To Have and to Hold Page 25

  “I think we ought to go home and look after her,” Alice says.

  “Good idea,” Harry and Joe say together, neither of them wanting to stay a minute longer at the party.

  “Great. Let’s find Sally and Chris and say good-bye.”

  Alice knocks softly on the bedroom door.

  “Emily? Can I come in?”

  There’s a silence. Alice tries again. The men are downstairs having a drink and watching some late-night television, and Alice has decided she must be the one to brave this.

  “Emily? Em? Are you awake?”

  Still silence as Alice pushes open the door. The room is dark and Emily is in bed, but Alice can tell she is only pretending to be asleep, her breathing is too slow, too measured, and Alice walks over to the bed and sits down.

  “Go away,” Emily says, rolling over. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Oh, Em.” Alice’s eyes fill with tears. “We have to talk about this. It was nothing. It’s not what you think.”

  Emily rolls back over and sits up looking at Alice in disbelief. “You mean I didn’t actually see my best friend of thirty years rolling around on the grass locked in a passionate embrace with my boyfriend?” she spits viciously.

  “It wasn’t passionate. And we weren’t rolling on the grass.” For a second Alice thinks back to what they were doing. And she’s not lying, it wasn’t passionate. It was gentle, and soft, and lovely. It felt as if she’d come home.

  She pushes this thought aside. “Em, we were both completely stoned and we were lying there looking at the sky and then it just happened. I promise it didn’t mean anything. Em, I didn’t even know what day of the week it was, let alone who I was kissing. And it only lasted a second. I swear to God if you’d come out a second later it would have been over.”

  “Well, we’ll never know that now, will we?” Emily says. “Of course it only lasted a second. You were caught, remember?”

  “Em, please. I love you more than anyone else in the world, and I would never do anything to hurt you. . . .”

  “But, Alice,” Emily says softly. “You just did. You kissed my boyfriend.”

  “Emily, it was a kiss. I didn’t sleep with him, for God’s sake, it was a nothing kiss, and you of all people know how meaningless a kiss can be. Remember when we were young, remember those kissing competitions we’d have with the boys? God, a kiss is nothing. And second”—she refuses to give Emily a chance to interrupt—“second you’re acting as if Harry is the big love of your life when you’re already planning on replacing him with Colin.”

  Emily gasps. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Oh God, Emily, I’m sorry, but you can’t pretend that Harry’s the one when he clearly isn’t.”

  Emily’s voice is as cold as ice. “How dare you presume to draw conclusions about my relationship? And whether Harry is the one or not—as it happens, I hadn’t even reached a conclusion about that—what gives you the right to pounce on him? Not forgetting, by the way, your own marital status.”

  Alice looks down at the floor. “You didn’t tell Joe, did you?”

  “No, of course I didn’t tell Joe. I may be stupid enough not to realize that my best friend and my boyfriend fancy one another, but I’m not that much of a bitch.”

  Alice keeps looking at the floor, as Emily looks up at the ceiling.

  The minutes tick by.

  “Look, I really don’t want to have to talk about this anymore,” Emily says.

  “But what are we going to do? We can’t leave it like this. I feel sick. I don’t want to lose you, Emily. I love you.”

  “Well, you should have thought of that before.” Emily sighs. “I just feel so incredibly hurt, and the only reason I haven’t left this house altogether is because we’re in the middle of bloody nowhere and I haven’t got anywhere to go.”

  “You’re leaving tomorrow anyway,” Alice says. “You couldn’t leave now. I wish you’d talk about it, Emily. I can’t let you leave with this awful feeling between us.”

  “Perhaps you should have thought of that before you kissed my boyfriend.” Emily stares at her with cold eyes as Alice flinches. “I’m tired,” Emily continues. “And I need to be on my own. Please go now.”

  Alice stands up, the tears welling again. More than anything in the world she’d like to be able to turn back the clock, and failing that, she’d like Emily to put her arms around her and tell her she forgives her.

  Neither looks likely to happen.

  “Do you think”—Alice pauses in the doorway and looks back at Emily—“do you think you’ll be able to forgive me? Not tonight I mean, but ever?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily says. “Please just leave me alone now. Maybe we can talk again in the morning.”

  24

  The only person to sleep well in the house that night is Joe. Alice lies awake crying as quietly as she can, terrified she’s lost Emily forever. Emily lies awake clenching her jaw with anger, unable to believe what happened tonight, and Harry lies on the sofa downstairs, thinking mostly about Alice.

  He gets up from time to time, makes himself a cup of tea, pauses to give Snoop a cuddle, attempts to watch television at around three in the morning, but sleep manages to elude him for most of the night.

  Harry can hardly believe what happened last night. Can hardly dare to believe it. He walks over to the bookshelf and picks up a picture of Alice, the Alice of old with glossy blond hair and perfect makeup.

  Harry smiles. She is so different now, and he knew, well before yesterday, that he had fallen for her, but kept hoping it would pass. He found himself thinking of Alice when he was supposed to have been thinking about Emily, and although he allowed himself to indulge, he did, truly, think that it was a slight crush that would disappear as quickly as it had arrived.

  Until last night.

  Until they kissed. Until Harry knew what it was like to hold her, to smell her, to feel her hair wrapped around his fingers.

  At seven-thirty the next morning Harry hears someone coming down the stairs, and he sits up, hoping it’s Alice, hoping they’ll have a chance to talk about what happened, but it’s Joe.

  “Morning, Harry. What are you doing on the sofa?”

  “Oh. Um. Emily had a headache and I thought it was best to leave her.”

  “Did you manage to sleep at all?”

  “No. It wasn’t the most comfortable.”

  “Not for a man your size, no. I’m not surprised. Alice is coming down in a sec. She’ll make some coffee before I take you to the airport.”

  “Oh. Right. Great.”

  When Alice does come down she can barely look at Harry. She mumbles good morning and smiles at him, but she doesn’t look into his eyes, and busies herself in the kitchen getting the breakfast things together.

  Emily stays upstairs.

  “Is she coming down?” Alice whispers to Harry when Joe is out of the way. Harry shrugs.

  “You mean you haven’t spoken to her?”

  He shakes his head. “She won’t talk to me.”

  “But you’re flying home together. She’ll have to talk to you.”

  “You would think so, but we’ll have to see. What about you? Has she spoken to you?”

  Alice shakes her head. “Not really. She basically said she’ll have to think about things.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Harry says, sorry for causing Alice pain, sorry for hurting Emily, sorry for creating such a mess.

  Alice sighs. “It’s not your fault. I’m sure it will all blow over. Eventually.”

  Emily comes downstairs just as they have to leave. Alice gives her a hug but Emily stands still, refusing to put her arms around Alice, just bowing her head until Alice lets her go.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice whispers, and Emily acknowledges it with a faint nod of her head.

  “You look terrible,” Joe says to Emily, concerned. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Emily says, forci
ng a smile for Joe. Harry and Alice shake hands, Alice jumping as soon as her skin touches his, the force like an electric shock, and still she is unable to look at him.

  They are barely up the driveway, Emily and Harry and Joe, before Alice has pulled a pad of writing paper from a drawer and is writing Emily a long letter, trying to express on paper what she was so inadequate at saying last night.

  She writes for a long time. She tells Emily how much she loves her, how thirty years of friendship is far more important than a thirty-second kiss, and how she doesn’t think she’ll be able to carry on without her forgiveness.

  She seals and stamps the letter before she has a chance to change her mind, and by the time Joe returns with an empty car, the letter is already sitting in the mailbox, waiting to wing its way to Emily.

  By March, Alice has written fourteen letters to Emily. At first apologetic, after a while she decided she had apologized enough, and now she fills the pages with long, rambly tales about what she’s been doing and the people she’s been seeing. Emily would never admit it, and she is not yet ready to either forgive or forget, but she is starting to look forward to receiving these letters, and as each one arrives a little bit of the pain starts to seep away.

  Alice has tried to phone, but Emily has taken to screening her calls and refuses to answer if it’s long distance, so that Alice has to leave an uncomfortable message on the machine. Emily never calls back.

  Via the letters Emily knows almost everything about Alice’s life. Alice knows nothing about Emily’s. She doesn’t know that Emily and Harry shared a cab home from the airport only because it was cheaper, and after a perfunctory good-bye they have never seen each other again.

  Alice doesn’t know that Harry tried to phone Emily to explain, to apologize, to say good-bye properly, but that Emily wouldn’t take his calls either, and eventually he stopped trying.

  Emily sought solace in Colin, jumping into bed with him rather more quickly than Alice would have advised, and although the relationship doesn’t seem to offer much more than sex, at least, Emily figures, it is giving her something to think about other than the betrayal by her ex-boyfriend and ex–best friend.

  Oh. And the sex is pretty fantastic too.

  Harry, on the other hand, still has students lusting after him in his dog-training classes, but post-Emily has made a decision not to get involved with any students again. He still thinks about Alice, thinks about her smile, her laugh, but he knows there’s no point, and he tries not to think about her very much. She’s happily married, after all. Happily married, in America, and she told him it meant nothing.

  What would be the point?

  But Alice isn’t quite so happy right now. Joe has stopped playing tennis—now that the potential seduction of Kay is no longer an option—and consequently can’t see the point in coming up to Highfield at all.

  The last time he was down—three weeks ago—it was to meet with, and engage, an architect with whom he intends to build the McMansion of his dreams. Joe excitedly showed Alice the plans—an eight-thousand-square-foot monolithic monstrosity complete with swimming pool, tennis court, and basement cinema.

  Ridiculous, Alice thought. What on earth was he thinking? She felt quite ill looking at the plans, and prayed that fate would somehow intervene to stop him from taking down these lovely trees and building such a horrendous house.

  With Joe hardly ever there, Alice has busied herself with the house. She found a picture in the library from an old local newspaper—Rachel Danbury sitting on the terrace—and she is doing her best to copy the plants, to restore the terrace to what it was. She has copied the pergola that was once on the side of the house, a pergola that can just be seen in the picture, and is planting wisteria on one side and clematis on the other. The plants she knows Rachel Danbury would have wanted, and the harder she works the more she feels at peace.

  Sometimes, when Alice is taking a break on the terrace, she feels almost as if the late writer is looking down on her and smiling, grateful that there is someone working on the house she had so clearly once loved.

  “It’s my pleasure,” Alice has whispered, more than once, those moments when she feels she is watched. “The least I could do.”

  She misses Joe, but understands how busy he is, although she thinks it’s a shame he’s given up on the tennis—he seemed to enjoy it and it was lovely having him down here on the weekends.

  These last few weekends, weekends when Joe has professed to be working, he has been living his old bachelor lifestyle. After almost a year of abstinence, Joe can’t see the point in no longer indulging. The only thing that turns Alice on these days is that bloody house, and Joe’s fed up with his dowdy wife who doesn’t pay him any attention anymore, nor make any effort for him.

  Joe needs to feel attractive again. Needs a thrill and excitement that Alice could not possibly give him.

  His first indiscretion occurs at Blue Fin. He’s having dinner with a friend when he notices a sexy blonde staring at him from across the room. He holds her gaze a few seconds too long, turns back to his friend to laugh at what he has just said, then immediately swivels his eyes back to the blonde. She’s still looking at him. And this time she smiles.

  Her name is Alison, and they go out for dinner two days later and back to her apartment for a fabulous fuck an hour after that. Joe leaves with her number and a huge grin on his face. So many women, so little time. He’ll never call her again, not when there are so many others from whom to choose.

  His second indiscretion is a hot little Brazilian called Carla. It lasts two weeks, two weeks of blissful, all-night sex, until Joe realizes she wants more, and walks out of her life and on to the next.

  His third indiscretion is slightly different. It’s three o’clock on a Friday afternoon and Joe is, for the first time in what feels like ages, getting ready to go down to the country for the weekend. He’s about to pack up his stuff when a Bloomberg comes through on his screen.

  It’s from Josie Mitchell.

  “I’m in New York,” he reads. “Left Godfreys, now at Deutsche. How about a coffee sometime? Josie.”

  Immediately he starts to smile. Good God. Josie. Now there was a real woman. He hasn’t thought about Josie for months, but seeing her name on his screen brings all the memories flooding back, and Joe grins, remembering what she was like in bed.

  He Bloombergs her back. “How about five today? Pick a Bagel at the World Financial Center. See you then.”

  “Okay. See you then.”

  Joe perches on a seat at the window, sips a steaming hazelnut-flavored coffee, and looks out of the window to see if he can see her coming. It’s 5:10 and he hopes he hasn’t been stood up. After all, he is supposed to be on his way to Highfield right now.

  And then the door opens and he sees her. Glossy, gleaming, and as gorgeous as he remembers her. A slow smile spreads upon his face as he stands to give her a kiss.

  Josie turns her head so his lips barely graze her cheek. “Hello, Joe. Whaddayaknow.”

  25

  If you happened to be in Manhattan’s financial district at the end of a sunny March afternoon and found yourself walking past a certain bagel shop at around six P.M., and glanced in through the large plate-glass window, you would stop for a second and smile, reassured to see two people so obviously meant for each other.

  Joe and Josie certainly look like two people fallen very much in love. They have been cozied up in the corner for nearly an hour now, the first part of which was awkward and strained, but now they are on more familiar, flirtatious territory, and Joe is feeling an excitement he hasn’t felt in far too long.

  Josie was intending to be cool. She intended to show Joe just what he was missing, just what he left behind when he walked out of her life without so much as a phone call afterward to see how she was.

  She had wanted to laugh with a cool toss of her hair, to deflect his advances with just the right amount of graciousness, and perhaps a hint of scorn to make her feel better.
<
br />   But she’s missed him. She didn’t even realize quite how much until she saw him again. She’s sitting here now, listening to him tell amusing stories about his weekend country wreck, and she’s gazing down at his hands, those fingers that are so familiar to her, that used to know every inch of her skin so well, and her own hand, resting only a few inches away from his, is almost hurting from the strain of not reaching over and touching him.

  Damn. It wasn’t meant to be like this. She’s half listening to him, smiling in all the right places, but her mind is back in her apartment in London, back in her bedroom, back in the days when she would watch him climb out of bed and pull her up to join him in the shower before he went home to his wife.

  There’s a silence and Josie looks up. Joe has stopped talking, is waiting for her to respond, but she has no idea what he’s been talking about, what he has asked.

  “My wife’s in the country,” he says finally. “I’m supposed to be on the seven o’clock train.”

  Josie nods. She’s not sure what she’s meant to say, although her heart beats just a little faster at the word “supposed.”

  Joe takes a deep breath. “My workload is rather heavy at the moment. I was thinking that perhaps I oughtn’t to be going to the country. . . .” He stares into Josie’s eyes. “I was thinking that perhaps I ought to stay in Manhattan this weekend.”

  Josie just looks at him, her blank expression belying her racing mind.

  There are two types of unfaithful married men. Those who are genuinely unhappy in their marriage, but are too lazy or too scared to leave. Perhaps there are children involved, perhaps they are just too cowardly, but either way it is easier for these men to stay married and have affairs, and one day they may or may not meet someone for whom they feel so strongly it becomes impossible for them to keep going home to someone else they do not love.

  And then there is the second type, who are far more dangerous. These are the men who are very happily married. Men who love their wives, depend on them, but are addicted to having affairs. Men like Joe Chambers.