Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  Nicki shook her head.

  ‘But it was my fault that we never talked, really talked about any of this,’ she admitted quietly. ‘I was too busy, too afraid of confronting my own fears, too eager to hang onto the resentment I was building up inside myself as a safeguard to fall back on if you did leave me! But then when I became pregnant…It’s all right,’ she reassured him, lifting her hand to his face in a gesture of tenderness. ‘I’m all right now!’

  ‘We could always try again,’ Kit offered whimsically. ‘Do a Maggie and Oliver!’

  Nicki shook her head.

  ‘No, if the pregnancy had gone full-term then that would have been one thing, but I hadn’t planned or even wanted to conceive, and right now I want to focus on the people I already have in my life.’ She took a deep breath.

  ‘Kit, I’ve been thinking. Your business is doing much better now, I know, but I know you’ve thought about buying somewhere in Italy. Joey’s growing up, and I suspect that Laura and Marcus could become a definite item—’ Nicki laughed when she saw his startled look.

  ‘Oh, Kit!’ she exclaimed. ‘You must have noticed how she’s always the first to get to the door whenever he calls, and I know they’ve been out to dinner together at least half a dozen times.’

  Kit looked bemused. Despite Nicki’s amusement, it was news to him that his daughter was seeing Nicki’s GP.

  ‘Anyway,’ Nicki continued, ‘what I was thinking was that a place in Italy where we could spend time, especially in the winter, and where we can entertain the children and their partners and our grandchildren, would be a very good idea. I know it would mean you downscaling your business a bit, just when you’d started to build it up again,’ she told him, ‘but it would be such fun to have something…somewhere we can be together…just as us.’

  ‘Fun? It would be sheer heaven,’ Kit told her fervently. ‘But never mind me downscaling, what about you?’

  ‘Oh, that’s already virtually sorted out,’ she told him airily. ‘I’m going to train Laura up as my second in command!’

  ‘Is Dad around?’

  ‘He’s just gone upstairs,’ Nicki told her stepdaughter, adding emotionally, ‘Laura, have I told you how much it means to me that you and I have finally found one another? And not because it removes a problem from my life, but because what’s happening between us now is immeasurably valuable to me. And so are you—not for what you’ve done, but for who you are!’

  ‘I’ve just been to the garden centre,’ Laura told her almost brusquely, but Nicki knew Laura too well now to mistake her abrupt non sequitur for any kind of negative or hostile emotion. After all it had been Laura more than anyone else, even Kit, who had fought for her to get better. Nicki had never mentioned it, but she had the clearest memory of lying in her hospital bed and hearing Laura say through gritted teeth, ‘Don’t you dare die on me, Nicki. I am not going to lose a second mother and you are not going to leave Joey! You will get better, Nicki. You have to. I can’t cope with Dad and Joey’s pain on my own. I need you!’

  ‘Mmm? What did you buy? A pot plant for Marcus’ flat?’ she asked mock innocently.

  Laura gave her a reproving look. ‘No, as a matter of fact, it was a tree. I thought we might plant it together, all of us. You, Dad, Joey and me.’

  Nicki looked at her, her heart slowing down to a heavy beat.

  ‘Do you remember?’ Laura asked her huskily. ‘You bought one for me when…after…So that I could have my own special place to remember Mum.’

  Nicki swallowed hard—and then held open her arms. ‘Oh, Laura,’ she whispered.

  ‘I didn’t understand then, but I do now,’ Laura told her chokily. ‘It’s a special summer flowerer because the baby would have been born then.’

  Alice saw Ian’s Mercedes pull up outside from the landing window. Her stomach muscles tensed automatically.

  Ian and Zoë were officially separated now, but, despite losing her sons and potentially her husband, not to mention her job, her driving licence and her self-esteem, Zoë was still refusing to accept that she had a problem.

  Alice had suggested to her that it might be an idea if she were to return to live with them, but Zoë’s response had been a stream of abusive language, and a flat refusal to move out of her house.

  She was still living there, and unexpectedly Ian was still paying the bills, but Alice assumed that ultimately he was going to want to sell the property. George and William were living with their grandparents, Ian having arrived on the doorstep less than a week after he had taken the boys, announcing that he could no longer cope with them.

  Alice reached the front door at the same time as Ian rang the bell. Opening the door, she eyed him uneasily. She wasn’t going to fall into the trap of blaming him for Zoë’s behaviour, but a part of her secretly believed that, though Zoë’s marriage to him might not have precipitated her downfall, it had certainly accelerated it!

  ‘Stuart at home?’ Ian asked casually as he stepped into the hall.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ Alice replied. ‘He’s out on business.’

  ‘Business?’ Ian laughed unkindly. ‘Oh, come on, Alice. Everyone knows that Stuart doesn’t have any business to be out on any more. I hear you’re putting the house up for sale, by the way.’

  ‘It’s too big for us now,’ Alice replied calmly, but she knew that her face was burning with a mixture of anger and bruised pride.

  Ian laughed again.

  ‘I’ve just called round to tell you that I’ve decided to live full time in the States. I’m moving there at the end of the month.’

  The casual way in which he delivered his news made Alice tense. ‘Have you told Zoë about your plans?’ she asked him.

  ‘I haven’t been to see her, if that’s what you mean, but I have instructed my solicitor to start divorce proceedings. She’ll probably be too drunk to read the letter, so I thought I’d better come round and tell you myself.’

  ‘What…what about the boys?’ Alice asked him.

  Ian hesitated and then gave a brief shrug. ‘They’d fare better with you. I’ve thought about this. We can make it legal, if you like. I’m quite prepared to pay you. After all, I know you need the money,’ he told her insultingly. ‘But I warn you, I don’t intend to hand over money to Zoë to drink away, so if she tries—’

  ‘Ian, they’re your sons. And as for paying us…’ Alice reminded him.

  ‘Are they?’ he interrupted. ‘Oh, come on, Alice,’ he added tauntingly as she looked at him in shock. ‘Everyone knows how Zoë puts it about. She was renowned for it at university. She’s a slut as well as a drunk…I never wanted to marry her. Did she tell you that? She blackmailed me into it. She even had the kids because she thought that after my own father’s antics I’d never desert my kids. Well, she was wrong. I realise now I never wanted them in the first place. She had them, she can damn well keep them!’

  Alice couldn’t comprehend either his cruelty, or, more shockingly, his complete lack of any kind of emotional attachment to his children. She had never liked him, but this!

  He was already walking away from her but he paused by the door, turning round to tell her insolently, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve put the house up for sale. It’s in my name and, since the mortgage is so huge—lucky that I decided to increase it recently, isn’t it? Lucky for me, that is. Anyway, you can tell Zoë, if she ever sobers up enough to ask, not to expect to get more than ten grand or so from the sale.’

  ‘Who was that, Grandma?’ George asked her a few minutes later, coming into the hall, followed by William.

  ‘No one,’ she told him, bending down to gather both her grandsons into her arms and holding them just as tightly as she could.

  ‘When’s Grandad coming home?’ William asked her. Touchingly and unexpectedly, Stuart had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his role as a stand-in father. In fact, he was spending far more time with the boys than he had ever spent with any of his own children, insisting that Alice needed time to herself in these vital
first weeks of her recently begun Open University course.

  The catalyst of his redundancy had brought them closer together than Alice had thought possible. And he had got a new job!

  He had attended a school reunion where he had fallen into conversation with one of his ex-classmates, the finance director of a small and highly innovative charity that involved helping disadvantaged young people.

  Initially Tom Fleming had merely asked Stuart to come along and talk to a group of boys about his work as a pilot, but things had developed from there and now Stuart had been offered a part-time, not particularly highly paid job working for the charity.

  He had returned home from his initial talk such a very different man from the one who had left the house only hours before that Alice had been totally bemused. All he had been able to talk about had been the boys, and the wonderful work the charity did.

  ‘My father would have loved getting involved in something like this,’ Stuart had commented tellingly, and that night for the first time in weeks he had instigated sex, and maintained his erection.

  Now it was as though he had discovered a completely new facet of his character. If Alice were honest, at first she had felt a little chagrined at this new compassionate, humbled, wanting-to-benefit-society Stuart. But now she was beginning to find that she was actually enjoying discovering this new man her husband was becoming! She could enjoy sharing his excitement and enthusiasm for what he was doing, just as he was sharing hers for her university course.

  Alice had met both Tom Fleming and his wife, and had immediately liked them, and, although their lives were still naturally shadowed by Zoë’s addiction and obvious unhappiness, Alice was beginning to feel that suddenly she and Stuart were doing what she had wanted them to do for so long—finally meeting as equal partners.

  The letter was there when Maggie came downstairs from taking just one more delirious look at the deliciousness of the nursery.

  She picked it up abstractedly and then froze as she turned it over and saw the jumbled mess of stuck-on letters running crookedly across the front, spelling her name.

  She knew, of course she knew, but she still had to open it.

  Her hands shook so much that it took her several seconds, and all the time the blood was drumming in her veins and her heartbeat was racing.

  Inside the envelope was a single sheet of folded paper. Shakily Maggie unfolded it, and read it.

  ‘You think you’re going to be safe, don’t you? You think that everything’s going to be all right. Well it isn’t! Everything is going to be very, very horribly wrong. And that’s a promise!’

  She was going to be sick.

  Panting, Maggie only just made it to the downstairs cloakroom, her head pounding now and her ungainly, heavily pregnant body shaking violently. She could feel the baby’s agitated movements and immediately placed her hands over it, trying to give it the reassurance she could not give herself.

  She needed Oliver. This letter had not come from Nicki! It could not have done! Which meant…Nauseously, Maggie knew that she did not want to think about what it meant. Suddenly panicking in a way that was totally alien to her, she went clumsily from door to door and then window to window, making sure they were all locked…that she was safe inside the house and that no one could get in to harm her baby.

  There was no reply from Oliver’s mobile and when Maggie rang the office Kath told her that he was still out.

  She couldn’t go and see Nicki now. She just could not take the risk of leaving the house, Maggie decided. Picking up the phone, she dialled her friend’s number.

  Wretchedly Zoë stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her face looked thin, pinched, and somehow bloated at the same time, her skin an unhealthy sallow colour.

  Ian was going to divorce her! Ian was trying to claim that he wasn’t the boys’ father! Somewhere inside her head she could hear her sons crying, as they had done when she had screamed and raged at her mother that it was her fault that Ian no longer wanted her. George had stood in front of her, his face red and wet with his tears, as he begged her, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t hurt Grandma!’

  She needed a drink.

  She was halfway down the stairs when she suddenly sat down, abruptly overwhelmed by disgust for herself. Reaching for her mobile, she flicked through the directory, her hands and then her whole body shaking violently.

  ‘Mum,’ she said shakily when Alice answered. ‘You’re right. I need help…’ She started to cry. ‘Please help me, Mum. Please help me.’

  ‘Stella?’ Richard questioned anxiously as he walked into the kitchen and saw Stella sitting motionless at the table. When she looked at him he saw the photograph of Jack on the table. Her eyes were full of tears.

  The last few months had been unbearably painful for her, first Julie’s bombshell, then Hughie’s total refusal to do anything to stop her.

  ‘Come on, Ma,’ he had tried to coax her. ‘You’ll have other grandchildren.’

  ‘Other grandchildren, yes,’ Stella had agreed fiercely, ‘but there can never be another Jack.’

  She physically ached for her grandson, waking in the night imagining for a second that she could actually hear his cry; that her fears that she had lost him were simply a nightmare from which she had now woken. But of course the real nightmare was that he had gone!

  ‘I’ve just been round to see Julie’s parents,’ Richard told her gently.

  It tore at his heart to see the hope flickering in her eyes.

  ‘Julie’s changed her mind?’ she demanded eagerly.

  Regretfully Richard shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that. I just thought we should have a talk about…things.’ He frowned and cleared his throat, a small habit he had whenever his emotions were particularly stirred.

  ‘Obviously their prime concern is for Julie and Jack and their futures, but Gerald and Lillian agreed that they could both appreciate our feelings, as Jack’s other grandparents.’

  Stella could hardly take in what he was saying. Gerald and Lillian? It was virtually unheard of in their relationship for Richard to take the lead, or make the decisions about anything, and yet here he was, telling her calmly and matter of factly that he had been to see Julie’s parents—‘Gerald and Lillian!’—and without so much as a word to her about his intentions.

  ‘They further agreed,’ he was continuing determinedly, ‘that it is only natural that we should want to keep in touch with Jack and—’

  Unable to stop herself, Stella made a small sound, somewhere between a moan of aching loss and a gasp of hope. Apart from pausing to frown at her, Richard made no comment, merely continuing with a formality that at any other time she would have immediately derided as being more appropriate to his role as a member of the bowling club committee than a form of address to his wife!

  ‘And to that end, it has been agreed that certain channels of communication will be kept open between our two families to enable a…a free exchange of information, and to allow Jack to grow up knowing both sides of his family. In fact, Gerald even went so far as to suggest that it might be possible for some sort of semi-legal document to be drawn up—to protect Jack’s interests, as it were, and to give him the right to make his own decisions with regard to his family, once he’s old enough to do so. Until then…’ He paused, and Stella felt her stomach muscles twist as the pain reached out and tightened its hold on her.

  ‘Until then what?’ she demanded urgently, her voice cracking with strain.

  ‘Until then they, Julie and Lillian and Gerald, have agreed that you and I can remain in contact with Jack.’

  ‘Remain in contact? When he’s living in Canada and we are here in Britain?’ Stella exclaimed bitterly.

  ‘Stella, there is such a thing as air travel, you know,’ Richard told her gently. ‘And telephones and videos. And who knows, by the time Jack is talking we could be set up with a web cam so we can see each other via our computers.’

  ‘Web cams? Air travel?’ Stella could feel a bitter
-sweet, dangerous hope rising up inside her. ‘But you hate flying,’ she reminded him unevenly.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed simply. ‘But you love Jack, and so do I. And what’s more, I love you as well.’

  Had she ever really been foolish enough to compare this man to Todd Fairbrother and find him wanting? Stella felt a huge well of moral indignation against her own stupidity rise up inside her to mingle with her earlier hope.

  ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked.

  ‘Which bit?’ Richard teased her, suddenly reminding her of the shy but sweet-natured man who had touched her heart so effectively when he had first courted her.

  ‘Every bit,’ Stella responded, and then somehow she was in his arms, laughing and crying at the same time as he held her and aimed a clumsy kiss in the direction of her mouth.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ she could hear him mumbling as she held the side of his face and aimed her own kiss with much better accuracy, ‘I almost forgot. Lillian and Gerald have asked us to go round before they leave. They want to take some photographs of us all together, do a video, that kind of thing, and it will give us all an opportunity to talk.’

  ‘Oh, Richard,’ Stella sobbed. ‘You really are the most wonderful, wonderful man!’

  Oliver sang under his breath to himself as he drove back towards the office. His meeting had gone well, and their client had confirmed her acceptance of his designs.

  They had had a week of unexpectedly mild early autumn weather, and the leaves on the trees were only just on the turn. His route home took him down a long, straight, well-maintained road flanked by hedges and farmland, but Oliver resisted the temptation to increase his speed.

  It happened totally unexpectedly, out of the blue. One minute the road was empty, and the next the woman was there, standing in front of his car, smiling at him.

  Automatically he tried to avoid hitting her, even though he knew it was too late, turning the wheel of the car hard.