River Deep (32 page)

Becca’s tears had stopped and she wound both her hands around the warm mug in front of her and held it close to her chest.

‘I think maybe over the years she’s been so busy trying to give you security and a home, trying to make sure you and Sam had everything you needed, that she’s forgotten, sometimes, just to be there for you,’ Maggie bit her lip. ‘And sometimes, Becca … Well, sometimes you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t really want her there.’

Becca took a noisy sip of her chocolate and gazed out of the rain-sheeted window.

‘I’ve only got sandals on,’ she said eventually.

‘I know,’ Maggie smiled cautiously. ‘Me too. Flip-flops, actually. I’m going to get soaked.’

Becca shrugged and looked at her.

‘She was wrong, though, wasn’t she?’ She seemed to be testing Maggie. ‘She was wrong not to write to Dad and tell him about me. Not to let us have a chance to know each other. That was wrong, really wrong, wasn’t it? Now he might have moved, or anything, and I might never find him. He might think that it’s because I don’t want to know him and that …’

Maggie intervened before Becca could work herself up again.

‘Yes, Becca. Yes. She was wrong. She was even wrong for the wrong reasons.’ Maggie paused, searching for a way to explain things clearly. ‘It’s like you said earlier about grown-ups thinking that kids don’t really feel things. Well, I think sometimes you forget that your mum really feels things. Sometimes you think she should just be this sort of big cosy cushion for you to come to and hug when you want her. In some ways maybe she should be. But she’s also a real person and she makes real mistakes. She made the wrong choice over that letter, it’s true, but it’s one wrong choice out of hundreds and thousands of right ones, all of them made for you and Sam. Whatever she did, Becca, whatever the reasons, she loves you so much,
so much
. And I think that if someone loves you that much, you owe it them to give them as many chances they need to get it right, don’t you?’

Becca said nothing as she drained her cup, leaving traces of chocolate around her mouth. For a moment she looked like that little rose-bud baby girl again.

‘I don’t really want to leave home,’ she said finally.

‘I know,’ Maggie said. ‘Why don’t we finish these and see if we can borrow an umbrella. We can go back and talk ––’

‘I’m not going back there unless you promise to stick up for me!’ Becca said. ‘I want to see my dad. I want her to promise to call him for me and arrange things. And if he’s not there any more, I want her to look for him and not stop looking until she finds him.’

Maggie nodded. She knew it would be difficult for Sarah to do all of these things, but she also knew that Sarah would do all of them. That Becca deserved no less.

‘OK, Becca, I’m sure your mum will agree to that. But you do understand, don’t you, that your dad has another life now. He won’t just come over here for ever. He’s married to someone else. There won’t be any fairy-tale endings for him and your mum. You might not even like him,’ Maggie said, stopping short of saying “he might not even like you”. It was harsh, she knew, but it was a possibility, and she wanted to be the one to say it to Becca. She wanted to spare Sarah that at least.

‘I know that,’ Becca replied tentatively. ‘But I can’t go through life not knowing, can I? I can’t just go on wondering what it might have been like.’

Maggie sat on the floor of Sam’s room whilst he performed
South Pacific
for her with his toys. Right now his Action Man was getting it on with one of Becca’s discarded and headless Barbies as he crooned ‘Some enchanted evening’ over the top of the makeshift scenery.

Becca and Sarah had been in the living room for over an hour now. There had been shouting, at which point Sam had stopped mid-song and turned to look at the door. Then there had been a loud thump, followed by a crash and then silence. Maggie had quickly got things going again by starting to sing ‘Happy talk’, which annoyed Sam intensely as she got the words wrong and it wasn’t even in the right place. Finally, as she’d listened over the top of Sam’s singing, there had been silence from the rest of the flat. She clapped as Action Man, headless Barbie and a couple of teddies took a bow.

‘Shall we go and see how Mummy and Becca are now?’ she asked Sam, supposing it was probably safe.

‘But I was going to do you
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
next!’ he cried, holding up his model of Dougie the Digger. Maggie stared at it and felt inexplicably sad. She pulled herself together with a smile.

‘I know, darling, maybe later, OK?’ He nodded, and with her hands on his shoulders Maggie guided him into the living room. The worst case scenario, she supposed, was that they could have knocked each other out. She didn’t think either one of them would go for out-and-out murder.

She pushed open the door. Sarah was on the phone, holding a tatty-looking piece of paper in her hand. Becca was standing beside her, staring at her intensely.

‘Oh, hello?’ Sarah said. Her voice was shaking. ‘Is that you, Aidan? Hi! It’s, um, Sarah, Sarah Mortimer, here. Hi! Yes, it is a bit out of the blue, isn’t it?’ She looked at Becca and nodded. ‘Um, Aidan, I’m sorry to call you so early, but have you got a minute to talk? It really
is
important.’

Maggie guided Sam back out into the hallway.

‘So, big fella, what were you saying about
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
then?’

‘Hooray!’ Sam shouted as Maggie followed him back into his room and shut the door behind them.

Pete had spent his Sunday writing and deleting at least twenty half-baked versions of the things he wanted to say to Stella. He’d get so far each time, work his way through a lengthy preamble to prepare her for what he had to say, and then he’d stall.
The thing is, Stella
, he’d begin, and then he’d stare at the liquid blue-white of the screen and sit back on his rickety chair borrowed from the kitchen and he’d wonder what exactly was the thing?

It wasn’t that he didn’t love her any more. He was fairly certain that he did still love her, he thought, after the third attempt, at which point he went for a walk and kept walking, even though a sudden shower of hot rain soaked him through to the skin. Sheltering under a tree for a moment he closed his eyes and thought of her, testing his response to her image. He saw her standing in front of him, that special half smile of hers the tiniest implication that she might, just might, be his after all. A promise which had been enough to keep him in love with her for over five years. But it was more than that wasn’t it? It had to be.

Pete opened his eyes and felt the sting of a heavy droplet of water, which temporarily blinded him. Shaking himself like a dog, he stepped out into the rainstorm and kept walking – he was saturated anyway; it was pointless to try and resist it. The real reason he’d loved her for so long, the reason his friends and family couldn’t see, was that Stella had something else buried deep in the middle of her, under layers and layers of artifice and theatre. Deep inside all the magic and light, Pete had found a very ordinary person, just a girl who had first-hand experience of the hard edges of the world. A girl who was petrified of making the wrong choices.

After all, her mum had got married at sixteen, when she was three months pregnant with Stella. Her father, barely eighteen himself, had left them within three days of her birth. Left because of her, Stella always said, as if her presence alone had wrecked what otherwise would have been a perfect romance. Stella and her mother had never seen him again, and she remembered a childhood of endless shifting from hostels to council B&Bs and finally a flat on the thirty-second floor of a high-rise on the outskirts of Leeds. Stella had told him that she used to pretend she was Rapunzel letting down her long hair, waiting for a prince to carry her away. Stella explained to him that her mum had made all the wrong choices too quickly without ever stopping to think what might happen, as if life was just something you could leave up to fate, and that both their lives had been blighted because of it. She told him she was terrified of doing the same, terrified of ruining everything because of the wrong choice. She had to make absolutely sure she was making the best possible choice for herself, giving herself the best possible chance in the future.

Once he’d known this, Pete thought she’d given him the key, the vital clue to, understanding her and keeping her. Pete had asked her often if the fact that he loved her and would stand by her and be with her whatever happened wasn’t enough. Stella would look at him sadly and tell him that no, it wasn’t enough. She needed more. God knows he’d stayed long enough in that well paid, dead-end job trying to make enough to make her feel as if she had enough. It seemed he’d never manage it, though. There was always the chance that someone, sooner or later, might be able to give her more.

Pete felt the rain trickle down the back of his T-shirt, which clung ever closer to his skin. He could understand, he supposed, her need to surround herself with material proof of her happiness. He’d grown up in a literally solid family in the posh bit of Oldham, an ex-
Coronation Street
actress had lived at the bottom of his road. He’d never thought of his family as rich, but he knew they were nothing like poor. He’d never really worried about cash, never really had to. Maybe if he had, he reasoned as he turned on to the high street, he’d feel the same as Stella did. She kept a dog-eared copy of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
which she’d stolen from a library as a teenager that she took with her everywhere, and although Pete had never found time to read the book, he’d watched the film one Stella-less Sunday afternoon on TMC. He imagined that Stella thought she was Holly Golightly, using her charms to find herself the security she craved. But in the end, George Peppard had prevailed and Holly had realised that love, even dirt poor love,
could
be enough to make life worth living. That was two years ago, and Pete had been certain that in the end Stella would one day stop in her tracks in the same kind of pouring rain he was standing in now and come to the same conclusion. She’d realise that Pete loving her would be enough. But that day hadn’t come yet, and Pete realised, as he mounted the steps to his front door, that it might never come.

He opened the door and listened to the house, the sound of him dripping on to the tiles magnified by the quiet. There was no noise coming from Angie’s ground-floor bedroom and nothing else resonating on the two floors above him.

‘Hello!’ He called out to be certain, uncertain why he wanted to be so absolutely alone. He supposed he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be interrupted. Just to talk to anyone right now, he knew, would break his train of thought. He couldn’t risk the thin, frail, brightly shining thread that was leading him through his maze of emotions. The house was silent in reply and Pete breathed a sigh of relief. He mounted the stairs, and once he had shut the door of his bedroom he peeled his wet clothes off layer by saturated layer. A warm wind billowed through the net curtains that hung at the open window, raising goosebumps on his skin.

And then there was Maggie. That was the other part of the equation. He didn’t know what to think about her, what to say. He couldn’t say he’d fallen in love with her, not after two weeks’ acquaintance, he knew that much. He could say that she moved him, inspired in him the need to be close to her somehow. He liked her very much, she made him laugh. And he wanted her, he let himself confess. He felt a jolting, jangling attraction to her that he hadn’t experienced since the first time he’d seen Stella, and maybe even then it hadn’t been as intense. He thought of her dark flashing eyes and the pale curve of her long neck. He found himself imagining his lips on her breasts, his hands moving as lightly over her skin as the damp breeze was moving over his. Pete stopped himself from thinking and pulled out whatever clothes lay piled under his bed before the thought of Maggie eclipsed what he was trying to do entirely.

Was it just lust, then, with Maggie? If he could have her, in some alternate universe where she would even consider the idea, then would he still love Stella afterwards? Or would he be sacrificing that love just to know what it felt like to be with Maggie?

Pete sat on the edge of his bed. He knew that if he made love to Maggie it would mean that he didn’t love Stella any more. He hadn’t ever believed in the ‘it didn’t mean anything’ excuse, for himself, anyway because he knew that it did mean something. It meant everything.

Before Stella he’d had his fair share of one-night stands, of promising to call and leaving half-stranger’s beds at dawn with half-baked excuses. At the time he thought he’d wanted all of that, the thrill and rush of pleasure with no consequences. But then came Stella, and the first time Pete lay down with her he knew that it meant something to take another person to bed. It meant everything. If Maggie wasn’t so firmly out of bounds, if last night she had reached for him and kissed him back and taken him in her arms, Pete knew that he wouldn’t have held back, he wouldn’t have stopped her and said ‘No, what about Stella?’ He knew that all thoughts of Stella would have been flooded out of his head by the touch and sensation of Maggie.

That was the thing, he concluded as he turned back to his PC at last. It wasn’t that he didn’t still love Stella. It was that Maggie had shown him a future where loving Stella wasn’t inevitable any more. When he looked at Maggie he saw a bright horizon, a future where everything he’d thought was laid out wasn’t inevitable.

After the twentieth attempt, Pete gave up trying to express what he was feeling in words. Instead he simply wrote.
Stella, something’s changed. I’ve met someone. I don’t know how to feel any more. I need to talk to you. I need to hear your voice. And then I’ll know. Please call me, you can reverse the charges
.

He typed in his phone number at the flat and pressed send. Only after the email had gone, fizzing and buzzing its way into the ether, did Pete realise what he’d done. He’d given her an ultimatum.