The One You Really Want (2 page)

Eventually the teasing had become too much to tolerate and Ella's inability to stop being jealous had taken its toll. Doug had finished with her and Ella had been inconsolable, begging Nancy to persuade him to see sense and take her back. All this had had a profound effect on Nancy, who had longed to say I told you so, I told you you'd drive him away in the end. Instead, she'd vowed never to be the jealous type, never to indulge in interrogation sessions - and never
ever
to accuse any man of hers of doing something he hadn't done.

Unless, of course, she knew he definitely had.

Nancy frowned. The thing was, did she know for sure? Could there still be an innocent explanation for what had happened, one that simply hadn't occurred to her? And if there was no innocent explanation, who in heaven's name could Jonathan be seeing?

Someone she knew? Someone from his office? Not his secretary, surely to God. The whole point of a mistress was getting one prettier and younger and bustier than your wife. Tania looked like a potato in a pashmina.

It couldn't be her, Nancy decided. To be honest, she'd be insulted if it was.

A car toot-tooted outside, bringing her back to earth. Rose, her mother, was rattling up the drive in her green Mini. Car, not skirt.

OK, forget the unfaithful husband and the all-but-over marriage. It was Christmas Day. On with the show.

‘Darling!' Rose threw her arms round her beloved only daughter. ‘You look beautiful! Merry Christmas!'

‘You too, Mum.' Nancy hugged Rose in return, thinking how frail she felt. Her mother was only in her late sixties, but there was always the worry that this year might be her last. This was why she couldn't tell Rose about Jonathan's philandering - OK, alleged philandering. It would break her heart and ruin her Christmas. If it kills me, Nancy thought, I will protect Mum from that.

‘Where's that lovely son-in-law of mine?' Rose was peering hopefully past Nancy into the house. ‘I've got bags of presents here - they weigh an absolute ton.'

‘Jonathan's gone down to the pub to meet Hamish and Pete. Pre-lunch drinks.' Nancy, who'd been delighted to be shot of Jonathan for an hour, said, ‘You know how it is, all the men get together and compare Christmas sweaters, the one with the most horrible pattern wins a - um, not that Jonathan ever stands a chance of winning', she added hastily, ‘but some people have families with terrible taste. Anyway, he'll be back by two o'clock. Let me carry the bags inside. Oh Mum, you are naughty, you've brought far too many presents.'

‘Rubbish, I enjoy buying them.' Following Nancy inside, Rose heaved a sigh of pleasure. ‘Such a gorgeous house. You're so lucky, darling. Can you believe how lucky you are?'

Nancy thought back to the times at the beginning of their marriage when she had thought she'd been lucky. Or before she'd begun to inwardly suspect that Jonathan might not turn out to be Mr Faithful-till-the-End-of-Time after all.

But this was her mother asking the question. This time last year Rose had bought Jonathan a mug with World's Best Son-in-Law! printed on it. Hastily changing the subject, Nancy said, ‘The turkey's in the oven. I've done the potatoes and the bread sauce, but the rest of the vegetables are still—'

‘How did I guess they would be?' Rose had been busily arranging the Christmas presents under the tree. Straightening, she beamed. ‘Don't worry, darling, I'm here now. We can have a glass of sherry and a lovely chat while we're doing it all. You can tell me everything that's been going on.'

Nancy had to turn away so as not to let Rose see the tears in her eyes. Did other twenty-eight-year-olds tell their mothers everything that had been going on in their lives? Maybe they did. But Rose always saw the best in people; there was a kind of innocence about her. Nancy, feeling it was her duty to protect her mother from disappointment, had never been able to bring herself to tell Rose the truth.

‘Now, parsnips. Carrots. Oh my word, asparagus - that must have cost a fortune, you are naughty.' Rose, surveying the contents of the vegetable basket, was torn between delight and terror at the thought of how much the bundles of fresh asparagus must have cost. ‘Right, I'll make a start on the carrots.'

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Nancy watched her mother deftly peel and chop the carrots. Rose McAndrew, sixty-eight years old, four feet eleven inches tall and weighing less than seven stone with all her clothes on. Widowed thirteen years ago, she had never so much as looked at another man. She lived alone in a tiny, pin-neat, rented flat in Edinburgh, still worked part-time as a cleaner in an old people's home and was a prodigious knitter. Every spare second was spent producing, at lightning speed, soft knitted toys which she then donated to a charity shop supporting a children's hospice. Privately Nancy found it heartbreaking that her mother could spend eight hours knitting, sewing together and stuffing an intricately detailed clown complete with knitted tube of toothpaste, toothbrush and pyjamas, only for it to be sold in the shop for four pounds fifty.
Four pounds fifty
. She'd visited the shop and seen the price tags with her own eyes. So much work for so little return, yet Rose had exclaimed in delight at the amount of money she was raising for the poor sick children. It simply wouldn't occur to her to be offended, because that wasn't the kind of person she was.

There was no one better.

Turning, Rose said happily, ‘And what did Jonathan get you for Christmas?'

Nancy swallowed. ‘A lawnmower. The kind you sit on. It's out in the garden.'

‘A sit-on lawnmower? Oh my word, how marvellous! I say, darling, you'll be able to ride around on it like the Queen. What fun!'

Forcing a smile, because she was unsure how often the Queen actually rode around on a lawnmower, Nancy said, ‘I know.'

‘That's Jonathan for you, isn't it? So original. He always knows exactly the right thing to buy.'

Other people might have mothers in whom they could confide every tiny detail of their lives, but Rose wasn't that kind of mother. She needed to be cosseted and protected from details that would only upset her.

Nancy knew she couldn't tell her the truth.

It was six in the evening when Carmen Todd let herself back into her empty house. She'd been helping out at the shelter for the homeless in Paddington since ten o'clock, serving up plates of Christmas dinner and pouring endless mugs of steaming hot, conker-brown tea. Nobody at the shelter knew who she was, which suited Carmen just fine. Now, reaching her bedroom, she stripped off her bleached blue sweatshirt and old jeans and chucked them into the laundry basket. They'd been clean on this morning, but you never wanted to stay in the clothes you'd visited the shelter in.

In the bathroom, Carmen switched on the power shower and examined her face in the bathroom mirror while she waited for the water to heat up. Her short black hair was tousled and spiky, as if she'd spent ages faffing it about with gel and mousse - except she hadn't. Her dark brown eyes stood out against the pallor of her face and her slanted eyebrows were more like the ticks made by a teacher with a fat felt pen, in a hurry to finish marking. She knew she could look better than this, but no one at the shelter was all that bothered when it came to make-up. So long as she slipped them a few extra cigarettes, that was all they cared about.

Oh well, maybe next Christmas would be better for both them and herself.

The doorbell rang just as she was about to climb into the shower. Hesitating, Carmen wondered who on earth it could be at six o'clock on Christmas night. Not carol singers, surely. She certainly wasn't expecting any visitors.

But not answering the door - or at least speaking into the entryphone - was beyond her capabilities. Hurriedly wrapping a daffodil-yellow towel round herself - not that anyone could see her, but old habits died hard - Carmen padded through to the hallway and pressed the button on the speaker.

‘Yes?'

‘Carmen Todd, this is the police. Open the door please, we have a warrant to search the premises.'

Breathless with disbelief, Carmen said cautiously, ‘Rennie? Is that you?'

‘Of course it's me! Open the door this minute, woman, before my feet freeze to the pavement. And you'd better put some clothes on before I get there.'

Startled, Carmen leapt back from the entryphone. ‘How d'you know I'm not dressed?'

‘I'm a man. It's my job to know these things. Superman isn't the only one with X-ray vision, let me tell you.' Rennie cleared his throat with characteristic impatience. ‘By the way, I wasn't kidding about it being bloody cold out here.'

‘Oh, sorry!' Hastily Carmen buzzed him in, before racing through to the bedroom to swap her bath towel for a parrot-blue velour dressing gown. By the time she'd finished fastening the belt - tied with a double knot in case Rennie got boisterous - he'd arrived at her front door.

‘It's really you! I can't believe you're here.' Thrilled to see him, she hurled herself into his arms. ‘I thought you were in Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere . . .'

‘Somewhere with lots of vowels,' said Rennie, hugging her hard in return. ‘I know, we were. Well, Illinois, same difference. They had to cancel the rest of the tour. Dave's been hitting the bottle again and Andy's snorting coke like a human Dyson. Neither of them were capable of doing their stuff on stage, and seeing as there was a drying-out clinic handy, Ed packed them both off there. So that's it, I flew back last night. Thought I'd come and see how you're doing. Now, stand back and let me take a good look at you.'

Ditto. Smiling, Carmen took in the almost shoulder-length dark hair, the deep tan, a wicked grin and those glittering dark-green eyes that always looked as though they were ringed with eyeliner - except they weren't, that was just Rennie's impossibly thick eyelashes. He was wearing a tan leather jacket, crumpled cream jeans, a faded brown polo shirt and the kind of hideous brass-buckled belt that only a cowboy would wear. But he was looking lean and fit, as ever. For as long as Carmen had known him, he'd exuded an air of health. The whites of his eyes were a clear blue-white, his tongue raspberry pink, his stomach washboard flat. The cowboy belt let the overall effect down badly, but Rennie wouldn't allow that to bother him. If he liked something, he wore it, and that was that.

‘Stunning as ever,' he pronounced at last, his brown hands on Carmen's shoulders. ‘Anyway, I thought this was a respectable street.'

‘It's a dressing gown! It's completely done up,' Carmen protested.

‘I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the street. I thought it was supposed to be dead posh around here.'

What with his touring commitments, combined with the fact that he'd spent the majority of the last three years out of the country, Carmen forgave him. Just.

‘Actually, it is dead posh.'

‘Sorry, it's gone right downhill since I was here last. Rear Admirals, QCs, the silver spoon brigade - more pompous gits than you could shake a stick at in the good old days. Call the police as soon as look at you, they would. Answer the door to a stranger? Good grief, you must be joking.'

Patiently Carmen said, ‘Is there a point to this, or is it just a general off-the-cuff rant?'

‘Sweetheart, of course there's a point.' Heading through to the kitchen, Rennie opened the fridge and seized a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. ‘OK to open this?'

She hesitated. The bottle had been there for over two years. She'd bought it on the first anniversary of Spike's death, along with several packets of paracetamol and Nurofen. The plan had been to spend the night at home alone, just for a change, and give herself until midnight to carefully think things through. If, when the clock chimed twelve, she decided there was no point in carrying on, she would finish the bottle of champagne then swallow the painkillers.

At eleven o'clock, with the bottle chilling nicely in the fridge, she had opened a writing pad and begun to compose a suicide note.

By midnight the wastepaper bin was piled high with scrunched-up sheets of paper. Mortified, Carmen had discovered that suicide notes weren't as easy to write as she'd recklessly imagined. Everything she put down sounded ridiculous when she tried reading it aloud, like one of those really bad plays in the Morecambe and Wise shows Spike had so loved to watch on cable TV. Increasingly self-conscious and frustrated, Carmen realised how embarrassed she would be to leave behind the kind of suicide note people might secretly snigger at.

Furious with herself, she'd ended up putting the unopened bottle back into the fridge and making herself a cup of tea instead. Since flushing the painkillers down the loo would have been nothing but a criminal waste of painkillers, she'd stacked them in the bathroom cabinet to use in the recommended dose when her next period arrived.

Waste not, want not.

Well, if she was going to carry on living, she'd need them.

The champagne she'd left there in the fridge, however, as a salutary reminder.

What the hell. Carmen gestured at the bottle. ‘Good idea. You open it, I'll get the glasses.'

‘And I'll get back to my point,' said Rennie, ‘which is that I arrived here two hours ago. You were out.'

‘I was at the shelter.'

‘That explains the smell.' Rennie had never been one to keep his innermost thoughts to himself. Catching the look on Carmen's face he grinned and said, ‘OK, OK, and it's very noble of you to do your bit, but I'm just telling you, you do smell.'

The trouble was, she knew he was right. Exasperated, Carmen headed for the bathroom. ‘Open the bottle. I'll be back in five minutes.'