Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  ‘It hurts. It hurts!’ Julie screamed. ‘I hate it, I hate you and I hate this bloody baby.’

  Over her body, Stella and the midwife exchanged wry smiles.

  ‘I told mine to stay where he was,’ the midwife told Stella. ‘I hated him more than I had believed I could hate anyone or anything, other than his father, until the moment he was born and I held him for the first time. Then…Yes. Come on, Julie. No! Don’t push! Not yet…Just take a breath. That’s a good girl…Take another…yes. I know it hurts but you’re being wonderfully, wonderfully brave.’

  As births went it was relatively quick, but as Julie gave an animal howl and the final push to bring her child into the world Stella felt as exhausted herself as though she had run a marathon—two marathons. And yet at the same time she felt more elated, more euphoric, than she could ever remember feeling before.

  ‘Yes. Julie, that’s it…Oh, yes. You’ve got a gorgeous, gorgeous, perfect baby boy,’ the midwife was crooning happily as she placed the baby on Julie’s sweat-slick trembling body.

  Just for a moment, before Julie enclosed him protectively in her arms, Stella caught a glimpse of him and felt her heart turn over inside her chest.

  She had thought with Todd she had experienced the most important emotional and physical love of her life, but now immediately she knew she had been wrong. This was what had been missing from her life; this feeling flooding and totally absorbing her, imbuing and endowing her, redefining the whole meaning and purpose of her life, Stella recognised emotionally as she looked at her grandson for the first time. What she felt could not be analysed or rationalised, it simply was. In the act of being born, her grandson had transported her from one set of needs and values and loyalties to another, and the feelings she had had for Todd quite simply ceased to exist.

  The baby was the image of Hughie. A perfect replica of how he had looked when he had been born.

  Love flooded over her and her eyes filled with tears. This tiny scrap of humanity was her son’s son. Her grandchild…a part of her…a tiny human link in an eternal chain. Stella ached to reach out for him, to pick him up and hold him to her own body. She could actually feel the echo of a retraction of her own womb, the tensing of her breasts.

  The midwife was tidying Julie up, and shooing Stella gently but firmly out of the room.

  ‘Time to let them get to know one another now, and Julie needs to sleep.’

  As she walked out into the corridor on unsteady legs Stella felt as though she were floating on a cloud of pure gold joy. As though she had experienced something so wondrous, so life-changing that she could never be the same person again. She reached for her mobile. She had to tell Richard, and the girls, her friends. Todd had tried to ring her again. Without a second’s compunction she deleted the call without bothering to return it.

  What twenty-four hours ago had seemed essential, exciting and necessary now seemed tawdry and pathetic—her behaviour with Todd that of another woman, with whom she no longer had anything in common!

  15

  ‘Stuart, what is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Alice.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Alice persisted. ‘Ever since you came back from that last trip to London you’ve been…different.’

  She had already anxiously mentioned to him that Ian had seen him having lunch with a woman, but Stuart had simply shrugged and said that she had been a colleague. And Alice had told herself that she had no concrete reason to doubt him. But…

  ‘And last night…’ she began carefully.

  ‘For God’s sake! So I couldn’t get it up,’ Stuart exploded, raking angry fingers through his hair. ‘What the hell does that prove? I don’t know why you’re complaining, anyway. After all, it isn’t as though you’ve exactly been gagging for it, begging me for it, these last few years, is it?’

  Alice knew that her shock was showing in her face. It was so unlike him to speak like this.

  ‘Stuart!’ she protested.

  “‘Stuart,”’ he mimicked back, adding irritably, ‘You know what your trouble is, Alice?’

  ‘No, actually, I don’t,’ Alice answered him, suddenly as angry in her own way as he was in his. ‘But I can see that you’re eager to tell me. So why don’t you, Stuart? Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what my trouble is?’

  She heard him curse under his breath as he raked his hair again, pacing the floor of the kitchen impatiently, like a man caught in a trap, she recognised, suddenly sharply aware of how very tense and on edge he was.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’ve spent so much damn time fussing around over the kids, running around after them, especially Zoë, that you can’t see what’s happening under your nose,’ he told her.

  Alice felt her heart lurch unsteadily from one side of her chest to the other as a sickening wave of anxiety washed coldly over her.

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d better tell me what is happening under it then,’ she suggested quietly.

  ‘Alice, I just don’t want this right now.’

  ‘And you think that I do?’ Alice challenged him.

  ‘Look, ever since they were born you’ve made the kids your priority, but they’re adults now, and it’s high time they were fully independent. I can’t go on financing them for ever!’

  ‘Financing them?’ Alice felt confused. She had been dreading Stuart telling her that their marriage was over and that he had found someone else, but instead he seemed more interested in complaining about the children. Was this some roundabout way of broaching the subject of a potential divorce with her?

  With every day that had passed since his return she had sensed him distancing himself a little more from her, just as with every day that had passed she herself had grown more panic-stricken and filled with pain at the thought of him leaving. She was even missing having sex with him, so much so that the previous night, after he had turned his back on her and gone to sleep, she had been left lying wide awake on her own side of the bed, literally, physically aching for him! She could remember once reading in a magazine that there was no sex quite like breakup sex, with its explosive mix of anger, pain, and desperation.

  ‘God knows, I’ve worked my balls off to support them all over the years, to make sure they’ve never gone without anything. And look at them now! Not one out of the three of them has ever so much as earned a penny towards their own keep. Zoë went straight from university into marriage and plays at working—God knows why, given what Ian earns! And as for the boys, swanning off around the world—at my expense! When I think of what their school fees were alone!’

  There was a strained, almost desperate note in his voice that made Alice frown. Stuart had never quibbled about how much money was spent on their children—in fact, she had often thought that he actually felt proud of how expensive their lifestyle was. He wasn’t the kind of man who boasted about material assets as such, but Alice had always been aware that he enjoyed the subtle superiority of others knowing that his family were so well provided for.

  Whenever she had tried to suggest that their children already had enough, it had always been Stuart who had insisted that they should be allowed the additional private classes, the riding lessons, the school trips, and, in fact, the twins’ expensive and supervised gap year, claiming that he wanted to know that they would be safe, instead of allowing them to do their own self-funded thing.

  ‘Alice, I’ve been thinking.’

  He sounded awkward, and uncomfortable, Alice recognised uneasily, his voice lacking the sureness and positivity that was such a familiar part of it and of him.

  ‘This house…it’s far too big for the two of us. Why don’t we put it on the market? Move to something smaller, easier to manage. Looking after it is a fulltime job and if you’re going to be studying…’

  ‘Sell the house?’ Alice stared at him.

  ‘It makes sense,’ Stuart told her. ‘I haven’t said anything yet, but there’s a chance that I might have to…to be based closer to the airport for a
while. A new venture. Can’t tell you much about it, all quite hush-hush at the moment, but the bottom line is that they’re going to need me to be there more or less on call for quite some time.’

  ‘You’re saying that you want us to move closer to Heathrow?’ Alice questioned him.

  He had always been the one who had insisted that there was no way he wanted to live close to the airport, and that he was quite happy to commute to and from his work so that his family could enjoy the benefit of living in a quiet country town.

  ‘No!’

  The alarm she could hear in his voice and see in his eyes startled her.

  ‘No…’ he repeated in a quieter voice. ‘Not move…not both of us. No, I was thinking more of selling this place and buying something smaller here, and then perhaps I could rent somewhere, just a bedsit type of place…’

  Alice was too shocked to know what to say. In the space of one brief conversation her world was threatening to turn from the safe, secure place she knew into somewhere alien and potentially very unsafe indeed.

  Was Zoë right? Could Stuart be involved with someone else? Shamingly, Alice knew that she did not have the courage right now to ask him.

  ‘Yes, he’s a month old now, and exactly like Hughie was at his age. No, Julie, don’t jiggle him up and down like that after you’ve fed him, you’ll make him sick. Oh, dear. You’d better give him to me,’ Stella told her firmly, taking charge of the baby who had fulfilled her warning by posseting some of his milk on Julie’s top.

  She exchanged an ‘I told you so’ look with Alice, who had called round at Stella’s invitation, in lieu of their normal monthly meal out, to see the baby and have a cup of coffee.

  ‘Oh, Alice, no, I can’t possibly, not this month,’ Stella had exclaimed when Alice had rung her about their regular get-together. ‘I can’t possibly leave Jack for a whole evening yet!’

  Alice, remembering how they had all managed to stick to their routine when they had had their own babies, had tactfully not reminded Stella of this, but she did say gently, ‘Maggie should be having a scan soon, I imagine, so we should be having some baby pics to look at. She came over the other day to sit with me and help me get to grips with the technological monster lurking on my desk. She’s looking really well, but she seemed a bit quieter than usual. She won’t admit it but I think she’s still very upset about what happened with Nicki.’

  ‘Well, you know my views on that subject,’ Stella informed her firmly. ‘They’re both intelligent adult women and it’s up to them to sort it out between them.’

  ‘Well, yes, but Nicki does seem to have withdrawn from us all, Stella.’

  ‘She’s probably just very busy. You mustn’t dwell on things so much, Alice. It only builds them up into something they don’t have to be.’

  Was that what she was doing with Stuart? Alice prayed that it might be!

  Ignoring the sullen look that Julie was giving her, Stella beamed indulgently at her grandson. Out of the corner of her eye Alice saw Julie fidgeting and looking bored.

  ‘I think I’ll take Jack round to Mum’s,’ she announced. ‘Dad will be at work.’

  ‘Oh, but…’ Alice could see that Stella was looking put out, but Julie had already picked up her son and started to walk out of the room.

  ‘Honestly, Alice, Julie just doesn’t have a clue about looking after a baby,’ Stella told her the moment the door had closed. ‘And she’s become so obstinate and difficult. I mean, when I suggested Jack as a name she totally refused to entertain the idea, until her mother said that it had been her grandfather’s second name.

  ‘And as for Julie’s mother! Well, I sometimes feel that she might as well have moved in here, she’s here so often!’

  ‘Has her father come round yet?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Well, he’s been round once to see Julie and Jack, but that’s all. According to her mother, he’s still very upset about everything. Hughie’s been home to see Jack. I got out all his old baby photographs. You wouldn’t believe just how alike they are. Although I do think that at Jack’s age, Hughie was quite a bit heavier. Julie just couldn’t take to breast-feeding. Well, she isn’t the most patient of girls. I did try to persuade her to keep on trying, and I told her how important it was for Jack’s sake, but she totally refused to listen to me. He really is the most wonderful baby, though, Alice. Sometimes I can’t believe that he’s actually here.’

  Stella paused, unable to find the words to express just how she felt about the wonder of the new life that was so much a part of her. He was the first thing she thought of when she opened her eyes in the morning and the last person she wanted to see before she went to bed at night, tiptoeing up to his room to kiss his baby cheek before going back downstairs to her and Richard’s bedroom.

  ‘As I’ve already said to Richard, you’d think that Julie would be more appreciative of my help, but all Rich says is that Jack is her child!’ Stella told Alice, looking affronted. ‘I had to point out to him that Julie is still a child herself, and that as such it’s up to us to guide her and advise her.’

  Although she wasn’t ready to confide totally in anyone else as yet, Stella had her own plans for Jack’s future.

  ‘Heavens, is that the time?’ Alice exclaimed, getting up. ‘I must go, Stella. It was lovely meeting Jack…’

  Stella was the last person she would have imagined becoming such a doting grandmother, but there was no mistaking the intensity of her friend’s feelings for her grandson! Alice could see problems ahead for Stella, when the time came for Jack to be adopted, and she had felt totally unable to mention this subject in Stella’s presence.

  After Alice had gone, Stella glanced at her watch. It was time for Jack’s feed. She hoped that Julie would remember and bring him home on time…perhaps she ought to ring her and remind her?

  Before she could do so, the phone rang. Quickly Stella answered it only to discover that her caller was Todd.

  ‘I was hoping you’d have been in touch with me before now,’ he began without preamble. ‘You did say you would ring.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry, Todd, but I’ve just been so busy with Jack.’

  ‘Well, how are you fixed tonight? We could—’

  ‘No, Todd. I really can’t.’ Stella gave a distracted second look at her watch. Poor little Jack would be starving.

  ‘Stella,’ Todd was demanding urgently. ‘You and I…’

  Stella frowned in irritation. She wanted to end the call so that she could ring Julie. ‘I’m sorry, Todd,’ she told him. ‘But I really don’t think…I’d have liked to help you to find a new flat, but I’m afraid that just isn’t going to be possible any more. Julie needs me to help her with Jack and—’

  ‘It’s okay, Stella. I think I’ve got the message.’ His voice was terse but Stella barely registered his anger, or the fact that he ended the call without saying another word to her.

  Making sure that Jack did not miss his feed was far more important to her than soothing Todd’s bruised ego! Whatever foolishness had caused her to believe that he was someone she wanted in her life was over, and she was thankfully now restored to her old sensible self.

  ‘You’re late again, Zoë. That’s the second time this week.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Andrew, don’t be boring,’ Zoë protested irritably, scowling as she switched on her computer and broke one of her nails. ‘I mean, it’s not as if we even open for another half an hour.’

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ Andrew responded huffily. He was the agency’s branch manager and the only reason he had taken Zoë on in the first place was because of her husband’s contacts. They were the oldest agency in the town—a relatively small family-owned concern with only a handful of offices—and needed all the help they could get to compete with the big nationals. But so far, instead of increasing their business as he had hoped, Zoë’s presence appeared to be having the opposite effect.

  There was that house she had gone to measure up, only to inform one of her friends
later in the wine bar, in a voice loud enough to be overheard by a neighbour of the potential vendors, that the house was crap and the decor total shit, and that she personally wouldn’t live there if she was paid.

  And then there had been the afternoons when she had mysteriously never reappeared in the office after lunch, and the even more annoying ones when she had—decidedly the worse for drink.

  Andrew had already been forced to give her a verbal warning—twice, but the last time she had totally unnerved him by interrupting him in mid-sentence to ask him conversationally if he actually preferred shagging dogs. Her reference to his current girlfriend, the plain, dumpy daughter of a local property developer, had thrown him so completely that he had totally lost his thread.

  ‘We’ve got clients complaining, Zoë,’ he told her in a hectoring voice. ‘You were supposed to send details of flats out to Todd Fairbrother. He telephoned three days ago to complain that he hasn’t received them.’

  ‘He wants an apartment with three double bedrooms with walk-in “closets” and their own bathrooms, plus a computer room, access to a gym, and a rumpus room, whatever that is. He’s crazy,’ Zoë told him unrepentantly.

  Andrew glowered at her.

  ‘You’ll have to do without a lunch hour today to make up for the time you haven’t worked,’ he told her crossly. ‘I’ve got a meeting at twelve with a potential client and the executors of Draycotte Manor.’

  Zoë gave him an insincere smile. Did he honestly think she was going to stay here in this boring office when she could be in the wine bar? No way!

  Ian was away again and she was bored. Laura had become as obsessed by the boys and their routine as her mother had been, and had flatly refused to join her for a drink after work.

  ‘Zoë, I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘What about the boys?’

  ‘What about them?’ Zoë had yawned.

  ‘I can’t just leave them…’

  ‘Give Ma a ring. She’ll be ready to come to heel by now. I’ll bet she’s just itching to check them over and make sure you haven’t been abusing them in some dreadful way.’