‘Home sweet home,’ she proclaimed, turning the key in the lock and giving the door a shove. It had been sticking for months, but she never seemed to have the time to do anything about it.
‘Are these yours?’ Ollie asked, whistling in appreciation as he stopped to admire the mosaic of photographs that were hanging in frames along the wall leading into the kitchen.
‘Guilty as charged,’ she replied, taking out the cafetière. For some reason, it had become absolutely paramount that she actually make the promised coffee.
‘Can I do anything to help?’ Ollie had appeared in the doorway.
‘No, that’s fine. Just, er, just make yourself at home.’ The spoon clattered into the sink and Megan swore at it far louder and with more vitriol than was strictly necessary.
Joining Ollie in the living room a few minutes later, she found that he’d taken her at her word and settled himself cross-legged on her sofa, his mismatched socks clashing merrily with her patchwork throw.
‘Nice place,’ he said, never taking his eyes off her as she put the cups down on the table and perched awkwardly next to him.
‘My parents lent me the deposit,’ she mumbled, feeling embarrassed. ‘It’s not much, but at least it’s mine.’
Ollie opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it again. She knew what he was thinking: why were they bothering with small talk now that they were here? There was a line that needed to be crossed, and they were both balanced on the very edge of it, each waiting for a sign from the other. In the end, it was Ollie who moved first, untangling his legs and moving towards her, his gaze making her feel excited and fearful all at the same time.
Just let him kiss you, she thought to herself, watching the coffee grounds dance in their glass chamber. What’s the worst that could happen?
‘Megan?’
She turned to find his face an inch from her own, his smile back in place and his lips moist with expectation. For a few seconds the intensity was almost uncomfortable, and then she closed her eyes.
It was a soft kiss, delicate and shy, and Megan could taste the beer on Ollie’s tongue. She waited for her body to respond, to feel that need course through her and force her hands up and across his back. It didn’t come. Instead, she thought about all the reasons why this kiss was a bad idea. Hadn’t she promised herself that a relationship had to wait until she’d achieved what she needed to? Wasn’t this the very worst thing that could happen now, right when she was on the verge of taking back the life that had already been stolen from her by the last man she kissed?
She sneaked an eye open and saw Ollie, his own eyes closed and his brow knotted with concentration. No, this was wrong. It wasn’t what she wanted.
‘Sorry.’ She pulled backwards and looked down at her lap.
Ollie took a breath before he answered. Evidently he’d felt a lot more during that kiss than she had.
‘Beer breath that bad?’ he joked, but the delivery was feeble.
‘I’m just not sure I can,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not you, it’s …’
‘Me?’ he finished, shifting away from her a fraction.
‘Oh no, it’s me. Definitely me,’ she assured him.
Ollie watched her for a few seconds in silence. He could have got up and left, politely told her that it was nice to meet her and then scarpered, never to be seen again, but he didn’t. Instead, he smiled at her, poured them both a coffee, and asked her to tell him more about her photography.
They could have just become those two strangers who hooked up on a whim, believing that the lust they were feeling meant something more, only to wake up the following day under a heavy blanket of mutual awkwardness and regret. But they didn’t. In choosing not to sleep with Ollie, Megan had inadvertently laid the foundations for something much more: a genuine friendship.
Megan snapped out of her momentary trance to find that Ollie had actually fallen asleep with his face on the table, an empty shot glass still clutched in his hand.
‘Come on.’ She poked him hard on the thigh until he grunted. ‘Time to get you back to the hotel, lightweight.’
The earlier sleet had frozen hard on the cobbles, and Megan almost lost her balance as they rounded the corner by the Old Town Square. The streets were alive with packs of stag and hen parties, all of them in an even worse state than herself and Ollie, who was now half-awake but still leaning a large proportion of his weight on her shoulder.
‘The closch looks so pree,’ he slurred in her ear, swinging up an arm as they made their clumsy way back past the Astronomical Clock. There were lights around it, and Ollie was absolutely right, it did look pretty. There was barely a corner of the square that hadn’t been lit perfectly.
‘I wuv yew.’
‘What?’
Megan’s reply echoed loudly into the quiet street that led to the hotel. She’d replied before her brain had really had time to process the words, and now she felt herself freeze with shock.
I love you – that’s what he’d said. Okay, so he was as pissed as that man in Camden Market that marched around with a loaf of bread tied to his head and climbed into bins, but he’d still said it.
Either her reply hadn’t registered with Ollie, or he’d been shocked into silence by the ferocity with which she’d delivered it, because he didn’t say another word to her as they crunched the final few yards along the flat cobbles and up the steps into the warmth and relative normality of the hotel reception. Mumbling something about needing the toilet, Ollie stumbled ahead of her and into the bar, where he made a beeline for the gents.
Ollie loved her? No, he was just drunk. But he’d said it, hadn’t he? Did he still fancy her, then?
‘Megan?’
She turned to see Hope, the woman she’d met in the bar that morning, nursing what looked like a nightcap. Sitting beside her, clutching what also looked like something with an alcohol percentage in the double figures, was the tiny, short-haired girl they’d both seen that same morning. Megan waved and pulled what she hoped was a friendly smile.
‘Join us for a swift one?’ Hope asked, making to get out of her seat.
‘Oh no.’ Megan shook her head. ‘I’ve had far too many swift ones already, trust me. And I need to get this one,’ she pointed at Ollie as he crashed sideways through the toilet door, ‘up to bed before he falls over.’
‘Maybe see you at breakfast, then?’ Hope chirped.
‘Definitely.’
Ollie staggered off ahead of her again and she waved to the two women, pulling a face at his departing back for effect. She hoped they hadn’t been able to see the confusion she was feeling on the inside.
Luckily, any awkwardness Megan might have felt about the prospect of climbing into the same bed as Ollie was eradicated when they got upstairs and he fell unceremoniously on to it face first, immediately passing out. She thought about taking off his shoes, then changed her mind, suddenly uncomfortable at the thought of touching him.
Why had he gone and blurted that out? Now she wasn’t sure what he was thinking, or, even worse, quite what she felt towards him. And the most troubling aspect of all, she admitted to herself twenty minutes later as she listened to Ollie’s gentle snores in the darkness, was that a tiny little piece of her had enjoyed hearing him say it.
11
Sophie bent her knees and let her head slide under the water, closing her eyes as the warmth flooded over her. She’d run the bath so hot that her heart was hammering, and from under the water it sounded incredibly loud, as if a drummer from a marching band was doing a solo show between her ears. She shifted slightly so that her nose and mouth broke the surface, and drew in some air.
The cold of the late afternoon had worked its way deep into her bones, and by the time she’d returned from her long, meandering walk back to the hotel, her teeth were chattering like a pair of gossipy old women.
St Nicholas Church, which had always been her favourite of the many churches in Prague, had been almost deserted when she got there, but she welcomed
the relative silence with pleasure. The sheer scale and grandeur of the place never failed to hush her in both heart and mind, and standing in front of the altar looking up into the far reaches of the vast, ornate dome, Sophie felt tiny and insignificant.
Robin always giggled when she dragged him in there. Being restless and gregarious, he usually found quiet spaces uncomfortable, often giving in to an overgrown teenage need to misbehave.
It was strange being there alone, and Sophie found that her eyes were taking in more than they usually did. She took a seat on one of the dark wooden pews close to the front and gazed at the golden cherubs up in the pulpit, their intricately sculpted faces shining brightly in the gloom. When you had someone with you, she thought, it made sense that you would try to look for things to point out to them, rather than just allowing your senses to be purely selfish. For as long as she could remember, she’d had Robin with her, and was always thinking what he would like or be interested in looking at. It was a simple enough realisation, but Sophie had never properly considered what a difference being here without him would make.
Before meeting Robin, she’d done everything on her own – often to the despair of her parents, who complained that they never saw her. But rather than losing her independence through her relationship with Robin, he had simply become her partner in crime – an organic extension. Now being here on her own felt alien to Sophie, and she forced herself to take comfort from her surroundings. There was barely a nook in the church that wasn’t adorned with decoration, and the light that was streaming in through the stained-glass windows had turned the walls and even the air a dusty pink. It was as if she was floating in the middle of a sunset, the ambient glow tricking her mind into feeling warm.
She sat back on the hard wood and let her head roll backwards until she could see the fresco that covered the ceiling and a good portion of the walls on each side of the church. There was so much colour, and so much beauty – it was mind-boggling to imagine the painters up there on their rickety scaffolding, a brush in hand and sheer force of will enabling them to complete their masterpieces. Had they sat where she was sitting now and admired their own handiwork? Had they wondered if people would still come to admire it centuries later? It must be one of the greatest things about being an artist – the fact that you got to leave something behind in the world, something that people would enjoy and talk about. There was a sort of magic to it.
Unfortunately for Sophie, she wasn’t very artistic at all. She could just about manage a stick man, if she had to, but she wouldn’t have the first clue how to sit down and paint the view from her bedroom window back home, or the faces of the people she loved. She and Robin had discussed the idea of having their portrait painted a few times over the years, but there never seemed to be time. When he got here she must ask him again – she liked the idea of a painting of the two of them surviving, and of strangers from an unknown future discovering the portrait and wondering who they were. Sophie always did the same pose in photos with Robin: eyes to him rather than the camera and a wide, adoring smile on her face. That was the portrait she wanted.
After the warmth of the café, the church felt draughty, and Sophie could feel her bottom turning slowly into a block of ice on the pew. She shuffled to her feet and took the winding stone staircase up to the gallery level, panting slightly with the effort and almost tripping over a wooden beam that was fixed across the middle of the floor. Prague was full of these anomalies – a random lump of wood here and a slab of stone there – but they all added to the charm of the place. As Sophie righted herself, she noticed a little old man standing guard over the gallery artwork. Seeing her almost take a tumble had clearly amused him, and again she thought how much she loved the people here for their cheeriness.
There was a sign pinned to one of the stone pillars warning visitors not to lean over the edge of the balcony, and Sophie felt her legs wobble just below the knee. She didn’t have a particular fear of heights, but every so often her body would betray her, turning her limbs to jelly at the thought of falling. Robin was the opposite. If he were here now he’d be leaning over the side just to wind her up. When they’d reached Australia for the first time all those years ago, he’d insisted that they immediately look up the nearest place to go skydiving, and Sophie could still remember how it had felt now, standing in the middle of a dusty field, peering through her fingers with trepidation at the image of her brand-new boyfriend hurtling through the air. He certainly knew how to keep a girl on her toes, did Robin.
The old man who had laughed at her cleared his throat, and Sophie pulled back several layers of sleeve to look at her watch. It was almost six, time for this place to close its doors and time for her to leave. Smiling at him and tiptoeing carefully back down the steps, Sophie pulled Robin’s hat right down over her ears and headed back out into the cold.
Thud, thud, thud.
Her heart was still hammering away under the water. Sophie lifted up one foot and used her toes to turn on the hot tap. She’d been in here for so long now that the skin on her fingers was starting to pucker, but she didn’t relish the idea of getting out. Her room was chilly and felt lonely without Robin. Places where they would usually have cuddled up together felt wrong, somehow. The bed too big, the covers too heavy and the silence oppressive. She turned off the tap now and listened to the nothingness, her ears straining to pick up even the tiniest of sounds. She heard a drip, the distant sound of tinny voices, perhaps from a television, a muffled car door being opened and closed, the gentle rumble of a passing tram, and behind it all the disquieting hum of absolute silence.
Feeling goosebumps start to spring up across her chest and arms, Sophie let out a deep sigh and made herself clamber up and out of the bath. The nagging darkness that had been threatening to creep into her subconscious all day was back, hammering away at her like a ghoulish woodpecker. All at once the need to get out of the room was urgent, and she pulled on her jeans so quickly that she stumbled over and collided with the edge of the desk.
That would leave yet another bruise. They seemed to pop up on her body so easily these days, as if she had the skin of a soft fruit. Sophie winced as she pressed a finger against her flesh, swearing under her breath. What she needed was a distraction. Perhaps there would be some other guests down in the bar that she could chat to. Anything was preferable to staying up here on her own.
Mind made up, she gathered up her bag and key, shut the door behind her with a bang and headed towards the stairs.
12
‘I’m not sure if that truffle ravioli second course was such a good idea.’
Hope turned to Charlie as they were crossing the bridge and put her hand on his stomach.
‘Oh no, did it not agree with you?’
‘Something didn’t.’ Charlie pulled a face and halted in his tracks.
Hope wanted to point out that it was his own silly fault for being such a pig and having two dinners, but she sensed that it wouldn’t go down very well. A bit like Charlie’s truffle ravioli, in fact.
‘Perhaps you’ve just had too much to drink today?’ she suggested instead.
‘Maybe.’ Charlie didn’t look convinced.
‘It has been a very long day,’ she said, slowing down as he doubled over, his discomfort clear from his grimace.
‘You poor duck.’ Hope slipped easily into her motherly role, fussing around him and putting her hand across his forehead to check he wasn’t burning up. ‘You don’t seem to have a temperature.’
‘This is embarrassing.’ Charlie reddened. ‘We’re supposed to be on a romantic trip.’
‘Doesn’t the castle look lovely, all lit up like that,’ she said to distract him, pointing behind them to where Prague Castle loomed on top of the hillside, bright gold against the navy sky.
‘Very pretty.’ Charlie didn’t bother turning around. ‘Sorry, love – I just need to get back to the hotel.’
‘Of course.’ Hope laced her arm through his and they continued in silence.
They’d had such a nice evening at the restaurant, enjoying the atmosphere and the delicious wine, and Hope had chatted away to him about her plans. She had decided that she simply must get a job, she told him, even if it was just something part-time in a shop. She didn’t want to be a burden.
Charlie had predictably pulled a face at this, reassuring her that she didn’t need to worry, that he was more than happy to support the two of them for as long as she wanted. It should have made her happy, but Hope found her hackles rising slightly and had concentrated on her food until the feeling slipped away. Didn’t he understand that she needed to work? She wanted to do it for herself, not for him. She’d had years of a man being the one in charge of the money, years of having to pluck up the courage to beg Dave for an extra tenner if the groceries were running low. There was no way that she was ever letting that happen again, even if Charlie did have the very best intentions.
As they skirted the edge of the Old Town Square and made their way along the street towards the hotel, Hope wondered what her ex-husband would have made of Prague. She seriously doubted that its beauty and charm would have got under his skin as it had hers – but he hadn’t always been so unresponsive. She tried to remember now when he’d changed into that person, someone who was no longer her friend, but she couldn’t quite see past the heavy curtain of time.
Charlie stopped her in the hotel reception, his cheeks red and beads of sweat forming on his top lip.
‘Do you mind if I …? I mean, can you wait until …?’
‘You want me to wait down here for a bit?’ she guessed, feeling herself soften as he nodded with relief. The poor man.
‘I’ll treat myself to a nightcap in the bar,’ she assured him, letting her hand rest on his arm for a second. ‘You go on up.’
He nodded again, and Hope watched as he limped slowly away like a soldier back from war. Men and their ailments – they really were ridiculous, she thought, smiling to herself as she pushed open the door to the bar.
A Year and a Day Page 7
