Hand On Heart: Sequel to Head Over Heels (4 page)

‘Ha, beat you, loser,’ Archie yelled, flinging the PlayStation handset
–
slightly more aggressively than the situation called for
–
across the room and, fortunately for him, onto the soft landing of the sofa.  The fourteen-year-old had just thrashed his stepdad, yet again, at Just Cause II, one of those bloodthirsty, shooting everyone and everything games that Mark wasn’t entirely sure were appropriate for a child of such a young and impressionable age.  Alex had given in, somewhat reluctantly, to the
All my friends have it
argument on his last birthday, and was pleased that, despite its content, it was an activity that he could share with Mark.  There was no point in her trying to join in, she wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with the handset; she just wasn’t programmed with gaming genes.  Or enough patience to even want to try.

‘You’re really crap at this, Mark,’ Archie spat, making the L for Loser sign on his forehead and skulking off to the kitchen to replenish his drink.  Mark stood open-mouthed.

‘Hey, young man, what’s all this with the bad language?’ Alex confronted her son as he came through the kitchen door.  ‘Go and apologise to Mark now.  No one speaks to him like that, least of all you.’

‘Sorreee,’ Archie said pointedly, in the vague direction of his stepfather.  Alex didn’t think it was worth trawling out the ‘Say it like you mean it’ comment when her son was in a mood like this.  He stalked off, the reason for his sudden change of mood still unclear.  Teenagers appeared not to need a reason to flip from happy one minute, to monster the next.  You simply had to be prepared for whatever they would throw at you.

‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Alex said.  Mark put his arms round his wife’s waist as she stood peeling the vegetables for their Sunday lunch.  ‘I really don’t know what’s got into him lately.’

‘You don’t need to apologise to me, love.  It’s just his hormones.  I can remember what it was like.’  Mark didn’t want to get his stepson into too much trouble, and tried to gloss over it, hurtful though Archie’s comments might be.   Archie had been a mild-mannered thirteen-year-old, and Alex thought naively that maybe her son was going to be the exception to the teenage rule.  But on hitting fourteen, almost overnight he had morphed into standard teen mode.  His arms seemed to have grown by several inches, and hung disproportionately and gorilla-like at his sides.  Good deportment was a thing of the past; slouching seemed to go with the territory now.  His hair, once short, dark and gleaming seemed forever to look greasy, despite Alex’s insistence on a daily shower and her presumption that ‘having a shower’ actually involved the use of shampoo and shower gel, not just getting wet, getting out and getting dry again.  But the worst trait belonging to this new era in his life was the permanently down-turned mouth, the constant frown he wore, as though the world was ‘so not fair’ and everything he was required to do, ‘so boring.’  Things had never been that straightforward between Mark and Archie, not like they were with the girls, but his apparent coming of age as a fully-fledged teenager had definitely made them worse.

‘Don’t worry about silly, grumpy Archie, Daddy.  I still love you.’  Nine-year-old Rosie came up from behind, hugging him round the waist, and the three of them stood there, Mark the male filling in a female sandwich, contemplating the whirlwind that was her eldest brother. 

But that was just it.  He wasn’t their daddy, even if that was what Rosie called him.  To give him his due, he hadn’t tried to be either; he certainly wanted to be a father figure to them all, but he would never force them to accept that he was their ‘new dad’, because he wasn’t.  Peter, Alex’s first husband, was a hard act to follow, his premature death putting him high on a pedestal to which no living mortal could ever hope to be elevated.  When it came to the children, there was no way Mark would even think about trying to step into Peter’s shoes, but as far as little Rosie was concerned, who had never even met her father, and twelve-year-old Millie, who had very little memory of Peter, Mark
was
the daddy.  He had been around for such a large proportion of their little lives, so it was only natural that he should slip into the role of the father that they loved and looked up to.

It was very different with Archie; he had been almost six when Peter died.  Peter was so ill during his final months that he had been unable to meet even the simplest of his personal needs himself.  Archie had helped Alex look after him, in as much as a small child was able, and although she had tried to protect her son from the trauma of seeing his father like that, she would never forget watching Archie spoon-feeding Peter and helping him sip water from the baby beaker he was reduced to using.  Although Archie had wanted to help, each night he would cry himself to sleep with frustration at the unfairness of it all.  It had broken Alex’s heart.

The brain tumour had effectively taken his father away from him even before Peter’s death, and Archie still hadn’t really come to terms with that.  Alex wasn’t sure he ever would, which made her view episodes like this one with a degree of laxity.  Although she couldn’t condone him speaking to other people like that, and wouldn’t stand for extremes of bad behaviour, he had coped with more pain in his life already than any child of that age should ever have to deal with. 

Archie wished he could block out the memory of the shell of a man his father had become.  A man who barely recognised his own son when the time came to say goodbye.  The memories he wanted to cling onto were the ones of Daddy chasing him down the garden on their mountain bikes, climbing the hill with him, making shelters in the bluebell woods, and snuggling up together in front of a roaring fire and watching the black and white films that Peter had such a penchant for.  Those were the memories that Alex tried to perpetuate too, although it was impossible for her to completely overlay the sad memories with thoughts of happier times, no matter how hard she tried.  And she tried very hard.  Mark didn’t mind all that; Peter was their father, it was important for them to grow up with as much knowledge and memory of him as they could.

There was a small area on their upstairs landing dedicated to Peter, a patch of wall covered in photos of him throughout his life, as a child himself, with his children, and on various trips around the world for research for the travel guides he had written.  Alex wanted it to be somewhere the children could go to talk to Daddy.  They could write messages to him if they wanted to; there was a little white board with a pen, and it usually bore some kind of positive remark, something happy which had happened to one of them that day. 

Mark didn’t feel at all threatened by this shrine to Peter; he knew Alex was happy and settled with him and glad to have found love again.  But Peter had been her first true love, and
–
even more importantly than that
–
was the father of her three eldest children, and Mark had no doubt that were he still alive now, Peter and Alex would still be together.  There would be absolutely no reason for them not to be; theirs had been an extremely happy marriage.  But life often throws us a curve ball, sending us on paths we wouldn’t have expected to follow.  For Alex, the next best thing to having Peter here was to have Mark.  He knew that was how things were, and had come to terms with it.  The only thought which often made him feel sick to the core was that, were Peter still alive, little Bertie wouldn’t exist.  That was the hardest thing in the world to get his head round.  He adored his three stepchildren, but the love he felt for his own flesh and blood was something else entirely. 

‘Come on, chicken, let’s go and pick some apples for that crumble you and I are going to make,’ Mark said to Rosie, stroking her long blond hair and breaking the mood.  He wanted to give Alex some time alone to have a chat with her eldest, if she felt she needed to.  ‘Call Bertie, he can come too.’

‘Bertieeeeeee!’ Rosie yelled upstairs, in a voice that would have made a Drill Sergeant envious.

‘Coooooommmminggggg!’ Bertie yelled back, and there was a crash and a bump as he climbed down off his bed and hurtled down the stairs.

Despite only being four, and not even quite at Big School yet, Bertie was a bookworm.  He was ‘reading’ the Famous Five books already, or at least trying to, much to Alex’s delight, as they were the very same copies she had grown up with, and that the three older children had read too, albeit several years further into their academic lives than Bertie.  He struggled with many of the words, understandably, but was very determined somehow to work out what was going on in the stories, and a lot of the time he did a pretty good job.  Her youngest son was clearly going to be bright, but he was no boring boffin; if he didn’t have his head in a book, then he could generally be found up a tree.  Or even both.  Up a tree, reading a book.  Or kicking a ball around the garden.  Or chasing one of his sisters around, whilst they moaned, ‘Mummy, Bertie’s stolen my Barbie/eaten my sweets/put mud on my duvet,’ or anything off a list of a hundred or so things that Bertie could possibly have done to annoy his siblings.  Despite what, in polite circles, would be called his ‘lively character’ (he was an absolute little terror and got away with murder), the three older children adored their younger half-brother to bursting point.  Alex had caught Millie on several occasions standing over a sleeping Bertie, tenderly stroking his hair and sighing at the sheer beauty of the sleeping child, just like a mother would.

Despite these small frictions between Mark and Archie, and what they had all been through in their younger years, Alex considered her children very lucky to have the idyllic childhood that they had now.  She smiled at Bertie as he came down into the kitchen bearing the appropriately titled ‘Five Get Into Trouble’.  He tucked the book under his arm and followed his father and half-sister into the garden.  She wondered how many of his future boyhood pranks would be plucked from the pages of Enid Blyton.  One day, when he could actually read the books properly, she was sure he would come downstairs and ask for ‘lashings of ginger beer’, probably without even knowing what it was.  She hoped Big School wouldn’t tame him too much, wouldn’t educate that individuality of character out of him.  Actually she thought it more likely that he would run rings round the teachers.  For the sake of her friendship with Grace, it was a good job he’d be a few years older
–
and hopefully a little less rambunctious
–
before Grace became his class teacher. 

‘It’s a boy!  Mum, it’s a boy!’ Mark yelled into the phone, his voice bursting with excitement and emotion.  Not normally one to wear his heart on his sleeve, the first sight of his baby son had changed all that and turned him into a blubbering wreck.  He could never have imagined that it was possible to love such a tiny little being so very, very much. 

There were a lot of people he loved in life; he worshipped the ground that Alex walked on, adored her kids to bits, and loved his parents in a familial way, but this love was something else entirely.  This new baby was such a tiny, precious little thing, but Mark could see, even now, the toddler, then schoolboy, then teenager, and finally the strapping adult son this infant was going to become, his future life playing out before him, like an as yet unseen film.  Suddenly the purpose of Mark’s own life seemed clear to him; this child, and his wellbeing and future, was the reason he existed now.  ‘Proud father’ didn’t really come close enough to explaining it.

‘Darling, that’s wonderful news!  How are they?  How’s Alex?  When can we come?  We’ll jump in the car straight away.  My bag is all packed and in the hall, we were just waiting for your phone call.  Oh, hang on a minute, your dad’s saying something.’

The phone went muffled; clearly Margaret had her hand over the mouthpiece but Mark could still hear stilted voices in the background.

‘Tell him we’ll try and get up in a week or two,’ he could hear his father saying.  What was the matter with him, didn’t he want to see his grandson while he was still tiny?  Their only grandson, their FIRST grandson?  Their first grandCHILD ever!  He’d have grown beyond recognition if they left it a fortnight.  Why wasn’t Mark’s father, like any normal first-time grandparent, chomping at the bit to get his hands on the little new-born and smother him with kisses?

Mark’s mother, Margaret, had mellowed with age and retirement, and Mark was thankful for that.  Gone was the high-flying City barrister, in whose legal footsteps her eldest son had trodden.  With retirement came a more relaxed approach to household and family life, and she was closer than she ever had been to her two sons.  Mark loved the change in her; it made up for a lot that had happened in the past. 

These days Margaret was at her happiest when she was at home, in their elegant town house in Chelsea, in front of their huge shiny kitchen range, cooking up something delicious for Bruce, for when he came home from work.  He was an economist, and in his younger years had held exalted positions at the Stock Exchange and a couple of City banks.  Too old now to keep pace with new developments – in particular technological ones – he had, in his dotage, turned into something of an academic.  He was now part-time Economics Adviser to University College, which was mostly a desk-based job, although he was occasionally drafted in to give a lecture or two.  He needed the job to keep his brain ticking over, he said.  He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel yet and succumb to old age, like Margaret had, and was slightly scornful of his wife’s enthusiastic adoption of retirement.  But his commitments did mean he was seldom home, pottering round the garden or putting his feet up, like most men his age would be content to do.  Margaret would have been happier if he was; her idea of an idyllic retirement didn’t involve being home alone for most of the day, even busy as she was with her hobbies and her own circle of friends.  But although she wished the two of them could spend more time together, she had been surprised at just how easily her life had slowed down to match the more languid pace of her days.  She hadn’t looked back.

‘I have that conference next week, Margaret,’ he could hear his father say.  ‘There’s no way I can leave until that’s over.  Next weekend at the earliest, it’ll be.  Perhaps we could squeeze in a quick visit then?’

Mark could hear the frustration in his mother’s voice.  She was itching to come up and see her new-born grandson, and quite rightly so.

‘Why don’t you come on your own, Mum?’ Mark suggested, as though travelling solo was something which wouldn’t now occur to his once highly independent mother.  ‘Jump on the train and I’ll come and get you from the station in Purbrook.  The little chap needs to see his Grandma, he can’t wait too long, you know!’  But of course everyone knew that his parents coming to see the baby was purely for him, not for Bertie – Mark was bursting to show off the best thing he’d ever done in his life and have this success sealed with the stamp of parental approval. 

He hoped his suggestion would cheer his mother up a bit.  There was nothing to stop her coming, was there, even if Bruce was being a complete curmudgeon. 

Mark was sure his father loved him, in his own individual way, but it would be nice if he could demonstrate that through his actions now and again.  He resolved not to adopt the same, quietly distant parenting style as his father; for Mark, family would always come before work.  He wondered how he would even cope with leaving Bertie for more than a few minutes when his paternity leave was over.  He couldn’t imagine his son ever being out of his sight from now on; when he was with him, he couldn’t take his eyes off the child.

Mark could never say he had had an unhappy childhood, because he hadn’t.  To the casual observer it might even have seemed a charmed existence: expensive private school in a West London suburb, where he displayed an aptitude for sport and was hugely popular with his peers.  Later he had been the darling of the nearby girls’ grammar, remarkably even through the spots-and-braces stage, which in true Mark style he had weathered pretty well.  And then he had graduated and fallen straight on his feet into a prominent legal career.  Despite the ease with which everything in his life seemed to happen, nothing had just dropped into his lap; each success had been worked hard for and was well deserved.  Of course there was an element of luck thrown in too, but so many things could have gone in so many different ways, and changed the course of his life completely.

The bugbear in Mark’s childhood and teenage years had been home and family.  Sometimes he wondered why his parents had had children, which wasn’t a terribly healthy thought for a young and impressionable boy to harbour.  His parents were seldom home, and when they were, there were always other priorities: phone calls, cases to prepare for, reports to produce, all of which held a far greater draw on their attention than he and David ever could.  Occasionally an au pair would be drafted in, an extra pair of hands to help with the practical things like doing the washing and feeding the boys.  But what he didn’t get from this string of enthusiastic young girls was the love and affection he so desperately craved.  Sometimes all he wanted was nothing more than his mother’s kiss on his cheek at bedtime, not a stranger’s.  It wasn’t much to ask, was it, for one of his parents to be home from work before he went to bed?

Mark had always been ambitious, and still was, but when he held his tiny baby boy for the first time, and felt the stirrings of that all-consuming unconditional love that would be with him for the rest of his life, he vowed that nothing would ever be more important to him than this little person.  He had already proved to Alex that he could be a wonderful father – he dearly loved her three children – but this was something entirely new.  This child was a small and joyful part of him, all the good bits and none of the bad.  He would be the best father there ever was.

‘Mum, there’s someone at the door,’ Archie said, as he helped himself to another roast potato.  Mabel, the latest addition to their family, a normally docile Golden Labrador from the rescue centre, barked furiously in the hall.

‘We’re not expecting anyone, are we?’ Mark asked.  Sunday lunch in the Hopper household wasn’t always solely a family affair.  Very often they would have friends round, and the afternoon would be spent eating, drinking and chatting, sometimes through to the evening, and frequently with complete disregard for the fact that it was school the following day.  Alex loved days like that, but secretly preferred the quiet Sundays they spent together, just them and the kids, enjoying a more subdued lunch, followed by a walk up the hill, a family bike ride, or on a wet afternoon, watching DVDs back to back. 

‘Nope, didn’t invite anyone today, as far as I can remember,’ Alex replied, frowning slightly as she wracked her brain, wondering if she had actually mentioned lunch to someone in passing and had then gone and completely forgotten about it.  There was no way, at the speed Archie was wolfing down his lunch, that they could stretch these quantities to accommodate guests.

‘Well, better go and see who it is then,’ Mark said. 

‘I’ll go,’ offered Rosie.

‘Daddy, it’s Granny,’ she announced moments later.

Well, neither set of Grandparents had been invited today, Alex knew for sure, relieved in part that she wasn’t going crazy, but also resenting slightly the unplanned intrusion on their lunch.  She headed into the hall, with Mark close on her heels.  Something must be up, as Mark’s parents never came to see them without an invitation.

Margaret dropped her suitcase onto the hall floor, and closed the door on the retreating taxi.

‘Mum, what on earth’s the matter?’ Mark asked, seeing her ashen face.

‘Mark, darling, I’ve left your father,’ she said and burst into tears.

‘So where’s Dad now?’ Mark asked.  Margaret hadn’t left the kitchen table, and had only stopped crying for long enough to sip at her tea a couple of times.  Alex had sent the children back into the dining room to finish their lunch, but hers and Mark’s sat uneaten, gravy congealing unappetisingly on soggy vegetables. 

‘With HER, I should imagine,’ she spat.  ‘Bitch.  How could she?  How pathetic of him, what a cliché he is.  I mean, she’s half his age, what was he thinking?’

Bruce’s actions, although shocking and the last thing Mark had expected to hear today, or any day come to that,
were
very clichéd.  Apparently he’d been having an affair with a lecturer he’d met at the university.  She was in her mid-forties, a married mother of two, though unhappily, Bruce had informed Margaret.  Like that was any kind of excuse for doing what she had done with Bruce.  The woman had responsibilities, and had failed in her duty to her family, as far as Margaret saw it, as well as destroying her and Bruce’s marriage in the process.

‘No wonder he wants to spend all his time in that bloody place, instead of home with me, where he should be.  Jesus, Mark, I’ve invested my whole life into that marriage, and now, when we should be enjoying our retirement together, he’s off, doing THAT, with her.  How could he?  For God’s sake, isn’t he a bit old to be having a mid-life crisis?  Stupid old bugger.’

She dissolved into floods of tears again.  Mark had never thought of his parents as particularly intimate, although he’d always assumed they loved one another in their own funny little way.  He couldn’t really recall seeing many signs of affection between them, but each being the other’s intellectual equal, their dinner table conversations had been stimulating, and they never ran out of things to talk about.  All children, even adult ones, seem programmed not to see their parents as sexual beings, so the thought that his father was off doing ‘THAT’, as his mother put it, with another woman, someone of a similar age to himself, made Mark feel physically sick. He was furious with his father.  Why couldn’t the silly old man just be content to relax into old age and spend some quality time with the woman who had helped him get there? 

‘So what will you do?’ Mark asked.  ‘You’re welcome to stay with us, of course.’  The significance of Margaret’s suitcase on the hall floor had only just dawned on him.  There was a silent ‘for now’ implicit in his offer, and Mark knew, much as he loved his mother, he wouldn’t want her to outstay her welcome, and nor would he expect Alex to have to home her for any longer than necessary. 

In his furious state, Mark had ideas of heading off to London, sorting his father out, and making him take Margaret back
–
if she’d have him.  Ludicrous as that plan was, the idea of his parents not being together just couldn’t really enter his line of vision.  They
had
to be together, they were his parents, plural, not singular, and with one another was where they belonged.

‘Thank you, dear, you’re very kind.  I would like to stay for a few days if that’s alright.  I need to clear my head, you see.  Decide what I’m going to do.  He says this affair thing is all over now, and if it really is, then I just wish to God he’d never told me.  I mean, men are men, aren’t they, they all have their little indiscretions, and what you don’t know can’t hurt you, can it?  Why would he feel the need to confess, if it’s all done and dusted?’ 

Alex almost fell off her chair with disbelief.  Surely no woman in her right mind could condone that sort of behaviour in a marriage?  Not in this day and age?  Acceptance of an affair and that level of resignation to the fact that ‘men were men’ belonged to another era as far as she was concerned, an era even before Margaret and Bruce’s time, although she had to concede that the older generation was still much more prepared to sort out a marriage than hers was, even a marriage like this with some fairly hefty cracks in it.  Margaret, like so many women over the years, seemed prepared
–
at least once she had come to terms with the affair
–
to turn a blind eye to her husband’s dalliance, to forgive and forget.  Once her anger had died down, of course, which could be a while yet.