Helene’s eyes widened. “You’re a demon baker?”
He laughed. “I run a cafe!”
Helene poured out her tea and helped herself to a cupcake. She may as well start eating for two now, she decided, biting into the pink and white icing. She wasn’t going to have to worry about her figure for a while. Maybe never. Maybe she’d just grow fat and stay that way – it would be one less thing to worry about.
“So. You wanted to pick my brain,” Matt reminded her.
“Yes, I did,” Helene sighed. “It’s hard to know where to begin, actually.”
“Pick a place – any place,” Matt suggested. He folded his arms and waited.
And so she did. And once she’d started talking, Helene found she couldn’t stop. The whole story came bubbling out, about how for so many years she had deluded herself into believing that Richard was going to leave his wife for her; how some outsider had swiped It’s My Show from under her nose; how Jack McCabe had taken over Atlantic 1 FM; and how Richard hadn’t bothered to tell her that Jack was actually his brother-in-law. How for a long time she had been terrified about how she was going to cope with a baby on her own. The only bit she left out was Richard’s suggestion that she have a termination because, almost as soon as he had the words out, Helene had pushed them to the back of her mind and refused to think about them again.
“Paulina’s advice is that I concentrate on making Chris Conroy – he’s the one who won the contest – into a star.” Helene finished the last crumbs of her cake.
“And what do you think?” Matt enquired.
Helene rummaged in her bag and pulled out the travel ticket and Richard’s cheque and handed them to Matt.
His eyes widened. “Generous guy!”
“Rich guy. Rich, guilty guy. It was his birthday present to me. His brilliant idea was that I could go travelling – alone – until he’d got his settlement out of Atlantic 1 FM. But of course I went and got pregnant and ruined his big plan. Anyone would think I had done it on my own.” Helene said bitterly.
“So what are you going to do?” Matt asked.
“At the time I dismissed the idea of travelling out of hand because of the baby. But then I got to thinking – well, you must meet lots of people who travel with babies, right?”
“All the time,” Matt confirmed. “You just need to take your circumstances into account when you’re deciding where to go.”
“I have a sister in New Zealand. She settled there with her family years ago. I’ve never been.”
“Well, you’ll love New Zealand!” Enthusiasm made Matt sound like a small boy. “And you won’t have any problem at all travelling there with a baby. When do you want to go?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know if I should wait and have the baby first – I don’t know what to do about anything really.”
“Sure, there’s no rush. I can give you all the advice you need over the next couple of weeks. Are you going to stay on at work in the meantime?”
“Don’t know about that either,” Helene mumbled. “My future isn’t there any more. But I can’t seem to get around to drafting my resignation letter either.” She shivered just thinking about it.
Matt looked at her speculatively. “I could do with a hand in the cafe. On a strictly casual basis. It might be something you’d consider.”
“Like ... wait tables?” Helene couldn’t hide her astonishment.
Matt laughed at her expression. “It’s not like being down the mines! It can be quite pleasant waiting on people. You get to meet the most interesting characters.” His eyes met hers. “Like you, for instance.”
Helene blushed. Was Matt hitting on her? Even after she’d just told him she was pregnant? But before she could think of a reply, he was back talking about work again. “I was thinking more about someone to work on strategies to get more out of the cafe. That’s your forte isn’t it – new ideas?”
“Broadcasting is all about new ideas,” she conceded. “Or old ideas presented in a new way.” In fact, she could think of lots of ways to improve the Travel Cafe now, right off the top of her head. Matt could run a competition for the most interesting itinerary, and right away you’d get lots of fascinating stories about people’s journeys and why they were doing them. With the right sort of publicity, she could really put the Travel Cafe on the national map.
“It’s just an idea. Think about it,” Matt said easily.
“I will ... and thanks.” Helene stuffed the cheque back in her bag thoughtfully. Matt made her feel as if her life may not be in so much of a cul-de-sac after all. “I’d better be getting back.”
“Keep in touch now,” Matt leaned forward to help her off the sofa, and as she looked at his hand on her arm, Helene wondered again if Matt could be attracted to her? But of course it was her treacherous hormones, making mischief again. Tricking her into finding any man attractive, a biological urge to find someone to share the rearing of her offspring with.
Still, as she got into her car to drive home, she couldn’t help smiling. It felt good that Matt had been there for her today, if only as a friend. Especially as a friend. He hadn’t even brought up the fact that she had never got him the radio gig she’d promised him. By the time she pulled up outside her apartment block she felt more at peace with herself than she’d been in months. Tonight, she decided, she was going to have a long, hot bath and draft her letter of resignation.
She was turning her key in the lock when someone pushed out of the shadows and put his hand on her shoulder. She swung around to face the intruder, her pulse racing.
“My key wouldn’t work!” Richard shot her an accusing look.
“You’ve just put the heart crossways in me!” Helene snapped. “And your key doesn’t work because I changed the locks.” She opened the door and turned back to face him, intending to keep him at the door, but he was too quick for her. He stepped in after her, standing so close to her in the tiny hallway that for a moment she found herself transported back to a time when she and Richard had been lovers and the best of friends.
Or so she’d thought. She pulled away from him and went into the kitchen.
“These are for you.” He handed a bouquet of flowers to her. “I’m sorry,” he added.
“Why? Because I changed the locks?” She took the flowers and dumped them on the table.
“You need to put them in water, to keep them fresh,” Richard advised.
Helene laughed mirthlessly. “So now you’re concerned about the well-being of a bunch of flowers but you haven’t asked about your unborn baby?”
“Don’t be like that,” he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
Helene snatched up an empty vase and half-filled it. She shoved the flowers, cellophane wrapping and all, into it and turned back to Richard, flattening the small of her back against the table to create a distance between them.
“Ollie is sacked, apparently.”
“I heard. But in fairness, he had it coming.” Richard looked at her gravely. “What about you?”
“I am about to write my resignation letter.”
He frowned. “I thought you’d want to keep your job at all costs now. With the er ... pregnancy,” he added.
“Well, I don’t.” Helene thought she saw a look of relief pass over his features.
“But are you sure you’re doing the right thing? In resigning?”
“No, I’m not. But my job at Atlantic would take way too much energy when I’m a single mother,” she said pointedly.
“You’d get maternity leave,” he reminded her.
“Yes I would. If I spend the next six months of my life faking an interest in the fame and fortunes of Chris Conroy. And trying to forget that Jack McCabe knows I was the third person in his sister’s marriage. I don’t have the stomach for it frankly. I couldn’t care less what happens at Atlantic now.” She reached out and began to absent-mindedly shred one of the flowers in the bouquet, peeling away the delicate pink rose petals one by one. “Richard, why a
re you here?”
“I wanted to explain things to you. I wrote that letter to you before I knew you were pregnant. And I know I shouldn’t have left it there, the night of your birthday. Not once I knew about the baby. But I was shell-shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Helene stayed silent, for once resisting the urge to tell him not to worry, that everything would be all right.
“Of course you must have been pretty shocked too,” he continued after a while. “What with the pregnancy and the pressures at work ...”
“And getting dumped by you,” she raised her eyes to his.
Richard looked away. “Yes. And that. And not winning the contest. I’m sorry about that. I know how much you wanted it.”
“There’re lot of things I wanted that I didn’t get,” Helene said flatly. “But now that I am going to be a single mother, I need a job that’s a little less challenging than trying to tune in to the psyche of the nation, or whatever rubbish Paulina had on the press release.
“What sort of a job?” Richard asked.
“Working in a coffee shop, apparently.” She smiled at the thought of it.
“A coffee shop? Are you mad?” Richard was looking at her with astonishment. “You’re an executive editor! Look, you know I will support you and the baby financially. In fact, that’s why I’m here. I’ve got my financial settlement from the station! It all went through a lot earlier than I expected. “
“Well, that’s great for you. And of course you can support the baby,” Helene agreed readily. God knows the child would need all the help it could get, with only her as a parent. “But you don’t owe me anything. I knew the score when we got involved.”
“I’ve told you,” Richard said peevishly, “I wasn’t thinking straight when you told me you were pregnant. There was the stress of the takeover and Louisa being extra-needy and ...”
“It’s in the past, Richard,” Helene interrupted him.
“But how can it be in the past when you’re expecting my baby?”
“Oh, it’s your baby now. The baby you wanted terminated?” There, she’d finally said the words. Her stomach churned at the sound of them.
“Don’t,” he begged. “I’ve had time to think things over. And well – I still want us to be together.”
“You do?” Treacherous hope flared in Helene. She looked at him seriously. “Have you brought your suitcase?”
“No. I mean, obviously, I can’t leave Louisa at this precise moment because ... well, I’m sure you don’t care why at this stage. But by the time the baby is born ...”
“You’ll get around to it then.” Helene finished his sentence for him. “Or maybe it will be by the time the first birthday rolls around? Or the first day at school, perhaps? Or maybe university?”
“You don’t seem like yourself, Helene,” he said huffily.
“Things have changed, Richard,” she said wearily. “I’ve changed. Going back to the way we were, with you pitching up whenever you feel like it is not enough any more. Not when I have a baby to consider. And to be honest, it never was enough. You already have a family, Richard – something I should have considered much, much earlier.”
“But having me around part-time has to be better than nothing, surely? It won’t be easy on your own,” Richard warned.
She looked at him. He hadn’t been there for her when she was in trouble, and something had changed in her then, something fundamental. No matter what Richard said now, Helene knew she would never trust him again.
“I think the term ‘too little, too late’ may have been invented for situations like this,” she said sadly.
“But how will you cope?” he demanded. “It’s not as if you have family close by to help. Please, Helene. Think about it.”
“I have thought about it. As soon as the baby is born, I’m going abroad – to New Zealand. To my sister.” There. Another decision made. She’d have the baby here, at home. And then, as soon as it was old enough, she’d set off on her travels.
“New Zealand?” He couldn’t disguise his shock. “But it’s so far away!”
She shrugged. “I need to find out what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I think it would be easier for me to do that if I wasn’t around here. Around you. The further away the better really.”
“How long will you stay?”
“I’m not sure. Long enough.”
“I could come and visit you, you and the baby?” His eyes were bright with hope.
And if Helene had ever wanted revenge on Richard, she had it right then – as she saw the hope fading when she explained she wouldn’t be leaving him a forwarding address.
“I’ll give you details of a bank account where you can deposit money for the baby. But that’s all. I don’t want any more contact with you. Not for a long time.”
He looked baffled then and so utterly defeated that for a few, mad seconds Helene almost changed her mind. Because whatever had happened between them, she knew that part of her would always love him. But she needed her energy for other things now, she reminded herself. She folded her hands protectively over the stomach. For someone else. She walked over to Richard, leaned up and kissed him softly on the mouth.
“Goodbye, Richard.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The sound of the phone jangling cut through Tess’s thoughts. She looked up warily. After their showdown in the Travel Cafe, Chris had taken to phoning her daily, wondering when she was coming back to work. Even after she’d convinced him that she was definitely finished with Atlantic, he would still ring at all hours of the day and night, looking for advice about his new role.
In desperation she had switched her phone off and spent a week staring at the walls, feeling nine kinds of stupid for getting herself into such a mess in the first place. She felt mortified when she thought back to all the mad stuff Chris had talked her into. Delivering an elevator speech to Jack McCabe. Thinking of herself as Cinema Tess. It had all seemed a bit zany at the time, a bit brave, actually. But in retrospect it just seemed as if an alien had taken over her body, forcing her to do things she would never normally do. When she thought about how she had moved into Chris’s apartment for that awful week, allowing herself to think they were together again, she felt faint with embarrassment.
But in the end, there was only so much self-incrimination Tess could endure. This morning she had switched her phone back on, grabbed a notebook and sat down to work through her options. But before she’d had time to commit one thought to paper, the phone calls had started up again. She snatched up her mobile.
“Chris!” she snapped.
“Tess?”
“Verity?”
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been ringing you for the past two days.” Her sister sounded worried.
“Er ... it’s a long story. What’s up?” Tess’s heart started to hammer. What if something awful had happened to someone in her family while she’d had her phone switched off, moping about just because she was going to have to start over yet again?
“Are you okay? I was starting to think something awful had happened to you. I phoned your job and they said you didn’t work there any more.”
“I don’t. But I’m fine. Really. As I said, it’s a long story. So what’s so urgent?”
“It’s not urgent. I was just wondering when you’re coming over to see us? I could visit you, but I’m not sure if there’re flying restrictions for very early pregnancy?”
“That’s late pregnancy,” Tess said absent-mindedly. Then as her brain did catch-up, she shouted, “Oh my God, Verity, you’re not?”
“I am!” Verity’s laughter rang down the phone. “You’ll be an aunt and a godmother. And I need help to go through baby name books and look at nursery furniture, and oh, a million things.”
“I’ll be on the next flight,” Tess said immediately. She hadn’t seen anyone in a week and she was going stir crazy in this apartment. In this town. In this country. She was so anxious to get going, in
fact, that she cut Verity off after another few minutes, saying they could catch up on all the news when she got to London.
As she bustled about the apartment, booking her flight online and packing her bag, Tess felt the sense of excitement she always got when she was about to make a journey. She had been in Killty for less than a year but she was already feeling stifled and stressed and vaguely victimised by her circumstances. Maybe she wasn’t meant to settle down? Maybe she could just keep on travelling. Forever. Where was the law anyway, she argued with herself, that stipulated you had to be on a corporate career ladder just because you were thirty?
In less than twenty-four hours she was sitting in Verity’s stylish Kensington home, enjoying a glass of chilled white wine while her sister cooked dinner in the kitchen. Verity worked as a self-employed interior designer and looking around her elegant living room, with its white sash windows and Scandinavian furniture Tess felt a sharp pang of envy. It had always been that way, ever since they were little girls. No matter how hard Tess tried, Verity had always achieved more. She effortlessly took the gold medal, while Tess had to work like crazy for the bronze. In fact, Verity was the reason Tess had chosen to study journalism in the first place, over her first choice of going to art college. She knew she would only be setting herself up to forever trail in Verity’s ultra-successful footsteps if she had gone into the same area.
Listening to Verity and her husband, Philip, now enthusing about their shiny new future together was lovely but it was also dredging up that old, uneasy feeling Tess had – that she would always be an also-ran compared to her sister.
As she filled her sister in on her news, Tess began to relax. Verity found the details of Chris Conroy’s career coaching hilarious – the way she’d imagined Andrea should have – and by the time she got around to explaining about her elevator speech, tears of mirth were pouring down both their faces.
“God, I’ve missed you,” Verity said finally, drying her eyes.
“To new beginnings,” Tess raised her glass in a toast.
The Cinderella Reflex Page 25
