Kitabı oku: «The Santiago Sisters»

For Charlotte

(when you’re big enough)

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for the author VICTORIA FOX

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

PART TWO

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

PART THREE

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

PART FOUR

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Endpages

Copyright

Prologue

Winter, 2014

NYchronicle.com/News/US-News/Tess-Geddes-disappearance

Live Feed, 10.31AM:

Concerns are mounting over the disappearance two nights ago of Hollywood superstar Tess Geddes. Ms Geddes was last seen leaving her New York home at 21:00 on Friday 19 December and no contact has been made with her since. The vanishing is described as ‘out of character’, despite the actress’s turbulent history. Friend and co-star Natalie Portis released this short statement yesterday: ‘Tess is a fighter. We knew she’d suffered the year from hell—but she knows better than that. She wouldn’t do anything stupid.’

It emerged this morning that Ms Geddes was accompanied by an unidentified female companion on the night of her disappearance. Police are now engaged in a hunt for this person, and witnesses are urged to come forward.

Her scent was deep: familiar and strange both at once. It filled the stairwell; savagery and glamour—one a relic from her old life, the other an emblem of her new.

Fear in her eyes, a pleading fear, begging for understanding. But it was too late for that. It was too late for sorry and too late for tears. She had arrived at her worst nightmare, and when that was over it would all be over: their history, their love, their hate; the cord that bound them unravelled at last. How to kill her? What method could rival her treachery, her greed, her betrayal; what could recompense her evil?

They should have stayed as one. They couldn’t survive apart. It was fate, forever destined to come to this: from birth, to death; two halves of the same whole.

PART ONE

1994—2000

1

Argentina

She wondered, sometimes, if they had started off as one person. All things combined, until a silver blade entered their mother’s womb and curled them apart. She pictured it dividing their heads, their shoulders, their hearts, their hands, and whether or not it had hurt. The change was immediate. Heat poured into her sister, red like fire. Cool stayed behind, with her, blue and quiet and longing for the warmth.

Calida Santiago dismounted her horse and knelt beside the wheezing guanaco. The animal was like a llama, with cinnamon fur and small, straight ears, and had broken its leg; the damaged limb was splayed behind the soft white pillow of its underbelly. She put her hand out to stroke it, and it flinched, fur trembling.

‘Is it going to die?’

Diego, their father, tethered the horses. He secured the guanaco’s neck in the crook of his arm to stop it biting or twisting, while he felt the fracture and then the pumping strain of its heart. ‘We should do what’s right,’ he said, removing the carved knife from his gaucho belt. Diego’s riding trousers were stained with dirt and sweat, his face obscured by dust. The facón blade glinted in the dwindling afternoon sun.

‘Take Teresita away.’

Behind them, Calida’s twin sat sidesaddle on their shared horse. At ten years old, they should both have been children. But Calida, for all of her two-minute head start, would always be the elder. It was what life had decided: she had been built the sensible one, the one who looked out for and looked after. Occasionally she wished to be as carefree as her sister, to dare a little more, to risk, but it wasn’t in her nature.

‘I don’t want to,’ protested Teresita. ‘I want to see.’

Calida took her sister’s dirt-smeared hand, as native to her as her own. Grudgingly, knowing her father couldn’t be defied, Teresita slid from the saddle.

‘Papa will make it better,’ Calida said. ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk.’

Teresita wore a dust-cracked scowl too determined for her years. She was wilful, stubborn, impossible once she set her mind to something, resolute to have her way no matter the cost: she was their mother’s daughter through and through.

The twins picked their way through sun-charred bramble, Teresita trailing behind like a disgruntled wolf cub, and into a ravine that twinkled with water. Calida crouched to rinse her face. The dust got everywhere; it was the taste of home, grit that caught in their teeth and ears and powder that clung to their eyelashes. All around, the dry green Patagonian steppe rolled into the distance; sharp peaks severed the vista and then flattened into grassy plains, like the whipping surface of a vast and angry sea.

‘What’s Papa doing?’ asked Teresita.

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

But Teresita wouldn’t. She always demanded to know, to find out. She was always asking these dumb questions that Calida didn’t know the answers to.

‘I can hear it screaming. Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ said Calida, putting an arm round her. ‘Come here.’

She drew Teresita close. Her sister’s hair smelled of the horses: the rich, solid scent of the saddlebags and the coarse rope of the reins, the leather stirrups, the tangy metal bit they put between Paco’s teeth and heard him crunch on like an apple core.

The guanaco shrieked a final time. Teresita pushed against her; whether with fear or resistance it was hard to say. Calida had felt her twin’s push from the very beginning: when they were born, a strength driving behind her, indignant at having been left behind. Hurry up, come on, get out, it’s my turn … When she had been old enough to identify it, and recognise in Teresita’s mop of black hair and huge jet eyes the sister she would love until the ends of the earth, Calida sensed that push so often in her life. Teresita’s struggle when she was crying and didn’t want to be comforted; her wishful gaze, reaching beyond the perimeter of the farm and into the frightening unknown; her resentment of gravity when all she longed to do was fly. Calida stayed on the ground, arms out, ready to catch her if she fell.

But there was a pull, too; a force of belonging that could never be changed and never be dimmed. It was blood, a mirror heartbeat, a laugh that echoed her own. At night, when they lay in their bunks, giggling in the dark or making hand shadows on the wall, whispering secrets that didn’t need to be told because they already belonged in each other’s hearts, Calida knew that this connection was a rare and precious gem. Faith. Trust. Devotion. Loyalty. No matter what, the sisters were there for each other.

‘What’s going to happen when we’re grown up?’ said Teresita now.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

‘Mama says not to do what she did.’

Calida didn’t reply. Instead, she said: ‘We’ll be together, though, won’t we? So it doesn’t matter. We’ll always be together, you and me. Promise?’

Teresita ran a hand across the brittle earth. She blinked against the sun, and gave Calida a smile that warmed her bones. ‘Promise. Can we go back yet?’

Calida went up the ridge to check. Diego was untying the horses. The guanaco was gone and she saw the slash of blood on her papa’s bombachas and dared herself not to look away, to be the big girl Diego always told her she was.

Paco chewed lazily on a tuft of yellow grass.

‘Come on, then,’ said Calida.

Every day the sisters went riding with their father, while Julia stayed at home. It had been that way since time began. Their mother rarely emerged and the girls knew not to make noise in that part of the ranch, especially when Julia was resting.

Calida tried not to feel sad at how, on Julia’s better days, she would invite Teresita into her bedroom; Calida would listen at the door, shut out of their exchange, desperate to hear and be part of the confidence, until she heard her papa’s tread and shame directed her away. Julia spent hours brushing Teresita’s ebony hair and singing her songs, telling her stories of the past and stories of the future, assuring her what a magical woman she was destined to become. Her mama adored Teresita, because Teresita was beautiful. The twins’ division was responsible for this injustice, marking their physical difference: Teresita as exquisite and Calida as average. Calida knew there were greater things in life than beauty, but still it hurt. She wasn’t special, or in any way extraordinary, like her sister. If she were, her mama would love her more.

Once upon a time, when Julia had first been married, she herself had been a magical woman. Calida had seen the evidence, photographs her father had taken when they had worked the land as a couple: Julia against the melting orange sunset, her head turned gently away and her hair in a thick plait down her back. The horse’s tail had been frozen in time, a blur when it had swished away flies. Calida loved those pictures. This was a woman she had never known. She longed to ask her mama about that time, and what was so different now, but she was afraid of making Julia angry.

Julia told Teresita those things, anyway. At least she was telling someone.

Summer 1995 was unbreakingly hot. Sunshine spilled through open doors, the heat bouncing off wood-panelled walls. The twins were in the kitchen, paper pads balanced on their knees. Their home tutor was a harsh-looking woman called Señorita Gonzalez. Gonzalez was thirty-something, which seemed ancient, and the way she wore her hair all scraped back from a high forehead and her glasses on the end of her nose only made her more alarming. She wore heavy black boots whose tops didn’t quite reach the hem of her sludge-coloured skirt, so that a thin strip of leg could be seen in between. In classes, Teresita would giggle at the black hairs they spied lurking there, and Calida had to tell her to shut up before they got told off. Gonzalez was strict, and wasn’t afraid to use their father’s riding switch if the occasion arose.

‘I’m hot,’ said Teresita, kicking the floor in that way she knew drove Señorita Gonzalez mad. Calida’s own legs were stuck to the wooden chair, and when she adjusted position the skin peeled away with a damp, thick sound.

‘Díos mio, cállate!’ hawked Gonzalez, scribbling on the board. ‘All you do is moan, Teresa!’ It was only the family who called her Teresita: it meant ‘little Teresa’.

Teresita stuck her tongue out. Since the teacher’s back was turned, this failed to have the desired effect, so she tore off a sheet of paper, balled it up and tossed it at Gonzalez, nudging Calida as she did so, to include her in the game. But Calida didn’t like to stir up trouble. The woman froze. Calida gripped the seat of her chair.

‘You little—!’ Gonzalez stormed, blazing down the kitchen towards them, whereupon she grabbed Teresita’s hair and hauled her up, making her scream.

‘Ow! Ow!’

‘Stop it!’ Calida begged. ‘You’re hurting her!’

‘I’ll show you what hurts, you disrespectful child!’

Gonzalez dragged Teresita up to the cast-iron stove and launched her across the top of it. ‘That hot enough for you?’ she spat. Calida felt the impact as sorely as if she were the one being assaulted: Teresita’s pain was her pain. But her sister stayed silent, contained, her dark eyes hard as jewels and the only giveaway to her panic the lock of black hair that hovered next to her parted lips, blown away then in, away then in, flickering with every breath. Gonzalez took the riding switch from behind her desk and drew it sharply into the air. ‘Time for a lesson you’ll really remember!’

‘Wait!’ Calida leaped up. ‘It was me. I threw the paper. It was me.’

There was a moment of silence. Gonzalez looked between the twins. Calida rushed to her sister’s side and shielded her, just as the kitchen door opened.

‘What is going on in here?’

Diego stood, his arms folded, surveying the scene. Calida felt Teresita squirm free, but not before she took Calida’s fingers in her own and squeezed them tight.

‘The girls fell down …’ Gonzalez explained, in a different voice to the one she used with them: softer, sweeter, with an edge of something Calida was too young to classify but that seemed to promise a favour, or a reward. ‘You know how energetic they are, rushing about … Honestly, Señor, I have my back turned for one minute!’

Diego approached and ruffled Calida’s hair. ‘There, there, chica.’

Calida clung to her father. She inhaled his warm soil scent. Diego held his other arm out to Teresita, but Teresita watched him and stayed where she was.

‘Nobody’s hurt?’ he asked.

‘Nobody’s hurt,’ confirmed Gonzalez. She narrowed her eyes at Calida and Calida thought: We’re stronger than you. There are two of us. You can’t fight that.

Winter came, and with it the rains. Teresita was staring out of the window; mists from the mountains pooled at their door and the freezing-cold fog was sparkling white. The reaching poplars that bordered the farm were naked brown in the whistling wind, and the lavender gardens, once scented, were bare: summer’s ghosts.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Calida, coming to sit with her. Teresita always had her head in some faraway place, where Calida couldn’t follow. She was forever making up stories she would sigh to her sister at bedtime, some that made her laugh and others that made her cry. Now Teresita reached to take her arm, looping her own through it, a ribbon strong as rope, and rested her head on her shoulder.

‘The future,’ she said.

‘What about it?’

‘The world … People. Places. What life is like away from here.’

A nameless fear snaked up Calida’s spine. Privately, the thought of leaving the ranch, now or ever, made her afraid. The estancia was their haven, all she needed and all she cherished, by day a golden-hued wilderness and at night a sky bursting with so many stars that you could count to a thousand and forget where you started.

‘But this is our home,’ Calida said.

‘Yes. Maybe. It can’t be everything, though—can it?’

‘What about me?’

‘You’ll come too.’

It was another dream, another fantasy. Teresita would never leave. They were happy here, happy and safe, and Calida comforted herself with this thought every night, locking it up and swallowing the key, until finally she could fall asleep.

2

Teresa Santiago would often think of her twelfth birthday as the day she left her childhood behind. This was for two reasons. The first was the bomb that exploded halfway across the world that same day in March, in a place called Jerusalem. They heard about it on the crackly television Diego kept in the barn, a small, black box with a twisted aerial that they had to hit whenever the reception went. Teresa tried to grasp what was happening—the flickering news footage, the exploded civilian bus, the hundreds of swarming, panicking faces. It seemed like it belonged on another planet. She felt helpless, unable to do anything but watch.

‘It’s a long way away,’ reassured Calida. ‘Nothing can harm us here.’

Her sister was wrong.

Because the second reason was that it was the day Teresa witnessed another type of combat, a different, confusing sort, which reminded her of two maras she had once seen scrapping on the Pampas. Only these were no maras: one was her father, and neither he nor the woman he was fighting with had any clothes on. Moreover, there was the faint inkling that this woman should be her beloved mama—and wasn’t.

It happened in the evening. The twins were outside; shadows from the trees lengthened and stretched in the lowering sun, and the air carried its usual aroma of vanilla and earth. Calida was on her knees, taking pictures with the camera Diego had given her that morning. She had been obsessed with photography for ages, and had waited patiently for this gift. ‘You’re old enough now,’ Diego had told her, smiling fondly as Calida basked in his love, always her papa’s angel. He never looked at Teresa that way, or gave her such special birthday presents. Teresa was too silly, too wistful; too girlish. Instead Diego spent time with Calida, teaching her the ways of the farm and entrusting her with practical tasks he knew she would carry out with her usual endurance and fortitude, while Teresa drew a picture he never commented on or wrote a poem he never read. Calida would be the one to find them later and tell her how good they were, and insist on pinning them to the wall. Teresa remembered she had her mother’s affection. That, at least, was something Calida didn’t have.

‘I’m going to wake Mama.’ Teresa stood and dusted off her shorts.

Her sister glanced up. ‘Don’t.’

‘Why not? It’s our birthday.’

‘She already saw us today.’ Indeed, Julia had graced them with her presence that morning, thirty minutes at breakfast in her night robe, pale-faced and sad-eyed.

‘She’ll want to see me again.’ Teresa said it because she knew it would hurt. She loved her sister deeply, an unquestioning, imperative love, but sometimes she hated her too. Calida was clever and useful and smart. What was she, in comparison? The youngest, made to follow directions and do as she was told. Why couldn’t she have been born first? Then her father would respect her. Then she could make her own decisions. Jealousy, a nascent seed, had grown over the years into creeping ivy.

‘Whatever.’ Calida pretended Julia’s preference didn’t wound her but her sister knew better. Teresa knew every little thing she thought or felt. ‘I don’t care.’

Teresa stalked past. It was as though the twins could argue on the barest of words, those surface weapons sufficient, like ripples on the deepest ocean.

Inside the house, it was cool and quiet. Teresa glanced down the hallway and decided she would take her mother a sprig of lavender, her favourite. She knew where the best of the purple herb grew, at the side of the stables, and went to find some. She imagined Julia’s face when she handed her the lilac bouquet, and lifted at the thought.

A strange sound came upon her slowly. At first she thought it was an animal in pain, one of the horses, maybe, and she hoped it wasn’t Paco.

But as she drew nearer, she knew it wasn’t that at all.

Teresa stopped by the stable door. The scent of lavender enveloped her, heady and sweet, and from that day forward it would eternally be associated with sex. In her adult years, in fields in France or in gardens in England, in perfumed tea-blends or in Hollywood spas, it would carry with it an echo of that exotic, bewildering revelation, all the more tender for the age at which she had discovered it.

A primal reflex told her the sound was human, not animal: gasping, close to a scream, as if the person making it was being stifled. There was violence buried inside; but willingness, too, even begging. She picked out a contrasting tone, guttural, which punctuated the silence between the high-pitched yelps, like a pig grunting. Words, perhaps, although she couldn’t be sure: Yes, she kept hearing, yes, yes, yes, and then please, and then yes again. Unable to desist, she drew the stable door wider.

Two figures wrestled on the hay-strewn floor. A bundle of clothes dripped from a rafter. The man, on top, was turned away, his pale, bare bottom pumping up and down. Each time it rose, a shadowy strip appeared between his cheeks, and a soft pocket of fruit, like an over-ripe peach, could momentarily be seen. His back was muscular, the ridge of spine glistening with sweat, and his thighs were scattered with hair. Gradually, the speed of his motions increased. He lifted the leg of the person beneath him and hooked it over his shoulder, pressing deeper, his hand clutching the person’s knee as he tensed and thrust with an urgency that soon became manic. His grunts got louder. Teresa saw the soles of his feet, white, the toes braced on the dry floor. She wanted to call his name, but knew it was impossible. This could never be interrupted: the thought of interruption was somehow cataclysmic.

Abruptly, their position changed. Teresa stepped backwards, scared she would be seen, but she had no need for fear: they were utterly consumed by their task.

The woman, facing her now, straddled the man, her cheeks flushed and her breasts pale and heavy, the nipples large and black, drooping slightly. She had long, mahogany hair. Teresa had never seen the woman’s hair down before, always scraped back off a high forehead, and she looked prettier than she normally did.

What alarmed her most was the clump of hair below Señorita Gonzalez’s stomach. It was close to the man’s belly, and she kept lifting it off him and going back down, and there was something connecting them, something swollen and weird that Teresa had heard only whispers about. The difference between boys and girls: the thing that grew hard. The man’s hands gripped Gonzalez’s waist then ran up to her breasts, squeezing them together, his thumbs on her nipples. Gonzalez threw her head back, all that mahogany hair falling free; her face screwed up tight and her mouth opened wide and the veins in her neck stood out as she released an ear-splitting cry, rocking back and forth and then, at last, she collapsed on to his chest.

The man kept going, raising his hips and thrusting. Gonzalez was thrown into an upright position, her breasts bouncing hectically, and Teresa almost laughed, but she was about to cry as well so it was confusing. In seconds, the man groaned.

It was over.

But that groan lingered on. It released something in Teresa, like a flesh wound in that pale instant before it splurges blood. All at once, she despised her papa. She despised his weakness. She despised his nakedness. She despised that pathetic, defenceless, self-serving groan. She despised him for liking her tyrant teacher, for choosing her over them. She despised him for loving her twin more than he loved her. She despised him for pretending that evil woman was her mama, who was tired and sick and ignorant of his sin. Teresa was filled with rage, but within that rage sat a nugget of conviction that smacked her with total clarity. Her father had committed a basic, unequivocal transgression that she would never forgive and never forget.

Gonzalez lifted herself and tied her hair back. They said something to each other, Teresa didn’t hear what, and laughed softly.

She found herself staring at it. The thing was relaxing now, less stiff and angry than before, and smaller, almost shy as it rested against her father’s thigh.

Soundlessly, Teresa retreated from the stable door. She stumbled back into the house, the lavender forgotten, and went to the bathroom and thought she might be sick.

Later, Teresa decided she would not tell her sister what she had seen. It was something she should keep to herself, a burden she alone must carry, and it would be the very first thing she ever kept from Calida.

Summer turned to winter and winter turned to spring. Skies were bracing and boundless blue, wisps of clouds drifting high in the ether, and far away the snow-capped mountains surveyed their kingdom of open plains. In the evenings, Teresa sat on the veranda to watch the horses run free, their manes wild in the hot wind.

She spent less time with her father, and resisted his embrace.

‘Chica, what’s the matter?’ Diego would ask. But she couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t look at him. She kept remembering what she had seen—it came at her in flashes, accompanied by that pitiful, animal groan, and she could not bear to be kissed good night or even touched by him. In lessons with Gonzalez, she became surly and distant. Gonzalez smacked and mocked her—’What are you doing?’ Calida whispered when their tutor’s back was turned. ‘Stop making her angry!’—and despite the number of times Teresa longed to put Gonzalez in her place and confess to what she’d seen, she never did. She was afraid of hurting Julia, of disappointing Calida, of Diego’s denial, of the question she kept returning to: Why didn’t you run? Why did you stay and watch? And the more she rejected Diego, the closer he grew to Calida, and the more Teresa felt the cool shawl of loneliness close around her shoulders.

What was there left for her here?

Her mama was right. Her mama told her she didn’t belong on the estancia. She was fated for greater, more important things. She had outgrown this life.

How could Calida be content to stay? There were so many worlds to see, so much more to discover, beyond the gate at the foot of the track. Teresa felt the draw of possibility as a physical force, beckoning her, tempting her. Stay here and you’ll never amount to anything. You’ll always be second best. She imagined her existence twenty years from now, as unhappy as Julia, her hopes and dreams snuffed to dust.

Julia hadn’t always been like this. Hers was a cautionary tale, so she said, as she combed Teresa’s hair and gazed in the mirror at the decades between their reflections. Once, Julia had bathed in banknotes and showered in glittering coins. She had been raised in a mansion many miles away and, as the only daughter of a rich man, had had her every need catered for; surrounded by servants, banquets, and ball gowns, she was the girl whose hand every suitor sought to claim. Then Diego Santiago had swept into her life, so different from the polished men of whom her father approved, and they had fallen in love. Julia, as spirited and defiant as her daughter, refused to be cowed by her father’s ultimatum. Given the choice between her family and her lover, she had chosen her lover. Teresa thought this romantic, but Julia was quick to clarify her mistake. She had been left with nothing. No money. No luxury. No furs or sapphires or silk sheets. When her parents died, they left it all to a distant cousin and not a peso came Julia’s way. Her sacrifice lost her everything.

What Julia wouldn’t give to swap her fortunes now! Look where romance had got her: a house that was falling apart, clothes that were tatty and shapeless, a husband who had changed, or so the story went, when he left to fight on the Islas Malvinas, leaving Julia behind with her pregnancy and a rapidly swelling depression. Now, her only refuge was in her romance novels, which she read to Teresa late into the night. The Billionaire’s Mistress, The Diamond Tycoon, The Handsome Magnate …

She informed Teresa how her beauty would serve her well; it was a pass into an exclusive club beyond the reach of ordinary people, and it meant she never had to settle. ‘These are the kind of men you must find,’ Julia counselled. ‘Rich men.’ She told Teresa that love was a trap only fools fell into. ‘Men will let you down—all men, eventually, no matter how much you think you can trust them—but money never will. If you have money, you have power … and if you have power, you have everything.’

That night, watching the stars through the window, silver cobwebs in a deep and soundless purple, Teresa prayed for the courage to make her mama’s vision come true. Diego’s betrayal proved that this was a cutthroat, adult world, that the innocence of her childhood was over, and, if she intended to succeed, she couldn’t hide away.

‘Recognise fortune when it comes for you,’ her mama said. ‘And when it does, be ready.’ Teresa was ready. She sensed it like a current at her fingertips. Something vital was about to change, something big: she could almost touch it.

She closed her eyes and took a breath, filling her lungs with promise. In the bunk below, she heard the yield of the mattress as Calida turned in her sleep.

3

London

Seven thousand miles across the sea, in a townhouse in Kensington, actress Simone Geddes faced the wall-mounted mirror as her husband drove into her from behind.

Shit, Brian was a lame fuck. He had never made her come—not once. His technique, if that wasn’t too grand a word, was to pound as hard and as fast as he could until her groans of boredom could be mistaken for cries of ecstasy, and so when the time came for him to collapse on her back in a sweaty, sticky heap (three minutes later), he could feel satisfied that she had also reached climax. This made her suspicious that Brian had never made a woman come, because otherwise he’d know.

‘That feel good, baby?’ he growled, rutting away, lightly slapping her bottom.

Do it properly! Simone wanted to scream. If you’re going to slap me, give it some welly! But as with everything with Brian, it was lame. Lame, lame, lame.

‘Let me get on top,’ she instructed. Her husband was close to spunking and she wouldn’t be in with a shot unless she took matters into her own hands. As she flipped his pale, bloated-from-too-many-lunches-at-Quaglino’s body between her thighs and clamped him into place, she thanked God for the mirror she’d had the foresight to install in the mansion’s master suite. At least this way she could get off on her own image, and no one could deny she looked incredible. At forty-eight, Simone Geddes was the ultimate English screen siren: cool, composed, with a chiselled sort of beauty that could freeze even the most experienced co-star into submission. She wore not an ounce of fat. Her ribcage was visible, delicate as a toothcomb beneath flawless white skin. Her breasts were high and small, the nipples tight. Her thighs were long and lean, smooth as the curves on a cherished motorcar. Her bush was honey-blonde and waxed into a neat landing strip. Her arms were slender and sinewy.

‘Baby, you are so sexy …’ Brian echoed her thoughts. She watched his hands reach up to knead her tits, quickly followed by the back of his head, then the feel of his wet, insistent tongue lapping her nipples as she mused on how much hair he had lost from that area. It was turning into a veritable monk’s patch!

‘I’m ready, hot stuff,’ he murmured—what were they living in, the 1970s? ‘Can you feel me deep inside you? D’you want this cock to make you come?’

Brian’s cock was mediocre. Simone would deal with it as one might a sticky gearbox, grinding it into position until finally she was cruising. She kept an eye on her own reflection as she hit orgasm, enjoying the pink flush that built and spread across her chest, and the way her breasts bounced and shook as she surrendered.

Brian shot his load a second later. He did this disagreeable wiggly thing with his hips, like he was stirring the contents of a mixing bowl with a big wooden spoon.

Efficiently, Simone dismounted. ‘Time to get ready,’ she ordered, stalking into the bathroom. Before entering, she called out, ‘Wear the Armani, would you? And the shirt. That shirt’s good. It’s slimming.’ She slammed the door.

Ugh. Doubts over her marriage were at an all-time high. At first, she had been seduced by the muscle of a big-shot director—not that she wasn’t a big shot herself, but Brian Chilcott was one of the hottest names in British film and together they were dynamite. Of course she had hoped the sex might get better, but then, when it didn’t, she’d given up. Brian did nothing for her, erotically. She didn’t even fancy him. Had she ever? Or had she just been in love with his plethora of awards and the allure of being half of the UK’s reigning power couple? No wonder she took other lovers. Men who knew where a woman’s clitoris was located—who knew women had one, for a start—and would happily spend an hour down there sending her to the brink, until the marital sheets were crumpled and soaked. Vera, the Spanish maid, asked no questions. The day Vera did, Simone would fire her so fast her head would spin.

Simone ran a scented bath and climbed in. The hot bubbles soothed her and she applied her cucumber facemask and closed her eyes. Brian’s latest movie was premiering tonight at Leicester Square and she had to look the part: they’d been married five years now and it was always around this time that the gossip columnists decided to speculate. A glowing joint appearance every couple of months normally did the trick. Just remember to smile! Simone told herself, attempting to practise underneath the mask, which had now set solid and cracked like cake icing.

She was beginning to relax when a caterwaul sounded from the bedroom.

‘But Daaaaad!’

Brian’s voice followed immediately: ‘I said no, darling.’

‘You are such a shit, Dad! All my friends are going. It’s only a fucking party—why do you have to be such a moron all the time?’

‘It’s only because I care—’

‘No, you fucking don’t. If you did, you’d fucking well let me go. It’s like I’m a fucking criminal—it’s like you’re keeping me fucking prisoner!’

‘Stop swearing.’

‘Like fuck I will.’

That was enough! Simone rose from the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. Damn Emily Chilcott! The thirteen-year-old was the bane of Simone’s life—she and her elder brother, the awful Lysander. Who would have stepchildren? Soon after Simone had moved in, Lysander and his friends had ‘done a waffle’ in the first-floor wet room, which involved defecating into the shower grill and, well, she couldn’t bear to think of the rest. Vera the maid had been forced to clear it up. Simone had been appalled, but all Brian did was to roll his eyes and chuckle, ‘Boys will be boys.’

Not on her watch, they wouldn’t. Emily and Lysander were begging for a smack of discipline; if they were her own, they wouldn’t get away with a second of it.

But they’re not yours, are they?

And now you’re a dried-up old husk. Barren. Shrivelled. Sterile.

Simone swallowed hard. She put her hand on the bathroom doorknob and stopped, watching her hand, focusing on it, because when she thought of that time, of that secret, it stole her breath away and it was all she could do to keep standing.

It wasn’t like that. I had no choice.

Emily’s tirade shattered her thoughts. ‘I hate you!’

Simone tore open the door. ‘What the hell is this?’ she demanded.

‘Oh, perfect,’ sang Emily, who privately loved Simone getting involved because that meant she could access her favoured armoury: the ‘you’re-not-my-mother’ diatribe. ‘Now your little bitch on the side is coming to tell me off.’

‘Emily, no!’ objected Brian, who was sweating. ‘You mustn’t say that!’

‘Bloody well let me go to the party, Dad, or I’ll say a lot worse.’

For a pretty girl, Emily Chilcott made an ugly mess of herself. Her permanent scowl erased the loveliness of her blue eyes, and her filthy mouth better belonged on a black-toothed hooker than an heiress to London’s greatest film dynasty. She was attractive, but her attitude made her a grim proposition. The same went for Lysander. Since their mother had left Brian for a female German show jumper named Trudi (a well-publicised scandal ten years ago), it had all gone tits up: all four tits up, if you thought of it that way. Brian’s laissez-faire attitude was one big long apology, and the kids took every advantage of it. When would he grow a ball-sack, for heaven’s sake?

Simone met Emily’s glare and raised it several notches. She would not lose.

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, madam.’

‘Screw you, Simone.’

‘You shut that mouth right now or I’ll shut it for you!’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘With pleasure.’

Brian stepped in. ‘Now, now, ladies …’

‘Lysander’s allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants,’ raged Emily. ‘He’s in his room this minute getting high off his nuts and neither of you two gives a shit.’

‘He’s doing what?’ Simone stormed into the hallway. Behind, Brian crooned, ‘OK, let’s everyone take it easy …’

Simone headed for Lysander’s room and threw open the door. But the sight that met her eyes wasn’t of Lysander—handsome, dark, rangy Lysander, with a curl to his spoiled, upper-class lip—skinning a joint or bent over one of his elaborate bongs; it was Lysander, butt-naked, reclining against his pillows and receiving a dedicated blow job from a redhead. Simone’s lips parted in shock. She didn’t know where to look. Lysander was coming hard. His eyes met hers as he ejaculated into the redhead’s mouth. In the corridor, Emily giggled. ‘Oops,’ she trilled, ‘my mistake!’

Post-climax, Lysander was unfazed. ‘All right … Mummy?’

Lysander’s accent was so sharp you could skewer cubes of meat on it.

‘What on earth is going on?’ Simone rasped. The redhead jerked up, clocked their audience and flung herself off the bed. She grappled for her clothes, her breasts jiggling as she tried and failed to cover her modesty. From the front Simone saw she was older than Lysander—quite a bit older, in fact. Lysander lit a cigarette.

Simone fought to keep her eyes off Lysander’s dying erection. He made no attempt to conceal it. It was huge. Why couldn’t Brian share that family trait?

‘You’re disgusting!’ Mortified, Simone turned on her heel. ‘Do not touch me, Brian!’ She flapped him off. ‘Whatever you do, do not bloody touch me!’

Before she disappeared back inside the master suite, she heard Emily wheedle: ‘So, Daddy, can I please go to the party? See, I’m not as bad as ‘Sander …’

And, predictably, depressingly, Brian’s castrated consent.

‘I just don’t understand why you can’t take control of them more!’

In the back seat of a blacked-out Mercedes rushing through Piccadilly, Brian placed a hand on his wife’s knee. Simone resisted the urge to recoil against the window: after all, they soon had to put on a convincing show for the cameras.

‘I try,’ he said pathetically. ‘You know how strong-willed they are.’

‘Or how weak-willed you are.’

‘They’re yours, too, you know.’ Brian said it as if he were sharing a prized chain of Umbrian holiday homes, not a host of cancerous growths in the armpit.

This time, she did flinch. ‘They already have a mother.’

‘But only one stepmother.’

God, it made her sound like some gnarled old thing in Cinderella. Oh, for a child of her own! Simone dreamed of it night and day. A girl—yes, a daughter, it had to be a daughter—whom she could mould in her own image. The girl would be her legacy, her gift to the world long after Simone’s own legend died. She would raise her as the ravishing, well-mannered, and impeccably groomed young lady that Emily Chilcott wasn’t and never could be. Simone wished for this immaculate creature so fervently that she thought she might explode. Yes, she had fame. Yes, she had riches. Yes, she had a wardrobe, and a stylist, and an army of fans that could topple the fucking monarchy, but all she yearned for was that most prized possession: a girl.

It would never happen. Simone was biologically unable, even before the first flushes of menopause. She hadn’t always been. No, it hadn’t always been that way …

‘Here we are, baby,’ said Brian, as they pulled up at the red carpet.

Their driver opened the door and the wall of sound that crashed in almost knocked her off her feet. Simone gripped her clutch and pasted on a smile. Cameras flashed and sparked. ‘Simone! Brian! Let’s see a kiss for the fans!’ And so on.

Simone had picked out her outfit personally, a Versace emerald-green drape dress with scoop neckline. Everyone said that, after forty, one should cover one’s décolletage, but Simone disagreed. She hadn’t been using five-hundred-pound face and neck creams the last twenty years for nothing.

‘You look tired.’ Michelle Horner, Simone’s manager and one of the most cutthroat women in the business, stole her at the end of the press queue. Simone had always thought Michelle resembled a whippet, especially tonight, in a grey trouser suit and pumps, her nose appearing even longer under the lighting. Michelle wore glasses on the end of her nose, amplifying the effect. ‘All OK on the home front?’

‘Same old.’

They entered the atrium, where champagne was circulating. Heads turned. In certain spheres Simone was known as The Ice Queen. She wasn’t sure where or how she had picked that up, but it was certainly an easier façade to maintain than the poor joke-a-minute suckers who had cultivated a comedy precedent and had to spend the rest of their days working the room like a court buffoon.

‘Terry Sheehan wants you for January Fight,’ Michelle was saying. ‘I told him we’d consider the script but it would have to be something special what with the Jonasses ringing off the hook and Sindy Reinhold at Paramour calling every hour of the day. I said, “Terry, we’re not getting out of bed in the morning for less than ten, and if you don’t like it you can bite me.” Between you and me, he’ll be scrabbling in his toilet bowl for coins. This is a waiting game and we’ll wait.’

Simone was only half paying attention. Across the space, a fellow forty-something actress had arrived. The woman was single, attractive if not ragingly successful, and in her arms she carried a gorgeously sweet black baby boy.

‘Where’d she get that from?’ Simone cut in.

Michelle followed her gaze. ‘The kid?’

‘Of course the kid—I thought her husband ran off with that bit of fluff.’

‘He did. She wanted a child, though. So she adopted.’

Simone narrowed her eyes. That sounded awfully simple. ‘Is it awfully simple?’

‘For ordinary people, I shouldn’t think so. For her, maybe.’

‘Where do you get them from?’

‘That one came from Africa.’

‘The internet? Are they in a catalogue or something?’

Michelle stepped back. ‘You’re not considering it, surely,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘What does Brian think?’

Right then, Simone couldn’t give a hooting crap what Brian thought. He wouldn’t know what it was like to go through life with no child to call her own. He wouldn’t understand. As with all else in their marriage, Simone would make the decision herself and then she would inform him of it. His opinion mattered not a jot. ‘Michelle, I want you to look into it for me.’

Michelle was used to dealing with her clients’ whims—this one would blow over in a week. ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Do you want a brown one?’

‘No.’

‘A Chinese one?’

‘No.’

‘Mexican? Filipino?’

‘I’m not ordering a goddamn takeaway. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll get you some information.’

‘Good. This could be the missing piece, Michelle. It really could.’

Brian joined them. On a happy impulse, Simone leaned in to kiss his cheek. A passing paparazzo captured the moment. ‘Hello, baby,’ he said, chuffed.

Hello, baby …

Except it wouldn’t be a baby. She had her own reasons for that. It would be a child. Hello to the child who was somewhere out there, halfway across the world, waiting to be plucked from poverty to riches, from obscurity to the spotlight, from nothing to having it all. What little girl wouldn’t want that?

She smiled. It would happen—and soon.

For, when Simone Geddes put her mind to something, she did not fail.

4

Argentina

In the autumn, without explanation, Señorita Gonzalez was fired. Diego appeared to make the decision overnight, and Calida didn’t dare question it—except to her sister.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think he found out what she was really like?’

‘Maybe. Who cares? She’s gone now.’

Teresita was flicking through one of their mama’s romance novels. Calida frowned: she could read her twin just as easily as the words on the page.

‘You know something,’ she said. ‘About Gonzalez—I can tell.’

‘No, you can’t. You don’t know everything about me.’

‘I know you can’t actually like those books. Come on, A Prince’s Affair?’

Teresita bristled. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she countered.

Calida could list the reasons from the covers alone—plastic men in open shirts with chests like dolls, smooth and hairless, and bright white teeth; how Julia swooned over their aeroplanes and chunky watches and forgot about the life that was right here in front of her. Calida thought the books looked like nonsense, but she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want to prove her twin right. They did know everything about each other—and in that case Calida didn’t need to explain what she disliked, nor Teresita what she enjoyed, so it seemed safer to walk away, and to try not to think about what Teresita was keeping from her, and why she hid it so deep, out of sight.

A month later, the girls were watching television in the barn when the phone rang.

Calida went through to the house. She lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’

The voice on the line sounded far away. It was a woman.

‘Es la policía,’ it said. ‘My name is Officer Puerta and I need to speak with Julia, wife of Diego Santiago. Is that her?’

They manoeuvered Julia into the back of the Landrover with difficulty: she hadn’t taken the car out in years and professed to have forgotten how—and besides, how could she operate a vehicle at a time like this? She was a wife in crisis.

‘My husband,’ she kept gasping. ‘What’s happened to my husband?’

‘We have to get to him, Mama,’ said Calida. She was terrified but she couldn’t show it. She had to stay strong. She helped her sister into the passenger seat and held her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her firmly. ‘It will be all right.’ Teresita gazed back at her with a stoic expression, and it was an expression Calida couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t find a way into it. It closed on her as firmly as the car door.

Calida had driven on the shrubland before, but never on the roads and never without Diego. She crunched the gears as they rocked and bucked down the pot-holed drive, and she tried to remember what her papa had taught her about checking her mirrors and coordinating her feet. It helped to hear his voice, guiding her.

Please be OK, Papa. Please, please be OK.

Eventually, they met the highway. Vehicles rushed past at speed. When a gap opened in the traffic she set the Landrover in motion and immediately stalled, trapping them across the oncoming lane. ‘Move!’ screamed Julia from the back.

Calida floored the gas and the car lurched forward. Car horns screeched. The wheel spun in her fingers and she grappled for control, finally setting them straight.

She followed the police officer’s directions. Everything was alien, sinister. Thoughts whirled as she turned south to the waterfront. Mauve clouds streaked the sky over the town lake. Calida could see the pulsing red beams from the police vehicles and the lump in her throat swelled.

You’re going to be OK. You have to be OK.

In her heart, though, she knew.

All her life her father had been a rock, as solid and constant as the mountains of home—but lately, he hadn’t been right. Since Gonzalez had left, Diego had become unpredictable, suspicious, checking up on the girls, calling them trouble, shouting at them for the tiniest thing. What had happened? What had changed? Once, he would never have left them at night while he went to town. Now, it happened more often than not. She had listened at the door while her mama spoke to Officer Puerta, watching Julia’s knuckles grow paler by the second. There had been an accident.

They reached the blockade: a ribbon of tape, police talking grimly into their radios, and, beyond that, into the dark, dense fog of the night, a shape she couldn’t make out and didn’t want to see. Calida brought the car to a stop. They opened the doors and climbed out. Calida attempted to be close to her sister but her sister didn’t want to be close. Instead, Teresita wrapped her arms round herself and turned away. Calida swallowed a lump of sadness. I need you, she thought. Don’t you need me?

A woman saw their approach and crossed the tape.

‘Come with me,’ she told Julia. ‘The girls stay here.’

Teresita was watching the police lights. ‘What’s happened to Papa?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he dead?’

The question stalled Calida. She knew the word that wanted to form on her tongue, the natural, logical word, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Calida would reflect on that moment and the tormented days that followed as frozen segments in time, as still and silent as the images on her camera. Diego pinned against the tree, the brief, ruthless frame of his body before he’d been covered; Julia with a handkerchief to her face, crying for him or for herself; Teresita refusing to weep, even once, and refusing her sister’s sympathy and shutting herself away.

It transpired that Diego had been drinking. Not just that night but every night before. Calida didn’t understand why. Her papa was a responsible man—not a drunk who got smashed in a bar and walked out into the middle of the road in front of a truck and got hit so hard his lungs collapsed and his heart stopped beating.

Diego had been her compass, her anchor and her ally. Now, he was gone.

Calida mourned him quietly and alone. Her mama’s door remained closed.

‘Are you awake?’ she whispered into the dark.

Weeks later, in bed, listening to her twin’s sleeping breath, Teresa shivered. She thought of her papa picking her up when she was five and swinging her over his shoulder, tickling her until she screamed with laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes.

You killed him. You have to live with that for the rest of your life.

Guilt and confusion hounded her every minute.

Papa died because of me.

Teresa had pushed him to it. In telling her father what she knew, she had set the wheels in motion. She had watched his face fall, heard his pleas not to tell her twin, delighted when he’d dismissed Gonzalez. She’d enjoyed that he spent more time in the bars, away from the farm and away from Calida. She hadn’t considered that his shame had turned him into an addict, or that he would wind up killing himself.

How was she to know that?

‘Are you awake?’ She tried again.

Silence came back at her. Perhaps, if it hadn’t, she would have told Calida the truth. Her sister would have kissed her and told her she wasn’t to blame—it would all be OK; they would get through it together. But there the silence was, cold and accusing. Teresa sat and climbed down the ladder, her feet meeting the floor, pale toes against dark wood. Her nightdress was thin and her legs were bare. She crept into Calida’s bunk and lay down next to her, felt the heat of her sister’s body, and put an arm round her slumbering shape, using the other to pull the blanket up to her chin.

Calida moaned as a freezing ankle touched hers.

A yawn, a sigh, then nothing. Sleep.

Teresa longed for the same oblivion. She snuggled into her twin’s back and held hard, thinking if she held hard enough they could be close again, like they had been when they were little. Everything seemed so complicated these days. It wasn’t simple, like it used to be, when all that mattered was each other. She had kept her father’s secret because she’d been scared—and then because she had wanted to shelter Calida in the way Calida had always sheltered her; she hadn’t wanted her sister to lose faith, like she had, in the only man in their life. But the more time passed, the deeper this wedge drove—a point of divergence on the cusp of adolescence. Teresa inhaled her sister’s skin, a scent she would never lose because it lingered on her own body, and wished she were more like Calida. She had thought she was doing the right thing in getting rid of Gonzalez—but since when had she been any good at that? Calida was the one who did the right thing, who fixed, mended, and made better.

Since Diego’s death, Calida had set to with grit and purpose while Teresa hung back, thinking, I’m twelve. I don’t want this to be my life.

Every time she looked at Calida, she saw her own failings—at having robbed them of their papa, at not wanting to stay and toil, at wishing she could be far away from their home—and the reasons why Calida would always be the better twin.

At last, she withdrew from the covers and left the safety of her sister’s side. For a moment she stood alone in the gloom, the boards scratchy beneath her feet. Through the window, the gate at the foot of the track seemed alive, pulsing in the moonlight, lit up like a pearl. She returned to her own bed, her heart thundering.

I’ll get away from here one day. I’ll make Mama proud. I’ll be rich and successful and all the things she wants me to be. Then I’ll have done something right.

Comforted by this, Teresa reached for Fortune’s Lover and read it beneath the blankets for a while, until her arm started to ache from holding the torch.

When at last she surrendered to sleep, the story grasped for her unconscious and, in her dreams, she walked through the farm gate and kept on walking.

She dreamed of billionaires and red carpets, of palaces and yachts, of sparkling blue swimming pools and satin purses stuffed with notes.

She dreamed of the elusive heroes of her mother’s novels, their shirts crisp and parted at the collar. So unlike any of the men she had encountered, these men were of a different breed, exotic and treacherous and holding out for her.