The Road Ahead

by Amanda Radley

  “Well, I didn’t do a full search, but I didn’t see him.”

  Arabella raised her eyebrow and remained silent.

  Rebecca opened her mouth to speak but stopped as Mary entered the room again, a tea tray in her hands.

  “Oh good, you’re both here. I made some sandwiches. How are you both settling in?” Mary asked.

  Arabella remained silent and looked at Rebecca, indicating that she was to answer.

  “Very well. You have a lovely home,” Rebecca replied.

  Arabella nearly snorted a laugh but managed to stop herself just in time.

  “And thank you so much for the sandwiches,” Rebecca continued, glaring at Arabella while Mary busied herself with putting the tray onto a coffee table.

  “You’re very welcome; I’m afraid you’ll struggle to find anywhere else to eat around here. We’re a little out of the way,” Mary said.

  Arabella raised her eyebrow again and looked at Rebecca. Rebecca shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  “Do you live here alone?” Arabella asked.

  “No, with my husband, Jonathan.”

  “I look forward to meeting him,” Arabella said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll come and introduce himself at some point,” Mary said. “I’ll leave you girls to it, ring the bell if you need me.”

  Mary gestured towards an old-fashioned brass button by the fireplace. By the time Arabella looked away from the bell, Mary had gone.

  Rebecca picked up the plate of sandwiches and offered it towards Arabella. She looked at it with a sigh.

  “Yeah, I know it’s not wholegrain, seeded rye bread with an avocado and hummus filling, but it will have to do,” Rebecca told her.

  Arabella was about to deny that was what she was thinking. But another look at the starchy white bread sandwich and she couldn’t stop herself grimacing.

  “Eat one,” Rebecca pressed.

  She picked up a sandwich and took a small bite. It wasn’t too bad, even if it did remind her of the sandwiches she ate at school many years ago.

  Rebecca moved the table nearer to them so they could both reach the tea and sandwiches. Rebecca sat down, kicked off her ankle-length boots, and started to wiggle her toes.

  Arabella stared at the dolls. Mainly because they were staring at her. “Do you collect anything?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really sounds like you do but you don’t want to admit to it,” Arabella said.

  “It’s not really a collection, as such. But every time I do a new photoshoot, I take a test shot to check my settings. I always print and keep that test shot. Everyone gets to see the final shots that make it to print, but only I have those first images. They might be out of focus, too much ISO, too little, incorrect f-stop. Whatever. Sometimes they are fine. But it’s something that only I have, and I like that.”

  Arabella smiled. It wasn’t a collection in a traditional sense, it was documenting her own life. Like a visual work diary, a reminder of her projects. She could see the appeal; she had kept the particulars from the first properties she had ever sold.

  “What about you?” Rebecca asked. “Do you collect anything?”

  “Keys,” Arabella replied. “Old keys. My grandmother had a rusty old key that she dug up in her garden, and I was absolutely fascinated with it. It was the kind of key that you draw when you were a child. Very simplistic, but big and important-looking. When I started working in the estate agency, it seemed an appropriate collection to keep.”

  “Sounds cool. I suppose you have keys that have a cool story and huge price tag attached.” Rebecca picked up another sandwich.

  “A few,” she admitted. “I do have one that is the key to some of the shackles used in the Tower of London. Who knows what that key could say if it could talk.”

  “Shackles? Didn’t think of you as the bondage type.” Rebecca winked as she sipped tea.

  Arabella laughed. “Oh, there’s a lot you don’t know about me, I’m sure.” She returned the wink.

  She enjoyed the back-and-forth banter she shared with Rebecca. It wasn’t like the conversations she had with her friends. It was on the edge of being risqué, but she knew it was all in good humour. She didn’t feel she had to watch what she said.

  Rebecca snorted. She picked up the plate of sandwiches and held it out towards Arabella. She took another sandwich, only now realising how hungry she actually was.

  “When’s your wedding?” Rebecca asked.

  “Soon.” She took a large bite of the sandwich. The need for real food outweighed her knowledge of just how much sugar she was ingesting.

  “Do you have everything sorted out and planned?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Wow, you seem so excited,” she said with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Have you ever been married?” Arabella changed the subject.

  “Nope.”

  “Been asked?” she fished.

  “Nope.”

  “Asked someone?”

  Rebecca hesitated a moment. Her cheeks started to show some colour.

  “Aha,” Arabella said knowingly. “So, what happened?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “She said no. She said I was too young.” She wiggled her toes and watched them, trying to look like she was unfazed by the fact. Trying, but failing.

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Arabella nodded. “You were too young.”

  Rebecca rolled her eyes and flopped back in her chair. “Wow, judgemental much?”

  “Not judgemental, just older than you.” She tossed the crust of her sandwich onto the plate. She wasn’t about to completely destroy her waistline.

  “So, because you’re older than me, you automatically know better than me?”

  “Yes, I’m an oracle. Like Yoda.”

  Rebecca laughed. Her irritation evaporated at the well-placed joke. “Don’t tell me you watch Star Wars?”

  “I may have seen it once or twice,” Arabella confessed.

  “Well, Yoda or not, just because you’re older than me doesn’t mean that you know better than me.”

  “Maybe,” Arabella allowed. She lowered her cast from the footstool and leaned forward to prepare herself a cup of tea.

  Suddenly something occurred to her. “You say that she said you were too young? So, how old was she?”

  Rebecca’s eyes drifted towards the fire. The blush that was light on her cheeks grew in richness and started to encompass her ears.

  Interesting, Arabella thought.

  “In her forties…”

  Arabella nearly dropped the milk jug.

  “Late… forties,” Rebecca continued.

  “How late?” Arabella asked, unable to stop herself.

  “Nine,” Rebecca whispered.

  “You were twenty-three and she was forty-nine? That’s… that’s… twenty-six years difference. She was more than twice as old as you.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “I loved her, and she loved me.”

  “What happened?”

  Rebecca tore her gaze away from the fire and reached for another sandwich. “She let me go. Her words. She said she loved me, and I know that she did. But she thought she was trapping me in a life where she would be growing older and older as I’d be coming into my prime. Again, her words.

  “I wanted to prove to her that I loved her, that I’d stick by her. So, I proposed. But that was the beginning of the end. I thought that making that ultimate promise would be the proof that I didn’t care about her age, that I just wanted to be with her. But it made her think about the future, what we were doing. And she broke up with me.”

  Arabella slowly stirred her tea, her mind racing in a hundred different directions at once. She couldn’t imagine a twenty-three-year-old being in love with a forty-nine-year-old. Hell, she wasn’t even sure she knew what love was herself.

  “How did you know you loved her?”

  Rebecca looked at her. “How do you know you love Alastair?”r />
  “Humour me?” Arabella requested.

  Rebecca let out a sigh and sat back in her seat. She brought her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest. “I enjoyed her company. Every moment we were together was something I enjoyed. I never spent a minute with her and thought it was a minute I would rather be doing something else. She made me laugh, made me think, made me hope, wish, dream. She listened to me, told me when I was wrong, agreed with me when I was right. We’d argue about things, not fight, just express a difference of opinion. Debate, I suppose. And we both learnt something new, about the subject, about ourselves, and about each other. I grew as a person, which is the purpose of life.”

  Arabella blinked. “Is it?”

  Rebecca looked at her. “I think so. I would hate to think that I graduated university and then never changed. I had my opinions and that was that. I want to be challenged, I want to learn new things, I want to be more today than I was yesterday.”

  Arabella played with her necklace as she considered what Rebecca had said. She didn’t have a pithy reply, nor a sarcastic comment. In fact, now she was left wondering if the scruffy, young photographer was right. Maybe Rebecca knew the purpose of life and she didn’t.

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to go to bed,” Rebecca said, she smothered a yawn with the back of her hand.

  Arabella looked at her watch, suddenly remembering the reason for the stop.

  “Of course, no problem.”

  “I told Mary that we’d be leaving at six, she said she would leave some breakfast out for us.” Rebecca stood up and gathered her boots.

  She stepped forward and handed Arabella a key.

  “Your room is up the stairs and at the end on the left, it has a three on the door. I’m up the next flight of stairs at the top of the house. Will you be okay getting up there?”

  Arabella took the key and nodded. “I’ll be fine. But thank you.”

  “Okay, text me if you need anything.”

  “I will, goodnight.”

  “Night.”

  Rebecca picked up her jacket and walked out of the room.

  Arabella let out a breath and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.

  This trip was the journey from hell. Not because she was trapped in a house with a thousand creepy dolls, not because she should be home by now, and not because she was stuck with someone she hardly knew.

  It was hell because it was giving her time to think. Something she had been avoiding for weeks. But miles of staring at nothing left little time for anything but reflective thought.

  She knew that she didn’t love Alastair, and that he didn’t love her.

  Not really.

  Not in the true sense of love. But it had never mattered before. Getting married was just a formality, a step in the process of life. She knew it was her lot in life to get married, stop working, have children, be a mother, and… that was it. It was what the women in her family did.

  Some juggled a career and being a parent, but Alastair and her own father had been adamantly against that. They wanted Arabella to stay home. Staying at home would be about as much work as going to an office. There would be coffee mornings, luncheons, dinner parties, charitable balls, and all other kinds of events to organise. Alastair had even joked that she was technically changing career from an estate agent to a party planner.

  Arabella didn’t want to be a party planner, but it was too late now. The wedding was fast approaching, announcements had been made and invitations had been sent.

  Everyone knew.

  To pull out now would be embarrassing, to say the least. And then what would she do? If it wasn’t Alastair, it would be someone else. While Alastair wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t as bad as some that had gone before him.

  She sighed again.

  It was just this damn trip that was giving her doubts. Rebecca and her strange outlook on life were shaking everything up. Rebecca seemed to live in a dream world. A world where people were endlessly kind and respectful of one another. Where love existed, outside of fairy tales and Disney movies.

  She’s a creative, they’re always a little odd, Arabella reminded herself.

  She was young and naive. In a few years, she’d be married to someone who wasn’t the love of her life, just someone who fit the role. Just like everyone else.

  “Has your friend gone to bed?”

  Arabella looked up to see Mary had entered the room.

  “Yes, she’s been doing a lot of driving, she’s very tired.”

  “She said all the way from Portugal? It’s a very long way. And back to England before Christmas?”

  “Hopefully,” Arabella said.

  “Make sure you book yourself on a ferry, they do become quite booked up.”

  “I plan to do it in the morning before we set off,” Arabella reassured her.

  “Oh, good. It is so important to get back home for Christmas, isn’t it? I’m sure you both have a lot of people expecting you?”

  Arabella thought of the Christmas Eve party, filled with people all wanting to talk to her about business or gossip about other partygoers. Then she thought of Rebecca, seemingly going home just to spend Christmas with her mother. Planning to watch the same shows they watched every year, eat the same things they ate every year. Both heading home for Christmas traditions, but both so widely different from each other.

  “Yes, lots of people,” Arabella answered. “Will you be spending Christmas here?”

  “We will, we invite the locals and we have a big Christmas dinner. It’s a mix of French and British foods and traditions. I thought I’d never break with my British traditions, but, I have to say, the French tradition of eating oysters at Christmas is something I really enjoy. Sometimes you need to mix things up a bit, keep things fresh.”

  Arabella smiled.

  Here she was, judging some elderly lady with her probably make-believe husband and her ten thousand porcelain dolls, who goes on to have a more well-rounded view on Christmas traditions. Willing to accept changes, even at her later stage in life.

  “That sounds lovely,” Arabella said diplomatically. She was too tired and too fragile to have any more personal conversations. She just wanted to go to bed and wake up feeling different. The exhaustion and stress of travel were causing her to question decisions that could not be questioned. She knew that with some sleep and some time, she would be back to normal.

  “I better get some sleep as well,” she said. “Thank you so much for the tea and the sandwiches, they were very much appreciated.”

  “Of course, my dear.” Mary looked at her foot. “Will you be all right with the stairs?”

  “Absolutely.” Arabella picked up her crutch and stood up. “It’s just a minor fracture, hardly the need for a full cast, but the doctor wanted to be safe.”

  Mary didn’t seem satisfied with the response and continued to look at her with a sympathetic expression. Arabella hated appearing weak, especially in front of strangers.

  “Well, good night,” she said. She quickly made her way to the door, ignoring the twinge of pain that rushed up her leg at the sudden movement.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rebecca changed lanes. She used the opportunity of looking in her wing mirror to glance at Arabella. The woman had been quiet since they’d left the that morning. Something seemed to be up.

  Rebecca wondered if the creepy porcelain dolls in her bedroom had prevented her from sleeping. Rebecca had been certain that she’d not be able to sleep when she’d seen the countless dolls, but she’d been so exhausted that she’d quickly fallen into a deep slumber. Maybe Arabella hadn’t been so lucky.

  But it seemed Arabella wasn’t about to admit to anything. She’d told Rebecca that she’d slept fine when she’d enquired over breakfast. Since then, it had been four hours of polite comments and very stilted conversation.

  Eventually, Rebecca had given up, not wanting to push Arabella who clearly didn’t want to talk to her.

  She was surprised that she
cared so much about the silence. They’d had periods of silence in the car before, but this felt different. She could feel that something was on Arabella’s mind. The car was thick with the emotion radiating off of the older woman.

  Arabella’s phone rang. The atmosphere became impossibly thicker.

  “It’s Alastair,” Arabella announced after glancing at the screen.

  “Are you going to answer it?” Rebecca asked. “I’d try to give you some privacy, but… you know. I suppose I could find somewhere to stop?”

  “No, it’s fine, I… I’ll take the call.”

  Rebecca tightened her grip on the steering wheel, attempting to focus more fully on the road and ignore what was happening beside her. She hated that such a strong and independent woman could be reduced to an uncertain bag of nerves by some man. Especially some man that she was due to marry.

  “Hello, Alastair,” Arabella answered the call.

  Rebecca could hear mumbling on the other end of the call. At least this time he sounded calmer. While she couldn’t make out the words, she could tell that his speech pattern was slower and softer.

  “We’re a little more than halfway through France…”

  Rebecca looked at the GPS screen. It was true, they were halfway through France. It was Christmas Eve, but they were well on their way. They’d get there just before Christmas Day, but they would make it.

  “Well, we stopped overnight.” Arabella’s tone became defensive. “Because we couldn’t drive solidly.” She paused and sighed. “The hire company wouldn’t let me drive at all because of my leg, so I’m relying on my travel companion.”

  There was a long pause.

  “They literally wouldn’t allow me to drive. Something about invalidating insurance,” Arabella explained. “Well, I suppose I could have…”

  Rebecca knew what he was saying without hearing him. He was suggesting that Arabella should have driven through the night. How anyone could suggest that was beyond her.

  She’d seen the winces, the tightened facial expressions. Whether or not Arabella wanted to admit to it, she was in pain from sitting so long in one position. Driving would only exacerbate that. How could someone who supposedly loved her suggest that she put her life in danger by driving through the night?