After Forever Ends - Ramone Melodie (бесплатные книги полный формат TXT) 📗

She laughed, “Well, my husband was a golfer and there is a nine hole course in the back. Or, if you’d rather, you can just go whack some balls. We have plenty of grounds, I’m sure you won’t bother anyone.”

“Wicked!”

“I’ll have Jacob get you the clubs. You’re a bit taller than John was, but they should be all right.”

Between whacking golf balls and borrowing a fishing pole to fish in her stocked pond, Oliver more or less disappeared for the next week and stayed gone. It left Sandra and me alone to laugh and talk for hours. It was just like we were girls again.

She and I took a long walk on the grounds the day Oliver and I left. The conversation turned to old classmates.

“You know, Meredith Ainsworth died at Christmas. She had a nasty fall from a horse about a year before and broke her spine. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she never got back up on her feet very well. It was all downhill from there. She was my husband’s cousin’s wife. Did you know that?”

“You never told me that! I think of her from time to time. I supposed she’d married some Greek oil tycoon or a prince or something.”

Sandra laughed and shook her head, “No, not a prince, just an heir to a great fortune! James is a good man and he gave her a good life. They had five daughters, can you imagine that? Beautiful girls. Bitches all of them, but they adored her. She was a wonderful mother, too. It was effortless for her. She loved them all so much. They had a yacht and sailed all over the world together with their children.”

“Wow. I’m glad for her.”

Sandy nodded, “Meredith never changed. She never got a clue in her head and she never gained an ounce of fat on her body. Her husband absolutely adored her. He gave her everything she wanted. She had a stable full of beautiful horses, Arabians and Andalusia’s. The last time I was at her estate she asked me if I still talked to you. She wanted to know about you and Oliver, about how you two had got on after Bennington. Then she wanted to know all about Alexander. She wanted to know how he was and what had happened to him, if he was happy. When I told her he’d married Lucy she was relieved. ‘He can’t take care of himself,” she said, ‘He absolutely could never make it alone. I’m so glad he married someone who’d do it all for him so Silvia didn’t have to take care of them both’. She really did love him once. As much as she claimed to hate him after Easter that year, the way she talked about him to me that day was as if he was the one that got away.”

“For her, I’m sure he was. I don’t know what it was about them, but they were kind of special together. Still, he treated her so awful in the end.”

“Actually, she told me that after graduation he phoned her and they talked it out. She thought that there might even be a second chance, but it never came about. She thought that he was in love with you.” Sandy paused, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, she continued, “I told her that was silly, but she didn’t think so. She said you, Alex and Oliver were a bizarre triangle and she knew she could never make it into a square, so she gave up hoping. She said she couldn’t compete.”

“The three of us have always been close, but I’m sure none of us ever intended on excluding her.”

Sandy smiled, “Well, she was very spoiled. Being as she was not the centre of attention, she probably felt excluded. But speaking of Alex and his exes, I saw Sarah Farnsworth not long ago in Belfast and she’s looking quite sprite. She looks ten years younger than any of us,” Sandra drew a deep breath and sighed, “When I think of us from Bennington, I still think of us all as being so young. Those are the pictures I have in my head. Us, just kids, making our way through school. We really looked out for each other, didn’t we?”

“Always. We were a family.”

“It’s hard to believe that any of us have died,” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Poor little Meredith.”

“She was sweet in her own way.”

“She was! Oh, how I hated her once! And why? In the end, we were in the same family. Cousins. We were friends,” She sighed, “And then there’s Lance. Did I ever tell you that I had a crush on him?”

“Of course you did.”

“He didn’t find me attractive. I was too tall,” She smiled. What she said was true. Lance liked Sandra, but she was not at all his choice in women being as he only stood to her chest. “But I thought he was one of the most handsome boys at Bennington.”

“He was a bit of a cutie in his day.”

“I’m just so glad I knew him. Merlyn, too. Merlyn was a nice boy. He used to help me with my luggage the first and last days of school. It was like a tradition, him helping me haul them out of the car and through the gates. I was always forgetting my code, you know, to get in, so he’d wait for me and punch his in. I don’t know why he did it,” Sandy wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on something far away.

“He did it because he liked you. Merlyn wouldn’t have stood there waiting for just anybody.”

“Yes, I would have counted him as a friend. I would have dated him if he’d asked me. My father would have had a fit with him being black, but I’d have done it anyway. I never cared about anyone’s colour. Merlyn was a great chap. He came from such a good family Daddy would have had to have gotten over it sooner or later,” She had a look on her face like she had a completely separate thought, then came back and finished, “But Ollie and Alex…they were well above my station.”

“You knew the twins the whole time you were there!”

“I did. I met them first year, but they weren’t my friends. Not until you came along. Ollie was nice to me, but Ollie was nice to everyone unless they irked him. It wasn’t like he made any effort to notice me. We just had classes together. And Alexander? Well, I don’t know what went on with me and Alexander. There was that short period in time when I thought we might get to know each other. I was terrified!” She laughed, “He was so handsome and so bloody mean! I think I might have brushed him off more than I meant to because after a while he wasn’t anything more than polite to me. He never gave me the time of day again.”

“What are you talking about? Alex was very fond of you! I know he was because he told me! And so was Oliver!”

She patted me on the back, “They may have been fond enough of me, but I was not on their social magnitude! I wasn’t in their crowd! They only chose me because they chose you and I came attached.”

“Social magnitude?” I snorted, “I was invisible, too!”

Sandra burst out laughing, “Oh, Silvia! I always loved that about you! You were always in your own little world! You didn’t know how much you stood out. When you got to Bennington everyone was talking about you. You had all that lovely red hair and those huge boobs!” She laughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, “And Oliver was besotted with you from moment one. Oh, he’d sit and watch you like there wasn’t another woman alive. It didn’t matter what you were doing, he couldn’t take his eyes off of you! That really brassed the girls off, but the boys were all jealous of Oliver. There wasn’t one who didn’t fancy you.”

“That’s not true!”

“No, it is! That morning you arrived everyone was chattering. ‘The new girl, you should see her! She looks like a right snob’, the girls said, ‘She was on the quad flirting with the Dickinson twins! It was terrible!’ The boys were all going on about how gorgeous you were. I decided to hate you immediately and then I saw the name on the list of my new dorm mate. Silvia Cotton. I knew it was you! They did everything by the alphabet…why wasn’t there a B that year?” She laughed out loud and squeezed my shoulder, “When you walked into that room and said hello to me I wanted to scream. I was sure you’d be awful, but you were so sweet. And helpful! Remember I found that hole in the seat of my uniform and you fixed it straight away! How long exactly did it take us to be best friends?”