Barefoot Bride

by Jessica Hart

  As if that wasn’t enough of a slap in the face, now she was the one who was getting through to Lily. It was Alice who was making the bond with his daughter that should really be his, and he resented that too. Will knew that he was being unreasonable and unfair, and he was ashamed of himself, but there it was, something else to add to the mix of his already confused feelings about her.

  The next few weeks were going to be even harder than he had feared. Lily went to bed early, which meant that there would just be the two of them alone together every evening like this. Alice still stirred him like no other woman he had ever met. She made him feel angry, and resentful and regretful and grateful and irritated and amused and sympathetic and muddled and disappointed and exhilarated and aroused, often all at the same time. And all it took was for her to turn her head and he was pierced by such joy at her presence that it drove the breath from his lungs.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t more enthusiastic about the shoes. I know she likes them. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to encourage her to think that happiness lies in shopping.’

  Alice was exasperated. ‘I bought her a pair of cheap shoes,’ she said tightly, and was aware, deeply buried, of relief that Will was being so objectionable. It was much easier to be cross than to be aware of him and his mouth, his hands and the way he made her feel again. ‘It wasn’t a philosophical statement, and it won’t turn her into a raging materialist. It was just a present, and not a particularly expensive one at that.’

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ said Will irritably. ‘It’s about giving her false expectations of the kind of life she’s going to have now. Nikki used to buy her things the whole time-toys, clothes, the latest brands, whatever made her feel better for being away at work so much-but that’s not going to happen now. I’m not going to try and buy Lily’s love, even if I had the time to do it. Little shopping trips like today’s will just remind Lily of a life that’s gone, and I’m afraid it will just make it harder for her to settle down here.’

  ‘There’s a difference between buying affection and giving your child some security,’ snapped Alice. ‘Lily’s been wrenched out of the only life she’s ever known. Where are all these toys and clothes that her mother bought for her? Did it not occur to you that she might like a few familiar things around her? Or would that have been making things too easy for her? I suppose you thought what she really needed was a clean break and the equivalent of an emotional boot camp to help her settle!’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Will stiffly. ‘It’s true I only brought what I could carry this time, but all her other things are being shipped out. They should arrive in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alice, wrong-footed. She had been ready to whip herself into a fury at his stupidity and intransigence. ‘Well…good,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘Is there anything else she needs-apart from pink shoes, that is-until the shipment arrives?’

  ‘She could do with more to keep her occupied during the day.’ Alice was glad that Will had given her the opening. She had intended to raise it, but was afraid she might have pushed him a bit too far to suggest it herself. ‘If I didn’t think you’d throw a fit at the idea of going to the shops again, I’d suggest getting her some books and maybe some paper and crayons.’

  ‘If I give you some money, will you take her and let her choose whatever she wants?’

  ‘What?’ She clapped a hand to her chest and opened her eyes wide. ‘You mean we’re going to be allowed to go shopping?’

  Will clamped down on his temper, not without some difficulty. ‘For things Lily really needs,’ he said repressively. ‘I don’t want it spent on rubbish.’

  ‘Heavens, no! We don’t want to risk Lily having something silly that would give her pleasure, do we?’ Alice got up in a swish of skirt. ‘That would be spoiling her, and we can’t have that!’

  He had handled that all wrong, thought Will glumly as she swept off saying that she was going to read in her room. He had to stop letting her get to him like this. He needed to forget that she was Alice and treat her the way he would any other nanny. Dee hadn’t wound him up this way, and she hadn’t done nearly as good a job as Alice. Somehow he would have to find a way to start again.

  Alice was decidedly frosty the next morning, and Will’s nerve failed at the thought of a tricky discussion before breakfast, but he was determined to make amends when he came home. He left work as early as he could, and found Alice and Lily on the back verandah playing cards.

  Hesitating behind the screen door, he looked at the two heads bent close together over the little table, and his chest tightened so sharply that he had to take a deep breath before he pushed open the door.

  At the sound of the door banging to behind him, Lily looked up with a shy smile. She didn’t cry ‘Daddy!’ or throw herself into his arms, but it was such a big step for her that Will felt enormously heartened. Alice was looking aloof, but that didn’t bother him. He knew he would have to work harder to win her round, but in the meantime he was content to go over and ruffle Lily’s dark hair.

  ‘Hello,’ he said with a smile. ‘What are you playing?’

  ‘Memory.’

  ‘Who’s winning?’

  ‘Alice is,’ Lily admitted reluctantly.

  That was typical of Alice. She would never patronise a six-year-old by letting her win. When Lily did win, her victory would be the sweeter.

  ‘It won’t be easy to beat her,’ Will warned Lily. ‘She’s got a good memory.’

  Too good a memory, Alice thought, trying not to notice how the smile softened his face. She didn’t want to be able to remember too well at the moment. It would be much easier if she could forget the times she and Will had played cards together. Neither of them had had any money as students, and they hadn’t been able to go out very often, but Alice had been perfectly happy to stay at home with him, to sit on the floor and play cards, while outside the rain beat against the windows.

  Once, when she’d got a distinction for an essay, Will had taken her out to dinner to celebrate. He had only been able to afford an old-fashioned brasserie on the outskirts of town with plastic tablecloths and a dubious taste in décor, but it had still been one of the best meals Alice had ever had. She wanted to forget that, the way she wanted to forget the long walks along winter beaches, the lazy Sunday mornings in bed, all those times when they had laughed until it hurt. She wanted to forget the feel of those hands curving over her body, to forget the taste of his mouth, of his skin. The last thing she wanted was to be able to remember the sweet, shivery, swirling and oh-so-seductive pleasure they had found in each other night after night.

  She wanted to remember why it had been such a good idea to end it all.

  Will was still talking to Lily. ‘That was a good idea to buy cards.’

  ‘We went shopping again.’ Lily eyed her father with a certain wariness after his unenthusiastic response to her shoes the day before, but he kept his smile firmly in place.

  ‘Did you buy anything else?’

  ‘Some books.’

  ‘Show me what you bought.’

  Lily ran off quite willingly to find the books, and Will glanced at Alice, who immediately turned away, mortified to have been caught watching him.

  ‘Don’t lift your chin at me like that,’ he said. ‘I know I deserve it, but I really am sorry. I was in a bad mood yesterday, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you and Lily, but I did.’

  Alice’s chin lowered a fraction.

  ‘I’m truly grateful to you, Alice, for what you’ve done. You’ve made a huge difference to Lily already, and I know I’m going to have to try harder to make things work if we’re going to spend the next month together. Say you’ll forgive me,’ he coaxed. ‘It’ll make it much easier for us all if you do!’

  The chin went down a bit further.

  ‘Would you like me to go down on my knees and apologise?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Alice with a
s much dignity as she could muster. She wished he would go back to being grumpy and disagreeable, but she could hardly sulk for a month. ‘Apology accepted.’

  ‘I really am sorry, Alice,’ Will said quietly, and, in spite of herself, Alice’s head turned until she met his steady gaze.

  That was something else she remembered-how those grey eyes could tip her off balance so that she felt as if she was toppling forward and tumbling down into their depths, falling out of time and into a place where there was nothing but Will and the slow, steady beat of her heart and the boom of her pulse in her ears.

  And when she had managed to wrench her eyes away it had almost been a shock to find, like now, that the world had kept turning without her. Alice had once been sitting on a train, waiting for it to depart and watching the train beside them turn into a blur of carriages as they pulled out of the station. She had never forgotten the jarring shock of realising that it was another train that had left, and hers hadn’t moved at all. As the last carriage had disappeared and she’d seen the platform once more, it had felt as if her train had jerked to a sudden, sickening halt. It was the same feeling she had now.

  ‘Let’s both try harder,’ she muttered.

  ‘All right,’ said Will. ‘Let’s do that.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘DO YOU want to see my books?’

  It was a tiny comfort that Will seemed as startled as Alice was by Lily’s reappearance. She was clutching a pile of books to her chest and watching them with a doubtful expression, as if sensing something strange in the atmosphere.

  ‘Of course I do.’ Will forced a smile. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Lily’s face was very serious as she stood by his chair and handed him the books one by one. Will examined them all carefully. ‘This looks like a good one,’ he said, pulling out a book of fairy stories. He glanced at his daughter. ‘Would you like me to read you a story?’

  Lily hesitated and then nodded, and, feeling as if she were somehow intruding on a private moment, Alice got to her feet. She suspected that this was the closest Will had ever been to Lily, and the first time he read her a story should be something special for both of them.

  ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ she said, firmly quashing the childish part of her that felt just a tiny bit excluded. ‘You two read a story together, and I’ll go and heat up the supper Sara left for us. She left very strict instructions, and I’m frightened of what she’ll say if I get it wrong!’

  Alice lingered in the kitchen, giving them time alone together. It wasn’t a bad thing for her to have some time to herself too, she reflected. She had spent all day feeling furious with Will, and there had been something almost comforting in that, but all he had had to do was say sorry and look into her eyes and her anger had crumbled. Like a town without a wall, she was left without defences, and it made her feel oddly vulnerable and uneasy. Will shouldn’t still be able to do that to her.

  Oh, this was silly! Alice laid the table with unnecessary vehemence, banging down the knives and forks, cross with herself for making such a fuss about nothing. She should be glad that Will had apologised and was obviously prepared to be reasonable. She was glad for Lily’s sake, if not her own. They couldn’t have spent the next month arguing with each other. That would have been no example to set a six-year-old.

  It would be so much easier if she could just think of Will as Lily’s father, if she could wipe out the memories of another time and another place. It was all very well to tell him that she wanted to be friends, but that was harder than she’d thought it would be.

  Alice sighed. Her feelings about Will weren’t simple. They never had been and they never would be, and she might as well accept that. Nothing had changed, after all. She had meant what she had said. When her holiday was over, she was going home and she was starting life afresh on her own. No more looking back, no more wanting something from love that it just couldn’t give.

  When Alice went back out onto the verandah, Will and Lily were sitting close together on the wicker two-seater. Will’s arm rested loosely around his daughter and she was leaning into him, listening intently to the story.

  Reluctant to disturb them, Alice sat down quietly and listened too. The sun was setting over the ocean, blazing through the trunks of the palm trees, and suffusing the sky with an unearthly orange glow in the eerie hush of the brief tropical dusk. Lily’s face was rapt. Will’s deep voice resonated in the still air and, watching them, Alice felt a curious sense of peace settle over her. Time itself was suspended between day and night, and suddenly there was no future, no past, just now on the dusty wooden verandah.

  ‘…and they lived happily ever after.’ Will closed the book, and his smile as he looked down at his daughter was rather twisted. It was sad that Lily already knew that things didn’t always end as happily as they did in stories.

  ‘Did you like that?’ he asked, and Lily nodded. ‘We could read another one tomorrow, if you like,’ he said casually, not wanting her to know how much it had meant to him to have her small, warm body leaning against him. It was like trying to coax a wild animal out of its hiding place, he thought. He wanted desperately for her to trust him, but he sensed that, if he was too demonstrative, she would retreat once more.

  ‘OK,’ she said. It wasn’t much, but Will felt as if he had conquered Everest.

  It was all getting too emotional. Alice had an absurd lump in her throat. Definitely time to bring things down to earth.

  ‘Let’s have supper,’ she said.

  ‘You’re starting to make a real bond with her,’ she said to Will.

  Lily was in bed, the supper had been cleared away, and by tacit agreement she and Will had found themselves back on the verandah. She had thought about excusing herself and spending the evening reading in her room, but it was too hot, and anyway that would look as if she was trying to avoid him, which would be nonsense. They had cleared the air, and there was no reason for them to be awkward together.

  Besides, she liked it out here. It reminded her of being a child, when she would lie in bed and listen to the whirr and click and scrape of the insect orchestra overlaid by the comforting sound of her parents’ voices as they sat and talked in the dark outside her room.

  She had been thinking of her father a lot this evening. He used to read to her the way Will had read to Lily earlier. He would put on extraordinary voices and embellish the stories wildly as he went along, changing the ending every time, so that Alice had never been quite sure how it was going to turn out. No wonder she had grown up craving security, Alice thought with a rueful smile. She hadn’t even been able to count on books to stay the same until she could read them for herself!

  Funny how she kept thinking of her childhood here. Normally, she kept those memories firmly buried, but she was conscious that she was remembering it not with her usual bitterness and frustration, and not with nostalgia either, but, yes, with a certain affection. Perhaps she should have remembered more of the good times as well as the bad.

  ‘Lily’s learning to trust you,’ she went on, and Will leant back in his chair and stretched with a sigh that was part relief, part weariness.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Just doing something simple like reading a story makes me realise how much time I’ve missed with her. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

  Alice hesitated. ‘How come you’re such a stranger to her?’ she asked curiously, hoping that she wasn’t opening too raw a wound. ‘Didn’t you want a child?’

  Will glanced at her and then away. ‘Do you want the truth?’ he said. ‘When Nikki first told me that she was pregnant, I was appalled. Lily was the result of a doomed attempt to save a failing marriage. That’s not a good reason to bring a child into the world. Nikki had already made arrangements to leave when she found out she was pregnant. So, no, I didn’t want a child then.’

  ‘But Nikki decided to keep the baby?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know why, to be honest,’ said Will. ‘She couldn’t wait to get back
to her career, and as far as I could make out Lily spent more time with her grandparents than she did with her mother. Nikki made it very clear that it was her decision whether or not to keep the baby, and I had to respect that. I accepted my responsibility to support the child, but I couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be a father,’ he admitted. ‘I hadn’t been involved in the pregnancy the way most fathers are. I didn’t get to see the first scan, or go to antenatal classes. I was just someone who would be handing over a certain sum of money every month.’

  ‘Would you rather Nikki had chosen not to have the baby?’ Alice asked curiously.

  ‘There was a time when I thought that would have been the best solution,’ said Will. ‘But then a funny thing happened. Nikki didn’t want me there at the birth, but she did let me see Lily a couple of days later.’

  ‘You cared enough to see her, anyway.’

  He looked out at the night. ‘I can’t honestly say I cared, not then,’ he said slowly. ‘I felt responsible, that’s all. Nikki was in London by then, and I was working in the Red Sea, but my child was being born. I couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t happening, could I?’

  Some men might have done, reflected Alice, but not Will.

  ‘So I went to visit,’ he went on, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘I guess Nikki thought that if she wanted me to pay maintenance she would have to let me see my own child, but she wasn’t exactly welcoming. Fortunately, there was a nice nurse there. I’m not sure whether she knew the situation, or just thought I was a typically nervous first-time father, but before I could say anything she picked Lily up and put her in my arms and-’

  He stopped, and in the dim light Alice could just see that his mouth was pressed into a straight line that was somehow more expressive of the feelings he was suppressing than a dramatic show of tears and emotion would have been.

  ‘…And I felt…’ he began again when he had himself under control, only to falter to a halt again. ‘I can’t really describe how I felt,’ he admitted after a moment. ‘I looked down at this tiny, perfect little thing and just stared and stared. She was so new and so strange, and yet I knew instantly-deep in my gut-that she was part of me.