by Jill Mansell
‘What?’ Belle’s voice was crackly over the phone. ‘I can’t hear you.’
There was a buzz of background noise, of music and voices interspersed with bursts of laughter. Clemency said, ‘Where are you?’
‘At the Mariscombe Hotel. We’re having dinner with Jess and Rob. It’s jam-packed here.’
‘Look, could I have a word with Sam?’
‘Sam? Why?’ Not in a suspicious way, just surprised.
‘There’s another flat he might be interested in.’
‘Another flat? Well we wouldn’t have time to see it,’ said Belle. ‘We have to leave St Carys at seven thirty tomorrow morning.’
‘How about tonight?’
‘Clem, we’re having dinner with friends!’
‘I know, I know …’
‘Hang on, Sam wants to speak to you. OK, don’t be long, our food’s about to arrive. Just tell her it’s too late.’ Evidently addressing Sam, Belle passed the phone over to him.
Listening, Clemency heard his rhythmic footsteps on the flagstones and the noise of the restaurant receding.
‘Right,’ said Sam. ‘I can hear you now. What’s this all about?’
Clemency wasn’t accustomed to setting her alarm for 5.30 in the morning, but in fact she was wide awake before it even went off. By six o’clock, showered and dressed in jeans and a grey sweater, she’d left home and headed over on foot to the address she’d given Sam last night. At this time of the morning the sun was nothing more than a bright white blur in a hazy white sky, and there was still a dense mist hovering over the sea. But the temperature was set to rise significantly.
Hers too, it seemed. As she neared the address, her palms grew damp. Always attractive.
He was there ahead of her, leaning against the side of his hire car as he waited for her, and on his own. The butterflies in Clemency’s stomach took flight like a swirling flock of birds.
‘I didn’t know if Belle would be coming with you,’ she said.
‘At six fifteen in the morning?’ He looked amused. ‘She decided to go for the extra hour in bed.’
Quelle surprise.
‘OK,’ said Clemency. ‘Well I wouldn’t have asked you to view this place if I didn’t think it was the perfect fit. Like I told you last night, the vendor’s desperate; she’s due to complete next week and the buyers have pulled out. The whole chain’s on the verge of collapse.’ She shrugged. ‘You’re a cash buyer. It’s a stunning property. It was more than you were looking to spend, but Cissy’s prepared to accept an offer. Honestly? If I could choose any flat here in St Carys, this is the one I’d go for.’
A flicker of a smile. ‘Is that your hard-sell sales pitch?’
‘I don’t do hard sells. When you view the place for yourself, you’ll see what I mean.’
‘Why did the buyers pull out?’
‘The wife just discovered her husband’s been having an affair. So instead of them moving down here from Nottingham, she’s filing for divorce.’ Clemency held up the keys to the property. ‘Want to take a look?’
Sam nodded. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
But it wasn’t the only reason they were here. He knew that as well as she did. There was an elephant in the room and Clemency wasn’t going to be the one to mention it.
Instead, with a brisk professional nod of her own, she said, ‘Let’s go.’
The apartment was empty. Cissy was currently in Edinburgh and most of the furniture was already in storage, waiting to be moved into her new house.
It didn’t take long to view the open-plan kitchen diner, the two bedrooms, the bathrooms and the spectacular living room. As they stood outside on the wide wraparound balcony and surveyed the view over Beachcomber Bay, the sun finally broke through the early morning haze. The sea was visible now, glittering and palest turquoise. A lone jogger was running along the pristine, just-washed sand with a dog at his heels. Seagulls wheeled lazily overhead, no doubt keeping an eye on the fishing boats chugging into the harbour.
And now the sun was growing stronger, brighter, warming their faces. Sam said, ‘Did you arrange for this to happen?’
‘You mean for the chain to collapse and the sale of this place to fall through? Yes, of course I did. Just call me Machiavelli.’
He looked at her. ‘Actually I was talking about the sun coming out.’
‘Oh.’ Her stomach tightened. ‘Well, that too. Obviously.’
‘Thought so.’
‘What’s the verdict, then?’
‘It is perfect. Exactly what I wanted. But you already knew that.’ Sam paused. ‘What are the neighbours like?’
‘Scottish. Very fond of bagpipes.’ Clemency smiled. ‘Don’t worry. It’s a retired couple below, very charming and very quiet. And a middle-aged divorcee on the ground floor. No orgies, I already checked.’
‘Shall we go back inside?’
Clemency allowed him to lead the way. When she’d locked the French windows, he said, ‘Are we going to talk about it?’
‘About you buying this property? I do hope so.’
‘I meant the other thing.’
‘Oh. The other thing.’ Her heart broke into a gallop. ‘We don’t have to. Really, it’s fine. It was … nothing.’
For a couple of seconds Sam didn’t say anything; the silence was broken only by the distant swoosh of waves breaking on to the beach, and the cry of a lone seagull overhead.
When he spoke again, his gaze was unwavering and intense. ‘But it wasn’t nothing, was it?’
Clemency turned, walked through to the kitchen and poured herself a tumbler of water from the tap. She drank half of it and seated herself on one of the high stools around the marble-topped central island. ‘It was three years ago. You passed the time by flirting with a stranger. When the flight was over, you remembered you were married and guessed your wife might not be too amused if she found the stranger’s card in your pocket. It’s actually a sign that you’re not a complete bastard,’ she said lightly. ‘You resisted temptation. You should be proud.’
‘I wasn’t proud.’ Sam shook his head. ‘I should never have done it.’
‘Well you’re divorced now, so it’s irrelevant anyway. What happened?’ said Clemency. ‘Did you do it again and get caught?’
She’d said it in a light-hearted way so he’d know she wasn’t bitter, that she understood these things had a habit of happening, especially to men who walked around looking like he did.
There was, after all, only so much beauty a girl could resist.
‘Actually,’ said Sam, ‘she didn’t divorce me. She died.’
Chapter 6
When he’d gone out on the evening of his twenty-fifth birthday, Sam had never intended to meet the love of his life. It was meant to be a casual get-together for a motley group of his friends at one of their favourite restaurants, followed by a visit to a club.
What he hadn’t banked on was catching the eye of a blonde girl at one of the other tables in the restaurant and liking the look of her enough to keep glancing over in her direction. And each time he did so, as if sensing his attention, she would look up and meet his gaze.
After an hour it was getting ridiculous. They were both doing it and trying so hard not to smile. Leaving his table, ostensibly to pay a visit to the bathroom, Sam walked past her and waited in the corridor outside.
Less than twenty seconds later she joined him, and this time there were no attempts to hide the smiles.
‘Happy birthday, dear Sam,’ she said, because his friends had sung the rousing chorus to him earlier before clattering their glasses together for a toast.
Sam said, ‘It’s not shaping up too badly so far.’
‘You never know, it could get better.’ Reaching up, she murmured, ‘Happy birthday to you,’ and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Followed by a proper one on the mouth.
Her name was Lisa, she was a nurse at King’s College Hospital and she shared a flat with four other nurses in Brixton. Having fulfilled her duty a
t the works do at the restaurant to celebrate the retirement of one of the doctors in their department, Lisa and two of her friends from King’s joined forces with Sam and his friends and spent the next few hours in a club. At the end of the night she kissed him once more and said, ‘I’m not coming home with you. If you want to see me again, call me tomorrow and invite me out properly on Saturday night.’
‘Fine.’ Simultaneously frustrated and impressed, Sam said, ‘Give me your number, then.’
‘If you really want to see me again,’ said Lisa, ‘you’ll track me down without it.’
Was she joking?
‘Are you serious?’ said Sam.
‘Absolutely.’ She’d given him a mischievous look. ‘I’m deadly serious about finding out if you’re serious about wanting to see me again. Because if you aren’t, why bother?’
‘And do you think I will bother?’
Lisa’s eyes sparkled. ‘Oh I hope so.’
It hadn’t been difficult. He called the restaurant, persuaded them to give him the number of the husband of the doctor whose retirement party it had been, and worked forward from there. Having been passed on to one of Lisa’s friends, he found out which ward she worked on and what time her shift ended. That evening, he waited outside the ward for her to appear.
When she saw him, Lisa said, ‘So you tracked me down. But did you get my phone number?’
Sam took out his mobile phone and pressed a button. Seconds later, a jaunty tone rang out from inside the yellow raffia bag slung over her shoulder. ‘You might want to answer that,’ he said.
When she did, he stood just a few feet away from her and said into his phone, ‘Hi, this is Sam, I was wondering if you’d like to come out with me on Saturday evening.’
‘Thank you.’ Her smile broadened as she stepped aside to make room for a patient on a trolley to be pushed into the ward. Speaking into her own phone, she said, ‘I’d like that very much.’
It had never been Sam’s intention to get married whilst still in his twenties. But sometimes fate took a hand, you met the woman you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, and after a while it seemed like the next logical step, so why wait?
A year after they’d first got together, he and Lisa moved into a tiny flat in Peckham. Six months later, they began making plans for the wedding, to take place on the date of the night they’d first met.
‘If we get married on your birthday,’ said Lisa, ‘you’ll never forget our anniversary.’
‘Fine, and you aren’t allowed to forget it either,’ said Sam.
Three months before the wedding, Lisa suffered a week of increasingly severe headaches that culminated in an epileptic seizure at work and admission to hospital. A brain scan confirmed what a physical examination had already given the doctors cause to suspect: there was a large tumour growing in her brain.
And suddenly the future they’d expected to share was no longer the future they found themselves having to face up to. Surgery swiftly followed, as much as possible of the malignant tumour was excised in order to reduce the pressure inside the skull, and Lisa underwent a course of radiotherapy. The tumour was a glioblastoma multiforme, not the kind anyone would choose to have. But Lisa made a good enough recovery to be able to insist that the wedding went ahead.
And for a few more months she was still herself, more or less, albeit weak and tired and with a frustrating struggle to find the right words when she spoke. Eventually the neurosurgeon informed them that the tumour was on the march again, and Lisa begged him to operate once more to reduce the mass. It was during this risky second bout of surgery that a bleed occurred and significantly more damage was done to her brain. After that, she was confined to her bed on the neurosurgical ward, and the surgeon explained to Sam that all they could do now was make her comfortable.
This was when Sam realised he had to come to terms with the fact that whilst he still loved Lisa, she was no longer the girl he’d fallen in love with. Furthermore, he was on his own. Before, they’d been a team, fighting the tumour together. Now Lisa was – quite literally – the sleeping partner. There was nothing more she could do to help him through the nightmare that lay ahead.
Sam paused, looked at his watch and exhaled; the memories were always with him, but it had been a while since he’d talked about what had happened. He glanced across at Clemency and said, ‘Sorry, were you in a hurry to be somewhere?’
‘No, not at all.’ Clemency was sitting opposite him at the central island in the kitchen. She hadn’t uttered a word since he’d begun.
‘I wasn’t planning on saying all this today.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about it so much before.’
She looked surprised. ‘Really?’
‘It’s not something I make a habit of. People I’ve known for a long time already know. New people get the very short version. I don’t go into detail. But I needed to tell you everything, to explain why … well, that day on the plane.’
‘Carry on,’ said Clemency. ‘I’m listening.’
Sam glanced out of the window at a red speedboat that was bouncing across the water in the bay. When it had disappeared from view, he resumed the story.
‘The staff at the hospital thought Lisa would die within months. What usually happens to people in that condition is they catch an infection, like pneumonia, and they’re so weak they don’t survive. But Lisa didn’t catch any kind of infection. And the tumour seemed to have stopped growing, so she just stayed as she was. Which was … comatose, without any way of coming back.’ His mouth was dry; he took a sip from the glass of water on the marble island before remembering it was Clemency’s. ‘Sorry. So anyway, I spent my days at work, working. And my nights at the nursing home she’d been moved to by then. I sat with Lisa every evening, and it was a pretty hard thing to do, because I knew how much she’d hate being in that situation if she knew what was going on. But the months went by and nothing changed … and after two years she was still there. The ironic thing was, because I didn’t have anything else to do with my time, I’d built up my company and turned it into something more successful than we’d ever imagined.’ He sat back and raked his hand through his hair. ‘One of my work colleagues said, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” He didn’t seem to realise there aren’t enough silver linings in the world to make up for a cloud that big.’
He stopped again and looked at Clemency, who was taking in every word. ‘So that’s the gist of it. Then three years ago, following a business trip to Spain, I found myself on a plane back to London, sitting next to a girl who’d almost missed her flight.’ Every detail of that day was as clear in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. ‘I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. I tried my best to ignore her. Then the plane hit an air pocket, she ended up covered in red wine and I realised how bloody rude I’d been. Anyway, she was nice enough to forgive me and we got talking. And for the first time in two years, I found myself having a normal conversation … the kind where you aren’t discussing business plans and things to do with work. Or the fact that your wife’s lying in an irreversible coma. It was effortless … it felt great … it felt like being young, free and single again, just chatting with someone because you wanted to. Because you enjoyed their company and found them attractive. It was like being locked in a dark room for two years then suddenly being let out and seeing the world again, in colour …’
Sam stopped speaking. If he hadn’t, he knew his voice would be in danger of cracking with emotion; and that was something no one got to hear. He breathed in and out and waited until he’d regained control.
‘So that’s pretty much it. Now you know why I did what I did. And can I just say, I was never unfaithful to my wife. I never would have been. But meeting you felt like the biggest test in the world, because if I’d been single … well, things could have been very different. Because meeting you and talking to you … it felt like the first night I met Lisa.’
The silence shimmered in the air between them. Sam shr
ugged slightly, to indicate that he’d said his piece and now she could speak.
Clemency nodded and rested her forearms on the cool marble worktop. ‘I’m so sorry I thought you were divorced.’
‘That’s OK. You weren’t to know.’
‘When did she die?’
‘Three weeks after I met you. Three weeks and three days,’ Sam amended. ‘Pneumonia. She was twenty-eight years old.’ He gazed for a second out of the window, where the sun was now properly bright. ‘The worst part is feeling guilty because you’re relieved it’s over at last. You can stop waiting for it to happen. And then you think about what you’ve just thought and you can’t quite believe you thought it. I kept trying to tell myself that Lisa would be glad it was over too … then I’d have this recurring dream where she was staring at me in horror and saying, “Are you kidding me? What kind of husband are you? Did you ever even love me at all?” Which was a great dream to have.’ He pulled a face.
‘Does it still happen?’
‘Not for over a year now. The guilt is one of those things you just have to get through.’ His phone pinged as a text arrived, and Sam glanced at the screen. ‘It’s Annabelle, wanting to know when I’ll be back.’ He tapped in the reply Soon and put the phone down once more on the worktop.
‘You’ve told Belle all about what happened to Lisa, though?’ said Clemency. ‘She knows everything?’
‘She knows what happened, that Lisa had a brain tumour and died. And that it took a while.’ Sam shrugged. ‘That’s as much as I said, and we left it there. She hasn’t asked any more questions. Lots of people don’t,’ he explained. ‘They assume I’d rather not talk about it.’
‘And are they right?’ Clemency was watching him, her attention unwavering.
‘Probably. It’s easier. Well, it depends who you’re speaking to. I generally change the subject.’
She nodded slowly. ‘And have there been other girls since? Or is Belle the first?’
‘Not the first.’ He shook his head. ‘There was no one for eighteen months, then a couple of disastrous dates. I went out with one girl for a couple of weeks but it didn’t feel right. Then two months ago I met Annabelle and things seemed to be going pretty well … they were going pretty well … God, you have no idea what it did to me, seeing you again yesterday, just turning up and here you are … and you’re Annabelle’s sister.’ When he looked at her again, he could see a pulse beating at the base of her throat.
