The Alone Alternative
Page 32
The old Marianne would have been overwhelmed by so much emotion. She would have analysed and weighed-up and beaten every pro and con until they were squeezed of life-force. But she is tougher now. After years of anxieties, decades of being a martyr to her chattering brain, she releases all her doubts and fears, hands over her trust to Edward and the fates and believes in the end, all will be sorted.
Epilogue
It is over a decade since Edward opened an email from Marianne Hayward via Friends Reunited, the consequences of which neither he nor she could ever have realised at the time. He remembers it because it was on the eve of a party in November 2001; one simple communication that has ultimately altered their life paths in far-reaching ways.
On a chilly damp evening, the twenty-sixth of October, they go to see The Rivals at the Ashcroft Theatre in Fairfield Halls in Croydon. It is a performance by a young and inventive group of actors called Creative Cows who are based near Exeter and are already known to Edward. Their company name derives from the fact that they rehearse on a farm.
Six players double up the parts, the ladies wearing long cage skirts with bloomers clearly visible underneath, the gentlemen with colourful jackets that can be easily swapped for something plain. The setting is spartan, simple and charming, scene changes indicated by music while the actors carry white-painted chairs, as if in a dance, to different positions on the stage.
Edward and Marianne sit in row L. When Marianne bought the tickets, she told him it was symbolic.
As the opening scene unfolds, he knows she is remembering …
Lydia and Lucy … aged eleven.
It has been forty-four years since they played their roles on the tiny stage at Brocklebank Hall – sweet young children, uncut rocks, unknown lives ahead, perhaps retrospectively, the tiniest clues of the teacher and the archaeologist in the making.
Now when Lydia and Lucy speak their opening lines, Edward reaches over and takes hold of Marianne’s hand. Their eyes meet. Their story has come full circle, from inauspicious beginnings when they barely exchanged a friendly word, to an intertwining of hearts and minds and lives.
ALSO BY LINDA MACDONALD:
Meeting Lydia
“Edward Harvey. Even thinking his name made her tingle with half-remembered childlike giddiness. Edward Harvey, the only one from Brocklebank to whom she might write if she found him.”
Marianne Hayward, teacher of psychology and compulsive analyser of the human condition, is in a midlife turmoil. After twenty years of happy marriage, she comes home one day to find her charming husband in the kitchen talking to the glamorous Charmaine. All her childhood insecurities resurface from a time when she was bullied at a boys’ prep school. She becomes jealous and possessive and the arguments begin.
Teenage daughter Holly persuades her to join Friends Reunited which results in both fearful and nostalgic memories of prep school as Marianne wonders what has become of the bullies. But there was one boy in her class who was never horrible to her: the clever and enigmatic Edward Harvey, on whom she developed her first crush. Perhaps the answer to all her problems lies in finding Edward again …
Meeting Lydia is a book about childhood bullying, midlife crises, obsession, jealousy and the ever-growing trend of internet relationships. It is the prequel to A Meeting of a Different Kind and the first part of a trilogy, the third part being The Alone Alternative.
Paperback: 9781848767126
Ebook: 9781848768574
A Meeting of a Different Kind
“Taryn thinks about Mr Perfect Edward Harvey and the news that he will be visiting London over the next few weeks. Marianne keeps saying he isn’t the philandering type; Taryn doesn’t believe a word of it. There isn’t a man alive who doesn’t have the potential to philander, given the right material to philander with …’
When archaeologist Edward Harvey’s wife Felicity inherits almost a million, she gives up her job, buys a restaurant and, as a devotee of Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, starts turning their home into a small eco-farm. Edward is not happy, not least because she seems to be losing interest in him.
Taryn is a borderline manic-depressive, a scheming minx, a seductress and user of men. When her best-friend Marianne says Edward is not the philandering type, Taryn sees a challenge and concocts a devious plan to meet him at the British Museum – a meeting that will have far reaching and destructive consequences on both their lives.
Set in Broadclyst and Beckenham, with a chapter on the Isles of Scilly, A Meeting of a Different Kind is the stand-alone sequel to Meeting Lydia, continuing the story from the perspectives of two very different characters. Like its prequel, it will appeal to fans of adult fiction, especially those interested in the psychology of relationships.
Paperback: 9781780883250
Ebook: 9781780887739