Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall

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      ‘What made you change your mind?’ Will asked much later when they were lying, lazily entangled, in Alice’s bed. He smoothed the hair tenderly from her face. ‘You were so insistent that you had everything you needed here.’

      ‘Everything except you and Lily,’ said Alice, rolling onto her side to face him. ‘It didn’t take me long to realise that I might have the security of material things, but none of them were worth anything without you. I knew I loved you, and that you loved me, but I still couldn’t bring myself to trust that feeling.

      ‘I was afraid to let go of what I had,’ she confessed. ‘It was just what you said. I was afraid to give it all up for the chance of happiness.’ She linked her fingers with his. ‘Once you know what you want, it all seems obvious, and I can’t believe now that I hesitated for so long. But then I was going round and round in circles, not knowing what I wanted or what I really thought.

      ‘Strangely, it was being offered that job that convinced me,’ she remembered. ‘I’d told myself that I would take it as a sign that I should stay here if I got it, but of course, when it happened, I realised it wasn’t the sign I wanted. I felt a fool,’ she told him with a twisted smile. ‘I’d just been offered the job of my dreams, and all I could think was that I didn’t want it if it meant I couldn’t be with you and Lily. Then my parents turned up.’

      ‘Your parents?’ Will sat up in surprise. ‘I thought they were in India?’

      ‘They were. Now they’re on their way to keep bees in Normandy.’ Out of habit, Alice rolled her eyes, but her smile held a kind of wry affection as well. ‘They thought they would call in and see me on their way through London, and, being them, they didn’t think to give me any warning. They simply turned up on my doorstep, at the very moment I’d just realised that I wanted to be with you, and I was in a terrible muddle about everything.’

      Will twisted a strand of her hair around his finger. ‘Did they help?’

      ‘Well, that’s the funny thing. They did.’ Alice pulled herself up to sit next to him, and adjusted a pillow behind her back. ‘They’ve never been what you’d call conventional parents. They’re two old hippies,’ she said with an affectionate smile, thinking of her mother with her anklets and long braid, her father with his tie-dyed T-shirt and his grey hair pulled back into a pony-tail. ‘But when they saw what a state I was in, they swung into their traditional roles straight away! They sat me down and made me tea, and got the whole story out of me.’

      She ran her hand over Will’s shoulder, loving the sleekness of his skin. ‘I told them about you and Lily, and how much I loved you, and that I’d let you down three times now. I told them I was afraid of doing it again, that I was scared that it wouldn’t work unless I was sure that I could get it right this time and that it would be perfect.’

      Her mother had simply shaken her head. ‘Alice, you can never be sure,’ she had said. ‘All you can do is trust each other and be true to each other and believe in each other. Love isn’t something that comes and goes. It’s something you have to make together, and if you both work at it, if you’re kind and patient and prepared to compromise, if you can stay friends through thick and thin, then you can make it last, but you can’t ever be sure of it.’

      Alice would never forget the way her mother had smiled at her father then, and suddenly they hadn’t seemed like faintly ridiculous hangovers from another era, but two people who had found their own way and loved each other a long time.

      ‘Loving someone completely isn’t easy,’ her father had added. ‘It’s hard work, and you can decide it’s easier never to try, but, if you never do, you’ll never be completely happy either.’ He’d reached out and took her mother’s hand. ‘Yes, it’s a risk committing yourself to loving someone for the rest of your life. It’s a leap in the dark, but it’s a leap out of the dark too, and if you don’t take it you’ll never know the joy and the wonder and the real security which is loving and being loved.’

      Alice felt quite teary with emotion as she told Will what her parents had said. ‘As I listened to them talk, I realised that I’d spent my whole life running away from the unsettling effects of my childhood—the moving from place to place, never having any real friends, never feeling at home—when I could have been thinking about all the wonderful things my parents did for me.’

      She shook her head at herself. ‘They gave me the best example I could have of a loving relationship. My father didn’t wear a suit, and my mother didn’t put on an apron and stay in the kitchen, but they were always friends and always lovers. They laughed and they talked and were true to each other. They took me to places most children never get to see, and showed me how wonderful the world is.

      ‘I had the most incredible experiences growing up,’ Alice remembered. ‘But, instead of realising how lucky I was, I turned it all into something negative. I became afraid of change, and I confused the security of place with the security of love.’ She curved her hand around his cheek and leaned over to kiss Will’s mouth softly. ‘I won’t do that again.’

      ‘Your parents sound like great people,’ said Will when he had kissed her back. Alice had never talked much about her parents when they’d been students. He had the feeling they had been in South America then, so he had never been introduced. ‘I’d like to meet them.’

      ‘That’s good, because they’re coming out to St Bonaventure.’

      ‘They are? When?’

      ‘For our wedding,’ said Alice calmly, and a smile twitched the corner of Will’s mouth.

      ‘Oh, we’re getting married, are we?’

      ‘Yes, we are.’ She leant over to Will until he slid beneath her, and her face was suddenly serious. ‘You’ve asked me to marry you four times now, and each time I’ve been the fool that said no, so this time it’s up to me. Will you marry me, Will?’

      ‘Alice.’ He cupped her face with infinite tenderness. ‘My heart, I’ve wanted to marry you СКАЧАТЬ