If Only You Knew

by Claire Allan

  Two hours later Ava was laid out like the starter dish in a fancy tapas bar. Cucumbers covered her eyes, some sort of green avocado-based mush was smeared onto her face and her hands and feet were swathed in soft towels enriched with divine tropical-smelling creams. The rest of her was wrapped in the softest, fluffiest bathrobe imaginable and she could hear the soft silence of the heat of the day buzz around her.

  She was lying on a sun-bed on the terrace of the spa at the chateau, while Hope lay beside her – the fruity creams being applied to her feet and the avocado mixture already baking on her face in the glorious sunshine. So far the experience had been exceptional. The therapists had made one godawful fuss of her when they found out she was pregnant and had been kind enough not to mention her existing stretch-marks when she stripped off to her swimsuit before taking a swim in the gentle waters of the chateau’s pool.

  Jean-Luc had been able to get them booked in quickly and had directed them to travel to the chateau where they were greeted like royalty or minor celebs. Trying to push any thoughts relating to what might or might not be contained in the envelope from the attic to the back of her mind, Ava had tried to throw herself into the spa experience. They were set up for half an hour’s sheer relaxation before they’d decide whether or not to brave the full body massages, the hot-stone treatments or the seaweed bath. Although Ava was already pretty confident that the seaweed bath would be the least of her notions. Now, if they had one of those chocolate-bath thingies she would have been up for that. And she would have asked for an extra big bath.

  “Will we have a drink?” Hope asked, smiling over from where she lay in a rather skimpy and tummy-flashing bikini.

  “You know,” Ava said, “I think we should. I’ll go the whole hog and have a glass of sparkling water but you should have a little fizz.”

  Hope sighed. “If you’re sure it won’t make you feel as if you’re missing out in some way then I will, if that’s okay.”

  “Trust me,I don’t feel as if I’m missing out. It was champagne which got me into this predicament in the first instance.”

  Ava nodded to an impossibly petite therapist who scuttled over in her pristine white uniform and asked if she could help. Having ordered the drinks, Ava lay back and closed her eyes and let the sun seep her worries out of her. She felt her eyes droop while she allowed herself just the smallest of siestas under the French sunshine.

  Hope had wanted to tell Jean-Luc as soon as she spoke to him that she had a letter for him from Betty but he had seemed a little cold – businesslike even – and she wondered had she imagined the easy way in which they chatted just the day before.

  “The spa? Oh yes. I will book that. And, of course, the market. I will come by later and pick up some things and take them to my friend? Then we can go together tomorrow.”

  “I would like that,” Hope had said and he had replied that he would come while they were out at the spa so as not to get under their feet.

  She wanted to say “Please, get under my feet. My feet need someone under them and you seem like a nice option” but she didn’t. Crestfallen, she had said yes, that would be fine, and she thanked him for his help before putting the phone down and cursing at it.

  “It’s official. I’m cursed,” she said to Ava. “I am a one-woman man-repeller. There is something about me which makes men get all smoochy and then forget it ever happened the following day.”

  “You’re not cursed. Men are just strange,” Ava said. “And I mean all men. Connor even has his moments. I swear he gets male PMT – once a month he goes a bit funny, sits up all night drinking beer and watching Men Behaving Badly reruns and eating Indian food. You dare not go near him when he’s in one of those moods – that’s his alone time. I just leave him to it . . . and open the windows for the beer/ Indian fart carnage.”

  Hope laughed, and packed her bikini into her case and threw in some hair-clips and her best, most bejewelled flip-flops. Ava sat on the edge of her bed as they chatted. Hope was trying her very best to keep things upbeat. Ava had been quiet since they had left the attic and while Hope could completely understand why her friend would be nervous at the contents of the ominous letter on top of the crib, the nosy journalist in her was dying to find out what it said. She could have been easily distracted by Jean-Luc coming across as all flirty with her, but given his apparent disinterest in flirting she would have to get her kicks elsewhere and that would be at the spa. She closed her beach bag and hooked her arm around Ava’s.

  “Come on, missus. Let’s forget arsey men, their stinky farts, secrets in the attic and everything that isn’t lying under the sun getting pampered by lovely French ladies with oodles of expensive products.”

  “Oh,” Ava said, “do you think it will be very expensive?”

  “You can count on it,” Hope said, “But it’s my treat. A way to say sorry for leaving you all on your own yesterday and then coming back and being a complete grumpy-hole and clearing off to bed early.”

  “I can’t let you do that!”

  Hope shook her head. “Enough, woman! I have spoken. Now let’s go and get pampered and remember that we are technically on holiday and as such should at least do some vaguely holiday-type things and not just spend our time going through an old woman’s things or being messed about by strange Frenchmen.”

  “Or obsessing about being pregnant and wondering how your overworked husband will respond to the news?”

  “You’ve not told him yet?”

  Ava shook her head. “Not yet. I will. When I get home. I want to pitch it just right. I want to get it right in my own head first.”

  “And is it . . . right? In your own head?”

  “Getting there. It’s still a bit of a shock and I’m still trying to figure out how we’ll manage but we’ll get there.”

  “You will, sweetheart,” Hope said. “To be honest, I’m in awe of anyone who manages with a baby at all. I struggle to get myself ready and out of the house in the mornings, never mind another human being who needs everything doing for them.” God love any child who came under her care, she thought, thinking of how she lumbered around the house most days in her jammies and lay eating toast while watching Jeremy Kyle when she should be working and wondering how to pay her credit-card bills. It didn’t scream responsible parenthood.

  “They’re worth it, you know. I mean, obviously there are times when I want to hit the pause button, or even the mute button, but Maisie is great. I miss her loads,” Ava sniffed.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “It doesn’t take much. Fecking hormones. I’m really selling this whole pregnancy thing to you, aren’t I? All tears and snotters and morning sickness.”

  “You look radiant!” Hope said, figuring that was exactly the kind of thing you said to a pregnant woman even if Ava didn’t look an ounce radiant.

  “You lying baggage!” Ava laughed. “Okay, let’s go!”

  Lying under the sun and listening to the gentle snores of her cousin beside her, Hope wondered just exactly where her life was going. She sipped from her champagne flute and lay back, unable to concentrate on the book she had brought with her, and mulled over the words in Betty’s letter again.

  She would have to let go. Wouldn’t she? If there really was no hope with Dylan. She would have to move on. Sure hadn’t her day out with Jean-Luc, who was admittedly acting like a big old weirdo at the moment, showed her that there was more to life?

  All she had to do, she realised with a thud, was to actually figure out if in fact there was no hope with Dylan. Given that he was living with someone else and declaring his ‘very much in love’ status all over Facebook, the signs were not good. And she knew that Betty was probably right and that it was highly unlikely he was about to fall madly in love with her. But then again . . . there was a time not too long ago when she wouldn’t have thought it even a remote possibility that she would ever, ever fall in love with him. Betty could be wrong. Just because she was old and wise and
dead, all mysterious and all, didn’t mean that she was necessarily right about everything.

  Lifting the cucumber from her eyes and rummaging in her bag for her phone she stood up – which prompted a sudden flurry of activity from the very petite therapist.

  “Are you okay, madame?”

  “I just need to make a phone call,” Hope said.

  “I’m afraid you cannot use your phone in this area, but if you want to go to the courtyard . . .”

  “I’d love to go the courtyard,” Hope whispered, hoping not wake Ava from her doze. She would only ask questions and probably tell her it was a very bad idea indeed to be calling Dylan. Which was kind of right . . . but still. She just needed to talk to him – to hear the sound of his voice, to see how he was feeling and to try and gauge in her own way if there was even half a chance of anything even remotely romantic ever happening between them.

  “How are you, mademoiselle?” he answered, his voice bright and cheery.

  She felt herself smile and her mind fled back for just a moment to when they were in France together. If he was here he would be in raptures about the trip to the market.

  “I am doing the absolute best in the world,” she fibbed. “I’m standing here in a bikini covered in salad, drinking champagne and am about to be pampered to within an inch of my life.”

  He laughed – a really rather dirty laugh. “Bikini?The Frenchwomen better lock up their sons. Hopeless is on the prowl!”

  She bristled at him calling her Hopeless. It wasn’t nice, she thought. Not one bit. Okay, maybe this phone call would be easier than she thought. Maybe it would be obvious really quickly that her obsession with him was most definitely a very wrong thing.

  “I’ll not be prowling anywhere, if you don’t mind,” she said. “How are things back home anyway?” She decided not to ask the questions she really wanted to ask, such as did he miss her? Had he maybe fallen out of love with Cyndi? Had he realised he was actually madly in love with her instead?

  “All quiet. Actually too quiet. I miss you being around,” he said. “This house isn’t the same without you leaving empty biscuit packets everywhere or drying your underwear on the bathroom radiator.”

  “Ah, does the bold Cyndi not use the bathroom radiator for her undergarments then?” Hope said, trying to steady her voice and stop the constant round of ‘I miss you, I miss you, I miss you’ running around her head.

  “She doesn’t wear any,” Dylan said and Hope felt herself blush and feel slightly nauseated. “No, she bought a clothes horse, a fancy one too. She is transforming us from our slatternly ways.”

  “Ooooh, clothes horse indeed! She’ll have one of those fancy tumble-drier machines fitted next.”

  “There’s talk of a dishwasher,” he said.

  “We’ll not know ourselves,” she said, thinking that she definitely wouldn’t know herself. She would have to move out, really.She was getting too old and too bitter to play the gooseberry.

  “I do really miss you though,” he said, interrupting her train of thought. “All joking aside. As that song says, I’ve become accustomed to your face.”

  “You old charmer,” she teased but she felt the breath catch in her chest.

  “There is something so odd about you being off on your travels alone. Surely we should do such things together.”

  “The bold Cyndi would have something to say about that, I’m sure.”

  “You’re right, she probably would,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I miss you any less. You are my best friend, H.”

  “Ha!” she blurted in a kind of half-laugh and half-cry which sounded strangely twisted. “Away with yourself, young man! Sure don’t you have Cyndi?”

  Now was his time – his time when he could say yes, that indeed he had Cyndi but that he would always need her. She would always be that extra special someone that he would turn to when he needed someone special to hold.

  “I sure do,” he replied and she could sense the grin all over his face. “She’s amazing. I never thought I would meet a woman who took care of me better than you did, Hope, but there you have it. Life has a way of surprising us at times.”

  “It sure does,” she said, feeling her heart sink and her head hurt with the realisation that he was never going to love her back. Not in that way. What he felt for her was never going to be enough. Betty was right. The bitch.

  Lying on heated towels, her eyes closed, Ava felt the therapist knead her muscles into submission. She hadn’t realised just how much tension she had been holding in her body until that very moment. Every part of her had been tensed up –so much so that she had become aware she was making vaguely orgasmic noises as the small blonde Frenchwoman unknotted the muscles in her shoulders.

  “You are very tense,” her therapist had said in soothing tones. “You must relax for your baby.”

  “I know,” Ava said.

  “We women, we worry too much, we do too much,” the little blonde woman said in her soft French accent. “We all need to learn to relax. The world still turns. The sun still comes up. As long as we have our health . . .”

  “I know,” Ava said.

  “And you have your baby. Your baby is a blessing. A very beautiful blessing.”

  “I know,” Ava said.

  Chapter 27

  The house was strangely empty when they returned to it. The boxes they had been stacking by the front door for the last few days were gone, including all those going to the charity shop and the nursing home. It felt a little impersonal – and strangely quiet. As if part of Betty was gone too, which Ava supposed was the case. So many trinkets and pictures and personal items were cleared out. It was a little disconcerting. She felt herself shiver a little.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Hope said.

  “It definitely is,” Ava said, walking through the living room and looking at the bare surfaces of the sideboards and the vague outlines on the walls where some of the pictures used to hang. “Can you imagine that your entire life could be packed away in a matter of days? Everything that mattered to you?”

  Hope gave a half laugh. “My entire life could be packed up in about thirty-four minutes. A laptop, a suitcase crammed with clothes and a bag for all my make-up. There’s not much more to me than that.”

  “I’m sure you’d be surprised if you looked at it closely enough.”

  “Nope. That’s pretty much it. Apart from a Sex and the City mug and a favourite cushion I like to cuddle when I’m on the sofa. The rest just came with the house – that’s the joy of renting. It’s shocking really how easily I could walk away from it all and not look back.”

  She said it with a smile on her face but Ava could see she was hurting. She had been quiet all afternoon at the spa, having confessed she had spoken to Dylan on the phone.

  “Why does he have such a hold over you?” Ava had asked as they sat together in the pool.

  “He’s my best friend,” Hope had said simply. “Or at least I thought he was. We have been through so much together, Ava. So much. I’ve grown up with him. I mean, we have lived in each other’s pockets for so long it is hard to imagine a time when we won’t be together.”

  “It must be hard.”

  “It is,” Hope said. “After that last time – that time we had sex, I was convinced it would all change. It just seemed different. Different to that time before when we did it, you know, here in France. Yes, we were both drunk and it is a bit hazy but it felt like something more. I hate to sound like a complete drip but it felt like we were making love . . .”

  Ava looked at her cousin’s sad eyes and felt heart-sorry for her. At least she had been lucky with Connor – very lucky. They had met and fallen in love and it had all been fairly simple and traditional and as things should be. They had dated for a time and gone through that stage where they wanted to spend each and every moment with each other which was about the time they had rented a small flat together while they, very sensibly, saved for a deposit for a house of their own. After a while
Connor had proposed. He had whisked her away on a romantic break to London and had proposed on the London Eye which was as romantic as it sounds and made for a great story to tell back home. Marriage followed – a lovely big wedding, a white dress, three bridesmaids and a turkey dinner everyone tucked into and declared it to have been a great day out. Then they had settled down – slowly furnishing their house and building their careers until they had decided it was time to have a baby and everything had gone perfectly well with that as well.

  Occasionally Ava thought it was all, well, just a little too predictable and a little too boring. That’s not to say she didn’t love Connor with every part of her being and that she wasn’t grateful for their lives – not to mention their daughter – but there were times when she had wanted to do something wild. Now, though, looking at Hope, she realised she was foolish to feel trapped by it all. Hope would give everything to have what she had. To have someone who loved her back and who she knew would always be there for her. With the wave of pity she felt for her cousin, came a wave of love for her husband and she thanked her lucky stars there were only a few days to go until she could see him again.

  “Do you think it felt different because you felt different?” she asked her cousin gently. “You said the first time you slept together it was all very out of the blue and this time it was different. The difference might have been your feelings.”

  Hope shrugged her shoulders. “I just don’t know. Was it? I mean, I felt something . . . I was sure he felt it too.”

  Ava was acutely aware that even though, in the space of just a few days, she had shared an awful lot with Hope she also didn’t really know her. Not enough to say: “Perhaps he was only after a shag?”

  She hadn’t met Dylan and there was something about him that made Ava feel uneasy. But she couldn’t say that – not without fear of offending Hope completely. And being stuck in France with someone who had right royal hump with you would not be a pleasant experience – especially when you were stuck in a house together with nowhere to run and fewer places to hide.