Always and Forever (26 page)

And stop worrying about having a baby. I know how scary that is for you and we don’t have to. Even if we never have children, we stil have each other, right?’

She faltered. Suddenly al this didn’t seem like such a good idea after al . Alex looked positively uncomfortable. So had Louise just now.

‘I should have phoned on my way here,’ Daisy said again, wondering exactly what she had said wrong. ‘Sorry. I arrived at a bad time. Me and my Mr Spocks.’ It was a private joke between them, the theory that Star Trek’s Mr Spock had to have big, pointy feet to go with his big, pointy ears. Today, Alex’s face didn’t crease up in amused recognition of the joke. Daisy felt the slightest shiver of strangeness. Something was wrong. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘We can’t real y talk here,’ Alex said.

‘The Coffee Bank, then?’

‘Christ no,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t have a private conversation in there.’

Daisy’s unease grew into ful -blown goose bump infestation. They’d talked privately in the restaurant before.

Once, they’d sat in the smal alcove near the kitchen and Alex had kissed her so intensely that her stomach flipped with excitement. ‘We’l go to the Rio Lounge, come on.’

Situated on a smal al ey, the Rio Lounge was as far removed from the sunlit beaches of Rio de Janeiro as it was possible to be: dark, dingy and the pub of choice for people toying with the idea of investing in another lump of hash. This was because it was so badly lit that drug deals could be done without anybody else being any the wiser.

Tourists also liked it because it was decorated in olde Oirish style and appealed to anyone who liked dingy nooks, genuine sawdust and strange farming implements bought as a job lot by the pub interior decorator. Daisy fol owed Alex obediently inside.

Despite its aura of grubbiness, the Rio Lounge clearly did a roaring lunchtime trade and was packed, so Alex and Daisy couldn’t locate stools and had to stand at one end of the counter. Alex ordered drinks without asking Daisy what she wanted, and he kept his face turned expectantly towards the barman until the drinks had arrived and he’d paid for them. Daisy took her quarter bottle of white wine silently and watched Alex pour most of his smal bottle of red into his glass

and take a huge gulp. Whatever he was about to tel her, it was serious.

Like a man about to step off the platform for a two-hundred foot bungee jump, Alex looked at her and plunged right in.

‘Louise is pregnant.’

Then why had Louise looked so miserable? Maybe she was in shock and had just found out. Or maybe she didn’t want the baby. ‘She doesn’t want it, then?’ For one crazy moment, Daisy almost added, ‘We’l take it!’ A baby nobody wanted; a baby she and Alex could love …

‘Of course she wants it.’

‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Wel , what’s the problem?’ She thought for a beat, her mind stil flooded with the picture of her and Alex with this darling baby. ‘The father doesn’t want to know? Is that it? Oh, poor Louise.’

‘That’s not it.’ Alex no longer looked as if he was about to bungee jump. He looked as if he already had and the rope had sheared in two.

‘He’s married, right?’ Daisy stopped feeling sorry for herself and felt sudden sympathy for Louise. ‘The father’s married.’ Men had it both ways, she thought darkly. They could have the fling and none of the consequences.

‘Not exactly.’

‘What then?’

Alex looked down into his wine and then, reluctantly, up into Daisy’s wide-open, innocent eyes. He’d looked at her in many ways over the years they’d been together but never like this; never with naked pity. Not even when she’d had her wisdom teeth out and her jaw was swol en to twice its normal size, making her look like a hamster after a day in the cream bun factory. The pity had been mingled with love then. Now, it was just naked pity.

‘Daisy, do you not see … ?’

And in that instant, she saw. There could only be one reason for the frozen look on Alex’s face.

The baby was his. Alex had been having an affair with Louise, which was why he’d wanted the trial separation.

And Louise was pregnant with his baby. Presumably she’d been pregnant al along and the separation had been almost a mercy thing, a case of let’s-not-give-Daisy-al -the-details-yet-or-she’l -have-a-breakdown. The news was to be drip-fed to her. First the separation, then the news about Louise. Final y, the baby. Except that she had upset the whole plan by rushing home from the airport with her plan.

‘It’s your baby.’

‘Yes, it’s mine.’

‘You didn’t want babies,’ Daisy said, almost disbelieving.

‘No, but it happened this way and there’s no turning back.’ ‘I thought you didn’t want babies at al ! That’s what I thought. I was going to sacrifice having children for being with you. It would have kil ed me but I was going to do it and now this.

How can you do this to me?’ she said.

Her innocent plans for their new life together, their wedding even, their rose-tinted future - it was disintegrating before her eyes.

‘When were you going to tel me?’ Daisy was proud of that sentence. She didn’t know how she’d conjured up the energy to say it without great gulping sobs.

‘I don’t know. Louise wanted us to be truthful from the start.

We never meant it to happen, I promise.’

Us, there was an us and it was no longer Daisy and Alex. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you,’ he said.

That was almost funny.

‘But you have,’ Daisy said in a lost voice.

‘I know. If there was any way I could have avoided it, I would.’ He was earnest. ‘If there was any way, Daisy, believe me …’

She was stil too stunned to cry. ‘Believe you? That’s what I have been doing and look where it’s got me, Alex,’ she said, knowing she was close to cracking now. ‘Just answer one thing: how long has it been going on with you and her?’

The bungee jump rope miraculously repaired itself and Alex’s confidence reappeared. ‘A couple of months,’ he said easily, too easily …

Daisy thought of the last year where she’d sunk deeper and deeper into anxiety over her childlessness. And she thought of Alex moving cool y away from her so that she’d somehow felt she couldn’t tel him what she was feeling. She’d been worried that it had been her fault for obsessing over babies, and al the time it had been this. ‘You’re lying,’ she said flatly. ‘No,’ he protested.

‘Don’t lie,’ she snapped back. ‘Tel me the truth.’ The fight went out of his eyes. ‘Since the conference in Kerry last year.’

April, she remembered, a big finance conference involving lots of advance dry-cleaning trips for her as she got his clothes ready. She’d developed a horrible flu while he’d been away and he’d been so sweet when he came back, making her cups of hot water and lemon to soothe her cough, buying her favourite fashion mags and cooking dinner each night until she recovered. It had been during a bad time for poor Mary, and Daisy could remember that guilty feeling of having a loving partnership while her friend and col eague didn’t. And al the time, her loving relationship had been a sham.

‘When is the baby due?’

‘Five months’ time.’

Daisy felt barren then. Not just childless, but like some great desert plain where no seed would ever grow, no matter what rain pelted into the ground. She was empty and flat-stomached, while Louise was swol en with life. Life with teeny little starfish fingers and huge dark pools of eyes and a curled-up body nestling in the womb until it wriggled into the world like a miracle. Without real y giving a damn, Louise had taken the two most important things in Daisy’s life. Alex and his baby. Louise didn’t even need them.

She’d had a child, a boy to nurture and love, and she would always be a mother. Always.

And Daisy wouldn’t.

She didn’t even realise she was crying until she saw the pained expression on Alex’s face. He hated her to cry, hated that outpouring of emotion. He had an expression he wore when she cried: tense around the mouth, pleading around the eyes. Please stop. ‘I am sorry, so sorry,’ he said. ‘If there was any way I could turn the clock back and make it not happen -‘ he broke off helplessly. ‘I would never want to hurt you, Daisy. We’ve been through so much together.’

Daisy barely heard him. ‘Was the Tiffany necklace for me?’

she asked, suddenly fingering the exquisite heart that had given her such comfort.

He exhaled, the puff gone out of him. ‘Yes,’ he said bluntly. ‘I was going to tel you that night when I came home from London. I thought the necklace might help, show you that I loved you and had never meant to hurt you.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

He buried his face in his hands. ‘I don’t know. You were so excited about the fertility clinic and you wanted to go … I didn’t know what to say. How could I tel you it was over when you were so happy?’

The tears kept flowing. Daisy brushed them away with her hand. ‘But you let me hope and dream,’ she whispered.

‘That was so cruel; that was beyond cruel.’

‘How could I tel you?’ he repeated, frustration making him angry. ‘You were so caught up in it. It was impossible to tel you that it was over. You just didn’t see, Daisy, did you?’

‘See what?’

‘That we’d find the right people one day. We both knew we were biding our time. Who ends up with the person they dated in col ege? We’re al looking over our shoulder, aren’t we? I Was looking for a special someone. Go on, be honest, you were too …’

‘No,’ she wailed, deeply shocked to think he could have looked at their love that way. ‘Don’t try and make it al right by lying about me. I was never waiting for anyone else, you were the one. You are the one for me.’

‘You must have known. When I said there was no point in getting married, didn’t you work it out?’ he said helplessly.

‘No.’ The word was so soft it was almost inaudible. ‘I tried to let you know, Daisy. I did,’ he insisted. ‘We were as good as married,’ she said. ‘We owned a flat together, we had plans, we spent Christmas and New Year and every single holiday of our lives together. What’s not permanent about that? How could I know?’

Alex didn’t seem to have an answer for that. Final y, he spoke again. ‘I thought you understood when we talked about marriage. That’s why I couldn’t tel you it was over when you said you’d made the appointment with the clinic.

Shit, Daisy, why are you so trusting, so bloody naive?’

‘Because I love you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m sorry you love me but it’s over, Daisy. Over. There’s no nice way to say it.

OK?’

She shook her head blindly. ‘It’s not OK. How wil I cope without you?’

‘That’s not my problem. You’re going to have to deal with it,’

he said simply, and left.

Standing beside the bar in the jam-packed Rio Lounge, Daisy had never felt lonelier in her life.

The high-heeled boots didn’t make her feel better, nor did the charcoal cashmere cardigan with the seductive V-neck and the clinging fit, but she bought them anyway. The sexy Damaris silk knickers with the flirty bow on the back -

ludicrously expensive - were a total indulgence, but Daisy bought two pairs, one pair in oyster and one pair in damson with cream spots. Then she bought a tub of ice cream and drove home to Carrickwel , eating the ice cream with a plastic spoon as she sat in traffic. Her shopping lay on the seat beside her, and she touched it sometimes, as if the sight of comforting, expensive things would block out the black hole inside.

Like a busy computer with a ful hard drive and slow reactions, her head refused to open the new file: the one label ed Alex and Louise. If she stopped herself from thinking about it, perhaps it wouldn’t be true.

In Carrickwel , she drove over the familiar bridge and saw the old man who occasional y played his accordion on her side of the river. He was frail and bundled up in a big coat, with a hat on the ground beside him for coins. Daisy hated the sad tunes he played but she always threw money into his hat when she passed.

Was he happy? she thought wildly now. Was his life better than hers? Probably. In the apartment, she mechanical y put her new clothes away, unpacked her suitcase and sorted it into two piles - laundry and dry-cleaning. Neat, methodical.

She took off the clothes she’d put on with such zest that morning in Diisseldorf and dressed in an old shirt and the brown slouchy velvet trousers she liked to wear at home.

When al was as it should be, Daisy got a bottle of wine from the fridge, and sat cross-legged on the couch, staring at the television for comfort. This could not be happening to her. Alex could not have left her. Could he?

Then she cried until her face was raw and the bottle was empty.

The first Monday morning of Mel’s new life, the alarm clock she’d forgotten to switch off rang lustily at six fifteen as usual and she lay for a moment the way she always did, savouring that moment of calm before the storm. Adrian did what he always did too: groaned in his sleep and rol ed over for another few minutes’ oblivion.

She started to race mental y through the day: what she had to do, what she should have done yesterday, what she might manage to put off until tomorrow. And then, with a delicious feeling like sinking into cool sheets with tired feet, she remembered. She wasn’t going to work today. She no longer had a job outside the home. Being a mother was her job. ‘Housewife.’ She considered the word. Housewife.

Stay-at home mother. Was she different? In the half-light of morning seen through cream curtains, she stretched out one arm and looked at it. Exactly the same. Her hand was the same, with slightly ragged cuticles and no polish on the nails. Perhaps she could do things like get manicures now.

No, they wouldn’t be able to afford that. She could do them herself. She’d have time. And bake - yes, she’d bake.

Muffins from that toddler cookbook, the one she’d had for years but had never used. Her own bread. Or perhaps that was a bit ambitious. There were clever ready-made bread mixes in the shops now; she could try them.

Indulging in her plans for the future, Mel rol ed over in the bed, snuggled up against the warm shape that was Adrian, and slipped off into a half-doze. Was there an apron anywhere in the house? she wondered. Probably only the one that had come free with cans of beans years ago.