Secrets from the Past. Barbara Taylor Bradford

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       THREE

      In the kitchen I was attempting to do three things at once: heat a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, toast a slice of bread and phone my sister in Nice, when the other line began to shrill. I swiftly ended my message to Cara and took the incoming call.

      Much to my surprise, it was my sister Jessica.

      ‘Hi, Pidge,’ she said, using the nickname she had bestowed upon me when I was a child, a nickname no one understood except me. ‘What’s up? How are you?’

      ‘Hey, Jess! Hello!’ I exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘I’m pretty good, and where are you? You sound as if you’re just round the corner. Are you in New York?’ I was hoping that she was; Jessica and I had a very special relationship and I hadn’t seen her for some months. When she was with me, I was immensely cheered up.

      ‘Not exactly, but kind of … I’m in Boston on business. Meetings yesterday and this morning. Now I’m done I thought I’d jump on a shuttle, spend the weekend with you, if you’re not caught up with a lot of other stuff. I can’t be this close and not see my darling Pidge.’

      ‘I’m not doing anything special, and I’ll be mad at you if you don’t come. What time will you get here?’ I asked.

      ‘I don’t know. I’ll head out to the airport now, get the first flight available. I’ll probably be there in a few hours, but I’ve got my door key, so don’t worry if you have to go out.’

      ‘I’m not going anywhere. Hightail it to the airport and get here as fast as you can,’ I ordered, bossing her for a change.

      ‘I’ll be there in three shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ she shot back, using a familiar expression we’d grown up with. Our English grandmother, Alice, had been unusually fond of it, had used it constantly – much to our irritation most of the time.

      There was a small silence and then we both burst out laughing before we hung up.

      The toast had gone cold, the soup looked congealed, so I threw everything away and started again. I made some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a childhood standby, and a mug of tea, and took everything to my office where I ate at my desk, as I usually did at lunch time, a bad habit picked up from my father and Harry.

      Later, I went to Jessica’s room and looked around, wanting to make sure everything was in good order. It was, thanks to Mrs Watledge, who came in twice a week to clean and do odd jobs for me. She always dusted every room in the apartment, whether it had been used or not. Much to my pleasure, she was fastidious.

      Jessica had left in a rush the last time she’d been here. I had hung up the clothes she had strewn around on pieces of furniture and put away all the scattered shoes once she was gone, and Mrs Watledge had vacuumed, polished the furniture and changed the bed linen.

      I saw there was not a thing out of place, and that would please Jessica, who was normally the neatest of the three of us. A crisis in the auction house she owned in Nice had necessitated her unexpected and swift return to France last November, hence the messy room she had so blithely abandoned without a backward glance, as usual focused on the problems in Nice.

      I was thrilled my sister was coming for the weekend. Although she and Cara had once teased me unmercifully, as the much younger child of the family, things had eventually levelled off as I grew older.

      We became the best of friends, the three of us, very bonded, and we were still extremely close. We shared this apartment and the house in Nice, which our mother left to us equally. The two places were our parents’ main homes for many years. Their special favourites and ours; the ownership only passed to us after our father’s death last year, which was the stipulation in her will.

      Closing the door of Jessica’s room, I went to the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. Mrs Watledge filled it up with basic items and bought a fresh roasting chicken from the butcher every Friday.

      There was plenty of food, and if my sister felt like eating out we could go to Jimmy Neary’s pub on Fifty-Seventh, or the French restaurant, Le Périgord, at Fifty-Second and First. Two old favourites of ours, where we’d been going for years, starting when we were teenagers.

      I wandered down to the office, sat at the desk and opened the top drawer, staring at the two cell phones and the BlackBerry.

      I knew there would be no messages. I never used the BlackBerry these days; only ever took a cell phone with me if I intended to be gone for several hours.

      Grimacing at them, I reached for my Moleskine notebook and closed the drawer firmly. Those devices reminded me too much of the front line.

      I had given up covering wars eleven months ago, and had no intention of ever walking onto a battleground again. The mere thought of this sent an ice-cold chill running through me, and I shivered involuntarily.

      For eight years I had been lucky. But I had come to believe my luck wouldn’t last much longer. And I’d grown afraid … afraid to put on my flak jacket and helmet and head out to some no-man’s-land on a far-flung distant shore, my camera poised to get the most dramatic shot ever. Fear had taken hold of me bit by bit by bit.

      When you’re afraid you don’t function with the same precision and skill, and that’s when you’re truly putting yourself at risk. I understood all this. The game was over for me.

      Flipping through the pages of the Moleskine, I came across some jottings I had made during the week, regarding the year 1999. I needed to talk to my sisters about that particular year, and what we’d all been doing then. I had a photographic memory, but several months of that year were somehow missing in my head. Jessica would no doubt remember.

      I pulled the manuscript towards me and glanced at the one section that continued to trouble me. As I pored over the pages I realized that only my father appeared in this long chapter. Obviously it was the reason I was worried.

      His family and friends needed to occupy those pages as well, didn’t they? Yes, I answered myself.

      A thought struck me. I jumped up, went to one of the cupboards built in below the bookshelves, and looked inside. Stored there in stacks were many photograph albums which had been carefully put together by my mother.

      I pulled out a few and glanced at the dates. Albums for the years 1998 and 2001 were there, but not 1999 and 2000. So those must be in Nice. The albums ran up to 2004, and some were much earlier, dated in the early Nineties. All would come in useful at some point, but these were not the ones I needed at this particular moment.