Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  ‘You mustn’t let her bully you, Alice,’ Stella reproved her sternly. ‘You’ve done more than enough for her already. You are the boys’ grandmother, not their mother, and you of all people deserve to have some “me” time. You’ve already told us just how much this degree course means to you.’

  ‘It’s not so much the course itself,’ Alice sighed honestly. ‘It’s what it represents for me—it’s doing something to prove that I’m an intelligent, thinking, viable person and not just Stuart’s wife and the children’s mother. Am I being unrealistic and selfish, Stella?’ she appealed to her friend.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Stella told her robustly.

  ‘I do hope that Maggie and Nicki patch things up before our next get-together.’ Alice sighed. ‘I felt dreadful when Maggie made that comment about wanting our support; as though we’d let her down.’

  ‘You know your trouble, Alice? You’re far too tender-hearted,’ Stella told her forthrightly.

  Later, when they had said their goodbyes, Stella reflected privately that, whilst no one could ever accuse Alice of selfishness, so far as Stella could see she was certainly being unrealistic if she expected either her husband or her family to give up willingly the total dedication to their needs and their egos that Alice had always lavished on them.

  She loved Hughie and she loved him with a deep, fierce, protective, maternal love that was the strongest and most intense emotion she had ever experienced, but she had never allowed him to rule her life.

  She loved Richard too, of course, but that love…A little uncomfortably Stella acknowledged inwardly that she did not want to either quantify or analyse the degree to which the word ‘love’ applied to her feelings for her husband!

  Apprehensively Nicki placed her hands to her aching temples. Her heart felt as though it were being jerked on a piece of elastic, and then thrown against her chest wall. Her mouth had gone dry and the fear that was filling her was almost a physical presence in the room with her.

  It was nearly two o’clock and she had no idea just where the morning had gone!

  She had known fear before; as a child at school, a misfit, afraid of the taunts of the other children, and then later as a young wife, lying in bed waiting for Carl to come in, terrified that when he did she might somehow have said or done something that would cause him to lash out at her, sometimes beating her so badly that she had been left unconscious.

  Then there had been the fear of other people discovering the truth about her marriage; about her weakness and her inability to have a normal marriage, the kind of marriage where a husband did not physically attack his wife because she was so useless. But thanks to Maggie she had learned how to overcome that fear and to leave it and her marriage behind her.

  But that had not been an end of her fears. She had feared loving Kit and then she had feared losing him. She had feared the power that Laura had over him and she had feared the effect of his first wife’s death on him. She had feared their breakup and then afterwards she had feared their reconciliation. She had feared hearing him say that he had felt trapped into marrying her because of their making love without using protection.

  But her biggest fear of all was for Joey. Joey, her most precious, wonderful child; so much loved, so very, very deserving of being loved and yet surely so much damned by the fact that she was his mother; so much at risk from the vagaries and cruelties of the same vengeful fate that had taken that new life from her, destroyed her baby in her womb.

  Just lately she had barely been able to sleep at night for worrying about Joey, afraid to close her eyes in case some dreadful fate befell him due to her negligence, her inability to protect him. Sometimes she felt as though she were just waiting powerlessly for Joey to be hurt—to be destroyed in an act of vengeance whose real target was her! But how could that be fair? She was the one who should be punished, not Joey. No, Joey had done nothing except be born!

  Why was she being persecuted like this? Was it because she had already proved herself to be an unfit mother by not being able to protect her new baby? Her heart felt as though someone had flung it hard—too hard—to the floor. The resulting bounce made her feel giddy, breathless, sick.

  ‘Nicki?’

  It took her several seconds to register Kit’s voice and by that time he had walked into the kitchen, frowning as he looked from the messy kitchen table with its clutter of unwashed mugs to her own congealing breakfast toast, to her uncombed hair and shiny nose.

  She couldn’t remember him saying that he intended to come home early and his unexpected arrival made her tense defensively.

  ‘Nicki, are you all right?’ Kit demanded.

  ‘I’ve been busy—working,’ she lied defensively. ‘One of us has to!’

  The air between them smouldered acridly with hostility as she looked belligerently at him. She already knew exactly the sour expression she would see on his face, the downturn of his mouth—the same mouth she had once thought so generous and sexy and exciting; the same mouth she had once loved to touch and kiss, and be touched and kissed by.

  ‘I tried to ring you but you didn’t answer,’ Kit told her, ignoring her dig. ‘So I came home instead to tell you…I thought you’d want to know that I’ve spoken to Laura. Apparently she’s got herself a job working for Alice’s daughter, looking after her children, and she’s going to be staying there as well.’

  Very deliberately Nicki got up and walked away from him.

  ‘Nicki!’ she heard him protesting.

  ‘You came home just to tell me that? Why? Laura is your daughter,’ she told him coldly. ‘Not mine. I don’t care what she does, Kit, or where she is, just so long as it isn’t here! She was trying to hurt Joey,’ she reminded him passionately, and as she spoke all the protective fury she had felt on seeing her son cowering away from her stepdaughter came back to her. She had cowered away from Carl, her ex-husband, in just the same way! What was it about her that drew these violent, dangerous people into her life? Was it, as she was beginning to fear, because there was something intrinsically bad about her? Something so bad that she had to be punished, that she deserved to be hurt? Wrapping her arms tightly around her body, she started to rock rhythmically to and fro. She might be bad but Joey wasn’t! He didn’t deserve…

  ‘Nicki, look.’ Kit frowned when she refused to respond or answer him, persisting doggedly, ‘The other night we were both overwrought. Things were said…’ Her behaviour bewildered him. Nicki had never been a sulker or a manipulator, her choice of weapons was more cerebral than emotional—sound, sustained, calm argument, not emotional pressure.

  ‘I don’t care what you say, Kit. I am not having Laura back here—ever. It’s Joey you should be thinking about and not her! She wants to destroy our marriage!’ Suddenly Nicki was virtually screaming at him. ‘And if she could, she would destroy Joey as well!’

  Kit took a step back from her, shocked by the fury he could see and hear in her face and voice.

  ‘Nicki, you know that isn’t true!’ he protested.

  ‘Do I?’ Nicki challenged him bitterly.

  Helplessly, Kit watched as she got up and left the kitchen, slamming the door angrily behind her, in a warning that he was not to follow her. He could hardly recognise the woman he had fallen so passionately in love with in the person that Nicki had become.

  Maybe, with hindsight, it was true that he hadn’t been as supportive about her losing the baby as he could have been, but he had still been in shock from the news that she’d been pregnant at all!

  Alice opened the door to the boxroom and took a deep breath. It had been later than she had planned when she had got back home. She walked over to the old-fashioned desk that had originally been her father’s, and began to open its drawers.

  Half an hour later, kneeling on the floor surrounded by their contents, she wondered ruefully if she might not have made life simpler for herself if she had bought a brand-new modern workstation. If she had, she wouldn’t now be faced with wondering what on earth she wa
s going to do with all the memorabilia she had removed from the desk drawers. As she started to stand up she noticed that a couple of photographs had become dislodged from one of the several albums she had removed from the two deepest drawers. Automatically she bent to pick them up.

  They were holiday snaps, the first one of her and Stuart, taken a year after they had married. Stuart looked impossibly tanned and sexy and sure of himself, posing in his seventies-style swimwear, whilst she stood at his side, looking pink and gazing up adoringly at him, wearing a towelling bikini, which she remembered she had felt very self-conscious about wearing because of the brevity of the briefs.

  She had bought it from a small boutique, feeling flustered and excited, after Stuart had announced that he had booked them a surprise last-minute trip to the Seychelles to celebrate their anniversary—in those days a holiday destination so exotic and exclusive that hardly anyone she knew had known where it was, never mind been there!

  For their honeymoon he had taken her to Venice. She had thought herself the most fortunate, the most loved of women then.

  In Venice on their honeymoon he had made love to her in a bedroom in what had originally been a Renaissance prince’s palace, to the sound of the water lapping against the walls. Afterwards they had sat on their balcony and he had wrapped her in his arms whilst they’d watched the reflection of the huge full moon on the lagoon.

  They had spent hours exploring the city on foot and by water, and hours too making love. There was something about the very air of Venice that breathed sensuality. When she had said as much once to Stella, she remembered that her friend had laughed and said that, so far as she was concerned, Venice’s air breathed bad drains!

  They had had such plans then, she and Stuart. She had loved the excitement and the intimacy of travelling with him. In that first year of their marriage they had visited over a dozen European cities, each visit a tiny glowing jewel of happiness to be stored away in her private memories.

  The holiday in the Seychelles had been especially special, the island the nearest place to paradise she could possibly have imagined. Zoë had been conceived there, and it had also been there that Stuart had persuaded her to go skinny-dipping with him. In fact, she had always suspected that Zoë had been conceived whilst they had been skinny-dipping, although Stuart had always claimed it was impossible for her to know that.

  He had been so thrilled when she had told him that she thought she was pregnant, and so jealous when Zoë had been born. She could still remember how pulled between them she had felt. Zoë had seemed to have the knack of waking up screaming the moment Stuart had touched her, and Stuart for his part had always seemed to want her attention the most when Zoë had been at her most demanding and difficult. She had often wondered if he would have behaved in the same way had Zoë been a boy, and had felt dreadfully guilty for that thought. As the only one of the four of them to have had a baby at that stage, she had half expected that the other three would grow as irritated by the maternal demands on her time as Stuart, but instead they had proved wonderfully supportive.

  It had been Stella who had decided, when she had not been able to get a babysitter so she could come and join them for a meal, that they would come to her and they would bring the meal with them. It had been Nicki who had booked her into a local beauty salon for a ‘full works’ treatment, as a special birthday surprise, and Maggie who had come and spent the day with Zoë to make sure that she could enjoy it.

  There had been pressures on them then that could have fragmented their friendship but that had only strengthened it, so why now, after all these years, did it suddenly seem as though they were pulling against one another?

  Tucking the photograph back inside the album, she picked up the other one.

  Coincidentally it had been taken on the group holiday they had all shared and which Stella had referred to earlier. As Stella had said, it had been Maggie who had suggested that they all go away together, but Alice had been the one who had organised everything. She remembered how much she had enjoyed doing so. Making lists, keeping files…organising!

  ‘You should do this on a professional basis,’ Maggie had teased her admiringly.

  ‘Alice run a business? Never!’ Stuart had laughed. She had laughed too, but secretly she had been hurt by his comment.

  Was Oliver right? Was she wrong to want to shield Nicki, to protect her and to give her the benefit of the doubt? This wasn’t a situation she could deal with on her own, Maggie recognised, putting down the contract she had been trying to read.

  They might have talked everything through and made up their quarrel, but that didn’t alter the fact that the letter was still there, its malevolence lying heavily on her heart, seeping slowly out to poison her trust and her happiness. She needed to talk about what had happened, and how she felt, she recognised. She needed the help, the support, the comfort of sharing her fears with her closest friends. The friends who, unlike Oliver, knew Nicki every bit as well as she did herself. And who, also unlike Oliver, would be able to give her opinions that were unbiased and non-judgemental.

  Of the four of them, Stella was the most practical, the most analytical. On the point of dialling Stella’s number, Maggie hesitated. She had felt the ambiguity of Stella’s attitude when she had initially told them her news, and Stella now had problems of her own. Alice would understand, though, and like her she would want to do what was best for Nicki as well. Unlike Oliver she would understand how and why Maggie felt so protective towards her, so reluctant to acknowledge the truth of Oliver’s insistence that the letter could really not have come from anyone else!

  Quickly she dialled Alice’s number.

  Alice had just finished finding the photograph albums a new home when the phone rang.

  ‘Maggie!’ She began to smile and then stopped, asking anxiously instead, ‘Is everything all right…the baby…?’

  ‘The baby’s fine,’ Maggie assured her, swallowing hard as she fought back the impulse to say, But I’m not!

  She had been worrying for hours about what she should do, not just for her own sake but for Nicki’s as well, and now she was desperate to unburden herself to someone she knew would understand.

  ‘Alice…I…There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I…I wondered if I could come round. I need your advice…I’m worried, Alice, about Nicki,’ Maggie burst out. She couldn’t tell Alice about the letter over the phone!

  On the other end of the line, Alice felt her heart drop.

  ‘Maggie, I do understand how…how upset you must have been by Nicki’s reaction to your news,’ Alice responded awkwardly, ‘but…well, it was a shock for all of us, and…Well, baby hormones do make one…what I mean is, I shouldn’t take Nicki’s comments too much to heart if I were you. I mean, she is under a lot of pressure what with Laura, and Kit’s business not doing very well. She probably spoke in the heat of the moment, and you know sometimes things are said that are best overlooked. We’ve all been friends for such a long time…I don’t think any of us would want…’ Uncomfortably her voice trailed away.

  ‘I understand what you’re trying to say, Alice,’ Maggie told her. She was unable to stop herself adding bleakly, ‘I wonder if you can understand, though, how it feels to know that my baby is the cause of…I wanted him or her to have your love, Alice, not to be rejected by you all before even being born!’ Maggie burst out emotionally. Closing her eyes in despair, she acknowledged that now she had probably totally confirmed Alice’s awkwardly expressed belief that she was suffering from an overdose of emotionalism.

  ‘Maggie, of course we’ll all love your baby,’ Alice soothed her. ‘It’s just that…Please don’t take this the wrong way, will you, but, well, life’s not entirely easy for the rest of us right now. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t happy for you, of course we are,’ Alice told her hastily.

  ‘But what’s happening to me isn’t that important?’ Maggie supplied for her. ‘Well, it was important enough for Nicki to—’ A
bruptly she stopped. All she had wanted to do was to discuss her fears with Alice, to get together with her and Stella and show them the letter she had been sent…to ask them to assure her that it could not possibly have come from Nicki.

  ‘Of course we care, Maggie,’ Alice told her gently. ‘It’s just that—Look, we’ll be getting together as usual in three weeks’ time. I’m sure by then that Nicki will have calmed down and come round.’ She stopped speaking as a small warning sound indicated that she had another call coming through, and when she looked at her telephone screen she could see that her caller was Stuart ringing on his mobile.

  ‘Maggie, I have to go,’ she exclaimed urgently. ‘Stuart’s trying to get through and I do need to speak to him.’

  Quickly she ended the call, but it was too late. Stuart had hung up, having left her a message.

  Maggie looked bleakly at the phone. So much for confiding in her friends and getting their advice, she reflected a little bitterly.

  Despite the centrally heated warmth of the room, Maggie gave a tiny little shiver. She knew that in general other people thought of her as someone who didn’t allow things to get her down, someone who was continually pushing back the boundaries, someone who took risks, who was upbeat, optimistic, and self-confident. But they were other people, not her closest friends! They, she had always believed, knew different—better! They knew and understood her as no one else could. Her need of their support, their closeness—the bond between them went very, very deep for her. Their shared friendship was of primary importance to her and she valued it as such. That had always been a given for her, one of the strongest foundations on which their friendship was built. For them, with them, she had no need to pretend, or to be brave and resilient! To them she would always be able to turn. That was what she had believed, just as they in turn could always come to her.

  Now shockingly, disturbingly, she was questioning whether the others shared those feelings. If she was perhaps alone. And that was a very frightening and alienating place to be, Maggie recognised soberly.