She smiled. ‘Have you heard anything from Monica?’
‘Nothing. And I don’t know what to do. I thought she would’ve made contact by now. I try and tell myself that she knows we’re close by, Giles and me, that we are her family and we love her. But it’s eating me up inside that she hasn’t reached out. Just a text would do. Anything.’
Nadia watched Giles when he called out from his position at the top of the climbing frame with an, ‘I’m the king of the castle!’
She turned back to Archie. ‘You must feel helpless. How are you explaining this to Giles?’
‘I’ve explained his mum has a few things she needs to work out, I’ve turned this into a bit of a holiday, more of a trip to see his auntie. He seems to have accepted it. I don’t want to upset him unnecessarily, you know.’
‘I think it was the right thing to do. No point having him worry too; you’re doing enough of that yourself.’
He nursed his coffee cup in his hands. ‘Thank you for getting in touch again. It makes my reasoning with Giles more plausible for a start.’
‘Glad I helped. Does he want to go home? Is he missing the familiarity?’
‘He’s all right at the moment, distraction is working, a new auntie, new surrounds, but I’m going to have to think about it soon. I toyed with the idea of leaving him with a friend back in Switzerland but I thought if Monica was to know he was here too, she might be more likely to come to us. If she gets in touch, I’ll get him on the phone; he needs to hear his mother’s voice and I think she needs to hear his too.’
‘Apart from coming to England when I first left Switzerland, has she ever done anything like this before?’
‘Gone off somewhere?’ He took a welcome sip of coffee. ‘No.’
‘What happened that first time?’
‘When your mum died, it hit her hard and more so because she knew she’d lost any kind of relationship with you. She became desperate to make amends, she felt totally cut off. I wanted to come to Dorset with her, help her find you, but I couldn’t; I’d landed a really good job and I knew her search was a long shot. I also knew I couldn’t stop her and so she came over by herself. After a few weeks, when she couldn’t find you, she returned home to Switzerland, devastated, her head all over the place. She pushed me away at first; she thought shedidn’t deserve me because of what she’d done. She knew she’d driven a wedge between me and my friend and that just added to everything else. She knew she’d got away with a lot when she was younger; she told me sometimes, she wished your mum had been harder on her: perhaps it would’ve helped her grow up a bit. But she never did and so it was left to you to tell her to pull herself together and she never took that well.
‘She was so disappointed that she couldn’t get in touch with you to invite you to the wedding – she didn’t have her sister, she didn’t have her mum, she didn’t have her dad to walk her down the aisle, and a wedding day without any of her own family was almost too much for her to bear. The day was still wonderful, but it was tinged with a sadness I’m not sure even I could make up for. She told everyone that you were working in England and couldn’t get time off, that it was an important step in your career.’
‘People must have thought I was terrible. Not coming to my own sister’s wedding.’
‘Actually, they didn’t. Monica made sure people knew you had a great job nursing, that your skills were very much in demand, that taking time off wasn’t an option and that you’d celebrate with her when you were next home. I think she even believed what she was saying half the time. She was proud of you.’
‘I didn’t think?—’
‘That she cared so much? Of course she did. She idolised you. It might not have seemed that way, but she really did. I’m not a psychologist but from what she’s said over the years, that was part of the reason she was always in trouble. She longed to be like you, to be approved of by you, but she knew she wasn’t.’
‘How did you two even get together? I never asked.’
‘Right place, right time, I guess. You might see it as wrong place, wrong time, but I fell in love so quickly with your sister. Itwas about a month after you and I split up. On a tram in Zurich. She was travelling around and she got on board with the biggest bag of chocolate you’ve ever seen.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘We went for coffee, a walk, and we saw each other the day after, then the day after that. At first, I thought she was using me to get one up on you but I soon realised she wasn’t. She was different to the girl I’d seen at your house that Christmas, the girl you’d told me about so many times. Away from home, on her own, she seemed to have grown up a lot. She still had all this energy but she put it into things like hiking, bike rides, outdoor swimming.’
‘That sounds nothing like Monica.’
His expression said it all: this was the woman he’d fallen in love with, not the woman Nadia remembered.
‘She’s changed a lot. She had time travelling – she went to every place in Switzerland she could think of, then after your mum passed away and you left, just when I thought she might never pick herself up, she did. She got a job in hospitality working at one of the nicest hotels I’ve been to, she worked hard, and we were happy. But she never lost the regret for hurting you.’
‘When you talk about her, I don’t recognise my own sister.’
‘That’s why I’m telling you all these things. She’s a good wife, a wonderful mother. She’s a hard worker, she volunteers at a local school helping kids learn to read, and she never gave up hope of seeing you again.’
Nadia tried to absorb everything he was saying. ‘Then why hasn’t she come forward?’
‘I don’t know. I wonder if she’s scared too: scared you’ll tell her to get lost. If only she’d call, I could talk to her, make her realise that you might want to see her as much as she wants to see you?’
It was a question, not a statement.
‘I don’t know, Archie. It took me time to be happy again. Her taking you from me was the worst – I mean, losing a part of my relationship with Mum because Mum had so much to deal with when it came to Monica was bad enough, but you were the one person I never thought I’d be without. You were something I thought she couldn’t take from me.’
‘Six months after you caught us together at your mum’s place, Monica really broke down over it all. She didn’t seem too distraught at first but over time, as I got to know her and her barriers came down with me, I could see how much it had affected her.’
