Now or Never

Maggie watched Oliver warily. In her younger days she knew she would have been tempted to feel flattered by such evidence of jealousy, but Dan was an important part of her past and of herself, and not even to please Oliver could she deny what she and Dan had once shared. What they had once shared … but what about her ongoing protection of him?

That was merely a habit, and nothing more, Maggie immediately reassured herself. But nonetheless, Oliver had raised an issue that Maggie knew she ought to deal with.

No matter what she might have said in the heat of her distress earlier, the friendship she shared with the others meant far too much for her to see it damaged. Nicki’s reaction to her news had hurt her, yes, but that did not mean that she no longer valued what they shared.

She could tell Nicki that, but somehow she did not feel able to tell her the truth about Dan. Why? To protect Nicki, or to protect her ex-husband?

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Oliver apologising ruefully.

A little guiltily Maggie shook her head. Oliver had obviously mistaken her absorbed silence in her own thoughts for anger and punishment.

Immediately she went towards him, leaning her head on his chest and wrapping her arms as far around him as she could. He had done so much for her; given her so much. After Dan she had believed there would never be another man she could love, another man who would love her enough to heal the pain of her loss.

‘You should tell Nicki,’ Oliver was insisting.

‘I think there’s more to her reaction than just the fact that Dan and I never had children,’ Maggie responded. ‘I’m concerned about her, Oliver. She was so wrought up, so … so unlike her normal self.’

‘Maybe so, but my concern is all for you and our baby,’ Oliver informed her.

Their baby … The baby her best friend felt she had no right to have!

These years of their lives they were going through now were, Maggie knew, a very, very dangerous rite of passage; a rite of passage that in many ways had become the last female taboo.

Maggie felt strongly that it was the responsibility of her own generation—the generation that had so successfully pushed back so many boundaries, and gifted so many freedoms to the decades of women following in their footsteps—to take up this challenge as they had done so many others.

This treacherous passage across the turbulence of the deep, dangerous emotional waters of these years were in their way as traumatic and life-defining as, perhaps even more so than, those of being a teenager.

Certainly no one—as far as she knew—wrote witty diaries featuring the hormone-induced miseries of her age group. Women of a ‘certain age’, to use a phrase that Maggie detested, had, it seemed, to be divided into two very different groups: those who clung gamely or ridiculously to the wreckage of their youth (depending on which paper and magazines one read) or those who simply opted to disappear and become ‘past it’ secondary people, useful only for the support they gave to others.

But why should this be the case? Maggie questioned. Where was it written down that it had to be so? Was it that women stripped of their youth but left with their power were such a strong force that they had to be mocked and reviled, taunted and made to feel that they were now second-class citizens? Maggie didn’t know. What she did know was that she was there in the vanguard, holding her breath, cheering on her own generation, waiting to see if they could perform the same transformation on this age that they had performed on every other they had passed through.

Her peers, her co-baby boomers, bulge yearers, were an awesomely powerful force, a huge wave of humanity, conceived in hope and celebration, a generation born into peace and prosperity, given unique gifts by their parents and their memories of those who had sacrificed their lives and freedoms.

Truly, if one wanted to look at it in such a way, a very special ‘Fairy Godmother’ had stood silently, rejoicing and hoping, in the wings at their births.

They’d been sprung free of the destructive trap of war that had snared their parents and grandparents, and no limits had been set on what they could achieve or what they could be.

Their lives had been a whole new learning curve for humanity, and, yes, there had been mistakes, foolishness, vanity, but also there had been spectacular life-changing, life-enhancing steps forward, ‘giant leaps’ for mankind of many different types, and this, their move forward into something so reviled and feared by folklore, was surely in its own way one very giant leap.

Get it right and, not just her own sex, but men and women alike of future generations would only look back in fond amusement that there could ever have been a time when a woman’s fiftieth birthday was something she suffered in fear and shame. Get it wrong and they would be consigning not just themselves, but heaven alone knew how many future generations to a life as medieval in its way as that of refusing to allow women to learn to read and write.

And, Maggie felt, it was men like Oliver who would share and rejoice in her sex’s crossing of this Styx-like river of fear.

The change of life! It was a turbulent and on occasion even frightening time, no one could deny that, but the strength it took to grow through it was life-enhancing and life-giving. Maggie knew far more about herself and her needs, her realities now than she had ever done as a girl. The things she had taken for granted then were infinitely more precious to her now, and those precious things included her friends. And her memories.

That her fellow humans had given her this chance to have the child she had so much yearned for, and with the right man, was surely something that should be celebrated, a glorious, wonderful gift that she had made a vow to appreciate and treasure, to love and send out into the world knowing how generously and with how much love he or she had been given life.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ Oliver was whispering sexily in her ear.

Maggie hid a small smile. How many times in the early days of their marriage had she and Dan exchanged those very words? Young lovers did make up in bed. And Oliver was young—at least compared to her. On the list of dos and don’ts they had been given by the clinic had been the information that sex was okay, so long as they were careful.

When she had learned about Dan’s affair her sex drive had deserted her completely, and she had believed that it had gone for good, destroyed by her pain, until Oliver had shown her otherwise! With him she had discovered the zest and excitement she remembered from her youth; she had relearned the pleasure of being physically loved, of giving and sharing that love. And she had also learned that perhaps the strongest aphrodisiac in the world was to be loved and desired by someone who simply wanted to put her needs first.

Dan had been a sexy, skilful, passionate lover, but it was Oliver who had shown her what sensitivity could bring to desire.

‘Mmm …’ she agreed, her eyes glinting with tenderness and teasing as she added insouciantly, ‘They did say at the clinic that I should make sure I got enough sleep.’

‘Sleep. That wasn’t …’

As she started to laugh Oliver grinned at her.

‘Okay, but just you wait until later,’ he mock threatened her as they went upstairs, their arms around one another.

The sight of Stuart’s car parked outside the house as she stopped her own made Alice’s stomach clench a little. She had known he was due to return home this evening, but she had not been sure when.

The others had thought it very glamorous when she had first met Stuart and she had learned that he was an airline pilot, and if she was honest so had she! He had stood out dramatically amongst the boys who formed part of their extended crowd of friends, tall, tanned from his stopovers abroad, blue-eyed, blond-haired and so good-looking that Alice had wondered why on earth he’d been singling her out.

‘Because you are stunningly pretty, and good and sweet, and he’s fallen in love with you, stoopid,’ Nicki teased her gently.

‘Yeah, and he’s seen how sexy you look in those hot pants.’ Maggie laughed, ignoring Alice’s pink-cheeked protests.

The outfits Maggie insisted they wore for their ‘gigs’, Alice suspected, got them far more attention than their music.

Stuart obviously thought so, because one of the first things he did was ask her not to wear them.

‘There’s only one man I want you to look sexy for and that’s me!’ he told her with the same dizzyingly masterful maturity with which he swept her off her feet.

Stuart no longer flew commercial flights. Instead he worked for the airline as an instructor, flying only as a relief pilot when necessary, which was what he had recently been doing.

‘Don’t you ever worry about him … I mean, mixing with all those air stewardesses?’ She was asked that question so many times over the years that she had her response off pat. A smile, a gentle laugh and small shake of her head. But of course she worried. Especially in the early years of their marriage. Stuart was after all a highly sexed man. But he was also a man who showed in many different ways that he loved her.

This house, for instance, that he insisted on buying when they first knew that her second pregnancy was twins. She was horrified at the cost of it—a very large detached house, set in its own immense garden, with an adjacent paddock. She protested that they could not possibly afford it, but Stuart was equally insistent that he wanted them to have it.

When the twins arrived, Stuart changed his own expensive car for a much smaller model and bought her a top-of-the-range four-wheel drive so that she could transport the children in comfort and safety. Zoë’s riding lessons and her pony and all the other extracurricular activities the children wanted, Stuart paid for without complaint. The allowance he insisted on giving her was a generous one, and the presents he brought her back from his trips drew the envious admiration of her friends.

No, Stuart never neglected her either in bed or out of it, something for which, if the stories she heard from other women were to be believed, she ought to be extremely grateful. And of course she was.

But the house, the allowance, the car, all of them were things she sometimes felt she would gladly have bartered just for the opportunity to sit down with Stuart and talk to him, to have her opinions sought and valued, to feel that he regarded her as an equal partner in their relationship, and that she mattered to him not because she was his wife, but because she was herself!

He was in the kitchen when she walked in, still an extraordinarily handsome man, his thick once-blond hair silver-grey now, the reading glasses he still pretended he did not really need adding an extra touch of subtle sexuality to his features. He always had been and always would be the kind of man who drew women’s glances, and, although he might deny it, Alice knew that there was that little touch of vanity in his make-up that meant that he needed their female recognition of his maleness.

As he saw her he shuffled the papers he had been reading and stood up.

‘Have you been in long?’ Alice asked.

‘A couple of hours. When I realised it was your night out with the others, I went down to the gym for an hour.’

Unlike her, Stuart was something of a gym fanatic, his body still lean and muscular. Alice had at one stage endeavoured to become more exercise conscious, but Stuart had laughed at her, refusing to take her seriously.