The Girl Next Door (47 page)

‘You might have to lose the disdain for rural life if you’re going to hitch your wagon to this guy’s horse, Liv.’

‘No way. He’s getting a city girl. He knows that.’

‘You sure he’s not planning to drag you back to the homestead, get you pregnant once a year for the next decade?’

She heard her sister shiver, then laugh.

‘I can’t wait for you to be here, Livvy.’

‘Me too. Three weeks and I’ll be there …’ After a pause, Liv’s voice grew suddenly serious. ‘How are you doing?’

Maggie shrugged, though she knew the gesture did not translate on the phone.

‘You know. I’m okay. I’m fine.’

‘That’s the banned word.’

Olivia had banned ‘fine’ ages ago. But ‘fine’ was a bad habit, hard to shake. ‘Fine’, she could have pointed out, was also exactly what almost everyone else who asked wanted to hear, after the initial interest and support.

‘Sorry.’

‘’S okay. You hanging in?’

‘By my fingernails.’ Maggie tried to keep her tone light, and Liv responded in kind, though neither of them believed each other.

‘What you got going on, apart from the bloody spring cleaning?’ No one but Liv knew about Maggie’s nocturnal habit. For the sister who’d grown up in Maggie’s messy tip of a bedroom, it still seemed bizarre. For all the kids knew, or noticed, a team of pixies slipped in each night and did it all.

Maggie took a quick stock. ‘Aly’s got the wretched exams, of course. I’m actually having lunch with Bill this week to talk it over.’

‘Is that okay?’

‘You know it is, Livvy.’ She and Bill could still talk about the kids, almost like they always had, with the crucial difference that one of them no longer lived with Aly and Stan and didn’t see them every day. She was determined that would not change. She did not withhold information. She did not do PR for their father, negative or positive. But she had never shut him out. She never would.

‘And then Stan is determined that we decorate for Christmas on December 1st, so the tree can drop all its damn needles by Christmas Eve, and this year he is also determined we must hike around in the mud at a Christmas-tree farm and cut the wretched thing down ourselves.’

Stan was too young and too oblivious to realize that selecting the tree, wielding the axe and tying the tree to the top of the car was definitely what Maggie would have considered Bill’s domain. So she would do it, though she would dread it.

‘Sounds ghastly.’ Liv hated the cold.

‘It’ll be …’

‘Don’t.’ Olivia’s voice, mock strict, was strident down the phone. She knew Maggie had been about to use the banned word.

Maggie laughed, stifling a yawn. ‘It’ll be … an adventure.’ ‘You yawning?’

‘Yep. Think the second rest shift might be on.’ ‘Charming. You’ve rung me, on the other side of the world, so I can talk you to sleep. I’m human Mogadon. I’m a lullaby made flesh …’

‘Pretty much.’

‘I love you, Mags.’ She hadn’t always been so sentimental. Hadn’t always said out loud the things she felt that she knew were understood. That was new.

‘I love you too. Livvy? I’m really, really pleased for you. Honest. I can’t wait to meet him.’

‘I’ll be there soon.’

Not soon enough. The moment Liv had hung up, Maggie’s heart sank. She put her mug in the shiny sink and climbed the two flights of stairs to her bedroom. She stood in the doorway, staring at the bed. It was a little more than seven foot wide – the biggest bed she had ever seen. Sheets for it had to be specially made. Bill had had it made for them, the year Stan was born. He said he wanted a bed they could all sleep in without being uncomfortable. All watch a black and white film on the vast wall-mounted television, or read books and newspapers on a Sunday morning. You could get lost in a bed that big, and Maggie felt lost in it every night now. She needed to get rid of it. She said that at least once a day, usually while she was making it, but she hadn’t done anything about it. She nodded her head decisively. She would. She must. She would talk to Bill about it when they had lunch this week. Then she walked to the foot, put her arms out to the sides, and fell forward, like a bungee jumper, her breath forced out of her lungs as she fell on the mattress, eyes already closed.

It was hot a couple of hours later, when Olivia stepped out of her office on to the street. Bright and sunny and still very hot. She pulled the sunglasses she’d had on the top of her head down, feeling her eyes start to water as they squinted at the yellow light. Maggie would be asleep now. She hoped. Like those clocks hotels kept in their foyers, showing the time in New York, Tokyo, London, she automatically thought in two time zones. Whatever she was doing, at any time of the day, she knew what time it was in London – what Maggie might most likely be doing. Now, now she should be sleeping. There was something like relief in knowing that. Maggie was unlikely to call for the next few hours. And she no longer called so much during Liv’s night. She had done, fairly regularly, at first. But she didn’t any more. Liv had said she could, and she didn’t mind, she truly didn’t, but it had been exhausting. Even on the nights when Maggie hadn’t called, her voice breaking and quiet, her Australian accent more pronounced in grief than it had been for years, Liv slept lightly, fitfully, waiting for the ring. Liv wasn’t sure whether it was because she no longer needed to, or because she knew how much those calls frightened and worried Liv, or maybe even because of Scott – because these days more often than not Liv was in bed with him.

That made little difference to Liv. If anything, she worried more. Once it was the phone ringing that woke her. Now it was quite often the silence. The not ringing. Either way, she was often sitting propped on pillows thinking about her sister in the middle of the night.

Scott had helped. God, how he had helped. Sometimes he slept through her wakefulness, and she lay on her side, watching him. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. The odd twitch of his eye or his lips as he dreamt. It made her calm, watching him. Sometimes he woke too, sensing her beside him. They didn’t speak. He knew and so there was no need. Then he would pull her in towards him, holding her tightly. Quite often he would make love to her then, silent and gentle and slow, as though in a dream, sometimes not even quite fully awake. They had a lot – really, a lot – of lights-on, eyes-wide-open, aerobic-work-out,
Kama Sutra-
style sex the rest of the time, but those times, in the middle of the night, in the silent darkness, those meant the most to her, because what it so eloquently told her was how well he understood her, and how willing he was to give her what he knew she needed. It was a huge part of how and why she loved him.

She remembered telling him about Maggie and Bill, and their story. Horribly early in their relationship. Too soon, probably. No, definitely. It was their fourth date. She’d been out with a lot of men, but Scott had made a huge impact. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, though he definitely was. They’d kissed, open-mouthed and hot under the collar, against the wall outside her apartment, at the end of the third date, but that was as far as things had gone. And then she was crying into her tapas. And she wasn’t a pretty crier – this she knew to be true. That he hadn’t run screaming for the hills was to his eternal credit.

And here he was, leaning against a bike rack, his tie already loosened and his jacket over his shoulder. She smiled at him, and he walked towards her. He often met her outside the office these days; he worked a few streets away. He slid his arms around her waist possessively and kissed her deeply, wonderfully oblivious to the commuters milling around them. She let him kiss her and she kissed him back, the sun strong on her upturned face, and gratefully let Maggie slip gently to the back of her mind.