Pete realised that both Angie and Falcon were standing in the door frame of Angie’s bedroom looking on with undisguised curiosity. He stepped away from her.
‘Oh, er, Stella, this is Falcon and Angie – my housemates.’ He looked back at Stella as if to make sure that she was still really there. ‘And this,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else, ‘is Stella, my fiancée.’
There were greetings and kisses, and Stella performed her usual trick of making both Falcon and Angie love her instantly. After a while Pete realised they couldn’t go on standing in the hall for ever, so he picked up Stella’s backpack.
‘You must be shattered,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you my room.’
Stella giggled. ‘I thought you’d never ask!’ she said, winking at Angie, her hand resting lightly on his arse as she followed him up the stairs.
Pete led her into his room and, unable to quite look at her, leaned her backpack against the wardrobe.
‘I never expected you to actually come here!’ he said, half laughing, at a loss for anything else to say.
Stella’s hands snaked around his waist and she turned him to face her, resting her head against his chest.
‘Well, you know I never like to do what people expect.’ She looked up at him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. I meant to, I really did, but I just got swept away by everything. It was all so new and for a while … well, for a while there was someone, hardly anything, really, but just someone who distracted me … I think I was testing myself to see what happened. And then, well, I was up in the middle of the night because I suddenly realised how much I missed you and needed you, and I was just about to finally write to you when there it was, your email. Saying you weren’t sure how to feel? Saying that there might be someone else?’
Stella’s voice took on a reproachful edge. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I had been so stupid as to nearly lose you – you, Pete. The only one that has ever mattered. And I knew I had to come back. I knew a phone call wouldn’t do, I had to come back and be with you, Pete. To tell you face to face that I want to be with you always, always and always from now on. So I took my ticket to the airport and got it transferred on to the first flight back and I came straight here. You don’t have to worry about how to feel any more, because I’m here to make sure you’ll always know. I know we’ll have to talk about it later and make things right again, but right now you don’t have to do anything but be pleased to see me. You don’t have to do anything now but make love to me.’
Stella took a step back from him and pulled her T-shirt over her head. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Pete felt his jaw tighten and muscles tense. It would be now, he told himself – any moment now, while he was in her arms, his skin against hers, he would start to feel for her again and everything would become clear and right again. He pulled her on to the bed and, as he started kissing her, he closed his eyes.
Maggie knocked on Pete’s front door again and waited, bouncing impatiently on her toes. What with one thing and another she hadn’t been able to make it round until after nine, but she knew that someone was in. The front room lights were on and the first-floor bedroom, Pete’s room, was also lit, but so far there had been no reply. At last she saw movement behind the frosted glass of the door and smiled as Falcon opened it.
‘Oh!’ He looked surprised and then glanced up at the ceiling. ‘All right? How’s Sarah?’
Maggie blinked at him. ‘Fine. Um, is Pete in? I wanted to find out how he got on with his interview?’
Falcon nodded and shifted from one foot to the other and looked at the steel toe-caps of his boots.
‘Oh, he got it, he got the job,’ he said, looking up at her as if she should go away now. Maggie felt pleased and disappointed all at once. She’d wanted Pete to tell her so she could have an excuse to throw her arms round his neck and hug him, purely out of courtesy, of course.
‘Oh great,’ she said, starting to sound slightly irritable at Falcon’s self-assumed guardianship of the entrance. ‘Well? Can I see him then? He is in, isn’t he?’
Falcon looked at her blankly, completely at a loss for what to say.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Angie said, appearing at his side, a small, tight smile on her lips. ‘Not right now. You see, Stella came back an hour or two ago and they’re still upstairs … reuniting. I don’t think Pete would thank us if we interrupted him.’
Maggie felt her chest tighten around her ribcage, forcing out a rush of air that resulted in an involuntary ‘Oh!’ She stood on the doorstep not sure exactly how she was going to leave it in one piece. She settled on neutral cheerfulness. ‘Oh. Well, that’s great! Really great for Pete. Right, well, tell him … oh, don’t worry, just tell him well done, and – OK! Thanks, then, goodbye.’
Maggie turned on her heels and stumbled down the steps back on to the street.
‘You could have been a bit more tactful,’ Falcon said to Angie as he closed the door. ‘I think she had a bit of a thing for Pete.’
Angie shrugged, pausing in the door frame of her room.
‘Yeah, well, it’s better to have the truth, even if it is brutal, isn’t it?’ She slammed the door shut and Falcon guessed that their little chat was over. Surprisingly, he realised he actually felt better for getting it all out in the open. Pete had been right about birds and talking. Angie was inexplicably furious with him, and hurt, but at least when she’d started looking psychotic and vengeful she’d stopped looking needy and hopeful. He thought it would probably work out for the best for her in the long run, and he was glad of that because he did like her, he really did. Just not enough to do what would make her happy.
Maggie walked fast and steadily back up the Hatfield Road towards the high street. The last vestiges of the day were sinking behind the silhouetted skyline, drawing down with them the remains of the dull silvered light. And Maggie was glad of the darkness. It covered the confusion that had engulfed her the moment she’d realised what had happened to her when she wasn’t looking.
‘It’s OK,’ she told herself. ‘It’s OK. Stella’s back now and that’s OK. I don’t have to think about it any more because it’s all decided, it’s all fine. I just have to get on with things and …’
Maggie stopped as she turned into the high street and looked down the length of it as it lit itself up for the evening, fairy lights strung out along the trees, twinkling and sparkling, shop signs luminescing and humming, car headlights blinking, converging and separating in a steady rhythmic stream. She felt the turn of the season in the slight chill of the evening and smelt it in the heavy scent of the exhaust. Everyone, everything else was moving on now, and would keep on going without her if she didn’t force herself to go on too, regardless of what had happened.
‘That’s it,’ she told herself as she started walking again. ‘If Pete is back with Stella, then that’s it, it’s settled. Nothing else matters any more except getting on with things and getting The Fleur on its feet and getting on with my life. So that’s it.’
There was no point in pretending any more. It was just a shame that she’d had to go and fall for him.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Maggie sat on her time-capsule bed and looked around her in bewilderment.
Up until this moment it had been fine for her to pretend that the reason she was sad about having possibly compromised her friendship with Pete was because she liked him. Up until now they had just been two people getting to know each other, under unusual circumstances maybe, and possibly a little too quickly when it came to the whole kiss debacle; but they had just been two people for whom, given some time and a bit of peace and quiet something really special might have happened. Or at least Maggie thought that it might have, secretly, quietly to herself. Stella’s meteoric crash-landing had thrown all of that up into nothing more than a cloud of meaningless dust and detritus. There was no possibility of anything any more with Pete, and therefore, Maggie supposed, no point in pretending, to he
rself at least. She had to face up to the facts.
She wasn’t exactly sure when she had fallen for him – it hadn’t been clear cut. She hadn’t suddenly thought, ‘Oh, I really like Pete, and guess what, I don’t mind at all about Christian any more’. It had been sort of gradual and stealthy, until yesterday morning on Sarah’s sofa when she’d realised she really, really didn’t mind about Christian and Louise. She’d put that down to simple, and probably temporary, resignation, something she had felt before and which would no doubt give way to frenzied angst once again. But now Stella was back, Maggie somehow doubted that. Strangely, she felt that she still loved Christian but in an entirely different way – in a sort of past tense.
Maggie couldn’t help smiling as she looked at her knees. All that insanity over Christian, all her plans and counterplans had been rendered pointless in one single sweep, and not by her getting together with Pete but by her realising that she was never going to get together with Pete. It made an illogical kind of sense.
She should have listened to Sarah, of course. Deep down she’d known that all along. She should have waited – just as Sarah had said – for the shock and grief to subside before she went wading into the breach after Christian and everything that he represented. Now, in the cool, still, calm of the eye of her personal storm, Maggie could see it wasn’t him that she’d been desperate to cling on to, it had been the shape and order of her life that she’d been terrified of losing. She had always been terrified of change, and life without Christian had seemed like a change too great to bear.
He had been right all along, too. When he’d told her he was leaving her it was because he’d seen that there was nothing magical between them any more. They had a deep, occasionally passionate affection for each other, but it was passion kindled by memories of what had once been. Because they had stopped dead maybe a year, maybe two years before the morning Christian told her he was leaving, and the relationship had been quietly decaying for all that time. Maggie couldn’t put it down to an incident or any particular event; there was just an implicit sensation of things falling apart. They had stopped being lovers and started being friends who sometimes had sex, and who often weren’t friends. Given time, she would have come to realise it herself, but the sharp slap of realisation that she could feel something so strong for someone who was not Christian had accelerated the process.
Any chance of friendship she might have had with Christian, Maggie realised sadly, had probably been squandered along with everything else she had trampled over in her confusion. Besides, she couldn’t quite see herself inviting Christian and Louise to dinner and revealing her double identity as she invited them in.
Maggie smiled to herself again as she pictured the scene. She was glad, at least, that she had been so incompetent at being devious that she hadn’t managed to meddle her way back into a relationship with Christian. That would have been too terrible – to have woken up next to him one morning feeling the way she felt now. Thankfully, given his and Louise’s silence, it was certain that Christian had made the right choice, and Maggie half wished she could call him and congratulate him and tell him what a terrible idiot she had been. Louise was a bit intense and sort of unpredictable, but she was basically a nice girl, and maybe the right kind of girl for Christian.
‘So I don’t want Christian,’ she said softly to herself, ‘and I can’t have Pete.’
She felt amazingly calm, she realised. Almost kind of liberated. It was as if wanting someone she absolutely could not have had freed her from all the pain of anxiety and hope. She was free now just to carry around the small warm glow of her feelings without feeling obliged to risk the consequences of acting on them or worrying about them coming to some cataclysmic end. Knowing how she felt about Pete would light her up from within just enough to help her get through the next few weeks until she had left Christian behind for ever and found her future on her own. After that she’d just have to wait for the feelings to fade. A small nagging voice, Sarah’s voice, was telling her that if she had any kind of sense she’d put up some kind of a fight and make a bid to win Pete from Stella, but Maggie was tired of fighting beautiful women for men who were looking the other way, and she was tired of hurting. She just wanted some peace and quiet in her life, and simply knowing that there was someone in the world who could make her feel so much gave her a peculiar kind of joy.
She just hoped that Stella would come through for Pete and make him happy at last.
‘Anyway,’ Maggie told Morten Harket, ‘I’ve still got a lot. I’ve got The Fleur, Sheila. Sarah and the kids. They’re going to need me more than ever right now.’
Maggie thought about her conversation with Jim that morning.
‘And I’ve got a family who love me and are there for me. If I let them.’
She stood and went over to inspect her A-Ha poster. It was faded with age and torn at the edges, and the Blu-tack that attached it to the wall was hardened and shiny. It hardly seemed like any time at all since Maggie had carefully extracted this poster from the centrefold of Smash Hits magazine and pressed it carefully against her bedroom wall, smoothing down the corners with loving strokes. Between that moment and this, Maggie had been making the same outwardbound journey as far away from her family as she could get. After all her travelling, though, all her trials and tribulations, she’d ended up in the same place, looking at the same four walls, standing on the same dirty pink carpet. How was it possible then, she wondered, that she still felt so far away from them?
Maggie pushed her thumb under the knob of hardened Blutack and it pinged easily off the wall. She took the poster by the loosened corner and then pulled it down quickly, ripping the poster in half. ‘Sorry, Morten,’ she said, looking at half of the erstwhile star’s chiselled jaw as it lay on the floor. The second half of the poster followed, and then poster after poster, poster under poster, old bits of receipt and a telephone number a boy had once given her – the first ever, she thought. She screwed them all up into satisfying balls and threw them on to the growing pile of debris that had begun to cover the floor.
Hung over her bed was a noticeboard where she’d used to pin everything she thought would mean something to her for ever, like the crumbling red rose, her first ever valentine’s gift, given to her at the age of twelve by the softly rounded ginger-haired boy that sat at the back of the class. Maggie hadn’t known whether to be flattered to get anything at all, or mortified that the least popular boy in class thought he had a chance with her, so she had kept it and pretended it was from Jon Bon Jovi. There were three round-cornered photos of various school trips featuring laughing, pointing, two-finger-waving groups of kids whose names she could no longer remember and had mostly never associated with since the day she’d left school. A dried leaf crumbled to dust in her hand as she took it down, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember why that had meant so much to her.
As she peeled away the last of the meaningless mementos, Maggie felt like she was taking down her personal battlements stone by heavy stone. She was dismantling everything she had carefully constructed to separate her from her family and what she had always thought of as her constricting life in the pub, turning the time capsule that had once been her refuge, and which had seemed like her prison since she had returned to The Fleur, into a blank canvas. It wasn’t her parents who had imprisoned her here in this room with her expectations, Maggie realised; it had been her own desire to live in a small, neat, ordered space, knowing what each day would bring and then each day after that. Her parents had tried to give her the world, quite literally, and she hadn’t wanted it. Somehow she had carried her understandable childish need for comfort and familiarity into her adult life, until trying to keep it in place had nearly smothered her. It was time to let it go. What she had to do now, Maggie told herself, was broaden her horizons – reach out there into the unknown and just see what happened. OK, so she wasn’t exactly going to go to Tibet to discover herself; she wasn’t going to go anywhere soon. Far more cour
ageous, she was going to make this place work, and her life without Christian work – without all her usual securities and insecurities holding her together like hard, shiny Blu-tack. Maggie was scared, sad. But exhilarated, too.
‘All I need to do,’ she said, her voice echoing off the bare walls, ‘is take that first step.’
When Maggie had rubbed every last scrap of Blu-tack off the wallpaper, she headed down into the kitchen to find some binbags. It was late, almost midnight, she realised as she looked at the wall clock. Sheila must have called time and cashed up without bothering to call her.
She walked into the quiet dark of the empty bar and stood there for a moment listening to the rhythmic hum of the fridges. She and Jim had bought most of a good kitchen yesterday and today she’d sat down with a builder and costed gutting and renovating this room, which had hardly changed since the day she’d walked in as a child. In just under a week this part of her life was to be ripped out and broken up for kindling or sold on for scrap. Maggie pressed her hand against a table top and leaned against it. She knew it had to be done, she knew that without these changes The Fleur would sink into the depths of the past without leaving a trace, but for the first time she felt a sense of regret and she understood how her parents and even Jim must feel – as if they were losing a close and trusted friend. Maggie thought of losing Christian’s support, and then, with a sharp pang, she thought of Pete. If anyone could understand what losing something important felt like, she thought, it was her.
As she walked upstairs to the flat, she paused by the living room door. Her dad was slumped in his armchair, his head lolled back, snoring in front of the TV. A now cold cup of tea was balanced precariously on his robust stomach, falling and rising with each breath. Maggie smiled to herself and, walking over to him, gently extracted it from his pliant fingers.
‘Wha … what?’ her dad mumbled as she disturbed him.
River Deep Page 28
