Postcards From Rio. Tina Beckett
obviously fond of her.’
It was strange how it was often the way that you didn’t appreciate what you had until it was gone, Clare mused. She missed Aunt Edith’s sensible advice and dry humour more than she would have believed.
‘I lived with her for part of my childhood.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘At the time I hated being packed off to her cottage in a remote Kent village while my parents remained at our home in London. It never occurred to me that my aunt might not have enjoyed having her life disrupted by a stroppy kid.’
‘Why did your parents send you away from home?’ Diego could not explain why he was curious about his passenger. Usually he avoided personal discussions. He was never even mildly interested in his mistresses’ private lives, and he discouraged curiosity about himself. His past was not a place he wanted to revisit or reveal to anyone.
‘My sister was very ill when she was a child. She was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was six years old and underwent chemotherapy for several years before she was finally given the all-clear. My parents couldn’t cope with spending weeks, sometimes months, in the hospital with Becky at the same time as trying to run their PR company and look after me.’
She sighed. ‘It sounds ridiculous, but I felt abandoned by my parents. I was only nine when Becky became ill, and I didn’t understand how serious her illness was. When my parents spent so much time with her I believed she was their favourite child.’
‘That’s understandable.’ Diego could appreciate Clare’s feeling of abandonment when she was a child. He had been abandoned by his father before he had been born, and his mother’s dependence on crack cocaine meant that he had learned to fend for himself from a young age. ‘You said your sister made a full recovery. Once she was better, did you return to live with your parents?’
‘No. I visited them at weekends, but I had started at a secondary school in Kent and my parents decided it would be better not to disrupt my education by moving me to a new school in London.’
‘You must have resented your sister because she lived with your parents while you were left with your aunt.’
Clare was surprised by Diego’s perception. There had been times when she had felt jealous of all the attention Becky received, she acknowledged, but she had hated herself for her jealousy because, of course, her sister had not chosen to have leukaemia.
‘I love my sister. It wasn’t Becky’s fault that I grew up feeling pushed out of the family. I was lucky that I hadn’t been struck down with a horrible illness or spent chunks of my childhood in the hospital. My parents dealt with a difficult situation in the best way they could.’
Thinking about Becky and wondering if the kidnappers had harmed her made Clare’s stomach contract. Becky had suffered so much as a child and it seemed desperately unfair that once again her life was threatened. Clare hoped her sister was not making the situation even more difficult. Becky had been over-indulged by their parents during the long years of her illness, and her subsequent career as a successful model meant that she was used to people rushing around after her. But it was unlikely the kidnappers would treat Becky like a princess.
The Jeep lurched as the wheels went down another crater in the road and Clare winced and rubbed her bruised spine. The continual jolting made her feel as though she was inside the drum of a washing machine on the fast spin cycle.
‘How much longer do you think it will take us to reach the village where we are going to stop for the night?’
Diego glanced at the instrument panel. ‘We’ve driven one hundred and forty miles. Inua village is two hundred and fifty miles from Manaus and because of the damned potholes in the road we’re travelling at an average speed of thirty-five miles an hour.’
‘So we should reach the village in just over three hours,’ Clare said instantly. She caught Diego’s surprised look. ‘I have a freakish brain when it comes to maths. At school, when my friends were trying to decide what careers to choose, I always knew that I wanted to be an accountant.’
‘So, did you go to university?’
She nodded. ‘I have a degree in Accountancy and Marketing and after I graduated I was headhunted by a top bank in the City of London. I worked for the bank for eighteen months, before I became chief accountant at my parents’ public relations company. Recently, I’ve become much more involved in the actual PR side of the business.’
Diego frowned. ‘I’m trying to understand what made you give up a good career and cut yourself off from your family and friends. How do your parents feel about your decision, especially as you have chosen to leave England and join a holy order in Brazil?’
Clare regretted telling him so much about herself. It was a sign of her insecurity that she felt she needed to boast of her academic achievements to make up for the fact that she wasn’t beautiful, she acknowledged ruefully. For a few moments she had forgotten that the Mother Superior had persuaded her to pretend to be a nun for her protection. She felt uncomfortable about her deception but she did not dare risk telling Diego the real reason why she was going to Torrente.
‘My parents support what I am doing,’ she murmured, remembering how her father had hugged her tightly when she’d said goodbye to him before leaving for Brazil. ‘What about you?’ She steered the conversation away from herself. ‘Do you have a family?’
‘No.’
When it became clear that Diego wasn’t going to add anything more, Clare tried again. ‘So, you’re not married?’
‘No.’
‘I imagine being a gold prospector means you spend a lot of time on your own. It must be a lonely way of life.’
‘I like my own company,’ he drawled.
Clare gave up. She wanted to ask him how he had developed an appreciation of classic literature if his education had been as poor as he had said. There was something about him that made her think he was more than a rough, tough prospector. It was not just because of the books she had found. She could not explain why she sensed an air of mystery about him, but the idea that he was hiding something reinforced her decision to keep the truth about her identity a secret.
* * *
The surface of the dirt road grew worse the further west they travelled. Twice more the Jeep became embedded in mud. The first time, Diego managed to free the wheels by placing wooden planks beneath them, but on the second occasion he had to use a specially designed jack to lift up the front of the Jeep. It was a lengthy procedure and Clare had to get out to help and found herself ankle-deep in mud which dried to the consistency of cement in the sun.
By the time they reached Inua she was wilting from the humidity and exhaustion and visualised a clean hotel room, hopefully with air conditioning and perhaps even a bath.
‘Where is the rest of the village?’ she asked Diego when he parked in a clearing in the forest where a few huts with thatched roofs were grouped around a larger hut that seemed to be a communal place for the villagers. The men sitting on the floor outside the large hut were mainly dressed in shorts and shirts, but the women were topless and the children who rushed up to greet the white-skinned strangers simply wore loincloths.
‘This is it,’ Diego told her. ‘Inua is home to a small community called the Yanomami.’
‘But you said that tourists stay here.’ Clare looked at the ramshackle huts. ‘Where will I sleep tonight?’ Her visions of a comfortable bedroom and en suite bathroom were disappearing.
‘The guest hut is over there.’ Diego pointed to a hut set slightly apart from the others. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said when he saw her expression. ‘The wooden cubicle next to the hut is a shower. The Yanomami children find the shower fascinating because they bathe in the river.’
He walked away to talk to an elderly tribesman and came back to Clare a few minutes later. ‘I’ll get your bag from the Jeep and show you your accommodation. The tribal elder, Jacinto, asked if we would like to eat