Best of Friends (77 page)

“But I am sorry.”

“Being sorry is about more than just saying it,” her aunt said. “It’s about demonstrating it.”

“But she’s never said anything to me,” Debra went on.

“Because she loves you and she doesn’t want to hurt you,” Gwen said. “And because you love only yourself, you let her.”

“I’m sorry, Mum, I’m really sorry. I didn’t think,” sobbed Debra, and for once it sounded heartfelt. “I love you and I’d never hurt you.” She got up, tears falling down her pretty face. “I’m going to the loo.”

Lizzie went to get up with her but Gwen held her back. “Let her go,” she said. “You can’t protect her from everything, Lizzie, especially not herself. She has to grow up and realise that other people have to be treated with respect.”

Lizzie sat down again and sighed. “You were too hard on her,” she said.

“I wasn’t. You’re too soft on her, Lizzie. God rest our poor de-parted mother, but she has a lot to answer for. She made you so scared of being tough that you’ve let Debra get away with every-thing her whole life. That’s just as bad as being too hard on her. There’s a happy medium.”

“She’s so upset,” Lizzie went on unhappily.

“Debra’s a lot tougher than you give her credit for, Lizzie. She’s young enough to change and if she doesn’t learn now, she never will. If she’s hard and selfish her whole life, is that going to make her happy?”

“No,” admitted Lizzie.

Debra came back to the table after a few minutes, her face still tear-stained. “This isn’t going to be much of a girls’ night out if we’re all arguing,” she said shakily. She squeezed her mother’s hand and managed to smile at her aunt. “Are you ready for another round?”

“You’re paying?” enquired Gwen.

Debra had the grace to blush. “Yes,” she said.

Life Beats Cancer had been very encouraging about Lizzie’s idea to get lots of people to do parachute jumps in aid of the charity, so Erin arranged a meeting with the co-ordinator at the Santa Monica airfield to organise it.

She had planned to go along with Lizzie, who was feeling very nervous about possibly bumping into Simon, on one of Lizzie’s Wednesday afternoons off but, at the last minute, Erin had to cry off.

“My blood pressure’s only a teeny bit up,” she told Lizzie on the phone, “so I don’t know why the doctor wants me to stay in bed.”

“Should I phone Greg and tell him to nail the duvet to the floor with you stuck in the bed?” teased Lizzie, who knew just how hard Erin found it to sit still.

“I’ve so much to do,” wailed Erin, thinking of the sheaf of papers she’d been working on so diligently and all the plans that required careful nurturing. Thankfully, someone had now been found to cover Erin’s maternity leave in the beauty salon, so at least that wasn’t taking up her energy now.

“We’re in this charity business for the long haul,” Lizzie re-minded her. “You lying in bed for a couple of days won’t put the ki-bosh on everything.”

“I know, but I’m leaving you to do so much of it all, Lizzie,” Erin pointed out.

And it was true: Erin’s energy levels meant she was confined to making phone calls rather than trekking round visiting the great and good of Dunmore, trying to get them involved in the proposed Sally Richardson Centre. And since both Jess and Tom had returned to Lyonnais, Abby had understandably been spending a lot of time with her family.

“I’ll be back helping soon, I promise,” she vowed to both Erin and Lizzie, “but we could do with this time as a family. It’s so lovely to wake up in the mornings and know that they’re both there with me.”

The one thing Abby wasn’t too busy to do was help Erin with or-ganising a surprise fiftieth birthday party for Lizzie, although she didn’t mention that bit of planning to Lizzie. Anyhow, organising a party was hardly hard work, and she was having fun bouncing ideas for it off Tom and Jess.

Lizzie totally understood that Abby had other things on her mind. Looking after your family—no matter what that meant ex-actly, Lizzie thought ruefully, thinking about Gwen getting tough with Debra—was a number-one priority.

But the fact that Erin and Abby were otherwise engaged meant that the donkey work was falling to Lizzie. Fortunately she loved it.

For this job, her natural empathy and kindness were the perfect assets. Nobody could look into Lizzie’s warm eyes as she told them about the plans for the centre and then tell her that their company or business didn’t want to get involved.

“Once you wedge your foot in the door, Lizzie, they can’t say no to you,” said Abby gleefully when Lizzie reported back about an in-terview with the legendarily stony manager of Dunmore’s Victorian Hotel. It had somehow ended up with Lizzie getting a tour of the banqueting facilities and a commitment to give the Sally Richardson÷LBC charity a seventy-five percent discount on the ballroom hire for their first big event.

“How did you manage it?” asked Erin in awe. “That guy is sup posed to be as hard as nails. I was advised not to bother even talking to him and to try one of the other hotels instead.”

“Lizzie has charm, eyes nobody can say no to, and she’s gor-geous,” teased Abby. “That’s her secret.”

“Stop it,” retorted Lizzie good-naturedly.

“They all fall for her, Erin,” Abby went on. “None of these cap-tains of industry can quite believe it when lovely Lizzie appears be-fore them and they’d sell their grannies to please her.”

“They wouldn’t,” said Lizzie, who was flattered that someone as glamorous as Abby would even think such a thing, but who didn’t for one second believe that her success with men on the fund-raising trail was anything to do with her personally.

“I’m only teasing,” Abby added. “But that guy in the Victorian is well known for being a tough cookie, so well done. You’re brilliant at convincing people to help us.”

Lizzie smiled. There was no way she was going to tell the girls that the man had held her hand slightly longer than necessary when saying goodbye, or that he’d pointedly said it might be an idea if she came to the hotel one night for dinner so they could talk over the event.

She wasn’t even a teeny bit interested in him. She sighed. There was only one man she was keen on seeing again and she hoped, when she went out to the Santa Monica flying school, that she would.

On the Wednesday concerned she took ages getting ready. It was a business meeting, after all, but there was nothing wrong with looking nice, was there? She changed into a pink silky sweater over slim navy trousers, hoping she’d managed to combine professional with approachable. Her hair was a bit sticky-out, though: some of Debra’s anti-frizz stuff might work.

In Debra’s room, a pile of nearly packed suitcases and a card-board box full of odds and ends were testimony that her daughter planned to move out at the weekend. Her friend Frieda’s flatmate had got a six-month job abroad, so Debra was taking her room in the interim.

Debra and Barry’s beautiful town house was to be rented out. It was more sensible that way, Debra said, as they’d never make any money selling it yet and it would be an investment for both of them.

“I’d hate to get rid of it, anyhow—does that sound silly?” Debra had said when she’d told her mother of the plan.

Lizzie had shaken her head. It made perfect sense. She was proud of the way Debra was facing up to things nowadays, but she still had a private hope that time and distance would help her daughter and Barry to sort out their differences.

Barry had even come round one night to talk about renting the house out, and the atmosphere of his visit had been light years away from that of the last time he and Debra had met. Debra had man-aged to be polite and businesslike with him, although she’d cried in her mother’s arms after he’d left.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” she’d said, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t mean to let you and Dad down by all of this. I’m so sorry.”

In the midst of her anguish for the pain Debra was going through, Lizzie felt irritation at herself for how she’d dealt with her daughter over the years. If only she and Myles hadn’t indulged Debra so much, then things might be different. It was a pity that Debra was having to grow up now, at the age of twenty-three. Gwen’s savage talking-to hadn’t devastated Debra in the way Lizzie had been scared it would; instead, it had made the girl sit up and take notice of how she had been behaving.

“She won’t change overnight,” Gwen had said when Lizzie re-ported back how much easier it was living with her daughter since that night in the Rock’s Tavern. But the new, improved Debra was a far cry from the moody, childish version of the past couple of months.

In a big bag of cosmetics on Debra’s dressing table, Lizzie found the anti-frizz stuff and did her best to flatten her tortoiseshell mop into some semblance of sobriety.

She added lipgloss that went with the sweater, then rubbed it off in case it looked too obvious.

Of course, she mightn’t see Simon at all, but if she did, she wanted to look nice—though not as if she’d tried too hard.

Gwen rang just as she was rushing out of the door.

“Hi, Lizzie,” said Gwen. “What are you up to?”

“I’m doing a bit of research for our charity,” Lizzie said, fudging it a bit.

“Oh, what?” said Gwen with interest. She was fascinated by the whole plan and had already offered her services.

“Erm … I’m going out to talk to the parachute centre people about setting up a weekend solely for our charity,” Lizzie admitted, knowing full well that Gwen would make the connection.

“Oh,” said Gwen, naughtiness in her voice. “That’s where that delicious Simon fellow works, isn’t it? Have you got your full war paint on?”

“Stop it, Gwen,” warned Lizzie, glad her sister couldn’t see her, because Lizzie’s face was going a becoming shade of pink to match her sweater. “He’s just someone I met, it doesn’t mean anything. Today’s about the charity. Anyway,” she added, as if this was the final clincher, “I’m too old to be going out on dates.”

“Is that Debra speaking or Lizzie?” asked Gwen intuitively.

“It’s common sense speaking,” said Lizzie crossly, sorry that she’d ever told Gwen about Simon and their abortive date.

“Common sense my backside,” said Gwen pithily.

Lizzie was shocked. Gwen was not a woman to veer into the lexicon of rudeness.

“What’s wrong with a woman of your age going on a date?” demanded Gwen. “You’ve got all your faculties, all your own teeth, and they aren’t holding a bed for you in the old folk’s home yet, as far as I know. Not that that’s any indication, either,” she added. “Look at Myra who used to live beside me. She went into Shady Pines home full of misery about her poor departed Howard and how she wouldn’t be long following him into the next world, and I just heard she’s getting married next month to Oswald, this man she met in basket weaving. You’re never too old,” Gwen finished her homily.

“How lovely for Myra,” said Lizzie. “I must send her a card.”

“Don’t let Debra’s views cloud yours,” Gwen went on. “Anyway, if she is a changed woman, she’s big enough and ugly enough to look after herself and leave you to your own life.”

“She is,” protested Lizzie. “It’s this weekend she’s moving out and she’s apologised for everything. She really has turned over a new leaf.”

“Hmmph,” snorted Gwen. “I hope so, or she’s going to get an-other lecture from me. Is this Simon going to be there today?”

“I doubt it,” said Lizzie nonchalantly, as if she hadn’t dressed up for the express purpose of seeing him.

“Well, if you see him, apologise for not ever phoning him back and ask him out.”

“Ask him out?” The whole world had gone mad, Lizzie decided, when her respectable sister Gwen was telling her to ask men out. “I can’t do that,” Lizzie said. Then, she remembered her “Things to Do …” list still crumpled up in her handbag. Asking a man out was on the list. Mind you, so was buying yourself expensive jew-ellery and she hadn’t managed to do that either. She supposed she
could
ask him out but he probably wouldn’t be interested. He’d been keen before but she’d ruined it all by backing off. It was unlikely that he’d even want to talk to her.

Two people carriers with business logos and a bus were parked in the flying school car park when she got there. Probably a corporate parachute day, she decided. There was lots of noise coming from the big hangar, which was where the students learned how to jump in harness. There were delighted screams and laughter every few moments as another person leaped from the platform thirty feet off the ground, practising the right way to flex their knees and break their fall. Lizzie felt a pang of envy for all that day’s students—they were going to have the incredible experience of their first parachute jump. Lizzie would never forget that magical feeling of floating through the air like a bird. She’d love to do it all over again. Simon had said he’d do a tandem jump with her, but that was before the embarrassing en-counter with Debra. What guy in his right mind would want to hook up with a woman whose family life was so awry that she couldn’t even stand up for herself in front of her daughter?

When she went into the office, a small balding man she didn’t recognise was behind the desk. He introduced himself as Trevor, and Lizzie explained about Erin not being able to come.

Trevor was all business and, over a cup of coffee, he outlined the way the centre operated group charity jumps. It was all very infor-mative and, by the end of half an hour, Lizzie had found out every-thing she needed. But there had been no sign of any instructor she recognised.

“Thanks, Trevor,” she said as he walked her out to her car. “We’ll be in touch about the wording of the sponsorship cards and to agree a date that suits all of us.”

They said goodbye and, deflated, Lizzie got into her car and pulled the seat belt on. So much for beautifying herself. If destiny had anything to do with dating, then it was obvious that she wasn’t meant to meet Simon again.

A tap on the window made her look up, expecting to see Trevor with some last-minute point to make. Instead, it was Simon.

He looked just the same as she remembered: the lean, smiling face, and the eyes that glittered with some private amusement. Lizzie rolled down the window.