River Deep (35 page)

‘OK, I’ll help you,’ Falcon said as if Pete had just made his speech to the table.

‘Falc, mate!’ Pete was exasperated. ‘You have to live here with Angie, and I have to live with both of you. I like you. I don’t want to move out. Look, you’ve known each other for years. Don’t just bin all of that because you’re not man enough to talk to her. Girls need words. They don’t seem to understand anything else!’ Pete said seriously.

Falcon stood up and took a swig directly out of the bottle.

‘All right, I’m going in,’ he said with the face of a condemned man. ‘I may be some time.’

Pete watched him go and then picked up what was left of the wine. Somehow it didn’t seem so appealing any more, so he tipped it down the sink.

He didn’t expect the knock at the door and it made him jump. He turned to face the kitchen door and leaned his back against the sink, finding himself suddenly uncertain what to do. It must be Maggie.

They’d said something about getting together after the interview, but he’d thought, after everything that had happened, that it had just been talk, a polite way of saying goodbye. But she’d actually come, and now he’d have to see her and he didn’t know how that would make him feel or how, if faced with her in the same room, he could wait to speak to Stella without doing something stupid, without wanting to reach out and touch her again.

But Pete knew with sudden certainty that he did want to see Maggie again – he wanted to see her right now and find out what would happen to his heart when he did.

Galvanised into action, he headed for the door as the knock was repeated more loudly and insistently this time – somehow unlike Maggie, he thought. Before he could reach the door, though, Angie emerged, rubbing her eyes, from her bedroom and opened it first, obscuring his view.

‘Sorry, Angie,’ he said as she stepped aside. ‘Maggie I––’ Pete stopped, quite literally. His speech stopped, his mind stopped and for a moment his heart stopped. When everything started again the world was an entirely different place.

‘Stella,’ he said, looking into the silver-gilded eyes of his fiancée. ‘You’re back.’

‘Pete!’ Stella squealed, and wrapped her arms around him, spinning him in her embrace. ‘Oh my God I’ve missed you!’ She kissed his face, his lips, his cheeks, his closed eyes in a frenzy of joy until finally she leaned back a little, her arms secured around his neck like an anchor.

‘I got your email and I thought, if Pete says he needs to
talk
to me, then he means that he needs to
see
me. He needs to know how much I love him!’ She lowered her lashes for a moment. ‘Oh Pete, all I did in Melbourne was miss you and realise how wrong I was to leave you at all, let alone for a whole year! How could I ever think I would survive that long without you? Well, I’m back now, for good, I promise you.’

Pete gazed down at her. Despite arriving in Australia during their winter, her face was bronzed and glowing, throwing her extraordinary eyes into brilliant relief. Her hair had been bleached even lighter and it looped over her shoulders in loose curls. He felt her small hard body in his and the weight of her arms around his neck. All of these things he felt and saw, and he waited for everything else to catch up with the moment. He waited to love her again. Because she was back now, and he’d made her a promise that he’d be here for her when she came back, no matter what. And that he’d never let her down the way she feared he might. She was back, and he belonged to her, so he had to love her again just as he had for the past five years. He had to. But somehow, the moment she had walked back into his life, the last of his love for her had left.

‘Kiss me,’ Stella said, tipping her chin back and closing her eyes, and Pete did kiss her. He felt the crush of her breasts as her body arched into his and his own response to that sensation harden and grow. But that was all, only that physical, mechanical insistence. It was the shock, he told himself, it was the surprise of having everything he’d ever wanted all in one day. He needed time to readjust to having her here in this new place, in his new life that had just begun without hope of her. It was just because he wasn’t prepared to see her here – not here, not now.

Pete realised that both Angie and Falcon were standing in the door frame of Angie’s bedroom looking on with undisguised curiosity. He stepped away from her.

‘Oh, er, Stella, this is Falcon and Angie – my housemates.’ He looked back at Stella as if to make sure that she was still really there. ‘And this,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else, ‘is Stella, my fiancée.’

There were greetings and kisses, and Stella performed her usual trick of making both Falcon and Angie love her instantly. After a while Pete realised they couldn’t go on standing in the hall for ever, so he picked up Stella’s backpack.

‘You must be shattered,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you my room.’

Stella giggled. ‘I thought you’d never ask!’ she said, winking at Angie, her hand resting lightly on his arse as she followed him up the stairs.

Pete led her into his room and, unable to quite look at her, leaned her backpack against the wardrobe.

‘I never expected you to actually come here!’ he said, half laughing, at a loss for anything else to say.

Stella’s hands snaked around his waist and she turned him to face her, resting her head against his chest.

‘Well, you know I never like to do what people expect.’ She looked up at him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. I meant to, I really did, but I just got swept away by everything. It was all so new and for a while … well, for a while there was someone, hardly anything, really, but just someone who distracted me … I think I was testing myself to see what happened. And then, well, I was up in the middle of the night because I suddenly realised how much I missed you and needed you, and I was just about to finally write to you when there it was, your email. Saying you weren’t sure how to feel? Saying that there might be someone else?’

Stella’s voice took on a reproachful edge. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I had been so stupid as to nearly lose you –
you
, Pete. The only one that has ever mattered. And I knew I had to come back. I knew a phone call wouldn’t do, I had to come back and be with you, Pete. To tell you face to face that I want to be with you always, always and always from now on. So I took my ticket to the airport and got it transferred on to the first flight back and I came straight here. You don’t have to worry about how to feel any more, because I’m here to make sure you’ll always know. I know we’ll have to talk about it later and make things right again, but right now you don’t have to do anything but be pleased to see me. You don’t have to do anything now but make love to me.’

Stella took a step back from him and pulled her T-shirt over her head. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Pete felt his jaw tighten and muscles tense. It would be now, he told himself – any moment now, while he was in her arms, his skin against hers, he would start to feel for her again and everything would become clear and right again. He pulled her on to the bed and, as he started kissing her, he closed his eyes.

Maggie knocked on Pete’s front door again and waited, bouncing impatiently on her toes. What with one thing and another she hadn’t been able to make it round until after nine, but she knew that someone was in. The front room lights were on and the first-floor bedroom, Pete’s room, was also lit, but so far there had been no reply. At last she saw movement behind the frosted glass of the door and smiled as Falcon opened it.

‘Oh!’ He looked surprised and then glanced up at the ceiling. ‘All right? How’s Sarah?’

Maggie blinked at him. ‘Fine. Um, is Pete in? I wanted to find out how he got on with his interview?’

Falcon nodded and shifted from one foot to the other and looked at the steel toe-caps of his boots.

‘Oh, he got it, he got the job,’ he said, looking up at her as if she should go away now. Maggie felt pleased and disappointed all at once. She’d wanted Pete to tell her so she could have an excuse to throw her arms round his neck and hug him, purely out of courtesy, of course.

‘Oh great,’ she said, starting to sound slightly irritable at Falcon’s self-assumed guardianship of the entrance. ‘Well? Can I see him then? He
is
in, isn’t he?’

Falcon looked at her blankly, completely at a loss for what to say.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Angie said, appearing at his side, a small, tight smile on her lips. ‘Not right now. You see, Stella came back an hour or two ago and they’re still upstairs … reuniting. I don’t think Pete would thank us if we interrupted him.’

Maggie felt her chest tighten around her ribcage, forcing out a rush of air that resulted in an involuntary ‘Oh!’ She stood on the doorstep not sure exactly how she was going to leave it in one piece. She settled on neutral cheerfulness. ‘Oh. Well, that’s great! Really great for Pete. Right, well, tell him … oh, don’t worry, just tell him well done, and – OK! Thanks, then, goodbye.’

Maggie turned on her heels and stumbled down the steps back on to the street.

‘You could have been a bit more tactful,’ Falcon said to Angie as he closed the door. ‘I think she had a bit of a thing for Pete.’

Angie shrugged, pausing in the door frame of her room.

‘Yeah, well, it’s better to have the truth, even if it is brutal, isn’t it?’ She slammed the door shut and Falcon guessed that their little chat was over. Surprisingly, he realised he actually felt better for getting it all out in the open. Pete had been right about birds and talking. Angie was inexplicably furious with him, and hurt, but at least when she’d started looking psychotic and vengeful she’d stopped looking needy and hopeful. He thought it would probably work out for the best for her in the long run, and he was glad of that because he did like her, he really did. Just not enough to do what would make her happy.

Maggie walked fast and steadily back up the Hatfield Road towards the high street. The last vestiges of the day were sinking behind the silhouetted skyline, drawing down with them the remains of the dull silvered light. And Maggie was glad of the darkness. It covered the confusion that had engulfed her the moment she’d realised what had happened to her when she wasn’t looking.

‘It’s OK,’ she told herself. ‘It’s OK. Stella’s back now and that’s OK. I don’t have to think about it any more because it’s all decided, it’s all fine. I just have to get on with things and …’

Maggie stopped as she turned into the high street and looked down the length of it as it lit itself up for the evening, fairy lights strung out along the trees, twinkling and sparkling, shop signs luminescing and humming, car headlights blinking, converging and separating in a steady rhythmic stream. She felt the turn of the season in the slight chill of the evening and smelt it in the heavy scent of the exhaust. Everyone, everything else was moving on now, and would keep on going without her if she didn’t force herself to go on too, regardless of what had happened.

‘That’s it,’ she told herself as she started walking again. ‘If Pete is back with Stella, then that’s it, it’s settled. Nothing else matters any more except getting on with things and getting The Fleur on its feet and getting on with my life. So that’s it.’

There was no point in pretending any more. It was just a shame that she’d had to go and fall for him.

Maggie sat on her time-capsule bed and looked around her in bewilderment.

Up until this moment it had been fine for her to pretend that the reason she was sad about having possibly compromised her friendship with Pete was because she liked him. Up until now they had just been two people getting to know each other, under unusual circumstances maybe, and possibly a little too quickly when it came to the whole kiss debacle; but they had just been two people for whom, given some time and a bit of peace and quiet something really special might have happened. Or at least Maggie thought that it might have, secretly, quietly to herself. Stella’s meteoric crash-landing had thrown all of that up into nothing more than a cloud of meaningless dust and detritus. There was no possibility of anything any more with Pete, and therefore, Maggie supposed, no point in pretending, to herself at least. She had to face up to the facts.

She wasn’t exactly sure when she had fallen for him – it hadn’t been clear cut. She hadn’t suddenly thought, ‘Oh, I really like Pete, and guess what, I don’t mind at all about Christian any more’. It had been sort of gradual and stealthy, until yesterday morning on Sarah’s sofa when she’d realised she really,
really
didn’t mind about Christian and Louise. She’d put that down to simple, and probably temporary, resignation, something she had felt before and which would no doubt give way to frenzied angst once again. But now Stella was back, Maggie somehow doubted that. Strangely, she felt that she still loved Christian but in an entirely different way – in a sort of past tense.

Maggie couldn’t help smiling as she looked at her knees. All that insanity over Christian, all her plans and counterplans had been rendered pointless in one single sweep, and not by her getting together with Pete but by her realising that she was never going to get together with Pete. It made an illogical kind of sense.

She should have listened to Sarah, of course. Deep down she’d known that all along. She should have waited – just as Sarah had said – for the shock and grief to subside before she went wading into the breach after Christian and everything that he represented. Now, in the cool, still, calm of the eye of her personal storm, Maggie could see it wasn’t him that she’d been desperate to cling on to, it had been the shape and order of her life that she’d been terrified of losing. She had always been terrified of change, and life without Christian had seemed like a change too great to bear.

He had been right all along, too. When he’d told her he was leaving her it was because he’d seen that there was nothing magical between them any more. They had a deep, occasionally passionate affection for each other, but it was passion kindled by memories of what had once been. Because they had stopped dead maybe a year, maybe two years before the morning Christian told her he was leaving, and the relationship had been quietly decaying for all that time. Maggie couldn’t put it down to an incident or any particular event; there was just an implicit sensation of things falling apart. They had stopped being lovers and started being friends who sometimes had sex, and who often weren’t friends. Given time, she would have come to realise it herself, but the sharp slap of realisation that she could feel something so strong for someone who was not Christian had accelerated the process.