‘I feel amazing.’
Valerie, too, was looking better than when Diane last saw her. Her hair was glossy and she had less of a preoccupied and anxious air.
Diane broke away from Tamzin. ‘Valerie, this is Bryony.’
Valerie smiled. ‘You’re like your father, Bryony. But prettier.’
When Bryony beamed, Diane suddenly saw a flash of resemblance to Valerie, too. There was something about the mouth and the way Bryony held herself. It was unsettling.
‘And this is James, Bryony.’ Diane had known that James would be there from a text conversation conducted late last night as she snuggled under her duvet. All day she’d looked forward to the meeting with tingling warmth, catching herself smiling at the thought of being near him. And she’d thought herself prepared to see him with his wife and daughter – but found herself trying to remember how to act normally around him. Disconcerted, she flashed a panicky glance at Valerie and found those hazel eyes regarding her almost with affection.
Guilt lurched through her like the first downwards drop on a roller coaster.
In cold blood, she was planning to have an affair with this woman’s husband.
Valerie – her husband’s half-sister and Tamzin’s mother. If she were to go through with it, it would always be this way. There would be one relationship with James in public and another when they were alone. Echoes of Gareth and Stella. Had they felt like this? Guilty and remorseful? Or had they hugged their secrets and giggled over them when they were alone?
To hide the sudden trembling of her hands, she pushed the chair set out for her back from the bed, and from James, so that Bryony could sit close to Valerie.
Tamzin, luckily, was uncharacteristically streaming with chatter about her sisters’ envy of her new clothes and all Diane had to do was listen and nod and smile, screamingly conscious of James’s hands, resting loosely, still and calm, on his jeans-clad thighs. The same hands that tomorrow would be holding hers in the streets of Cambridge. Perhaps sliding beneath her clothes in the privacy of a car in a secluded spot … Pleasure and self-reproach butted heads and she felt sick.
As Valerie talked a wide-eyed Bryony through the helicopter crash and the complexity of lift offs – without actually mentioning the role of alcohol in what went wrong – Diane felt the truth of what she was contemplating like spicules of ice in her stomach.
There were so many people who could be affected. Valerie, Tamzin, Natalia and Alice. And, most of all, her own Bryony, sitting beside Valerie’s white hospital bed and getting to know her family. Family that first Gareth had kept from her and now Diane was going to risk alienating.
People with whom Bryony and the tiny life she cradled inside shared blood.
Clammy horror climbed up on her shoulders.
She’d been thinking that she was only betraying Gareth. But that wasn’t true at all. She rose jerkily. The conversation halted. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled.
Outdoors, she blinked in the sunlight, as confused as if she’d just arrived by Tardis. She felt like hell. Like such an evil bitch that she didn’t want to be with herself. She crossed the car park and climbed a bank, skirted a big bed of red roses and dropped to the grass between it and a Leylandii windbreak. Rolling onto her back she slung her arm over her eyes, pressing with her forearm until her eyeballs ached, trying not to see a mental image of Bryony and a baby, both dark-eyed and cherubic and in need of a happy home.
Then Tamzin’s face floated in front of her. A face that had suddenly remembered how to look cheerful, lit from inside by first love. And Valerie, plastered and pinned, and with plenty to cope with. Not really in any condition to fight for her husband.
The thought made her feel sick.
The thought of being without James made her feel worse.
It had taken a long time but it was as if she’d been drunk on joy ... and here came the hangover.
Her phone rang but she didn’t even take it out of her pocket. She just lay with her face turned towards the sky, utterly miserable to realise how taking what you wanted could mash the hearts of other people.
Finally, she trailed back in through the automatic doors. The carpet, the hospital smell, the smiles of the nurses, the low key buzz of the place – all drearily familiar. She trudged up the stairs to the first floor and knocked gently on Valerie’s door.
Valerie lay alone, staring out of the window, a magazine face down beside her.
Diane halted. Somehow she’d expected Bryony and Tamzin and James.
Valerie turned, forehead puckered with concern. ‘Are you OK? You’ve been gone almost an hour, the others wanted to send out a search party. Bryony’s gone to visit her father and Tamzin and James have left. I think James wanted to hang on and be Sir Lancelot but Tamzin’s made arrangements to meet this new young man, so she hauled him out.’
‘George,’ Diane supplied, automatically.
‘He’s a relative of Gareth’s, isn’t he? If you’re not in a dreadful hurry, why don’t you sit down and tell me about him? According to Tamzin he’s a god.’ She reached over and pressed a button on her panel. ‘You look as if you could do with a coffee. Are you all right? Shall we get a nurse to fetch Bryony?’
‘I’m fine. I did feel strange but it’s passing.’ Awkwardly, Diane sank down onto the chair while somebody brought in coffee and a few biscuits on a little blue plate. She waited silently while the nurse put Valerie at a more comfortable angle to drink and joked gently about whether the coffee was strong enough to melt tar, the way Valerie liked it.
‘Only because they won’t put any scotch in it,’ Valerie added under her breath as the nurse rustled out. ‘So, is this George character the wonder that Tamzin insists?’
