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‘Only that it was urgent. It’s the middle of the night there now,’ she reminded him as he picked up the phone, hit the fast dial for her number.
‘It doesn’t matter. She wouldn’t have called unless it was…’ He stopped as the call went immediately to the answering machine.
“This is Grace McAllister. I’m sorry that I can’ttake your call at the moment. Due to a family bereavement,all classes have been cancelled untilfurther notice. Please check the Web site forfurther details.”
Bereavement?
He felt the blood drain from his face, put out a hand to grasp the desk. Posie…
It had to be Posie. Small babies were so vulnerable. Meningitis, cot death… After so many years of waiting, so much heartache.
‘Cancel everything, Anna. Get me on the next available flight to London,’ he said, dialling his brother’s number.
Someone whose voice sounded familiar, but wasn’t Michael, wasn’t Phoebe, wasn’t Grace, answered the phone.
‘It’s Josh Kingsley,’ he said.
There was a momentary hiatus and then she was there—Grace, her familiar voice saying his name.
‘Josh…’
It was all it took to stir up feelings that he’d done his level best to suppress. But this last year he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head….
‘Josh, I’ve been trying to get hold of you….’
‘I know. I rang your number. Heard your message,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘What’s happened? Who died?’
He heard her take a long shuddering breath.
‘Grace!’
‘There was an accident. Michael, Phoebe… They were both killed.’
For a moment he was too stunned to speak. His brother was dead. ‘When? How?’
‘Last Sunday morning. I’ve been calling, leaving messages. When you didn’t get back to me I thought… I thought…’
‘No!’ The word was wrenched from him. He knew what she’d thought and why, but it didn’t hurt any less to know that she could believe him so heartless.
But then she already believed that.
She had been so happy that she was having a baby for her sister, couldn’t understand why he’d been so desperate to stop her. And he hadn’t been able to tell her.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘The police said that the car skidded on a slick of mud. It went through a fence and then it rolled. It happened early in the morning and no one found them…’
‘The baby, Grace,’ he pressed urgently. ‘Posie…’
‘What? No! She wasn’t with them. She was here with me. Michael and Phoebe were away for the weekend. It was their wedding anniversary but they left the hotel early. They couldn’t wait to get back….’
Long before she’d stumbled to a halt, he’d clamped his hand over his mouth to hold in the cry of pain.
‘Josh?’
‘It’s okay. I’m okay,’ he managed. ‘How are you coping?’
‘One breath at a time,’ she said. ‘One minute. One hour…’
He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, but in a situation like this words were meaningless. And in any case she would know exactly how he was feeling. They were faced with the same loss. Or very nearly the same.
Grace wouldn’t have to live with his guilt….
Instead, he kept to the practical. He should have been there to deal with this, make the necessary arrangements, but it had been over a week already.
‘Who’s with you? What arrangements have been made? When is the…’ He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
‘We buried them on Friday, Josh. Your father insisted on going ahead and, when you didn’t call back, no one could reach you…’ He heard her swallow, fight down tears, then she furiously said,
‘Where were you?’
‘Grace…’
He looked up as his PA returned. ‘There’s a car waiting to take you to the airport. You have to leave now,’ she said, handing him a replacement BlackBerry.
‘Grace, I’m leaving now for the airport.’ Then, ‘Keep breathing until I get there.’
Grace let Elspeth take the phone from her as she leaned weakly against the wall.
‘Maybe you could get some sleep now,’ she said gently, handing her the pills the doctor had left when he’d called after hearing the news. ‘You’ve left plenty of milk in the fridge for Posie. I’ll manage if you want to take a rest.’
‘I know.’ She put the pills in her pocket, knowing she wouldn’t take them. She didn’t want to go to sleep because when she woke she knew there would be a moment when she’d think it was just another day.
Then she’d remember and have to live through the loss all over again.
But she didn’t say any of that. Instead, she hugged her and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘We’re here, Mr Kingsley.’
Josh glanced up at the façade of the tall Georgian town house that Michael had bought when he had married Phoebe McAllister. It was a proper family home with a basement and an attic and three floors in between. Endless rooms that they’d planned to fill with children.
Instead, they’d got him and Grace. A seventeen-year-old youth whose parents had split up and who, wrapped up in their own concerns with new partners, didn’t want a moody cuckoo in the nest. And a fourteen-year-old girl for whom the only alternative was to be taken into the care of the local authority.
Exactly what every newly-wed couple needed.
They’d taken on each other’s damaged siblings without a murmur. Had given him his own space in the basement, had decorated a room especially for Grace. Her first ever room of her own.
She’d been such a pathetic little scrap. A skinny rake of a kid, all straight lines when other girls her age had been testing out the power of their emerging attraction on impressionable youths. Only her eyes, a sparkling green and gold mix that could flash or melt with her mood, warned that she had hidden depths.
Like her nose and mouth, they’d been too big for her face. And, until she’d learned to control them, they’d betrayed her every thought.
Eyes like that should carry a health warning.
‘Is there anything I can do, Mr Kingsley?’
Josh realised that the chauffeur—a regular who his PA had arranged to pick him up from the airport—was regarding him with concern.
He managed a smile. ‘You can tell me what day it is, Jack. And whether it’s seven o’clock in the morning or seven o’clock at night.’
‘It was Tuesday when I got up this morning. And it’s the evening. But I’m sure you knew that.’
‘Just testing,’ he said, managing a smile.
He’d counted every one of the last twenty-four hours as he’d travelled halfway round the world, coming to terms with the loss of his brother. And of Phoebe, who’d been the nearest thing to a big sister he’d ever had. By turns motherly, bossy, supportive. Everything that he’d needed.
Knowing that he would have to live with a world of regrets for the hard words he’d said. Words that could never be taken back. For holding on to his righteous anger, a cover for something darker that he could never admit to…,
But the hair shirt would have to wait. Grace needed him. The baby would need them both.
He climbed from the car. Grace’s brightly painted ‘Baubles and Beads’ van was parked in its usual place but the space where he expected to see his brother’s car was occupied by a small red hatchback that underlined, in the most shocking way, the reality of the situation.
Realising that Jack was waiting until he was inside, he pulled himself together, walked up the steps to the front door as he had done times without number to a house that had always felt as if it were opening its arms to him. Today, though, even in the spring sunshine, with tubs of bright yellow tulips on either side of the front door, it seemed subdued, in mourning.
The last time he’d been here he’d tossed the keys to both the house and his basement flat on his brother’s desk—his declaration that he would never return. For the first time since he’d moved in here as a seventeen-year-old, he would have to knock at the door but, as he lifted his hand to the antique knocker, it was flung open.
For a moment he thought it was Grace, watching out for him, racing to fling her arms around him, but it wasn’t her. Why would it be? She had Toby Makepeace to fling her arms around, to offer her comfort. At least she had the last time he’d come home on a visit. He hadn’t been in evidence on the day he’d turned up without warning, but then discovering his girlfriend was pregnant with someone else’s baby must have put a crimp in his ardour.
The woman who opened the door was older, familiar—a friend of Phoebe’s. Elizabeth? Eleanor? She put her finger to her lips. ‘Grace is in the kitchen but she’s just dropped off. Try not to wake her. She hasn’t been sleeping and she’s exhausted.’
He nodded.
‘You must be, too,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. ‘It’s a terrible homecoming for you. I’m so sorry about Michael. He was a lovely man.’ She didn’t wait for him to answer, just said, ‘I’ll go now you’re here, but tell Grace to ring me if she needs anything. I’ll call in tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Thank you…’ Elspeth. ‘Thank you, Elspeth.’
He watched her until she was in her car, then picked up the bags that Jack had left on the top step, placed them inside and shut the door as quietly as he could. Each movement slow, deliberate, as if he could somehow steady the sudden wild beating of a heart that was loud enough to wake Grace all by itself.
He told himself that he should wait.
Go down to the basement flat, take a shower. But to do that, he’d need the key and the key cupboard was in the kitchen.
For the first time for as long as he could remember, he was frozen in indecision, unable to move. Staring down at the hall table where a pile of post—cards, some addressed to Grace, some to him—waited to be opened. Read.
He frowned. Cards?
He opened one, saw the lilies. In sympathy…
He dropped it as if burned, stepped back, dragged his hands over his face, through his hair as he looked down the hall. Then, because there was nothing else to do, he turned and walked slowly towards the kitchen.
He pushed the door very gently. It still squeaked. How many times had he heard Michael promise Phoebe that he’d do something about it?
He’d offered to do it himself, but Phoebe had just smiled. She liked the warning squeak, she’d told him. Liked to have something to complain about once in a while. It wasn’t good for a man to believe he was perfect.
He could have told her that Michael didn’t believe that. On the contrary. But that had been a secret between the two of them and, somehow, he’d managed to smile back.
He paused, holding his breath, but there was no sound and he stepped into the room that had always been the hub of the house. Warm, roomy, with a big table for everyone to gather around. An old armchair by the Aga that the fourteen-year-old Grace had taken to like a security blanket, homing in on it when she’d arrived clutching a plastic bag that contained everything she possessed under one arm, a small scruffy terrier under the other.
The pair of them had practically lived in it. And it was the first place she’d taken the puppy he’d given her when old Harry had died a few months later and he’d been afraid her heart was going to break.
The puppy, too, had finally died of old age, but now she had a new love. Posie. The baby she had borne with the purest heart as surrogate for the sister who had given her a home and who was now lying, boneless in sleep, against her shoulder.
Michael, hoping that if Josh saw the baby he would finally understand, forgive him even, had e-mailed him endless photographs of Posie, giving him a running commentary on her progress since the day she’d been born, refusing to be deterred by Josh’s lack of response.
There had been no photographs of Grace until the christening and then only in a group consisting of Grace, as godmother, holding Posie, flanked by Michael and Phoebe. A happy picture in which everyone had been smiling and sent, he suspected, with just a touch of defiance. A ‘see what you’re missing’ message.
He hadn’t cared about that. He’d only cared about Grace and he’d cropped the picture so that it was only of Grace and Posie. He’d had it enlarged and printed so that he could carry it with him.
Her face had been outwardly serene, but a photograph was just a two-dimensional image. It was without warmth, scent. You could touch it, but it gave nothing back. But then it had been a very long time since Grace had given anything back to him. Keeping her distance, her eyes always guarded on his visits home.
At least he’d had time to get over his shock that, some time in the last year, she’d cut her beautiful long hair into a short elfin style. He’d come to terms with the fact that her boyish figure had finally filled out in lush womanly curves.
But this scene was not a photograph.
This was an intimate view of motherhood as only a husband, a father would see it and he stood perfectly still, scarcely daring to breathe, wanting to hold the moment, freeze this timeless image in his memory. Then, almost in slow motion, he saw the empty feeding bottle that had dropped into her lap begin a slow slide to the floor.
He moved swiftly to catch it before it hit the tiles and woke her, but when he looked up he realised that his attempt to keep her from being disturbed had failed.
Or maybe not. Her eyes were open and she was looking at him, but she wasn’t truly awake. She wasn’t seeing him. He froze, holding his breath, willing her to close them again and drift back off to sleep.
She stirred. ‘Michael?’ she said.
Not quite seeing him, not yet remembering. Still he hoped…
She blinked, focused, frowned.
He saw the exact moment when it all came flooding back, and instinctively reached out to her as he had a year ago. As if he could somehow stop time, go back, save her from a world of pain. ‘Grace…’
‘Oh, Josh…’
In that unguarded moment, in those two little words, it was all there. All the loss, all the heartache and, sinking to his knees, this time he did not step back, but followed through, gathering her into his arms, holding her close.
For ten years he’d lived with a memory of her in his arms, the heavy silk of her hair trailing across his skin, her sweet mouth a torment of innocence and knowing eagerness as she’d taken him to a place that until then he hadn’t known he had wanted to go.
He’d lived with the memory of tearing himself away from her, fully aware that he’d done the unforgivable, then compounded his sin by leaving her asleep in his bed to wake alone.
He’d told himself that he’d had no choice.
Grace had needed security, a settled home, a man who would put her first while, for as long as he could remember, he’d had his eyes set on far horizons, on travelling light and fast. He’d needed total freedom to take risks as he built an empire of his own.
