River Deep

by Rowan Coleman

  Stella had found herself crying in the stock room, rocking on her heels, feeling the sting of humiliation more keenly than she ever had. Her flatmate and fellow barman André had found her and held her shoulders as she cried.

  ‘Darling, I thought you had more sense,’ he’d told her. ‘I thought you had a bit more class than to go there!’ He tossed his head slightly and Stella got the fleeting impression that he might have been there and suffered exactly the same fate that she and countless others had. ‘Anyway,’ André said, picking up her ring finger and holding her hand inches in front of her face. ‘What about him?’ Stella had begun to cry in earnest then and André had sent her home, where she’d watched TV and drunk beer into the small hours. It was sometime around three that she finally plucked Pete’s emails out of the air and read them for the first time, from the most recent bombshell back to the first one. She got on the next plane home.

  Stella knew Pete: she knew he wouldn’t back out on her unless he really had to. She was pretty sure she could keep him if she played her cards right. If she could show him how much she needed him, he wouldn’t leave her. He just wouldn’t; he’d promised he never would.

  Pete paused as he buttoned up his shirt and glanced at Stella. Each time he looked at her she seemed slightly diminished, as if she were somehow fading. His chest constricted and he felt a wave of his old empathy for her, his perpetual desire to save her. He sat down on the bed cautiously and looked at her. Perhaps if he gave it a chance, everything would come back gradually. There was no point in hurting Stella if he didn’t have to.

  ‘It’s just …’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s a lot to take in …’

  ‘I’ll say!’ Stella giggled coquettishly, and then kicked herself for trying to be flirty when he was trying to be serious. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, showing rare candour. ‘I’m nervous, Pete. You’re making me feel as if I have to be nervous …’ She picked up his hand. ‘I’ve never felt like that with you before. Do I? Do I have to feel nervous?’

  ‘No! I mean …’ Pete paused. ‘I just need to get used to the idea that you’re here, that’s all. That you really are here …’ he said lamely.

  Stella fell back on to the bed and stretched her arms above her head in a carefully arranged display of her breasts. Pete looked at her, his eyes travelling the length of her body. She was beautiful and sexy – he could still see that, still feel it in the pit of his groin. But his desire for her had somehow disentangled itself from the intensity of his emotion and reformed itself into something new and … cold. If he got back into bed with her now it would be like last night all over again but worse, because last night he’d had every reason to believe that being near her would be enough to make things better.

  Now he knew he had to give them both a little time. He had to give the jangle of feelings that had shaken him up and pulled him in all directions time to subside. In a week or so, maybe the memory of kissing Maggie would dissipate. Maybe the desire to have something that strong and that simple would wane. Perhaps when he’d got used to Stella and her tightly-packed neurosis again, things would start to get back to the way they were.

  At that thought, Pete felt a small cold stone form in the pit of his belly. There was one thing he did know – he didn’t want to go back to standing still, caught in suspended animation. If Stella was staying, she’d have to stay on his terms. Finding a way to not sleep with her, not talk to her and not tell her anything while he tried to sort his head out was the problem. Pete smiled to himself and thought of his talk to Falcon last night. He’d just have to bite the bullet. Girls needed words, and Stella probably needed more than most. He was nearly cacking himself with fear, but he’d have to talk to her, get his cards on the table. It was the only way.

  He picked up her jeans and T-shirt and tossed them on the bed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get dressed. I’ve got a bit of time. Let’s get some breakfast.’

  Stella looked at him reproachfully and then pulled her T-shirt on over her head.

  ‘I just hope,’ Pete thought to himself, ‘that I’ve worked out what my cards are by the time we get there.’

  Despite the possibility of seeing Maggie in Declan’s café, and maybe because of it, Pete walked Stella past two perfectly good places before turning her into the now familiar coffee shop. The place was near empty, with just a few business people on the way to work staring blankly at folded papers or with pens poised above lined notepads until the caffeine kicked in. Pete nodded at Declan and ordered two coffees and a giant chocolate muffin for Stella on the grounds that it seemed to be a universal panacea for most Women’s Ills, and at the very least it’d give him a chance to get his words out when Stella realised what he was trying to tell her, which would be sometime after Pete had worked it out himself.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ Stella said as he set the muffin down in front of her. ‘This place is all right, quite chic, although I was thinking as you’re working up in London, we could get a place up there. Notting Hill. Or Ladbroke Grove?’

  ‘I don’t think we’d afford that kind of rent, and anyway––’ Pete began.

  ‘But you’ve got some in the bank, haven’t you, and I bet you’d earn more really quickly, and I could … help. It’s very important to have the right address in the movie business, Pete.’

  Pete looked at Stella and wondered when she had become the expert.

  ‘Only when your name’s listed above the opening credits,’ he said. ‘And anyway, I like the house. I like Falcon and Angie. It’s nice having flatmates again. And it’s cheap. I don’t want to move.’ Pete averted his eyes as he sipped his coffee expecting Stella to go all … well, Stella.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, watching him over the rim of her own cup. ‘Oh, well, OK then. Sharing could be fun.’

  Pete looked at her hard as she took another bite of her muffin. She was being uncharacteristically deferential and demure. He steeled himself. Now was as good a time as any.

  ‘Stella, about that email I sent you,’ Pete began.

  Stella waved her hand dismissively and talked through a mouthful of muffin.

  ‘Oh, forget about it,’ she said, or at least that’s what Pete thought she said.

  He pressed on, as tempting as the suggestion was. ‘No, no, I can’t just forget about it. We have to talk about it, talk about how I felt when I wrote it. I mean, that’s why you came back, isn’t it? Because of that email.’

  Stella washed down the muffin with a swig of coffee and thought of AJ.

  ‘Partly,’ she said, her mind racing. Stella hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t expected a head-on confrontation with Pete – it wasn’t his style. He liked to leave things unsaid until they didn’t need saying any more, or at least until both of them could pretend that they didn’t. ‘It helped clarify my mind,’ she said, smiling warmly at him. ‘But that’s all I needed … Look, Pete, if you were with someone else, then don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I understand why you did it and it hurts, but … well, all I want to know is if we are going to be all right – that’s all that matters now. I know that I’m ready now, to be with you and marry you and settle. Settle down, I mean. I’m ready. The question is, Pete,’ Stella raised her chin a little defensively, ‘are you?’

  Pete didn’t speak for a moment. Those seconds of silence hit Stella’s bravado hard and shook her to the core. This was going to be harder than she’d thought.

  ‘We’ve been together now for a long time, haven’t we?’ Pete began, feeling his way along the sentence like a man on a cliff edge. ‘And it’s been a rollercoaster, hasn’t it? You’ve been like the centre of my universe for all of that time. I’ve jumped through hoops for you, Stella, walked on broken glass. Done the whole mountain high, river deep number to try and get you to see that I was the one who could make you happy. I was the one who could save you …’

  Stella nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, I know! And you’ve done it, and I see that now––’

  Pete interrupted her. ‘No, you don
’t understand. While you were away, when you still went away after I said the one thing that I really thought would make you stay, things changed. I started getting altitude sickness from climbing all those sodding mountains and it felt like I didn’t have the energy to swim another bloody river. I wanted to be swept along, Stella. I didn’t know it or believe it until it happened, but I did. And I met someone, who … well, she wants to be with someone else and so nothing happened, not really. But she made me feel differently. She made me think that maybe it doesn’t have to be a constant battle to be with someone, not if it’s the right someone. If you’re right together, you should just both want it and let it be. And I’m not sure that we both want it, Stella. I’m not sure that we’d ever have that.’

  Pete stopped speaking and waited, forcing himself to look at her.

  ‘I …’ she began.

  ‘Pete! Hi! What are you doing in this godawful town this time of the morning?’

  Louise was standing beside their table, her smile as bright and as hard-edged as the diamond at her throat. Pete stared at Louise and blinked.

  ‘Um, I, er, well, I live here,’ he said finally.

  Louise pulled up a chair and sat down, setting her own coffee between him and Stella as if she were laying down a gauntlet.

  ‘Hello,’ she said to Stella. ‘I’m Louise. Maybe you’ve heard of me?’

  Stella looked uncertainly at Pete, dumbstruck, and Pete could see her wondering if this was the other person he’d been talking about.

  Louise rattled on without waiting for further introductions. ‘It’s just that when I saw you in London with Carmen I got the impression you lived in town. Carmen does, doesn’t she?’

  Pete shifted slightly under Louise’s inexplicably close scrutiny; he had no idea where Maggie had told her she lived.

  ‘Um, yeah. In, um, Notting Hill,’ he said, pulling the place name out of the air.

  Louise pressed her lips together and smiled at Stella with more than a hint of pity. ‘So you must be the erstwhile fiancée,’ she said, and then, turning back to Pete, ‘Oh God, I hope I haven’t dropped you in it!’ She giggled, but the laugh was brittle and high.

  Pete shook his head, feeling confused and embattled. It was like Louise thought she was having an entirely different conversation from the one that was coming out of her mouth.

  ‘Are you OK, Louise?’ he said, hoping to deflect her unsettling attention from himself and to calm her down a bit. ‘You seem a bit … hyper? I mean, what are you doing in St Albans anyway?’

  Louise’s shoulders sunk a little and she spooned four large heaps of sugar into the froth of her cappuccino, watching it sink beneath the surface.

  ‘Good question, Pete.’ She huffed out a breath and took a moment. ‘Christian and I went away. Italy, the Amalfi coast. He said we needed to get away from everything here, we needed to get far away from the past. Clear the air – give ourselves a chance to be together without all the “pressure” and “confusion”. There we were sitting at dinner, you know, Pete, that night I saw you and Carmen, and I was expecting the whole “I’m sorry it’s not going to work out” speech, and he produces these tickets! I couldn’t believe it. I mean I said to him, “What about Fresh Talent 2?” It’s opening on Friday, you know. But no, he said we’d be back in time for that, most of the work was done and one of his managers here could tie up the loose ends. He said that we were more important. Can you imagine that? Christian, who has never put anything before work before, putting me first! I thought, this is it. This really means he loves me. I’ve won.’

  Pete noticed that Louise was talking exclusively to Stella now, as if his very maleness excluded him from the conversation. That and the fact that she seemed to be somehow angry with him, which, he was fairly sure, was why she was sitting here in the first place. Stella’s reply was a blank façade thinly covering whatever her reaction to everything he’d just said was. Pete wished he could make Louise go away but he didn’t know how. Stella would know how, but she seemed unable to speak.

  ‘And it was perfect, Stella, I really thought it was perfect. Perfect hotel, perfect view over the bay, we made love every bloody hour of the day. Jesus, what more could I do? So we get back this morning, early hours, and he brings me back to his flat because it’s closer. The first time ever and I thought, that proves it, he’s going to ask me to move in with him. I slept like a baby.’

  Louise paused as every muscle in her face tightened by one degree.

  ‘And then I wake up this morning and he’s sitting on the end of the bed crying. Crying! I ask him, what’s wrong? And do you know what he does? He holds out this photo of Maggie and he tells me that he’s sorry, he loves me, he really does, but he thinks he has to give it another go with Maggie. He says that he still loves her too and that he thought he’d be able to let her go once and for all but he just can’t, he says that it’s not fair on me to be in a relationship that he’s not sure about! That he can’t throw away what he and Maggie had over … me! Even if apparently I make him happier than he’s ever been. And that she, she, deserves better!’

  Pete opened and closed his mouth, at a loss what to say. It was a pretty tough break-up, after all, but in the back of his mind he knew there was something, some small detail, that was really, really important, but he couldn’t seem to focus on it. There were too many other whopping great big things to get round first. Things like his suspended conversation with Stella and the fact that Christian was definitely going back to Maggie. Pete felt a small flame of hope – that he hadn’t even known was there until this moment – blow out in his heart.

  ‘I mean, you tell me, Stella,’ Louise’s voice had risen and the few people in the café were watching her, ‘would you rather have someone because they loved you, or because they felt a sense of duty towards you? Because that’s what it is. It doesn’t make sense to me. How can it be that I make him happy, and he still wants her, the woman who practically bored him to death?’ Louise looked sharply at Pete. ‘Or maybe you could answer that question?’

  Pete shook his head. This was all getting too much. He was sorry for Louise, but he was about to leave his own life crashing against the rocks. He couldn’t take time out to counsel her.

  ‘Louise, I don’t know what to say. Sometimes people make the wrong choices,’ he said, mentally urging her to leave.

  ‘Exactly,’ Louise said, pushing her chair back so hard it toppled over. ‘Well, it isn’t over yet. I’ll show them, I’ll show them both. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d better go. Nice knowing you, Pete.’

  Louise picked up her bag and made her way out of the café, clearly irritated that the door was too heavily weighted to slam behind her.

  Pete looked at Stella, whose head was bowed.

  ‘God, I’m sorry about that. She’s sort of an acquaintance, a very angry one.’ Pete reached for Stella’s hand. ‘Are you OK?’

  Stella gave a small laugh and looked at him.

  ‘Was that the one? Was that her?’

  Pete shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t her. But that’s not important now. You said it wasn’t … Look, I’m not saying we’re over, Stella,’ he said, feeling like a coward. ‘I’m just telling you how I feel. You have a right to know how I feel.’ Stella withdrew her hand from under his. ‘I feel exhausted.’

  ‘If we’re not over then what are we?’ she said. ‘How can we be together if you say you’re tired of being in love with me?’

  Pete shook his head. ‘I’m tired of trying to make you love me, that’s what I meant.’

  ‘So you still love me, you still want me?’

  Pete stared at her, uncertain of what to say, so he tried honesty. ‘I don’t know, Stella. It’s pathetic, I know, but I think I began to realise that love can be different from how I thought it had to be. I thought it was like a kind of quest, that after I’d passed all the tests you set me you’d be mine. Now I don’t feel that. Now I think we just need to be happy to be with each other. We need to make each othe
r happy. I don’t know if we are capable of that kind of relationship …’

  Stella leaned across the table towards him. ‘But I do love you, Pete, I do. You have made me love you, I realise it now, please …’ Stella’s eyes filled with tears and Pete felt his chest tighten as he looked at her. ‘Please,’ she said again.

  Pete swallowed hard and asked her the one thing he really needed to know.

  ‘Do you, Stella? Do you love me, or are you still feeling hurt and bruised from someone or something in Australia? Do you just want to be with me because I’m the safe and secure one? Just until I bore you again and you feel good about yourself? If you can say that it’s none of those things, that you want me because being with me makes you complete, then I’m willing to give it another try. If, after all these years, you’ve finally started to really feel like that then I won’t walk out on you, I’ll stay.’

  Pete felt ashamed. He pretended to himself that the whole purpose of this talk had always been to try and work things out, but he knew that he didn’t want to work things out. He wanted to be with Maggie, or on his own. Stella’s light had suddenly blinked out of his vision. But he couldn’t just say that; he couldn’t tell it like it was. He had to walk all around the issue waiting for her to see it. Waiting for her to say it. Waiting for her to end it. He felt his body tense and a surge of sudden panic at losing something he had become accustomed to wanting for so long.