The Women Who Ran Away - Sheila O'Flanagan Page 0,103
holidays, doing his best to tire them out so that they’d go to bed at a reasonable time and allow himself and Grace an hour or two of peace and quiet to unwind. Sometimes they’d sit together in silence, sometimes they’d talk. Their conversation was rarely idle; Ken didn’t do chit-chat. He enjoyed talking about politics, both national and the internal politics of the university, which was like a nation of its own. He liked to think of himself as a left-leaning liberal, but the older he got, the more conservative his views had become. Grace had always believed herself to be a conservative sort of woman – she’d given up her career to raise her family, after all – and yet she’d become more liberal with time. Her views were formed by her experiences, which mostly, she thought, revolved around the desire for people to be nicer to each other. To realise that life could be hard and outward smiles didn’t always mean inner peace. Ken was impatient with anyone who struggled, and he found it difficult not to hark back to the greater difficulties of his own youth relative to modern times. And yet he had championed every single one of his students, helping them be the best they could be, and was always vociferous about cuts to education budgets and a lack of investment in arts and culture. Conversations with him had always been challenging. Grace missed them.
She debated texting Deira to check on her plans, but decided to leave her alone. They were travelling companions, not soulmates. Nevertheless, she was pleased that Deira was still with her on the journey and that they’d overcome the awkwardness of their different opinions regarding her desire to sleep with Charlie Mulholland. Grace still believed that Deira was wrong, but she also accepted that the younger woman was struggling to cope with the result of her ex-partner’s behaviour and the challenge of her declining fertility.
There had been a time, shortly after Regan was born, when Grace had suspected Ken of seeing someone else, and her suspicions had taken over her very existence. But when she’d eventually confronted him, he’d been truly shocked by her accusation and told her that he’d never even looked at anyone else. ‘Why would I rock the boat for a fleeting moment of pleasure?’ he’d asked. ‘You know me better than that, Grace.’ It was because he’d called her Grace, and not Hippo, that she’d believed him.
She understood that it was hard for Deira to accept that Gavin was now going to be a father by two different women when he’d refused to have a baby with her. Grace couldn’t imagine life without Aline, Fionn and Regan. They were the foundation of her existence and the greatest comfort she could have. It didn’t matter that her two youngest were so far away from her. She felt their presence every single day. And Aline was always there, ready to call around if needed. Ken’s death would have been a million times more difficult if the children hadn’t been there to support her. And if she hadn’t been there to support them. That was what family was, she thought. People you could depend on when you were at rock bottom. And yet Ken hadn’t depended on her. He’d excluded her from the most important decision he’d ever made.
She closed her eyes and let the book slide from her hand as she drifted into sleep. In her dream, she was driving through France with Ken again, the children in the back seat, arguing loudly. He wasn’t taking any nonsense from them, telling them that if they didn’t keep quiet, they weren’t going out on the boat that afternoon. But the children were arguing more and more, until Ken suddenly swerved to one side and drove the car off the bridge over the River Penzé.
‘No!’ gasped Grace as they hit the water with a thud and she felt the airbag explode against her chest. And then she gasped again as the car began to fill up. The children were screaming and she was sobbing and Ken was looking at her and telling her that he was sorry, it had been an accident, he’d never meant for it to happen . . .
‘I’m so sorry.’
The words were clear and distinct, spoken in a Scottish accent. Grace’s eyes snapped open, and she saw a grey-haired man wearing bright-blue shorts and a white T-shirt standing at the end of her sunbed. He picked