by Jill Mansell
“That’s fine,” Will reassured him. “I’ll make the coffee.”
“I want to talk about it, more than anything. But I mustn’t,” Dan said. “I just mustn’t.” He held the index finger of his left hand up to his mouth to show how discreet he was. “It’s a great, big secret.”
Chapter 28
“I don’t know what to do. I wish I didn’t feel like this, but there isn’t any way to make it stop.” Dan rubbed his good hand over his stubbly jawline. “I love her. I just really and truly love her. And the thing is, I love her too much to risk ever doing anything about it.”
There, he could hardly believe he’d said them, but the words were out. It had been like jamming a nail into a car tire and hearing the hiss of air escaping under pressure, except instead of air it had been his deepest, darkest, and most personal confession spilling out.
Oh God, though, the anguish it had caused him over the years.
Sean and Will were looking pretty startled too. As well they might.
“Seriously?” said Sean.
“I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.”
“And you just suddenly realized this…what, last week?”
Ha, if only. Dan shook his head. “Longer ago than that. Much longer.”
“How much longer?” said Will.
“Ooh, give or take a few days, it’ll be nine years now.”
“What?”
Dan even knew the day; he could pin it down to the exact moment. He’d replayed it in his mind a thousand times. “Remember the week in St. Carys? That vacation we all went on together after I’d finished my A levels and Lily had just taken her GCSEs?”
Dan watched Sean nod in agreement. Of course Sean remembered; he’d still been married to Patsy at the time. The three of them had gone down to Cornwall with Coral, Nick, and Lily, staying in a fantastic hotel overlooking the main surfing beach. The weather had been kind to them, hot sunny days melting into balmy nights. He’d met a girl whose name he’d long forgotten, and Lily had teased him because the girl had this way of gazing at him as if he were some kind of superstar. And he’d laughed about it because Lily was forever teasing him. They’d grown up together making merciless fun of each other. It was just what they did.
The change had happened on the second to last night of the vacation, surging out of nowhere with no warning at all. The adults—he might have been eighteen, but he wasn’t one of the grown-ups—were starting a barbecue on the beach. He and Lily had been exploring the rocks over to the left of the bay…
“Um, hello, are you actually going to tell us?” said Sean. “Or were you just going to sit there picturing the scene in your head?”
“Sorry.” It was exactly what he’d been doing. “The evening of the barbecue. Lily was wearing a loose pink cotton sweater and jeans. I was wearing a denim shirt and orange board shorts. Lily found a baby crab in one of the rock pools. Then she spotted a bigger crab in the sea below us and said it must be the baby’s mum. So I scooped up the baby crab, climbed down, and slipped it back into the water.
“Except then another big crab crawled out from under one of the rocks in the pool, and Lily said we hadn’t reunited mother and baby at all, we’d actually separated them.” Was this too much detail? Dan found he couldn’t bear to leave any of it out. “So I called her a dipstick, and she called me a murderer because the baby crab would probably die without its mum. And that was when I dived off the rocks into the sea.”
“I remember now.” Sean was nodding.
“Well, I couldn’t find the baby crab. But I managed to slice my knee open on the edge of a rock underwater and came up swearing. Lily thought it was hilarious and said, “Is there blood? Oh, look, and there’s a shark heading straight for you!” Then the next moment she saw the blood spreading in the water like a cloud and jumped in with me.”
Will’s eyes were wide. “Was there a shark?”
“No.” Reliving the moment, Dan smiled and shook his head. “She just jumped in for the hell of it. With all her clothes on. We swam all the way around the rocks and made our way back to the shore. My knee was still pouring blood, and Lily called me a liability and a hopeless case. Then I sat on the beach and she rinsed all the sand out of the cut on my knee. And I looked down at the back of her head with her wet hair rippling over her shoulders, and suddenly out of nowhere I realized I loved her. With all my heart. And that was when she turned to look at me and said, ‘You know what you are, don’t you? A crab murderer with an attention-seeking knee.’”
For a couple of seconds the cottage was silent.
“What happened next?” prompted Will.
“Nothing. I couldn’t do anything. Or say anything. I couldn’t tell her.” Dan marveled at the very idea. “She’d have laughed her head off. I’d never have lived it down. I needed time to get used to the idea, to work out what I was going to do.”
“I took you back to the hotel to get your knee bandaged up,” Sean remembered. “And you meant to spend the next day—the last day of the vacation—with that pretty girl you’d been seeing. What was her name?”
“Can’t remember.”
“Maeve, that was it. She was from Coventry. But you called and told her you couldn’t meet up after all. None of us understood why.”
“Well, now you know,” said Dan.
The light-headedness was still there, along with a sense of freedom. At long last he’d bared his soul.
Sean said, “And you’ve been recklessly damaging yourself ever since, desperate for Lily to show you some more sympathy.”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t do all this on purpose.” Dan glanced down at his injuries.
“All this time,” Will marveled, “and you’ve never once made a move.”
“Never once.” Dan was already picturing the unfolding next scene.
“Why not?” said Will.
“I thought I’d hang fire for a bit, make sure the feelings were real. I mean, really real. I couldn’t take the risk of rushing into anything. Plus, I was about to head off to university. I’d never waited before; it had never even occurred to me. But this was Lily we were talking about. I knew it was important. Everything had to be right.” Dan raked his fingers through his hair. “It had to be completely right. Because if it went wrong, our whole relationship would be ruined. So I waited until the thirtieth of August.”
“Nick’s birthday,” said Sean, as Dan had known he would.
Dan nodded. “He was having one of his big parties to celebrate. Everyone was invited. It was scary to think I was going to do it at last, but exciting too. Until I was standing at the back of the tent that evening and I overheard Lily and her friend Amber talking outside the tent. We were less than two feet away from each other, separated by a sheet of canvas, but they had no idea I was there. Amber was saying how much she fancied me—which I’d known for ages—and how she couldn’t understand why Lily didn’t.” He paused, his mouth dry. “And Lily said she never had and never would fancy me. I just wasn’t the kind of guy she’d ever go for, not in a million years.”
“She might not have meant it,” Will said.
“Oh she did, believe me. Why would she say it otherwise? She told Amber I wasn’t her type, that I was the opposite of her type. And she certainly sounded as if she meant it.”
“We’ve all said things we didn’t mean, though.” Will made a face. “When I was eighteen, I told everyone who’d listen that I fancied the pants off Yasmin Le Bon. Of course it was really Simon Le Bon.” He shook his head at Dan. “I can’t believe you gave up, just like that. And it never occurred to you to try again, in case she might have changed her mind?” To make his point, he indicated Sean next to him. “Because…you know, sometimes people do.”
“OK, OK.” Dan raised a hand to stop him. “You haven’t heard the rest of it yet. The double whammy.” They couldn’t begin to understand the las
ting impact that evening had had on him; he was still able to vividly recall every second of it, every emotion, every word, every last detail. “So there I was; I’d overheard Lily and Amber talking about me, and it had come as a shock. Then they moved off, and the next moment someone was putting their hand on my shoulder.
“It was Nick,” Dan said. “I hadn’t even realized he’d been standing behind me. He’d heard Lily too. And I thought he was just going to make a joke about it, because he didn’t know how I felt about Lily, but it turned out he did know. He sat me down and told me he’d seen what was happening ever since the vacation in Cornwall, had realized the way things could be going. And he said he needed to make me understand why it might not be a good idea.”
Sean was looking shocked. “He warned you off? Like Don Corleone in The Godfather?”
“No, no, it wasn’t a threat. Actually, it was worse than that.” If Nick had flatly refused to permit any kind of relationship, Dan knew his eighteen-year-old self would have been inclined to just go ahead and do it anyway. Instead, Nick had reasoned with him and appealed to his better nature. “He was incredibly nice about it…sympathetic… He said it might have seemed like a good idea, but imagine what it would be like if me and Lily got together and it didn’t work out.
“And really, we were so young, the chances were that it wouldn’t last, and then how awkward would things be? Everyone in Stanton Langley doted on Lily. If I ended up breaking her heart, I wouldn’t hear the end of it.” He paused, then shrugged. “Well, he was right about that. Basically, I didn’t have the best reputation, and if I hurt Lily, I’d never be forgiven. As Nick said, we could either stay as we were and be friends for life, or I could try to take things further and risk losing everything. And not just Lily. Our friends, families…everyone.”
“Wow,” said Will. “Heavy.”
“But he had a point,” said Sean.
“He did.” Dan nodded in weary agreement.
“You slept with Amber that night, for a start.”
Dan shrugged and nodded again; he wasn’t proud of himself for having done that. In his admittedly inadequate defense, he’d been eighteen years old and his heart had just been broken into a million pieces. It had also made Amber’s night. At the time it had seemed like the only thing to do.
“Then you went off to university and slept with most of the girls there too.”
“Not most of them,” said Dan, although it had been a fair few. “So anyway, you see now why I never did say anything. It would have been me versus the whole of Stanton Langley.”
Not once had it occurred to any of them that he might be the way he was purely because he wasn’t allowed to make his feelings known to the one girl he truly did want and felt he could be faithful to.
But the years had rolled by, and he’d grown into his role as an indefatigable ladies’ man. He’d tried so hard to fall in love with another girl but it just hadn’t happened. And over time he’d realized he could no longer be sure he did trust himself one hundred percent. The fear was too great to take the risk.
All the more reason not to try.
Sean had been watching Dan disappear into his memories. Now he said, “So this is why you have your jokey relationship with Lily. You fake-flirt with her because it would be weird not to, but it’s a double bluff because deep down you actually mean it. And you’ve gotten used to things being the way they are because it’s safe and you’re not risking the whole thing blowing up and hitting the fan.”
Spookily spot-on. Was it being gay that made Sean so adept at digging beneath the carefully constructed devil-may-care surface and understanding what was actually going on in his confused and despairing mind?
“Sounds about right,” Dan said.
“So what happens now?” asked Will. “Are you going to tell her how you feel?”
There it was again, the serrated knife in the stomach. Dan shook his head. “No, I’m not. I can’t. All the old arguments still stand. I know what I’m like… I’ve been this way for so long now. I can’t afford to take the risk of fucking up.”
More silence. Finally Sean said, “So all this business with her and Eddie Tessler must be pretty hard for you to handle.”
“Let’s just say it hasn’t been the best few days of my life.”
“Maybe he’ll lose interest,” said Sean.
“He might not,” said Will, unhelpfully.
Dan was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. The light-headedness had dissipated, his eyelids were now heavy, and his brain appeared to have been replaced by cotton wool. Under the accidental influence of drink and drugs, he’d shared his secret, which had been a relief at the time, though it wasn’t as if they could do anything about it.
There was no magic answer.
“You mustn’t tell anyone.” Through half-closed eyes he looked from Sean to Will. “I mean it, you have to swear on your lives. Lily must never know.”
They were both nodding sympathetically. “Don’t worry, we promise,” Sean said. “Your secret’s safe with us.”
Will was smiling. “Same. And let’s face it, if you can’t trust a couple of gay men who both hid their sexuality for years…well, who can you trust?”
* * *
Dan woke up at six thirty the next morning. Sean and Will were both upstairs asleep. He left a note on the coffee table:
Don’t worry, I’m still alive. Many thanks for last night. D. P.S. Remember, just between us.
As he let himself out of the house, it occurred to him that anyone else catching sight of the note might think they’d had a threesome.
Limping along like Long John Silver, he paused outside the cottage and decided to head down to the main street. The convenience store would be open; he wanted to pick up a couple of papers, and they sold painkillers too.
In the newsagent’s he flicked casually—one-handedly—through some of the papers, not even admitting to himself what he was looking for.
Until he turned a page and saw the huge photo captioned: This could be The One, says Eddie.
Then he really wished he hadn’t bothered.
“Oh my goodness,” said a blond girl, grinning across at him as she picked a copy of Heat magazine off the rack. “You’ve been in the wars!”
She was young, pretty, clearly interested. There was a fuchsia-pink streak in her hair. Out of sheer habit, Dan flashed a brief smile in return. “You should see the other guy.”
“I can imagine. Wow, that’s what I call a black eye. Is it really painful?”
Not nearly as painful as looking at pictures of Lily with Eddie Tessler.
“I’m managing.” He wondered idly who she was.
“I’m Shaz. Hi. Saw you looking at that photo just then. If you’re from around here, you must know Lily.”
Dan no longer needed to wonder. She was a journalist. “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. It’s such a great story, real Cinderella stuff.” Shaz’s eyes were bright as she said playfully, “Now you’re making me wonder if she’s an ex-girlfriend of yours!”
Dan shook his head. “No.” Limping over to the counter with the newspaper tucked under his arm, he asked Ted Wilson for a packet of aspirin, paid for both items, and made to leave. As he reached the door, he heard Ted say to Shaz, “If you want to know about Lily, I can tell you everything you need.”
“You can?” Shaz perked right up. “Well, that’s fantastic.”
“I mean, you’ll pay, will you?”
“Depending on the information, we can certainly negotiate a price.” Shaz nodded so vigorously that her earrings jangled.
Dan turned in the doorway and raised his eyebrows at Ted, who had only moved into the village a couple of years ago.
“What?” said Ted defensively. “If I don’t do it, someone else will.”
“Exactly,” said Shaz.
>
Chapter 29
Who knew so much could happen in the space of a week?
Lily was brushing her teeth in the en suite bathroom of her hotel room. Not up in London this time, but in the Valentine’s best room, occupied for the past seven days by herself and Eddie Tessler. And if it seemed weird to others that she was staying in a hotel in her own village…well, it felt a bit weird to her too.
Most annoyingly, one of her all-time favorite things about hotels had been going downstairs to the dining room in the morning and enjoying a proper cooked full English breakfast.
But when you knew the chef and the waitresses and could see them looking at you as if you were a whole different person, it all became hugely awkward and impossible.
Lunch or dinner at the Star, being served by friends, fine.
Breakfast at the Valentine, too embarrassing for words.
And as for having it delivered to your room, actually carried in on a silver tray while you stood beside the huge, velvet-canopied four-poster you’d spent the night in with the hotel’s current VIP…eurgh, no way, forget it.
Lily grimaced at her reflection in the mirror and spat toothpaste froth into the sink. The term “VIP” was something else she wasn’t fond of.
“Why are you making that face?” Emerging from the shower behind her, Eddie slicked his wet hair back with his hands.
Lily smiled, because sharing the king-size hotel bed with Eddie was something she was enjoying about her stay here. She rinsed her mouth with water, spat again, and said, “It should be VFP.”
“Of course it should.” He wrapped his arms around her. “What are you going on about?”
“People say VIP, but they don’t mean VIP. Some people are important but most aren’t,” she told him. “It should be very famous person. That’s what they really mean, isn’t it? Or just FP, because most people aren’t even very famous.”
“So true.” Eddie was looking amused. “And what about me? What would I be?”
“You’d qualify as a QFP,” said Lily.
