Something in the Air (Skylarks #3)

Chapter 20

20

Nadia was a bag of nerves as she waited at the bench overlooking Whistlestop River. She’d got a coffee and there was a playground nearby where Giles would be able to run off some energy while she spoke to Archie. Yesterday when she’d made contact, she’d half expected to have missed her chance. She’d thought perhaps he’d already be back in Switzerland, or at least be on his way, but he was still here in Dorset, which spoke volumes about how much he loved her sister and his family. It also made her realise the hell he’d been going through these past weeks, the emotional turmoil he had to be feeling with Monica still not in contact. She’d focused so much on her own feelings and pushing the past away that she hadn’t been able to be a sympathetic ear for anyone. And for that, she was ashamed. At work, she gave it her all, the personal touch, she was a good listener, she advised and counselled. But she couldn’t seem to do it with her own family.

‘Nadia!’ Giles ran over to her at the bench, arms out like he was pretending to be an airplane. Nadia could do nothing else other than embrace him in a hello hug.

‘He’s been cooped up in our Airbnb all morning given the rain.’ Archie was carrying a cardboard tray with three drinks pushed into the sections.

‘Can I go?’ Giles had already lost interest in the adults with a roundabout, swings, a seesaw and a climbing frame in sight instead.

‘Off you go,’ said Archie. ‘I can watch from here.’

Giles charged over to the climbing frame first.

‘I’m glad you called, Nadia.’ Archie noted the coffee cup already in her hands. ‘However, this was my peace offering, and you’ve kind of ruined it now.’ He was just like the Archie she’d met at university, the Archie she’d hung out with in cosy cafés in Zurich, the Archie she’d studied with and quizzed, him returning the favour, each ensuring that both their brains were packed full of knowledge.

‘I’ve finished this one already.’ She slotted her empty cup into the vacant hole on the cardboard tray and he indicated which was hers. She looked at the third cup. ‘Giles drinking coffee already?’

‘Not quite. The third one is a juice. But he wanted it in a coffee cup like us with the lid with the spout.’

‘Ah, I see.’ She sipped the fresh coffee. ‘That’s good. Even better than the first.’

‘You always did like your coffee.’

She smiled. ‘Have you heard anything from Monica?’

‘Nothing. And I don’t know what to do. I thought she would’ve made contact by now. I try and tell myself that she knows we’re close by, Giles and me, that we are her family and we love her. But it’s eating me up inside that she hasn’t reached out. Just a text would do. Anything.’

Nadia watched Giles when he called out from his position at the top of the climbing frame with an, ‘I’m the king of the castle!’

She turned back to Archie. ‘You must feel helpless. How are you explaining this to Giles?’

‘I’ve explained his mum has a few things she needs to work out, I’ve turned this into a bit of a holiday, more of a trip to see his auntie. He seems to have accepted it. I don’t want to upset him unnecessarily, you know.’

‘I think it was the right thing to do. No point having him worry too; you’re doing enough of that yourself.’

He nursed his coffee cup in his hands. ‘Thank you for getting in touch again. It makes my reasoning with Giles more plausible for a start.’

‘Glad I helped. Does he want to go home? Is he missing the familiarity?’

‘He’s all right at the moment, distraction is working, a new auntie, new surrounds, but I’m going to have to think about it soon. I toyed with the idea of leaving him with a friend back in Switzerland but I thought if Monica was to know he was here too, she might be more likely to come to us. If she gets in touch, I’ll get him on the phone; he needs to hear his mother’s voice and I think she needs to hear his too.’

‘Apart from coming to England when I first left Switzerland, has she ever done anything like this before?’

‘Gone off somewhere?’ He took a welcome sip of coffee. ‘No.’

‘What happened that first time?’

‘When your mum died, it hit her hard and more so because she knew she’d lost any kind of relationship with you. She became desperate to make amends, she felt totally cut off. I wanted to come to Dorset with her, help her find you, but I couldn’t; I’d landed a really good job and I knew her search was a long shot. I also knew I couldn’t stop her and so she came over by herself. After a few weeks, when she couldn’t find you, she returned home to Switzerland, devastated, her head all over the place. She pushed me away at first; she thought she didn’t deserve me because of what she’d done. She knew she’d driven a wedge between me and my friend and that just added to everything else. She knew she’d got away with a lot when she was younger; she told me sometimes, she wished your mum had been harder on her: perhaps it would’ve helped her grow up a bit. But she never did and so it was left to you to tell her to pull herself together and she never took that well.

‘She was so disappointed that she couldn’t get in touch with you to invite you to the wedding – she didn’t have her sister, she didn’t have her mum, she didn’t have her dad to walk her down the aisle, and a wedding day without any of her own family was almost too much for her to bear. The day was still wonderful, but it was tinged with a sadness I’m not sure even I could make up for. She told everyone that you were working in England and couldn’t get time off, that it was an important step in your career.’

‘People must have thought I was terrible. Not coming to my own sister’s wedding.’

‘Actually, they didn’t. Monica made sure people knew you had a great job nursing, that your skills were very much in demand, that taking time off wasn’t an option and that you’d celebrate with her when you were next home. I think she even believed what she was saying half the time. She was proud of you.’

‘I didn’t think?—’

‘That she cared so much? Of course she did. She idolised you. It might not have seemed that way, but she really did. I’m not a psychologist but from what she’s said over the years, that was part of the reason she was always in trouble. She longed to be like you, to be approved of by you, but she knew she wasn’t.’

‘How did you two even get together? I never asked.’

‘Right place, right time, I guess. You might see it as wrong place, wrong time, but I fell in love so quickly with your sister. It was about a month after you and I split up. On a tram in Zurich. She was travelling around and she got on board with the biggest bag of chocolate you’ve ever seen.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘We went for coffee, a walk, and we saw each other the day after, then the day after that. At first, I thought she was using me to get one up on you but I soon realised she wasn’t. She was different to the girl I’d seen at your house that Christmas, the girl you’d told me about so many times. Away from home, on her own, she seemed to have grown up a lot. She still had all this energy but she put it into things like hiking, bike rides, outdoor swimming.’

‘That sounds nothing like Monica.’

His expression said it all: this was the woman he’d fallen in love with, not the woman Nadia remembered.

‘She’s changed a lot. She had time travelling – she went to every place in Switzerland she could think of, then after your mum passed away and you left, just when I thought she might never pick herself up, she did. She got a job in hospitality working at one of the nicest hotels I’ve been to, she worked hard, and we were happy. But she never lost the regret for hurting you.’

‘When you talk about her, I don’t recognise my own sister.’

‘That’s why I’m telling you all these things. She’s a good wife, a wonderful mother. She’s a hard worker, she volunteers at a local school helping kids learn to read, and she never gave up hope of seeing you again.’

Nadia tried to absorb everything he was saying. ‘Then why hasn’t she come forward?’

‘I don’t know. I wonder if she’s scared too: scared you’ll tell her to get lost. If only she’d call, I could talk to her, make her realise that you might want to see her as much as she wants to see you?’

It was a question, not a statement.

‘I don’t know, Archie. It took me time to be happy again. Her taking you from me was the worst – I mean, losing a part of my relationship with Mum because Mum had so much to deal with when it came to Monica was bad enough, but you were the one person I never thought I’d be without. You were something I thought she couldn’t take from me.’

‘Six months after you caught us together at your mum’s place, Monica really broke down over it all. She didn’t seem too distraught at first but over time, as I got to know her and her barriers came down with me, I could see how much it had affected her.’

It was a comfort to know that something so major for Nadia hadn’t been just a joke to her sister – that was how Nadia had felt and it had given her a pain she couldn’t tolerate, an urge to get away that she couldn’t ignore.

‘I’m glad you found each other, Archie.’

‘Really?’

‘In an odd way, yes. I didn’t see it, not until now, now you’re here. Seeing you worry and the fact you’re doing everything you can for Monica shows me that it wasn’t for nothing. I just hope she does the same for you in return, that this isn’t a game for my sister.’

‘I swear, if I thought that, I wouldn’t even be here.’

They watched Giles for a while until Nadia admitted, ‘I’m happy in Whistlestop River, Archie, have been for years, but in the moments I’ve let myself, I’ve wondered whether things could’ve been different.’

‘That’s human nature. The what if? question.’

‘Do you ever…’

‘Think about us?’

‘Well, yes. I mean, there was a baby.’

‘I’ve never forgotten what happened, Nadia. Never.’

‘Did you tell Monica?’

‘I had to. I wanted to be honest with her from the start and I expected the same in return.’

‘Did she care?’

‘Of course she cared. But she also knew you wouldn’t want her to try talking to you about it.’

‘No, I wouldn’t have wanted that.’ She would’ve closed the door in her face, physically and metaphorically.

‘She did care,’ he said. ‘I can promise you that. She asked whether I wanted to walk away, said she’d understand if I did because of my friendship and history with you. I’m sorry, Nadia, but I didn’t want that. I’d fallen for her by then, I couldn’t imagine not having her in my life.’

She looked over at Giles, who leapt off the climbing frame and came barrelling over. Archie handed him his juice without even asking whether he wanted it. He downed it in a few big, thirsty gulps.

‘You want some time with your iPad?’ Archie asked his son.

But Giles was already running away back to the playground.

Archie smiled. ‘I guess that’s a no.’

‘He’s a lovely little boy. And look…’

Another boy about Giles’s age had arrived and already he and Giles were racing together around the base of the climbing frame.

‘He is, and Monica adores him, which makes this so hard because I’m starting to wonder how she can stay away from him for so long. But if her head is in a similar space as it was when she came back from England last time then perhaps she’s not thinking straight at all.’

‘Do you think she’d do anything that might put the baby at risk?’

‘Apart from travelling over six hundred miles so close to her due date, you mean? No.’

Giles’s giggles had them both grinning as they turned to watch him and the other little boy on either end of the seesaw, sending it high enough in the sky that their little bottoms came off the seat each time it was their turn to go up.

‘I’m going to have to go back home to Switzerland soon,’ said Archie. ‘I have work. I just hope she gets in touch with me before that but I can’t stay on indefinitely, much as I’d like to.’ He turned on the bench to face her. ‘I’m sorry about everything, you know. I’m sorry about the way things were in Switzerland and that you felt you had to leave.’

She looked him right in the eye. ‘I don’t regret it. That might sound harsh but I don’t.’

‘I understand why you left and Monica does too.’

‘You’ve turned into a wonderful man, Archie. You seem a good husband and father.’

He smiled but before he could reply, his phone rang and when he pulled it from his pocket and answered, his face said it all.

The call was from Monica.

He put it on loudspeaker because he was struggling to hear her.

And hearing Monica’s voice after all these years had emotions pinging all over the place for Nadia. It was joyous, painful, hopeful, scary.

‘I’m sorry… didn’t call earlier.’ Her call kept breaking up.

‘It’s fine. You’re calling now,’ said Archie. ‘Where are you?’ He had the phone right close to him, still struggling to hear with the bad connection.

‘Outside,’ the word came eventually.

‘Outside where?’

Nadia looked at Archie; she swore Monica just said, ‘Your place.’

Archie must’ve thought the same. ‘You’re back in Switzerland?’

It sounded like they’d lost the call, but then came the word, ‘Dorset.’

‘Where exactly are you?’ Archie asked.

The connection seemed to be hanging in there.

‘I’m outside the address the police gave me,’ said Monica, ‘but you and Giles aren’t here. Archie…’ The unmistakable sound of crying came down the line. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I want to go home. I’ve caused so much trouble.’

‘You haven’t; I’m just glad you called.’ Tears welled in his eyes.

‘I need you,’ Monica sobbed. ‘I need Giles. I left you, him, I shouldn’t have.’

And now Nadia felt like she was intruding in this conversation by listening in.

‘Don’t apologise, we just want you to be okay,’ said Archie. ‘Don’t panic. Monica…’

No answer.

‘Monica,’ Archie said repeatedly until he got a response.

‘The baby…’ Her voice didn’t sound right, it was contorted as if each word was hard to get out.

Nadia waved Giles over but he wasn’t budging; he was happy with his new friend. She was about to go over and get him when she heard Monica cry out.

She turned to see Archie’s panic and heard her sister wail even louder. ‘The baby… I think it’s coming!’