Greek of yours?’ He waited for Emily to answer, apparently unaware of the panic that had laid its icy hand on her thoughts. ‘Are you very much in love with him?’ he asked more gently.
‘I don’t know!’
Her father patted her hand consolingly. ‘If he hadn’t telephoned here you wouldn’t have told us a word about him, would you, my dear? Don’t shut us out of your life altogether, Emily. I’m your father just as much as I’m Patrick’s and Margaret’s—more, I sometimes think, especially when I’m tired and have to accept help from all and sundry as I do at the moment.’
‘I’m not trying to shut you out. I really don’t know.’
‘But you do know his name?’
His name! He hadn’t got a name! At least none that she knew!
‘His name?’ she repeated. ‘Of course I know his name. He’s called—his name is——’ She shut her eyes and tried to think of any Greek name she knew and, surprisingly, one came floating to the surface of her mind—a name that was undoubtedly Greek and not in the least famous. ‘His name is Demis Kaladonis,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWO
‘There! I told you so!’ Margaret declared in triumph. ‘Father looks oodles better already. He can’t wait to meet this fiancé of yours.’
‘He’s not my fiancé! Nor will he ever be! I told you, I didn’t actually lie about it—at least, not at first. I just went along .with the conclusion everybody had jumped to. How can I be engaged to a figment of my own imagination?’
‘He’s becoming more real by the moment,’ Margaret observed. ‘He has a name now, and a nationality. I’m beginning to think that you do know such a person but, for some reason best known to yourself, didn’t want us to know about him.’
‘Oh, Margaret, really! I told you—’
‘Well, who knows what you get up to in London all by yourself! He doesn’t sound made up. Figments of the imagination don’t have little scars on the jawbone.’
‘That was someone I met on the train,’ Emily admitted, knowing it was unwise to mention the Greek stranger but somehow quite unable to stop herself.
Margaret’s eyes widened. ‘On the train? What happened? Did he try to pick you up? The Greeks are devastating lovers, so I’m told!’
‘He saw I had a lot of parcels and allowed me to sit in his seat,’ Emily said primly. ‘An ordinary, commonplace event that I’d rather you didn’t blow up into being the grand passion of the century.’
‘But, darling—’
‘I mean it!’ Emily flared up. ‘I don’t like playing silly games, and you’ve managed to ruin my Christmas completely for me already. I hate pretending to Father at the best of times—’
‘It’s for his own good.’
‘I wonder. I think he would have preferred the truth had he been consulted. What have we given him? A few false hopes that can never be realised! There’s no such person as Demis Kaladonis, so how is he going to be Father’s favourite son-in-law and inherit the business from him? Tell me that!’
Margaret refused to be depressed by any such realistic talk. ‘I don’t believe he doesn’t exist,’ she said grandly. ‘If you ask me, you’re a dark horse, Emily Thorne, and you do know such a person! How did you think up the name on the spur of the moment like that? Answer, you didn’t! You know a Demis Kaladonis very well, only you don’t want us to know about him because you’ve always been so superior about our love affairs that you don’t want us to witness the fall of the ice maiden in case we laugh at you! Well, it hasn’t come off, because I’m laughing now!’
If Margaret believed that, she would soon convert her mother and Patrick to her way of thinking, Emily realised with increasing desperation, and she would never hear the end of it. It was her own fault too. She should have refused to diverge from the narrow path of truth right at the beginning, selfish or not. Demis Kaladonis! She was beginning to hate the very name of the man she had invented. Nor was she enjoying the guilty feeling she had every time she looked at the worn, drawn face of her father and saw the new contented, satisfied glow that had come to him.
He had been busy all afternoon. At intervals Emily had heard the telephone bell sound as it does when the receiver is replaced, and she had wondered what business he had been able to do two days before Christmas.
‘Don’t do too much,’ she had begged him when she had taken him up his tea. ‘We want you downstairs for Christmas, and you won’t be if you don’t rest now.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Her father had grinned happily to himself. ‘As soon as Peter arrives I’ll come downstairs.’
‘Margaret says he isn’t coming,’ Emily had reminded him.
Mr. Thorne had dismissed that with the contempt it deserved. ‘Of course he’s coming. The young fool will learn in time that Margaret exaggerates everything, just like her mother, and that the only way to handle her is to pay no attention to the verbal excesses that she likes to indulge in.’ He had turned and looked up at Emily. ‘Now you, my dear, would do better if you let down your back hair more often. Still, I can’t imagine Demis Kaladonis allowing you to bottle things up for long, however. Is that what frightens you about him?’
‘Who said I was afraid?’
‘Aren’t you? The Greeks like to be the masters in their own homes, and you’ve always valued your independence to the point of obstinacy. No one expects a woman to make it all by herself—not even in these days. Oh well, it’s too late for you to allow me to help you with your restaurant now. It won’t be any use to you in Greece.’
Emily had stood her ground with a courage she had not known she possessed. ‘You don’t understand!’ she had suddenly cried out. ‘I’m not going to marry anyone! You’re all making far too much of a—a chance acquaintanceship with no one in particular!’
But her father had only laughed. ‘Demis Kaladonis will never be nobody in particular!’ he had told her.
He had been right, too, in thinking that Peter would join them that evening. Emily had thought her brother-in-law would have left Margaret to stew in her own juice until late on Christmas Eve, but he arrived just as they were sitting down to eat the meal she had prepared with all her usual flair.
‘Thank God for something fit to eat!’ he murmured as he sat down beside his sulky-faced wife. ‘I’d have come a long way for that if nothing else.’
‘Then you should have married Emily and not me,’ Margaret shot back at him.
‘Sometimes I wish I had!’
Emily looked down at her plate, wishing she could like him a little more than she did. Why did he have to be stupid enough to stroke Margaret’s fur the wrong way just for the fun of it? It had always embarrassed her to have to watch their quarrels, and she was shrewd enough to know that they both knew it too, and that it added a zest to their sparring that would not have been there otherwise.
‘Have you much last-minute shopping to do tomorrow?’ she asked him, hoping to turn the conversation. Peter was famous for his last-minute Christmas bargains.
He turned to her, his eyes hard and unsmiling above his grinning mouth. ‘Absolutely not, sister fair! I’m to be your father’s messenger boy for the day, it seems. I can think of better ways of spending Christmas Eve, but’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘if one marries into a family like yours, one has to take
the rough with the smooth.’
‘Meaning?’ Margaret asked him dangerously.
‘I have to run round after you and pick up the pieces you’ve carelessly left lying around—and not only you but your family too!’
Mrs. Thorne uttered a wail of dismay. ‘Peter! You’re not talking about me, are you?’
‘Not this time, Mother dear.’
Emily tried to cut him out of her thoughts. Her mother had apparently not noticed the barbed tone with which he had addressed her, but she had. She always did. He scarcely ever spoke to any of them without that underlying sneer in his voice.
‘Then who—?’ Mrs. Thorne asked, puzzled.
‘It’s Emily who has mislaid her property on this occasion,’ he said.
That startled them all. ‘Nonsense!’ said Emily. ‘I even remembered your favourite mince-pies after the complaints that there weren’t enough for you last year.’
‘Oh, leave him alone!’ Margaret drawled. ‘It’s me he’s getting at. It always is.’
Peter looked at Emily and laughed. ‘So innocent and so deceitful!’ he whispered to her. ‘And I always thought you were different from the rest of your family. Tell me, what’s he got that I haven’t? Or do you hand him the frozen mitt whenever you meet too? What’s special about him?’
Emily heaved a sigh. She had thought better of her father than that he would tell Peter about her supposed affair.
‘If you’re talking about Demis,’ she said, knowing that he would be unable to follow her into this particular flight of fancy, ‘he’s the son of Apollo and the beautiful Coronis. His skin is the colour of gold and he doesn’t feel the cold. On the contrary, the very stones come to life and warmth if they are lucky enough to feel his feet upon them.’
Peter’s look told her that he hated her, but it was her mother who burst into delighted laughter. ‘Oh yes! I remember him! Your father told me about him on our honeymoon. He was brought up by some mythical beast and learned his powers of healing from him, and he was punished by Zeus for raising too many of the dead and disturbing the balance of nature. Now, whatever was his name?’