Page 123 of The Seven Sisters

‘Forgive me, Laurent,’ she murmured into her knees. ‘As you say, today I feel desolate. What are we to do?’

‘Now is not the time to discuss it. You must concentrate on your mother and her health. And although I hate to say it, you must take a cab immediately to the Copacabana Palace so you can emerge as if you have been there taking tea with your friend,’ he reminded her. ‘It is already past six.’

‘Meu Deus!’ Bel stood up and immediately turned towards the door. Laurent caught her arm and dragged her back towards him.

‘Bel,’ he said as he stroked her cheek, ‘please remember it is you I love and you I want.’ He kissed her tenderly and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Now, hurry away before I kidnap you and lock you up here in my apartment to keep you all to myself.’

39

Two days later, Bel walked out of the hospital entrance alone. The doctor they had just seen had insisted that Carla admit herself immediately for tests and Bel was to collect her at six that evening.

Even though Luiza and Gustavo were aware she was at the hospital and it would have been possible for her to spend the afternoon in Laurent’s arms while she waited for Carla, Bel could not bring herself to do so. Guilt that she had selfishly neglected her mother for Laurent ate into her. While Carla underwent the necessary tests, Bel sat numbly watching the trail of human tragedy enter and exit the hospital doors.

At six o’clock, she reported as requested to the ward to which her mother had been taken.

‘The doctor has asked to see you when you arrive,’ said the nurse. ‘Follow me.’

‘How is she?’ Bel asked as she followed the nurse along a corridor.

‘Sitting up in a chair and drinking tea,’ said the nurse briskly as she knocked on an office door.

Bel entered and the doctor ushered her to a chair in front of his desk.

*

Fifteen minutes later, Bel left the doctor and walked shakily along the corridor to collect her mother. The doctor had confirmed that the cancer had spread to Carla’s liver, and almost certainly further. Her mother’s instincts had been right. There was no hope.

In the car on the way home, Carla seemed simply relieved to be leaving the hospital. She made jokes that Bel found impossible to respond to and talked about the fact she hoped that the cook had remembered that Antonio had asked for fish that evening. When they arrived at the house, Carla turned to her daughter and clasped her hands in her own.

‘Don’t worry about coming in,querida. I know that you saw the doctor and I know also what he said to you, because he had already spoken to me before he called you in to see him. I only went with you today because I knew that I must convince you. And now that I have, we will speak no more about it to anyone. Especially not to your father.’

Bel felt the heat of her mother’s glance and the desperation contained within it. ‘But surely—’

‘When it is necessary, we will tell him,’ Carla said, and Bel knew it was her final word on the subject.

Bel returned that night to the Casa, feeling her world had tipped on its axis. For the first time, she was being forced to face her mother’s mortality. And, through that, her own. She sat down to dinner that evening and glanced at Gustavo next to her, before gazing across the table at Maurício and then Luiza. Both her husband and her mother-in-law had known where she was this afternoon. And yet neither of them cared enough to ask after Carla’s health, enquire of her what had happened at the hospital. Gustavo was already inebriated and incapable of lucid conversation, while Luiza probably considered that touching on a distressing subject would upset her digestion of the beef, the texture of which would challenge the most cannibalistic of incisors.

After dinner, and the endless rounds of cards, matched in numbers by the glasses of brandy downed by her husband, she accompanied him upstairs.

‘Coming to bed,querida?’ Gustavo asked her as he divested himself of his clothes and fell back onto the mattress.

‘Yes,’ she replied, walking towards the bathroom. ‘I will be there in a few minutes.’

Shutting the door behind her, Bel slumped onto the edge of the bath and put her head in her hands, hoping that by the time she emerged, Gustavo would be fast asleep and snoring. As she sat there desolately, she remembered Carla talking to her before her marriage of the fact that she had needed to grow used to Antonio and learn to love him.

However much Bel had inwardly derided what she had seen as her mother’s subservience to her father in the past, and wondered how she could tolerate his arrogance and never-ending desire for social acceptance, for the first time she understood the strength of the love her mother had for her husband.

And Bel had never admired her more.

*

‘How is she?’

Laurent’s concerned face greeted her at the door of his apartment as he ushered Bel inside a few days later.

‘She’s dying, as she told me she was.’

‘I’m so sorry,chérie. So what will happen now?’ Laurent asked as he led her into the drawing room.