Love-40 (3 page)

He acknowledged all this with a flicker of respect in those gorgeous hazel eyes and let his hand slip from her shoulder at last. ‘Ciao,' he murmured.

‘Ciao,' she tossed back at him, turning away with a graceful sweep of the shoulders, a flounce of her dark red hair and, damn it, a stumble as she tripped over one of the tennis balls.

‘I should have left him years ago.' And this time she said it out loud as she ran down the steps and into the late afternoon sunshine. Just think what fun she could have had with all the Nick Rossis of this world.

*   *   *

Michael watched Suzi watching Liam and wondered when he should tell her his news. Would she be pleased? He examined the gamine face for clues. Imagined himself sliding a finger against the soft hollow of her cheek, down, down, into the cleft of the narrow chin. He hoped she'd be pleased, though he couldn't be sure. He'd known Suzi Nichols for over a year, been seeing her regularly for twelve months, staying weekends for most of that time. And yet, he didn't know her – not in any way that would make her remotely predictable. Perhaps that was what made her, he thought, so hard to resist.

‘Another?' he asked her, waggling his empty glass to get her attention.

She debated this, head on one side, eyes flicking towards Liam and Amanda Lake. Wondering if her services would be required, he guessed, also wondering how much he minded. It was a bit like loving a woman already married to another man, he thought. Knowing there was part of her that would always be attached elsewhere. Worse, since she and Liam were unlikely to ever divorce. Trying to catch hold of what was tantalisingly out of reach could make a guy blind to limitations. Did they have limitations? He caught Suzi's eye. Whatever, it was bloody frustrating – feeling you were second best.

‘What time have you got to get back to Fareham?' Suzi asked, instead of answering the question. ‘Do you want to eat first?'

He captured her small hand in his. ‘I'd like to take a shower first,' he said meaningfully. ‘And then eat.'

Suzi's answering squeeze told him he had her undivided attention for the first time that afternoon. ‘And then…?' she teased.

He might tell her his news … ‘I'll go back to Fareham.' He released her hand again and pushed his glass aside. ‘So shall we hit the road?'

Once again, Suzi's glance shifted to the Formica bar. Michael watched Nick Rossi stride in, place himself firmly between Liam and Amanda, plant a kiss on each of her golden cheeks.

Suzi seemed to come to a decision. ‘Let's,' she agreed. ‘Will you miss me next week, Michael?'

‘So much, that…' Michael almost told her. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he bit it back at her look of surprise.
Will you miss me,
was his cue to say,
you bet,
followed by her,
how much,
then,
this much,
a dialogue of foreplay that invariably led to making love. Suzi, he sensed, was unsettled by his unfinished variation on their theme.

So, ‘I'll show you how much,' he whispered into her cropped dark hair, as he leaned forward to get to his feet. She smelled of tennis after-glow, her Suzi-smell, for she never bothered with perfume, and the scent of something vaguely animal that probably lived at her riverbank cottage along with the rest of the menagerie. It was a comforting fragrance. Comforting and familiar.

Yes, he'd miss her and he'd miss Pridehaven. The truth was, that Michael had never much liked Fareham, and neither did he enjoy working as a pharmaceutical assistant in a factory that belched out fumes unconvincingly declared harmless to the atmosphere.

His fault, he knew. When he'd made the decision ten years ago, to turn his hobby of building and repairing sound systems into an up and running business, he had failed to research the project thoroughly enough. Suffused with energy – Michael always was – he had created ambitious plans, advertised everywhere he could think of, ignored his budget, re-mortgaged his house, launched himself into the business without so much as a look over his shoulder.

Michael frowned his perplexed frown. He still wasn't sure how it had happened. It might have been the outlay – of business premises, brochures, advertising. It might have been the perfectionism and Michael's seeming inability to quote the correct price for a job. He knew his faults. But whatever it was, he had lost virtually the lot, lucky, he supposed, that he had not got further into debt, that he had escaped relatively unscathed from a venture that had left him living in a rented furnished flat in Fareham, working in a factory that he loathed.

What Michael really wanted was very different. He wanted to be a musician – a successful musician, the kind who received critical acclaim rather than hero worship (at forty he felt too old for hero worship, pleasant though it might be in small doses). And so, during every white-coated, nine to five day that led inexorably into another just the same, he dreamed of himself on stage. Sometimes in a modest venue, but more often playing Earls Court, where he had once seen the Rolling Stones. The image of Mick Jagger swinging on a rope down from a platform suspended high in the air on to centre stage, was one of his treasured memories.

And when he wasn't enjoying this pleasant fantasy, for Michael could swing on a rope as easily as the next man, he was waiting for Friday nights and thinking of Suzi Nichols.

He waved goodbye to Liam and followed her out of CG's clubhouse. Suzi Nichols dressed not in blue joggers and sweatshirt, but in a power suit with the kind of short black skirt Suzi never wore, in black stockings and suspenders that would probably compromise all her feminist principles, with pouting lips that whispered sweet nothings – not to Liam, but only and always for Michael alone.

*   *   *

Estelle's feet were hot in her trainers, so when she got to the riverbank, she tugged them off, digging deep into her multi-coloured rucksack for her flat strappy leather sandals. At the same time, she pulled out an indigo wrap-around skirt and wound it round her waist, conscious of her pale legs in lycra shorts – OK on the tennis court, but not so appropriate to Pridehaven on a late Sunday afternoon in March. And it was getting chilly … She pulled on her sweater and observed the clouds, gathering quickly, as though suddenly realising it was not summer, no, not even spring, and that they should never have left the sky alone in the first place because people would assume too much.

Estelle leaned on the parapet of the blue bridge over the River Pride. She loved this narrow river that wound its way from the Dorset hills in the north, through the town itself, past Suzi's riverbank cottage to the south and down to the tiny harbour with its sheltered, shingle bay and sandstone rocks not quite imposing enough or pretty enough to attract hordes of tourists to Pridehaven in the summer. Thank God, Estelle thought. She loved the river, despite – or maybe because of – what it had done to her.

To stare into the water was a therapy, she told herself, since water, and especially moving water, water that dragged along bits of twigs, reed and bulrushes, the seeds and dying flowers from wilting plants of the riverbank, made her remember too much. It would be easier, of course, not to recall events from thirty-five years ago, if that were possible. Memory played tricks – one could never be sure how experiences had been trimmed or frilled by time and other people's voices. But some internal spectator told her,
to be strong you must remember, deal with, resolve.
And so Estelle would often stand here at the bridge, gripping this blue parapet with white knuckles, staring down at the River Pride. Like a madwoman, she thought.

She was almost forty. At least half her life had gone and what did she have? A career that had only just stuttered into being. No children, maybe no man, certainly no mother. Perhaps she was wrong to come here to the bridge. Perhaps she should have moved away years ago. Why hadn't she?

The water was hypnotic and Estelle swayed slightly. Liam, she thought. Liam was the answer to that, just as he was the answer to most things. Except contentment, she reminded herself, watching a family of sleek, caramel and green ducks as they scooted along the surface of the water, each staring straight ahead, as focused on their journey as Estelle herself was not.

How could you be contented, living with a man who at any moment might move on to … she frowned, to something more interesting? A man you could never feel secure with.

Estelle released her hold of the parapet, flexing her fingers with some surprise at their stiffness. She and Liam had always fought. They pitted their strengths against each other rather than combining them; it was one of the things, she knew, that had kept them together so long. That and … she trailed her hand along the railing … the fact that they had always seemed to belong together. That there had never been – for either of them – another.

Apart, of course, from Suzi, Estelle thought wryly as she gathered up her rucksack and finally crossed to the other side of the river. Suzi was always there, had always been there, had been there even before Liam, when they had first become friends.

Estelle's steps quickened as she thought of those days, a tentative friendship begun by a teacher at her new school. ‘Suzi will look after you. She's very kind.' The sympathy in the teacher's eyes, in all their eyes.

‘You can come back to my house for tea,' Suzi had told her that first day. ‘If your auntie will let you.'

And Estelle had shrugged, knowing that Auntie Mo, immersed in the romantic short stories she wrote for women's magazines, kind but never in a million years maternal, would probably not even notice she'd gone. ‘Won't your mum mind?' she had asked Suzi.

‘Course not.' Suzi was clear on this point. ‘We do what we want, Liam and me. Mum never minds.'

And it had been easy, Estelle reflected now, to slip into the routine that was so far from what she had always understood to be routine, at the Nichols'. Liam and Suzi's father had died years before, which gave them some common ground, and their mother – though clearly loving her children with intensity – still seemed somewhat lost without him.

Liam and Suzi, Estelle soon realised, had taken advantage of this fact, taken advantage of the independence their mother had inadvertently offered them. Liam, though (who had seemed to Estelle at the time to be scarily sure of himself), had taken a while to accept her. Only Suzi's stubborn insistence that Estelle be included in every game, every outing, every treat and as time went by, every secret, had made him tolerate her.

They had fought even then, she recalled, as she opened the church gate and slipped through to the graveyard. Once Estelle had found her feet. Fought and then loved and fought some more.

Once, near their beginning, they had planned to move away from here – away from the ties of childhood, teenage secrets, Estelle's vague memory of her mother's death. And yes … she passed by the flint walls of the church, glancing up at the stained-glass window depicting Jesus and the twelve disciples. Away even from Suzi too.

But they never had. Slowly, she left the graveyard behind, crossed North Street and headed for the house she loosely called home. Liam said Suzi would never leave Pridehaven, but sometimes Estelle wondered if it was Liam who was attached by some invisible umbilical cord, to the town of his childhood. For here he was, now teaching in the very school he had attended himself, the school his father too had once taught in, running the youth club where he had once played table tennis, taking Sunday afternoon hikes in the woods to the west of the river Pride, where all three of them had once played, and where she and Liam had first … she closed her eyes. First touched one another's naked bodies.

Oh yes, she thought, as she slotted her key in the lock of the huge Victorian building that housed three flats, including the one right at the top that Liam had first fallen in love with as a student, there were a hell of a lot of memories in those woods.

She took the stairs in twos; the first carpeted flight gave way to bare floorboard by the time she reached the garret, as Liam affectionately referred to it. He had rented it as soon as he left college and returned to Pridehaven to live, bought it as soon as his salary allowed him to. Estelle – who had stayed in Pridehaven while he did his teacher training, toyed with various career opportunities, ended up working as a clerical officer with the local water authority, where she'd progressed (though she sometimes wondered if that was the right word) into the customer complaints department – had moved in very soon after.

She used her second key to let herself in.

But it had remained Liam's garret, she reminded herself as she dumped her rucksack in the hall and went through to the galley kitchen. It had always been his choice.

There was some white wine in the fridge, a half-decent Bordeaux, so she poured herself a generous glass, wandered into the living room and surveyed its contents as if seeing it for the first time. If she left, she wanted it inscribed on her memory, just as it was at this moment.

To one side was a chair in front of a pine table, whose surface was hidden by the papers, books, exercise jotters and pens of Liam Nichols, teacher and amateur poet. And if you swung the chair to the right, you would be facing a computer screen and keyboard; pencils, rubbers, elastic bands and Tippex spilling out of desk tidies – or un-tidies in Liam's case. Above were bookshelves stacked with poetry, books on education, Socialist essays, child psychology, you name it …

But Liam's influence didn't stop there. Estelle's critical gaze roved on, committing it to memory. On the floor by an armchair was a tray containing the remains of his breakfast, the dregs of a strong Italian coffee in a brown mug, the flaky crumbs of a croissant and a dollop of strawberry jam. His videos were piled haphazardly by the TV, his cassettes and CDs dominated the shelf space above the hi-fi, a pair of his jeans sprawled across the sofa, waiting to be ironed. And most disturbing of all, a Fauve print on the far wall seemed to watch Estelle's every move.