Summer At Villa Rosa Collection. Kate Hardy
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NEVER TOLD ANYONE.’ Andie was struggling with what she’d just heard. Trying to imagine the shock, the horror of that moment. How everything would have been made a hundred times worse by what had just happened. ‘About the baby.’
‘Rachel died horribly. I felt guilty enough without dragging her name through the mud.’
‘Guilty?’ Was that what tormented him? Not grief, but guilt? ‘Why on earth would you feel guilty?’
‘I should have grounded her. I should have called Lucy and asked her to bring in someone else to take the flight but it was like with the kettle,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘The only similarity to the kettle,’ she said, ‘is that they were both accidents. You must have been pretty shaken yourself.’
‘Shaken by the scene, by how much pain she’d bottled up, but mostly I was relieved.’ He’d been looking over her head, staring somewhere out to sea, but now he was looking directly at her. ‘I was going to have to surrender everything I owned, mortgage my soul to hold onto Goldfinch but it was over. I didn’t have to pretend any more. While I was running, even with the struggle ahead, it was as if my feet had wings.’
He turned away but she reached up, took his face between her hands and forced him to look at her.
‘It was a bird strike, Cleve. She was flying low, coming in beneath heavy cloud cover and had the misfortune to run into a flock of geese set up by dogs or a fox, or maybe a bird-scarer installed by a farmer desperate to protect his winter wheat. She didn’t stand a chance.’
‘I told her that I’d see her in hell.’
She ached for him, understanding how, psychologically, those words must have eaten at him.
‘It’s the kind of thing we all say in the heat of the moment. Rachel was an experienced, responsible pilot, Cleve. If she’d had the slightest concern about her fitness to fly she would have grounded herself just as I did.’
‘If she’d been thinking straight. I would have given her everything, the flat, Goldfinch, whatever she wanted, not to have those deaths on my conscience.’
The faint stubble on his cheeks was tickling her palms and she wanted to slide her fingers into his hair and kiss him quiet, make him stop thinking about this, but he’d been bottling up all this guilt, blaming himself and right now there were some things he needed to hear.
‘Tell me, Cleve, in what way wasn’t she thinking straight?’
‘She was angry—’
‘Of course she was angry. She’d been found out, caught cheating, forced to confront the issue before she was ready and, like you, saying things in the heat of the moment. A little door-banging strop—’
He shook his head but she didn’t let go. If she let go he’d walk away and she wasn’t done.
‘A little door-banging strop is to be expected under the circumstances but by the time she reached her car she’d have been feeling relieved that it was out in the open.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I have three sisters,’ she said. ‘We’ve all been there at some time or another. Keeping secrets, getting caught out. Anger is always the first response and then almost instantly there’s relief.’
He didn’t look convinced.
‘When Rachel arrived at the airfield no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. She checked the weather, filed a flight plan at the airfield office. The guys there said she’d teased them about having thrashed them in the pub quiz at the weekend.’
He must have heard all this at the Air Accident Inquiry, the inquest, but maybe it hadn’t made it through the fog of guilt.
‘She met her passengers, both of whom had flown with her before and knew her well. She flew them to Leeds for a meeting. They both said she was totally focused as always. She had lunch in the airport cafeteria. Soup of the day, carrot and coriander, with a roll. She chatted to one of the ground crew, asked about his granddaughter—’
‘How do you know all this?’ he demanded.
‘It was reported in detail in the local paper.’ Every word was engraved on her memory. She’d wanted to be there for him but she and other pilots had had to keep Goldfinch ticking over, deliver the cargoes, put on a bright face for the regulars who hadn’t deserted them. ‘She wasn’t in a “state”, Cleve. At least not the kind of state you’re talking about. If she was distracted it was because, like you, she was free and imagining a new future.’
‘What future?’ he demanded. ‘The father of her baby never stood up to be counted. He just disappeared into the woodwork.’
‘What would you have done, Cleve?’ She held up a finger to stop his protest. ‘I know you’d never have had an affair with a married woman, but if you’d been in his position, what would you have done?’
He remained silent, a muscle working in his jaw.
‘Isn’t it possible that he kept his grief to himself because, like you, he chose to protect the woman he loved?’
‘You see the good in everyone.’
Not entirely. She thought Rachel should have been honest with Cleve but that was easy to say. She’d struggled with how to break the news of her own pregnancy and, as a result, he’d found out in the same brutal way...
‘I see the good in you,’ she said. ‘You feel you were let off scot-free and that has fed your guilt. Instead of letting go, moving on, you’ve been brooding on that last confrontation, blaming yourself. Her death was a tragedy, grief is natural, but you were not to blame.’
‘I should have—’
‘Should, could,’ she said, losing patience. ‘This life isn’t a rehearsal, Cleve. You don’t get to come back and do it better. We all have things we’d have done differently given the chance but if you spend your whole life looking back at your mistakes, you’ll never notice what’s in front of you.’
‘I know what’s in front of me.’
For a moment she’d thought he was going to say it was her, their baby, a future neither of them had ever expected, but he was not seeing her as he stood up.
‘I’ve got a roof to fix.’
How like a man to grab for something solid, something he could touch. She’d seen her father deal with messy, emotional things in just that way. It was as if fixing a broken engine, cutting the grass, repairing a bike gave him back control.
‘Be careful,’ she said, forcing herself to remain where she was as he waded through the pool, stepped up onto the sand. ‘If you fall off, I will blame myself.’
He turned to look back at her, his forehead buckled in a frown. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘You’re only here because of me, Cleve. You’re only fixing the roof because I blackmailed you into staying and because it’s human nature to blame oneself for things that go wrong. To analyse everything you said and did and how, if you’d acted differently, things would not have turned out the way they did.’
‘Is that it? Are you done lecturing me?’
‘That depends. How well have you been listening?’
‘Let’s see. You’re responsible for me being here. You’re responsible for me fixing the roof? How am I doing?’
‘You’re listening but is any of it sinking in?’
‘You want a demonstration?’ He held out his hand. ‘How’s this? If you’re responsible for me being on the roof, you’re going to have to come and watch.’
She thought what she needed to do was leave him alone to process what she’d said, give his brain a chance to work