Love @ First Site (24 page)

"Don't tell me, they've found the bastard who did that to your hair?" quips Richard.

"Very funny." Kara's face doesn't even crack a smile. Pausing for dramatic effect, she scans the table to make sure she has the attention of every last one of us. "No, my news is that Dan and I are back together."

My mouth falls open, a small flake of chocolate dropping out and landing on the table. I can't believe what I'm hearing.

"Kara, that's fantastic news!" enthuses Tab. "I'm
so
pleased for you both."

"Thanks. I always knew we wouldn't be apart for long." Kara directs this remark straight at me, her beady eyes gauging my reaction.

Having managed to marginally compose myself by now, I smile benignly. "Great. So when did that happen?" An image of Dan kissing me pops into my mind and I briefly close my eyes to try to blot it out.

"A few nights ago." Her eyes are shining with victory. "He rang and said he was missing me terribly and wanted to see me."

"Really?" I don't attempt to disguise my complete surprise at this sudden turnaround by the man whose final words to me were "It's over for good."

"Yes, so I kept him waiting for a couple of days . . ." She turns towards Madeleine and Tab. ". . . well, you have to, don't you? They mustn't think you're keen . . . and then I agreed to meet him just to talk things through."

"And, voila, you just fell into each other's arms," says Richard, furtively shooting me a derisory look.

"Not quite." Kara smiles benevolently. "Obviously, I had to get a few things straight first and a guarantee that the same thing wasn't going to happen again."

"And you got that?" I ask. This just gets better and better, or is it worse and worse?

"Yep," she says triumphantly, pouring herself another generous helping of wine. "So, whilst you can never say one hundred percent, I doubt very much we'll be splitting up again." Her face takes on a dreamy look. "The making-up bit was
sensational
."

Richard pulls a "yuk" face. "Well . . ." He raises his glass. "A toast to Tab's birthday, to Jess's new relationship, and to Kara being rogered senseless again. Cheers!"

"Cheers!" we all chorus.

Toast over, the conversation moves on to other things, with Richard and Will discussing the merits of rugby player Jonny Wilkinson--though from different perspectives, I suspect. I can hear Richard telling Will that he would "never take part in a sport that has ambulances on standby."

On the other side of the table, Tab, Madeleine, Kara, and Lars are chatting about his new picturephone. So far, he reveals, the only image he's received is one of Richard's ass.

I sit facing them, my body language and expression suggesting I'm engrossed in their conversation, but really I'm in a world of my own, thinking about Olivia. And Kara. I'm still baffled by Dan's change of heart so soon after our conversation.

As for my sister, we have spoken on the phone since she returned home from her mastectomy, and she was trying hard to sound upbeat and positive. But tomorrow I will physically
see
her for the first time.

I will do my utmost to mirror her positive outlook, but inside I'm dreading it.

Twenty Nine

M
ichael opens the door still in his dressing gown. "Blimey!" He looks at his watch. "I don't think I've ever clapped eyes on you at this time in the morning before."

"I woke up at seven and couldn't get back to sleep," I say with a sheepish smile. "Things are on my mind."

"Yes, I know what you mean." He stands aside to let me pass. "Olivia is still in bed, so go up if you like."

I dwell in the hallway, waiting whilst he closes the front door. "How is she?" I deliberately keep my voice low.

He gestures for me to follow him through to the kitchen, minimizing the chances of her hearing us talk.

"Coffee?" He waves the kettle at me and I nod. "In answer to your question, she's as well as can be expected." He wrinkles his nose. "God, that sounds like a real doctor-ish thing to say, doesn't it?"

I smile warmly. "Yes, it does. A husband-ish answer, please."

He lets out a long sigh and I notice how gaunt his face looks, illuminated by the early morning light pouring in through the window. "She's very up and down, to be honest. When she first came back from hospital, she was quite up, hyper almost, gabbling on excitedly about how well she felt and that she was convinced everything was going to be all right. And of course she becomes extremely bright and cheerful whenever she thinks about the children coming back tomorrow. She's missing them terribly." He pauses for a moment and stares out of the window.

"Then?" I say gently.

"Then yesterday, literally just as she'd put down the phone from an upbeat chat with Matthew and Emily, she just went downhill, crying uncontrollably and saying she couldn't bear the thought of dying."

Tears well up in his eyes and he hastily brushes them away, clearly embarrassed by someone other than Olivia seeing him so vulnerable.

"Michael, it's OK." I move forward and put a reassuring arm around his shoulders. "Believe me, I have cried about it until I'm utterly exhausted. I just try to be strong around Olivia, but it's bloody hard."

"Me too." He smiles wearily. "I'm like a robot around her sometimes, because it's the only way I can stop myself from falling apart. I've taken this week off, so I haven't even got work to hold me together."

I pour boiling water into our cups and hand him one. "Michael . . ." I pause, unsure whether I should ask the question, but I
have
to know. "
Is
there still a chance she could die?"

He nods his head miserably. "Yes, I suppose there is, although I have to say that it's only a very small one. The operation went very well and once they've blasted it with chemo, well . . . we just have to keep our fingers crossed that it doesn't come back." He stops and closes his eyes for a few moments, his face wracked with pain. "I'm still trying to get a grip on all of it."

"You're doing just fine." I smile reassuringly. "Olivia's very lucky to have you around . . . you're very lucky to have each other."

"Believe me, I know." He sighs. "Sometimes, I wonder if all this is somehow our punishment for having had such a happy marriage up to now . . . you know, our payback time." He stares up at the ceiling.

"Nonsense," I chide gently. "It's just one of those things. But if anyone can beat it, Liv can." I take my coffee and turn to head upstairs. "I plan to stay here for several hours, so if you want to go out and get some fresh air or whatever, don't worry. I'll be here."

"Thanks," he says gratefully. "I might just do that."

Climbing the stairs to Olivia and Michael's bedroom, I feel the nagging thud of fear in the pit of my stomach. I'm not sure what--or who--I'll find. The door is half open, the room beyond shadowy, its curtains closed to block out the light. I tap gently.

"Come in." Her voice sounds sleepy.

"Hi, it's me," I whisper, stepping into the gloom and peering in the direction of the bed.

She's sitting upright, propped up by pillows, her head lolling back against the brown leather headboard. Her eyes are open but she looks groggy, her hair smooth one side but ruffled the other, where she's been sleeping.

"Hi!" she says brightly, making an attempt to sit up more.

"Stay as you are." I move forward and make a gesture for her to lie back again, not daring to actually touch her. "How you feeling?"

"Not bad actually, considering . . ." She smiles weakly. "Still a bit sore." She touches the area near her right breast, which, in the half light and covered by her nightdress, looks indistinguishable from before. "Look, can you open the curtains a bit? It's terribly gloomy in here, not conducive to feeling cheerful at all."

I oblige, and she screws up her eyes as a shaft of bright light streams directly onto her face.

"Too much?"

"No, I'll get used to it. Just give me a few seconds." She pats the bed. "Now come and sit down. I want to hear everything you've been up to."

The minutiae of my life seem particularly trivial today, but if Olivia wants to discuss it, I'll oblige. For the next hour, I fill her in on Tom, the older gentleman with all his talk of pretty ladies and champers, on Simon . . . yes,
with
the frenzied sex bits . . . and Kara and Dan . . . without the frenzied snog bit, which I'm too ashamed to admit to anyone. Throughout, I'm leaping up and down from the bed animatedly describing scenes, embellishing anecdotes and pulling extreme faces in a bid to make her laugh.

It works, and by the time I get to last night's denouement
of Kara announcing she's back with Dan, Olivia's face is glowing with delight, wrapped up in the scandal of an outside world where others' lives are treading their usual predictable, trivial path, unsullied by life-threatening diseases.

"Oh, Jess, you are a tonic!" she declares, clapping her hands together in glee. "I
told
you I needed you to carry on dating, just so you could come round and cheer me up with your stories. And how's work been?"

"Bearable." I shrug. "The usual bollocky diet of tripe and trivia, although I
did
do a really worthwhile report recently," I add, telling her all about my visit to Sunshine House.

"Those poor, poor kids," she says, tears welling in her eyes. "At least I have managed to enjoy
some
kind of life before getting ill. Their lives have barely begun."

I nod. "I know, although strangely, they seem to deal with it far better than their parents, according to what my friend who works there says."

Olivia mulls over what I've said for a few moments. "True. For all that I'm going through at the moment, I know that it would be one hundred times worse if it was happening to one of the children instead. As a parent, you'd feel so hopeless, wanting to take the sickness away from them and bear it yourself."

I absentmindedly pick a hair from the shoulder of her nightdress. "My friend Ben says they also feel terrible guilt, because they feel that in creating the child, they have somehow created the illness too."

"So what's he like then, this Ben?" she asks, taking a sip of water from a glass on her bedside table.

"He's great." I smile. "Bit of a strange cookie though. He seems very old fashioned in many ways."

"Do you fancy him?" she grins cheekily.

I shake my head. "No. Besides, there's a chance he could be gay. Tab and Will certainly think so, and he doesn't seem to have had a girlfriend for a long time."

"Set Richard on him." Olivia laughs. "He'll find out."

"God, can you
imagine
?" I groan. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone. No, I'm sure Ben will cough up in his own good time, but meanwhile I really like his company and I admire him enormously for what he does."

We lapse into silence for a few seconds, the only sound Michael's travel alarm clock ticking away.

"Have you said anything to the children?" I ask eventually.

She nods. "Yes, a little bit. We had to really, particularly as I'll still be in bed quite a lot when they get back."

"So what do they know?"

"We didn't make a big deal of it . . . you know, building it up and making a somber announcement . . . we just told them casually that mummy has got a blood disorder that's making her a bit tired. It's
how
you relay something to children that's so important."

"So did the casual approach work?"

She purses her lips. "Seems to have done, yes. They asked a couple of basic questions, like would it make me throw up and would I still be able to cook Christmas dinner." She laughs at this point. "So I said yes, and yes. It's especially important they know that I'll be getting sick for when the chemo starts."

"Which is?"

"Middle of next week. I have to say, the thought of it terrifies me more than the surgery I've just had."

I squeeze her hand. "It'll be fine. You always deal so well with things."

She looks unsure, her face crumpling slightly. "I'm scared, Jess.
Really
scared." She clasps my hand as if she might never let it go.

"I know, sweetie, I know." I lean forward and hold her, my face embedded in her hair. "I'm always here for you; don't ever forget that."

She pulls away, visibly composing herself. "Jess," she whispers, her expression worryingly serious. "I need you to do something for me, but it must be our little secret. You mustn't tell a soul."

"Of course, of course."

She points down to the dresser drawer near my feet. "Open that and pull out the green folder that's tucked under the blanket."

Intrigued, I do as she asks and place it on the bed in front of her.

Casting a quick glance towards the doorway, she half buries the folder under the duvet. "Michael mustn't see it, he'd go mad," she whispers, opening it up.

Inside are several sheets of paper covered in Olivia's distinctive handwriting, plus dozens of photographs of Matthew and Emily at various stages in their lives.

"I'm putting together two memory boxes for the children, just in case . . . well, you know." She looks at me apologetically. "I want them to have something to remember their mummy by."

I am, by turns, both horrified and immensely touched at the thought, but I know that now is not the time to express the former. "Sweetie, you are
not
going to die, but it's a lovely idea anyway." I smile.

She looks pleased. "I was really hoping you'd say that. I can't show it to Michael because I know he'd get really cross with me for even
thinking
that I might not be around to see the children grow up."

I flick through the stack of photos on her lap. Matthew, aged about six months, his face smeared with chocolate, Emily being nursed by Olivia on the day she was born, the four of them, suntanned and smiling, sitting in a beachside cafe . . . all snapshots of a normal, loving family.

"And what's all the writing?" I say, pointing at the sheets of paper.

"A history of their lives so far, as I remember it," she says enthusiastically. "You know, little anecdotes like how Matthew became attached to an old dishcloth and took it everywhere with him . . . how Emily once threw up straight into our pediatrician's lap . . . when Matthew was a sheep in the school nativity and mistakenly made a mooing noise . . . and how Emily insisted on wearing a ballet tutu over her trousers for virtually the whole of last winter."

I grin from ear to ear at the memory.

"I know they're just silly little things," she adds, "but when children get older they do love to hear about their little idiosyncrasies, and if I'm not around to fill them in, I doubt Michael will know a lot of it because he's at work so much."

I nod in agreement. "And men tend to remember the big, grand things in life. They're not very good on the small details." I smile. "So, we're agreed it's our little secret. Now what would you like me to do?"

She pushes the paper and photographs back in the folder and hands it to me to replace in the drawer. "I need you to buy me two scrapbooks, some glue, and two fancy boxes that will accommodate the books, plus some other little bits of memorabilia like Matthew's first shoes, and Emily's old blanky. Luckily, I kept a lot of those kinds of things anyway." She smiles.

"Consider it done." I press my fingers to the side of my head in a salute sign.

"Thanks, honey." She visibly relaxes, knowing that her important task is being dealt with. "And besides, if I do hang on in there, which I have
every
intention of doing, then the boxes will still be great mementos for the children, regardless."

"That's the spirit." I smile.

"Oh, and one other thing . . ." Her back straightens slightly again.

"Yep?"

"I don't know if you remember, but a couple of years ago I told you I was putting you down as one of the executors of my will?"

I frown slightly. "Vaguely, yes. Although I wasn't quite sure what it entailed."

"Well, basically, it meant . . . still does mean . . . that if I die, then you would be part of a panel, including a lawyer, Michael and Dad, to make sure that my last wishes were carried out as I requested."

I nod my understanding.

"When I first asked you, it was one of those in-the-unlikely-event-of things, but now of course I've been thinking about it a lot more . . ."