River Deep Page 3

  Sheila had never had another child, she’d never got remarried. ‘Well, I never got divorced, did I?’ she’d say with a laugh. ‘Wasn’t done in them days.’

  Looking at her now, as she leaned against the bar, her hair still meticulously blonde, her thick gold chains looped around her neck and hoops in her ears, her make-up carefully applied, Maggie could see the eighteen-year-old Bow Belle still there, as clear as day. Years of smoking had kept her thin, and though her skin was etched with deep lines it was still taut and revealed good bones. She had often wondered if Sheila regretted the way her life had passed, but if she did she never mentioned it, never seemed to reflect on it.

  To Maggie, Sheila was a second mum. Whenever she couldn’t stand her parents’ brand of hands-off parenting any longer she’d always turned to Sheila, who’d listen to her problems patiently and then tell it like it was. It was no exaggeration to say that Sheila had often saved Maggie’s sanity, if not sometimes her very life. Maggie couldn’t imagine life without her.

  ‘Where you off then?’ Sheila nodded at Maggie’s attire. She had spent all of this morning deciding what to wear, how to look for her meeting with Christian. Eventually she’d plumped for a shortish black linen skirt that accentuated her slimness, and a dark pink shirt, one that contrasted well with her dark looks and light skin. It was a shame she wasn’t getting her hair done until after the meeting, but she’d taken Sarah’s advice and spent some considerable time applying her foundation and concealer until you could hardly see the shadows and soreness around her eyes.

  Maggie had done all she could to remind Christian of the things he loved about her: her large brown eyes, her smooth white skin that never tanned, her slim and slender legs. Perhaps now, after this short break away from her – which felt like a hundred years – he’d see her with new eyes and realise exactly what it was he was leaving behind. He’d see how well she was coping, how well she looked, and realise he couldn’t do it. Of course she hadn’t mentioned any of these half-hidden hopes and dreams to anyone, least of all Sarah or Sheila, who would both laugh in her face point-blank, but somehow Maggie felt things weren’t entirely over between her and Christian. They couldn’t be, not after everything they’d been through together, and that tiny feeling was pretty much all that kept her breathing.

  After several minutes of practising keeping her voice level she’d finally called him yesterday, just after Sarah had gone. He hadn’t picked up and, wondering if he’d seen her name on his caller display, she’d left a hesitant message offering a time and place that they could meet. Today, Friday, at noon. She hadn’t wanted to seem as if she had no structure to her life, as if she could just fit in with him, although all she longed to do was to just fit in with him, just as she always had done, just as she was once sure she always would do. She’d waited all of Wednesday afternoon for his call, taking her phone with her to the loo and into the shower, and then, just as she went to bed, she’d noticed an envelope flashing on her mobile. He’d sent a text agreeing to the time and suggesting that the office would be better than the flat. She’d texted back OK and switched off the light, climbed into bed and stared into the darkness, wondering and waiting.

  Sheila regarded her with her smokey grey eyes, still waiting for a response.

  ‘Oh, um, I’m off to see Christian to try and … finalise things. After all, we were together six years. There’s a lot that needs sorting.’

  Sheila snorted, blowing smoke through her nose. ‘Too bloody right. You want to get half that flat for starters, and half that business. More than half of it. If it hadn’t been for you keeping it going he’d have run it into the ground ages ago with his fancy ideas.’

  Maggie sighed. ‘That’s not really fair, She. His ideas usually paid off, even if they were a bit off the wall. All I did was keep the more mundane side of things going, the weddings and the Christmas do’s. And the thing is, I paid Christian rent, I was never on the deeds for the flat, and as for the business … well, I started out there as his employee and somehow that never changed, at least not officially. I didn’t think it mattered.’

  Sheila muttered something supremely offensive under her breath and shook her head.

  ‘Anyway, that’s not really what’s important to me. I just want to see him, to see for myself that he really means it. I can’t believe he means it …’ Maggie’s voice trailed off as she looked around the empty bar.

  ‘Oh, he meant it, my girl,’ Sheila said bluntly. ‘How long did he say he was sleeping with this other tart? Couple of months, wasn’t it? That weren’t a mistake, love, I’m only surprised you never noticed it before.’

  Maggie winced, but somehow Sheila’s realism comforted her. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said bleakly.

  ‘Here she is.’ Maggie’s mum and dad entered the bar and Maggie had to blink a couple of times to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. The old faded jeans that her dad now wore under his beer belly instead of over it had been replaced by a beige suit and brown tie, vintage eighties by the looks of it, and her mum had found a white blouse from somewhere and was wearing her knee-length ‘respectable’ skirt, her bare legs shining palely against the red of the material. They usually only got themselves up in this apparel for weddings and christenings, and Maggie was fairly certain no one was getting married this Friday lunchtime.

  ‘Blimey,’ Sheila said without cracking a smile. ‘The whole world’s all suited and booted today, makes me feel quite dowdy.’ She fingered her gold chains as she spoke.

  Marion smiled briefly at Sheila and smoothed down the skirt she clearly felt uncomfortable in before speaking to her daughter.

  ‘The thing is, darling, we thought if you didn’t have anything on you might come with us to the bank. We’ve got to see Mr Shah and I … well, I thought that with all your experience you’d be able to give us a bit of support, cut in with a bit of jargon here and there. You know me and your dad, we never really get to grips with all that.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m on my way to see Christian. I mean …’ She looked at her parents. She knew they hated any kind of institution, especially financial ones. They had never been happy with participating in capitalism, and if it had been up to them the whole family would have kept circumnavigating the globe for the rest of their lives, just as they had done for the first seven years of Maggie’s.

  As as child, Maggie had been all over Asia (barring the communist bits) by the time she was five, and had done some of South America and most of India by seven. The only places her parents never seemed to want to ‘discover’ were the kinds of places with basic amenities, TV and chips. But one unbearably hot morning not far from the banks of the River Ganges, seven-year-old Maggie had lain down in the dust and screamed like a banshee, shouting the same thing over and over again: ‘I want to go home. I want to go home to ENGLAND!’, until her throat was raw, her skin covered in an angry blotchy red rash, her eyes and nose streaming. She had had enough. Enough of mosquito nets, enough of hot spicy food, enough of temples and monks and monkeys in the street. It was the culmination of several months of pleading, screaming and howling that had always fallen on deaf ears.

  Maggie had begun to feel this way after a brief trip back to England to see her grandparents. She had been entranced by the cool darkness of her native country’s flat silver sky, the remarkable moist greenness of the countryside and, most of all, by her grandparents’ bungalow. Restfully beige and cream throughout and relentlessly neat and clean, Maggie just ached for her own mantlepiece with her own collection of china figurines of ladies selling flowers, their porcelain faces tipped up with rosy-cheeked smiles.

  Another child might have dreamt of going to Tibetan monasteries or Thai fish markets, but from that moment Maggie dreamed of nothing but suburbia, her childish idea of a normal, peaceful English life. She’d started crying on the plane out to India and didn’t stop for three months, even recruiting her three-year-old brother into her scheme. Eventually, after the hysteri
a of the Ganges incident, her parents had relented, genuinely worried that they had somehow hurt their children with their plans for a free life, picking up work here and there, seriously concerned that Maggie might be in some way mentally deranged.

  Within two weeks they were back home living the life of middle-class luxury at Maggie’s grandparents’, and six months after that they’d bought The Fleur. Neither of them could bear the thought of working in an office, and neither of them had any particular skills, so her granddad had given them the deposit and for years and years the pub – with the help of Sheila – had more or less run itself. Maggie’s gran, now long gone, had even given her the little china flower-seller to put on her dressing table. She still had it in a shoebox somewhere.

  Maggie focused on her parents.

  ‘I mean, I suppose if it’s really important I could try to rearrange it?’ she offered, feeling a pang of guilt. But the mixed feelings of terror and relief that the thought of postponing Christian gave her showed clearly on her face, and her dad shook his head firmly, putting his arm briefly around her shoulder and kissing her on the forehead.

  ‘No, love. You stick to your plans. I know how hard it is for you as it is – you don’t need us messing you around. Will you be all right on your own?’

  Maggie smiled at her dad and rested her head briefly on his shoulder. Over the years, especially in the last ten or so, he had gradually turned into just a normal dad, watching the footie on the big screen on a Sunday, enjoying a pint with the locals. But her mum had never really left the sixties behind. She was still as hopeless as she had always been, wafting about with a stupid everything-will-turn-out-all-right smile.

  ‘I’ll be all right, Dad,’ she reassured him, although she wasn’t sure.

  ‘You just remember Maggie, if it starts getting too much, try the mantra I gave you. You have to say it at least six times,’ her mum added, before repeating. ‘ “I am as serene and as calm as a tiny cloud in the summer sky. I am as …” ’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Sheila said, lighting up another fag. ‘You kick him where it hurts, in his wallet.’ She looked at Marion. ‘I haven’t a single punter yet today, you know.’

  Maggie didn’t see her parents exchange worried looks as they all left the pub. She was too busy worrying herself.

  Chapter Four

  ‘So … um … what are your plans?’ Christian asked Maggie, as yet unable to look her directly in the eye. ‘Legally I mean? I’m only thinking of you. It’s just that I don’t think the solicitors’ fees will be worth it.’

  He stood up, feeling awkward about sitting behind the desk they had made love on more than once, and went to stand by the window. This was the part he’d dreaded and been tempted to delay for so long, but Lou had said it would be best to get it over and done with, and whatever her motives she was right. Dragging it on made it worse for everyone.

  Having to look Maggie in the face, though, having to see her pain for himself, that was hard. Now he just wanted to be as far away from her as he could be, away from this small and airless office that they used to share.

  ‘I thought, what if I just gave you a couple of grand, ten, say, for your share of the furniture, another month’s wages and we called it quits?’ He half smiled at a point just over her left shoulder, and hoped that she’d just take the money and run, that just for once she wouldn’t want to talk about it. ‘No, you’re right. Twenty. It should be twenty grand. I’ll arrange it.’

  Maggie forced herself to look at him: the kind hazel eyes she’d fallen for, the strong chin. The sweet mouth that melted her with its smile and those hands she had loved to touch her. She contracted every muscle in her body, clenched every single fibre of her being to prevent herself from flinging herself at his feet and begging him to take her back. She couldn’t see them, but she knew that all five of their – Christian’s – staff were hovering outside the office door right now waiting to hear her do just that.

  ‘I don’t want money,’ Maggie said eventually, her voice sounding tight and strange in her own head. She felt bewildered, lost. This wasn’t what break-ups should be about, was it? They should be about grief, about anguish. It should be catastrophic for them both, not a cold conversation about money. She focused on a sentence and spoke it carefully. ‘I … I just want to know when I can pick up the rest of my stuff; my CDs and some personal things. I thought maybe we could talk then, have dinner—’

  Christian interrupted her, his eyes softening for a terrible, hopeful moment.

  ‘Mags, look. The thing is, going over it again and again … is not a good idea. We’ll just end up tearing each other apart.’ He paused, glancing down at his knotted fingers. ‘I just think that it’s better to make a clean break of it. And you should have some money. I’ll see to it, OK?’

  Christian studied her face for a moment and then looked quickly away. She was still beautiful to him. She was still there in his heart and his head, but that was just it. She was everywhere in his life, and he couldn’t live like that. He couldn’t lose himself in another person so completely. He needed space and his own identity. Louise was the quickest way of getting it.

  ‘Fine,’ Maggie said, picking up her bag as she stood up. And then, just as she was about to leave, something in Christian’s eyes melted all of her resolve into instant desperation, and she knew that she’d do anything and say anything if there were the faintest hope that she could save their relationship, save her own life. Maggie stood close to him, ignoring his silent pleas for space, and looked up into his eyes, just as she had in the moment before they first kissed.

  ‘It’s just …’ she said desperately, ‘it’s … that I thought you loved me. I thought we loved each other. The two musketeers, remember? It’s just, how can this be happening when only a few weeks ago we were laughing about growing old together, talking about having kids to run round after us? You were there with me, Christian. I can’t believe you were putting it on, I can’t believe you don’t love me any more. If you didn’t love me any more then I’d have seen it. I knew something was happening, but I can’t believe that you just stopped feeling anything …’ Maggie stared at him, at a loss for words, and Christian shook his head, searching for something, anything, to say that would help her, that would make her feel better about this.

  ‘We can’t go back, Maggie, it’s impossible. I know it’s all my fault, I know I’ve ruined it and I’m sorry. But we can’t go back after this, not after I’ve lied to you for so long …’

  Maggie took a step forward and clasped his hands, forcing him to look at her.

  ‘But we could! We could go back. I don’t mind. Are you certain that this is what you want? Is this really it? Six years, everything we’ve built up, thrown away because of her? Doesn’t it all mean anything to you?’

  Christian gently detached his hands from hers and settled them heavily on her shoulders.

  ‘You know, Maggie, I’ll always love you. In fact maybe that was it, yes – we loved each other too much.’ He grasped on to the concept with both hands, grateful he’d stumbled on something to say that wasn’t too cruel, too difficult for her. ‘What we had was special, yes, but I felt like it was suffocating me, all the emotion every day. The weighted significance of everything we did together, all the things that we were meant to be, the perfect couple. It … it was burying me alive. Lou was a way out of that, an escape route. I’m not proud of it, Maggie. I do … care about Lou, but to be honest, when it began it was because I couldn’t think of another way of leaving you.’

  He dropped his hands to his sides and took a step back, his shoulders dropping with the relief that he had found a way to say what he had to without tearing her completely to pieces.

  ‘Sometimes I think we found each other a little too soon,’ he added softly. ‘I needed to grow up first and I didn’t get that chance, and now I want to try before it’s too late.’

  Maggie stared at him, clinging on to random words and shaking the sense from them she wanted.

 
‘You don’t really want this, do you?’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I mean, aren’t you even a little bit sad that what we had is over?’ She worked hard to keep the whine out of her voice, hoping that somehow in all the confusion he’d have one moment of clarity and realise what he was doing, that he didn’t have to throw it all away.

  Feeling light-headed, Christian shook his head and retreated back behind his desk, which was suddenly just a desk again, and ran his fingers through his thick hair.

  ‘Honestly?’ he said, his face suddenly open and light.

  Maggie nodded, holding her breath.

  ‘No, Maggie, I’m really sorry, but I’m not sad, only relieved that the deception is over at last. I never wanted to hurt you, but Lou has brought a … a lightness to my life that I had forgotten was possible. I can’t be sad, Maggie. This is what I need right now, this is what I’m ready for. I’m not … maybe I never was ready for you. I feel alive for the first time in years. I’m sorry.’

  Maggie stood frozen by the pain for a moment, and then, when she could breathe out evenly again, she turned on her heel. Keeping her eyes fixed ahead, she walked back through the main office and down the stairs, firmly ignoring the absence of conversation that followed her.