by Della Galton
‘I was thinking about coming here when I was small,’ she told him truthfully. ‘My parents used to say that all of the world’s history could be viewed in these rocks. From as far back as 250 million years ago. In the geology of the land, I mean. You could literally walk back through time by looking at the different rocks and fossils.’
‘Ah,’ Phil said. ‘Well, they would know.’ A beat. ‘The most interesting fact I know about the history of the South West Coast Path is that it came about because of smugglers – or, more specifically, catching them. The coastguards had to walk close to the coves so they could look down into the bays and see what the smugglers were up to.’
‘I never knew that.’ Olivia looked at him with respect. ‘And I’ve lived here all my life. Did your parents tell you that?’
‘No.’ He flicked her a smile. ‘It’s on a brochure at the hotel.’
‘Like the fact that Richard Burton once performed in The Bluebell Cliff’s amphitheatre,’ she teased.
‘Yes, but I think the coast path fact is more likely to be true.’ He slipped his hand into hers. ‘It feels like ages since I’ve seen you properly. What’s been going on in Olivia’s world?’
It was the perfect opportunity to stop talking about the past and ask him about the future. He already knew about Ruby’s pregnancy – she’d told him on the phone the other day. She decided to bring that up now and then lead into the conversation about their future too. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, a woman in red shorts who was coming in the opposite direction flagged them down.
‘Excuse me, have you seen a little brown and white dog with a white smudge on his nose. He looks a bit like a Jack Russell?’
‘We haven’t noticed one, have we?’ Phil looked at Olivia and she shook her head.
‘No, I hope you find him.’
‘He’ll turn up – he ran off after a rabbit, I think.’ The woman thanked them cheerfully and carried on walking.
‘Where were we?’ Phil said. ‘Ah yes, work. I know you’ve been mad busy like me. But anything exciting? No news from Clarice about any intriguing auditions?’
‘If there was, you’d be the first to know,’ she said. ‘No. It’s been mostly cake making, my end.’ They had just reached a part of the track that widened out and a group of hikers were approaching, chattering and laughing. The moment to talk was gone again.
They stopped for lunch and sat in the shelter of a tufty hillock, away from the cliff top and out of the wind. Phil unpacked the rucksack and Olivia unwrapped sandwiches. They ate them with sips of fizzy water and then Phil took out two Creme Eggs and handed her one. She hadn’t noticed him slipping those into the rucksack.
‘We’d better eat them before they melt,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, definitely.’ She adored Creme Eggs. He was so thoughtful.
He also produced some brochures.
‘I found these in the information rack at The Bluebell. What do you think?’
She looked down at a picture of someone in full scuba gear, underwater, looking directly into the camera beneath a headline that said: Scuba Diving. Beginner or qualified diver – we have the course for you.
She flicked through the details. ‘It has been a while since I went diving. It might be nice to brush up on my skills.’
‘Me too. I’ll book a date. Which would you prefer? Boat or shore dive? These guys do both.’
‘It would be nice to go out on a boat, I think. We can do a shore dive by ourselves after that.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Phil said, laying back on his elbows and looking up at the sky. He gave a little sigh of contentment and shut his eyes.
Olivia’s heart was beating madly. She had to say something. The time was now. Aunt Dawn’s voice echoed in her ears – ‘You need to have a direct conversation with him.’
‘Phil,’ she began, wondering how it was possible for her throat to be so dry when she’d just swallowed a mouthful of fizzy water.
‘Yes, honey.’ Something in her voice must have alerted him, because he half sat up again and looked at her.
‘I need to talk to you about something important.’
‘Sounds serious.’ There was a glint of humour in his eyes. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘I need to know how you feel about the future.’ That sounded heavy even to her. She began again, ‘What I mean is that I know, when we met, we said we would keep things light and just have fun, but I think we’ve moved on. Or at least I think I have.’ She paused because he was smiling.
‘Me too.’ He caught her hand and planted a kiss on the palm. ‘I love being with you.’
‘I love being with you too.’ Her heart was beating very fast. ‘But I need to know how you feel about having children.’
There, she had said the words out loud and he hadn’t laughed or brushed it off. She was so relieved that he hadn’t joked away the comment that for a few seconds she didn’t register that he hadn’t said anything at all. Or that his face had become more serious.
‘Do you not want children?’ she asked gently. ‘I know it’s not something we’ve ever discussed for one reason or another, but I need to know.’
‘Are we having this conversation because of Ruby getting pregnant?’ he said, carefully.
‘Not really no.’ She plucked out a piece of scrubby grass. ‘I’m asking because it’s really important and… well, I want to know if we’re on the same page about this.’ She paused again. ‘I’ve never told you the full story about why Tom and I split up.’
‘I thought it was because you’d realised you wanted different things from life and then he went off to Spain…’ He licked his lips and looked nervous.
‘Yes.’ She remembered she had told him that. ‘He did go off to Spain. But we split up because Tom had always said that he wanted us to settle down and have a family. And then one day, a long way in to our relationship, he told me he’d changed his mind. He couldn’t see himself ever wanting a family at all.’
Phil was nodding. ‘That’s a pretty shitty thing to do.’
‘It hurt,’ she said, realising she’d been chewing the grass stalk and was now discarding it. ‘Because I do want a family.’ She met his steady gaze. ‘And I need to know if you do too, Phil.’
In that moment, Olivia felt as though the whole clifftop had stopped to listen to their conversation. The wind had dropped. The sound of the sea far below them was muted. Even the seagulls had hushed their incessant cries, waiting for Phil’s reply.
‘Hey,’ he said, leaning forward and taking her hand again. ‘Don’t look so worried. I do want kids. I’ve always hoped I’d have them.’
The world started up again. Olivia could hear a whooshing in her ears. The distant sea combined with the sound of her own thunderous heart. The relief of his answer was totally overwhelming. The sweet coconut scent of gorse was everywhere around them. She’d read somewhere once that gorse was called the kissing plant because you could kiss your sweetheart when it was in bloom and it bloomed in every season.
Slowly the thunderous sound of her heartbeat quietened and she realised that Phil’s fingers had closed around hers and that he was speaking again.
‘There is a but though, Olivia. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can actually have kids…’
19
When she looked back on that conversation later, Olivia realised she hadn’t heard much of the rest of it. She knew that he’d begun to talk about blocked tubes and abnormalities, but she hadn’t taken it in.
All this time she had worried he might not want children, but that hadn’t been the case. It wasn’t that he didn’t want them – it was that he couldn’t have them. Those two little words, ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’, that sounded so similar but were worlds apart in meaning.
She’d cut the conversation short. The sense of relief she’d felt at the brilliant news he wanted kids, followed by the shock of discovering he couldn’t have them, had rocked her. She had covered her devastation with flipp
ancy. ‘That’s a shame. Enough of that then. We’d better get cracking, hadn’t we?’
Phil had looked slightly startled, but he hadn’t argued and they’d both scrambled to their feet. He’d repacked the rucksack with the remains of their picnic and the diving brochures and for a long while they’d walked in silence, each of them alone with their thoughts.
Suddenly, all of Phil’s throwaway lines made sense and she realised that the reason they hadn’t ever had this discussion wasn’t just because she’d been afraid to broach the subject but because he had been afraid of discussing it, too.
She remembered that cornered rat look on his face when they’d been drunk on tequila, just after she’d asked him if he’d wanted a family. Then, later on at Ruby’s, when he’d said, noncommittally, that he’d always hoped he’d have a couple of kids, one day. She had known on some level that he wasn’t being straight with her then. She just hadn’t realised why.
What was the point in hoping for a family if you knew you couldn’t have one?
She told Ruby about it on the phone a few days later. She didn’t mean to, but it just came up in conversation. This wasn’t surprising as it was the only thing in Olivia’s head. It kept repeating like a rhyming refrain – ‘I can’t have kids, can’t have kids, can’t have kids.’
‘Why would he say he wanted them if he couldn’t have them, Rubes?’
‘Maybe he meant he could hook up with a woman who had them already,’ Ruby said, which wasn’t very tactful. ‘Get a ready-made family.’
Olivia forgave her the lack of diplomacy because Ruby’s head was swimming in pregnancy hormones.
Aunt Dawn had a different take on it. ‘If he wants to have them, and it sounds as though he might, then there’s still hope. You can adopt, or maybe some medical intervention would help.’
Olivia had got stuck on the word adopt. With it, every one of her dreams of holding her own gorgeously warm, newborn baby in her arms fled away into the ether and she’d felt swamped with despair.
Medical intervention. That was possible though. She wanted to talk to Phil about it – would he mind? Would he be up for being messed about with? She didn’t know much about fertility treatment, but Phil was so proud that she was sure he’d hate it – even if it did lead to them having a family.
With hindsight, the best time to have talked about it would have been straight away while they were out on the coast path. Or, at the very latest, a day or two after, when they were both cool and calm and rational, but they hadn’t done either. This was partly for practical reasons. Phil had been given some more voiceover work and had been away for a few days. Then, when he’d come back, Olivia had been swamped with work for new orders.
They had met a few times in the couple of weeks after, but neither of them had mentioned that clifftop conversation. His inability to have children was the elephant in the room. It was there every time they met, but it wasn’t discussed. She didn’t bring it up because she didn’t know how to do it diplomatically and he didn’t bring it up, she guessed, for the same reasons.
It was now mid-May. The month of Morris dancing, maybugs and the council cutting back the overgrown verges. Work seemed to be the only thing that helped stop her thinking. Making cakes and icing them. Olivia welcomed the total, focused concentration that it took. She immersed herself in her hot little kitchen, which filled up with the scents of spiced fruit, cinnamon and nutmeg, and the sweetness of vanilla, and lemon, sponges.
In between work, she went on long runs, pounding the pavement and the coast path by the sea, letting the soundtrack of nature soothe her whirling thoughts. There was no acting work on the horizon. None of her theatre friends had been in touch lately. She hadn’t heard from Clarice either – not even a sniff of an audition, although she had phoned her once on the pretext of asking if Clarice thought she should update her CV.
‘Not unless you’ve got anything substantially new to put on it, no,’ Clarice had said in her brusque kindly fashion. ‘There’s a lot of waiting around in this business. If something comes up, you’ll be the first to hear.’
Which Olivia took to mean, ‘Stop pestering me. I’ll call you if I hear of any jobs for almost-past-their-sell-by date actresses.’
Then something very odd happened. She had a text from Tom.
He sent it late one evening and she didn’t see it until the next day because she’d had an early night.
Hey, Olivia, you’ve been in my thoughts. I’m back from Spain. I wondered if I could pop by and see you? Tom.
When she did finally see it, she had to read it twice. Now that was a blast from the past she hadn’t expected. Their parting had been acrimonious and very final and their last communication over a year ago.
For one crazy second, she wondered if she knew another Tom, other than her ex. He must have changed his number because it wasn’t the one she’d had on her phone. Then she remembered she’d blocked him.
Her hands sweated and for a few seconds her stomach swirled with anxiety. She might know another Tom, but it was highly unlikely that she knew another one who’d been in Spain. It had to be her ex and his timing was terrible. She felt way too vulnerable. Seeing him – or even speaking to him – was the very last thing she needed right now. She deleted it.
Twenty-four hours later, however, she got another message from him.
How about it, Olivia? A drink for old times’ sake.
She deleted that text too. She had no desire whatsoever to see Tom.
Fortunately, she got distracted because she had a voicemail message from Eric.
‘Hello, doll.’ Eric was the only person she’d ever met who’d called her ‘doll’. ‘I’ve got something I want to talk to you about. When can we discuss? I—’
He might have said something else, but he’d taken so long to get that bit out in his slightly wheezy, breathless voice that the time had run out on the voicemail message and he’d been cut off.
Olivia phoned him back. It rang for ages before he answered and she pictured him struggling along the hall on his Zimmer frame.
‘How are you?’ she asked when he’d got his breath back enough for a conversation.
‘Never better, doll. Thanks for asking.’
‘I’m very glad to hear that,’ she said, pleased, because he sounded so chirpy.
‘I need another one of your gorgeous cakes.’
‘I assumed it wasn’t just a social call.’
‘It would be – if I was twenty years younger.’
‘Thirty,’ she reminded him and he chuckled. ‘So, is it for another birthday?’ She did some calculations in her head, remembering the baked bean cans, and wondered how little she could get away with charging him. Maybe she could say she had some kind of promotion going on. In fact, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Doing discounts for regular customers was something she’d been toying with for a while.
‘It’s no one’s birthday. It’s much more exciting than that. Have a guess.’
‘Your granddaughter’s getting engaged?’
‘Nope. You can have another guess – on the house.’
‘You’re getting in early to beat the Christmas rush?’ She hoped he wasn’t going to say that one of his offspring was having a baby or getting one christened. She didn’t think she could deal with making any more pink booties or teddy bears at the moment.
‘It’s not for Christmas. That’s enough guesses. I’ll tell you.’ He paused. She wasn’t sure if it was for dramatic effect or because he needed to catch his breath. ‘I’m getting married.’
‘Um. Wow.’ She hadn’t seen that one coming. ‘Well. Congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’ He stopped for a moment. ‘We haven’t been courting very long. But Brenda says at our age, you can’t hang about.’
‘No. I guess you can’t.’
‘She calls me her toy boy.’
‘There’s an age difference then?’
‘She’s eighty-one and a half.’ He chuckled again and it was so infectious that Oli
via laughed with him. Not least because it had always amused her that only the very young and the very old referred to ages that were less than a full year.
‘So when is the happy event going to take place and what kind of cake would you like me to make for you? Aside from an amazing one, I mean. Were you thinking fruit cake or sponge?’
‘Not a hundred per cent sure on that. But we’re getting hitched on the twelfth of June. Is that too short notice?’
Olivia gulped. That was less than a month away. ‘I’ll squeeze you in,’ she said, trying not to think of her jam-packed order book. Maybe it was just as well Clarice didn’t have any work for her.
‘I was hoping you might tootle on over for a proper chat with us both.’
‘I’d be delighted,’ Olivia said truthfully. ‘Where does your fiancée live? And what’s her name?’
‘It’s Brenda and she lives upstairs. Flat 4. She’s niftier on her feet than I am.’ More heavy breathing. ‘So she can pop down anytime.’
‘I’ll get my diary.’
They fixed a date for Olivia’s visit for late the following afternoon.
As she drove to the sheltered housing block for four thirty, Olivia practised the speech she’d prepared.
‘At the moment, I’m doing a regular customer discount.’ Or maybe, ‘You’re in luck. I’m doing a customer promotion. Half-price, how does that sound?’
Would he go for that? Eric may be old and doddery, but he was as sharp as a tack. He also had his pride and he’d never go for a deal if he knew she’d created it especially for him. He’d been a market trader when he was younger – she imagined he’d been very good at it, but it wasn’t the kind of job that had a pension or sick pay attached. He’d told her once that he was proud of doing what his father, and grandfather, had done before him, even if it had meant working all hours outside in the rain and the cold, which had no doubt hastened the crippling arthritis that plagued him.
