‘I have to go, Stella. I don’t know what will happen, but I have to go.’
Stella swallowed, and shrugged.
‘You’re right, you know, about us,’ she said, her tight voice softening a little. ‘I do know that, Pete, I just didn’t want to face it. Someone hurt me while I was away.’ Stella gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘Someone totally stupid and wrong, but he hurt me anyway, I let him get to me. And after that I just wanted to be with you until you made me feel better about myself again. But you didn’t, you didn’t even seem to really be there. I thought if I tried really hard to make you see how much I needed you … but you just didn’t.’
Stella looked shell-shocked, but calmer at last.
‘I suppose … I have to try and get along without you now.’ She pushed her mug away from her. ‘I suppose I’d better fix myself.’ She pulled herself up in her seat. ‘I’ll phone Mum, tell her I’m coming home today,’ she said.
Pete reached out and took her hand.
‘You don’t have to just rush off. You could stay for a bit and I could help you get sorted, and …’
Stella shook her head. ‘And we could still be friends? I don’t think so, Pete. I think I need to go now, while I can. I’ll be all right, you know. Mum’ll look after me, and before you know it I’ll be back largeing it in the Leeds scene, lunching at Harvey Nicks, crowds of men following me around. You wait, it won’t take long.’
‘I’m sure it won’t,’ Pete said.
‘There’s one more thing,’ Stella said, holding up her left hand. ‘The ring. Can I keep it? I’ll need some cash, you see, to get me started again, and, well, you could call it a sort of settlement. Is that OK?’
Pete looked at the ring illuminating the weak afternoon light, and realised that it meant nothing to him now; it was just a cold, hard, beautiful commodity.
‘Of course you can keep it,’ he said. ‘I bought it for you.’
Stella smiled weakly, pulling her sleeves over her knuckles.
‘I’ll make some calls and then pack. I’ll be gone in an hour, all right? Probably best if you go out or something. I don’t want to say goodbye to you again because it … might be too hard. So just go out, OK?’
Pete looked at her, wondering what his life would be like without her.
‘You’ll always be such a big part of me, Stella,’ he began.
‘Don’t, Pete.’ Stella stopped him. ‘Don’t try and make it all right between us. It won’t be, not now, maybe not ever. So please just don’t.’
Pete nodded, wishing there was some other way for this to happen.
‘Will you call me, though, when you get to Leeds, let me know you’re all right?’ Pete asked her.
Stella shook her head. ‘No, I won’t. I’m not your responsibility any more, Pete. And besides, I won’t get to Leeds until this evening.’
She raised her chin a little.
‘And you’ll already be out by then.’
Maggie only let her breath out again about five or ten seconds after Pete had left the shop.
‘Oh no,’ she said, unable to comprehend exactly how excruciatingly difficult the moment had been, only knowing that it had epic proportions. ‘Oh no no no no no!’
Louise looked somewhat bemused by all the fuss and shrugged.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I thought it went really well, myself. You knocked him dead!’
‘Oh no,’ Maggie said again for the want of anything better. ‘Oh no no no …’
‘Maggie! Enough with the “oh no’s”! We all get the picture, OK?’
Maggie sat on the small seat in the changing cubicle and pulled off the shoes, holding them as if at any moment she might convert their spike heels into lethal weapons. Looking up at Louise, she attempted to find something else to say but found that her entire vocabulary had been boiled down to those two words. So she didn’t say anything.
‘But you’re still going to buy the dress and shoes, right? Aren’t you?’ Louise said somewhat hopefully, leaning against the door of the cubicle and tipping her head to one side.
At last Maggie found the power of speech.
‘Are you mad!’ she screeched before she could stop herself, causing the woman in the next cubicle to stop talking on her mobile and hurry rapidly out of it. ‘I looked terrible in it, cheap and terrible, and … he saw me. Oh no!’
Louise gave her own reflection an anxious look and took the dangerous-looking shoes out of Maggie’s hands, handing them to the assistant, who had been hovering a few feet away for the last minute or so.
‘You can take these back for now,’ she said with an abrupt smile before turning back to Maggie. She was surprised to find that she was starting to feel a bit sorry for her. ‘He could hardly take his eyes off you!’ Louise told her as she began to wriggle out of the dress.
‘He couldn’t look at me, you mean,’ Maggie said through the thin, clingy layer of latex-cotton mix that currently shrouded her head. Maggie yanked the dress off her head, leaving her hair standing on end with static electricity. She glowered at Louise, who she held completely responsible for the entire spectacle. ‘He looked everywhere but at me!’
‘Same thing!’ Louise seemed genuinely mystified by Maggie’s distress.
‘Same thing my arse,’ Maggie said as she quickly redressed.
Louise wondered if she should mention she’d buttoned her shirt up wrong, and then decided that now wasn’t the time.
‘He looked as if the worst possible thing that could ever happen to him in the entire known universe had just happened – and it was me!’
Louise made a gesture that is interpreted the world over as ‘Duh!’
‘Yes!’ she said, ‘you’re right, but it wasn’t seeing you, it was seeing you with his whey-faced misery of a girlfriend––’
‘Fiancée!’
‘OK, whey-faced misery of a fiancée in tow!’ Louise sighed through tight lips. ‘No wonder you can’t keep a man, Maggie. You can’t see what’s going on right in front of your face!’
Maggie straightened up abruptly with only one boot zipped up and took a step nearer to Louise, sincerely wishing she still had hold of one of the spike-heeled shoes.
‘OK Louise, that’s enough,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I’ve just about taken as much as I can take today, and I’m not taking any more. I’ve put up with the bitchy comments – I thought maybe I deserved them – but you’re no angel yourself, and I thought we were trying to get along with our lives. If you really want to go over the fact once again that it was you who stole my boyfriend right out from under my nose and started this whole thing, then fine, let’s do it, right here, right now.’
Louise held up the palm of her hand.
‘No!’ she said quickly. ‘No. Look, I’m sorry. I just … well, it is sort of true in a way. I didn’t actually mean it to come out sounding so nasty, but I take your point. I’ll try and, you know, be properly nice to you.’
Maggie literally backed down off her tiptoes and huffed at Louise’s acquiescence.
‘Either way, he won’t come tonight. She won’t let him, or he won’t want to, and maybe it’s for the best. I was stupidly building my hopes, but it’s better to know now and just get on with the whole most-important-night-of-my-professional-career-to-date thing. It’s Sarah’s fault. I blame her fully.’
Louise picked the discarded dress up off the floor and returned it to its hanger, glad to be off the top of Maggie’s hit list.
‘So you’re definitely sure you’re not buying this dress?’ she asked.
Maggie looked at her closely. ‘Definitely sure,’ she said. ‘It’s just not me. It’s too tight, it’s too red, it’s too much.’
Louise nodded and pursed her lips in thought before saying, ‘I’m sorry, Maggie.’
Maggie raised her eyebrows. ‘What for?’ she said.
‘For trying to get you to buy a dress that makes you look like a hooker.’ Louise held out her hand. ‘There was a little bit of me that thought you might b
e after Christian, still, with all your niceness and your policy of openness, and it’s wrong, but I thought, well, I know how Christian hates tarty women …’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Maggie said, looking pointedly at Louise’s cleavage.
‘OK, I deserved that. But now, seeing you … I can see there’s no way you’d go after him now. So I’m sorry, really honestly sorry. Let’s call it a proper truce this time. Can we start again?’
Maggie took her hand. ‘Again again?’ she said with half a smile.
‘Well, if a thing’s worth doing …’ Louise said with a shrug.
‘Come on,’ Maggie said to her. ‘We’ve been gone nearly an hour. Time’s up.’
‘But what are you going to wear?’ Louise asked her.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got millions of clothes. It just doesn’t seem that important any more.’
Pete thought he’d found approximately the same piece of ground that he’d lain on with Maggie all those weeks ago, looking at stars and talking about Stella. It was soggy and damp now, and run through with deep scars of mud where dogs and children had skidded chasing footballs or autumn leaves. Looking up at the same sky, now covered with densely woven cloud leaning low above the horizon, Pete felt that if he could only stretch up high enough he’d be able to touch them, to part the sky and see those stars again.
When he’d been here before with Maggie, there had been not a shadow of doubt in his mind about how he felt for Stella, maybe because her influence over him had burnt so brightly within him that it had chased out any possibility of shadows until finally she was too far away to be able to reach him. In just a short space of time, everything he had imagined he felt, the frailly built construct of her image, had fallen into tiny pieces at his feet. Pete sat down on the muddy grass and, drawing his knees up, dropped his head into his hands.
He was angry with Stella, angry that she had squandered every single chance they had had until there was nothing left. And angry with himself for not seeing a year or two or three ago that there would never be enough chances for them, that ‘for ever’ wouldn’t have been long enough for them to get it right. And he felt sad, incredibly sad. Part of him couldn’t help but feel that he had failed her. The first time he had set eyes on her laughing in the moonlight, he’d promised himself that he would be the one to save her, and he had failed.
Large drops of rain began to hit his cold hands and his bare head, and because although he wanted this to happen, he wished it didn’t have to hurt anyone, and because the end of this part of his life, though necessary was so painful, Pete began to cry until his tears were lost in the pouring rain.
Chapter Thirty-four
Maggie held her breath and looked around at the newly refurbished bar of The Fleur. It shone and glittered underneath the spot lighting, and shimmered a little, like a mirage. Except that it wasn’t a mirage, it was real. It had happened, and Maggie had made it happen. Oh, and Sheila, and Jim, and her mum and dad a bit, and then Christian at the last minute, and ever so slightly Louise. Not to mention Keisha and CMS Commercial Builders and Fitters. But mainly it had been Maggie. It had been Maggie’s vision and her ideas, and somehow, though immersed in the mess of her personal life, she had still managed to pull it all together.
‘Just imagine,’ Maggie thought, raising her eyebrows as the idea occurred to her, ‘what I could have done if I hadn’t just been chucked by my long-term boyfriend and then immediately spurned by the first other man I met?’ Then Maggie realised that if that had been the case, she’d still be sharing a flat with Christian, still doing sex in the same three positions and still filling invoices, and would never even have had the chance to be spurned by Pete. For a while now, Maggie had accepted with good grace the changes in her life, even embraced them – but it was only at this moment, standing on the brink of a new age for The Fleur, that she could say that Christian leaving her was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
It had woken her up and shaken a new kind of drive and confidence into her that she thought she had lost, that she’d actually forgotten she’d ever had. Maggie smiled and breathed in, puffing out her chest with pride.
‘Are you actually going to say anything, Maggie? Or are you going to stand there gawping like a fish out of water while we stand around like lemons? I’m gasping for a drink!’
Maggie jumped and looked at Sarah, who was standing with crossed arms a few feet in front of her. Oh yes, she was supposed to be making a little speech before they opened the doors on the launch party guests.
‘Er, right. Yes, sorry.’ Maggie looked around her at everyone who stood in the bar. Her mum and dad stood just to her right, her dad’s hand on her mum’s shoulder. Jim stood to her left, leaning against the new bar with the same kind of new confidence that Maggie thought she’d discovered in herself. Sarah had come early to do her hair, with Marcus, both of them laughing like a couple of kids the moment they’d got here. Keisha stood by the kitchen doors, her arms crossed across her whites like a gourmet gangsta rapper. Sheila was there, of course, in her best finery, and finally Christian and Louise, dressed in red, looking a million times better than Maggie ever would have.
‘Um, I just wanted to say that, well, everyone in this room has been so important in helping us get The Fleur back off the ground. These last few weeks have had their ups … and downs.’ Maggie tried hard not to look at Christian but did anyway. ‘If someone had told me when this all began that all of the people that are standing in this room right now would be here, and what’s more would be my very dear friends, I wouldn’t have believed them!’ Maggie caught the eye of one of the Fresh Talent waiters she’d borrowed for the evening. ‘Um, except for the waiters, that is, because I don’t really know them. I’m sure they’re super, but anyway …’
Sarah rolled her eyes and performed a theatrical yawn at Marcus as she leaned back against his chest.
‘But anyway,’ Maggie scowled at Sarah, ‘none of this could have happened without all of you. Most especially Sheila. Sheila, my family has known you for most of our lives, and during that time you’ve never stopped surprising us! Stumping up the cash for The Fleur was the biggest surprise of all, and I really hope you’re pleased with your investment.’
Sheila, who was sitting on the other side of the bar for once, took a long drag on her cigarette, which she had inserted into a long black holder for the occasion.
‘Ain’t nothing, Mag,’ she said, with a very pleased smile, through a curl of smoke, shrugging so that the sequins on her black beaded top glittered.
Maggie shook her head. ‘No, it is something, Sheila.’ Maggie glanced round at her family. ‘It’s everything, and I want you to know that we love you, Mum, Dad, Jim – all of us – love you very much.’
Maggie smiled and glanced around the room.
‘Talking of family, a lot of positive things have come out of my return to The Fleur, a lot. But the main thing is that I’ve made some really good new friends, friends I think I’ll just get closer and closer to as time goes on. I got to make friends with my family again after a very long time, and … I’m sorry if that sounds soppy, Sarah, but that’s how I feel.’ Maggie put her arms as far around her family as they would go. ‘Mum, Dad, Jim, I’m so glad that I’m home again.’
‘Hip! Hip!’ Christian started the cheer and everyone else joined in with the hoorays as best they were able to without laughing.
‘Right then,’ Maggie said, breaking free from the embrace. ‘We’re open for business!’
‘You should drink more,’ Sarah said, leaning closer to Maggie so that she could be heard over the hum of the crowd. ‘If you drank more and worried less, you’d have a better time!’
Maggie shook her head at her ever so slightly tipsy friend.
‘That’s easy for you to say. You and Marcus stuck in traffic is your idea of having fun these days. Anyway, this isn’t about having fun, it’s about making sure everyone else is having fun.’ Maggie looked anxiously around her. ‘Do yo
u think I should go and say hello to that journalist, or do you think I should just leave her to it?’
Sarah glanced over at the woman who was seriously flirting with Declan.
‘I think she’d kill you if you went over there. She’s scored!’ Sarah leaned her elbows back on the bar. ‘Maggie, for God’s sake, relax will you? Everything’s going really well. The food’s great, the atmosphere’s fantastic, the champagne’s flowing. Everyone turned up! I don’t know what you’re worried about.’
Maggie took in the scene around her. It was true – everyone was having a good time. In fact, in one corner a few people had started almost dancing to the Latin American music Maggie had chosen as background.
‘Not quite everyone came,’ Maggie said, sighing under her breath. ‘Not Falcon or Angie or … anyone.’
‘What?’ Sarah raised her voice and cupped her hand to her ear.
‘I said, what the hell, I’ll have another drink!’ Maggie called back and, taking the champagne that Sarah handed her, drank deeply, tipping her head back. When she returned her chin to its appropriate position, her head was swimming a little, so for a moment she thought she was seeing things. She blinked again and then once more for luck. No, she wasn’t hallucinating. It really was Pete standing in front of her.
‘Have you got something in your eye?’ he said. ‘You seem to be blinking a lot.’
Maggie shook her head, dumbstruck, and looked at the space where Sarah had been standing. She’d made herself very scarce indeed in double-quick time. Maggie forced the muscles in her throat to work.
‘Pete, gosh,’ she said, wondering when the last time was – if ever – that she had used the word ‘gosh’. ‘I didn’t expect you to come …’
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Pete said anxiously.
‘No! No, no. Not at all. I’m … glad … you’re here.’ Maggie licked her suddenly dry lips and sipped her drink. ‘Um, do you want one? A glass of champagne, I mean?’ she asked him.
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