Take A Look At Me Now

by Miranda Dickinson

  The sudden reappearance of Max Rossi played on my mind all weekend. Why had he chosen now to contact me? I had just managed to pack him away with my San Francisco memories – why jump out of the box now? I considered calling Lizzie but I was still angry with her for giving Max my number. I hadn’t talked about Max with my parents and didn’t intend to explain everything to them in order to discuss this latest turn of events. In the end, there was only one person who knew enough to tackle the latest development.

  ‘You are having me on! When did this happen?’

  ‘On Friday evening.’

  ‘And he just called you out of the blue?’

  ‘Yes. Lizzie gave him my number.’

  ‘Why on earth did she do that?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Vicky blew out a long breath as a waiter brought an afternoon tea tray to our table. ‘And you say his little girl’s with him?’

  ‘Yes. He said he was asking me to come for her, not him.’

  ‘Dreadful! What kind of father uses his daughter as a bargaining chip?’

  ‘The kind of father who lies about her existence and dates someone behind his partner’s back, presumably.’

  ‘Good point. Is Shanti with him?’

  ‘No.’ I could tell from her expression exactly what Vicky thought of this.

  ‘Are you going to go?’

  ‘No. Probably not.’

  Vicky gave me a knowing look. ‘Those are two very different answers. You’re not considering it, are you?’

  ‘No.’ I picked up a fruit scone and broke it into pieces. ‘I don’t know, Vix. What do you think I should do?’

  Vicky held up her hands. ‘Don’t ask me. I’m living with a bloke whose chat-up line was, “More wine, love?” My standards really are that low.’ She gently took the pieces of decimated scone from my hands. ‘Only you can decide what’s best.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s not helpful.’

  ‘OK, look at it like this: if you go, you might find some answers to be able to let him go and move on with your life. Alternatively, you might end up more confused. If you don’t go, you could save yourself a lot of unnecessary heartache before the diner opens. Or you could regret it for years.’

  In a nutshell, my best friend had summed up the kaleidoscope of questions whirling in my mind. Thinking about this wouldn’t move me forward on it: I was going to have to trust my instincts.

  Monday morning arrived with no clearer answer. I turned my attention to fulfilling the long list of tasks for the week ahead. I was keen to hear what John had made of progress on Nell’s Place when he had visited on Friday, so I arranged to meet Aidan for lunch.

  At a pub restaurant overlooking the Thames, we made slow progress through the to-do list, updating each other as we went. Aidan was still looking tired and his curt answers to my questions made me conclude that he, like me, was growing impatient of the endless planning.

  ‘It’ll be happening soon and then we can forget all this,’ I smiled.

  He gave a hollow laugh and rubbed his eyes. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Are you OK? You look tired.’

  ‘That’s probably because I am. I was at the diner till late on Friday evening and spent most of yesterday thrashing out plans with Dad. I love my father but he really doesn’t know when to give it a rest.’ He observed me. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, the same. I’d like to remember a time when I was able to go to sleep without a million-and-one thoughts racing around my head.’ I felt a pang of guilt at concealing the real reason for my lack of sleep.

  Aidan’s gaze held mine. ‘It wasn’t to do with – you know – what happened on Friday, was it?’

  Now I felt even worse. Aidan had mistaken my reason for not sleeping for thinking about him, when in truth he’d barely entered my thoughts all weekend. ‘No, not that. I think what we said about waiting until Nell’s Place opens still stands.’

  His smile was pure relief. ‘Me too. Look at the pair of us, eh? If this is what Nell’s Place has done to us before it even opens, I dread to think what we’ll be like a month from now.’

  A month from now Max will be back in San Francisco and I won’t be debating whether or not to see him …

  I returned Aidan’s smile, pushing the thought of Max away. Instead I focused on the way that Aidan’s gaze flipped my stomach. What happened last week was a mistake, but the memory of it remained. ‘We’ll be celebrating the successful launch of Acton’s latest hot place to be.’

  Aidan laughed and raised his pint glass. ‘Here’s to being the talk of Acton!’

  As the day wore on, I tried not to think about Max and Eva, or the fact that they would both be at the exhibition, waiting. Aidan had suggested we go out for a meal in Kensington after work and, thinking this would solve the issue once and for all, I agreed. We now had a table booked for eight thirty p.m., across the city from the hotel where the exhibition was taking place. It would be impossible to do both in one evening and I had already accepted Aidan’s invitation. In the meantime, I had plenty of tasks to keep me occupied. Q.E.D. – problem solved.

  At three p.m. I called it a day, intending to catch a couple of hours’ rest before I had to get ready to meet Aidan. But by the time I lay down in my room, however, I was wide awake. Frustrated, I rolled over and picked up a book from beside my bed. Something fell out from between the pages, landing on the bedroom floor. I leaned down to pick it up, my heart stopping when I turned it over: an iconic red suspension bridge across vivid blue water to green-blue hills at the far side of its expanse. The towers of the Golden Gate Bridge began to wobble and blur as tears filled my eyes.

  And I knew what I had to do.

  The Underground was a mass of swarming, jostling bodies as I waited for a tube train that would allow me to stand in it and still be able to breathe. With the departure of each packed train, more bodies pushed onto the platform. I checked my watch and felt like screaming. The next train arrived and I elbowed people out of the way, squeezing myself into the smallest imaginable space. I needed to see Max to finally put my feelings for him to rest. Only then would I know how I felt about Aidan …

  As I changed lines the queues only seemed to grow, but I had come this far and there was no point turning back. Knowing I would have little time to spare between the two engagements, I had dressed in my black lace dress ready for my dinner date with Aidan, my red heels swinging in a carrier bag as I dashed across London in my ballerina flats.

  Nearly two hours after I had left my parents’ house I emerged from the Underground station and hurried across the road to the glass and steel hotel building where Max’s exhibition was taking place. Pink and yellow lights blazed from within its translucent core, revealing a seven-storey floor-to-ceiling atrium served by glass lifts moving at high speed, like those I had watched travelling outside the uppermost floors of the tall green Westin St Francis Hotel in Union Square. Using the tinted glass of the street level windows as a mirror, I re-pinned the strands of hair that had worked loose from my ponytail and patted my cold hands against my cheeks to cool the redness from my sprint. Taking a deep breath of cold air, I entered the lobby.

  I was directed to the seventh floor – the Wren Suite – where the exhibition was being held. I took off my coat in the lift and swapped my flat shoes for the heels. My stomach lurched as I neared the top floor and I couldn’t tell whether this was due to a dizzying drop from the glass sides of the lift, or the imminent reunion with a man I’d thought I never wanted to see again.

  Don’t over-think this, Nell. Follow your heart, I instructed myself as the doors opened and I walked out onto the luxurious thick carpet of the hotel’s premier suite.

  ‘Can I take your coat, Madam?’ the polite cloakroom attendant asked, as I neared the Wren Suite’s opulent entrance. I handed it over, but held on to my bag, feeling the need for a barrier of some kind to protect myself as I walked through the doors – and saw him.

  Max Rossi was wearing a white open-necked shirt an
d khaki trousers, his suntanned Californian skin contrasting with the pale English exhibition organisers with whom he was speaking. He didn’t see me enter the room, deep in conversation about a large canvas unusually displayed at his feet, mimicking the wide grey sidewalks of San Francisco. It was transformed into a cracked Arctic ice floe ridden by a large white polar bear – just like the one I had seen with Lizzie near her apartment. Before I’d discovered the artist was Max. Before the lies had begun …

  All around the wide suite, similar canvases bore the unmistakable evidence of his craftsmanship, each one eliciting delighted responses from the exhibition guests.

  As I was gazing at one secret he had kept from me, another spotted me in the crowd and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  ‘NELL!’

  Max’s head snapped upright as his daughter dashed across the exhibition floor to jump with a loud whoop into my arms. The force of her hug spun me three hundred and sixty degrees as Eva clung on to me for all she was worth, sobbing into my shoulder.

  ‘Hello you,’ I laughed, despite my increasing nerves as Max hurried over. ‘It’s so lovely to see you.’

  ‘You came.’ Max was standing next to me, his grey eyes wide.

  ‘Eva wanted me to come,’ I replied. After all, that was the reason you gave me, Max …

  ‘Are you pleased to see Nell, honey?’

  Eva’s head nodded emphatically against my shoulder. ‘I missed you,’ her muffled voice said before she pulled her head back and grinned at me. ‘I waited all day.’

  ‘Well, I’m here now.’ I avoided eye contact with Max, but I could feel the weight of his stare. ‘So what do you think of London?’

  ‘It’s cool. Daddy took me on the bus with no lid and we saw Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. We didn’t see the Queen or Prince William, though.’

  ‘Most rude of them not to say hello,’ Max commented.

  I kept my smile hidden. ‘And what about your daddy’s paintings? Do you like them?’

  ‘Uh-huh. My daddy’s very good at colouring, just like me.’

  ‘I have a long way to go before I’m better than you, kid.’

  Eva shrugged. ‘I know. But I’ll help you.’ She wriggled back to the floor and took my hand. ‘Wanna see the best thing?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ I let her lead me, expecting her to share her favourite chalk artwork, but instead she marched me past the exhibits, through a set of sliding doors and out onto the marble and steel balcony which ran the entire length of the top floor. It was freezing up here, with the lights along the Thames in the distance below. ‘Is the view from here your favourite thing?’

  ‘Not just the view,’ she replied, looking to her left and pointing upwards. ‘Look!’

  Above her little hand, seemingly floating over the nearby rooftops, was the white dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, floodlit and ghostly against the dark sky.

  ‘That’s beautiful.’

  ‘Isn’t it? I got so excited when I saw it. Daddy took me out here this morning when we came to get the room ready. I’ve seen the birds, too! They sit on here sometimes.’

  I grinned at Eva, noticing that the little girl had begun to shiver. ‘We’d better get you back inside. It’s too cold to be out here without a coat.’

  ‘It’s cold here all the time,’ she exclaimed as she led the way.

  More visitors had arrived and the Wren Suite was already looking crowded as waiters dressed in the hotel’s signature burgundy waistcoats traversed the room with trays of red and white wine. A large woman dressed head to foot in floating layers of chintz-patterned chiffon had cornered Max and appeared to be attempting to persuade him to paint a permanent artwork in the grounds outside her home. He was smiling politely, but his gaze drifted over her shoulder towards me. At the earliest opportunity, he made his excuses and joined us.

  ‘Hey honey, can you help the organiser lady to hand out those flyers we brought? She’s over by the waterfall picture, you see her?’

  ‘I see her. And her name is Kathy, Dad.’ Having corrected her father, she dashed off to attend to her task.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ Max said, his body inches from mine in the crowded room. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘Like I told you, I came to see Eva.’ It was so difficult not to sustain eye contact with him and I began to feel hemmed in. I jumped as his hand touched my arm.

  ‘I want to explain. There are things you don’t understand.’

  I wanted to walk away, to leave him here and never look back. But another part of me needed answers. Everything had ended so suddenly, with such devastating hurt, that I wanted to know why. I looked at my watch. It was almost seven p.m. If I was going to make it across town to meet Aidan, I didn’t have long. ‘Then tell me.’

  Surprised, he looked around but found no corner of the room where we might talk. A queue of new visitors blocked the entrance and each exhibit was crowded. Then, he turned back. ‘Wait, I have an idea.’ Holding my arm to guide us through the guests, he propelled us in the direction of the balcony doors. The chill wind bit at my face as we stepped outside and I wished I had hung on to my coat, the thin lace-covered sleeves of my evening dress offering little protection from the plummeting November temperature.

  ‘It’s freezing out here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s the only place we can talk.’

  ‘Then talk quickly.’

  He faced me, his body blocking some of the icy wind as I huddled against the side of the building. ‘Nell, what you saw at Eva’s club – it’s not what you think it is.’

  ‘You were picking your daughter up,’ I returned. ‘A daughter I didn’t know you had. I’ve met her mother, Max! She’s a wonderful lady – and all along I was having an affair with her partner while making friends with their child. Do you have any idea how that made me feel?’

  ‘I should have told you …’

  ‘Yes, you should. Before anything happened. Before …’ Before I fell in love with you, I completed in my head. ‘I thought you cared about me, Max.’

  ‘I did. I still do!’

  I couldn’t believe he thought that would change anything. Did he even understand what he had done? ‘You cheated on a woman you confessed to me you still loved. The mother of your child, Max! Don’t you see how bad that is?’

  ‘Nell, listen to me …’

  ‘Why? So you can tell me more lies?’

  ‘I never lied.’

  His attitude stunned me. ‘You didn’t tell me about the paintings. You didn’t tell me about Shanti. And you didn’t tell me about your daughter. Three lies, Max.’

  ‘I never lied to you!’ Anger tensing every muscle in his face, Max moved closer. I could feel the air temperature rise between our bodies. ‘Yes, I didn’t tell you about the paintings. But I didn’t tell anyone – not even my little girl. And you were right. I needed to reveal my identity as the chalk artist. It brought me here and it’s bringing me the promise of good money to support my kid. I didn’t tell you about Shanti because she’s not my partner. We had ten years together and one beautiful child, but we broke up, eleven months ago. We’re still friends. You asked me if I loved her and I said yes – because she gave me Eva. You don’t spend ten years of your life with someone and not love them in some way. She’s my friend and we’re raising our kid as best we can between us. But not together.’

  Could I believe him? He was inches away from me, the intensity of the way he looked at me greater than I had seen before. Had I made the biggest mistake by refusing to see him on my last night in San Francisco?

  ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

  His hand rested on my shoulder, the warmth of his palm sending shivers down my arm. ‘I wanted so much to tell you the truth. But when you wouldn’t talk to me I thought I’d lost my chance. Eva said …’ his voice faltered in surprise as I shook his hand away from me.

  ‘Eva,’ I repeated. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a child?’

  ‘I – I don’t know. Things
were happening between us so fast I wanted to see where it was going …’

  ‘I told you everything about me. Everything. There were things I could’ve held back, but I didn’t because I wanted you to know me.’

  He dropped his head, a gust of cold breeze hitting my face and neck when he moved. ‘I love my little girl. I wanted to protect her. I haven’t been a dad before – I’m going to make mistakes. And you were the first person I wanted to be with since Shanti. I was in new territory and I didn’t know what to do. How was I to know you already knew her?’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ A clock chimed the three-quarter hour and I looked down at my red heels. ‘I really have to go.’

  ‘Nell, I love you. I think you love me too. And Eva loves you. I don’t know if we can make this work, but I’m willing to try.’

  My heart breaking, I looked into his eyes and saw the truth. Tears welled up and my heartbeat drowned out the sound of the wind. I thought about Nell’s Place and all of the hours I’d invested in making my business a reality. I thought about Aidan, on his way to meet me now on the other side of London; of the closeness between us since my return from San Francisco; and how, even though I thought I loved Max, the hurdles between us were just too much to overcome.

  His hand stroked my face and I wanted to stay … but I had a life here and a dream to fulfil.

  ‘It’s not enough. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No!’ A loud wail beside us caused us both to turn. To my horror, I saw the crushed expression of my little friend feet away from us. ‘I hate you!’ she yelled, running back into the room.

  ‘Eva!’ Max hurried after her.

  Alone on the freezing cold balcony, I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. In one moment I had broken any bonds remaining between us. Once and for all, I had my answer: Max Rossi would never be a part of my life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE