how she kept thinking of her childhood here. Normally, she kept those memories firmly buried, but she was conscious that she was remembering it not with her usual bitterness and frustration, and not with nostalgia either, but, yes, with a certain affection. Perhaps she should have remembered more of the good times as well as the bad.
‘Lily’s learning to trust you,’ she went on, and Will leant back in his chair and stretched with a sigh that was part relief, part weariness.
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Just doing something simple like reading a story makes me realise how much time I’ve missed with her. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’
Alice hesitated. ‘How come you’re such a stranger to her?’ she asked curiously, hoping that she wasn’t opening too raw a wound. ‘Didn’t you want a child?’
Will glanced at her and then away. ‘Do you want the truth?’ he said. ‘When Nikki first told me that she was pregnant, I was appalled. Lily was the result of a doomed attempt to save a failing marriage. That’s not a good reason to bring a child into the world. Nikki had already made arrangements to leave when she found out she was pregnant. So, no, I didn’t want a child then.’
‘But Nikki decided to keep the baby?’
‘Yes. I don’t know why, to be honest,’ said Will. ‘She couldn’t wait to get back to her career, and as far as I could make out Lily spent more time with her grandparents than she did with her mother. Nikki made it very clear that it was her decision whether or not to keep the baby, and I had to respect that. I accepted my responsibility to support the child, but I couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be a father,’ he admitted. ‘I hadn’t been involved in the pregnancy the way most fathers are. I didn’t get to see the first scan, or go to antenatal classes. I was just someone who would be handing over a certain sum of money every month.’
‘Would you rather Nikki had chosen not to have the baby?’ Alice asked curiously.
‘There was a time when I thought that would have been the best solution,’ said Will. ‘But then a funny thing happened. Nikki didn’t want me there at the birth, but she did let me see Lily a couple of days later.’
‘You cared enough to see her, anyway.’
He looked out at the night. ‘I can’t honestly say I cared, not then,’ he said slowly. ‘I felt responsible, that’s all. Nikki was in London by then, and I was working in the Red Sea, but my child was being born. I couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t happening, could I?’
Some men might have done, reflected Alice, but not Will.
‘So I went to visit,’ he went on, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘I guess Nikki thought that if she wanted me to pay maintenance she would have to let me see my own child, but she wasn’t exactly welcoming. Fortunately, there was a nice nurse there. I’m not sure whether she knew the situation, or just thought I was a typically nervous first-time father, but before I could say anything she picked Lily up and put her in my arms and—’
He stopped, and in the dim light Alice could just see that his mouth was pressed into a straight line that was somehow more expressive of the feelings he was suppressing than a dramatic show of tears and emotion would have been.
‘…And I felt…’ he began again when he had himself under control, only to falter to a halt again. ‘I can’t really describe how I felt,’ he admitted after a moment. ‘I looked down at this tiny, perfect little thing and just stared and stared. She was so new and so strange, and yet I knew instantly—deep in my gut—that she was part of me.
‘I’ve never felt anything like it before,’ he said. ‘It was such a strong feeling, it was like a tight band around my chest, and I could hardly breathe with it. It was too painful to be happiness, and there was terror in there too, but it was a wonderful feeling too…I don’t know what it was.’
Surprised at how moved she was, Alice managed a smile. ‘It sounds like love,’ she said, lightly enough, and Will turned his head to look at her for a long, intense moment.
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘I suppose that’s what it was. But not love the way—’
He had so nearly said the way I loved you. Will caught himself up just in time.
‘It’s not the same as the love between a man and a woman,’ he finished smoothly.
‘Of course not,’ said Alice. ‘But it’s still love. I’ve never had a child, but I recognized the feeling you described straight away.’
She remembered lying in bed next to Will and feeling just that mixture of terror and wonder, a feeling so intense that it was almost pain. Its power had seemed dangerous, overwhelming, uncontrollable, and in the end she had run away from it. She had been a coward, Alice knew, but at the time it had seemed the sensible thing to do.
And now…Well, there was no point in looking back. No point in wondering what it would have been like if she had given in to that feeling instead of fighting it, if she had chosen love rather than security. She and Will might have had a child together. She would have discovered for herself how it felt to hold a child in her arms.
She wouldn’t have been able to run away from that feeling.
Aware that she was drifting perilously close to regret, Alice gave herself a mental shake. She had made her own choices, and she would have to live with the consequences.
‘I don’t think Lily knows that you love her that much,’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘How could she?’ said Will. ‘I’ve hardly seen her since she was a baby. Nikki had already started the divorce process before Lily was born.’
‘You’d think the baby would have brought you together,’ Alice commented.
‘I would have been prepared to give it another go for Lily’s sake, but I suspect Nikki was right when she said that we both knew it wasn’t going to work, so we’d better accept reality sooner rather than later.’
Will shifted shoulders restlessly, as if trying to dislodge the memory pressing onto them. Of course, that was what Alice had said too. It’ll never work. Let’s call it a day while we’re still friends. It’s not worth even trying. At least Nikki had taken the risk of marrying him. Alice hadn’t even had the guts to give it a go.
‘So you didn’t contest the divorce?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Our marriage was a mistake. Nikki was right about that. We should never have got married in the first place.’
‘Why did you, then?’ asked Alice, who had no patience with people who didn’t think through the consequences of their actions. Of course, sometimes you could think about things too much, and you ended up missing opportunities, but Will was an intelligent man, and marriage was a serious business. It wasn’t the kind of thing you fell into by mistake.
The sharpness in her voice made Will glance at her, but he didn’t answer immediately. How could he tell Alice how hard he had tried to find someone else after she had given him that final ‘no’ at Roger’s wedding? How every woman he’d met had seemed either twee or colourless in comparison to her? Nikki had been the first woman he’d met with a strength of personality to match hers. Seduced by the notion of wiping Alice from his memory once and for all, Will had convinced himself that he was falling in love with Nikki’s forcefulness and vivacity, and he had been too eager to find out what she was really like until it was too late.
‘I think I fell in love with the idea of Nikki, rather than with the person she really was,’ he said at last. ‘And I think she did the same.’
Alice opened her mouth to tell him it had been madness to even think about marrying an idea, but then closed it abruptly. Hadn’t she done the same with Tony, after all? Tony had represented something that she had always yearned for, but she hadn’t really known him. If she had, she might not have been so unprepared when he’d met Sandi.