Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [120]
‘You mustn’t say that,’ she told him, fishing in her pocket for her handkerchief in case she disgraced herself by starting to cry. The beaches looked so ugly and frightening with the defences in place. She wished passionately that things were different, that there was no war and that Teddy could be well.
‘I’m glad you told me, I really am.’ It was the truth. ‘I would have hated it if … if I hadn’t known,’ she finished lamely.
‘I told you because I wanted there to be honesty between us, Grace, and because, selfishly, I wanted you to be the one I could turn to and talk to.’
‘You can talk to me, Teddy,’ insisted Grace.
Teddy shook his head, the soft floppiness of his hair already tangled slightly by the sea breeze. ‘No I can’t. Not as I want to. Just then you were going to say you’d have hated it afterwards if you hadn’t known, but you didn’t say it. That isn’t being straight about things, Grace. That is not what I want. I know it’s hard for you, and I know I’m asking a lot of you, things that I don’t have any right to ask. I don’t want you fussing like me mum, or thinking the worst every time you don’t see me for a few days. What I want more than anything else is to live whilst I can. I want to share that living with you, Grace, but what I don’t want when I’m gone is … One day, Gracie, you’ll meet someone and fall in love.’
Grace made a small murmur of distress but Teddy shook his head again.
‘Of course you will, and it’s only right that you should. You and me aren’t sweethearts, Grace. We’re friends. I’m not saying that if things had been different we couldn’t have been different, but they aren’t. When you do fall in love, I hope you’ll tell him about me and when you do I don’t want him feeling or thinking that I did badly by you. By that I mean that I don’t want to feel I’m leaving you with a burden of guilt – for anything.
‘When you look back at this time I want you to look back with happiness, not pain. What I want more than anything else, Gracie, is for you to remember that we laughed and had fun. I want the time we spent together to be as if nothing was going to happen. Even when we die, a part of us lives on in the hearts and the minds of those who’ve known us. I know I’m asking a lot of you, asking you to carry me with you into the future, but I know you can do it. I don’t want you clinging to the past, and when you and this chap you’re going to fall in love talk about me, I want him to think what a decent sort I was, and I want you to know that your happiness is the future I want for both of us. I won’t be here for that future, Gracie, so you have to be happy and live it a little bit for me.’
I can’t do that. The words would be so easy to say but Grace knew she mustn’t. She felt older and more grown up than she had ever imagined she could feel.
‘I want you to promise me that you will do that, Gracie.’
‘I promise.’
As though by magic, just as she spoke, the wind dropped so that instead of being carried away out to sea her words hung softly on the air between.
Teddy didn’t kiss her and Grace was glad in a way that he had not done so, because that made the moment and her promise somehow more sacred.
He did kiss her later, though, after they had competed with one another to see who could skim the flat pebbles they had picked up from what was accessible of the beach over the flat sea as it waited for the tide to turn.
It was a bittersweet kiss. Both tender and fierce. A kiss that she knew instinctively was both a taste of what could have been and a reminder of what must not be.
Bella could hear the laughter coming from the kitchen the minute she opened the front door, and for a moment it held her immobile in the hallway, her face warmed by the shaft of sunlight coming in through the window and catching motes of dust in the air, gripped by an