He didn’t let go of my arm. Instead he pulled me around to face him.
‘You were a lovely little Red Indian today,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forget you. You were so wet, rain was streaming down your hair but you were paddling away. You looked so determined. So …’ he hesitated, ‘ … so beautiful.’
I knew what was coming next and I did nothing to stop it. He took me in his arms, brought his head down to mine and kissed me, a long lingering kiss that tasted slightly of beer and crisps and rain, and was utterly wonderful.
Oh the joy of it! To be wrapped in Will’s arms again, to feel his arms around me, to put my head on his chest and be cocooned in that little world.
We kissed again. And again. Each kiss fiercer than the last. It was strange, the clothes were unfamiliar, the scent of his skin was not what I knew, but yet it was still Will, still the man I loved, the man I’d missed so dreadfully. And now here I was wrapped up in him again. I was in Will’s arms. I was home. I wanted to burrow inside his soggy mac and jacket, feel his skin against mine …
We disentangled ourselves and I looked up at him. He was smiling down at me and his eyes were Will’s eyes, laughing and loving. He started to say something and stopped.
‘I—’ I started, but he put his finger gently on my lips to silence me and I fitted myself back under the curve of his shoulder with his arm around me, holding me tightly against him. We ambled along the top of the town wall, with just an old bike lamp against the dark and the only sound was the lapping of the flood water and the flump flump flump of our wellies.
That Frank Sinatra song drifted back into my mind. They cant take that away from me. I knew I would have this memory for ever.
We came down from the town wall about fifty yards from the Browns’ house. In the darkness of the steps once again we wrapped ourselves around each other and kissed long and hard, not saying a word, just trying to get so much of each other …
Billy finally pulled away and said, ‘It’s all different since you arrived. I don’t know what it is, but you make life exciting. You’re different, you think differently.’
He buried his face in my hair, then kissed my neck, my throat … ‘Oh God, you don’t belong here. It’s as if you come from another world, not another country. All I know is,’ and he took my face and held it gently in his hands so I was looking up at him, ‘all I know is that I think a tremendous lot about you, Rosie. I didn’t mean to, and I don’t want to, but I have. You really are very special. I could love you, I really could. In fact …’ he stopped and looked at me helplessly, hopelessly, ‘I already do.’
It was what I had longed to hear all the weeks I’d been there. I closed my eyes and reached hungrily to kiss him again.
But something had happened.
I could feel his hands holding mine. He was taking my hands and removing them from around his neck. I could feel the strength in his wrists as he pushed my hands away. I tried to push against him, but it was no good. He was holding my arms down by my sides and holding me away from him. ‘It’s no good, Rosie,’ he said, and his face looked desperately sad. ‘I am married. I have a wife and three children. I can’t hurt them. They have done nothing wrong. Don’t you see? They are my responsibility. I can’t let them down, not even … not even for you.’
I stared at him, not believing what I was hearing. Had I won him only to lose him just a few heartbeats later? One look at the pain on his face told me the answer.
‘Carol is a good wife and a brilliant mother. She works hard and we’re happy. We were happy, until you came along. And we will be again. I think you’re wonderful, magical, different from any girl I’ve ever known. I would love to leave everything and be with you, but I can’t. It can’t happen. I must stay here with my family and you must go back to where you came from. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have kissed you. I shouldn’t have said what I said.’
‘But you did!’
I was so angry. So hurt. This was what I had wanted ever since I had first set eyes on him in the newsroom. And now he was saying it was over before it had begun?
‘No! You can’t say that! That can’t be the end. We’re meant to be together, you and I. You’re the only one. There’s no one else.’
Billy put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me gently, sadly. ‘I can’t let Carol down. I can’t. It’s not fair, not right.’
And it wasn’t. He was right. Oh I knew that really, deep down. ‘Then why did you tell me you love me? Just so you can snatch it away! That’s not fair, Billy! That’s not fair!’
‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ said Billy, brushing some of my tears gently away, ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to hold you in my arms. I wanted to know what it would be like. I thought I could just … but I can’t. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry. This has been a magical night and I wish, I really do wish … But it can’t happen. Pretend it hasn’t happened. Wrong time, wrong place.’
Wrong time. Wrong place. And how.
But he was right. How could I blow in and wreck his marriage, his children’s lives? Wrong time. Wrong place.
If Billy and I were meant to be together, it wasn’t in the 1950s. I made myself stop crying. I tried to act casual. It took a few goes to get my breathing under control before I could speak, but I did it. Made a decent fist of it. ‘Well, it was only a kiss. What’s a kiss between friends?’ I said, though my tough-girl attitude didn’t quite work between sniffs. ‘It’s been a funny old day, funny old night. We’ll blame it on the weather, shall we? Here’s another friendly kiss.’
And I reached up and kissed him gently on the cheek.
He bent down and kissed me in return, the same gentle way. I could feel his eyelashes brush my face. I swallowed hard.
‘OK, I’m nearly home now. Goodnight, Billy. See you tomorrow.’
He was still holding my hand. As he let go, he rubbed his thumb over mine the way Will always did. That nearly finished me off. I broke free of him and ran the few yards to the house.
‘Rosie!’ I heard Billy shout. And it echoed strangely over the lake of moonlit water. ‘Rosie!’ as if it were coming from a very long way away. Another time. Another place.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I didn’t sleep.
When I got home the Browns had long since gone to bed. Walking into the kitchen I tripped over sacks of potatoes, tins of paint, a clothes horse, an old wash boiler – all things that had presumably been rescued from the cellar when the flood waters had soaked in. They brought the smell of mud and damp into the normally cosy kitchen and reminded me of Billy and Carol’s house.
There was a pan of warm milk sitting on the side of the stove waiting for me. I heated it up, made some cocoa and crept into the sitting room to the cupboard where the Browns kept a bottle of sweet sherry and another of brandy, for medicinal purposes. Sambo followed me, wrapped himself around my legs, unsettled by all the upset. I definitely needed medicine. It would be months before they got the bottle out. They wouldn’t notice. But it didn’t calm me.
I paced back and forth in the kitchen wondering what on earth I was to do next. Wondering why I was here. I was as confused – more confused even – than when I had first arrived. There was no future here for me and Billy.
OK, maybe I could have tempted him further, persuaded him into an affair, maybe even to leave Carol.
But it wouldn’t have worked. He was good and loyal. And – oh bitter bitter irony – that made me love him even more. He had made promises that he would keep even if his heart wanted to be elsewhere. Even if it left me in despair, you had to admire a man like that, you had to respect him. And his, well, decency I suppose. Now there’s an old-fashioned word.
But Billy was just Will in another age, other circumstances. And, I realised, quite suddenly, that I could trust Will too. In every way, with my life, my future. Why couldn’t I have seen that before? I had built up spiky little barriers all around me, afraid of letting him in, in case he let me down. But there was no need. He wouldn’t. I knew
that now. Once Will committed himself to me, it would be for life. No question. As I would to him. If only I could get back to him to tell him so …
I finally went up to bed as dawn was breaking, but I still couldn’t sleep. When my alarm went off I dragged myself downstairs to get a cup of tea. But even wrapped in my huge blanket of a dressing gown, I was still shivering.
Mr Brown was out looking at the garden. It was a chaos of mud and branches where the river had flooded. Already the water level had dropped right down, but the devastation was clear.
‘I’ll never get that garden back the way it was now,’ said Mr Brown. ‘The bulldozers will be through here soon enough. Still, I might rescue a few of the early spuds.’ He went optimistically down the path to investigate.
I leant over the range, trying to get some warmth into my bones. And you’re not going anywhere today, young lady,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘You’re not well. You got yourself chilled with all that trailing about in flood water. Get yourself back up those stairs into bed and I’ll bring you up a hot-water bottle.’
She did too. And some more tea. And some toast cut into soldiers, which I couldn’t really face, but which was a nice thought. I heard the front door slam a little while later when she went out to work. Then I slithered gently down the pillows and gave up.
I thought about Billy, remembered the way we just fitted together as though we were meant for each other. I thought about Carol and the dark little house and what it must be like now after the river had raged through it. I thought of his kids, especially Peter, so like him, and little Libby. I couldn’t make sense of anything. Where did I go from here?
I tossed and turned, half slept, half woke, dreamt weird dreams, imagined worse. And sometimes when I closed my eyes I could hear Billy’s voice, calling to me from far away.
‘Rosie! Rosie! Are you there? Can you hear me?’
Eventually I got up, re-made my bed and went and had a bath, which warmed me a little. I had got dressed because I couldn’t stand getting back into my night clothes, when I heard a ‘Yoohoo!’ from downstairs. Nothing ghostly about this call.
Peggy had arrived.
‘I saw Mum and she said you weren’t well so I came around to see you. Did you write all the flood stuff?’
She was looking at The News. There was our story all across the front page, with George’s pictures. ‘By our News Staff, it said. I glanced at it. They seemed to have used plenty of it, but it hurt my eyes to read it.
‘I think George took most of those pictures,’ she said proudly. Then she looked up at me. ‘You look awful.’
‘Married life suits you then,’ I said, with only a little bit of cynicism.
‘Yes,’ she said matter-of-factly ‘It does.’
She poured me some tea and cut a slice of the cake her mum had baked for her homecoming. I couldn’t face it and let it sit untouched on the plate, though I managed some of the tea.
Already Peggy looked different. Partly it was because she was so obviously pregnant now and no longer trying to hide it. She’d gone past the early morning sickness stage and had that glow of pregnancy that seemed to light up the kitchen.
But more than that, she had the confidence of a married woman. As she fussed with the teapot and pushed the cake bossily towards me, there was an air about her … She knew she had a place in society, a standing. However it had been done, she had been chosen and someone had made a commitment to her. She was a respectable married woman, and I knew that even though I knew what I knew, she still somehow felt one better than me.
I couldn’t hack it.
But she was looking concerned.
‘Is it just the chill that’s making you feel bad?’
‘I don’t know.’ I was damned if I was going to tell her about Billy. She might have had a long affair with Richard Henfield but right now she was a paid-up member of the married women’s club, and I knew her loyalties had swapped right over without so much as a blush or a backward glance, so I didn’t even go there.
‘I suppose I’m wondering why I’m here really. What’s been the point of it.’
And that’s when I realised I’d got Peggy wrong, because she put down the teapot and gazed at me earnestly.
‘I don’t know where I would have been without you,’ she said. ‘Me and my baby and George, we’re a family now. And that’s thanks to you. If you hadn’t turned up … if you hadn’t got George to come looking for me … I don’t know what would have happened. We’re all here for a reason, Rosie, and I think that was your reason. You saved me and my baby.’
Was that the reason? Could that really be why I was there?
When Lucy went through the wardrobe to Narnia, she and her brothers and sister had a mission to save Narnia, the whole world, not just one person. Everyone who ever travelled in time had some great and noble mission. I didn’t know why I was there, but I knew all that it had really achieved was to make me realise how much I loved Will. And, too, what he was really like if he had the chance to show it.
If I ever got the chance to tell him, I would never let him go again.
I was still wondering how to reply to Peggy when we both heard a strange noise out in the street. We looked up, looked at each other, tried to work out what it was, when we heard it again.
‘It’s a car horn,’ said Peggy, and then, with a squeal of excited realisation, ‘Dad’s got the car!’
She rushed to the front door. Mr Brown was sitting at the wheel of a little black Morris Minor. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it grand?’
Peggy had rushed out to look at it. I had sunk onto the wooden bench of the hallstand, my legs seemingly made of cotton wool.
‘Oh there’s Mum! Cooeee! Mum!’ yelled Peggy down the street. Soon Mrs Brown arrived home from work with a bulging basket.
‘Well, will you look at that!’ Mrs Brown walked all around the car. Mr Brown showed her the boot, the little finger-shaped indicators. He switched the lights on and off.
‘Can we go for a ride, Dad, please?’ asked Peggy, as excited as a two-year-old.
‘Ooh wait, let me get ready!’ said Mrs Brown. She ran into the house, dumped the shopping on the kitchen table and then started brushing her hair. Back in the hall, she took off her everyday beret that she wore to work and instead put on a slightly posher felt hat.
‘You don’t need a hat to go in the car!’ said Peggy.
‘It’s my first outing in our car. I have to look my best,’ replied Mrs Brown firmly.
‘Come on, Rosie,’ urged Peggy as she climbed into the car, ‘you’ve got to come too!’
I really didn’t feel like it. I wanted to crawl back to bed, but they were so excited that it seemed churlish to refuse. Mrs Brown had to get out again, to push the front seat forward for me to get into the back.
‘Right, where shall we go?’ asked Mr Brown. ‘We can’t go down near the quayside because there’s still a lot of water around.’
‘I know, Dad! Let’s go up to The Meadows and see where we’re going to live.’
‘Right you are then.’
Mr Brown turned the engine on. ‘Self starter motor,’ he said proudly. The car hiccuped a bit before we chugged off down the road.
In the weeks I’d been working on The News I had never yet been up to The Meadows. The estate was slightly above the town, the new road curving around from the end of the old High Street. Squashed in the back of the car next to Peggy, I couldn’t see much out of the small windows, though I could feel the car struggling up the hill with the four of us inside it. Ahead of us I could just make out a higher bit of hill full of lorries and cement mixers, but Mr Brown turned off onto the bottom road, the first of the new estate. There were just a couple of vans parked there as workmen were doing the last of the decorating or tidying up.
Peggy and I scrabbled out of the back of the car and I had a shock.
The view from The Meadows was tremendous. You could see down over the town, and the fine old parish church. Although the floo
d level had dropped you could see the river still overflowed its banks. The bottom half of the Market Place was a small lake, and there were fire engines down by Watergate. ‘Still pumping out the flood water,’ said Mr Brown.
The road we were standing in was like a scar on the hillside. The gardens were churned-up mud, but workmen were fitting in fences and the houses looked fresh and new. They hadn’t yet acquired that bleakness so typical of The Meadows as I knew it. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ said Mrs Brown, walking along. ‘They’re lovely houses, so new and clean. And look at the size of those windows! They’ll be lovely and light. No mouldy old cellars here.
‘Proper front gardens, and look, the gardens at the back are a tidy size. Plenty of room for your vegetables there, Frank. And not far to walk into town, Peg. Be a nice walk out when you’re pushing the pram! Oh and look, we’re almost in the countryside.’
True, at the end of the road was a field with horses, and beyond that some woods. ‘What a grand place to grow up. Oh it will be lovely for the baby here. And the air’s so clean. No smuts on your washing up here, Peg!
‘I just hope we get some good neighbours. These houses will be wasted on some of those people from Watergate. Bathroom! They wouldn’t know what to do with one. Keep pigeons in it I expect.’
Peggy laughed, ‘Well there’s you and my dad. Then there’ll be me and George and his mum. And Billy West and Carol and their three kiddies will be moving up here. So that’s a good start.’
I thought of Billy living up here with his family, making a new garden, playing football with his boys, riding his bike down the hill to work, his coat flapping behind him … The thought hurt so much, I bent double.
Peggy and her mum walked up the path of one of the houses and peered in through the windows. They enthused over the size of the kitchen, tiles around the fireplace, the boiler, the concrete shed by the back door. Everything met with their approval and delight.
Mr Brown was poking his toe into the soil in the garden. ‘I’ll get some potatoes in, get that clear, then I think it will do very nicely,’ he said. ‘We could have a bench out here, sit here of an evening and look out over the town.’
The Accidental Time Traveller Page 26