Page 87 of The Cocktail Bar
Belief is everything.
Wasn’t that what Felix had said when he’d dropped him off at his hotel? It had been a placebo all along, nothing more than a bottle of water – on paper at least. Except River chose to think otherwise; this was no ordinary water. This wasn’t even water from the town’s Chalice Well, or nearby Bath’s Roman Spa. This was ‘a little bit special’ in the words of one Terry. It was water with one super powerful blessing, all right.
***
River squeezed Alice’s hand. He took a deep breath and started up the ignition.
“So… where are we driving to now, James?”
“God, you are starting to sound Somerset again.”
They both giggled at that, the relief enveloping the Citroën and themselves in a warmth that suggested the craziest, biggest bridge they would ever come to know in their relationship, had been crossed now. Those Three Billy Goats Gruff; Lennie, Blake, Georgina – four he supposed if you counted Tamara and her handiwork, far behind them.
“Actually, that might come in handy… Somerset… Cornish, they’re kind of the same.”
“I’m not so sure anybody from Cornwall would agree with you there,” said Alice.
“We could always put it to the test, what do you say?”
“Wearegoing to Cornwall? Do you mean to say that was the surprise?”
“One of the surprises... I hear there might be a pub up for sale in that general kind of direction… a pub in need of a little cocktail bar conversion… which might just happen to be in the same village as some buildings commonly referred to as stables… with a gert lush farmhouse attached to them besides.”
“Now you’re going all Bristolian on me… and no, no, you aren’t serious… Oh, River, I—” Alice’s eyes filled up with tears.
“I think we’ve both been holed up in that caravan too long, and we’ve both put other people’s happiness first for too long.” Of the latter, River was surer than he’d ever been about anything in his life. “Time to treat ourselves now, I can’t promise I’m going to be the lucky bidder, but I’m sure as hell going to give it my best shot… kind of helps knowing your dad has offered to counterbid, should the offers exceed my retainer.”
“Daddy’s what?”
“He’s popping down next week… your mother’s blissfully unaware though… so Mum really is the word.”
“Ha,” said Alice with a smile. “That’ll be easy on my part… I’m just delighted to think he’s finally making contact, even if it is behind her back. Sometimes I wish it had been Mummy and Tamara in one house, Daddy and me in another. Family dynamics would have been a whole lot better that way.”
“If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that we don’t choose our families… well,” Heather’s reminder flashed before him, “at least not when we’re in this physical incarnation.”
“Que sera sera.Let’s look to the future now.” Alice’s grin grew wider at the very idea.
And it was no ordinary grin, but that legendary spellbinder of hers, the one that had broken Blake’s heart, the one that had broken too many wooden jerks of an actor’s hearts, but the one that hopefully wouldn’t do the same to River’s.
She couldn’t have sounded more like Mercedes when she said that, and that had to stand his vulnerability in good stead, at the very least – the rest he’d make up as he went along. Yet those three simple Spanish words were as true in his life and Alice’s, as they were in anybody else’s, be it a question of labour or love, Blake or Georgina, the world’s most off-the-wall-and-all-the-more-beautiful-for-it taxi driver, or heck, even the Rigby-Chandlers.
Except in English they translate to five words: what will be, will be.
River Jackson would take it one step further than that though: when we want something so badly that we’re scared it might consume our very soul, and then we surrender to that soul’s dark night; when we get out of our own way and stay there just a little while, finally, one morning we rise to see that the universe had our back all along, the dark clouds have parted, the sun is shining, and we have arrived at that perfect place.
THE END