Second Chance - Jane Green [132]
‘I didn’t,’ Holly says sadly. ‘I mean, a sort of love, perhaps. He is, after all, the father of my children, but not a love you’re supposed to feel, not the kind of love you have with Paul.’
‘So you’re not going back, then?’ Will has, until this point, been quiet, not wanting to get too involved.
‘No.’ Holly raises her eyes to meet Will’s. ‘I’m not going back. I just can’t face telling him that yet.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
The thrill and excitement of commune living is beginning to pall somewhat. No arguments, not yet, but Olivia is starting to miss her flat, miss her animals, and is wondering exactly how long she will have to stay here. Saffron seems… fine. Not as fragile as she had expected, certainly not fragile enough to need to be surrounded by five people looking after her.
Saffron always was strong, Olivia realizes. Stronger, perhaps, than all of them. They ought to have changed so very much, she thinks, since school. Ought, as they approach forty, to feel grown-up, surely, but Olivia certainly doesn’t. She doesn’t feel much different at all. Just older, more tired, and, with this pregnancy, sicker.
Holly feels different, which is not to say she is. Holly always thinks that if she were to pass people from her class on the street, they would not recognize her. She is surely better-looking now, her hair sleeker, her cheekbones more pronounced. But in fact Holly, like all of them, has barely changed. Look just slightly below the surface and they are all exactly the same.
In so many ways, Holly is slowly coming back to herself. In just a few days, she has stopped acting like Marcus’s wife, is rediscovering who she is.
But it’s a Holly she doesn’t quite remember, a Holly she has to get used to. And this Holly has a different life to the one she has lived these past fourteen years. She no longer has a home to go back to, no longer has the safety and familiarity of her old life.
This stay in the country is like a time out, a break from her real life, a holiday that she doesn’t want to end, because whatever the changes going on in her life, she is trying to stay focused on the present and not think about the future.
She lost herself for a while this evening. The kids had just left with Marcus, Will was finishing off the kitchen cupboards, and Paul and Anna, Olivia and Saffron were reading the papers in front of the fire. Holly poured herself a vodka and went to sit outside.
It was cold. Too cold really to be outside, but she kept her hat and gloves on, and snuggled down in one of the beaten-up wooden chairs that Anna found in a junk shop on their last trip up here.
At first everything was pitch-black. As her eyes adjusted, she started to see the outline of the trees. The noises of the country seemed so loud, yet so calming. For a while she was just… being. Listening to the noises, no thoughts at all.
After a few minutes, as the vodka warmed her up and her body started relaxing, her mind started wandering. She thought back to a girl she had done the NCT childbirth classes with when she was pregnant with Oliver. Her name was Julia. They had become friends through their shared experiences, not a friendship that would otherwise have happened but one born of having children within a week of each other, of being neighbours and in a similar plight. Not that Holly admitted it at the time.
Julia had married Dave, she said, because she thought that no one else would marry her. She had married him, she said, because he seemed to be everything she ought to be looking for in a husband. He had a good job, was kind, treated her like a princess, and he loved her.
‘So are you happy?’ Holly remembers asking her, trying not to compare her own marriage, trying not to go to a place from which there was no return.
Julia had shrugged. ‘I’m… fine,’ she’d said. ‘And now there’s Felix.’ She had jiggled her baby on her knee and covered his chubby cheeks with adoring kisses. ‘We’re a family. It is what it is. I think,’ and she had looked up at that point and met Holly’s eyes, ‘I think there are many different kinds