Never Too Late (5 page)

when Rosie had rolled up her torn jeans to examine the

scraped bit.

He was just as bad when it came to female ailments.

Brought up as an only child by a mother who treated his

conception practically as the virgin birth, Simon had no

experience of women’s problems. Evie couldn’t clutch her

abdomen when she had a painful period without Simon

averting his eyes as if he’d stumbled on some arcane

female secret. God alone knew where she’d have to hide

her tampons when they got married. In a separate room in

a brown paper bag probably.

So duelling was out. He might shoot someone to save

her honour, she thought. Shooting happened such a long

way away that he couldn’t mind that. Evie took a sip of

milk and immersed herself in the racy world of the

seventeenth century where men were men and women

were glad of the fact.

CHAPTER TWO

Parsnips! She’d forgotten the parsnips, Olivia realised with

a start. Stephen would go mad if he didn’t get parsnips

with his Christmas lunch. He loved them, especially

pureed until they resembled baby food, she thought fondly.

It was just after nine p.m. on December 23rd, the

supermarket was about to shut and if she didn’t reach a

checkout soon, she’d probably be shoved out of the

electronic doors into the freezing night - without her

shopping. But Olivia who would have died rather than

keep the staff in the supermarket waiting for her, knew

that she just had to get parsnips. Poor Stephen had to

face three whole days in her parents’ house over the

holidays so the least she could do was cook him the sort

of food he liked.

Hastily abandoning the jam-packed trolley, she sprinted

back to the vegetables, both the fringe of her ankle-length

Indian skirt and her long fair hair flying out behind her.

She nearly collided with another late-night shopper as

she rounded the bend beside the flowers at high speed and

her sudden sprint surprised an elderly lady reaching for the

cat food.

‘Sorry,’ gasped Olivia, without stopping.

There had obviously been a run on parsnips that day: all

that remained at the bottom of the display were a few

stunted specimens which looked about ten years old and

would probably taste like boiled socks.

For about the tenth time that day, Olivia cursed the

events which had forced her to leave her shopping so late

that she hadn’t time to visit her favourite greengrocer and

delicatessen to stock up on Christmas goodies. Her father

adored those fat Spanish olives drenched in olive oil and

she hadn’t been able to find them anywhere in the

supermarket. The pre-Christmas panic meant the shelves

were virtually bare and she was now left with prehistoric

parsnips Stephen would hate. Still, she’d manage to revitalise

them somehow. What was the point of being a home

economics teacher if you couldn’t rustle up something

wonderful in the kitchen?

Olivia grabbed a handful of the puny vegetables,

weighed them and rushed back to her trolley in time to

hear a bored voice announce over the Tannoy: ‘The supermarket

is now shut. Please go to the checkouts. This is the

last call.’

It was a bit like being at the airport, hearing your

flight was closing, Olivia thought, snatching a big bag of

mini Mars bars as she passed the biscuits and flinging

them on top of the mountain of groceries. What she

wouldn’t give to be jumping on a plane right now,

heading off somewhere exotic where Christmas wasn’t

celebrated and the temperature seldom dropped below

thirty degrees Centigrade.

For a moment, she dreamed of palm-fringed beaches,

white sand and cerulean water so clear you could see the

tiny silver fish that swam near the shore. She and Stephen

lazing on loungers at the water’s edge, listening to the

sound of the lapping waves as the heat of the sun warmed

their bare limbs. Sasha playing on the sand, toys spread out

beside her fat little legs as she sat in her pink swimming

costume, her white-blonde hair tied up in adorable pig tails

and her cherubic little face lit up with happiness.

Wishful thinking, Olivia realised. The three of them

hadn’t been on holiday for nearly eighteen months because

Stephen had been so busy at work with the merger

between Clifden International Incorporated and a giant

German bank.

European Information Technology Executive was supposed

to be the sort of incredibly high-powered job that

came with hot and cold running assistants to do the dirty

work, but in reality the combination of Stephen’s dedication

and perfectionism meant he insisted on being consulted

over every crisis - weekends, night-time, whenever.

‘I can’t let anybody else sort this out,’ he’d mutter,

handsome olive-skinned face blank, his mind already miles

away as he expertly packed his sleek Samsonite case for

another trip abroad. “I don’t get paid the sort of salary they

give me for nothing, you know. It’s tough on you, Olivia,

but we’ve got to make sacrifices to get on.’

Now she was sick of making those type of sacrifices.

Their apartment in Blackrock may have looked like the

‘after’ picture in an interior design magazine thanks to

Stephen’s ever-increasing salary, but she saw less and less

of him as his workload grew heavier. She spent birthdays

and anniversaries alone and despaired of ever having a

normal family weekend that didn’t involve Stephen

haring into his city centre office at least once. In the

twelve years they’d been married, she’d been alone for

six wedding anniversaries, and last-minute business meant

Stephen had been away for her birthday on three

separate occasions.

They’d had to cancel the longed-for week in Spain in

July when there was a crisis in the Amsterdam office and

their two weeks in the Dordogne the previous year had

been constantly punctuated by the shrill sound of

Stephen’s mobile phone.

Olivia could have lived without the expensive Swedish

wood floors and the high-tech kitchen if only she’d had

someone to share her home with more of the time. She

absolutely adored Sasha but by the end of a week spent

with only her daughter to talk to, Olivia craved adult

conversation. Long-distance ‘Yes, of course I miss you’

from a distant hotel room wasn’t quite the same as

cuddling up on the sofa with Stephen, having her feet

massaged as they talked about their days. But he adored his

job and was willing to go to any lengths to advance his

career, even if it meant being away from home more often

than he was there.

Sometimes Olivia simply couldn’t understand him. No

job could have made her leave Stephen and Sasha for

weeks at a time, not even one with a huge salary, lots of

perks, a 5 series BMW and a company American Express

card.

Perhaps it was because being a part-time home economics

teacher didn’t fill her with the same burning drive and ambition to succeed.

Teaching a deeply disinterested 3A how to make a

nourishing meal out of a can of kidney beans and a bit of

minced beef no longer fired her with boundless enthusiasm.

Apart from her enthusiasm for breaktime when she

could throw herself into an armchair in the teachers’

staff room, enjoy a cup of tea and discuss what a little

horror Cheryl Dennis was, to a universal chorus of: ‘When

will the principal expel that child?’

Stephen, on the other hand, adored his job and its

time-consuming challenges. Running his section like an

all-powerful despot suited him down to the ground and

Olivia suspected he’d know exactly how to deal with

Cheryl Dennis when she threw mince at her best friend,

who promptly threw kidney beans back.

‘Next,’ yawned the checkout girl.

Forget about sun-kissed beaches, Olivia told herself

sternly. She stacked her groceries on the conveyor belt and

thought about the sort of holiday season she would be

having: Christmas lunch with her parents, Stephen and

Sasha in the rambling Lodge, a raucous affair where both

parents would be roaring drunk before the smoked salmon

had hit the table, while Stephen would sit in disapproving

silence as bottles of her father’s favourite claret moved up

and down the table with frightening speed. You’d swear it

was Olivia’s fault her parents drank like fishes.

Her mother would be giggling too much to help with

the cooking and Janet, the latest housekeeper-cum-home

help - whom Olivia suspected also made a substantial

contribution to the already-stratospheric household drinks

bill - had been given the week off.

Stephen was hopeless in the vegetable-peeling department,

and anyway he’d be so tired after his week-long

German trip that it’d be down to Olivia and her mother’s

ancient, grime-encrusted cooker to produce everything.

No wonder the school’s selection of prehistoric cookers

never fazed her - after learning to cook on the Lodge’s

rackety appliances, Olivia could have whipped up a four

course meal with a single gas flame and two saucepans.

At least, Mum and Pops would fall asleep over whatever

Indiana Jones movie was on that afternoon, so she and

Stephen could take Sasha for a walk around the village and

call in on the Frasers, her closest friends.

Christmas was always so much fun at the Frasers’, Olivia

thought longingly, remembering the year she’d sneaked out

of a loud Christmas morning party in the Lodge, leaving all

her de Were relatives braying loudly at one another across

the fifteenth-century refectory table, swigging back the

strongest egg nog imaginable. She’d been a shy, retiring

sixteen at the time and slipping into the peaceful atmosphere

of the Frasers’ small homey kitchen after the

enforced jollity of her own home had been bliss.

The scent of a goose roasting in the old black range filled

the room, Mrs Fraser and Evie were joking and laughing as

they finished setting the table for lunch, Mr Fraser sat in

his battered old armchair reading, as usual, and six-year-old

Cara was sprawled on the floor, attempting to turn her

new doll into Action Man with the help of oven blacking, a

ripped khaki T-shirt and a pair of large kitchen scissors she

obviously wasn’t supposed to be using. The simple table

wasn’t a quarter as grand as Olivia’s parents’ table with its

Waterford crystal glasses and silverware, but it was a

hundred times more inviting.

‘Olivia darling, Merry Christmas,’ said Mrs Fraser, opening

welcoming arms for a hug. She didn’t reek of early

morning hair-of-dog remedies and mothballs from an ancient twinset she’d dug out of her closet; she smelt of baking and of the Blue Grass perfume she used on special

occasions.

Olivia smiled happily at the Frasers, wishing they were her parents, and then guiltily suppressed the thought, feeling desperately disloyal.

You were supposed to love your parents, not mope

around after your best friend’s. It was just that Evie’s

parents were so … well, like parents, grownups. Not like

Sybil and Leslie de Were who still both behaved like the

carefree, idle kids they’d been when they’d met at college

in the fifties.

Olivia felt more grownup than they were. Well, someone had to be a bit grownup in the Lodge, otherwise the final reminders would have been shoved in the hall drawer

unpaid and nobody would ever have thought of paying the

account in the butcher’s.

Over twenty years later Olivia still sometimes wished

she could go home to the Frasers’ for Christmas, although

sneaking clandestinely out of the increasingly rundown

Lodge for a few hours was no longer possible now that the

hordes of hard-drinking distant de Were relatives were all long gone and the only company her parents had would be herself, Sasha and Stephen.

Olivia stuffed his parsnips into a plastic bag along with

the rest of her vegetables and wished he wasn’t away in

Germany. The apartment always seemed so empty when

he was gone and she felt so lonely on her own in their big

double bed. Stuffing a pillow on Stephen’s side so there’d

be something beside her didn’t work very well.

She loved it when he came home and they could sink

into the snowy cotton sheets he preferred and make

rapturous love. Stephen’s lean, dark-skinned body wrapped

around her pale gold one. No matter how much time they

spent apart, it only took a few minutes for the passion that

had drawn them together in the beginning to be rekindled.

Not that there’d be any time for lovemaking when he

flew home the next day, she thought ruefully, unless his

parents decided to do the convenient thing for the first time

in their lives and left at a reasonable hour. And Cedric and

Sheilagh MacKenzie never did anything that was convenient

for their daughter-in-law. Take today when they’d

turned up at the Blackrock apartment unannounced, just as