Love Me Or Leave Me (25 page)

The lift door gracefully gliding shut, just in time for her to see Andrew looking back at her, having taken in the whole scene. And the pained expression on that worried, handsome face was somehow worse than anything.

Chapter Twenty

At about the same time as Lucy suffered out her hangover, Kirk realized that absolutely zilch was working for him. He thought his usual nighttime transcendental meditation session might help, but no, nothing doing. Neither did listening to his beloved ‘Homage to Mother Earth’ CD. Not even when he tried to realign his chakras using rose quartz – which he’d always found so effective when it came to healing. And even the smell of incense that he’d been burning in his hotel room wasn’t having its usual effect.

There were two things on this mortal plane that Kirk didn’t believe in: the first was lies and second was deceit. And yet, with Dawn, his beloved girl, his best friend, he’d practised both. And now, trapped in this ridiculously extravagant hotel room, he had nothing to do for the whole night ahead but to dwell on it. Learn to live with it, if that were even remotely possible.

But try as he might, he couldn’t. Kirk just wasn’t hardwired like that, none of his family were. They were freethinking and free loving and took life just as they found it. And after all, the last thing Kirk had ever gone looking for was love. Not after Dawn came along. His princess, his goddess; he’d been with countless other women before he met her, but never felt for any of the others what he’d felt for her and surely never would.

He could still remember the look on Dawn’s worried, pale little face, when she’d first started to suspect all wasn’t well. But I’m here, he’d told her at the time, constantly trying to reassure her. There never was any other woman for me and there never will be, he said. And I’m never going to leave. Why would I? Why would anyone who had a cherished soul like you in their life, ever want to walk away from that? How insane would you have to be?

Those had been his exact words.

The thing was, Kirk meant it as sincerely then as he did now. He wasn’t going anywhere and it cut him to the quick to think that Dawn had dragged him to this awful place, this hotel he’d hated and felt so uncomfortable in from the word go, just so she could ‘perform a Kirk-ectomy on her life’, as his Dad, Dessie had so succinctly put it.

Times like this, Kirk envied his Dad and Gaia, his stepmother. They’d never had to deal with anything like this. Kirk had lost count of the number of lovers his father had taken over the years and Gaia seemed to have absolutely no problem with a single one of them.

Ditto when Gaia herself had fallen in love, and subsequently had a seven-month-long fling with a bloke who installed water features at her local garden centre. And what had Dessie done when she first confessed all to him? Laughed and wished her well and immediately invited Mr Water Features round to hang out and smoke some weed. In Kirk’s world, this was how civilized, evolved beings behaved.

Had either of them reacted with hate and negativity? Had they insisted on dragging one another to a ridiculous divorce hotel like this? The kind of place that ordinarily, Kirk and his friends at the Yoga Rooms would have shaken their heads at and wondered how bitter and unloving a soul you’d have to be to cross the threshold of in the first place? Of course not. Dessie and Gaia had worked it out between them so everyone was happy, everyone was sexually fulfilled in every way and no one was left out. That was what you did when you had a life partner. You made it work, no matter what.

Which was why Kirk was genuinely at a complete loss right now. He’d thought he and Dawn were able to read each other like pages from a book. He thought she’d understand, as he himself would have, if the shoe had been on the other foot. He thought she knew exactly what she was signing up for, that far distant day when they’d had their commitment ceremony in Mount Druid at Midsummer, what seemed like another lifetime ago now.

And yet there it was, the telltale guilt, that no matter how hard he tried, Kirk just somehow couldn’t seem to shift. Fact was, for all his deep love for Dawn, he’d betrayed her. He’d duped her and under the pathetically thin veneer of ‘anything goes’, and then even had the barefaced cheek to try to defend the indefensible. And now someone like him, who’d lived his whole life battling lies and deceit, had to somehow try to come to terms with it.

He’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, but at that uncomfortable thought, suddenly got up and started to pace round a bit. Anything to try and shift the negative ions rattling through him. Yet he couldn’t, try as he might.

So his frustration quickly shifted to this ridiculous hotel room instead. It was irritating him now and Kirk was rarely irritated, unless you were talking about the plight of the Tibetan people or something along those lines. Seriously though, he thought. All the unnecessary waste and expense that a hotel like this incurred, not to mention the toll it took on the environment? And still they never even bothered to have the place feng-shuied?

In fact, Kirk thought, maybe a bit of feng-shui might just help. Maybe he’d have some outside chance of easing his mind if he just rearranged the furniture a bit. So with considerable effort, he managed to haul the heavy oak bed over to the southwest corner (so it ended up exactly blocking the bathroom door, as it happened), and tried that out.

But no. Sleep still wouldn’t come. And now all Kirk could do was lie there and listen to the air conditioning thingy hum away in the background. He’d been trying to switch the thing off ever since he arrived, and couldn’t. Air conditioning! Didn’t Ferndale Hotels realize the strain that even one air-conditioner put on the earth’s resources?

That was when he sat bolt upright on the bed, with its ludicrously soft mattress, that a whole family of geese had probably sacrificed feathers for. He had a wedge of grass here with him somewhere, he was sure of it. Dessie had given it to him a while back, ‘to help ease the pain of the journey you and Dawn have to face’. It was stuffed in the pocket of the backpack that went everywhere with him. Three ounces of his Dad’s best homegrown. Who could ask for more?

Just what he needed right now. Perfect antidote to all the negativity hovering in the ethos round here. Nothing else would tune out Dawn’s voice earlier, harsh and bitter, her accusations, tears, anger and the unavoidable fact that he was the root cause of it.

In one fluid move, Kirk was out of bed and rummaging round the bottom of his bag.

Two minutes later, he’d blazed up and suddenly started to feel a whole lot better for it.

Chapter Twenty-One

At about the same time, Andrew had finished up his cigar and was just about to leave the garden and head back inside, when a tiny, muffled noise suddenly distracted him. Strange, he thought. He could almost have sworn it sounded like sobbing. A woman’s voice too. The light from the hotel bar spilled out onto the garden as he got up and strolled deeper into the garden.

Turned out he’d been right. Not far from where he’d been sitting all this time, he suddenly saw a young girl, mid-twenties at most and dressed head to toe in white, curled up on a bench, twisting a Kleenex nervously round and round her finger.

She jumped when she sensed someone approaching and immediately sat up straight.

‘I’m so sorry if I startled you,’ Andrew said politely, ‘but I just wondered … are you alright?’

‘Fine, just fine,’ she said in a tiny, strangulated little voice, but one look at the girl told you she was far from it.

A waif, Andrew thought, looking down at her and almost feeling fatherly and protective towards her. Tiny and slim with long, straggly red hair and big soulful eyes that somehow only made her face look even smaller still. Someone who worked here maybe? Or a fellow guest? Surely not. She looked far too young, not only to have got married in the first place, but for that marriage to have subsequently ground to a halt.

‘Andrew Lowe,’ he said, reaching down to shake her hand. ‘I don’t think we were introduced earlier.’

‘I’m Dawn,’ she sniffed, dabbing at her nose with the Kleenex.

‘May I sit down for a moment?’ He didn’t like to intrude, but it just didn’t seem right to turn his heel on her and walk away. This slip of a thing seemed upset and maybe talking would help a little.

‘Sure,’ she said, sliding over on the bench to make room for him. He stubbed out the dregs of his cigar and joined her.

A silence fell as she shifted uncomfortably beside him.

‘And, may I ask,’ Andrew eventually said, ‘if you’re staying here too?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘Have to say,’ he added, ‘I never thought I’d end up here.’

‘Well, that certainly makes two of us,’ Dawn replied, with a weak little smile.

‘And might I have met your husband earlier?’

‘I’m not sure. Kirk is – well, he’s tall and has long hair down well past his shoulders. White shirt and jeans? You’d know him if you saw him.’

Bingo, Andrew thought. Yes, he’d walked past someone who fitted that description on one of the upstairs corridors. Rather a strange looking individual, he’d thought. The sort of man just two steps away from shaving his head, and banging on a tambourine on Grafton Street.

‘I needn’t ask you who you’re here with,’ Dawn said. ‘You were married to Lucy Belter, the model, weren’t you?’

‘Technically, I’m still married to her,’ Andrew gently corrected her. ‘And it’s Belton, actually.’

‘Sorry. It’s just the papers always –’

‘Never believe a word you read in the papers, my dear,’ Andrew smiled. ‘They have a habit of stereotyping, particularly when it comes to women like my wife, sadly.’

Another silence, but somehow, now that they’d broken the ice a bit, it was that bit less tense and awkward now.

‘Of course it’s absolutely none of my business,’ he ventured tentatively, ‘but you seemed a little upset just now. May I ask if everything’s alright?’

Dawn looked across at him, with big watery eyes.

‘What do you think? I’m twenty-five years old and I’m sitting in the garden of a posh hotel about to wind up the last three years of my life. Other girls my age are out on the town tonight, enjoying themselves, having a laugh, young, free and without a care in the world. And look where I ended up. No, everything is not okay. Everything is so far from okay, I can’t tell you.’

‘And nor does it get any easier with age, let me tell you,’ he said wryly. ‘Just try being at my hour of life and about to be divorced for the second time.’

‘Can I ask you something?’ Dawn said, looking directly at him now.

‘Fire away.’

‘Well … how did you know Lucy was the one? I mean, the one for you? If it’s not too personal, that is.’

‘I’ve a feeling I’ll be asked questions a lot more personal than that over the course of the next few days, my dear.’

‘So how did you know for certain?’

Andrew sat back, remembering. And it was funny, but in a weird way, given everything he’d been so overloaded with of late, it was almost soothing to think back to happier times.

‘It was – close to four years ago,’ he smiled. ‘The bank I work for was sponsoring an awards do. In the Four Seasons hotel,’ he added. ‘Although it’s hard to imagine that we’d shell out for anything so lavish in the present economic climate.’

‘And she was there?’

‘Presenting an award. She bounced out onto the stage and in a matter of moments, had the whole room guffawing with laughter. It had been quite a formal night up until then and Lucy just broke the ice completely.’

‘Thank Christ I get this over with now,’ was what she’d actually said into the microphone. ‘I’ve been hanging round backstage for the last two hours waiting to do this and my shoes are only killing me. Besides, the quicker the awards bit of the night is over with, the quicker the dancing starts!’

The room chortled along and Andrew vividly remembered sitting there utterly transfixed. He was newly separated, and for the first time in twenty-five years, found himself if not exactly young, then certainly free and single. The wives of various board members at the table had all been dressed in sombre black, whereas Lucy was in vivid scarlet, a colour she seemed to dominate. As only she could.

He’d sat there as she addressed the room and almost felt cartoon-like, so sure was he that steam was beginning to come out of his ears. That body, that face, those endless legs …

‘You’re drooling, stop it,’ he remembered the CEO’s wife had teased him, but Andrew had barely registered her. He made a point of seeking out Lucy afterwards and inviting her to join their table. And she seemed just to light up his whole evening from then on, like she never failed to do. Till she’d bounced along, conversation round the table had been about golf handicaps, the shocking price of maintenance fees on your average villa in Marbella and who was on a waiting list for a hip operation.

But with Lucy, suddenly everything changed. She was funny, fearless and fabulous, she lived life on her own terms and didn’t care what anyone thought. There and then, Andrew was a man completely smitten. In work the next day, he’d made a point of tracking her down and managed to get hold of her booking agent’s number. And the rest was history.

‘And that was when you knew for certain?’ Dawn interrupted his train of thought.

‘It was like my whole life suddenly went from black and white to glorious Technicolor,’ he said. ‘If that makes any sense.’

‘Yeah,’ she nodded, focused on a rockery straight ahead of them. ‘Yes, it does.’

‘How about you?’

‘Seems like another lifetime ago,’ she said. ‘Kirk is a yoga instructor and one fine day, he just called into the store where I work.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Andrew smiled. ‘Your eyes locked across a crowded shop floor and that was it?’

‘Not quite. He was giving out flyers for the Yoga Rooms where he works and he asked if he could put one in our window. So I said yeah and … and that pretty much would have been the end of that, only the thing was … I just … had to see him again. So myself and my pal from work signed up for one of his yoga classes and I made sure to turn up in my tightest leggings and skinniest crop top.’