by Lucy Diamond
Gosh. And that was interesting too, she realized, as truths slotted into place in her head, like cogs clicking together. She had spent all these years thinking miserably that she hadn’t been good enough for Will, and that must be why he’d left – when in actual fact perhaps the real story was that he just hadn’t been quite good enough for her.
She blinked at this astonishing possibility as if a light had been switched on in her face. There was definitely some pondering over that idea to be done later on.
After a while Celeste appeared with the little ones, having returned from the local shops, and the children both rushed over to Amelia to show her the treasures they’d found along the way: a pebble with a hole in the middle, a fallen fuchsia bloom that was as pink and fulsome as a pair of harem pants. There was something rather touching about their eager faces, so much so that Maggie didn’t even feel irritated by Celeste saying ‘Maggie! Hello’ in her low, dreamy voice and coming over to kiss her.
(Actually, she did feel a little bit irritated, but only because she was not a kissy sort of person. But never mind. It only lasted a moment. She would get over it.)
This is Amelia’s family, she found herself thinking tentatively. These people are connected to her now and I can’t change that. She had a slight pang as Amelia pulled the little boy (what was his name again? Nettle? Rain?) onto her knee – and yes, there it was, she acknowledged: the ache that a mother of one sometimes felt, when imagining your child with a sibling or two. The guilty stab that maybe they wished they weren’t an only child. There was Amelia bending her face down to hear what the little boy was saying to her, as he related some tale or other about a ginger cat they had seen and, for a second, Maggie’s heart cracked just a tiny bit that this was a scene in which she had no part, one where she could only be an onlooker. But it was sweet the way that Amelia and the boy – Thistle, that was it – could chat in this easy way. Nice that they had formed a new bond of their own. Perhaps as they both grew older they would choose to develop that bond, call each other brother and sister, ring up one another to grumble about Will or exchange funny stories about him. Perhaps this would be as close as they ever came, though, this moment about a ginger cat – and their paths would diverge from here and never really connect fully again and . . .
Okay, stop, Maggie. She was taking all this way too seriously. The details could all be worked out in the future.
Draining her mug of disappointingly weak tea, she caught Amelia’s eye. ‘We should head off soon,’ she said. She wanted to reclaim her daughter now, to sit with her in the car and return to being on holiday together. They’d all survived this strange family shift more or less intact; perhaps it was time to get out while the going was good. ‘Shall we?’
Amelia lifted Thistle from her knee and stood up. ‘Thanks for having me,’ she said to Will and Celeste, suddenly formal once more and a little shy, Maggie thought, as she pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes.
‘Any time,’ said Will, following them to the front door. He looked uncharacteristically vulnerable as Amelia heaved her bag up on her shoulder. Uncertain even. ‘So . . .’ he began awkwardly. ‘So, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you.’
‘You too,’ Amelia said. Oh gosh, now everyone was becoming formal and mannered. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as straightforward as Maggie had anticipated.
‘Er . . . So where do we go from here?’ Will asked.
And that was him all over, Maggie thought, trying to mask her exasperation. Still a man-child at the end of the day, still unable to be the adult in a situation. Really, Will? It’s up to Amelia to broker another meeting? It’s your move now, pal. You are the grown-up here, remember.
‘Well,’ she put in, so that Amelia didn’t feel she had to reply, ‘where would you like things to go from here, Will?’ Come on, mate, she urged him in her head. Take the lead for once. Make your firstborn feel wanted. Wasn’t that what this was all about?
He scratched his chin. Perhaps he was so used to other people throwing themselves at him that he found it difficult to be the one having to ask the big, scary Do you like me? question. ‘I would love to do this again,’ he said eventually. ‘I know I haven’t been a great dad to you before now – or any kind of dad to you – but I’d like to make up for that. For us to get to know each other. If you want that too?’
There. Congratulations, Will – you did it. One heart on a plate, handed out hopefully. And Amelia was nodding. ‘Sure,’ she said, hiding her pleasure with a casually offhand shrug. ‘Cool.’
Maggie felt a tiny bit sorry for Will, having finally made his grand gesture only for it to be greeted by this typically underwhelming response. ‘That’s teenagers for you,’ she said, winking at him. Then she slung an arm around Amelia. ‘Come on, you,’ she said. ‘Let’s hit the road.’
‘Can I just have a quick word?’ Will asked her abruptly. ‘In private?’
‘Sure,’ said Maggie, handing Amelia the car keys. They both watched her slope away. ‘What is it?’
He leaned against the doorway, his gaze sliding down to his tatty Converse momentarily before back up at her. ‘Look, I . . .’ he began. ‘She’s amazing,’ he said quietly. ‘And I regret being such a self-absorbed idiot that I thought I didn’t care. That I cut myself off. It’s not an excuse, but I think I had a sort of . . . breakdown. Like, an empathy breakdown. I was so caught up in my career taking off that I . . . God, I got it all wrong. I’m sorry, Mag.’
She couldn’t reply immediately because a wave of emotion was brimming inside her. All the angry things she’d wanted to say over the years had risen to the surface. Then they boiled over. ‘You hurt me,’ she blurted out because no, she couldn’t just shrug this off and pretend it didn’t matter. ‘The things you said to me as you left . . . they’ve been torturing me for years.’
He had the grace to look ashamed and stared down at his feet again. ‘I guess it was easier to direct the blame at you rather than myself,’ he replied after a moment. ‘Whatever I said – please, just put it out of your head. I was looking for a way out, that’s all. You’re a good person. You’ve always been a good person.’
Gosh, he looked so humble, so meek right now, just like in all those fantasy conversations she’d imagined where he prostrated himself at her feet and begged her forgiveness. Of course it was pretty much at this point in her fantasy that she always kicked him with the toe of her boot, shouted ‘Never!’ and walked away, nose in the air. Except she didn’t feel like doing that so much any more.
‘Thanks,’ she said instead. ‘Well . . . Let’s just see how it goes. I’m glad you’re back in Amelia’s life at least. And she is too. Thanks for having her.’
He smiled. ‘It’s been a pleasure. Bye, Maggie.’
‘Bye, Will.’
She was whistling as she walked to the car and got inside. Then, clicking in her seatbelt, she asked, ‘All okay?’
‘Yep,’ said Amelia, leaning back expansively and kicking off her sandals in the footwell. ‘What was that all about?’
‘Oh, he was just saying how great you were,’ she replied, starting the engine.
There was a moment’s silence as they both waved to Will, still there in the doorway, then Maggie pushed her foot down, feeling the sweet feeling of freedom as they accelerated away.
‘Ahhh,’ sighed Amelia, in exaggerated relief. ‘No more having to pretend to be nice. Thanks, Mum.’
Maggie laughed. ‘You are nice,’ she said.
‘Not when it comes to annoying little children, I’m not,’ Amelia said, shifting around to get comfortable.
‘What do you mean – didn’t you like them?’ Come on, let’s hear it, she thought. All the bitching. There was only so much magnanimity and graciousness a person could dredge up in a single day, after all.
‘I like them, but they’re just in your face all the time. Totally full-on. Last night they were begging Celeste for a sleepover with me. Rain actually started having a tantrum – like, proper banging fists
on the floor and everything. I was like: sorry, no way. That will not be happening for at least ten years. Twenty, if you keep this up. Jesus!’
‘How about your dad?’ asked Maggie, doing her best at nonchalance. ‘Did you have to pretend with him too?’
‘He’s all right,’ she replied. ‘He’s a bit . . . well, I like him, but I can see why you got rid of him. He’s kind of flaky and woo-woo sometimes.’
‘Wait – what? I got rid of him? He walked out!’ Maggie spluttered. There was a charged moment of silence bristling with the shock of old presumptions having been challenged, and then they both spoke at once. ‘You didn’t think that—?’
‘I just assumed that—’
‘He left!’ Maggie said. ‘He went off to be a famous photographer. I was devastated!’ They stared at one another before Maggie remembered to stare at the road. ‘I thought you knew!’
‘No! Because you never talked about him!’ Amelia retaliated.
Maggie felt bamboozled, racking her brain to try and figure out how this misunderstanding could have come about. She had been so careful not to blame Will aloud in front of Amelia, or bad-mouth him too disparagingly, that perhaps she hadn’t ever actually spelled out the events themselves. Had she? And so perhaps Amelia, in turn, had taken Maggie’s silent disapproval of Will and interpreted their history as being one where she’d gone off him. As if! Over the years, Amelia must have accepted her own assumption of truth as gospel, with a drum beating louder and faster as the accompanying bitterness took root. Mum sent him away. Mum robbed me of my father.
‘That must have been pretty shit,’ Amelia said eventually.
Pretty shit. You don’t say, Maggie thought, remembering all those desperate lonely nights when she had paced up and down with her wailing infant, feeling simultaneously alone and smothered. ‘It wasn’t shit, because I had you at least, and I loved you enough for two parents,’ she managed to say. ‘But it was hard for a while, yes.’ A stunned few seconds passed. ‘Sorry, we probably should have had this conversation a long time ago, you and I, but I guess I didn’t want you to feel that he’d rejected you,’ she went on. ‘When it was me he was breaking up with.’
Another stretch of silence followed. ‘Anyway,’ she added, switching up into a brighter gear. With the three of them having just forged a tentative new alliance, perhaps this wasn’t the right time to go raking up old hurts. At the end of the day, they had all survived to tell the tale. ‘Are you hungry? Because I am.’
‘I’m starving,’ said Amelia.
‘Good, you can make yourself useful then,’ said Maggie. ‘Find the nearest pizza place on your phone and let’s make a pit stop for lunch. And then I’m going to tell you about the surprise I’ve got planned for this afternoon. This is our holiday after all,’ she declared over the sound of her daughter’s whoop.
Chapter Thirty-One
Olivia was sitting on a slightly creaky rattan chair admiring the view from the old stone terrace: long formal gardens stretching out in front of her, with rolling purple moorland in the distance. The lawns were verdant, the flowerbeds well tended; there was no sound other than birdsong from the trees and the faint hum of conversation from another couple at the end of the terrace. The occasional clink of a cup being returned to its saucer.
‘Earl Grey tea?’ said a waiter, appearing beside her just then with a tray balanced on his hand.
‘Thank you, yes,’ she said, and he deftly set down the crockery on the table, followed by a milk jug and sugar bowl, then the white china teapot with steam curling in wisps from its spout.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, holding the empty tray behind his back. He was in his early twenties, she guessed, and terribly earnest. The sort of nice young man whose parents were undoubtedly very proud of him. She wondered, as she had done so many times over the years, about Leon and what he was doing now; whether he was working like the waiter here, or a student. What he looked like. If he was happy.
‘No, thank you,’ she said, worried suddenly that she was staring at the waiter too intently. He made a slight bow and walked away and then she was alone again. Alone again, that was, but not for much longer. Here she had come, to a rather nice hotel on the fringes of Dartmoor, waiting for the rest of her life to begin. She hoped it was going to be okay.
Sitting parked up in the lay-by earlier as lorries and coaches hurtled by, she and Mack had gone on to have one of the most honest and revealing conversations of their lives. She had confessed the recent state of her head: how inadequate she had been feeling as a mother, how hard she found the day-to-day routine, and how she had gone to some pretty dark places in her mind; dark places that perhaps her own mother had visited before her.
Out it had all come, her secret self-doubt and unhappiness. She laid it out for him like an unrolling carpet – the raw, real Olivia, there to be trampled over. It had felt both liberating and terrifying to peel away the mask, to say, Here I am. This is what you married.
He didn’t trample over her, though. He didn’t flinch from the real her, either. Instead he listened, really listened, without interrupting and when eventually she had finished, ending with an anxious ‘I’m sorry’, his reply contained sincere compassion. ‘Oh, Liv. You don’t need to say sorry,’ he told her. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry for not having realized you were feeling like that. I’m really, really sorry. But we’re going to make a few changes from now on. Right? We’ll dig you out of this hole together.’
She’d shut her eyes for a moment, surprised that he was even saying the word ‘together’. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, her voice practically a whisper. ‘Even though I . . .’ The words were lodged in her throat; she had to force them out. ‘Even though I ran away?’
‘Yes! Of course I’m sure. I love you. We’re married,’ he cried.
We’re married. Such a strange line of reasoning, she thought. Marriage hadn’t stopped her mum from leaving the family forever, had it? It hadn’t stopped her from emigrating to another country and eventually dying there without an explanation, without an apology.
But then she remembered Danny’s words earlier: You’re not Mum, and she forced herself to listen to them. Accept them. No. She wasn’t Sylvia. She had made mistakes – mistakes all over the place – but she wanted to put them right now.
‘We’re married,’ she echoed, as if it was that simple. Maybe on one level it was that simple. We’re married. Together. So we’ll see this through together. The thought was immensely comforting, as if she’d only just noticed the safety net beneath her. She’d been running for so long, she realized. Not just this week down to Cornwall, but ever since Aidan had died, and Leon had been born, she had been ducking and dodging: from the truth, from her own actions and the pain they had caused. Perhaps part of loving someone was stopping and facing those things. Holding hands and standing firm.
‘Anyway, now that I’ve had the pleasure of solo childcare since you left, I get it,’ Mack was saying in her ear. ‘I hadn’t really appreciated before just how—Talk of the devil.’ He broke off, a new severity appearing in his voice. ‘Oi! Stanley, get off him. Stanley! I’m going to count to three and if you don’t stop that, there’s going to be trouble. One . . . Okay, that’s better.’
Had Olivia ever even heard him tell the boys off before? Usually it was her who had to be the killjoy enforcer, while Mack got to play the fun guy all the time. She pressed the phone closer to her ear, suddenly desperate to hear the familiar sounds of home, acutely able to visualize the boys grappling on the carpet, all squirming limbs and shouts until Mack’s intervention.
‘Sorry,’ he was saying, ‘but it kind of illustrates my point. It’s bloody hard work being a stay-at-home parent, isn’t it? Knackering. I have never been so tired in my life.’
She swallowed, unable to say anything for a moment. Yes. Yes. Yes, to all of that. He had stepped into her shoes and realized just how thin the soles were, how tightly the toes pinched. But at least he had done tha
t much, she thought. Some men she knew would have farmed their children off to the nearest amenable woman, rather than muck in and experience the coal-face for themselves. ‘It’s not easy,’ she agreed.
‘No wonder you wanted a break,’ he said with feeling. ‘Hold on, I’m just going somewhere a bit quieter,’ he added, and she could hear a door closing and muffled bumping sounds, presumably as he went upstairs. ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Where do we go from here? Do you want to come home? Because if you do, I promise we’ll do things differently. I’ll help more with the boys. We could start them at pre-school – or get a childminder, if you wanted to go back to work. Or . . .’
Her head swam with so many questions and options; she felt overwhelmed with all the decisions that lay ahead. ‘Um . . .’
‘Otherwise, if you’re not ready to come back right away, then that’s fine too,’ he said into the silence, perhaps sensing her apprehension. ‘We could always meet you somewhere in the middle. Geographically, I mean, as well as in the abstract sense.’
A Peugeot estate had pulled in just in front of her and a man emerged from the driver’s seat to let a child out from the back: a wriggling, hopping child who was escorted round behind the car, where a woman appeared with a yellow potty in hand. There was a sticker from a zoo on the back windscreen of the car and two other small heads visible inside. Every family journey had a few emergency stops along the way, she found herself thinking. That was just part of the deal.
‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly wanting the comfort of a child on her knee again, the smell of her boys’ necks. Remembering how adorable they were when they woke up with their flushed faces and hair standing up in tufts. ‘Yes, let’s meet in the middle.’