Past Secrets

‘Honey.’ Grey leapt off the couch and went to touch her, but the frozen look in Maggie’s eyes stopped him. They stood several feet apart, staring at each other, misery on both their faces.

‘I am so sorry,’ Grey said, and he sounded it.

He honestly was sorry. But sorry that he’d had sex with a stunning blonde student or sorry he’d been caught? Bastard.

‘I love you. You might not believe that, but I do.’

‘Then why did you do it?’ Maggie asked. She hadn’t meant to ask anything, had meant to tell him bluntly she was going home for a while. But the question had shot out of her mouth before she could stop it.

Grey’s gaze didn’t falter, she had to give him that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said dismally. ‘She was there, I could have her…it sounds dumb, but I still love you, Maggie. You’re different, special.’

The spinning washing machine still kept rattling out ‘lying, cheating bastard’ as Maggie struggled to make sense of Grey’s words. Her heart was broken and this was his sticking plaster?

‘She was there? Is that your only excuse, Grey? She was bloody well there? If I’m so special, why would you even want to make love with someone else whether she was there or not? If I’m so special, then you wouldn’t want to look crossways at another woman, never mind screw one in our bed. IN OUR BED!’

He looked taken aback at this. Maggie was not a shouter.

‘It wasn’t making love, it was sex. It’s not what you and I have. That’s…’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she snapped, ‘special.’ Infidelity must have a previously undetected side effect of robbing people of their linguistic skills. Even Grey. She had never known Grey to run out of words before.

‘I’m not explaining it correctly,’ he began.

‘Oh yes, you are, and it still doesn’t make sense. You’re the one who says he’s logical, I’m supposed to be the klutzy one who forgets her bank card numbers and can’t program her mobile phone.’ Maggie knew her voice was rising but she couldn’t help it. If Grey was tongue-tied, her word power was on 110 per cent. ‘So how can you come up with such an illogical explanation? If I’m so different and special, you shouldn’t want sex or love with anyone other than me. Simple. QED. That’s what I thought I was getting when we moved in together: fidelity, monogamy, no threesomes. Did I miss the briefing where you said we’d sleep with other people? Or were you just lying through your teeth when you said that I was the sort of woman you wanted, not a pneumatic blonde like all your previous girlfriends?’

‘I wasn’t lying and I do believe in fidelity, really,’ Grey said helplessly. He sat on the edge of the armchair, running a hand through his hair. He had such long, sensitive fingers, like a pianist, fingers that could elicit a ready response from Maggie. He still looked handsome and desirable, with sexily rumpled hair as if he’d been so lost in his books he had forgotten to comb it. Maggie, who spent all her time surrounded by books, had always found this combination of brains and beauty utterly captivating. She could totally understand Ms Peachy Skin wanting to sleep with him. Grey was gorgeous, clever, and powerful within his sphere, all wrapped up in one package.

Just not faithful.

‘I love you, Grey, I don’t look at other men,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about anyone else but you, I almost don’t see anyone else but you. If there was anyone else there, if Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Wesley Snipes and anyone else you can think of were there for the taking, you know what?’ She paused. ‘I’d still say no.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, so sorry.’ The long piano-player’s fingers ran through his hair again and for a flicker of an instant, Maggie thought of his hands running through the girl’s hair in the throes of passion, twisting it and pulling gently like he did with Maggie.

‘I love your hair,’ he’d mutter when they were naked together. Maggie almost never cut it now. Grey loved its length lying tangled on the pillow as he hung over her, cradling her face before he kissed her. He thought she was feminine and sexy, things Maggie had never felt in her life until he’d come along and made her feel them. Now he’d taken all that away.

When her mother or Shona or other people said she was beautiful, she didn’t believe them. They loved her, they were being kind to her. But when Grey said it, she had believed him. He made her beautiful because she glowed from being with him.

That he had so much power over her made her feel helpless now. Going back to the sort of woman he’d had before her made it a double betrayal – a blonde with curves that Maggie would never have. She felt so hurt that she wanted to hurt him too.

‘You’re lying. You’re not sorry, only sorry I got home early and ruined it all. You screwed her. In. Our. Bed,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s not love and respect.’ She paused. ‘Were there others?’

A strange look touched his face briefly, a look of sheer guilt, and it was gone so quickly that only someone who loved his face and knew it in every mood would have noticed. But Maggie was that person. She noticed.

‘No,’ he said. She didn’t believe him.

The armchair seemed to rise up to greet her. Collapsing into it, she hugged her knees to her chest, a gesture that said ‘keep out’.

There had been others, of that she was sure and she wasn’t strong enough to hear about them. Her mother was ill, crying and not coping. Her father was asking for her help. Maggie’s world was topsy-turvy.

‘Just tell me, what’s so hard about fidelity?’ she whispered, afraid she knew the answer.

It had to be her fault. This confirmed what she’d known all along. She’d always felt lucky to have Grey, astonished that he was with her.

Someone like Grey could manage faithfulness with other people, with one of those icy blondes, but not with her. For one of those women, the right sort of wife for a man with a political future in front of him, he’d have got married. But Maggie obviously wasn’t the right sort of wife for him. She was an experiment between the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy types, the trophy women. She wasn’t worth giving up other women for. That was what this was all about.

The demons of anxiety and the self-doubt she’d grown up with rushed back howling into her mind and it was as if they’d never been away.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I swear this will never happen again, never.’ He looked up at her but Maggie was away in her head, remembering the years when she’d lived with a permanent clench of anxiety in her gut.

Sunday nights were the worst, when the weekend was careening to an end and Monday loomed, Monday with Sandra Brody and her taunting crew who’d made it their mission in life to destroy Maggie Maguire. Maggie had never done anything to them but that didn’t appear to matter. Maggie was the chosen scapegoat. Daily verbal torture and cruel tricks were her punishment. The self-loathing – because it had to be her fault, hadn’t it? – felt just like it did now.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ Grey repeated. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

‘Really?’ she asked with a bitter laugh. Why was he bothering to pretend? She’d prefer it if he told her the truth: that he loved her but just not enough. She wasn’t quite good enough.

‘You’re different, Maggie,’ Grey began and sat at her feet, pulling both her hands from around her knees, trying to make her hold him. ‘I love you, I never meant to hurt you. I am so, so sorry. Can’t you forgive me?’

She whisked her hands away, but he laid his dark head on her chair, pleading, imploring. It would be so easy to reach out and touch him, make it all go away and start again. Go on holiday, sell the apartment, move somewhere else, anything to paper over the crack. Maggie felt her fingers reach out, an inch away from brushing the softness of his hair.

Marriage – that would be the ultimate Band-Aid. A sign that they were together despite it all. Her mum would love it if she got married. Poor Mum, always hoping for the fairytale ending for her daughter. But Grey had never discussed marriage with her. Perhaps she wasn’t worth that, either.

Maggie’s hand stilled on its way to his hair. She could forgive Grey, she could forgive him almost anything. But then it would happen again. Other women, who’d work at the university and pity her, understanding that a prince like Grey wouldn’t be satisfied with just one woman. That was the price a woman like Maggie had to pay to be with a man like Grey. Why hadn’t she realised that there was a trade-off, a price?

She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t pay that price.

Suddenly, her running shoes seemed very inviting. Even home, the confines of Summer Street where her life had never been storybook perfect, was better than this.

It was familiar, somewhere she could lick her wounds. Shona and Dr Phil were probably wrong about running away. Now, staying was the hard option and running was easy.

Christie had cooked a beautiful goulash by the time she heard James’s key in the lock.

Goulash in honour of her dear Hungarian friend, Lenkya, who’d once said, ‘You can kill a man or cure him in the kitchen.’ This had been nearly forty years before, when Christie’s culinary expertise extended to making porridge or boiling eggs.

‘Cooking is the heart of the home and is the place where the woman is queen,’ Lenkya pointed out in the husky Hungarian accent that would have made the phone book sound fascinating, should she ever want to recite it.

Lenkya had lived below Christie in a house on Dunville Avenue that contained a veritable warren of bedsits.

‘If you can kill in the kitchen, I’ll end up in the dock for murder,’ Christie had said merrily.

She was dark-haired then and when she and Lenkya walked the half-mile to Ranelagh to buy groceries, people often mistook the two women with their flashing dark eyes, hand-span waists and lustrous curls for sisters.

‘You should learn to cook,’ said Lenkya, who could rustle up the tenderest stew from a handful of root vegetables, a scattering of herbs and a scraggy piece of meat. ‘How have you never learned before this? In my country, women learn to look after themselves. I can grow vegetables, raise chickens, kill chickens, pouf –’ She twisted both hands round an imaginary chicken’s neck. ‘Like that. If you are hungry, you soon learn.’

‘My mother cooked for all of us, my father, my brothers and sister,’ Christie told her. It was harder to explain the family dynamics which meant cooking was the only power her mother had ever had. Under Christie’s father’s thumb all the time, it was only when Maura was in front of her stove that she was in charge. If it was possible to kill or cure a man in the kitchen, Christie wondered how her mother had resisted the impulse to kill her overbearing husband.

James hadn’t known Lenkya well, but he’d been benefiting from her cooking expertise ever since. Food was all about love, Christie knew now. Feeding your family, giving them chicken soup when they were sick, and apple cake to take away the bitterness in their mouth when they were lovelorn: that was how you could cure them. Love and healing flew out of her kitchen into her home. Her life was nothing like her poor mother’s and she had no need of killing.

‘Hello, Christie.’ James put his arms round her and held her tightly. He smelled of the train, of dusty streets and other people’s cigarette smoke. He looked, as he so often did these days, tired and in need of a long, long sleep.