Me Before You (46 page)

‘It … it was a pretty amazing place,’ said Nathan. He had grown quiet too, but now tried to smile, to seem his normal self.

I felt frozen, my hand clutching my passport like I was about to go somewhere else. I had to remind myself to breathe.

‘Well, we thought you might like a special dinner,’ Will’s father said. ‘There’s a jolly nice restaurant at the Intercontinental. Champagne on us. What do you think? Your mother and I thought it might be a nice treat.’

‘Sure,’ said Will. He was smiling at his mother and she was looking back at him as if she wanted to bottle it.
How can you?
I wanted to yell at him.
How can you look at her like that when you already know what you are going to do to her?

‘Come on, then. I’ve got the car in disabled parking. It’s only a short ride from here. I was pretty sure you’d all be a bit jet-lagged. Nathan, do you want me to take any of those bags?’

My voice broke into the conversation. ‘Actually,’ I said – I was already pulling my luggage from the trolley – ‘I think I’m going to head off. Thank you, anyway.’

I was focused on my bag, deliberately not looking at them, but even above the hubbub of the airport I could detect the brief silence my words provoked.

Mr Traynor’s voice was the first to break it. ‘Come on, Louisa. Let’s have a little celebration. We want to hear all about your adventures. I want to know all about the island. And I promise you don’t have to tell us
everything
.’ He almost chuckled.

‘Yes.’ Mrs Traynor’s voice had a faint edge to it. ‘Do come, Louisa.’

‘No.’ I swallowed, tried to raise a bland smile. My sunglasses were a shield. ‘Thank you. I’d really rather get back.’

‘To where?’ said Will.

I realized what he was saying. I didn’t really have anywhere to go.

‘I’ll go to my parents’ house. It will be fine.’

‘Come with us,’ he said. His voice was gentle. ‘Don’t go, Clark. Please.’

I wanted to cry then. But I knew with utter certainty that I couldn’t be anywhere near him. ‘No. Thank you. I hope you have a lovely meal.’ I hoisted my bag over my shoulder and, before anyone could say anything else, I was walking away from them, swallowed up by the crowds in the terminal.

I was almost at the bus stop when I heard her. Camilla Traynor, her heels clipping on the pavement, half walked, half ran towards me.

‘Stop. Louisa. Please stop.’

I turned, and she was forcing her way through a coach party, casting the backpacking teenagers aside like Moses parting the waves. The airport lights were bright on her hair, turning it a kind of copper colour. She was wearing a fine grey pashmina, which draped artistically over one shoulder. I remember thinking absently how beautiful she must have been, only a few years earlier.

‘Please. Please stop.’

I stopped, glancing behind me at the road, wishing that the bus would appear now, that it would scoop me up and take me away. That anything would happen. A small earthquake, maybe.

‘Louisa?’

‘He had a good time.’ My voice sounded clipped. Oddly like her own, I found myself thinking.

‘He does look well. Very well.’ She stared at me, standing there on the pavement. She was suddenly acutely still, despite the sea of people moving around her.

We didn’t speak.

And then I said, ‘Mrs Traynor, I’d like to hand in my notice. I can’t … I can’t do these last few days. I’ll forfeit any money owed to me. In fact, I don’t want this month’s money. I don’t want anything. I just –’

She went pale then. I saw the colour drain from her face, the way she swayed a little in the morning sunshine. I saw Mr Traynor coming up behind her, his stride brisk, one hand holding his panama hat firmly on his head. He was muttering his apologies as he pushed through the crowds, his eyes fixed on me and his wife as we stood rigidly a few feet apart.

‘You … you said you thought he was happy. You said you thought this might change his mind.’ She sounded desperate, as if she were pleading with me to say something else, to give her some different result.

I couldn’t speak. I stared at her, and the most I could manage was a small shake of my head.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, so quietly that she could not have heard me.

He was almost there as she fell. It was as if her legs just gave way under her, and Mr Traynor’s left arm shot out and caught her as she went down, her mouth a great O, her body slumped against his.

His hat fell to the pavement. He glanced up at me, his face confused, not yet registering what had just taken place.

And I couldn’t look. I turned, numb, and I began to walk, one foot in front of the other, my legs moving almost before I knew what they were doing, away from the airport, not yet even knowing where it was I was going to go.

Louisa didn’t come out of her room for a whole thirty-six hours after she got back from her holiday. She arrived back from the airport late evening on the Sunday, pale as a ghost under her suntan – and we couldn’t work that out for a start, as she had definitely said she’d see us first thing Monday morning.
I just need to sleep
, she had said, then shut herself in her room and gone straight to bed. We had thought it a little odd, but what did we know? Lou has been peculiar since birth, after all.

Mum had taken up a mug of tea in the morning, and Lou had not stirred. By supper, Mum had become worried and shaken her, checking she was alive. (She can be a bit melodramatic, Mum – although, to be fair, she had made fish pie and she probably just wanted to make sure Lou wasn’t going to miss it.) But Lou wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t talk and she wouldn’t come downstairs.
I just want to stay here for a bit, Mum
, she said, into her pillow. Finally, Mum left her alone.

‘She’s not herself,’ said Mum. ‘Do you think it’s some kind of delayed reaction to the thing with Patrick?’

‘She couldn’t give a stuff about Patrick,’ Dad said. ‘I told her he rang to tell us he came 157th in the Viking thing, and she couldn’t have looked less interested.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Mind you, to be fair on her, even I found it pretty hard to get excited about 157th.’

‘Do you think she’s ill? She’s awful pale under that tan. And all that sleeping. It’s just not like her. She might have some terrible tropical disease.’

‘She’s just jet-lagged,’ I said. I said it with some authority, knowing that Mum and Dad tended to treat me as an expert on all sorts of matters that none of us really knew anything about.

‘Jet lag! Well, if that’s what long-haul travel does to you, I think I’ll stick with Tenby. What do you think, Josie, love?’

‘I don’t know … who would have thought a holiday could make you look so ill?’ Mum shook her head.

I went upstairs after supper. I didn’t knock. (It was still, strictly speaking, my room, after all.) The air was thick and stale, and I pulled the blind up and opened a window, so that Lou turned groggily from under the duvet, shielding her eyes from the light, dust motes swirling around her.

‘You going to tell me what happened?’ I put a mug of tea on the bedside table.

She blinked at me.

‘Mum thinks you’ve got Ebola virus. She’s busy warning all the neighbours who have booked on to the Bingo Club trip to PortAventura.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘Lou?’

‘I quit,’ she said, quietly.

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’ She pushed herself upright, and reached clumsily for the mug, taking a long sip of tea.

For someone who had just spent almost two weeks in Mauritius, she looked bloody awful. Her eyes were tiny and red-rimmed, and her skin, without the tan, would have been even blotchier. Her hair stuck up on one side. She looked like she’d been awake for several years. But most of all she looked sad. I had never seen my sister look so sad.

‘You think he’s really going to go through with it?’

She nodded. Then she swallowed, hard.

‘Shit. Oh, Lou. I’m really sorry.’

I motioned to her to shove over, and I climbed into bed beside her. She took another sip of her tea, and then leant her head on my shoulder. She was wearing my T-shirt. I didn’t say anything about it. That was how bad I felt for her.

‘What do I do, Treen?’

Her voice was small, like Thomas’s, when he hurts himself and is trying to be really brave. Outside we could hear next door’s dog running up and down alongside the garden fence, chasing the neighbourhood cats. Every now and then we could hear a burst of manic barking; its head would be popping up over the top right now, its eyes bulging with frustration.

‘I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. God. All that stuff you fixed up for him. All that effort … ’

‘I told him I loved him,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘And he just said it wasn’t enough.’ Her eyes were wide and bleak. ‘How am I supposed to live with that?’

I am the one in the family who knows everything. I read more than anyone else. I go to university. I am the one who is supposed to have all the answers.

But I looked at my big sister, and I shook my head. ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I said.

She finally emerged the following day, showered and wearing clean clothes, and I told Mum and Dad not to say a word. I implied it was boyfriend trouble, and Dad raised his eyebrows and made a face as if that explained everything and God only knew what we had been working ourselves into such a fuss over. Mum ran off to ring the Bingo Club and tell them she’d had second thoughts about the risks of air travel.

Lou ate a piece of toast (she didn’t want lunch) and she put on a big floppy sunhat and we walked up to the castle with Thomas to feed the ducks. I don’t think she really wanted to go out, but Mum insisted that we all needed some fresh air. This, in my mother’s vocabulary, meant she was itching to get into the bedroom and air it and change the bedding. Thomas skipped and hopped ahead of us, clutching a plastic bag full of crusts, and we negotiated the meandering tourists with an ease born of years of practice, ducking out of the way of swinging backpacks, separating around posing couples and rejoining on the other side. The castle baked in the high heat of summer, the ground cracked and the grass wispy, like the last hairs on the head of a balding man. The flowers in the tubs looked defeated, as if they were already half preparing for autumn.

Lou and I didn’t say much. What was there to say?

As we walked past the tourist car park I saw her glance under her brim at the Traynors’ house. It stood, elegant and red-brick, its tall blank windows disguising whatever life-changing drama was being played out in there, perhaps even at this moment.

‘You could go and talk to him, you know,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’

She looked at the ground, folded her arms across her chest, and we kept walking. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. I knew the other bit, the bit she didn’t say aloud.
He’s probably not even there
.

We did a slow circuit of the castle, watching Thomas roll down the steep parts of the hill, feeding the ducks that by this stage in the season were so well stuffed they could barely be bothered to come over for mere bread. I watched my sister as we walked, seeing her brown back exposed by her halter-neck top, her stooped shoulders, and I realized that even if she didn’t know it yet, everything had changed for her. She wouldn’t stay here now, no matter what happened with Will Traynor. She had an air about her, a new air of knowledge, of things seen, places she had been. My sister finally had new horizons.

‘Oh,’ I said, as we headed back towards the gates, ‘you got a letter. From the college, while you were away. Sorry – I opened it. I thought it must be for me.’

‘You opened it?’

I had been hoping it was extra grant money.

‘You got an interview.’

She blinked, as if receiving news from some long-distant past.

‘Yeah. And the big news is, it’s tomorrow,’ I said. ‘So I thought maybe we should go over some possible questions tonight.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t go to an interview tomorrow.’

‘What else are you going to do?’

‘I can’t, Treen,’ she said, sorrowfully. ‘How am I supposed to think about anything at a time like this?’

‘Listen, Lou. They don’t give interviews out like bread for ducks, you eejit. This is a big deal. They know you’re a mature student, you’re applying at the wrong time of year, and they’re still going to see you. You can’t muck them around.’

‘I don’t care. I can’t think about it.’

‘But you –’

‘Just leave me alone, Treen. Okay? I
can’t do it
.’

‘Hey,’ I said. I stepped in front of her so that she couldn’t keep walking. Thomas was talking to a pigeon, a few paces up ahead. ‘This is exactly the time you have to think about it. This is the time when, like it or not, you finally have to work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life.’

We were blocking the path. Now the tourists had to separate to walk around us – they did so, heads down or eyeing with mild curiosity the arguing sisters.

‘I can’t.’

‘Well, tough. Because, in case you forgot, you have no job any more. No Patrick to pick up the pieces. And if you miss this interview, then in two days’ time you are headed back down the Job Centre to decide whether you want to be a chicken processor or a lap dancer or wipe some other person’s bum for a living. And believe it or not, because you are now headed for thirty, that’s your life pretty well mapped out. And all of this – everything you’ve learnt over the past six months – will have been a waste of time. All of it.’

She stared at me, wearing that look of mute fury she wears when she knows I am right and she can’t say anything back. Thomas appeared beside us now and pulled at my hand.

‘Mum … you said
bum
.’

My sister was still glaring at me. But I could see her thinking.

I turned to my son. ‘No, sweetheart, I said
bun
. We’re going to go home for tea now – aren’t we, Lou? – and see if we can have some
buns
. And then, while Granny gives you a bath, I’m going to help Auntie Lou do her homework.’

I went to the library the next day, and Mum looked after Thomas, so I saw Lou off on the bus and knew I wouldn’t see her again till teatime. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for the interview, but from the moment I left her I didn’t actually give her another thought.