Why is he looking at me so strangely? I’ve never seen that expression on his face before.
‘Just tell me that you never slept with another man while you were away from me. Tell me that and I will have the peace of mind I need.’
I hesitate as I feel my face growing instantly hot.
The truth. He’s asking me to simply tell the truth, but how do I dare? My throat feels like it’s swelling up to twice its normal size, closing up because of the lie I’m going to have to tell now. I have to say it because if I don’t, then I lose everything, the Yanomami will lose everything.
I lift my face skywards, eyes closed, feeling the dank, humid raindrops splashing on my skin. For a second, my mother’s grave flashes before my memory. Her little, unobtrusive, barely-marked spot that hardly anybody knows is even there or cares about. I wanted to make a difference! Not like her. But still, in part, I wanted to do it for her. And I wanted – I grasp Gui’s hand desperately – I wanted someone to love me as much as this man loves me, as much as that man who forgave his wife and built her a monument with that fabulous marble angel. All these things flicker through my mind in an instant.
Oh Gui, I want you to tell me that it doesn’t matter, what I did. I want you to tell me that you love me enough to forgive me and maybe…maybe I can come to make you feel the way I do about things. Maybe you will still help my people?
I gulp.
‘I never slept with anyone, Gui.’ I say it. I say it looking him straight in the eye, but something fails me, something fails me and he knows it. He sees it.
‘It is a virtue, Scarlett, to be an honest woman. But it is one that betrays you now, do you know that?’
Red Balloon
Luciendo is insisting that she send this one off too, Mairie explains to her son’s bemused guests. The ten-year-old’s party has gone well. Her husband Alto has just spent the last half-hour filling an assortment of animal-shaped balloons with helium gas from a canister and the kids are about to let them all off into the air. Including the one on which she took that careless driver’s number down because Luciendo wanted that one to go off, too.
The American’s already been pulled in by the police, so Mairie doesn’t need his numbers any more. That envelope brought them good luck, she reflects with some satisfaction. The man’s been thrown in jail for a couple of days and he’s been ordered to pay for the repair of her car too. Maybe it’s only fitting and fair that she should send this balloon message off again, she tells the curious parents of her party guests – who knows, with a strange name like that on it, maybe someone will actually know the girl it was intended for and she’ll get it one day? She’s a romantic at heart, she tells them, she likes to believe in such things.
Alto has already cut away the old balloon and attached a new one, bright red, just the same so it’s good as new. He’s pumped up about twenty animal balloons for the kids and now they all go out to the balcony to let them off. The wind conditions are perfect today, Alto declares. There’s a steady high breeze and the afternoon sun is as warm as an oven on everyone’s backs as they lean out over the balcony, watching their animals take flight. Whoever’s balloon climbs the highest or travels the furthest before disappearing has been promised a special prize.
Birthday boy Luciendo claims it in the end, though there are some suggestions that Alto may have pumped up the giraffe a little more full of helium than the other animals. Others claim that the red helium balloon went the furthest before dropping out of sight, but while Mairie doesn’t refute that, Luciendo still gets the prize because, as she says, the red helium balloon doesn’t actually belong to anyone, does it?
Scarlett
I watch Gui as he turns on his heel, head down, and makes straight back for his jeep.
‘I’ll send some people out to fetch you,’ is all he mutters to Barry on the way back to the road. After a moment of shock, I make to go after him but Barry steps in front of me before I get the chance.
‘Let him go.’ His voice is regretful; he shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what’s just happened between you two but I’ve only ever seen him look like that once before – when someone reneged on a business deal. I think you’ve lost him, Scarlett.’
‘No, Ican’t have.’ I could have told him the truth, oh, if only I’d just told him, like he asked me to…I could still come clean, I could still make it all right.
‘I know him.’ Barry is saying quietly. ‘He won’t change his mind.’
‘Scarlett.’ Emoto is back at my elbow now, hissing into my ear.
‘What?’ I scowl at him. Why can’t they all just leave me alone?
‘It’s the Yanomami. I’ve just spotted them on the opposite bank. I think they’re waiting for you to say goodbye…’
I rush to the water’s edge again. On the other side, the mist has come down even lower, shrouding the trees in a nebulous glow. The bridge is gone. There is no way I will get to say goodbye to any of them, now. The mist is so low, I can’t see anything! I stand as close as I dare to the water’s edge, looking out over the river, but it’s as if everything that was on the other side has just gone, disappeared into the fog – the little gap between the trees which leads back to all our tents and all the things we left behind; the rock on the riverbank where I mixed up those powders just this morning – it’s all invisible now.
‘They’re over there, look.’ Emoto takes my hand and gently guides my line of sight to a group of what looks like faint shadows in the mist. ‘There’s José, look, he’s waving at you – see?’
I stare for a few moments, my eyes watering with the effort, till at last I can make out his shape. I can make out half a dozen outlines, but they seem to be moving on now. Only the little one is still there, hesitating, as if he’s looking out for someone. I lift both my arms up and wave them up and down frenetically. The sound of a macaw echoes through the trees and I imagine its flash of bright feathers, gold and green and blue. I cannot see it. It’s all fading now, like a dream fading from my sight when I wake up of a morning to the real world.
‘Over here, here!’ I like to think my young friend sees me. I don’t know. ‘Emoto -’ a sudden thought hits me – ‘did you get the chance to bring anything of mine away from the camp? Anything at all?’ He looks blank. ‘Did you get my monkey paw?’
He shakes his head, smiling sadly. ‘Scarlett, I don’t think even that would have the power to reunite you with them now…’
‘But I haven’t even had the chance to say goodbye! This can’t be it, the end. There’s got to be some way I can get back to them…’
‘I don’t think there will be, Scarlett,’ Barry is saying, beside me. ‘The flooding goes on for miles around here, there’s no other way to cross. And it looks like PlanetLove are pulling out of here for now. Even the weather has worked against us. Sometimes you’ve just got to accept when a thing is over…’
But I haven’t got anything to show for it! And these people were my friends.
‘José!’ I screech, lowering myself perilously close to the water’s edge. He sees me now, he does, I know it. And I think that, through the mist, I can just about make out his wave. After a while, he lowers his arms and melts away into the forest along with the rest of his people.
That’s it then.
‘I’m not going to see them any more, am I?’
Emoto looks at the ground. ‘It’s worse than that, Scarlett. I have a feeling you may not be seeing Guillermo Almeira any more, either. Are you sure you still want to pass up my offer of getting some seeds for you to put in for the Klausmann? You’d still be eligible.’
‘What are you on about, Emoto?’ I look at my Japanese friend uncomprehendingly.
‘The Klausmann.’ He indicates my former boyfriend’s jeep retreating into the distance now. ‘By the looks of it maybe you are still going to need it, after this.’
Hollie
I turn at the bottom of the garden, allowing myself one final glance at the newly planted chaenomeles under which we p
laced Ruffles’ ashes yesterday. It’s near enough to the coal bunker where he spent so many happy days with his mistress when they were both younger. He didn’t go back down there after she left this time; I think he knew that she wasn’t coming home.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and try and pull myself together.
‘OK. All ready?’ Rich has appeared looking all dapper and suited up for the big celebratory event tonight. I don’t think either of us feel much like celebrating but it’s the big re-opening of Rochester Bridge celebration down at the Bridge Warden’s chambers and there’s no way we can’t not go.
‘Did you post off that letter you wrote to PlanetLove, in the end?’ Rich takes my hand as he walks alongside me. He knows now, all about how I helped Scarlett get the Amazon job. We’ve come clean with each other on a lot of things over the past few weeks. I confessed to how the horrible jealousy I’ve felt towards Scarlett over him has been eating me up. He opened up and was able to say how he regretted ever going along with me on it. But he’d never choose her over me, that much is clear.
It’s not been the easiest time in the world but it has been healing, being able to strip everything back to its bare bones -a bit like Scarlett’s room.
‘It wouldn’t have brought her back, you know,’ I say at last. ‘Even if I had posted it. I thought long and hard about what ruining her reputation might do – about whether she really deserved that. She didn’t, because it was me who switched the papers, not her. I’d have had my revenge, but in the end, I couldn’t go through with it. What would have been the point?’
‘You don’t think if she lost her job she might have been forced back – to the UK at least?’ The slightest tension in his voice betrays his feelings. It’s his child too, I remember with a pang. He must want to know, at the very least, if it still exists.
‘I don’t imagine anything on this earth would entice her to return, now. She’s stubborn as a mule, you know that. She’s guilty and ashamed and if she did come back here and I found out that she terminated the pregnancy – which she may well have -I’d…I’d just start feeling bad about her all over again. Maybe I’d rather not know.’
He puts his hand into mine and gives my fingers a tight squeeze. ‘It’s your call. Perhaps one day we’ll know the truth. Put a brave face on now, love. We’re nearly there and I see they’ve got the paparazzi out in force too.’ We can see a photographer from the Kent Messenger and a van marked ‘BBC South East’ out front. I need to get my head back in gear. We’re here on a PR exercise tonight: Rochester Bridge is back in action, they’ve got the new bridge picture hanging up in the entrance hall and it’s all systems go. I plaster on a smile, gripping Rich’s hand a little more tightly…
‘How about you? Did you manage to get hold of that woman from the National Trust?’
He inclines his head a fraction. ‘She was very interested in coming back to see us in the morning. I explained we’d be likely to give them a leasehold for three years only in the first instance, just in case things didn’t work out and we needed to return, but…’
But we won’t return, once we leave here. I don’t believe that either of us will want to. I have had to accept that I may never know what has happened to my sister and the baby she was carrying for me. So, we’re gearing up to leave this place instead. I’ve been dreaming of a house in the mountains in Trieste where the air is sweet and still; of waking up in the mornings to the faraway blue of the sparkling Adriatic, ripe olives and sunshine-bright lemons for a salad picked from my own tree…a whole new dream.
Richard drops my hand and turns to me to smile. ‘Your arm, my lady.’ He offers me his and we leave the garden, the rusty latch dropping into place behind us as we start making our way up the Esplanade. It’s early evening, still sunny and bright. The sounds of music and merrymakers coming from the castle grounds beyond remind me of happier days; fair-time again.
A solitary red balloon drifts off into the blue evening sky. Has anyone made a wish on that one, I wonder? And do wishes ever come true?
Scarlett
‘Did you ever try and get hold of Gui in the end?’ Emoto hands his last wine gum to the toddler gawping at us over the top of the coach seat in front. The child snatches it and sits down. ‘Make that call you’ve been putting off for the last three weeks?’ ‘Nope.’
‘Nope?’ His dark eyes are looking at me intently. ‘So it wasn’t just the cramped conditions and lack of privacy at Eve’s flat in the city centre that stopped you from making the telephone call there?’
‘I changed my mind about him, Emoto, that’s all. I had to. I realised that maybe there are some things we can’t go back on. Me lying to him was one of them. But we wouldn’t have made such a fab couple in the long run, would we?’
Emoto shrugs. ‘Everyone else seemed to think you two were pretty cool together.’
‘We were using each other, that was all. Every time I tried to imagine what I’d say to him if I called, I could see that more and more. Besides, he hasn’t tried to contact me, has he? And he’s the one who walked away.’
My Japanese friend shifts his body round so he’s facing me. ‘Does that mean you’re a free woman now, Scarlett?’
I manage a laugh, looking pointedly down at my swollen belly. Hardly free. ‘You offering to take me out on a date?’
Emoto smiles disarmingly. Bloody hell. He’s actually shy, not aloof as I’ve always thought. Why did I never see that before?
‘You’ll be getting on a plane to Tokyo after London,’ I remind him, ‘and I’ll be entering a contract into slave labour for the next three months…’
‘Barry set up that temporary au pair’s job at his brother-in-law’s hotel for you then?’
I nod unenthusiastically.
‘Why don’t you just go home, Scarlett?’ he says feelingly.
I turn my head as the loud hiss of the coach signals that, at last, we are on our way out of Manaus.
‘I can’t go home,’ I tell him thickly. ‘I wish I could, but I can’t.’
I can feel him looking at me curiously for a few moments, his eyes darting over my face till eventually he lowers his gaze.
‘Perhaps for the best, eh? If you’re still here then some other environmental group are bound to pick you up. Would have been better if you could have stayed on with Eve maybe but with the way things were…’
‘Yeah,’ I offer up a wan smile. ‘I wasn’t exactly flavour of the month by the end, was I?’
‘It did get a bit…cramped,’ he admits. That’s one way of putting it. ‘Hardly surprising,’ he runs on, ‘five of us cooped up in a two-bed flat while we were trying to regroup and figure out our next move.’
‘Yeah. I thought Barry’s offer was the better one, which is why I’m on this coach with you now. And I’m glad, you know, Emoto. This is the first time we’ve been properly able to get to know each other, isn’t it?’
‘I’m glad, too,’ he says. ‘And once you get the award, you just wait, they’ll be queuing in the aisles to offer you another job…’
Ah yes. The award.
The two-year-old in front is staring at us again. He’s just thrown his dummy at Emoto’s head and Emoto grins, bending to retrieve it for him.
‘You’re going to make someone a fantastic daddy one of these days,’ I say before I can stop myself. ‘And you’re going to get the Klausmann,’ I add to cover up the confusion the last statement has thrown us both into. ‘I won’t be submitting any seed samples so that means I’ll be no longer eligible. Don’t try and dissuade me either. I’ve had the last three weeks to think long and hard about this.’
It wasn’t just the thought of Duncan, waiting in the wings to expose me as a wrongdoer, that swung it in the end. It was discovering that Emoto really was the one who deserved it. It was never my thesis that impressed them all so much. It was my mother’s. Her work did do some good in the end, though. It brought me to this place. It gave me this opportunity. I won’t use it to steal away Emoto’s bi
g chance now.
Emoto pushes his short dark hair up into spikes on his head and rests his trainers up on the seat in front of him. The toddler lets off a high-pitched scream and he promptly removes them, grinning guiltily.
‘You don’t have to do this, Scarlett.’
‘I do, though, Emoto.’
‘Come on! You don’t want to spend the rest of your life pulling hair out of plug-holes and straightening people’s beds, do you…?’
‘Not the rest of my life, you wally. Just till I’ve got myself sorted, that’s all.’
‘And have you figured out yet how you’re going to do that?’ He arches his brows and looks pointedly towards my belly.
‘Yes,’ I tell him assuredly. ‘I’ve got it all planned out. How I’m going to manage…things and stuff.’
He snorts, because he knows me better than that. I lean my head back against the seat now, feeling my lids starting to droop. If only I could let my sister know how very sorry I am for all the pain I caused her. What wouldn’t I do, what wouldn’t I give, to take it all back? But she wouldn’t want to know. She wouldn’t believe me, anyway.
And who can blame her?
Hollie
‘So, the Italy move is going ahead?’ Bea’s face falls, a picture of disappointment. ‘So soon? What about the cottage? Please don’t tell me the developers bought it?’ Our neighbour is looking very alarmed.
‘Now we wouldn’t do that to you, would we, Beatrice?’ Rich grabs a couple of glasses of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray for us ladies. Nobody can say the Bridge Wardens don’t know how to put on a party.
‘It’s going to the National Trust. They’re mooting plans for opening up the garden and serving cream teas and such to the coachloads that come to see the castle.’
A Sister’s Gift Page 36