A Hundred Pieces of Me (55 page)

‘Don’t worry, not
you
you. It was talking to you the other night, about regrets and moving on – it made me realise how
un
happy I was. And how
un
happy Amanda was. I realised we were wasting time, and none of us has time to waste, have we?’

Nick hadn’t moved his gaze from her face since he started speaking, and Gina felt a low, slow heat building inside her. She tried to put up some kind of barrier to hide the confusing sensations filling her mind, but she couldn’t. It was as if Nick was reading everything about her, then and now, and things she didn’t even know she was thinking.

‘Amanda is determined to have a baby, and I don’t want to be the dad who sees his child every two months via flights to New York. Babies don’t stick relationships together. She’s been “investigating her options” so it’s safe to assume she’s got plans laid already. With or without me.’

‘And you?’

Nick said nothing but gazed at Gina for a long moment; she could read everything from the spark that flickered in his weary eyes when he looked at her.

‘Do I have to say?’ His lips were dry, from hours and hours of talking, and they cracked a little at the edges. Gina felt a tugging desire to run the ball of her thumb over them, then kiss them to feel their roughness against her lips, to have that mouth that said such intelligent, funny things exploring her own.

She nodded.

‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else,’ he said. ‘Someone who makes me absolutely determined not to waste a single second of my life away from her.’

For a stomach-dropping instant she wondered if he was talking about someone other than her,
that he’d met someone else
, but his eyes never left hers, and the grey irises grew darker and softer as if he were trying to print her face on his mind, like a photograph. Nick’s voice was breaking but he couldn’t stop talking in his husky whisper.

‘I met someone who’s made me notice all the small things, as well as all the big things, that I like about my life. I want to make her happy. No,’ he corrected himself, ‘I want to be happy
with
her. She makes herself happy.’

Gina managed a smile. The moment was stretching out, not flitting away from her. She tried to slide herself into it instead of hovering above it, framing it with her imaginary Polaroid.

‘Even happy people can always do with some help.’ Her own voice was husky now, echoing in the empty hall. They were whispering for no other reason than to make their own little world smaller in the big house.

Nick turned on the stairs, his long thigh pressing against her hip. Her senses were filled with his familiar Nick-smell, a mingling of washing powder, cologne and the musky maleness of his skin. Gina had surreptitiously sniffed every washing powder in Waitrose, trying to identify the right one; when she’d found Fairy non-Bio her heart had done a secret flip. But it had only been a tiny base-note of the scent that had seemed so familiar to her from the morning he’d walked up behind her outside. If it was a colour, she thought, it was dove-grey, sleepy but strong, the colour of Georgian walls, something she wanted to wrap around herself.

Nick took her wrist again, but this time he circled it gently with his hand, caressing the knobbly part with his thumb.

‘You’re bringing this house back to life,’ he said softly, more to her wrist than to her face. ‘And the way you do it is so thoughtful it moves something inside me. The way you show me what to fix, what’s rotten, what needs replacing. What to cut out, what’s precious. You have no idea how incredible you are when you’re running your hands over some oak, or telling me the story of some stone.’

He lifted the wrist up to his lips and kissed the blue veins on the inside. A million shivers of electricity ran up Gina’s arm, tingling into every part of her.

Nick was giving her every chance to stop this, she thought. He was giving her a moment to say, ‘No, this is too weird, too soon, too unprofessional.’ But it wasn’t any of those things. It felt completely right, as if every other wrong step in her life had been leading to the centre of a dark green private maze in the middle of this falling-down, magnificent house.

Gina turned, giving in to the longing to feel the dry heat of Nick’s lips, and pressed her mouth against his. He hesitated briefly, then she felt him slide a hand around the small of her back to pull her closer. The kiss was sweet and soft for a moment, then Gina’s lips parted and it became something more urgent and yielding as her own hands reached for him, wrapping around his back, then tangling into his hair.

They kissed as if everything else had vanished around them, and Gina felt a sense of utter happiness she’d never experienced before. It was like floating, weightless, the same euphoria she’d once felt in a tropical sea, of being completely supported but at the same time lighter than air.

She felt a buzzing in her back pocket. ‘My phone’s ringing.’

‘Ignore it,’ Nick murmured into her neck, pressing kisses into the hollow where her scent gathered in the hot weather.

‘That’s not very professional. What if it’s Keith Hurst?’ She laughed into his mouth.

‘Oh, go on, then . . .’ Nick released her, but only far enough for her to get her phone out of her jeans. He carried on burying his nose in the soft skin behind her ear while she answered it on the other side.

‘Stop it,’ she muttered happily, batting him away. ‘Hello?’

‘Is that Georgina Bellamy?’

‘Yes.’ Something in the voice made her sit up straighter. It was an official voice, one that rang a distant alarm bell in the back of her mind.

‘This is Catherine Roscoe from Longhampton Infimary breast clinic. Is this a good moment to talk?’

Gina pulled away properly, and put a finger in the other ear to hear better. Reception was mutinously bad in the old house. ‘Um, no, but go on.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s regarding the annual appointment you attended on Monday – I wonder if you could come in and have some further tests this week?’

‘This week?’

‘Yes, we’d like to schedule them as soon as possible. Are you available tomorrow lunchtime?’

Gina’s insides hollowed out. Tomorrow lunchtime. That wasn’t a routine test. That was urgent. That was . . .

‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice sounded strangled. She coughed. ‘What time?’

Nick was staring at her, already conscious that something wasn’t right. He frowned, silently asking what was wrong, and Gina turned away, unable to stop the childish rage at the wrongness of it. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, bowing her head to ward off the emotion crushing her as if it might go away.

Not now. Not now, she begged the universe. Not now she had just found this man, this incredible feeling of joy. Please, not the hospital.

‘Could you manage twelve o’clock?’

‘Twelve o’clock,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘And do I need to bring anything?’

‘No, that’ll be fine.’ The nurse carried on talking in her soothing manner, about tests and directions and car parks, but Gina wasn’t listening. The blood was roaring in her ears.

Further tests. At best, a new kind of cancer to carve out and scorch with chemotherapy. At worst . . . Her mind turned away from the bleak fact, which her eye had skimmed in so many leaflets, but she made herself think it. At worst, a recurrence of the old cancer, somewhere else. And there was no treatment for secondaries, only what the leaflets euphemistically called ‘management’.

Or it could be nothing, pleaded a lone voice inside. It could be nothing.

But Gina had been through this before: hope was more slippery to cling to, knowing what she knew now. ‘Nothing’ didn’t need immediate tests.

The phone slipped from her hand, and somehow she managed to catch it before it bounced on the stairs and cracked onto the wooden floor below.

‘Gina, what is it?’ Nick grabbed her wrist. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ve got to go in for tests.’ She corrected herself. ‘More tests. After my routine appointment.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow lunchtime.’ Saying it made it real, and Gina felt the ground lurch sickeningly away from her.

‘I’ll take you,’ said Nick at once, and something in his expression caught her, the instinctive way she’d caught her phone. She felt held. Safe with him. ‘What time?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to take me.’

‘Really. What time? It’s fine. I’ve got nothing else I’d rather do. You can’t go alone. I can make notes, if you want. If you need someone there to ask questions.’ Nick reached for her but she pulled away. ‘What? What did I say?’

‘Nothing.’ Gina covered her face and tried to pull her racing thoughts together. Nick wasn’t Stuart, and she wasn’t the person she’d been that time around. This wouldn’t be exactly the same. It couldn’t be. For one thing, she knew what would happen next, one way or another. This time, she could do it on her own. She was a different person.

She took her hands away from her face and gazed straight into Nick’s eyes. ‘I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,’ she said fiercely. ‘I don’t want you to organise me, and I don’t want you to feel you have to be there because I’m sick.’

‘Not this again,’ said Nick. ‘Let other people worry about how they feel about you. You just concentrate on what you feel. What
you
want. I want to help you. You don’t have to let me, but I want to. What can
I
do to make the bit
you
have to do easier?’

Gina managed a watery smile, then it froze. ‘Will you look after Buzz?’

‘Tomorrow? Sure.’

‘No, I mean if . . . if they find something and I can’t manage? I can’t bear the thought of him going back into a rescue, wondering why I abandoned him. Just when he started to trust humans again.’

It was the mental picture of a miserable Buzz roaming the park searching for her after she’d gone, the eight years that George had said he had left of his better new life, that suddenly made it real for Gina. What if she didn’t
have
eight years? The tears came from nowhere. Nick wrapped his arms round her and let her sob into his shoulder, stroking her head and murmuring into her hair.

‘Why don’t we meet you after your appointment, in the park?’ he said. ‘Me and Buzz. It’s going to be a perfect June day. We’ll have a picnic ready, and we’ll wait there until you’re finished – we’re in no rush – and then we’ll drink cider in the sunshine and eat cake and look up at the clouds, and just enjoy being in the sun together. Whatever happens.’ He dropped a kiss on her head and Gina felt cocooned in a warmth that crept into all the cracks of fear in her heart. It didn’t make the fear go away, but it strengthened her.

She breathed in the smell of the Magistrate’s House: the old plaster, the fresh new wood, the dust and beeswax, the years of human love and fear, the dogs and children that had run through the parquet halls since it was built. It had weak spots and decay but it still stood.

‘I know this isn’t ideal,’ Nick went on, ‘but something about it feels really right. Like this house did, the first time I saw it. Sometimes people come into your life at strange times, and you don’t know why, but then it turns out that they’re the exact right person for that moment. Don’t you think?’

Gina nodded into the soft linen of his clean shirt, then raised her head. I need to get into this picture, she thought. Not watch it, be in it. ‘I wish this was a better moment,’ she said. ‘But this is what we’ve got. I don’t want to waste it.’

‘Me neither.’

There was a long pause, then Gina leaned forward and kissed Nick, urgently and hungrily. He kissed her back, hands reaching around her waist, her hip, stroking and exploring her curves, and then they broke off, breathing each other’s hot, quick breath, their mouths only a hair’s breadth apart.

‘Here?’ whispered Nick. He didn’t need to explain; she knew what she wanted too.

Gina thought, then said, ‘No. Not here. My flat.’ She smiled, filled with a weird elation. ‘There’s nothing in my flat. No history. Just us.’

Nothing for the witch-ball to see.

Nick slipped her hand into his, and they half walked, half ran to Gina’s car, Buzz loping happily alongside.

Chapter Twenty-four

ITEM
: a silver Mini Cooper on a key-ring, with two keys and a photo of Gina and Terry standing by her green Mini with white stripes over the bonnet, tearing up her L-plates, taken at a slight slant by Janet on Terry’s new SLR camera

Hartley, January, 1998

Gina’s stepdad Terry is doing something to the engine of the Mini, while Gina sits in the corner of the garage, pretending to make notes on
Macbeth
but really finishing a four-page letter to Kit.

Minnie’s nearly finished
, she writes, already on page four.
Terry keeps trying to explain how it all works and I keep nodding but it’s not really going in. I keep imagining me and you in it. It’s just big enough for the road trip. Not sure we could get it on the plane but I reckon we could get as far as Brighton. We’d have to talk in American accents and pretend Little Chef was Dairy Queen but . . .