CHAPTER TWO
‘BUT, Mum, I don’t like that kind of ham! Why can’t I just have some chocolate instead? Everybody in my class gets to bring a bar of chocolate for lunch! I’m the only one who brings in yucky sandwiches with yucky ham and yucky brown bread!’
‘Brown bread’s good for you.’ Charlotte Chandler barely heard the familiar lament from her eight-year-old daughter. She was running late for work and was not open to a lengthy debate on the quality of sandwich fillings or, for that matter, the nutritional value of chocolates for lunch. ‘Where’s your homework, Gina?’
‘In my room.’
‘Well, honey, run and get it! Oh, for goodness’ sake!’
She waited, tapping her heels by the front door, looking at her watch and waiting for her daughter.
Sometimes, at moments like this, she was assaulted by one of those ‘what if’ moments that always left her shaken.
What if, eight years ago, things had turned out differently? What if she hadn’t decided on a stupid whim to trek in Riccardo’s wake so that she could pay him a surprise visit? What if she had just stayed put with the two friends with whom she now had zero contact and just waited for him to return? What if he had loved her the way she had loved him? What if, what if, what if?
She had devised a method of dealing with the past, though. In her head she visualised a box, and into that box she put all those nasty, sad memories, and then she visualised herself shutting the lid of the box and sealing it down with masking tape. Most of the time, though, life was just too hectic for her to indulge her quiet regrets. And certainly, when Gina had still been a vociferous, demanding toddler, she had spent her days working flat out to meet the cost of the rent and the child minder and then flopping, exhausted, into bed at night, too tired from coping to have had much room in her head for anything.
Only now, Gina was older, and her quiet moments were no longer few and far between. It didn’t seem fair that the memories that should have naturally died a death as time passed by should now start clamouring for attention.
Gina reappeared, homework in hand, already looking slightly disheveled, although it was the start of the day and she had been perfectly neat an hour before when she had got dressed for school.
Charlotte automatically reached down and smoothed some of the dark curls back into position. ‘Okay. Now, you’re sure you’ve got everything?’
‘Sure!’
‘How sure?’
‘Two thousand sure.’ They grinned at each other, enjoying this little game they had been playing before school since time immemorial, and then they were off.
Yet another busy Monday. A short drive to drop Gina off to school and then a far longer one for Charlotte, heading north, giving her ample time for all those unwelcome thoughts and memories to begin jostling in their box until, as she cleared the Hammersmith flyover and eased her little car onto the M4, she just sighed and allowed her mind to drift.
She knew why this was happening, of course. It was because of Ben. Because she was finally trying to get her life back on track, so to speak, by jumping back into the whole dating game instead of standing on the sidelines watching the world go by, and making excuses whenever her friends tried to encourage her to go out and meet some guys.
It was inevitable that she would be reminded of him. She was emerging from eight years of cold storage, for heaven’s sake! Any guy she now saw would generate comparisons in her head.
And she was pretty sure that the comparisons were unfair, because after such a long time there was no way that she could actually remember Riccardo in any detail to speak of. She had taken no photos of him, something for which she was eternally grateful. In her head, she could still catch his smile, though, that lazy, sexy smile when he’d turned to her and reached out, and she could still remember the way her foolish heart had fluttered at the slightest contact.