‘Because I have to go home, Lily,’ Alice told her. ‘My life is in London, not here. But until I do go back we’ll have a lovely time together, shall we?’
Lily seemed to accept that. ‘OK,’ she said.
Alice was more nervous than she wanted to admit about how Beth would react to the news that she was moving out that night to live with Will and Lily. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt Beth’s feelings. But, once the situation about the missing nanny had been explained, Beth was very understanding, and even surprisingly enthusiastic about the idea.
‘It sounds like the perfect solution,’ she said, smiling, her gaze flickering with interest between Will and Alice. ‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.’
‘I’m doing it for
Beth opened her eyes wide. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Why else?’
Roger was less convinced that it was a good idea. ‘Are you sure about this, Alice?’ he asked under his breath as they came to say goodbye.
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
Roger glanced at Will. ‘Maybe it’s not you I’m worrying about.’
‘We’ve talked about it,’ said Alice firmly. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
‘Well, you’re a big girl now, so I guess you know what you’re doing.’ Roger swept her up into a hug. ‘Look after yourself, though.’
‘I’m only going up the road!’
‘I’ll still miss you. I’ve got used to coming home to find you drinking my gin.’
‘I’ll miss you, too. I always do.’ Alice hugged her dearest friend, holding tightly onto his big bear strength, and her eyes were watery when he finally let her go.
‘Oh, good God, she’s going to cry!’ exclaimed Roger in mock horror. ‘Take her away, man!’
Will, who had observed that tight hug, thought it would not be a bad idea to get Alice away from Roger for a while. He was worried about Beth. At first glance, she seemed as bright and cheerful as ever, but on closer inspection Will thought there was a rather drawn look about her. It might be best all round if Alice came with him.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to Alice and Lily. ‘Let’s go home.’
They had decided that Alice might as well start her new role straight away, so she had already packed a bag by the time Beth and Roger got home. Now Will slung it in the back of his four-wheel drive and hoped to God he was doing the right thing.
Will’s house had no pool, no air-conditioning, and was some way away from the exclusive part of St Bonaventure up on the hill where Roger and Beth lived in manicured splendour, but Alice felt instantly much more at home there. An unassuming wooden house set up on stilts, it had a wide verandah shaded by a corrugated-iron roof, and ceiling fans that slapped at the air in a desultory fashion.
It was set on a dusty, pot-holed road and an area of coarse tropical grass at the rear led down to a line of leaning coconut palms. ‘The sea’s just there,’ said Will, pointing into the darkness. ‘Go through the coconuts, cross a track and you’re on the beach.’
He carried Alice’s cases inside and put them in what had been Dee’s bedroom. ‘I need to make some calls, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I want to ring the hospital and see how the boys are, and then I’ll have to talk to our head office in London. Lily, perhaps you could show Alice the house?’ he suggested.
‘That was a good idea, getting Lily to show me round,’ Alice said to him later when they had eaten the light supper left by his cook and Lily had gone to bed. They were sitting out on the back verandah, listening to the raucous whirr of the insects in the dark and, in the distance, the faint, ceaseless suck of the sea upon the sand. Alice could just make out the gleam of water through the trunks of the palms. ‘Knowing more about the house and where everything was made her realise that she was more at home than she thought. It was good for her to be able to explain everything to me,’ Alice told Will. ‘She might not have been talking much, but she’s certainly been taking it all in.’
‘I’m glad about that.’ Will handed her a mug of coffee that he had made, unthinkingly adding exactly the right amount of milk. He hadn’t forgotten how she took hers any more than she had forgotten how he liked his tea, Alice thought with an odd pang. She took the mug gingerly, taking care that her fingers didn’t brush against his.
‘This is going to be her home for a couple of years at least,’ he went on, picking up his own mug and sipping at it reflectively. ‘So she needs to feel that it’s where she belongs.’
He paused to look sideways at Alice, who was curled up in a wicker chair, cradling her coffee between her hands. The light on the verandah was deliberately dim so as not to attract too many insects, but he could make out the high cheekbones that gave her face that faintly exotic look and the achingly familiar curve of her mouth. It was too hard to read her expression, though, and he wondered what she was thinking.
‘I want to thank you, Alice,’ he said abruptly. ‘I know I didn’t seem keen when you first suggested it, but I think it will be a very good thing for Lily to have you here.’
‘I hope so,’ she said.
‘What about you? Do you think you’ll be comfortable at least?’ He glanced around him as if registering his conditions for the first time. ‘I know it’s not as luxurious as Roger’s house.’
‘No, but I like it better,’ she said. Tipping back her head, she breathed in the heady fragrance of the frangipani that blossomed by the verandah steps. The wooden boards were littered with its creamy yellow flowers. ‘This reminds me of the kind of places I lived in as a child.’
Will grimaced into his coffee. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing. You hated your childhood.’
‘I hated the way my parents kept moving,’ she corrected him. ‘It wasn’t the places or the houses-although we never lived anywhere as nice as this. It was the fact that I never had a chance to feel at home anywhere. My parents never stuck at anything. They had wild enthusiasms, but then they’d get bored, or things would go wrong, and they’d be off with another idea.’
She sighed. She loved her parents, but sometimes they exasperated her.
‘I was shy to begin with. It was hard enough for me to make friends without knowing that in a year or so I’d be dragged somewhere new, where I’d have to learn a new language and make completely new friends. After a while, it didn’t seem worth the effort of making them in the first place. It was easier if I was just on my own.’
It was her unconventional upbringing that had made Alice stand out from the other students. Will had noticed her straight away. It wasn’t that she’d been eccentric or trying to be different. She’d dressed the same as everyone else, and she’d done what everyone else did, but there had been just something about the way she’d carried herself that drew the eye, something about those extraordinary golden eyes that had seen places that most of the other students barely knew existed.
Alice might complain about being endlessly uprooted by her parents, but continually having to adapt to new conditions had given her a self-sufficiency that could at times be quite intimidating.
It was a kind of glamour, Will had always thought, although Alice had hooted with laughter when he’d suggested it. ‘There’s nothing glamorous about living in a hut in the middle of the Amazon, I can tell you!’ she had said.
‘That’s why I identify with Lily, I think,’ she said now, sipping reflectively at her coffee. ‘She’s a solitary child too.’
‘I know,’ said Will, anxious as always when he thought about his daughter. ‘But I hope she’ll have a chance to settle down now. I should be here for two or three years.’
‘And then?’
‘Who knows?’ he asked, a faint undercurrent of irritation in his voice. He wasn’t her parents, moving his child around the world on a whim. ‘It depends on my job. I’m not like you. I don’t plan my life down to the last minute.’
‘I’ve learnt not to do that either, now,’ said Alice, thinking about Tony and the plans they had made together. ‘There are some things you just can’t plan for.’
Will arched a sceptical brow. ‘I can’t imagine you not planning,’ he said. ‘You were always so certain about what you wanted.’
‘Oh, I still know what I want,’ she said, an undercurrent of bitterness in her voice. ‘The only thing that’s changed is that now I’m not sure that I’ll get it.’
