Jessica Hart - Barefoot Bride

‘But you’d have met him already if he’d been working here,’ Alice objected. ‘St Bonaventure is such a tiny place, you must know everybody!’

‘We do, but Will’s only been here a week, he said. I got the impression that he knows the island quite well, and that he’s been here on various short trips, probably before Roger and I came out. But this is the first time he’s brought his family with him, so I imagine they’re going to settle here for a while.’

Alice’s stomach performed an elaborate somersault and landed with a resounding splat, leaving her with a sick feeling that horrified her. ‘Will’s got a family ?’ she asked in involuntary dismay. She sat up and swung her feet to the warm tiles so that she could stare at Beth. ‘Are you sure?’

Beth nodded, obviously surprised at Alice’s reaction. ‘He had his little girl with him. She was very cute.’

Will had a daughter. Alice struggled to assimilate the idea of him as a father, as a husband.

Why was she so surprised? Surely- surely , Alice-you didn’t expect him to stay loyal to your memory, did you? she asked herself.

Why on earth would he? She had refused him. End of story. Of course he would have moved on and made a life of his own, just as she had done. It wasn’t as if she had been missing him all these years. She hadn’t given him a thought when she’d been with Tony. Well, not very often, anyway. Only now and then, when she was feeling a bit low. If things had worked out, she would have been married by now herself.

Would that have made the news less of a shock? Alice wondered with characteristic honesty.

She could see that Beth was watching her curiously, and she struggled to assume an expression of unconcern. So much for her fears about Beth’s matchmaking plans!

‘I didn’t know that he had married,’ Alice said, hoping that she sounded mildly surprised rather than devastated, which was what she inexplicably felt. ‘What was his wife like?’

‘I didn’t meet her,’ Beth admitted. ‘But I asked them to your welcome party tomorrow, and he said they’d like to come, so I guess we’ll see her then.’

‘Oh.’ The sick feeling got abruptly worse. Somehow it seemed hard enough to adjust to the mere idea of Will being married, without having to actually face him and smile at the sight of him playing happy families, Alice thought bitterly, and then chided herself for being so mean-spirited.

She ought to be glad that Will had found happiness. She was , Alice told herself.

She was just a bit sorry for herself, too. None of the great plans she had made for herself had worked out. How confidently she had told Will that her life would be a success, that she wanted more than he could offer her. Alice cringed now at the memory. She wouldn’t have much success to show off tomorrow. No marriage, no child, not even a job, let alone a good one.

Will, on the other hand, apparently had it all. He probably hadn’t even been thinking about her all those years when the thought of how much he had loved her had been somehow comforting. It was all very…dispiriting.

‘It’s not a problem, is it?’ asked Beth, who had been watching Alice’s face rather more closely than Alice would have liked. Beth might be sweet and kind, but that didn’t mean that she was stupid.

‘No, no…of course not,’ said Alice quickly. ‘Of course not,’ she added, although she wasn’t entirely sure whether she was trying to convince herself or Beth.

How could it be a problem, after all? She and Will had split up by mutual agreement ten years ago, and she hadn’t seen him for eight. There was no bitterness, no betrayal to mar their memories of the time they had spent together. There was absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t meet now as friends.

Except- be honest, Alice -that he was married and she wasn’t.

‘Honestly,’ she told Beth. ‘I’m fine about it. In fact, it will be good to catch up with him again. It was just funny hearing about him suddenly after so long.’

She even managed a little laugh, but Beth was still looking sceptical, and Alice decided that she had better come clean. Roger was bound to tell his wife the truth anyway, and, if she didn’t mention how close she and Will had been, Beth would wonder why she hadn’t told her herself, and that would give the impression that she did have a problem with seeing Will again.

Which she didn’t. Not really.

Slipping her feet into the gaudily decorated flip-flops she had bought at the airport at great expense, Alice bent to adjust one of the straps and let her straight brown hair swing forward to cover her face.

‘You know, Will and I went out for a while,’ she said as casually as she could.

‘No!’ Beth’s jaw dropped. ‘You and Will?’ she said, suitably astounded. ‘Roger never told me that!’ she added accusingly.

‘We’d split up long before he met you.’ Alice gave a would-be careless shrug. ‘It was old news by then. Roger probably never gave it a thought.’

‘But you were both at our wedding,’ Beth remembered. ‘I do think Roger might have mentioned it in case I put you on the same table or something. I had no idea!’ She leant forward. ‘Wasn’t it awkward?’

Unable to spend any more time fiddling with her shoe, Alice groped around beneath her lounger for the hair clip she had put there earlier.

‘It was fine,’ she said, making a big thing of shaking back her hair and twisting it carelessly up to secure it with the clip, all of which gave her the perfect excuse to avoid Beth’s eye.

Because it hadn’t been fine at all. There would have been no way she’d have missed Roger’s wedding, and she had known that Will would be there. It had been two years since they had split up, and Alice had hoped that the two of them would be able to meet as friends.

It had been a short-lived hope. Alice had been aware of him from the moment she’d walked into the church and saw the back of his head. Her heart had jerked uncomfortably at the sight of him, and she had felt ridiculously glad that he was wedged into a pew between friends so that she wouldn’t have to sit next to him straight away.

She had been going out with someone from work then. Clive, his name had been. And, yes, maybe he had been a bit of a stuffed shirt, but there had been no call for Will to talk about him that way. They had met, inevitably, at the reception after the service, and Alice had done her best to keep up a flow of increasingly desperate chit-chat as Will had eyed Clive and made absolutely no attempt to hide his contempt.

‘You’ve sold out, Alice,’ he told her later. ‘Clive is boring, pretentious and self-obsessed, and that’s putting it kindly! He’s not the man for you.’

They argued, Alice remembered, in the hotel grounds, away from the lights and the music, as the reception wore on into the night. Clive had too much to drink, and to Alice’s embarrassment was holding forth about his car and his clients and his bonuses. Depressed at her lack of judgement when it came to men, she slipped away, but, if she had known that she would encounter Will out in the dark gardens, she would have stuck with Clive showing off.

Will was the last person she wanted to witness Clive at his worst. She had been hoping to convince him that her life had been one long, upward curve since they had agreed to go their separate ways and that she was happily settled with a satisfying career, a stable home and a fulfilling relationship. No chance of him thinking that, when he had endured Clive’s boasting all evening.

Mortified by Clive’s behaviour, and tense from a day trying not to let Will realise just how aware she was of him still, Alice was in no mood for him to put her own thoughts into such brutal words.