by Pamela Fudge
Tea was made, with many hands making light work, and a delicious lemon drizzle cake – made by the daily treasure who came in to ‘do’ for her – was cut into hefty slices.
Once we were settled the talk quickly returned to a story I had heard and enjoyed so many times over the years. It was the story of how Tina and Calum had met, and the story of how they had eventually got back together many years after their initial affair had ended.
‘It was also when Tina and I first met,’ Bette said for my benefit, even though I had also been privy to that piece of information longer than I cared to remember.
I had to say that I never tired of hearing Bette’s version of events – embellished as it was by her romantic vision of a love story that had finally ended in happy ever after, many years after it all began.
‘Well,’ she was saying, when I wrenched my attention back from wishing I could claim a more auspicious first meeting for Jon and me, because merely working for the same company failed completely in the romance stakes as far as I was concerned.
‘We met at a writing weekend,’ Bette continued. ‘I don’t know if I ever told you that, Wendy,’ she threw a look in my direction.
‘Erm, I don’t think so,’ I replied, and could only keep a straight face by very carefully avoiding Tina’s gaze.
‘Well,’ Bette said, leaning back in her armchair and settling herself in for an enjoyable session relating her favourite tale. ‘I was keen to present Calum with my latest manuscript, but I couldn’t get near him for the would-be writers that surrounded him at the bar. Well,’ she said again, ‘I had scarcely turned away for a minute to speak to someone and when I turned back he had shrugged off the gaggle of writers and made a bee-line for Tina.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you, Bette,’ Tina protested, ‘that he only included me because I was talking to Maggie – she was running the weekend with her husband,’ she explained this as much for Bette’s benefit as for mine. I had always accepted her explanation, but Bette wouldn’t have it.
Nonsense,’ she interrupted briskly, as we had both been expecting that she would, ‘the man couldn’t take his eyes off you, and she was smitten, too,’ Bette insisted, turning to me. ‘She couldn’t stop talking about him when we went upstairs. We were sharing a room – did I tell you that?’
I shook my head, knowing from past experience that it was futile to try and interrupt the stream of memories that were as real to Bette today as they had been all those years ago.
‘The poor man had only invited her to call him Calum and do you know what she said as soon as we got upstairs?’ I shook my head again. ‘She mimicked him in the cruellest way, “Call me Calum, everybody does,” and I said, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much,” buried my head under the covers and went straight off to sleep.’
There was a dramatic pause in her narrative and I knew she was building herself up to the finale, which began with the inevitable, ‘Well,’ paused again to milk the moment for all it was worth and, when she was sure she had our full attention, she delivered the climax to the story, ‘I woke to the sound of the door being kicked open and Calum stepped into the room carrying Tina in his arms, both of them soaked to the skin.’
‘Just like a scene from Gone With The Wind,’ Tina put in helpfully, knowing the way the dialogue always went off by heart.
‘A modern version of Gone With The Wind,’ I added my own little embellishment.
‘Exactly,’ Bette beamed, ‘and I knew then that they were destined to be together forever.’
Of course, we all three of us knew it hadn’t been anywhere near as straight-forward as that. A brief affair had resulted in the birth of a child, a fact Tina had chosen to keep secret from Calum for reasons of her own. In the end she had been forced into confessing, but not for many years. Tina and Calum were very happily married now, but it had been touch and go for a while whether they really would end up together.
I shivered, as I realised that some aspects of their life mirrored mine and Jon’s, except we were already married when the affair took place and the child that was subsequently born almost certainly wasn’t my husband’s.
Anyone looking at us would assume that, like Tina and Calum, Jon and I had the perfect marriage and, to all intents and purposes, we did. However, unlike Tina – who no longer had anything to hide – I was carrying the burden of a huge secret that could blow our happy family life sky high and destroy everything.
Chapter 5
Calum took all three of us to Annabelle’s for lunch. The restaurant had always been my favourite, especially because it was where Jon and I got engaged. Going there always brought back wonderful memories. The ring, not very originally, had been dropped into my champagne glass.
Everyone in the restaurant seemed to have been privy to the imminent proposal of marriage that evening - everyone that is except for me - and there were party poppers going off and sparklers in a cake that was delivered even before I’d had a chance to say yes. It had been such a happy occasion and we were so very much in love.
I jumped a little as Calum touched my arm and asked, ‘Is everything all right, Wendy? You’re very quiet.’
It was only then I realised that, while I had been reminiscing and pushing my seafood cocktail starter round the plate, everyone else had eaten theirs and they were waiting for me.
I had to tell them something, so I told them the part about getting engaged in this very restaurant, but obviously leaving out the fact that the ensuing marriage had run into trouble quite quickly when I’d failed to conceive the child we both wanted so much.
I feel sure I could have accepted the fact that we might never have children, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, Jon couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that the fault almost definitely lay with his dodgy sperm – even going so far as to refuse further tests or even to talk about it. It all became about apportioning blame elsewhere and a small weight gain on my part was enough to be held up as a contributory reason as to why I wasn’t conceiving. I’d tried to be understanding of Jon’s obvious insecurities but it hadn’t been easy.
Tina had become aware of this and it was her dire warning to Jon that he would lose me if he continued to heap all the blame on me that brought the turn-around in our marriage. The warning did the trick but, unfortunately, it came too late to prevent the affair that had almost certainly resulted in my pregnancy and the birth of William.
I’d been making an appearance of eating while these thoughts had been running through my mind, though the food could have been made of cardboard and the wine been water for all I tasted of it.
It appeared Tina had been carrying the conversation along and was saying. ‘Oh, yes, I remember you telling me all about it – and the fact that you had a coughing fit when you almost swallowed the ring. Trust you to glug back the champagne, instead of sipping it,’ she teased.
I forced myself to laugh along with everyone else, and described the waiter banging me furiously on the back - continuing even after the ring had shot out of my mouth and landed on the next table, where it sat twinkling away in the middle of another diner’s steak meal.
To Will’s enormous and very apparent delight we were all four of us waiting to meet him at the school gate and he raced to throw his arms around each of us in turn.
‘Can we go to McDonalds?’ he pleaded, breathless with excitement. ‘All of us?’
We looked at each other dubiously, and it was Bette who saved the day by agreeing, ‘Why not? We should all try something at least once in our lives and you can’t dismiss it if you haven’t tried it.’
‘Take away, or eat in?’ Calum looked at each of us in turn.
‘In, in, in,’ William shouted, beside himself with excitement, ‘and Daddy. He won’t want to miss it.’
Following a phone call, Jon was waiting outside the restaurant when we got there and it was noisy and busy inside. While Calum and Jon took Will with them to order the food, and Bette went off to the rest room, Tina and I bagged a t
able big enough to seat the six of us.
‘Are you really all right, love?’ she asked. I shrugged, and she continued, ‘I do know what you’re doing, Wendy, and as your friend I’m insisting that this really has got to stop.’
I looked at her as if I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘All this brooding on the past, expecting someone who is little more than a stranger to step back into your life for the sole purpose of destroying it. It just isn’t going to happen.’
Her words, so sane and sensible, snapped me back to reality and I felt the huge weight that had been sitting on my shoulders lift once again – just like that – and suddenly smiling, I heaved a huge sigh and said, ‘You’re right.’
She laughed and gave me a hug. ‘Aren’t I always?’
Everyone arrived back at the table at the same time, and we were soon tucking in to our own preference and tasting everyone else’s too, talking and laughing at the same time. I couldn’t think when I’d enjoyed a meal more – even though I regularly spent more time than I would have chosen to partaking of the various choices offered by this particular fast food chain, due to William make a bee-line for the place in any given town.
I think Bette spoke for us all when she said, ‘Do you know, this is quite delicious and I can’t believe what I’ve been missing. I think I should have had tea instead of coke, however, as I’ll now be hiccupping all night.’
‘Try this, Auntie Bette.’ Will offered her a bite from a chicken nugget, and she accepted, chewing with every appearance of enjoyment.
‘So, what’s on your calendar for the next few weeks?’ Tina asked, as we drove across town after taking Bette home and seeing her safely inside – leaving the men and Will to head for home in Jon’s car. When we’d left her she was sitting waiting for the next episode of Coronation Street to begin with her laptop in front of her, a chapter of her next blockbuster up on the screen.
‘Absolutely beats me how she can concentrate on the goings-on in soap land and write a novel at the same time,’ I said, full of admiration for the older lady’s creative talent.
‘Don’t you have music on while you work on your cakes?’ Tina asked, and knowing full well that I did, she added, ‘Well, there you are then – and you haven’t answered my question.’
‘Making cakes, cakes and more cakes,’ I grinned. ‘Oh, yes, and going to a wedding that I created a four tier cake for. A wedding for which I haven’t a thing to wear and the reason for that – as you know - is because I totally freaked when I went out into town to buy myself an outfit, after convincing myself I’d seen the ghost of weddings past – or one wedding in particular - and immediately headed home from the shops.’
‘When’s the wedding?’
‘Next weekend,’ I shrugged, ‘I can probably find something suitable in my wardrobe. It’s not as if I don’t have any clothes.’
‘Why don’t you spend this weekend with us in London?’ Tina offered, ‘all three of you, I mean. You could go to a show with Jon while you’re in town and leave us to babysit Will.’
‘We couldn’t,’ I insisted, though I was undeniably tempted by the whole idea. A weekend away, shopping and a show, not to mention time spent with my best friend.
‘You could.’
‘We could,’ Jon echoed Tina’s words, and then he hesitated and said dubiously, ‘As long as we won’t be getting in the way, because we do appreciate how busy you both are.’
‘Never too busy to spend time with friends,’ Calum said, his tone firm, before adding with a distinct chuckle and his attention on Tina and me, ‘as long as you don’t make too much of a habit of it and you don’t expect us boys to come shopping with you.’
‘Shopping,’ Will chimed in, ‘yuk.’
‘So, you don’t want to go to the biggest toyshop in London, then?’ Jon winked at Calum, who immediately added, ‘Oh, no, because that would be shopping, wouldn’t it? And we don’t like shopping, do we, Will?’
‘Noooooo,’ William danced around the two men, ‘I meant I didn’t like clothes shopping.’
‘Oh, clothes shopping.’ Jon and Calum spoke in unison and nodded. ‘It’s clothes shopping we don’t like. Not toy shopping.’
‘Stop teasing the child,’ Tina scolded and swept Will up in her arms and hugged him close. ‘If your Daddy and Uncle Calum don’t take you to Hamley’s then your Mummy and I will.’
‘You might not have time.’ Will looked into her eyes anxiously, looking and finding reassurance there.
‘We will,’ she assured him, and Will’s face became one big beam.
*
‘We should do this more often,’ Jon said, just after we hit the M27 on Friday afternoon.
‘Oh, no,’ I shook my head, ignoring the exited, ‘Yesssss,’ that came from Will safely strapped into his booster seat in the back of the car, ‘we couldn’t make a habit of landing on Tina and Calum – they’re far too busy.’
‘I meant,’ Jon explained, ‘taking off for the weekend like this. We never do anything spontaneous anymore.’
‘Well, with you at work and Will at school...,’ I began.
‘Nothing stopping me leaving work early on a Friday like I did today,’ Jon sounded almost as excited as William and over-rode my protests before I could voice them, ‘and leave as soon as we’ve collected Will from school. We could do much more now that he’s a bit older.’
‘It would be nice...’
‘And we should be thinking about going on a proper holiday, too, somewhere abroad.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘What about the expense? We’d have to pay a lot more in the school holidays?’
‘Accepted,’ Jon said easily, ‘but between us we have far more money than we ever expected to be earning. Certainly enough for us to enjoy a regular family holiday without worrying about the cost.’
I felt a flicker of excitement and, glancing at Jon, I thought how lucky I was to have him. I’d always loved him, but I thought I loved him more now than ever. He was strong, dependable, the rock at the foundation of our marriage.
‘I love you,’ I said, placing my hand on his thigh and squeezing, and then I added over my shoulder, ‘both of you,’ and then smiled as I realised that Will was sound asleep.
‘Soundo, is he?’ Jon glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Never takes long does it? Takes after his old man…,’
There was a pause before Jon continued, and I discovered I had stopped breathing.
‘Yeah, definitely takes after me for being able to practically fall asleep on a clothes line.’
I started breathing again, and even managed a light laugh, before reminding him of the time he’d been coming back by train, late at night, from a business meeting in London, and hadn’t woken up until the train reached the end of the line in Weymouth.
‘The taxi fare almost broke the bank, as I recall. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry.’
‘Still, it was worth it,’ I recalled, ‘for the news you brought with you. Your little business being bought out at a handsome profit and the offer of a well-paid job with the company you sold out to on a salary that made our eyes pop. News like that takes some topping.’
Jon was smiling – as I was, too – while we were talking, but then his expression suddenly became serious. ‘It should have been a great time for us, and it would have been if only I hadn’t been so obsessed with the fact we weren’t conceiving.’
‘Jon, don’t.’ I touched his arm, already knowing what was coming next and dreading it.
‘But I behaved like an idiot, Wendy, and we both know it. I just didn’t want to accept what I was being told. Yet even from the early tests it was quite clear that the fault was mine.’
‘It was no one’s fault,’ I insisted.
Jon continued as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘I couldn’t bear it – the thought that you might leave me if I couldn’t give you a child – and so I made it all about you. Going so far as to convinc
e you that your weight was the problem – I mean, what weight? I can’t believe now that I could be so cruel.’
‘Please don’t, Jon,’ I found myself begging, just trying to make him stop torturing himself and in the process torturing me about a time I was desperate to forget.
‘If it hadn’t been for Tina, straight-talking Tina, telling me how it was, I might really have lost you.’
‘You wouldn’t have lost me, Jon, because I did understand that you were behaving that way because the low sperm result make you feel insecure – less of a man, even – but you could never be less than a man to me.’
‘Liar,’ a voice shrieked inside my head, and then it continued ruthlessly, refusing to be ignored, ‘He couldn’t get you pregnant and you thought he was having an affair. You used both of those things to excuse the fact you behaved like a complete slut – and you were ruthless enough to make sure to spent your night of unbridled passion with someone who stood an excellent chance of making you pregnant and - bingo, you were proved right.’
‘But I was less of a man to me,’ Jon indicated himself with a hand pressed to his chest, ‘and I behaved like one. I really don’t know how you put up with me.’ He smiled suddenly, and it lit up his blue eyes, ‘but you did and after that it was better than it ever had been between us and then – then – we found out Will was on the way. Yes, I know we agreed we could live without children, but look what we would have been missing.’
We looked at each other, and there were tears in both of our eyes. Thank goodness Jon could not have known that my tears couldn’t match the unadulterated happiness of his – tinged, as they were, with the deepest regret.
Of course I didn’t regret having Will, not ever, not even for one moment, but I did regret the question mark that hung over his paternity. If only I could be certain that Will had definitely been born of the love that Jon and I shared, I knew I would be the happiest woman in the world.
