Читать книгу Single Dads Collection - Lynne Marshall - Страница 29

‘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.

‘I’ve never felt anything like it before,’ he said. ‘It was such a strong feeling, it was like a tight band around my chest, and I could hardly breathe with it. It was too painful to be happiness, and there was terror in there too, but it was a wonderful feeling too…I don’t know what it was.’

Surprised at how moved she was, Alice managed a smile. ‘It sounds like love,’ she said, lightly enough, and Will turned his head to look at her for a long, intense moment.

‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘I suppose that’s what it was. But not love the way—’

He had so nearly said the way I loved you. Will caught himself up just in time.

‘It’s not the same as the love between a man and a woman,’ he finished smoothly.

‘Of course not,’ said Alice. ‘But it’s still love. I’ve never had a child, but I recognized the feeling you described straight away.’

She remembered lying in bed next to Will and feeling just that mixture of terror and wonder, a feeling so intense that it was almost pain. Its power had seemed dangerous, overwhelming, uncontrollable, and in the end she had run away from it. She had been a coward, Alice knew, but at the time it had seemed the sensible thing to do.

And now…Well, there was no point in looking back. No point in wondering what it would have been like if she had given in to that feeling instead of fighting it, if she had chosen love rather than security. She and Will might have had a child together. She would have discovered for herself how it felt to hold a child in her arms.

She wouldn’t have been able to run away from that feeling.

Aware that she was drifting perilously close to regret, Alice gave herself a mental shake. She had made her own choices, and she would have to live with the consequences.

‘I don’t think Lily knows that you love her that much,’ she said, breaking the silence.

‘How could she?’ said Will. ‘I’ve hardly seen her since she was a baby. Nikki had already started the divorce process before Lily was born.’

‘You’d think the baby would have brought you together,’ Alice commented.

‘I would have been prepared to give it another go for Lily’s sake, but I suspect Nikki was right when she said that we both knew it wasn’t going to work, so we’d better accept reality sooner rather than later.’

Will shifted shoulders restlessly, as if trying to dislodge the memory pressing onto them. Of course, that was what Alice had said too. It’ll never work. Let’s call it a day while we’re still friends. It’s not worth even trying. At least Nikki had taken the risk of marrying him. Alice hadn’t even had the guts to give it a go.

‘So you didn’t contest the divorce?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Our marriage was a mistake. Nikki was right about that. We should never have got married in the first place.’

‘Why did you, then?’ asked Alice, who had no patience with people who didn’t think through the consequences of their actions. Of course, sometimes you could think about things too much, and you ended up missing opportunities, but Will was an intelligent man, and marriage was a serious business. It wasn’t the kind of thing you fell into by mistake.

The sharpness in her voice made Will glance at her, but he didn’t answer immediately. How could he tell Alice how hard he had tried to find someone else after she had given him that final ‘no’ at Roger’s wedding? How every woman he’d met had seemed either twee or colourless in comparison to her? Nikki had been the first woman he’d met with a strength of personality to match hers. Seduced by the notion of wiping Alice from his memory once and for all, Will had convinced himself that he was falling in love with Nikki’s forcefulness and vivacity, and he had been too eager to find out what she was really like until it was too late.

‘I think I fell in love with the idea of Nikki, rather than with the person she really was,’ he said at last. ‘And I think she did the same.’

Alice opened her mouth to tell him it had been madness to even think about marrying an idea, but then closed it abruptly. Hadn’t she done the same with Tony, after all? Tony had represented something that she had always yearned for, but she hadn’t really known him. If she had, she might not have been so unprepared when he’d met Sandi.

‘It was a holiday romance that got out of hand,’ Will went on. ‘She came out to the Red Sea to learn how to dive, and when we met she was incredibly enthusiastic about diving and the reef. I saw that she was fun, pretty, vivacious…and I think she saw me as someone very different from her friends and business associates in London.’

Alice could imagine it all very clearly. To Nikki, bored with men in suits and ties, escaping from a cold, grey London, Will must have seemed hard to resist with his wind-tanned skin and the glitter of sunlit sea in his eyes. He would have been a step up, too, from the surfers and beach bums. Will’s shorts and T-shirts might have been as faded from the sun as theirs, but he had an air of competence and assurance that gave him the kind of authority other men had to put on suits to acquire.

‘So you were both carried away by the sea and the stars?’ she suggested, with just a squeeze of acid in her voice.

‘You could say that,’ Will agreed dryly. ‘And of course, once reality set in, the sea and the stars weren’t enough. Nikki was full of how she wanted to start a new life with me, but it didn’t take long before she was bored, and then she started to resent me for “making” her give up her career in London.’

His mouth twisted. ‘It wasn’t a good time. We tried to patch things up—hence Lily—but in the end it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. Nikki wanted to pick up her career where she’d left off, and the truth was that by then I wanted out of the marriage too. I just didn’t count on how Lily’s birth would change things.’

‘It must have made everything more complicated,’ said Alice, and he gave a mirthless laugh.

‘You could say that. Nikki insisted on having full custody of Lily, and I was prepared to accept that. What I wasn’t prepared to accept was not having any access to my daughter at all.’

‘No access? But that’s completely unreasonable!’ Alice protested, shocked. ‘And unfair!’

Will shrugged. ‘Unreasonable…unfair…You can shout all you like, but, when you’re up against the kind of hot-shot lawyers Nikki hired, saying that it’s unfair doesn’t get you very far. For two years she refused to communicate with me except through the intimidating letters her lawyers would send me.’

‘But why would she be like that? You’d have thought she’d have wanted her child to grow up knowing its father!’

‘I don’t know.’ Will rubbed a weary hand over his face. ‘The only thing I can think was that she was afraid I’d somehow take Lily away, but I wouldn’t have done that, and she had no grounds for suspecting that I would.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice, appalled at what Will had been through. ‘It must have been very hard for you.’

‘I didn’t react quickly enough.’ Will’s face was set in grim lines as he remembered that bleak period. ‘I’m a scientist. I understand about ocean currents, and protogyny among coral-reef fish, and sampling by random quadrats, but I wasn’t well equipped to deal with divorce lawyers. It took me too long to get my own hot-shot lawyers and take the fight back…and by the time I did Nikki had changed tactics.’

Alice frowned. She didn’t like the image of Will, bruised from the wreckage of his marriage, frustrated by lawyers and manipulated by Nikki. No wonder there were harsh lines on his face now. ‘In what way?’

‘She opted for emotional blackmail next,’ he said, and, although he was clearly trying to keep his voice neutral, it was impossible to miss the underlying thread of bitterness. ‘And very effective it was, too. Lily was already a toddler by then, and Nikki claimed it would be too unsettling for her to see me regularly. I wouldn’t understand her needs the way Nikki did. It would distress Lily to go and stay somewhere strange. She didn’t know who I was. I wouldn’t know how to look after her properly. She needed to be in a familiar environment. It would be too disruptive for her to spend longer than a couple of hours with me. And so on and so on.’

‘With the result that you became even more of a stranger to Lily?’

‘Exactly. The few times I did manage to see Lily I was only able to take her out for a few hours, and frankly they weren’t successful visits. I think Nikki was so paranoid about the possibility of me taking her away altogether that she’d transferred all her tension and suspicion to Lily. It’s not surprising that she was nervous of me. As far as she was concerned, I was a stranger her mother didn’t trust.’

He rubbed his face again, pushing his fingers back through his hair with a tired sigh. ‘It wasn’t just Nikki’s fault. I didn’t know how to reach Lily either. I wanted to tell Lily how much she meant to me, but I didn’t know how, and I still don’t. I’ve got no experience of being a father, and, now that I’ve got Lily all the time, I just feel inadequate. I either try too hard, or I get it completely wrong.’

He sounded so dispirited that Alice found herself reaching out to lay a comforting hand on his arm.

‘You got it right tonight,’ she told him.

She was burningly aware of his hard muscles beneath her fingers, and wished that she hadn’t touched him. She had reached out instinctively, but now that her hand was on his arm it seemed suddenly a big deal, and she felt jolted, as if she had done something incredibly daring.

Which was ridiculous. It was only a matter of a hand on his forearm, after all. No reason to feel as if she had done the equivalent of clambering onto his lap, unbuttoning his shirt, pressing hot kisses up his throat…

Alice swallowed. She wasn’t even touching his skin, for God’s sake! Will was wearing a long-sleeved shirt rolled back at the wrist, but there was only a thin barrier of cotton between his skin and hers, and she was sure that she could feel his warmth and strength through the fine material anyway.

Horribly conscious of the way her body was thrumming in response, she made herself pull her hand away. She couldn’t have been touching him for more than a few seconds, but her heart was beating so hard she was afraid Will would be able to hear it above the crescendo of the night insects.

In this light it was impossible to tell whether he had even registered her touch, and his voice sounded perfectly normal as he credited her with the small progress he had made with Lily.

‘Thanks to you,’ he said. ‘The books were your idea.’

‘But you were the one who read to her.’ Sure that her cheeks were still burning with awareness, Alice was very grateful for the darkness that she hoped hid her expression as effectively as it did Will’s.

‘You’re good with children,’ he said abruptly. ‘Somehow I never imagined that you would be.’

‘I’m not really,’ she confessed, glad that her voice seemed steadier now. ‘I’m not usually that interested in them. But I like Lily.’

‘You’ve never wanted children of your own?’

Alice thought about the years she had spent trying to find a man she could settle down and be happy with, a man she could build a family with, a man who would make her forget Will and all that she had walked away from. She had thought she had found him at last in Tony. They had talked about having children, when they were married, when the time was right. But sometimes the time was never right, and, even if it was, it wasn’t always that easy. Look at Roger and Beth.

‘You can’t always have what you want,’ she said in a low voice, and Will turned to her, wondering if she was thinking about Tony who she had loved so much, and thinking about how much he had wanted her for so long.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Sometimes you can’t.’

‘It’ll rain soon.’ Will handed Alice a glass of fresh lime juice chinking with ice, and sat down next to her with a cold beer.

‘I hope so.’ Alice took the glass with a murmur of thanks and held it against her cheek, letting the condensation cool her skin. ‘Mmm…that feels nice,’ she told Will, who had to make himself look away from the sight of her, her eyes closed in pleasure as the condensation on the glass trickled down her throat and into her cleavage. It was dark on the verandah, but sometimes not dark enough.

‘It’s been so hot today,’ she went on, languid with heat. ‘I took Lily over to see Beth today so we could sit in the air-conditioning for a while.’

With her free hand, Alice lifted a few damp strands of hair that had fallen from their clip onto the back of her neck. ‘The heat doesn’t usually bother me, but for the last couple of days it’s been suffocating. It’s like trying to breathe through a scarf.’

‘It’s the pressure.’ Will was dismayed at how hoarse his voice sounded. ‘A good storm will clear the air.’

‘I can’t wait,’ she sighed. ‘There’s no sign of any rain clouds, though. I’ve been looking at the horizon all day.’

‘They’ll be boiling up now,’ said Will. ‘Didn’t you notice them at sunset? That’s always a sign. It has to break soon.’

He wished that he was just talking meteorologically. A different kind of pressure had been building inexorably over the ten days since Alice had arrived, and Will was finding it harder and harder to ignore.

He had done his best to try and think of her simply as Lily’s nanny, but it wasn’t any good. She was resolutely Alice, impossible to ignore. It didn’t matter if she was just sitting quietly next to him in the dark, or playing cards with Lily or laying the table. It was there in every turn of her head, every gesture of her hands, every sweep of her lashes.

Will struggled to remember how he had disliked her at Roger and Beth’s party, but that tense, brittle, superficial Alice had somehow been whittled away by the heat, the sunlight and the warm breeze that riffled the lagoon and rustled through the coconut palms. He had to remind himself constantly that she hadn’t really changed that much. She still wore that absurd collection of shoes. She flicked through magazines and talked about clothes, make-up and God knew what else, encouraging Lily to remember her life in London more than Will wanted. She still talked about the great career she was going to resume.

She was still going home.

He needed to keep that in mind, Will told himself at least once a day. She would only be there for another few weeks, and then she would be gone. He would have to start thinking about life without her all over again.

It alarmed him how easily they had slipped into a routine, and he was afraid that he was getting used to it. He left early for work, but for the first time in years found himself looking forward to going home at the end of the day. Alice and Lily were usually on the verandah, playing games or reading together, and he would often stand behind the screen door and watch them, unobserved for a while, disturbed by the intensity of pleasure the peaceful scene gave him. Sometimes he tried to tell himself he would have felt the same no matter who was with Lily, but he knew that he was fooling himself.

It wasn’t just the fact that Lily was gradually settling down. It was Alice.

Every night when Lily was asleep, they would sit on the verandah, like now, and they would talk easily until one of them made an unthinking comment that reminded them of the past and all they had meant to each other. And when that happened, the tension a routine kept successfully at bay most of the time would trickle back into the atmosphere, stretching the silence uncomfortably until one or other of them made an excuse and went to bed.

Will had hoped that the weekend would break that pattern, and things had certainly been different since then. He just wasn’t convinced that it was for the better.

On the Saturday he had taken the two of them out to the reef in the project’s tin boat. Half-submerged in a life jacket that was really too big for her, Lily had clutched onto the wooden seat. Her face had been shaded by a floppy cotton hat, but, sitting opposite her at the helm, Will could peer under the brim and see that her expression was an odd mixture of excitement and trepidation. She’d looked as if she wanted to be thrilled, but didn’t quite dare to let herself go.

‘Would you like to drive the boat?’ he asked her, and her eyes widened.

‘I don’t know how.’

‘I’ll show you.’

Will held out his hand, and after a moment, with some encouragement from Alice, she took it and let herself be handed carefully across to stand between his knees. He showed her how to hold the tiller, and kept her steady, guiding the boat unobtrusively from behind. Lily’s small body was tense with concentration, and it was hard to know whether she was terrified or loving it.

Over her head, he could see Alice, straight-backed as ever on the narrow seat, holding her hat onto her head. Her eyes were hidden by sunglasses, but when she met his gaze she smiled and nodded at Lily. ‘She’s smiling,’ she mouthed, as if she knew what he most wanted to hear, and Will felt his heart swell with happiness.

The sun glittered on the water, bouncing off every surface and throwing dazzling patterns over Alice’s face as the little boat bounced over the waves. Everything seemed extraordinarily clear, suddenly: the breeze in his hair, the tang of the sea in his lungs, his daughter smiling as she leant into him…And Alice, contrary, prickly, unforgettable Alice. At that moment, Will felt something close to vertigo, a spinning sensation as if he were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and he had to jerk his gaze away before he did something stupid like telling her that he loved her still.

Bad idea.

It had been a happy day, though. They pulled the boat onto a tiny coral island, where they could wade into the warm water and watch the fish dart around their ankles, flashing silver in the sunlight. Will taught Lily how to snorkel while Alice sat under a solitary leaning palm and unpacked the picnic they had brought.

Afterwards, Lily dozed off in the shade, and Will watched Alice wandering along the shore. The set of her head on that straight spine was so familiar it made Will ache. Her loose white-linen trousers were rolled up to her knees, her face shadowed by the brim of her hat, a pair of delicate sandals dangling from her hand.

‘You won’t need shoes,’ Will had said when they’d got into the boat that morning, but Alice had refused to leave them behind in the car.

‘I feel more comfortable with shoes on,’ she had said. ‘You never know when you’re going to need them to run away.’

‘You won’t be able to run very far on the reef,’ Will had pointed out, but she’d only lifted her chin at him.

‘I’m keeping them on.’

Alice would always want an escape-route planned, he realised as he watched her pause and look out across the translucent green of the lagoon to where the deep blue of the Indian Ocean frothed in bright white against the far reef. She would always want to be able to run away, just as she had run away from him before.

She wouldn’t be here now if she didn’t have that ticket home, Will remembered. It would be foolish to let himself hope that she might stay. She wasn’t going to, and he had to accept that now. Consciously steadying his heart, he made himself think coolly and practically. He mustn’t be seduced by the sea and the sunlight and Alice’s smile. Sure, he could enjoy today, but he wouldn’t expect it to last. There were no for evers where Alice was concerned.

When Lily woke up, she ran instantly down to join Alice at the water’s edge. Will watched them both, and tried not to mind that his daughter so obviously preferred Alice’s company to his. Tried not to worry, too, how she would manage when Alice was gone.

He could see them bending down to examine things they found on the beach. Alice was crouching down, turning something in her hand and showing it to Lily, who took it and studied it carefully.

And then it happened.

‘Daddy!’ she cried, running up the beach towards him. ‘Daddy, look!’

It was a cowrie shell, small but perfect, with an unusual leopard pattern on its back, but Will hardly noticed it. He was overwhelmed by the fact that Lily had run to him, had called him Daddy, had wanted him to share in her pleasure, and his throat closed so tightly with emotion that it was hard to speak.

‘This is a great shell,’ he managed. ‘It’s an unusual one, too. You were very clever to find it.’

‘Alice found it,’ Lily admitted with reluctant honesty, and Will looked up to see Alice, who had followed more slowly up the beach. Their eyes met over Lily’s dark head, and she smiled at him, knowing exactly what Lily’s excited dash up the beach had meant to him.

Will smiled back, pushing the future firmly out of his mind. He knew the day wouldn’t last for ever, but right then, with Lily’s intent face, the feel of the shell in his palm, and Alice smiling at him, it was enough.