The Awakening of Poppy Edwards by Marguerite Kaye Read Free Book Online Page B

Hollywood. Was she mad?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Couldn’t she have come with you? To LA, I mean, didn’t they want the two of you?’
    ‘Yes.’ She sighed heavily. ‘They did want us both. Only Daisy, I told you she lost her husband, and she—why are you asking me this, Lewis?’
    ‘Why are you being so touchy?’
    ‘I’m not! I just—my sister and I—I told you about it. It wasn’t me who broke up our act—it was Daisy. Actually, she broke up. Literally, pretty much, and that broke me up because I couldn’t help her, and she stopped singing, and she stopped talking for a while, and no matter what I did it seemed to make her worse, because she knew she was killing my career as well as her own, and… It didn’t happen all at once. She went back on-stage at first, within weeks, and I thought—we all thought she was coping. But she wasn’t.’
    Poppy pushed her plate away, the steak for which Musso and Frank were famous, almost untouched. When she brushed her hair out of her eyes, her hands were shaking. ‘I lost my sister, Lewis, because of the war. I’m sorry, but thinking about it tends to make me touchy, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to change the subject.’
    And that’s when I said it. I said what was in my head, without thinking. I don’t often do that, though I’d started to do it a bit more around Poppy. ‘That’s why you’re scared,’ I said.
    She’d picked up her fork again to mess around with the leaves on her salad plate, but when I said that, it clattered onto the table. ‘Of what?’
    I hesitated, but I knew I’d already gone too far. ‘Right from the start, you’ve been so careful to stake out your ground. Here’s the bit that’s mine. Here’s the bit that’s yours. God forbid we meet in the middle.’ And saying that, I began to realise how much I wanted to meet in the middle. Yeah, it should have scared me, but at the time, I was thinking it wasn’t down to me to make the move. That didn’t occur to me. I was thinking it was down to Poppy. At least, I wasn’t exactly thinking that in a
reasoned
way. Reason came much later. I’m just trying to explain—you get the picture, right? I pushed her. I did push her. I just didn’t think she’d push back. Even though I was the one who said how much we had in common, I didn’t think this was as much about me as her.
    ‘You hold back,’ I continued, as if I hadn’t said enough. ‘With us. It’s been two months since Bunty’s. We’ve been together nearly every day, but you keep insisting it’s nothing. It means nothing. You’ve never even let me—in your house, I’ve never even been in your bedroom. And all this, it’s because you’re scared.’
    ‘You’re damn right I’m scared,’ she hissed. ‘We were everything to each other, Daisy and I. Everything. We’ve looked after each other since we were kids. We didn’t even have to talk to know what the other was thinking, that’s how close we were, Lewis. I knew she didn’t want to marry Anthony. I knew she was scared she’d be hurt. But the war is a great lever for guilt. And once she’s committed to something, Daisy doesn’t do things by halves. She loved him and he made her happy and I wasn’t jealous, in case that’s what you were thinking. I was happy for her. So when it all fell apart—I could see, Lewis. I could see inside her, what it was doing, and she knew I could see, she knew that her pain was mine. That’s how close we were. That’s how painful it was. Too painful for us to stand. So, yes, you’re darn tooting I’m scared.’
    In the war, one of the things that terrified me most was the way things unravelled. A guy starts out as walking wounded, and you think all that’s wrong with him is shock. He can’t hear you because of the blast. That blank look on his face, it’s because he’s disoriented. So you make him wait, because you’ve got other cases, cases where it’s obvious what’s wrong because things that should be inside are