The Day You Saved My Life

by Louise Candlish

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Her whole world hinged on the moment one man jumped… Louise Candlish returns with her most page-turning and emotional story to date
On a perfect summer's day in Paris, tourists on a river trip watch in horror as drama unfolds. A small boy has fallen overboard and disappeared below the surface of the water. As his mother stands frozen to the spot, another passenger jumps... This is the story of how a single act of courage transforms the lives of all those involved: the hero James and his wife Alexa; Holly, the young mother of the victim; and Holly's mother Joanna, whose whole adult life has been lived in the hope that her daughter will never make the same mistakes she did.

Release date: April 5, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 416

Sample

Paris

There was nothing about the riverboat itself that foretold of a terrible accident.

Quite different from the Seine’s famous bateaux mouches, the ones you saw with tourists and schoolchildren straining over the rails to call to pedestrians on the bank below, it
was small and quaint, with wooden decks, a shaded roof and open sides. On the lower deck there were steamer chairs for sunbathers
and a little bar that served wine in proper glasses and coffee in old-fashioned china cups. Staff, who wore spotless naval
white, were delightfully quick to smile at the passengers.


Very nice, Joanna Walsh thought. Just how I remember Paris.

‘Comfortable?’ she asked her daughter, turning optimistically towards her. But Holly just murmured something unintelligible
and gazed blindly at the water.


Please enjoy this, Joanna pleaded silently; for Mikey’s sake, if not your own.

This was, however, a moot point since the boy was asleep in his pushchair, which was wedged fast against the rails. They’d
boarded late and got two of the last seats on the upper deck, commandeering just enough legroom to avoid having to extract
Mikey from the buggy and fold it away. Once he lost consciousness, Holly liked him to stay that way for as long as possible.
If it was down to Joanna, she’d have woken him, for he had not been on a boat before and would surely enjoy the sensation
of sailing, all children did: that lovely slippery illusion that it was the buildings that were in motion and not you, making
you want to reach out and hold them still.


‘Really packed, isn’t it?’ Holly said, starting, almost as if she’d forgotten where she was.

‘You’d expect that,’ Joanna said. ‘It’s Paris in June, the honeymoon season. Everyone wants to take a river trip, don’t they?
It’s the romantic thing to do.’


But Holly had used up her words and the only reply Joanna got to this was a sniff, followed by a blink, followed by a yawn.
She was used to the rhythm by now – sniff blink yawn, sniff blink yawn. There was nothing sullen about it, nothing disrespectful,
but it served its purpose in repelling further attempts at conversation.


No matter: with piano jazz dripping gently from its public address system, the boat was setting off from its pier at Pont
d’Iéna, and Joanna wanted to concentrate. Soon, the music gave way to the tour commentary. They were about to share all the
treasures of historic Paris, it said (in English, thankfully), treasures she had last shared with her sister and parents over
twenty years ago. One of the first, a bridge with golden statues standing ablaze in the sun, made many of the tourists gasp
and raise their cameras to their faces; some even sprang to their feet. Joanna had decided not to take any pictures herself
but to buy the souvenir brochure at the end: that way she’d miss nothing and the photos would be ten times better. She didn’t
want to spend this whole trip working out the best angles by which to remember it later.


The curve towards the Pont des Invalides was gentle, the pace of the engines brisk, and she felt her excitement grow. ‘Look,’
she said, half to herself, ‘that must be the Tuileries up ahead. We’re almost at the Louvre already.’ They’d been to the gallery
yesterday and the memory gave her a disquieting feeling, made her listen more closely on the words of the commentary: Louis
XVI … the storming of the Bastille … the guillotine’s merciless blade … the Seine running red with blood. This last prompted
Joanna – and several others – to peer down at the water in fear of some sinister transformation, but from the upper deck, even on a hot, thin day like today, the river was green-black, sucking
the sunlight as if into the kind of depths found far out to sea. Were they travelling upstream or down? She had no idea, but
you could see the infamous currents tussling below the surface, fast and evasive as eels. In a way, it was sinister.


‘Shall I get us something from the bar downstairs?’ she asked Holly, coming up for air again. ‘An ice-cream, maybe?’

Holly shrugged. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Then what about a cold drink?’ She allowed a smidgen of impatience to rise. ‘Come on, Holls, perk up a bit! We’ll be back
home the day after tomorrow and you’ll have missed all the fun.’


At last Holly’s eyes connected with hers and Joanna read the message in them as plainly as if in print: What’s the point? It was not Holly speaking, she knew, it was the depression, but for once she wanted to defy the professionals’ advice and
let her tongue work unbitten: ‘Mikey’s the point, you silly girl! Your son is the point, just as you were mine, and still
are mine, even if I hardly recognise you any more!’


But she couldn’t do that, of course she couldn’t. ‘Right,’ she said, brightly, ‘I’ll choose you something. Back in a minute
…’ As she left, she touched Holly’s shoulder, hoping to communicate something positive by the gesture, to effect some miraculous
reconnection.


It was oddly pleasurable, standing in the queue for the kiosk. The boat felt steady and powerful beneath her feet, easing
them closer to the left bank and into the narrower waters of the Ile de la Cité. Then, just as she was about to be served,
there was the sombre facade of Notre-Dame itself – so soon! – heralded by a rise in enthusiasm in the tone of the commentator
and a story of a bell that rang in F-sharp only on the most significant of occasions. Joanna wondered what those occasions
might be, and then she fancied the bell sounding out right at that very moment, jolting Holly from her daze, exorcising her
of her demons like something from a fairytale.


More and more she was thinking in terms of fairytales, of miracles, as if ready now to give up on the possibility of human salvation for her daughter.


Reaching its optimum vantage point of the great cathedral, the boat slowed and the photography became even more frenzied,
only one or two of those on the lower deck remaining in their seats. Now Joanna pictured Holly as she almost certainly was,
the only passenger aboard who was unmoved by the sight, perhaps not even glancing up at it, and she allowed herself, very
briefly, to feel a little sad.


‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez …?Madame?’


‘Oh, yes, pardon… ’ She realised she was being asked for her order, decided she’d get a biscuit for Mikey and dithered for a moment as she
tried to remember how to pronounce the word in French. She thought again what a shame it was that he should miss this experience:
it was proving briefer than she’d expected, Paris more compact than she remembered. When she’d come before, as a teenager,
the city had seemed immense to her, a place that glittered day and night, both its monuments and its people designed to catch
the light.


How they’d hoped, she and her sister Melissa, that they did it justice, that they caught the light too.

It was as the hot water was being poured into her cup and the selection of teas offered that she became aware of the screaming.
It was a continuous and unsettling sound, from a source somewhere on the same side of the boat as Notre-Dame. At first she
made no personal connection with it or even associated it with their tour group, not until she picked out the single human
word that arose from it – ‘Mu-um!’ – and realised with a breathless slam inside her ribcage that it was Holly. Holly was screaming, she was screaming above
her, around her, through her, for her.


‘I’m sorry … I need to …’ Abandoning her order, she dashed to the stairs, emerging on the upper deck with a sensation of pure
disorientation – had she come to the wrong place? Was there another set of steps up to this deck? – for there was not a single
passenger sitting in the spot he or she had occupied five minutes ago. Chaos reigned, everyone crowding at or moving towards
the island side (it crossed her mind that the boat might even capsize), whole blocks of seats left empty or strewn with belongings.
Such was the crush that it was not possible at first to see Holly, or even to hear her any longer, for her cry had either
stopped or been lost in the roar about her: everyone was speaking at once, in a variety of languages, asking, answering, shrieking,
gasping, panicking. Only the tour commentary continued as if nothing were amiss: ‘We are now at the point where the two famous islands almost kiss …’


‘Let me through!’ Joanna called out in desperation. ‘I think something’s happened to my daughter! Please, let me through!’

Holly’s cry came again then, no longer the ghostly wail but short, shrill outbursts, quickly obliterated by a half-hysterical
English voice right in Joanna’s ear: ‘Why aren’t the crew doing anything? What do they say for “man overboard” here? Do they
not have a distress signal in France?’


‘Don’t know,’ a companion replied, not quite so excitable but plainly concerned, ‘but they must be on the case because we’re
slowing – can you feel it? Whoa!’


Sure enough the boat was dragging heavily to a halt, nosing slightly towards the island as it did. The manoeuvre prompted
a collective readjustment at the rail and Joanna was at last able to find a crack through which she could see Holly. The girl
was pressed against the side, doubled over it as if about to vomit, barely an inch from tumbling right over. Two women close
to her were reaching out with urgent gestures of restraint, causing Joanna to make her first stab at understanding this scene:
Holly was the cause of all this hysteria; she had tried to jump overboard but had been pulled back; someone had alerted the
crew to the emergency and now the boat was stopping. Holly was … she was attempting suicide.


Oh God, no.

She pushed forwards more forcefully, only half registering a graze to her leg as she caught the edge of a seat, and managed
to seize her daughter’s right shoulder. ‘Holly, get back from there! What are you doing?’


Holly straightened and turned with wild, rough movements. ‘Oh, Mum … oh, Mum …’ Her face was a shocking sight, swollen with
high colour, her eyes feverish, almost deranged.


‘Come and sit down,’ Joanna urged her, ‘you’ll fall in if you lean over like that!’ She motioned to their seats, noticing
as she did Mikey’s pushchair, still fixed in its original position by the rails, the straps now unbuckled and the seat empty.


Her insides clotted. ‘Holly? Where’s Mikey?’

There was no answer, just that same twisting, feral expression on the girl’s face.

‘Where is he, Holly, tell me? Holly?’


Man overboard … Only then did she hear those words properly, only then did she understand: not Holly, Mikey. Turning from Holly she crushed
herself against the rail, needing the grip of another passenger to stop her from overbalancing, but all she could see of the
water was the wake of churned yellow-white around their boat, that horrible sucking brown beyond.


‘He’s fallen in,’ Holly managed to say at her shoulder, speaking in the most ghastly, choking syllables, ‘he went over the
side …’


‘How, Holly? When? When?’ But Holly was sobbing violently as a new surge of hysteria overpowered her and Joanna renounced any hope of getting useful
answers to the demands that now besieged her: How far had they come since she first heard the screams? Ten metres? Twenty?
More? How far was the drop to the water? Could it be survived by a child – an infant not yet two years old? Why couldn’t she
see him, where were his splashes? Then: Should she go in after him? Was that what Holly had been trying to do, leaning over
the side like that? One of them had to rescue him, didn’t they?


The questions, the connections, had a dizzying downward trajectory of their own, drawing her over the rail once more and closer
to the water, closer to the point of having the dilemma decided for her, until, behind the suffocating panic, came a tiny
flare of oxygen: the crew knew, they had known before she did – ‘They’re on the case,’ that man had said – and they had stopped
the boat. Any second now they were going to turn back or reverse, fish Mikey out and bring him to safety. It couldn’t have
been more than a few seconds since it happened: trained professionals would save him.


Wouldn’t they?

She hauled herself upright, evading the curious gazes and urgent questions of those around her, and returned her attention
to Holly. Sensing that the girl was losing the last of her strength, she lunged to steady her body, pressing it close to her
own. At once Holly monopolised her energies entirely, becoming a groaning, clutching thing in her arms. The sound came from
her mouth like water from a hose, the pressure of it at such close range painful, unbearable. The feat of reaching their seats
was beyond Joanna; she could only stand, supply enough power to stop Holly from falling to the deck and herself from looking
once more at that terrible empty pushchair with its straps hanging loose over the sides.


Then, all at once, beyond the desperate clutch of her daughter and that terrible groaning, she felt a change in pitch, a swarm
to the rear, a new clamour of voices:


‘Oh my, oh my …’ An American voice rose above the others: ‘He’s in as well now, look, Jeff! When did that happen?’

‘He jumped from the lower deck, did he?’

‘All his clothes still on, look at that!’

‘He must be totally crazy!’

Then a third person spoke, obviously tearful, a British woman: ‘Oh, I hope he gets to the little boy in time, this is absolutely
awful. What’s the official procedure here? Where’s the lifeboat?’


Straining on tiptoe, Joanna could just see past Holly to the water, catching the frantic movements of a man swimming fast
in the direction from which they’d come; he seemed to be bypassing a rigid orange-red ring that was attached to thick rope
and, presumably, the boat. She was aware now of a gathering of spectators on the quayside of the Ile Saint-Louis, and on the
footbridge that joined the two islands.


‘Listen, someone’s gone in after him,’ she said to Holly through the noise, enunciating distinctly and directly into her ear, as if to a blind person. ‘It must be one of the crew.
He’ll know what to do. Mikey will be fine, don’t worry, sweetheart.’ She had no idea if either of these last statements were
true, but kept repeating, ‘He’ll know what to do,’ as if that was enough to make it so.


In her arms Holly began suddenly to shake, the convulsions gripping the length and breadth of her. Involuntarily, uselessly,
Joanna remembered how her daughter had shaken after Mikey’s birth, for almost half an hour, rocking the hospital trolley bed
as she was pushed back to her ward, Joanna walking alongside with the baby resting in the crook of her left arm. She began
speaking to Joanna again now, in a despairing, choking voice that cracked Joanna’s heart. ‘It’s too late, Mum … it’s too late
… he’s gone under, he can’t swim … it’s too late …’ As the words went on, Joanna felt herself accept them as fact. Holly knows,
she thought, a mother knows, that’s why she’s shaking. We’ve lost him. Then: She won’t recover from this. It’s not just Mikey
who’s gone, it’s both of them.


There followed an unfamiliar sensation of release, of hovering in pure white desolation, like how she imagined dying to feel.

This was the bad end they always said would come, the true punishment she was owed.

It made no difference now how hard she had tried, because she had lost.

Before the accident, Joanna had had no instinct whatsoever that something this extraordinary was going to take place during their weekend in Paris.


Actually, this was unusual in itself, for over the course of her adult years she had come to pride herself on the accuracy
of her instincts. She’d had a sense, for instance, when she’d sent off her competition entry to the magazine that this was
one she might win. Entering competitions had become something of a passion lately, as had reading romantic novels set in exotic
other worlds, though she didn’t like to consider why. As well as travel, hotel and spending money, included in the winnings
were tickets for the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and seats on a luxury river cruise. The perfect weekend in Paris: just what
the doctor ordered (his other prescriptions didn’t seem to be working, after all).


It was a prize intended for a couple, that was obvious from its inclusion in the Valentine’s issue of the magazine, and it
was true that she had imagined how it might be if circumstances were different and she was able to invite her former partner
Adrian instead of her daughter, to make a reconciliation of it worthy of one of those romantic novels. As it was, she’d known
of course that it would be Holly she would bring. Holly had not been on holiday since Mikey was born, at least not abroad,
a known deprivation for a girl of twenty-two. Her working friends, the few who had remained since she’d dropped out of college
to have a baby, seemed to tear off constantly to Ibiza or God knew which other party island, treating the months in between
– real life – as prison stretches to be endured before it was time to check in for the next flight. Joanna thought it was a generational thing,
this attitude of entitlement: expect not respect, as her friend Suze put it every time another Saturday girl let her down.


But not Holly. She expected nothing. She’d been claimed by a force outside her – or anyone else’s – control.

Postnatal depression, it had been diagnosed as, an extreme form of the baby blues that received an awful lot of attention,
Joanna had come to realise, for Holly was constantly being told she was not alone in her affliction. Quite why knowing that
thousands of others suffered similarly should make you feel any better was beyond Joanna, but that was by the by. Over the
past year there had been a deluge of professional aid, including three types of antidepressant medication, a specialist counsellor,
leaflets and books to read and support groups to attend, but nothing had come close to reversing the original slump.


Paris will succeed where the rest of us have failed, Joanna decided; it will bring back Holly’s interest in life, her sense
of fun, her desire to succeed. Even when she heard she’d won the competition, it felt less like a lucky break than a simple
necessity; a life saver, if that wasn’t too dramatic.


It was a lot of pressure to put on a city, but if anywhere could do it, Paris could.

Of course they’d hardly been there five minutes when Joanna realised the fundamental flaw to her plan: she was not the one who needed to believe in the power of Paris, it was Holly herself.


‘No one’s speaking French,’ the girl said, as they joined the queue at the Louvre on their arrival in the city on Friday afternoon.
‘It’s all tourists.’ This was not a complaint, but more a statement of deep sorrow. She gripped the handlebars of Mikey’s
pushchair as if she expected to be knocked to the ground at any moment by a charging mob of non-Frenchmen.


‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Joanna’s tone was one of happy agreement with a positive statement. Over the last year or so she had found
this was the best way to counter the pessimistic world view caused by Holly’s condition. Contradiction, challenge, criticism:
all seemed to have an effect similar to that of physical injury. Even mild sarcasm could cause an instant collapse.


‘Bit hot,’ was the next mournful comment.

‘Yes, it’s a perfect day,’ Joanna said. She had grown expert in concealing her impatience and, at times, especially when she
looked at her daughter’s face, her heartbreak: how easy it was to forget what a pretty girl Holly was! In spite of the heat
her skin was so deathly pale you’d think her breaths too shallow for oxygen to reach the surface of her, her freckles like
those flowers that could grow on the arid banks of volcanoes; and her dark, almond-shaped eyes were vacant, seeming never
to focus properly on anything, even Mikey. She was walking proof that beauty was more than an accident of bone structure,
but an emotion expressed through shining eyes and glowing cheeks, through engagement with life.


Unable to bear it, Joanna removed her gaze and scanned instead the triangular segments of the glass pyramid in front of them.
When she was last here, almost twenty-five years ago in the 1980s, the structure was a work-in-progress and the subject of
controversy, even scandal. Her parents were against its construction, she remembered, and for that reason alone she had considered
it vital for the very future of mankind. Today it looked settled in, even classical, a reminder – along with every queuing
tourist’s casual acceptance of it – of just how much time had passed since.


‘I’m tired,’ Holly sighed, her eyelids half closed, ‘really, really tired.’

‘That might be a side effect of the new pills, do you think? You’ll feel better when your system’s adjusted.’

How many times had she said that? Enough for Holly to no longer dignify it with a response.


Joanna felt a sudden swell of passion, longed with all her heart to be able to cry out, ‘Isn’t this wonderful? I knew you’d love Paris!’ and to get an excited exclamation in return, a request to hear all about that first visit, how she had
fallen for the city on sight. But she did not, allowing instead the old doubt to lurch forward and replace the joy, allowing herself to think how different her own childhood had been from the one she’d given Holly,
the one that had brought the girl to this point.


The point at which she could stand in one of the world’s most beautiful cities and hate every moment of it.

Did she, Joanna, bear some of the responsibility for that? She had to be guilty on some level, surely?


Now the doubts had broken ranks, she was unable to stop them advancing, as if she’d been planted in the queue to the Louvre
expressly to confront her own ghosts. Is this my life? Is this how I expected it to turn out when I came here all those years
ago? Am I really a grandmother at forty-two, an age when many women are just starting their families? Have I failed my daughter,
failed myself?


One thing she did know: you were supposed to do a better job than your own parents had, not worse. You were supposed to give your children
the things you’d missed, not conceal from them the more enviable details of what you had once had but that they never would.


A father, for instance.

Admitted more quickly than expected, they stood in the vast entrance space of the museum and faced a choice that was overwhelming
even for those of sound mind: thirty-five thousand works of art, but which was the one that might speak to Holly?


‘Is there anything in particular you’d like to see?’ Joanna asked, knowing as she spoke that the question was probably redundant.

Holly, however, was still sentient enough to detect a dip in Joanna’s own spirits and to summon the smallest of enthusiasms
of her own. ‘The Mona Lisa?’ she said, in the voice of a quiz contestant making an embarrassingly wild guess and already anticipating the direst humiliations
for her blunder.


Joanna nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s as good a place to start as any. If we head in that direction we can always wander off
if something catches our eye along the way.’


They did not wander off, though, but were swept along the fast-moving current as if on dinghies. Well, it was the most famous painting in the world, she thought; they were hardly going to get a private view, were they.


‘Exciting,’ she whispered to Holly, when after a short wait they were released into the Salle des Etats and the company of
the hallowed lady herself. They took their places at the back of the throng, among those holding cameras high above the heads
of the people in front, as if at a stadium concert, no hope of seeing the stars on stage with their own eyes.


Holly made a half-hearted bounce on to the balls of her feet to catch a quick glimpse, before remarking, with signature disappointment,
‘It’s smaller than I thought.’ A little ahead of them, a toddler of Mikey’s age was screaming in delight at the dazzle of
a camera flash and Joanna watched Holly wince at the sound, as might someone who had no experience of small children, no understanding
of their high spirits. She was indifferent to the cries of her own son, who was straining to be released from his buggy.


Joanna bent to unbuckle him. ‘Look, Mikey, it’s the most famous painting in the world! Come and see.’ She held him in her
arms, partly to stop him from darting off, partly in the hope that he might accidentally focus on the fabled picture and remember
this cultural highlight in years to come. Maybe he’d be a painter or an artist himself one day! But he only wriggled and bucked
and faced the wrong direction and her lower back soon ached with the weight of him on her hip, her forearms with the effort
of keeping him still.


‘Hey, Mikey,’ she told him, ‘let’s be a good boy for Mummy and Grandma.’

Holly’s helplessness, Mikey’s lack of cooperation, these she realised she had expected. What she had not bargained for was
her own reaction to the portrait. For there was one glorious moment when the crush of bodies between them parted freakishly
in her favour, offering her a clear view of that pale oval face with its famously unknowable gaze. Except Joanna thought she
did know it, actually, now that she was faced with it. It was the picture of tenderness, she decided; not the extravagant tenderness of a new lover or the playful kind of an old friend, but
the quiet, private kind, like that of a mother on seeing her child sleeping. It was how Joanna herself had felt as she checked
on Holly at night when she was younger, and it was what she feared to be fatally absent when Holly checked on Mikey (if she
ever did).


It gave her the chills to turn from that serene, glowing face on the wall to the young woman behind her, to the downturned
eyes, the shoulders rolled forward, the relentlessly negative aura. Mikey might have dashed out of the room and been trampled
underfoot by sculptures come to life and Holly would not have noticed.


‘Want to try and get a bit closer?’ she suggested.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve seen it.’

After that she scarcely said another word. When they stopped for a cup of coffee and Mikey became fractious, the decisions
that needed to be made – sweets that would pacify him initially but send him frantic afterwards, or the more difficult sell
of a piece of fruit? – were left to Joanna. Holly sat as if in a party of her own and sharing their table out of necessity
alone, her fingers listlessly cupping her café au lait. What went on in that head of hers? Joanna wondered. Did she fill it
with dreams or did she close down her thoughts in a form of meditation? It was impossible to know.


‘Anything else you fancy seeing?’ She pressed the museum plan on the table under Holly’s nose and Holly looked as terrified
by it as if she’d been presented with a warrant for her arrest. ‘Or do you want to just head off back to the hotel?’ This,
in fact, was Joanna’s own preference, for they’d been up early to catch their train from St Pancras and it was obvious that
Mikey was overtired, but she was determined to force at least a small share of the decision-making on her daughter.


‘Sorry, Mum, I’m not that into museums,’ Holly said in a tiny, tragic voice.

There was no point reminding her of the many she’d enjoyed as a child in London.

‘OK. Well, tomorrow will be more your thing, maybe.’

Holly glanced up with a small show of willing. ‘What’s happening then?’ She’d obviously not absorbed the basics of their itinerary,
announced several times before departure and outlined once again, in more detail, on the train. It