"That's great, Rachel."
"I know. It was a bit of a surprise. I was sure they would have given it to some up and coming kid from head office, not that I'm complaining. But that isn't why I called. Look Tom, I've been thinking about what you said. About us going out together."
"Well,… I was a bit mixed up."
"Now, don't spoil it. I'd really like to see you again. How about tonight? I'll pick you up. Where are you?"
"Paris," I said. Suddenly I felt like a high flier, though this was the first time I'd been out of Middleton in years.
"Paris! Well, it won't be tonight then. When are you coming home?"
"Tomorrow afternoon."
"What's your flight number?"
"BA 1607, I think."
"I'll meet you then."
"Where?"
"At the Airport, silly. Have you any plans for the weekend?"
"Well, I hadn't thought that far yet."
"Good. How about that walk along a beach we promised ourselves?"
"Sounds good."
"See you tomorrow then. Bye."
She rang off, but I remained for a long while, still dripping from my bath and with the phone pressed to my ear until the towel, of its own accord, unwound from my waist to leave me naked and completely amazed. Surely, I thought, this meant something! Rachel was waiting for me at the end of tomorrow - and somehow I had to tell her that I loved her.
Chapter 27
The aeroplane touched down on a wet and cloudy Manchester tea time. I remained in my seat for a while, letting the crush of passengers disembark, not even daring to hope she might be there, for it still seemed incredible to me, the very idea that Rachel Standish was meeting my flight.
The cabin was empty before I made my move, plunging into the bewildering complexity of the airport, eventually to emerge dazed and blinking and mole like into the arrivals' hall. She was there. I saw her before she saw me, thus giving me the chance to observe her candidly for a while as I was swept towards her by the tide of people. She was wearing a tight top and a floral, wrap around skirt, like she'd just walked off a beach. She looked stunning in the mixture of her strangeness, and yet also her ageless familiarity.
It seemed more my place to shuffle by unseen while she gazed into the crowd, looking for someone else, looking for the bright young man who had once been John Ogilvy. But by some mysterious process, some queer unravelling of fate, if only for today, it was me she was looking for.
"Hi," I said, puzzled by the neat little suitcase on the floor behind her.
She started, then laughed. "Tom. You're here."
She kissed me, or at least I felt her cheek brush mine. It was an innocent gesture, but was for me more significant for it being the closest we had ever come together. I felt the texture of her skin against my five-o'clock shadow and I caught the scent of soap. I felt a heat, and for just a moment, from the way she held herself, an impression of a deeper part of her.
"Come on," she said. "Our plane leaves at seven."
"Eh?"
"Majorca."
"You're having me on!"
"No. It was a special deal at the travel agents this morning. Short notice - weekend for two in Majorca. Well? What do you say?" She misread my hesitation. "It's all right isn't it? I mean you said you had no plans or anything. I thought it would be fun."
I felt groggy after my trip. Also I felt dishevelled and grey beside her brightness and her energy. "It's fine. It's,… . unbelievable. It's just that when you said a beach, I thought you meant - I don't know - Formby Point or somewhere."
"Well, there's nothing wrong with Formby Point of course, except it'll be freezing. I've been to this place before, passed through it once - it'll be so quiet at this time of year. And I know we'll have the beach to ourselves. You'll love it."
"I'm sure I will."
I recalled the vision of her last night, and her chastisement for my not being honest and open with her. It was a fantasy, the words had been my own, and yet they had been spontaneous in a way that was entirely mysterious to me, and also prescient.
"Rachel,… there's something I should tell you,… "
"I'm sorry,… . you're tired. Lets find somewhere we can sit down. Would you like a coffee?"
"Rachel,… please,… before we go on, there's something I really have to tell you."
"You look so serious. What is it?"
I hung my head and took a deep breath. "Rachel, I love you."
She looked at me, her expression one of bemusement. "What?"
"I love you."
"That's what I thought you said."
"I've loved you since I was fourteen years old. There hasn't a day gone by when I haven't thought of you, or wondered what you were doing. I have always loved you and you will be a part of me until I die."
There was an understandable and significant pause while she took this in. "You're serious?"
I tried to soften the shock of it with smile. "Yes," I said. "Now, if you still want to risk a weekend alone with a guy who's just told you that, then lead on."
She shook her head as if to clear it. Then, slowly, she returned my smile, took hold of the limp remains of my tie and led me through the crowd. "Let's go and check in."
I followed. I gave myself over to her entirely and I followed, ignoring signs and directions, just letting her show me the way. Half an hour later, we were in the departure lounge. sipping cappuccino, and she was looking at me.
"There's something I'd better do," I said, taking out my 'phone. "I'd better ring Eleanor."
"Sure."
"Eleanor's the woman I'm living with."
She turned her head a fraction, bringing one slightly raised eyebrow to bear, but said nothing.
"The beautiful young woman," I added. "Who I'm living with."
"You've already said that. Except for the beautiful and the young part. She's your sister, I suppose?"
"No."
"Your daughter then?"
"No."
"Lover?"
"No. My stepmother."
"I take it there's a story there. Are you going to tell me about it?"
"Yes," I said. "I think I'd better."
I laid out the bare facts leading up to my living with Eleanor. As I spoke to her, I knew this was a crucial exchange between us, but not because I couldn't bear the thought of ever losing her, more that if she were to go, it had to be for reasons entirely between the two of us and not caused by the interference, however innocent, of another woman.
Rachel waited until I'd finished. "I'm sorry about your dad. Mine passed away last year. Relationships are odd aren’t they? Eleanor sounds nice - you obviously get on well."
"She’s my best, my only friend."
Rachel smiled. "Not your only friend, Tom. Not any more. But anyway, what's the problem?"
"I don’t know. It’s sometimes misconstrued,… if there's anything you want to know, just ask. I have no secrets."
"I’m not the jealous type," she said and then she leaned forward intently. "But there is just one thing: Did you really mean it? What you said before, about loving me. Only there are some things you should never joke about, and you know that's one of them."
"It's not a joke. I meant it, truly. I just never believed one day I'd be sitting this close to you, that I'd ever summon the nerve to tell you so directly."
She glanced away, her eyes darting nervously. I'd unsettled her. "I know you hinted at something last time, about having a crush on me. I'd no idea it had been so serious."
"Please,… . don't worry. You weren't to know."
"I can't believe it. All those years at school and you never said anything. I wish you had. I was desperate for someone to ask me out back then. But no one ever did."
"I was afraid."
"How could you have been so sure I'd say 'no'?"
"Sometime it's easier to hope than to risk having it all dashed by rejection - a coward's philosophy, but that's me."
"I'm an old ghost then?"
I was stung by her perception. Sure, I had begun in Langholm Avenue, months ago, thinking that's exactly what she was, an old ghost come to haunt me, but sitting there close to her once more, it came to me again as it had that night at the Dunnet, the sense of certainty, that all I had managed to do over the years was seal her off behind the thinnest of membranes, only to have her emerge now looking exactly as she had always done, provoking in me the same emotions, the same heat, the same restlessness. She embodied the vital clue to all the feeling, all the emotion my life no longer contained.
"If that were true, I shouldn't feel the way I do about you, not now, not after all this time. I've been feeling confused by the way my life's turned out, and I thought maybe after seeing you, things would be clearer, like touching the past, I suppose. I wondered what it would feel like, just to sit with you, how I would feel inside. I imagined it would be pleasant, a little nostalgic perhaps."
"And how does it feel?"
"Shocking."
"Shocking?"
"Looking through these eyes, Rachel, you won't believe how little you have changed, and how much I still love you. The past twenty five years, the whole of my adult life might as well never have been for all the effect it's had in erasing the memory of you."
She breathed deeply, her breast rising slowly, then falling suddenly as she exhaled deliberately. "And I thought I was going to surprise you," she said.
"You have, believe me. I'm just not sure if it's real or if I'm still dreaming in my bath in Paris."
"You've dreamed,… . about me?"
"We've had many conversations, you and I over the years. Conversations not unlike this one. Except this time, your words are your own, and not from my unconscious mind."
She drew away slowly, shaking her head and smiling in a mixture of disbelief and apprehension. "Tom,… you're,… "
"A nutter?"
"Very open. In fact your sincerity is blistering."
"I'm not normally like this," I assured her. "But then you're not just anyone,… you're Rachel. Rachel Standish."
"And I'd say you were trying very hard to get me into bed."
"Oh no. A man does not set out to seduce a goddess."
"Lest she become merely human?"
"Lest he should burst into flames at the first touch."
She laughed, not unkindly, and turned away. "Tom I don't know what to say, what to do."
"Take me to Majorca," I said. "Find us that beach and let's take our walk."
She nodded, then laid her hand across the table and sealed it around mine. From the short periods I had actually spent in her company and from the pieces of her life's history I had thus far gleaned, I had put together a picture of a confident and energetic woman, not entirely undamaged by her past. There had been affairs, perhaps many, but none had led to happiness and now she seemed to have reached a point in her life where she had come to terms with being alone. But if that were true, I should have stood less chance of being with her than at any other time in her life, save perhaps the better years of her marriage to John. Yet she looked at me now with wide and hungry eyes that had me wondering if it was me she saw at all.
Chapter 28
It was midnight on Majorca. There was concrete and glass and a clean, comfortable air, like springtime in England, and there was a taxi ride down ever narrowing roads until we reached a secluded, white fronted hotel aglow with moonlight. We stepped out into the road and I watched the taxi disappear, then felt the night closing around us, Rachel and I, alone in the middle of an exotic nowhere, the half open door of the hotel beckoning us inside to rest, to shelter, and to an unimaginable fate.
From here my life would either explode into immeasurable joy, or it would sour into an unbearable agony. I could see no middle path, and so I hesitated.
"Right then," said Rachel, but her voice betrayed her own nervousness.
"I can hear the sea. "
She took a long, slow breath and savoured it. "Yes. Can you smell it? "
"I think so."
And we might have stayed there until morning contemplating the sounds of the sea but a figure appeared in the doorway and beckoned us inside. I did not know what arrangements she had made for our stay. Perhaps it sounds ridiculous but I had thought it indelicate to enquire during the flight over. It would have been to brush dangerously close to a subject it seemed I was determined to avoid. The hotel manager, a rotund and jovial Spaniard, led us to the top floor of his modest abode, eventually throwing open a door on the top floor, then stepping aside for Rachel to enter. I held back a moment, thinking he would take the lead and show me to another room, but with a smile and tilt of his head, he beckoned me inside. It was small, he said in tones of genuine apology but he explained it had a balcony overlooking the bay and was thus one of the finest rooms he had.
The bay was invisible in the darkness but the sounds of the sea came louder now, filling the room with its rhythm and its scent, so that I felt sure it could be only a stone's throw away.
He wished us both a good night, then left.
"There's just the one bed then," I observed.
"I know. I'm sorry, there was no choice. I didn't think you'd mind. We're neither of us children, Tom."
"I'm sleeping on the couch then?"
"There isn't a couch, silly." She gestured to the bed. "You'll sleep here, with me."
She turned down the bed, then went into the bathroom. "I'll be out in a minute."
My head was spinning suddenly, the floor moving like the deck of a ship in a storm. I did not want what I now understood might be coming and I had not expected to face it so soon. I did not want to sink myself, so stained by adulthood, inside of Her - she who was so firmly rooted in the innocence of my youth. I did not want Her to become real,.. to become simply,… her..
Had we been adolescents, our date would have been different - a Saturday morning rendezvous in Middleton park, perhaps - the bandstand at ten, then a walk, a talk and an ice-cream on a bench overlooking the lake. It would have been a seduction of course, but its consummation would have been the sealing of her hand in mine - the feel of her skin, and in the weeks to come, perhaps a kiss, my instincts guided by her eyes, her tone, her touch, her smell,… such dizzy innocence! We moved so fast these days,… always choosing sex before ice-cream - and we missed so much.
I waited on the balcony, drawing down great lungs full of that exotic air and when I turned back, she was slipping into bed. I caught a shimmer of thigh beneath a slip of turquoise satin and I felt the panic rising in my chest: Never mind that I didn't want to; I was so knackered by now, what if I couldn't?
She patted the space beside her. "Come on," she said. "You must be tired."
Now there are many subtle nuances of language that are generally wasted on me, words which, when combined with certain situations, can mean something other than what is merely being said. But I had been married for a long time and I understood the word 'tired' in this particular context. She was telling me it would not happen tonight.
"Sure," I said. "It's been a long day. I haven't been out of Middleton in decades, and suddenly I'm jetting all over Europe."
"Let's sleep then."
"Sleep with you?"
"Yes, with me."
She turned off the light, allowing me some privacy while I stripped down to my shorts. Then I slunk into the bathroom, trying to urinate without a sound, for she was certain to hear in such a tiny room. And this was Rachel! Rachel Standish! I showered for ages, leaning back beneath a lukewarm trickle, trying to rinse away the accumulated odours of a long and eventful day. I was about to lie with her and had become suddenly paranoid about my body. It was not perfect, not muscular and firm, but I could do nothing about that - still, I could at least make sure that, whatever it was, it did not smell.
Eventually, I settled beside her, my head sinking onto the pillow next to hers, my body rigid and feeling somehow brittle, like a dry old stick. Still she did not see me, did not know me, even when she
raised herself on one elbow for a moment and laid her head against my neck.
"I wish you'd told me before that you loved me," she said.
I wondered then, as I had wondered many times, those past months, how different our lives would have been now, if I had told her. Perhaps if she'd said 'yes' to me all those years ago, we would simply have run our course like so many teenage romances do. Perhaps she would have tired of me and left me with a broken heart, but cleansed of my love for her.
"I don't think I was ever meant to tell you," I said. "It was not meant to be, not then,… "
"And now?"
"Tomorrow," I said. "Let's take our walk in the sand. Perhaps then we'll know."
I could feel her, the full heat of her softness pressing against the length of my body, from the brush of her hair to the pleasing prickle of her toes against my feet. I could hear the sea and I could smell it as the air wafted in, making the curtains float.
I sealed my palm around the coolness of her arm and closed my eyes. She did not move, except for her lashes which I felt brushing softly against my cheek, blinking slowly,… open, closed,… open,.… closed,… and gradually, I felt myself relaxing into her.
In life, there few cherished moments we are aware of as they unfold. The rest we enjoy in retrospect, and they are pale by comparison. Lying there that night with Rachel, as I sank into the shallow waters which sufficed for sleep in those days, I felt it would always be the most cherished, the most precious moment of my life.
In the morning, I awoke to find her still sleeping, still pressed against me, the two of us glued together by our heat. I moved away a fraction, but carefully so as not to wake her, then I gazed upon her with a growing sense of wonder.
Her shoulders were freckled, like her nose and cheeks, things remembered from so long ago and familiar to me. But then her strap slid down, and a fold of turquoise satin peeled aside, allowing me a glimpse of the voluptuous curve of her breast, and a nipple of the purest, softest pink. I had rarely thought of her with breasts at all, so small, so discrete she had been as a girl, and though it might sound ridiculous to you, it took such a thing now to remind me that Rachel was a mature and experienced woman, a woman in her forties with half her life behind her.
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