Past Secrets (55 page)

Christie held her breath. He hadn’t said, Goodbye, I’ve come to pick up my stuff. There was some hope.

‘I don’t know if I can ever forget what happened between you and him.’

Again, he didn’t say Carey’s name and Christie felt her spirits sink at his words.

‘But,’ James went on, ‘I could try.’

‘You could try?’ Christie asked. ‘Try to forget?

Try again?’

He nodded. ‘I love you, Christie. You’re my whole life, you always have been, ever since I met you. That’s what hurts, to think that there was a time when I wasn’t your whole life, to think that we’ve been living a lie.’

‘But we weren’t,’ Christie pleaded. ‘It only happened for a short time, it was stupid, and then it was over. It didn’t rewrite our history, it doesn’t negate everything we had, our love, our children, our life together.’

‘I know that,’ James said. ‘Doesn’t make it any easier to handle, though. I kept imagining you and him -‘ He stopped. ‘I can’t bear to think of that, Christie. And then, when you left the pictures for me to see, I was so angry and hurt. All I could think was you were trying to show me how much he loved you, because he’d been able to paint you.

I don’t understand art, that’s your world and I was never a part of it. But I felt bad because I’d never tried to be a part of it and, at the same time, furious with you for having him, having that other life.’

He was being so honest and it was so heartbreaking that Christie wanted nothing more than to get up and to put her arms around him. But she couldn’t. She had to let him speak his piece.

That was his right. She’d done what she thought was right, now it was his turn.

‘When you showed me the pictures,’ he went on, ‘I thought you’d done it for a reason: that you wanted to be with him again. When you said it wasn’t that, that he was dying and that he wanted to see you one last time, I don’t think I believed you. I still thought you must be trying to hurt me.’

‘I’d never hurt you, not intentionally,’ she said. ‘Although I have hurt you, I didn’t mean to.’

‘I didn’t go fishing,’ he said. ‘I took some time off to think. I stayed in the B & B beside the lake, but I just walked and walked every day. I couldn’t bring myself to actually fish,’ he said ruefully. ‘And I realised I couldn’t let the past destroy us. We’re

stronger than that. You’re an honest person and that’s why you told me, I know that now. You could have left me in the dark and I would never have known and some day, a hundred years from now, someone would put two and two together.

You’d be named as the dark lady and I’d be the fool, the cuckold, the man who never knew. I don’t want to be the man who never knew, that’s not what I married you for. I can’t say I’m glad you told me, but now that you have, it’s not going to end our marriage.’

‘Oh, James,’ said Christie and she ran to him.

He held out his arms and pulled her into his embrace.

‘Thank you,’ she sobbed, ‘thank you. I couldn’t ring you or try to get in touch with you, I knew you had to do this on your own. I never meant to hurt you, not twenty-five years ago, not last week, not ever, you know that. I just don’t want there to be any more secrets. I’ve lived my life frightened that this would come out and destroy what we had. I just couldn’t live with that any more.’

He held her close, saying nothing, stroking her hair, her head burrowed into his shoulder.

‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘That’s what made me come back. Thinking of a life without you, what it would be like to live on my own. We’d sell this place, split the money and both of us live out lives of quiet misery because of my pride, because of something that happened twenty-five years ago.

And no, I didn’t want to do that,’ he said. ‘Carey Wolensky nearly took so much away from me, he wasn’t going to take you away again.’

And Christie stood in his embrace and prayed thank you to whoever was watching over them.

They stood there for a while, until the dogs got tired of sniffing around their feet and lay down and fell asleep. It was nice just to stand there and be held by the man she loved most in the whole world.

‘What are you painting?’ asked James, eventually.

Christie

moved back and wiped her eyes with her hand.

‘I started doing one of my flower pictures,’ she said with a sniffle, reaching into her cardigan pocket for a tissue. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. ‘But I couldn’t concentrate on it, couldn’t concentrate on anything really, I was just waiting for you. And then, I found this old photo and it came to me that’s what I should be painting.’ She led James around the other side of the easel and stood while he stared at the picture.

In her own style, she’d copied an old family photograph of when the boys were young. Shane and Ethan sat on a couch and behind them, leaning over the back of the couch, smiling, arms around each other, were James and Christie. It was a beautiful family shot, hidden in an album for far too long, and she’d captured the joy on their faces perfectly.

‘It’s a family portrait,’ James said.

‘Because my family is what’s important to me,’

Christie said. ‘You’re what’s important to me.’

He put an arm around her waist and squeezed. ‘I know,’ he said.

Autumn on Summer Street came very slowly. The gently curved road was a sheltered place and, by September, the leaves of the maples that lined the pavements were only tinged with the most delicate hint of gold. The Japanese maple in Una Maguire’s front garden, however, had turned a startling dark crimson attracting admiring glances from passers-by. Christie Devlin’s soft white blousy roses were losing their petals daily, except for the creamy climbing rose that crept up over the wall and wrapped tendrils around the ever-open gate. That still bloomed, sending a heady rose scent on to the breeze and making people talk of an Indian summer.

But in spite of the good weather, the summer indolence of barbecues and sitting out sunbathing on front steps was over.

There was a sense of business about the whole street, the feeling of a new start. Holidays were over and the new school term had arrived.

At the Summer Street Cafe, Henry took in all but two of the little tables that stood on the pavement.

His customers were drifting indoors now, preferring their coffees looking out over Summer Street. He liked autumn with its sense of renewal; it reminded him of being a kid going back to school with a bagful of clean new copy books, ready to be filled with wisdom.

‘I think you were always a wise man,’ teased Xu. She’d really come out of her shell, Henry thought proudly, feeling a certain responsibility for that. He and Jane had done their best to welcome her warmly, and her growing friendship with Maggie Maguire had helped integrate her into their community too.’

Xu was a lot different from the shy woman who’d come to work for them at the start of the year. She was a big part of Summer Street.

Xu herself was excited that her mother was coming from China to visit her.

Henry and Jane had insisted that Xu’s mother stay in their spare room.

‘You’ve only got a tiny bedsit,’ Jane pointed out. ‘There won’t be room to swing a cat there.’ ‘She doesn’t have a cat,’ Xu said gravely, then laughed. She loved being able to make jokes in English now. Everyone assumed her to be so sober and serious that they didn’t expect her to make jokes.

‘We’ve taught you too well,’ smiled Jane. ‘You’ll be as bad as Henry soon with the jokes.’

‘I told you the Irish and Chinese were similar,’

said Xu. ‘We have the same sense of humour, except it’s more hidden in my people.’

‘It’s not hidden now,’ said Jane cheerfully. ‘Come on, you pair, let’s get those chairs in or the customers will be tripping over them.’

At number 34, Christie Devlin was getting ready for another teaching year, her last, she’d decided.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ James said to her the night before school started. ‘Don’t do it just because of me.’

‘I’m ready to retire,’ said Christie. ‘Think of all the places we can go then, the things we can do together.’

Although James could stay another two years before retirement, he’d decided to go early. He’d stop working when Christie did the following summer. They had already amassed a collection of brochures about long holidays abroad for the adventuresome spirit. Christie particularly liked the sound of the trip around India, although Ethan and Shane had been a bit anxious when they had seen the brochure.

‘A month?’ said Shane, the brochure opened to the fares page. ‘For this price, you’re hardly going to be staying in old maharajahs’ palaces,’ he said doubtfully. ‘And what about the food, what if one of you gets sick?’

James and Christie looked at each other and laughed.

‘If we get sick, we get sick!’ James said cheerily. ‘We’ll bring plenty of medicine to bung us up from each end. We’re grownups, you know,’ he added, ‘we’re not ready for the nursing home yet.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Shane explained. ‘I know, I know,’ said his father.

‘But why now?’ said Ethan. ‘Why did you never go on these sorts of holidays years ago? You could have taken the time off.’

Christie and James exchanged another look, a private look.

‘This is time for us now,’ she said. ‘You’re all settled, you’ve got your own lives, your own families, it’s time for us to be selfish.’

‘Yeah, but what if we need you, with the baby and everything?’ Shane said, sounding briefly like a child and not like an adult with a wife and a first child on the way.

‘The baby will be fine,’ Christie said, and she knew he would be.

She’d seen a healthy little boy in the future, to be followed, hopefully, by two more. She and James had given Shane and Janet some money for their new arrival and to help them buy a house.

‘We promise we’ll do double babysitting duties when we get back,’ she added. ‘You can always email us, we have a hotmail account.’

‘I don’t know,’ joked Ethan, ‘parents these days: they’re crazy and want to travel the world and don’t care about anyone else.’

The whole family laughed at this.

‘You’re right,’ James said. ‘It’s like we’re in our second childhoods.’

At number 48, Una Maguire was back on her feet and had taken up yoga.

‘Flexibility is the key to taking care of yourself,’

she told everyone who’d listen. ‘If I’d done yoga years ago, who knows, I mightn’t have broken my leg after all. Your father and I have a bet on about the lotus position. I said I’ll be in it by Christmas and he says never. I’m going to win that tenner from you, Dennis.’

Maggie laughed at her mother. It was brilliant to see her on such good form. Una Maguire was one of life’s strong people. No matter what life threw at her, she threw it right back with her own peculiar topspin. Maggie had stopped obsessing about how she’d turned out so different from her mother and had begun to appreciate her differences.

She

was a bit more like her dad really. Quiet and shy, but with enough of her mother’s strength and fire, if required. The developers involved in trying to destroy the Summer Street pavilion had certainly learned that to their cost.

The holiday season had meant that both the plan to knock down the pavilion and the campaign to save it were at a standstill. But the fact that no bulldozer had entered the park in the dead of night and ripped the pavilion to pieces was down to Maggie’s work. She’d given so many interviews

with newspapers and radio stations about the pavilion that she could recite her points in her sleep. And it seemed newspapers liked using her picture too.

‘The pavilion may be crumbling and need a fortune to restore it, but it’s a beautiful building,’

Ivan said, looking at the picture everyone liked best, the full-colour one of Maggie and her mum sitting on the pavilion steps: two radiant redheads, smiling at the cameras with the Save Our Pavilion posters in the background. ‘But having two beautiful women in the picture certainly helps,’ Ivan went on.

‘That’s the type of thing Shona would say,’

Maggie teased him, but she didn’t contradict him either.

He said she was beautiful ten times a day, and he meant it. What was more, Maggie was beginning to appreciate her own worth. When there was nobody else around, she’d examined her photo in the paper, trying to be objective about her own face, and realised that people hadn’t been lying to her when they said she was beautiful.

She didn’t think she would ever totally see it herself. There’d always be that core of self-doubting somewhere, the doubt that made Maggie so lovable and vulnerable. But she was growing stronger and more confident every day. She had become slightly more adventurous when it came to clothes and had just purchased several new bikinis for the holiday she and Ivan were going on in November.

They planned to tour Croatia and then spend one week in Dubrovnik mixing culture and the seaside all in one glorious package.

Going on holiday with Ivan wasn’t the only momentous event in Maggie’s life. He’d asked her to move in with him. Actually, he’d asked her to marry him, but she’d said it was too soon to think of all that.

‘It’s a wonderful idea and I’m honoured you’ve asked me,’ she said, sitting on his lap, her arms around his neck. ‘I just don’t want to rush into anything, Ivan.’

‘It wouldn’t be rushing,’ he said. ‘But OK, I understand. I won’t push you.’

‘Thank you for that,’ she said. ‘You know I’m crazy about you.’

‘How crazy?’ he asked.

‘Oh, this crazy,’ she said, leaning forward and hungrily catching his mouth with hers.

At number 18, Faye Reid had decided that there was no point letting her savings sit miserably in the bank for ever and had employed a landscape gardener to transform her back garden.

‘I love sitting in yours so much,’ she’d said to Christie. ‘It’s so peaceful and lovely with the pergola and the scent of all those roses, and I thought why am I killing myself trying to make my little square of grass look attractive? I don’t know anything about plants and, without professional help, it’ll always be a disaster of a bit of