Love Falls Read Free

morning they’d barely had time for breakfast. Just an apple and a cup of pale tea. Lara had brought the remaining apples with them, thinking they’d only rot, left in their bowl. She’d packed them into her bag with an unopened bottle of Perrier that was standing in the hall. She opened the Perrier now and took a gulp that fizzed so fiercely in her throat she almost choked.
    ‘Steady on,’ Lambert said, and he reached out for a drink.
    She didn’t know if it was the fizz of the water or the act of sharing the unwiped bottle but she suddenly felt quite heady with excitement. They were going away. Setting off on an actual holiday! Until now, she hadn’t quite believed it, and to hide her excitement she turned to the window and looked out. They’d left London behind, were already rumbling through a suburban landscape, were soon rolling out through scrub and fields. She looked over at her father, but he had closed his eyes and was gripping the bottle of water by the narrow top of its neck.
    Although the train was full, with people standing in the corridors, they were alone in their first-class carriage, the dark seats, wider than standard, draped with head-protectors, like the starched white pinnies of a hotel maid. Lara knew it was wrong, felt the unfairness of it in her bones, but all the same she stretched luxuriously, ate an apple, threw the core out of the slip of window, watched it drag backwards in the wind.
    She thought about her mother, as she’d left her the evening before, rinsing lettuce for a salad, and it occurred to Lara that she’d never asked her what she planned to do. Maybe Cathy would do what Lara did when she was away, have a party, upset the neighbours, eat tinned vine leaves for breakfast, take baths three times a day. Suddenly she felt supremely happy, the sun streaming in through the window, aware she was at that perfect stage of a journey, safely begun but with no danger of having to arrive.
    She thought of how miserable she’d been on the last day of term, only ten days before. How cowardly she’d felt when she’d missed her chance of saying even one word to Clive – Clive, who for three terms she’d dreamed of, yearned for, fantasised about, and who still, for all she knew, didn’t know she was alive. She’d sat behind him every Monday in history, too distracted by the black curls of his unbrushed hair, the wide shoulders of his donkey jacket, to take more than the most illegible notes. And then she’d made a decision. She’d talk to him at the college disco, the finale of all the Wednesday lunchtime discos, where for three terms now she hadn’t danced. Lara and her best friend Sorrel swung in and out of the swing doors, hovered by the curtained windows, whispered in dark corners, and always there was the suspenseful feeling that something was about to happen.
    That Wednesday she’d stood near Clive, waiting, nothing between them but a stack of chairs, and then, just when she was sure she’d plucked up enough courage, a girl from drama A level swept in, and without a moment’s hesitation took Clive’s hand and pulled him out on to the floor. And he’d allowed it. It was as easy as that. What kind of a spineless idiot was she to have been so afraid? Why was she so stupid? She closed her eyes against the vision of the two of them, Meg and Clive, only half an hour later, kissing hungrily behind the stage.
    ‘My God.’ Lambert sat up with a start as the train began to slow. ‘Here already,’ and they gathered up their bags and shouldering themselves into the scrum, they prepared to crowd off the train.
     
     
    There was a bar on the boat, already beery with overflowing ashtrays, and a canteen into which Lara hungrily peered, but it was in the restaurant that Lambert had decided they should eat. By the time they found it there was only one table free and almost as soon as they’d sat down they were asked if they would share. Would they? Lara had no idea. But Lambert nodded his