Fiona Harper - Best of Fiona Harper

He rose as I approached and kissed my hand. From anyone other than Nicholas I would have thought it was too smooth to be true, but he really was like that all charm and effortless manners.

‘You look stunning,’ he said as he pulled my chair out for me.

‘Thank you.’

I did look good. I hadn’t worn the red dress, though. I’d chosen an Audrey Hepburn-esque little black dress and put my hair up. Nicholas liked the pared-down minx, after all, and it didn’t go to give a man the impression he had even the tiniest bit of control over what a girl did. The lipstick was crimson, of course, but I’d faltered when it had come to the shoes.

I’d looked at the array of different styles and shades of red in the bottom of my wardrobe, had tried loads on, but discarded them all. I’d ended up nipping over to the shop and borrowing the black suede evening shoes with the bow on the front. But I was so used to wearing nothing but red on my feet that every time I looked down I had the feeling that something was wrong. They pinched my little toes as well, but what the heck?

As you can tell, I reverted to the original plan after Adam left.

Okay, straight after Adam left I stumbled home, ate two pints of Devilish Diva chocolate ice cream, watched three black-and-white movies back-to-back and then sobbed into my pillow until morning. But that had been five whole days ago now, and despite the fact I had repeated the process on the two following nights I had forced myself to get up and move on. Hence the plan.

It had been a good plan, after all.

Adam had been right—I was ready for something more serious than puppy-training. I was ready for a serious relationship. With someone like Nicholas. Someone who thought that girl was funny and sparkly and full of pizzazz. Someone who couldn’t see through the dizzying parade of polka dots, who couldn’t make them transparent with just one look.

Only…

As we ate the exquisite food and chatted in the candlelight I kept looking at my Perfect Man and noticing lots of silly little things.

The fan of creases at the side of his eyes, for one. They didn’t appear often enough, and when they did they didn’t make me feel like melted marshmallow inside. The eyes were all wrong, of course. Too clear. Too blue. No cheeky little glimmers inside that dragged the corners of my mouth up, whether I liked it or not. And I just kept wanting to lean across the table and unto his top button, or muss his hair up a little. Sometimes perfection can be a little too uniform.

I sighed. I was being picky, wasn’t I?

Deep down, I knew why. Deep down, I tried to tell myself all about it. But somewhere nearer the surface I squished it down again—a kind of mental sticking of the fingers in one’s ears and singing ‘la-la-la’, I suppose.

Nicholas topped my glass up with fizz that was a hundred times better than the stuff I usually got at the corner shop.

‘Coreen?’

‘Mm-hm?’

‘Is everything okay?’

I flashed him my Marilyn smile. ‘Absolutely wonderful.’

He glanced over his left shoulder. ‘You seem to be fascinated by something behind me. Is there something wrong with the restaurant? And you keep sighing.’

‘No.’ I shook my head emphatically. ‘The restaurant is lovely. I wasn’t looking at anything in particular…’ Not in these elegant surroundings, anyway. But I was hardly going to own up to the mental slide show that had been distracting me.

Adam’s grin as he stole yet another sweet and sour pork ball.

His face close to mine as he adjusted a pair of hideous tortoiseshell glasses.

The look in his eyes as I sang my mum’s favourite song.

I put those thoughts away and shuffled through the images of the previous weekend, trying to find a nice one of Nicholas—like the time when he’d congratulated me on geeing everybody up, or when he’d asked me to dance—but they were all fuzzy and out of focus.

I let out a breath, long and slow. Nicholas’s eyebrows dipped at the edges. Maybe he’d been taking lessons from Robert. He looked down at his architecturally beautiful dessert and then up at me again.

‘I’m still too late, aren’t I?’

I tried to deny it, but the words wouldn’t come. Dissolved by the fizzing bubbles of the vintage champagne, no doubt. Nicholas, gentleman that he was, said nothing further. He was charming and interesting as we finished our meal, attentive and amusing during coffee and on the limo ride home. The kiss he pressed on my cheek as we parted was decidedly platonic.

I stood with my key in the lock and watched the limo pull away into the starlit summer night. Not once did I sigh. I felt like Cinderella in reverse. I’d gone to the ball only to wind up with the pumpkin. No, that wasn’t fair to Nicholas. He was everything I’d imagined him to be.

It was just that he wasn’t my pumpkin, and no amount of wishing would make it otherwise.

I held up fine until I got into the flat and ran to the kitchen, but as I opened the freezer and reached for yet another tub of Devilish Diva I paused and my fingers numbed on its frosty surface. Seemed I was going to bypass the ice cream stage and fall headlong into the sobbing stage. Gluey tears, a waterfall at the back of my nose and some rather unattractive snorting noises to follow.

I pulled the ice cream tub out of the freezer, clutched it to my chest, and then closed the freezer door, turned around and slid down it until I was sitting on the kitchen floor.

Why did it still hurt? Why did it hurt more? I hadn’t made the fatal mistake of following him. I was doing the right thing, wasn’t I?

Suddenly I got really angry. I dropped the ice cream and stumbled to my feet with all the grace of a new-born giraffe, kicking off the uncomfortable black heels as I did so, and ran into the living room to stare at the picture of my mother, back in its proper place on the mantelpiece.

‘It’s all your fault!’ I screamed. ‘You did this to me. This is your legacy and I don’t want it! I don’t want it!’ I picked up the frame and hurled it across the room. It hit the fake zebra skin rug and shattered. I made a horrible gurgling noise down in my throat—it could have been the word no, trapped by the raw swelling there—and then ran over to the frame. Shards of glass lay on the floor, but the wood was still intact. I smiled. And then I cried. And then I cried harder.

Carefully, I bent down to pick it up and shook the loose glass onto the floor. Then I held it in both hands, my knuckles paling, and stared down at her. Although the laughing face never changed, her expression seemed to sober. I searched her eyes out and locked on to them. Laughing eyes, I reminded myself. Happy eyes. I didn’t want to see anything else.

But even that didn’t work. Clouds passed over the eyes too. It was as if she was looking back at me, trying to send me a message.

Don’t be a fool like I was. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.

‘I’m trying not to,’ I whispered, my voice thin and high. ‘But it’s not working. I just feel… I feel…’ I closed my eyes and wept silent tears. There was no point in denying it to myself any longer. No point in trying to wedge my blinkers back on my stubborn head.

I was in love with Adam and I always would be.

But it wasn’t in my genes to balance. Two-way street? Hah! Anyone who knew me understood that I hogged the road and behaved as if I had my own personal police escort when I drove. And it would be no different in love. As whole-hearted as I’d been at bending the world to my will and making it serve me, I’d show the same total commitment to loving Adam.

I knew I could give to him and never stop giving. Never stop until I was a grey shadow of myself, just as my mother had been. And then I wouldn’t be the woman Adam had fallen in love with any more. That’s when the rot would set in.

Oh, he’d stay at first. I didn’t doubt that. Adam didn’t disappoint, after all. But we’d stagnate, grow to hate each other, and he deserved so much more. So much more than a woman who would always be waiting for the moment when she found the note on the mantelpiece, when she found a dent in the pillow but the bed cold and empty…

If there was one person I couldn’t be Left Behind by, it was Adam. So maybe it was better that I’d taken fate into my own hands and chosen the moment we’d part, rather than having it thrust upon me years from now, when I’d been lulled into a false sense of security.

I risked a look at Mum. She was smiling again, eyes laughing. Had I imagined the rest?

Couldn’t you have found a nice man? I whispered mentally. A good man who wouldn’t have abandoned you and sucked you dry? A man with a safe pair of hands to hold your heart? Then you might still be here. I might have had you long enough to—

A safe pair of hands.

Oh.

I wasn’t sure whether I was frowning or smiling, and a nerve in my cheek worked overtime as it tried to decide which one. I was just like my mother, but it had taken me up until now to understand all that that meant. All that it could mean.

Perhaps my red suede ballet pumps hadn’t been the way to go. I know the boat driver had recommended sensible footwear, but for me this was sensible footwear. I’d heard Langwaki was a tourist hotspot, so I’d expected it to be quite cosmopolitan, but I hadn’t realised just how many islands there were in the archipelago. While some had bustling resorts, the island I was speeding through a turquoise sea towards was apparently home to only one hotel.

My hair, however, had lived up to expectations, so I wasn’t totally wrong-footed.

I soon forgot all about the frizz, though, because the scenery was stunning—full of mountainous islands covered so completely in rainforest that only a sliver of pale yellow at the water’s edge broke up their unrelenting green caps. I turned to look out of the other side of the boat, not wanting to miss a thing, and realised we must be nearing our destination. Rather than skimming past the closest island we were heading straight for it. As we rounded a jutting headland the resort came into view. I think I may have stopped breathing.

This was no ordinary hotel. It wasn’t the rough, wooden, tree-hugging backpackers’ base I’d imagined either. No, this…this was more like an exotic fairytale.

As far as I could see along the shore were wooden chalets on stilts, their legs in the water, some of them more than one storey, all with pointed red-tiled roofs. From the midst of the cluster of waterborne buildings a walkway jutted out towards us, with a larger structure on the end. The boat docked beside some steps that led up to what I now realised was a reception area, and the other passengers began to disembark.

I let them flow around me.

This was obviously a luxurious and well-established resort. Was I really in the right place? I checked the name with the boat driver and he nodded emphatically. I had no choice but to ascend the stairs and carry on my journey.

I arrived in the reception area and headed straight for the wide, glossy, dark wood reception desk. A young woman in a smart collarless red jacket smiled at me. I cleared my throat.

‘I’m looking for Adam Conrad? He builds—’

‘Ah, yes. Mr Conrad. I will arrange for someone to take you to him.’

She clapped her hands twice and a lad in the same uniform appeared from nowhere and motioned for me to follow him. I trailed along behind him, listening to his commentary in accented English on the hotel, its history, the fauna and flora of the island, and how excited everyone was about the new eco-friendly treehouse development on the resort. I just nodded vacantly as I followed him through a maze of walkways that linked the chalets and then finally led onto dry land, over the top of a silky white beach and on into the jungle into a section of the resort that wasn’t yet open to visitors.