Here Come the Boys (10 page)

Clad in their last pair of clean knickers and their floaty dresses, the two of them set off up the hill and down into Korčula town. It was buzzing. Market stalls were busy with bartering holidaymakers, the restaurants were full of diners, souvenir hunters filled the tiny shops.

‘I’ve been there for lunch before,’ said Selina, pointing over to a restaurant which had tables either side of the road. ‘Simple food but very good.’

‘Looks lovely,’ nodded Angie. ‘Let’s go there then.’

They found an empty table overlooking the pretty harbour with its dark sparkling sea. The table wore a jolly red gingham cloth and there was a candle set in the middle of it, the warm wind tickling the flame with its breath and making it dance.

‘It’s perfect,’ said Angie, hardly able to believe she had made it here and was hours away from seeing her wonderful Gil again.

‘Glad you approve.’

A waitress walked past with two huge bowls of spaghetti Bolognese.

‘That looks tasty,’ said Angie.

‘It’s what I’m having. And some white wine.’

They ordered two spag bols, a bowl of chips and a carafe of the coldest white wine they had in the house.

‘This looks fantastic,’ said Angie, gripped with a sudden euphoria. They’d got here. They’d fought migraines and hairy salads and coffee overload and it had cost them a fortune, but they were here. And Dave was right – it was a gem of a place.

They tucked into their food heartily, eating everything on their plates and the complimentary local bread too, and washed it down with glasses of white wine that tasted like heaven on the back of their throats. Neither of them would have swapped that meal for four courses with all the trimmings at The Ivy.

Selina leaned over for a fresh serviette and knocked Angie’s glass over onto the tablecloth.

‘I’m sorry, Ange,’ she said.

‘It’s okay. There was only a little bit left. It’ll give me an excuse to fill up my glass.’ She grinned and reached for the carafe.

‘No, I mean
I’m sorry
, Ange,’ said Selina. ‘I’m sorry for what I did to you.’

There it was, the apology Angie had been waiting for for twenty years. Angie stopped pouring and put the carafe back down. This was the moment she had imagined for so long – Selina saying sorry. Now she would give Selina both barrels as she had always planned. But Angie was more than surprised to find that she no longer wanted to.

Instead, she asked calmly: ‘Why did you do it? You were my best friend, Sel.’

Selina dropped her eyes onto her fingers which were threading nervously around each other.

Angie pushed for an answer. ‘You know how much I liked him… loved him. You had everything, Sel. Why did you have to take him as well?’

Selina’s head sprang up. ‘Me?’ she said. ‘I had everything?’

‘You were captain of the hockey team, you had a horse, a massive house, everything you wanted, everyone wanted to be your friend—’

‘I had a horse I couldn’t ride,’ Selina interrupted her, ‘a house I rattled around in because no one had any time for me, I had ―things‖ bought for me because it was easier to do that than to give me any attention. And no one really wanted to be my friend, Ange. They were just sucking up because we were loaded or they wanted to ride on my horse or their parents wanted to be ―in‖ with mine. The only real thing of value in my life was you. You were the one with everything. Those lovely parents of yours, that cosy house, your old dog that farted, brains, talent. You should have been captain of the hockey team, everyone knew it. Even Mrs Weaver knew it. But now you know why she gave me the shiny captain badge to wear.’

‘What?’

That wasn’t what Angie expected to hear.

And in Selina’s mind, the cogs were turning furiously.

‘Oh God, Angie, please tell me you aren’t still in love with him,’ she gasped. ‘Is that why you’ve been so super-hostile to me?’

Selina looked into Angie’s eyes and she knew she had guessed right.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Selina sighed, then she laughed. ‘You bloody fool.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Angie, a snap in her voice.

‘You didn’t know him long enough to find out what he was really like under that shiny veneer, Ange,’ said Selina, shaking her head slowly from side to side. ‘ I saved you from a fate worse than death by stealing him from you. Zander Goldman is a …selfish, narcissistic, emotionally retarded, adulterous, boring bastard, and those are his good points. Oh, he looks the part. He’s groomed, he’s successful, he’s charming… but as a husband he stinks. I can’t have children, but he can. He has two. To different women, obviously. He’s very cross that he has to pay out maintenance because he doesn’t want anything to do with them.’

‘Pardon?’ said Ange, trying to gulp down the lump which had suddenly risen to her throat.

Selina lifted the carafe and poured them both a glass of wine, then she called over the waitress and asked for a replacement.

‘No one sticks with a man for twenty years if he’s that bad,’ said Angie.

‘Yes they do,’ replied Selina, her voice calm and wise. ‘Hundreds, thousands of women stay in relationships just like mine. Women who have had all the self-belief and confidence crushed out of them.’

Now Angie knew she wasn’t serious. How could Selina not have confidence? She was slim and golden and gorgeous, rich and successful.

Then she remembered going out with Baz Cook when she was twenty. He was funny and sweet in the beginning – like Zander. Within two months he’d turned into a monster. She’d stood too much of his verbal abuse before her sister told him to piss off and leave her alone, because Angie was afraid to tell him herself. He’d reduced her to rubble in that short time. What if she hadn’t had a sister to help out and had stayed in that relationship?

But Zander Goldman was no Baz Cook. Was he? Angie couldn’t take it in. Then again, she had mooned over him for years but only actually gone out with him for less than a month.
No no no no no no
. All those years she’d pined for him, dreamed about him, fantasised about him, kept a secret part of her heart for him that should have, by rights, belonged to Gil. It couldn’t be that the man she had obsessed about didn’t exist, had never existed and was merely a product of an over-romantic imagination.

He didn’t even have the guts to tell you he’d dumped you,
said a voice in her head.
Some knight in shining armour!

He was enchanted away by Selina,
countered another voice.
She would have told him not to contact you. Everything was her fault, none of it was his.

Oh grow up, Angie.
The first voice was stronger. And she knew it was telling her a truth she had battled against hearing for twenty years.

The shrine in her head dedicated to the tall, dark, handsome Zander Goldman crumbled as surely as if it had been hit by a thousand-pound wrecking ball.

‘I think I’ve killed something inside you,’ said Selina, watching Angie’s eyes flicker.

‘But surely if you’re that unhappy, you could leave him. You’ve got somewhere to go. And you can’t be short for money. That’s what keeps most people in unhappy marriages, and staying together for the sake of chil…’ Angie cut off her sentence. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to say…’

‘Don’t worry. Money doesn’t make you happy, Ange – that much I do know. It might impress some people to brag about having a flat in London, but to me it’s merely the place where Zander shags his interns.’

Angie felt as if her whole life had been shaken up, like a snow globe.

‘He must love you though, surely, Sel. You’ve been together for twenty years.’

‘Zander doesn’t love anyone but himself and never has,’ was Selina’s reply. ‘Other people exist only to serve his needs. Zander can be the most charming man in the world and make you forgive him for all the horrible names he’s called you and the detestable things he’s done to you. Oh, Angie, the amount of times I’ve been about to leave him and he’s promised and cajoled and persuaded me that things will change. And for a while they do. Then suddenly we are back to hell and I threaten to leave and on and on that cycle goes… and has been turning for twenty years. Every time I get a little bit closer to going for good, but I never quite make it.

‘That’s why we are on a cruise together. Yet another “new footing” after a sobbing young lady turned up at the house to tell me what my husband had been doing to her behind my back. Zander doesn’t want me to divorce him. Not until I’ve inherited what my parents decide to leave me in their wills, anyway. Oh yes, this holiday was going to wipe the slate completely clean. Alas, the ship had barely left Southampton when we had our first argument and that is why I was in Malaga by myself, to get away from him. He hasn’t spoken one word to me since the sail-away party, unless you count the voicemail message he left on my mobile when he realised I’d missed the ship. He said he hoped that I never got back on it.’

Angie found tears seeping from the corners of her eyes and she didn’t know whether it was because of her own shattered fantasies or her old friend’s suffering.

Selina smiled, leaned over the table and squeezed Angie’s hand. ‘You have to be careful what you wish for sometimes. I hoped, on this holiday, to find something that gave me a great big kick up the bottom so I could finally say those words, “I’m leaving you, Zander” and mean them.’

Angie wiped at her eyes with a serviette. Who would ever have thought the feisty, beautiful, perfect Selina would have this sort of life.

‘Do you think you will?’

‘Oh, absolutely, without a doubt. You have no idea what verbal abuse I have in store for him when I get back on the ship. He won’t be there to greet me, he will be in our suite glowering, his whole being full of festering fury waiting to vent in my direction. He’ll expect me to take it silently as usual. But this time, I won’t.’ Selina’s eyes began to sparkle. ‘Seeing you again has made me think a lot about the girl I was. She didn’t grow up into the woman she should have been, like you did: smart, savvy, living with a man who obviously adores you. You look like a happy woman, Ange.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, you do. And these past couple of days, horrific as they’ve been, have put a pair of jump leads on my spirit. I’m ready to change things.’

‘It’s been a bit mad, hasn’t it?’ grinned Angie, dabbing at the ever-increasing flow from her eyes.

‘Crazy. But this,’ she spread her arms towards the table, the sky, the sea, the whole island, ‘money couldn’t buy the serenity I feel at this moment. It’s like a taste of the freedom I could have if I walked out of my marriage.’

‘I’m glad. I want you to be happy,’ said Angie, smiling through her tears. ‘Even if you have been a thorn in my brain for twenty years.’

‘I acted like a cow, I know I did. I think I felt I deserved to be punished for it.’

‘Oh Sel, no,’ Angie shook her head wildly. ‘Well, you can stop now.’

‘Ange, you don’t know how many times over the years I’ve wanted to find you and turn up on your doorstep and say hi. But I was totally convinced that you would tell me to piss off.’

‘I would have done.’

They grinned at each other.

‘Let’s have dessert. There’s still plenty of room left in my dress. I’ve got just enough money left to buy us cake, coffee and another carafe of wine,’ said Selina.

‘Please no coffee, just cake and wine.’

So they ordered two desserts and another carafe of the icy cold house white and talked about old friends from school and teachers and laughed like the girls they once were.

‘Remember that awful square dancing we had to do?’ giggled Angie. ’You used to pretend every week to have hurt your ankle in hockey so you could sit at the side. Now I know why Mrs Weaver let you get away with that one so much.’

‘I love dancing now,’ replied Selina, making Angie’s eyebrows rise.

‘Rubbish. You would rather follow my sister into a convent than dance.’

‘It’s true. A few years ago we were on the
Mermaidia
and, as usual, Zander and I weren’t talking, so I went to see a show by myself and then had a drink and ended up sitting on the top deck by myself until very late. I was just about to go back to the cabin and I looked down and saw this lovely old couple dancing together on the deck, totally lost in each other. Quite adorable. They inspired me. I took myself off for some dancing lessons and I loved them. I’m good enough to be on
Strictly.
You were always very good at stripping the willow, I seem to remember,’ she said with a grin. ‘Does Gil dance?’

Angie raised her eyebrows. ‘To a fashion. We had some lessons a few years back too. He was very keen, but he’s not exactly a natural. We look a bit weird on a dance floor with him being two feet taller than me, but he doesn’t care.’ A picture of Gil cha-cha-cha-ing sprang into her mind and with it a huge surge of affection for the dear, sweet man. She’d dance with him in the middle of the atrium and not give a stuff how funny they looked at the first available opportunity. She couldn’t wait to see him and his lop-sided happy grin. She couldn’t wait for his long arms to fold around her.

‘I suppose we better get some sleep. Big day tomorrow. Especially for me,’ said Selina.

They paid the bill and walked slowly up the hill, arm in arm for support as they’d had a lot of wine. King was asleep on the patio chair outside the front door like a large ginger sentry. Emerick’s flat was cosy and inviting, the beds were soft and clean, a breeze stirred through the wooden slats of the window shutters. They both slept like logs.

DAY SEVEN

Chapter 15

They drifted awake within minutes of each other to the sounds of a town rousing, and rooms filled with slices of bright sunshine.

There was only an hour before Emerick collected them so they sat on the patio and waited, King hopping from one knee to another in a bid to test who was the most comfortable. They lifted their faces and felt the sun’s warmth caress their skin. An evening in Korčula, though not quite the one Selina had planned in her head, had been every bit as lovely as she had imagined. It would always stay in the box in her heart where all her most special memories were kept. And she was determined to have more to add to them now.