A Home in the Sun

by Sue Moorcroft

  She always seemed to be regretting something – her relationship with her mum, with her sister – even bringing the question of Malta up with Adam while they were still in bed – and now she regretted not listening to Kieran properly when he told her what Bethan’s parents were like.

  What if those two tender young kids weren’t safe in the kind of love nest Adam had depicted? They might be trying to live in Kieran’s small car, surrounded by their belongings, chilled to the bone. Or battling to stake a claim to a corner of a horrendous squat. Kieran wasn’t the type to stick up for himself in such a hurly-burly environment and Bethan would be scared to back him up because she was as much a softie as he was. Judith had a sudden vision of herself having to track them down to some squalid terrace with boarded windows and extracting Kieran from under the noses of the lawless and the hopeless.

  She set about scrambling the eggs with unnecessary force, splashing her hands and wrists as she beat.

  Of course, technically, crucially, Kieran wasn’t actually her son. That’s what Tom said. Despite all those years of cuddles and bedtime stories, bruised knees kissed better and homework explained, Kieran had only been on loan to her. Well, sod Tom, she wouldn’t have driven Kieran away if she’d been able to influence the situation.

  Adam came down in yesterday’s suit trousers and white shirt, hair damp and jaw stubbled, his eyes wary till Judith showed him the note saying, ‘Poor kids. I hope they’ll be OK. I should have let them move in here when they asked.’

  He squeezed her waist and kissed her hair. ‘You can’t put everything right for everyone, Jude. If they’d lived here, they would’ve been under constant attack from Tom and Bethan’s parents. And so would you. You might’ve stood it, but could they?’

  She sighed. ‘It’s just so wrong they feel they have to leave to be happy together. That people who love them have driven them away.’

  After making tea to go with the food, they ate facing each other at the table. Adam cut the corner from his toast and scooped up fluffy eggs. He didn’t have what he called his gizmo to fit around his hand and the knife was obviously a struggle. ‘So you’re going back to Malta?’ he asked bluntly.

  She sighed, dragging her mind from whether, by slipping off together, Kieran and Bethan could actually have done what was best for them. ‘For a while.’

  ‘How long’s that?’ He waited, clear grey eyes fixed steadily upon her.

  She sipped her tea, aware that it was the person who filled a silence with explanations who was the weaker negotiator. However obliquely, they were negotiating. Last night with Adam had caught her unawares but it hadn’t changed what she knew she had to do. ‘Until last night, I didn’t have any reason, aside from fixing up time off, to consider you when I made the decision to go.’

  He asked, ‘You couldn’t make your enquiries from England?’

  ‘Probably,’ she acknowledged. ‘But it would prove to be frustrating and unsatisfactory. Also, I didn’t tell you because you had the wedding to worry about as well as a busy work schedule, but Richard rang last week. He’s organising his retirement. If I’m not going back to the business he wants to buy me out so he can pass Richard Elliot Estate to his children. The development the business invested in is up and running now and providing a nice reliable stream of income. It’s a good time.’

  Adam narrowed his eyes but his voice was as matter of fact as if he were planning a shoot. ‘Do you also have the option to return to the business and keep your stake? Reclaim your old desk?’

  She chewed mechanically, picturing herself back in her corner of the office at Richard Elliot Estate with the constant flow of traffic beyond the window and the sea beyond that, bobbing with colourful small boats. She admitted, ‘I could pretty much reclaim my entire old life.’

  He paused, thoughtfully. ‘Except Giorgio.’

  She swallowed. ‘Except Giorgio. But now the rawness of losing him is fading I miss Malta. I miss the sea, the people and their approach to life. I miss hot days and warm evenings, the food, the beer, the fireworks at festa time, the amazing amount of traffic in the tiny streets. I even miss the storms.’

  ‘And you’d feel closer to him, there.’ He laid down his knife and fork.

  She flinched. His calm couldn’t disguise the hurt in his eyes but still he remained the same decent Adam. He didn’t bawl or glower or throw things or crash his fist on the table to make her jump.

  She tried to be truthful but gentle. ‘I don’t know. It might be comforting. Or it might be torture, as it was before. I’ll find out.’

  They finished the meal and Adam’s brows cut thoughtful lines above his eyes as he helped her stack the dishes into the washer. Then he leant against the table and folded his arms. ‘Can I go with you?’

  She felt her jaw drop. ‘To Malta?’

  ‘For a couple of weeks, anyway. I realise you might stay longer. Months. Forever. But I think you could do with someone for a while, a friend. I’m your friend. You know that?’ Despite the hurt that still lurked in the grey depths, the expression in his eyes was compassionate.

  She nodded, unable to speak for the lump in her throat. Instead, she picked up his hand, the one with only the finger and thumb, and turned it over to examine the white scars and the pink knuckles. Casually, he changed hands so that he could curl a full complement of fingers around hers.

  ‘You’re one of the kindest men I ever met,’ she said when she’d conquered the urge to cry. She shifted her gaze to his. ‘No one treats me with the same consideration that you do, no one is so much in my corner. It’s probably harder to find a friend like you than a lover.’

  He stiffened. ‘You’re suggesting I ought to be pleased to be your friend rather than your lover?’

  She fidgeted, uneasy at this unfamiliar hint of anger. ‘I’m not trying to tell you what to feel. But let’s think of you for a minute. What do you want? Where are you on the road to recovery? What comes next? Forget making me happy, tell me how you’d arrange your world if you could.’

  He squeezed her hand, his expression softening, facial lines shifting so that they crinkled around his fine eyes. ‘I’m ready to go forward. I wish we could do that together. But, so far as I can see, I’m still travelling on my own. I’ll settle for dawdling for a while. See how steep you find Recovery Road.’

  Her voice cracked. ‘I might never catch you up.’

  He nodded. ‘You might even turn back. I’d have to give up on you.’

  ‘It seems a bad bargain for you because I can’t offer much.’ Her heart lurched at the realisation that she was opening the door wide for him to leave, to give up on her, at any time.

  But he said, ‘I don’t expect much. Are you going to Malta immediately?’

  She dropped her eyes. ‘Not straight away.’

  With one finger, he lifted her chin. ‘Because you’ll be like a dog with a tick up its bum until you find out something about Kieran and Bethan?’

  She managed a smile, viewing him through a sparkle of tears. ‘You reveal me.’

  The pad of his thumb wiped gently beneath her eye. ‘I particularly liked that part. If you fancy it, we could go back to bed and I could reveal you again.’

  She blinked away her tears and slid her hand onto his thigh. ‘Bring it on.’

  The winter ground along throughout March, wet, cold, windy, and it felt like forever.

  Judith didn’t get any fonder of cold weather. Adam declared, ‘You’ll need surgical intervention to prise you from your cocoon coat when the warmer weather eventually arrives.’

  ‘If it ever does,’ she sighed, checking the weather forecast for Malta and seeing it was seventeen degrees and sunny. She hadn’t made arrangements for her return visit, yet, but it was constantly on her mind.

  Adam was in a quiet, reflective mood, these days.

  He said it was because his boys’ lives were diverging steadily from his. After their honeymoon, Matthias and Davina had moved into an apartment on the west coast of Scotland. Adam had
gone up for a week to help them decorate what he deemed upside-down rooms – coloured ceilings and white walls.

  And Caleb, to everyone’s surprise, landed a city advertising job and bought a grey suit and five white shirts. Then he put cobalt-blue streaks in his hair to celebrate becoming a London commuter.

  Shelley asked Adam round to ‘talk about the boys’ then put her heart on the plate with the fresh cream cakes she’d bought him and asked him to go back to her. Gently, he told her that he couldn’t and that he had feelings for Judith.

  Judith felt sorry for Shelley but couldn’t help being glad for herself.

  However, to her bewilderment and dismay, Adam then took a unilateral decision to return his relationship with Judith to platonic. It wasn’t a decision he voiced before he put it into practice but, after them sleeping together regularly, one day Judith tried to kiss him, he gently drew away. ‘It’ll be less confusing, for the time being,’ he explained.

  She knew he meant, ‘I can’t just let you jump about on my feelings while you decide what to do about Malta.’ Though her eyes brimmed, she didn’t protest, and they stepped back into their old ways, without touching, without sex. Apparently, Adam having ‘feelings for Judith’ didn’t mean he had to act on them.

  His resolution wavered only once. He’d come round to help Judith move her sofa and chairs around, wearing his usual grin along with a blue sweatshirt that brought out blue flecks in his eyes. Judith discovered an old cannabis stash of Caleb’s tucked into the frame of the sofa and tried to dispose of it by chucking it on her open sitting-room fire. Adam flung himself full length across the carpet to snatch it from her hand. ‘Are you mad? What are you trying to do, Jude? Get the entire street stoned?’

  Then he laughed so much that he went weak and somehow she ended up in his arms on the floor, her shirt open to her waist and two of the buttons on the floor as a testament to his impatience with his own lack of dexterity. They threw the cannabis in the wheelie bin later.

  But that hot, sweet interlude on the floor became their swan song so far as sex was concerned.

  Their old friendship was intact. It didn’t keep Judith warm these frosty nights but she knew it wasn’t fair to want a loving relationship to comfort her while she decided what to do with a life that may or may not include Adam. But that didn’t stop her wanting it.

  April brought snow to Northamptonshire, which Judith hated more than the rain. In her opinion, snow should come from December to February, not when trees were trying to blossom and birdsong had begun. Tramping through a cotton-wool-like six-inch layer had yesterday broken the heel of the only elegant pair of boots she owned and today was putting white streaks in her new chocolate suede trainers as she slithered through the salted pedestrian area in town, the late afternoon as dark as winter. It didn’t cheer her at all to glance up and see Tom ploughing past in clumpy steel cap toe work boots, looking dry-shod and certain of his step.

  Nevertheless, feeling that she should make an effort now he’d had time to cool down, she called, ‘Tom!’

  Ignoring her, he flung through the aluminium-framed doors of The Norbury Centre.

  She pulled a face after him. Awkward sod. Then she watched him pause to attach a hanging orange flyer more securely to a post, one of many flyers the Sutherlands had scattered through the town. Have You Seen Bethan? it asked. There was a picture of Bethan, laughing into the camera in happier times. The posters had been up for weeks and were already shredding and blowing away. They’d been a forlorn hope but parents got desperate when it came to the fate of their children.

  Judith had received two visits from Nick and Hannah Sutherland. The first, only a couple of days after Kieran and Bethan had left, had been hostile. They’d refused to step over her threshold but just bristled on the doorstep, insisting loudly, ‘You must know, you must know, you must!’ The next visit, a few weeks later, had been more conciliatory. They’d accepted Earl Grey in the sitting room and addressed her earnestly. ‘If you know anything, anything at all, if you can just reassure us that she’s all right …’

  Judith had shaken her head sadly though she showed them the note from Kieran telling her not to worry. ‘Apart from that, I’ve heard as much from my son as you’ve heard from your daughter. Nothing.’ She hadn’t been able to resist the little dig about Kieran being her son, after the way they’d excluded her at the hospital, but it didn’t afford her much satisfaction. She missed Kieran. A constant heartache, daily misery. Even when she’d lived in Malta, they’d shared weekly phone calls and emailed in between. There hadn’t been this awful, yawning silence.

  She missed his trick of rushing his words together when he had a good story to tell, the way he laughed so much he could scarcely get the funny bit out. Even today, she couldn’t help cocking an eye for him as she fought to keep her footing through the slushy town centre, as if he might suddenly emerge from a shop or a pub, laughing with friends as the cold pinkened his face.

  Not unexpectedly, she failed to spot him. No news was supposed to be good news but whoever came up with such an optimistic view had never lain awake at night picturing her son sleeping rough, being beaten up for his cardboard box and left shivering in a shop doorway.

  Hoping that if anything like that was happening he’d have the sense to contact her, and then trying to banish such images from her mind, she swung left at the edge of the precinct, stepping off the broken block pavers and onto the simpler flagstones of Henley Street as she made for Rathbones, the leather goods shop that had been on the same spot ever since she could remember. Wilma had asked her to buy her a new purse.

  ‘The zip’s gone on this one,’ she’d said, when Judith and Molly had visited her yesterday afternoon. ‘Can you get me a black one to match my bag, with a zip not a clasp – you know my hands – and a separate bit for the notes? But don’t pay much, duck, it’s not worth it. Go to the pound shop.’ Wilma had taken to insisting on buying the cheapest available, in case she didn’t last long enough to get the wear out of anything of quality. It was a habit that saddened Judith and she had no intention of shopping for her mum’s new purse at the pound shop.

  She entered Rathbones just before they closed. She told the man behind the counter, smart in his maroon smock, what she was looking for and he slid a drawer full of black purses from beneath the glass counter. Judith fingered rapidly through them and selected the one she thought Wilma would like most and paid £9.99 for it. Roomy and soft, it had chunky zips that should be easy to grip and smelled satisfactorily of leather.

  Once outside, she picked off the price tag and discarded the thick, pale-blue paper bag in favour of a thin, pink-striped carrier she had in her pocket, knowing that was what Wilma would expect from the pound shop. She felt like a teenager preparing elaborate lies to pull the wool over her mum’s eyes but Wilma was so staunch in her refusal to let Judith or Molly ‘treat’ her to nice things that a little subterfuge was called for occasionally.

  Slithering on through the slush to the car park, she sighed over the lacy fingers of the bare trees that protruded through the pavements and longed for spring to act like spring and clothe the trees in frothy dresses of pink blossom. At the car she swore when she dropped her car keys in the snow and had to locate them by feel. Finally, she drove to Molly’s house with numb fingertips. It took two big mugs of her sister’s ‘real’ coffee from a filter jug to warm her through and biscuits to keep her from fading away before Judith was ready to take Molly on to visit Wilma. Knowing Wilma would refuse to leave the sanctuary of The Cottage in the snow, she and Molly had already agreed to eat together later.

  When they were ready, Molly drew on mittens and a voluminous red cape. ‘I’m glad you don’t mind driving because I just can’t be doing with this white stuff,’ she grumbled, shuffling down the path in crepe-soled boots and angling herself cautiously into the passenger seat of the car as if she were at least Wilma’s age.

  ‘Me neither,’ Judith answered seriously, hopping into the driver’s seat. ‘
I hope we don’t crash or have to get out and push.’ Then she threw her head back and laughed to see her sister’s horror. ‘For goodness sake, Molly! Don’t clutch the door handle, I was joking.’

  But Molly hung on as if the car were a roller coaster about to dive down a precipitous slope and actually shrieked as the car side-slipped the corner into Northampton Road. Rotating the steering wheel rapidly to correct the skid, Judith shook her head at her sister’s feebleness. Driving in snow was the only thing she liked about it, still childish enough to be exhilarated by the odd skating moment.

  They found Wilma awaiting them in the residents’ lounge. Her hair looked freshly done and she was wearing passion-pink lipstick that didn’t suit her, probably meaning it came free on the front of a magazine. ‘You made it without huskies and sled,’ she beamed. ‘Did you remember my purse, Judith?’

  Judith settled into one of the high-backed chairs. They were the only visitors in the lounge but there were several unaccompanied residents. Watching other people’s visitors was a bit of a spectator sport when there was nothing good on the telly and so several grey-haired ladies craned to see as Judith handed over the carrier containing the purse.

  Wilma beamed as she fumbled the black leather out of its wrapping. ‘Ooh, isn’t it a lovely one?’

  ‘Lovely!’ chorused around the room.

  ‘But you didn’t get this from the pound shop?’ Wilma demanded, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Judith lied. ‘I’ve kept the receipt at home in case you want me to take it back.’

  ‘I won’t want you to take this beauty back, m’duck.’ Wilma creaked a laugh. With stiff fingers, she unzipped and examined compartments, dropping her voice. ‘Did you put a coin in it? It’s bad luck to give a purse without.’

  ‘Of course.’ Then, honestly, she added, ‘Molly reminded me.’

  Molly smiled at receiving due credit. She’d hung her cape tidily on a coat rack whereas Judith had just stuffed her green cocoon on the floor beside her chair.

  Wilma discovered the lucky coin. ‘Judith, it’s a pound. That’s all the purse cost. Here, let me give you some change.’ She reached for her ever-present handbag by her feet.