Forget Me Not (24 page)

‘You’ve just taken her to the airport?’

‘Yes. Why do you keep repeating everything I say?’

‘Which airport?’

‘Heathrow. You know, Anna, you’re sounding pretty stressed. Maybe you should go and unwind somewhere for a day or two.’

‘Yes … maybe … Sorry, Jamie, as I say, I’m a bit … tired.’ ‘Anyway, I’m off to play cricket, but I wanted to thank you for your advice. It was spot on.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said faintly.

‘So I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

‘’Bye.’

I sank on to the unmade bed, staring into space, then dialled reception. ‘I’m trying to contact a friend of mine who’s staying here,’ I asked. ‘Could you give me the extension for his room please?’

‘What name is it, Madame?’

‘Percy du Plessis.’

‘Would you mind spelling that for me? I’m sorry, Madame,’ she added after a moment, ‘but there’s no one of that name currently resident in the hotel. Can I help you with anything else?’

NINE

‘Are you sure it was her?’ Jenny asked me the following Saturday afternoon. She’d come round for tea with Grace, who was playing with Milly at the other end of the sitting room. I’d confided in Jenny because I needed to talk to someone about it, and because she’s never met Jamie, and because I know that she’s completely discreet. ‘Is there any chance you could have been mistaken?’

‘I saw her face, Jenny. I heard her voice.’

‘And she doesn’t have an identical twin – like me?’

‘No, she doesn’t. But I feel so awful, knowing what I do. Jamie told me that he’d just dropped her off at Heathrow.’

‘So she’d obviously waited until he’d driven away, then jumped in a taxi and gone to Cliveden to meet her boyfriend. Oh dear…’

‘I wonder who he is,’ I said.

‘Did you get a close look?’

‘Not close enough to recognise him again, but he’s likely to be someone she met on one of her trips. He probably had a stopover in London so they arranged to touch down together in Cliveden. But I heard her say, “Have we got the same room?”’

‘Which means that she’s obviously stayed there with him before, which suggests that it’s been going on for a while. Poor Jamie.’

I shook my head. ‘What do I do?’

‘Well …’ Jenny shrugged. ‘I don’t think you can do anything. After all, it might just end and then, in theory, she and Jamie could carry on perfectly happily with him none the wiser – if she’s lucky.’

‘She looked pretty keen on him, whoever he was.’

‘There’s no upside for you if you tell Jamie, Anna.’

‘That’s true. Plus I don’t think I’d actually be able to say it – I couldn’t bear for him to be hurt.’

‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ I thought about it for a moment. ‘I am. Jamie’s not just my business partner, he’s my friend; he’s a good, kind and utterly reliable man whom I trust, respect and like.’

‘But that would all change,’ Jenny said. ‘Because deep down he’d never forgive you for breaking the bad news. My feeling is that he’ll find out anyway,’ she went on. ‘His wife will slip up and he’ll find out. From what I’ve seen as a counsellor, the unfaithful party often has some subconscious desire to be caught so that everything can be resolved and they can stop feeling guilty. But I’d try and put it from your mind for now.’

Having discussed my dilemma, we went to the other end of the room and played with the little girls. I gazed at Grace – her baby beauty had bloomed into infant loveliness. She had curly fair hair, peachy skin and large, lido-blue eyes. She no longer looked like Jenny but was presumably – though I couldn’t ask – more like her father.

I gazed at Milly. She wasn’t like me at all. She most closely resembled Xan and my mother – the two people who should have been so close to her, but who, in different ways, were missing from her life.

Grace was busy cooking something on Milly’s toy cooker with a clattering of tiny metal saucepans. She rummaged in the box of play food, then put on the oven glove.

‘Would you like to wear the apron too, Gracie?’ I said.

She nodded, then turned and let me tie it on for her. ‘There you are, poppet.’

Milly was playing with her doll’s house. She held up one of the tiny wooden dolls, which had a purple jacket and a flouncy pink skirt. I knew what was coming. ‘Thass my mummy,’ she announced. She picked up another doll, with a yellow T-shirt and blue trousers. ‘And thass my daddy.’ She laid them in their little blue beds, side by side under the pink roof, and put their yellow duvets on, then she placed her left forefinger over her nose. ‘Shhhhh!’ she whispered. ‘My mummy and my daddy go to sleep now.’

‘I don’t have a daddy,’ Grace said without looking up from what she was doing.

Milly stared at her, dumbfounded, even though I knew she’d heard Grace say this before. Then she turned to me with a look of exquisite sympathy. ‘Gracie don’t hab a
daddy
,’ she repeated, shaking her head sadly.

‘But Gracie’s very lucky,’ Jenny went on swiftly, ‘because she has lots of other people in her life – don’t you, sweetie?’ Grace nodded. ‘You have Mummy, and you have Auntie Jackie in France and Uncle Philippe and your two little cousins, and you have Milly and Anna, and all your friends and teachers at nursery school – and you have Grandma and Grandpa too.’

‘Your parents?’ I asked Jenny. She nodded. ‘So they’ve come round, then?’

‘Not exactly.’ She shrugged. ‘They’re … resigned. They behaved horribly,’ she added without rancour, ‘but I still want Grace to have a good relationship with them as they’re her only grandparents.’

‘She’s doing better than Milly on that front, then,’ I said as Grace offered me a spillage of plastic peas with a wedge of Black Forest gateau on top. ‘Mmm …
delicious
, Gracie. All she’s got is my dad.’

‘What about Xan’s parents?’

‘They’re elderly so they don’t travel outside Spain. I got a card from them saying that Milly and I would be welcome to visit them any time, but as I’m not
with
Xan I feel it would be awkward – and it would make me feel sad to go there without him – regretting what might have been.’

‘But you’ve got a
new
man now,’ Jenny pointed out as she nibbled a vinyl croissant and a tiny tin of baked beans. ‘This is yummy, Gracie.’

‘Yummy in your tummy, Mummy?’

‘Yes, darling. So how’s it going with Patrick?’

‘It’s going … well. We like each other. We’re attracted to each other. We have things in common.’

‘That’s a good start.’

‘And I’ve been … lonely, Jenny. Four years is a long time not to be loved, or desired.’

‘It
is
a long time,’ she agreed. ‘And I’m glad you’ve met someone. But to be honest I find the relationship I have with Grace quite fulfilling enough.’

‘So you’re not even … looking, then?’

‘No. And it’ll be a long time before I do,’ she added quietly.

I was dying to ask Jenny why it would be such a long time, and why she never saw Grace’s dad, and what it was he had done to deserve her condemnation. But Jenny had already changed the subject, as she so often does. ‘So is Patrick divorced, then?’ I heard her ask. I explained his situation. ‘New Zealand?’ she repeated. ‘Poor guy.’ And I thought Jenny’s sympathy for Patrick odd, given that she had excluded her ex from Grace’s life – but this irony, strangely, seemed lost on her. ‘He must feel so angry.’ I nodded. ‘And does he show it?’

‘Well…’ I didn’t want to say too much about Patrick’s little flare-ups. ‘He does get a bit stressy sometimes. But he admits that things affect him more – if people cut him up in traffic, for example, or keep him waiting on the phone he can get very wound up. But I know why he’s like that,’ I went on, ‘so I have to be understanding.’

‘You don’t have to be,’ Jenny cautioned.

‘OK – but I want to be, because I like him. And he likes me. And knowing that a man is interested in me is such a good feeling after Xan’s … rejection.’

‘And has he met Milly?’

I shook my head. ‘That’s something I’m not going to rush.’

As late spring went on, the rhododendrons and azaleas were everywhere superseded by wisteria, dripping from the fronts of houses or stretched along walls, then by purple spears of lilac, then by fizzing blue
Ceanothus
and by
Philadelphus
, with their balls of fragrant white petals, which Milly and I used as confetti for her dolls’ weddings – then came the roses and peonies of early summer.

Patrick and I had been spending more and more time together and I felt that the moment had come for Milly to meet him. So to begin with he’d ‘bump into us’ in the park and help me push her on the swings: she seemed a little suspicious at first, still convinced that he’d stolen her shoe. Then he began popping over for Sunday lunch, bringing armfuls of flowers from his garden for me and chocolate buttons for her. Then I invited him to her birthday tea.

‘Iss my daddy coming?’ she asked me as I put the Winnie the Pooh paper plates round the table that Friday afternoon. My heart sank. Xan’s visits were so rare that I’d stopped telling Milly she would see him ‘before too long’ because I could no longer bear her disappointment. I didn’t talk about him as much as before; and I now avoided the news, as she would invariably start to cry the second he’d disappeared from the screen.

As I sprinkled ‘Happy Birthday’ sequins over the tablecloth, Milly, dressed in the pale-blue fairy outfit I’d given her that morning, ran to the window, climbed on to the sofa and peered out. ‘Iss my
daddy
coming?’ she repeated, looking down the street in both directions as though she believed she might see him.

‘No, darling,’ I said, ‘he’s not.’

‘He
is
coming,’ she insisted. She waved her magic wand about. ‘He
is
.’

‘No, sweetie, he’s very busy at the moment – but you had that birthday card from him this morning and I got an e-mail from him last night to say that he’s posted you a present, so he’s really thinking of you. But lots of other people are coming – Grandpa, and Jenny and Grace, and Luisa of course, and Phoebe and Carla from Sweet Peas, and Cassie, and Auntie Sue, so we’ll all have a lovely time. And Jamie’s going to pop in for a little while.’

‘Jamie?’ She ran to her book box and got out
The Gruffalo
.

‘And Patrick’s coming too,’ I added casually. ‘Is that OK?’ Milly nodded slowly, as if she wasn’t quite sure, but then Patrick was a new person in her life, I reasoned. It would take time for her to feel at ease with him.

Patrick had been quite nervous about meeting my family for the first time, but he and Dad seemed to hit it off – I heard them having an animated chat about e-commerce; Jamie went out of his way to be friendly, and I felt that Sue and Jenny approved. Only Cassie seemed less than impressed. She’d had too much champagne, and after the others had gone and only she and Dad were left, she’d blurted out that Patrick shouldn’t have bought Milly a bike.

‘Why not?’ I demanded, not wanting to admit that I’d been a bit taken aback myself when I’d seen the ‘Barbie’ bike complete with pink helmet.

‘Because he hasn’t known her that long. It was too much,’ Cassie went on as Milly played with the Fifi Forget-Me-Not doll that Jamie had brought her. ‘He should have just got her some paints, or a puzzle. Don’t you agree, Dad?’

‘There’s some truth in what you say,’ he replied. ‘But he’s obviously well off and he’s keen on Anna, so he felt like buying Milly something special.’

‘Exactly,’ I said as I poured him more tea. ‘Patrick’s very generous, and if that’s what he wanted to give her then it’s fine by me – plus I like him, Cassie, so please don’t criticise him.’

‘Just my opinion.’ She shrugged. She picked up her digital camera and began viewing the shots she’d taken earlier. ‘That’s a lovely one of Milly.’

‘Let me see.’ I sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘Yes, it’s sweet.’

‘And this one of her blowing out the candles.’

I peered at the tiny screen. ‘Could you e-mail them to me so I can send some to Xan?’ I decided it would be more tactful to send him the ones that didn’t have Patrick in the background, tempting though it was to show him that my life had moved on. ‘And that’s a nice one of Luisa.’

‘She’s lost weight,’ Cassie said. ‘She used to be plump.’

‘That’s true.’ I hadn’t noticed. ‘It must be all the swimming – and that’s good of Jenny.’

‘Now
she
intrigues me,’ Cassie mused. ‘She’s so open and friendly – you’d say that she’s happy: yet at the same time she casts a long shadow, as though she’s in pain.’

‘Well …’ I wasn’t going to discuss Jenny with my sister. ‘It’s not easy being a single mum.’ Milly clambered on to the sofa and put her arms round my neck. I drew her on to my lap.

‘Doesn’t Grace’s dad help out?’ I heard Cassie say.

‘Erm … I don’t think he does,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘Gracie don’t hab a daddy,’ said Milly, shaking her head.

‘Why not?’ Cassie enquired in her characteristically direct way.

I shrugged. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘You mean she hasn’t told you?’

‘No.’

‘How odd to be secretive about it in this day and age. But don’t you wonder about it, Anna?’

‘Occasionally,’ I conceded, not wanting to admit that I was
consumed
with curiosity most of the time. ‘But I’d never ask her outright.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if someone is choosing not to tell you something important about themselves, you have to respect that or risk losing the friendship. I like Jenny so I’m not going to pry.’

‘But she might want to talk to you about it,’ Cassie suggested with another swig of champagne.

‘Then I can only say that she’s had plenty of opportunities to do so. She clearly doesn’t want to, so we just don’t go there.’

This seemed to satisfy Cassie. ‘There’s Patrick,’ she said, looking at her camera again. ‘He’s good-looking. I’ll give him that.’

‘I think so too,’ I said.

‘And he’s very well dressed.’ That was true. ‘But the knot of his tie …’

‘What about it?’