Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  Hughie was on his way back to university. Watching as they said their goodbyes it had struck Stella how noticeably he and Julie treated one another as peers and friends rather than lovers.

  ‘In our day,’ she had told Richard in exasperation, ‘at that age, falling in love meant sharing a few inexperienced kisses and, if it was really serious, a bit of heavy petting. Now it has to be full sex virtually on a first date. They treat it so casually.’

  She had stopped speaking when she’d realised that Richard hadn’t really been listening to her. The silence between them, which normally felt so comfortable, irked her a little. It was as though, having expressed his disapproval, Richard had totally distanced himself from the situation.

  Stella had never met Julie’s parents and as she drove towards their house she wondered just how accurate Richard’s description of Julie’s father was. He wasn’t normally prone to exaggeration—far from it! She had already telephoned them, initially to reassure them that Julie was safe, and secondly to arrange to see them.

  The house was in a quiet, well-maintained cul-de-sac of modern detached homes. There were two new cars on the drive, a large saloon car and a smaller runabout.

  As she got out of her own car Stella was ruefully aware of its age and shabbiness.

  Neither she nor Richard had ever been materialistic; people and not possessions were what mattered to them.

  As she headed for the front door she was conscious of how quiet the cul-de-sac was. Their own street with its mixture of flats, small terraced houses and much larger ones like their own was busy and vibrant with life, and a good deal less up-market, Stella acknowledged as she rang the doorbell.

  The woman who answered it was an older version of Julie, but a Julie without the younger girl’s spirit and determination, a woman somehow crushed and made small and tired by life, Stella recognised.

  Julie had told Stella that her parents had met when they’d both worked in the same bank but then her mother had given up work when Julie had been born, and that she had spent the last five years taking care of both her own and her husband’s ailing parents.

  The room Julie’s mother showed Stella into was immaculate; not a cushion was out of place on the plumped up seats of the two sofas facing one another across a highly polished coffee table.

  Gingerly Stella sat down, refusing her offer of a cup of tea.

  ‘How is Julie? We’ve been so worried about her. She’s such a headstrong girl,’ Julie’s mother told Stella. ‘I don’t know what she’s said to you, but her father didn’t mean…’

  Julie’s father was standing in front of the window with his back to her, and Stella could see the nervous look.

  ‘Oh, yes, I did,’ he corrected his wife flatly. ‘Julie’s chosen her own bed and now she can damn well lie on it. If she’d had any shred of sense or responsibility, she’d have made sure she told us in time…’

  Stella’s heart sank as she heard the bitterness and the anger in his voice.

  ‘And if you’ve come here to try to persuade us to change our mind,’ he told Stella grimly, ‘then let me tell you that you are wasting your breath! No way is Julie coming back here, not until…Does your bloody son have any idea what he’s done?’ he demanded furiously, his anger breaking through his self control. ‘That girl was supposed to be going to university. She’d virtually been guaranteed a place, all she had to do was to get the A-level grades her teachers had predicted she would get, so what does she do? She allows your bloody son to damn well impregnate her and then she doesn’t tell us until it’s too fucking late for us to do anything about it!’

  ‘Gerald…’ Stella heard his wife protesting in a small bleat. ‘Language.’

  ‘She’s a social worker—she’s heard it all before. Social workers, bloody interfering…It’s people like you…’

  ‘I actually retired from the social services many years ago,’ Stella told him firmly. ‘And I do understand how you must feel. After all, this isn’t just your problem or your responsibility—it’s ours as well.’

  ‘Bloody high-minded, aren’t you? On the side of the tracks where I was born there’s only one person gets the blame when something like this happens, and it’s never the lad who causes it. My God, after all we’ve given Julie, all we’ve done for her. The education she’s had…when she knows…My sister fell pregnant at seventeen and it ruined her life. No decent lad would look at her. I was eleven at the time. They were all talking about her, saying that she was…’ He stopped abruptly. ‘If Julie had only told us earlier something could have been done.’

  ‘If by “something” you mean a termination, Julie didn’t want—’ Stella began but immediately the girl’s father overruled her.

  ‘Never mind what Julie thinks she doesn’t want. I’m her father and I know what’s best for her. I’ve seen what happens. She’s had every advantage, everything she’s wanted, and this is how she repays us. Well, she doesn’t come back here. Not until it’s all over and everything’s been sorted out.’

  ‘Sorted out?’ Stella queried.

  ‘Yes. Obviously, the baby will have to be adopted.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’ Stella pressed him. ‘Julie is still at school, she should be here at home…’

  ‘No—no way does she come back here. Your bloody son is the one who’s got her into trouble, let him sort it all out. He’s the brat’s father, after all.’

  One look at his face confirmed to Stella that he was not going to change his mind. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Julie’s mother nervously biting her lip.

  ‘Very well,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘If Julie can’t come back here then she is welcome to stay with us.’ Turning towards Julie’s mother she added, ‘If you want to come and see her…’

  ‘She doesn’t. Like I said, Julie’s made her bed and now she can damn well lie on it.’

  He was in shock and furiously angry, Stella knew, and it was obvious that the stigma of his sister’s pregnancy had left its mark on him, but that did not alter the fact that he was someone she suspected she would never be able to bring herself to like. Guiltily, she admitted that she was glad that she was never going to have to try to do so, since thankfully he was not going to be Hughie’s father-in-law.

  Julie’s mother saw her out, and glanced nervously over her shoulder as she opened the door before whispering urgently to Stella, ‘Give Julie my love, won’t you? Tell her that…that I’m thinking about her.’ Her face suddenly crumpled. ‘I’m so worried about her. What’s going to happen to her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Stella assured her firmly. ‘She’s going to stay with us until the baby comes, and for as long as she feels she needs to afterwards. You’re welcome to come and see her whenever you like,’ she added briskly.

  As she got into her car she acknowledged fatalistically that she was committed now. How could she not be? Julie was carrying her son’s child.

  Busily, she started making mental lists. Julie had already admitted that she had not seen a doctor or had any of the normal check-ups. Her school would have to be contacted, and the hospital—there must be some kind of local support group for girls in Julie’s position—and then they would need to prepare for the baby. She had to drive past the surgery on the way home. She could call in and make an appointment for Julie, she decided practically.

  Stiffly Laura got up from the bench. It was hard to believe spring would ever arrive. Everything looked so grey, the dull sky, the river reflecting its dullness with a faint, pewterish sheen, and still full from the heavy winter rains they had had. Perhaps if she were to search the hedgerows she might be able to find the tiniest beginnings of new life, but she simply didn’t have the spirit to be bothered. Her body ached for sun and warmth, for light and laughter—a physical manifestation perhaps of her inner hunger for the warmth of love?

  She was reading too many magazines, Laura decided wryly. She wasn’t used to having so much time for reflection, or for introspection. Until she had begun to work
for Ryan, her career had absorbed every moment of her time and her energy.

  She had never intended the job she had taken with his firm to be permanent or final—it was simply another step on the steep career path she had plotted for herself. Her career goals were already set out in her mind—by the time she was thirty she intended to be heading her own financial services company. She had already made several potentially very profitable investments that would ultimately fund this venture, but the arm of the financial industry where she worked was extremely close-knit, not to say incestuous. Any hint of weakness on her part would sink her chances of success. An affair with Ryan would not be deemed a weakness, but the way she felt about it inside certainly would if it were ever to become public knowledge! It was a business that didn’t allow for close personal friendships, merely close personal rivalries, but her relationship with Nicki had surely equipped her to handle any amount of those.

  When she had initially decided to come home to take time out, it had been the situation with Ryan that had been at the forefront of her mind, but now…Weird how easy it was to step back into the shoes of her teenage self! Weird, and extremely ego-deflating, not to mention exhausting.

  Laura knew herself to be reasonably intelligent. It didn’t escape her that in many ways with Ryan she was repeating the situation that had existed between her stepmother, her father and herself. Two women, both fighting for the exclusive right to the love of one man! And this was the twenty-first century!

  In the distance she heard a clock chiming the hour. Five o’clock. It couldn’t be! But when she checked her watch she realised that it was. She hadn’t eaten any lunch and now suddenly she was both cold and hungry, but she shrank from the idea of going back and facing Nicki.

  Deep down inside, Laura was already regretting her outburst—her retrograde step back into her childhood. Seeing Nicki so protective of Joey had been what had originally caused it; knowing that her stepmother, her father and Joey formed an exclusive little world from which she was indeed excluded. It had brought it all back to her: the pain, the sense of shock and betrayal she had experienced when she had realised that Nicki was not after all her friend and confidante but her father’s lover, that the two of them had a secret relationship from which she was excluded. She had been so afraid already of losing her mother—her dying had in its way been a form of betrayal in Laura’s then immature eyes—that to have to face another and far more destructive betrayal had been too much for her to cope with. All the tentative feelings of admiration and shy affection she had felt for Nicki had been destroyed by her discovery that Nicki and her father were lovers. She had hated Nicki for that discovery then and a part of her still hated her for it now.

  Huddling into her jacket, against the briskness of the winter wind, she started to walk towards the town.

  Laura was halfway down the town’s tree-lined main shopping street when she heard someone calling her name.

  ‘Laura. I’d heard you were back!’

  She stiffened as she recognised Zoë, but Zoë seemed impervious to the ‘I want to be alone’ signals Laura’s body language was giving out as she pushed her hand into her hair in one of the theatrically dramatic gestures Laura remembered from their schooldays and exclaimed, ‘I’ve just finished work and the kids are at Ma’s. Are you in a rush or have you got time for a drink? There’s a reasonably decent wine bar round the corner.’

  Uncertainly Laura hesitated. Despite, or more probably because of, the subtle pressure on them to be friends, she and Zoë had kept a wary if not outright hostile distance from one another when they had both attended the same local school. However, if they had not been particular friends, they had never been enemies either, and right now anything, anyone offering her an excuse for not going back and facing Nicki was an ally she could not afford to ignore.

  Even so…

  ‘Do they serve food?’ she asked Zoë.

  Zoë’s eyebrows rose. ‘You eat? I’ve often wondered. You’re so incredibly slim.’

  ‘I’ve got a fast metabolism,’ Laura told her dryly. A fast metabolism and currently the kind of emotional trauma that virtually guaranteed female weight loss. In the words of one of her more cynical friends, ‘Unavailable man plus in love woman equals weight loss. It’s the best diet going—and it’s free, in terms of money that is!’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Zoë sighed enviously as she pushed open the door to the wine bar. ‘Two babies have not done my waistline any good. What brings you back here?’ she asked curiously when they had ordered their drinks and found a table.

  ‘It’s my home,’ Laura began, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to look Zoë in the eye.

  ‘Man trouble?’ Zoë guessed.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, Laura recognised that she wanted to talk to someone about how she was feeling.

  ‘Man trouble,’ she admitted reluctantly.

  ‘Join the club,’ Zoë told her. ‘Why is it that things are so hard for us, Laura?’ she asked querulously as she drank her wine. ‘My mother doesn’t approve of Ian, my husband.’ She pulled a face. ‘She thinks I got married too young. Of course, what she really means is that she is afraid that I might manage to steal her crown. You know, the one she wears that says, “I was the perfect tender virgin bride”. Well, I may not have been a virgin, but I beat her to marriage by three months, and the same when I had George…’

  Laura stared at her in bemusement. Although she had known Zoë virtually all her life and attended her wedding, it had never occurred to her before now that anything less than perfect mother-and-daughter love existed between her and Alice. It was surely only wicked, ungrateful, selfish stepdaughters who criticised their nurturers?

  ‘Of course, it was different for Ma. It always is.’ Zoë picked up her glass and emptied it. ‘My father swept her off her feet, she was too sweet and naïve to resist him, whereas I was the one who “persuaded” Ian into marrying me! He calls it blackmail. But it was his choice.’

  She laughed when she saw the way Laura was looking at her.

  ‘He travels all over the country—all over the world, it seems now—on business; he’s an investment banker with one of the big American banks. He drives everywhere at ninety miles an hour, regardless of speed limits! He was right up to his points limit on his licence—one more automatic fine and he’d have lost it. He went through a camera and got caught. When the letter came he told me he wanted me to say that I was driving. As if—he never let me anywhere near the driving wheel of his precious Porsche. I said I would but only if he married me. He was furious about it, but he needed his driving licence more than he needed his freedom!’ She gave a small self-mocking shrug. ‘Do you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever admitted that to! Not that Ian has ever let me forget it.’

  ‘I expect he wanted to marry you, but was doing the macho thing of pretending he didn’t,’ Laura offered comfortingly.

  ‘Ma disapproves totally of him,’ Zoë continued morosely. ‘She doesn’t say so, but I can tell! She skirts round the subject of course, asks me if I think he’s being “supportive”’ enough. For supportive you can read “loving”—although how on earth she can question whether or not anyone else loves me enough when she damn well never has! No, I was just the unwanted daughter she had on her way to producing a pair of perfect, wonderful sons! And that of course made her the perfect, wonderful wife. Sometimes I just hate her so much. And not just her. All of them! Mothers. And I include stepmothers in this, too.

  ‘It’s like their whole bloody generation is part of some special untouchable race! God! They’ve become like a mythological cult somehow—legends in their own lifetime, ceaselessly reinventing themselves to suit themselves. You name it, whatever it is and they’ve done it first—and don’t they just rush to let you know it,’ Zoë complained belligerently. ‘And our mothers and their peers are the worst of the whole bloody lot! Doing drugs, fucking pop stars, being thin, hippying it out in India and finding themselves whilst they conveniently lost the babi
es they dropped nine months after they first dropped their knickers—I mean, why did they bother taking the pill? And now they’re all writing books about it, and still refusing to let us into the playground. They act like they rule the world. They’re so damned selfish but they pretend they’re so sanctimonious—that it was all done for us. Balls. All they’ve done for us is make our lives bloody hard. I mean, what is there left for us to be? To do, other than follow in their pioneering footsteps?

  ‘They’ve done it all before us, haven’t they? Moved the goalposts, broken the rules, redefined what it means to be a mother and a wife; the only thing they haven’t taught us is how to get their attention and keep it, because they were always too busy doing something else.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of taking up politics?’ Laura asked her teasingly.

  ‘I’m on the Board of Governors for the local junior school,’ Zoë replied, not seeming to pick up on the wryness in Laura’s question. ‘Ian thought it was a good idea.’ Impatiently, she signalled to the waiter and ordered them both another drink.

  Once he had gone she told Laura bitterly, ‘My mother makes this big thing about being a mother, but the truth is that once the twins were born I might as well not have existed. Emotionally she just abandoned me! She’s never really loved me! No one has!’

  Suddenly Laura found her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘My mother went one better than that,’ she told Zoë, emptying her own glass. ‘She got sick and died!’

  ‘And then Nicki came along and stole your daddy,’ Zoë offered. ‘Life’s shit, isn’t it?’

  Owlishly they looked at one another, united in a shared wine-fuelled sea of remembered grievances and pain.

  ‘This is definitely a bonding thingy, Laura,’ Zoë pronounced. ‘Do you believe in fate? Shall we have another drink? Mothers! You’d think they’d have had the decency to leave us something to achieve that they didn’t manage, but, no, they had to go and do it all…Anyway, I’m bored with talking about them! They’re old! Past it. We are the future! Let’s talk about something more interesting. Tell me more about this man trouble you’re having?’ she demanded.