Barefoot Bride

Alice thought about the day out on the reef. About reading with Lily on the verandah. About lying under the ceiling fan with Will breathing quietly beside her, and the thrill of anticipation when he rolled towards her with a smile. To her horror, she felt tears sting her eyes, and she was very glad of her sunglasses.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said with a careless shrug. ‘It’s been fun.’

‘We wondered if you’d think about staying,’ said Beth, ultra-casual. ‘You and Will must have got quite close.’

‘Yes, it’s been nice seeing him again.’ Alice was shocked by how unconcerned she could sound when she tried. ‘But, you know, when it’s time to go…A new nanny is coming out next week, so there’s not much point in me staying any longer. Besides, I’ve still got my ticket home.’

‘Oh, you’re going?’ Beth looked disappointed. ‘You will come and see us before you-Oh!’ She broke off abruptly and put a hand to her stomach.

‘Beth?’ said Alice in quick concern. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Just a bit sick,’ muttered Beth, and when Alice looked closely she saw that, beneath her hat, Beth was looking grey and drawn.

‘Come inside,’ she said, taking Beth’s arm. ‘It’s cooler in there, and you can sit down.’

She made Beth sit in a cool quiet room while she went to find some cold water. ‘Shall I get Roger?’ she asked worriedly when she came back. It wasn’t like Beth to be ill. ‘You don’t look at all well.’

‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ said Beth, sipping the water. She smiled at Alice. ‘Don’t look so worried. It’s good news. Oh, Alice, I’m pregnant at last!’

Alice gasped. ‘Beth! That’s fantastic news!’

‘It’s early days yet,’ Beth warned, ‘so we’re not telling anyone yet, but I wanted you to know.’

‘Oh, Beth…’ Tears shone in Alice’s eyes as she hugged her friend. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise, but I’m so, so happy for you! And Roger…he must be thrilled!’

‘He is. Neither of us can quite believe it yet,’ Beth confessed. ‘We’ve wanted this for so long, and we were just beginning to think it wasn’t going to happen. Of course, I didn’t count on quite how sick I’d feel!’

Alice was so elated by Beth’s news that she forgot her own misery about saying goodbye to Will for a while. Leaving Beth to recover in the cool, she sailed out with a wide smile to find Roger.

Roger being Roger, she found him in the middle of a laughing group. Mindful of the need for secrecy, it took all her ingenuity to extricate him but she finally managed to drag him to a quiet place behind the laboratory where she threw her arms around him and promptly burst into tears.

‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ asked Roger in alarm, enveloping her in a comforting hug.

‘I’m just so happy for you,’ Alice snuffled against his broad chest.

‘Ah.’ Roger began to smile. ‘You’ve been talking to Beth?’

‘Yes, and I’m sworn to secrecy, but it’s such fantastic news,’ she said, lifting her head to smile at him through her tears. ‘I know how much it means to you both.’

‘Well, we’re expecting you to be godmother, so you’d better come back when the baby is born.’

For a fleeting moment Alice wondered how on earth she would cope with coming back when she would be bound to meet Will again, but she pushed that thought resolutely out of her mind. It was Roger and Beth who mattered now.

‘Of course I will,’ she told him. ‘Try keeping me away from my first godchild!’

She was still smiling when she and Roger rejoined the party. Beth had recovered by then, but Alice was glad to see that Roger took her away soon afterwards. She couldn’t help noticing the tender way he put his arm around his wife, and she watched wistfully as he ushered Beth out to the car.

Their devotion to each other brought a lump to Alice’s throat. Roger and Beth were lucky. They loved each other completely and they faced everything together. They had had their sadnesses, but their life seemed so much less complicated than her own. Everything was simple for Roger and Beth. Why had she had to fall in love with someone whose life was incompatible with hers?

Sighing, she turned to find Will watching her. His jaw was set and his mouth was pressed together in a decidedly grim line, but Alice’s heart still skipped a beat at the sight of him.

‘Oh…Hi,’ she said.

‘You look very sad, Alice,’ he said, an edge to his voice that Alice was too full of emotion to analyse.

‘I’m not sad,’ she said. ‘Envious, perhaps.’

‘Of Beth?’

‘Yes.’ She was a little surprised that he had guessed so quickly. ‘I think she knows how lucky she is.’

‘Does she?’

This time there was no mistaking the hardness in his voice, and Alice looked at him, puzzled. But, before she could ask what he meant, Will’s attention was claimed by someone who came up to say goodbye.

The event seemed to be winding down, anyway, and, feeling deflated after the earlier high, she began to help with the clearing up. In spite of her hat, she was beginning to feel the effects of standing in the sun too long, and her head was thumping, so when Will told her that one of the divers had offered her and Lily a lift home she was glad to accept.

‘I’ll need to wait and lock up when everyone else has gone,’ he said brusquely.

Alice had put an exhausted Lily to bed by the time he came back, and she was sitting on the verandah and trying not to think that this time next week she would be home. She tried to imagine herself in her flat. She would pick up the accumulated post from the doormat. She would unpack her case, and put some washing on.

And then what? Desolation washed over her at the realisation that there would be no one to sit down with, no one to have missed her, no one to pour her a drink or put an arm around her and tell her that they were glad she was home. She would be alone again.

‘There you are.’ Will let the screen door crash behind him. He was carrying a bottle of beer, and although he sat down in his usual chair nothing else was normal. His expression was stony, and he was taut with suppressed feeling, wound up so tight that Alice looked at him in concern. Something had obviously happened, but she had the nerve-racking feeling that if she put a foot wrong he would explode.

‘Long day,’ she ventured cautiously.

‘Yes.’

‘Still, I think it was a success.’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause while Alice eyed him warily. ‘Do you want anything to eat?’

‘No,’ he said, adding grudgingly as Alice raised her brows, ‘Thank you.’

‘I wasn’t hungry either,’ she said, and gave up. If Will wanted to tell her what the problem was, he could, but she was in no mood to sit here and coax it out of him if he didn’t feel like cooperating. Let him keep it all bottled up inside him, if that was what he wanted.

The silence lengthened uncomfortably. Will drank his beer grimly, until at last he put the bottle down on the table between them with a sharp click.

‘I think you should be more careful of Beth’s feelings,’ he said abruptly.

Alice wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t that!

‘What on earth do you mean?’ she asked in astonishment.

‘I saw you with Roger this afternoon.’

She stared at him. Surely he wasn’t jealous of Roger? ‘Yes, we’re friends. Of course I talked to Roger!’

‘What were you talking to him about?’

Opening her mouth to tell him, Alice remembered her promise to Beth just in time and closed it again. ‘That’s none of your business,’ she said after a moment.

‘Because friends don’t usually sneak away behind the lab to have a conversation, or kiss and cuddle each other when they’re doing it!’

Will had been gripped by a white-hot fury ever since he had watched Alice drag Roger out of sight. He didn’t know what had prompted him to follow them-all right, he did know, he was jealous-but he was completely unprepared for the fist that had closed around his heart as he had seen Alice bury her face in Roger’s broad chest and cling to him.

Unable to watch any more, he had turned on his heel and left them to it, and he might have left it at that if he