‘Still is,’ he insisted, and when she rolled her eyes he laughed, and said, ‘Do you still have that dress?’
‘What dress?’ she said in confusion.
‘The red dress you wore that day. It had a big wide skirt, and puffy sleeves, and when I first went to the States I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Chris de Burgh singing “The Lady in Red”, and every time I heard it I thought of you, singing on this beach.’
‘Did you?’ she said faintly, and he nodded.
‘You wouldn’t believe how homesick I got whenever they played that song.’
But not homesick enough to write to me, or phone me, she thought, but she didn’t say that.
‘I’m afraid I threw the dress out years ago,’ she said instead.
‘Pity,’ he murmured, picking up a pebble and sending it skimming across the water in front of them. ‘I always liked that dress, and the little red boots you used to wear.’
‘My
pixie boots
!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten all about them, too. I
loved
those boots. Couldn’t wear them now, of course.’
‘Yes, you could. You’ve still got great legs. Great figure, too,’ he added.
‘Not that good,’ she said, feeling the wash of colour on her cheeks return as his gaze swept over her. ‘Years ago I could eat whatever I wanted and never put on a kilo. Now I just have to look at a cream cake, and, pouf, on goes the weight.’
He grinned. ‘Well, you’re looking good from where I’m standing.’
So was he, she thought. With the sun on his face, and the
wind ruffling his hair, he looked exactly like the town bad boy he’d been all those years ago, whereas she…
What had she been back then?
Naïve, yes. Trusting, most definitely, but mostly so full of dreams, and hopes, and plans. Tom had been the same, but her dreams hadn’t been the same as his. He’d wanted to get as far away from Penhally as he could, to live a life of adventure and excitement, and she…She’d simply wanted him.
‘Let’s have some fun,’ he’d said when he’d come back to Penhally as a fully qualified doctor that summer, and she’d been so happy because he’d finally asked her out that she’d chosen not to believe him when he’d told her he would be heading for the States at the end of September.
He’ll change his mind, she’d told herself, and for four wonderful, glorious months they’d walked, and talked—lord, how they’d talked—and they’d made love. She’d been a virgin when they’d first started going out and he’d teased her about it, said a woman could have just as much fun as a man without fear of the consequences, and she’d gone on the Pill to be safe, and then after four far too short months he had left.
‘What are you thinking about?’
She looked up to see him gazing at her quizzically, and managed a smile.
‘I was just wondering where the last twenty years had gone,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it, and sometimes just a few months.’
‘And I can’t believe you’re still single,’ he observed. ‘The men in Penhally must be either blind, or stupid, or both.’
‘I almost got married once,’ she replied, kicking the sand in front of her so it sprayed out as they walked, ‘but…’
‘It didn’t feel right?’
‘Something like that. What about you?’ she asked. ‘Were you never tempted to take the plunge?’
‘I’ve had a couple of semi-serious relationships, but…’ He
shrugged. ‘My work makes it difficult because I never know where I’m going to be from one day to the next.’
‘Maybe you’re just not the marrying kind,’ she said. ‘Some people aren’t.’
He stared out to sea, then back at her, and to her surprise he looked suddenly wistful, almost sad.
‘And maybe I simply got my priorities all wrong.’
His eyes were fixed on hers, refusing to allow her to look away, and her heart gave an uncomfortable thump. This conversation was getting too personal, way too personal, and she had to change it. Now.
‘Last one to reach the end of the beach is a wimp,’ she said, and, before he could reply, she was off and running, her bare feet flying over the sand, her skirt billowing above her knees, her shoes swinging from her hand.
From behind her she heard him shout a spluttered protest, but she didn’t stop. She just kept on running and when she heard his footsteps begin to thud behind her she suddenly, and inexplicably, began to laugh.
To laugh like the girl she’d once been. The carefree young girl who had once sung on a beach, feeling nothing but the joy of being alive, and she knew she probably looked like a demented lunatic, but she didn’t care. For this moment—for just this one moment—with her hair streaming in the breeze, and the taste of the sun and the sea on her lips, she felt like that girl again, and it was wonderful.
‘You
cheated
!’ he exclaimed when he caught up with her, and grasped her by the waist, spinning her round so fast she had to catch hold of his shirt to prevent herself from toppling over.
‘Sore loser,’ she threw back at him, laughing breathlessly as she pushed her hair away from her face. ‘You’ve been spending far too much time behind a desk.’
‘Too much time…?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll make you pay for that remark, Eve Dwyer.’
‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ she said, turning to run again, and he made a grab for her, and she jumped back to escape him, only to let out a yell as she ended up ankle deep in the sea. ‘Oh, my God, it’s
freezing
.’
‘Serves you right.’ Tom laughed but, when she scooped up some water and threw it at him, he splashed into the water after her. ‘Play rough, would you? OK, you deserve a complete ducking for that.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ she cried, trying to evade him, but he caught her round the waist again and swept her up into his arms.
‘You think?’ he said, deliberately lowering her towards the water, and she shrieked and threw her arms round his neck.
‘Tom, no!’
He grinned. ‘OK, if you don’t want to be ducked, you’ll need to pay a forfeit, and I think you know what that forfeit is, don’t you?’
A kiss. The forfeit had always been a kiss when they’d dated and, as Eve stared up into his, oh, so familiar face, she realised with a stab of pain that even after all that had happened, even after all the heartache and desolation, she wanted to kiss him, and the thought appalled her.
‘Tom, let me go,’ she said, but he didn’t hear the strain in her voice.
‘Nope, not a chance,’ he said. ‘The forfeit, or the sea. Your choice.’
‘Tom,
please
.’
‘Make a decision—make a decision,’ he insisted as he whirled her round in his arms, but she didn’t have to.
She had suddenly seen what he hadn’t, and she tugged desperately on his sleeve.
‘Tom, we have company.’
‘Company?’ he repeated, then swore under his breath as he followed her gaze. ‘Oh, wonderful. Bloody wonderful. Is that who I think it is?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Eve said, through gritted teeth, and when Tom quickly put her down she splashed out of the sea, feeling completely ridiculous and stupid, as Audrey Baxter walked towards them.
‘Tom Cornish,’ Audrey declared the minute she drew level with them, her faded brown eyes alive with curiosity and speculation. ‘My heavens, but I never thought to see you in Penhally again.’
‘Us bad pennies have a nasty habit of turning up again, don’t we, Mrs Baxter?’ he replied dryly.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call you a bad penny, Tom,’ Audrey declared. ‘You were a little wild, to be sure—’
‘I think the words you used to shout after me when I was a teenager were, “You’re heading straight to hell in a handcart, Tom Cornish”.’
Audrey patted her steel-grey curls and shook her head at him reprovingly.
‘That was a long time ago, Tom.’ She shifted her gaze to Eve, making her all too aware that her hair must be sticking out all over the place, and the hem of her skirt was wet. ‘I see you and Nurse Dwyer are getting reacquainted.’
Tom moved up the beach a step. ‘We are, but now I’m afraid we have to be going.’
‘I thought you might have come back to Penhally two years ago, Tom, when your father died,’ Audrey continued. ‘I know you didn’t always get on—’
‘And I think your dog’s looking for you,’ Tom interrupted, pointing to the brindle and white greyhound which was splashing in the water further up the beach.
‘Looking for crabs, more like,’ Audrey replied. ‘He loves them.’
‘Indeed,’ Tom declared, ‘and now if you’ll excuse us…’
But Audrey wasn’t about to let him leave so easily.
‘I hear your father left you his house in Trelissa Road?’ she
called after him, and Tom turned slowly to face her, his expression tight.
‘What a very knowledgeable little community Penhally is,’ he said, the sarcasm in his voice so plain that even Audrey couldn’t miss it, and Eve grabbed his hand quickly, not caring that Audrey’s eyes followed her action.
‘Tom, we really do have to be going,’ she insisted, and determinedly she urged him back up the beach, but it wasn’t over as far as he was concerned.
‘Nothing changes, does it?’ he spat out when they reached the steps leading off the beach, and he glanced over his shoulder to see Audrey was watching them. ‘Twenty damn years, and nothing changes. I could be the Prime Minister of Britain, and in Penhally I’d still be Tom Cornish, that drunkard, Frank Cornish’s, son who no decent family ever wanted their daughter dating.’
‘Tom—’
‘If you’re going to say Audrey meant no harm, you can save your breath,’ he interrupted, sitting down on the step and beginning to drag on his socks, heedless of the fact that his feet were still covered in sand. ‘And if you were going to ask me why I didn’t come back for my father’s funeral, you can save your breath on that one, too.’
‘I know why you didn’t come back, Tom,’ she said gently, ‘and Audrey…There’s no question she can be an interfering busybody, but your father’s dead and gone. Don’t let him keep hurting you.’
‘He left me his house, Eve,’ he said furiously. ‘After years of battering me from pillar to post until I was big enough to hit him back and make it count, he had the gall to leave me his house.’
‘Maybe…’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Maybe he was trying to make amends, at the end?’
‘If I believed that for one second,’ he retorted, ‘I’d go round
and torch the bloody place myself. No guilt gift can ever make up for the fact he hated me from the day I was born. Time and time again, he’d tell me of all the things he could have done—would have done—if my mother hadn’t become pregnant, and her family hadn’t forced him into marrying her, and when she died he hated me even more.’
‘I know,’ she said, sitting down beside him, aching at the pain she saw in his face, feeling a different kind of pain in herself, but he rounded on her furiously.
‘No, you don’t. You have
no
idea of what it’s like to live with a man whose dreams you’ve shattered. No idea to feel, even as a seven-year-old child, that it would have been better if you’d never been born.’
She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘You’re right. I don’t know.’
Silently she brushed the sand from her feet, then pushed her feet into her shoes, but when she made to stand up he put out his hand to stop her.
‘You’ve forgotten your stockings.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied, and, for a second he said nothing, then he thrust his fingers through his hair, and she saw his hands were shaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice so strained it almost broke. ‘So sorry for yelling at you.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said.
‘It’s not,’ he declared. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it out on you, and I’m sorry, too, that Audrey saw you in my arms. I know what this place is like—the gossip, the innuendo…’
‘It’s
all right
, Tom,’ she insisted, and saw a small smile creep onto his lips.
‘I’ve always created trouble for you, haven’t I?’ he said.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ she lied. ‘And now, come on,’ she added, ‘or we’ll be completing this tour of Penhally by moonlight.’
‘Which would really set the local tongues wagging, wouldn’t it?’ he declared as he fell into step beside her. ‘Audrey—’
‘Forget her,’ Eve ordered as they began walking back down Harbour Road, and he shook his head.
‘This is a professional observation, not a personal one,’ he replied. ‘Her colour’s very high.’
‘She has angina, and she’s hopeless about remembering to use her glyceryl trinitrate spray. “I keep forgetting, Nurse Dwyer”,’ Eve continued in a perfect imitation of Audrey’s voice. ‘I don’t think she realises, or will accept, how serious her condition is.’
‘Denial can be a form of self-protection when people are scared,’ Tom observed, kicking a pebble at his feet so that it ricocheted down the street in front of them. ‘If they don’t think about it, it hasn’t happened.’
It was true, Eve thought, but denial had never worked for her. All the denying, and pretending in the world, had never made it go away for her, and when they reached Harbour Bridge she came to a halt.
‘Tom, why did you come back?’ she asked. ‘You always said you wouldn’t, so why are you here?’
For a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer, then he shrugged.
‘My dad’s solicitor has been bending my ear about the house, wanting to know whether I want to sell it, or rent it out.’
‘You didn’t have to come back to Penhally for that,’ she pointed out. ‘You could just have told him over the phone.’
‘I suppose,’ he murmured as he stared down at the river Lanson flowing gently under the bridge beneath them, then he grinned. ‘OK, you’ve rumbled me. I thought it might be interesting to see Penhally again.’
He wasn’t telling her the truth. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.
‘Tom—’
‘What happened to the cinema?’ he interrupted. ‘It used to be up there, in Gull Close, didn’t it, on the right-hand side of the river?’
‘It was on the left-hand side of the river, in Bridge Street, but it closed down years ago,’ she replied, all too aware that he was changing the subject, but she had secrets so she supposed he was entitled to secrets, too. ‘People gradually stopped wanting to go so much once they had television in their own homes.’