Chapter 3
Everything really stepped up a gear about six months later.
Despite our best intentions, we hadn’t been able to meet up as often as we had planned for a while because of family issues. Of course, life had changed for us all in so many ways. Other people still had calls on our time.
Anna’s sons and their families had both been moving house, one to Scotland and the other to Cornwall, and Anna and Rupert seemed to have been constantly whizzing up and down various motorways with laden cars to help out or give their opinions of properties.
Harriet had recently retired from academia, and her twin daughters had finished their degrees and gone off travelling for a year in a flurry of passports and backpacks and unrealistic promises to keep in touch on a daily basis.
My son had finalised his breakup and come back to live at home with me ‘for a few weeks’, a nebulous time which by then had extended into five months.
My garage was full of his belongings; the fridge was nearly always empty.
I suppose if I was honest I didn’t mind that much. He was company of sorts.
Despite his erratic working hours and newly blossoming social life, he was good fun, if a bit high maintenance.
Everything had to be planet friendly and carbon neutral.
We had enjoyed some spirited discussions about vegetables, paper towels and shampoo, which of course was fine, but his principles didn’t seem to cover his gas-guzzling car or his many recent mini breaks with his friends to places like Morocco and Turkey.
The three of us were enjoying a little mini break of our own one day, together in glorious, May sunshine, almost a heatwave actually, and having by then thoroughly caught up with the details of each other’s past lives, we were starting to contemplate the future.
And considering I had felt as though life since my divorce had been almost stagnant, this made a lovely change.
In fact, the more I faced reality of life as a divorcee and the possibilities, the more I could start to hope that life still had something to offer me.
In a strange way reuniting with Anna and Harriet had helped with this and made me remember the person I had once been, back then when the whole of my adult life was ahead of me.
‘Don’t you think it’s time we did something different?’ Anna said that afternoon as we shared a bottle of Pinot Grigio on the terrace of Sea Spray, the adorable holiday cottage in Devon Anna and Rupert had bought for family gatherings many years previously.
Harriet, who had been lying back on her sunbed with a towel over her legs because she was self-conscious about a scar from her recent knee operation, opened one eye and looked suspicious.
‘I can almost smell the trouble from here.’
Anna laughed. ‘We need to think of the future.’
‘How odd, that’s exactly what I was thinking,’ I said.
‘We’ve all retired now,’ Anna said, ‘all those years of slog and being good, chasing after our kids and utter tedium. Don’t you think we deserve a proper treat? Not just a few days in Devon, but an actual full-blown escapade.’
We considered this for a few moments.
‘Escapade; something involving adventure, daring or excitement,’ Harriet murmured. ‘I’m not terribly sure about that.’
‘Are we still allowed to have adventures? I haven’t been on a proper break on my own for years. I mean one without the kids or Feckless Freddy,’ I said.
This was my polite nickname for Frederick, who had been my husband for nearly thirty years. I had called him far worse.
After the first gloss of being married and moving into our first house and having our son had worn off we had muddled along like most married couples I suspect, until the inevitability of his roving eye and his conviction that he could do better than me as a life partner had kicked in.
At that point in my life, Fred and I had been divorced for nearly seven years.
Anna tutted. ‘No, we might be too old for some things, but surely we are never too old to have fun. After all, the secret to a long life is to keep showing up, and that’s what I intend to do.’
‘And me,’ Harriet said, sitting up a bit straighter.
‘My girls are out of the country for most of a year doing good deeds in Thailand and I’m a bit aimless if I’m honest. I’m all in favour for us having a different sort of adventure.
But a nice one this time. What about a gorgeous five-star hotel in Tuscany?
A week at a spa? I could certainly do with that.
Somewhere with a heated pool so Lizzie can show us if she can still do racing starts and tumble turns. ’
Anna pulled a face. ‘Well yes, but that sounds a bit ordinary. And sensible. I’ve been to so many spas, and they are all the same.
I haven’t had anything like a proper adventure for – well, I can’t remember.
Rupert is nearly seventy-three and he’s as fit as a flea, but he’s a bit reluctant to do anything different these days.
And if I’m honest I’m fed up with either coming down here to Sea Spray where I know every rock and blade of grass or going to Rye to visit his parents’ graves.
Remember that summer we all went Interrailing? Now that was real fun.’
‘We didn’t all go,’ I said peevishly, ‘if you remember.’
Anna looked blank for the moment and I was outraged that she could forget something so significant.
‘You did. I was sure you were there when we met up with those Australian surfers in Biarritz.’
I was shocked to the core. ‘No, I jolly well wasn’t! You must remember? My father wouldn’t let me go. I had to work in Bowens Bank all summer. Being Miss Stevens in charge of the filing cabinet and washing up the coffee cups.’
Anna looked disbelieving. As though I was lying or perhaps losing my memory.
‘Really?’
The feeling of disappointment swelled in my throat, that she really had forgotten.
‘Anna, you know perfectly well she wasn’t there,’ Harriet said, pushing her glasses up her nose.
‘Are you sure?’ Anna said, frowning, and looking even more sceptical. ‘So that can’t have been you who missed the train in Ulm.’
‘Where the heck is that?’ I said, exasperated.
Harriet flapped her hand at me.
‘Near Munich. We stayed in a lovely place near the cathedral. There were bats.’
‘And that lovely waiter – Hans – who had the hots for you. We had to leave town to get rid of him.’ Anna chuckled.
‘Oooh yes,’ Harriet said, looking a bit sad, ‘he was so sweet. But a hopeless kisser. I was never sure if he had taken out his chewing gum first, which spoiled the mood. Gosh, I’d forgotten about him.’
Anna nodded sympathetically. ‘And then we went to Rome and your cousin Tom got off with that girl who worked in the museum. And we didn’t see him for two days and he nearly missed the train to Florence.
I can remember you hanging out of the door trying to stop the guard from closing it. It was so funny.’
‘I didn’t think it was at the time,’ Harriet murmured, ‘not at all.’
‘Oh but it was!’ Anna insisted. ‘Don’t you remember that woman on the train screaming at us, Lizzie? I laughed so much I was nearly sick. And then Tom leapt on at the last minute and fell over her bags.’
Strange how she remembered some things so clearly but not the fact that I hadn’t even been there. Still, they were back in that place again, a life-changing event that I had missed.
‘I keep telling you, I wasn’t there. I wish I could have gone with you; it sounds as though you had such a great time,’ I said.
‘Apart from the food poisoning,’ Harriet said.
‘What? Really?’
This didn’t fit in at all with what I had been told.
Anna laughed. ‘Oh, it was nothing. And do you remember the Spanish police keeping an eye us? It was quite sweet really. I didn’t blame them, I suppose we did look a bit rough around the edges by then.
Tom hadn’t shaved for two weeks and looked a bit like the Ancient Mariner.
And he had a filthy cold. And Paul was no use at all.
He kept losing everything, it was like having a kid with us. ’
‘I had no idea,’ I said.
This didn’t sound at all like the trip I had imagined.
I’d pictured the four of them travelling from one gorgeous place to the next, arms linked, as they strolled down an elegant boulevard or ran into the Mediterranean surf.
In my mind’s eye they had always been laughing and having fun.
My imagination had cast them in a golden, sunny glow of warmth and sunshine, while I was battling with the rain on my way into the bank.
People having food poisoning and filthy colds didn’t fit into this narrative at all.
‘But then, I’ll admit, we got to Florence and it was all worthwhile,’ Harriet said with a sigh. ‘It was so gorgeous there, I always wanted to go back.’
She topped up our wine glasses and we sat and watched her, all of us lost in our own thoughts for a moment.
They might have been remembering the glories of Florence that summer, but I was back in the dusty back room of the bank while Bob Collyer explained the filing system and I flinched back from his halitosis.
‘But why not?’ I said at last.
‘Why not what?’ Harriet frowned.
‘Why didn’t you go back to Florence? You could have afforded it.’
Harriet sighed and ruffled her spiky grey hair. It had always been a bit wild at school, and now it was cropped, pixie-ish and rather elegant. I’d always wanted to try something similar, but it didn’t suit me. I think I had the wrong sort of hair or the wrong shaped head.
She sighed. ‘After Bruce and I divorced, I lost a lot of self confidence, and I didn’t want to go on my own.
And all the girls wanted to do when they were younger was go to Centre Parcs or Alcudia with their friends and have foam parties, they certainly didn’t want to drag around Florence with their mother looking at palazzos and galleries, even if I was paying. ’