The Four of Us

by Margaret Pemberton

  With all her heart she now wanted to tell Simon about their child, about the baby she was expecting, but it was news for a joyous moment and the present one, filled with grief at Kiki’s wanton and treacherous behaviour, was not remotely suitable.

  She felt him gently touch her hair and, as she raised her tear-streaked face to his, she saw, with a fresh slam of shock, that he was looking completely bewildered.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked quietly, his face still looking oddly harrowed. ‘Has there been an accident?’

  ‘No.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Kiki phoned Geraldine at twenty minutes to two to tell her that she was in Rome and that Francis was with her. She said that they might get married, or they might not. And then she rang off.’

  ‘Dear Christ!’ Since the moment he’d put his arms round her he hadn’t been leaning against the lychgate. Now he tottered back against it, his face ashen. ‘Dear Christ,’ he whispered again, devoutly. ‘How could she do such a thing? When did their relationship begin? Why was it she who telephoned Geraldine, and not Francis?’

  He was no longer holding her. With his back to the gate, his hands were clamped on to it as if, were he to let go, he would fall.

  ‘I don’t know, darling.’ Some last remaining thread of loyalty to the friend she had grown up with as a sister prevented her from saying what she felt in her heart – that Kiki hadn’t so much taken Francis from Geraldine because she wanted him as a long-term lover or husband, but because she wanted him to manage her career.

  ‘I need a drink.’ He looked ghastly and, remembering how he always felt personally responsible whenever Kiki behaved badly, she wasn’t surprised.

  Wiping tears from her cheeks, she was just about to suggest that they go back to Cedar Court so that she could change out of her bridesmaid’s dress and he could get the drink he so obviously needed, when he said, ‘And I need to talk to you, Primmie. It’s no use my putting if off because this has happened.’

  ‘Putting what off?’

  A joker of a wedding guest, cheated of throwing his confetti on Geraldine and Francis, had emptied his box of confetti into the air and the light breeze was now blowing it towards them. She could see it settling on Simon’s hair and feel it on her own.

  He let go of the gate and took hold of her hands. ‘It’s over between us, Primmie,’ he said tautly. ‘It has to be. Our being apart has given me plenty of time to think and I’d be doing you a great disservice if I married you. The age difference is too great. There’d be ugly talk. You lived in my home as a child and the gossip … the gossip would be horrendous.’

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words would come. Flakes of confetti settled on her mouth and her eyelashes. The blood was drumming in her ears so loudly she thought she was going to faint.

  ‘But I love you!’ she managed at last, her voice cracking and breaking. ‘I don’t care about the age difference! I’ve never cared!’

  ‘I know.’ Very carefully he let go of her hands. ‘But I care, Primmie. I’m sorry, darling. It won’t work and I should have seen that it wouldn’t far earlier. You’ll get over me, just as Geraldine will eventually get over losing Francis.’

  ‘But I won’t! How can I possibly ever get over you when … when …’ She choked on the words she was about to say, knowing that if she told him about the baby he would feel duty-bound to marry her. And she didn’t want him to marry her out of a sense of duty. She wanted him to marry her because he loved her deeply; because he couldn’t envisage life without her – as she couldn’t envisage life without him. ‘… When I love you so much,’ she finished, fighting back the sobs that clutched at her throat.

  ‘You’re twenty-one,’ he said gently. ‘When you’re twenty-one, life goes on. You’ll find happiness with someone else, Primmie dearest. Someone your own age. Someone who, like you, will want children. I’m too old to begin parenting again. Kiki …’ He winced with pain. ‘Kiki is as much as I can cope with.’

  ‘What will you do?’ she whispered, wondering how she was going to live with her hurt, wishing that the ground would stop tilting so crazily.

  He took a deep breath and braced his shoulders. ‘First, I’m going to fly out to Rome and speak to Kiki. It won’t make any difference to what has happened, but when realization dawns as to just how monstrously she has behaved, she’s going to need someone – and when she does, she won’t be able to call on her friends, because she’s lost them, hasn’t she? I can’t imagine Geraldine ever wanting to see her or speak to her again, and neither you nor Artemis are going to be lending her a shoulder to cry on over this, are you?’

  With her heart hurting, she shook her head, unable to even envisage offering Kiki sympathy over her selfish, reckless action, wondering how it had happened that, on a day that should have been so joyous, both her world and Geraldine’s had come crashing down around them simultaneously.

  What, she wondered, was life going to be like, now that it was no longer the four of them, but the three of them? Close as all their relationships to each other had been, Kiki’s and her relationship had been, perhaps, the closest, because for seven years they had shared a bedroom and lived, Monday to Friday every week, as sisters. And they still did live together. What was going to happen when Kiki returned to London and to the flat? How could things ever be the same between them when Kiki had so treacherously and callously ruined Geraldine’s life?

  ‘I’m going, Primmie.’ His voice was bleak, and if it hadn’t been for the tears running relentlessly down her face she would have seen that his eyes were full of pain. ‘Though I know you don’t believe me, you’ll be happy again, Primmie dearest. Goodbye. God bless.’

  Without reaching out to her again, without touching her or kissing her, he turned away from her and, his shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his pockets, began walking down the narrow lane towards his parked car.

  Other people were leaving the churchyard in his wake, the thrown confetti sprinkling their clothes and blowing in little flurries along the ground. Not caring as they looked curiously towards her, she stood at the lychgate, weeping, the tears spilling down on to the pale grey silk of her bridesmaid’s dress. Then, as she heard the familiar sound of his car engine rev into life, she hugged her breast as though holding herself together against an inner disintegration and slowly began to walk back towards Cedar Court.

  Artemis took her back to London. It was an almost silent journey, with both of them being too heartsick to talk. Only when they neared Kensington did Artemis say, ‘You still haven’t told me about you and Simon, Prim. How long have the two of you been in love? What does Kiki think about it? You do realize that if she comes to your wedding – and she’ll have to, won’t she, seeing as she’s Simon’s daughter? – Geraldine won’t come. It’s the end of it being the four of us. Kiki has destroyed that for good.’

  ‘There won’t be a problem about who to invite to the wedding, because there isn’t going to be a wedding, Artemis. What there was between Simon and me is now all over.’

  ‘And does it matter?’ Artemis asked, turning her head towards her, her eyes wide.

  ‘Yes, Artemis.’ Her eyes were bruised with grief, her face pale. ‘It matters very, very much.’

  Artemis was silent again for a few minutes as she continued to drive through the busy traffic in Kensington High Street and then, turning into the side street towards the flat, she said awkwardly, ‘But you’ll get over it, Prim, won’t you?’

  As Artemis brought the car to a halt at the kerb-side, Primmie clasped her hands tightly in her lap. ‘How?’ she asked, her voice thick with pain, knowing that it was pointless keeping her pregnancy a secret any longer. ‘I’m having a baby, Artemis. I’m nearly two months pregnant.’

  Artemis had, of course, wanted to come into the flat with her, to make her a cup of tea or pour her a stiff drink and to give what comfort she could. It was comfort Primmie couldn’t cope with.

  ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Artemis,’ she said, steppin
g out of the car. ‘All I want to do now is to go to bed and to sleep.’

  It was only half the truth, for what she did when the door of the flat closed behind her, was to throw herself on her bed, and sob and sob until she could sob no more.

  Two days later, early in the evening, Geraldine let herself into the flat. ‘I’ve heard,’ she said bluntly, looking a ghost of her former self. ‘Artemis rang me.’

  Primmie, who had been relying on Artemis to do just that, hugged her tightly. ‘He couldn’t cope with the difference in our ages,’ she said brokenly, her face buried in Geraldine’s hair. ‘And he was frightened of the talk.’

  ‘Talk?’ Incredulously Geraldine pulled away from her, to look into her face. ‘What kind of talk?’

  Primmie gave a helpless, despairing shrug of her shoulders. ‘That perhaps there’d been something going on between us when I was still at Bickley High and living in his home. That, being so much older than me, he’d taken advantage of me. He’s a family GP, Geraldine. It’s understandable his being so scrupulously careful.’

  She knew she didn’t sound convinced and, when she saw the expression in Geraldine’s violet-dark eyes, she knew that Geraldine wasn’t convinced either.

  ‘And all this has just occurred to him, out of the blue? I don’t think so, Primmie. Kiki’s got to him. She’s either emotionally blackmailed him into not marrying you – which would be easy considering the ridiculous guilt he’s always felt where she’s concerned – or she’s threatened there’ll be an absolute stink of publicity about it, because of her being who she is.’

  Primmie’s eyes widened disbelievingly.

  ‘Oh, come on, Prim! Don’t tell me you hadn’t worked it out for yourself? I know you said Simon and Kiki hadn’t met up before he became ill and vanished off to recuperate, but I don’t believe it for a minute – and nor do I believe he was ever ill, apart from perhaps being ill with the guilt he so likes to saddle himself with. And this time his guilt would have been over deciding to break off his relationship with you in order to keep Kiki happy.’

  Her voice was totally unlike her usual voice. Instead of being husky and affectionate, it was harsh and full of vitriolic bitterness.

  Still disbelieving, Primmie shook her head vehemently. ‘No,’ she said, lifting up a hand as it to physically ward off Geraldine’s words. ‘No. That isn’t possible, Geraldine. Why would Kiki do such a thing?’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t want the world to know that her father was in love with her best friend!’ Geraldine erupted explosively. ‘Dear God, Primmie! Didn’t you ever look at your relationship with Simon from Kiki’s eternally selfish point of view?’

  She threw herself down on to the sofa, one arm stretched out along its back, her long legs crossed.

  ‘The chances of Kiki absolutely loving the fact that you would be her stepmother were always nil,’ she continued, her eyes continuing to hold Primmie’s fiercely. ‘She would hate it. It wouldn’t accord with the image she’s so carefully constructing for herself where her public is concerned. And she wouldn’t think any further than that, Primmie. She wouldn’t like it, and so she’d take good care that she didn’t have to put up with it. And to hell with you and your feelings.’

  ‘No.’ Primmie felt as if she were back at the lychgate again; as if the ground were shelving away at her feet. ‘No,’ she said again, her throat tight. ‘I can’t believe Kiki would do that to me. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.’

  Geraldine gave a harsh, mirthless laugh. ‘Oh yes she would! If she’d take Francis away from me, on our wedding day, then you’d better believe that she’d take her father away from you! Kiki’s a bitch, Primmie – a selfish, unfeeling, cold-hearted bitch!’

  In the hideous days and weeks that followed, Primmie never openly acknowledged to herself that Geraldine’s reading of the situation was correct, but doubts were sown and doubts remained. She could, she knew, have telephoned Simon and asked him if he and Kiki had had a meeting and if Kiki had pressurized him into not marrying her. Though the temptation had been strong, it had been one she had resisted. For one thing, hearing his voice, when he no longer wanted to hear hers, would have been more than she could bear, and for another, if Kiki had brought pressure to bear on him, his succumbing to it showed that he had never loved her in the way she’d believed he had.

  With the acceptance that their relationship was utterly over, all her thoughts turned to the baby she was carrying. How were the two of them going to manage on her salary? Even more of a problem, how was she going to be able to continue working at BBDO, when there were no affordable nursery facilities within even a bus ride of the agency or the flat?

  It was a problem she couldn’t talk over with Geraldine, for within days of visiting her at the flat she had gone to Paris.

  ‘And not for a holiday, Prim. For good,’ she had said, her voice still hard and barely recognizable. ‘London is too small a city for me and Kiki both – and now that Cedar Court will never be mine, I have to put distance between it and me. If I don’t, I shall go mad.’

  Her last remark had, Primmie knew, been quite literal.

  Hard on the heels of Geraldine’s phone call had been a phone call from Kiki. ‘Hi,’ she had said laconically, as if nothing very much had taken place since the last time they had spoken. ‘I shan’t be coming back to the flat, Primmie. Francis and I are going to be making Cedar Court our British base. You can empty my room and give the contents to Oxfam.’

  And then, before Primmie had the chance to respond, she’d severed the connection.

  At the beginning of August, it had been Artemis’s turn to drop a bombshell. ‘Daddy wants to sell the flat,’ she had said, unhappily. ‘I’ve tried to get him to change his mind, and I’ve tried to persuade Rupert to buy it from him, so that you could still stay on in it, but Daddy’s realizing all his assets so that he can move to Portugal with a bimbo he’s left Mummy for, and Rupert says he simply can’t afford the asking price. What will you do, Primmie? Will you move into a flatshare or will you move back in with your parents for a while?’

  Artemis had sounded so distressed on her behalf, that Primmie had assured her that it wasn’t a problem and that she would soon find herself another flat.

  The problem was, of course, that she couldn’t do so, because what she was looking for was a flat not just for herself, but for herself and her baby. Up until now she had never had any money worries, for the rent she paid to Artemis’s father was ridiculously low. The rents being asked for other flats in the area were so astronomical as to make even looking at them a complete waste of time. Flatsharing, which she could have happily done under normal circumstances, was now impossible. No single girls sharing a flat together would want to be kept awake at night by a baby crying and by having their flat full of baby paraphernalia.

  Aware that she didn’t have to vacate the flat for several weeks yet, she extended her search to south-east London, only to find the experience a grim one. There were some nice flats, but their rents were always stratospherically beyond her means and the flats she could afford were poky, dingy disasters.

  She was now four and a half months pregnant and still hadn’t told her parents.

  ‘What are you doing with yourself, gel?’ her father asked on one of her regular telephone calls to him. ‘We ain’t seen sight or sound of yer fer yonks.’

  She’d promised to visit at the weekend, knowing that when she did so she would have to tell them about the baby and knowing that the news would hit them hard.

  Making things even more difficult was that when she broke her news she wouldn’t even be able to tell them who the father of her baby was. The repercussions if she did so would be too dreadful.

  ‘Have you thought of having the baby adopted?’ Artemis asked hesitantly, when she told her how much she was dreading speaking to her parents. ‘It might be the best thing, Primmie.’

  ‘No.’ The word came unhesitatingly. ‘No, I couldn’t do it, Artemis. I couldn’t hand my baby over to people
I didn’t know, never to see it again. I absolutely couldn’t. Not ever. Never.’

  There was a short, tense silence, and then Artemis said carefully, ‘It might not have to be like that, Primmie. Not if … not if …’

  ‘Not if what?’ she asked, not sensing where Artemis was going.

  Artemis took a deep, steadying breath. ‘Not if the adoptive parents were Rupert and me.’

  Primmie heard herself gasp as if she had been slammed hard in the stomach.

  ‘Please don’t be angry, Primmie!’ Artemis’s words came in an absolute rush now the issue she’d been longing to broach for weeks was finally out in the open. ‘It’s just that I know you may not have thought of having the baby adopted, and for Rupert and me – and for you and for the baby – it would be the most perfect solution. We wouldn’t have any worries about hereditary defects or … or anything like that. Not that I’m worried about that side of adopting, but Rupert is. He keeps saying that if we adopt we won’t know what kind of genes our baby will have inherited, but this way he wouldn’t have to worry, because nothing inherited from you or Simon could possibly be bad and …’

  ‘No.’ This time the word was a croak. ‘No, Artemis. I couldn’t possibly … I want to keep the baby … I can’t even begin to imagine giving it up.’

  ‘But this way … this way you won’t be giving the baby to people you don’t know.’ Artemis was crying now. ‘You know how much I would love it and cherish it and … and if you don’t let us adopt it, I don’t think Rupert will adopt at all and then I’ll never have a baby …’ She was weeping so earnestly now that Primmie could barely hear what she was saying. ‘… And I do so want a baby, Primmie! I could give it everything. All the love in the world, a beautiful home, a privileged education, holidays abroad, everything. Please, please say you’ll think about it, Primmie. Not just for your sake and for my sake, but for the baby’s sake, too.’

  With tears streaming down her face, Primmie had hung up the phone, unable to say a word in response.