River Deep (36 page)

Any chance of friendship she might have had with Christian, Maggie realised sadly, had probably been squandered along with everything else she had trampled over in her confusion. Besides, she couldn’t quite see herself inviting Christian and Louise to dinner and revealing her double identity as she invited them in.

Maggie smiled to herself again as she pictured the scene. She was glad, at least, that she had been so incompetent at being devious that she hadn’t managed to meddle her way back into a relationship with Christian. That would have been too terrible – to have woken up next to him one morning feeling the way she felt now. Thankfully, given his and Louise’s silence, it was certain that Christian had made the right choice, and Maggie half wished she could call him and congratulate him and tell him what a terrible idiot she had been. Louise was a bit intense and sort of unpredictable, but she was basically a nice girl, and maybe the right kind of girl for Christian.

‘So I don’t want Christian,’ she said softly to herself, ‘and I can’t have Pete.’

She felt amazingly calm, she realised. Almost kind of liberated. It was as if wanting someone she absolutely could not have had freed her from all the pain of anxiety and hope. She was free now just to carry around the small warm glow of her feelings without feeling obliged to risk the consequences of acting on them or worrying about them coming to some cataclysmic end. Knowing how she felt about Pete would light her up from within just enough to help her get through the next few weeks until she had left Christian behind for ever and found her future on her own. After that she’d just have to wait for the feelings to fade. A small nagging voice, Sarah’s voice, was telling her that if she had any kind of sense she’d put up some kind of a fight and make a bid to win Pete from Stella, but Maggie was tired of fighting beautiful women for men who were looking the other way, and she was tired of hurting. She just wanted some peace and quiet in her life, and simply knowing that there was someone in the world who could make her feel so much gave her a peculiar kind of joy.

She just hoped that Stella would come through for Pete and make him happy at last.

‘Anyway,’ Maggie told Morten Harket, ‘I’ve still got a lot. I’ve got The Fleur, Sheila. Sarah and the kids. They’re going to need me more than ever right now.’

Maggie thought about her conversation with Jim that morning.

‘And I’ve got a family who love me and are there for me. If I let them.’

She stood and went over to inspect her A-Ha poster. It was faded with age and torn at the edges, and the Blu-tack that attached it to the wall was hardened and shiny. It hardly seemed like any time at all since Maggie had carefully extracted this poster from the centrefold of
Smash Hits
magazine and pressed it carefully against her bedroom wall, smoothing down the corners with loving strokes. Between that moment and this, Maggie had been making the same outwardbound journey as far away from her family as she could get. After all her travelling, though, all her trials and tribulations, she’d ended up in the same place, looking at the same four walls, standing on the same dirty pink carpet. How was it possible then, she wondered, that she still felt so far away from them?

Maggie pushed her thumb under the knob of hardened Blutack and it pinged easily off the wall. She took the poster by the loosened corner and then pulled it down quickly, ripping the poster in half. ‘Sorry, Morten,’ she said, looking at half of the erstwhile star’s chiselled jaw as it lay on the floor. The second half of the poster followed, and then poster after poster, poster under poster, old bits of receipt and a telephone number a boy had once given her – the first ever, she thought. She screwed them all up into satisfying balls and threw them on to the growing pile of debris that had begun to cover the floor.

Hung over her bed was a noticeboard where she’d used to pin everything she thought would mean something to her for ever, like the crumbling red rose, her first ever valentine’s gift, given to her at the age of twelve by the softly rounded ginger-haired boy that sat at the back of the class. Maggie hadn’t known whether to be flattered to get anything at all, or mortified that the least popular boy in class thought he had a chance with her, so she had kept it and pretended it was from Jon Bon Jovi. There were three round-cornered photos of various school trips featuring laughing, pointing, two-finger-waving groups of kids whose names she could no longer remember and had mostly never associated with since the day she’d left school. A dried leaf crumbled to dust in her hand as she took it down, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember why that had meant so much to her.

As she peeled away the last of the meaningless mementos, Maggie felt like she was taking down her personal battlements stone by heavy stone. She was dismantling everything she had carefully constructed to separate her from her family and what she had always thought of as her constricting life in the pub, turning the time capsule that had once been her refuge, and which had seemed like her prison since she had returned to The Fleur, into a blank canvas. It wasn’t her parents who had imprisoned her here in this room with her expectations, Maggie realised; it had been her own desire to live in a small, neat, ordered space, knowing what each day would bring and then each day after that. Her parents had tried to give her the world, quite literally, and she hadn’t wanted it. Somehow she had carried her understandable childish need for comfort and familiarity into her adult life, until trying to keep it in place had nearly smothered her. It was time to let it go. What she had to do now, Maggie told herself, was broaden her horizons – reach out there into the unknown and just see what happened. OK, so she wasn’t exactly going to go to Tibet to discover herself; she wasn’t going to go anywhere soon. Far more courageous, she was going to make this place work, and her life without Christian work – without all her usual securities and insecurities holding her together like hard, shiny Blu-tack. Maggie was scared, sad. But exhilarated, too.

‘All I need to do,’ she said, her voice echoing off the bare walls, ‘is take that first step.’

When Maggie had rubbed every last scrap of Blu-tack off the wallpaper, she headed down into the kitchen to find some binbags. It was late, almost midnight, she realised as she looked at the wall clock. Sheila must have called time and cashed up without bothering to call her.

She walked into the quiet dark of the empty bar and stood there for a moment listening to the rhythmic hum of the fridges. She and Jim had bought most of a good kitchen yesterday and today she’d sat down with a builder and costed gutting and renovating this room, which had hardly changed since the day she’d walked in as a child. In just under a week this part of her life was to be ripped out and broken up for kindling or sold on for scrap. Maggie pressed her hand against a table top and leaned against it. She knew it had to be done, she knew that without these changes The Fleur would sink into the depths of the past without leaving a trace, but for the first time she felt a sense of regret and she understood how her parents and even Jim must feel – as if they were losing a close and trusted friend. Maggie thought of losing Christian’s support, and then, with a sharp pang, she thought of Pete. If anyone could understand what losing something important felt like, she thought, it was her.

As she walked upstairs to the flat, she paused by the living room door. Her dad was slumped in his armchair, his head lolled back, snoring in front of the TV. A now cold cup of tea was balanced precariously on his robust stomach, falling and rising with each breath. Maggie smiled to herself and, walking over to him, gently extracted it from his pliant fingers.

‘Wha … what?’ her dad mumbled as she disturbed him.

‘You’re asleep in the chair, Dad,’ Maggie said. ‘Go to bed or else you’ll get a frozen neck.’ Her dad mumbled something in reply, but by the time Maggie had reached the door he was snoring loudly again.

As she left, Maggie noticed that the light was on in the ‘spare’ room across the hall. Long and narrow, without a window, it had always been used for storage, but Maggie had thought it would make a good galley kitchen which, if sufficiently equipped, would mean that for home cooking they wouldn’t have to keep using the pub kitchen downstairs, which would be essential once they were serving quality food again. Pushing open the door, Maggie found her mum sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes, piles of papers and old photos. Marion looked up and smiled.

‘I just thought I’d make a start on clearing this lot out.’ She gestured at the piles around her. ‘This lot’s for the bin, this lot needs to get filed, and these …’ she patted a haphazard pile of photos … ‘need to go in an album. I’ve been meaning to do it for years and years, but now we’re retiring I’m sure I’ll get it done.’

‘It must be a day for clearing out,’ Maggie said, holding up the binbags she had retrieved from the kitchen. ‘I’ve just been doing the same thing in my room.’

Marion smiled up at her and held out a photo.

‘Look, that’s me and your dad, just before we found out I was pregnant with you.’

Marion took the photo and stared at it. Her parents were standing in a field somewhere, apparently by a tepee, with their arms wrapped around each other, and next to them, with his arm flung over them both, was a dark young man in an orange embroidered shirt. He had long, thick, black hair that fell past his shoulders and long, fuzzy sideburns that were almost a beard. He looked very familiar, somehow, and Maggie felt the beginnings of an old uneasiness stir in her stomach.

‘Mum, is that Mr Shah?’ Maggie asked, squinting at the photo.

‘Oh yes! That’s him. Isn’t it funny how he’s changed? He was so handsome then. Any of the girls we knew would have died to get together with him …’ Her mother drifted off mid-sentence with a dreamy look on her face.

Maggie looked from the image of Mr Shah to her mother’s rapt expression and back again. Before she could stop herself she blurted out, ‘Mum, is Mr Shah my real dad?’

Marion blinked and looked at her daughter. A look of uncertainty and worry flashed across her face and Maggie prepared herself for the worst. Then Marion laughed. She laughed so hard that she had to press the heels of her palms against her eyes to stem the tears. Maggie hadn’t seen her so amused since … she couldn’t actually remember.

‘Oh Maggie, you are funny!’ Marion said, shaking her head. ‘No, Mr Shah is
not
your father. Your father is your father. I don’t know. I can’t tell when you’re joking these days … Imagine me and Ravi Shah! Oh dear, I haven’t laughed so much since …’ Marion glanced back up at her daughter, whose face was stone cold sober.

‘You weren’t joking, were you?’ Marion said slowly.

Maggie shook her head, feeling suddenly ridiculous. Feeling ridiculous had almost become her default setting.

‘Well it’s just that I don’t look like Dad, do I? And I don’t look that much like you, and Jim is almost Dad’s exact carbon copy, and so … well, I just sometimes wondered, what with the free love and all …’

Unfortunately, despite her experience in making a fool of herself, Maggie still felt excruciatingly embarrassed and realised it wasn’t so much the question that had disarmed her but the display of insecurity which she had become used to hiding from her mum.

‘And, you know … because my hair and eyes are so dark and you are all so fair. Where did it come from, then? Not you or Dad.’

Marion cleared a space beside her on the floor and, indicating that Maggie should fill it, began sifting through the photographs until she pulled out a white card scalloped round the edges and yellowed with age. On the front it had an embossed design of roses and a gilded date – 1938. Marion opened out the card to reveal a wedding photo.

‘Well, you’ve got your father’s brown eyes, although a shade darker, and the rest of it did come from me, in a way, via this lady – your great-grandma Constantina.’

Marion handed Maggie the photo.

‘My grandma. You never met her, of course – she was long gone before you arrived on the scene. She was Argentinian, came to this country in the thirties. She always said she was running from something, but we never did discover what. She’d never talk about it, just press a finger to her lips and give us one of those black-eyed looks that you do so well. She didn’t have a penny in her pocket or a hope in her heart, but she had bucketloads of determination and she loved to dance.

‘That’s how she met my granddad. He was a farm worker, but it was a bad time, lots of unemployment. No one had much money, but when they could they’d let off a bit of steam and there used to be a local dance on in the town, and him and his mates all went down there one night hoping to catch a kiss from a pretty girl. He wasn’t a big man, not much taller than me, really, but he had this sort of spark, Maggie. Right up until the end he had eyes that burned so brightly with the passion of just being alive.

‘Grandma Connie always used to say that until she met him she’d wondered daily what on earth it was that brought her to this wet, cold, miserable country when everyone else she knew had stayed at home or gone to America. Until the night that she danced with my granddad. And then she said she knew – God had brought her there to meet the love of her life. I wish you could have seen them dancing together – it was so beautiful, almost like a ballet the way they moved together. And they were so in love, Maggie, right up until the end. They even died within two weeks of each other. I don’t think Connie could see the point of anything after he’d gone.

‘When I was a girl I promised myself that when I fell in love it would be with that kind of intensity and passion, not the sort of friendly politeness that my parents had. When I met your father I found that, and I still feel that way about him even now, with his big belly and his bald patch. So no, Mr Shah is not your father. I don’t know … when
I
look at you, I see your dad reflected in some way in every one of your movements and looks. I don’t see why you don’t see it.’

Maggie looked down at the photo. The dark young woman was wearing a drop-waisted wedding dress which showed her ankles neatly turned out in button-through shoes with a granny heel. Her meticulously waved hair was crowned by a garland of flowers and a veil. Her nose was a little longer than Maggie’s, and her chin a little more square, but other than those small differences, Maggie realised, it could have been a photo of her. She looked at her great-grandfather, fair and slight. She could see a faint echo of Marion’s smile reflected in his stiff formality, a certain restless look.