If Only You Knew

by Claire Allan

  Dylan was almost delirious at the thought of a proper restaurant meal and Hope laughed as he almost ran to the restaurant doors.

  “Can I really have anything I want?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eyes and Hope had smiled and nodded that, yes, of course he could.

  She didn’t realise that would mean her, at the pool, afterwards.

  Even now, many years after the fact, she couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. There had been a fair bit of wine consumed, she knew that much, and they had decided to walk home from the restaurant afterwards. It was a glorious night – the sky was so clear that she felt that if she had wanted she could just have reached up and pulled a star right down. The roads had been almost deserted – just a few cars tootled past them – no one in France seeming to be in any rush to get anywhere.

  Dylan had looped his arm around her shoulders as they walked through the garden on the way home. She had kicked her shoes off and was enjoying the feeling of the warm grass between her toes. They weren’t really talking – just walking, enjoying the silence of the night sky. Moments like these made it all worthwhile – all the sitting on tiny planes beside obese and sweaty people. All the rushing in the heat to a crowded train or bus with no suspension which rattled your bones until you felt like your brain might fall out of your ears. All the nights trying to sleep while someone or other had a sing-song, or an argument or a water fight in your dorm. All the wishing for air-conditioning. All the sore feet and sunburn and dodgy tummies. This, on a beach in Provence, was what made their round-the-world trip astounding.

  They had walked back to the villa and down to the terrace beside the pool – attracted to the glint of the moon on the water like magpies to silver – and as Hope dipped her feet into the cool water, she had let out a very undignified squeal which prompted Dylan to break into a belly laugh which echoed through the night sky. He had laughed until he was holding his tummy, begging for the pain of the laughing-fit to pass while Hope had told him it just served him right and put on a mock huff as she sat down on a sun-lounger.

  When he followed her, and sat down beside her, she had allowed her head to rest on his shoulder – just as she had done so many times in the past. He had kissed the top of her head, just like he had done so many times in the past and she had looked up to smile at him. And then he kissed her – not at all like he had done in the past. And this time instead of feeling like she was kissing her brother, or Matt Goss on a Bros poster from Smash Hits she felt as if she was being kissed properly for the first time.

  She closed her eyes and gave into the feelings which were coursing through her body. The wine made her shameless and before she knew it her hand had slipped from his neck, to the small of his back while his hand slipped from the small of her back to the curve of her breast. She gasped – shocked and amazed that she felt her body responding to his touch. With a boldness only brought on by the aforementioned wine she moved her hand to his crotch and when he groaned at her touch – a heavy groan from the very pit of his stomach – she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. So, they went, silently, back to her room and then things changed forever.

  The sex was great. Mind-blowinglygreat. Hope might have actually passed out at one stage, it was that great.

  But when they woke in the morning it was as if it had never happened. Indeed, if it had not been for the naked man in the bed beside her, she would have questioned whether or not anything had happened at all. He just got up, went to the kitchen, made her some toast and then suggested a trip to one of the local markets.She wanted to ask him what it all meant but it just seemed like one of those things – one of those mad, drink-induced moments of craziness never, ever to be spoken of again. Every now and again Hope had liked to replay it all in her headbut she was happy to relive the memory and leave it at that. She hadn’t wanted more. She valued Dylan too much as a friend to want to complicate or risk it or any of that old nonsense. Or at least that is how she felt right up until that point, several months ago, when she had realised she was crazy in love with him.

  Back at the terrace, the memory of a more recent tryst fresh in her mind, she slipped the blanket from her shoulders and padded down to the pool – still glistening majestically in the moonlight. She dipped her toes in. Funny, the water didn’t seem so cold this time round and soon she was sitting on the edge contemplating diving right in. Sure, why not? She slipped in, still wearing her cotton sundress, and immersed herself in the moment. She definitely wanted to be there right in that very moment and not in any moment which involved Dylan, Cyndi and the horrible triangle she had found herself in.

  Hope hadn’t closed the shutters in her room before going to sleep so when the sun rose it shone right in, waking her from her peaceful slumber. Still, she thought, it was better to be woken by a ray of sunshine glinting in the window than the noise of naked flesh slapping together in the adjoining room. There were definitely no ear-splitting orgasms happening anywhere in their gorgeous villa that morning and Hope was deeply grateful for that. She realised just how well she had slept – obviously wrecked from a day’s travelling, an afternoon sipping fine French wine and an evening bobbing around in the pool trying to push her memories as far away from her as possible.

  Stretching, she sat up and slipped her feet into the slippers that were by her bed. She decided to make her way downstairs to put on some breakfast. The old habit of having a bacon sandwich ready for everyone in the house was steadfastly refusing to slide and she thought it would be a nice treat for Ava to have something fresh and delicious ready which they could maybe eat on the sun terrace before getting to work.

  The skip would be delivered later.She supposed they would have to go shopping as well – find a supermarket or wander through the local village. She had, at best, hazy memories of it and she wondered would it all come back to her as she wandered down the winding streets. She hoped they would find some time for some Grade A lounging around the pool or perhaps some more sightseeing, but she was under no illusions as to why she was here and she was quite happy to keep busy. Busy gave her less time for thinking – and that day she didn’t want to think. Although she knew she had so much to sort out in her own head, it could wait until she was in better form for it and until Betty’s house had been taken apart and put together again all ready for the new owners.

  Pulling her dressing-gown round her, Hope was just about to leave the room to go downstairs when her phone beeped. Lifting it, she saw a text message from Dylan.

  “We’re just in from work. Wanted to check you had arrived safely? D x”

  “We’re,” Hope muttered in a childlike voice. Everything was ‘we’ these days. ‘No, thanks, we’ve eaten.’ ‘We’re just going to bed’ (most often said with a wink and a giggle), ‘No, we have plans’.

  Hope grimaced at the phone and threw it on the bed. She would answer it later, she thought – they’d probably be off bonking by now anyway. Letting herself have the smallest and quietest of screams, she walked out of the room and padded downstairs where the smell of cooking bacon and fresh coffee assaulted her nostrils.

  Clearly she was not the only early bird in France.

  “Morning!” Ava called cheerily from the kitchen. “Did you sleep well?”

  “The best. Must have been the fresh air. And the wine. Definitely the wine helped. How about you?”

  “Like a baby,” Ava said, her back to Hope as she finished grilling the bacon. “But I’m so used to getting up early with Maisie, I couldn’t lie in even if I wanted to. Anyway, I thought we would get a good breakfast into us and get stuck in.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Hope said. “We should really keep to Betty’s schedule or we’ll never get through it all. She was quite the planner.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Ava said with a smile, sitting down across the large wooden kitchen island from Hope. “Planning is one of my favourite things too. Sad but true.”

  Hope laughed. She didn’t want to say
to her cousin that she had kind of got that impression anyway. The manila folders were a giveaway. As was the way Ava’s eyes had lit up at the mention of extra baggage allowance, the arrival of a skip and the way in which she had got up early, cooked breakfast and cleared up the detritus from the previous night.

  It was refreshing actually, Hope thought, to share with a girl. Her holidays with Dylan had always been so much more chaotic. He left all the planning down to her – and she was notoriously scatty. Each holiday had been peppered with a lost passport incident, or lost tickets, or lost traveller’s cheques. On one particularly memorable trip to Barcelona, they had even managed to lose their luggage – leaving it in the back of a taxi as they skipped into their hostel of choice while singing the Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe duet loudly, and out of tune, together.

  He never cooked her breakfast – unless you counted presenting her with a McDonald’s breakfast – and he certainly never suggested making concrete plans. “We’ll just follow our noses,” he would say, knowing that more times than enough his nose would lead him direct to the beach. And it wasn’t that Hope hated beaches, it was just that she hated beaches. They were relatively boring – especially to someone like her who was completely fish-phobic and wouldn’t dream of swimming in the sea if her life depended on it. And then, of course, there was the sand-everywhere issue. No – she preferred to sight-see, to drink in the local culture. Dylan just preferred to drink in the local drink.

  She took a deep breath and sipped from the coffee cup Ava had put in front of her. Yes, she would follow Ava’s plans and distract herself from the mess her life was becoming and she would not think about Dylan at all. Not even a wee bit. Well, maybe just a little bit. A tiny bit. Such a small bit she would hardly even notice.

  Chapter 14

  Breakfast was done, the dishes were washed (of course Ava couldn’t leave dishes sitting). She had showered and dressed in a pair of loose trousers, a T-shirt and comfy sneakers. She had tied her hair back and sat down at the small table in the living room with Betty’s letters and schedule to make plans. Today was to be ‘bedroom’ day. The next letter would be somewhere – undisclosed – in the bedroom. Bohemian to the last, Betty was making things interesting.

  But there were things Ava wanted to do first. The first thing, of course, was that she absolutely wanted to go to the supermarket and preferably on her own so that she wouldn’t have to explain slipping that pregnancy testing kit into the trolley. She would have to fob Hope off – tell her she would be best fixed staying at home and waiting for the skip to be delivered in case it needed signing for.

  It wouldn’t be easy. Hope knew the area better than she did – she would be able to find the supermarket easily and her knowledge of French was definitely better than Ava’s. All Ava could do was look on with admiration when her cousin had eloquently sorted out the car hire the day before while she herself had only been able to hand over the printout of her booking form and her driving licence. Ah! Driving licence. Hope didn’t have one and wasn’t on the insurance for the hire car – that would be the way of ensuring it was she who went to the supermarket and she was sure Hope wouldn’t mind waiting for the skip. Sure wasn’t that as glam as it got, she thought with a cringe as she set about planning the rest of the day.

  She would pick up some storage boxes, some bin bags, and some more manila folders if she could find them for storing photos and paperwork. And then they would get stuck in.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked as she picked up her shopping list and the car keys.

  Hope shrugged her shoulders. “Honestly? No. I don’t mind one bit. Choice of a supermarket and lounging by the pool until you get back? I can live with that.”

  Ava felt a little bit of a bitch for not telling her the real reason she wanted to go but she simply wasn’t ready to say the words out loud just yet – in fact certainly not before she absolutely had to say them outloud.

  When she woke that morning she had thought, once again, about phoning Connor but something had stopped her. He was the kind of person who liked definites – who would have asked had she tested and when she replied that nope, not yet, he would have told her come back when she had something more concrete.

  Besides, she didn’t really want to tell him over the phone from France. A part of her – the very small tiny almost miniscule part which was not freaking out at the very notion of having another baby to look after – wanted to tell him in a nice way. She had always wanted to be one of those women who bought a pair of bootees and handed them to their husband on a silver platter to announce her pregnancy, or who wrote a “To Daddy” card and handed to him, watching for the change in his facial expression as he read those life-altering words. She had missed the boat on that one with Maisie. She had done the test when her period had been precisely twenty-three seconds late (or some other such absurdity) and had burst into tears when the second pink line had come up. Hearing her wailing, Connor had walked into the bathroom to see her sitting, still on the toilet, knickers at half-mast, thrusting the testing stick right at him. That was not a story they would be retelling any time. Phoning, slightly hysterically, from France would be right up there.

  Grabbing the car keys and gearing herself up for driving on the wrong side of the road to a hypermarket on the other side of the village, she took a deep breath. It was time to pull herself together. Focus on the task ahead. Get what she needed and quit overanalysing everything.

  Hope had wandered from room to room. It was hard to think the house hadn’t been lived in for a few months. Betty had gone into the hospice nursing home in January but the house still had the feel of her in every room. Standing in front of the wood-burner, she could almost see her aunt holding court from her favourite green tweed armchair – her Irish chair as she called it – and urging Hope and Dylan to join her in a sing-song. They would, even though they didn’t know the words, nor the tunes, to many of the old Irish songs Betty sang. They would all give it a bit of gusto on Danny Boy though and, without fail, Hope would notice her aunt wipe a tear from her eye when she reached those famous highnotes of “But come thee back, when summer’s in the meadow!”. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear her voice echo around the room.

  She moved on to Betty’s room, where they were due to start their de-cluttering task – pristine, tidy and as if her aunt had left it just that morning while she went for a walk to the village. A small silver-handled brush still sat on the dressing table, kept company by a host of coloured glass bottles into which Betty had decanted her favourite perfumes. The bed was still made. The picture of a grinning Betty and a proud Claude on their wedding day still hung above the bed. All that Hope noticed missing was the framed picture of Claude which used to rest on the bedside table. She imagined Betty had taken that to the hospice with her. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed and thought how sad it was that she was about to pack up someone’s life for good.

  Needing some air, Hope grabbed a bottle of water and walked down by the pool where she suddenly became aware of someone watching her from the top of the steps by the villa. Stopping and shielding her eyes against the sun, she looked up, assuming whoever was watching had come to deliver the skip in which they would toss the unwanted parts of their beloved aunt’s life.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice called, his accent soft.

  “Hello?” she called back.

  “Are you Ava?” he called, “Je suis – I am – Jean-Luc.”

  Ah, Jean-Luc – he who left wine and chocolate and who Ava surmised was perhaps a lover of their feisty aunt and who was definitely not the rotund French pensioner she had imagined him to be. In fact, he was kind of sexy in a George Clooney meets Dr McSteamy from Grey’s Anatomy kind of a way. She guessed he was in his mid to late 40s, and he clearly looked after himself and was no stranger to the gym.

  “No,” she replied as he started to walk towards her. “I’m not Ava, I’m Hope. Ava has gone to the supermarket. She shouldn’t be long.”<
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  “I was passing and I wanted to check if everything was okay? Betty wanted me to keep an eye on you.” He said it in such a way, with such a gleam in his eye, that Hope wondered what exactly Betty had been telling her neighbour.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re fine. It’s lovely here. We’re just making plans to do what she wished.”

  He smiled. “Yes. It is lovely here. Your aunt, she loved it very much. It made her happy.”

  Hope fought the urge ask him what else made her aunt happy. Indeed, had he made her aunt happy? Was he her lover? The thought made her smile – and also made her just the teeniest bit jealous. Hmm, she thought, I was definitely not expecting that.

  “And you have no problems with the house? It has been empty for a while. I did pop in every now and again but –”

  “No, not that I know of. Everything seems just fine.”

  “Trés bien,” he muttered, pushing his sunglasses off his face and onto the top of his head.

  She wondered should she be inviting him in for coffee. He was about the only living link she had to her aunt right there and then. It seemed likely that he, more than anyone, knew exactly what her intentions for the house were.

  It would be polite, she reasoned, so she offered and he graciously accepted and she found herself standing in the kitchen making fresh coffee for a man who only had to look at her for her to feel the minute hairs of the back of her neck stand on edge. In a good way.