Wish You Were Here. Victoria Connelly

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       Have you seen the gardens at the Villa Argenti? You haven’t? Then you must. You really must!

      There are long, shady avenues, sun-drenched terraces and lush green lawns. There are stone temples and urns spilling over with bright flowers, and fountains which cool the air in a musical mist. But it is most famous for the Goddess Garden where beautiful statues are placed at respectful intervals, enticing the visitor to walk amongst them in venerable silence. There, beside a cypress tree, stands Artemis, goddess of the hunt, with two faithful hounds by her feet. Overlooking a pond is Demeter, goddess of the harvest, carrying a sheaf of wheat. And there are Athena, Hera and Iris too.

      But it isn’t until you reach the end of the garden that you find the most popular of the goddesses. In full sunlight, surrounded by roses, is Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.

      There is something special about this statue – something that marks it out from the thousands of other statues of Aphrodite that can be found all over Greece. It’s hard to spot at first because she looks very like the others with her curls tumbling down her back and the finest of silken garments only just covering her curves as her arms reach up to lift her hair away from her face. She holds the attention. She’s mesmeric and, some even say, magical. Her eyes might be sightless but she seems to see so much and she appears to be smiling as if she can see into the future and knows what’s going to happen.

      Perhaps she does.

       Chapter 1

      Alice Archer would be the first to admit that she wasn’t beautiful. Sweet, perhaps. But never beautiful. Beauty was a word far more at home describing somebody like her sister, Stella, with her blonde hair, sharp cheekbones and hourglass figure. Next to her sister, Alice faded away into the background. She was Alice the Gooseberry. Second-fiddle Alice. Alice – sister of Stella. She’d never been Alice in her own right. Not that she was complaining. She’d never really wanted to be the centre of attention. She was far happier just to watch life happen to other people.

      So that’s what makes what happened to her so hard to understand.

      It all began on a perfectly ordinary day in February. Well, it was an ordinary day for Alice – Valentine’s Day always was. She awoke in her tiny terraced cottage, shivering because the boiler had broken yet again, and got ready for work.

      I will not look on the doormat, she told herself as she walked through to the kitchen for breakfast. There won’t be any Valentine’s cards there and I will not let it bother me.

      Still, she couldn’t help a sly little spy and, sure enough, the mat lay bare of all declarations of secret admiration and unrequited love.

      It’s wasn’t that Alice didn’t get to meet many men because she did. In fact, she was surrounded by men. But it was the kind of men she was surrounded by that was the problem and she couldn’t help thinking about this as she left the house and saw Wilfred the postman ambling up the driveway as if he had all the time in the world and posting his letters was the last thing on his mind. He was in his mid-fifties and had the hairiest face Alice had ever seen, with great thick sideburns giving him a furry quality. He always reminded her of a half-metamorphosed werewolf.

      ‘Morning, Wilfred,’ Alice said with the brightest smile she could muster on a Monday.

      ‘Morning, Alice. Just bills today,’ he said. ‘Gas and credit card.’

      ‘Great,’ she said. She didn’t really mind that Wilfred knew all about her private business. If she was a postman, she’d probably make it her business to know too. It was one of the perks of the job, wasn’t it?

      ‘No Valentine’s cards for you then?’ he said.

      ‘Well, I wasn’t really expecting any.’

      ‘Third year in a row now, isn’t it?’

      Alice sighed. Wilfred’s memory was far too sharp sometimes. He stopped on the pavement for a moment, blocking Alice’s way, and she knew she was in trouble.

      ‘That cough of mine’s back,’ he said.

      ‘Oh?’ Alice said, knowing all about Wilfred’s cough.

      ‘Went to the doctor’s again. Complete waste of time.’

      ‘Oh, dear.’

      Wilfred coughed loudly. ‘Hear that?’ he said. ‘That rattle?’

      Alice nodded.

      ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Can’t be right.’

      Alice didn’t like to point out that Wilfred’s twenty cigarettes a day might not be helping matters because she knew he wouldn’t listen.

      ‘Oh, well. No rest for the wicked,’ he said, and mooched on. ‘Oh, look,’ he added, ‘a second red bill for Mrs Bates at number twenty-two. And a lingerie catalogue too. Bit old for that, isn’t she?’

      Alice rolled her eyes.

      Wilfred was usually Alice’s first male encounter of the day. The second one was Bruce at the bus stop and he was standing there in a long dark trench coat, his briefcase in his hand. She nodded to him and he nodded back. That was it, really. Alice had gone to school with Bruce but that was never worth talking about because they’d only ever nodded to each other there too. He was quite good-looking, she supposed, with short fair hair and hazel eyes. He had that mean and moody thing going on which had never really attracted Alice.

      She turned the collar up on her winter coat and shivered. The Norfolk village of West Carleton was one of the prettiest places in summer. Surrounded by emerald fields, deep cool woods and more round-towered flint churches than you could shake a vicar at, it was like something out of a fairy tale but, in the depths of winter when the wind howled in from the coast across the great expanses of fields, it was a miserable place to be and Alice would wish that she hadn’t had to sell her car and endure the bone-crippling conditions of February at the bus stop.

      A half-hour bus ride took her into the centre of Norwich and to her job in the Human Resources department of a building society. She didn’t enjoy her job but it did have its compensations for somebody who was as inquisitive as she was. Nobody suspected her of being nosy, of course. She was hard-working and quietly-spoken. In other words – completely above suspicion. Alice would often smile at the secrets she was privy to.

      ‘Ah, Alice. Can you bring me Martin Kasky’s file?’ Alice’s boss, Larry Baxter, asked as soon as she’d walked into the office. He was fifty-four, lived just off the Newmarket Road at the posh end of town, had had three sick days off last year and was a Sagittarius. That was one of the perks of working in Human Resources. Alice had all sorts of useful information at her fingertips.

      ‘I’ll just do a bit of filing,’ she’d tell her colleagues when she wanted to find something out about a guy. Like last year when Philip Brady asked her out to dinner. He worked in the New Business department, had jet-black hair and was very charming. Before the date, Alice looked him up quickly in between filing jobs. She noticed he was on a very good salary, had had two jobs before taking this one and had nine GCSEs at grade A. What she forgot to look at, though, were his self-certified sick notes. If she had, she would have seen that he’d taken six separate days off for irritable bowel syndrome СКАЧАТЬ