Gracie thought for a moment before answering. She knew she would hate herself for sinking to his level but she knew what her response would be. As she looked at him and took in his guilt-free smile she hated him more than she had ever hated anyone, and she wanted him to suffer at least some of the pain she had.
‘Yes, I had a boy. He was stillborn – he’d died in the womb, which was why I felt so ill …’ she paused. ‘Not that you cared.’
She knew she was wrong to mislead him and she also knew he was bound to find out but she wanted to hurt him. Really hurt him. ‘Not that that’s relevant, of course, as you were sure he wasn’t yours anyway.’
Sean Donnelly’s expression was one of genuine shock and for a moment she thought he might even cry.
‘I never said that. Gracie, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe this …’
‘You did say that! You listened to Jennifer’s poison and believed what you wanted to believe to justify putting your sexual wants above your unborn child, to justify sleeping with your own goddamned sister-in-law!’
At that point she could feel all the grief of the past few weeks simmering away just waiting to erupt, but then as she looked into his eyes she saw his face crumple. For a moment she felt guilty, but only for a moment; then she remembered exactly what he’d done to her. She decided she would tell him about Fay but first she wanted him to feel the same pain that she had.
‘Now, I have to get back to work … Is there anything else?’
‘I’m sorry, Gracie. I really am.’ Sean stood up and walked towards her. ‘I don’t understand what happened to me; I had a mental blackout or something. The past few weeks have been hell and I was scared to come back but I want my life back to how it was before she came along. I’m sorry.’
‘Evil is as evil does …’ As Sean neared her she moved away from the ledge and stood upright.
‘Gracie, I don’t understand how all this happened, but surely we’re both as bad as each other?’
‘No, we’re not, so don’t try and tar me with the same brush. Now do me a turn; get out of this hotel and out of my life and never come back.’
He looked stunned and stared for a few moments before answering.
‘No, I won’t. I’m going to be around and I’ll keep coming back until you forgive me. I love you, Gracie, I always have. We’re right together – Jennifer isn’t important.’
He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek and Gracie felt herself softening. At that moment she nearly gave in. He was her husband and the father to Fay, the little girl he was entitled to get to know and vice versa.
‘Please, Gracie? I’m so, so sorry I did what I did. You have to take me back. I’ll forgive you if you forgive me …’
‘Is it all over with you and Jennifer then?’
Sean’s eyes darted from his feet to Gracie’s face and back to his feet again before he smiled and held his hands out to her.
‘Look, you have to help me here. Me mam’s going to be spitting feathers. She’s coming over next month with Yolande. I want everything to be back to normal for when she gets here, else she’ll kill me for sure. And you as well …’
As Gracie looked at his expression, the reason for his apology fell into place. He didn’t want his mother knowing exactly what he’d done. Gracie felt her resolve strengthen once again as she moved past him and walked over to the door.
‘So this is because you want to appease your mother? It’s not because of our marriage? Our baby?’
‘Be reasonable, Gracie.’ He put his palms together as if in prayer, a pleading gesture that made her feel quite ill. ‘Please? We all make mistakes. You let me think you were a virgin, you never even told me that you’d had an illegitimate baby. For God’s sake, are you surprised I went off the rails? Come on, darling …’
‘But you seduced my sister, that’s not the same as going out and getting drunk.’
‘It was the other way round, I promise you it was. It was Jen who came after me and my mistake was that I fell for it …’
Sean’s easy use of her sister’s name told Gracie all she needed to know.
‘Oh, that’s enough. Goodbye, Sean,’ she said as calmly as she could before she turned to leave the office.
‘I’ll be back …’
‘Don’t, we’ve got nothing to say to each other. Just get out.’
‘Do our marriage vows not mean anything? It was a year ago, our first anniversary, how can you ignore that?’
‘GET OUT …’ she shouted at him.
Gracie pulled the door open for him and then stood stock-still as he went through it. She watched as he walked through the lobby and then turned and ran out of the building without another word.
As Sean left, Ruby came down the stairs.
‘How did it go with him?’ she asked.
‘I can’t talk about it, I’m so bloody furious. He’s little boy sadness and blackmail, but one thing I do know is that I have to keep a close eye on Fay, because once he knows about her, he’ll sure as hell be back.’
‘You need to have a nice strong brandy, but I suppose a cuppa will have to do while we’re working.’
‘I’d better go up and tell Jeanette what’s going on …’ Gracie said, but then she stopped and shook her head as the full impact of what she’d just done hit her. ‘My mother was right all along. I
am
a nasty piece of work.’
‘Oh Gracie, Grace, you know that’s not true! Come through to the kitchen, we’ll have a tea break and you can tell me what happened.’
‘I can’t talk about it, I have to think. I’ve just done something that makes me as bad as him. Or worse.’
Gracie’s voice was filled with panic and as she looked at Ruby, she felt physically sick. She had denied her baby’s very existence to the child’s own father. The same as he had denied his daughter before she was born.
‘I’ll have to go after him …’
Gracie ran out of the hotel as fast as she could and looked both ways, but there was no sign of Sean Donnelly and she had no idea where he was staying.
At that moment she hated herself more than she hated him.
Ruby Blakeley was wearing unflattering dungarees and a headscarf knotted on top of her head in an attempt to keep the dust at bay as she mucked in to help with the refurbishment of the house next door to the Thamesview.
‘I feel like a Land Girl,’ she said to Johnnie. ‘They used to work in and around Melton during the war and I thought they looked so unkempt, and yet here I am, looking like something the cat’s dragged in …’ She stood in front of him in an exaggerated ballet pose, arms high and one leg gracefully pointing to the side.
He reached out and touched the tip of her nose.
‘You look gorgeous in whatever you wear, but I’m not too sure about the dusty face powder. It’s a bit pale for you and it’s turned your lips white …’
‘Sheeesh … And have you looked in a mirror lately? You look as if you’ve suddenly aged fifty years, your hair is covered in dust and paint. But as Babs used to say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Or nails …’ she held her hands out in front of her. ‘Look, every single one of them is done in.’
‘Tea break time, I think. You sit on this ‘ere comfy orange box and I’ll nip next door and fix us something,’ Johnnie said.
‘No, I’ll go – you finish that last bit of wall before Babs and George arrive. I really want them to be impressed with our efforts, both in here and next door. Anyway, I need to check they’re doing what they should be doing in the kitchen. That new daily doesn’t do much if I’m not waving the whip.’ Ruby flicked an imaginary whip.
‘Oh, they’ll be impressed alright, we’ve all worked like navvies and it’s coming on a treat in here! It’ll soon be habitable downstairs, and the rest will come in time. Probably another year before the whole building is fit for what you want it for!’ Johnnie replied.
‘
We
,’ emphasised Ruby. ‘Fit for what
we
want it for …’
‘No way is there a
we
in this business! I don’t want to be labelled a gold-digger. I’ve already overheard talk about me being after your inheritance, especially from Sean. I think he thought he should have been part of the business.’
‘Well, we both know that’s not true so whoever’s saying that can go and take a long walk down a short pier because they don’t matter – especially when it’s someone like Sean Donnelly saying it!’ Ruby shook her head angrily. It infuriated her that people who knew nothing about her relationship with Johnnie Riordan, the love of her life from the moment she met him on her return to London from her evacuation, felt that they could pass judgement.
‘Go and make the tea, woman – I’ve got men’s work to do …’ Johnnie laughed and pointed to the doorway that was missing a door, as Ruby curtsied. ‘Yes, master …’
Ruby had been able to buy the vacant property next to the hotel at a bargain basement price because it had fallen into such disrepair it wasn’t habitable. The reclusive old lady who had lived and died there had no family that anyone knew of and had refused all offers of help from her neighbours in her final years. In fact, as best they knew, no one had even been allowed over the threshold since before the war.
In its day the house had been an expansive family home but when the owner’s husband and two sons had all been killed in the First World War she had never recovered and had gradually closed up all the rooms as they were, spending her final years living in just one room at the back of the house. It had taken a long time to settle her affairs but finally the house had been put up for sale and, as Ruby and the Wheatons had already done their sums, they were ready to jump right in and buy it at a bargain price.
It had been a challenge to clear it out and do the very essential repairs but now it was starting to look like a home again. The body of the well-built house was still firmly standing so Johnnie had happily taken it on as his project, which was to convert it into an annexe to the main hotel.
Times had moved on and although there was still a market for a ladies-only establishment, there was a bigger market for family holidays in Southend, so the idea was for the annexe to become a basic bed and breakfast establishment for families, with a self-contained flat in the basement.
It was an ambitious project and it was taking up all of Ruby and the Wheatons’ inheritance from Leonora Wheaton, but it was a good investment. They were making progress and Ruby and Johnnie had welcomed the challenge.
‘Here you are …’ Ruby said as she arrived back from next door with a tray in her hands. ‘Not quite Leonora style, but the best you’re going to get, Master.’
Johnnie took it from her and they both perched on the newly sanded window seat that looked out over the shambles of a garden that was being used as a dumping ground for all the débris from the house.
‘Thank God the labourers are back tomorrow,’ Ruby sighed heavily. ‘I have to get back to the hotel. Gracie’s doing her best but it’s hard with Fay. We may have to take on someone else soon.’
‘She does well, considering. It’s hard enough for me with two boys living with Sis in Walthamstow – I can’t imagine working with a young baby in tow. I feel sorry for her, but you have to think about the hotel …’
‘How are the boys doing?’ Ruby asked. ‘It seems forever since we’ve been able to sit down and talk properly. We’re either flogging ourselves working or falling into bed dead beat.’
‘I know, but there’s an end in sight. Hopefully once this place is finished and the furore over poor Sadie has died down then we should be able to settle down, all of us. We can get married and have another child …’
Ruby laughed. ‘That’s a bit of a leap, Johnnie. But one day, maybe one day.’
‘Definitely one day soon.’ Johnnie leaned forward and kissed her. ‘I love you, Ruby Blakeley. Always have, always will …’
‘Me too!’ she smiled.
Ruby was happy with her life. She loved Johnnie, she loved the Thamesview and she wanted to have the opportunity to love Johnnie’s two young sons as if they were her own; the only sadness was their own daughter Maggie, who had no idea of her true parentage. Maggie Wheaton looked on Ruby as her older sister and Johnnie as a sort of uncle.
In the beginning it had been hard for Ruby to even see Maggie as part of another family but gradually she had adjusted and she really did sometimes forget that she had given birth to her, that she was her natural mother.
Ruby and Johnnie had both had a hard time of it but they were starting to come out the other side of the trauma that had surrounded Johnnie’s ill-fated marriage to Sadie, his volatile and unpredictable young wife. No one knew for certain but it seemed that in a fit of pique, she had made a dramatic suicide bid that had succeeded because the person she was expecting to arrive and save her, her errant boyfriend of the moment, had stood her up.
Sadie was found the following day in her best dress and high heels, wearing full make-up, lying on the floor with her head inside the gas oven. It had been traumatic for everyone but especially for Johnnie, who had two sons with her, two very young boys who had lost their mother because of a moment of madness.
Ruby Blakeley and Johnnie Riordan had a long history together going back to when she first returned to her family after her wartime evacuation to Cambridgeshire in 1945. It had been a brief relationship but it culminated in Ruby becoming pregnant on the one occasion they had got carried away. In fear of her older brothers’ reaction she had run away back to Cambridgeshire and the Wheatons before being taken to Southend, where no one knew her to have the baby. Maggie. The newborn had been adopted by Babs and George but it had been five years before Johnnie and Ruby met up again and he discovered they had had a child together. In the intervening years he’d married Sadie and had two children with her.
‘Will Betty let the boys come and live with us now, do you think?’ Ruby asked.
‘They’re my sons, he can’t stop them but I’d like it to be with her blessing. Betty, Tony and their kids are the only family the boys and I have got now Mum has passed on… . Apart from you and Maggie but they don’t … can’t know that’. Johnnie paused and smiled at Ruby. ‘It’s a bloody shame that she disapproves of you and me being together, especially as it’s because of Sadie. You and I did nothing wrong, it was Sadie who was unfaithful but she became a saint when she died and we can’t change that,’ he said sadly.