The Goodmans

by Clare Ashton

  Chapter 36.

  “Shit,” Jude said. She dropped Abby’s hand.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t think I’m ready for this. I can’t do it.”

  “We don’t have to hold hands if you’re uncomfortable.” Abby withdrew and the look on her face made Jude’s heart ache.

  “It’s not that.” Jude smiled to reassure her. “Not that at all. In fact it’s hardly any different to how we used to walk together, except I want to drag you back to bed.”

  “Oh,” Abby said with relief. “Then what’s the matter?”

  “Maggie,” Jude said. “Maggie’s up the street and I’m not ready to tell her.”

  Abby’s reaction was immediate. It was as if she became small, wanting to shrink away from the world. “I’m not sure I’m ready either,” she said.

  “We don’t have to say anything, not yet.”

  Abby nodded, her face pale.

  “So not now,” Jude said. “And not here. We need to prepare and tell her privately at home.”

  “OK,” Abby replied. “But soon, please. I won’t lie to her.” She peered at Jude mournfully. “I’ll be lying by omission if nothing else, and I can’t do that to Maggie. We need to talk to her as soon as we can.”

  Jude’s heart sat heavy in her chest. She didn’t want this blissful carefree existence to end – sunny days wrapped in each other’s arms, away from the eyes of the world.

  Jude squeezed Abby’s hand. “It’ll be OK. I’m here.”

  They both looked up as a loud “Girls!” was hollered down the street. Maggie strode towards them, arms out and a beaming smile on her face.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said, throwing her arms around Jude and tugging her down for a kiss. “I haven’t seen you girls in days. Where have you been hiding yourselves?”

  Abby blanched at the question but managed to return Maggie’s embrace.

  Jude was about to politely enquire how Maggie had been spending those days as a distraction, when Juliette sauntered down the road and stopped at Maggie’s side.

  “Good morning both,” she said, clearly already in Maggie’s company.

  “Err, hi,” Jude managed. The manner between her mother and adversary was markedly changed since Jude had last seen them.

  “Are you walking anywhere in particular or simply enjoying a promenade this fine morning?” Juliette asked, her charming French accent lending the whole suggestion an indulgence. It seemed to work its magic even on her mother, who stood at Juliette’s side with a pleasant smile on her face.

  “We were, erm,” Jude shook her head. “We’re out for food together.”

  “Ah.” Juliette raised an eyebrow in a clear question towards Jude whose cheeks heated under the scrutiny. Juliette nodded and Jude had the feeling she’d answered whatever the other woman had posed.

  “Perhaps you would like to join us?” Juliette offered. Maggie was still strangely quiet and content at her side. “I’m treating Maggie to coffee and some of those exquisite petit fours at the hotel restaurant? I would love to treat you both.”

  Abby looked more than a little alarmed, but Jude couldn’t see a way to refuse.

  “I leave tomorrow, so I would be grateful for the opportunity,” Juliette pressed.

  “That would be lovely,” Abby accepted.

  And it was with a nervous tension, which could rival a piglet snuggling with a boa, that Jude and Abby followed the bizarre sight of Maggie and Juliette arm in arm. Which made the amused expression on Abby’s face all the more strange.

  “What’s tickled you?” Jude asked.

  “Oh nothing.”

  “Come on. Out with it.”

  “It’s just,” Abby had to break off to snigger, “don’t you think they make striking couple?”

  “Who?”

  “I mean in theory.”

  “Mum and Juliette?”

  “Yes.” Abby’s face flickered between confusion and mirth. “They look great together.”

  “What on earth? What’s got into you?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe in a parallel universe they’d make a phenomenal couple.”

  “Mum?”

  “Yes,” Abby looked at Jude with amused incredulity. “You do realise she’s attractive don’t you?”

  Jude shrugged. “She’s always looked good, and Juliette is obviously beautiful, but that’s about as likely as Mum talking to a Tory.”

  “Funny though. I can’t help thinking how great they are together.”

  “We need to get you to the café stat. You must have dangerously low blood sugar.”

  “Lead the way doctor,” Abby said, giving her an affectionate tug, and Jude smiled, warm inside at having Abby near.

  They took the box window overlooking the sunlit gardens at the rear of the hotel. Maggie sat on the window seat, plans rolled out in front discussing them in detail with Abby while Jude and Juliette sat cross-legged in their chairs opposite. Maggie spoke nineteen to the dozen about the upcoming meeting. She always talked more to Abby these days, and Jude felt a twinge of jealousy akin to sibling rivalry. She supposed they shared concerns about the town and its people and Abby somehow understood her mother more than Jude ever had. Of course Abby’s infinite well of patience was an advantage when it came to the vexed Maggie Goodman.

  But there was something different in her mother’s manner today, and not just the apparent ease in Juliette’s company. She was almost, Jude stumbled over the word in her head, but it was the right word and it was: relaxed. Jude could have added content, even happy. Maggie was leaning over the plans and scribbling notes, listening to Abby’s suggestions. There was enthusiasm there. Hope. Jude hadn’t seen her mother like this in a very long time.

  Jude turned at a light touch on her arm.

  “Let me show you something,” Juliette said quietly. “The gardens are only open to residents so I would love to show them to you. Would you care to look?”

  “Yes.” Jude was surprised by the invitation. “Why not.”

  They ducked through the warped doorframe and into a small formal space outside – a knot garden of trimmed box hedges and abundant herbs between the leafy threads, surrounded by the black and white wings of the hotel.

  “Here,” Juliette said, patting a bench at the edge of the garden. “Now tell me everything.” Her conspiratorial smile told Jude much more than her words.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know very well. I can guess the cause of Abby’s rosy cheeks. And yours by the way. Well?” She raised an eyebrow.

  Jude tried to speak but she couldn’t stop grinning.

  Juliette tilted her head. “So did you take your seat on that rollercoaster?”

  “Oh yes. Oh good God, yes.”

  Juliette clapped her hands together. “I’m so glad. I am happy for you. Abby adores you, and you make a terrific couple. Eli thinks the world of you both.”

  “Thank you,” Jude said, her cheeks aching with the ferocity of her happiness. She couldn’t help it. “But…”

  Juliette nodded to encourage her.

  “Is this normal?” Jude gasped. “I’m overwhelmed by her. She’s all I think about, since we got together.”

  Juliette nodded indulgently.

  “I’m this mad, crazed woman who wants to jump into bed with her constantly. Really, is this normal?”

  Juliette clasped her hands together. “Perfectly. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “But it’s insane,” Jude said wide-eyed. “I don’t know what I expected, but I literally want to eat her up sometimes. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Devour her? Surround her as if she is a part of you? Be consumed so you are part of her? Crave every taste and inch of her skin?”

  “Yes,” Jude gasped.

  “All fantastically normal.”

  Jude’s belly tingled with butterflies – part hunger, part elation.

  “Isn’t it remarkable,” Juliette said, “how something so universal and com
mon can be so incredible? The peak of feeling, the pinnacle of existence, all just ordinary.”

  “Perhaps it’s because I love her so much,” Jude wondered out loud, “because I already loved her as a friend before this. I don’t think I’ve been so close to anyone else.”

  Suddenly the weight of Jude’s regard for Abby sat heavy in her chest. “I love her with such depth and intensity I think I could break. I’m incapacitated by this.” Jude clutched the edge of the bench. “I would do anything for her.” And the love that ached in her chest flooded through her entire body making her light and heavy at the same time.

  “The rollercoaster.” Juliette smiled. “Wonderful, but terrifying also.”

  Jude looked to Juliette tentatively. Baring this rawness of experience was unusual for her. She thought that kind of vulnerability consigned to her teenage years.

  “Thank you for listening,” Jude said. “Thank you for being here.”

  “My pleasure. Really, I’m very grateful for the opportunity. I’m here if ever you need me. I leave tomorrow, but come to the hotel and see me again if you want. And I will be back for another visit soon.”

  “I can’t talk to anyone else.”

  Juliette shrugged. “Everyone needs someone to tell of their new love.”

  “Usually that would be my best friend.” Jude stared at Juliette, still incredulous at the turn of events and the adventures of her heart. “But, it turns out she is my greatest love.”

  “I’m so happy for you.” Juliette squeezed her hand.

  “I can’t tell Eli. He would be unbearable.”

  Juliette laughed.

  “Dad and Celia would say ‘very nice dear’. They wouldn’t understand the enormity of this. And Mum’s the last person I want to confide in.”

  Juliette hesitated a moment, still holding Jude’s hand. “Do you plan to tell her soon?”

  “I don’t know. I want to wait, but Abby,” she looked towards the hotel. “Abby can’t stand to lie to her.”

  “I see.”

  “I keep telling her it will be fine, that Maggie will come round. But, truthfully, I’m dreading it.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Just why?” Exasperation flooded through Jude. “Why is she so adamant? What the hell does she have against lesbians? It’s not even that. She loves Abby without reservation, but the minute she mentions a partner… It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Maggie,” Juliette took a few moments to respond fully, “Maggie is complicated.”

  “She’s impossible.”

  Juliette shook her head sadly. “Not impossible. Not in many ways.”

  “I don’t understand her. I never have,” Jude said, the frustration of years bubbling up. “How can she support gay rights when she was young, then despise lesbian relationships now? She’s so extreme. You know,” she looked to Juliette, “when I was growing up, she was a vivacious inspiring mother one moment, open to the world and experience, the most loving person you could imagine. Then, when I was a teenager, she withdrew. As soon as I didn’t need her every minute she seemed to fade.”

  An image filled Jude’s head, the most vivid of her teenage years – Maggie sitting by the river and staring past the swirling waters, her long cardigan wrapped around her body as if to protect her from the cold wind when there was none. It was the overriding memory of her mother during that time. And sometimes she remembered her father, gazing forlorn from the living room window, watching her too.

  “I don’t know who she is,” Jude said. “I don’t understand her at all.”

  “I am beginning to,” Juliette said, quietly. “I don’t agree with her always, especially when it comes to relationships between women, but I’m beginning to understand why she thinks as she does.”

  “Really?”

  “Unfortunately yes. It’s partly her nature,” Juliette said, “but also we are our own histories and Maggie is very much a product of hers.”

  Jude held onto Juliette’s hands, an anchor in her storm. “I don’t know what to do.” It was the first time since she was a child that she felt at sea.

  “Please,” Juliette said. “Will you give me a little time before you tell Maggie? I need to clear something between us. I hope it will help.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.” Juliette stood and smoothed her dress, seeming to gather herself. She pulled at her sleeves then straightened her back to stand tall. “We should get back to our companions,” she said.

  But when they returned, Maggie was already rolling up her plans to leave. Her cheeks were knotted as if trying to bite her tongue, and the rose colour of her cheeks wasn’t from any kind of pleasure.

  “What’s wrong?” Jude asked. Abby’s face was white.

  Maggie cleared her throat. “Abby was catching me up with her news. Tell me the rest another time, dear,” she said cutting off Abby’s plea. She stiffly leaned over to kiss Abby’s cheeks, the usual warmth and ease gone. The peck on Jude’s cheek was similarly cool.

  Maggie turned to bid good bye to Juliette but Jude didn’t hear what they said. She could see Abby was shaking.

  “Take me home,” Abby whispered and Jude didn’t hesitate to take her arm. As soon as they stepped into the cool outdoors Jude held her close and stroked her hair.

  “Did you tell her?” Jude began.

  “No.” When Abby looked up, tears flooded her eyes. “I didn’t even get that far. I admitted that I was seeing someone, then she froze.”

  Chapter 37.

  “Come with me please, Maggie,” Juliette said.

  “I’m going home,” she snapped.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Juliette stood across her path with such calm inevitability that Maggie relented and allowed Juliette to lead her to the room. When Juliette closed the suite door behind them and asked her to sit, Maggie obeyed out of reflex, her mind dwelling on Abby’s confession. The bed dipped as Juliette sat beside her.

  “What did Abby tell you?” Juliette peered at her intently.

  “She’s seeing someone and she didn’t need to tell me that it was a woman. The guilt was written all over her face.”

  Juliette nodded, shifting her weight on the bed, as if preparing for an ordeal. “She is not you, Maggie,” Juliette said quietly, “and her partner isn’t me.”

  “You’re right,” Maggie shot back. “She’s not me. She’s fragile inside. She lost everything when her mother died and it has taken years for her to recover. I can’t bear to see it all go up in flames. Because it will. It always does. Gay relationships do not last and nothing shatters the soul like the broken love of two women. And when the rest of the world’s hurling stones, forgive me for not rejoicing that Abby is throwing herself into the fire.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t always end in breakup.”

  “But usually it does, and it will crush her.”

  Juliette shook her head.

  “She’s not strong.” Maggie tutted. “For Christ sake, look at me.” Maggie’s eyes burned as she stared at Juliette. “It’s been thirty fucking years since we split, and it still hurts.” She held her fist to her heart that pounded with a savage ache. “I never got over you. Life went on and I lived a very different one to that I’d craved, but your absence was always raw. You only had to walk in again thirty years later for me to fall apart.”

  Juliette stared at her hands. “We shouldn’t have ended. It could have worked.”

  “That’s what I wanted.”

  “I should have listened to you and trusted that you loved me enough to have a family.”

  “Yes, you should have.” Maggie’s voice wavered, overpowered with emotion. “I wanted you as my wife and the mother of my children. And thirty years later there’s still a bit of me, there’s still a bloody part of me that wants that.”

  “I was scared.” Juliette looked at Maggie with inconsolable eyes. “I thought you would change. I feared that when you gave birth, you would bo
nd so closely with the child and father I would be left out. I was terrified I’d love the child as fiercely as my own blood, with no rights as a parent. The thought of losing you was unbearable. The possibility of losing more, completely overwhelming.”

  Maggie, at last, understood that fear.

  “I did try,” Juliette said. “I’m sorry it made us argue. But I did want to try.”

  Maggie turned away. This she couldn’t stomach. “So instead you left and high-tailed it to your fucking ex’s.”

  “But that’s the thing; I didn’t.”

  Maggie glared at Juliette in furious disbelief. “You walked out.”

  “Yes, I did,” Juliette said, distraught. “That was nothing new. Sometimes you needed to blow off steam. You would get so irate there was nothing else I could do and, yes, I would leave the flat for a while.”

  “You knew what staying at your ex’s meant. There was no doubt about what she would do.”

  “I slept at the department. I still had a key to my old office.”

  Maggie stared at her.

  “I slept on the floor, then went to work the next day in London.”

  “But…Tiff…?”

  “Tiff told you I stayed at Alex’s.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said emphatically.

  “Many months later,” Juliette started, “I wondered if that’s what she’d done. Did Tiff invite you to stay with her?”

  “She did. I was distraught and frightened.” Maggie clutched at her belly, feeling all the vulnerability there. “I thought it kind of her, considering she was more your friend than mine. I felt guilty, in fact, for all the times I’d accused her of trying to steal you.”

  Juliette’s eyebrows raised in despair. “And did she invite Richard to see you?”

  “Yes… How…?”

  Juliette hesitated. “I came back.”

  Maggie laughed a nasty laugh. “I know. One day you were there, another you left, the next all your belongings were gone.”

  “I came home, you weren’t there and I was worried. I asked Tiff if she knew where you were. Of course, she invited me round,” a shadow fell across Juliette’s face, “just in time to see Richard.”