Page 30 of Summer on the French Riviera
‘If there hadn’t been a party, what had you planned to do?’
‘Ring the bell and say hi to whoever opened the gate and tell them I was an old friend of yours.’ He flashed her a smile.
Harriet shook her head. ‘I’m glad that part of your plan failed. You weren’t in the impasse late that night, were you?’
Jack shook his head. ‘No. I did hang around for a bit, but I left after about an hour and walked back to my hotel.’
‘Why were you looking for me anyway after all this time?’
Jack gave a deep sigh. ’It was something that Lizzie said at the wedding. Initially I put it down to her having drunk too much champagne, but then I started to wonder. Ah, coffee.’
The waiter placed the two coffees on the table and they both muttered their thanks.
Jack picked up the sachet of sugar from his saucer and carefully tore off the corner and poured the sugar into his cup. ‘Never give you enough sugar in French cafes, I find.’ He looked at the sachet in Harriet’s saucer. ‘Do you take sugar these days? You never used to.’
‘And you always took too much,’ Harriet said, pushing her unused sachet across the table towards him, wishing he’d hurry up and get to the point.
‘That Dear John letter you sent,’ Jack said. ‘Almost broke me, thinking of you with someone else. I thought we had something special. I’d known the future was going to be difficult, but I truly believed we’d overcome our problems and the little matter of the Atlantic Ocean being between us and be together.’ His voice took on a hard edge. ‘I wanted to jump on the next plane, find you, confront you, make you see you were making the wrong choice, but everything conspired against me doing that.’
‘My first wrong choice of many,’ Harriet said in a sotto voce.
‘My father died, my mother needed me – oh, so many things.’ Jack shook his head and took a deep breath.
‘I’m sorry about your father.’
‘I got over it, over you, got married and life carried on.’
‘So what do you want now?’ Harriet asked quietly, looking at him.
‘The truth from you. I think you might have something to tell me. Lizzie said you had a baby girl, Elodie, six months after I left. That little gem got me thinking. Most pregnancies last for nine months, don’t they? She also said…’ Jack stirred his coffee thoughtfully before glancing up at her. ‘That no one knew who the father was. You hadn’t even confided in her, your best friend.’ Jack’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Harriet. ‘So either your daughter was very premature or you were pregnant when I left and you chose not to tell anyone, including me. Something tells me that it was the latter.’
Harriet closed her eyes in defeat, in relief almost, that after all these years it was finally happening, her secret was out in the open. The one person she’d longed to tell finally knew he had a daughter. There was no point in denying it.
‘It would never have worked. We were from different worlds, different cultures. You were an all-American preppy boy,’ Harriet said defiantly, fiddling with her coffee cup. ‘And I was…’ She shrugged. ‘I was a working-class English girl who wanted to paint. I lived in a totally alien world to the one you knew.’
‘Rubbish. I knew you and the world you lived in. A world I felt perfectly at home in. You didn’t even know mine.’
‘But I knew you came from a family with money, and I didn’t.’
Jack stared at her. ’There’s more to it than that.’
Harriet took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down before she spoke. ‘Remember, you’d also told me that there was a girl back home whom your parents expected you to marry. I guessed they wouldn’t react too kindly to me upsetting their plans. And once you’d left, I sort of accepted that you would find it difficult to return. Family ties would bind tighter and tighter to keep you over there.’ She paused and fiddled with her silver bracelet.
‘Sure, there was that arrangement both sets of parents wanted, but like I told you, I’d never agreed to it. It was one of the reasons I was in Europe that year. I’d hoped making myself absent for a few months would give everyone a chance to realise that I was serious when I refused to accept their plan.’
Harriet looked at him and despondently shook her head. ‘I also didn’t realise I was pregnant until after you’d left. If we’d still been together, of course I would have told you, but you were miles away with family problems in another country.’ Harriet looked at Jack, her eyes glistening, the guilt as strong as ever. ‘Telling you would have added to your problems and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want you to feel trapped into marrying me. But you have to believe me, not telling you and writing that Dear John letter was one of the hardest decisions to make, and follow through, of my life.’
‘It was the biggest mistake of your life – for both— all of us.’
Harriet bit her lip and blinked rapidly as she heard the sad unhappy tone in Jack’s voice.
He shook his head and gave her a despairing look. ‘I loved you, Harriet. I would have moved heaven and earth for you both if you had chosen to tell me the truth. At least you are not denying that Elodie is mine.’ Jack drained his coffee cup before he spoke. ‘But Lizzie also told me you left her behind with your mother when you married and went off to Australia. Why didn’t you contact me then? I would gladly have offered to have her. Given her at least one parent in her life.’
‘I regret leaving Elodie more than you or anybody will ever know, but you have to know how wonderful my mother has been for all these years,’ Harriet said quietly. ‘Gabby has been a tremendous mother stroke grandmother to her, a real rock in Elodie’s life. Probably a better mother than I would ever have been. Elodie adores her. How would your wife – I suspect you were married by then – have taken to having your illegitimate toddler thrust into her life to look after? And you’re still married judging by the wedding photo – how’s she going to react to learning the news now?’
‘There won’t be a problem. Sabrina and I divorced five years ago,’ Jack answered flatly. ‘We met up for Nathan’s wedding like civilised adults. When can I meet Elodie?’
Harriet bit her lip and shrugged in despair. The question she’d been dreading. ‘I don’t know. She doesn’t know anything about you, not even your name. Just recently she has been asking questions about who you were, how long we were together, but at the same time insisting that she doesn’t need to meet you. She just wants to know who she is. I’m going to need time to tell her if you want to meet her.’
