Page 73 of The Cocktail Bar
Chapter Thirty-Five
ALICE
“I still think Georgina’s pregnant… you know… that the baby is yours. What would you do if it was? Wouldn’t you be tempted to go back to her? After your own childhood being brought up by just one parent… doesn’t… doesn’t,” Alice faltered and then drew a deep breath, it was now or never, despite the copious amounts of alcohol she had imbibed, despite the fact she wasn’t even sure if she could string together a half logical sentence, “doesn’t the presence of a child, regardless of who its mother is, change everything between us?”
“What on Earth has brought this on?” River flopped back onto the bed, nursing his head. “We had… such an awesome time… tonight, why ruin it?” He too was hardly coherent, and now she wasn’t even sure if he was truly taking in any of what she thought she had said.
“I just can’t do this. I’m head over heels in love with you,” she cried, “but it’s the thought that she is carrying your child… it’s doing my head in, River… and in all honesty, that scattering of twigs and leaves all over the bed when we walked in tonight, well, it’s hardly helped to keep me in my previously passionate mood. I mean, who does that?”
“And I… I… told you,” River sat up now briefly, reaching for the water bottle standing on his bedside table and gulping at it greedily, “I will be having… more than a word with this hotel’s… management about it… I asked for… for rose petals,” his words slurred and swirled, “red rose petals… at that… not flaming weeds.”
He put his head in his hands, sloshing the remains of his bottle all over the bed, and she wondered for a moment whether he’d laugh or cry.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stop thinking about it,” Alice steered the conversation back on her track. “And surely, River,surelyyou’ve noticed her titillating bust which is only getting larger by the minute, her ever-growing paunch which definitely can’t just be passed off as eating one too many of Zara’s pies; the way she declines alcohol at every given opportunity, no longer partaking in a new cocktail when you whip one up for us to sample, the pale face, the permanent parking of her hand on her back, the emerging from the bathroom with a beaded brow, the collection of her pills from our caravan – pills she’d evidently been neglecting to take. Want me to go on?”
Alice was shouting now but she found she couldn’t stop, such was her anger at Georgina’s hell bent plans to ruin their relationship. And anyway, the dialogue flowed a lot better this way.
“Let’s move away… for a fresh start.”
River’s face was serious now, as if implying it was something he had already been looking into, whether drunk or not. But to Alice this felt like nothing more than diversion.
“It’s not the answer… besides, the caravan is so homely now… and I’ve only just put up the tinsel.”
“But it’s only November, we can put it up somewhere else.”
“But… but… but… why are we even having a discussion about tinsel? You’re evading me, avoiding my question, which leads me to believe that if this baby is yours… because make no mistake about it, there is a bun in that oven… in truth, you’ve absolutely no idea whether you’d run to her side or stay by mine.”
“Alice! There’s no bun and there’s no baby, okay. This is just your imagination… and even if there was, in which case I am positive it isn’t mine… but even if there was a miniscule chance I was this phantom child’s father, then no, I assure you, I would not go running back to her.”
“You’re just saying this now, I know it. You have to remember, River, your own dad didn’t stick around, men change when they become fathers and they’ve lived through that absence as children. They know the pain, the suffering, the loss,the void. The love for a child outweighs everything, even going above and beyond the way we feel about a partner, the way you profess to feel about me. Grown men stay with women theydetestsimply to give a child the bond they deserve, some stability so they don’t let history repeat itself when they themselves have been deserted in their childhood.”
His tired eyes appeared to follow the words she had expelled. She watched him, quite voyeuristically, trying to capture them as they circled the air, invisible to all but the two of them and this moment; a moment which would quite possibly redefine everything they thought they were working towards.
A moment which also meant that Georgina had, once again, won the tug of war that Alice vowed she would never partake in.
***
Whilst the threads of that inebriated conversation could only be clutched at, Alice was sure enough by the next morning that she had heard as much as she’d needed to hear. Sometimes drink will out the truth like that.
No, River undoubtedly didn’t have a smidgen of a feeling for Georgina, she could see it in his eyes; the hatred, the bitterness for the way this Man Eater had taken advantage of his kinder side, propelled as she would have been by her ego and greed. Not that River’s malice was to be encouraged in any shape or form, but under the circumstances, it was useful to know. And yet as she had always feared, the word ‘baby’ had become not so much an elephant in a room, but an elephant in a caravan, tipping his world, and their small world, upside down with it.
But Alice was tired of running away.
Sometimes you just had to stay put and accept things. What use had it been last time anyway? He’d only come to find her once more. And so, as she would insist upon sleeping on the couch – for the Czech penthouse was furnished with a burnt orange one, draped in those distastefully embroidered arm covers – equally she would insist upon exploring Prague alone, by day and by night. This causing quite the height of speculation within the travel group no doubt, but she had three days to get her head together, to resign herself to a life of Just Good Friends all over again in the caravan, until the New Year when she would hatch out a new plan and a new start.
On the final morning they waited for their taxi to the airport, to fly back to Bristol in quite the anti-climax of the mood they’d taken off with, and the others were preparing for their epic drive back across Europe, with Hayley taking the helm at the wheel this time.
“No offence, Tel,” Hayley said, as she helped Terry board his luggage and Christmas market purchases into the trailer which was hitched onto the rear end of the mini bus.
“None taken, Hayley. To be honest, you’ve done me a favour. How am I ever going to fill in Cassandra’s Eye Spy scrapbook with photos and snippets from the journey if I’m constantly staring at cats eyes and road signs? There’s a prize for the best recorded memories of the trip when we reconvene next week in the bar: drinks on the house courtesy of Cassie herself… for a whole year!”
“Now you tell me,” said Hayley with her very best disgruntled look. “There’s no way I’d have volunteered to drive you all home if I’d known that.”
Banjo Boy appeared then from the boat, instrument tucked under his wing. Somehow he’d transformed during this trip from chick to fully grown sparrow. Cassandra left the group for a moment and went over to hug him, their words inaudible as they bid their adieus. She turned back to wave at him one more time, only to be lunged at by River as she climbed on board the minibus.
“But I thought you two were—”
“Oh never mind about him, River,” said Cassandra. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me, just because he’s decided to stay here and run off with that charming folk band; I’ve got a whole queue of young models waiting back home.”
For the one and only time in her life, Alice wished she was Cassandra.
