by Penny Jordan
‘Yes, you do,’ Maggie had contradicted her firmly. ‘You just don’t realise that you do.’
And somehow or other Maggie, being Maggie, had managed to chivvy and downright bully her into taking what had then, to Nicki, seemed to be an impossibly dangerous step.
To her own surprise, what had started out as a small venture run from her own home had now become a very demanding and thankfully healthily profitable business. And what had been even more surprising had been the discovery that as the business had grown so had she; that she positively enjoyed the challenges it had brought her and that she was far more business-minded than she had ever known she could be. Or at least she had been until Joey had been born.
‘You’re pregnant. But you can’t be. You’re too old. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!’ had been Laura’s furious reaction when they had told her the news about Nicki’s pregnancy. ‘You’re being such a typical second wife,’ she had taunted Nicki when Kit had not been there. ‘They always rush to get pregnant. I’d hate to be in your position. Always feeling you’ve got something to prove, always knowing that someone else had been there before you. It isn’t my father who wants this baby, no matter what you say. It’s you. After all, he already has me!’
It had been just over a week after they had broken the news of her pregnancy to Laura that she had announced that she intended to leave. By then Nicki had had enough of trying to placate her. Overwhelmed with ‘morning sickness’ that lasted virtually all day, beset by anxieties about her agency, and worrying herself sick about the wisdom of her actually having a child who had not been planned, she had been in no fit state to cope with Laura as well.
The peace that had descended on the household after Laura’s departure had given Nicki a blissful taste of pure and absolute happiness, as within days of her stepdaughter going so had her morning sickness. But with that happiness had also come a bitter aftertaste of guilt, from knowing how badly Kit felt about Laura leaving. His anxiety for her had overshadowed Nicki’s pregnancy and Joey’s birth—so much so that Nicki had suffered a severe and unexpected bout of depression following the birth. Laura, predictably, had refused even to acknowledge the baby, never mind come and see him, and Joey had in fact been walking before Laura had met her new half-brother for the first time.
Nicki tensed now, collecting her thoughts as the kitchen door opened and Kit and Laura came in.
‘Where’s Joey?’ Kit asked as he looked round the kitchen.
‘In bed,’ Nicki told him sharply. ‘It’s past his bedtime and, as I told you this morning, I have work to do this evening.’
Nicki paused deliberately before reminding him, ‘You were supposed to be reading him the next chapter of his book.’
‘Oh, Dad, remember when you used to read my bedtime story?’ Laura smiled, interrupting Nicki, one hand on her father’s arm. She threw Nicki a smugly triumphant look before adding, ‘You never missed a single evening, no matter how busy you were. But of course things were different for us. With Mummy being so ill I really only had you. I expect that’s why we’re so especially close.’
As Nicki listened she could feel herself starting to grind her teeth. She itched to be able to tell Laura that she’d made her point and that there was no need for her to over-egg her bread, but if she did she knew that Laura would immediately turn to Kit for support. The last thing Nicki wanted right now was to be humiliated in front of her stepdaughter!
‘You mustn’t blame Dad for being late, Nicki,’ Laura was saying mock apologetically now. ‘It’s my fault! I wanted to have a daddy and daughter chat with him. Private stuff…’
As Laura leaned into Kit’s side Nicki tried to control the fury building up inside her. She knew that Laura was deliberately manipulating the situation, and trying to cause an argument between them.
‘I loved driving the new BMW,’ she added enthusiastically, ignoring Nicki to speak to her father. ‘And thanks for letting me have the spare set of keys, Dad. I promise I’ll check with you before I borrow it.’
Nicki had had enough.
‘Actually, Laura, I am the one you should be checking with,’ Nicki told her stepdaughter with icy rage. ‘The BMW is actually my car.’
Nicki could feel her face burning with resentment and guilt as she saw the look Kit was giving her.
Nope, she still appeared the same, Laura acknowledged derisively half an hour later as she peered at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She had not suddenly turned back into her pony-tailed fifteen-year-old self, even if she had just given a pretty good display of that self to her stepmother.
What was it about the relationship between oneself and one’s family that somehow meant that within minutes of being with them one reverted to childhood, not to mention childish habits? Laura knew that she was not alone in experiencing this unpalatable phenomenon, just as she also knew she was not alone in being guilty of still enacting in adulthood the travails of her teenage step-parent wars!
It was a subject her generation were experts on and a powerful bonding agent. ‘Show me a person who can put their hand on their heart and honestly say that they accepted and welcomed their step-parents from the word go, and I’ll show you an alien. It is a universally accepted truth that a child in possession of two parents is not in need of a step-parent,’ one of Laura’s friends was fond of saying facetiously. But there was a certain black-humoured element of truth in her statement.
Laura wasn’t exactly proud of the way being in her stepmother’s presence made her revert with dizzying speed back to the mindset of her teenaged self, employing deliberately contentious tactics as only teenage girls knew how. It gave her no pleasure now she was back in her adult skin to recognise how quickly and effectively she had stoked the fires of Nicki’s hostility and resentment.
As a girl she had told herself that it was her duty to show Nicki to her father in her true colours, and to show Nicki herself that there was no way she or Joey could ever match, never mind usurp, the place she and her own mother held in her father’s heart.
What must it be like to always have to live with the knowledge that your husband had previously been legally committed to another woman, another family? Was there always a fear lurking on the edge of one’s awareness that one might be less loved…the lesser loved?
Laura knew that her stepmother was hardly likely to give her the answer to such questions!
And as to seeking her input, her guidance, her support on the matter that had brought Laura here, running for cover, seeking safety…A mirthless smile curled her mouth, her grey eyes shadowing.
Her hair, like her father’s, was wheat-gold and thick, just like Joey’s. She shared other similarities with her half-brother as well, she recognised, not least a tendency to be wary of anyone trying to push their way into their family life!
She had felt very sorry for her father earlier when Nicki had made that acrid comment about the BMW. Her smile gave way to a frown. Did Nicki habitually humiliate him like that? Did he always allow her to?
Resurrecting the battle between Nicki and herself had been the last thing on her mind when she had made her decision to come here; she wasn’t an insecure teenager any more, after all, terrified of losing her father as she had already done her mother, and resentful of the woman who in her eyes had been the catalyst for that loss. But listening to the way her stepmother had spoken to her father had swamped her good intentions and reawakened all her old bitterness and hostility.
A little ruefully, she reflected on the generous company car allowance she had given up when she had given up her job. With a little careful handling it would just have stretched—just—to the pretty BMW convertible she had had her eye on!
Still, with her qualifications and CV she knew she would not have too much trouble in getting another job, but not yet…not until…Instinctively she reached into her bag for her mobile, and then grimaced. She had handed it in along with her notice. Much better that way. After all, her mobile, like her job, would be easy enough to replace.
Even so, she couldn’t resist working out just how long it would be before he realised what she had done…Quickly she calculated. He was still away and not due back for another couple of days, and…Stop it! she warned herself, quickly clamping down on the thought and on the sudden give-away surge of her heartbeat.
‘Was that really necessary?’ Kit asked Nicki grimly when he walked into their bedroom, having finished reading Joey his belated bedtime story.
‘Was what really necessary?’ Nicki asked him defiantly, but of course she knew what he meant.
‘That dig about the car,’ Kit told her. ‘You were the one who insisted that I should drive it.’
‘That you should drive it, yes,’ Nicki agreed. ‘But there is no way I am prepared to have Laura driving it.’
‘Nicki!’
The very way he said her name was a weary sigh. Ridiculously, Nicki could feel tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, and not a teenager!
‘Oh, Nicki…this is crazy,’ she heard Kit saying in a much warmer voice as he walked over to where she was standing, brushing her already neatly glossy nut-brown bob. Standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her, nuzzling the exposed curve of her throat. Immediately Nicki stiffened and tried to pull away.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Kit demanded.
In the mirror their glances met. Nicki looked away first.
‘I’m tired of having to cope with Laura. You know how I feel about her living here, Kit. About the way she’s upsetting Joey.’
She shivered as she saw how Kit was looking at her, his voice tense as he told her, ‘This isn’t just about Laura, is it, Nicki? This goes back to before Laura’s arrival.’ He paused. ‘Look, if it’s because…’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Nicki denied, jerking frantically away from him. ‘Just like you didn’t want to talk about it when…All I want is for you to leave me alone.’
She could feel the emotions surging up inside her with frightening force. Pain; guilt; the horrible tormenting, debilitating fear that robbed her of the ability to think or function properly, and with it the full force of her anger against Kit, and against life itself.
‘Nicki…’
She could hear the anxiety in his voice, but she felt too isolated and distant from him to want to respond to it. It was safer feeling like this, she recognised. Safer and easier. Let him turn to his precious daughter if he wanted someone to sympathise with him. She no doubt would fully endorse his feelings—his behaviour!
‘Look, Nicki, what happened happened to both of us.’
Nicki gave him a bitter look.
‘Oh, really? You can say that now, Kit, but at the time, according to you, it was my problem…my decision.’
‘Your decision, yes. But…’
They both tensed as Laura knocked on their bedroom door and called out, ‘Dad, are you in there? Can I have a word?’
‘You’d better go,’ Nicki told him fiercely, and rejectingly. ‘Laura needs you!’
‘No Hughie? I thought you said he was coming home today?’
Accepting her husband’s perfunctory kiss on her cheek, Stella nodded. ‘I did and he has. He’s gone round to see Julie,’ she told Richard wryly. ‘He seemed to be a bit on edge before he left, and he’s lost weight.’
‘Students always do,’ Richard pointed out equably, ‘and I shouldn’t worry too much about Julie. To be honest I rather got the impression that things had cooled off somewhat between them.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Stella denied. ‘But it has occurred to me that Hughie might have given us that impression deliberately, because he knows it’s what we want to hear. He’s an intelligent boy, after all. I mean, it’s like I was saying to Alice earlier. It’s not that I don’t like Julie, I do. I just want them both to be sensible and look beyond the here and now, the immediacy of the moment, and think about the future. Hughie is far too young to even think of tying himself down to a steady relationship. Apart from anything else, with him away at university and Julie here, it just isn’t practical!’
As she spoke Stella suddenly heard Maggie’s voice from their own teenage years, teasing her. ‘Oh, Stella! Miss Practicality, that’s what I think we should call you!’
Funny the things one remembered…and why. At the time she had found nothing wrong in Maggie’s comment, even preening herself a little for it, telling herself that she had more common sense than the other three put together, and that without her to put an end to some of their more outrageous exploits and sometimes too silly attitude towards life they would have been in a sorry mess indeed. They needed her to remind them of what was what—to stop them behaving foolishly. Yes, she had prided herself on her role within the quartet—the sensible one, the cool, non-flirtatious one whom boys knew better than to approach with too-familiar overtures. The one whom, in fact, the male sex tended to treat more as a pal and an honorary member of their own sex that they could confide in, rather than a mysterious and exciting object of desire and lust. And she had continued to pride herself on it, feeling both empowered and ever so slightly superior to the other three because of her foresight, her ability to rationalise and plan, her sheer sensibleness.
But just lately…
‘Are you in this evening or out?’
Although Stella no longer had any paid employment, having given up her social services job after Hughie’s birth, over the years she had been co-opted onto the committees of a variety of voluntary organisations, starting with the Parent-Teachers Association of Hughie’s junior school, and picking up along the way a position on the Board of Governors for his senior school, an appointment as a local JP, and three local charity organisations, all responsibilities on which she had thrived, with which she dealt with her famed efficiency, and which kept her just as busy as Richard since his promotion to Chief Clerk of the Local County Council.
‘In but I’m out tomorrow,’ she told him pragmatically. ‘Dinner with Maggie and the others. Apparently Maggie has something she wants to tell us!’
Richard shook his head. He was a hard-working, honest, but unimaginative man who found it hard to get to grips with the emotional intensity of the bond the four women shared. For a start they were all so very different. Alice, the quiet, gentle, stay-at-home mother; Nicki, the glossy, immaculate businesswoman; his own Stella with her formidable efficiency and practicality, and who—thank the Lord!—had never and would never exhibit any of the passionate intensity that was so much a part of Maggie’s vibrant personality. But that was women for you. And Richard, one of the last of a dying race of a certain type of man, was quite happy to openly admit that, so far as he was concerned, the female sex was a complete enigma!
‘So why couldn’t Maggie tell you whatever this news is before tomorrow night?’ Richard asked.
‘You know Maggie,’ Stella responded wryly. ‘Typically, Alice is convinced that she’s going to announce that she and Oliver are planning to get married.’ She gave a small exasperated shrug. ‘I hope she’s wrong. You’d think after what she went through when she and Dan split up that Maggie would be very wary about inviting any more emotional pain—and that’s what she’s going to get ultimately, because, no matter what he feels about her now, sooner or later Oliver is going to want a younger woman.’
‘Mmm. I always thought that was a rum business—Maggie and Dan splitting up. I mean, you never saw them apart. Whenever we went out together, they were always all over one another.’
‘Well, according to Nicki, Dan wanted children and Maggie didn’t, so—’
‘I thought they split up because Dan had that affair,’ Richard interrupted her, looking confused.
‘Well, yes, they did, but we always knew that there had to be a reason why he had the affair. I mean, Dan just wasn’t that kind of man.’
‘He was a damn good-looking chap,’ Richard mused.
‘Very good-looking,’ Stella agreed ruefully.
All of them had at one time or
another been a little bit in love with Dan, even her, although she had kept her feelings determinedly to herself, firmly lecturing herself against being foolish.
People might nowadays describe her approvingly as a striking looking and confident woman, but in her youth she had quite definitely been plain. Yes, she had had regular features, healthy, clear skin, and good teeth, but what they had added up to had always fallen short of the head-turning male-attention-getting looks the other three had in their different ways possessed.
Not that she had minded. Prettiness had been in her opinion, then, a dangerously two-edged sword, in that it encouraged her sex to rely on it and, if they were weak and silly enough, to trade on it. Not that any of her friends had ever been guilty of that!
At the time she had calmly accepted her position in the foursome as the plain one, the sensible one, without resentment; it was only recently that she had begun to look back and feel resentful, to feel that somehow she had been cheated of the right to something—a certain femininity and sensuality—that the others had openly enjoyed.
Deep down inside she knew that these feelings were somehow connected to the very obvious air of sexual and emotional happiness that surrounded Maggie. Somehow it disturbed her; made her feel that she was less of a woman than the others, especially in the sexual sense. And yet that was ridiculous, surely, because she had never once experienced those kinds of feelings when they had been young. In fact, it had been her friendship with Richard that she had prized most in their marriage, the interests they had in common—which had never included a desire to spend hours in bed indulging in sexual Olympics. If anything she had actually pitied Alice for having such an obviously highly sexed husband as Stuart, just as she had pitied Maggie when Dan had had his affair, and Nicki when she had fallen so passionately in love with Kit.
So why was she now feeling that somehow she had missed out?
And more importantly why was she wasting time brooding on it? She had always been a doer not a dweller, dealing in realities and practicalities rather than the vagueness of emotions.