By her own admission, this was ridiculous. Stevie had all the same feelings as a seventeen year old on her first date as she waited for Adam to come home from work that night. She had been so full of nervous energy back then, waiting for David Idziaszczyk to knock on her door and take her to Rebecca’s nightclub, that she had been sick on her shoes in the hallway and had a mad scramble to wipe up and spray her legs with her mum’s Youth Dew. She dipped into the memory of her first love and smiled. On the day she finally learned to spell his name, he’d dumped her. She thought her life had ended and there were many dramatic wailings to be had. The heartbreaks didn’t get any easier with age but neither did the love-bugs, now tickling the walls of her tummy, get any less active.
Danny was staying the night at Catherine’s because there was a teachers’ ‘inset’ day at school tomorrow, whatever they were. Latin for ‘a rest from the little buggers’ probably. Cath was always offering to babysit at the moment, for her own mischievous reasons, and tonight, well, Stevie was not prepared to look a gift horse in the mouth.
She checked the large coffee cake cooking in the oven.
She was quite proud that she had managed to make it without blowing up the lovely cottage kitchen. The vegetables were all ready in their pans, the fillet steaks in the fridge waiting to be cooked, the wine breathing on the work surface. Why she was going to all this trouble was anyone’s guess. Adam MacLean wouldn’t look in her direction in a million years, she knew that, but some little romantic (and stupid) part of her wanted to run with the feeling that he might. Just for a few days. Just until her head could get around the fact that soon they would go their separate ways and probably only see each other in passing in the gym. Then one day she would see him roaring past her in a sports car with a gorgeous, tall, slim woman next to him, her long, dark hair streaming behind and Stevie would be a distant memory, an amusing after-dinner tale at best.
I once knew a woman who wrote for
Midnight Moon.
Now, what was her name again
…
?
And Stevie would still be alone, still writing out fictional lives full of the hope and love that she wanted so much for herself.
She was just rolling the edges of the big cake in battered-up Flake when he came in, dropped his bag by the door and smiled as the cocktail of nice domestic aromas hit him at full pelt. He carried a couple of bottles of wine in his hand. He just wanted to savour the last few days of being with her, he knew that was all he had left. He should have told Stevie that Jo had gone, but he feared that would accelerate her journey back to
his
arms. He should leave now and not prolong the heartache, but he just wanted to be with her, a little longer, an hourglass-worth of time with someone who had the same voluminous capacity to
love as he did. Someone warm and generous, imperfect, irritating, annoying, frustrating, bloody lovely.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I got some steaks, if you want one. Nothing special.’
She had baked. This was special. Well, to him. No one, except his Granny Walker, had ever made him a cake before.
‘I got some wine, if you fancy a glass.’
‘Yes, I do, thanks. There’s a bottle open already over there.’
‘Ho’d on a wee minute until I get oot o’ this clobba.’
He said he liked his steak well done, not still moo-ing and struggling on the end of his fork, as she had once thought he might. She slapped them in the pan and as they sizzled in the hot olive oil, she smiled to herself, thinking about him upstairs, changing out of his work ‘clobba’.
He poured two glasses of the open red, when he at last came down in a T-shirt and jeans. She tried hard not to look at his muscular arms, the definition of his chest under the snow-white material, his fantastic chunk of a bum and big crushing thighs shaping the denim.
‘Where’s the wean?’
‘He’s at Catherine’s. They’re having a cinema night.
The Incredibles
again, I think, for the forty-billionth time.’
‘Och, that’s a shame. I was going to have a kick aboot wi’ him in the garden.’
Fond of him as Matthew had been, he had never once said ‘that’s a shame’ when Danny wasn’t around, Stevie suddenly realized. Then again, she had realized quite a lot recently. Mostly how pale her real relationship with Matthew had been, even when placed at the side of this imaginary one with Adam.
‘Can I help?’ he asked.
‘Yes, you can pass me the brandy and those peppercorns, unless you want your steak plain.’
‘Aye, plain for me, please. I want to taste that meat, it looks braw…good.’
‘I understand you now, you don’t need to translate.’
He smiled. The wine swirled in his head already. He wanted to get horribly plastered and rip all her clothes off, but for now, he got on with slicing some tomatoes.
‘Bea Pollen!’ he chuckled, when they were sitting down on the sofa, mellowing after a lovely meal and gentle banter. They had both suggested having a sobering raspberry-truffle-flavoured coffee afterwards. He, before he really did rip her clothes off, and she before she leapt on him and made a complete twat of herself. They had both kicked off their shoes and their feet were inches apart on the big long footstool. She couldn’t imagine ever borrowing his socks. He had the biggest feet she had ever seen. She tried hard not to think what that might mean, scale-wise.
‘Whatever possessed you to call yourself Bea Pollen?’ he asked suddenly.
‘It’s
Beatrice
Pollen, actually. It was my granny’s name. Crystal didn’t like me to use the name Stevie, said it sounded too much like a man. Men don’t sell well, you see, and my granny always wanted to see her name on a book. So…’
‘Oh, I see. Is Honeywell your married name then?’
‘No,’ said Stevie. ‘I went back to my maiden name after Mick was killed.’
‘What happened? Only if you want to talk aboot it,’ said
Adam, twisting his position so he was sideways on to her, his arm dangerously close to her head.
‘He was in a car crash. On the way to the airport.’
‘Och no. Business trip?’
‘No, it was most definitely pleasure,’ she said with a mirthless little laugh.
Adam looked at her in a quizzical way that prodded her to go on.
‘If you must know, he was running off with another woman. She was killed outright too. Apparently they didn’t suffer, which I’m glad for, if you know what I mean. Whatever they did, they didn’t deserve to suffer.’
‘Oh God no! I’m sorry. Did you know about her?’
‘I found out about a month before. I’d had my suspicions but he denied it. Then one day, he just stopped hiding her away. He would ring her in front of me, come in stinking of her. It was a nightmare time. Sometimes he was away all night, sometimes he got into bed beside me but he wouldn’t let me touch him. I didn’t know where I was. I was out of my skull with pain.’
‘I’m no’ surprised,’ said Adam, who had long since stopped being shocked by the cruelty of people to each other.
‘I followed him to her house once, confronted her, asked her…begged her to stop seeing him.’ Stevie fell headfirst into the memory of that day, how she had waited outside in the car for over an hour tormenting herself with images of what they were doing together until she saw Mick leave and drive away. She had breathed deep, crossed the road and knocked hard upon the shabby peeling council-house
door, determined to chase her rival away once and for all. Linda had looked through the side window to see who was at the door before brazenly appearing in a cheap and tacky negligée, the smell of sex and cigarettes and Mick hanging around her like a heavy fusty cloud.
‘I pleaded, I cried, I threatened all sorts. Totally lost every bit of dignity I had,’ Stevie went on. ‘She just laughed and shut the door in my face, made me feel
this
big. I think I went a bit mad really.’ Stevie cringed, but the wine had loosened her tongue and it felt easy to talk about it, even if she would probably recall this in the morning and want to die. ‘I did everything to get him to come back, except leaving him alone to get it out of his system. I thought if I dogged him he’d give in, you see, but it got me absolutely nowhere. The only thing I had left to try was letting him get on with it and see if he came back, but I ran out of time for that one. On the day I got my pregnancy confirmed, I came back home to find him packing. He said he was leaving me to go and live in Tenerife with Linda. The car crashed on the way to the airport.’
‘Oh my!’ Adam’s hand reached forwards and brushed her fringe back from her eyes in an instinctive and sympathetic gesture. She let him do it without slapping his hand away, which amazed him.
‘Mick had remortgaged the house to raise the money to go–got Linda to fake my signature, I presume. I was in big financial trouble when it all came to light and Linda’s family were going crazy. They made a huge scene at the funeral…it was an awful time.’ Stevie gulped. ‘His mum had a headstone done, but that was destroyed and his flowers kept
getting kicked over.’ She recalled Mick’s mother ringing up in tears, expecting Stevie to go and clear up the mess with her, shouting at her to forgive him in death, not understanding why that could be so difficult for her, considering this was all Stevie’s fault.
‘
If you had been more of a wife, he wouldn’t have left you and he’d still be alive
.’
‘I was really sick, carrying Danny at the time, and found it hard to go out to work. But I had to, there were so many debts. Mick had cancelled all the insurances, you see, and I didn’t know.’ Stevie managed a little smile. ‘Then
Midnight Moon
came up trumps for me and gave me a chance to find my feet.’
‘Do you think it would have made a difference if Mick had known about Danny?’ Adam asked gently.
‘He did know,’ said Stevie, poking an escapee tear back inside. ‘I told him, showed him the test I’d done in case he thought I was trying to trick him. He told me to get shut and send him the bill. Six hours later, he was dead.’
Adam winced. ‘Do Mick’s family ever see Danny then?’
‘I rang when I gave birth and left a message on their answering machine telling them how ill Danny was, and that if they wanted to see him, they ought to come straight away, just in case he didn’t make it. I sent them some Polaroids, but they just sent everything back with a note to say they’d pray for him.’
‘Some godly faith, turning your back on a wee baby!’ said Adam. Stevie shrugged. It was just one more rejection in her book.
‘They blamed me for not being a strong enough wife to
keep Mick. If he hadn’t been running away from me, you see, he wouldn’t have had the accident, that was their reckoning.’
‘What nonsense,’ said Adam, shaking his head in outrage. ‘How on earth could you have been to blame?’
‘People need to have someone to focus their anger on, Adam. It’s easier blaming outsiders than the ones you love.’ Stevie’s voice faded, realizing exactly what she was saying. She saw Adam shift a little uncomfortably too. Yes, it was all too easy.
‘It must have been hard for you alone, with a wee baby,’ he said, moving swiftly on.
‘We got through,’ she smiled. Looking back, she didn’t know quite how, but they had.
‘Ye’re no’ close to your own family?’
‘Not really. Catherine and Eddie are my family. I’d have been lost if it hadn’t been for them. That’s why I feel such a failure for Danny. I wanted him to have the family life I never had. I thought we’d found it with Matthew.’
‘So why Matthew? Why did you fall for Matthew?’ he asked quietly.
‘My ex-husband Mick was wild, live-for-the-moment, intoxicating, a one-man charm offensive. Matthew was considerate, affectionate, faithful…’ She gave a little laugh at that last quality. ‘I think I fell for what Matthew wasn’t, rather than what he was, if that makes any sense. Mick exhausted me, burnt me out, stamped all over my heart, then along came steady, nice Matthew. Chalk and cheese, or so I thought.’
‘They weren’t really all that different though, were they?’
said Adam with his objective eye. ‘From where I’m standing, they were both takers in life.’
‘Probably,’ said Stevie, nodding. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t special enough for either of them in the end. I thought more of them than they did of me, if that doesn’t sound like romantic claptrap.’
‘Naw, it doesn’t at all,’ said Adam, thinking of Diane, of Jo, of his mother. He knew what it was like only too well to be on the begging end of love and the insanity it produced.
‘So come on, why Jo? Stevie asked him. ‘Why would you want someone as gorgeous and flawless as her?’
He laughed and flicked her hair, and she turned to him with her sweet, funny, smiling face and deep blue eyes. It was as if he was looking at it for the first time. It wasn’t the perfect, magazine-cover face of someone like Jo; there were fine lines around her eyes to show how much she had cried and laughed and loved and lived, but Stevie Honeywell’s was making his heart do flick-flacks in a way that no one else had ever made it do.
‘Jo, eh? Because, if
this
doesn’t sound like romantic claptrap, Jo promised me the sort of love I’ve been looking for all my life. Some people just have to ability to mould themselves to what you want. Jo was one of them.
‘I was just recovering from a nasty divorce. My wife, Diane, had run off with her boss. You know the type: thirty years older than her, Satsuma tan, married of course, owned the company. If that wasn’t enough, she then tried to get half of everything I had, too. I went a bit mad masel’. Actually, I shouldnae really be telling you this after what you thought of me.’
‘Oh, go on,’ she said, poking his arm with her finger.
‘I got a solicitor’s letter saying she was entitled to half of everything. So rather than sell the stuff, I started to halve it with a chainsaw.’
‘Half of everything? I’ll give you half!’
he had roared, when she finally confessed that all those late nights hadn’t been down to ‘finishing a project’ after all. He’d started to divide their furniture all right. He’d got as far as slicing two dining-room chairs down the middle then realized he was scaring himself more than he was Diane.