Page 81 of The Cocktail Bar

“I think we both know it would be best not to tempt fate… I’ll take the first coach, you must stay on and celebrate, it’s your duty as Best Man, you can’t not fulfil it. Who knows, perhaps Georgina will show up again, a few drinks… you, I mean, not her… in her condition… and suddenly life with a ready-made family will look a lot rosier.”

“Just stop this, Alice, stop it!”

Silence, until in a distant field a cow mooed. It seemed to be telling him to tell her something, anything, even if his words were to spew out in a pile of utter drivel.

“I’m out of my mind, life’s been so tough that at times – and I can hardly believe I am saying this… but at times I have been ever so slightly close to understanding just how a man could take his life.”

Now she looked at him, eyes reluctant to let themselves become shiny, it was a trait of hers he knew too well.

“I love you, Alice Goldsmith… I wanted to tell you that day in the market in Prague, but you’d only have said I was returning the compliment, matching your words… and besides, I loved you too much to keep you away from your beloved mulled wine for a second longer.”

Alice climbed to sit next to him on the gate, keeping a safe distance apart. It was a start of sorts. He somehow stifled the urge to smile and he definitely didn’t dare inch closer. She was still a wild animal, wilder than she’d been that day when he’d rescued her from the strawberry fields. And yet as they sat there in the rural Somerset Levels’ silence, watching herons stoop low to take their fill from the water; watching waiters annoyingly deposit the last of the Eggnogs before the claxon called for one and all to huddle to graze on caviar… and Alice a gourmet slice of nut roast; watching Hayley and one TV Executive called Bob enjoying a thoroughly cheeky snog beneath the sails of a quaint windmill, River knew that he and Alice had turned a corner.

Somehow destiny had brought them back together. And now, much like the millers who had ground their crops for long enough, he wasn’t so much determined to make hay while the sun was shining, as flour – preferably of the self-raising variety, of course. Which was quite the corniest of puns given their location, yet somehow there was no better way of summing things up.

Soon it would betheirtime.