Just Between Us (29 page)

As dawn slowly lit up the room, creeping in past the unlined blue curtains, reality came crashing into Tara’s mind. It wasn’t that Finn liked constant partying; he liked constant drinking. Booze flowed through their lives like tap water. It was always there. Finn wouldn’t have dreamed of an evening at home without something alcoholic to drink. Meals out involved several aperitifs, wine and something in the liqueur department. They never met friends over coffee: pubs were the preferred meeting place. In crisis, without
crisis, whatever. There was only once constant: Finn drank.

Tara looked at the clock. Ten to six. Too early to wake Finn? No.

Tara had never been good at waiting. She had to do it now. She thrust back the duvet and got up, not even bothering to pull her dressing gown on over her flimsy T-shirt. She stormed into the spare room where Finn lay snoring in the bed. His clothes were carefully laid on the exercise bike he’d had in his previous flat. Boxes of possessions were lined up all over the place, some opened with their contents spilling out after one of Tara’s manic searches for something vital.

‘Wake up!’ she shouted.

Finn sat up in shock, his hair standing on end like a punk’s.

‘Whassup?’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know what’s wrong.’

Through the veil of sleep, Finn’s eyes looked suddenly wary. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I know you’re fed up with me working late…’

He got no further. Tara leaned over him and there was fury and menace in her face. ‘It’s nothing to do with you working late. It’s to do with you drinking.’

Finn slumped back to his pillow. ‘What about it?’ he said flatly.

‘You’re drinking every day, Finn. Every day and every night.’

‘It’s work,’ he said. ‘I can’t socialise and do my job properly if I don’t.’

‘You mean you can’t go out without having a drink?’ Tara’s face was fierce. ‘I know plenty of people who can. I can. It doesn’t bother me.’

‘Well, bully for you,’ Finn said bitterly.

‘You’ve got to stop. This is destroying us. You’re never home at night and when you do get home, you’re plastered. The only time I see you sober is in the morning and then you’re hungover.’ The truth of this hit her forcefully. Breakfast really was the only time when she was guaranteed that there’d be no tell-tale scent of alcohol on his breath. The
fierceness vanished from her face, leaving a vulnerable look of pain. ‘Why, Finn?’

The rapid change of attack seemed to affect Finn more than her full-scale anger had. He buried his face in his hands and watching him, Tara sank onto the bed, all the fight suddenly gone out of her.

‘Why? What are you trying to escape from? Is it me?’ She looked so lost and forlorn, so utterly devastated.

Finn grabbed her and held her so tightly that it hurt.

‘It’s not you, Tara. It’s never you. I love you, I’m crazy about you,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I just forget to say stop when I’m out, that’s all. You know me, life and soul of the party. I just needed a kick up the bum to remind me that life isn’t all a party.’

‘Are you sure that’s all?’ Clinging to him, feeling his heart pumping through the thin cotton of his faded T-shirt, Tara wanted to be reassured that everything was all right.

‘Of course I’m sure. Listen, I’ll stop drinking for a month, will that convince you? Not a drop shall pass my lips. I don’t need it, all I need is you.’

She half-laughed, half-sobbed. ‘Good, I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Oh, Tara,’ Finn buried his face in her shoulder, kissing the soft place where her neck curved and her collarbone began. ‘I do love you, so much, you don’t know how much.’ He slid his fingers under her T-shirt, his touch tantalising her flesh.

He could make her melt by touching her, his skilled fingers stroking her gently, sending desire quivering through her body. Just looking at his face, sleepy-eyed with lust for her, was enough to make her want him. Nobody had ever looked like that at Tara before: nobody had ever made love to her the way Finn did. His technique had blown her off her feet when they’d first met, this movie star man who could make her gasp with pleasure. Finn’s hands reached the curve of her buttocks, clasping her close to him, caressing gently with his fingers slipping inside the soft cotton of her panties.

‘I love you too,’ she said crying. And then he pulled her
T-shirt off and she dragged his off and they were wrapped around each other on the spare room bed, kissing fiercely, passionately, as if the force of their love was a physical thing and could protect them from every harm.

It was the worst week in the world to be suffering from serious hair shock. The following Saturday, Stella was meeting Nick’s daughters for the first time and she’d just had the haircut from hell. There was no other way to describe it. Feeling absurdly naked, she reached up to touch her ears, vulnerable to the world now that her shoulder-length dark hair had been shorn to frightening proportions. There wasn’t a strand of hair on her head that measured longer than five inches.

The swinging, glossy mane had been cut up around her ears in an approximation of the style that made Christy Turlington look gamine and chic. On Stella, it had gone terribly wrong. The shocked face in the hairdresser’s mirror looked like a stranger: Olive Oyl on a bad hair day. Even worse, it was all her own fault. The cut was lovely. It just didn’t suit her.

Cristalle in the salon opposite the office cut her hair every two months, had done so for six years. Reliable and possibly a bit stick-in-the-mud, Cristalle was never going to be swept up to do hair at any avant-garde catwalk show in New York but she suited Stella. Until today, when Stella had decided on a change in honour of meeting Nick’s daughters for the first time. She also had a longing to look glamorously different for the anniversary party in Kinvarra the following week. She’d booked an appointment in a different salon, feeling wild and daring, imagining herself with one of those wash-and-go styles which require no painstaking blow-drying or even a brush, for that matter.

Seated in a high-tech salon staffed with trendy people, armfuls of glossy magazines on her lap and a cappuccino in front of her, she’d uttered the fatal words: ‘I’m not sure what I want: something completely different. Do what you like!’ Idiot!

Stella wondered how the law hadn’t caught up with hairdressing and made it illegal to say such things to a hairstylist you didn’t know. Subsection 4 of the Penal Hairdressing Code could cover it. The hairdresser would have to ensure that the client had taken the proper professional advice before agreeing to ‘something different’ or uttering the inflammatory ‘do what you like’. Two independent witnesses would be required, one of whom would have to be a best friend like Vicki and therefore licensed to say: ‘Short hair with your jaw line? I don’t think so.’

‘It really suits you,’ said the stylist, showing Stella the back of her hair with a second mirror. The back was just as bad. Worse, it revealed that her natural hairline went so low down the nape of her neck as to qualify her for primate status.

‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ cooed the colourist, walking by.

‘Wonderful, fantastic cut,’ said another hairdresser.

Stella knew she was destroyed. When every member of staff queued up to tell you how lovely your haircut was, you were either a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman or you looked like you used to when your mother cut your hair with the aid of a pudding bowl. There was nothing she could say. It was her own fault. Knowing the law backwards was of no benefit when you’d given the stylist carte blanche. She should never have got so immersed in her magazines. If only she’d looked up from those hints on how to transform your wardrobe with accessories, she’d have realised that short hair was very definitely not her. And how had she never noticed her strong jaw before? You needed dainty little heart-shaped faces to carry off such severe hair.

Outside, having over-tipped out of guilt, Stella walked slowly back to the office, self-consciously touching her shorn
hair every few minutes, as if smoothing it down could make it grow more quickly.

If only there was a wig shop on the way back to the office, she’d have bought a wig. But there wasn’t. Instead, there were acres of plate-glass windows where Stella could catch horrified glimpses of her reflection.

The receptionist in Lawson, Wilde & McKenna was too well trained to be honest. ‘Your hair is…lovely,’ she said, blinking rapidly. A sure sign of lying. Stella slunk off to the lift, praying that she would meet no-one she knew until she’d had another look at herself in the loo mirror.

Vicki was such a bad liar that she’d given up trying years ago. She looked up from Lori’s desk to see Stella trying to sneak surreptitiously into her office. ‘Jeez, your hair! What happened, Stella?’

Stella bit her lip. ‘I said I wanted something different,’ she muttered.

‘Different?’ said Lori. ‘Did she use a lawnmower?’ Lori was still sulking over Stella’s annexing of the most gorgeous man she’d seen in years.

‘Don’t,’ begged Stella. ‘It’s awful, I know. Whatever am I going to do? It’s the anniversary party in a week and I’m meeting Nick’s daughters for the first time on Sunday. This is absolutely the worst time for this to happen. I look like a complete idiot.’

‘Lots of make-up and hair wax,’ said Vicki firmly, ‘that’s what we need. We’ve got to make it look intentional.’

‘Short hair is fashionable,’ added Lori, trying to make up for the lawnmower joke.

‘It is on people like my sister, Tara. She can carry it off. She’s trendy, she’s younger than me and she doesn’t have a jaw like a shot-putter,’ wailed Stella.

It was like waiting for the President, Stella decided, when she’d peered out the window for the fifth time in twenty minutes because she’d heard a car door slam. She’d have some camomile tea and forget that Nick was coming with
Jenna and Sara for their first ever visit. She was pouring boiling water on a camomile tea bag when she heard the front door opening. Determined to be calm and unfussed, even though her heart was beating double time, Stella added honey, stirred her cup carefully and smoothed her hair down again.

‘Hello,’ said Nick’s voice. Tense, definitely, Stella thought. And a bit odd. He normally said ‘Hello, Stella.’

Still holding her teacup, partly as defence, she walked into the living room to meet Nick’s daughters. Nick stood awkwardly in the room with just one girl. She had to be Jenna, Stella realised, but Jenna had just had her fifteenth birthday and this unbelievably adult girl-woman looked as if she was at least nineteen. The photo Nick had shown Stella all those months ago did not do her justice.

Slender as a model and very pretty, she had long fair hair, a disdainful grey gaze and a lipglossed mouth that was set in a firm line of dislike. She wore hip-hugging jeans, a T-shirt that showed off her tanned, flat stomach and a lot of makeup. Stella couldn’t help staring.

‘Jenna, this is Stella,’ Nick said, still awkward. ‘Sara will be coming later. Some college thing came up.’

‘Hello, Jenna, welcome.’ Stella moved forwards, unsure, in the face of this adult creature, if she was to shake hands or air kiss both sides.

Jenna took matters into her own hands. She leaned back as if she couldn’t bear Stella to touch her and the disdainful gaze hardened into insolence.

‘Well,’ said Nick, falsely jovial and deliberately ignoring Jenna’s rudeness in not replying, ‘isn’t this nice?’

‘I’m having camomile tea,’ said Stella. ‘Would you like me to make you some or would you like juice?’

‘No.’

Stella noted the absence of the word ‘thanks’ but said nothing. Instead, she watched as Jenna scanned the room. The corners of the glistening lips turned up faintly, as she smirked at everything she saw. She clearly wasn’t impressed
with the museum prints that Stella had framed cheaply herself and she literally looked down her nose at the big old couch with the rich brocade throw that hid a multitude of ancient sins. None of this comfortable, lived-in furniture could compare with the interior-decorated grandeur of her own home, her haughty expression said.

Stella felt her long-planned welcoming smile shrink. Loving her new-found family, Nick’s family, suddenly seemed like a much tougher task than she’d thought.

‘Stella made lunch for us all,’ Nick said, putting an arm around Jenna.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Jenna stared defiantly at Stella, as if daring her to say something sharp in return.

‘That’s fine,’ Stella said evenly, thinking of the feast laid out on the kitchen table. ‘We can eat later.’

‘I won’t want to eat later.’ Still that defiant stare.

Stella picked up her cup of tea and took a sip, more to reassure herself than for any other reason.

‘Hey, Stella has that Macy Gray CD you like. You do like Macy, don’t you?’ said Nick. He flicked through Stella’s CD collection rapidly, found the CD in question and put it into the player. Stella watched Jenna watching her father. She was evidently shocked at his familiarity with everything to do with Stella. He knew what CDs she had; he was comfortable enough in Stella’s home to put music on without asking. Stella could see this knowledge shaking Jenna’s notion of how friendly Nick and Stella were.

The music started. Nick stood between his girlfriend and his daughter and smiled earnestly, as though goodwill alone would break down the barriers.

Stella decided she’d have to take matters into her own hands. Don’t be afraid to touch the sensitive issues,
The Art of Step
counselled.

‘I have a daughter,’ Stella said. ‘She’s seven, her name’s Amelia. I’d love you to meet her but I thought it might be easier if you and I met without her first, because I can understand that this is hard for you.’

Jenna’s little face moved from defiance to sneering. ‘Hard for me?’ she said. ‘You don’t know what’s hard for me. You don’t know anything about me. I don’t want to be here today. I don’t want to know about your stupid daughter…’

This was too much for Stella. Amelia was sacrosanct. ‘Don’t you dare be so rude to me. This is my home, I won’t tolerate such rudeness.’

‘I don’t want to be in your home!’ screeched Jenna, switching to tears in an instant.

‘Sweetheart, don’t get upset.’ Nick pulled Jenna towards him and cradled her in his arms like a baby as she sobbed.

Shaking with rage and impotence, Stella stood and watched.

‘Hush, darling,’ soothed Nick.

Suddenly, Jenna pulled away from him and rushed for the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nick, before going after her.

Stella sank to the couch, her legs weak, and listened to Macy Gray’s husky helium voice fill the room.

It was five minutes before Nick returned, alone.

‘Darling,’ whispered Nick.

Oh, she was
darling
now, was she? Stella glared at him.

‘Jenna’s upset. I’m going to bring her out for a while, let her get used to the idea. Maybe buy her something.’

‘Buy her something?’ hissed Stella back. ‘As a reward for bad behaviour? That’s not the sort of advice they give in parenting classes.’ She knew she was being sarcastic but she didn’t care.

‘Come on, Stella, this is tough on the poor kid. She’s had a lot to take in today. It can’t be easy for her.’

‘And what about me?’ Stella wanted to ask, but she couldn’t, because Nick had already rushed back to his daughter. Through the window, Stella watched him get into the car, say something to make Jenna smile up at him, and then drive off.

Stella didn’t know which of them she was angriest with.

Nick: for allowing his badly brought up daughter to be so rude. Or Jenna: for the gratuitous rudeness. She was grateful that she’d decided to drop Amelia at Hazel’s just in case the meeting didn’t go as planned. If Amelia had been exposed to such naked hatred, Stella was sure she’d have thrown Jenna out.

‘How’s it going?’ asked Hazel eagerly half an hour later when Stella arrived to pick up Amelia.

‘You choose the word,’ said Stella grimly. ‘Awful, terrible, catastrophic, rude!’

‘That bad?’ winced Hazel. ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine?’

‘Oh no,’ said Stella. ‘It’s not too early at all. What I don’t understand,’ she said, sitting on the edge of a chair, too taut to sit back and relax, ‘is why none of Nick’s bloody family seem to like me. His sister-in-law, the horrible Clarisse, cancelled our dinner, ostensibly because she was sick but I know it’s because she just didn’t want me in her house. Now Jenna’s being unbelievably rude.’ Feeling childish, she blinked back tears.

Hazel changed her mind and got out the big wine glasses instead of the small ones.

‘Where are the girls?’ asked Stella, suddenly startled to realise that in her rage, she hadn’t looked for Amelia or the twins.

‘Ivan took them swimming,’ said Hazel. ‘They should be back any time now.’ She poured a glass of white wine for Stella. ‘Biscuits?’

‘Only if you’ve got double, double chocolate chip.’

Two glasses of wine, four biscuits and an hour of Hazel’s down-to-earth advice later, Stella and Amelia walked back home hand in hand.

‘Did Jenna and Sara see my room?’ said Amelia excitedly. ‘I want to show them myself.’ She chattered away nineteen to the dozen about Jenna and Sara, while Stella felt herself
tense up again. In Amelia’s innocent eyes, these two girls were going to be like big sisters.

‘Mum, don’t squeeze my hand so tight,’ complained Amelia.

‘Sorry, pet,’ said Stella, loosening her grip.

She began to pray silently. Please let Jenna and Sara be kind to little Amelia. It wasn’t her fault.

At home, there was a message on the answering machine to say that Nick would be back by six with Jenna, and that Sara might make her own way there earlier.

Stella thought of Hazel’s advice: ‘Plod along with a smile on your face and take no offence at anything.’

‘Only a robot could smile at that girl’s antics,’ Stella had said mournfully.

‘It must be difficult for her, Stel,’ said Hazel. ‘And difficult for Nick, too. She’s his little girl and he’s trying not to hurt her, that’s all.’

‘I haven’t hurt her,’ protested Stella. ‘Her parents split up before I even met Nick but she wants to take it out on me.’

‘Yeah, but kids can be irrational. You know that.’

‘Kid? Jenna Cavaletto isn’t a kid: she’s a spoilt brat.’

‘Stel, calm down. You want this to work, don’t you? So learn to deal with it. Just think of how you turn the other cheek when someone cuts you up in traffic or whatever. That doesn’t get to you.’

‘This is different,’ Stella tried to explain. ‘When somebody cuts you up in the car, or when they bang their trolley into yours in the supermarket, they don’t know you. It’s not personal. This is. If you’d seen the way that girl looked down her nose at my home…’ Stella could feel her blood boil at the very thought of it.