‘I’m okay. Are you?’
‘I am. Are you? Sorry, you’ve just said . . . you’re okay, you said.’
They both smiled. They both wanted to cross the divide, but neither dared.
‘Did you drive down to Southampton?’ she asked. A banal question, because her brain had frozen and it was all she could come up with. He looked so ridiculously handsome. The sort of handsome that the eyes register and then pass on to every other part of the body for it to appreciate too. He’d dressed for someone, made himself smart for a woman.
‘Yeah, we drove down. You?’
We, he said we. Something nipped her heart hard. Something that felt worse than the seasickness she had endured the other day.
‘Bus.’ Her throat felt suddenly dry.
‘We didn’t think of that until it was too late. Next time.’
That we again. She should go. It was easy to miss bumping into people on a ship. They tended to move in orbits, she’d noticed. He hadn’t been in hers, until then. She didn’t want to see him again. She didn’t want to see him with someone. Someone who wasn’t her.
‘Amazing how we’re the only two people out here, isn’t it?’ he said.
Alone together, but not together.
‘Yes. Though it is very cold tonight.’
‘Not much of a moon.’
They were talking like Russian spies conversing in code, he thought. The Norwegian sky is dark is it not, Pyotr Muratov?
‘Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your cruise,’ she said. She had to go. She couldn’t bear to be this close to him, and yet so far away. She wondered again if he knew about Tara and Alex. Wondered if this was what had torn them apart, put them on different roads, to meet other people with less complicated backgrounds.
‘And you.’
He bent, he had to, he needed to touch her, this woman he wanted so much, who belonged to someone else. He kissed her cheek. The lovely scent of her hair, her skin, her perfume entered his nostrils and found a part of his brain that both sighed and felt desperately sad at the same time.
Chapter 66
14 February
Laurie attended a theatre presentation the next afternoon explaining the phenomenon and folklore of the Northern Lights. The Norwegian head of the tour, who looked exactly like Ranulph Fiennes, warned that they all had to respect the lights if they made an appearance. They weren’t to be whistled at or mocked because this could make them reach down and carry you off, he said with relish, making everyone laugh. Everyone but Laurie. Some people believed the lights were party beacons of gods celebrating, or reflections from the shields of the Valkyries. Some, that they were a bridge connecting the afterlife to the realm of mortals, a place where the membrane between this world and the next was at its thinnest, where the souls gathered in the colours of the skies hoping to see their loved ones again.
Laurie tried not to scan the room for Pete. The theatre was huge, however, and she didn’t see him, but she was convinced he must be in there somewhere. She hadn’t been able to shake him from her mind since meeting him again on the top deck and it had taken her ages to get to sleep afterwards. She replayed his kiss on her cheek over and over like a stuck record, but there was no meaning to read into it. It was a kiss of politeness, a kiss that said hello and goodbye at the same time. But still she thought of it over and over, tried to pause the moment when his lips made contact with her skin.
Knowing he was here on board had killed her enjoyment of the holiday. She wished she could fly home. She was on edge now, waiting for him to turn up around any corner holding hands, laughing with a woman. If Alex had led her here for that purpose, it was a cruel joke. She gave herself a mental shake, What was she thinking? He wouldn’t have. In any case, Alex was gone, this was coincidence, pure and simple. She needed to pull herself together and not let it spoil what she had paid an arm and a leg to see.
There were four buses full of people going on ‘the hunt’. Laurie sat with Olive, who was delightful company. She hadn’t been away from her little boy and girl before and, although they were in superb hands with her husband and his huge Greek family in Cephalonia, she was missing them and told Laurie all about them.
‘That big love, if you know what I mean, was the kind of thing that happened to other people, not me. Until it did,’ said Olive. ‘I always believed in some magic in life after that. It couldn’t have been coincidence. If anything it made me believe less in coincidence and more in magic,’ and she laughed.
‘I met someone I know on the ship late last night, someone from home,’ Laurie burst out, even though she’d sworn to herself that she wasn’t going to talk about him, think about him. She might as well have sworn that she wasn’t going to breathe.
‘Someone?’ Olive angled for more details.
‘Someone that I once really liked.’ Someone I fell in love with.
‘Happens all the time, Ven says. She saw my ex-mother-in-law on board once. She isn’t a woman to easily mistake.’ Olive smiled softly. ‘I’d quite like to run into her, which sounds odd. Not sure she’d recognise me though, I’m a different person to how I was then. Funny isn’t it how one lifetime can encompass so many phases and changes. It’s like a book full of short stories, except now I’m quite happy being in a long romantic novel.’ Olive pulled out her phone, showed Laurie her family: her twins, her good-looking stepson, her very good-looking husband. ‘Once upon a time I was Mrs Olive Hardcastle, cleaner, slave and wilted weed. Now I’m a flourishing olive tree, I own land, property, I’m blissfully happy and my life is flooded with sunshine. Trust me, Laurie, if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.’
Norwegian Ranulph Fiennes had decided that the best place to find the lights would be in a camp two hours drive away. Laurie enjoyed looking out of the bus window, snatching fleeting glimpses of the cosy interiors of Norwegian houses dotted on slopes and in settlement clusters. She imagined being inside one of them, in a toasty warm lounge with fat squashy sofas and furry rugs, viewing the vast expanse of ink-dark sky through the window like a framed oil painting.
The Norwegian bus driver was well used to the snowy roads that cut through the mountains. But then snow was part and parcel of life here; no one’s life fell to pieces for a few inches of it.
Finally the coach deposited them outside a field with a big log cabin, three teepee-style tents, large burning camp fires and benches covered with thick furry pelts set around them. There were two white husky dogs with coats as dense as sheepskin rugs, one lying in the snow, the other plodding around enjoying the petting and fuss. An oasis of civilisation and comfort in a deserted landscape of snow, mountains and sky.
The clouds had started to thin, a perfect smile of moon visible now.
Laurie followed Frankie and Roz into the log cabin where they sat near a crackling fire, helping themselves to the most delicious sweet hot chocolate and moist lemon sponge. It was seductively inviting in there, but she didn’t want to miss the lights if they made an appearance.
‘I think I’ll have a wander outside,’ she told the others.
‘We’ll be out as soon as we’ve finished,’ said Roz, who was on her third piece of cake – chocolate this time. The Norwegians really knew how to bake, everyone was in full agreement on that one.