Falling For You (42 page)

I gasp, and he steps back. I can hear his breathing, heavy and uneven.

‘It was never what I intended, you know that.’

I turn my head away but his fingers are around my face, softly, insistently, drawing me back to him. I would pull away except I find that I cannot, my body suddenly has a will of its own. When he kisses me this time it feels different from all the other times but no less powerful. When he kisses me now I
feel
him, all the different parts of him, merging together like a kaleidoscope of all his memories and fears, everything he has been running from all his life, and all that he still longs for. I know the intensity of his pain and his love. For a moment, all of these things are there on his lips, trembling on mine. I feel it in his body which he has pressed close to me again, so close that we might for these few minutes have become one person, not separate anymore. In the urgency on his lips, there is something else, too. I know he wants me to understand what happened. He wants me to show some compassion. Lawrence needs me to forgive him and I... I cannot hold out against him any longer.

What happened to my dad - it was never what he intended.

My hands reach up tentatively to his shoulders, to his neck. I kiss him back, softly. His mouth opens slightly in relief and wonder and I take in the slightly bewildered gratitude in his eyes, feeling myself momentarily giddy, almost faint with a sense of my own immense power.

‘I have to forgive you, Lawrence. You know I love you, too.’ I whisper the words into his ear and for a few seconds they feel like a blessing, like cherry blossom falling softly through the park on a spring morning.

‘
You can’t imagine, Rose
, how much you saying that means to me...’

I think maybe I do know. Unexpectedly, it has released me, too. We don’t have to be enemies anymore, do we? Whatever happens next, I can still love him. I
do
love him, I don’t have to deny it, even to myself.  My fingers reach up to twine around the short hair at the nape of his neck, wanting to touch him, wanting to remain in physical contact because I am aware that, now I have said the words, I feel a pensiveness. An apprehension. Because there is only one way forward from this and I know it is not a way he will relish.

‘The thing is - Dad never even knew who you were,’ I whisper. I can feel my whole body trembling.’ He never knew why you wanted to hurt him so badly.’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt him...’

‘Then...’ I look into his eyes, hope lighting for the first time since I learned the terrible truth. ‘Then I need you to come back with me and tell him that.’

Lawrence
swallows. His hands come up to seek my own now. For a moment I feel his fingers, warm and loving, just as they were before, clasping mine.

‘I can’t do that, Rose.’

He can’t. My stomach sinks but I keep my eyes on his, don’t let him wriggle away.

‘You can’t. You mean you
won’t?
’      

‘Please try and understand.’ His voice, when he eventually speaks, comes from a very faraway place and it occurs to me suddenly that he never expected things to go this way when he came back in here just now. He came back in here to let me know his intentions, to execute a sense of duty that way.

 ‘I heard from Dougie while I was in the tower.’ Lawrence casts his eyes upwards and I realise where he’s been hiding out all the time. Dougie. I close my eyes for a second and the name is like some bird arrived from foreign shores, a thing out of place here.
Dougie,
I think,
your boss from the place you have told me you’ve already left.
What has Dougie got to do with anything important, with anything that really matters?

 
You heard from him
, I raise my eyebrows questioningly...
and?
  

‘He told me that he’s back and that... as long as I have things sorted out with my family, he hopes to have positive news for me this afternoon.’ Positive news. I look at Lawrence blankly.

‘What about my dad?’

Lawrence
swallows. I see a fleeting look of panic cross his face.

‘I have to save Sunny,’ he repeats.

‘He still matters, then...’ I mutter under my breath. My fingers tighten in his.
Sunny.
Of course. That’s who he came here for, isn’t it? That’s who he’s risked it all for. I don’t know why I imagined my concerns would take any precedence over what Lawrence originally came here to do.   

‘He still matters, Rose.’  I pause, then I lift my chin up,

‘Because he is You, right?’

‘He’s me?’

‘He’s you. A different version of you. Someone you might have been. If you save him... it’s like saving yourself from the World War Two bunker.’ My eyes come challengingly up to meet his. ‘You have to do it because nobody ever came to save you.’

There is a moment’s silence after that.

Lawrence
looks down. His hands slide out of mine suddenly and he sits down, right there, on the floor at my feet as if his legs have just given way beneath him. I stare at the top of his head as his hands go up to cover his face and I wonder;
what did I say, what did I just say that you didn’t already know? Wasn’t it obvious?

A few minutes go by in silence. Then I can hear his shuddering breath and I know that he is quietly crying. I feel a lump in my own throat. 

‘I’ll help you,’ I say after a little while. ‘If you trust me to, I’ll help you to do the right thing and save yourself, Lawrence.’

He makes a movement with his head, gulping down his tears and I can’t tell whether he’s accepting my offer of help or whether he’s just re-affirming that he’s got to go. I sense how conflicted he is. He had a mission to accomplish here, and time is running out. If he’s going to succeed in helping Sunny, he can’t stay here any longer.

But if he has any hopes left of doing the right thing by my dad,
and saving himself
- he can’t afford to go.

An arc of tiny sparks shoot up from the brazier into the dark air now, bright moments of deep yellow and red igniting my memory. The hot hazy air over the fire wavers for a bit. My eyes water and I clench my fists. In the smoky haze over the brazier a shape forms, stretches out, dissolves; I can see a man running.
It’s him
, isn’t it? The thought catches at my throat, puts me suddenly in touch with my grief at losing the man I have been so in love with. For a split second, I’m standing in the stiff breeze with Mum, on the edge of Topfields again, scattering primroses,
Titsy, totsy…

And he - I turn to look at him at last - Lawrence, the man I was destined to love and then hate and then to lose - he’s back here again when he shouldn’t be. Back in the place that will be the ruin of him.

Doesn’t he know that?

I know Rose is right.

Yet I cannot bear to think I will not be able to help Sunny; that after coming all this way, I will fail him at the final hour. When that call from Dougie came in, woke me up with a jolt in the tower, it gave me a kick-start again, made me remember why I came. To hear that surprised hope in his voice, that maybe something could come of this after all when I’ve suspected all along he’s never really believed it - that was a vindication of all my fragile hopes. When I lift my eyes, stare at the chapel door, the possibility of what I might yet do is still within my grasp.

Travelling alone, I could be at Macrae Farm within the hour. I could seek out my mother. I could get all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed on the documents Dougie needs. Sunny could still be on that flight out. It could happen.

Yet now Rose is asking me to consider someone else and I cannot ignore the significance of that. Now that she’s put him into my mind - I rub my face, taking in deep gulps of breath, trying to come back into myself - now her father is in there, I cannot get him out. Why did you remind me of him, Rose? The forgotten one. I didn’t want to remember him. ‘
He never knew why you wanted to hurt him...’
That’s what she said, isn’t it? Her words clawed more deeply into me than she will know. I thought I saw him, cowering there, terrified, bewildered, in some deep and unused corner of my heart. A place I never go to. I’ve been too scared of what I’ll find there. Me, perhaps? The part of me who still believes I am a coward. The part of me who still believes maybe I deserve to be locked away somewhere and forgotten. Could Rose ever love
that
part?

Could I?

She’s kneeling by me, still. Her fingers are in my hair, I can feel her, the gentl
e
pressure of her fingertips as she massages my scalp. I am grateful, but I can’t bring myself to look at her. I reach my hands up at last, pull her fingers away from me.

‘This is never,’ I say to her after a while, ‘Never going to work. You know that, don’t you?’

‘What isn’t going to work?’ She edges herself around to the front of me.

‘You, me.’

She makes a small sound, like a strangled laugh, then.

‘I’ve always known it, Lawrence.’

I look up at her, a little shocked. She believes I’m him, then? Her soul-mate. The one she can never be with.

‘Yet still you ...’ I’m not even sure what my question is. Still you comfort me? Still you’re talking to me? ‘
Y
ou didn’t tell them about me?’

‘You heard me just now, talking to my aunt?’ She’s only just realised that. I heard some of it, not all of it. I heard the tone of her voice, how she hesitated, answered only carefully. I didn’t hear her spilling out everything she knew. I didn’t hear her give me away.
I watch her pulling apart the thin leaves off one of the branches we brought in yesterday, stripping it carefully as if it were a very important task, a task she must get just right.

‘I didn’t mention you,’ she breathes. ‘What you do next ... it has to be
your choice
,’ she says shakily.  ‘Anything else won’t count. The police marching up here and dragging you away, that won’t count. The judge throwing you in jail for five years - that won’t count. The only thing that’ll count now is if you come back with me, of your own volition, and tell my dad what he needs to hear.’

‘What will your family say, when they find out?’ I look at her curiously.
Strange
, I think, how now we are in this space,
talking about what will happen next, how things might pan out
, I find that is not something that frightens me. It isn’t what the world will do to me next that I am really scared of.

‘Will they demand an eye for an eye?’ As my father would. 
As he will
, when I am taken in. When I am no longer in a place that is out of his reach.

‘Uncle Ty and Carlotta will want you to face the penalties of law,’ she comes straight back. ‘They’ll want to see you go through due legal process. I believe that’s the only thing that’ll satisfy them.’

‘And your father ...?’ 

‘My father ...’ she sucks in her lips and her shoulders hunch ever so slightly; here we are talking about someone whose wishes matter a hell of a lot more than
Uncle Ty and Carlotta
without a shadow of a doubt. Here we are talking about someone whose happiness is so close to her core we might be talking about Rose herself. ‘What will he say?’ Her large eyes flash open wider, scanning me apologetically, and then she frowns a little, looks away. ‘I really don’t know, Lawrence. All I know is what he needs
you
to do. I don’t know what will happen after that. It’s an unknown.’

An unknown. There’s a kind of comfort in that. A gentleness, a hint of kindness that reminds me of Dougie, and Mr and Mrs Patel and all the other good people in my life who’ve helped me along the way.

‘So;’ I say to her after a while. ‘Do you think that maybe, with my help, and the fact that the tractors are back on the lanes again - you’d be able to make it back to Clare Farm today?’

She stands up, slowly.

Then she smiles a small smile, stretching her hands out to me, helping me up.