River Deep (21 page)

Maggie nodded her assent, and Sarah examined her closely.

‘Well, if he said that then yeah, it sounds like he does want you back,’ she conceded. ‘But Mags, are you sure you want
him
back?’

Maggie looked up at her crazy friend. ‘Are you kidding? Of
course
I want him back, I love him!’ A momentary hush fell over the salon, and Jackie, Luce, Mrs Ellis and Karen, the part-time manicurist all looked in their direction. ‘I love him,’ Maggie repeated, lowering her voice. ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for, working for.’

Sarah leaned a little lower over Maggie’s shoulder.

‘But Mags are you sure? I mean, you’re on the brink of getting your own business off the ground, and it’s more or less been handed to you on a plate.’ Sarah thought of her long and debt-ridden struggle to get The Sharp End open and the seemingly endless battle to keep it open. ‘What if he wants you to go back and run Fresh Talent for him? He must realise how good you were at your job?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘No, I’ve already thought about that. I think it was the working together thing that hurt us in the first place. He needs to see me as a separate entity. An independent person who can succeed without him. I was talking it over with Pete ––’

‘Pete? The engaged man from the other night?’ Sarah interrupted her, wondering how he’d cropped up again.

Maggie nodded impatiently.

‘Yes, I met him buying a blouse in M&S and we went for a drink. He’s a nice bloke, that woman doesn’t deserve him, but
anyway
we worked out that I was too clingy and needy before, which was funny, because Pete said he wished Stella would show that she needed him sometimes. So anyhow, this time I have to show him I can make it on my own if I want to hold on to him for ever and make sure he never leaves my side again.’

Sarah’s brows furrowed deeply.

‘I know I was in labour for the English A level exam, but isn’t that a, you know, an oxy-thingy, that thing that means the opposite of what you’re saying?’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Isn’t that total bollocks? Don’t forget you’re talking about a man who seduced his new girlfriend right under your nose. How
could
you trust him again, let alone want to?’

Maggie thought for a moment.

‘Because, well, the first time around, trusting him was the biggest mistake I made. I let myself grow complacent. I made the assumption he’d never look elsewhere. This time, though, I’ll be on my toes. I’ll know how to keep him interested.’

Sarah shook her head again and threw in some eye rolling for good measure.

‘Mate, you sound like you’re signing up for a lifetime of hard labour! What with being a hard-headed glamorous business-woman, not to mention having to monitor your boyfriend’s interest in your relationship full-time, you’ll be a burnt-out wreck inside a year. That doesn’t sound like blissed-out love to me.’

Sarah put her hands on Maggie’s shoulders.

‘I know I don’t know much about long-term relationships, but I do know they should be all about being able to trust someone. Being sure and certain of how they feel for you. Not walking a constant high wire of emotional terror. Sarah grinned. ‘I should sack hairdressing and take up hosting daytime chat shows – I’m good at this.’

Ignoring her, Maggie stretched out her fingers and examined her bare nails.

‘Could Karen do me a French manicure, do you think?’ she asked, suddenly picturing her fingers raking down Christian’s back. She blinked the thought away and suppressed a lustful smile.

Sarah, glancing over at Karen, nodded. ‘I expect so,’ she said. She was worried about Karen. She liked the girl, and she thought the three days a week she came in for were good for the salon – for starters it meant she could call it a salon and not just a hairdressers – but her books where hardly weighed down with clients, and Sarah wasn’t sure if she could really afford her.

‘Let me just see him, Sarah.’ Maggie broke her train of thought. ‘Maybe after tonight it will be like you said. Maybe when I’ve seen him I won’t want to see him any more.’ Maggie thought of touching Christian’s skin again, and her heart took a double loop around her ribcage. ‘But relationships take work, and I’m prepared to work at this one. It’s hard to just wipe away six years of my life in one clean sweep. All that time together wasted, and for what? Because I couldn’t be fussed to try a bit harder? I love him, Sarah, and that’s all there is to it. And he loves me, I know he does.’

Maggie looked at her own reflection, a picture of absolute certainty.

‘I’ll never love anyone else.’

Sarah had been exchanging ‘God, I knows!’ with Leanne’s mum when Luce had finished her hair, and wanting to avoid any more ‘advice,’ Maggie had slipped out of the shop, leaving her cash on the counter. Sarah always insisted that her friend never pay, and Maggie always did; after all, the first rule of small business was never give freebies to friends and family. If only her parents had abided by that one.

She had two hours to kill – two hours of trying not to get all hot and sweaty, not to mess up her hair or rub her eyes. She walked towards the abbey slowly, carefully, across the small city taking its narrow back streets and high-terraced pavements, hoping to avoid meeting anyone she knew. Although St Albans Abbey had earned the town its city status, it was a remarkably insular place, and Maggie knew far more people than most. But if she talked to anyone now she risked wearing off her lipstick. And she wanted some time to prepare – to think and be quiet.

As she trailed down the gently sloping, curved streets of the old town, she looked in through the small-paned windows of the cottages that crowded the pavement. Two hundred, maybe three hundred years old some of them, especially here, clustered around the abbey. Maggie caught glimpses of dark polished tables, a bowl of fatly overblown roses scattering their petals on a windowsill cluttered with antiques. She heard people’s dogs barking and children shouting down stairs.

It was all these small, ancient slices of English life that she had longed for as a little girl, that she had dreamt of. Her life back here hadn’t been exactly what she had imagined it would be, but it had been better than it was, at least. Her mum hadn’t had her hair bobbed and joined the WI, but at least Maggie knew where she was most of the time. Nor had her dad bought two suits and gone to work every morning on the train, but at least he had created some order and routine in their lives, even if it did always revolve around last orders and no one ever sent her or her brother to bed.

Her childhood had still been fairly chaotic: Jim and her packed off to school with unironed shirts and a pound note each instead of a lunch box. When they got in, it’d be either her mum or Sheila waiting for them in the kitchen with two sandwiches on a plate and a can of fizzy pop bursting with E numbers. Gradually she’d found herself hoping it would be Sheila, with her tales of a wartime childhood and her no-nonsense take on life. Her mum would ask them about their day, but while Jim chattered on about painting or PE, somehow, for some reason, Maggie would clam up into a tightly balled little fist of silent fury. Her mother made her furious. She never really knew why, except that she just wished her mum was less of a person, all kooky and original, and more of just, well a mum.

When Christian had first kissed her on her third week of working for him, part of her, the only part that wasn’t singing with joy, thought, ‘Well, about bloody time. Finally I’ve got someone in my life who can take me out of this disjointed craziness, who can make me normal, who can make me happy.’

During her three years at university, before Christian, she had found the space to create a little order for herself and to shape the person she wanted to be out of still raw material. She’d discovered that she loved organising, arranging and creating success out of nothing. She was a meticulous planner and seemed to be able to generate ideas amongst her fellow students; she felt in control and fulfilled. But after she’d graduated she’d had no choice but to return to The Fleur, for a while at least. And she’d found she resented its freestyle oppression even more. Her relationship with her mother had disintegrated into Marion’s passing flurries of attention and Maggie’s steadfast rebuttals. She got her own studio flat as soon as she could, and worked her way through a variety of jobs, none of them offering the challenge and opportunities she wanted.

Then Christian gave her a position and her whole world opened up into a beautiful vista full of possibilities. She’d moved into his flat at his first invitation, eagerly, almost greedily. She thought that after a year or two they might find a cottage with wisteria climbing over its windows. There might be children. She might give up Fresh Talent then and stay home with them. She might bake. Six years later she had still been waiting; they had still been talking about it as some distant future they would one day amble into together, and Maggie had always been certain that it would come one day. Now she had the pub, the cottage and the children and the wisteria were further away from her than ever, but she could still have the promise of a future, she could still have her heart intact if she only had Christian. He was really all that she needed – all her other dreams could just melt away.

Maggie glanced at her watch: she still had half an hour to wait. She wondered what Christian was doing right now, if he was shaving or picking out a shirt. If he was making excuses to Louise or practising what he was going to say to Maggie. She walked into the abbey grounds, and although it was getting on for eight the light was still bright and the heat still strong enough to penetrate the cloth of her dress and prickle her skin as she walked up the abbey steps. The cool dark interior of the immense building was very welcome. Inside the choir was singing and there was a service going on. A small collection of people had congregated and were singing, almost silently, in unison with the choir.

Maggie walked quietly along the right-hand aisle and past the main service to the Lady chapel at the back of the abbey. One other woman sat on the last row of wooden chairs, her head bent, her closed fingers pressed to her forehead, her lips moving silently. Maggie sat gingerly on the end of a row and looked up at the high, vaulted ceiling, and let the coloured light dazzle her.

She had been confirmed here, in the mid-eighties, in a boxy white suit with black plastic buttons from Etam. She had told her mum she wanted to be confirmed like Sarah, and her mum had told her it was up to her how she wanted to connect with her inner spirit, but that she’d probably need to get christened first, because she was fairly sure it was a prerequisite. Maggie had been mortified and ashamed. It had never occurred to her that she hadn’t been christened. Everyone was christened, surely? Sarah’s mum even had a picture of Sarah’s christening framed on the wall in her hallway.

Sarah and at least three others in her class were starting the confirmation classes that term, and Maggie really wanted to be the same as them. Sarah, who couldn’t stand the thought of it, had earnestly begged Maggie to wag it with her in the park instead, but as Maggie had pointed out, her mum was bound to find out if they did. And if she found out, Sarah would be dead. Besides, Maggie had wanted to be confirmed. She wasn’t sure it was because she believed in God; in actual fact the idea had terrified her. But she liked the idea of being confirmed in its most literal sense. She wanted someone important and good resting his hands on her head and telling everyone, even God, if he existed, that she was
really
there. That she was
real
and that she
mattered
. In the end she’d arranged her christening herself, and it took place quietly at the end of the regular Sunday service, with just her parents. Sheila and Sarah there to watch her.

When finally the day of the confirmation had arrived, in those few brief moments kneeling alongside Sarah Maggie had felt special, had felt at home and at peace. Twenty years later, and still the abbey was somewhere she could go, somewhere she felt at home. She closed her eyes and dropped her head a little and listened to the sounds of the choir echo in the vaulted ceiling. She closed her eyes and waited.

Christian was late. But it didn’t matter.

‘Maggie.’

His voice rich beside her made her jump out of her reverie. Ten minutes before, she had re-emerged on to the abbey steps and had become gradually lost in her thoughts and her day-dreams. Now he was here in the flesh and for real, Maggie found she could not look him in the eye. ‘God, you look fantastic!’ he told her, and she dipped her head instinctively as he bent to kiss her cheek, forcing his mouth to graze her hair. As if sensing her discomfort, he took both her hands in his and turned her to face him.

‘Look at me, Mags,’ he commanded softly.

Gradually Maggie allowed herself to look into his face once more, her breath catching and her heart pounding.

‘Oh, Maggie,’ Christian breathed, his eyes roaming the length of her body before returning to meet her eyes. ‘It’s
so
good to see you. I’ve missed you, you know. So much.’

Maggie smiled. ‘Me too,’ she managed to say.

Christian’s smile broke into a grin and, dropping one of her hands, he began to lead her briskly through the back of the abbey grounds and out into the centre of the town.

‘Come on, I’ve booked us into Luigi’s. I called him earlier, he’s going to cook for us off menu. He’s got in new season asparagus and some French truffles – it’s going to be fantastic.’

Maggie followed him, her hand securely slotted into his familiar grip. For a moment the world around swam with dizzying lights and she felt as if Christian were leading her into thin air. She took a deep breath and followed him anyway. After all, this was what she wanted more than anything – whatever it took.

Maggie’s head swam with Pinot Grigio, and as another mouthful of dark chocolate torte melted in her mouth, she felt that all the anguish of her separation from Christian had been worth it for this perfect moment of bliss. He was so attentive, so sweet, so kind. He made her feel like she was completely precious to him, priceless. His hand covered hers and she smiled back at him.