by Anna Maxted
I struggled to speak. Unless I was hallucinating, here was a new Nick rising from the ashes – strong, supportive, selfless. A smart woman would have given him encouragement for good behaviour. I was about to fling his kindness back in his face.
‘Actually, Nick. Don’t ask Michael. It’s very . . . big of you, but right now, I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of him knowing. I haven’t even told Em and Dee. But don’t worry. I will ring Caroline. And anyway, you’re right. Of course Stuart doesn’t want to sue me. He’d be mad.’
Despite these brave/stupid (is there a difference?) words, I had a fantasy vision of Stuart facing the might of Michael Mortimer in court and being crushed to a dust. The fear of what Stuart was capable of still pricked but at least now I had the mental ammunition to fight it.
This realisation made my stomach rumble.
Nick looked like he might argue, then didn’t. ‘Food?’ he said, instead.
I smiled my gratitude. ‘Good idea. Where shall we go?’
Except for spinach soup, my cupboard was bare, and as I knew that Bo was given to such pronouncements as ‘We don’t eat butter in this house’, there was no point going to her place.
As it was Nick, I didn’t bother garnishing the first thought that came into my head. ‘Somewhere where people are kind to us.’
This ruled out about half the restaurants in London. The last time I’d booked a table for 7 p.m. on a Thursday, at a former favourite of mine in Wardour Street, they’d demanded back the table at 8.30. And – after the waiters had hung about like a brood of vampires, snatching our plates while we were still chewing – service charge had been added to the bill, which was dumped on the table, unrequested. This was BS – Before Stuart – so I’d paid up, sighed, ‘Well, it is Thursday night,’ and dissuaded Claudia from making a scene. (She managed to dawdle spitefully over her cappuccino until 9.20 and had to be satisfied with that.)
‘I know a place,’ said Nick. ‘Cantina Italia. It’s a little place in Islington. Smokey. Hard chairs. But so friendly. And the food is likketyspishous.’
‘Is that good?’
‘A cross between lick your lips and delicious.’
‘Let’s go!’
I drove, squeaking at Nick to give me directions at every turn. (He never does unless forced, mistakenly believing that because he knows the route, I should too.) To be fair, apart from that, he’s the ideal passenger. He doesn’t bark orders like, say, Issy does. (‘Careful, that car! Pay attention! Watch that cyclist! Signal, signal! Slow down, you’re speeding! Mind that pedestrian! Brake! Don’t jolt! Progressive braking!’) Sometimes you’d smash headlong into a juggernaut just to shut her up.
Cantina Italia was exactly what the doctor ordered. (The benefits of red wine, etc.) A long, thin restaurant, with a reassuring gaggle of middle-aged Italians feasting on pasta and garlic bread at the kitchen end. The smiley waitress sat us near the door in a quiet corner. It was a while since I’d sat opposite Nick in a restaurant, alone. Towards the end of our relationship, a lethargy had overcome us. We would go out to dinner but only with the safety net of friends. They were the buffer zone – their presence ensured that Nick and I would make an effort, rather than sit there dumbly – and they were also the entertainment, as Nick and I no longer had the energy to try to enchant each other.
‘Been a while,’ said Nick, reading my mind.
Feeling shy all of a sudden, I straightened my knife and fork on the table. ‘Can you remember our first date?’ I said, giggling.
Nick rolled his eyes, and shook his head. This meant, yes, I do remember it, I only wish I didn’t. Our first proper date – not counting the ice-cream-after-the-duck-episode – was at a cheap, plasticky central London chain restaurant. We’d sat outside, coughing into the traffic. Nick had been so keen to impress me, but at the same time, communicate that he was cool, that – out of all the sumptous, sophisticated, softly lit gourmet venues in the capital – this grubby bar/café, with its tasteless overpriced pseudo-French food had been his top choice. But we were high on love and the stale brioche could have been Play Doh for all we cared.
‘Remember the roses?’
Nick beamed. ‘The best thirty-seven quid I ever spent.’
A man with a bucket of red roses – the scourge of courting couples everywhere – had galloped towards our table and yodelled, ‘A rose for the lady?’
Nick had bought thirty-seven roses, the entire contents of the bucket. And the fact that every single one had drooped brown in death the following morning didn’t matter. The thought was everything. And if only both of us could have stuck by that principle for more than three years, we might have made it work.
I squirmed happily and flapped the menu at him. ‘What are you going to have?’
Nick chose seafood spaghetti, I chose the home-made gnocchi with tomato sauce and mozzarella. We also shared a plate of garlic bread – a pizza in disguise. And I had a roquette salad. I always over order in nice restaurants, it’s my squirrel-stuffing-nuts-for-the-winter gene. We talked about Bo and Manjit for a while – why Bo seemed to have dashed straight from her teens to middle age. Even the house she lived in looked from the outside like a fifty-something’s home – flat, drab and suburban. And the previous week she’d snapped at Nick for querying her obsession with the weather forecast (‘I don’t know why you bother, Bo, all you need to know is that it’s going to be raining for the rest of our lives!’).
We didn’t approach serious conversation until dessert – not normally a great time to approach serious conversation, because you can never quite concentrate, a fine dessert demands your full attention. But even though my crème brûlée was exquisite, Nick won the battle with what he had to say.
‘You know I said I wanted to find my real mother before and you said you weren’t sure it was a good idea? I . . . wasn’t being entirely straight with you. I’ve already started looking. I started looking about a week after Lavinia and Michael told me the truth. And I think I’ve found her.’
I swallowed a great crunchy chunk of caramel without tasting it. ‘What! Already? Oh my God! No, no, great idea! How? Who is she? Have you seen her? What about your father?’
Nick ran his hands through his hair and mussed it. As he talked, he repeated the gesture until his hair stood on end. He suited messy hair. I preferred it that way. ‘No. I haven’t seen her yet,’ he said. ‘But I know where she lives. It was a shock, that Pamela found her so soon. Oh yeah, I thought it would take months. I didn’t trace her personally – I found this woman, Pamela Fidgett, who runs her own agency. I chose her partly because I like her name. There’s a few agencies, and most of them charge thousands. But she was different. Less bureaucratic. She had long grey hair, like a good witch, and she kept dropping things off her desk. But she knew what she was doing, I could tell. She cared. There were loads of thank-you cards pinned about the place. She said that as she traced, she tended to build up a picture of the mother – for instance, there’d be a file on me from the adoption agency, with notes from the hospital, how much interest she’d shown in me after the birth, letters from her, if she’d ever written, Pamela says nothing ever got passed on in those days – so that by the time I got to meet my mother, I’d be a little prepared for what kind of person she was, how she might react towards me. Also, Pamela charges by the hour, and most of her tracings cost between £150 to £250.’
‘God,’ I spluttered, ‘that’s nothing!’ Nothing, I meant, for a whole new family. I was in awe. ‘You’re so matter of fact about it, Nick. I so admire that. It’s an incredible amount to take in . . .’ As I spoke, I was aware of a softer, more benign attitude towards him. For the last three or so years there’d been a sharpness to our conversations, no courtesy, no frills, no gentility, if such extras still existed in the twenty-first century. ‘So, how did she trace her?’
Nick grimaced. ‘It’s not as if I have a choice. Inside, I am in a state. There’s so much to wonder about. You can be very bitter. I still haven’t got my
head around it. But Pamela has been great. She’s almost like a counsellor. She’s very wise in the ways of human nature, if that doesn’t sound too Brothers Grimm. She had a lot to say about why some adoptive parents don’t tell their children they’re adopted, remind me, I’ll tell you about that. Oh yeah, so how did she trace her.
‘Five weeks ago, I found Pamela on the net, rang her, and she said that before she could do anything, I had to find my birth certificate. And she said I could do that by going to the local Family Records Centre. They make you have this thing called a Section 51 counselling session – you know – “why now, are you prepared for the consequences, etc., etc.” and then—’
‘What sort of consequences?’
Nick, who was talking very fast at this point, looked mildly irritated at the interruption. ‘The obvious, like, if I was illegitimate, which Pamela says I probably was, and my mother had since married and not told her husband, if that was the case she might not want to know me’ – he gabbled the words as if to gloss over such a remote possibility – ‘so anyway, there’s this excruciating wait, but two weeks ago I finally get the birth certificate and that has my real, well, the name that my blood mother gave me on it, and her name on it too.’
I clamped my hand over my mouth and another great blob of crème brûlée was lost forever.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he added. ‘But don’t you tell anyone.’
I swore silence, and he beckoned me to lean over the table, then whispered in my ear. I felt a shivery thrill as if he were sharing the password to the end of the rainbow.
‘Nick, that’s a beautiful name. And hers too, it sounds lovely. Although I’ve always thought “Nicholas Mortimer” was a fantastic name. Very noble.’
He shrugged, as if not wanting to commit. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ he said. He paused. ‘I wonder who she named me after.’
There had been more bureaucracy, but at every stage of her search, Pamela had kept Nick informed. Several factors made detection easier. Nick’s blood mother had a fairly unusual name, hadn’t moved far from the area in which she’d given birth and she hadn’t divorced. Pamela had no trouble finding her marriage certificate. Nick hadn’t wanted Pamela to write to his mother (if he had given permission, she’d have penned a cryptic letter, ‘I have a client who is trying to trace someone he knew in [date of Nick’s birth] – his name is [whatever she’d named him] if you would like to contact him, this is the number to call . . .’).
Instead, Pamela had given Nick the woman’s address and dug up the local newspaper coverage of her wedding.
I stared at him. ‘You have a picture of your mother?’
He nodded. Then, carefully, he pushed our glasses of wine and water to one side of the table, and took an envelope out of his jacket pocket, the one over his heart. Together, we pored over the grainy photograph. ‘That’s her,’ said Nick, unnecessarily, as there was only one person in the picture in a big white dress. ‘What do you think? Do you think I look like her?’
I badly wanted to say yes, but the truth was, there was little resemblance. This woman had dark straight hair, curled into a wave at the bottom, and a round face. She was a lot plainer than her son. She looked happy and smiley, as you’d hope on her wedding day, but I couldn’t help but think of her as cruel. You caused my boyfriend a lot of heartache, I thought, staring at her, you should have been more careful, you selfish, thoughtless woman. Then I realised that had she been more careful, there would have been no Nick.
I squinted. ‘It’s hard to tell, but I think you have similar shape of mouth. And there’s maybe something in the eyes.’
‘I look nothing like her.’
I found his hand and held it. ‘Perhaps you look more like your dad. But, really, Nick, you look like you.’
He looked down at the table. ‘She only lives ten minutes from Mum and—Lavinia and Michael,’ he said, without raising his head. ‘I could go and sit outside her house and spy on her, like, now.’
I felt a flutter of fear. If this woman hurt him again, caused him even one more second’s pain, I’d scratch her eyes out, kill her soon as look at her. ‘If you want, I’ll come with you. I mean, I don’t even have to look, I’ll hide my eyes if you don’t want me to see her, but maybe you should have someone with you.’
Nick smiled. ‘Thanks, Hol. I don’t think tonight is the night – I should be taking care of you, if anything – but, well, if I do decide on a stakeout, I’ll call you. You can provide the doughnuts and coffee. And I won’t make you hide your eyes. I don’t think she’ll turn you into a pillar of salt.’
I grinned, and lifted my glass to take a sip of wine.
Nick lifted his and clinked it against mine. ‘To your recovery, Holly, and a life full of joy, love and wonder. To the future.’
Chapter 30
NICK INSISTED ON paying for dinner. Not so long ago, I would have considered a response along the lines of, ‘blue moon, is it?’ But the bitter resentment fuelling the last months of our engagement had dissolved. (See what breaking up does for your relationship.) I was also touched by the fact that since the Stuart revelations, Nick wasn’t treating me any differently. I felt different but he was treating me like the old me – with a little more respect even – and this made it easier to behave like the old me.
Claudia had been an angel, but the dynamic between us had changed for the worse. She was patient, polite, even patronising – alarmingly unlike herself – so I was reminded of the delicate state I was in the entire time she was with me. I felt like an idiot child who couldn’t look after herself and had to be watched. I hadn’t known how Nick would react to the news – it wasn’t as if he had a claim on me any longer – but Caroline had warned me. Some blokes behaved as if their girl had been unfaithful and was therefore damaged goods. These were the mefi who saw women as property, but then, in a situation like this, everyone you knew surprised you.
Nick, it turned out, didn’t view women as property. Caroline might have been surprised, but I wasn’t. He had many flaws, but chauvinist piggery wasn’t one of them. Admittedly, this was a new line of thinking for me. When we lived together, Nick rarely tidied, and if he did, he tidied like a guest helping out around the house. Then, I’d called it sexist; with this new détente, I called it conditioning. Finally, I had the goodwill to try to understand him.
Outside my front door, we clutched each other. ‘Thank you for today, Nick, it was brilliant.’ The words came out clunkily, like chunks of Lego. What I had in mind was more poetic, but maybe that was the best place for it. As he hugged me, he murmured, ‘Special, special Holly, thank you.’ An unwelcome thought struck me as I watched us (I always did, these days, watched myself from a distance). Were we one of those drearily dysfunctional couples who could only thrive in a crisis? Everyday humdrum life highlighting our failings, did we require a horrible drama to create the excitement our personalities lacked? Nick might have come in, but I stiffened in the hug and he backed off, blowing me a kiss as he hailed a cab.
Despite the cynic inside my head, I slept more soundly that night than in ages. Apart from the fogged conk-outs induced by glandular fever, I’d developed an allergy to sleeping. And I’d realised, over the last few months, that you can train yourself into insomnia. I needed the rest. I woke up, groggy, at 8.45, but I drove to work smiling. There was something different about today. I stopped at traffic lights and it hit me. I was humming.
Five minutes in the office put a stop to that. The star of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had broken his ankle. And, bizarrely, even though the part required the guy to act a broken ankle, the real thing precluded him from playing it.
‘Not a fan of method acting then?’ said Claw, when Nige burst through the door and trumpeted the news.
The heir-apparent rolled his eyes. ‘Like that hasn’t been said a thousand times.’ He grinned and dropped to his knees. ‘Holly, dearest, pretty please, Holly, grant me an open-ended sabbatical as from today, Issy can fill in for me, this is fate, darling, it’s fate – I
didn’t trip him, I promise – I have to prepare for the role, attend rehearsals, perfect my lines, consider how to interpret the character, decide how precisely to blow every other sucker off the stage! Unfortunately, the bastard keeps his dressing room. But I’ll get you and Claw free tickets, front row, you can even bring that ghastly friend of yours, Rachel—’
‘We spend our days listening to you rattle on,’ said my ungrateful sister. ‘Now we’ve got to spend the evenings too?’
Nige blanked her, fixing me with moony eyes.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’re going to go whether I give permission or not, so I might as well be gracious. Of course you can have a sabbatical, you big berk. You’re going to be a star!’
We all three nodded our glad amazement at fortune sticking out a leg to speed Nige on his journey to fame. Two seconds later, he was gone.
Claw bit her lip. ‘Blocks. I’m actually going to miss him.’
So was I. I’d gone through a phase of treating Nige with suspicion. Now I’d begun to recover my senses, I saw him for what he was – a good pal and great company. He cheered the entire office. Even Issy had thawed in his presence. (Claudia and I were amazed the day when Nige expressed his boredom at needing the toilet as it was down the end of the corridor. Issy, normally prudish, had confided that after her Caesarian she was displeased at having a catheter inserted but to her surprise, ‘It was remarkable. You just don’t feel the need to go – ever!’ Nige had squealed, ‘Ohhhh, catheters are great! But society says No!’) In his absence, I felt all three of us would wilt a little.
‘Now what?’ said Claudia.
‘We’ll manage,’ I lied. ‘Get Issy in more often.’
‘Can we afford her?’ said Claw. (Issy didn’t let a little thing like family get in the way of income. She cherishes money, I suppose because growing up we never had much. Claw is the opposite – from a fiver to five grand, she spends frantically until it’s all gone. It’s as if she feels guilty about having it, as if any accumulation of wealth is an implied slight on our parents. She never extracts less than a hundred pounds from the cash machine and squanders it at such a speed you’d think the notes were pure asbestos. I’m somewhere in between. I love buying for others and I like buying for myself, but I don’t have to.)
