Before I Do(25)

She increased her pace, taking a right turn, through a break in the hedge.

“You didn’t call me either,” he said.

“The number you wrote down smudged, I couldn’t read it.”

Audrey reached another fork in the maze and stopped, turning around to look at him again, inexplicably angry now. “What do you want me to say to all this? That I was gutted when you didn’t show? I was. That I looked for you too? I did.” Should she admit that she remembered every detail of their day together, that if only he’d been there, everything that followed might have been so very different? What if, what if, what if.

“I just wanted to explain. It is one of the biggest regrets of my life, that I wasn’t there that day to meet you.”

His face was earnest, imploring. The air smelled of dewy foliage, of summer evenings full of potential. The moon shone down on Fred’s beautiful face, and she wondered if, in another life, this might have been the face she ended up knowing better than her own.

“I’m sorry, I know this is the last thing you need to be hearing right now. I don’t want to upset you,” he said.

Thunder cracked above them, and it started to rain once more, huge heavy droplets of water, like a shower turning on. The storm had returned.

“This way,” he said, taking her hand and guiding her back the way they had come. Fred had to raise his voice over the sound of the rain, since he was facing away from her now. “I kept your photo. I still have it in my wallet.”

He had kept her photo.

“I still have yours in mine. I don’t know why.” She blurted it out without thinking. As soon as she’d said it, it felt dangerous, disloyal.

He had led them back to the start of the maze. They looked at each other and laughed, both soaked to the skin. Audrey ran a hand through her wet hair, exhilarated. The rain wasn’t cold, and there was no wind, so standing in it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.

“I really should go in,” she said. “I need to get to bed.”

“Of course. I’m sorry I kept you out here.”

There was so much more she could say, but she didn’t trust herself to stay, so she set off in a run across the lawn, raindrops slapping against her skin. Why the hell was rain so romantic? Especially rain in a moonlit garden; she really walked into that one.

As she got to the door of the hall, she looked back to see Fred still standing in the downpour, watching her. Audrey paused, holding his steady gaze for a moment, before turning to go. Inside, she slapped the wall in frustration. What was she doing? She knew she had the capacity to be changeable and indecisive in life, but not when it came to love. She wasn’t the kind of person to get caught up in the words of a stranger. That was something Vivien did, and if there was one thing Audrey had promised herself from a young age, it was that when it came to love, she would not be anything like her mother.





15


Six Years Before I Do



As soon as Audrey heard Benedict’s voice, she knew he would spell trouble.

Audrey had picked up the house phone and accidentally overheard her mother’s conversation. Vivien always used the house phone. She didn’t approve of mobiles, and reception was often patchy in some parts of the house.

“. . . So will I see you when you’re in London?” she heard Vivien say, in that sultry voice she used when she wanted something.

“I’m coming to see you, gorgeous, so I should hope so,” said the man. He had an accent, maybe South African or Dutch. Accents weren’t Audrey’s strong point.

“We’ll stay at my club next weekend . . . ,” Vivien simpered girlishly.

Audrey slowly, ever so quietly, replaced the receiver. She felt a cold chill prickle her skin and a faint tapping sensation, chipping away at some foundation inside of her.

After splitting from Audrey’s father, Richard, Vivien had married a fashionable French journalist, Jean-Luc. She had picked up their lives and moved them to Paris, enrolling seven-year-old Audrey in a school where she didn’t speak the language. Audrey’s main memory of that year was of having no friends and spending Sunday nights on the Eurostar, shuttling back and forth between her parents. She remembered a French nactor named Elise who would accompany her and who once let her try red wine on the train.

Neither Paris nor Jean-Luc turned out to be a good fit for Vivien. “That is the last time I marry a man who wears tighter trousers than me,” was the only explanation Audrey was given for why they were moving back to Fulham less than a year after they’d left.

Brian appeared on the scene when Audrey was ten. He taught a Saturday-morning art class Vivien had signed up for. Audrey liked him immediately; he had a gentle manner and spoke to her like she was a grown-up. In Audrey’s mind, Brian and Vivien had a wonderful relationship; they never argued, they were tactile with each other, they appreciated the same food and music. Plus, Brian took his role as a stepfather seriously. He knew the names of all Audrey’s friends, picked her up from parties, even took an interest in her stargazing. She clearly remembered the week after her father died, when she’d been thirteen, sitting on her bed looking at her boxed-up telescope. Brian had gently asked if she would show him the night sky, to tell him about the constellations her father had taught her. He had made looking through that lens again possible.

Audrey pressed her forehead against the wall, willing her ears to unhear the conversation on the phone. Something in her mother’s voice took her right back to being a seven-year-old girl who had to pack her life into a suitcase every other weekend.