Читать книгу The Things We Need to Say: An emotional, uplifting story of hope from bestselling author Rachel Burton - Rachel Burton, Rachel Burton - Страница 20

Fran

She has never been on a plane on her own before. Until she met Will, she’d never been on a plane at all. Meeting him had opened up a whole new world to her: a family she’d never had, countries she’d never visited, things she’d never dreamed of doing. Every year they would go en masse to the south of France, or skiing in the Alps – Fran was a hopeless skier, which utterly frustrated Will, who was, of course, brilliant and only ever skied black runs. It was a life Fran had never imagined.

On Sunday morning when she had been talking to Jamie about it, when Karen Barden was just a woman who worked in the village pub who occasionally flirted with her husband, she had felt foolish. Foolish about how nervous flying alone at the age of thirty-eight made her feel. But she barely notices anything as she drifts through passport control, through security and through the boarding gate. Bigger things have taken over from her fear of flying and now she is high in the air, her ears popping and the man in the seat behind her digging his knees into her back.

She can still feel Will’s hand on her arm trying to prevent her getting into the taxi. It would have been so easy to go with him, to send the cab away and take his hand. To walk back into the house with him, forgive him, start again.

That’s what she wanted after all wasn’t it? To start again. To try again.

But even if Will hadn’t done what he’d done, even if she hadn’t found out about it, she did have to come to Spain. The reasons for leading this yoga retreat were still there. Over the last few years Fran has felt as though she has been losing her way, her essence. She wants this retreat to help her find out who she is again, to help her rebuild herself. She had been excited at the thought of an adventure on her own, despite her nerves. She had been looking forward to some time away. Now she doesn’t know what to feel.

Will had always supported her in everything she had wanted to do. They’d always supported each other. They were Will and Fran; they were a team – together they could weather the highs and the lows. They hadn’t expected so many lows, but she never expected the possibility of facing life as only one half of that team either.

She remembers when she first mentioned teaching yoga. She used to go to a lunchtime yoga class twice a week at the gym near her office. It was the class that Will complained she was always late back from, in the days when she was just his secretary. It was perfect – it stretched her body and relaxed her mind halfway through a stressful day. Her sanity, and the sanity of the rest of her colleagues, depended on it.

One week the regular yoga teacher was away. Fran often found herself disappointed when this happened. It always left her with a strange sense of loss, an echo of how she felt after her mother died. She sees it now, sometimes, in the eyes of her own students when she tells them she won’t be there the next week and another teacher will take the class. She knew she shouldn’t be attached to one teacher and one style of teaching, but she always found it hard to let go.

She’d hated the yoga class that Thursday lunchtime. She’d never hated a yoga class in her life before. She’d found herself, halfway through, uncharacteristically and unapologetically angry. She had done something unthinkably rude, something she’d never done before.

She’d walked out of the class before it had finished.

Fran was the sort of person who stayed in the cinema until the bitter end even when the film was long and boring and she couldn’t stand it. She always finished books, even when she lost interest in the characters on page twenty, and when it came to yoga classes she considered herself the mistress of etiquette. She always turned off her phone, never chatted, always arrived early and never, ever left before the end.

She’d tried to explain to Will what it was she’d hated so much about it, tried to make him understand something that she didn’t really understand herself.

‘I could do better,’ she’d said.

Will smiled. ‘I know you could,’ he’d replied. ‘So why don’t you?’

There were so many reasons why Fran didn’t think she could. She considered herself uncoordinated and ungraceful. She didn’t think she looked like a yoga teacher should look. She swore too much and drank too much red wine and was married to a divorce lawyer.

But Will had never been a fan of excuses. He didn’t put up with them. He liked challenges and pushing yourself harder and always reaching your goal. He liked to be the best, to win.

And most of all Fran knew that he wanted her to be happy and healthy and less stressed. They wanted to start a family and by then they were both beginning to realise it wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d hoped. Fran had gone down to working part time at the law firm she’d moved to after she stopped working for Will, but she knew he wanted her to take some time out. In his mind this was the perfect answer – a less stressful life for Fran while she still got to do something she loved, something she was interested in.

Fran had signed up for yoga teacher training. She was terrified. But she was forced to look inside herself and face that fear. To learn to stand up in front of a class of people and share with them the thing she loved most in the world. Will always knew she could do it and eventually she believed she could as well.

Together they could do anything. Or so she used to think.

As the plane flies over the Pyrenees towards Barcelona – somewhere so full of memories and that cycle of hope that came to nothing – she didn’t know how she was meant to feel. She didn’t know what to do with her sadness; she didn’t know where to put it. There was the sadness for what Will had done, but also the sadness for what had happened before, the dreams they had shared that had been torn apart.

She looked out of the little plane window at the mountains below her and blinked back her tears. Crying always made her feel stupid.