‘So what will he do? Do you think he’d ever tell her?’
‘I don’t know. I sort of thought last night, when she seemed to be softening to him, there was a chance. But she had a face like a slapped arse on her when I spotted her running away from him earlier so I think it’s back to business as usual this morning.’ Hattie sighed. ‘Well, it’s none of our beeswax, I suppose. I’m certainly not going to stick my beak in when there’s a risk of my future brother-in-law getting hurt. They’ll have to sort it out between them.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Then that’s that, isn’t it? It’s a pity though. I think they could really make each other happy, if they could just put their past behind them,’ Hattie said. ‘Come on, let’s go see if the kids have got these bacon sarnies going. I’m starving.’
Bridie heard their footsteps retreat as they wandered off to the cooking area.
She slumped back, feeling dizzy. What had she just heard? Ben Kemp, the major crush of her teenage years, the first and last boy she’d ever loved, her worst enemy… and one of her best friends, when you got right down to it. He loved her. He loved her! The only words she’d wanted to hear him say at one point in her life. His failure to do so – his total and utter rejection of her, and his subsequent embrace of what felt like the entire female population of their hometown – had sown the seeds of discord and bitterness towards the whole idea of love. And yet all this time, all these years, he’d…
That meant it was true. He really had fallen for her at school, just like he’d said. When he’d told her that under the layers of swagger and ego there’d been just an insecure, sexually inexperienced teenage boy, falling in love for the first time, confused, terrified of getting it all wrong… that had been true too. He’d hidden his identity at the party, kissed her, not as a trick but quite simply because he hadn’t been able to help it. Tricks and games, taunts and teases, the foundation of their relationship as adults – it was all just a shield to hide what he really felt.
What about her, how did she feel? Her heart was thumping in her ears; her stomach was flipping double somersaults; she felt dizzy, light-headed and sort of strangely elated, but that didn’t mean she had any romantic feelings for him. It was far more likely to be an anxiety attack.
What should she do? Find him? Talk to him?
No, not now. She needed time: time to think. She needed to get through this trip and go back home where she could work things out.
There was the sound of the tent unzipping, and she jumped.
‘Ben,’ she said when his head poked through. Her lips flickered with the beginnings of a smile at the sight of his face. It was funny how different he looked to her, now she knew what he felt. How much softer.
‘I wondered where you’d got to,’ he said, in that deep voice with the eternally laughing edge to it that she knew so well. ‘Can we talk now you’ve calmed down a bit?’
‘Not now. There isn’t time, we have to leave soon. And besides… no, Ben, sorry.’
‘I won’t go until we’re friends again. Look, I’m sorry about the party but I genuinely wasn’t lying. Everything I’ve told you this weekend has been one hundred per cent the truth, I swear to you.’
‘Yes. I know that now.’ She managed a smile. ‘I’m not angry, not any more. It’s just all so… overwhelming. I have to get through this expedition then take time to think about it properly. Will you respect that?’
‘Of course, if that’s what you need. Just tell me you believe me and I’ll give you as much space as you want until you’re ready to talk.’
‘Thanks, Ben. I do believe you.’
‘What made you realise I was telling the truth?’
‘Oh, just… thinking it over. Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so quick to flounce off.’
He smiled. ‘I thought you didn’t flounce.’
‘Maybe on very special occasions,’ she said, returning the smile.
‘All right. Well, you know where I am.’
He withdrew his head and left her alone. Bridie, feeling more confused than she had done since she was eighteen years old – waiting outside the school sports hall in a Monsoon ballgown and a lacy thong set for a date who was never to appear – exited the tent with her head whirling. The bottles of shampoo lay forgotten on the groundsheet.
Nineteen
Bridie sat on her bed, smiling as she flicked through the photo album she’d dug out of storage.
So many memories. Photos of her as a child with her mum and dad in the garden of their old house on Messington seafront, before her parents had left the town two years ago for a seaside of rather warmer persuasion in Italy. Her as a gawky teen with her fringe in her eyes, sitting with the rest of the kids in her English set on the last day of school after GCSEs.
Where was Ben? Bridie scanned the group and soon located him in the back row with the popular kids, next to Louise Marsh, trying to look cool by casting a bored glance anywhere but at the camera.
That was around the time Louise had bragged to Bridie and a group of other girls about how she and Ben had celebrated finishing their exams, with a big bottle of Blue WKD and a quickie under the slide in the kiddies’ playground. Louise had always relished telling stories about her sexual feats to an audience of awed virgins. Had it really been total fiction, all the time? There’d been a lot of detail. Bridie still remembered Louise’s in-depth descriptions of the goodies Ben had been packing underneath his grey school trousers as a sea of unblinking schoolgirls had listened rapt. No wonder she’d always got such good marks for creative writing.
Bridie flipped the page to look at the next photo. Ben was in that one too. It was his birthday party – his fifth, she guessed – and he was sitting behind a huge cake, beaming broadly, with chocolate all round his mouth. Bridie soon found herself in a group of kids behind him, giggling as Ben’s dad Jonny entertained them with a couple of hand puppets.
Ben and Cal never saw their dad now, or spoke to him as far as she knew: not since it had all come out eleven years ago. The string of affairs their mum had known nothing about; the mistresses Jonny seemed to have squirreled away in every town he travelled to in his job as a sales rep. The scandal had rocked Messington. Jonny Kemp had been – or at least, had seemed to be – a kind man, well liked around town and devoted to his family. Bridie remembered him as being funny like Ben, but quieter in his disposition, more like his younger son. And all the time it had been nothing but a smokescreen for his womanising. One day, one of the mistresses decided she’d had enough of being someone’s dirty little secret and contacted Alison Kemp to fill her in on her husband’s extra-curricular activities.
Bridie looked at the little boy in the photo, grinning as if nothing bad could exist in the world as long as there was chocolate and cake, and felt a surge of pity for him. Back when it had all happened, she’d been smarting so much from being jilted at the ball that she’d never fully considered what a horrific shock it must have been for him. She could only imagine what it felt like to discover something like that about someone you loved.
She flicked through a few pages of photos spanning the decades, instantly homing in on Ben in each one he was in. They’d shared a lot of their lives, now she thought about it – the number of photos they both appeared in was testament to that. Here was Ben dressed as a robot for the town fete procession aged about eight, his skinny little legs painted silver and his head in a foil-covered box. Teenage Ben with his arms around two girls in some nightclub, looking mightily pleased with himself. A passport-sized photo of Ben and her in a photo booth, Bridie grinning at the camera while he kissed her on the cheek. It had been taken in the days when they’d been not-quite-dating, not long before it all went tits up.
She stopped on that one for a moment, smiling, before taking it out and slipping it into her pocket.
It was three weeks now since they’d arrived home from the Duke of Edinburgh trip and Ben had been as good as his word, leaving her alone apart from a few businesslik
e messages about the Sten arrangements. Bridie knew she needed to talk to him, but what the hell did she want to say?
Her feelings were… confused, to say the least. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about Ben these last three weeks – in fact, she’d struggled to think about anything else. One minute she’d feel white-hot anger towards him, remembering how he’d kept the truth from her all these years about one of the most painful experiences of her life. She’d reflect on all the bad dates she’d been on, all the failed relationships, every one of them stemming from that formative night of the leavers’ ball when Ben Kemp had stood her up. The next minute, she’d remember the look in his eyes when he’d kissed her at the waterfall, recall everything she’d overheard her friends saying about the strength of his feelings, and experience a rush of fondness for her lifelong friend-slash-enemy that reminded her of those heady days when they’d first become more than just friends.
She’d loved him then, in her naive schoolgirl way. But now she was an adult, and love at seventeen was a long way from love at twenty-nine. Over and over Bridie asked herself the question: how did she feel? Was she in love? In love with… with Ben Kemp?
She stumbled over it every time she tried to think about it. Her brain seemed to be rebelling against coupling the word ‘love’ with the name ‘Ben Kemp’. For ten years she’d been telling herself he was the last person she could ever love, and now she tried to think about whether that had only been a screen for other, deeper feelings – the sort of feelings that might end with her getting hurt again – there was some invisible barrier stopping her from admitting it to herself.
And yet it was Ben, Ben, Ben, over and over again in her head. Visions of him as a kid, and a teen, and a man. All her life he’d been there, driving her crazy. Making things interesting. Maybe she loved him, maybe she hated him, maybe it was a bit of both, but one thing, at least, Bridie was forced to admit to herself: she couldn’t do without the bastard.
She jumped as a knock sounded at the bedroom door.
‘Can I come in?’ Hattie called. ‘Brought you a drink.’
Hastily, Bridie closed the album.
‘Yeah, come on,’ she said.
Hattie came in and put the cup of tea down on Bridie’s bedside table before perching on the bed beside her.
‘The final cuppa, eh?’ she said, smiling a little sadly. ‘I can’t believe I’ve spent my last night in this place. Feels weird, doesn’t it?’
Bridie sighed. ‘It feels awful, Hat. I mean, sorry, I know you’re excited for your new life with Cal and everything. I’m going to miss you something rotten, that’s all.’
‘I know, love. Me too.’ Hattie glanced at the photo album. ‘What’s that?’
‘Just some old pics I was looking through.’
‘From sixth form?’
‘Yeah, some of them.’ Bridie frowned. ‘Why?’
Hattie shrugged. ‘Just a hunch. What’ve you hunted those out for? Feeling nostalgic?’
‘Not especially. I just thought I might stick a few up on the school alumni page.’
‘Any of Cal in there?’
Bridie smiled. ‘How did I know you were going to ask that?’ She flicked to the photo of Ben’s fifth birthday party. ‘There you go. Cute as buttons, wasn’t he?’
‘Aww.’ Hattie simpered at the four-year-old surreptitiously trying to steal a Smartie from a bowl at his brother’s elbow. ‘I hope our kids get his cuteness gene.’
‘That’s their dad,’ Bridie said, pointing out Jonny.
Hattie scowled at him. ‘That prick. He looks so nice, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah, he seemed it too. It was a massive shock when everyone found out what he’d been up to. Although not nearly as big a shock as it was for Alison and the boys, obviously.’
Hattie pulled the album to her and flicked through some pages.
‘Oh,’ she said when she got to the place the passport photo of Bridie and Ben had until recently inhabited. ‘There’s one missing.’
‘Is there?’ Bridie tried to look surprised.
‘Yeah. Did you take it out?’
‘No. Must’ve come loose. I’m sure I’ll find it in a drawer somewhere.’ Bridie took the album back and closed it. ‘You all right?’
Hattie shook her head. ‘How do you always know when I’m not?’
‘I’ve lived with you for three years, Hat. Some women get synchronised periods; I get synchronised mood swings. What is it then?’
She sighed. ‘I was standing in the supermarket queue with Mrs Bradley this morning. You know, Cal’s neighbour? Well, my neighbour as of later today, I guess.’
‘All right. I know Penny Bradley can talk for England but she isn’t all that traumatising, is she?’
‘No, it’s just… well, you know her eyesight’s pretty poor.’
‘Yes, and?’
‘She asked me… she asked me what had happened to the new hairdo.’ Hattie’s tone was filled with suppressed anxiety.
Bridie frowned. ‘What new hairdo?’
‘That’s what I said. So she said she was sure last time she saw me, I’d gone blonde. I told her I’d never dyed my hair; I had a bad reaction to bleach. So she just said “Oh”, and tried to change the subject.’
‘That’s weird.’
‘I thought so too.’ Hattie looked down at her fingers twisting together. ‘Anyway, I pressed her on it and she said she thought she’d seen me going into Cal’s three weeks ago with this new look. She’d remarked on it to her husband; said it suited me.’
Bridie shrugged. ‘It probably was you. Like you said, her eyes aren’t what they used to be. She is eighty-four.’
‘It couldn’t have been me though, could it? We were away on the D of E trip.’ Hattie closed her eyes. ‘And she said… Bride, she said she was sure it must’ve been me, because her and her husband were sitting in their conservatory all night and… and this woman, whoever she was, never came back out. She must’ve stayed overnight.’
Bridie shook her head. ‘Nah. Penny’ll have nodded off and not seen whoever it was come out. Who would Cal be having sleepovers with?’
‘All right, suppose she did come out. Who was she in the first place though?’
‘A mate, probably. He has got mates who are girls, you know. I can think of half a dozen old schoolfriends it might be.’
‘I know.’ Hattie fell silent for a moment. ‘I just keep thinking, that would’ve been the night he was supposed to wait for my call and I couldn’t get hold of him. Then he turned up to camp with that tent, obviously hungover, saying he’d fallen asleep on the sofa. If it was a mate, why be coy about it? I’m not so possessive I mind him having women over; I just worry when he goes out of his way to hide it from me.’
‘He didn’t go out of his way. He just didn’t mention it, that’s all.’ Bridie put an arm around her to give her a squeeze. ‘Hat, you know I’m quite prepared to believe in any amount of twatty behaviour by men, but Cal Kemp is the perpetual exception to that. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. If he didn’t mention it, there’ll be a perfectly innocent reason why.’
‘Like what?’
‘A surprise for the wedding, probably. I bet she’s a baker or something and he’s plotting with her about cakes.’
Hattie brightened a little. ‘Yeah. I guess that might be it.’
Bridie smiled. ‘You know, you never used to be this paranoid before you were getting married.’
‘Bad, isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s the nerves or that it feels like I’ve suddenly got more to lose.’
‘Talk to Cal about it if you’re worried. I’m sure he’ll put your mind at rest.’
‘You’re right. Thanks, love.’ Hattie looked up as the doorbell rang. ‘Speak of the devil. That’ll be him, come to help me finish packing.’
‘Shall we ignore it and hope he goes away?’
Hattie smiled. ‘Sorry, Bride, but we can’t put it off forever. One way or another, I’m moving out today.’
Brid
ie sighed. ‘I suppose I’d better help then, if you will insist on leaving me. You two finish upstairs; I’ll pack up the living room.’
Ben glared at the notepaper he was writing on, covered in scribbles and crossings-out, before crushing it into a ball and throwing it over his shoulder to join the mountain of crumpled sheets currently filling the wastepaper bin in his bedroom.
Ugh! Why was this so hard? The words were all there in his head. It was just getting them onto the page in the right order that seemed to be giving him trouble.
He hadn’t heard from Bridie since they’d come home from the Duke of Edinburgh expedition, aside from some brief, perfunctory replies to his messages about the arrangements for the Sten trip to Blackpool next month. He had no idea, right now, what she was feeling. All he knew was, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Now he’d finally admitted his feelings to himself, he found that Bridie Morgan was in his thoughts night and day. He went to work and every little thing reminded him of her, whether he was taking a group of kids climbing at Little Monkeys’ Junior Activity Centre (monkeys were Bridie’s favourite animal and top of her ideal pets list), leading a canoeing trip (Bridie hated canoeing but had always wanted to go on a gondola ride in Venice) or eating his lunchtime sandwiches (never prawns, because he knew Bridie hated the smell of them on his breath). He thought about her when he was falling asleep, remembering how she’d snuggled into him that night on the expedition and imagining how it might feel to fall asleep like that with her every night. He thought about her when he was actually asleep, when both teenage and adult versions of her haunted his dreams. And when he woke up, she was the first thing on his mind.
He had to tell her. It was the only way to exorcise the Bridie-ghost currently living rent-free in his brain. And if she rejected him, well, then he’d… he’d… shit, she wouldn’t do that, would she? She loved him – Cal had said so. That was all that was keeping hope alive right now.
Love at First Fight Page 17