Marriage Make-Up

That had been just after she had learnt she was pregnant, and she hadn’t seen him since.

Abbie gave a pleased smile as she totted up the final column of figures some time later and closed the account book, placing it on top of the pile of other papers she had prepared for her accountants.

She knew how dubious several of her friends had been all those years ago—ten years ago—when she had announced that she was going to set up her own employment agency, but after fifteen years of experience of working in the hotel and catering trade, doing everything from waitressing and chambermaiding right through to being asked to take responsibility for organising a conference, she had learned enough to take such a big step and, more importantly, in her mind at least, she had the contacts on both sides of the business to succeed.

And she had been proved right; some of the staff who had been with her at the very start were still on her books. Her reputation had been passed by word of mouth to others. Along with her honesty and her loyalty to her staff, she was known never to supply staff to anyone she felt would abuse their position of authority over them in any way.

Her rates of pay were good and she explained firmly to anyone who quibbled about the amount she charged that she supplied the best and paid them accordingly. Abbie could supply catering staff right across the range, from a butler to lend gravitas to a formal private affair to a French chef to step in at the last minute and provide a buffet for five hundred people at an important convention, and everything in between.

Cathy, just as soon as she herself had been old enough, had been encouraged to earn her own extra pocket money by waiting at tables and serving behind a bar, just as her mother had once done. It didn’t matter that once her daughter was at university Abbie could quite easily have afforded to supplement her grant very generously indeed; she’d wanted Cathy to have the independence and pride of knowing she could earn something for herself—just so long as her part-time work didn’t detract from her studies, of course.

Abbie’s own parents had offered to help her when her marriage had fallen apart, and had even begged her to move back home with them, but she had stubbornly insisted on supporting herself and now she was glad that she had done so, that she had made an independent life for herself here in this middle-sized, middle England town, where Sam had brought her as a new bride. Then they had both planned to make their future here—Sam as a university lecturer, with plans to become a writer one day, and Abbie also working at the university, in the archive department.

She glanced at her watch. Abbie had promised a friend who had become an aficionado of car-boot sales that she would go through her attic and see if she could find anything she wanted to dispose of. She had just enough time, if she was quick, to do so before her evening appointment with the manager of the new luxurious conference centre which had recently been opened as an extension of a local hotel.

Abbie herself had actually been approached to see if she would be interested in taking up the appointment as manager of the centre, but she had declined. She preferred being her own boss, being in charge of her own life. It might sometimes be lonelier that way, but it was also much safer—and safety when it came to her relationships, be they professional or personal, was something that was very, very important to her.

Not even her closest women-friends were allowed to get too close to her, just in case they might hurt her in some way, and as for men…

It wasn’t that she was a man-hater, she denied as she made her way up the narrow flight of steps that gave her access to the attic space, no matter what some men might think. It was just that having been hurt very badly once, having been called a liar and worse, she was not about to give any man the opportunity to do so a second time. Why should she? She would be a fool if she did. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been times…men who had tempted her, but the memory of the pain Sam had caused her had always held her back. He had told her he loved her, that he would always love her, that he would never hurt her, but he had lied to her and she had believed him. How could she allow herself to trust another man after that? And not just for her own sake, for her own protection, but for Cathy’s as well. Letting herself be hurt was one thing—she was an adult capable of making her own choices and of paying the price for them—but Cathy was more at risk. Cathy needed love and security.

Abbie pushed open the loft door, wrinkling her nose against the smell of stale air and dust. She hadn’t been up here since just after Cathy had left home for university.

That was where Cathy had met Stuart, who had been taking a postgraduate course, and for a while, during the early stages of their relationship, Abbie had been worried that history was going to repeat itself.

It had been Fran, one of her oldest friends, who had warned her that she was in danger of alienating Cathy and damaging their relationship by becoming almost fixated on the belief that Stuart would hurt Cathy as Sam had hurt her.

‘Stuart isn’t the same,’ Fran had told her, ignoring Abbie’s refusal to discuss the subject with her. ‘And even if he was,’ she had added hardly, ‘it’s Cathy’s right to make her own mistakes and her own choices. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a parent is letting go,’ she had added wisely. ‘I understand how you feel about Cathy, we all do, but she’s an adult now, Abbie, and she’s in love—’

‘She thinks she’s in love,’ Abbie had interrupted angrily. ‘She’s only known him a matter of months, and already she’s talking about moving in with him and—’

‘Give her a chance,’ Fran had counselled her. ‘Give them a chance.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ Abbie had grumbled. ‘Your two are still only teenagers…’

‘And you think that makes things easier?’ Fran had rolled her eyes theatrically.

‘Lloyd and Susie haven’t been speaking all week. Lloyd caught her in a passionate embrace on the front doorstep the other night, and, predictably, he’s suddenly turned into a protective, outraged father. And, of course, Susie’s just at that age where she thinks she’s old enough to make her own decisions—even though she isn’t—and then she had to go and make matters worse by telling Lloyd that she was the one who snogged Luke, and not the other way round.’

‘Hmm…’ Momentarily Abbie had been diverted from her own problems.

Susie, Lloyd and Fran’s elder daughter, was her godchild and back then had been a formidably feisty fourteen-year-old.

Along with Michelle, Fran and Lloyd’s younger daughter, she had inherited her father’s striking red hair and there was certainly no way that there was any remote resemblance between Lloyd’s two daughters and her own, Cathy; if Sam had stayed around long enough he would very quickly have been forced to withdraw his accusation that Lloyd was Cathy’s father.

Poor Lloyd. He hadn’t met Fran when she and Sam had split up, and he had been wonderfully supportive in the early months when she had first been on her own, even hesitantly suggesting that perhaps they should marry. She had refused him, of course. She had known that she didn’t love him, nor he her, even if everyone else had considered them to be a pair before Sam had appeared in her life.

Gingerly kneeling down in the only space she could find in the piles of stuff heaped all over the loft floor, Abbie started moving things out of the way so that she could get to the boxes of bits and pieces she knew were stored up there, and which she intended to hand on to her friend for her car-booting sorties.

As she did so she knocked over a pile of children’s books. She paused to straighten them up, her eyes misting unexpectedly with tears as she recognised Cathy’s first proper reading books.

How well she remembered the thrill of wonder and excitement she had felt when Cathy read her first proper word, her first full sentence. How proud she had been, how sure that her daughter was the cleverest, prettiest little girl there ever was, how humbled by the knowledge that she had given birth to this special, magical little person—the same special, magical, perfect child who had refused to eat her supper and later thrown a tantrum in the supermarket of blush-making proportions!

Abbie’s smile faded as she also remembered how it had felt to have no one to share the special moments with, to have to wait until she could telephone her parents to tell them of Cathy’s wondrous achievement.

Firmly she resisted the temptation to indulge in nostalgia. She was a busy career woman with a full diary and very little time; the daydreamer who went soft-eyed and emotional over every small incident in her life had been firmly suppressed and controlled. Another Abbie had had to develop and take shape. An Abbie whom people respected and sometimes even found slightly formidable, an Abbie who had learned to deal with life and all its small and manifold problems by and for herself…An Abbie who could and would, if necessary, fight like a tigress to protect her child, an Abbie who had no need of sentiment or regrets about the past, and who had certainly no need for a man in her life to mistrust her and hurt her.

She crawled across the floor to where she thought the boxes were stored, cursing as the dust made her cough and then cursing again and trying to ignore the ominous pattering and scuffling sounds she could hear in the rafters above her. Birds, that was all…nothing to worry about.

She reached the boxes and pulled the first one out, reaching for the one behind it. Only it wouldn’t move; it appeared to be wedged against something. Gritting her teeth, Abbie felt behind it and then froze as her fingers curled round a piece of net fabric.

She knew immediately what it was, but, even though caution warned her to leave well alone and ignore it, for some reason she didn’t.

Instead…Instead, her fingers trembled as she tugged harder on the fabric, clenching her teeth as she heard it rip slightly and the balled-up grey-white bundle of fabric finally came free of the small space she had jammed it into.

Once it had been pristine white, the tiny crystals sewn onto it glittering just as much as the diamonds in her engagement ring as she’d pirouetted around the fitting room, turning this way and that, her face flushed a delicate, happy pink as she waited for her mother to admire it.

She had been a fairy-tale bride, or so the report in the local paper had said, her wedding dress every little girl’s dream and most big girls’ as well—at least in those days. She had felt like a princess—a queen—as she’d walked proudly down the aisle on her father’s arm. And when Sam had finally raised her veil after the vicar had married them, and she had seen the look in his eyes, she had felt as if…as though…She had felt immortal, she remembered. Adored, cherished…loved…And it had never even occurred to her that there might come a day when she would feel any different, when Sam wouldn’t continue to look at her with that mixture of adoration and desire.

How naive she had been…How…how stupid.

Her mother, her parents, had tried to warn her that she was rushing into marriage, that she and Sam barely knew one another, but she wouldn’t listen to them. They were old; they had forgotten what it was like to be in love, how it felt to be wanted, to want to be with that one special person so much that you actually hurt when they weren’t there.

She and Sam had met by accident…literally…She had been riding her bicycle illegally through a part of the university campus which was prohibited to students, taking a short cut to a lecture.

At first when she had cannoned into Sam, almost running him down, she had assumed he was a fellow student—although she hadn’t recognised him from her own political history course—albeit rather older than her. And, whilst she had laughed and flushed as she’d apologised, her embarrassment had been caused not by the fact that she had nearly run him down, and certainly not by the fact that she was doing something prohibited, but by the way he had made her feel, by the way her body and her emotions were already reacting to him, by the sudden rush of sensation flooding her mind and her body.

She had later admitted to him that if he had taken her there and then, in the middle of the quadrangle on the short, sweet grass, she doubted that she would have made any move to stop him. That was the kind of effect he had had on her, even though at the time she had still been a virgin and her experience of the opposite sex had been limited to Lloyd’s chastely explorative kisses and attempts at a bit of mild petting.

When she had discovered that Sam was not, as she had assumed, a fellow student, but a newly appointed junior classics lecturer, who had just completed his doctorate at Harvard, she had been completely mortified and shocked.

He had read her a mild lecture about riding her bicycle through a prohibited area and then sent her on her way, and she had not expected to see him again.

Only two days later he had turned up at her lodgings, carrying a book which had fallen out of the basket of her bike. She could remember how embarrassed she had been about the fact that he had discovered her almost in tears over a newspaper story she had been reading.

The article had been accompanied by heart-and conscience-rending photographs of grave-eyed starving children in the Third World, which had made Abbie exclaim passionately to Sam, once he had discovered the reason for her tears, that she could never bring a child into a world where so many, many children were so desperately in need.

‘I expect you think I’m being over-emotional, don’t you?’ she had asked him self-consciously when she had herself back under control, but he had shaken his head.

‘No, I don’t,’ he’d told her sombrely. ‘As a matter of fact…’

He had never finished what he had been about to say because one of Abbie’s fellow lodgers had returned, bounding into her room to request Abbie’s assistance in the search for a borrowed book she had misplaced.

Sam had refused her offer of a cup of coffee, but it had been close to the beginning of the summer recess at the time, and to her astonishment, two weeks later, when she was lying in the garden of her parents’ home sunbathing, he had turned up and invited her out.

He had explained later that he hadn’t felt he was in a position to ask her out before, bearing in mind the fact that she was a student and he a lecturer. When he had explained that he’d felt uncomfortable about being thought of as the kind of lecturer who took advantage of his position to coerce young female students into sexual relationships with him, she had fallen even more deeply in love with him. He was so straightforward, so honest, so moral…Too moral on occasions…like the time he had refused to take her back to his rooms with him and make love to her.

‘You don’t want me,’ she’d accused him tearfully.