by Penny Jordan
As she listened to Nicki Maggie was aware of a growing sense of disquiet. Nicki had gone through a very difficult time when she and Kit had first fallen in love, she knew that. She knew, too, that Nicki had suffered from depression following Joey’s birth, but she had quickly recovered, and she and Kit had seemed very happy together in their marriage. But the Nicki she was listening to now, the Nicki who had been so vehemently opposed to her own pregnancy last night, was disturbingly full of negativity and anger. Why? What had happened? Had something gone wrong, and, if so, what? And why hadn’t she as Nicki’s friend been more aware of it? Because she had been too wrapped up in her own life, her own love? Now it was Maggie’s turn to feel guilty.
‘Nicki, you can’t say that,’ she protested. ‘You and Kit were made for one another. You told me yourself that you both believed that you were fated to meet and to share your lives.’
‘Yes,’ Nicki agreed tightly. ‘It’s amazing just what you will do to find an excuse for your own behaviour, isn’t it? I expect you’ve told yourself that having this baby is something that was meant to happen, rather than the result of your own manipulation,’ she challenged Maggie sharply.
Just for a second, Maggie was tempted to retaliate and remind Nicki unkindly that Kit had insisted they marry after they had had unprotected sex and he had feared that Nicki might be pregnant, and that the charge of manipulating fate might just as easily be made against them. But there was something so vulnerable and disturbing about the way Nicki was behaving that Maggie felt that to do so would be cruel and unfair.
‘Nicki, I don’t know what has happened between you and Laura, or what’s been said,’ she sidetracked gently instead.
‘But you want to know, don’t you? You want to hear every sordid little detail.’
As Nicki’s voice rose so too did the colour in her face. Seriously alarmed, Maggie tried to calm her down, protesting, ‘Nicki, I don’t want—’
‘You don’t want to what?’ Nicki challenged her angrily. ‘You don’t want to waste your time listening to me? You don’t care about what I think or feel, or suffer? No, neither does Kit. He hates me for what happened…I know that, and that’s why…’
Her voice had dropped now, almost as though she was looking inward and backward; as though she had in a way forgotten that Maggie was there. Now as Nicki rewrapped her arms around her body Maggie was suddenly sharply aware of how thin she was.
‘I know that Kit blames me for what happened, that day! Perhaps Kit is right to blame me. Perhaps deep down inside I knew that he would come to me and that I was tempting him…tormenting him.’
As she turned her head to look at Maggie, Maggie could see the raw pain in her eyes and she ached to be able to offer her some comfort.
‘Whatever it is, Nicki,’ she began softly, ‘whatever happened, however bad things seem right now—’
‘Right now?’ Nicki interrupted her. ‘I’m not talking about something that happened “now”, Maggie.’ She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I’ve never told you or anyone else about this. I’ve always felt too shocked…too ashamed. But I swear I never meant it to happen.’ Nicki’s voice was suspended as though the words she was trying to say were choking her.
‘You never meant what to happen, Nicki?’ Maggie encouraged her, but she suspected she already knew the answer.
‘I never meant to…to incite Kit into breaking his vow, and…and have sex with me, there in Jennifer’s house…her home, whilst she…!’
Compassionately Maggie watched her. Did Nicki really think that all of them had not guessed that it was inevitable for two people as much in love and as much in need of each other as Kit and Nicki had been to take physical comfort from each other and their love?
Maggie knew how much Nicki prided herself on her self-control and her moral strength, but, after the trauma of what she had gone through at the hands of her ex-husband, of course she had needed the comfort of Kit’s love. And equally how could Kit, who they all knew had not been able to have a sexual relationship with Jennifer for the years of her illness, have been able to resist showing her that love?
‘Nicki,’ Maggie protested quietly, ‘ I know you hate admitting as much but you are only human, you know. So you and Kit were lovers…’
‘It was only the once,’ Nicki defended herself immediately. ‘It wasn’t planned…and…I know we shouldn’t have done it,’ she told Maggie in a low voice, which to Maggie’s relief was beginning to sound more rational, more as though it belonged to the Nicki she knew.
‘I hated myself afterwards,’ Nicki told her fiercely. ‘And I know that Kit blamed me for what happened. That he has never forgiven me for being the cause of his betrayal of Jennifer and their marriage vows.’ She gave Maggie a thin, bitter little smile. ‘So you see, Maggie, I am not so much of a saint after all!’
‘Nicki!’ Maggie protested. ‘You are being far too hard on yourself. You can’t possibly think that Kit doesn’t love you. He adores you!’
‘Does he?’ Nicki looked tired. ‘I seem to have a knack of choosing men who end up hurting me, don’t I? Dan, who left me for you; Carl, who turned out to be a wife-beater; and now Kit, who…’
Compressing her mouth, Nicki turned away.
‘When he learns that Laura was in the house that day and overheard us…’
‘What?’ Now Maggie was shocked.
Nicki’s mouth twisted. ‘Oh, yes. Apparently she’d been sent home from school sick, but we were too engrossed in what we were doing to be aware that she was there. She heard everything. Every single intimate, personal detail,’ Nicki told Maggie, her voice cracking with pain and distress.
‘Nicki, it wasn’t your fault,’ Maggie tried to comfort her.
‘Not my fault.’ Nicki laughed bitterly. ‘Of course it was my fault. I was shagging her father and she heard me. I hate that word—it’s so…so degrading, so demeaning somehow. We never used it, did we? It was a man’s word, used to denote the kind of sex that belittled and dehumanised women. This modern generation of women do use it, though. Laura used it today when she was telling me how she had been forced to endure the agony of listening to us…listening to her father shagging me whilst her mother was dying. I keep trying to imagine how I would feel if Joey was put in that position, and how I would feel about the woman who was responsible for putting him there. I would hate her, Maggie. I would hate her because she would deserve to be hated.’
Nicki’s voice was rising again. Maggie could understand how shocked and distressed she must feel, but the sense she was getting from Nicki, that what had happened was somehow very much a current and contentious issue between her and Kit, rather than something that lay in the past, worried her.
‘Come and sit down,’ Maggie insisted, firmly taking hold of Nicki’s arm and guiding her back to her chair. ‘I can understand how you must feel, but it’s a long time ago.’
Nicki didn’t seem to be listening to her. Shaking her head, she said in a sickly voice, ‘She told me this morning. There was the most terrible row.’ Nicki put her fingers to her lips as she tried to stop them from trembling. ‘All these years and she’s never said anything until now.’ She started to laugh hysterically.
‘All these years when Kit and I have been so careful about not doing anything whenever she was around. All these years when I’ve begged Jennifer in my prayers to forgive me, when I’ve done everything I can to atone for what I did; when I’ve told myself that just so long as no one else knows everything could be all right. That just so long as Kit and I pretended that it never happened, he might one day forgive me! And now this. I can’t bear it, Maggie. I can’t bear her knowing…and I can’t bear knowing that she knows.’
Every word Nicki spoke was increasing Maggie’s anxiety and foreboding for her. Of course it was only natural that she should be very upset and shocked, but this was more than that—much more!
‘Nicki, you need to talk to Kit about this,’ Maggie told her.
‘Talk to Kit about th
is! I don’t talk to Kit about anything any more,’ Nicki cried in a goaded voice. ‘I can’t talk to Kit about anything. He doesn’t want to talk to me any more.’
As Nicki looked at her Maggie knew she had not been quick enough to hide her shock.
‘This is what happens, Maggie,’ Nicki told her bitterly. ‘Sooner or later, this is what happens. This is the reality of the world you will be bringing your baby into, a baby nature would never have allowed you to conceive.’
‘Nicki, please,’ Maggie begged. She was beginning to feel seriously worried about Nicki’s emotional and mental state.
‘Nicki please what?’ Nicki demanded sharply, her abrupt change of mood startling Maggie, who had put to one side her original purpose in coming to see her when she had seen how distressed her friend was. There was no reasoning with Nicki whilst she was in her current mood, Maggie recognised unhappily, hurt both by Nicki’s outburst and her attitude towards her.
‘Nicki, please tell me I’m wonderful? Please tell me what I’m doing is right? I can’t, Maggie…I can’t. I think you’d better go,’ Nicki told her tiredly. ‘Joey will be home soon and I don’t want him to see me like this.’
‘Nicki!’ Maggie protested. She didn’t want to leave her friend whilst she was in such a disturbed and distressed state, but she sensed that if she stayed she might only add to her obvious agitation, and that they might between them say things that could destroy their friendship for ever!
‘There isn’t anything more for us to say, Maggie. And right now I just don’t want you here. Everything’s always worked out well for you, hasn’t it? You’ve always come up smiling and smelling of roses—you don’t even begin to know what life is like for people like me…people who always lose out no matter what they do or who they choose. I know you, Maggie, you came here today hoping to get me to say I was pleased for you, because you always need everyone to be pleased for you, don’t you, Maggie? To be pleased for you and to approve of you. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t. And as for the poor baby you are so selfishly determined to have…’
Compressing her mouth, Nicki got up and went over to the back door, opening it.
Silently, not wanting to risk saying anything she might ultimately regret, Maggie left.
6
Marcus checked his watch a little anxiously. Ten minutes to go before surgery started. His first surgery here in the market town partnership he had just joined.
Hebe had been furious with him when he had first announced his plans. There had been cracks appearing in their relationship before then, ignored by him in his desire to make it work, but his decision had been the cause of the final, unbridgeable split between them.
After all the effort he had put into maintaining their relationship, it had shocked him to discover just how little he was actually missing it.
‘A habit, that’s all you and I are, Marcus,’ Hebe told him matter-of-factly when she announced that it was over. ‘We’ve been together too long and for both our sakes now it’s time that we moved on. We’ve got very different goals in life. I realise that now.’
That comment was made scornfully, contemptuously almost, and Marcus knew why. Practising medicine had never been a part of Hebe’s life plan.
‘Marcus, you know my views. There is no way I would ever want to tie myself down to some deadly dull GP practice in the middle of nowhere,’ she told him irritably. ‘That is not what I sweated through med school to get the best grades I could for. Research is where the excitement lies, the challenges, the—’
‘The money,’ Marcus interrupted her wryly.
‘Yes, the money too,’ Hebe acknowledged briskly. ‘You’re a fool, Marcus,’ she told him, and she meant it.
‘And as for this thing you’ve got about babies!’ she derided him scornfully. ‘It’s my sex who are supposed to give in to the urgings of their biological clocks!’ she pointed out mockingly.
Her sex maybe, but never Hebe herself.
‘A baby? Marcus, are you mad?’ she demanded when he first told her how he felt.
‘It would be a commitment between us, Hebe, something of ourselves that we give to each other to create a new life.’
‘Marcus, you are a doctor. Human life, as you very well know, can virtually be created in a lab,’ she reminded him once she had stopped laughing, adding ‘I thought you were too intelligent to come out with such sentimental emotional nonsense. If and when I choose to have a baby, naturally I shall want to ensure that it has the best possible genes available. And that means…’
‘That mine are not good enough,’ Marcus suggested lightly.
She looked at him speculatively.
‘You know your trouble, don’t you?’ she challenged him. ‘You are far too emotional. I should have seen the warning signs when you insisted on diversifying into paediatrics. Just because your cousin lost a child through meningitis does not mean that you have to train as a kiddie doctor. In fact you could do far more to prevent meningitis through research.’
They argued incessantly over his decision to train as a paediatrician and in the end Marcus was forced to concede defeat and to give up trying to persuade her to see things his way.
They parted on reasonably amicable terms, their relationship too worn out to even merit any passionate fights.
He knew that she blamed what she had termed his ‘over-emotional’ response to the death of his cousin’s six-year-old son for his decision. All Marcus knew was that he had suddenly recognised how very important it was to him to have children. How sterile and empty his life felt without them. He was thirty. He had begun to hate city life, and he knew that he wanted to move out of hospital work and into a GP practice, that he wanted the sense of community and belonging that he had seen had been such a source of comfort and strength to his cousin.
He also knew that these were the very things that Hebe disdained and despised the most; the things she considered to be the foolish cravings of her emotion-dependent inferiors. Even so, he had still tried to explain to her how he felt.
She had told him as though in retaliation that she had been offered a very prestigious job in America, which she had already formally accepted!
He had known then that they had reached the end.
It was typical of Hebe, of course, that where another woman might have protested passionately that his desire for children was more important to him than her, Hebe simply rationalised his feelings as an inconvenient biological glitch.
Unseeingly, Laura stared out across the river. She had gone from Nicki’s kitchen to the church where her mother was buried, sitting staring at the headstone that bore her name until her body was stiff with cold.
The scene with Nicki had brought back too many memories—and aroused too many disturbing feelings.
She knew she would never, ever forgive Nicki for what she had done; to do so would be to betray her mother. But she ached inside for the sound of Ryan’s voice.
She had been aware of him from the first time she had walked into his office for her initial interview. Although he was not particularly tall, there was a magnetism about him that was instantly compelling. As Irish as his name implied, he had the broad-shouldered physique of the rugby player he had once been, a thick shock of night-black hair and the bluest eyes she had ever seen, all crinkly when he smiled, his mouth curling. And the heat in those eyes when they had looked at her and told her that he found her desirable…
Laura shivered. She was a modern young woman who considered herself to be sexually aware and experienced, but that look from Ryan!
He had taken her out for lunch within a week of her starting to work for him, and within a month he had told her about his disastrous marriage and the fact that for family and religious reasons he could not find it in himself to bring it to a legal end. He had arranged things so that they had to work late together, and then had taken her out for supper. He had asked her to work weekends and then told her that they would be working from the flat in the city where he lived as a bachelor
whilst his wife and children remained at home in Cork.
She had been so tempted then and it would all have been so easy. Ryan would have made it easy. He was that kind of man. She had known just by looking at him how it would be, and she had ached for the pleasure she knew he would give her.
But she could not allow herself to be turned into another Nicki, the woman she had despised and hated for so long. She had told him, bluntly, that she would not sleep with him.
Ryan had laughed at her and told her that she was wrong, that their coming together was inevitable; that they were destined to be lovers and that he intended to make sure that they were!
So, cravenly perhaps, she had waited until he was away on business and then she had handed in her notice and left. She hadn’t even worked her notice period, which would no doubt look wonderful on her CV, she acknowledged grimly.
She missed Ryan with an intensity she could hardly bear, a pain that ached continuously through her. She was terrified that he would find out where she was and somehow persuade her to go back with him, and she was terrified too that he wouldn’t!
And if she was honest there was a part of her that wished that he would.
A fine, damp, misting rain had started to fall. Ignoring it, she remained staring at the river.
‘Julie, are you sure you don’t want to come with me? They are your parents, after all,’ Stella said firmly.
Immediately Julie shook her head.
‘Dad said he never wanted to see me again,’ she told Stella mutinously. ‘I hate him. He wanted to kill my baby.’
Stella sighed. Julie was so immature. So young. Little more than a baby herself in many ways.
Coaxing and bullying her this morning to eat some breakfast had reminded Stella of the battle she had had with her son when he had been a little boy. Then, like all young children, he had needed the security of knowing that ‘Mummy knew best’. Even though she was seventeen, right now Julie was behaving in very much the same way, needing the security of handing her problem and herself over to someone else to deal with. She was, though, Stella acknowledged, mature enough and maternal enough to be determined to protect her coming child.