Authors: Tess Stimson
‘It’s all right,’ she said, and ‘I understand,’ because she did, and he was right – she
did
deserve better, even though it hurt like hell, and she
wondered despairingly how she was ever going to scrape up enough courage and energy to put her life back together a second time.
He’d spent the night in Nell’s empty room, and the next morning he’d left before she awoke. He’d gone to see Harriet, no doubt, to beg her for a second chance; and
despite his gloomy prognostications of the night before, she was quite certain his wife would take him back. Harriet loved him; she could see that. After all, it took one to know one.
She’d felt sick with grief and misery. It was as if time had stood still: she was twenty-two again, pregnant and deserted, curled up on her bed and listening to Patrick quietly let himself
out of the house for the very last time.
It was Nell who’d pulled her out of her mire of self-pity and tears. Nell, crashing into the house, slamming the front door and pounding up the stairs to her bedroom, throwing herself on
her bed in a violent fit of sobbing audible through the thin walls, who had Zoey up in a moment, dry-eyed and ready to fight like a tigress for her child.
She’d run into her daughter’s room, knotting the belt of her threadbare dressing gown – nothing like as luxurious as the one from the hotel – around her waist.
‘Darling! What is it? What’s happened?’
‘Mnnnff! Drmmmnt msss pmprss!’ Nell wept into her pillow.
‘Sweetheart, calm down and tell me what’s happened. Has someone hurt you?’
Violent shaking of the head.
‘Upset you, then?’
A nod.
‘Is it – is it about me and Oliver?’
A terse shake of the head.
‘Is it a boy?’
More violent shaking.
‘Oh dear,’ Zoey had sighed. ‘I’ve never been very good at these games. Couldn’t you just
tell
me?’
Nell had rolled over on the bed, lifting a red, tear-stained face to her mother.
‘Teri
was the one who sold the story to the newspapers. They gave her thirty thousand pounds for
it. I thought she loved me!’
Zoey scooped her into her arms. ‘Oh darling. I’m so sorry.’
‘How could I have been so
wrong
about her?’ Nell wailed. ‘That’s the worst bit. I thought she was special and she wasn’t. She was just . . . just
banal
!’
She’d sighed. ‘Life
is
banal, darling. Except when it’s happening to you.’
‘Mum,’ Nell had said as her hiccoughing slowed. ‘About Oliver.’
‘It’s OK. I know how you must feel—’
‘It’s not that I don’t like him,’ she’d said in a rush as if Zoey hadn’t spoken. ‘I
do.
He’s cool, most of the time. But he’s
married,
Mum. He’s not yours. It’s . . . it’s like wearing a pair of shoes that don’t belong to you. You’ve always said that’s the one thing you
can’t recycle. They’re never going to fit, because someone else has worn them and made them shaped like their own foot.’
‘Yes,’ she’d said sadly.
‘Can’t you try again with Richard? He loves you so much. He’d take care of you. You wouldn’t have to sell the shop – you could settle down and relax. Maybe even
have another baby . . .’
‘Nell!’
‘What? You’re only thirty-nine. It’s not like you’re past it. Lots of middle-aged women have babies these days.’
‘Have you been talking to Richard?’
‘He keeps calling,’ Nell said defensively. ‘He saw the piece in the paper and he said he understood. It only happened because of Florence and me and all that stuff. He says he
doesn’t care, he still loves you.’
‘I don’t love him,’ she’d said softly. ‘Not the way he deserves.’
Nell had looked down at her hands. ‘The way you love Oliver? Even though he doesn’t love you?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry, Nell.’
‘It’s OK,’ she’d said sadly. ‘I love him too.’
The letter from Harriet’s lawyer hadn’t upset her the way Harriet had probably hoped it would. She’d quickly thrust it back in the envelope so Nell
couldn’t read it upside down across the breakfast table as she did everything else, and shoved it into the kitchen drawer where she kept all the bills and bank statements and everything else
she couldn’t quite bring herself to deal with.
The lawyer’s threats had been so preposterous she didn’t take them seriously. Either he was some kind of monstrous Victorian throwback who still thought unwed mothers should be
institutionalized, or he was an unscrupulous bastard taking easy money from a woman too emotionally overwrought to think straight. Probably both. Not even the most reactionary judge could possibly
believe, in the twenty-first century, that having an affair was reason enough to take a fifteen-year-old girl from her mother and her school and her friends and her home and transplant her four
thousand miles across the Atlantic to live with a family she barely knew. For heaven’s sake,
Prince Charles
had had an affair! Adultery practically came with a royal warrant these
days!
The other reason she hadn’t cared about the letter, of course, was that she’d had too much else to worry about.
It had been something Nell had said the morning she’d come home that had planted the first seed in her mind. She hadn’t quite been able to believe she hadn’t thought of it
before,
considered
it even, but she’d got so used to thinking of herself as Nell’s mother, the parent of a teenager, middle-aged and, yes,
past it,
that it had never
occurred to her that actually she might
not
be. And as Nell had pointed out, thirty-nine wasn’t old these days at all.
She’d called Oliver. ‘I need to see you,’ she’d said without preamble.
‘Zoey, I’m in Manchester. Working.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘Friday Tomorrow morning.’
‘Then I need to see you tomorrow afternoon.’
A long, static-filled silence. ‘Zoey, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Oliver, I’m not asking you to meet me to reminisce about the old days,’ she’d said sharply. ‘This is important. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’
‘I can’t do tomorrow afternoon. I’m meeting – I have a meeting at three.’
Harriet,
Zoey thought, trying not to feel bitter. ‘What time do you get back to London?’
Another silence. ‘I could meet you around one. The Bluebird Café on the King’s Road. If it’s really important.’
She’d agreed and put the phone down with a firmness she hadn’t really felt. Perhaps, if Harriet’s lawyers hadn’t sent that letter, if Harriet hadn’t threatened to
take her child – however empty those threats might have been – she wouldn’t have called Oliver at all. Perhaps she’d have let events take their course, shouldered this on
her own, dealt with it alone as she’d dealt with everything for the past twenty years.
But Harriet
had
threatened to take Nell. And she was tired of being the only one who ever had to face the consequences. So now here she was, sitting opposite Oliver in the Bluebird
Café, telling him she was pregnant with his child, watching that painfully familiar play of emotions sweep across his face: surprise, delight, pride even; and then, as reality sank in, the
surprise turning to shock, delight to horror, pride to fear.
She waited wearily for him to tell her he had a family to think of, other children to consider, to promise to make sure she ‘didn’t suffer financially’ and to know he was
‘always there for’ her, as Patrick had.
But, to her surprise, there was no careful distancing, no rejection. He didn’t brush her off with meaningless platitudes and empty promises.
Instead, he reached across the table and took both her hands in both of his.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
For a brief, hallucinatory moment, Oliver fantasized that everything would be OK. They’d go back to Vermont and form a flower-power commune, all of them: he and Harriet
and Zoey, their mixed-up, switched-up daughters, the boys, and a new baby who would somehow connect them all, bind them together as
a family . . .
Of course it wasn’t going to be OK. Nothing was ever going to be OK again.
Zoey’s big grey eyes filled with hope as he took her hands across the café table. ‘You’ll
stay?’
she said incredulously.
‘This isn’t just your problem,’ he said, trying to keep the despair from his voice. ‘We both got ourselves into this. I’m here if you need me.’
‘Need you?’ she gasped. ‘Of course I
need
you!’
Of course she did,
he thought dully. It was what he’d found so attractive about her, a lifetime ago.
Harriet had never needed him, not in the helpless, damsel-in-distress way Zoey did. Not in a way that aroused his primitive, masculine impulse to
protect.
His wife had always been so
capable and competent. Running their business, running their home. For most of their marriage it hadn’t bothered him because, deep down, he’d known she
did
need him, in her own
way: as a husband, a father, a business partner. Between them they’d created a perfect balance that was the core of their family. She was conscientious, intense, a setter-of-bedtimes and
enforcer-of-homework; by tacit agreement, he was the easy-going one, indulgent, the breaker of rules. At work, his creativity and headlong passion was tempered by her grounded practicality. For
sixteen years, they’d each brought something different but equally necessary to the table, balancing one another, yin and yang.
But then, six months ago, they’d faced the single most significant crisis of their marriage, and he’d been shut out. Instead of listening to him, taking him seriously, she’d
simply pursued her own agenda, seeking out Nell and Zoey on her own, as if he no longer mattered. She hadn’t needed
him.
She hadn’t needed anyone.
He didn’t want to think about how much his affair with Zoey had been prompted by his hurt pride and an unconscious desire to pay Harriet back. To deceive and hurt her as much as
she’d deceived and hurt him.
‘What about Harriet?’ Zoey asked suddenly.
He released her hands and rubbed his palms over his face. ‘I’ll have to tell her.’
She looked alarmed. ‘You can’t! She’s already
so
angry. She’ll set the hounds of hell on me when she hears this, never mind the lawyers.’
‘Zoey, I can’t
not
tell her. I assume you intend to keep the baby?’
‘You want me to
get rid
of it?’
‘No, of course not,’ he said sharply. No matter what the circumstances, or the consequences, he would never for a moment wish a child of his unborn. ‘I just mean that Harriet
will need to know sooner or later. I’d rather that it was sooner, and from me.’
She nodded. ‘I’m so sorry, Oliver. You know I didn’t plan this, don’t you? What happened in Maine – I never expected it. Any of it.’
He suppressed a sudden flare of anger at her pure
carelessness.
He didn’t think for a moment she’d got pregnant on purpose, but Harriet would never have got caught out like
this, no matter how unexpected the situation might be. Zoey’s entire life was a fucking train wreck, and now he was trapped in the middle of it with her.
Your choice,
he thought grimly.
No one forced you into bed with her.
‘It’s my fault as much as yours,’ he said wearily. ‘I never even considered the possibility. So bloody irresponsible. Like a couple of teenagers.’
‘Teenagers these days are much too savvy to get caught out unless they want to be.’ She hesitated. ‘I know this couldn’t come at a worse time. I wish there was something
else I could say.’
Tell me to go back to Harriet,
Oliver pleaded inwardly.
Tell me you
don’t
need me. Love me enough to let me go.
‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘I told you, I’m not going to leave you on your own to cope with this. I’ll support you financially, and I’ll stay in England as long as
you need me.’
‘But.’
‘But?’
‘There is one, isn’t there? A ”but” I’m not going to like.’
He fiddled with a packet of sugar, turning it end over end between his fingers.
‘Oliver, please. Are you going to
stay
stay? With me, I mean? I’m not talking about giving me money or coming along to scans. I’m not even talking about being a good
father later. I’m talking about me. Are you going to stay with
me?’
He met her gaze head-on. ‘No,’ he said steadily.
‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ Oliver said.
Harriet slid into the booth opposite him.
‘I
didn’t think I’d come.’
‘I’m glad you did. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. Thank Nell.’
‘Nell?’
‘She came to see me two days ago,’ Harriet said evenly, reaching for the laminated menu pinioned between the salt and pepper shakers. ‘Didn’t she tell you? Came to plead
your case. Well, not yours. Zoey’s.’
Her voice stuck on the name as if was covered in burrs.
‘I didn’t realize,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Manchester all week. I only got back yesterday morning.’
He watched the fact that he hadn’t been with Zoey register.
‘Well, she was very persuasive,’ Harriet said after a moment. ‘And tough. Frighteningly so, in fact.’
‘She’s your daughter,’ Oliver observed.
He signalled to the waitress. The two of them ordered a pot of tea, deferring to each other politely over the blend – they settled on English Breakfast – as if they were on a first
date. He leaned back in his chair, watching his wife as the waitress fussed with spoons and saucers. Harriet seemed the same as ever: her hair in its neat brown bob, no makeup beyond a slick of
lipsalve, the pearl earrings her mother had given her on her twenty-first. Yet she looked different. It was in her eyes. Nothing had changed; and everything had changed.
There were two types of fury, he thought: hot and cold. The latter was far more terrifying and effective.
‘I know I promised I’d come and see you yesterday afternoon, but something happened. Something I had to deal with before I could talk to you,’ he said carefully as the waitress
placed their teapot on its cast-iron stand. ‘I hope Florence wasn’t too upset I couldn’t make it. She’d promised to make sure you’d be there at three—’