by Peggy Webb
“No, I didn’t mean that.”
“Of course not, because of Josie, but—”
“Not just because of Josie. I wouldn’t want to lose what we had. It was so beautiful.”
“It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. And when I found that I’d fallen in love with you again—or still loved you—a bit of both perhaps—I thought…” Luke made a gesture of frustration, “Dammit, I can find the words easily enough when they don’t mean anything.” He looked up. “But not with you.”
She brushed the hair out of his eyes, looking down into his face with love.
“Was it true what you told me,” she asked, “about turning back at the airport?”
“Yes. I couldn’t believe that you’d really let me go, but you did. So I turned back. It half killed me to be the one to crack first, but you meant more to me than pride. And you weren’t there.”
“I was too proud to stay,” she confessed. “I walked off at once because I thought hanging around would have been pathetic.”
They looked at each other.
“We could have had it then,” she whispered. “If I’d only stayed a little longer—if I hadn’t put my pride first, we could have been together all these years.” She put her head in her hands and wept.
“My darling, don’t.” He got up onto the bed beside her and took her in his arms. “Don’t, please don’t. It’s no good looking back.”
“But the years we wasted. I can’t bear it. All this time we could have been together.” She clung to him, sobbing in a kind of angry despair.
“Pippa—Pippa, please—look at me, darling—don’t cry—please don’t cry.”
He could almost have wept himself. There was an unfamiliar pain in his heart at the lost years, and her pain made it greater. He kissed her tear-stained cheeks, seeking to console her, for until she was happy again he knew that nothing would go right with him. Suddenly he was kissing her mouth, and it was as warm and soft to him as it had been hard and unwelcoming before.
Pippa reached for him eagerly. She was in Luke’s arms again, and this time it was right. The old magic was working, flooding her senses with sweetness, telling her she was where she belonged. He was hers as she had always been his, and now she was free to tell him so with her lips, her hands, her loins.
A slight tug and her robe fell open. She shrugged it quickly aside, pulled at his towel and they were naked together. He touched her reverently. He seemed to have suffered a mysterious loss of confidence. There was a hesitancy in his manner as though he were asking for reassurance every step of the way. She gave it to him joyfully. She, too, needed reassurance, and she found it in the love in his eyes and the gentleness of his touch.
Pippa had tried to imagine the woman she had become making love with the man he had become, but the vision always collapsed against the memory of their younger selves, feverish and frantic, thinking pleasure was everything. The pleasure was still there, but it had changed character. Once their matings had been fierce, volatile, but always with an underlying tenderness. Now the tenderness was greater, infusing every gesture and every whispered word.
“Tell me that you want me,” he murmured. “I need to hear you say it.”
“I never stopped wanting you.”
“But now—this moment?”
“Now—and always.”
As he entered her, Pippa felt a profound peace overtake her, as though all was now well because she had returned to where she was meant to be. And it was the most wonderful place on earth, a place where the storms were stilled and only joy remained. With his old instinctive understanding of her Luke made love with her now in just the way she needed, cradling her as though she was something precious and breakable that he feared to harm.
As they lay in each other’s arms afterward he said, “There was never really anyone else. Only you.” Certain memories assailed him and he added hastily, “However it may have looked.”
Pippa smiled. “It’s all right. I know what you mean.” And she did.
It had never been like this before. Their young selves had collapsed with exhaustion, not lain together in such deep, healing calm.
“I’ve been thinking,” he murmured after a while. “Perhaps it’s as well that you left the barrier when you did. We were kids. If we’d married then, we might not have lasted. I wouldn’t have left you, but I’d have been lousy as a husband, and you’d have gotten fed up and thrown me out. As it is, we’ve got years and years ahead of us.”
“Years and years,” she echoed wistfully. “Oh, Luke, I do hope so.”
“Of course we have. We’ll see our golden wedding, and I’ll look back and remind you of tonight.” He grinned. “Josie will be sixty by then, fussing around her grandchildren. Can you imagine that? And I’ll be in my eighties, still relying on you to keep me on the straight and narrow. As long as I have you I’ll be all right. But—” his arms tightened suddenly, and for the first time ever she heard a note of fear in his voice “—but you have to be there. I faced life without you once before, but I couldn’t face it again.”
“Hush,” she whispered, “don’t say things like that.”
“I know I’m talking nonsense. It’s just that I can’t believe how lucky I am to have been given a second chance.”
For a while he went on talking in a soft murmur. The future entranced him, and he dwelt on it lovingly as the minutes drifted away and she nestled against the warmth of his body. Then something struck him.
“Hey, I’ve just remembered what I was going to ask you. When you were mad at me you said—what was it? Oh, yes, ‘when it’s almost too late for me.’ What did you mean by that? Darling? Pippa?”
But she was asleep.
Cinderella’s ball lasted for three beautiful days. One perfect moment followed another in such profusion that they both lost the sense of time, and everything seemed to be happening at once.
They talked endlessly, as though no barriers had ever existed between them. Pippa found the photographs she’d brought with her, meaning to show them all to him.
“Things started happening so fast that it kept going out of my head, but I would like you to see them. I’m a compulsive picture taker, and they’ll fill in so many gaps for you. She was one day old here.”
He looked slowly through the pictures. Long ago Pippa had sent him one from this set, and so he’d thought he knew what his newborn daughter looked like. Now he saw that one picture could only convey a fraction of the truth. Here were a dozen tiny Josies, mostly asleep, but one with her eyes barely open, looking bruised and battered from her perilous voyage. Something caught at his throat as he realized that he hadn’t been there to greet her.
But so many other people had been there, he realized jealously. There was Angus and Michael, Liz, Sarah—all the old gang who’d lived at the guest house in those days, crowded around the bed, raising champagne glasses, while Pippa held her little bundle shoulder high for the camera.
But not him.
Here was another close-up of Josie, tiny fists raised high to tell the world that she’d arrived now, and it had better watch out. And Pippa again, also looking bruised and battered, her face full of a touching mixture of triumph and vulnerability.
In all the years apart he’d been thinking of her as the same Pippa, growing a little older perhaps, but the same. Now he saw that the minute scrap in her arms had taken her on to a new stage of life. One where he hadn’t followed.
More pictures. There was his little girl in a pink party dress, facing a cake, trying to blow out three candles.
“Her third birthday,” he murmured.
“That huge giraffe beside her was your present.”
“My—”
“You sent some money and I bought it. It was her favorite. She went around telling everyone that Daddy gave it to her.”
“Pippa—don’t.” He closed his eyes.
“Darling, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to rub it in.”
“I know you d
idn’t. It’s just that it’s all gone, forever. And I didn’t realize.”
There were more birthday pics, third, fourth, fifth, and now Josie was showing the first signs of the child she was today, the face growing finer, the eyes already hinting at a cool intelligence working away behind the childish features.
“She learned to talk early,” Pippa recalled, “and boy did she talk! She was the first in her class to learn to read and she never stopped asking questions. She went around interrogating everyone at the guest house. I told them not to let her pester, but none of them shooed her away.”
He thought of being “pestered” by a bright-eyed little girl who wanted his company more than anything. Like that kiddy in the park in London, long ago, crying, “Daddy, Daddy, come here, I want you.” And her jerk of a father had got mad at her, instead of understanding that he was privileged. But at least he’d stayed with her. Not like another jerk.
Pippa didn’t seem to have noticed his reverie.
“Josie’s like a sponge,” she was saying, “she just sops up knowledge and experience and never forgets. Her teachers think she might be something really brilliant in computers.”
“Not the greatest cook in the world?” he asked, dismayed.
“Only in her spare time.” She laughed. “Look at this one.”
It showed Josie in a blue frock, her head covered in a tea towel held down by a circle of tinsel, clutching a cushion wrapped in a shawl. Beside her stood a scowling little boy, also equipped with tea towel and tinsel halo.
“That’s her being Mary in the school Nativity play. She was seven. The cushion is meant to be the baby. But don’t be fooled by that saintly look. Two minutes after this was taken she had a bust-up with Joseph. He knocked her halo off, and she walloped him with the cushion.”
Luke shouted with laughter. “There’s a chip off the old block!”
“Whose old block?”
“Yours, mine, her great aunt Clarrie maybe. She comes from the same kind of stock on both sides, folk who like to make a nuisance of themselves. Have you got any more?”
“This one was last year, and the Labrador with her is George. He belonged to a lady called Helen, a financial genius who’d stayed with us years earlier. Josie loved her because she could play with George, who was a puppy, and I liked her because she rearranged all my financial affairs so that I was more profitable. Then one day the police called, and the next thing we knew Helen had dumped George in Josie’s arms and vanished out of a back window. She was wanted for fraud, but they never caught her. She sends us a postcard from the Bahamas every Christmas.
“George turned out to be valuable, and as Helen had left his papers we were able to use him for stud, and did very well out of him.” Pippa laughed. “That was how Josie learned about sex. She became his ‘manager.’ He died last year in a car accident. She cried for a month.”
In whose arms? Not his, that was for sure!
They called Josie constantly but were lucky to speak to her. These days all her time was spent at the zoo, where she’d fallen in love with Billy and Tara and Ruby and Gita, all elephants. When they did find her in, she would talk about her new friends as though they were people. It was clear she was having a wonderful time.
“I guess I’ve just discovered another aspect of being a parent,” Luke said ruefully. “It’s calling to say, ‘How are you, darling? I miss my little girl.’ and getting, ‘Daddy, guess what Billy did today!’ I’ve been jilted before, but never for a elephant.”
Pippa chuckled. “You’re learning.”
They were together every moment, except once when Luke left her behind while he vanished for an hour, only to be mysterious on his return. They would talk about driving into town to eat out, but always settle for a candlelit table just inside the French doors overlooking the pool. Afterward they would stretch out on one of the huge sofas, idly zapping television channels, too lost in each other to take notice of the screen, until Pippa usually fell asleep in his arms.
One night he said, “It’s not too late, is it? We can still have it all.”
“Nobody gets it all. We’ve got now, and it’s far more than I ever thought we’d have.”
“Say you’ll marry me,” he pleaded.
“I want to marry you. Oh, Luke, if you only knew how much I want that.”
“That’s good enough for me. Here.” He reached under the cushion and brought out a small box. “This is what I went to buy this morning.”
Inside the box was a ring, set with one large, perfect diamond, and surrounded by a cluster of small ones. She gasped at its perfection.
“I’ll change it if you don’t like it, but I thought this suited you.”
“Luke, I—”
“Please put it on, my love. And keep it. And say that we’ll add another one to it, very soon.”
She slipped it on. It was a beautiful ring, and she kissed it lovingly. He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t said what he wanted.
The days became one long perfect day, until at last it was time to go. The last swim, the last of
Sonia’s wonderful meals, the goodbyes to the servants, who’d been observing everything, doing their bit to help the romance along and then fading into the background, but never so far that they couldn’t watch with delight.
Luke found Pippa sitting by the pool, staring into the water, her eyes fixed on something deep inside her. “Are you ready to go?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. “I shall never be ready to leave here,” she said wistfully. “We were so happy.”
“Because we found each other.”
“Yes, and because we managed to shut the world out. It’s as unreal here as Disneyland. When we leave—”
“It won’t vanish. We have our own reality, and it’ll come with us. We don’t need places, just us. From now on we’ll always be happy.”
“Always,” she whispered. “I wonder what always will mean for us.”
“It means growing old and gray together, and loving each other through everything that happens.”
“And forgiving each other?”
“If that means you’ve forgiven me, then yes. But you could never do anything I needed to forgive. I know that everything about you is good and true.”
“Luke, there’s something I—”
“Hush,” he said, kissing her. “What do we need to say? I love you. I will always love you, until the end of time. Tell me that you feel the same.”
“You know I do.”
“I want to hear you say it. I want you to say it often, for all the times you might have said it in the past and didn’t because you knew I wasn’t ready to hear. Say it, my darling.”
“I love you, Luke—”
“Until the end of time?”
“Yes,” she said huskily. “Until the end of time—whenever that is.”
He brushed a stray lock of hair back with tender fingers. “What a strange thing to say. Time will never end, just as we will never end.”
Suddenly she was clinging to him. “Oh, Luke—Luke—”
“Darling, what is it?”
“Hold me. Don’t let me go.”
She wanted to cry out, “Don’t let me go into that dark place that might take me away from you. I’m not ready—”
“I’ll never let you go,” he promised.
She searched his face. “Luke, you really do love me, don’t you? You’ll love me whatever happens?”
“Nothing could happen to make me stop loving you. Nothing at all.”
They drove back to Manhattan Beach in the late afternoon. At Pippa’s suggestion they left collecting Josie until the following morning. She planned to use this final evening to explain things to Luke. All the way home she was working out how to tell him gently that in a few days she must have an operation that would either save her or not. And if not—she wouldn’t think about that. They would come through this and have a future together. For a moment the wall of black ice was there again, barring her path. She c
overed her eyes with her hand, refusing to see it. In her newfound love and strength she would not admit that it could all be taken away.
The sun was setting as they reached home. “Just time for a dip in the sea,” Luke said.
“All right.” She would tell him over supper.
Just as everything had been silver the night they’d swum in the pool, now everything was deep gold. The beach was emptying fast, the tide was out, and if they turned their backs to the land there was only the empty sea and the sky.
“It’s like having the world to ourselves,” Luke said.
“If we could only keep it like this.” She sighed. “With just Josie. Nobody else.”
“We will. We’ll create our own place. We’re lucky. I’ll make it up to you, Pippa. You’ll be the happiest woman alive. What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly.
“You flinched. What did I say?”
“You imagined it. Let’s go back.”
They began to walk slowly up the beach, hand in hand. At the last moment he stopped and turned, his arms around her waist, leaning back to look at her, golden in the light of the setting sun.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You’ve always been beautiful, but never so much as at this moment, my love.”
“My love,” she echoed softly. “My love, oh, my love.”
“My love, as you’ve always been.” He drew her against him.
“Darling, people will see.”
“Let them. Everyone’s crazy on this beach, anyway. Kiss me, Pippa. We have so much to make up for.”
Keeping his mouth on hers he took her hand and began to tread carefully up the rest of the beach. The few drifters who were out at that time of the evening parted, laughing, to let them pass. The sun was growing richer in color as it dipped to the horizon, and for a moment it seemed as though the whole world wanted to stop and gaze on this golden couple who walked in a golden light to a golden future. Whatever the secret was, it seemed as though they had cracked it.
Across the Strand, then up the walk to the doorway, still with his lips on hers, his body warm against her skin.
“Quickly,” he murmured. “Let’s get inside so that I can have my wicked way with you.”