mention me to you. She didn’t know that we’d been…’
‘Lovers?’ suggested Will with a sardonic look when she trailed off.
A slight flush rose in Alice’s cheeks. ‘I didn’t put it quite like that,’ she said repressively. ‘I just said that we had been close when we were students together.’
‘It’s not like you to be coy, Alice.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Roger were
Alice’s eyes slid away from his. She didn’t want to be reminded of how much she had loved him. She certainly didn’t want a discussion of how in love they had been. No way could she cope with that right now.
‘Whatever,’ she said as carelessly as she could. ‘Beth got the point, anyway.’
He had changed, she thought, unaccountably disconsolate. Of course, she had known in her head that he wasn’t going to be the same. Ten years, marriage and children were bound to have had an effect on him.
But in her heart she had imagined him still the Will she had known. The Will she had loved.
This Will seemed taller than she remembered, taller and tougher. His neck had thickened slightly and his chest had filled out, and the air of calm competence she had always associated with him had solidified. He still had those big, capable hands, but there was none of the amusement she remembered in his face, no familiar ironic gleam in the grey eyes. Instead, there were lines around his eyes and deeper grooves carved on either side of his mouth, which was set in a new, hard line.
It was strange, talking to someone at once so familiar and so much a stranger. Meeting Will like that was even worse than Alice had expected. She had planned to be friendly to him, charming to his wife and engaging to his child, so that they would all go away convinced that she had no regrets and without the slightest idea that her life wasn’t quite the glittering success she had so confidently expected it to be.
She might as well have spared herself the effort, Alice thought ruefully. In spite of all her careful preparations, her confidence had evaporated the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and she was as shaken and jittery as if Will had turned up without a moment’s warning. She knew that she was coming over as brittle, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
‘Beth said that you were working out here,’ she said, opting to stick with her social manner, no matter how uncomfortable it felt. It was easier than looking into his eyes and asking him if he had missed her at all, if he had wondered, as she had done, whether life would have been different if she had said yes instead of no that day.
Will nodded, apparently willing to follow her lead and stick to polite superficialities. ‘I’m coordinating a major project on sustainable tourism,’ he said, and Alice raised her brows.
‘You’re not a marine ecologist any more?’ she asked, surprised. Will had always been so passionate about the ocean, she couldn’t imagine him giving up diving in favour of paperwork.
‘I am, of course,’ he corrected her. ‘But I don’t do straight research anymore. A lot of our work is assessing the environmental impact of major development projects on the sea.’
Alice frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with tourism?’
‘Tourism has a huge effect on the environment,’ said Will. ‘The economy here desperately needs the income tourists can bring, but tourists won’t come unless there’s an international airport, roads, hotels, restaurants and leisure facilities…all of which use up precious natural resources and add to the weight of pollution, which in turn affects the delicate balance of the environment.’
Will gestured around him. ‘St Bonaventure is a paradise in lots of ways. It’s everyone’s idea of a tropical island, and it’s still unspoilt. Its reef is one of the great undiscovered diving spots in the world. That makes it the kind of place tourists want to visit, but they won’t come all this way if the development ends up destroying the very things that makes this place so special.
‘The government here needs to balance their need to get the money to improve the living standards of the people here with the risk to the reef,’ he went on. ‘If the reef is damaged, it will not only destroy the potential revenue from tourism, it’ll also leave the island itself at risk. The reef is the most effective protection St Bonaventure has against the power of the ocean.’
Will stopped, hearing himself in lecture mode. The old Alice might have been interested, but this one certainly wasn’t. Instead of leaning forward intently and asking awkward questions, the way she would have done before, she wore an expression of interest that was little more than polite.
‘Anyway, the project I’m coordinating is about balancing the needs of the reef with the needs of the economy before tourism is developed to any great extent,’ he finished lamely.
‘Sounds important,’ Alice commented.
He glanced at her, as if suspecting mockery. ‘It is,’ he said.
Alice had deliberately kept her voice light to disguise the pang inside. For a moment there he had been the Will she remembered, his face alight with enthusiasm, his eyes warm with commitment.
What would it be like to work on something you believed in, something that really mattered, not just to you but to other people as well? Alice wondered. When it boiled down to it, her own career in market research was just about making money. It hadn’t changed any lives other than her own.
That had never bothered her before, but she had had to question a lot of things about her life in the last year. What did her much-vaunted career amount to now, after all? Nothing, thought Alice bleakly.
Will had built his career on his expertise and his passion. He had done what he wanted the way he’d wanted to do it. He had found someone to share his life and had fathered a child. His life since Roger’s wedding had been successful by any measure, while hers…Well, better not go there, Alice decided with an inward sigh.
‘What about you?’ Will asked, breaking into her thoughts and making her start.
‘Me?’
‘What are you doing on St Bonaventure?’
Alice wished she could say that she was here for some interesting or meaningful reason. ‘I’m on holiday,’ she confessed, immediately feeling guilty about it.
‘So you’ll just be here a couple of weeks?’
She was sure she detected relief in his voice. He was probably delighted at the idea that she wouldn’t be around for long so that he could get on with his happy, successful,
The thought stiffened Alice’s resolve not to let Will so much as guess that all her careful plans had come to nothing. It wasn’t that she begrudged him his happiness, but a girl had her pride. She needed to convince him that she had never had a moment’s regret. She wouldn’t lie-that would be pathetic, obviously-but there was no reason why she shouldn’t put a positive slant on things, was there?
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m here for six weeks.’
He lifted one brow in a way that Alice had often longed to be able to do. ‘Long holiday,’ he commented.
‘I’m lucky, aren’t I?’ she agreed with a cool smile. ‘Roger and Beth have been telling me I should come and visit ever since they were posted here last year, but I just haven’t had the opportunity until now.’
Redundancy could be seen as an opportunity, couldn’t it?
‘You must have done well for yourself,’ said Will. ‘Not many people get the opportunity for a six-week holiday.’
‘It’s not strictly a holiday,’ Alice conceded. ‘As it happens, I’m between jobs at the moment,’ she explained, tilting her chin slightly.
That wasn’t a lie, either. She might not have another job lined up just yet, but when she went home she was determined that she was not only going to get her career back on track, but that she would be moving onto to bigger and better things. With her experience, there was no reason why she shouldn’t aim for a more prestigious company, a promotion
‘I see,’ said Will, his expression so non-committal that Alice was afraid that he saw only too well. He had no doubt interpreted being ‘between jobs’ as unemployed, which of course was another way of looking at it, but not one Alice was prepared to dwell on.
‘I was in a very pressurised work environment,’ she told him loftily. ‘And I thought it was time to take a break and reassess where my career was going.’
Strictly speaking, of course, it had been the company who had taken over PLMR who had decided that Alice could have all the time she wanted to think about things, but Will didn’t need to know that. It wasn’t as if it had been her fault. Almost all her colleagues had been made redundant at the same time, she reminded herself. It could
