“I wouldn’t go that far,” muttered Michael.
“And Roxie was always so happy-go-lucky and sweet . . . before, you know.”
“Yeah.” Michael smiled sadly. “She was.”
“But I don’t know anything about you. Not really.”
Michael lay back, throwing his arms wide, like a hot version of Jesus. “Ask me anything. I’m an open book.”
“Okay.” Summer propped herself up in bed. Michael loved the way her long chestnut hair spilled over her shoulders onto his sheets.
“Why did you quit Oxford?”
“That’s easy,” said Michael. “It was boring. Next question.”
“Are you easily bored?”
“Very. This is fun.”
“By women?”
“If they’re boring, yes. Don’t worry. You’re not boring.”
He reached between her thighs. Summer firmly removed his hand.
“I’m not worried. And you’re not boring either. Yet.”
Michael grinned. He liked a challenge.
“Any more questions, Miss Meyer, or can the witness be excused?”
“Plenty. Why do you always defend your mother when she and Roxie fight?”
Michael frowned. “Do I?”
“You did at supper the other night.”
He thought for a while, then said, “I suppose I defend her because nobody else does. I love Roxie as much as anyone, and we all feel terrible about what happened to her. But she can be very unfair to Mummy. She blames her for everything.”
“Isn’t your mother to blame, though?” Summer asked.
“She can be cruel to Rox at times,” Michael admitted. “She’s to blame for that.”
“But wasn’t she the one who drove Roxie’s boyfriend away? That’s what I heard.”
“You can’t drive someone away who doesn’t want to be driven. He was a grown man, not a goat.”
Michael was angry, but he wasn’t sure why. He’d never really talked about this with anyone, not even with Tommy, his best friend. No one in the family talked about it. But perhaps, he realized, that was part of the problem, part of what gave Roxie’s tragedy its power. The fact that it had become taboo.
“I’ll tell you what happened. Mum hired a tennis pro one summer, a guy named Andrew Beesley.” Michael spat out the name as if it were poison.
“You didn’t like him.”
“No, I didn’t. Not from the start. He was a snake. Good-looking, but by God he knew it.”
Look who’s talking, thought Summer, but she wisely said nothing.
“All Beesley was interested in was screwing women. I don’t think he ever really cared about Roxie, but she fell for him hard.”
“And your mother didn’t approve?”
“Neither of my parents approved. Nor did I, nor did most of Rox’s friends. By the time Roxie and Andrew got together, he’d already shagged half of Oxfordshire.”
And I’ll bet you shagged the other half.
“Anyway, he and Rox became an item. After a few months Andrew proposed. Roxie was beside herself with joy. She accepted right away. But Mum was worried he was a gold digger, with good reason, as it turned out. She invited him out to lunch one day, when Roxie was up in London. As I understand it, she offered him money if he would break off the engagement, move to Australia, and never contact Roxie again.”
“She bribed him.”
“Yes. Against my father’s wishes.”
“How much money did she offer him?”
Michael shrugged. “Dunno. Enough to set him up in a private coaching business. I suspect a few hundred grand. Anyway, whatever it was, he took it. Pretty much bit Mummy’s hand off apparently, which in my book goes to show how little he cared about Rox in the first place. All Andrew Beesley ever wanted was a slice of my sister’s inheritance. When Mum made it clear she wouldn’t get a penny if the marriage went ahead, he was out of there faster than Boris Becker could drop his trousers in a broom cupboard.
“Roxie blamed Mummy entirely. Said she shouldn’t have interfered, that she’d poisoned Andrew against her. I believe she even accused Mummy of sleeping with him at one point, that’s how unhinged she’d become.” He shook his head sadly. “It was awful.”
“I’m sure.” Summer’s sympathy was genuine. She could imagine how painful it must have been, for all of them.
“The truth is, Rox had totally lost her marbles at that point. She was so in love with this bastard, so totally, hopelessly, dangerously in love. It broke her when Andrew left, it really did. I don’t think even Mummy expected her to take it as hard as she did.”
There were tears in his eyes. Tentatively, Summer reached out a hand and stroked his face.
“Don’t go on if you don’t want to.”
Michael grabbed her hand and kissed it. “No. It’s good to talk about it, actually. It’s a relief. About two weeks after Beesley took off, I got a call from Dad telling me Roxie had jumped out of her bedroom window at Kingsmere.
“She definitely intended to die. It wasn’t a cry for help or any of that bollocks. She left a note eviscerating poor Mum.”
“How horrendous. For all of you.”
“Yes,” said Michael. “But, you know. She didn’t die. It could have been worse.”
“Something died, though.”
“Yes. Something died. The girl that she was died. The family that we were. It’s so fucking sad, but there was nothing I could do about it then, and there still isn’t.”
Summer wrapped her arms around him, cushioning his head against the soft pillow of her breasts. “Of course there isn’t. It’s not your fault, you know.”
“It’s not Mum’s fault either. Not entirely, anyway. But she doesn’t help herself. After Roxie’s fall, Dad was so loving and sympathetic, and Mum just . . . wasn’t. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She’s just not very expressive when it comes to emotions.”
She’s a total fucking machine, thought Summer. Alexia had always intimidated her, and still did to some degree. They didn’t call Michael’s mother the Iron Lady for nothing. She’d always had an edgy relationship with Roxie, even before the boyfriend came on the scene.
As if reading Summer’s mind, Michael said, “Mum’s not a warm and cuddly person like your mother. She’s practical and she gets on with things. She doesn’t like wallowing.”
“She thinks Roxie’s wallowing? That’s a little harsh under the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not really,” Michael said defensively. But then he relented. “I don’t know. Maybe. She’s tough, my mother, and Roxie isn’t tough, and I think fundamentally Mum just couldn’t understand why Roxie did what she did.”
“What about you?” Summer asked.
“What about me?”
“Do you understand it?”
“No. I’ve tried to. But I don’t. I understand loving someone, but not losing yourself to that degree. It’s not healthy.”
No, thought Summer, it’s not. But it’s human.
She wondered if Michael De Vere had ever been in love.
But that was one question she was too afraid to ask.
Chapter Nineteen
Alexia De Vere closed her eyes and tried to enjoy the feeling of the salt breeze in her hair and the warm sand between her toes. For years, her entire twenties, she had avoided beaches. It was the sounds that bothered her most: the rhythmic lapping of the waves, the distant peal of children’s laughter. Just thinking about those sounds made her feel sick and anxious. But since Teddy had persuaded her to buy the Gables in the early nineties, she’d slowly rediscovered her love of the ocean. The irony was that Teddy, probably the most English man in the world, had chosen to buy in the States. But Arnie Meyer had offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse, and over the years both he and Alexia had come to love Martha’s Vineyard.
These days, Alexia found the vastness of the ocean calming rather than frightening. She enjoyed the sense of nature being so big, and her own life and struggles so small by comparison. All her life, Alexia De Vere had struggled to be someone, someone important, someone whose life mattered. A little boy had lost his life because of her, and a decent man had had his life destroyed. She owed it to both of them to make her own life count, to achieve something significant. So it was ironic in a way that the feeling of insignificance the ocean gave her should bring her such profound peace.
“Spit spot, no dawdling!” Lucy Meyer’s Mary Poppins impression was embarrassingly bad, but it always made Alexia laugh. Because Lucy truly was Mary Poppins, in so many ways. “We’ll never get to the beach by lunchtime if you keep standing there with your eyes closed like Kate Winslet on the Titanic.”
It was an unfortunate allusion. Too often these days Alexia felt as if she were aboard the Titanic, sailing inexorably toward her doom. She’d worked things out with the prime minister before Parliament broke for the summer—at least she thought she had. And despite the storm of disapproval within the party over her handling of the flag-burning affair, in all the opinion polls Alexia’s popularity rating was high. Even the Daily Mail was changing its tune in support of her tough-on-immigration stance. But the turmoil in her personal life had stopped her from savoring these successes. Not being able to talk properly to Teddy about the pressure she was under was the hardest part of all. Just alluding to Billy Hamlin the other night had sent Teddy into a full-fledged panic. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now: she had to solve her problems on her own.