‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
Serge grinned as he guided the boat towards the pier.
‘You think it is nice here, but you will never see sand as white or water as clear as in the Philippines.’
‘Serge, I said I’d think about it.’
‘I tell you what I think,’ he said with a mischievous smirk. ‘I think you are a little bit in love with Liam.’
Rachel’s mouth dropped open. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Serge threw up a hand. ‘What is so ridiculous? You are very cute together and I have seen the way you look at him.’
‘Serge, he is my friend, my business partner.’
‘So. Make it more. If that’s what’s stopping you, then it’s simple, no?’
Rachel shook her head, squinting at the long jetty stretching out into the pale green water.
‘You Frenchmen. All you think about is affairs of the hear
t.’
‘So? What else is more important?’
But Rachel wasn’t listening; she was staring at a figure standing on the pier. She recognised her even before she could make out her face. It was her shape, so familiar, and her long dark hair, glinting in the sun like liquid chocolate. For a moment, she was tempted to tell Serge to turn the boat around, but he had already seen the woman.
‘Ah ha! I think I have some business,’ he smiled. ‘A pretty one too.’
‘She’s not a tourist,’ said Rachel with a flutter of panic. ‘She’s my sister.’
8
Thailand suited Rachel, Diana could tell that immediately. Standing on the strange banana-shaped boat, her younger sister seemed spotlit by the sun, highlighting a body that looked slim and toned, her dark hair slicked back, her skin glistening with beads of silvery seawater. She just looks so . . . alive, thought Diana, with a spike of envy, as the boat bumped gently against the pier and the driver cut the engine. Her heartbeat slowed as her sister came closer and closer, her features sharpening until Diana could make out her expression of anxious bemusement.
‘Hello,’ said Diana. She put one foot in front of the other and propelled herself to the end of the jetty, where Rachel stepped off the boat barefoot. ‘Have you been swimming?’
It was the only thing she could think of. On the twelve-hour flight to Bangkok, she’d agonised over what she would say to her sister after four years of silence, rehearsing over and over again her first words, hoping to come up with something clever and grand. But standing here, she just felt mute and stupid. She took a deep breath and swallowed warm, clammy air. What could you say to a woman you had effectively banished, to whom your last words had been hateful and angry?
‘Free-diving,’ said Rachel finally. She wasn’t smiling; in fact there was no trace of emotion on her face.
‘Free-diving? What’s that?’
‘Going as far under the sea as you can without an oxygen tank.’
‘Oh, like pearl divers?’
‘But without the pearls,’ said the man from the boat, but Rachel shot him a look and he walked on ahead of them up the pier.
‘Why are you here?’ asked Rachel when he was out of earshot. She said it quite neutrally, but Diana recognised a tiny flicker of anxiety. Rachel always put a brave face on any difficult situation, but Diana knew her too well to miss her signs of fear.
‘I . . . I just want to talk. There’s no one else I can talk to.’
It sounded lame, Diana knew that. But it was the truth, and it was the reason why she had flown halfway around the world. Rachel probably hated her guts. Diana herself had spent months, years blaming her sister for the problems in her marriage. But right now, Rachel was the only person she wanted to talk to.
‘Do you mind if I change first?’ said Rachel. ‘There’s a café just there.’ She pointed down the beach to a bamboo-covered shack with tables on the sand.
Diana walked over and ordered a Sprite, sitting under an umbrella and slipping her sandals off as her sister disappeared into a wood-slatted shower cubicle. She was tired and anxious herself, but the view of the sea soothed her. She had been to Thailand before – to a luxury villa on Phuket that came with the biggest infinity pool she had ever seen and a massage team that had dispensed the most exquisite four-hands massage. But this place was something else. Raw, luscious and uncommercialised. Julian had always been so proud of his architect-designed office, with its white carpets and its view over the city, the Shard, the London Eye and beyond. He had called it ‘the most incredible office with the most incredible view in the world’, but right now, looking at the bone-white sand and the jade ocean beyond, Diana thought that he had miscalculated.