Second Chance Read online

  ‘It’s not what he looks like,’ Tom had said.

  ‘But I saw it with my own eyes,’ Holly had insisted. ‘He looks like a bleeding model. What happened to the permanent stubble because he couldn’t be bothered to shave? Paul’s hair was always a complete mess, and frankly the Paul I used to know wouldn’t have known Prada from a pencil.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Tom had cracked up, ‘Paul’s still exactly the same. I was his best man, and I had to stand over him with the razor and supply the hair gel to make him look half decent. He’s still happiest in his scruffy old jeans and T-shirts with holes in them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Holly had said dubiously. ‘It sure as hell looks as if he’s changed. What’s she like, anyway? She looks terrifying.’

  Tom had sighed in sorrow. ‘Don’t be so bloody jealous, Holly. She’s lovely. You think she must be a bitch because she’s beautiful but she’s not. She’s incredibly sweet, and she adores him.’

  ‘You’re right, you’re right. I was making assumptions because she is completely stunning. Lucky Paul. Lucky couple.’ She’d sighed. ‘Looks like they have a completely glamorous, perfect life.’

  ‘Not so much,’ Tom had said, serious now. ‘Vogue made it look like that, but trust me, their life isn’t nearly as glamorous as it looks, and nobody’s life is perfect.’

  ‘Mine is,’ Holly had said wryly, and Tom had snorted.

  With these memories Holly gets up from the kitchen counter and switches on her computer. Why not email Tom now? It’s been, what, seven months? Eight months? Ages, anyway, since their last contact, and she misses him. He and Marcus had never seemed to gel, and Sarah wasn’t exactly Holly’s cup of tea, hence their drifting apart.

  Not that Sarah wasn’t nice, she had always been perfectly pleasant when they’d attempted to get together on the rare occasions Tom had brought Sarah back to England to see his family, but Holly had found her cold, unyielding. Polite without giving any more than she had to.

  Holly first met Sarah after she got back from Australia, the trip on which she met Marcus, marrying him a year later.

  She hadn’t spoken to Tom the entire six months she’d been away, but soon after getting back she got in touch again. It wasn’t long before Tom started talking about this cute American girl who was working in his London office.

  ‘How’s the Yank?’ Holly would tease, secure once again in their friendship now she had Marcus, unable to believe that she had ever had feelings for Tom, ever thought of him as anything other than her best friend, even after that night…

  ‘She’s pretty amazing actually,’ Tom would say hesitantly, going on to tell Holly how much she would love this Sarah, how he couldn’t wait for them to meet, that they should all get together as a foursome.

  And so they did. The four of them going to a pizza place in Notting Hill one night, Holly excited about meeting this girl that Tom had been talking about for so long, who had now become his girlfriend, whom he was talking about moving in with him.

  Holly wanted to love her. Was convinced she would love her. But she approached Sarah with a warm smile and an open heart and found Sarah to be prim, proper and cold.

  ‘God, she’s awful,’ she hissed to Marcus when they were safely in their car on the way home. ‘What does he see in her?’

  ‘She’s quite sexy in a stand-offish kind of way,’ Marcus said, instantly regretting it as he watched Holly’s eyes narrow.

  ‘Sexy? What’s sexy about her? What? Because she’s clearly addicted to the gym? Is that why she’s sexy? She’s had a complete sense-of-humour bypass as far as I’m concerned, plus she’s intense beyond anything I’ve ever known. Christ, do you think she’d even crack a smile? Gender politics all evening. Please. Does this woman even know the meaning of the word relax?’

  ‘You liked her, then?’ Marcus had said with raised eyebrow and a grin.

  ‘Did you like her?’ Tom phoned first thing from the office.

  ‘I thought she was great,’ Holly lied smoothly.

  ‘Isn’t she? I knew you’d think so.’

  ‘She’s quite serious, though,’ Holly ventured.

  ‘Is she? I think it’s probably because she doesn’t know you that well, but you’ll get to know her much better now she’s moving in.’

  ‘What about us?’ Holly’s curiosity got the better of her. ‘Did she like us?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Tom lied smoothly. ‘Very much. She thought you were both great.’

  And that was the thin end of the wedge that lodged itself into the heart of Tom and Holly’s relationship. At first it was just a splinter, but the more the four of them endured one another, attempting to find a way of turning Holly and Tom’s friendship into an equal friendship among the four of them, the larger the splinter grew until Holly and Tom were forced to sneak in the odd lunch or phone calls from work. It was a friendship that suffered from lack of contact but became more precious precisely because of it.

  Years ago, Holly would call Tom in Massachussetts, praying that Sarah wouldn’t answer the phone, praying that she wouldn’t be forced to go through the obligatory small talk. Eventually she had stopped phoning.

  Holly always thinks of Sarah as Scary Sarah. It had slipped out once, by accident, when she and Tom were having lunch, and Tom had almost spat out his drink, he was laughing so hard. It is still a shared private joke between them, something that indicates the intimacy they had before.

  ‘Hey, stranger!’ Holly taps into the computer, her need to get in touch with Tom suddenly all-consuming.

  Have been wondering where/how you are, my

  friend. Not sleeping well at the moment and finding

  myself thinking about my past and realize it’s been

  AGES since we spoke. How are you? How’s Sarah?

  And those little munchkins? My own munchkins are

  as delicious as ever. Have you been in touch with

  anyone? Read something about Saffron the other

  day – she’s got a small part in some new film with

  Jim Carrey– whaddya think?–could this be the big

  time we’ve all been waiting for? (Unbloodylikely, I’d

  say. Ouch!) How’s Paul? Any little ones yet? Would

  love to hear from you. Actually, would love to see

  you – can’t you do a business trip over here? Just

  think, we could have long liquid lunches like in the

  old days. Anyway, thinking of you and sending you

  much love. Send my love to Scary Sarah. Big kiss,

  Holly xxxxx

  Much later, Holly will find out where Sarah is at the precise moment she hits the send button on her computer.

  Sarah is, at that moment, shouting up the stairs to Violet to hurry up or they will be late for school. Violet is four, in her last year of pre-school before starting kindergarten, and as slow as molasses, particularly when her mother is in a hurry.

  ‘Come on, honey!’ Sarah shouts. ‘It’s your field trip today. You can’t be late. Oh Violet!’ she says, as Violet appears in the doorway of her bedroom, naked, clutching her threadbare pet elephant. ‘I asked you to get dressed!’ Sarah snaps and Violet starts to cry.

  ‘Oh God,’ Sarah mutters. ‘Please give me patience this morning.’ Last year she complained to Tom that it was like this every day, always running late, having climbed out of bed too late and spending too long over breakfast, forgetting to get the kids’ clothes ready the night before, not able to find the car keys.

  Every day last year she woke up and vowed that today would be different, today she would be fun, nice, loving Mommy; and by the time they all piled into the SUV in the driveway, she was back to being stressed, shouting Mommy, hating herself for doing it, but somehow being unable to stop.

  Sarah takes a deep breath. I will not shout at the kids this morning, she tells herself. So what if we’re a bit late? It’s only pre-school, for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter. And feeling calmer, she grabs her camera from the dresser in the bed
room and takes the kids down to the car.

  An hour later – so many mothers to catch up with in the car park – Sarah is about to get in the car when Judy, another mother, races up, her face stricken.

  ‘Have you heard?’ she says, her eyes wide with excitement and horror.

  ‘What, what?’ The mothers clamour around her, some turning as mobile phones started to ring simultaneously.

  ‘Another terrorist attack! Right here! They bombed the Acela!’

  Sarah’s focus shifts as everything becomes fuzzy. The Acela Express. The high-speed Amtrak train that covers the north-east. That can’t be right. Tom is on the Acela.

  ‘No! What happened? Is it bad?’ comes the babble of voices, and then groans of, ‘Oh God, not again.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Judy says as one of the other mothers shouts over. ‘Bodies everywhere. Happened just outside New York. Oh God, we’re bound to know someone.’ And all eyes suddenly turn to Sarah, who finds herself sitting on the ground of the car park, her legs having given way.

  ‘Sarah?’ A voice, gentle, on a level with her ear. ‘Sarah, are you okay?’

  But Sarah can’t speak. These things are not supposed to happen to people like her and Tom, but now it seems they have.

  Chapter Two

  Holly Macintosh wakes up, as she has woken up every morning since she heard the news, and feels the weight of grief settle upon her chest.

  It is all she can do these days to get out of bed, to go to the kitchen and pour herself a coffee with a shaking hand, to sit at the kitchen table lost in a cloud of memories, of things unsaid, of might-have-beens and of missing Tom – the Tom she grew up with and the Tom she will never see again – so very, very much.

  She shakes it by breakfast, has to for the sake of the children. Marcus has been wonderful. The night she found out, she collapsed in tears and Marcus wrapped his arms around her, the children looking on from the kitchen table, fear etched in their little eyes.

  ‘Why is Mummy crying?’ Oliver asked.

  ‘Mummy’s sad because she’s lost one of her friends,’ Marcus said softly over the top of Holly’s head.

  ‘Shall I help you find her?’ Daisy said after a pause, and Holly was able to smile through her tears, which only started a fresh round of sobbing.

  Just three days earlier, Holly had watched the footage on the news with Marcus. One hundred and forty-seven people dead. She had shaken her head with her friends and said how unbelievable it was, how they lived in a different world; they wondered whether it could ever end.

  And then one morning, on the Internet, she’d found a list of names on the BBC News website. I wonder if I know anyone, came the thought. She’d known it was unlikely, and odd, given that tragedies had come and gone throughout her childhood – various IRA bombings, none of them far from where she lived – and never had it occurred to her that someone she knew might be involved, but this time she’d clicked on the article and started to read.

  Names. Brief biographies. A banker from Islington, in New York for a business trip; a mother and daughter from Derbyshire, there on a brief holiday; Tom Fitzgerald, a software genius…

  Holly had kept reading, then her eyes went back to his name, and she reread it a few times. Tom Fitzgerald. A software genius. Tom Fitzgerald. Tom.

  Tom.

  But it couldn’t be. How could it be? This happened outside New York. Tom is in Boston. Tom has to be fine.

  Confusion had swept over her as she picked up the phone to call Tom at work, but it would be night-time there, and she dialled the home number.

  ‘Hi, this is Tom, Sarah, Violet and Dustin,’ Sarah’s voice had sung down the phone, lending this phone call a normality that had made Holly think perhaps she was imagining all this; she must, surely, be imagining all this because how could the answerphone indeed be so normal, how could the message still be the same if something terrible had happened to Tom?

  And she’d looked back at his name, jumping out at her from the computer screen.

  Tom Fitzgerald.

  ‘Oh hi. Sarah, Tom, it’s Holly.’ She’d spoken haltingly, unsure, Googling Tom’s name as she spoke, looking for more information. ‘Um, I just… I was reading… God. Sorry. But can you call me? Please? I…’ There’d been nothing else to say. Another article had appeared. Tom Fitzgerald, chief executive officer for Synopac, was on the doomed Acela Express on his way to a business meeting…

  The phone had been placed back in the receiver in slow motion.

  ‘Holly?’ Frauke had come into the room, had observed Holly’s trembling back. ‘Is everything okay?’

  And Holly had turned to her, stricken. Her face had filled with grief and shock, and when she had tried to speak, nothing had come out in the way it was supposed to.

  ‘It’s Tom,’ she had managed to whisper eventually. ‘He’s my oldest friend. On the train…’ and she had stopped speaking as the sobs took over, collapsing in Frauke’s arms when Frauke had rushed over to comfort her.

  At thirty-nine years old, perhaps it is not surprising that Holly has not fully known grief. She has a passing acquaintance – various elderly relatives have died over the years – and Holly was naturally upset at the time, but there was a sense that this was all in the natural order of things. People you loved got old, sometimes they got ill and occasionally this was earlier than it was supposed to happen, and eventually they died.

  You could accept that this was their time or, if not their time, they had at least managed to live a full and fulfilling life. They had done what they were supposed to have done while on this earth; and they left those who loved them with happy memories albeit some wishes that there had been less left unsaid.

  But this? This is something entirely different. This is a deep, searing, tearing, raw grief. This isn’t just emotional. This is physical. This unexpected grief is with Holly all the time. It wakes her up in the morning by settling itself on her chest, sinks down on the floor with her as she collapses in sobs next to her desk, works with its friend gravity to pull her eyes and mouth down in an expression of such deep sadness that strangers come up to her in the street and in shops and ask her if she is all right, then have to hover awkwardly as Holly nods, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  She took a week off working altogether, after going back into the studio at Jubilations feeling numb, but thinking she would be able to cope, thinking that she would be better off being surrounded by people, having to make conversation, having to act as if everything in life was normal.

  Sitting in a meeting with the marketing department, someone had asked Holly an opinion, someone who worked in a different building and had heard that Holly had lost a person she knew, but didn’t understand how it could be different to losing, say, a grandparent.

  ‘I heard you knew someone who died on the train,’ the man had said nonchalantly. ‘Awful thing, wasn’t it?’ He’d shaken his head, preparing to move on to the business at hand – Holly presenting her drawings of elephants for their new line of belated birthday cards. ‘Such a shame. I just can’t believe what’s happening in the world today.’

  And Holly had immediately replayed in her head the tape of the train blowing up in flames (a tourist had captured the precise moment on film: grainy, blurred, the train way off in the distance, but the only film that existed) and watched the moment of Tom’s death as she’d seen it on television, trying to imagine whether he knew, whether it was quick, whether he had burnt to death or had been blown apart by the bomb.

  Holly had looked up at the man, and then the tears had started falling again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I just don’t understand. I don’t understand how this could happen to Tom. This just doesn’t make sense to me…’ And her shoulders had started heaving, her body racked with sobs as her colleagues had looked at one another nervously, none of them knowing quite what to say with this oh-so-public display of grief, none of them knowing how to fix it, but all of them wanting to climb back into their comfort zone,
to have the old Holly back.

  ‘I’ll take her out,’ Simone had mouthed, leading Holly out through the door and into the small kitchenette, gathering her in her arms and letting Holly sob.

  ‘You need to take a break,’ Simone had said when Holly had finished. ‘Grief is a process and one you have to work through, and you certainly shouldn’t be in here. You’ve worked incredibly hard on the elephant campaign and we’re not in a hurry. Take some time. It can wait a month, at least.’ Holly had nodded mutely and looked down at her hands, unable to meet Simone’s eyes.

  Things like this aren’t supposed to happen to people like me and Tom, she’d thought, as she gathered her things and allowed herself to be put in a radiocab to go home. This is not what my life is supposed to be.

  This was not supposed to happen.

  But she can’t sit at home doing nothing, replaying in her head all the memories, all the horror stories of how Tom might have died, how it must have felt. Did he know, was it quick?

  Do the others know? Their gang from school, people she hasn’t spoken to for years but who suddenly seem as close as the day they finished their A levels, old friends she now feels compelled to see.

  She phones Paul first. Given his high-profile wife, he is easy to track down. A phone call to Anna Johanssen at Fashionista, an urgent message left with the assistant for Paul to call, and he rings later that afternoon.

  ‘Holly Mac!’ he says when he phones. ‘How lovely to hear from you, what a tremendous surprise!’

  ‘Well – actually,’ Holly pauses. She hasn’t worked out what she is going to say, the right words to use. A couple of phrases had come into her head but they sounded so clichéd, so completely out of a film that she knew the best thing to do would be to just phone and hopefully the right words would come.

  But of course there are no right words to say that someone you both love has died. Holly has cried more tears these last few days than she thought possible. Her head feels woollen, she is exhausted with the constant thump of a headache from too much crying. And now, now that she has Paul on the phone, Paul with whom she knows Tom is still in touch, Paul who has remained friends with Tom, Holly cannot believe that she is the one who has to give Paul the news.