Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  It had been a busy meeting with a full agenda, without any opportunity to socialise. She had seen Todd just before she had left, though. He had been deep in what had obviously been a very intense and intimate discussion with one of the other female members of the committee, his head bent towards her, his free arm resting against the wall in a way that enclosed them both in their own private space. He had looked up as Stella had walked past, and then deliberately looked through her, totally blanking her. She knew that his action was designed to hurt and humiliate her, but what she had actually felt was a definite sense of relief. It was impossible to believe that she had actually contemplated leaving Richard for him. The stable, longstanding marriage she and Richard shared was the very best kind of home background for Jack.

  She looked at her watch. Another ten minutes or so and she would be home. Jack would be in bed asleep, of course, but she could still go up and see him…

  ‘I’ll just go up and see Jack,’ Stella announced, pausing in the kitchen just long enough to remove her jacket.

  ‘He isn’t here,’ Richard told her.

  ‘What? Where is he? Has something happened? I knew I shouldn’t have gone out—’

  ‘Stella, calm down. Jack’s fine. Julie rang half an hour ago, to say that she’s decided to stay over at her parents’ tonight. Her mother is on her own.’

  ‘Stay over? Oh, right. Well, I’d better drive over there and bring Jack back…’

  She was already reaching for her jacket, but Richard stopped her, an expression of pity mingled with exasperation in his eyes.

  ‘No. Stella, you can’t do that.’

  ‘Of course I can,’ she protested. ‘I must. This is his home. His things are here, his cot and—’

  ‘Jack’s home is with Julie. You must understand and accept that, Stella, otherwise…’ He stopped and shook his head.

  There was a look in his eyes she didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, a part of her recognised as she said quickly, ‘Well, I suppose we can’t stop her from staying with her mother, but really she should have said something instead of just acting on impulse. I’ll have to have a talk with her when she gets back. It isn’t good for Jack to have his routine disrupted like this. I’ve been thinking, Richard, we really need to get him a decent pram. That silly three-wheeler thing that Julie insisted on buying is all very well, but I’m hardly likely to go running with him, am I? No, I know it’s a bit extravagant, but I think we should get him a proper old-fashioned pram, and of course something more modern we can use in the car.’

  ‘Stella, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to be making these kind of plans.’

  ‘Oh, Richard,’ Stella sighed. ‘That’s so typical of you. Honestly, if I left things to you nothing would ever get done, and Jack would be walking before we got a pram.’ Shaking her head, Stella went to fill the kettle. She would need to have a word with Nicki and find out what she thought of the private school she sent Joey to. Where a child’s education was concerned, it was never too early to start making plans, especially with the competition for places at all the better schools. When Hughie had been growing up they had not been able to think in terms of private education, but now it was different.

  ‘Dad. What’s going on? Are you all right?’ Laura demanded anxiously as she hugged her father and then stepped back to study his face.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he reassured her. ‘I’m worried about Nicki though, Laura.’

  Laura shot him an incredulous look. ‘Why on earth should you worry about her when—?’

  ‘Laura, I know how you feel about…about Nicki and my marriage to her, but in this instance…’ He paused. ‘This situation with Maggie being pregnant has affected her badly, and that’s my fault.’

  Laura looked blankly at him.

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

  ‘Nicki was pregnant,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘An accident…And I…Well, at the time I was struggling to keep my business afloat, and Nicki was working all hours God sends to pay the mortgage, and the bills, and I just didn’t think…I didn’t feel…I didn’t know how on earth we could cope with another child. Having Joey hadn’t exactly been planned, and to have to start again with another baby…In the heat of the moment I overreacted and panicked…said something that I realise with hindsight I should not have said, and that Nicki misconstrued.’

  ‘Nicki was pregnant?’ Laura repeated slowly. ‘Dad…’

  Kit could see the shock and the horror in her eyes.

  ‘Dad, you didn’t…Nicki couldn’t…’ As she fought for the words to say what she could scarcely bear to think Laura recognised instinctively that Nicki would never, ever have agreed to have her pregnancy terminated.

  ‘No, no,’ Kit assured her quickly, guessing what she was thinking. ‘No, Laura, Nicki lost the baby…naturally…a few days after I had told her that I…I wasn’t happy about her pregnancy.’

  Laura swallowed, hard. Against her will she found herself imagining how she might have felt in Nicki’s shoes, and recognising with a savage sense of shock that she was instinctively in sympathy with her stepmother. Of all the things she might have felt justified in accusing Nicki of over the years, not being a loving mother was not one of them. Nicki was as fiercely protective of Joey as Laura had always secretly longed for her mother to be of her, as nourishing, loving and proud as Laura knew instinctively she would be with her own children. Laura tried to imagine how she would feel if her partner were to tell her that he wasn’t ‘happy’ about a conception they had created together.

  Laura loved her father, intensely so, but suddenly she was seeing him from the viewpoint of a woman looking at a man and recognising that he had failed to meet the high expectations she had had of him, the high criteria she had for the potential father of her children; a woman feeling saddened and disappointed by his weakness…his man-ness…and his inability to match her hopes.

  ‘Because of that, Nicki seems to have got it into her head that I don’t love Joey…that I didn’t want him, and that…’

  Shaking his head Kit burst out, ‘I just can’t seem to get through to her any more, Laura. She’s changed so much, become someone I can scarcely recognise.’

  ‘She must have been very upset when she lost the baby,’ Laura suggested sombrely.

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, she was,’ Kit agreed. ‘She actually said to me afterwards that she thought she was being punished for marrying me, and that she should never have changed her mind about ending things between us.’

  ‘Ending things?’ Laura queried, frowning.

  Kit gave her a rueful look.

  ‘Well, yes. After your mother died, and it became obvious that you weren’t happy about…about her, Nicki decided that for your sake it would be better if she and I split up. I felt so torn between my love and responsibility for you and my love for her! And I’d already put her through enough! After your mother died I—’

  ‘I heard you and Nicki in the bedroom…having sex…before…whilst Mum was in hospital. They had sent me home from school, and I was in my room…I heard you,’ Laura heard herself interrupting him to blurt out. ‘I told Nicki about it.’

  ‘Oh, Laura…’ Kit’s voice was muffled as he enfolded her in his arms. ‘That was my fault too. Nicki had made me promise that nothing physical would happen between us whilst Jennifer was alive. She said that she couldn’t live with herself if it did. But then that day…’ He paused. ‘She begged me to be strong for both of us, to remember my marriage vows, but I needed her so damned badly. Day after day in that hospital room, surrounded by the sounds and smells of disease and death. I needed to lose myself in her wholeness, her healthiness. She never wanted it to happen like that, and afterwards…I loved your mother very much, Laura, but her sickness meant that my love for her became that of a carer rather than a lover, a parent for a child if you like, whilst my love for Nicki was very much that of a man for a woman. She told me herself that she hated feeling that she was taking the love that shou
ld have been another woman’s, and that she couldn’t bear the thought of knowing she had enabled me to break my marriage vows. I thought I was going to lose her then!’

  Laura couldn’t say anything. She was trying to come to terms with what he had just told her; the revelation that it was not Nicki who had seduced her father away from her mother, callously claiming him as her lover in her mother’s home, but her father who had been overwhelmed by his own need.

  As she had been by hers earlier this evening?

  A child knew nothing of the fierce, compulsive savagery of sexual hunger and need, but she was not a child any longer.

  ‘Perhaps it was wrong of me to love Nicki whilst your mother was still alive, but I don’t believe she would have condemned me for it, or have wanted me to burden myself and Nicki with the guilt I did burden us both with after her death,’ Kit continued sombrely.

  ‘In fact, I didn’t realise until I almost lost her just how much I did love Nicki, and even then she almost refused to change her mind.’

  ‘Because of me…’ Laura guessed.

  ‘Partially,’ Kit acknowledged. ‘She felt that it would be unhealthy for you, growing up with a wicked stepmother as a role model, even if you had created her yourself. She wanted to give you so much, Laura. She had an unhappy childhood herself, and then, with the physical abuse she had endured from her first husband, she felt very strongly that it was important that you grow up with the strongest, most positive feelings about yourself she could help you to have. She often used to talk about it before…whilst Jennifer was still alive. She even put herself through a course of therapy because she wanted to make sure she didn’t pass on to you any negative feelings about what it means to be a woman. She suffered quite badly from depression during her first marriage, and then after Joey was born there was some concern. Of course, being Nicki, she refused point-blank to let anyone but me know about it, not even Maggie and the others, and fortunately she recovered very quickly from that.

  ‘Despite what you think, she was always concerned about ensuring that your mother remained a part of your life. Having lost her own mother before she grew up, and never being allowed to talk about her out of a misguided belief that it would be too upsetting for her, she wanted things to be different for you. She wanted to help you to keep your mother alive in your own thoughts and memories, and to ensure that you would always feel able to talk about her and remember her. She wanted you to feel that you could always be open with her, always talk about Jennifer and make her a continuing part of your life.’

  As he spoke images, memories were springing into vivid life inside Laura’s head: events, conversations, things which, in the light of what her father was saying, she could see she had wilfully and destructively sabotaged in order to hang onto her vengeful desire to hurt and reject Nicki. And all because deep down inside, secretly, where she had locked the knowledge away so that no one, not even herself, could view the shame of it, a part of her had actually wanted during her mother’s lifetime for Nicki to be her mother, to have a mother who was not confined to her bed, always sick, always tired, always to be treated with care.

  She could still remember the innocent comment of a school friend, which had turned her secret longing into coruscating, destructive guilt. ‘I bet you wish that Nicki was really your mother, don’t you?’ was all she had said. An innocent, naïve comment, not meant to hurt or maim, but which had done both of those and so very much more.

  Yes, she had wished that Nicki were her mother. Had wished it, longed for it, and even prayed for it sometimes.

  Laura felt the hot, cleansing salt burn of the tears stinging her eyes. She was, she recognised, crying for the child she had been, for the love she and Nicki could have shared, for the mother who had been too ill to be a mother, and perhaps most of all for the woman who would have been so many things for her if only she had allowed her to be.

  ‘I don’t know where or why it’s all gone so wrong,’ Kit was saying wearily. ‘This obsession Nicki’s got at the moment about Joey! He’s my son as well as hers but from the way she behaves, you’d never think so.’

  ‘Dad, why don’t you go back and see her, talk to her?’ Laura suggested, determinedly putting aside her own thoughts and feelings.

  Kit shook his head. ‘It’s too soon. We’re both feeling too raw. We both need time.’

  ‘But you love her and she loves you,’ Laura told him urgently.

  ‘I thought we did,’ Kit agreed bitterly. ‘But according to Nicki, I don’t know what love really is. If that’s true, why the hell does she think I’ve been flogging myself half to death to get the business back on its feet? It isn’t because I enjoy it! Given the choice I’d sell it off tomorrow and buy a little place somewhere in Italy, like I used to talk about, spend my time growing olives.’

  ‘Have you told Nicki that?’ Laura asked him curiously. ‘That you want to move with her to Italy?’

  Kit shook his head.

  ‘How the hell can I? She’s worked flat out to keep things going whilst my business has been in trouble. It’s only right that I repay her.’

  ‘Maybe you could repay her far more effectively by being happy,’ Laura suggested. ‘Okay, so you can’t move to Italy while Joey still needs to be at school, but there’s nothing to stop the pair of you buying yourselves a small property, if that’s what you both want, and spending time there together.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kit acknowledged. ‘We’ll see!’

  Laura’s mobile rang as she was on her way back to Zoë’s.

  ‘Can we talk?’ she heard Ryan asking her as she answered the call.

  ‘We can,’ she told him as she stopped the car at the side of the road, ‘but I don’t think there’s any point.’

  In the end, the decision she had known she would have to make from the moment she had accepted Ryan’s invitation to lunch was much easier than she had envisaged.

  ‘I enjoyed this afternoon with you, Ryan,’ she told him honestly, smiling as he tried to speak but refusing to let him do so until she had finished what she wanted to say. ‘Probably I shall never experience such intensely carnal and satisfying sex ever again. But the truth is that I can’t live with the guilt of what having sex with you really means, whereas I can, if I have to, live without the sex.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Ryan told her flatly.

  ‘I can, Ryan,’ Laura insisted. ‘And, just to make sure that I do, if you try to persuade me to change my mind, then I shall get in touch with your wife and tell her that we are having an affair.’

  Through the silence, she could almost hear the pressure of his thoughts.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ he said at last, but she could hear the note of angry unease splintering his certainty.

  ‘I do, but in any event we both know that you wouldn’t want to risk putting me to the test, don’t we? After all, Ryan, you can always find a willing body to fill your bed and satisfy your ego. But I could never find a working and permanent salve for my conscience.’

  She waited for him to argue with her, but she had not fully appreciated either the size or the vulnerability of his ego, because after a few seconds of silence he simply ended the call and hung up.

  It was probably relatively easy to contemplate a famine with a full stomach, Laura reflected ruefully. The time to judge how well she was coping with her decision would be six months from now, lying awake at night with her whole body aching for the pleasure that she could now only enjoy in her memory.

  18

  Zoë frowned as she concentrated on the road in front of her. She had woken up with only one thing on her mind, and that was telling that little prick Andrew that there was no way he was going to sack her!

  A car pulled out of a side street in front of her and she swerved round it, gesticulating at its elderly driver and sounding the horn of her car.

  Her head still ached from the mixture of wine and vodka she had consumed the previous day. She turned onto the dual carriageway that formed the town’s ring
road, recklessly ignoring the warning signs for the police speed camera, pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator and laughed as she felt the car surge forward, oblivious to the fact that, up ahead of her, a lorry was pulling out to overtake a slower-moving vehicle…

  Alice was making a list of the books she was going to need when the telephone rang. Anything to stop herself from having to think about what might lie behind Stuart’s uncharacteristic behaviour. Before leaving for work this morning, he had informed her that he could be late back, his voice terse.

  The temptation to say equally tersely, ‘Again?’ had been so strong she still wasn’t sure how she had been able to resist it. But then, fear could be an extremely strong motivating force, as she was beginning to discover. And what if he did not come back? What if he simply rang her to say he was never coming back? Her hand shook as she reached for the telephone receiver, and perhaps because of the intensity of her inward dialogue it took her several valuable seconds to comprehend what she was being told. She lost several more in the panic and despair that followed that comprehension, but eventually she was able to understand that the hospital was ringing her to tell her that Zoë had been brought into their accident and emergency department following a road traffic accident, and that she had requested that the hospital inform her mother of what had happened rather than her husband.

  ‘What—? Is she…? Can I see her?’ she demanded shakily, the most terrible images flooding through her head.

  ‘Fortunately, she isn’t seriously injured,’ she was told. ‘But we will be treating her for shock and various scrapes and bruises.’

  ‘Can I see her?’ Alice repeated, her voice choking with tears.

  There was a small pause, and Alice took immediate advantage of it.