by Claire Allan
“Feck it,” she decided, lifting her phone from her pocket and walking back to the pool where she could pick up a signal. She slipped off her mules, sat down and dipped her feet in the water – the shock of the cold sending a shiver up her back.
“’Allo ’Allo,” Dylan answered in a very dodgy accent straight out of the cult BBC show. “’Ow are yeeeuu?”
“Quit the accent, big lad,” Hope teased. “It doesn’t suit you. But since you asked anyway, I’m fine thanks. The weather here is amazing. I’m sitting with my feet in the pool right now.”
“Aye, rub it in,” he teased back and she could sense the smile on his face.
See, she had nothing to worry about after all. He was still Dylan. He was still her friend. There was no tension. Even him being very much in love with someone else didn’t change that. Even him sleeping with her and never mentioning it again didn’t change it, she tried to convince herself while trying to block the whole horrible, embarrassing messy episode out of her mind. Think happy thoughts, she told herself.
“Ach, you’re not missing much – just sunshine, fine wine, delicious food and scenery to die for.”
“I’m not a woman!” he protested. “I’d be just as happy with a pint of Bulmers down at Cutter’s Wharf on a hot day and well you know it. Actually I’d be happy with a pint of Bulmers at Cutter’s on a rainy day – no need to be fussy.”
“Who are you kidding, McKenzie? You’d give your eye teeth to be lounging by the pool with me right now.” She blushed as soon as the sentence was out – thinking of the last time he lounged by the pool with her.
“Don’t take this the wrong way but I have my gorgeous girl here with me and that’s enough. No pool in the world would entice me away from her.”
She felt his words cut through her and she had to fight the urge to tell him to stop being such an insensitive twat. She then had to fight the urge to tell him to go away and cop himself on. Her next thought was to make fake sick noises down the phone at him. Instead she opted for option four – sighing and saying the very last thing she wanted to.
“Sure, aren’t you the old romantic? I’m glad to see you’re getting on so well.”
“I know,” he said, his voice taking on a softer tone. “I feel very lucky. She’s great.”
“Yeah,” Hope said half-heartedly, wondering how she could change the subject from reasons why Cyndi was amazing to something less likely to make her want to throw herself into the pool with some rocks in her pocket.
“Can I ask you something?” Dylan said.
“You can always ask . . .”
“Are you okay?”
“Me?” she said, her cheeks flushing. Were they actually going to have that conversation now? Was he actually going to bring up the great unmentionable? Surely not?
“You just seem a little distant, that’s all,” he said as she gulped.
“Well, my dear Mr McKenzie, that will be the several hundred miles and several bodies of water between us, I would think.”
“Ha ha, very funny,” he said, the tone of his voice indicating that he did not find it funny at all.
She knew then that she could have launched into it all there and then but part of her didn’t want to – didn’t feel strong enough to and didn’t really know what it would achieve anyway.No, not now, she reasoned. She wouldn’t talk about it just now.
“I’m fine, Dylan, honestly. It’s a bit strange here – going through Betty’s things. The old doll had taste. But there is something sad about it. Sad but lovely. I think she had a very happy life.”
“And how are you and Ava getting on? Is it awkward?”
Hope thought of the afternoon they had shared and laughed. No, they had definitely hit the ground running in terms of forging a friendship. Two days in and they’d had a pregnancy-test issue, a declaration of an unrequited love affair and bonding over vintage clothes.
“Not a bit. Surprisingly. We’ve been getting on really well.”
There was a brief silence. “I miss you,” Dylan said and she knew that he wasn’t just talking about the physical distance which separated them.
“I’ve got to go,” she muttered, knowing that staying on the phone would not end well and she pressed the end-call button on her phone. She was almost tempted to throw the damn thing into the pool but it had cost a lot of money and she needed it for work. So instead she sighed, pushed her hair back from her face and stared straight at the sun until her eyes watered.
Once suitably composed, she walked back to the house, back to Betty’s green tweed chair where she sat down, poured the last drop of Merlot from the bottle into her glass and slugged it back, launching into perhaps the single worst ever rendition of Danny Boy – complete with closed eyes and the waving of her glass in a slightly out-of-time fashion.
She was just reaching lamenting the valley being hushed and white with snow when she opened her eyes and saw Ava in front of her, looking at her quizzically.
“I would very much like to keep this chair,” Hope said, lounging back into it and singing “Oh yes, oh yes, I’ll take it home with me!” in tune with the song.
She noticed a half smile on Ava’s face, a curious mix of concern and amusement.
“I’ve had a drink,” she crooned on and Ava sat down opposite her.
“I noticed. But yes, you should have the chair. Of course you should have the chair.”
“I phoned Dylan.”
She watched Ava pull a face which she couldn’t help but feel was hysterically funny. So she laughed – a big belly-laugh.
“I know. It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have done it . . . but you see . . . there was this picture . . . of his feet. And her feet. Their feet. Together. I fucking hate feet. Especially feet together. Especially their feet together. There’s no need, no need at all.”
She knew she was rambling and she knew she sounded like a madwoman but she didn’t care – because his feet were out there for the whole world to see and it was only a matter of timebefore she got emails and texts from well-meaning associates asking about the big love affair and wondering how she wasn’t a part of it.
Ava shook her head. “To be honest, I’m not a big fan of feet either. And they took a picture, of their feet?”
“And put it on fecking Facebook. With a status update. What’s on his mind? Well, what’s on his mind is that he is very much in love.”
“That’s . . . erm . . . nice?” Ava offered half-heartedly.
“Yes. Nice. It’s fecking nice – not. And he misses me. He told me that. He told me he misses me. And it was more than a ‘I miss you’ in a platonic kind of way. There was a tone.”
“A tone?”
“Oh God, Ava, it’s a mess, isn’t it? Wasn’t it supposed to be simple? Didn’t all the books and all the movies just tell us we would fall in love? Isn’t the male best friend supposed to fall in love with the female best friend? You know all that ‘men and women can’t get along ’cos all they want to do is shag’ shit or whatever Harry told Sally?”
Ava shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know about the best friend thing but I’ll tell you that, yes, I kind of thought by now I’d have it together. I’m a grown woman. I’m thirty-four. And I’m terrified of telling my husband I’m pregnant and I’m even more terrified of telling my mother who will wonder what on earth we’ve been at, since we’ve been finding things so hard.”
Hope tried to focus on Ava’s face but that last sip of wine had tipped her over the edge into full-on drunkenness.“Do you think Betty had it all together when she was our age?”
Ava sat back in her chair, or at least Hope thought she sat back in her chair – everything was a bit swimmy at that stage.
“I think she did,” Ava said, showing her the letter she knew she had no chance whatsoever of being able to read. “And she believed in happy endings.”
And Hope finally gave into a flurry of tears as Ava read aloud how Claude had been forced to leave Derry and how Betty had followed and even though
it had been unbelievably tough she had left her family and found her happiness here in France.
“Happy endings do happen then?”
“I guess so.”
“I’d love to have one.”
“You might,” Ava offered, reaching out to take the glass of wine from her cousin. “How about we get you a coffee? And maybe something to eat? I’m hungry. I could eat something.”
“I’ve made a tit of myself,haven’t I?”
“Look,” Ava said calmly. “Earlier I had a mini-fit, then peed on a stick and then cried when I found out I was pregnant – so if you have made a tit of yourself, which I’m not at all saying you have, then so have I.”
“And I thought you had it all together.”
“Fuck!” Ava laughed and Hope felt herself choke.
Ava was a primary schoolteacher – and a very proper-looking responsible adult type and she didn’t really expect her to swear – not proper bad swear words. She felt a giggle rise up in her throat and she laughed as Ava started to laugh too.
“I don’t think anyone really has it together,” Ava laughed when she composed herself. “No one has it together at all.”
Chapter 18
Hope woke to the light streaming in the small window. She was lying on the bed, with a throw over her, still fully clothed apart from her shoes which she surmised Ava had removed, or helped her remove. Christ, she should have drunk the coffee Ava had offered her instead of saying she was perfectly okay to open a third bottle of wine.
The rings had done it. The letter and the rings Ava had handed to her. She had realised with a thumping great thud that she wasn’t married or even in a relationship. More than that – no one loved her. Not in that way. No one had ever offered her their grandmother’s engagement ring and vowed to move heaven and earth so that they could stay together. The man she was hopelessly in love with didn’t love her back – and didn’t even seem to acknowledge the fact they had slept together or that she clearly had feelings for him.
She hadn’t gone mad. She had drunk one (large) glass of wine while hugging into the tweed chair for dear life and telling Ava how very, incredibly lucky she was.
That was what she remembered clearly with a deep sense of embarrassment. She had hazier memories of Ava very gently taking the wineglassfrom her hand, and softly urging her to go to bed. She had been handed a glass of water to drink. Or at least she thought she had been handed a glass to drink.
Carefully, slowly and a little bit painfully, she opened her eyes – one a time. Too bright. She closed them again and took a deep breath. Opening them again, and feeling the room swim past her eyes, she glanced at the bedside table where indeed the tall glass of water still sat. Untouched. Oh no, this was not a good way to start the day. She lifted her arm to try and focus on the watch on her wrist. It was gone nine thirty and she was pretty sure they were supposed to be meeting Jean-Luc at some stage – not to mention getting on with clearing out Betty’s things. Heavy lifting was not a good idea when your stomach was doing its best washing-machine impression. She should sit up. She knew that she needed to sit up – if for no other reason than her bladder was starting to wake up and she really needed to go for a pee.
Slowly, carefully, she pulled herself to a sitting position and looked out the window at the day in front of her while feeling for the glass on the bedside table. Sipping the tepid water her mind turned again to the rings and to Betty.
Betty hadn’t been afraid to take risks – to move her life miles away from home for something she wanted. She didn’t fall apart in a crisis or drink herself silly. No, she thought of Betty’s kind face and warm smile and how she had brought her out to France and something – a little, tiny something shifted.
Hope realised she couldn’t keep doing this. Well, she could, but she would quickly end up a pickled old prune and she would still be on her own and still miserable. Getting drunk and singing Bros’ back catalogue loudly wouldn’t make Dylan love her. (If that was all it would take he would have been madly in love with her years ago.) Phoning him and letting him torture her with details of his great big love affair wouldn’t help either. She felt her stomach sink – a combination of her hangover, embarrassment at what she had got up to the night before, and the realisation that she would have to start letting go – and she sipped from the glass again and set about wondering just exactly what she would wear on the first day of the rest of her life. And, come to think of it, she would really have to start thinking about what exactly she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
The three rings were sitting together on the small table in the corner of the living room and Ava sat staring at them. She had woken early and wasted no time in getting up and going for a swim in the pool. She was filled with determination that she would get as much as possible done and she decided to form her plan while swimming lengths in the pool. It was glorious – to swim, properly swim. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a proper swim. For the last years any trip to the pool had involved arm-bands, or swim nappies, fun pools and water slides and the inevitable tantrum at the end as she attempted to extract her waterbaby daughter from the pool and tackle her out of her swimming suit and into her clothes before she herself contracted hypothermia in the cold changing rooms. It was never an entirely pleasant experience and it certainly did nothing for her cardiovascular workout hopes. The only time she came close to breaking out in a sweat was when Maisie would dive-bomb under the waves with not a hint of fear about her.
Before she was a mum, swimming was one of the things she did to de-stress and she missed it. Gliding through the water, staring up at the sun, she smiled. Yes, this was perfect. This was the perfect way to clear your mind. Maybe she should recommend that Karen take up some swimming – although she could already hear Karen’s retort echoing her in her head. “Swim? Are you mad? The only kind of swimming I want to do is in a big vat of vodka.” Karen would laugh and Ava would smile and nod even though what she would really want to do is snap back that really Karen shouldn’t be so bloody rude all of the time. And she would seethe with anger at her own spinelessness all the way home. Or, in a worse scenario, she would snap back and then Karen wouldn’t speak to her and she would find herself crippled with guilt for the next fortnight. Which, she thought as she pulled herself up at the edge of the pool to catch her breath, was exactly what was happening now.
She wondered how Betty would deal with Karen. She would probably know exactly what to say to her and how to say it. And she wouldn’t feel horribly guilty afterwards. Jesus, Ava realised, Karen would have a canary when she heard Ava was pregnant again. She would no doubt give her chapter and verse on how she was mad as a box of frogs and throwing her life completely down the toilet.
On a previous night out she had already waxed lyrical on why Sophie would be her one and only child. “Oh God, do that again? Are you mad? You know what they say, I’ll try anything once . . . well, I tried it and, honestly, I don’t get the appeal. All that getting fat and getting stretch-marks and getting the lining kicked out of you for nine months before having to give birth. Oh my God, they can send a man to the moon but they can’t come up with a single dignified way of getting a frigging baby out of you? My body was wrecked – you know what I’m talking about, Ava,” she had said, giving Ava a full body scan with her eyes as if she had X-ray vision and could see exactly how Ava’s tummy still sagged over her C-section scar and how her breasts were only pointing in the right direction thanks to the wonders of M&S underwiring. “And then what? The total loss of freedom for the next eighteen years!”
“You do love her though,” Ava had said.
“Oh yes,” Karen had said, half-heartedly. “But I’m not doing it again. My life has been turned upside down enough. You’d have to be off your trolley to go there again.”
Diving back into the cool water for another length Ava considered whether or not she was off her trolley and whether or not it mattered anyway. She was pregnant. That ship had sailed. The decision
was well and truly out of her hands. Karen would have to just lump it and keep her opinions to herself – which even as she thought it, Ava knew was never going to happen. It was up to Ava to learn not to give a damn.
Wrapped in a dressing-gown at the table in the living room, having called Jean-Luc and arranged to meet him in the village, Ava looked up to see Hope, looking slightly worse for wear, walk into the living room and pull a face which wordlessly said: ‘I am sorry I got so drunk I passed out and you had to take my shoes off.’
Ava smiled and shrugged her shoulders reassuringly. From her exceptionally distant memory of proper gut-busting hangovers, Hope would be feeling delicate in every way and wouldn’t need Ava making any jokes about the state she had got herself in.
“Sleep okay?” she offered.
“Not so much sleep as a coma,” Hope answered, walking past her to the kitchen and pouring herself a very tall glass of water.
“Feeling okay now, or a bit delicate?”
“Delicate for definite, but don’t worry. I’ll get some water in me and I’ll be right as rain. I’ll get stuck into the cleaning – it’s the study today, isn’t it? There are so many books in there – we need to sort them – decide whether to leave them, or sell them or just dump them.”
“Maybe we could donate some of them somewhere?” Ava offered, thinking there was no way on God’s green earth she was going to dump any book of any description.
“Good idea. Sure we’ll ask Jean-Luc what he thinks. When should we see him?”
Ava felt herself blush. This was where she had to admit she was an organisation freak and had already made arrangements to meet with Jean-Luc, in about an hour’s time, in a small café in the village.
“I spoke to him this morning,” she said with a nervous smile. “I hope you don’t mind, since you have actually met him. But I was up early and feeling a little antsy so I just got on with a few things.”
