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Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Susan Lewis 2020
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photograph © Lyn Randle / Trevillion Images (flowers), Shutterstock.com (insects)
Susan Lewis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008286873
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008286859
Version: 2020-06-18
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Acknowledgments
Read on for a sneak peek at Susan’s next book Forgive Me
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Susan Lewis
About the Publisher
‘I’m leaving,’ he said.
She kept her head down as though working on the pages in front of her. She’d heard the ‘you’ even though he hadn’t said it. I’m leaving you.
He continued to stand in the doorway, making her wonder if he really meant what he’d said, but she knew that he did.
He’d told her about the affair two weeks ago. She hadn’t suspected it, although she probably should have. She’d lost her temper, had even hit him, had told him she didn’t care if he was sorry, and that he had to get out.
He hadn’t gone then, but he was going now.
She didn’t want to look at him; it would hurt too much. She didn’t know what to do to repair this.
‘Do you have nothing to say?’ he asked.
‘Is there anything that would make a difference?’ she countered, her head still down.
He sighed and she pictured his expression, exasperation, worry, guilt. It was the guilt she couldn’t stand to see, because it would confirm that he cared. If he didn’t care his eyes would be cold, and she’d never seen his eyes cold. She knew he didn’t want to hurt her, had never set out to, but with the way things were between them …
The affair had been going on for five weeks.
That was all the time it had taken for him to decide he wanted out of their marriage so he could go to live with her best friend.
No longer a best friend.
‘Holly wants to come with me,’ he said quietly.
A brutal knife in the back, this one almost worse than the other. He was going to take their teenage daughter with him.
Could she allow that? Did she have a choice?
Holly made her own decisions these days and some were to spite her mother, or challenge her, or simply to annoy her.
Did either of them know that her heart had already been broken before they’d taken the pieces and broken them all over again?
Holly would pretend not to care, but she wasn’t as unfeeling towards her mother as she tried to make out.
He would care, but she’d never told him how it was with her, what she’d done to blot out the pain, so that was that.
‘Please say something,’ he urged, ‘even if it’s only goodbye.’ He apparently thought about that because then he added, ‘You probably don’t want to be that polite about it.’
Even now, in the midst of this nightmare, he could make her smile. She didn’t let him see, but he’d know it anyway. That was how well they knew each other, they could sense things, know things without having to see or hear them.
Finally she turned around and because she loved him so much the hurt cleaved through her. He was tall and rugged with a slow, winning smile and sleepy dark eyes that were as kind as his soul. When they were younger she used to call him Harry because he reminded her of Harry Connick Jr. ‘Just a shame I can’t sing like him,’ he’d say. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t loved him, when she hadn’t felt complete because of him, when most of her thoughts hadn’t found their way back to him. They’d been young when they’d met, but they’d considered themselves mature, as all teenagers did and do, especially those at uni. They’d become parents in their twenties and it had brought them closer together. They’d supported each other’s careers, understanding one’s ambitions were no more important than the other’s, they’d hit more highs and lows than she could recall and had always been there for one another.
Now it was all going to change.
‘Have you packed?’ she asked, and immediately regretted it when she saw him flinch. She didn’t want to hurt him really. Why would you want to hurt someone you loved?
‘Everything’s in the car,’ he replied.
‘Holly too?’ Why would he take her daughter? Why did Holly want to go? What did it say about her? As a mother, as a person?
‘She’s almost ready,’ he said.
She had to swallow a choking build-up of emotion before she could say, ‘It’s hard for me to imagine being happy without you, but obviously it’s not hard for you.’
His eyes darkened and they entered a rare moment when she didn’t know what he was thinking, although they were becoming more frequent now.
He was leaving her today and she wasn’t trying to stop him. She could sense his confusion over that, along with the guilt – of course guilt, he’d been sleeping with another woman. And yes, he was hurting, because all their years together had meant something to him too and he’d probably expected her to fight harder to keep him.
He could have accused her of driving him to this, but he never had because that wasn’t his style. He didn’t blame others for his actions whatever the provocation. He was a decent man, not a coward who hid behind excuses. In some ways that was a failing, for often he claimed responsibility when there was no need to.
Superhero-dad, protective-husband, respected boss.
‘You’re not angry any more,’ he stated, and she heard his surprise and pique.
She was angry all right, so angry she could turn violent simply to think of him with another woman – especially that one – like she had when she’d first found out. A lot had been smashed that day and she didn’t doubt that more would go the same way during the darkest moments ahead.
She was going to hate sleeping in their bed alone, not hearing his key in the door at the end of the day, pouring only one glass of wine, not having him to talk to or watch TV with. For as long as she could remember they’d been the closest couple amongst their friends, no one had expected this to happen, theirs was the marriage that would go on to the end.
It would have if it weren’t for the affair …
It would have if he’d been there for her when her world had spun out of control, when she’d lost the sense of who she was, and asked herself what point there was to anything any more.
Maybe he would have been if she’d told him, but she hadn’t, because she couldn’t, and wouldn’t.
Some things were just too hard.
And so he was leaving.
CHAPTER ONE
1968
The really cool thing about teasing Sir – (Mr Michaels the music teacher) – is the way it makes him blush. It starts under his collar and creeps out like mischief, slowly, cautiously, as though checking to see who’s looking before suddenly revealing itself with rosy abandon over his neck and cheeks. It makes him seem younger, closer to our age in a way, but not so close to give him the air of a teenager, or someone lacking in worldly sophistication. He definitely isn’t, for he seems to know everything and isn’t easily shocked, only easily thrown or discomfited by a roomful of fifteen-year-old girls intent on claiming his attention.
He’s not tall exactly, but few of us girls can look him directly in the eye – I don’t think he’d allow it even if we could. We’re too challenging, too full of ourselves and determined to score points over one another at his expense. I can tell he understands that and he never assists. I’m not one of the girls who dares to throw myself at him – no one does really, at least not in an actual physical sense. However, some are brazen enough to try and treat him to glimpses of their stocking tops or to ask if he thinks they should wear lipstick when kissing a boy.
‘Sir, do you believe in free love?’
There’s a big, exciting world out there, beyond the walls of our boarding school, where people are drawing power from flowers and ‘finding themselves’ as though they’ve been lost, and we just know that in his free time Sir is one of them. There’s more to him than his beige corduroy suit and deep brown eyes that try not to twinkle (and rarely succeed) – and his love of music.
‘Sir, did anyone ever tell you that you look like Andy Fairweather-Low?’
‘Who?’ he asks and we almost riot, before realizing he’s teasing us back.
We’re all mad about Amen Corner’s lead singer, so for most of the girls this is the biggest compliment we can give Sir, but in my opinion he looks more like George Harrison. Or he did before George let his hair and beard grow long. Sir’s face is always shaved, but it has a similar sculpted look to George’s and in my opinion he has the same air of secrecy about him.
What are his secrets?
How we all want to know.
Actually, Sir is much more thrilling than a pop star, mostly because he’s here and so accessible, possible even, and because he’s willing to treat pop music as if it’s as important as any other kind. Our lessons are called music appreciation, so I guess that makes sense, although I can’t imagine our previous teacher, Mr Maugham, even considering the hit parade to be part of his lessons. Much less can I imagine him picking up a guitar, or any other instrument, to play ‘Hey Jude’ while we writhe around in time to the slow-motion beat and shake our hair loose as if we’re at a wild party, or even a ritual coming of age.
With Sir we get into deep discussions about the lyrics of pop songs and why we think one instrument has been used over another. Sometimes he breaks it all down on the piano and gets us to sing phrases that sound silly out of context and we end up laughing so hard that someone knocks on the next-door wall to tell us to pipe down.
Sir’s classes are the last period on Wednesdays for our year, and no one ever misses them, not even on the weeks it’s all about classical pieces by long-dead composers. Sir has a way of talking about music that holds us all rapt, as if we’re small children caught in the melodies of a lullaby. He even manages to bring obscure, centuries-old symphonies to life by playing snatches on the piano while telling stories about how, where and why the score was composed. He tells us about first performances in exotic-sounding places, conjuring images of the crowds and the acclaim, or sometimes the horror and the shame. He delights us with the tale of Mozart composing the overture for Don Giovanni on the morning of the opera’s premiere while he had a terrible hangover.
‘Have you ever had a hangover, Sir?’ Mandy Gibbons asks him cheekily.
Sir gives her a look that’s both playful and mock scary and everyone laughs.
I remember us being electrified by the tale of John Rutter fancying John Tavener’s girlfriend when they were at school together, and we wanted to know how things had worked out.
‘Did they fight?’ someone asks.
‘Which one did she prefer?’
‘What was her name?’
‘I’ve never even heard of them.’
‘Have you ever fancied someone’s girlfriend, Sir?’
He never answers those sorts of questions; he just carries on as if they haven’t been asked. I guess he thinks we’re all pretty childish and stupid, and of course we are, but we’re old enough to have sexually charged crushes that’s for sure. I wonder if they’re even more intense at fifteen, given their newness and ripe hormonal appassionatos and attaccas. They could easily run out of control with lots of girls and considering the times we’re living in – I’ve already mentioned free love and most of us are dying to be a part of it. I’m sure we would be if we weren’t locked up in this school during the week. We are on the periphery of an explosion of newness – a revolution some are calling it, an emancipation say others – and though we don’t really understand it we still vibrate with the excitement of it.
I will readily confess to the frissons of lust I feel going into Sir’s class minus my bra sometimes. He doesn’t know, obviously, no one does, but later, as everyone around me in the dorm is falling asleep I imagine how it might have been if he had known. It makes me breathless and hot and excited to go even further the next time, although I never do.
I’m still a virgin. I haven’t even kissed a boy properly, much less let one put his hand up my skirt or inside my bra. Tricia Hill, whose bed is next to mine, claims she did things with her cousin’s friend during a weekend home visit, and Mandy Gibbons, who’s the most rebellious of our group, came back after one weekend swearing she’d gone all the way with her new boyfriend. Her eyes were glittering so brightly and her cheeks were so flushed that it was easy to believe she really had allowed that first barrier of resistance to be breached. And by someone who was virtually a stranger! How courageous and erotic that made it seem.
‘Did it hurt?’ we all want to know.
She shrugs as if she’s a grown-up now, and we are mere tadpoles in the pond of life. ‘Only a bit,’ she admits, ‘and not for long.’
‘Did you like it?’
With a dreamy sort of smile she says, ‘It was wonderful.’ (Personally, I reckoned it had hurt, but she didn’t want to tell us. She might even have been lying, and I think she was because we’d all read parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by then, and I’m sure it inspired her fantasy.)
‘Did you take all your clothes off, or just some of them?’ Tricia asks.
‘Did you feel embarrassed?’
‘What happened after?’
‘What if you get pregnant?’
‘Are you going to do it again?’
We have so many questions, and we’re so stimulated by the things she tells us that it isn’t long before Sir’s name is mentioned. It always is at some point, whatever the conversation, because it’s as though everything we discuss is a prelude to get to him.
We’d all long since agreed that he’d probably had sex hundreds of times so he would be an expert at it. When we talk about this we pause, eyes closed, to imagine ourselves with him, and then we dissolve into riotous giggles when someone makes noises as though it’s really happening.
We aren’t the only ones who fancy him. Some of our younger female teachers do too, you can see it in the way they break into smiles when they spot him coming their way, or are always willing to join in any project suggested by him. Some even openly flirt with him, like Mrs Blake, the PE teacher, who sometimes joins our special Wednesday classes to show us how to dance like the Go-Jos or Pan’s People. She’s really good with the moves, whether she’s dancing to something slow like ‘Honey’ or wild like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. No one can take their eyes off her, except me, because I’m watching Sir and the way he looks at her makes me certain he’s had sex with her. I’m furious about it. She’s married and has no right to him. I will her to fall over or break wind or do something to make herself ridiculous or disgusting in his eyes. The only thing that allows me to forgive her is her praise of my dancing. She says I’m one of the best in the class, a natural, and if I carry on this way I’ll end up on Top of the Pops.
‘Don’t you agree, Mr Michaels?’ she asks him, and without quite looking at me he smiles and says something like, ‘absolutely,’ or ‘she certainly has talent.’ Of course I love it when he agrees, but it upsets me that he doesn’t really seem to be paying attention.
‘It’s because he’s not seriously into the same sort of pop music as us and Mrs Blake,’ my friend Joy says when I complain to her, and I think she’s right.
As far as pop goes, Sir is mainly into Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, the headbanging stuff that makes a lot of the girls shudder and groan. I don’t mind it, but I especially enjoy it when he puts it on the turntable and laughs when everyone boos and cries ‘Off, off, off.’ We all love it when he laughs. It’s as infectious as measles, and no one wants a cure.
One day he plays us ‘The Gaelic Blessing’ and asks us to write down the images it evokes for us. I think it’s a strange choice, but he’s like that, always throwing something different at us, and collecting up our reactions as if they’re musical notes he’s going to use for a symphony he’s composing.
When the piece has finished he asks Prunella Jones to read out what she’s written, but every time she tries she bursts out laughing.
‘It’ll be something rude,’ someone calls out.
He moves on to Tricia Hill who gets booed when she says it made her see churches and choirs and hymnbooks.
‘Stating the obvious,’ Mandy Gibbons informs her loftily, and rolls her eyes as if Trish is an idiot.
Trish throws her exercise book and pen up in the air. ‘So let’s hear yours, if you’re so brilliant,’ she challenges.
Mandy’s eyes sparkle and we all know something outrageous is coming, but before she can read out a single word, Sir says,
‘What about you? What did you see?’
Startled and thrilled that he’s asked me, and embarrassed and desperate to impress even though I know what kind of reaction I’ll get from the others, I tuck my long blonde hair behind my ears (I always wear it down for Sir’s class) and begin. ‘I saw myself floating over a meadow like a bird,’ I read out loud. ‘I was a weightless ballerina looking down at the flowers in the grass and up to the sun and out across the sea to where angels were beckoning to me to join them.’
A couple of girls actually clapped, but more gagged and Sir says, ‘Very good.’
He’s not looking at me and I wonder if he means it.
I feel upset, rejected even, but then I comfort myself by thinking of a time when he was looking at me. It was when I was playing hockey in the top field and during a pause in the game I happened to glance back across the pitch towards the main school building. I’m not sure if I actually felt him watching me, and that was what made me turn around, you know how that happens sometimes, or if it was just coincidence that he was standing at the music room window and caught my eye as I glanced his way. He didn’t look away and as I stared back at him I stopped feeling the chill air on my bare thighs and panting breath in my lungs.
I think that was when his lessons first became the true light at the centre of my week and I, like a moth, circled it constantly, so drawn to him that each Wednesday afternoon was like being burned with the intensity of my own feelings.
Today, as we file into his class, there is a buzzing anticipation infecting us all for it’s one of our pop days, as we call them, and several of us have brought in the new records we bought while at home over the weekend.
The night before, in the dorm, we’d taken bets on what he would or wouldn’t like.
‘A shilling says he’ll love “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals, or “Stone Soul Picnic” by Fifth Dimension.’
‘Sixpence says he’ll hate “Mony Mony” or “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream.’
They’re all wrong about ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, apart from me, because I knew from the minute I first heard it on my parent’s record player that he’d love it. My parents are groovy people. At weekends when their friends come over wearing bright-coloured kaftans and fake roses in their hair they drape themselves around the place like exotic furniture to chill out, smoke weed and drink gimlets or whisky sours. They talk about Vietnam or cricket or how to change the world. During the week, my mother is a senior civil servant writing speeches for ministers and my father is a lawyer specializing in tax and finance. They morph into hippies at the weekends and immerse themselves in the same sort of bands that Sir likes, which is how I knew he’d dig ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.
There really is no other teacher in the school like him. He feels more like a friend than someone who’s supposed to instruct and discipline us. I’ve never heard him tell anyone off, not even when some of the cheekier girls ask him for a kiss as a reward for saying something to impress him. He just arches an eyebrow in a comical way, almost as though he hasn’t heard, but the colour that rises over his neck gives him away. It’s why we do it, to see the little tell-tale spread of embarrassment that, according to most, proves that he really does want to kiss them.
I have no idea when class starts that day that I will remember it forever. It’s not my choice of record that changes the background music of schoolgirl crushes and improbable dreams, it’s Mandy Gibbons’s. She’s brought ‘Young Girl’ by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. It was released a couple of weeks ago, but this is the first chance we’ve had to play it with Sir, and every one of us secretly thinks the song is about her and him. We can hardly wait for Mandy to slide it from its paper cover and put it on the turntable. She’s allowed to do the honours while Sir peels off his corduroy jacket and drapes it over the back of his chair.
Mandy sets the needle carefully on the revolving disc, stands back with taut anticipation and as those two magical words – Young Girl – fly into the room with all their tragedy and passion Sir lowers his head. We’re all watching him, waiting for the blush, certain it will come and it does. What I don’t expect is the way his eyes find their way to mine. I can feel my heart pounding as the song tells me to get out of his mind, that his love for me is out of line, I’m too young and he needs to run. I feel the heat of the moment, intense and fateful, while in possession of all the charms of a woman.