Second Chance (22 page)

The band is a jazz trio. Not too soft, not too loud. The music is wonderful, and Holly is stunned at how much she is enjoying this: sitting at the bar listening to music, a beer in hand – and God knows when was the last time she sat and enjoyed a beer – a beer! Vodka and tonic is more her speed these days.

She is surrounded by good people. Easy people. People who don’t need to impress, who aren’t judging her but are just happy to be where they are and with who they’re with.

So different from her life with Marcus, and her role as Marcus’s wife.

Ah. Marcus.

She told Marcus she was going out, just wasn’t entirely truthful in telling him who with. She mentioned Will, couldn’t lie completely, but told him that there was a group of them going: Paul and Anna, Olivia, a couple of others. ‘It’s such a shame you’re not here,’ she lied to Marcus on the phone. ‘We’ll miss you.’

‘Have fun,’ he said distractedly, and she hadn’t felt guilty about telling him a lie.

Hugs all around at the end of the evening, and Will turns to Holly. ‘I’m going to pop in to drop some stuff off to Mum and Dad tomorrow, and I’m planning on staying for lunch. Do you want to come? They’d love to see you.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Holly looks at her watch, stalling for time. Tomorrow. Marcus is still in Manchester and not expected home before late afternoon. She doesn’t have any plans for tomorrow other than the usual Saturday with the kids.

‘I have the kids,’ Holly says, not sure what Will is saying. Although he is not saying anything other than come and see my parents who know and love you.

‘So bring them.’ Will grins. ‘I’d love to meet them.’

‘Do you want to check with your mum and dad? Make sure it’s okay?’

‘Oh come on, Holly, this is Mum and Dad. You know Mum will have cooked enough to feed an army
and, as far as she’s concerned, you’re family anyway.’

‘Will you tell them we’re coming? Make sure it’s okay?’

‘If it makes you happier, I’ll tell her you’re coming. Does that mean you’re coming?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great!’ Will says, and with that they have one last hug goodbye and Holly climbs into her car. She turns the music up and smiles all the way home. She smiles as she gets undressed, smiles as she brushes her teeth, smiles as she falls into bed. It takes her two hours to get to sleep, two hours and an eventual Valium, but even as she lies there replaying every minute of her evening, the smile never leaves her face.

‘Do they have children?’ Oliver bounces up and down in his booster seat as Holly winds her way through the quiet streets.

‘Yes, darling,’ Holly says, ‘but not your age. Remember Mummy’s friend Tom? He was their son, and also Will, who you’ll meet today.’

‘Mum?’

‘
Mummy
. Yes, darling?’ She hates that Oliver has started shortening her name to Mum. Every time she hears a Mum, she feels his childhood slipping through her fingers like sand. Such a small thing to try to grasp onto, being a Mummy rather than a Mum, but one that Holly refuses to give up.

‘Mummy.’ Oliver rolls his eyes, unseen in the back seat. ‘Mummy, do you think that Tom can see us from heaven? Do you think he’s watching us now?’

‘I think he probably is, darling. Sometimes I talk to him, and I feel that he’s here with us even though he’s not. I dream about him too.’ Holly has had precisely two dreams about Tom since his death. Both times, Tom just appeared out of nowhere, and Holly, shocked, flung her arms around him saying: I thought you were dead. Tom hugged her and reassured her that he was fine. That he was happy where he was and that he wanted her to be happy too.

She awoke confused but with a sense of peace each time, and although Holly never thought she was one to buy into contact with your loved ones in the afterlife, she is now certain that Tom is watching her, that he is fine and this is his way of reassuring her.

Daisy’s high voice pipes up from the back seat. ‘Mummy, I want to go to heaven. Can I go to heaven?’

Holly shudders. ‘Not for many years, darling.’

‘Silly,’ Oliver reprimands her. ‘Heaven is where you go when you die. You don’t want to die.’

‘I do!’ Daisy insists. ‘I want to die and go to heaven, and there are beautiful princesses there and ponies, and I do! I want to die!’

‘Daisy!’ Holly’s voice is harsher than she intends. Even though Daisy can have no idea what she is saying, she cannot bear Daisy saying that. ‘You mustn’t say you want to die. I would miss you terribly if you died, and you have too much to do on this earth first.’

‘See?’ Oliver is triumphant. ‘Told ya.’ And Holly slips in the audio CD of
Harry Potter
in a bid to keep them quiet.

‘Oh look at her!’ Maggie stands back and watches Daisy with a delighted smile on her face. ‘She’s a little
you
, Holly! She’s exactly like you. Gorgeous!’

‘And this is Oliver. Oliver, say how do you do to Mrs Fitzgerald.’

‘Mrs? Don’t be ridiculous, Holly. Mrs Fitzgerald is my mother-in-law. I’m Maggie to everyone, children included.’

Of course she’s Maggie, Holly thinks. How could
she possibly be anything else? Holly has never been comfortable instructing her children to call her friends Mr and Mrs, but Marcus insists. Insists that all children are to call all adults Mr and Mrs, irrespective of how good friends they might be.

It is, she realizes, part of Marcus’s pomposity, part of his behaving how he thinks he is supposed to behave if people are to believe that he is from the upper-crust background he so desperately wants to come from. In line with his behaviour, Marcus has very clear rules about how the children ought to behave.

They are to shake adults by the hand, look them in the eye and say how do you do. They are to sit at the table and not speak unless they are spoken to. They are not to watch television during the week and only an hour on each day of the weekend. Daisy is to wear smocked dresses and patent-leather Mary Janes, and Oliver is to wear corduroy trousers and woollen sweaters.

Never mind that Daisy has a will stronger than anyone Holly has ever met, and getting her into
anything
that isn’t pink, purple and sparkly is a battle Holly doesn’t have the energy for.

Never mind that Oliver is nearly seven and wants to be a super-cool skateboarding dude, dressed in Gap Kids like all the other children in his class. Marcus seems to want the children to belong to another era and is bewildered and not terribly happy that Holly is clearly not following his instructions when he is out of the house.

‘They’re children, for God’s sake!’ Holly actually
moaned to Marcus’s mother one day when Joanie was on a rare visit from Bristol.

‘They’re only little,’ Joanie agreed with Holly. ‘And we’re living in 2006, not 1886.’ Holly burst into laughter. ‘You just keep on doing what you’re doing and they’ll turn out great.’ Joanie nodded. ‘I think you’re a wonderful mother.’

‘Thank you, Joanie.’ Holly smiled at her, wondering how such a down-to-earth woman had produced a son like Marcus.

Holly stands at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes, and stops for a few seconds, smiling as she gazes across the garden to the large old oak tree at the bottom, where Peter and Oliver are looking very industrious as Peter – rather bravely, Holly thinks – holds a nail and Oliver bangs it very carefully.

Peter came into the kitchen when they arrived and squatted down on his haunches so he was the same height as the kids.

‘You look like you’re very strong,’ he said to Oliver. ‘Do you have big muscles?’

Oliver nodded cautiously.

‘Oh good, because I need some help building a tree-house. Do you think you’d be any good at building a treehouse?’

Oliver almost squealed his answer, jiggling up and down with excitement.

‘Well, actually it is built, but the ladder is broken, and there’s no point in having a treehouse if you can’t climb up to it, is there? How are you with a hammer and nails?’

‘I’m really good with a hammer,’ Oliver said, although, as far as Holly knows, he’s never picked up a hammer in his life.

‘Come on, then. I’ll be the builder and you can be my second-in-command. Sound good?’ He extended a hand to Oliver, who immediately slipped his hand into it and nodded as he walked out to the garden, Peter stopping in the doorway and turning around to wink at Holly.

She watches Oliver chat away to Peter nineteen to the dozen, and echo Peter’s pose, hands on his hips as he surveys his work, in a bid to be just like him.

‘He’s lovely with kids, isn’t he?’ Maggie slides up next to Holly and smiles as she looks at them. ‘He misses Dustin and Violet so very much. We both do. Nothing like the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent, and so difficult when they live so far away.’

‘Have you spoken to them? How are they? How’s Sarah?’

Maggie lets out a long sigh. ‘Mostly distraught. I expected her to be fabulously stoic, to get on with her life and keep her grief contained, but it seems grief gets us in unexpected ways. Her sister is living with her for a while, helping out enormously with the kids. We offered to have the kids for Christmas, give her a break, time to grieve properly, but of course she rightly pointed out that the kids are the only thing keeping her going at the moment.’

‘And the kids?’

‘I think a lot of it is over their heads, particularly Dustin, the little one. Violet is struggling with it. She
understands that her daddy isn’t coming back and just misses him hugely. She draws him pictures every day…’ Maggie’s voice tails off and she wipes her eyes, biting her lip to suppress the tears, willing them to go away.

Holly puts her arm around Maggie, and Maggie rests her head on Holly’s shoulder. Together they stand at the window until Daisy, sitting at the kitchen table making doll’s houses out of cereal boxes, demands some help with the tissue ‘sheets’.

At one fifteen, there’s still no sign of Will. The roast lamb is ‘relaxing’ on the counter, the fresh garden mint has been chopped into a sauce with vinegar and sugar, the vegetables are steaming, and the potatoes are crisping in the oven.

Holly has been surreptitiously looking at her watch for the last hour. She is dying to ask when he is coming – whether he is, in fact, coming – but she does not want to give Maggie any indication of what she might be feeling.

Hell, she doesn’t even know herself what she might be feeling.

She does know that she got home last night on a high that continued this morning when she woke up knowing that she had something to look forward to today. Marcus phoned after breakfast and even he commented on how happy she sounded.

‘I just woke up on the right side of the bed,’ she said.

‘How was last night?’ he asked, miraculously, for most of the time he never asked her anything about her days.

‘It was great. Great band. Lovely evening.’

‘That’s nice,’ he said distractedly, and didn’t ask anything else. He would be due home late afternoon. What plans did she have? She told him lunch at Peter and Maggie’s and that she’d see him at home later.

She didn’t tell him that she’d spent the last hour trying on clothes to come up with the perfect combination for Saturday lunch. Not to look as if she tried too hard, not too mumsy, but comfortably casual. She’d settled on skin-tight cords, a long-sleeved stripy T-shirt and baseball shoes, another recent purchase.

But with every minute that passes, the high is starting to leave, and at one fifteen Holly is moments away from sinking into a depression. Stop it, she tries to tell herself. You are here with your children, here for Peter and Maggie, not here to see Will. So what if he doesn’t come, you’ll still have a lovely time. You’re
having
a lovely time.

But she knows it’s not true.

Maggie calls everyone to the table, and Holly promises herself she will not ask about the empty setting at one end.

She doesn’t have to.

‘Where’s Will?’ Peter says.

Maggie shrugs. ‘You know our Will. Saying he’ll come at twelve means he could come any time between ten in the morning and ten at night, if he comes at all.’

Peter shakes his head. ‘Sometimes that boy is so infuriating.’

‘We’ve learnt not to rely on Will very much. Although…’ she shoots a cautious look at Daisy and
Oliver, both engaged in teasing Pippa with a green dental chew that has to taste better than it looks, given Pippa’s overexcited reaction ‘… he has been fantastic through all… this. I never thought we could rely on Will the way we have, but he’s come through.’

‘Yes, he has.’ Peter nods sombrely. ‘And now I suppose it’s back to business.’

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,’ Maggie says, even though she has eaten almost nothing since the day she heard about Tom and has dropped over a stone, which, at her age, makes her look haggard and old. ‘Let me serve the kiddies first.’

Holly clears up the dishes, then excuses herself to go to the loo. She feels like crying. From the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression in the space of an hour. Grow up, she hisses at her reflection in the mirror. You are a married woman, she tells herself. Stop behaving like a teenager.

But that is exactly how she feels. Like a teenager who has no control over her emotions. Whose emotions and mood can be changed in a heartbeat by external influences.

She still has no idea where this is leading, still thinks of herself as someone who would never have an affair; and the truth is she hasn’t contemplated anything happening between her and Will, hasn’t thought about what the end result of all this… friendship… might be.

She knows she is attracted to him, but he’s gorgeous, how could
anyone
not be attracted to him? She is still waiting, wishing, hoping that at some point in the fore
seeable future, the attraction will wane and they will have a true friendship.

That doesn’t mean she’s going to act upon the attraction, doesn’t mean anything’s going to happen. And yes, so there have been a couple of times when she has closed her eyes while having sex with Marcus and has pictured Will there, but only out of curiosity, only to spice up their sex life a bit, and God knows it worked.

What is clear to her is how much she has missed having a man in her life who is a friend. Marcus has never been her friend, she realizes now. Has never been her partner. She would tell people in the beginning that Marcus was her best friend, but she knows now that was to make up for never feeling physically attracted to him, as if somehow being her best friend would be enough.