by Fiona Harper
She stopped reading at that point, not wanting to spoil his horrible attempts at good penmanship on that lovely paper by making the ink run. She put the letter down on the table and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes to rub away the tears and then she stood up and walked across the room to stare out of the tiny window that looked across the back gardens of the houses in her street and the one beyond.
Had it all been an act?
Probably not, although that’s what she’d thought at first, but there was still this feeling of something tugging her towards him deep inside, something she neither wanted nor understood, that just wouldn’t let her neatly file him away under the heading ‘terrible mistake’, as she had done with all her past relationships.
She was going crazy, wasn’t she? To even think of still liking him.
Even if she did, it didn’t change anything. He’d still lied to her, whatever the reasons. He’d still thought of saving his own skin first before making life easier on her, and she didn’t need that kind of man in her life. Not again. Not ever.
So, without reading the rest of the note, she folded up the lovely green paper, slid it gently back into its envelope and then she walked over to the stove and turned on the gas. She held it there, the blue flames licking it until it caught and blazed yellow, and then she dropped it on the stainless steel hob and watched it burn away until nothing was left but ash and tiny curls of blackened paper.
Chapter Forty-Six
(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I
Dominic stood outside the Victorian terraced house and drew in a large gulp of air. He knew he shouldn’t be here. He knew this might only make things worse, but he had to do something.
He’d hoped Claire would have softened after she’d got his letter. He knew she must have found it, because he’d walked by the house every evening and on Saturday the lights had been on upstairs. It was odd, he’d never really thought of his flat that much as ‘home’, but now he was tucked away in Pete and Ellen’s attic room, he was really missing it.
Anyway, he still hadn’t heard anything from Claire and he realised he never would. And he’d have been able to let that go if he hadn’t thought that, deep down, she knew there was more to him, that they had a chance at something good.
But words were cheap, weren’t they? And he and Claire had exchanged a lot of words over the last month or two. What he really needed to do was show her. And that’s why he was here.
He mustered up his courage, walked up the front path and knocked on the door. A few seconds later, it opened and he was looking at Claire’s grandmother’s friend, Maggs.
She looked him up and down. ‘Look who it is,’ she said dryly. ‘Mr Arden.’
He nodded. ‘Hello. I know I’m the last person you’d expect to see on your doorstep, but I’d like to talk to you about Claire.’
The old lady folded her arms. ‘What Claire does – or doesn’t do – with her love life is entirely up to her.’
‘I agree,’ he said, which earned him a look of surprise and also curiosity. ‘But I’m worried about her.’
Maggs just looked at him. He could tell she was thinking hard. In the end, she backed away from her front door and indicated with a nod of her head that he should enter. ‘So am I,’ she said, ‘but I have to say that you are responsible for a lot of what’s bothering her at the moment.’
He followed her into a narrow kitchen and sat at the pine table as instructed. ‘I know that. And that’s why I want to do something to make it up to her.’ He looked at the knotty surface of the table then up at his host. ‘She told me about her dad, about how she’d been to see him.’
Maggs’s eyebrows shot up. ‘She told you that?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. And I know that it hurt her even more than she let on. And I realise now how my own stupidity just stuck the knife in. I understand.’
Maggs sat down opposite him and eyed him shrewdly. ‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. What’s that got to do with me?’
Dominic swallowed. This was it. He had an idea. An idea that might give Claire the boost she needed, something she would never think of doing for herself, but the problem was he couldn’t do it alone. He needed to convince this suspicious old lady to work with him, and that was going to be no mean feat.
‘I think I’m falling in love with her,’ he said slowly.
He hadn’t planned on saying that, hadn’t even realised it, but now he heard the words out of his own mouth he knew he couldn’t deny it any longer.
Maggs’s expression didn’t change much. He couldn’t read what she thought of that statement at all.
‘But nothing I do or say at the moment will convince her of that,’ he added.
‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
He shrugged helplessly. ‘I can’t prove it to you either. I don’t even know if I’m any good for her, but I really want to be.’ He paused for a moment, hoped the old lady could see the sincerity in his eyes. No talking himself up, no glossing over stuff and hoping it would be okay. He was being as honest as he could be. ‘I certainly know she’s good for me. She’s clever and warm-hearted. She makes me think about stuff I’d never realised was important.’
Maggs was staring at him, unblinking and very, very still.
He exhaled. ‘All I know is that we’ll both regret it if we’re too scared to take this chance, if we chicken out of diving in and seeing what’s there.’
For a long time Maggs didn’t say anything, just stared at him and then she finally opened her mouth. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Your help,’ he said plainly. ‘And that of the Doris Day Film Club.’
Chapter Forty-Seven
Softly, As I Leave You
The evening sun was still hovering at the tops of the trees when Claire stepped into the shady garden at the back of St Elwin’s nursing home. Here and there mottled patches of sunlight spattered the grass, growing longer with every passing minute. She searched the garden and spotted her father sitting on one of the benches at far end of the lawn, one of the last places enjoying full sun.
She waited for the familiar feeling to come, that tightening of her chest, the sense of growing doom, but all she could feel was the breeze on the bare skin of her arms and the sound of bees dancing through the waving lavender in complex patterns, like little girls round a maypole. Hear heart rate was steady, her breathing even. She walked calmly across the grass to where he was sitting.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘They told me you’d be out here.’
The shock on his face would have been funny if the whole situation hadn’t been so horribly sad. ‘Wh—why …?’ He seemed to recover himself a little. The surprise hardened into suspicion. ‘You came back.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said, sitting down on the far end of the bench. ‘I did.’
She saw the question in his eyes, the one he really wanted to ask, but his lips remained a grim slit. Fine, she thought to herself. Be awkward. I don’t care any more.
‘The nurse told me you had bypass surgery.’
He glanced towards the building, scowling. ‘They shouldn’t have told you anything.’
‘I’m family,’ Claire said simply, ‘and I asked. You didn’t leave any instructions that relatives shouldn’t be told.’
She saw anger and discomfort in his eyes and guessed the reason: he hadn’t told the nursing home that, because he hadn’t expected anyone to ask.
‘When are you going to go home? They said you came here to recuperate because there wasn’t anyone to stay with you.’
He glared at her. ‘You volunteering?’
‘No.’ She looked away at the bright flowers in the well-tended borders. ‘Where do you live?’
As the words left her mouth, she thought what a strange question it was to ask one’s own father. She turned back to find him studying her. His eyes narrowed.
‘Why do you want to know?’
She was tempted to laugh. Had he always been th
is way? So paranoid? So untrusting? She hadn’t seen that about him as a child, but she took a few moments to sift back through her memories and realised there’d been a sense of it then too; she’d been too scared of him to see it.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Tell me or don’t tell me. I thought that’s what people did when they were trying to get to know each other. Is there anything you want to know about me?’
He thought for a few seconds. She could tell he still thought he was walking into an ambush, but he asked the question anyway. ‘You were always a sharp little thing … What do you do? For a living?’
‘I’m a travel agent. I used to work in advertising, but I run my own business now.’
‘Why that?’
She gave a little one-shouldered shrug. ‘For a long time I wasn’t sure. I’d always wanted to travel. But recently I’ve been thinking more about it, trying to look back and see where it all started. I think it’s because I used to sit in my room at night with my atlas that had all the pictures in and dream of where I could escape to when I was old enough to leave home. I suppose I have you to thank for that.’
Not an easy thing to say. Not an easy thing to hear, either. But it was the truth. She was tired of dancing around with him, of trying to find the right thing to say to please him. It might not be pretty, but it was clean and simple. Liberating.
For some reason, he seemed to respond to that better than if she’d been nice to him. He stopped looking at her as if she was about to pull out a knife and stab him. He stared away at a clump of pampas grass in the centre of the garden. ‘Lewisham.’
Claire frowned. ‘Pardon?’
‘You heard. It’s where I live now.’
She nodded. ‘I live in Highbury. In Gran’s flat.’
At the mention of his mother, the shutters came down again. His jaw tensed and his nostrils flared slightly, but Claire quickly realised it wasn’t her he was angry with. He wasn’t even upset that his mother had left her granddaughter the flat that should have been his. He was angry with himself.
Of course he was. In her father’s world, everything was about him.
It was odd. She’d never been able to read anything but displeasure from him as a child, but now, as she stepped back from her own emotions and viewed him objectively, watched his body language, she found it surprisingly easy to tell what was going on inside his head. Guilt. Frustration. Rage. Self-pity. They were all there, but well hidden so only the tiniest ripples showed on the surface.
‘If you want, I’ll come and visit you again,’ she told him. ‘But if you don’t want, I’ll leave and you won’t have to see me again.’
He grunted, not giving an answer one way or the other.
‘It was you who asked to see me in the first place. You must have had some reason for that.’ Claire watched him carefully as she said this. ‘Or was it really just because you wanted to satisfy your curiosity?’
He glanced at her and looked away. Claire waited. She realised with a jolt that she could feel the struggle that was going on inside him, the war between the bit of him that wanted to reach out to her and the bit that wanted to push her away, as he always had done. The very air around them seemed to pulse with it.
He did care, just as Maggs had said. He just refused to show it.
Because he was afraid.
That didn’t make sense to her; he’d always seemed this towering presence in her mind, one that had wielded terror instead of being cowed by it, but as she thought about it more she realised it was the only thing that did make sense – the frightened man made others fear him, so he didn’t feel so weak and vulnerable himself.
It might have kept him safe, but it hadn’t made him very happy. And now he was a lonely old man who’d had to come to a nursing home after major surgery because he’d driven everyone who truly cared about him away.
He still hadn’t answered, so she stood up. ‘It’s up to you.’
She realised there was one last thing she needed to know, especially if this was going to be the last time she saw him. That, as she had told him, would be up to him, but she had to take this chance while it was presented to her.
‘Why did you wait all these years before contacting me? Why didn’t you get in touch when Mum died? Or when Gran died?’
He shook his head. The anger was back, but also the guilt, so heavy she thought she saw his shoulders bow under it. He kept staring at that damn pampas grass as he spoke, and his voice took on a gravelly tone. ‘I knew I was no good for them – for Cathy or my mother. It was easier not to think about them, not to think about you. I just …’ he turned an looked at her ‘… put you all out of my mind.’
That’s when Claire’s anger flared. It broke away from her like a horse about to bolt. She drew in a breath to answer him, to tell him what the hell did he think of by pretending she didn’t exist, but something stopped her.
Wasn’t that what she’d done too? Father was horrible, so bury him away, never think about him? Had she learned this survival mechanism from him? She kept trying not to be like him and, in doing so, she only seemed to conform even more tightly to his pattern. And she didn’t want to end up like this – a broken person beneath an iron husk.
The only way to slip from his grip would be to take back control, the control she’d never had and he’d always guarded so tightly, and she could think of only one way to do that, only one way to stop herself nursing her hurt and anger, like he had, and using it as armour against an unfair world.
‘Dad?’
He looked round at her, surprised as she was at the word that had just come from her lips.
She had to forgive him, as unfair and counterintuitive as that seemed. It was the only way she’d be able to let go. Of the hurt, of the anger, of the wilful blindness. She had to do it for herself, not for him.
But she wasn’t going to beg. From now on they’d meet as equals or not at all.
‘I need to know. I’ll come and visit again if you want me to, but you have to tell me you want me to.’
He stared up at her, and somehow she glimpsed a younger man inside that shell, a man who was angry and hurt and afraid. Still he didn’t speak.
She pulled a business card from her bag and handed it to him. ‘These are my contact details. If you change your mind, use them.’
She took one last look at him and then she turned and walked back across the lawn and into the house, knowing that it was probably the last time she’d ever see him.
Chapter Forty-Eight
It’s Magic
Although, technically, the Doris Day film season had ended, because the Doris Day Film Club met on the first Tuesday of the month, they were back together the following Tuesday, the fourth of August. They watched Lover Come Back, Doris’s second outing with Rock Hudson. Not as well-remembered as Pillow Talk, but some critics said it was better. Claire thoroughly welcomed being transported into the make-believe world for a couple of hours. Funnily enough, it was this film and the work they’d done in their rival advertising businesses that had got her interested in that profession when she’d been ready to work out what she wanted to do when she left school.
When the film was over and people were drifting away, Maggs cornered her. ‘Before you go, I’ve got some good news to share.’
Claire looked up, surprised. Maggs hadn’t breathed a word to her about this so far this evening.
‘You know I like my competitions,’ Maggs said. ‘Keep the mind sharp. Well, finally I won more than a year’s supply of cat food or a free iPod thingy that I don’t know what to do with.’ Maggs took a deep breath. ‘I won a holiday.’
Claire grinned. This was exactly what Maggs needed to cheer her up. ‘Congratulations!’
Maggs gave her a rueful smile. ‘But I don’t think I can go.’
Claire’s face fell. ‘Oh, no! Why not?’
Maggs shrugged. ‘Barney. I can’t possibly leave him just after he’s just come to live with me. It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘You have
to take the trip now?’
Maggs nodded. ‘Yep. It’s in the terms and conditions. Have to fly out before the end of August. It’s one of those “now or never” kind of things.’
Claire pulled a glum face. ‘That’s too bad.’
Maggs cleared her throat. ‘That’s why I want you to take it. I want you to have the holiday.’
Claire blinked. She had not been expecting Maggs to say that. When the shock wore off, she laughed softly. ‘Me? Isn’t giving a travel agent a holiday a bit like taking coals to Newcastle?’
Maggs gave her one of those looks. ‘It would be if you ever took one. When was the last time you had some time off, Claire?’
‘I …’ she fell silent. Cripes. Maggs was right. That trip to Prague with Philip had been three years ago. ‘What sort of holiday?’
Maggs smiled. It was a happy smile, but it was a kind of mischievous one too. ‘This is the good bit. It’s a week, all expenses paid, in California.’
Claire’s eyes popped open.
‘Three days in Hollywood and another three in Carmel-by-the-Sea.’
Claire’s mouth dropped open. ‘But that’s—’
‘Exactly,’ Maggs said, nodding. ‘That’s where Doris lives. Now do you see why I want you to go? It’s fate, I tell you.’
Claire made a dismissive noise with her lips. ‘Maggs, you don’t believe in fate!’
Maggs suddenly looked very serious. ‘I do since I got Barney. That seemed like a lucky coincidence at the time, but that dog is the best thing that ever happened to me.’
Claire stood up and tidied her chair away again, then she walked over to where she’d left the DVD collection and her handbag and began bustling around putting things away. ‘Even if that’s true, I can’t possibly just drop everything and fly away for a week. Not before the end of August.’
‘I know you’re good enough at what you do that you could wrap up all your loose ends by then. Even travel agents have to travel sometimes!’
