When You Walked Back Into My Life (2 page)

Flora nodded sympathetically. ‘The problem is you’re a sitting duck, living right under their noses.’

‘Not the only problem in my life though, eh?’

Flora gave him a wave and moved off towards the main entrance. She liked Keith, he was endlessly kind to Dorothea, helping her out with small tasks in the flat whenever
Flora asked, such as fixing the bathroom light or recalibrating the Freeview box, but she didn’t feel inclined to listen again to the tale of his miserable life since he’d been forced out of the Army – his one and only passion. His back, the cause of his discharge, was fine now, he insisted. But for him, life was over.

‘Will you be here for the next half an hour?’

‘For you, Florence, I’ll be here a million lifetimes.’

His attempt at flirting was accompanied by a theatrical sigh that made her laugh, and even brought a smile to Keith’s heavy, lugubrious features.

As soon as she was outside she took a long, slow breath, happy to be in the open air on this late-summer’s day, the air sharp with a hint of approaching autumn but still pleasantly warm. Twelve hours in the flat, always on duty even when Dorothea was having her afternoon nap, was wearing, and she relished these brief moments to herself. She turned right down Gloucester Road, towards the Underground station, crossed the busy Cromwell Road and entered the arcade on the corner. The supermarket was at the far end, and she dawdled … checking out the face cream in Boots, which she decided she couldn’t afford, peering into the expensive jewelry boutique.

The store wasn’t busy yet. She took a hand-basket and began in the fruit and vegetable section. A Bramley apple
or some plums to stew, leeks – Dorothea’s favourite – carrots, a couple of potatoes for mash. Maybe she’d get some chicken today … a change from the endless poached fish. She was picking out tomatoes for her own lunch, when an arm reached rudely across her and plucked a bag of organic carrots from the box to the left of the tomatoes. No ‘excuse me’, no apology. Flora, irritated, turned to glare at the owner of the arm, and froze. For a moment she held her breath, then her heart began to beat twenty to the dozen.

‘Fin?’ She was surprised that any sound came out.

The man, obviously equally taken aback, just stared at her for a moment.

‘Flora.’

She knew her pale cheeks were flushed, she could feel the warmth. She brushed a hand self-consciously across her hair, collecting the dark strands that had come loose from the band and smoothing them flat.

‘God, Flora. Is it really you?’ Fin McCrea kept staring at her.

He looks just the same, she thought, just as beautiful. Tall and athletic, he stood well over six feet, his hair, sun-bleached, sticking out from his head in a wild tangle she was painfully familiar with. He wore jeans, and a faded red T-shirt sporting a Save the Children logo, the ubiquitous black daypack slung across his broad shoulders.

‘What … what are you doing here?’ he was asking.

‘Shopping?’ She smiled and so did he, his light grey eyes creasing with amusement. ‘How about you?’ she added. ‘Not your usual neck of the woods, West London.’

Flora talked, but she hardly knew what she was saying. It had been all but three years – she knew almost to the hour how long – since she had seen him last.

Fin put his basket down by his feet and shook his head. ‘Long story. I’m staying with a mate at the bottom of Queen’s Gate. I had a pretty bad fall in January.’

‘What happened?’ She asked more to give herself time than because she wanted the grisly details.

‘I was in Chamonix, guiding this old Italian, and the ledge I was standing on collapsed … sodding rock just fell off the side of the mountain. He was OK, miraculously, but I smashed into the rock face and just broke up. They flew me back to the UK and it was all mending fine, except the pin in my leg’s playing up now. I had to go back into hospital.’

As he talked, she just watched him, watched every movement of his face, noted his square hand clutching the strap of his bag and the golden hairs on his permanently tanned arms.

‘But everything else is OK?’

He shrugged. ‘S’pose … I had a bust pelvis, compound fracture of my thigh.’ He tapped his right leg. ‘Two cracked
lumbar vertebrae, God knows what else – the docs got bored of telling me. Can’t stand London, as you know, but it’s easier to be near the hospital for all the follow-up stuff. They’ve put more metal plates in me than a Sherman tank.’ He looked questioningly at her, as if he were waiting for her story now.

‘Sounds as if you’re lucky to be alive.’

‘Lucky to be alive
and
walking, so the doctor says,’ he agreed, his face breaking into an uncertain grin.

There was a paralysed silence. Flora didn’t know what to say, where to look; adrenaline was coursing through her body making her shaky and cold. She clung to the black plastic handle of the basket as if it were her lifeline.

‘I’d better get going. I’m on duty,’ she said eventually, but remained rooted to the spot.

‘You’re not at the Charing Cross are you? That’s where I’ve been … on and off all year. How weird would that be? Us in the same place and not knowing it.’

‘No, no, I’m doing private nursing at the moment – just down the road. I needed a break.’

Finlay McCrea and her, standing in the middle of a London supermarket, making polite conversation as if they were old mates catching up? She suddenly needed to get away from him.

‘Flora.’ As she turned to go, he reached out and touched
her arm, sending a shock through her body as if he’d been electrically charged. ‘It’s … incredible to see you. Seems like a lifetime. Don’t go without telling me how I can get hold of you.’

She felt a spurt of anger. ‘What for?’

He looked surprised at her tone. ‘Well, er, I thought we could meet up. Have a drink or something while I’m around?’

A drink? It sounded so normal. As if going for a drink could ever contain the maelstrom of feelings she had for this man. ‘Sorry … it’s … it’s not such a good time. I’ve got a lot on.’

She noted his crestfallen expression. ‘But it’s been good to see you too,’ she added, hearing the formal, almost prim tone of her voice as she hurried away and instantly regretting it.

The rest of the shopping was conducted in a blur. She moved up and down the aisles, plucking the necessary items mechanically from the shelves, not daring to look up from her task in case she saw him again. She felt lightheaded, but she kept focused until she was safely out of the store, then almost ran back to Dorothea’s flat as if the devil were on her tail.

Keith hadn’t moved from his desk. He looked up as she shot round the corner.

‘No need to panic. I haven’t heard a peep out of her.’

‘Oh … thanks, thanks for keeping an eye.’

‘You OK?’ He peered at her through the gloom of the hall.

‘Fine, yes.’ She smiled brightly and hurriedly closed the door of the flat behind her, only able to relax when she had a physical barrier between herself and Fin McCrea.

*

That evening Flora stood in her sister’s immaculate, state-of-the-art kitchen, telling her about the supermarket encounter. It was nearly nine – Flora only finished work at eight, and Prue was just back from a gallery opening in the West End.

Prue took a wine glass from the cupboard and set it on the polished black granite worktop with a sharp click. She poured out red wine from an already opened bottle of Australian Shiraz and handed it to Flora, her face set and angry.

‘Bloody man.’

Prue, three years Flora’s senior, was about as unlike her sister as it was possible to be and yet still be related. She looked good for her forty-four years, her clothes classic and expensive, giving only a passing nod to trend. Her hair, short, layered and tastefully blonde, framed a round face, seldom seen without extensive make-up; her nails were long, manicured, and varnished a rich, shiny crimson. The
only similarity to her sister was her gold-flecked brown eyes. Financially ambitious from an early age, Prue was now an interior designer of considerable fame and popularity amongst the international set with homes in London; she never stopped working. Her husband, Philip, a lawyer, was usually the one at home making supper for their teenage daughter, Bel.

‘He wanted to have a drink with me,’ Flora said. She had somehow managed to get through the rest of the day with some semblance of normality. Rene had come round for tea with Dorothea, the doctor had visited, Mary, the night nurse, had bent her ear about what they would all do if Dorothea died. So she hadn’t yet had time to make sense of what had happened.

‘And you said no, right?’ Prue asked, not really concentrating as she checked her BlackBerry and replied at once to whatever message she’d just received – Prue’s phone was never more than grabbing distance from her hand. Laying it temporarily on the counter, she opened the fridge and pulled out a box of butternut squash and sage ravioli, a bag of watercress, a lemon and a block of Parmesan cheese. ‘Have you eaten?’

Flora shook her head. ‘Where are Philip and Bel?’

‘Bel’s staying with Holly … getting up to some unspeakable fifteen-year-old mischief, no doubt. And Philip is having
dinner with an old college mate.’ Prue stopped what she was doing to peer closely at her sister. ‘You didn’t give him your number, did you?’

‘No, no, of course I didn’t.’ And then she burst into tears.

‘Darling … come here.’ Prue wrapped Flora in her arms and held her close. ‘Poor you, it must have been a terrible shock.’

Flora rested in her sister’s embrace for only a moment before pulling away and wiping the tears away with the back of her cardigan sleeve. Prue made a disapproving face and passed her a piece of kitchen roll.

‘It
was
a shock.’

‘What was he doing in Waitrose in the Cromwell Road for Christ’s sake? He spends his entire life up a mountain.’

‘He had a bad fall, he said. He was in Charing Cross Hospital getting his leg fixed.’ Flora took a gulp of wine and pulled herself up onto one of the high beechwood stools that lined a side of the square island in the centre of the kitchen. Her sister’s house always amazed her. She realised, of course, that it was Prue’s calling card for her design business, but still, there was no mess anywhere, none of the normal clutter, nothing out of the cupboards and drawers at all. Just clean, blank lines and gleaming surfaces, punctuated by an occasional art work, an elegant vase of flowers, some tasteful arrangement of fruit. Not even salt and pepper
mills or a bottle of olive oil sullied the black polished perfection of the kitchen.

‘Serves him right, stupid sod.’ Prue smacked a pan of water down on the stove, repeatedly jabbing at the controls of the black ceramic hob until the halogen plate was glowing.

She leaned across the central island. ‘You don’t
want
to see him again, do you? After what he did? You’d be insane.’

‘No …’ In the face of her sister’s indignation, Flora wasn’t going to argue – too much like hard work right now – but it didn’t seem as black and white to her. Part of her wanted more than anything else in the world to sit with Fin McCrea and talk and laugh – and perhaps experience the intense sexual energy that had always existed between them. But part of her wanted to run a million miles in the opposite direction, so terrified was she at the thought that she might depend on him in any way again.

Prue looked at her suspiciously. ‘You don’t sound at all certain.’ She topped up Flora’s glass and went to check on the water. It had boiled, and she tipped in the ravioli, prodding with a wooden spoon to separate the pouches.

‘I suppose I’m not.’

‘Uh?’ Prue spun round, letting out a gasp of horror. ‘Flora!’

Flora held up her hand. ‘OK, OK, I know what you’re saying and I agree, of course I do. But …’

‘But nothing. You can’t go there, darling. You really can’t. Eight years together and he walked out on you, never called you, never even wrote. Just disappeared up one of his sodding, bloody mountains.’

Flora met her sister’s angry stare. ‘I know all that.’

‘No, you can’t. Not if you’re even contemplating spending a single second in that bastard’s company.’ Prue paused, as if she were gathering together her arsenal before an attack. ‘He broke your heart. He wrecked your career. He made it unlikely you’d have the children you always wanted, and he sent you into a depression that you’re only now recovering from. What part of this sounds like a good idea to you?’

Flora had to admit Prue was right, but that didn’t mean that meeting Fin hadn’t triggered all the feelings that, for nearly three years, she’d been trying to quash. Mostly unsuccessfully. The therapist to whom she’d been assigned when she’d been depressed had said she needed ‘closure’, to be able to draw a line under the relationship. But how could she do that without learning why he’d walked out on her so suddenly? Perhaps, she thought, it was important to see him again: to realise for herself what a selfish bastard he was, rather than just being told so by everyone else. She ignored the voice in her head, which said, ‘That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.’

‘Hello? Speak to me …’ Prue was waving the spoon in front of her sister’s face.

Flora smiled. ‘Sorry. Just thinking. You don’t need to worry. It’s not like he’s after me any more. If he was he’d have got in touch years ago. He knows where you live.’

Prue looked away for a moment. She seemed to be about to say something, then apparently changed her mind.

‘Anyway, I didn’t give him my number.’

‘Bloody good thing too,’ Prue pursed her lips, glaring off across the room. ‘It’s not
his
agenda I’m worried about …’ she added.

*

After supper, Flora made her way downstairs to the flat in the basement of her sister’s large Cornwall Crescent house near Ladbroke Grove. However irritated Flora got with what she considered her sister’s blunt, pragmatic approach to life, it had been Prue who had scooped Flora up after Fin’s defection and brought her to live with her and Philip. Later, when she fell badly behind with the mortgage payments on the house in Brighton, Prue had suggested she sell up and stay with them, rent the basement flat on a ‘mate’s rates’ basis. Flora had reluctantly agreed, helpless in the face of her incapacity. Her only certainty back then, which had been a steady beacon in her darkness, was the absolute certainty that Fin would come back – today, tomorrow, next
week … But as the months passed and he didn’t, her depression deepened.