Second Chance - Jane Green [38]
A few sentences about how good it was to be able to really talk to someone, how rare to reconnect so strongly with someone from your childhood, then she erases and starts again.
‘If I was the first,’ she taps, a smile playing on her lips, ‘who was the second? From Curious Insomniac in Brondesbury.’ And she switches her computer off and goes downstairs to make herself some tea.
Marcus leans over to kiss her goodbye, as he always does at five thirty in the morning. He leaves the house to drive to the tube station, briefly rousing Holly who, if she isn’t already awake, tries to go back to sleep for an hour until the kids come in to wake her up.
Today Holly lies in bed listening until the front door closes, hears his car start up and pull out of the driveway, and when she can no longer hear it she leaps out of bed and runs up to her studio, turning her computer back on, going straight to her inbox and smiling as she sees a reply from Will. Wow, she thinks. Sent at 4 a.m. He doesn’t sleep either.
Dear Curious Insomniac in Brondesbury,
Interesting question. Am thinking that perhaps
there has only been one great love of my life,
however had a lesser love at Durham for Cynthia
Fawley. Worshipped her from afar (seems to have
been a pattern of my younger years) for a year,
ended up going out with her for a year after she
broke up with her muscular but dim-witted
rugby-playing boyfriend. Have had several loves,
unsurprisingly for a thirty-five-year-old, over the
years but none quite as innocent or pain-searingly
sweet as my pre-pubescent dreams. Do you
remember we almost snogged once? You and Tom
let me join in spin the bottle and I spun that thing,
praying to God and promising that I’d never do
anything bad again if I got you, and I did. And we
went into the cupboard and you kissed me on the
lips, and I was desperate to kiss you properly but I
didn’t know how. That kiss kept me going for years
(may still be keeping me going even today)…
Is he flirting with me? Am I flirting with him? What is this? What am I doing? Isn’t this how affairs start? Haven’t I always said I would never have an affair, not after my father? Haven’t I always said infidelity is the greatest betrayal a human being can make? Oh for heaven’s sake, Holly, this isn’t flirting. This is just having some fun. Who said anything about an affair?
And it can’t be flirting. This is Tom’s brother, and Tom’s not even cold in his grave. The last thing Will’s going to be thinking about is this, and it’s the last thing I would be thinking about. How entirely inappropriate would flirting be? There. Settled. This isn’t flirting. This is friendship.
Odd, perhaps, that these questions are even there, albeit not in the forefront of Holly Mac’s mind, so Holly tells herself that she has rediscovered an old friend. That the reason she is sitting in front of her computer at 5.30 a.m., checking emails, is because she is excited at finding the Fitzgeralds again, excited at seeing Will again after all these years.
And so what if there is a touch of innocent flirting going on? How lovely, actually, to be flirted with after so many years of having no one look at her.
Holly used to feel gorgeous, but lately she feels harassed. In her running-around-with-kids clothes she feels like a stressed mum, and in her cashmere sweaters and pearls, out with Marcus in the evening, she feels like a fraud.
Rarely does she feel like Holly, the real Holly. The Holly that Will has known. Perhaps this is why she feels so comfortable, she muses, as she thinks about what to write back.
And if he is flirting gently, so what? Holly would never do anything, and how invigorating to have a gorgeous, single man pay you attention. They will just be friends, she decides, and how lucky to have a male friend, how much she has missed male friendship since she and Tom drifted so far apart.
It doesn’t occur to her that this is almost always how these things start.
Paul rings later that morning. ‘Maggie said you were