by Jill Mansell
“She fancied you rotten,” Coral supplied with a grin, “but she needed to be certain before anything happened. She said it was like starting at a brand-new school and making friends with the first person who spoke to you, then realizing a month later that you’d gotten yourself stuck with a complete weirdo and there was no escape.” She paused. “Not that you were a weirdo, of course. But you have to make sure.”
“Plus, I kind of had a girlfriend,” Declan admitted, “although I broke up with her two days after first setting eyes on Jo. A week later, I told Jo she was the reason. And the day after that, a group of us left work at midnight and went out to join a party down on Barceloneta beach.”
“And ended up staying there all night. This was taken at seven o’clock the next morning, by one of Declan’s friends.” Lily gazed lovingly at the glossy snapshot, with the remains of a barbecue in the foreground and a hazy sunrise behind them turning the sky palest pink and the sea liquid silver. Her mum and Declan were half sitting, half lying back on their elbows with their heads tilted together and her mum’s left foot touching Declan’s right ankle.
It was all there in the eyes, in the secret smiles on their tanned faces, and in the glow of happiness surrounding them. They were young, they were healthy, and they were free to do whatever they liked. Her mum was wearing a short, ruffled skirt and an oversize white T-shirt that had slipped off one shoulder, with a pink halter-neck bikini top visible beneath it. Declan’s own shorts and shirt were both wet from the sea.
“I remember Jo telling me about that night on the beach.” Coral’s eyes lit up. “Someone had a boom box, and you were all dancing to Fairground Attraction. Remember that song? It’s got to be-eee-eee-eee…”
“Perfect,” said Declan. “Ha, yes, we were. And we danced to that song by Bros too. ‘I Owe You Nothing.’”
“Bros?” Lily couldn’t keep a straight face. “That’s a bit embarrassing.”
He shrugged good-naturedly. “Tell me about it.”
To tease him, Lily sang, “I owe you nothiiing…” and did a couple of pointy-fingered gestures in the air before suddenly wondering what she was doing and tucking her hands back down at her sides.
“That’s how Jo used to dance to it,” Declan said. “Exactly the same.”
“She had that song on a cassette tape,” Coral joined in. “It was one of your favorites when you were little. You used to beg her to play it over and over again.”
Lily turned to her. “I did? Really?”
“The two of you used to dance around to it together.” Coral did the pointy-fingered hand movements. “Just like that. When you were three. It was hilarious to watch—you used to take it all so seriously and get so cross if you ever made a mistake.”
“OK, thanks a lot, you can stop now. And to think I called you embarrassing,” she said ruefully to Declan.
“Hey, you were three years old. I was eighteen.”
Lily could just picture her mum and the young Declan together; she could imagine them dancing wildly on the beach as the stars faded from the sky, the sun rose above the horizon, and the dawn chorus filled the air. Vying, of course, with the equally chirpy sounds of Matt and Luke Goss.
There were other photos too, of Declan and her mum either individually or together, depending on whether anyone else had been around to take the pictures. Sometimes they were part of a group of friends, all making the most of their year in Barcelona, cavorting in the sea, climbing mountains, or socializing with drinks at sidewalk cafés.
“You can see the connection between you.” Lily looked at Declan. “You can feel it. I mean, I’m not just imagining it, am I? It’s really and truly there.”
“I think so.” He nodded. “It definitely felt like it at the time.”
“It’s such a shame you broke up. Apart from me not being here if you hadn’t.” It was kind of a weird thing to think about. She was inclined to believe that if her mum and Declan had stayed together and had a baby, that baby would still somehow have been her, only this time with two parents who loved each other. Wouldn’t that have been nice?
“I know. If our universities hadn’t been so far apart, I think we might have managed it. As it was,” Declan said, “we ended up having—”
His phone was ringing. As he took it out of his pocket and saw the name flashing, he winced. “Oh God.”
“It’s fine.” Coral was already on her feet. “We’ll go into the kitchen, leave you in peace.”
“No need. My fault.” Declan pressed Answer. “Gail, sorry, I’m not going to be able to get over for dinner.” Pause. “I know, I know. I meant to and completely forgot.” Pause. “No, I’m not in London.” Long pause. “I’m in the Cotswolds. Stanton Langley.” Even longer pause, during which Lily and Coral were both able to hear Gail’s exclamation of disbelief, followed by a rattle of words they couldn’t make out.
Which was probably a good thing.
“I know, but I did,” Declan replied patiently. “And it’s been a fantastic day. Look, everything’s fine. I’ll speak to you tomorrow; I’ll tell you all about it then.”
“Oh dear,” Coral said when the call had ended. “I feel terrible now. Like a mistress!” Then her cheeks turned pink at the realization of what she’d just blurted out.
“Is your girlfriend incredibly jealous?” Lily was curious.
Declan shook his head. “No, she’s really not. Just organized and efficient. She’s cooked dinner for me, and I’m not there. That’s why she’s a bit put out.”
“Understandable,” Coral said. “Well, if you’re not rushing back, will you stay and have something to eat with us?”
Stay, stay, Lily mentally willed him. Staaay.
And without even being aware of the message she was sending out, Declan smiled and said easily, “Sounds great.”
Hooray for secret messages!
“Well, it might be.” Coral’s eyes were sparkling. “Keep your fingers crossed.”
Chapter 18
They moved inside. A bottle of wine was opened, and Coral began putting a meal together in her characteristic slapdash but hopefully successful way. An hour later, they sat down at the scrubbed oak table in the kitchen and ate king prawns in chili and garlic sauce, followed by fried chicken with green beans and new potatoes with hollandaise. Maybe the chicken was a bit burned and the green beans too crunchy, but who cared? The company was wonderful. For dessert, they had Jaffa Cakes.
“So how exactly did you and Mum break up?” Lily was busy separating the orange jelly from the sponge part of her Jaffa Cake.
“Well, basically, the distance was too great, and I think we were both too proud.” Declan shrugged and stirred his coffee. “We discussed it over and over again, with each other and with our friends. Could we cope, being that far apart? It was a ten-hour drive from Fife to Exeter, if either of us even owned a car capable of getting that far, which of course we didn’t. There were no cheap airfares back then. Even trains and buses cost more than we could afford. Which meant we wouldn’t be seeing each other for months on end.”
Coral nodded sympathetically. “Jo told me about that. It must have been so horrible for you both.”
“It was.” Declan sighed. “Everyone else told us we’d be crazy to even try to keep things going when we were meant to be having fun and enjoying university life. In the end, Jo said maybe we should accept the situation and make a clean break. I was horrified, but she made it sound as if it was what she wanted, and I wasn’t going to beg. So I pretended to agree.”
“She only said it because she thought it was what you secretly wanted,” Coral said.
“At the time, that didn’t occur to me. Jo was upset with me, I was upset with her, and we ended up doing what neither of us wanted to do.” Declan raised his hands in defeat. “And that was it, no going back. The decision had been made.”
“Oh God.” Lily was only
too easily able to envision it.
“It was pretty awful,” Declan said. “We’d agreed not to contact each other, once we’d made the break. So I went up to St. Andrews and Jo went off to Exeter, and we stuck it out. The first six months were awful, but I got through it and gradually things became easier. The following May, I started seeing someone else. Then in June, I did hear from Jo. She sent me a letter asking if I fancied taking off to Barcelona for the summer. But I’d already arranged a job with my flatmate’s dad, and I couldn’t let him down. Plus, my girlfriend saw the letter and wasn’t amused.”
“Was her name Theresa?” Lily asked.
Startled, Declan said, “Yes! How did you know that?”
“She wrote to Mum. Warned her off.”
“God, really? I had no idea.” He shrugged. “She was way too pushy. We broke up a couple of weeks later.”
Missed opportunities, sliding doors.
“So you and Mum never saw each other again,” Lily said.
Declan hesitated for a moment, then said, “Well, I did see Jo. Just once. But she didn’t see me.”
“You saw her?” Coral straightened. “When?”
“Halfway through second year. I’d just been missing her so much. So much.” He shook his head. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions.”
“Like coming here today,” Lily said.
“But with less of a happy outcome.” Declan was rueful. “I skipped a couple of lectures, borrowed some money, and spent the whole of Friday traveling down on a bus from Fife to Exeter. Then I walked three miles to a pub called the Parrot, because the sister of a friend of mine had told me that Jo always went there on Friday nights.”
Coral nodded. “We did.”
“Anyway, it rained. A lot. By the time I arrived, it was ten thirty, and I looked as if I’d just climbed out of a pond.”
Lily drank some wine; as a story, it clearly wasn’t set to end well. Across the table, Coral had the flat of her hand pressed against her sternum.
“The place was packed,” Declan continued. “There were banners and balloons everywhere, celebrating someone’s birthday, and at first I thought Jo wasn’t there. Everyone was dancing, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then suddenly the music stopped and the DJ said, “Come on then, where are they? Where are the lovebirds?” And that was when they appeared on the stage. It was Jo and the guy whose birthday it was. And they were kissing.”
“Neil…” Coral said faintly.
“That’s right.” Declan nodded. “He was tall, with reddish-fair hair, wearing a red rugby shirt and jeans.” The mental picture in his head was evidently as vivid now as the day he’d seen them together up on the stage. “They had their arms wrapped around each other and they kept kissing, and the DJ made some jokey comment about… Well, never mind.” He shook his head apologetically at Lily. “I’m sure you can guess.”
“I was at that party,” Coral said.
“Well, I realized I’d chosen the wrong time to make my surprise appearance. In fact, I couldn’t have picked a worse night if I tried. Neil and Jo were dancing together on the stage, gazing into each other’s eyes like it was their honeymoon. Jo looked amazing, just so happy.” Declan sat back on his chair, his fingers gripping his coffee cup. “And I felt as if my heart was being ripped out.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “So I left. Spent the night on a plastic bench in the bus station and the next morning headed back up to Scotland. Not what you’d call the best weekend of my life.”
There was silence around the table for a few seconds. Then Lily said, “So who was Neil? Mum didn’t have that many boyfriends, and I’ve never heard of a Neil.”
“Oh dear,” Coral said. “That’s because he was never her boyfriend.”
Lily frowned. “But why…”
“Neil was a friend of ours. He’d been dumped by his last girlfriend, and his much-better-looking older brother was down from Bristol University that weekend. You know what big brothers are like… He was always teasing Neil for not getting girls as pretty as the ones he got. So Jo and Neil pretended to be an item to shut his brother up. And it worked like a charm,” Coral said. “But it was all for show; there was never anything going on between them. Neil was just a mate.”
Declan shook his head. “Well, they fooled me too. Of all the Friday nights I could have chosen to turn up, I had to choose that one.”
“If they hadn’t done that, everything could have been different,” Lily marveled. There were so many what-ifs; life was like a ball of string with three hundred ends.
“And it was only a couple of weeks after that party,” Coral said, “that Jo met Keir.”
Just for a moment, unshed tears pricked at the backs of Lily’s eyes; talk about bad timing all around. Except she really had to stop thinking like that. If Mum hadn’t gotten together with Keir, I never would have been born.
* * *
Declan left soon after midnight. At the front door, he hugged them both. “Thanks for making me so welcome. It’s been an amazing day.”
“Thank you,” Lily said, “for driving all this way and coming to see us.” She smiled, inwardly desperate to know if they’d ever see him again, or if this was it. He’d met her now and assuaged his curiosity; maybe as far as he was concerned, that was enough. But she couldn’t appear needy, couldn’t ask if another visit might be in the cards…
“It’s been lovely to meet you,” Coral said. “Really, you don’t know how much it’s meant to Lily.”
“And to me too.” Declan glanced at the bangle on Lily’s wrist. “It’s almost as if Jo meant it to happen.”
“If you come down again, you have to meet Patsy,” Coral said. “Such a shame she’s in Oxford tonight… She’s going to be so sorry she missed you.”
Good try, thought Lily, but in all honesty, was meeting another complete stranger really that much of a draw?
“You’re looking worried,” Declan said. “What’s wrong?”
Oh bugger, so much for not being needy. Lily spoke in a rush. “We might not see you again…and I haven’t even shown you my birthday letters yet!”
He smiled, first at Coral, then at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
* * *
It was three o’clock in the morning. Coral heard the grandfather clock chime downstairs in the hall and gave up on the idea of sleep. Sitting up in bed, she reached for her phone and clicked on the camera.
Nick had died a little more than two years ago, and since then, scrolling through the photo gallery had become her nighttime comfort blanket. It was weird to think that she’d always been six months younger than him, and now she was eighteen months older than he would ever be. There were fine lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there when he was alive. As the years passed, she would continue to grow old without him.
“Oh, Nick.” She lightly touched the screen where his dear familiar face smiled out at her. “I still miss you. So much.”
The last two years had been a trial, without a doubt the very worst of her life. At first, the shock of losing him so suddenly had left her barely able to function. But gradually she’d begun to work through the stages of grief and rejoin the human race, even if she had often felt like an imposter, smiling and talking and generally behaving like a normal person on the surface, while inside all was joyless and frozen.
The things she’d especially loved to do before—like sketching and painting—no longer interested her in the slightest. Arranging spur-of-the-moment weekends away had become a thing of the past, because the person she most wanted to go away with was no longer here. Weeks and months passed with glacial slowness, and all she wanted was to begin to feel normal again, but it was turning out to be easier said than done.
Because Nick had been her first and only love. There’d never been anyone else. They’d met when she was sixteen and he was sevente
en, and it had been like finding each other’s missing halves. People had laughed and told them they were crazy, how could they know they were right for each other if they didn’t have other experiences to make comparisons with? But the idea of breaking up for no reason and spending time being unhappy apart, purely to satisfy their critics, seemed even crazier. So they’d metaphorically given their detractors the finger and stayed together.
Till death us do part.
Bloody death. So uncompromising. So final.
Because it never gave you a second chance, did it? You couldn’t apologize to God or whoever was in charge of deciding when these things should happen. You weren’t allowed to strike a bargain and say, “Look, we knew we were happy; we just didn’t always realize quite how happy. But we do now, so please could you bring him back, even if it’s just for a few more years?”
It didn’t work that way, sadly. Once they were gone, they were gone.
So anyway, the freeze had set in, and she’d imagined it would be there for good. Over the course of the last year, people had begun making the occasional half-jokey remark about how in time she would meet someone else, but the idea was ridiculous. It was on a par with being told “If you flap your arms really fast, you’ll be able to fly.”
It just wasn’t going to happen.
Coral scrolled on through the more recent photos that didn’t feature Nick, then came to the ones from tonight. She’d taken some of Lily and Declan standing together smiling into the camera, as well as several more informal unposed ones.
So there it was; against all odds it had happened at last. This afternoon she had looked at Declan Madison out in the yard and seen a nice-looking man who did nothing for her. Then this evening she’d looked at him across the dinner table and experienced a jolt of attraction so out of the blue and completely unexpected that at first she hadn’t known what it was.
