She leaned back to make herself more comfortable but the hard surface of the bench didn’t meet the curve of her spine as well as it should. Her back was still aching from spending so much time at the hospital the day before and now her feet ached too after a morning in the salon. In fact, everything ached, her heart included.
Harvey stood up in the vain hope that her fidgeting was a precursor to getting up but Maggie didn’t have anywhere else to go. When it didn’t happen, he sat back down with a disgruntled snort. She consoled him with a pat on the head. ‘Sorry, boy, we could be here a while.’
Maggie started to say something else but a sigh escaped before her words had formed. She tried again. ‘I thought I was strong, an independent woman who could be a good wife and daughter and a reliable friend, but lately I’ve been failing on all counts. I can’t help Jenny, I’ve shipped Dad off to another country, I let Liam and Sam down, and I’ve been giving James such a hard time about his mum. What if he falls out with her because of me?’
When Maggie stopped berating herself it wasn’t because she had run out of failings to list, but because there was still one left that hurt most of all.
‘What if Ted was right and I have made matters worse for Elsie? And God forbid, what if Judith’s right too? What if I can’t care for my baby properly? Have I been fooling myself? Is it time to accept that I can’t be everything I want to be or achieve everything I want to achieve?’ She raised her hand to ward off the response. ‘Don’t answer that! Of course you’d say I can still do anything I set my mind to but not everyone believes in me the way you do, me included. I’ve tried, but I have to face facts. The only reason I managed to be so strong and independent was because you were there helping me, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, don’t you think? And there lies my problem. You’re not there any more, are you, Mum?’
Maggie’s body sagged and she had to put her hands out to support herself, only to recoil from the cold touch of smooth, varnished wood. There were no memories to be drawn from the surface of this bench. Her mum had never sat next to her here. She was lying six feet under the ground in front of her.
Covering her face with her hands, Maggie pushed her fingers against her eyes, forcing back the tears. She wouldn’t cry. That would be letting her mum down completely. She strained her ears, still waiting for an answer to her questions from beyond the grave but the only sound came from a more earthly source. The approaching footsteps belonged to someone with a long and powerful stride. A man, she guessed. Harvey jumped up and his tail began to wag ferociously. Her man, she corrected.
‘Playing truant?’ she asked.
‘I decided to give myself the afternoon off,’ James said. He swept his hand under her chin and, lifting her face towards him, kissed her gently on the lips.
‘That’s not like you.’
James sat down next to her and she heard the rustle of a paper bag being set to one side. ‘I missed my wife. Nothing unusual in that,’ he said, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her close.
She rested her head on his shoulder. ‘So how did you find me?’
‘Kathy told me you were avoiding the park so this was my next best guess.’
Maggie had walked around rather than through the park that morning to reach the High Street. It wasn’t that she was afraid of bumping into Elsie and breaking her promise to Ted – Elsie would still be in hospital. It was for reasons she barely knew how to express. She felt something akin to betrayal by, of all things, the park itself. It had been the place where she not only felt safe and secure but connected to the people who meant the most to her, even though they weren’t there any more. Elsie had made similar if not stronger connections but rather than bring her comfort, their beloved bench had been complicit in her self-inflicted torment. Ted was right, it might be what Elsie wanted but it was never going to help her. Was it possible to feel anger against an inanimate object? She knew she had no rational justification for her feelings and yet still she responded to them. Her surrogate bench was a poor substitute but with James’s arrival, she would find comfort in the present rather than the past.
‘So what’s in the bag?’ Maggie asked.
‘First I have a confession. I wasn’t in work this morning either.’
Maggie raised an eyebrow. The tone of his voice was soothing, the steady rhythm of his breath calm. His confession held the promise of something good. ‘So why did you act like you were? What have you been up to, Mr Carter?’ It was only now that she noticed that the usual smells of acrid dust and sweat from heavy labour were absent. The aromas she could detect, however, were familiar, just not on James. She sniffed the air to let him know that he had been caught out. ‘What have you been up to?’ she said again.
‘I’ve been letting you down lately and I know I’ve got to take more responsibility for resolving things with Mum,’ he started.
Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. ‘What have you done?’
James laughed. ‘Nothing yet, not about Mum at least; this has nothing to do with her. I suppose it has more to do with your Mrs Milton.’
‘Yesterday really got to you, didn’t it?’
James pulled away from her to retrieve the bag he had set to one side and then handed it over. ‘This is my way of telling you I’m sorry. I know I’m too soft for my own good and this probably only goes to prove the point but I don’t care and … well, please stop me talking, Maggie, and open the present.’
Maggie prolonged James’s agony a little longer by exploring the shape of the gift bag rather than delving straight in. It was roughly the size of a carrier bag and had an embossed picture of a teddy bear on one side. There were curls of ribbon attached to the handle.
She wanted to savour the moment. A rift had been growing between them and they had already started to bridge that gap with words and promises but so far there had been a distinct lack of action. This felt different. It was a ground shift and the chasm didn’t feel so deep or so wide.
Slowly, Maggie slipped her hand inside the bag and removed three separately wrapped gifts. She couldn’t decide which to open first. ‘What are they?’ she asked. They were similar in size, flat and oblong. From their weight and softness, she guessed they had something to do with the baby.
‘You’ll have to open them to find out.’
Peeling back the paper of her first parcel, Maggie discovered a plastic Ziploc bag and pulled it open. The scent of roses filled the air and seeped into her senses, painting them pink. She lifted out a Babygro. It was impossibly small and had a scalloped neck with embroidered flowers. ‘It’s a girl,’ she laughed.
‘Or …’ James prompted.
With growing excitement and urgency, Maggie unwrapped the second parcel to find another secret contained within a plastic bag and this time released a clamour of bluebells. ‘Or it’s a boy,’ she said, her words now choked with emotion. ‘So what on earth is the third option?’
She didn’t wait for an answer but ripped the paper and opened the final gift. Lemon scents were now fighting against those of rosebuds and bluebells so she lifted it to her face. The delicate material felt baby-soft against her skin and, unlike the other two gifts, she knew without doubt that one day her baby would wear the yellow Babygro grasped in her trembling hand.
‘I thought I’d cover all angles,’ James said.
‘And raid my office while you were at it?’
‘Guilty as charged.’
Maggie’s office was for her use and hers alone, no clients visited there and even James rarely ventured inside. She remembered the first time Judith had seen it. She had been dumbfounded that Maggie used a computer, a skill she had never acquired herself. But Maggie’s office wasn’t only the place where she kept client records; it was where she experimented with her bottled rainbows. James had shown no more than a passing interest in what went on in there and although she had slowly introduced him to her alternative understanding of colour, this was the first time he had painted her world without supervis
ion and she was stunned.
‘You don’t want to give up work completely, do you?’ he asked when Maggie fell silent.
She thought about it for a while, recalling all the long hours she had put into developing her craft. ‘I always thought of my business as my baby. I thought it might be the only one I would ever have,’ she said at last. A smile trembled on her lips as she felt the now-familiar flutter of a real baby inside her. ‘But now that I’m about to be a mum, I’m beginning to realise that the business was just that, a business. It’s not such a big sacrifice; in fact, it’s nothing at all.’
‘Maybe we could manage. It would be a stretch on the finances but not impossible.’
‘Let’s assume not, for now at least. And maybe if I do need to find something to make me feel like I’m earning my keep, I could work from home.’
‘You don’t have to earn your keep, Maggie. I made a promise to your mum,’ he said. They both turned their heads to the grave in front of them as if someone was listening in. ‘I told her I’d look after you and that’s what I intend to do. If you’ll let me.’
The offer hung in the air and as Maggie returned the baby clothes to their respective bags, the colours began to fade. She couldn’t be sure if her desire to retain her sense of independence was being driven by determination or desperation. It had come as a shock to her to realise how much of a safety net her mum had been in her life and it hadn’t helped that she had vanished from her daughter’s life without warning.
Joan had woken up one morning feeling unwell and by the time Stan had returned upstairs with a breakfast tray, a massive heart attack had taken her from them. Maggie dreaded to think what life would be like if James hadn’t been in her life, then – but she had yet to accept that he could be a safety net too. She had asked him to take care of the problems with his mum but she hadn’t asked him to take care of her. She could feel him tensing as he waited for her to let him in.
‘Yes, I’ll try,’ she said with a smile.
They sat quietly for the longest time, holding on to each other and letting go of the past. It was Harvey who broke the spell. He pushed his nose into the space between them – which was no distance at all.
‘How about we take Harvey for a bit of a run?’ she suggested.
‘The park?’
‘Why not?’ she asked, and this time she couldn’t think of a single reason to stay away.
14
‘The gate’s broken again,’ James said as he joined Maggie in the garden.
She was making the most of the sun during one of its rare appearances so far that summer, tending to the small herb garden that James had built for her soon after they had moved in. There were slim pickings. The lavender had plenty of buds but the flowers weren’t quite ready and the thyme had yet to recover from the harsh winter, its straggling stems too delicate and precious to harvest; but at least the rosemary had grown in abundance and offered some reward. Its velvety green aroma could ease the mind and improve the memory, but for Maggie, the memories it enticed to the surface were far from settling.
Rosemary had been one of the oils she had used on Mrs Milton in her feeble attempts to counter the effects of her Alzheimer’s. She wished she could do more but she had been true to her word and had kept away in recent weeks. Elsie had been discharged quickly from hospital but that was as much as she knew. There had been no sightings in the park, not even the faintest scent of lilac.
‘And I suppose you’re going over there to fix it,’ Maggie said. She already knew whose gate he was referring to; the shrill ringtone a few minutes earlier had been unmistakeable. ‘I can’t believe that with an architect and a builder in the family, it hasn’t been mended yet.’
‘Do you want to come with me?’
‘Did your mum invite me?’
James knew how easily she would detect a lie and so tried a half-truth. ‘You don’t need an invitation. You’re my wife.’
Maggie pursed her lips. It was Sunday morning and she had been looking forward to some quality time with her husband. She hadn’t seen her in-laws for some time and this could be the perfect opportunity for another attempt to break down Judith’s prejudices. On the other hand, James could step up to the plate and have a long talk with his mum. He might decide now was the time to tell her that while she couldn’t drive a wedge between husband and wife she might very well strain relations between mother and son. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ she said.
‘I won’t be long,’ he said before bending down to kiss the top of her head.
Left on her own, Maggie refused to let thoughts of Judith pull her down and it didn’t take long before she was absorbed in her favourite obsession. And it wasn’t only Elsie she was thinking of now, but Tess also. Was it possible that she could be traced? Would Ted ever give his permission to even begin the search? And even if he agreed, if they did find her, would Elsie be well enough by then to recognise her as her baby? And what of the baby herself? Would it be fair to reunite Tess with her birth mother only to lose her all over again?
The debate raged inside Maggie’s head until rudely interrupted by a phone ringing from inside the house. In her urgency to answer the call, Maggie stubbed her toe and, gritting her teeth to suppress a cry of pain, she said, ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Maggie, it’s Carolyn.’
Maggie could feel her hand tingling but the electric current running down the phone line was all in her mind. There had been some lingering animosity between James and his ex-wife when Maggie had started to date him, mostly caused by Carolyn’s move to Portsmouth, but that had eventually dissipated. James had even considered inviting her to the wedding but Maggie had said no, citing her mum’s recent death as reason enough to keep the day as intimate as possible, but there had been another reason too. As Judith often pointed out, it had been Carolyn’s decision to leave James and even though Maggie didn’t believe for a minute that James was still Carolyn’s for the taking, she was wary of letting her get too close. There was a rivalry between the two, even if Carolyn wasn’t aware of it.
‘Oh, hi,’ Maggie replied as pleasantly as she could. ‘James is out at the moment but he shouldn’t be long.’
‘Never mind. I was only going to check the arrangements for the summer holidays.’
The rash of goose bumps that pricked Maggie’s arms had nothing to do with stepping into the cool shade of the kitchen. She had heard the telltale signs of someone sidestepping the truth. ‘So have you settled on a holiday yet?’ she asked, not so eager to end the call any more. Had Carolyn been phoning James as a shoulder to cry on about the state of her marriage? Another, more rational voice reminded her that the only evidence that Carolyn’s marriage was in trouble had come from Judith.
‘We might be giving it a miss this year,’ Carolyn said.
There was an almost imperceptible inflection in her voice that set Maggie’s nerves on edge. ‘I suppose it’s going to be difficult with a new addition to the family,’ she said with a forced laugh.
There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘Oh, the puppy? Yes, we’re picking him up in a couple of weeks, perfect timing for the start of the school holidays.’ Carolyn laughed nervously before rambling on. ‘I want to enrol him in obedience classes but I think the kids are going to be disappointed when our pup doesn’t turn out quite as well-behaved as Harvey.’
When Carolyn finally took a breath, Maggie threw caution to the wind. ‘What new addition did you think I meant?’
She could hear Carolyn slow her breathing as she summoned up the courage to answer honestly. ‘It’s early days,’ she warned. ‘And we’ve not even told the boys yet but I’m pregnant too.’
The knot of suspicion that had been growing in the pit of Maggie’s stomach dissolved. The news not only washed away the irrational doubts that had plagued her moments earlier but some of her more deep-seated anxieties. ‘Does Judith know?’
‘Good grief, no,’ Carolyn said. ‘Actually, that was why I wanted to speak to James. I wanted to forewar
n him.’ As difficult as it was to believe now, Carolyn had fallen out of favour quite dramatically with her mother-in-law after she walked out on James. Judith put the blame for their failed marriage squarely on Carolyn’s shoulders and relations didn’t improve when she remarried and announced she was moving down to Portsmouth. It was only when Maggie appeared on the scene that Judith miraculously mended her bridges with Carolyn; given a choice of daughters-in-law, Carolyn was clearly the lesser of two evils; but Carolyn hadn’t forgotten how difficult Judith could be.
‘You don’t think she’ll take it very well, do you?’
‘About as well as your news I should think,’ Carolyn agreed. In recognising a common foe, the two women formed a tenuous bond. ‘On the bright side, she might actually begin to accept that James and I are both happy and settled in our new lives.’
‘We can hope,’ agreed Maggie, ‘although I think hell will have to freeze over before she accepts that I could make James happy.’
‘She is impossible. And I know you don’t need to hear it from me but you do make James happy, far more than I ever could. Why Judith can’t see that, I don’t know. She’s never going to give up on this idea that you trapped him.’
‘Trapped him?’
There was silence at the other end of the phone, not even the sound of Carolyn’s breathing until she said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just the way Judith is; she has to make the story fit to justify her rigid view of the world. Honestly, when you’ve had the baby, she’ll have no choice but to welcome you with open arms. If I’m honest, she was a bit aloof with me before the kids came along. Anyway, I’d better go, the boys have gone too quiet and that’s never a good sign.’
‘OK, I’ll get James to phone you later then.’
Maggie put the phone down on the kitchen counter and stood still for a moment. There was no sense of shock. Carolyn hadn’t exposed Judith: she had simply confirmed Maggie’s suspicions about how her mother-in-law’s mind worked. Surprisingly there was no surge of anger either, only a wry smile as she imagined what Judith’s reaction to the latest baby news would be. Surely now she would have to accept that both James and Carolyn had moved on with their lives.
Where I Found You Page 17