River Deep (8 page)

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Maggie said, relieved about the reference to a fiancée. ‘At least you haven’t told me that I can’t make you happy any more, and that actually now you come to think of it, I never did.’ The man she now gathered was called Pete let her perpetual self-referencing slide silently by into the night.

‘Don’t worry,’ Pete told her. ‘I sort of know how you feel. I mean, I’ve not been chucked. Quite the opposite, actually. Although I must admit it’s hard not to feel like I’ve been … quality controlled?’

Maggie mustered up a smile, and turned to face him, only to find him examining the skies with a faintly bemused air.

‘Oh yeah?’ she said sceptically, feeling her earlier anguish recede once more to breathable background levels. ‘Call me jaded, but it sounds like a fancy way of saying chucked to me.’

Pete shook his head and turned his chin to look at her, the colour and quality of his eyes hidden by the absence of natural light.

‘No, I definitely haven’t been dumped. Stella’s gone away for a year. To Australia, the week before last. To decide things. The day after I proposed. I really miss her.’ He shrugged self-consciously. ‘It’s like I breathe in and I miss her, I breathe out and I miss her, I blink and I miss her and—’

Maggie interrupted abruptly. ‘I get the picture. You miss her so much that you think you could die, but the big difference here, my friend, is that she loves you. She’s coming back to marry you in twelve months. Christian, on the other hand, doesn’t care if he never sees me again, and now I’ve gone from Company Director to redundant barmaid in one easy step.’

Suddenly angry, Maggie felt herself letting go of The Plan, and, picking up her bag, began to rub at the dark pools of mascara that had collected under her eyes. She peeled one fake lash off her cheek and dropped it to the ground.

‘I don’t think we should talk any longer,’ she told Pete kindly. ‘Because you obviously need sympathy and I’m not the one to give it. You should make friends with someone who’s still labouring under the misapprehension that happiness is more than just some flim-flam invented by God to keep us all quiet whilst he plots our excruciating demise.’

Maggie stood and shrugged in apology, but Pete only laughed, causing her to despair quietly to herself.

‘It’s not funny,’ she told him sulkily.

‘It is, sort of,’ Pete replied. Despite himself he found her distress distracting, like looking at a car crash, only messier. ‘And anyway, um, sorry, what’s your name?’

‘Maggie,’ Maggie grumbled, feeling the sudden chill of sobriety creep over her skin.

‘And anyway, Maggie, she’s gone to Australia to decide if she really loves me, to make sure that she really wants to marry me. To absolutely rule out the possibility that there might be someone better out there.’

Maggie sat back down with a bump, bemused by the expression of acceptance and, yes, even affection, in Pete’s eyes. She laid a cold hand on his arm, for a split second enjoying being the harbinger of doom, instead of the harbingee.

‘I don’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, Pete, but I’m fairly sure you are chucked.’

Pete shook his head, running his fingers though his roughly-cut fair hair, trying to shake off a look of discomfort. He’d preferred it when they were talking about her.

‘I know, I know how it sounds, but you see, it’s not like that.’ He tried his best to explain to this stranger what he had failed to explain to his closest friends and family. ‘I’m having the courage of my convictions, is all. I love her. I know
absolutely
that she is the one for me. I know it just as I know the universe is infinite and endless, and for me that knowledge is enough. I don’t need anything else, I have faith. But Stella needs … proof. So she’s gone away for a year to make sure,’ he finished with a brave smile, which slowly faded as he noticed Maggie gawping at him. ‘Come to think of it, it does sound rather daft when you say it out loud.’

Pete thought of Stella laughing and smiled to himself. It was something no one could understand unless they felt her love, although when he’d told his sister that she’d laughed, and replied that she imagined that by now there were quite a few men who’d earned that distinction. Maggie’s voice snapped him back to the moment in hand.

‘You proposed to this Stella and she nicked off to shag her way around another continent for a year?’ she said incredulously, strangely angry on this stranger’s behalf.

‘Well, seeing other people is part of the agreement, yes,’ Pete began. ‘Not that I will, I couldn’t. Look, I know you think I’m a stupid idiot and a gullible fool, like most people – my mum, my mate Ian, my sister Jess – but, you see, like most people, you’re all caught up with the small things in life, the minutiae, the detail. We, this planet, we are nothing, we’re just a speck of dust in an endless universe, one planet amongst billions. I see the big picture, and the big picture is that I love Stella. I always will, and one Earth year won’t make any difference to that. And if, when she comes back, she knows for sure she loves me too, then it will have been worth it.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Pete, sometimes it’s the little details you should focus on, things like when your boyfriend’s working late at the office even though you personally cleared his in-tray for him that afternoon; or like when he smiles to himself when a song that means nothing to you comes on the radio, or when he starts deleting all the text messages in his in-and-out-boxes and puts a password on his email. They are the little details that I ignored, when there was still time to have done something about it – cut my hair, bought some new knickers or something …’ Maggie stopped suddenly, realising that once again she was making a spectacular display of self-obsession. ‘What I’m trying to say is that surely, if you have enough faith in this Stella then she should have the same in you, shouldn’t she?’

Pete shrugged and shook his head.

‘Well, you had faith in your bloke without testing him, and look where it got you,’ he said with a half smile.

‘Good point,’ Maggie said despondently, and then, with a tiny grin, she added, ‘you’re still chucked, though.’ She took a deep breath and wiped her palm under her nose. ‘Anyway, I have a plan. Well, at least I have the
idea
of having a plan to get him back. I’m just not sure what the plan is yet.’

Pete smiled at her. She was clearly barking, but he liked her air of optimism – and if he was so sure Stella would be walking up the aisle to meet him in twelve months, why wouldn’t her ‘plan’ work? Her hope gave his hope foundation.

‘Good for you,’ he said sincerely, and Maggie nearly fell off the bench.

‘Pardon?’ she said, in shock.

‘I mean, good for you. I hope it does work. You obviously love this bloke a lot, enough to put some effort in to keeping him. In my book that takes guts, and these days there’s not many of us about. Old-fashioned romantics.’ Pete laughed a little.

‘Bloody hell, if my mates could hear me now they’d kick me all the way to Bolton and back. But anyway, good for you and good luck.’

They returned each other’s smile for a moment in the darkness.

‘And to you too,’ Maggie said, heartened by meeting someone who understood. ‘Oh well, I’d better get off. My parents’ place is just up the road.’ She nodded in the general direction of The Fleur. ‘I hope you settle in all right, and maybe I’ll see you around.’ She stood up as she spoke and backed away a few steps.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, and then, as he watched her go, he felt a sudden regret and kicked himself hard.

‘I never asked where I could find a decent Chinese,’ he murmured.

When Maggie woke up the next morning she thought she almost had a spring in her step. Not an actual spring, she mused, more like a sort of cheerful tremor, but it was a tremulously cheerful step in the right direction nonetheless. Somehow her brief encounter with the man called Pete had cheered her, given her hope and spurred her on. It didn’t matter that the only person thus far not to think she was a total fool for wanting to try and get Christian back was a stranger. He’d shown faith in true love, and right now Maggie desperately needed to see that kind of faith reflected back at her. That tiny glimpse last night had been enough to give her renewed impetus. And in the early hours of this morning, she’d even had an idea about how to begin.

As she walked through the bar she found her mum sitting at one of the corner tables staring blankly at a pile of papers. Maggie reasoned that it would be plain rude not to say hello.

‘Hi, Mum,’ she said, sitting on the worn stool opposite her. ‘I was just on my way out to see Sarah. What are you doing?’

Marion smiled at her daughter, and not for the first time Maggie wondered where she’d got her looks from. Her dad was big and pale – even in his youth he’d looked like a rotund Viking – and her mum, though slim like her, had reddish-brown hair and her eyes were periwinkle blue, intensely so, even if they were now embellished with unkempt laughter lines. Maggie was always amazed that her mum, pushing sixty as she was, was still described as pretty by most people who met her, a description she’d always thought didn’t apply beyond twenty-five. That was until she’d reached twenty-five, at which point she’d amended the limit to thirty-five, still hopeful that one day someone might think
she
was pretty. She’d been called ‘attractive’ and ‘stylish’, and Christian had called her ‘beautiful’ and ‘sexy’, but somehow she yearned for the carefree weightlessness of being thought pretty. It wasn’t that she was paranoid about her looks, it was just that in this one respect she wouldn’t mind being like her mum.

During most of her childhood she had sincerely hoped that the explanation for her near pitch-black eyes and hair was that her mum had engaged in free love with a swarthy civil servant from Kensington and that he would arrive one day and whisk her away to a life of quiet (and rich) normality. As an adult it occurred to her that the former part of this scenario, at least, was entirely possible considering the policy of free love her parents’ generation had indulged in, but she chose not to think about it any more, except at moments like this when she was confronted with how different she was from them both.

Her mother glanced down at the papers.

‘Oh well, dear,’ she sounded forlorn. ‘I thought I’d have a go at sorting this out, while your dad’s resting. Try and see if we could budget a bit better …’ She paused, pressing her lips together for a moment’s consideration. ‘But actually our income is so low, the only thing I can think of doing is asking Sheila to retire early, and I don’t know if that’ll be enough.’ Her mum gave her a weak smile. ‘Oh Maggie, you know I’m no good at this sort of thing. I look at the numbers but all I see is pages and pages of gobbledegook. The more I try and concentrate the worse it gets. I don’t know, perhaps it will all just sort itself out,’ she finished hopefully.

Maggie suppressed her irritation at her mum’s habitual helplessness. Frowning at the thought of losing Sheila, she reached for the papers, bank statements, half-kept accounts and overdue invoices. It took only a brief look for her to get some idea of the situation.

‘Mum!’ she exclaimed, unable to keep the note of anger out of her voice. ‘How did you let it get like this?’ She thumbed through the back statements, seeing The Fleur’s account fall further and further into the red as each month went by. ‘This doesn’t just happen overnight. Was this why you went to the bank yesterday?’ she demanded, perhaps a little too brusquely. She saw the bright blue eyes fill perilously with tears.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ her mum’s voice wobbled. ‘I didn’t want to bother you, I know you’ve got so much more to worry about right now. I don’t really know how it happened … I mean, you know, we’ve ticked along the same way here for years and years. A few of those new bars opened up in town and things changed, but we thought it’d be a fad and that people would be glad of a traditional pub to turn to when they’d had enough of loud music and those alcopop things. I suppose times change.’

Maggie shook her head and wondered how her mum, such a crusading revolutionary in her youth, had become so stuck behind the times. For a brief moment she felt a surge of guilt; after all, if it wasn’t her for they’d still be picking coffee beans in Columbia not stuck in a business they had never known how to run – or needed to until now. She reached over the table for her mum’s hand, her annoyance washing away to leave only the underlying affection.

‘Look, I’ll need to spend some time with all this, this afternoon maybe, but at first glance this looks to me like it might be more than letting Sheila go. It might mean letting the pub go,’ Maggie said more abruptly than she’d intended to and squeezed her mum’s fingers. ‘But let me have a look, hey? Maybe there’s something here we’re not seeing. And anyway, you and Dad are near retirement age so maybe now’s the right time to chuck it. You’ve got your private pension scheme, haven’t you?’

Marion avoided her daughter’s gaze. ‘Well, not exactly,’ she said.

‘What do you mean “not exactly”?’ Maggie asked, feeling the irritation rise on its return ebb.

‘Well, it was very nice of you to set it up for us, Maggie, but it seemed like such a lot of money to pay in every month and, well, we’ve always preferred living in the moment.’

Maggie took a deep breath and squeezed her mum’s hand just a tad more tightly than was comfortable before releasing it and drawing back.

‘So if the pub goes to the bank and …’ she gestured at the pile of papers … ‘all these other people you owe, you and Dad will have nothing. Nothing at all,’ she stated baldly, wondering if her mum was awake to the reality of the situation.

‘Yes, it looks that way, but I’ve often said what do we need material wealth for anyway, and—’

Maggie suddenly lost it, standing so quickly that her stool shot backwards, leaving her mother open-mouthed.

‘Mum! When you are fifty-nine and your husband is sixty-two you need it, trust me. You need heating and light and what if one of you got ill and you needed health care? I mean, look at me – I’m out of a job, and Jim’s never had one. It’s not as if we can look after you!’