Past Secrets (40 page)

‘He’s very busy at the moment,’ said his

constituency secretary on the third occasion Maggie phoned. ‘I have put your proposal to him but I just don’t think he has the time.’

Something in Maggie snapped. The night before, she and her dad had walked around Summer Street park, talking about life, the universe and everything, admiring the flowers and ruefully thinking that if the campaign wasn’t successful it might all look so different in a few months. Maggie had decided there and then that she was not going to lose this fight. She had lost so many fights in her life. Things were going to change.

She’d got a book from the library on selfconfidence and had read it twice. Practising affirmations in front of the mirror in the morning felt a bit silly at first, but it seemed to work. After all, if you said, ‘I feel useless’, it had an effect, so surely the opposite was also true.

Start believing in yourself and stop knocking yourself, the book said. So simple and so true. And it was working.

‘Fine,’ Maggie said to the constituency secretary in pleasant tones. She knew exactly what to say, having practised this argument in front of the mirror earlier. ‘You can tell Mr Mitchell that I’m giving a newspaper interview tomorrow and one of the main points I will be bringing up is his complete lack of interest in our pavilion. I’m going to point out that Mr Mitchell is obviously only interested in projects that get his name in the paper and that he has refused to see us on three separate occasions.’

‘Now there’s no need to be like this,’ interrupted the secretary.

‘Oh, there’s every need,’ said Maggie. ‘Watch me.’ She hung up.

Within fifteen minutes, she had an appointment to see Mr Mitchell the next afternoon.

‘I can’t go with you,’ wailed Una. ‘I’ve a doctor’s appointment. You really need someone to go with you. You can’t go and see someone like that on your own.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Maggie, feeling a certain amount of renewed vigour. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Harrison Mitchell’s office was much grander than Liz Glebe’s and was in the basement of his imposing Georgian three-storey terraced house. Handy to be a councillor when you were independently rich, thought Maggie, as she went down the steps into the basement, admiring topiary box trees sitting in giant stone troughs with just the correct amount of lichen on them. The effect was very beautiful and very grand.

She doubted that Mr Mitchell’s waiting room would be covered with awful, sick yellow paint.

She was right. It was a tasteful light blue with white cornices and a flower arrangement on a stand in an alcove.

‘Sorry about the delay in seeing you,’ said a man opening the door to her. It was Councillor Mitchell himself. Maggie recognised him from the newspapers. He was tall, good-looking, charming,

and the product of an expensive education that gave in-built confidence. Maggie drew herself up to her full height and gave him a half-smile.

‘I’m sorry it’s taken us so long too,’ she said coolly. Start as you mean to go on.

Politely, charmingly, Harrison Mitchell did his best to get out of helping with the Summer Street park campaign.

‘I think that local people working together on something they really believe in is very powerful,’

he said finally, after half an hour of discussing vague plans for what the protesters could do for their cause.

Maggie had had enough.

‘You’re a bit of a snob when it comes to conservation, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You like projects with historical connections or fabulous architectural proportions and to hell with anything that’s of use to the community but doesn’t fit your criteria.’

‘That’s not true,’ he snapped.

‘Yes it is,’ said Maggie, listing the last five projects he’d been involved in. Every one of them was a historical site, despite his political literature claiming he was interested in saving community landmarks irrespective of their age or architectural beauty. ‘I work in the library,’ Maggie went on. ‘And research is my specialist subject. We need your help. We’ve a lot of press planned,’ she said, which was more or less true. Lots of newspapers and radio stations had been contacted but nobody was very interested yet. ‘This could be a wonderful campaign for you. At least it would stop critics from saying you’re only interested in getting your name in the papers,’ she added, thinking that a month ago she’d never have had the courage to say something that ballsy.

Mitchell narrowed his eyes and looked at the telegenic redhead before him. She’d be stunning in front of any sort of camera and she had chutzpah too.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But let me deal with the press.’

‘Sorry,’ said Maggie calmly, ‘we’ll deal with it together. This is our campaign, remember.’

She saw a flicker of respect in his eyes.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s your campaign, Ms Maguire.

You’re the boss.’

Yes, thought Maggie proudly, I’m the boss.

It was nearly half past seven when she walked up Summer Street from the park end, still running over the meeting in her mind. She was so engrossed in her triumph that she almost didn’t notice the man getting out of a car outside her house.

‘Coming home from your car maintenance class?’ said a low, deep voice behind her. Maggie knew it instantly. Big bear of a man with absolutely no social skills, greasy overalls and dirt under his fingernails. The man with the petrol sucker-outer.

She turned and stared at him. She might have walked in her gate without recognising him if it

hadn’t been for that voice. The overalls were gone and he was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton jumper that stretched slightly across his huge shoulders.

He

cleaned up well, she conceded. Without the patina of garage grease, he was really rather attractive with those sparkling dark eyes. Not her type obviously; she didn’t go in for those big men who looked like they never went to the gym, just heaved trucks around the garage to keep their muscles in shape.

‘No, I’ve given up car maintenance. I’m in training for the space programme,’ she said gravely. ‘We’re working on a plan to ship mankind off Earth and leave womankind behind.’

‘All men? Or just ones who work in garages and make stupid jokes?’

‘All men,’ she said firmly.

‘Where are we being sent?’ he asked. He really was tall. Beside him, she felt positively fragile, which was something Maggie wasn’t used to feeling.

‘Somewhere with no oxygen.’

She tried to glare at him, but it was hard, because he was smiling at her, a relaxed smile as if he felt utterly comfortable.

‘I don’t suppose you can tell me when we’re being shipped off: mankind, I mean,’ he said, and it even sounded as if he was smiling. Honestly, what was the point of trying to be clever with someone who glinted sexy eyes back at you and looked wildly amused. ‘Except I came to apologise.

Sorry, I should have done it the day afterwards but I thought you might be too angry to listen to me. I wanted to invite you out to say sorry.

By the way, how much time has mankind left before being shipped off to this unoxygenated planet?’

‘You came to apologise and ask me out?’ Maggie repeated, wondering if this was another joke. ‘Unless NASA has a non-fraternisation policy,’

he added, ‘and you can’t. For reasons of international security.’

He was teasing her, but it was gentle and Maggie found she quite liked it.

‘Only intelligent life forms are considered a threat to national security,’ she pointed out with a hint of sarcasm, leaving him in no doubt that she figured he was in the non-intelligent life-form quotient.

‘Well, then it’ll be fine for you to go out with me,’ he said evenly. ‘Next Saturday at two. It’s my cousin’s wedding.’

‘A wedding? You don’t ask someone you’ve just met to a wedding,’ she said suspiciously. ‘I barely know you. I can’t remember your name.’

‘Ivan Gregory,’ he said. ‘We met at my garage.’ ‘I know where we met,’ she said hastily. ‘So, why are you here asking me out? Did your girlfriend dump you because of your awful practical jokes?’ Even as she said it, she knew it was bitchy and not worthy of either her or poor Ivan. But he took it well.

‘No,’ he said, ‘she dumped me because of the

body odour. Every Christmas I got deodorant, aftershave, washing powder. I think finally she realised the message wasn’t getting through.’

‘All right,’ said Maggie, grinning in spite of herself. ‘Go on, what’s the real reason? You don’t turn up at your cousin’s wedding with a woman no one in your family knows and nobody has ever heard of.’

‘They’re a bit mad in my family,’ Ivan said, with a glint in his eyes. ‘They won’t mind. They’ll be astonished that a jumped-up pump jockey has a date at all.’

Maggie flushed at that, remembering what she’d called him before. She’d better rethink her original evaluation. He was anything but stupid.

‘Are we going to the whole wedding?’ Maggie asked. ‘The church, the dinner, the whole thing? Because if we are and it’s fancy, I have to tell you, I don’t do fancy. I’m more of a jeans woman.’

‘I don’t do fancy very well myself,’ Ivan said gravely. ‘Although I was going to make an exception in this case. Maybe buy a new pair of overalls. But the rock chick look would be fine.’

He flicked an appreciative eye over her outfit, which was Maggie’s standard look of jeans, cowboy boots and a peach-coloured T-shirt that clung to her slim body and showed off the rich russet of her trailing curls. Her new business jacket was slung over one shoulder. ‘Be yourself,’ he said.

Now Maggie really did laugh. ‘Be yourself is one of those things people say when they don’t really mean it and they don’t know what else to say.’

‘No,’ said Ivan, with all seriousness. ‘I mean it: be yourself. What else would you be?’

Maggie thought of all the different people she tried to be in her life. At school, she’d tried to blend in so nobody would notice her.

Eventually, she tried to be tough, because invisible hadn’t worked. Tough had been a good compromise. People left you alone if you were a bit tough.

She’d been working that whole ‘don’t mess with me’ phase when she’d met Grey. She toned it down, then, becoming softer, letting her hair grow the way Grey loved. In other words, she’d been what she thought everyone wanted. And here was a man who wanted her to be herself.

Well, she might as well give it a try. After all, she had nothing very pressing to do.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. Not as a date, right?’ The new improved Maggie, chairwoman of an important committee and worthy foil of politicians, said what she meant these days. ‘No,’ agreed Ivan easily, ‘not as a date.’

Maggie didn’t pursue why he needed somebody at such short notice. There was bound to be a story in it, but she’d find out later. ‘You’ll pick me up then on Saturday?’

‘Your house at two?’ he said.

‘Done,’ Maggie said, ‘and I won’t be wearing a hat.’

‘A hat’s not required.’

For a wedding she didn’t want to go to, where she was going to meet lots of people she didn’t know, Maggie found herself remarkably involved in trying to work out what to wear. On Friday evening, her mother sat on the bed and they went through all the various options.

‘A little dress always works,’ said Shona on the phone earlier when asked for advice, ‘but then you don’t have any little dresses, do you?’

‘Shona, you know my wardrobe,’ Maggie said. ‘The last time there was a little dress in it, I was four. Although Mum probably still has the item in question stuffed up in the attic, I am unlikely to fit into it.’

‘What about the bridesmaid’s dress you wore to my wedding?’

‘There is that,’ Maggie conceded, ‘but it’s very glamorous and over the top for a man I don’t know. I can’t wear that.’

‘Oh God, I don’t know,’ groaned Shona. ‘Ring me when you’re sorting through the clothes and I’ll give advice.’

‘Trinny and Susannah by phone?’

‘Maybe not,’ agreed Shona. ‘Wear lots of lipstick, then. It’ll detract from the jeans.’

‘I have more than jeans, you know. I have other trousers too.’

‘I know, but unless the trousers are part of a chic trouser suit with a matching jacket, then you’re not going to be very weddingy, are you?’

‘What do you think of this?’ Maggie asked her mother, holding up a midnight-blue silk camisole, with sparkly, fake jewels sewn on the front. A thrift-shop purchase, it was a little worn around the edges but Maggie liked it.

‘That’s lovely,’ sighed her mother. ‘It’s pretty.

Now, what will you wear with it?’

There followed a big search through the piles of jeans, smaller pile of black trousers and Maggie’s two skirts. One was a distressed velvet affair that had possibly once been brown and was now mottled and faded, in a way that was either fabulously beautiful or totally shabby, Maggie wasn’t sure which.

‘I don’t know about that now,’ said Una doubtfully. ‘If it was fancy dress, that would be great but … Well, try it on anyway and we’ll see.’

‘Cinderella, before the transformation by the fairy godmother,’ Maggie decided, when she’d pulled on the skirt.

‘Oh, now, don’t say that,’ chided her mother. ‘With a bit of make-up and if you curl your hair up, you’ll be the belle of the ball.’

‘Mum, I think that fall affected your brain,’

teased Maggie, stripping off.

Her mother laughed. ‘That’s what your father says. How would he know, that’s what I say! Now look at that lovely skirt.’

She pulled out Maggie’s only other skirt, which Grey had once urged her to buy. A fitted pencil skirt that showed off her long, slim legs, she had worn it only once, for the purpose of Grey removing it.

‘That’d look beautiful on you, Maggie. You never show off your legs.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Maggie reluctantly, because there was a very good reason why she didn’t show off her legs, which was that people would look at them. ‘Anyway, I’ve no tights.’ What would you need tights for if you didn’t wear skirts?

‘I’ll get you some of mine,’ volunteered her mother, hobbling off on her crutches at speed.

Finally, there were the beginnings of an outfit.

Maggie barely recognised this slim girl in the mirror with the long, long legs encased in sheer nylons and the sleek skirt clinging to her hips.