by Cathy Kelly
Give her the puppy-dog eyes and she’s putty in my hands, Harry would say smugly.
No, no, Felix would smirk, she is sexy, she loves making love. Tease her with kisses and wonderful sex and she’ll fall into my arms.
Hannah pushed him away forcefully.
‘Hannah?’ he gasped.
‘Felix, you left me without a word. I can’t forgive that. It’s over,’ she said, panting with a mixture of desire and temper.
‘I know, but it’s because I’m weak, Hannah,’ he said. ‘And scared. I was ashamed to phone you after Christmas, I knew you’d be so angry with me and I couldn’t…You’re so strong, you’re my rock. I need you.’
‘What a load of old crap!’ she hissed, not sure who she was more furious with: Felix for waltzing back into her life unannounced, or herself, for falling for his tactics and kissing the face off him. ‘You knew I’d be angry, I’d every right to be. But I’d have forgiven you. I loved you. One week, two weeks, I’d have forgiven you after that long. But four is pushing it, Felix. And at Christmas into the bargain. The season to be jolly, my backside. I’m sorry. Get out. You wanted to talk and we have. You’ve got what you came for.’
‘I came for you. You’re my rock, Hannah,’ he repeated. It sounded so corny, like a line from a second-rate TV movie.
‘Tom Stoppard not writing your lines, then?’ she said bitchily. ‘You need something snappier than that, Felix.’
‘Nobody I know is as funny as you, Hannah,’ he said fondly.
‘Not even all the bimbos you’ve been fucking since you left me?’ she spat. ‘I saw the piece in Hello! about you and “your lovely companion” at that horror movie premiere. She looked like girlfriend material from the way she was clinging to you. Either that or she’s an aspiring actress practising for a role where she plays your girlfriend. Or maybe she’s someone important’s daughter and you’re dating her as a favour, although it isn’t much of a trial going out with some babe in slashed to the waist Gucci. Was she someone helping your career, Felix?’
The photo had cut her to the bone, the sight of Felix mid-laugh with one arm around a blonde vision in barely there jungle-print silk, the picture of twenty-one-year-old beauty. He was described as the handsome actor who’d been a big hit in the TV sitcom Bystanders. She was an unidentified blonde, but they were two fabulous blondes really, glamorous other-worldly creatures. Hannah had felt like a bog-trotting beast by comparison.
A woman not given to self-criticism when it came to her looks, she’d felt ugly as she looked at Hello! No wonder he’d left her, she’d thought in misery, when he could have a woman like that.
‘I can’t imagine you were missing me too much that night, eh, Felix?’
He hung his head in sorrow. ‘I know. I don’t deserve you, Hannah. But please – ’ he sank on to her couch and put his face in his hands – ‘please don’t send me away. I need you, so much. You can’t tell me you haven’t missed me too.’ He turned beseeching eyes up to her.
Christ, he was handsome, she thought irrationally. Almost impossible to resist. She had to.
‘I have missed you,’ she said slowly. ‘You have no idea how much. Which is why I won’t have anything to do with you any more, Felix. I’m not a masochist. Please leave.’
He uncurled his long body from the couch, graceful as ever, and gave her another heart-rending look with those soulful eyes. He was going.
‘I want to explain one thing before I go,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t understand; I didn’t want to fall in love with you. Having a person I loved wasn’t part of my career plan. I didn’t want to be in love, I wanted to play around and have fun, but I met you and it went haywire. I fell in love with you, Hannah.’ His face was strangely bleak as he spoke, the lines around his eyes more noticeable than usual. He did look weary and anguished; it wasn’t an act. ‘I know it doesn’t show me in a very good light if I admit that I tried to fight what I felt about you, Hannah. I wanted you to be like all the others, to be with me for a month before we both got bored with each other. But it didn’t work that way. I love you, in spite of myself. I’m not proud of how I’ve behaved, but it’s the truth. I wanted you to understand and I’m sorry I hurt you.’
Hannah said nothing, she couldn’t trust herself to speak. She hoped she could keep her face stony for as long as it took him to leave the flat. He didn’t say anything else as he left, closing her door behind him quietly. Watching him leave without calling him back was one of the hardest things Hannah had ever done.
She wanted to desperately but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. She waited motionless until she heard the front door slam shut and then she broke down.
Tears flowed down her face as she wept with grief. She’d been kidding herself. She wasn’t over Felix, not even a little bit. She was still crazily, horrifically in love with him. She longed for him, longed to hold him and kiss him and let him make love to her. And the sensation of holding him earlier had been such bliss…It was agony to think he was gone from her life, that she’d never hold him again, never touch him, never feel his hot breath on her skin. It was as if he was dead to her. Imagine a life where Felix existed but she couldn’t see him or talk to him ever again, never hear his voice husky with love, never touch his face tenderly. Waves of sheer misery swept over her as she cried helplessly, standing alone in her flat, with nobody to love her or care about her ever again. She cried for what felt like hours. For once, the tears simply wouldn’t stop. She cried thinking of all the wonderful times they’d had together and she cried because she knew Felix would have stayed with her, if only she’d let him. She didn’t care what he did, whether he had ten women as well as her, as long as she could be with him sometimes. In her hubris, she’d sent him away and now she was paying for it. Alone, alone for ever.
Finally, she forced herself to stop sobbing. Mechanically, she went into the bathroom to wipe her face and almost didn’t recognize the stranger staring back at her from the mirror: a hollow-eyed woman with mascara trails running blackly down her face. She looked a hundred, not thirty-seven. No wonder Felix had wanted to date a carefree blonde child. He wanted a woman who was girlish and pretty, not a neurotic hag with enough emotional baggage to fill an airport. She listlessly removed her make-up and then washed her face with a flannel, scrubbing her skin as if to punish herself. Then she stripped off her work clothes and pulled on the most comforting thing she could find: old soft jeans that had been washed so often they were the palest blue imaginable, and a giant sloppy grey jumper she’d had for years. Barefoot, she padded into the kitchen and looked around. She’d been making dinner when he’d arrived: pasta with tuna, garlic and onions. The garlic she’d been chopping scented the air enticingly, but Hannah didn’t have an appetite any more. She never wanted to see food again.
She scraped the garlic into the bin and threw the plastic chopping board into the sink. Meals for one, that was her life from now on. She’d never cook up a delicious feast for two again. Not that she’d ever been much of a cook, but Felix had always been so appreciative of her meals.
‘I love the things you can do with pasta and a tin of supermarket spaghetti sauce,’ he’d tease her when she was assembling a meal with the help of a tin-opener.
Everything came back to Felix, she sighed. Why had she fallen in love with him? Why hadn’t she been able to resist? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the problems men brought with them, but she hadn’t taken her own advice. She’d fallen for him hook, line and sinker. All she was left with now was a sense that a huge part of her life was over for ever. The things she’d valued so much seemed curiously hollow – her job, her flat, her independence. They paled into insignificance beside love. Or lack of it. Loving somebody shouldn’t be important, that had been her mantra. True love was such a pile of rubbish, she was sure of it. The only person in life who truly loved you was yourself. Nobody else could be trusted. People like Leonie, who longed for love with incredible intensity, were mad.
Leonie. A picture of her fri
end’s laughing, kind blue eyes came to her suddenly. Yes, she’d go and see Leonie. Hannah couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of the evening alone in the flat. Her heart ached and she couldn’t think of anyone better to comfort her. Leonie understood pain, heartache and love. Hannah looked at her watch: it was only ten to nine. How strange that her life should receive such a mortal, shattering blow, yet a mere two hours had passed.
Leonie’s sympathy on the phone was like a balm to Hannah’s wounded heart.
‘Come and stay the night,’ Leonie urged. ‘You can go into work from here tomorrow and that way you can have a couple of glasses of wine with me. Have you eaten?’ she asked, practical as ever.
‘I couldn’t eat,’ Hannah said dully.
‘Yes you can.’ Leonie was firm. ‘I’ve just the thing for you: seafood chowder. I made it earlier and there’s loads left.’
Hannah couldn’t imagine eating a single morsel of food. Drinking was another matter, however, so she stopped at an off licence en route and recklessly bought three bottles of wine. But when she arrived at Leonie’s, the scent of fragrant hot chowder made her stomach leap with hunger.
‘I didn’t think I could manage a single mouthful, but that smells wonderful,’ she said, peering into the saucepan where the soup bubbled invitingly. Leonie’s lovely golden dog leaned against her legs, eager to have her ears rubbed.
‘Aren’t you a good girl,’ Hannah crooned at Penny, after crouching down on the floor to hug her properly. Penny basked in this new source of adoration.
Mel, Abby and Danny all trooped into the kitchen to say hello but Leonie shooed them away after a few minutes.
‘You were all grumbling earlier that I wanted to watch The Bodyguard and you hated it,’ she informed them. ‘Now you have the telly to yourselves and you all decide you want to be in the kitchen. Scram.’
‘You’re not going to drink all that wine, are you?’ said Danny, mildly scandalized at the thought of his mother and Hannah consuming three bottles between them. He and his pals wouldn’t think twice about drinking that much, but his mother. He was sure he’d heard that women shouldn’t drink as much as men.
‘Yes, we are,’ she said with a wicked grin, shutting the kitchen door firmly behind him.
On their own at last, she hugged Hannah tightly. ‘Don’t cry,’ she warned. ‘Wait till you’ve had your chowder and then we’ll get the wine going and you can sob till you drop. But you need something in your stomach.’
Hannah nodded tearfully. It was lovely being mothered like this. She sat at the table while Leonie ladled up a huge steaming bowl of chowder. Hannah buttered a soft roll and tucked in. Penny sat by her side, looking mournfully at Hannah as if to say she never got a bite in her life and would dearly love just a teensy, weensy little crumb.
‘That was gorgeous,’ Hannah said appreciatively when she put down her spoon finally after finishing the whole lot. ‘I wish I could cook like that. Felix joked that I should start my own cookery school – the Tin-Opener Cook.’
Her mouth trembled. Felix again. He was haunting her thoughts. She began to cry softly and Leonie whisked away the dishes, produced a box of tissues and opened the first bottle of wine.
‘Tell me everything,’ Leonie said gently, pouring glasses for them both.
Half-way through the second bottle, Leonie was groaning that she’d regret it in the morning and Hannah was feeling a lot better. Good food, nice wine and the comfort of her dear friend had helped immeasurably. So had the presence of the lovely golden retriever, who seemed to understand that Hannah was heartbroken, and had sat loyally near the table all evening, distributing licks to both women at intervals.
When Hannah was worn out talking about Felix, Leonie talked about Ray’s wedding and how insecure she’d felt when she watched the twins with their new stepmother.
‘You should see her,’ Leonie sighed. ‘Fliss is incredible, your basic nightmare. Clever, gorgeous, slim, nice. That’s the killing thing, you know. She’s a lovely person, genuinely lovely. If she was a conniving bitch it would be much easier to hate her, but she’s kind, warm and wonderful. The twins adore her and Danny would do anything for her.’
Hannah poured Leonie another glass of wine.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Leonie, taking a deep slug. ‘She and Ray phoned three times from their honeymoon. Now, I know Ray loves the kids, but I also know that he wouldn’t have phoned three times. It was Fliss’s idea. She told me on the phone it’s vitally important that the kids don’t think she’s taking their father away from them. She wants them to be more a part of his life than ever before.’ Miserably, she took another huge gulp of wine. ‘How can you hate someone like that? And she keeps sending the most incredible presents to them all. Donna Karan denim jackets for the girls because they liked her one, and some new MP3 thing for Danny. Oh yeah, stacks of perfume and silly things like sparkly nail varnish. I’m too busy cooking dinner to think about buying them sparkly nail varnish,’ she finished gloomily.
‘That’s all very nice,’ Hannah said tipsily, ‘but you’re their mother, Leonie. You shouldn’t feel so threatened by her. They’re not going to forget that for a designer denim jacket, are they?’
Leonie snorted. ‘They’re teenagers! They’d go off with Jack the Ripper if he came up with the correct designer wear.’
‘Well,’ comforted Hannah, ‘they don’t see her that much, do they?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Leonie said, draining her glass and holding it out for a refill, ‘she wants them to go to Boston as often as they can. Am I being selfish in not wanting them to go?’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ advised Hannah. ‘It’s a difficult situation. Do you have any crisps?
‘I’m so tired,’ Hannah said after just one glass of the third bottle she’d insisted on opening. It was half past twelve and she felt limp with exhaustion, the way she felt after a mammoth session in the gym. ‘I think I’ll go to bed. If you show me where the blankets are, Leonie, I’ll make up a bed on the couch.’
‘No you won’t,’ Leonie said. ‘I’ve got a double bed and you can bunk in with me. According to Danny’s mates, sleeping on that couch is like sleeping on a bed of nails; I wouldn’t put you through it. My bed’s lovely, as long as you don’t mind…’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Hannah said, a fresh crop of tears welling up in her eyes at Leonie’s kindness. ‘You feed me, take care of me and now you’re letting me sleep in your bed.’
‘Only if you don’t mind a big lump jumping into the bed in the middle of the night,’ Leonie said, trying to make Hannah laugh. ‘Penny sleeps on her bean bag for half the night and then gets lonely by about four a.m., when she dives on top of me. If you’re very good, she’ll lick your make-up off in the morning!’
They both laughed at this and Penny joined in, barking delightedly.
‘Come on,’ Leonie added, opening the kitchen door and leading Hannah to her room. ‘You sort yourself out and I’ll let Penny into the garden for her ablutions.’
‘You’re finally out of the kitchen?’ Danny said, popping his head round his bedroom door. ‘I’m starving and I didn’t want to interrupt the boozing session.’
‘I think he has a tapeworm living inside him,’ Leonie remarked to Hannah. ‘It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why he eats so much and stays like a whippet.’ ‘Well, if you’ve got a tapeworm inside you, Mum,’ Danny laughed minutes later, when Leonie returned to the kitchen to see him making a ham sandwich, ‘it’s drunk after all the wine you’ve had. Three bottles, you old alco!’ ‘Ha ha,’ she said, giving him a mock slap on the bum. ‘I’m still the boss round here, sweetie-pie. I’ll withdraw your fridge privileges if you keep slagging off your old mother, right?’
‘Yes, wonderful, non-alcoholic mother,’ Danny mumbled with his mouth full of sandwich. ‘Your wish is my command.’
Hannah’s head throbbed when she woke up, instinctively knowing she was in a strange place. The bed felt different a
nd she didn’t have dusky pink sheets, surely? Just then, another pink thing loomed: a long pink tongue began affectionately licking her face.
‘Penny,’ said Hannah fondly, remembering where she was and why she had a hangover. ‘You darling. What a nice way to wake up, with someone kissing you.’
Penny threw herself down beside Hannah and waited to be petted. Hannah did so mechanically, that ache at the back of her eyes telling her that being licked awake by a dog was the nearest she was going to come to affection in the morning for the rest of her life. She gulped fiercely, determined not to cry again. Penny squirmed and made growly noises which Hannah correctly interpreted as meaning, Pet me some more, on my belly. Maybe she should get a dog. She’d love one, but it would hardly be fair to the poor dog seeing the hours she put in at the office. You couldn’t leave a dog on its own all day. Or maybe if she got two dogs, they could keep each other company.
‘Maybe I’ll steal you, Penny, and bring you home with me,’ she said, sitting up and playing with the dog.
Penny replied with more delighted growly noises, rolling on to her back for more comprehensive adoration.
‘She’s a shameless hussy,’ Leonie said, arriving with breakfast. ‘Rub her tummy and she’s anyone’s. I brought you some toast, juice and coffee. Danny is actually making bacon sandwiches, but I didn’t think you’d be up to anything that advanced.’
‘Quite right.’ Hannah’s stomach lurched at the thought of greasy congealed bacon. But toast and coffee she could manage. ‘You’re spoiling me, Leonie,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Ah, shut up, would you,’ Leonie replied. ‘Wait till you get the bill. Get off the bed, Penny. She’ll spill your coffee if she decides to move,’ she told Hannah. With a disgruntled Penny off the bed, Leonie laid the tray on Hannah’s lap. ‘It’s half seven, so you don’t have much time if you want to be in work by eight forty-five,’ she warned. ‘I’m going to have a quick shower to make myself presentable. It’s all your fault I’m hungover, Campbell, you brat. I’ll have to use the liquid cement make-up this morning to cover up the ravages of last night.’