by Hilary Boyd
‘Flora.’ As she turned to go, he reached out and touched her arm, sending a shock through her body as if he’d been electrically charged. ‘It’s … incredible to see you. Seems like a lifetime. Don’t go without telling me how I can get hold of you.’
She felt a spurt of anger. ‘What for?’
He looked surprised at her tone. ‘Well, er, I thought we could meet up. Have a drink or something while I’m around?’
A drink? It sounded so normal. As if going for a drink could ever contain the maelstrom of feelings she had for this man. ‘Sorry … it’s … it’s not such a good time. I’ve got a lot on.’
She noted his crestfallen expression. ‘But it’s been good to see you too,’ she added, hearing the formal, almost prim tone of her voice as she hurried away and instantly regretting it.
The rest of the shopping was conducted in a blur. She moved up and down the aisles, plucking the necessary items mechanically from the shelves, not daring to look up from her task in case she saw him again. She felt lightheaded, but she kept focused until she was safely out of the store, then almost ran back to Dorothea’s flat as if the devil were on her tail.
Keith hadn’t moved from his desk. He looked up as she shot round the corner.
‘No need to panic. I haven’t heard a peep out of her.’
‘Oh … thanks, thanks for keeping an eye.’
‘You OK?’ He peered at her through the gloom of the hall.
‘Fine, yes.’ She smiled brightly and hurriedly closed the door of the flat behind her, only able to relax when she had a physical barrier between herself and Fin McCrea.
*
That evening Flora stood in her sister’s immaculate, state-of-the-art kitchen, telling her about the supermarket encounter. It was nearly nine – Flora only finished work at eight, and Prue was just back from a gallery opening in the West End.
Prue took a wine glass from the cupboard and set it on the polished black granite worktop with a sharp click. She poured out red wine from an already opened bottle of Australian Shiraz and handed it to Flora, her face set and angry.
‘Bloody man.’
Prue, three years Flora’s senior, was about as unlike her sister as it was possible to be and yet still be related. She looked good for her forty-four years, her clothes classic and expensive, giving only a passing nod to trend. Her hair, short, layered and tastefully blonde, framed a round face, seldom seen without extensive make-up; her nails were long, manicured, and varnished a rich, shiny crimson. The only similarity to her sister was her gold-flecked brown eyes. Financially ambitious from an early age, Prue was now an interior designer of considerable fame and popularity amongst the international set with homes in London; she never stopped working. Her husband, Philip, a lawyer, was usually the one at home making supper for their teenage daughter, Bel.
‘He wanted to have a drink with me,’ Flora said. She had somehow managed to get through the rest of the day with some semblance of normality. Rene had come round for tea with Dorothea, the doctor had visited, Mary, the night nurse, had bent her ear about what they would all do if Dorothea died. So she hadn’t yet had time to make sense of what had happened.
‘And you said no, right?’ Prue asked, not really concentrating as she checked her BlackBerry and replied at once to whatever message she’d just received – Prue’s phone was never more than grabbing distance from her hand. Laying it temporarily on the counter, she opened the fridge and pulled out a box of butternut squash and sage ravioli, a bag of watercress, a lemon and a block of Parmesan cheese. ‘Have you eaten?’
Flora shook her head. ‘Where are Philip and Bel?’
‘Bel’s staying with Holly … getting up to some unspeakable fifteen-year-old mischief, no doubt. And Philip is having dinner with an old college mate.’ Prue stopped what she was doing to peer closely at her sister. ‘You didn’t give him your number, did you?’
‘No, no, of course I didn’t.’ And then she burst into tears.
‘Darling … come here.’ Prue wrapped Flora in her arms and held her close. ‘Poor you, it must have been a terrible shock.’
Flora rested in her sister’s embrace for only a moment before pulling away and wiping the tears away with the back of her cardigan sleeve. Prue made a disapproving face and passed her a piece of kitchen roll.
‘It was a shock.’
‘What was he doing in Waitrose in the Cromwell Road for Christ’s sake? He spends his entire life up a mountain.’
‘He had a bad fall, he said. He was in Charing Cross Hospital getting his leg fixed.’ Flora took a gulp of wine and pulled herself up onto one of the high beechwood stools that lined a side of the square island in the centre of the kitchen. Her sister’s house always amazed her. She realised, of course, that it was Prue’s calling card for her design business, but still, there was no mess anywhere, none of the normal clutter, nothing out of the cupboards and drawers at all. Just clean, blank lines and gleaming surfaces, punctuated by an occasional art work, an elegant vase of flowers, some tasteful arrangement of fruit. Not even salt and pepper mills or a bottle of olive oil sullied the black polished perfection of the kitchen.
‘Serves him right, stupid sod.’ Prue smacked a pan of water down on the stove, repeatedly jabbing at the controls of the black ceramic hob until the halogen plate was glowing.
She leaned across the central island. ‘You don’t want to see him again, do you? After what he did? You’d be insane.’
‘No …’ In the face of her sister’s indignation, Flora wasn’t going to argue – too much like hard work right now – but it didn’t seem as black and white to her. Part of her wanted more than anything else in the world to sit with Fin McCrea and talk and laugh – and perhaps experience the intense sexual energy that had always existed between them. But part of her wanted to run a million miles in the opposite direction, so terrified was she at the thought that she might depend on him in any way again.
Prue looked at her suspiciously. ‘You don’t sound at all certain.’ She topped up Flora’s glass and went to check on the water. It had boiled, and she tipped in the ravioli, prodding with a wooden spoon to separate the pouches.
‘I suppose I’m not.’
‘Uh?’ Prue spun round, letting out a gasp of horror. ‘Flora!’
Flora held up her hand. ‘OK, OK, I know what you’re saying and I agree, of course I do. But …’
‘But nothing. You can’t go there, darling. You really can’t. Eight years together and he walked out on you, never called you, never even wrote. Just disappeared up one of his sodding, bloody mountains.’
Flora met her sister’s angry stare. ‘I know all that.’
‘No, you can’t. Not if you’re even contemplating spending a single second in that bastard’s company.’ Prue paused, as if she were gathering together her arsenal before an attack. ‘He broke your heart. He wrecked your career. He made it unlikely you’d have the children you always wanted, and he sent you into a depression that you’re only now recovering from. What part of this sounds like a good idea to you?’
Flora had to admit Prue was right, but that didn’t mean that meeting Fin hadn’t triggered all the feelings that, for nearly three years, she’d been trying to quash. Mostly unsuccessfully. The therapist to whom she’d been assigned when she’d been depressed had said she needed ‘closure’, to be able to draw a line under the relationship. But how could she do that without learning why he’d walked out on her so suddenly? Perhaps, she thought, it was important to see him again: to realise for herself what a selfish bastard he was, rather than just being told so by everyone else. She ignored the voice in her head, which said, ‘That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.’
‘Hello? Speak to me …’ Prue was waving the spoon in front of her sister’s face.
Flora smiled. ‘Sorry. Just thinking. You don’t need to worry. It’s not like he’s after me any more. If he was he’d have got in touch years ago. He knows where you live.’
Prue looked awa
y for a moment. She seemed to be about to say something, then apparently changed her mind.
‘Anyway, I didn’t give him my number.’
‘Bloody good thing too,’ Prue pursed her lips, glaring off across the room. ‘It’s not his agenda I’m worried about …’ she added.
*
After supper, Flora made her way downstairs to the flat in the basement of her sister’s large Cornwall Crescent house near Ladbroke Grove. However irritated Flora got with what she considered her sister’s blunt, pragmatic approach to life, it had been Prue who had scooped Flora up after Fin’s defection and brought her to live with her and Philip. Later, when she fell badly behind with the mortgage payments on the house in Brighton, Prue had suggested she sell up and stay with them, rent the basement flat on a ‘mate’s rates’ basis. Flora had reluctantly agreed, helpless in the face of her incapacity. Her only certainty back then, which had been a steady beacon in her darkness, was the absolute certainty that Fin would come back – today, tomorrow, next week … But as the months passed and he didn’t, her depression deepened.
Up until that September day three years ago, Flora had considered her life a good one. She loved her job in the A&E department, relished the frantic, unpredictable, life-or-death nature of the work – so much more exciting than the more mundane pace of ward life. And she had Fin.
True, his work – and obsession – was climbing mountains, and there weren’t too many of those in Brighton, so he was away a lot. And when he was home, he was restless from day one, champing to get out of the city again. As soon as she was off duty for a few days, he would whisk her away, both of them astride his sleek Triumph America. They had seen the dawn rise from the top of Mount Snowdon, they had camped out in Swiss mountain huts with the goats, hiked up Kilimanjaro, driven across the desert to Timbuktu, literally. If her duty rota meant they were stuck at home, he would smoke a bit of dope, tinker with the bike and make mostly botched attempts at renovating their tiny terraced house, seven minutes’ walk from the sea. And threaded through all the adventures was that powerful sexual charge, which Flora sometimes felt controlled her as much as any drug. She and Fin might be having supper, getting up in the morning, walking along the seafront, and one look would catapult them both into an almost unseemly desire to possess each other. When he came back from one of his expeditions, perhaps having been away for a month or two, they would spend whole weekends in bed. Fin wasn’t just a boyfriend: for eight years he had been a way of life for Flora.
Thankful to be home, away from Prue’s nagging, Flora ran a bath and sank into the too-hot water with relief. She had drunk a lot of red wine but barely touched the butternut ravioli; she felt muddled and a bit queasy. All she could see as she lay still, the water almost up to her neck, was those light grey eyes she knew better than her own, their expression always containing vanity and a certain vagueness, a detachment from the reality around him, but also a balancing humour and charm, which was how he connected with the world.
She wondered if he had changed. But what does it matter if he has or he hasn’t? she asked herself. I blew him out, he won’t bother to try and find me. And acknowledging that, she felt an almost painful sense of loss.
CHAPTER 2
11 September
‘Would you like to go to the park today?’ Flora asked Dorothea the following morning. ‘It’s so beautiful out there.’ She had just finished giving the old lady a bed bath and was dressing her, pulling on the navy elastic-waisted slacks that Rene bought from Marks and Spencer in bulk, along with cardigans and blouses in beige, and horrible pastel shades of blue, pink and green, which she found at knock-down prices at various outlets of Edinburgh Woollen Mill. ‘Every time I see a branch, I go in. There’s always something on offer,’ Rene told Flora proudly.
‘I … might like to,’ the old lady replied uncertainly, struggling weakly with the arm of today’s pink cardigan. She looked up at Flora. ‘But … Maybe Dominic said he would come round.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Flora suppressed her annoyance. Dominic was Dorothea’s great-nephew and, in Flora’s opinion, a smarmy creep. ‘Did he say when?’
Dorothea gave a small shrug. ‘Perhaps not till this afternoon.’
‘You don’t have to go to the park if you don’t want to,’ Flora said, as she helped her off the bed, propping her inside the semicircle of her aluminium frame for the agonisingly slow walk to the armchair in the sitting room.
‘I think I would like it,’ Dorothea smiled up at Flora, her pale old eyes large behind her glasses.
Keith jumped up from his desk as soon as he saw Flora pushing Dorothea’s wheelchair out of the flat.
‘Go-o-od morning, Miss H-T. And how are we today?’
‘I am quite well, Mr Godly. I can’t speak for Flora, I’m afraid.’
Keith laughed. ‘Touché!’ He grinned at the old lady, whose face lit up in response. ‘I deserved that.’
Never underestimate Dorothea, Flora thought with satisfaction. The small stroke she had suffered about a month ago had taken it out of her, as had the several other transient ischaemic attacks she’d experienced. Each time she lost a bit of ground physically, but mentally, although her speech was so slow, she seemed as sharp as ever.
The flower-walk in Kensington Gardens was worth the long haul with the wheelchair. Peaceful, and lined with blooms for most of the year, filled with small wildlife, it was a haven in the hectic urban surroundings. Nowadays it was Dorothea’s only real experience of the outside world, and she revelled in it.
‘Look …’ Dorothea held out her hand to a squirrel standing inches from the wheelchair, observing the old lady. ‘Do we have some bread?’
Flora passed her a handful of crumbs from a plastic bag slung on one of the chair handles. A small child saw the squirrel too and came over, sitting quietly on her haunches to watch. Dorothea passed the little girl some bread, which the squirrel grabbed eagerly, making the child laugh. The sound sent the squirrel darting off into the bushes.
Normally, Flora would have taken pleasure in the scene, but today she was distracted. Since she’d woken up, Fin had never been out of her thoughts. She had begun looking around as soon as she left Miss Heath-Travis’s flat, hoping and dreading in equal measure that she might bump into him. She had no idea how long he would be living with his friend, he hadn’t said. But she knew Fin never stayed in one place very long.
*
‘Flora, lovely to see you.’ Dominic Trevellick, Dorothea’s great-nephew – her sister’s daughter’s son and only living relative – held his hand out.
‘Hello, Dominic.’ She reluctantly shook the limp, moist hand that was offered and forced a smile. Dominic was short and plump. An antique dealer by trade, he was about her age but dressed like a fogey in a navy blazer, butter-yellow cords, a matching silk waistcoat with paisley bow tie, and tan loafers. His blond hair, neatly parted, was darkened by hair product and barbered too short, his large tortoiseshell spectacles giving him an owlish air which seemed to overwhelm his watery blue eyes.
‘How is she?’ Dominic lowered his voice, a look of studied concern on his face.
‘She’s very well.’
‘Good-good.’ He waited, looking awkward. ‘May I go in?’
Flora nodded. ‘She’s expecting you.’
She went into the kitchen to make the tea and unwrap the Jamaican ginger cake Dorothea always asked her to get for her great-nephew. She heard him making conversation with his aunt, his plummy tones loud in the quiet flat. He had barely visited in the first eighteen months that Flora was working for the old lady, but since then he had been round more frequently and more regularly. Flora knew from an unguarded moment with Rene that he stood to inherit from Dorothea, so perhaps he was just keeping tabs on his legacy. Although Dominic had done nothing specific to warrant it, Flora didn’t entirely trust him. His aunt, however, seemed always delighted by his company.
She carried the tea tray in and set it on the sideboard. Dominic, ever on guard about showing
his ‘breeding’, insisted on the habit of putting the milk in last. This seemed daft to Flora because you then had to stir the tea; whereas, if you put the milk in first, the tea mixed itself. But she played along and handed Dominic his cup of tea, then offered him the milk jug.
‘Marvellous. Thank you so much.’ He beamed up at Flora from his seat on the ancient chintz sofa. ‘I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: you’re a very lucky lady, Aunt Dot, to have this special girl looking after you.’ He splashed milk into his cup and handed the jug back to Flora. ‘But I’m sure you know that.’
Dorothea nodded slowly. ‘She is wonderful,’ she said, speaking slowly but with deep sincerity, and Flora found herself blushing.
‘I’ll be in the other room if you need me,’ she told the old lady, escaping gratefully to the kitchen.
When she went back into the sitting room, Dominic was standing over by the French doors that led to the balcony and then, via some iron steps, to the communal gardens behind the flats. He still carried his cup and saucer in one hand, but with the other he was lovingly stroking the surface of a small walnut box-table wedged next to the window.
‘This is a pretty little piece, Aunt Dot. I never noticed it before.’
Dorothea twisted round as much as she could and cast an eye on the table. ‘It’s Georgian, I think. A sewing box. Open it up, the inside is quite interesting.’
Dominic turned the small metal key and lifted the lid. Flora had never seen inside. It was neatly laid out into fretwork sections, some still containing spools of coloured thread, a cloth tape measure, tiny gold-coloured scissors and a thimble. The lid was lined with delicate floral marquetry.
‘Splendid.’ Dominic bent to inspect the detail. ‘And it’s in such good condition. Must be worth a couple of hundred at auction.’
‘My mother’s. I don’t care for it much,’ Dorothea told him, her tone unusually disdainful. Flora had seldom heard her mention her mother. Her father, yes. She talked about him a lot, and always with great fondness. His portrait hung above the fireplace. He was a handsome Edwardian, with Dorothea’s hawk nose and an impressive waxed moustache. It was almost a swagger portrait in style – with his puffed chest, his head thrown slightly back and his hand resting on the marble mantelpiece as if he were at least a captain of industry – when in fact he’d been something in insurance.
