‘Izzy – just the girl I need,’ Harry said as I came level with the Range Rover, heading towards the steep path up through the Sweetwell woods to the Lady Spring and beyond it the Lodge, where I lived with my guardian, Aunt Debo, and her friend and housekeeper, Judy.
He was leaning his tall, skinny frame against the open door of the car, as if he might fall down if he didn’t – and going by the sparkle in his green eyes, he’d drunk more than enough for that.
‘Who, me?’ I asked, pausing uncertainly.
My recurring dream reran its usual course, a brief video clip of a golden evening and four young lives full of hopes and aspirations.
Harry and his friends had seemed so grown up and sophisticated to my sixteen-year-old eyes. They were all about to go their separate ways: Harry to medical school, and quiet, unassuming Simon to study horticulture at a nearby college, while Cara, who’d grown as tall and thin as a beanpole, had only days before been spotted by a top modelling agency and, much to her parents’ dismay, was poised to turn down her place at Oxford.
I always wished I could hang on to the dream long enough to see exactly what madness made me get behind the wheel of that car, but instead I usually woke suddenly, jerked right out of the past, just as I’d been summarily ejected from Heaven when I was in a coma in hospital after the accident …
For once, however, the picture dissolved as slowly as morning mist in the sun and I swam back up into wakefulness and the rattle of the ceiling fan in my Mumbai hotel room … and the unwelcome memory of the previous night’s phone argument with my fiancé, Kieran.
Well, I assumed he was still my fiancé, though that might change once we met up at his parents’ house in Oxford on Monday and I laid on the line exactly what I intended to do next and, more importantly, where I wanted to do it.
It was ironic that our relationship had gone pear-shaped only once we’d finally decided the time was right to stop working abroad and settle down together in the UK. And last night, when I’d told him I’d already invested some of the small legacy left to me by my father into commissioning stock for the online retro clothes shop I was going to set up, he’d been furious, even though I’d never made any secret of my plans.
He was even angrier when I added firmly, ‘And don’t count on the rest, because I’ll probably need all of it to bail Aunt Debo out. The kennels are having a huge financial crisis.’
‘Your aunt’s affairs are always in financial crisis,’ he’d said dismissively. ‘She overreaches herself taking in all those dogs that are too vicious to be rehomed, so there’s no point in throwing good money after bad.’
Then he’d claimed that we’d agreed to use my legacy as part of a deposit on a house, even though we’d never so much as discussed it. And at that point I started to wonder if he’d ever taken in a single thing I’d said to him.
Until we’d visited his parents in Oxford the previous year, he’d certainly never mentioned to me that he had any intention of going back there to live and work. He seemed like an entirely different person once we’d set foot on UK soil …
‘Look, I’ve got to go and pack. We’ll discuss it all on Monday, when I’m back,’ he’d snapped finally, then put the phone down on me.
I felt angry, confused and very upset. Why, over the course of our three-year engagement, had I never realised that the laid-back, good-natured, popular and cheerful Kieran I’d tumbled headlong in love with existed only as long as everyone else was falling in with his plans? But then, we’d spent most of our engagement on separate continents and even when we had managed to make our vacations coincide, we’d spent them on romantic breaks in exotic locations, watching the sun coming up over the Serengeti, or setting over the Taj Mahal, so I suppose it wasn’t really surprising that we appeared to have entirely misread each other’s character.
It was unfortunate that I could never sleep on planes, since the long flight back gave me way too much time to think. Appropriately, it was due to arrive in the UK on 1 April, All Fools’ Day.
I was jammed between two large, sweaty, heavy-drinking businessmen in suits, who sprawled thoughtlessly, legs wide apart and arms akimbo, as if the seat between them was empty. I might have spent the whole journey bolt upright, with my feet together and arms clamped by my sides, except that although small and skinny I have extremely sharp elbows … and also an unfortunate habit of kicking intruding ankles very sharply.
After a few mutterings and dirty looks, to which I responded with sweetly smiling apologies for my nervous tics, they gave in and subsided in opposite directions away from me and I was left to my unwelcome reflections.
The previous night’s argument with Kieran, unsatisfactorily conducted over a patchy phone line, only added to the feeling of acute cold feet I’d recently been developing about our relationship. Now I suspected there was more than a hint of frostbite setting in around my toes.
It wasn’t that I didn’t still have feelings for Kieran – a vision of his blunt-featured face with its slightly wonky, rugby-bashed nose, under a mop of sun-bleached fair hair popped into my mind and slightly weakened my knees, if not my resolve – but did he love me enough to change his plans, rather than assume it would be the other way round?
I suspected not.
When we first met, it felt so right that I thought falling in love with him must be part of my preordained destiny. Even though my best friends, Lulu and Cameron, teased me about my conviction that I had a near-death experience and went to Heaven while I was in a coma after the accident, and was sent back only because I had some important purpose to perform in life, I knew it was real. Since then I just had to tune inwards to the voice of my guardian angel from time to time to check I’d taken the right turning … only with Kieran, I think I must have fallen for him so hard that I misread the message.
My path through life had appeared clearly marked till then, for after studying Textiles and Design, I’d accepted a job with the Women’s World Workshops Foundation, which sent me on assignments all over the world, though the majority were in India. The pay was minimal, but the job satisfaction immense: discovering the skills and artistic heritage of each area and finding ways of utilising them in the making of beautiful garments, the sale of which could transform the lives of the local women involved in the scheme and, through them, those of their families and even their whole communities.
And all the time I was amassing a huge portfolio of colours, designs, patterns, ideas and contacts, ready for the day when I would finally go home for good to Halfhidden, the small village in west Lancashire where I grew up, and set up my own business selling retro-inspired clothes.
Yes, the way forward had unrolled in front of me like an inviting magic carpet … until I literally bumped into Kieran in Pakistan, where he was working as a doctor for a medical charity and I was helping some enterprising local women to set up a co-operative making woven jackets.
It seemed like sheer serendipity that we should have been in the same place at the same time … though not so serendipitous afterwards, since we rarely managed more than snatched days together whenever we could make our leaves coincide.
Perhaps if we’d spent more time in each other’s company, we wouldn’t still have been engaged.
I’d always believed that Kieran was a wonderful doctor who loved his work as much as I loved mine – it was just that until a few months before, he hadn’t mentioned that he’d always intended joining his family’s GP practice in Oxford. When I discovered this, he’d suggested that I could just as easily set up my business there as anywhere else.
But although Oxford was a lovely city, it wasn’t my city. I’m a country girl, used to living on the edge of moorland, a short drive from endless expanses of beaches, not a hemmed-in-by-dreaming-spires one.
And then, Kieran’s parents were a bit of a shock, too. Miranda, his overbearing mother, and Douglas, his sarcastic, know-it-all father, not only assumed I’d fall in with Kieran’s plans, but