From The Heart by Sheila O'Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page A

probably can’t help but experience flashbacks of other Christmases where you’ve hung the same bauble on the tree and where something magical happened (in my case nothing magical ever really happened – the closest was when Aidan came home one year with a voucher for a turkey which he’d won in the golf club nearest-the-pin competition. Unfortunately it was a whole turkey, not boned and rolled like I preferred – and straight from the farm, so that the entire episode of having to clean it out and pluck half of its feathers rather put me off eating it). Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that the twins arrived at the house at the beginning of December with the envelope in their hands and wide, beaming smiles on their faces and I discovered that they had booked us into the White Sands Hotel all-inclusive stretching from a few days before our anniversary until the twenty-seventh of December.
    I was gobsmacked. Firstly that they remembered our anniversary. Coming as it did just before Christmas, it normally got overlooked in the great scheme of things. Secondly that they were able to afford what I knew had to be a breathtaking amount of money to send us away. White Sands was an expensive hotel. I knew that because a couple of years earlier Madge, one of my best friends, had gone there with her second husband (her fairly rich second husband) and had regaled me with stories of the expense! So I found it hard to believe that Carina and Callum (both hedonistic twenty-five-year-olds) had managed to save up enough money to send Aidan and me to the Caribbean.
    ‘Would you not worry about how we managed to pay for it?’ demanded Carina when I couldn’t help but murmur that it was surely way outside their earning power (both of them worked in the media – Carina as a researcher for an independent TV company; Callum in radio). ‘It’s something that we wanted to do for you and Dad. You’ve always been great to us and I know we forget your anniversary all the time. So this is a kind of accumulation of all of them. Besides,’ her dark eyes twinkled at me, ‘it’s your silver wedding anniversary. You deserve a great break.’
    ‘Actually,’ added Callum, ‘we wanted to send you somewhere called Silver Sands. But we couldn’t find anywhere.’
    I smiled as widely as I could. ‘It’s very good of you,’ I told them. ‘Both your dad and I appreciate it very much.’
    Well, I’d no idea how Aidan would feel about it. But he’d have to appreciate the gesture if nothing else.
    When I told him he frowned slightly (as I’d expected) and murmured that it wasn’t a hugely convenient time to go away. And I nodded in agreement and said that he was right but that the children had gone to a lot of trouble to organise it and so the least we could do was to be totally appreciative and accept such a wonderful present as gracefully as possible.
    Sometimes I still have the power to make Aidan do what I want. This was one of those times. He nodded thoughtfully and then phoned Callum to say that it was a wonderful gift and we were delighted with it.
    Which is why, despite the fact that I’d made other plans, I was sitting in the sea-front restaurant of the hotel at 7.30 on the evening of our wedding anniversary and looking out over the inky blackness of the Caribbean Sea. It wasn’t completely black, of course. The underwater lights illuminated the area closest to the restaurant while, further out, the reflections bobbed on the surface of the gently lapping water, occasionally breaking into glittering shards of colour thanks to a stronger than usual wave before settling back into beads of light again. Meanwhile, in the restaurant, the impeccably trained waiters and waitresses moved swiftly and unobtrusively between the tables, making sure that every whim of every guest was catered for.
    At our table, the wine waiter, DeVere, was discussing the merits of the cabernet sauvignon over the shiraz with my husband. Aidan