The Vow (34 page)

The two women were too busy discussing the capriciousness of cats to hear the radio newsreader announce,

‘
Junction 13 of the M25 has been closed after an accident involving a runaway lorry. Emergency services have been at the scene for some time and initial reports confirm there are fatalities.’

~

Susan lifted up the tiny matinee coat with matching bonnet and cooed, ‘Oh, isn’t it sweet!’

Julie had been out shopping for the baby and hadn’t been able to resist calling in on her mother on the way home. One after another the carrier ba
gs had been emptied as they looked over the clothes, soft toys and shawls she had decided were indispensable.

‘
Steve will have a fit when he finds out how much I’ve spent, but I don’t care,’ declared Julie as she began to pack everything back into their bags.

‘
Well at least you haven’t got to fork out for the buggy.’

‘
No, and we’re so grateful, Mum.’

‘
It’s our pleasure, love,’ Susan assured her. ‘It’s exciting for us too. I know your dad doesn’t say much, but he’s really looking forward to having a grandchild.’

‘
I know,’ said Julie with a happy smile. ‘How’s his indigestion by the way?’

‘
He’s still got it, but I’ve made him a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow evening and I expect that will sort him out. Now who’s that?’

A car had pulled into the drive and was partially hidden behind Julie’s elderly Ford. Going to the kitchen window Susan said with surprise,
‘It’s Jeff, the transport manager from Bendalls. Whatever is he doing here?’

She hurried out to meet him. Taking her place at the window Julie watched in horror as her mother’s face contorted with emotion, and then she heard her cry out in anguish.

~

It was the first time she had ever been in an Intensive Care unit, and she sincerely hoped never to repeat the experience. The staff, clad in white, some with facemasks, all with soft coverings on their shoes, seemed to float between the hushed and dimly lit rooms. It had the eerie feeling of a dream.
But this wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare. The kind from which you didn’t wake up. She sat mesmerised by the steady bleeping of the monitors and the nurse who was checking the printouts gave her a concerned look.

‘
You’re very pale. Are you feeling okay?’

‘
I’m pregnant,’ Lucy told her dully.

‘
I’ll fetch you a glass of water,’ the nurse told her sympathetically, a mother of three herself. ‘And I think there are some dry crackers in the staff room, they always did the trick for me.’

The next twenty-four hours would be critical they had told her. There were multiple fractures and some internal bleeding, but it was the head injury which was the most threatening. The doctors were concerned that he’d still not regained consciousness. She looked at him lying there hooked up by tubes and wires to an incomprehensible array of machines, so still, so distant. She took his hand in hers, desperate to reach him.

She felt so alone. Both Kit and Amelia were on their way. She wanted to hear them tell her everything would be all right, for them to make the bad things go away as they always had when she was a child. But she wasn’t a child anymore. She was a grown woman carrying her own child whose father, the man she loved, was fighting for his life. The man she loved. It was the first time she had let those words form in her mind. As they did she knew for sure that they were true, and felt the icy grip of fear on her heart. This couldn’t be happening, not now, not when they were just starting out. He couldn’t leave her, not before she could tell him how she felt, not without ever seeing their child.

‘
Wake up, Marcus. Please! Don’t leave me. I love you.’

The baby whimpered gently in his sleep.

Crossing to the cot, Lucy cooed, ‘It’s alright, Lucas, I’m here’.

She looked at his fair curling hair, his chubby little fingers clutching his teddy, the perfect skin of his slightly rosy cheeks; he was like a cherub. What was it the Dutch woman in the bank this morning had called him? A cloud of a baby! Her baby, her precious son. It was hard to believe in just a few weeks it would be his first birthday. Or that she herself was thirty that day. The time slipped by so quickly.

Returning to the dressing table she studied her face in the mirror. Not bad, a few lines but that wasn’t really surprising; the last eighteen months hadn’t always been easy. She thought back to those dark days when Marcus’s life hung in the balance. It had been seventy-two hours before he regained consciousness and she had almost given up hope. She had been at his bedside when he opened his eyes and for one horrible moment she had thought he didn’t recognise her. When he spoke her name she cried and cried as if she would never stop.

Then there were the months of physiotherapy as he learned to walk again on his shattered legs. The road to recovery had been slow and painful, but they had travelled it together. Realising how close they had come to being parted forever they had each poured out their feelings for the other, and their relationship deepened and strengthened.

Marcus went to the palace on crutches to receive his knighthood and still needed a walking stick when they married only weeks before the birth of their son. The wedding, a year to the day from their first meeting at the airport, was a small, informal affair but deeply emotional for them both. It could all have turned out so differently.

The joy of Lucas’s birth had been followed by the deep sadness of Ellen’s death from a cancer which took her so quickly, and less than two months after marrying Simon. The whole family had found the loss hard to deal with, but for her the grief was profo
und. Watching Kit and the heartbroken Simon helping to shoulder her woven wicker casket had been the saddest thing she had ever seen. She missed Ellen every day, her beautiful face, her sense of fun, her good advice, her friendship. When Amy sought to repair things between them she had welcomed her with open arms. Life was too short and fragile to turn away from those you cared for.

She was not naive enough to think that Marcus’s experience had turned him into a saint. In the business arena he was still a force to be reckoned with and doubtless his methods remained questionable. But at home with her and Lucas he was a very different man from the one she had first met. He no longer held a part of himself back, he was open and caring. They shared everything, good and bad.

But she had a secret. She was pregnant again. No sickness this time, perhaps that meant it would be a girl? She rather hoped so. Not an Arabella or Jacintha, and certainly not a Pipette! No, if Marcus agreed, she would like to call a daughter Ellen.

Marcus walked into the room, the limp
which would be with him forever barely noticeable. Pausing to look down at his sleeping son, he asked, ‘Aren’t you ready for your party yet, Lady Delacroix?’

Coming up behind her, he smiled at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Close your eyes, I have a surprise present for you.’

Smiling back, she told him,

‘
And I have one for you.’

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Love is the Drug

Two months ago my best friend committed suicide. The void that opened up in my life is immeasurable, and there is a wound I doubt will ever really heal.

Shock, grief, guilt and anger; they swept in and all but engulfed me. How after more than twenty-five years of friendship had I not seen that she was so troubled? How could that have happened? 

I heard myself, like a character in a bad film, telling the police, ‘It can’t be suicide, it just can’t. She had everything to live for.’

But there was no doubt. She had left a handwritten letter saying the man she loved had betrayed her and she couldn’t go on without him, or with the guilt of what she had done for him. I did not understand a word of this letter; it seemed to have been written by a complete stranger. The confusion and disbelief were overwhelming. All I could think was that I had failed her. And I was very angry. I still am.

She was supposed to have been my best friend so how could she have kept so much from me? We had always told each other everything, or so I had thought, but now it seemed there had been so much she had kept hidden. I felt cheated.

And why, when things started to go wrong, hadn’t she turned to me? She knew I was always there for her. Whatever she had done, I would never have judged her. And I could have helped her, saved her, I was sure of it. But I’d not even been given the chance. It shouldn’t have turned out this way. And selfish as it sounds, I felt furious that she’d left me. It was all over for her but I was the one left behind with a gaping hole in my future.

She had been pivotal in my life; we did so much together, shared so much, had so much fun. Ridiculously I had thought of the plans we’d made for Christmas. What was I supposed to do now? She was my friend, I needed her and she had left me. Ashamed of these feelings I couldn’t stop them coming and they just added to the guilt and anger. My head filled with a silent screaming which, try as I might, I could not vocalise.

My grief counsellor assures me this was all perfectly normal, that everyone experiences these feelings when they lose someone they love, but at the time I hated myself. Anyway, over the coming weeks I would discover things about myself, and my friend, which were even less palatable.

Grace and I had been friends since our days together at the village primary school where we always sat together and constantly got into trouble for talking too much. Pony-mad, we had spent all our weekends and holidays at the local riding school where we mucked out and led round the beginners to earn free rides. We built show-jumps out of upturned buckets and broom handles in Grace’s big back garden and careered round dressed in our riding togs, pretending to be our heroes and heroines from The Horse Of The Year Show. We talked constantly about when we would both have our own ponies and ride together every day. That day did eventually come but many years on, and our mounts big elegant beasts not the Welsh ponies with flowing manes and tails of our childhood dreams.

Grace lived in a large sprawling stone house at the posh end of the village with her mother and three sisters: two older and one younger. Her father who had been “something in the city” had not expected to die of a heart attack aged only forty-two and had left his wife, with four small children, in straitened circumstances. Grace barely remembered him. Their house was always full of people, noise, various gun dogs - usually damp and smelly - and yesterday’s washing-up. Mrs Lancaster was a short plump woman who habitually wore a quilted body-warmer and a harassed expression. She never seemed to mind the noise, didn’t worry about the state of the kitchen floor and was unconcerned if you sat down to tea without washing your hands. I was always welcome there and I enjoyed the contrast to my own, rather different home, on the other side of the village.

I too lived with my widowed mother, but there the similarities ended. I could still remember my father in those primary school days but only vaguely as he had died when I was five and the memory was fading fast. Although only a local government officer his forward planning had been superior to Richard Lancaster’s, and whilst we lived in a small cottage down in the less picturesque part of the village we had more what is now referred to as disposable income. But then there were only the two of us. Unlike Grace’s mother mine was stick thin, our house always tidy and our lives orderly.

If this sounds critical then I don’t mean it to do so. My childhood was happy. I adored mum and still do, it’s just that in those days she seemed so buttoned up. It is only now, as an adult with some experience of the curves life can throw at you, I realise how lonely her life must have been back then: widowed at thirty-two and left in a rural location that was never her choice. She’s a town bird, my mum. She had enough money to get by on but not enough to change things; she made the best of it but never really fitted into village life. Now remarried she lives in the middle of a city, safe from the horrors of the W.I, the church cleaning rota and the Monday Club.

Penelope Lancaster married again too and went to live in Canada. She didn’t come back for the funeral. She isn’t in the best of health and she just couldn’t face the pain of seeing her beautiful daughter’s coffin lowered into its grave. Some of us had no choice.

My name is Meredith and I rather like it. I think it suits me; it conjures up someone plump, warm and merry, which is how I was until very recently. My father’s family came from the
Rhondda valley and he wanted a Welsh name for me, but Mum drew the line at Myfanwy, or Blodwen even if it did mean white flower. Meredith was as Welsh as she was prepared to get, so Meredith it was. It actually means protector of the sea, which I’ve never really understood as to me the sea is something you need protection from, not for. It frightens me with its unseen depths and mercurial moods. Grace’s name was perfect for her. A pretty child, she didn’t so much grow as blossom into a beautiful woman with the ease that she did everything.

Everything seemed to be easy for Grace. Not for her the spots and puppy fat of adolescence, nor the shyness and insecurities. Even from a very young age she had always known who she was, and where she was going. I remember one summer afternoon when we had won the show-jumping gold medal for
England and stolen a bottle of fizzy pop from Mrs Lancaster’s pantry to celebrate. We lay in the long grass at the far end of the garden gulping down the Cherryade, our favourite tipple in those days, and I said,

‘When I grow up I’m going to marry a very rich man who will buy me lots of ponies, and I’ll drink Cherryade every day.’

Grace had disagreed.

‘No, that’s no good. He’ll want you to do all the housework and probably to kiss him as well.’

We both put our fingers in our mouth and made gagging noises followed by lots of sniggering.

Grace continued. ‘I’m going to make pots of money myself, I’m not sure how yet, but I shall be very important and probably famous too. I will live on my own and spend my money just how I want to.’

‘But we’ll always be friends won’t we?’ I had asked, frightened of being left behind.

‘Oh we’ll be friends forever, Merry,’ she had assured me. And we were.

Grace got her big career although she was never actually famous, and I got my own more modest one. We came to rather like the kissing thing but made mistakes with men and were both divorced by thirty. Peter cheated on me and Grace cheated on Simon. I came out of it with nothing and would have lost my home had it not belonged to Mum whereas Grace kept the house, the new jeep, and got a lump sum in exchange for relinquishing any claim to Simon’s future earnings. Now this may illustrate the difference in marrying a successful actor rather than a plumber, but it definitely shows Grace’s ability to always come out on top.

She hung herself my beautiful friend. From a beam in the small barn where we keep the hay for the horses. Oh Grace, how did it ever come to this, how did you get so desperate without me seeing it?