The Harder They Fall (11 page)

“Put it on,” he said. He looked like Morten Harket, Shaunna thought, standing there, with his hands resting casually in his pockets, and she could feel the knot of sexual tension building within. She dismissed it with a shudder and shooed him away so she could do as he suggested. The fabric was so soft and sensuous against her skin, and she smoothed the dress down over her hips. It felt so good. She tossed her hair back over her shoulders and checked her reflection.

“You can come back now,” she called out. Kris walked into her room—it had once been
their
room—and stopped in his tracks when he saw her.

“Wow.”

He moved towards her to take in the full beauty of her cleavage, the silky fabric moulding perfectly around her breasts, before falling away until it collided with the outermost curves of her hips. He couldn’t help himself and reached out and touched her bare shoulder. She tilted her head and trapped his hand with her cheek.

“Don’t,” she said. He held her gaze and she let his hand slide around to her back. He pulled her to him, until their lips were almost touching, and inhaled her scent.

“You don’t want to. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Of course I want to, but…” It was so difficult to explain, to put into words the confusion she was feeling. He was the one who ended their marriage, not her. She still loved him, and yes, she still wanted him. The easiest thing in the world would be to give in to the temptation and satiate this hunger, brought on by months of famine and need. Then what would it be like afterwards? Could they continue to share their house, pretending to their friends that all was well with their marriage, when it was a farce? Or was it? After all, what was marriage, but an enduring partnership? And hadn’t they endured!

Her momentary doubt was sufficient to allow the flames to die down to a tameable height; Kris released her and turned away.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was so small, so distant, but she couldn’t care for him, not the way that she had done, through those years of make-believe and then his breakdown. He was stronger now, ready to move on with his life, the way it was meant to be, which was absolutely not like this.

“Me too,” she said, reaching out and taking his hand. He curled his fingers around hers, but remained turned away from her. Then he released her and walked out of the room. Shaunna sat on the edge of the bed and felt the fizz of tears forming in her throat, but she wasn’t going to cry anymore.

Eleanor had been muttering to herself and throwing things out of the wardrobe ever since they’d arrived home, and James was happy to have the boys to entertain, for it was the perfect excuse to stay out of the way. Three times now she had come into the lounge and declared that she knew her dress was here somewhere; she’d seen it recently, when they were packing up in preparation for the move, all this with the intention of being well and truly settled in, first before Toby was born, and then before the wedding. Unfortunately, the builders said, it was beyond their control: the house wouldn’t be finished until November. Something to do with the electricity supply, they said. She didn’t care. She just needed to find that damned dress!

“Enna is cross?” Oliver asked. He still hadn’t quite mastered the pronunciation of her name, but he was getting there. Sometimes he got the ‘L’ in it too, so it came out as ‘Ellna’, which was pretty close. He had no problem saying Toby, though, and took every opportunity to practise, with a constant stream of questions powered by the curiosity of childhood: ‘Why is Toby crying?’, ‘Why can’t Toby eat cornflakes?’, ‘Why hasn’t Toby got any teeth?’.

“No, she’s not cross. She’s looking for something and she can’t find it,” James explained patiently.

“Why?” Oliver came back. Why, why, why.

“She can’t remember where she put it,” James replied, already planning the next response in his head, but Oliver was bored and had moved on to his toy car, zooming it up and down the table with ‘nyerrrrrr nyerrrrrr’ vocal effects, followed by ‘crasssshhhh!’ as he sent it flying like a miniature aluminium missile into the air and three or four feet across the room.

“That’s it,” Eleanor announced on her way into the lounge. She flapped her arms once to emphasise the permanence of this statement. “I give up. I must’ve thrown it out. I mean, who in their right mind would think they were going to need something like that again? And anyway, I doubt it’d go anywhere near me now, the size of my hips.”

“What does it look like?” James asked. He swapped Toby onto his other arm and caught a whiff of recently filled nappy. He wrinkled his nose.

“I’ll do it,” Eleanor offered, laying out the changing mat, nappy and baby wipes. James handed his youngest son across, over the top of Oliver’s head.

“What you doing, Enna?”

“Changing Toby’s nappy, because he’s had a poo,” she said, hoping to avoid any ‘why’ by pre-empting it and only succeeding in demonstrating the foolishness of adults.

“Why do babies poo?”

“Because they don’t need all of their milk.”

“Why don’t they drink less milk? Then they wouldn’t poo.”

“Oliver!” James raised his voice a little and his eldest son was immediately quiet. Eleanor didn’t look up from the nappy-changing, because she sometimes felt James was too strict on the poor little fellow, who wasn’t quite four and behaved impeccably for most of the time.

“I was thinking,” James said, ignoring Oliver’s brief detour, “if you have a good idea of what your dress is like, perhaps we could purchase something similar.”

“Unlikely. My mum made it. No, I’ll just have to wear something else. I don’t suppose anyone’s actually going to play along with Rob’s silly game, so it probably doesn’t even matter that much.” Eleanor fastened Toby’s nappy. “There ya go, stinky baby,” she said, tickling his bare tummy.

“Why does Toby like tickles?” Oliver asked.

“I don’t know, Oliver. Because it feels nice, I suppose.” He leaned over his little brother and gently tickled his tummy. Toby looked up at him and smiled. Eleanor gasped.

“He smiled! James! Toby just smiled at Oliver!”

“He did?” James joined the rest of the family on the floor and Oliver tickled Toby again, with the same effect, though he was far less impressed than the adults and soon toddled off to play with his other toys, leaving them to wonder if the now dissipated smile had been a figment of their imagination.

“Why don’t you have one last look for that dress of yours?” James suggested. Eleanor eyed him sideways.

“You’re getting as bad as Oliver. No. It’s fine. Really. I’ll wear something else instead—maybe go to the mall tomorrow morning.” Toby’s crying brought an end to the discussion, and she picked him up from the changing mat, unbuttoning her shirt as she walked over to the sofa. Oliver paused to watch, his mouth open, question at the ready.

“Shush, Oliver,” James commanded and his son frowned. “Come and help me with Toby’s things.” He passed him the baby wipes and indicated where he should put them. Oliver complied, then returned to playing with his car, leaving James to tidy away the changing mat and dispose of the dirty nappy. When he returned, Eleanor was almost done feeding Toby and hadn’t even noticed he’d been gone so long. He took the baby from her and set him down in his cot for his afternoon sleep.

The trouble with moving four and a half thousand miles away, George was explaining to Sophie, was that it meant getting rid of all superfluous belongings, and therefore his tuxedo, and the ludicrous thirty inch, high-waist trousers that went with it, was long ago dispatched to a charity shop, with everything else he’d possessed prior to emigrating. Well, maybe not quite everything else, but that was a different story. He rabbitted on, while she listened, a smirk fighting its way onto her lips every so often, until George sighed loudly and thumped his elbows down on the table. They were back in the little tea shop, because it was a rather nice place to be.

Infuriatingly, George continued (again), Josh still had his suit
and
it fitted him perfectly, but of course why did he expect anything else from Josh ‘just-so’ Sandison? If ever things looked as if they might begin to change, he’d do everything in his power to ensure they stayed exactly the same, including his weight and his hairstyle. It was a shame the same rules didn’t extend to his living quarters, because he was on about getting yet more wallpaper this morning: this time for the hall and stairway. Old-fashioned, Sophie suggested. Traditional, George argued, but she was right. Josh was old-fashioned and at some point would have to concede to the ineluctable changes in his life.

George was being contrite and he knew it, but this reunion was making him incredibly nervous. When they were at school, it was unheard of for people to be openly gay, and Kris had braved the verbal, and sometimes physical bullying that ensued from coming out. George wasn’t so harsh on himself as to believe he’d been a coward back then, although he was feeling very cowardly about it now, because other than his closest friends, the people he went to school with were mostly unaware of his sexuality. He’d done his coming out in his twenties mostly, first at university and then over in the States, neither of them what he would class as positive, pain-free experiences, so he was hardly relishing the prospect of going through it all over again and quite frankly found it ridiculous that he should have to, at the grand old age of thirty-eight. To cap it all, speaking to Joe, albeit via online chat, had stirred up all sorts of uneasy feelings that he wasn’t prepared to share with Sophie, as she didn’t know about what had happened with the ranch, other than that he had sold up and returned to England.

So his options, she advised, were quite straightforward: either he was going to have to bottle out, make up some excuse and not go to the reunion at all, in which case he would regret it for years to come, or, and this was the option she favoured, he was going to let her take him shopping tomorrow morning and find an outfit bearing some resemblance to the original. She tilted her head to the side and blinked rapidly as a signal that she was awaiting his response.

“So what you actually mean is I don’t have any choice whatsoever,” George stated. She shrugged and said nothing. “OK,” he sighed, “what time d’you want to meet?”

“That’s my boy,” she said, patting his hand encouragingly. “You’ll have an amazing time, I know it.”

Josh came home from work and went straight up to his room to search, not for his tux, which was already at the dry cleaner’s, but for the item James had requested. He was bound to have one somewhere. Of course, he knew George had one (and then some) but he couldn’t really ask without giving himself away. He stopped to listen for a moment, to make sure he was still home alone, took out his keys and unlocked the ottoman.

Dan was almost unconscious by the time they reached the hospital, and they’d had to carry him in on a stretcher, but he was now safely ensconced in a side ward and hooked up to a drip, with various tests under way. Initial observations indicated that there was no swelling, so it definitely wasn’t altitude sickness, thus the doctors instantly dismissed Dan’s self-diagnosis; he hadn’t been at a great enough elevation to cause it for one thing, and aside from the headaches and somewhat delusionary state, he had no other symptoms. What he did have was a dangerously high temperature and a blood test confirmed that his immune system was on the brink of shutting down. For the first few hours, Andy kept vigil, only leaving when asked to do so and taking these opportunities to try and reach Adele to tell her what was going on, knowing that each subsequent missed call would send her into further panic. Eventually he decided to give up on all counts, and returned to the hotel, where the owner was only too happy to have him back almost a day early, but was suitably sympathetic about the circumstances and took some food up shortly after he arrived. Andy was fast asleep, so ‘Alan’ left the food next to the bed and quietly closed the door.

Later in the evening, Bhagwan also arrived at the hotel, looking a little more refreshed and with the offer of a lift, but Andy had already left on foot, so he stayed and had a drink, before making his way to the hospital to wait for his friend, who was back sitting on the terribly wobbly and uncomfortable wooden chair at Dan’s bedside. Nurses came and went, checking blood pressure or drip bags. Sometimes Dan would stir and mutter some thing or another that usually made little sense, then drift back into a state of semi-consciousness. By now, the test results were all back and indicated that he had picked up a particularly nasty virus at some point during the past few days. There was nothing more that could be done to help him; just a matter of time, they said. Andy rubbed his eyes and yawned. He was sick: of sitting watching over his brother in hospital beds, knowing that he was responsible. If he could have changed places right there and then, he’d have done so without hesitation. Telling Adele, when he finally got through, had been tougher than he’d anticipated: she started crying, and he took the full hit of her regret for rejecting Dan’s marriage proposals. Regardless of Andy’s assurances that she would have the chance to accept the next time, she wouldn’t believe him, and why should she? He’d hardly proved himself trustworthy in the past.

Dan slept on fitfully, and incredibly Andy found himself nodding off, perched on that rickety chair. The first time it was the sensation of slipping off the edge that woke him; the second he nearly jumped out of his skin when Dan shouted out for him.

“Shh,” Andy comforted. “You’re OK. You’re in hospital and on the mend.”

“I wanted to…” Dan began. He couldn’t keep his eyes open and his mouth was clogged at the corners with dried saliva.

“Do you need a drink?”

Dan shook his head. “Shaunna,” he said. “You love Shaunna.”

Andy considered this statement for a moment, then remembered his conversation with Bhagwan when they were driving back down the mountain. He’d thought Dan was asleep at the time, otherwise he may have been a little more stoic.

“Yes, I do,” he admitted. “She’s my niece. Of course I love her.” Dan giggled and shook his head.