After You Left(23)

She was touched by his words. Meeting his eyes, she registered the unsteady pencil line around the possibility of his having been The One, if only she had stayed. ‘Perhaps we would have hated one another if we had gone on that date,’ she said.

‘We wouldn’t have. But that’s in the past now.’

She looked around at the garden, and the sudden weight of inexplicable regret dragged down the corners of her mouth. ‘Lindisfarne is the most magical place on earth. I’m torn between bursting to tell everyone about it and desperately wanting to keep it secret.’ Tears came to her eyes. ‘Sometimes, I wish the tide would close us off permanently from the rest of the world and I’d be captive here, even though as a young woman that used to be one of my worst nightmares!’

‘You’d eventually wither and die, or start swimming and drown. Then your children would be bereft.’

‘I don’t have children.’

‘The earl, then.’

They looked at one another again. The casual way he made reference to Mark made her remember something. He was someone else’s husband. She was someone else’s wife.

‘You probably need to get off home now,’ she said.

‘You mean you want me to get off home now.’

‘Maybe.’

He studied her for a moment, then started walking to the garden gate, seeming to naturally assume she would follow, and she did.

It didn’t feel like it was just today that they had met again, that today they had talked for the first time in twenty years. There was an ease between them, an ease that you wouldn’t have thought could be there, but it was. ‘My dad grew those in his greenhouse.’ She pointed to three or four mounds of frothy pink-and-white bell-head fuchsia by the gate. ‘When he died, Mam planted them here, not really expecting they’d take off, but they did. I think my dad must have been giving her green thumbs from heaven.’

He bent down beside one of the bushes of red and purple ones, and carefully held a flower head, and the memory of his hands came back to her with a rush. ‘These are called Lady’s Eardrops because of the shape. But some say they resemble a ballerina. See, the stamen look like the legs of a dancer, while the petals are the dancer’s tutu.’ He inadvertently glanced over her legs, and it sent a small charge through her. She remembered how desperately she’d wanted to sleep with him, but she was a nice girl and it had felt like the wrong way to behave.

‘You’re right.’ She gazed at the small and vibrant flower in his upturned palm. ‘It really does look like a ballerina.’ She pulled her eyes away from his hand.

At the gate, he hesitated. ‘So, Countess of Lindisfarne, if you’re planning on doing this place up, I could help. I’m quite handy.’

‘I’m just going to paint it. Nothing huge.’

‘I’m great with a paintbrush.’

‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

‘You didn’t. I volunteered. I could even start tomorrow, if we want.’

We want? She almost laughed. ‘Don’t you have other gardens to do?’

‘It’s going to rain.’

‘Is it?’ She looked up, doubtfully, at a bright blue sky.

‘I’m going to pray for it.’

She did laugh now. His boldness was still there, and it was refreshing. She experienced a flash of herself as that twenty-year-old woman again. That’s what was missing from her marriage: Mark no longer wooed her. He no longer thought he had to, or that it mattered. He would probably have never guessed that she even missed it.

Turn him down, she was thinking. Or no good will come of this. But she had reached a precipice and was catching herself in the act of jumping off into thin air. She would either soar and fly, or crash and burn. But either way, the movement was exhilarating. ‘Well, I could certainly use the help . . .’

He studied her for a moment as though he might back out, then said, ‘Tomorrow then?’

Pressuring her like this made her slightly delirious. She could almost feel her mother looking on, with bated breath, saying, See! Second chances . . . ‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

He reached to shake her hand. It was an oddly formal gesture. She registered the strong clasp of his fingers around hers. And, as she looked into his eyes, she suddenly possessed a discomfiting perspective on herself. Her life felt like a grand mansion built without any proper foundations. It could crumble with the right little earthquake.





TEN


Alice

Our relationship started like a runaway train, with no brakes and no one driving.

There was nothing particularly original about it. We met in one of Newcastle’s busy, uber-trendy cocktail bars. I was with Sally, who rarely got a night out because she worked unsociable hours and was a parent.

‘Two o’clock.’ Sally nudged me as we clung to our wine glasses. We had just been lamenting the coincidence of how, over dinner two hours previously, we’d witnessed my ex – Colin, who couldn’t commit – proposing, on his knees, complete with diamond and spellbound onlookers. Colin, who actually shed tears when he told me how much he loved me but how fervently against the idea of marriage he was. Fortunately, the girl had looked mortified.

My eyes moved to two o’clock. There was a dark-haired guy in a suit trying to order a drink. He was thrusting a hand into the air in that assertive way only a very tall person can pull off, and which comes across to everyone else as slightly obnoxious. I could only see him from the side. A fine head of hair. Nice build. A thatch of white shirt-cuff protruding from his jacket’s sleeve.