ANA spent the rest of the day working on the final draft of her translation. Daniel had spent several hours at Mark’s home but now they could get together to share the day’s discoveries. They sat in the cool of the trees at the bottom of the garden.

​

“Are you really telling me, cariño, that Sarah had discovered Mark is the father of a child with his lover in India? And the lover never told him? He didn’t know."

​

"No. I could see it was such a shock I suggested that Holly came over. I didn’t think he should read all that stuff alone, and it is so private I thought Holly was the best person because she was closest to Sarah. But maybe I was wrong, he might have preferred to be alone.”

 

“I am sure you were right. Holly is a lovely woman and she loved Sarah, I think.  But tell me, how on earth could Sarah have found out about the child, without Mark knowing?” 

​

Daniel explained that he had found a word document, a kind of a diary, saved onto a memory stick. He had found the diary difficult to access, and he admitted it made him curious. He was keen to see what Sarah had taken so much trouble to hide. The diary had a number of chapters, and one was called ‘India’.

 

“There are others, too. There was one marked “Jonathan” and another marked “Holly” but I decided they could wait. In any case, Mark can read them himself, if he wants to, that is.”

​

"He has a shrewd idea of what might be there,” Ana said, telling him about Mark’s words to Manuel Camps that morning, “ but tell me about the India file.”
 

“I felt such a voyeur,” Daniel said, “but I couldn’t stop reading, once I had started.” 

 

The first part of the diary described the life that Mark and Sarah had enjoyed in India.  Mark didn’t read it when Daniel was present, he scrolled through to see if as anything stood out.  
 

Then he found a section containing extracts from web pages, from English language Indian newspapers, and he saw a series of cuttings about a woman whose name he had seen in the first part of the diary. She had a whole file to herself on the laptop. Daniel guessed it was the woman Mark had fallen in love with, and so he skimmed through some of the cuttings, wondering why Sarah thought them so important.

 

It was when he saw a picture of this Indian woman with a child, her son Ravi according to the picture’s caption, that Daniel realised who it was. Mark had looked through some of the pages before politely asking Daniel to stop the search for the moment. The child, six years old according to the cutting, was tall, dark-haired and handsome, like his mother Indira. Her husband was an important businessman in Uttar Pradesh, and she had been a civil servant until the birth of Ravi. Daniel thought her calm face looked sad. As he realised Ravi was Mark’s son,  Mark asked him to stop the search.

 

“You know, Ana, I am sure that up till then, Mark had no idea at all about his son. He told me he promised Sarah that when they left India he would never contact Indira again.” He said because Sarah stayed with him, and made a go of their marriage, he kept his word and never contacted the woman he loved again. Indira’s husband could not have children, so Mark and Indira had always been very careful. “But not, it seems, careful enough. Do you know, the boy looked like Mark, although he also looked Indian.” 
 

“Well, Mark is dark; almost Mediterranean looking. Visually, he and Sarah were perfect foils. Oh Daniel, what a tragic story for them all. Daniel, do you think Sarah realised Mark was true to her in the end?; I hope she knew he never contacted Indira and had not learned about  his son?”

 

“Yes, I do. I think that’s why Sarah didn’t tell Mark what she had found out.” Daniel said he thought telling Mark might have been disastrous for Sarah; because a man like Mark might have decided he must do something about his child, and that would have upset their life together.

 

Ana knew talking about his innermost feelings was never easy for Daniel.  In the early days of their relationship, he had told her that although he knew his parents loved him, and were clearly proud of him, they were not physically affectionate people, and they had never discussed feelings. She could see that sharing Mark’s intimate, emotional discovery had stirred something in Daniel.

 

And then Daniel, after a slight hesitation, told Ana how this conversation had brought back his passion for her when they first met in Brussels. He had felt, he said, at a disadvantage,  being fifteen years older, as Mark had been with Sarah.  Their situations though could not have been more different. Ana, known in European Commission circles as “la Lopez”, was an object of admiration and speculation in equal parts, and Daniel had been only one of a group of admirers. Sarah although stunningly beautiful was painfully shy and, as Mark found out early on, very nervous about intimate relationships. He told Daniel he had won her trust slowly but, eventually, she came to see him as her rescuer, her knight in shining armour.  He told Daniel that he was now ashamed to admit that he provided a good male model to her, became the father figure she had only read about, never known in reality. And then, he had told Daniel, he had let her down. “ He said he couldn’t have done it better if he had tried. Heart-breaking stuff. I felt so sorry for him because I know how good for me our life together is. I can’t imagine life without you now.”

 

Ana was thrown by his words, for once uncertain what to say to him. Her own thoughts were confused and she wanted time to straighten them out. She had not prepared for this conversation.

Well,” she said, “Mark’s life with Sarah is over now. Whatever will he do now, poor Mark? I find it so difficult to imagine him in the grip of a ‘grand passion’. But what a tragedy; to be a good man, to have loved two women, only for it to end in this awful way.

 

“Mark told me that he loved Sarah very much but he could never quite get over the feeling of being the father she had never known. I never imagined having that kind of intimate conversation with Mark, I like him but there is something so private that I never looked far below the surface, you know”. 

Ana felt as if she were jumping into the sea blindfolded. Many of her instinctive beliefs had been shaken since she had been brought face to face with this tragedy and the secrets that were revealed every day.

 

She had seen tonight how Daniel found it hard to talk about his feelings outside of the bedroom, although when they were making love he was expressive in a different way. There he used special words to woo her, making her feel, she had often thought, as though she were the most beautiful, most sexy woman in the world. Had Daniel once loved Lynette as much as he now said he loved her?  Did she wonder why, in their most intimate moments, she had never told him about Max? Perhaps because Max was married and she was ashamed of what she had done. Or, more worryingly, because Max revealed a side of her she felt belonged in a hidden relationship? Perhaps the play, the fun, brought out behaviour and feelings inappropriate in a partnership where children were the aim. Was she more influenced by her mother and her mother's strong belief in the moral code of the Church than she had thought.?

 

Ana reflected on love and passion, how they are not always focused on the same people. She had been passionate about Diego, but she realised now she hadn’t loved him at all. Perhaps Mark truly loved Sarah but found an object for his passion which had undone him. Until now she had been pretty certain she and Daniel were the lucky ones, they had both discovered love and passion in the same person, even if her passion was more than tempered than her experience with Max. Now she wasn’t so sure. She felt sad, remembering the night before the beach party when things between them had seemed so uncomplicated. Their lovemaking had been so passionate that night, Daniel so open to her. Ana wondered if the clock could ever be put back.