The Woman Next Door(43)

She is quiet again and I curse myself inwardly. Have I done it again? Said the wrong thing. She gives a long sigh.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I didn’t really have that sort of childhood, to be honest. Holidays weren’t really on the agenda.’ She doesn’t elaborate but then speaks again. ‘What about you? Do you know Dorset?’

‘Not so much, but my parents used to take me to Carbis Bay every year,’ I say and I can feel the smile warming my voice at the memory. ‘We had such wonderful times there. Donkey rides on the beach, crabbing in the rock pools. We always stayed in the same guest house. It was run by a formidable woman called Mrs Hoskins and my dad joked she was older than Methuselah!’

Melissa laughs kindly. ‘Carbis Bay’s lovely,’ she says. ‘Mark and I stayed in a gorgeous boutique hotel down there for our wedding anniversary.’

‘Well this place wasn’t exactly in that league,’ I murmur.

You can keep your ‘boutique hotels’. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about those holidays.

***

I can still picture it all so clearly. The memories are like Polaroids tinted in sunshine colours; the yellow Formica-topped tables in the dining room; the stack of tourist brochures in reception that seemed to hold the promise of so many wonderful attractions. Golden sunlight dancing on the water like fireflies. The salty thrill of the waves and the rough feeling of my red spotted costume as Mum and Dad waved from the beach.

I was blessed. For a short time at least, I was truly blessed. It’s what I’d always hoped to share with a child of my own.

‘Are your parents still around?’ asks Melissa gently, bringing me back to the present.

Ribbons of pale road streak beneath the wheels of the van. My fingers are gripping the steering wheel again.

‘No,’ I say. ‘They were both killed in a coach crash. It was the M62 one in 1974. Have you ever heard of it? It was quite a big news story at the time.’

‘Oh, no. I’m sorry, I haven’t,’ says Melissa, sounding genuinely sad for me, which is touching. ‘That’s awful. How old were you?’

‘Nineteen,’ I say with a wistful sigh. ‘I sometimes think it was the turning point of my whole life.’

‘I’m sure it was,’ says Melissa quietly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I don’t want to get stuck in the past. Dark times should stay in the background, where they belong. I force brightness into my voice. ‘We all have our crosses to bear, don’t we?’ I say.

‘You got that right,’ says Melissa, her face turned to the window again.

We drive in silence through several villages, which probably look quite picture postcard in the daytime. I picture Melissa, myself, and Tilly having a ploughman’s lunch in the garden of a pub we pass. It is on a corner, so well lit. The building is a long, low cottage style, whitewashed and quaintly uneven, with baskets of flowers tumbling from under a thatched roof. It’s still too dark to see the colours, but I imagine them to be intense beacons in the daylight. The thought brings an unaccountable joy to my heart.

Everything feels more colourful now. More real.

It’s somehow as though I have been asleep for years and now I am properly awake. When did I fall asleep? Maybe since I gave up my hopes of being a mother? Or when I was finally free of Terry? ‘You’ve an old head on young shoulders’, my mother used to say. I think she meant that I was more mature than other people my age and not given to outbursts of temper and heat, even as a teenager. But now … I feel as though my nerve endings are zinging with some delicious excitement and the thrill of this odd challenge. Melissa and I are closer than we have ever been. A bubble contains us as we drive along these roads, a bubble only marred by the presence of what we are carrying. But one which brought us together in the first place. For a second I feel almost tender towards that young man.

The darkness is now just a bruised lilac tint at the horizon. This capsule of contentment won’t last. It can’t last. A terrible fear clutches at my heart at returning to normal life and just for a moment a dangerous but delicious thought flashes into my mind.

It would be so very easy.

All it would take would be one slight shift of the wheel and all our problems would be over. We could leave it all behind. Together …

Of course, I do no such thing.

The band of light at the edge of the sky is starting to thicken now. There is a pearliness to it that makes things seem especially vivid along the side of the road.

The road begins to rise to the crest of a large hill. Around us lie fields topped with skeins of mist like bridal veils and there is a sweet little castle on the horizon. Once again I imagine that we are going on holiday.

I’ve had to put the windscreen wipers on now though and their swish and thump is hypnotic. I’m trying to concentrate but it’s cosy – almost. Womb-like. As though Melissa and I are curled together in its embrace, twins joined by adversity. The thump-swish-thump-swish sound is almost like a heartbeat …

‘Hester?’

Alertness blasts through me like the blare of a horn. Did I almost drop off? Thankfully, Melissa doesn’t seem to have noticed.

‘Yes?’ I say, when I find my voice.

‘I think we’re nearly there. We have to take the next turning.’

I stretch my fingers on the steering wheel and frown as I peer through the smeary windscreen.