Abby was determined to stand her ground.
‘By our own admission we have to make the show as powerful as possible, and this is exactly the sort of image that should be at the heart of it.’
‘Abby, Blake was a very minor adventurer, a playboy by all accounts. I don’t need to remind you that the show is called “Great British Explorers”. We are here to celebrate the best. The very best.’
It was easy to be swayed by Stephen’s self-confidence, but Abby felt suddenly passionate about the Blake photograph.
‘We have plenty of shots that put across the triumphs of exploration: Everest, the Poles, Burton at Lake Tanganyika, the Northwest Passage. But I think the man in the street finds it hard to understand the courage and grit required to do such things. Conquering Everest just doesn’t have the same resonance it had fifty years ago, not when everyone knows someone who has run a marathon, or walked up Kilimanjaro for charity. This is the GPS generation, Stephen. People aren’t impressed by explorers any more. They don’t understand them. Not like you do.’
GPS generation. Abby was pleased with that one, and she could see that it had struck a nerve. Stephen was looking sombre.
‘That’s a depressing way of looking at it. But I suppose you have a point,’ he said, rubbing his chin.
Abby nodded.
‘This show shouldn’t just be about summits and triumphs and firsts. It should be about loss and courage and heart.’ She thumped her hand against her chest, surprised at how strongly she felt about this.
Stephen fell silent in thought, then nodded.
‘Hmm,’ he said, tilting his head to look at the photograph. ‘I suppose we could pitch it as a companion piece to the letter written by Captain Scott’s wife.’
‘Yes, I really think you’ve got something there,’ said Abby, holding her breath. Experience had taught her that Stephen’s fragile ego needed to believe that every idea was his own.
‘All right. Add the Blake images to the Southern Hemisphere section and find out a bit more about the woman in the picture.’
Smiling, Abby picked up the phone and dialled an internal number.
‘Hello?’ said a husky voice.
‘Get you, sexy lady,’ laughed Abby.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Lauren morosely.
‘Hoping it was George Clooney looking for a map of Darfur or something?’
‘I was just hoping Alex might ring.’
‘Sorry to disappoint. Just wondering if you could help me find out about Dominic Blake. Sixties explorer type. I particularly need to know if he was married.’
‘I was just about to sit down and have a sneaky read of Grazia,’ said Lauren, more light-heartedly.
‘Stephen wants it asap.’
‘Okay, okay. Pop up later and I’ll see what I can dig out for you.’
‘Check him out,’ said Lauren, opening a copy of Three Centuries of Exploration by Peter May, the bible of expedition documentation. She thunked the volume on to her desk and pointed at a handsome man in a parka. ‘Is it wrong to fancy a dead person?’
‘He was very good-looking,’ said Abby, scanning the text.
‘If he was around today, he’d have his own show and a range of sleeping bags,’ said Lauren. ‘How much do you know about him? It’s a really sad story.’
Dominic Blake was standing in a formal shot on a mountainside, piles of equipment in the background, rope looped around his shoulders. It was stiff, posed, but he certainly stood out, his gaze coming straight down the lens as if to say ‘Yes? And you are?’ There was just the hint of a smile, too.
‘Where’s he off to in this one?’ asked Abby.
‘The Karakoram Pass,’ said Lauren, reading the caption.
‘He got around.’
‘You have no idea. I called my mother. You know she was a bit of a mover and shaker in the sixties. According to her, he shagged half of high society. Why the sudden interest?’
‘I’m thinking of using a picture of him in the exhibition.’
‘I’d better tell my mum. Might get you one more punter through the door.’
‘What about the wife? We’ll have to do some notes to accompany the images.’
‘I haven’t been able to find out about that. Dominic’s got a Wiki page, but it doesn’t say much. Went to Cambridge, edited a long-defunct magazine called Capital, wrote a few books, travelled the world. Seems he wasn’t married.’
‘Well he looks pretty much in love here,’ said Abby, showing Lauren the photo she had brought with her.
Lauren sighed as she looked at it.
‘Wow. What wouldn’t you give to have a man look at you like that? Lucky lady.’
Abby silently agreed with her.
‘There were a few more photos in the set,’ she said. ‘You can see the woman’s face better in this one.’
‘Well let’s see if we can track her down that way,’ said Lauren, clicking on Google Images and tapping in the words ‘Dominic Blake’, ‘Capital magazine’ and ‘girlfriend’.
Some random images appeared on the screen. A few of them were even of the right Dominic Blake.
‘We’ve got a stash of old society magazines over there. Have a look through while I try the online Spectator archives.’
Abby wandered through the shelves of the library. It was an impressive place, stacked floor to ceiling with books about everything that might interest the Institute’s members, from geology to the birds of the northern tundra.
She heaved one of the leather tomes on to a reading table: Bystander magazine, 1958–62, all carefully bound together. She smiled: to many of the well-born RCI members, the people featured inside this society journal were probably friends and relatives. She flipped to January 1961 and found the party pages: lots of photographs of toffs having fun. Apart from the fashions and the grainy photography, they could have come from the social pages of Tatler today. The same bright faces, the same cocktails, the same swish houses just glimpsed in the background. She turned to the February issue, then March, April, May, June and July. And there, nestled among the coverage of the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix, was the handsome face she was looking for. It was unmistakably Dominic Blake, sitting holding a cigarette, his arm draped along the back of a sofa. Next to him was a woman, laughing. Abby stopped. It was her. She glanced down at the caption: Adventurer Dominic Blake and Rosamund Bailey. May 14th, 1961.
She took the book over to Lauren.
‘She’s called Rosamund Bailey.’
‘I’ve heard of that name,’ said her friend, typing it into a search engine.
Abby’s eyes opened in surprise as thousands of entries came up.
‘She’s more famous than Dominic,’ muttered Lauren as they read her Wiki page.
Rosamund Bailey is a British journalist and political activist. She wrote the controversial ‘View from the Gallery’ column in the Observer newspaper and was involved in setting up Greenscreen, the eco-pressure group, and FemCo, the charity credited with changing international law on the exploitation of women in the Third World.
Wow. Abby had been expecting some Home Counties housewife. Rosamund sounded like Superwoman.
She scrolled through the many archived articles the woman had written: ‘What Price a Life?’, ‘The Conservative Approach to Poverty’, ‘Must We Rattle America’s Sabres for Them?’ She only had to dip into them to see they were left-leaning polemics. The biography went on: ban the bomb and CND marches, demonstrations at Downing Street, actions to stop the Vietnam War. Throughout the following decades, Rosamund had been involved in a variety of government think tanks and appeared on heavyweight TV and radio programmes. Abby was surprised she hadn’t heard of her before now.
‘Blimey. Bit of an odd match. The playboy adventurer and the firebrand feminist,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Do you think she’s still alive?’
‘She’s probably not that old,’ said Abby, doing the mental maths. ‘Mid-seventies?’
‘You should track her down. I
nvite her to the exhibition.’
As Abby returned to the basement, she was stopped by Mr Smith, who was holding an enormous bunch of flowers.
‘These were just delivered for you, Ms Gordon,’ he said with a hint of embarrassment. He held them out to her; when she didn’t immediately clasp them to her bosom, he added uncertainly, ‘There is a card.’
She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She opened the envelope and read the message.
I will always love you.
She stared at the flowers sadly. They were beautiful: a delicious arrangement of peonies and lilies from her favourite – and usually too expensive – florist in South Kensington.
She closed her eyes and steadied her resolve. It was a trick, a bribe, an empty gesture of flattery . . . She wasn’t going to fall for this. Not today.
She removed the card and handed the flowers back to Mr Smith.
‘I think there’s been a mistake. They are for Lauren Stone in the library.’
‘That’s not what the man said . . .’ said the security guard, looking confused.
‘Please,’ she said softly, and Mr Smith nodded as if he understood.
By the time she got back to the archive, Lauren had already called her extension.
‘I got flowers,’ she said sounding as if she was hyperventilating. ‘Alex sent me flowers.’
Abby cursed herself for not thinking that one through, panicking at the idea of her friend calling Alex Scott to thank him for flowers he had not even sent.
The truth was on the tip of her tongue, before she heard the joy and excitement in her friend’s voice.
If Lauren called Alex Scott and he was interested in her, it would sort itself out. If he had no romantic intentions, then at least the flowers would make Lauren look popular. It was a win-win situation, thought Abby, deciding to keep quiet and let the flowers make somebody happy.
Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was lunchtime. The basement was feeling stuffy and lifeless again. She had to get out; she needed to breathe fresh air, see trees and people and . . .
She recognised him instantly, even before she was through the revolving doors of the Institute. She almost spun herself back into the building again, but this was it. Time for confrontation.
‘Hello, Nick,’ she said brusquely.
‘Happy anniversary, Abby.’
Chapter Four
He was still as handsome as ever.
Part of Abby was hoping that in the past six weeks he’d have aged a decade. That his thick dark hair would have turned thin and grey and those deep green eyes lost their sparkle. But no. He still looked bloody gorgeous. A little slimmer in the face, perhaps, but he even had the cheek to have a tan.
‘Please, Abby, talk to me,’ said Nick, trotting to catch up with her. ‘We owe each other that.’
‘I owe you nothing,’ she replied, not even looking at him, surprised at the venom in her voice, a venom she hadn’t thought she was capable of possessing.
She willed herself to stay calm. She had to do this. She had to remain mature and composed; businesslike, she decided quickly. Yes, she should see this as a professional conversation. As if she were phoning the photo lab to order a set of silver gelatin prints or arranging a venue for the exhibition.
‘Did you get the flowers?’
‘Thank you,’ she said, finally stopping in the middle of the pavement.
‘Six years. Twelve years really. Twelve years of being together.’
She nodded tightly, thinking back to that hot, lazy summer after their first year at Glasgow University. Exams were finished and a group of her friends had arranged to go to Glastonbury. Glastonbury! She still couldn’t quite believe she had agreed to go. Quiet, sensible Abby Bradley, whose CD collection consisted of rom-com soundtracks and whose sole drug consumption over her first third of university life was a quarter of an e during Freshers’ Week.
But after months of studying hard and working almost every holiday and weekend, Abby was determined to have some fun, and being the organised sort had prepared accordingly. A pink and white floral tent had been purchased from Millets, waterproofs borrowed from more outdoorsy friends. She’d bought a flask, spare socks, and a camping stove, only becoming mildly anxious when her flatmates had stuffed a packet of Rizlas and a box of condoms in her rucksack. She knew they were right. She had to prepare for all eventualities.
She’d met Nick Gordon within an hour of getting to Worthy Farm. He was another Glasgow University student, from Leeds, a friend of a friend of her housemate’s, and had turned up to Glastonbury without a tent. It had been stolen at Central station, he’d explained to his adoring audience of new female friends, most of whom immediately offered their sexy, witty new acquaintance a place in their own tent for the weekend.
Later Abby found herself alone with him. Her friends and his had disappeared to see some band she had never even heard of, and she lost track of time as she drank cider, talked and laughed with him, surprised at how much they had in common, thrilled that such a good-looking guy with that dry, northern sense of humour, was paying her so much attention.
‘Why did you come to Glastonbury without a tent?’ she asked him, as they walked away from the people and the noise.
‘Couldn’t waste my ticket,’ he replied. They found a spot on the outskirts of the farm overlooking the Somerset Hills and the Pyramid Stage in the far distance.
‘I’d have thought it was fate telling me not to go.’ She smiled, taking slow sips of warm cider, thinking how content she was just sitting there with him.
‘I don’t know. I think fate did bring me to Glastonbury this year,’ he said before he kissed her.
She couldn’t really remember being apart from him after that. Nick made her a better version of herself. A happier, more spontaneous Abby than the girl who had left her home town of Portree on the Isle of Skye.
They travelled back to Glasgow together, found a flat, moved in with each other for their second year, and if Abby thought it had been a rushed and rash decision, she needn’t have worried. They understood one another. Their relationship was easy, the sex was great and they never ran out of conversation. They decamped to London after graduation, bought a flat, not even contemplating the idea of living apart, and got engaged at twenty-five, the first of their friends to do so. Nick didn’t have to ask anyone for Abby’s hand in marriage. Abby had no family. No one close, no one who really cared. So there at the altar of the remote St Agatha’s Church in Yorkshire, six years after the Glastonbury weekend when they had met, Nick Gordon became her husband, her family, her everything.
‘Should we walk to the Serpentine?’
‘Fine,’ she said as she watched the muscles in his face relax.
They threaded their way through the people and traffic of South Kensington to the open green space of Hyde Park.
‘How are you?’ he asked, rubbing the sweep of stubble on his chin.
‘You mean how has the fallout from my husband’s infidelity been?’
‘I don’t know how many times I have to say I’m sorry, Abs,’ he said, pushing the dark tufts of hair anxiously from his forehead.
‘Say it again,’ she said sharply.
There was an awkward silence.
‘I love you so much, Abby.’
‘I think you’ve shown me exactly how much you love me.’
‘And I miss you.’
She didn’t want to tell him how much she missed him too. How she had never felt more lonely than that first night she had slept in an empty bed. And the six weeks since had seemed like an eternity, days bleeding into one, endless hours of feeling hollow and broken. It was as if she was locked into a suffocating twilight, like some Arctic winter’s day when the sun never rose and the thought of ever feeling warmth on her face felt impossibly distant. She missed him too. More than anything. But she wasn’t prepared to admit that now.
‘I was thinking, maybe we could go away for a couple of days. I rang Babington House, and they have a
room next weekend. I thought we could go and talk.’
‘Is that where you think this is going, Nick? A mini-break in some boutique hotel where we have kiss-and-make-up sex in a four-poster bed. Is that how the script goes next?’
‘You said you always wanted to go to Babington.’
‘Not under these bloody circumstances.’
She sat down on a bench. She could feel her anger being slowly replaced by a sad, weary resignation.
‘How did we get here, Nick?’ she said finally. She looked at him closely and noticed pale lilac semicircles under his eyes.
‘I was an idiot.’
‘Yes, you were.’
It was another few seconds before he spoke.
‘We let it die, though, didn’t we?’
She turned round and looked at him in shock.
‘All this time, since the second I found out about you and that woman, I’ve been torturing myself. Was I not beautiful enough for you, funny enough, smart enough? Anna, Ginny, Suze, they all told me I was being stupid, they all told me it wasn’t true. You had the problem, the wandering eye, the overactive libido, not me. But now you’re telling me this somehow is my fault. We let it die.’
‘Abby, I have never met anyone as lovely as you. I never will.’
His natural confidence, the easy-going intelligence and charm, had evaporated.
‘I was wrong to be unfaithful and I will never, ever forgive myself. But the last two years . . . the ovulation kits, the timetabled sex, clinics, doctors, acupuncturists . . . Everyone just treating me like a sperm donor. It got so mechanical, Abby. So joyless. We were trying so hard to have a baby that we lost sight of us. You lost sight of us.’
‘So you jumped into bed with the first slapper that batted her eyelashes at you in a hotel bar.’
She closed her eyes, the breeze brushed against her face, and instead of visualising her husband in bed with another woman, she could only think about the night that he had proposed. Christmas Eve in New York City. The first time she had ever been to the Big Apple. She had always wanted to go there at Christmas, and when Nick’s fledgling IT business had won a big client, he had decided to treat them to a mini-break. They’d had a room with a view of Manhattan and the park, and it had begun to snow. He’d stood behind her, arms wrapped round her waist, chin resting on top of her head, and they’d watched the snowflakes flutter past the picture window of their hotel room.
The Last Kiss Goodbye Page 4
