There was no turning the clock back on what might have been. Out here, with the sea gently embracing her in its icy seal, she could clear her thoughts. It was time to think only of those things she might be able to change for the better.
Elizabeth O’Shea was every bit as lost as Lucy, even if it was for very different reasons. Whatever about the surgery, or her husband’s debts or that old mausoleum of a house she was rattling about in – Jo knew that no matter how she tried to set up the dominoes, ultimately Lucy taking over the surgery was out of her hands and she was fine with that. If it’s for you, it won’t pass you. Isn’t that what her own mother had said many years ago?
No; she’d done what she could there. Jo sighed, feeling a familiar wave of contentment wash over her – as if she was closing the page on another chapter where she could read no further.
But this, an unexpected thought was edging its way into her now; this could be the greatest gift she could ever leave with both Lucy and Elizabeth. These days, she thought about leaving a lot, as if some message had long been printed on her DNA and she was responding to its inherent whisper. She sighed deeply now, wondering how she could put into words the nirvana state of joy that swimming each night in the freezing waves brought to her.
She would bring them swimming with her, down here, at night; somehow she would talk them both into it, just once. It would be something they’d remember when she left them; perhaps they would cling to it when she was gone, or maybe, just maybe they could come here together occasionally.
Overhead, the moon stole swiftly behind a swollen grey cloud and darkness enveloped her further, so it felt as if there might not be a soul about for miles. Then, as if to reassure her, the little church bell far up above her rang out its midnight chimes. Jo closed her eyes. She was too old for making wishes, but one floated up and she murmured it onto the stillness of the air around her. The Ladies’Midnight Swimming Club. That’s what she wanted more than anything else now and somehow, some deep part of her knew with certainty it would be the answer to so many other questions.
4
Dan
Dan exhaled – a long, ragged sound that felt as if it might fill the whole city. Of course no-one else heard it. He looked out across the rooftops. People were getting on with life, oblivious to the fact that his world was crumbling around him. It was one of those stupid, horrible coincidences, that was all – but Leah Maine wouldn’t see it like that. He was quite sure of that.
Leah was head of the studio, parachuted in six months earlier when the new owners decided a more aggressive approach to growing the audience was required. Dan knew even then, neither the Americans, nor Leah, boded well for the sitcom he’d written to be commissioned for a third year. He was right. Still, although he could see the final curtain before they’d even completed recording, it was the unfortunate timing that had finished them off. The red tops were full of it, mind you; it was an easy gambit to make a short and screeching headline of his downfall. The worst of it all was that the show was good. The critics had praised everything, from the writing, to the acting; even the costumes had picked up prizes at the annual awards.
‘The problem,’ Clive Cooper said as they waited for their final sentence, ‘was not with the show.’
‘It’s not you, it’s me?’ Dan said, as if that insufferable break-up line covered the train wreck this would make of his career.
‘Yeah, something like that,’ Clive said and he began to inspect those perfectly manicured hands. Clive would recover. He had fingers in so many pies; he was up to his elbows in work and he’d been in demand since his one big hit, The Green People, had bagged every gong going a few years earlier. ‘Look, hardly your fault that the episode went out on the same night that a tourist boat sank on the Thames…’
‘No, but very unfortunate that the whole episode was one long joke about a modern-day Titanic bringing down the whole of Westminster…’ In fairness, Dan felt bad for the real-life victims whose faces would probably live on forever in scenes that were televised on all the major news channels. That was it, really. While the news channel was beaming out pictures of the greatest tragedy London had seen in his lifetime, their channel had audiences laughing their heads off at the same story, but in a spoof docu-comedy that suddenly no-one found funny.
‘Might as well suck it up, buddy; sometimes timing stinks,’ Clive said under his breath as Leah made her way past them in a cloud of expensive perfume and a skirt too short for her skinny legs.