Now or Never

Less than four months after their marriage Laura had walked out, announcing that she was going to live with her godmother, and in the end it had been agreed that she should be allowed to do so, although Kit had told her over and over again that she must always consider the home he and Nicki shared to be her own.

She had returned briefly between leaving school and going on to university, to spend the summer with them, but if anything her hostility and resentment towards her stepmother had been even more marked in Nicki’s opinion, and she had been relieved to see Laura go.

That had been seven years ago. Seven years during which Laura had grown up and made her own life, only now she was back. And just thinking about her and what she had done filled Nicki with tension and seething anger.

‘Why? Why has she come here to us?’ she demanded angrily, pacing the kitchen floor as Kit sat and watched her. ‘It’s not even as if this has ever been her home, in any real sense! You sold your family home when we got married and the money was invested for her. We bought this house together.’

And she had supplied the bulk of the down payment and paid the mortgage, Nicki could have added, but of course she did not.

‘Because we’re her family,’ Kit answered her.

‘No!’ Nicki denied bitterly. ‘We are not her family, Kit. She has never wanted to be a part of this family. She has never accepted me as your wife or Joey as your son. You are her family. And that’s why she’s come here. To claim you, to cause discord between us and—’

‘Nicki, you’re reacting over-emotionally,’ Kit protested.

‘Me over-emotional?’ Nicki challenged him angrily. ‘The truth is that you just don’t want to accept the facts about Laura and her behaviour. You’d rather blame anyone than her! You just won’t see what she’s doing!

She’s already upset Joey. He’s the one you should really be protecting, and not her,’ she threw at Kit, tears burning her eyes. ‘He’s only a little boy and she’s an adult. Why has she come here? Has she told you yet?’

The look on his face was its own answer.

All Laura had said was that she had handed in her notice at work and given up the lease on her flat and that she needed to give herself a breathing space before she decided where she wanted her life to go.

It was incomprehensible to Nicki that a young woman in her mid-twenties should behave in such an irresponsible way, and had Laura actually been her child she would have been insisting on being given some answers to some far more pertinent questions than Kit seemed disposed to ask. Not for her the slightly nervous, conciliatory attitude adopted by Alice towards her aggressively determined daughter!

But, of course, Laura was not her child.

‘She’ll talk to us when she’s ready, Nicki, and until then we have to respect her privacy,’ Kit had told her firmly. ‘Right now, Laura needs our love and support just as much as Joey does, but in a different way.’

Laura was a bone of contention between them that was never going to go away, Nicki acknowledged grimly.

Where was Kit? Nicki wondered irritably five hours later. He knew she had work to do tonight and he had promised to be home early, but there was no sign of him.

Angrily, she remembered the row they had had last night. An exchange of destructive hissed whispers in the darkness of their bedroom, both of them tensely aware that they might be overheard.

The result had been an ‘atmosphere’, which had been still hanging over them like a black cloud this morning.

Even before Laura’s arrival they had been having problems. Kit’s business as an independent insurance broker and financial adviser was suffering badly in the current economic climate—a reflection on the general situation and not on him personally, as Nicki had already pointed out to him.

Part of the trouble was that she was simply not the kind of woman who was prepared to spend her time propping up a male ego, even when that ego belonged to the man she loved. She had gone down that road with her first marriage and all she had got from it had been a bullying, violent husband, from whom she had been glad to escape through divorce.

But when she had fallen in love with Kit he had been in no need of any ego massaging. He had applauded the fact that she was a successful businesswoman in her own right, just as she had admired his uncomplaining shouldering of the responsibility of caring for his terminally ill wife and his teenage daughter.

She and Kit had originally met when he had approached her agency wanting to find a part-time housekeeper to help him with the responsibility of caring for his wife, Jennifer, and providing a home for Laura, then thirteen years old.

There had been an immediate spark of attraction between them, which they had both equally immediately and separately chosen to ignore. After all, Kit had been a married man. And she had been still bruised from her first marriage, with a young and fragile business to nurture, and no place and even less need in her life for the emotional trauma of falling in love with a man in Kit’s position.

The agency was to be her life, she had insisted to Maggie.

It had been thanks to Maggie that Nicki had set up the agency in the first place. After the breakup of her first marriage and before she had met Kit, Nicki had done temping work. When the agency she had worked for had announced that it was closing down, she had been panic-stricken, knowing how much she’d needed the money she’d been earning.

‘So set up your own agency,’ Maggie had told her.

‘I can’t,’ Nicki had protested. ‘I could never run my own business. I don’t know how.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Maggie had contradicted her firmly. ‘You just don’t realise that you do.’

And somehow or other Maggie, being Maggie, had managed to chivvy and downright bully her into taking what had then, to Nicki, seemed to be an impossibly dangerous step.

To her own surprise, what had started out as a small venture run from her own home had now become a very demanding and thankfully healthily profitable business. And what had been even more surprising had been the discovery that as the business had grown so had she; that she positively enjoyed the challenges it had brought her and that she was far more business-minded than she had ever known she could be. Or at least she had been until Joey had been born.

‘You’re pregnant. But you can’t be. You’re too old. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!’ had been Laura’s furious reaction when they had told her the news about Nicki’s pregnancy. ‘You’re being such a typical second wife,’ she had taunted Nicki when Kit had not been there. ‘They always rush to get pregnant. I’d hate to be in your position. Always feeling you’ve got something to prove, always knowing that someone else had been there before you. It isn’t my father who wants this baby, no matter what you say. It’s you. After all, he already has me!’

It had been just over a week after they had broken the news of her pregnancy to Laura that she had announced that she intended to leave. By then Nicki had had enough of trying to placate her. Overwhelmed with ‘morning sickness’ that lasted virtually all day, beset by anxieties about her agency, and worrying herself sick about the wisdom of her actually having a child who had not been planned, she had been in no fit state to cope with Laura as well.

The peace that had descended on the household after Laura’s departure had given Nicki a blissful taste of pure and absolute happiness, as within days of her stepdaughter going so had her morning sickness. But with that happiness had also come a bitter aftertaste of guilt, from knowing how badly Kit felt about Laura leaving. His anxiety for her had overshadowed Nicki’s pregnancy and Joey’s birth—so much so that Nicki had suffered a severe and unexpected bout of depression following the birth. Laura, predictably, had refused even to acknowledge the baby, never mind come and see him, and Joey had in fact been walking before Laura had met her new half-brother for the first time.

Nicki tensed now, collecting her thoughts as the kitchen door opened and Kit and Laura came in.

‘Where’s Joey?’ Kit asked as he looked round the kitchen.

‘In bed,’ Nicki told him sharply. ‘It’s past his bedtime and, as I told you this morning, I have work to do this evening.’

Nicki paused deliberately before reminding him, ‘You were supposed to be reading him the next chapter of his book.’

‘Oh, Dad, remember when you used to read my bedtime story?’ Laura smiled, interrupting Nicki, one hand on her father’s arm. She threw Nicki a smugly triumphant look before adding, ‘You never missed a single evening, no matter how busy you were. But of course things were different for us. With Mummy being so ill I really only had you. I expect that’s why we’re so especially close.’

As Nicki listened she could feel herself starting to grind her teeth. She itched to be able to tell Laura that she’d made her point and that there was no need for her to over-egg her bread, but if she did she knew that Laura would immediately turn to Kit for support. The last thing Nicki wanted right now was to be humiliated in front of her stepdaughter!

‘You mustn’t blame Dad for being late, Nicki,’ Laura was saying mock apologetically now. ‘It’s my fault! I wanted to have a daddy and daughter chat with him. Private stuff …’

As Laura leaned into Kit’s side Nicki tried to control the fury building up inside her. She knew that Laura was deliberately manipulating the situation, and trying to cause an argument between them.

‘I loved driving the new BMW,’ she added enthusiastically, ignoring Nicki to speak to her father. ‘And thanks for letting me have the spare set of keys, Dad. I promise I’ll check with you before I borrow it.’

Nicki had had enough.

‘Actually, Laura, I am the one you should be checking with,’ Nicki told her stepdaughter with icy rage. ‘The BMW is actually my car.’

Nicki could feel her face burning with resentment and guilt as she saw the look Kit was giving her.

* * *

Nope, she still appeared the same, Laura acknowledged derisively half an hour later as she peered at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She had not suddenly turned back into her pony-tailed fifteen-year-old self, even if she had just given a pretty good display of that self to her stepmother.

What was it about the relationship between oneself and one’s family that somehow meant that within minutes of being with them one reverted to childhood, not to mention childish habits? Laura knew that she was not alone in experiencing this unpalatable phenomenon, just as she also knew she was not alone in being guilty of still enacting in adulthood the travails of her teenage step-parent wars!

It was a subject her generation were experts on and a powerful bonding agent. ‘Show me a person who can put their hand on their heart and honestly say that they accepted and welcomed their step-parents from the word go, and I’ll show you an alien. It is a universally accepted truth that a child in possession of two parents is not in need of a step-parent,’ one of Laura’s friends was fond of saying facetiously. But there was a certain black-humoured element of truth in her statement.