What Became of You My Love?

by Maeve Haran

  Cameron got down on his knees.

  ‘Mind the gout!’ shouted someone from the back.

  ‘Will you have me back, Debora?’

  ‘Shall I take him back, ladies and gentlemen?’

  This time the roar was even louder. It seemed to Stella that it was more like the roar from a stadium than two hundred genteel people from Camley.

  In front of a thrilled and delighted audience who would have paid their thirty pounds just for this moment, Cameron and Debora kissed, then she stepped back into the wings as Cameron dispensed with his usual routine and stunned the band by going straight into his first and most famous song.

  The whole audience stood, entranced.

  At the back of the garden, hidden by the shadow of her studio, Stella found Duncan was back by her side.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to find out about Amber.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  And then Cameron’s smoky, pain-shredded voice rang out through the still afternoon air:

  Don’t leave me in the morning,

  Baby, I don’t want to let you go;

  Don’t leave me in the morning,

  Baby, I know our love could grow . . .

  ‘Do you really think he wrote it about me?’ Stella asked, still not quite convinced.

  ‘I know he didn’t.’

  The sudden edge in Duncan’s voice made her look in his direction. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Because Cameron didn’t write it.’

  Stella turned to him, a bewildered expression on her face. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wrote it.’

  Stella shook her head. ‘Sorry? Are you saying you wrote Cameron Keene’s greatest hit?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote it. About you.’

  It was as if they were completely alone in the middle of the noisy, crowded garden.

  ‘It was after we spent that night together. You’d just told Cameron you wouldn’t go with him and he took off, just like that, and left us both behind without a word. I was as upset as you were. I think you did it because you felt sorry for me. I knew it was a mercy fuck but you were the beautiful Stella Scott and I didn’t care why you did it. I just didn’t want the night to ever end. I didn’t want you to get up in the morning and leave me. When you did I wrote the words to the song.’

  He held up a dog-eared notebook.

  ‘You hardly ever spoke to me again after that night and I thought I’d die.’

  Stella felt the shame rise in her at the cruelty of youth. ‘I’m so sorry, Duncan, I can’t believe I behaved like that.’ She hesitated, then added haltingly, hardly able to face him, ‘But that song has made millions and millions for Cameron.’

  ‘So what? I’ve loved you for forty years.’ His eyes fixed on hers. ‘I didn’t begrudge Cameron his success because he hasn’t loved anyone like I’ve loved you. I still love you, Stella. And I think you love me.’

  Before she had a chance to answer, three dogs raced past them. Amber’s horrible boxer, Donleavy, about to commit rapine on the gentle Licorice, followed by the sheepdog puppy.

  Stella picked up a dustbin that had held ice for the champagne and poured it over the disgraceful Donleavy.

  As he slunk off, she heard the sound of clapping and turned to find Izzy and Jesse ranged in defence of Licorice in case Donleavy decided on another attempt.

  ‘Gran,’ asked Izzy, trying to keep up with the mysterious speed of adult developments. ‘If you and Granddad do get divorced, are you going to marry Duncan?’

  Stella found something quite fundamental had happened to her voice.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t say this,’ Izzy held tight onto Jesse’s hand, ‘but Duncan’s a lot more fun than Granddad. And don’t worry about Mum and Dad. They’ve been expecting it, haven’t they, Jess?’

  ‘Too right,’ endorsed Jesse with a grin. ‘Mum guessed when she saw you and Duncan together in Brighton. She thinks it’s a really good idea because you won’t be able to lecture her any more.’

  Stella avoided Duncan’s eye, still overwhelmed by the situation she found herself in.

  Donleavy suddenly shook the water from his fur, soaking them all.

  ‘Jesse, can you take that awful dog back to Amber?’ Stella picked up the cowering Licorice. ‘I’ll bring her with me in a minute.’

  Her two grandchildren dragged the disgusting dog in the direction of its owner.

  Despite her protests, Duncan removed Licorice from Stella’s grasp and placed the dog on the ground.

  ‘I hope I’m not for the dustbin treatment too,’ he announced as he pulled Stella into his arms.

  The kiss that followed left Stella in no doubt of his intentions.

  ‘Next time, when we go to bed together, I’d better make it a little more memorable.’

  ‘But, Duncan,’ Stella was beginning to come to her senses. ‘We can’t possibly get together, even if Matthew does go off with Fabia.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me we’re too old?’

  ‘You live in America. I couldn’t just up sticks and leave my grandchildren.’

  ‘Who said you’d need to? Has it never crossed your mind, my long-lost inspiration, that Matthew has never been that interested in his grandchildren, whereas I like them and, as you’ve just heard, I think they quite like me? So I’m obviously going to have to move here. Especially now that I’m no longer Cameron’s manager. Or so Amber tells me.’ He smiled at Stella’s look of embarrassment. ‘I suppose you’re pairing her off with the unfortunate tech millionaire?’

  As Stella appeared to be lost for words, he kissed her again. This time Licorice seemed to be quite resigned to the situation and made no protest. ‘And let’s face it, Fabia isn’t going to be exactly a hands-on step-grandmother. I think you’ll have to have me whether you like it or not. Though I do have one more question.’ He looked at her with a decidedly un-grandparental glint in his eye.

  ‘Are you going to leave me in the morning?’

  ‘I suppose that depends,’ Stella replied, pulling him towards her again, ‘on who gets up to make the tea.’

  If you enjoyed What Became of You, My Love? you’ll love The Time of Their Lives. Read on for an extract

  The Time of Their Lives

  by

  MAEVE HARAN

  OUT NOW

  The must-read novel for anyone who wasn’t born yesterday

  Sal had spent a lifetime building a career as a magazine editor but she hadn’t banked on a nasty surprise from the one area of her life over which she had no control.

  Claudia loved her urban existence – the thought of the country sent shivers down her spine. But, as many women will know, other people’s needs always seem to come first . . .

  Ella is ready to try something different. But she hadn’t bargained on quite such a radical change . . .

  Laura succumbed to the oldest cliché in the book. But it didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  Outside of the supportive world of their friendships, they find their lives are far from what they expected – the generation that wanted to change the world didn’t bargain on getting old.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘OK, girls,’ Claudia looked round at her three closest friends who were gathered for their usual night out in The Grecian Grove, a basement wine bar sporting badly drawn murals of lecherous shepherds chasing nymphs who didn’t look as if they were trying that hard to get away, ‘does anyone know what date it is today?’

  To call them girls, Claudia knew, was pushing it. They weren’t girls, as a matter of fact, they were women. Late middle-aged women. Once they would have been called old, but now, since sixty was the new forty, that had all changed.

  Sal, Ella and Laura shrugged and exchanged mystified glances. ‘It’s not your birthday? No, that’s in February and you’ll be—’ Ella ventured.

  ‘Don’t say it out loud!’ cut in Sal, ever the most age-conscious of them. ‘Someone might hear you!’

  ‘What, some snake-hipped potential young lov
er?’ Laura teased. ‘I would feel I owed him the truth.’

  ‘It’s the thirtieth of September,’ Claudia announced as if pulling a rabbit from a hat.

  ‘So?’ They all looked bemused.

  ‘It was on the thirtieth of September that we all first met.’ Claudia pulled a faded photograph from her bag. ‘The first day of term at university. Over forty years ago!’

  Sal looked as if she might pass out. The others scrambled to see. There they were. Four hopeful eighteen-year-olds with long fringes, short skirts and knee-length boots, optimism and hope shining out of their fresh young faces.

  ‘I must admit,’ Ella said proudly, ‘we look pretty good. Why do the young never believe they’re beautiful? All I remember thinking was that my skin was shit and I ought to lose a stone.’

  Claudia looked from her friends to the photo. At first glance Sal had worn best, with her chic clothes and fashionable haircut, but then she’d never had a husband or children to wear her out. Besides, there was something a little overdone about Sal’s look that spoke of trying too hard. Laura had always been the most conventionally pretty, given to pastel sweaters and single strings of pearls. You knew, looking at Laura, that as a child she had probably owned a jewellery-box with a ballerina on top which revolved to the music. This ballerina had remained Laura’s fashion icon. Next there was Ella. She had always been the elfin one. Then, three years ago, tragedy had struck out of a blue sky and had taken its toll, but she was finally looking like the old Ella. Oddly, she looked younger, not older, because she didn’t try to alter her age.

  Then there was Claudia herself with her carefully coloured hair in the same shade of nut-brown she always chose, not because it was her actual colour, she couldn’t even recall what that was, but because Claudia believed it looked more natural. She wore her usual baggy beige jumper with the inevitable camisole underneath, jeans and boots.

  ‘It can’t be as long ago as that,’ Sal wailed, looking as if she could see a bus coming towards her and couldn’t get out of its path.

  ‘They were good times, weren’t they?’ sighed Ella. She knew her two daughters judged things differently. They saw their parents’ generation as selfish, not to mention promiscuous and probably druggy. The baby boomers had been the lucky ones, they moaned, inheritors of full employment, generous pensions and cheap property prices while their children had to face insecure jobs, extortionate housing costs and working till they were seventy.

  Ella thought about it. They were right about the promiscuous bit. She would never dare confess to her daughters that at the age of twenty she’d prevented a man from telling her his name as they made love, preferring instead the excitement of erotic anonymity. How awful. Had she really done that? Not to mention slept with more men than she could remember the names of. Ah, the heady days after the Pill and before Aids.

  Ella found herself smiling.

  It had been an amazing moment. The music, the festivals, the sense that the young suddenly had the power and that times really were a-changing. But it was all a very long while ago.

  Claudia put the photograph carefully back in her bag. ‘I have a question to ask.’ She poured them another glass of wine. ‘The question is, seeing as we may have another thirty years to live, what the hell are we going to do with the rest of our lives?’

  ‘Won’t you go on teaching?’ Ella asked, surprised. Claudia was so dedicated to her profession and had been teaching French practically since they left university. ‘I thought you could go on forever nowadays.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Claudia replied.

  They stared at her, shocked. ‘But you love teaching. You say it keeps you in touch with the young!’ Laura protested.

  ‘Not enough in touch, apparently.’ Claudia tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I’m out of tune with technology, it seems. My favourite year group has been reassigned to a younger teacher who gets them to learn slang on YouTube. It’s having an energizing effect on even the slowest pupils according to the deputy head.’

  Claudia tried not to remember the deputy head’s patronizing tone yesterday, when she had explained, as if talking to a very old person, that Peter Dooley, a squirt of thirty known by the rest of the staff as Drooly Dooley because of his habit of showering you with spit when he talked, would be taking over her favourite pupils.

  ‘Mr Dooley!’ Claudia had replied furiously. ‘He has no experience of the real France! He looks everything up on the Internet!’

  Too late she realized her mistake.

  ‘Exactly!’ the deputy head insisted; she was only thirty herself, with an MBA, not even a teaching degree, from a university in the North East – an ex-poly at that, Claudia had thought bitchily.

  ‘But you’ve always been amazing with your pupils!’ Sal defended indignantly. ‘Do you remember, years before the Internet, you made tapes up with you and Gaby speaking French to one another? Your pupils loved them!’

  Claudia blanched. The deputy head had actually produced one of these twenty-year-old anachronisms during their interview and had had the gall to hold it up and ask in a sugary tone, ‘Of course you probably think the old ways are best, don’t you, Claudia?’

  Claudia had wanted to snap that she was perfectly au fait with modern teaching methods, thank you very much. But the truth was she was beginning to feel defeated. For the first time, since those heady days of the photograph, she had started to feel old. And it wasn’t the fault of memory loss or the war with grey hair.

  It was technology.

  Jean-Paul Sartre might say hell was other people, but he’d never been to an Apple store on a busy Saturday, only to be told you needed an appointment to talk to a ‘genius’, one of a thousand identikit geeky youths, before you could ask a simple question.

  Nor had he to contend with the horrors of the ‘managed learning environment’ where pupils and even their parents could go online and access their school work from home. Even the tech-savviest staff found it a nightmare to operate. As if that weren’t enough, now teachers were expected to identify their pupils’ weaknesses using some hideous software developed by a ten-year-old!

  ‘Snotty cow,’ Ella’s angry voice echoed through The Grecian Grove in Claudia’s defence. ‘You’re far better at technology than I am. I still think an iPad is something made by Optrex. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Actually,’ Claudia realized the truth for the first time herself, ‘I might even resign.’

  ‘Claudia, no!’ Laura was shocked. ‘But you love teaching and you’re really good at it!’

  ‘Am I? Seriously, girls, the bastards think we’re has-beens. Drooly Dooley even said, “If it’s any consolation, Claudia, a lot of the older teachers are struggling with the system.”’

  ‘Bollocks!’ protested Sal, emptying her glass.

  ‘Anyway, another school would snap you up!’ Laura, always the positive one in the group, happily married for twenty-five years and a great believer in the virtues of the institution, was attempting to answer Claudia’s question. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. You’d find something else useful to do. Funny, it only seems the blink of an eye since we first met. We should just keep calm and carry on. It’ll only be another blink till we’re ninety.’

  ‘Except that this blink will be punctuated by arthritis, memory loss and absence of bladder control,’ Sal pointed out laconically. ‘And anyway, you should fight back! Don’t take ageism lying down. We’re not old yet. Not even middle-aged.’

  Maybe because she was the one who most needed to earn her living, Sal was fighting ageing the hardest. She had declared war on body fat, laughter lines and any clothing in baggy linen. The dress she wore today was black gabardine, strictly sculpted and teamed with high heels. Ella had given up on anything but flatties years ago, and Claudia was wearing trainers so that she could walk to the tube.

  She liked to walk to work on school days. But would there be any more school to walk to? Claudia asked herself glumly, as she poured out th
e last of the resin-flavoured Greek wine into their glasses.

  ‘You’d definitely find another teaching job,’ Laura comforted, with all the encouraging optimism of someone who didn’t really need to work.

  ‘Would I?’ Despite the jeans, Claudia felt suddenly old. Who would want to employ a teacher on a high pay-scale who wouldn’t see sixty again?

  ‘Come on, Clo,’ Ella encouraged. ‘You’re the dangerous radical in our midst. You were in Paris in ’sixty-eight throwing paving stones! You can’t just give up because some snotty jobsworth is trying to sideline you!’

  Claudia sipped her wine and winced. The trouble was she wasn’t sure she wanted to fight back. She was beginning to feel tired. She looked around at her friends. ‘A toast.’ Claudia raised her glass. ‘To us. It was bloody amazing while it lasted.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sal seconded. ‘But it isn’t over yet!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sal, admit it.’ Ella shook her head. ‘We’re not middle-aged, we’re ancient.’

  ‘No we’re not. There’s no such thing as old any more. We’re YAHs – Young At Hearts. Or maybe we’re SWATS.’

  ‘I thought that was a valley in Pakistan,’ Claudia giggled.

  ‘Or some kind of police unit,’ seconded Ella.

  Sal ignored them. ‘Still Working At Sixty.’

  ‘If we are still working,’ Claudia sighed. ‘Or in your case, Sal, maybe it’s SOTS. Still Out There at Sixty.’

  ‘That makes me sound like an ageing cougar with a drink problem!’

  ‘And your point is . . . ?’ Ella teased.

  ‘Now, now,’ Laura admonished. ‘Don’t gang up on Sal.’

  ‘The thing is, we’re just not old like people have been old in the past,’ persisted Sal. ‘At my age my mother looked like the Queen – with a curly perm and twinsets. I wear jeans and shop at H&M!’

  ‘It’s true we all look nothing like our mothers did,’ Laura conceded. ‘The only way you can tell a woman’s age these days is to look at her husband!’

  ‘The thing is we may be old but we don’t feel old,’ Sal insisted, ‘that’s what makes us different. We’re the baby boomers, the Me Generation. We’ve always ripped up the rules and done it our way. Ageing isn’t inevitable any more, it’s a choice! And I, for one, am not choosing it.’