The Forever Girl (11 page)

“Maybe I’d better not,” he said.

“Why not? Just for half an hour?”

“Because …”

“Because what?”

He did not reply immediately, but after a while he said, “Ted’s coming round.”

She waited for him to invite her too, but he did not.

“I could come too.”

This was greeted with silence.

She tried again. “I could come, if you’d like.”

She heard his breathing. “Actually, Clover, it was just me and Ted. We were going to do some things.”

“What things?”

“Ted’s got a metal detector.”

She persisted. “Couldn’t I …”

“No, Clover, sorry. Maybe some other time.”

There was silence.

“Don’t you like me any more?” It was a wild gamble. He could easily say no, he did not, and that would be the end of the friendship. But he did not. “Of course I like you, it’s just that my mother says that you and I should … shouldn’t spend so much time together.”

She absorbed this.

“What’s it got to do with her?”

He sounded surprised. “She says …”

“You don’t have to do everything your mother tells you, James.” And with that she hung up. She hoped that he would
call her back, chastened, apologetic, but he did not. She sank her head in her hands. Why did she feel so empty, so unhappy? Why should a boy do this? She had never asked for this to happen; all she wanted was to be his friend, forever if possible, but at least for that day, for that moment. She wanted to see him again and listen to the way he laughed. She wanted him to look at her and smile. She wanted it to be the same as it always had been. Which is, of course, what we all want. We all want love, friendship, happiness to last forever, to be as it was before.

13

There was nothing in David’s behaviour to indicate that he knew. She watched him closely over the days that followed the encounter with Alice in the car park. But there was nothing unusual in the way in which he spoke to her; nothing to suggest a change in the polite, but somewhat distant, relations between them. He was busy preparing for a business trip to New York that would take place two weeks later – a trip that he said would be awkward. There were Internal Revenue Service enquiries into the affairs of one of the firm’s clients and he had been requested to attend a hearing. It was entirely voluntary – the Cayman Islands were outside the jurisdiction of the American tax authorities, but the client was asserting his innocence vigorously and had waived any privilege of confidentiality. David was sure that the client had nothing to hide, but he knew that he would be treated as a hostile witness, that he would be disbelieved.

She heard that John Galbraith would be going too. He disclosed this casually, but her heart thumped when she heard it.

“Why does he have to go? It’s your client, isn’t it?”

“I took him over from John,” he replied. “He looked after him for part of the period they’re interested in.”

She searched around for something to say. “John would be good in court …”

“It’s not actual court proceedings. It’s an enquiry.”

“He’d be good at that.”

He was looking at her. They were sitting in the kitchen; he had just returned from work – late – and was drinking a beer at the kitchen table. The air conditioner wheezed in the background. He said: “That damn air conditioner. Has the man been?”

“He came and looked. He did something to it. He was here for only fifteen minutes or so. He was singing some sort of hymn while he worked – I heard him.”

“They’ve all got religion.”

“Well, at least they believe in something. What do air conditioning men believe in … in New York, for instance?”

He raised his bottle of beer to his lips. “The dollar. And at least that’s real.”

She turned up the gas under the pasta she was reheating for him. The smell of garlic was too strong for her, and she wrinkled her nose; but he liked to souse things in garlic; he always had.

“Is John travelling with you?” She tried to make the question sound casual.

“Yes. There, but he’s coming back before me.”

“And staying in the same hotel?”

He looked up sharply. “What is this?”

“Nothing. I was only asking …”

He smiled. “What’s it with John? Do you think we share a room?”

She brushed this aside. “Of course not.”

“You think he’s gay, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “How can you tell? I know what people say, but how can they tell? He’s never said anything, has he?”

“He doesn’t have to.”

She wanted to get off the subject, but he had more to say.

“He’s discreet, of course. People like that often are. Conventional, high-achieving background – a very prominent New Zealand family. His father’s a general, I think, or an admiral – something of the sort. He’s used to not giving anything away.”

She did not react.

“For instance,” David continued, “if he knew something, he wouldn’t speak about it.”

“Oh yes?” Her voice was small, and she thought he might not have heard her. But he had.

“Yes.”

She had her back to him, but she felt his eyes upon her.

She stirred the pasta. It was already cooked and it would spoil if she over-heated it. But it was hard for her to turn round. “That’s good.”

“You know what I think?”

She struggled to keep her voice even. “What?”

He finished his beer, tilting the bottle to get the last few drops. “I think he rather likes me.”

She reached for the plate she had put on the side of the stove. “Likes you? Likes you as a friend? As a colleague?”

A mocking tone crept into his voice. “Come on, Amanda. Come on.”

She dished out the pasta. The odour of garlic rose from the plate, drowning the tomatoes, the onion, the slices of Italian sausage. “You mean he likes you … like that?”

He nodded. “Who knows? I’ve done nothing to encourage him in that view. And he knows that I’m not interested.”

She put the plate in front of him at the table. She and Clover had eaten earlier, but she usually sat down and kept him company when he came in late like this. “He may not know. Or he might think that you … well, that you liked men as well as liking women.”

He began his meal, spearing pieces of pasta on his fork. “I doubt it. And anyway, frankly I wouldn’t care to try …”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I’m going to have another beer.”

She rose to her feet. “I’ll get it.”

It was while she was reaching into the fridge that he told her. “He came to see me the other day, you know. In the office. He stood in the doorway for a few seconds, as if he were hesitating. Then he came in. He said that he wanted to speak to me about something.”

She was holding the bottle of cold beer. Her hand was wet. She did not turn round.

“Then he kind of clammed up. He shook his head and said it had been nothing. He said: some other time. Something like that.”

She straightened up. “Your beer. Here it is.”

He opened the bottle. “Poor John. It must have been something to do with his private life. I would have been perfectly happy to listen to him – he maybe doesn’t have anybody else to speak to – living on his own, as he does.”

She sat down.

“Mind you, it could have been something to do with the office. Jenny is being a real pain in the neck right now. She’s taken it into her head that we need to change all our internal procedures. It’s chronic.” He went on to describe Jenny’s plans and nothing more was said about John. After a few minutes, she made the excuse of going to check that the children had finished their homework. She left the kitchen and made her way along the corridor that separated the living quarters from the bedrooms. She stopped halfway, in front of a poster listing the islands of the Caribbean. She remembered how she had stood in front of it every day, with one of the children in her arms, and read out the list of names and pointed to the islands on
the map. They had been taught to identify them all, from Cuba down to Grenada. Now she found herself staring at Tortola – a small circle of green in the blue of the sea. She thought, inconsequentially, of something a friend had said the other day – “Tortolans – they’re the rudest people in the Caribbean, by a long chalk. They have a major attitude problem.” But could one generalise like that? And people sometimes appeared rude for a reason; here and there, history had left a legacy of hatreds that could prove hard to bury.

If John had not told him already, then he would probably do so on the trip to New York. They would be together, at close quarters. He would say something when they had drunk a beer or two. But why?

The answer came to her almost immediately. Because John was jealous of her and would like to prise him away. Perhaps he thought they would separate, and then David might move in with him – temporarily, of course – but when you had to rely on scraps of comfort, then that would be consolation enough.

She lay awake that night, not getting to sleep until two in the morning. David slept well – he always had done – and did not wake up when she got out of bed to find a sleeping tablet in the bathroom. She did not like taking pills, but these ones worked, and were for emergencies.

The next morning she slept in, and by the time she woke up David had gone to work. The children were up, but Margaret had fed them and prepared them for school. They came into her bedroom to kiss her goodbye, while Margaret hovered at the door, saying that she would drive them, and then go to the supermarket to buy things they needed for the kitchen.

Amanda lay in bed in the quiet house, staring up at the
ceiling. If she had been uncertain what to do last night, now her mind was made up. She would speak to John and ask him, once again, to refrain from telling David. She would remind him that David had told her that he had clearly wanted to say something. She would shame him; she would accuse him of breaking his promise.

She dressed quickly. She knew that John was always one of the first to get into the office in the mornings; she would phone him there and arrange to meet him for coffee somewhere down near the harbour; there was a place that she knew they sometimes went to with clients.

She reached him; he sounded hesitant when he realised it was her. But he agreed to meet her for coffee an hour later.

“I can’t be long,” he said, as he sat down opposite her. “I have a meeting. There are some people coming in from Miami.”

“I won’t keep you.”

He looked at her enquiringly.

“It’s about the other day,” she said. “When I came to see you …”

He cut her short. “We don’t need to go over that ground again. I told you what my … my position was. It hasn’t changed.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Hasn’t it?”

He frowned. “No, it hasn’t. And David hasn’t said anything. It’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.”

“David said that the other day you wanted to say something to him and then changed your mind.”

He seemed puzzled. “Me? I wanted to tell him something?”

She thought that his surprise was genuine. Now she was not so sure that she should have sought him out. “He told me you came
into his office and said that there was something you wanted to say, and then you seemed to change your mind.”

The waitress brought them coffee. He reached for his cup and half-raised it to his lips; then he put it down. “Oh yes. I remember that.” He seemed relieved. “That had nothing to do with this, I assure you. Nothing at all.”

She looked at him silently.

“It was an office thing,” he volunteered. “Somebody had taken money from the petty cash. I had an idea who it was, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to sound David out, because this person works for him, but then I thought that it was wrong of me even to voice my suspicions. It could amount to casting an aspersion over an innocent person’s character – if he was innocent, that is.” He looked at her. “Which we all are, of course, until somebody unearths proof against us.”

She realised that she had been holding her breath. Now she released it. “So.”

“Yes, that’s all there was to it.”

“I’m sorry, I thought that you were going to tell him. I jumped to conclusions, I suppose.”

He looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup. “So it would seem.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d better dash.”

She nodded. “May I say one thing – just one thing?”

“Of course.”

“What I told you was absolutely true. I promise you that. I’m not having an affair with George Collins. I’m just not.”

He sat quite still, looking at her. “You know something? I believe you. So even if he were to ask me, I wouldn’t say anything.” He paused. “Is that better?”

She reached out to take his hand, and held it briefly, squeezing
it in a gesture of gratitude – and friendship. “Thank you, John.”

He smiled at her, weakly. He was tired; at forty-three, he was tired. “The problem with Cayman,” he said, “is that it’s too small. We all live on top of one another and spend far too much time worrying about what other people are thinking.”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. That’s why I’m getting out five years from now. To the day. My forty-eighth birthday. I’ll be in a position to stop work. I don’t want to be an international partner. I don’t want any of that. That’s me off.”

“Back to …” She was not sure where he was from.

“Not back to anywhere. Somewhere new. I’ve been thinking of Portugal. I know people who have moved there. They bought a vineyard – which is as good a way of losing one’s money as anything.”

“I can see you being happy there.”

He seemed to be weighing what she said.

“It’s not that I see you as being unhappy here,” she said hurriedly.

He smiled, and stood up. “But you know I am – you know I’m unhappy. So why say that I’m not? Is unhappiness something we’re ashamed to admit to?”

She shook her head.

“To cheer me up?” he prompted.

She met his gaze. “Maybe. We don’t want others to be unhappy, do we?”

He agreed. “Not really. But perhaps we should allow them their unhappiness, don’t you think? Just allow it?”

“Of course.” She let her gaze wander. It was bright outside, as it almost always was, with that intense Caribbean light that
left no room for subtlety. It was a light that seemed to demand cheerfulness, that somehow went so well with a steel band. Just inside the door, the bored waitress answered her phone, starting an animated conversation that became louder and louder as the emotion behind it rose.
Why you think that? Why you do that?