River Deep (37 page)

‘Why didn’t I know about her?’ Maggie asked her mum.

‘Well, you never knew her, I suppose. And we only got these photos after Mum died and I don’t think I’ve looked at them until now. Whenever we talked about her it was always Grandma Connie – not very exotic sounding, I know! And you never said anything. If you’d told me you were worried so long ago I’d have explained. It’s just, well, you’re my baby – part of this family. I’d never have guessed you felt like this!’

Marion reached out and rubbed Maggie’s shoulder.

‘I’m glad you asked me, though. Look, you can keep that photo if you like. As proof.’

Maggie shook her head and a large tear hit the cardboard edge of the photo. Maggie wiped it quickly away with her thumb.

‘I’d like to keep it,’ she said, ‘but not as proof, Mum. I don’t need proof that I belong to this family. It was just that I sometimes wondered, that’s all … And I know that this is a hard time for you and Dad as well. I know I’ve been wrapped up in my own problems recently, and maybe a bit … distant.’

Maggie looked down at Connie’s photo and suddenly felt at a loss for anything else to say. Marion put a cautious arm around her daughter’s shoulder and pulled her a little closer.

‘What’s wrong, love? Is it too much, looking after us all and splitting up with Christian? You know that the last thing your father and I want is for you to feel obliged––’

Maggie stopped her quickly. ‘No, Mum. No, I don’t feel obliged, that’s the last thing I feel. If anything it’s The Fleur that’s kept me going. And you and Dad being here for me. I haven’t thanked you, but I am grateful. It’s just … oh, I don’t know, I thought I’d worked it all out in my room just now and that I could handle everything, but I guess maybe it’s the shock or something … Everything’s got into such a huge mess …’ Maggie faltered and stumbled to a halt.

‘Maggie,’ Marion said, pulling herself to her feet and then holding a hand out to her daughter. ‘Come downstairs and I’ll make us some hot chocolate. If you like you can tell me about your huge mess. Maybe I might be able to help you. At least I could listen?’

Maggie reached out and took her mother’s hand, letting her help her to her feet. As they padded into the kitchen Marion took a desk lamp out of the larder, unplugged the toaster and switched it on.

‘I’ve been coming down here a lot recently in the middle of the night. It seemed more sensible to have some soft lighting,’ she told Maggie as she filled the kettle and waited for it to boil.

‘Have you, Mum?’ Maggie asked her. ‘I didn’t know …’

Marion spooned chocolate powder into two mugs and filled them to the brim with boiling water.

‘When I was your age,’ she said, sitting down, ‘I’d already met your dad and had my kids. Yes, it was the tail end of the sixties when your dad and I met, and it was supposed to be a revolution, but in some ways at least we were much more sheltered than you are today. I met your dad and married him not so long after. He’s been my only lover …’

‘Mum!’ Maggie opened her eyes wide. ‘
You
weren’t much of a wild child, were you?’

‘Well it wasn’t the sleeping around I believed in, love, it was love and peace and freedom. I still do believe in those things, but it’s hard to keep believing in a world that doesn’t seem to want or understand them.’ Marion paused. ‘Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that although I haven’t gone through what you’re going through with Christian, that doesn’t mean I can’t help you, and if you wanted to tell me … well, if you wanted to, I’d listen. I figure that when you’ve been alive for a certain number of years you’re bound to have picked up at least some good advice.’

Maggie thought about everything that had happened with Christian and Louise and Pete and looked at her mum.

‘I’ve been pretty flaky,’ she said cautiously – it was something of an understatement.

‘I’m not about to start telling you off now, am I?’ Marion said with a faint smile. ‘Unless you want me to, that is. No, I’ll leave that up to Sheila and Sarah.’

Maggie shook her head, returning the smile.

‘OK,’ she said simply, already feeling a little lighter. ‘I’ll tell you.’

And it was almost two in the morning by the time she’d finished telling her mum everything that had happened to her since the moment Christian had told her about Louise.

Pete sat hunched over the edge of his bed, rubbing his hands back and forth through his short hair. There had been times, more than a few during his relationship with Stella, when he’d hated himself. Hated his inability to please her, his failure to keep her, and his weakness for her that made it impossible to stay away. But never had he loathed himself as much as he did now. After everything he’d said to Falcon yesterday about sleeping with Angie just for the sake of it, what he’d done last night had been just as bad, maybe worse.

He’d had sex with Stella because he wanted to have her when he wasn’t so beguiled by her. He wanted to know what it felt like to have power over her for once. It had been a brief, explosive experience, one without tenderness or a trace of love, which made Pete wonder if it had been his love for her and his love only that had fuelled all their previous encounters with such meaning. Stella hadn’t seemed to notice or mind the difference; in fact she’d seemed incapable of noticing anything, and Pete had wondered in that moment of cold detachment if what she really wanted was men who didn’t really want her. Maybe it was his loving her that had kept them from ever finally resolving their relationship. The thought of it kept on tying knots in his head, and when he climaxed it was painful and raw, sending a wave of radiation burn through his body. Afterwards Pete rolled off Stella and turned his face away from her, looking at the wall.

‘Well, someone was a bit pent-up, weren’t they?’ Stella had said, lightly positioning her cheek against his chest and stroking his stomach with her fingertips. ‘How about we try for an encore?’

Pete had closed his eyes and concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, feigning sleep. After a while he sensed Stella prop herself up and look at his face.

‘Pete? Pete?’ she whispered. Pete kept resolutely still. She lay back down and for a while she tossed and turned, sighing and huffing as she fought off the confusion of jet lag and Pete’s mixed reception. Then at last she was still, and after a few moments more she slept. Pete had turned to look at her in the half light. She looked the same as she always had, still beautiful and fragile, gilded with all kinds of shimmering tones and lights. Once the sight of her sleeping like that would have filled his chest with such emotion that it threatened to burst out of him at any second, but last night and now, this morning, he couldn’t fathom what he was feeling for her. He simply didn’t know. Except that it was nothing like it had used to be.

‘Baby?’ Stella’s slender arms snaked around his neck and she rested her chin on his shoulder. ‘Come back to bed.’ She pulled him back on to the bed and clambered on top of him, murmuring, ‘We’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.’

Pete shook his head and attempted a smile. ‘I can’t, Stella, I’ve a class to go to …’ he began.

Stella looked at his alarm clock. ‘But it’s only seven-thirty. And a class? Don’t you mean the film job?’

Pete winced, remembering one of the things he’d told her. ‘That job is, um, suspended for a couple of weeks. Some production hitch. I’m teaching until it starts. Again,’ he said, trying to extract himself from under her slight but insistent weight.

She pressed down on to his groin with her pelvis and began to lightly kiss his chest. ‘Oh, but you don’t have to go just yet, do you?’ she said. ‘You’ve got time for Stella to make you feel all nice, haven’t you?’ she whispered as she began to trace her way down the length of his torso.

In one swift movement Pete extracted himself from beneath her and got out of bed.

‘Pete!’ Stella sat amid the tangle of sheets looking bewildered. She had never been turned down for oral sex by anyone ever before. It was unprecedented.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pete said. ‘I … just don’t feel like it.’ They looked at each other, neither one of them pointing out that Pete had considerable physical evidence to the contrary on display right at that moment.

Stella drew her knees up under her chin and watched Pete as he hurriedly pulled on his boxers, turning his back on her. She felt a small cold fear begin to grow in her stomach. She couldn’t lose Pete, she needed Pete. He was her rock, her safety net, and she had decided, she really had decided this time, that she was going to stay with him. This new distance he was showing to her, the way they’d made love last night, made things worse, it made them more complicated. Stella realised she wanted him more as he seemed to want her less. She cursed herself and tightened the grip around her knees. She knew what she had to do: she had to play it cool. She had to be calm and not ask any questions, least of all about this Maggie he had mentioned.

Stella had let Pete’s emails collect in her in box, unopened since the moment she had arrived in Melbourne. At first they had seemed like the links of a chain stretching halfway around the world to restrict and restrain her. She was angry with Pete for not understanding that she needed this time to be completely free of him to see if she could stand up on her own two feet without him. And then there had been this man, AJ, who came into the bar she worked in more or less every day. He was the kind of guy who lit up a room, the sort of man who attracted attention the second he entered the atmosphere – sort of a local celebrity, a local radio DJ with a small TV profile. The moment Stella saw him she wanted him.

It wasn’t that he was better looking than Pete, but rather that he had the kind of confidence and self-assurance that Stella had often wished for in Pete. God knows, Pete could have broken more hearts than most if he’d had a little sharper edge.

Girls just flocked around AJ like moths drawn to a flame. Every night it would be another one, and they didn’t seem to care that he didn’t seem to care about any of them. Stella had been fascinated by the whole charade, witnessing it all unravel before her very eyes in a three-act play. The seduction, the consummation, the rejection. The gratuitous torture of one helpless little girl after another. But Stella had felt confident, too, more than confident. She’d felt certain that she could have him, but not in the same way as the ever growing line of simpering women that sulked in corners and glowered at him as he got it on with someone new. Stella knew how to work a man. She had got her plane ticket, her job in Melbourne and, yes, the ring on her finger by doing just that. She had her own wake of lovers ebbing behind her for thousands of miles. She was certain that AJ would not be immune to her charms and that he would be as beguiled by her. There was even some part of her that thought maybe this man was her equal – her other half and her mirror image. As she watched him operate, she allowed herself to daydream, allowed herself to believe that she could be the one, perhaps the only one able to tame him. So Pete’s emails were left unread, packed away in the chaotic miasma of cyberspace, waiting to take shape under her gaze.

After two weeks of planning and plotting her seduction, AJ asked Stella back to his place. It wasn’t like she’d imagined it would be, the two of them melded in a union of equals – it was all show, and all about him. Every one of his laborious tricks and techniques to turn her on, even, was more about his prowess as a lover than consideration for her. And yet Stella still wanted him. When he turned his back on her and fell straight to sleep, Stella had missed Pete more than she ever had, but she still
wanted
AJ; she wanted him to look at her and actually see her, for some spark of emotion to disrupt that perfect face. But Stella knew that if there was some woman out there capable of creating that effect in him, it wasn’t her – which made the whole experience even more humiliating. Stella thought she’d be equal to him, but she wasn’t. The next day he was charming but remote. The day after that he blanked her.

Stella had found herself crying in the stock room, rocking on her heels, feeling the sting of humiliation more keenly than she ever had. Her flatmate and fellow barman André had found her and held her shoulders as she cried.

‘Darling, I thought you had more sense,’ he’d told her. ‘I thought you had a bit more class than to go
there
!’ He tossed his head slightly and Stella got the fleeting impression that he might have been
there
and suffered exactly the same fate that she and countless others had. ‘Anyway,’ André said, picking up her ring finger and holding her hand inches in front of her face. ‘What about
him
?’ Stella had begun to cry in earnest then and André had sent her home, where she’d watched TV and drunk beer into the small hours. It was sometime around three that she finally plucked Pete’s emails out of the air and read them for the first time, from the most recent bombshell back to the first one. She got on the next plane home.

Stella knew Pete: she knew he wouldn’t back out on her unless he really had to. She was pretty sure she could keep him if she played her cards right. If she could show him how much she needed him, he wouldn’t leave her. He just wouldn’t; he’d promised he never would.

Pete paused as he buttoned up his shirt and glanced at Stella. Each time he looked at her she seemed slightly diminished, as if she were somehow fading. His chest constricted and he felt a wave of his old empathy for her, his perpetual desire to save her. He sat down on the bed cautiously and looked at her. Perhaps if he gave it a chance, everything would come back gradually. There was no point in hurting Stella if he didn’t have to.

‘It’s just …’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s a lot to take in …’

‘I’ll say!’ Stella giggled coquettishly, and then kicked herself for trying to be flirty when he was trying to be serious. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, showing rare candour. ‘I’m nervous, Pete. You’re making me feel as if I have to be nervous …’ She picked up his hand. ‘I’ve never felt like that with you before. Do I? Do I have to feel nervous?’

‘No! I mean …’ Pete paused. ‘I just need to get used to the idea that you’re here, that’s all. That you really are here …’ he said lamely.