After Ever After (51 page)

I’m not sure how long we did talk for, but we didn’t stop until the sky darkened and the orange glow of the city rose behind the skyline. Twenty-four years of the things we should have said to each other, the things that had been waiting to be told, asked or spoken, until we talked away the darkness and remembered only the light.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ I said finally, ‘that I was thrilled with the colour TV. I mean, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I really didn’t. I was ever so proud of it.’

My dad laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. You were so like your mum. Always away with the fairies.’

I smiled at the comparison and thought of her smiling, dreamy face.

‘You understand, don’t you now, that when I said all that stuff about blaming you, it was just so I could tell you I was wrong, so that I could clear everything away. Make a fresh start?’ He took my hand and held it to his face. ‘I’ve wasted so many years, Kitty, so many years being angry when I should have just loved you, taken care of you the way you needed. At least you’ve got Fergus to do that now.’

I touched his hand. ‘You can still look after me a bit, Dad, it’s not too late, and I can look after you.’ I kissed him gently on the forehead and sat back in the chair. ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you?’

Dad nodded, raising his palms in invitation.

‘Well, those “other things” I was telling you about, that were going on at home. A lot of stuff has happened with Fergus … and, well, Dad, I think I know what I’m going to do, but I wanted to tell you first.’

Dad leant forward a little in his chair and began to listen closely.

Dora and Camille exchange glances they think we don’t see over our heads and Camille nods towards the living room.

‘So anyway, we’ll, um, leave you to it,’ Camille says with studied calm. ‘If you need us, Kits, just shout.’ She shoots a meaningful glance at Fergus and I nod, looking at him, his eyes bruised with shadows and red rimmed as if he’s lost a lot of sleep.

‘Are you okay?’

He half smiles and nods and then shakes his head in one fluid movement.

‘No, I’m terrible. I loved being with Ella but I missed you, I missed you being there, Kitty. The three of us together.’

I want so much to be able to connect with him now, for him to be my knight in shining armour again. I want so much to be able to fall into his arms and be all happy ever after again, but if I believed that could happen once I know that it can’t now. Fairy-tale endings and trouble-free futures are things that really do only ever happen in books. The question is, do we have any kind of future at all? And after talking with my dad I know the answer.

‘What about you? Are you okay? Do you miss me?’ he asks me, his voice hoarse.

I nod mutely in reply. I am relieved, even almost pleased, that Fergus found out about Gareth when he did. Vindicated, justified, exonerated are the words that have been flashing through my head ever since. But still, everything Fergus and I said to each other burns like a fresh scald and I keep thinking, if he loved me, if he truly loved me, then he wouldn’t have had to wait for it to almost happen again to believe me. He would have stood by me come what may, he would not have abandoned me. For Ella’s sake, for Fergus’s and mine, I want this to be a new beginning for us, but I have wondered and worried – have we fallen too far apart?

After Dad had finished listening to my plan for the future, he had nodded and said, ‘Never let go of the things you love, not if there is still a chance, not ever. You’ll just spend the rest of life regretting it.’

‘Clare came to me the morning of the play,’ Fergus begins, clearly phased by my silence. ‘She told me about Gareth and the baby and everything. She told me that she was wrong about you and that I was, too, and that I should give you another chance. Go to the play and see you. And then the girls turned up and practically frog-marched me there anyway.’ I look away from him. ‘But I was glad I let them. It’s been hell without you, Kitty. I’m asking
you
to give
me
another chance.’

The one thing about this town I have always loved is that here you can see the stars wheeling about you in the night sky, moving endlessly over time in a way that the vast, permanently switched-on city never allows. Now I push back my stool and open the back door and step out into the garden. The night air is still warm and the dark sky seems only inches away from the tips of my fingers. I sense Fergus standing behind me, and for a moment I scan the skies looking for something, a sign, a shooting star, even a banking airplane, but everything is perfectly still. For once I think I trust myself to know the right answer.

‘The thing is,’ Fergus says, ‘that I didn’t need Clare to tell me what the truth was, I didn’t need to see Gareth in action to know what had happened. I didn’t need anything, Kitty, except to hear it from you.’

I turn and look at him, thrown for a moment, confused and hurting.

‘But I did tell you, I did,’ I say. ‘Maybe too late. But I told you and you threw me out.’

‘Because … Because you waited to tell me. Because you kept it from me when I should have been the one you ran to first.’

Fergus digs his hands into his pockets and looks away from me. In the moonlight and the half light from the kitchen his profile is picked out in an etching of fluorescent silver, and just looking at him makes my heart ache.

‘I don’t know how to say this without making you hate me. I was angry with you for not telling me, I was hurt that you went up there with him in the first place, and I couldn’t see past that for a long time …’ He pauses, pulling his hands free of his pockets and running his fingers through his hair. ‘The blunt truth is that I couldn’t face it, Kitty. I couldn’t face what happened to you. I couldn’t bear the fact that I couldn’t protect you, the very person I live to protect. And … Christ, Kitty, I’m ashamed to say it, but I didn’t know if I could love you, I didn’t know if I had it in me to love you after that had happened. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t deserve to, because I had failed you. I said those things because, well, because it was easier to believe that it happened that way.’

I stand apart from him and concentrate on breathing.

‘I should have told you straight away,’ I say, breathless. ‘I should have told you I was unhappy, but I didn’t want to admit our perfect life wasn’t perfect. I shouldn’t have gone up there with him. I did things that were stupid and wrong, but I never thought you’d let me down when I needed you most. Maybe I took your love for granted. Maybe I thought that whatever I did you’d still be there. I didn’t know what you wanted, Fergus, I didn’t know if you wanted to us to be together or not, and I didn’t know if I could be with you any more. Everything’s different.’

Even as I say the words I find myself moving into Fergus’s arms, welding myself to the heat of his body, inhaling his scent, desperate to hold on to the ghosts of the past even as I finally let them go.

‘Christ knows I love you, but when we met I thought that love was all we needed. Now I don’t know that it’s enough.’ Fergus holds on to me hard, pressing me close into the contours of his body. ‘If we do this then we’re going to need much more than just a hope and a prayer, we’re going to need each other. A proper partnership. You and me working together, sharing the load financially, emotionally, equally.’

‘I’m not letting you go,’ he says, the first hint of a hopeful smile shadowing his mouth. ‘Maybe love on its own isn’t enough, but we have so much more than that, Kitty. We have honesty now, and respect, and if we’ve found a way through this we’ll be stronger than we ever were before. And now we’ve come through this, the next time anyone tries to knock us for six we’ll be ready to face them. We know the worst that life can throw at us, we know it’s not all fairy tales and romance.’ He steps back, one hand on each of my shoulders. ‘But what will never change is that we love each other and we love our baby. And
that’s
the magic that means we can make it, we really can.’

I smile in the second before his kisses me, and, as I close my eyes, for the first time in months I feel the promise of the future, tender and vulnerable, but there all the same.

‘Do you really think that we can beat the world?’ I ask him, in a last moment of uncertainty, the taste of his kiss still on my lips.

‘I know we can,’ Fergus whispers. ‘We can do anything as long as we are together.’ He lays his palm against my cheek and looks down at me, smiling.

‘Please, Kitty. Don’t let this be the end.’

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Published by Arrow Books in 2003

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Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2003

Rowan Coleman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

‘Secret Love’. Words by Paul Francis Webster. Music by Sammy Fain. © 1953 (renewed) Remick Music Corp, USA. Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd. All rights reserved

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

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ISBN 9780091956875