Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [97]
And Lucy lay beside him, awake, knowing that it never really would be again.
It was the first time in her life that she had hated herself.
The next morning, after Patrick had brought her tea in bed and gone to get the children (‘I’ll take them swimming, give you a couple of hours to yourself to do some packing or just laze around – I’ve got making up to do with them, too. And I can’t wait to see the look on my mother’s face when I tell her – I think she was more worried than we were!’), Lucy lay under the duvet, waiting to know what to do.
Alec answered his mobile phone on the fourth ring. ‘Lucy?’
‘Can you talk?’
‘I’ve got Stephen. We’re in the park. Nina and Marianne are in the shops.’
‘Does that mean you can?’
‘Wait a minute. Yes. Yep. Are you okay?’
‘Yes. No. Not really.’
‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scared to death myself.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘Yes, Alec. Something happened.’ She paused. ‘We cheated.’
There was silence at the other end of the line.
‘And we have to stop. Whatever it costs us.’
‘Is that what you want?’
It wasn’t. She had a dull ache in the pit of her stomach. ‘We’re going to hurt people, Alec. And please don’t say that we won’t hurt them if they don’t find out because that makes us sound cheap and nasty.’
‘We weren’t that. We were never that.’
‘I know. That’s why we have to stop. Because I think we’re both okay people, Alec, not bad ones.’
‘Of course we’re not bad.’
‘Maybe.’ She thought about Marianne and the shades of grey.
‘Why now? Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ Why did he keep saying that?
‘It has to be now.’ Because I don’t think I could walk away from you if we made love again. I think I would want to hold you for ever. ‘Before it’s too late. Please, Alec.’
‘Okay. If that’s what you want.’
She wanted to say that it wasn’t what she wanted. That right now it was the last thing she wanted. But what was the point of that? ‘I’m sorry, Alec.’
‘I’m sorry too, Lucy. And, Lucy? I—’
‘Don’t.’ She hung up on him. Was he going to say that he loved her?
R for Rock-climbing
Natalie thought about her dad every day. She hadn’t done that for years. Worried like a parent does about a child. Every bit of new information she gleaned from her mother, or from the doctors when she was visiting, was fascinating to her. Each small progression in Nicholas’s condition was absorbed, celebrated, reported to Tom, and Rose, discussed over and over again.
She didn’t want to believe that he would never fully recover from this. Because that would mean she would have to grieve for a part of him, and she couldn’t bear to do that when so much of him was still here with her. That felt like betrayal.
Life had changed completely, and yet at the same time went on as before. It wasn’t the same for her mother, whose entire life had gone on hold. Natalie made time to visit him, more time than she thought she had. She spent hours in the hospital, sitting beside his bed. And when she wasn’t there, she went to work, and she went out with friends, and she saw Tom, and the alphabet rolled on.
‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’ They were parallel, about ten feet above the ground. Tom was sitting back, relaxed, in his harness.
Natalie was hanging on for dear life, knuckles white, trying to smile. Of course she bloody had. And this was the highest she had ever got. She’d had three private sessions, in the last fortnight, at the indoor climbing wall on the industrial estate, costing twenty pounds each time, with Thaddeus, the hippie instructor, who wore tie-dye Lycra and said ‘cool’ a lot.
Two major problems: (1.) The harness was just like the one you used for abseiling. Not flattering; (2.) And this was worse than abseiling – the person on the ground pretty much had to support your weight. The first time she fell off the wall with Thaddeus below, she was vaguely afraid that he was going to fly to the ceiling, letting her drop like a stone. He didn’t. He said ‘cool’, and told her to get back up.
The wall was multi-coloured, the handholds sticking out at intervals,