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Very soon a trickle of sunset worshippers gradually filled up most of the tables overlooking the sea. She folded her white cashmere sweater on her lap as she sat down and breathed in the scent of the sea and this unspoiled stretch of the coast that she loved so much.
It was turning a bit chilly now that the sun had disappeared behind a cloud so she would soon have an excuse to wear the new sweater that she’d fallen in love with when she’d been doing some last-minute panic buying in London. She didn’t usually spend so much on clothes but she’d salved her conscience by convincing herself that anything that would boost her depleted confidence was a definite asset.
‘What would you like to drink, Julia?’
‘I’ll have a Kir please, Bernard.’
He nodded before going inside to the bar, returning shortly with her crème de cassis and white wine aperitif and a pastis with ice and water for himself.
She smiled as he placed the drinks on the table. ‘Thank you. I used to come here as a child with my parents and brothers when we were on holiday. My mother used to drink Kir. I knew it was a very grown-up drink but she allowed me a small sip. I loved the taste of the blackcurrant juice mixed in with white wine. As soon as I was old enough I tried one for myself and that became my favourite aperitif in the evenings.’
‘To your grown-up Kir, Julia.’ Bernard smiled as he raised his glass to her. He thought she looked so lovely now with the sun low in the sky on her face. What an enigma she was! To think that she had performed so self-assuredly in Theatre today and yet here she was reminiscing so naively about her childhood.
She smiled back as she took her first sip. ‘Mmm! So reviving after a long day in hospital!’
‘You deserve it after your performance this morning. I was proud of you—I mean, you’re one of the students I selected from a large number of applicants who wanted a place on the course so it’s good to know you didn’t let me down.’
He hastily drank from his glass of pastis with ice, adding some water so that he wouldn’t become too exuberant. He didn’t want Julia to misinterpret his remarks. She might think he … well, he fancied her in some way. Perish the thought, he lied to himself, knowing full well that she was a most attractive woman and he’d better be careful or he might go overboard in his admiration.
But putting that aside, he told himself sharply, trying to leave his admiration out of the equation, whenever he discovered a talented student he found it very satisfying, euphoric almost! But he’d better hold back with the praise so that Julia would work hard throughout the course and not let him down. And he must also be aware that his delight in her achievements had to remain totally without emotional attachment.
Nevertheless, it was certainly true that he found himself drawn towards her in a way that a professor shouldn’t think of his student. They were both adults, yes, but he mustn’t let this attraction he felt affect his professional judgement of her during the months of hard work ahead.
He looked across the table. ‘So tell me, Julia, what made you apply for this course?’
She hesitated before answering. ‘Well … er … having survived a disastrous marriage that had been a total mistake, I felt it was time to make a fresh start and get on with my career. My family background also contributed to my decision. Mum and Dad, who’d planned to be surgeons when they were in medical school, had then taken a more practical route to become general practitioners because they fell in love, married when my eldest brother was on the way and …’
She broke off and took a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Bernard, you don’t need to know all this.’
‘Oh, but I do. It’s fascinating! Your story is similar to mine, in fact. I too come from a medical background where my parents gave up their ambitions in favour of family life. Please go on.’
She felt relieved she wasn’t boring him. ‘Well, as I told you before, GP parents and three brothers, now surgeons, meant I had to be a high achiever to get myself heard in the family. Fortunately I enjoyed studying my favourite subjects. Only when I hastily married Tony after a whirlwind courtship and found it so difficult to find the time for study did I question the sanity of becoming a surgeon.’
She leaned back against her chair, her eyes temporarily blinded by the sun low in the sky, setting behind the hillside that swooped down into the sea. She delved into her bag for her sunglasses.
‘That’s better.’
She paused to gather her thoughts. How much should she tell him? He was a good listener, seemed interested, but was he simply being polite?
‘At times I despaired of my exhausting role of wife, stepmother, medical student …’
‘So you hadn’t qualified when you married. Why didn’t you wait until …?’
‘I thought I was madly in love! I’d never been in love before and the wonderful euphoric sensations I experienced when I first met Tony swept me along. For the first time in my life I entered a world that was quite different from my own.’
Bernard looked puzzled as he watched the vibrant expressions on her face. ‘In what way was it different?’
‘Tony was a very successful man, having made enormous profits in the building and property business, proud of the fact that he’d come from a deprived background and made something of himself. Money meant everything to him. He lived and breathed doing deals, buying expensive clothes for himself, for the children and for me. He told me he’d outgrown his first wife, she was lazy, an ex-model who’d let herself go and wouldn’t keep up with his aspirations so he’d set her up in an expensive house where she could bring up their two children. He’d bought a luxurious flat in London where he could continue his wheeling and dealing.
‘I found out later that his wife had divorced him because of his womanising, realising that she was happier without him. She’d been hoping for a huge divorce settlement but she was still waiting. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I first saw him at the opera.’
‘The opera?’
She smiled. ‘Oh, it was a business deal he was doing with a client and he clinched it by taking this man and his wife to a performance of La Bohème. Anyway, I’d gone along with a group of fellow medical students and we were queuing at the bar in the interval, trying to get a drink.
‘Tony was in front of me and put on the charm when he gathered that we were all medical students. He insisted on buying everybody a drink before whisking me off to his table and introducing me to his business friends as a young doctor. With the benefit of hindsight I know I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be swept away by an unknown man who liked to flash his cash but I was still young, impressionable, and having had a cloistered childhood this whirlwind from another exciting world seemed the epitome of sophistication.’
‘But what about your own friends? Didn’t they think …?’
‘Oh, they were happy to accept the free drinks but they thought I’d gone mad … which actually I had, for the first time in my life! I’d always been so careful to toe the line and do everything my mother and father told me … especially my mother. She’d insisted I mustn’t marry until I was well established in my career. She used to constantly tell me about how she’d sacrificed her ambitions and forced herself to be content with life as a country GP, married to a GP, struggling with a huge workload whilst bringing up a family.’
She looked across the table at Bernard, who was hanging on her every word. She took a deep breath as she remembered her totally out-of-character stupidity in those early days of her relationship with the charismatic but totally unreliable Tony.
‘You see, I was totally blown away by Tony’s charismatic aura. I’d never seen anyone like him before except on TV or in a film. Looking back and remembering, I can’t believe how gullible I was in those days. I feel as if I’m remembering something that happened to someone else, a little sister if I’d had one, someone with no experience of real life—which, in a way, was exactly how I was. I couldn’t take my eyes off this tall, handsome character in the well-cut, expensive suit who seemed to demand attention from everybody who was listening to his deep, sexy voice.’
She paused as the weird memories from her past came back to her.
She took a deep breath as she watched Bernard’s reaction. Yes, he was a good listener and definitely seemed to want her to continue.
‘Tony was proud of the fact that he was a self-made man who’d come from a poor background. At the time I just couldn’t help admiring him and then the admiration blossomed into something more dangerous and I fell for him, hook, line and sinker, whilst enjoying the fact that he seemed attracted to me.’
‘So he was impressed by the fact that you were a medical student?’
‘Oh, he thought I was a good catch. He told me during our disastrous marriage that he’d thought I must be from a wealthy family because we were all doctors. How wrong he was! Our education was the top priority to my parents and that made a big hole in the family budget.
‘What I didn’t realise was that his business deals were getting fewer and further between and he needed to find a wealthy wife to help keep him in the lifestyle he’d got used to during his successful years. My parents met him for the first time at our registry office wedding. My mother could hardly disguise her dislike of him and she made no secret of the fact that I’d let her down badly. That hurt … that really hurt.’
Her voice faltered as she remembered the angst she’d suffered, knowing full well that it was all her fault, knowing she’d hurt her mother who’d given up so much to raise her family. She shifted in her seat, pulling the sweater around her shoulders as she glanced away from Bernard towards the beautiful seascape in front of them. Maybe she should stop talking about her past and give him a chance to recover from his busy day.
‘Bernard, you’re a good listener but I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Please continue! I’m fascinated. I can see where you’re coming from now. I do like to take an interest in the background of my students. As you say in England, it helps if I know what makes them tick, isn’t it, Julia?’
‘Yes, you got that exactly right, Bernard. You’re finding out what makes me tick.’
He leaned across the table. ‘I can tell you already, having known you only a couple of days. You’re aiming for the top and it isn’t easy, believe me. You’ll reach the next peak and what will you find? Another peak to climb!’
He broke off. ‘Please do go on. So you married this man from a different world? Were you happy at first?’
‘Well, for the first few weeks of our marriage Tony boasted to all his associates—I won’t call them friends because they were mostly hangers-on intent on helping themselves to his dwindling cash—about his clever young wife who was going to be a doctor. But the problem was that he thought I could pass my exams without spending time studying, be the perfect stepmother to his children when they came to stay at weekends, be a good hostess to his clients—and I quickly realised it wasn’t possible. That’s when it all turned nasty. His attitude completely changed. He seemed to think that by shouting at me he could turn me into superwoman, perfect in everything he wanted me to do for him.’
‘You have another saying in England—marry in haste, repent at leisure. Isn’t that right?’ Bernard was watching her reaction. ‘Was that what happened?’
‘Exactly! He changed completely once the ring was on my finger and he realised my family hadn’t endowed me with money. One of the things he told me before we married was that having fathered twins who were then five, a boy and a girl, he didn’t want any more children. It was a struggle to come to terms with that because I’d always hoped I would have children of my own when I’d established my career.
‘I subjugated my own desires for parenthood by immersing myself in taking care of my stepchildren. I loved those two as if they were my own and it was a terrible wrench when we split up and I lost all contact with them.’
Bernard noticed the emotional waver in her voice as she said this. Yes, he could see she would adore starting a family. Warning bells were ringing in his head. He mustn’t get too familiar with her.
‘So what caused you to split up?’
‘It was pressures of my work and trying to take care of my stepchildren. Tony, not being from a medical background, just didn’t understand. I adored the children, bonded with them and began to put them before my medical studies, but Tony was still dissatisfied with the amount of time I could spare him. He began to look elsewhere.
‘Everything came to a head one fateful weekend just six months after we were married. I was trying to get to grips with some revision in the study and was working on my computer when he flung open the door and told me to leave all that medical stuff and get into some expensive clothes. It was important that I should get out of my scruffy tracksuit and tart myself up so that I looked drop-dead gorgeous. He’d been speaking to a prospective client and he was taking him and his wife out for lunch. The wife, apparently, was a real doll and knew how to dress so I’d better make the effort.’
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