Kitabı oku: «Dreaming Of... Australia», sayfa 8

CHAPTER TEN

AIMEE re-read the opening to the oral history spread out on the hotel table before her and stared at the words as though they were prophecy.

She’d first met Coraline McMahon as an elderly woman from the suburbs of Melbourne, but the Cora she was meeting now was fifteen, beautiful, running barefoot and wild in her home on the Isle of Man. Cora had set her cap at tear-away Danny McMahon from a very early age—a young man idolised by the boys, dreamed of by the girls, and tsked about by their parents alike, which had only made him all the more desirable. Dark and bold and charismatic. She’d fallen hard and irrevocably for Danny, but he’d left her behind when he’d enlisted in the Second World War.

Broken-hearted. Fifteen.

Pregnant.

Within weeks a shamed Cora had been married off to Danny’s younger brother Charley: the responsible one, the tolerant one, the one willing to raise his brother’s child to avoid a family scandal.

They’d had a sound sort of marriage, living in the McMahon household while the war raged on, until the day Danny got a foot blown off and limped home to a hero’s welcome.

‘Ugh.’ Aimee dropped the sheets of her transcribed story onto the tabletop and slid down further on her chair to study the ceiling.

Every day.

Every day Cora had struggled with wanting a man she couldn’t have. Living under the same roof. Watching him making a slow life for himself. It had broken Charley’s heart, watching her try to hide it. She’d never so much as touched Danny again, but breathing the same air as him had tarnished her soul and her husband’s—even after he’d packed them all up and shipped them to Australia to escape his older brother’s influence.

Aimee’s subconscious shrieked at her to pay attention. To what, though? What was the right message to take from Cora’s cautionary tale?

Was it counsel against the pain of spending time with someone she wanted but could never have? Or a reminder of how damaging it could be to any future relationship she might form? Or was it a living warning about not seizing the moment, of settling for someone less than you wanted? Cora had lived seventy years with second-best, faithful, loyal, accepting Charley McMahon. Yet he’d married her because she was pregnant with his brother’s child. Pressured by his parents. And he’d lived his life knowing her heart truly belonged to his brother.

No matter the great affection that had eventually grown between them, each of them lived had long lives knowing that neither was the other’s first choice.

That was just … awful.

And yet their story was going in her book. Coraline McMahon had willingly given her life to the brother she didn’t love. She’d done the right thing by her family, her son, on her own merit. She hadn’t been swayed by the fact that it was the wrong thing for her. Outwardly it smacked of passivity, but there was great strength in the way she’d taken her unplanned future by the scruff and fashioned a reasonable life for herself, and that made her story perfect for Navigators.

She’d owned her choices and she lived with the consequences. For ever.

But … oh … how it had hurt her.

Aimee remembered the cloudy agony in Cora’s eyes as she’d relived the day they’d trundled away from the McMahon home with their meagre belongings stacked around them. Told her about the momentary eye-contact she’d shared with a broken and war-shocked Danny, standing respectfully to the rear of the group farewelling his brother’s family.

Bare seconds locked together. Her first and only glimpse of the saturated sorrow in his eyes. Realising he’d loved her after all.

How had she managed, never seeing him again, never speaking to him …? Aimee studied the yellowed photograph of Cora and her son aboard the ship they’d boarded for Australia. Seeing Danny every single day in the dark eyes of their son?

Was that a comfort or a kind of torture?

She squared up the bundled pages that captured Cora’s story and refastened the elastic band around them tight, sealing in all the heartbreak. The cover title was the widow’s final words to her on the last day of their interviews: This Too Shall Pass.

Except Aimee felt certain it had never passed for Coraline McMahon. She was strong and honourable, and hadn’t been afraid to reinvent herself for her son’s sake, but she’d carry the secret pain of Danny’s loss to her grave.

Aimee slid the documents back into their file and swallowed back tears. Would she have the same strength of character? Endurance? Would she grow to accept Sam’s unavailability or, like Cora, would her heart form a callus around the wound so that she could survive?

‘Phone, Aimee …’

She jumped at Sam’s voice, so close behind her, and reached for her mobile as the special ring-tone he’d recorded on her phone the day before repeated itself.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

But just as she went to accept his call she paused, glanced at Cora’s notes, and then at the hotel wall between their suites. She tuned in to the heart that hammered in Pavlovian response just to the sound of Sam’s voice. The cell-deep anticipation that excited her blood.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

And she let it go to voicemail.

She opened the door, expecting hotel staff to collect her bags, and found Sam there, instead, a deep scowl marring his handsome face and fire sparking in his eyes. Her stomach clenched.

‘Why are you leaving?’ he said.

Because it’s not healthy for me to be around you, like this. Because I need to remove myself from the temptation of touching you.

‘You don’t need me for this afternoon’s meetings so I might as well fly out today.’ Without you.

‘But what difference does one more night make?’

Her whole body stiffened up. That was not an easy question to answer. If he knew what she’d be wanting to do right through that night … What she’d wanted to do that first night, with a head full of images of him in his towel … Or last night, fuelled by sensual dream images of his strong, lithe fabric hawk kite twisting around her … How long she’d lain awake taking herself through the mental pros and cons of rolling out of bed and tiptoeing next door … How hard it had been to finally settle on not doing it …

Her arms crept around her front. ‘None, to you. But I’d like to get home now that I’m not needed. I’ve done my part for your department.’

It was more defensive than she’d meant it, but that couldn’t be helped. Being strong had to start somewhere.

He frowned. ‘You have. You’ve been amazing. I just …’

‘What, Sam?’

‘Are you leaving because of yesterday? Because of what I said on your recorder?’

There was nothing too controversial about what they’d recorded at the café. But ‘yesterday’ could only mean the kites. She tossed her hair back. ‘I’m leaving because I’m done.’ Totally. ‘And because staying has absolutely no purpose.’

His eyes smouldered the way they had at the end of their kite-flying. He was busting to say more, but even he had to see the sense in not hurting each other any further.

Aimee’s skin stretched to snapping point as they stood there, silently.

‘So … good luck this afternoon.’ She stood back to close her door.

‘I’ll call you. When I get back to Hobart.’

Her heart squeezed. ‘Why?’

His scowl bisected his handsome face. ‘Your book. Don’t we need to finish the interview?’

The book. The last remaining thread between them. A totally fake thread.

She pressed her fingernails into her palms. ‘I think I got everything I needed yesterday.’

‘I’ll call you. To be sure.’

She’d seen him angry, amused, confused, delighted. But she’d never seen Sam so … adrift. Cutting him completely free just wasn’t something she could do at this very second. She needed more strength for that.

She sighed. ‘Okay.’

No one said she had to answer his call.

The banks of the Derwent were busy as always—even for a week day. Small watercraft under billowing sails glided along its gleaming surface, and presumptuous ducks busied themselves nearby, waiting for any scraps that might tumble from Aimee’s lunch. Parallel pairs of prams pushed by athletic mums dominated the shared pathway and cyclists had to rumble onto the grass to go around them.

Aimee sat on her comfortable bench, tucked back into a recess in the thick foliage edging the pathway, munching absently on her chicken sandwich, her eyes very much lost amongst the boats out on the channel. Glorious golden rays of sun sprinkled down, warming all they touched.

Was there anything more restorative? A productive morning in Hobart’s research library, a simple lunch by the Derwent and a silent mind. A rare treat after the emotion of the past few days.

Aimee sighed and sipped her apple juice.

A clutch of power-walking nannas passed her, chatting across each other like the ducks grumbling around her feet, and she followed them with her eyes as she ate. She missed Danielle. Not that they’d ever been power-walking-type friends, but she missed having someone to chat to, to share work with, since her friend had gone on a month’s leave back to New Zealand.

Maybe that was what she needed? Some more friends. Broader horizons. New people. Non-Sam people.

As if just thinking his name had made him manifest, the gaggle of fast-moving nannas split like a cell, dividing around two people strolling towards her secluded corner of riverbank in the distance, then reformed behind them.

Her tasty chicken turned to ash in her mouth.

Sam.

With his wife.

They stopped in the distance and watched the boats go by, the downward tilt of Sam’s head indicating he was listening intently. Eager to see her after his three days away.

Aimee’s body reacted as immediately and inappropriately as it always did to the sight of Sam: tightening, anticipating. Going all gooey. But for the first time it wasn’t him that dominated her focus.

Melissa was as small and slim as she remembered from the confused chaos of the A10. But she was better lit in the golden noon light than she had been in the dimness of early morning on the mountain, and infinitely better dressed in businesswear rather than the running pants and sweater she’d had on that cold morning. Dark hair tumbled around her shoulders and seemed to blaze red in the sunlight.

She was … radiant.

Aimee’s heart pattered harder, and she dropped her eyes rather than be caught staring. Not that Melissa would have a clue who she was. But Sam would, if he turned around and saw her. Her mouth dried.

She hadn’t expected Melissa to be so lovely. She’d built an image of a fusty scientist gadding around in a lab coat stained by God knew what in a poor attempt to diminish her. What kind of cosmic injustice was this, that she should get Sam’s heart and be beautiful, too?

But of course he would pick someone beautiful. Ethereal.

She risked a glance up again. Sam’s back was still to her. But she recognised that posture, the slope of his shoulders.

They stood barely separated, barely touching, and watched the boats. Then Melissa turned and peered up at her husband with such unmasked adoration it stole Aimee’s breath. Even from a distance she knew that this was not the face of a woman who was unhappy in her marriage. And right then another convenient myth crumbled. She’d built an image of two mutually unhappy people trying to make a doomed marriage work. It had suited her to think that Sam’s dissatisfaction wasn’t one-sided.

Because that made him a better man.

As she watched he lifted a hand to stroke an errant lock of hair from Melissa’s face, but Aimee was too far away to see the details of her expression. Did his wife’s eyes drift shut in bliss at that tiny contact? Did her lips fall open on a tiny breath the way hers would have? Certainly her body seemed to sway towards his. Would Sam have that smile on his face—the gentle half-twist that matched the warm glow in his gaze? Would he still be smiling as he leaned in to kiss her?

Melissa stretched up onto her toes and Aimee dropped her head, forcing her voyeuristic gaze to the pathway, her stomach churning, her lips tight, her heart screaming.

Damn him.

And damn herself.

She’d fooled herself into believing—stupidly—that they were staying together out of some kind of obligation, that they were physically together but emotionally apart. Where was the obligation in Melissa’s devoted gaze just then? Where was the emotional separation in the way Sam gently brushed her cheek with his knuckle? Even faking it wouldn’t be that convincing.

She forced her rampant heart back into some kind of regular metre, her breathing easing. But her chest was still tight.

It was not fake. There was love there. Lots and lots of it.

Did it make her a bad person that she really couldn’t find it in herself to be happy for Sam? She wanted that love for herself.

When she dared to glance up they were gone, back the way they’d come.

She sagged back into her bench, spared the hideousness of having them bump into her, fresh out of that touchy-feely display. She wasn’t sure she could look Sam in the eye and not cry.

She wasn’t sure she could look Melissa in the eye at all.

Thinking of her as ‘the wife’, or imagining her in shabby jogging pants with a severe ponytail, or in that stained lab coat, or as a faceless, nameless person, had all been futile attempts to depersonalise the woman behind the wedding ring. To somehow make it okay that she was coveting someone else’s husband.

She didn’t need a commandment to tell her it was wrong. She knew it was wrong. For so many reasons.

But try telling her straining pulse that.

She tossed what was left of her sandwich down to the ducks and ignored the fat little birds that raced in to demolish it, staring off in the direction Sam and Melissa had gone.

Delusion, thy name is Aimee.

Somewhere deep down she’d seriously convinced herself that Sam was miserable, holding onto his marriage out of some misguided honour. Because that had made her feel less dishonourable about the feelings for him that she was harbouring.

But he was doing just fine in the job of getting past whatever speed bump his marriage had hit, judging by what she’d just seen. If he’d rushed back from Melbourne to stroll the riverbank with his wife on a work day then they weren’t exactly at loggerheads.

Which meant Aimee was distracting Sam from a perfectly healthy relationship—not a fatally flawed one.

And she knew exactly what else that meant.

Bundling up her rubbish and her empty juice container, and tucking her research under her arm, she hurried down the cycle path in the opposite direction from Melissa and Sam.

There were some fates you just didn’t tempt.