Three’s a Crowd (53 page)

‘What? What excuse could you possibly have for doing that? I keep thinking about poor Sophie, and everything she's been through. She didn't need to hear that as well.'

Catherine sighed, but kept her composure. ‘You're right. And I wish I could take it back,' she said. ‘It was unforgivable.'

Alice shook her head in frustration. She got up and walked over to the window, staring out at the back garden.

‘What do you want me to do, Alice?' Catherine asked. ‘I would apologise, but I don't think they're going to want to hear that from me.'

‘Probably not,' she muttered without turning around.

Catherine felt like this was just a distraction now. Of course she felt awful about what had happened, but there was nothing she could do about it now. This wasn't turning out the way she'd planned, and it wasn't getting them anywhere.

‘So,' she said after a while, ‘do you have any thoughts about the other thing we were talking about? Do you think you might want to meet your father, or have anything to do with him?'

Alice turned around slowly then, leaning back against the windowsill. ‘You know, Mum, right now it's hard for me to see any great advantage in having another parent in my life. One's bad enough.'

‘You want to throw insults at a single mother? Go right ahead,' said Catherine.

‘I never thought worse of you because you were a single mother, or because you had me when you were a teenager,' said Alice. ‘You were the one who seemed ashamed of that, and resentful that I ruined your life.'

‘No Alice, you didn't ruin my life,' Catherine insisted. ‘How could you think that?'

‘You've always been so disappointed in me.'

Catherine took a deep breath. This wasn't the time for platitudes and pretence, she had to be completely honest with her. ‘It's true, but not in the way you think. You don't disappoint me, Alice. You are beautiful, and funny, and smart, and I've just wanted you to be everything you can be, and so any disappointment I've expressed has to do with that.'

‘But don't you know you can't put that onto me?' said Alice. ‘I don't want the same things you do. I don't want to be a lawyer.'

‘Well, I realise that, Alice,' said Catherine. No surprises there. ‘But what do you want to do?' she added tentatively.

‘I don't know,' she shrugged. ‘And that doesn't mean I'm hopeless, Mum. Heaps of my friends don't know what they want to do.'

Catherine nodded. ‘I understand, but the HSC is getting close, you'll have to put in your preferences for uni soon. You're going to have to make some decisions.'

‘I'm thinking I might take a year off.'

Catherine hated the whole trend towards ‘gap' years. It was indulgent, and she'd seen too many bright, capable kids lose their focus entirely. It's exactly what had happened to Rachel. But she knew she had to play this carefully. If she reacted too strongly, it would only make Alice all the more determined.

‘Well, we'll see,' she said. ‘But you still have to apply for uni so that you can defer it for a year. That's the way it works.'

‘But I don't even know if I want to go to uni.'

Catherine took a breath. ‘Look Alice, I'm trying to be understanding here, but I am entitled to some say if I'm going to be supporting you while you figure out what you want to do.'

‘Who said you're going to be supporting me?' Alice said squarely.

Catherine was taken aback by that. ‘Who else is going to?'

‘I'll support myself, get a job, then I can move out.'

Catherine swallowed. This was getting worse, but she mustn't take the bait. ‘But what if you decide to go to uni later, Alice, how will you manage then?'

She shrugged. ‘If I work for a certain amount of time I'll be considered independent, and then I can get student support from the government.'

Catherine grimaced; she'd obviously looked into this. ‘I had to do that, Alice,' though in her case it was the single parent pension, ‘because I didn't have any choice. But there's no need for you to live on welfare. Look, I'm going to sell this place, I can buy an apartment somewhere that suits you, maybe near the beach, wherever you want.'

‘Mum, don't.'

‘I just don't want you to make any rash decisions.'

‘I'm not going to,' Alice insisted. ‘That's the whole point. I don't want to apply to uni when I don't even know what I want to do. I don't want to get stuck. I'm young, Mum, I have time, that's one thing I do have. And I want to take my time. You're just going to have to accept it, because you can't make decisions for me any more once I turn eighteen.'

Catherine sighed, dropping her head in her hands. So it had finally come to this. She looked up again after a while. ‘This has been my nightmare, you know,' she said. ‘That you'll walk away
after your HSC and live your own life, and I'll be lucky to get a phone call on my birthday.'

‘Mum,' Alice groaned. ‘I'm doing this, well, for a lot of reasons, but only one of them is about getting away from you.'

Catherine laughed then, she couldn't help it. ‘That's supposed to make me feel better?'

Alice was smiling now as well. ‘And another is because I think we might have a much better chance of getting on if we don't live together.' She walked back over to the kitchen and picked up her school bag. ‘That's about as much D and M as I can handle for one afternoon. And I've got homework.'

Catherine watched her saunter off over to the stairs. ‘You still haven't said what you want to do about your father.'

Alice turned to look at her. ‘I don't know yet. But I'll figure it out myself. It's my decision, Mum, and you're going to have to respect that.'

Rachel got off the bus at Coogee Beach and started up the street towards the café. When she'd called earlier, Scott had told her Lexie would be in around ten. Rachel had missed her on the home phone this morning; she gathered she was already on the school run. She had to talk to her, and she had to do it in person. She wasn't sure how Lexie felt about the fallout on Saturday night, though she got some idea from her brief exchange with Scott. He was fine, very friendly, reassuring, which was a relief. But when she asked him to let Lexie know she was planning to call in this morning, he said, ‘I think it might be best if I don't tell her in advance.'

‘Why, so she's not tempted to hide when I get there?'

‘Something like that.'

Rachel sighed.

‘Don't worry,' he'd assured her. ‘You know what a softie she is. She'll be fine once she sees you.'

Rachel walked up to the café, past the tables on the footpath, and stepped inside. It was not terribly busy, there was only a smattering of patrons, so at least she didn't feel she was getting in the way. Scott was first to spot her; he was so tall he easily saw over the dividing wall to the kitchen.

‘Hey,' he said, not announcing her name. ‘Come on through, Lexie's up the end there. Lex, you have a visitor,' he called.

Rachel went to the gap in the counter as Scott walked up to her, wiping his hands on a tea towel. Lexie was sitting on a stool in a corner at the far end of the galley kitchen. She had a pile of papers on the bench in front of her and the telephone in her hand, though not to her ear. She must have been about to make a call. When she turned around and saw Rachel, she hung the handset back in its cradle on the wall. ‘Hi,' she said quietly.

‘Hi Lexie,' said Rachel.

‘Well, I'll leave you two to it,' Scott said with an affectionate pat on Rachel's shoulder as he retreated to the other end of the kitchen again.

‘Would you like a coffee or something?' Lexie asked.

‘If you're having one.'

‘Sure, why don't you go find us a table and I'll bring them out.'

She was being polite, but reserved, which was fair enough. Rachel walked over to a booth at the back of the café where they could have some privacy, and soon Lexie appeared carrying two cups of coffee. She set them down on the table and slid into the booth opposite Rachel.

‘Thanks,' she said. She took a sip of her coffee and set the cup back in its saucer. ‘Okay Lexie, I might as well get straight to the point. I came here to apologise for the scene on Saturday night, to begin with.'

‘You didn't create the scene, Rachel,' she said.

‘Still, I feel partly responsible.'

‘Tom's already been in to apologise.'

‘Oh, he has?'

She nodded. ‘He and Sophie.'

‘Right,' Rachel nodded. He wouldn't have brought up everything in front of Sophie, it would have been all about the girls'
misdemeanours. ‘Well, I guess I just wanted to see if everything was okay, with us, you know, considering . . .'

‘. . . you've been sleeping with one of our best friend's husbands?'

Well, that was certainly giving it to her straight.

‘Tom was one of my best friends, before Annie came along. Just so you know,' said Rachel. ‘And the other thing you should know is that we're not going to see each other any more.' She felt a thickening in her throat as she said that.

‘Why not?' Lexie asked.

‘We just decided that it's not the right time. Tom needs to establish a new life for himself with the girls. I'd only get in the way.'

Lexie shook her head faintly. ‘That seems a shame.'

Rachel sighed. ‘Wow, Lex, I thought you'd be pleased.'

‘Pleased?'

‘Well, you obviously didn't approve. I guess you felt betrayed on some level.'

Lexie sighed heavily. ‘You know, Rachel, I probably felt most betrayed because you didn't think you could tell me.'

‘I didn't tell anyone,' Rachel assured her. ‘Catherine didn't know either.'

‘What has she had to say about all this?'

‘I haven't seen her, haven't spoken to her. And I'm not planning to.'

Lexie frowned. ‘Really?'

Something had shifted irrevocably. From her messages Rachel construed that Catherine didn't get that at all, she thought it was business as usual. Which only made Rachel more resolved. She'd had enough. Every moment she'd ever spent feeling guilty about Tom was obliterated by the cold hard fact of Catherine's premeditated betrayal. Rachel wasn't excusing Tom's part in it, but Catherine had deliberately seduced a close friend, who was married to another close friend, when he was down and vulnerable. What had she hoped to achieve? Quite obviously she had no qualms tearing their marriage apart so that yet again she had a man waiting in the wings once she was ready to leave Martin. While that was never going to happen with Tom, of course, what
it said about Catherine was beyond what Rachel could tolerate any longer.

‘I think we've grown apart over the years,' Rachel started to explain, ‘and we've never really stopped to think about it. I mean, you can have different tastes, like different music, movies, that stuff doesn't really matter. But at the core of a friendship, surely you have to have some kind of shared values? And I just don't understand Catherine any more. I don't understand her motivations, her actions, and I don't agree with them. It makes it difficult to relate to her.'

‘But you've been friends such a long time.'

‘Maybe too long.' Rachel picked up her cup and sipped her coffee. She didn't want to rubbish Catherine to Lexie, that was between the two of them. ‘So anyway, like I said, I just wanted to apologise for Saturday night.'

Lexie shook her head. ‘Listen, Scott and I owe everyone an apology as well. We acted like a pair of five year olds, it was a disgrace.'

‘Are you okay now?'

‘We are, you know,' she nodded, a smile forming on her face. ‘Better than ever, to be honest.' She paused. ‘We're actually thinking of selling up and moving to the country.'

Rachel blinked. ‘You're kidding? Where did this come from?'

‘Totally out of the blue,' she exclaimed. ‘It's been a dream of Scott's for a long time, but he thought it could never happen so he never told me. And when I got it out of him the other night, I can't explain it, but it felt so right. It was like a light bulb going on, making everything clear. We were up half the night talking, and on the internet all day yesterday, looking up restaurants for sale. We're going up to Orange next week to check some places out.'

‘Wow, that's quick.'

‘I know,' said Lexie, holding up her hands, like it was a surprise to her as well. ‘But you know, why muck around? Life's short.'

‘Yes, it is.'

Lexie sighed. ‘Well, now I feel like a hypocrite.'

‘Why?'

‘I thought you and Tom were . . . well, wrong, because it seemed like it was too soon . . . But what do I know?'

‘Don't worry about it.'

Lexie looked at her. ‘Do you love him?'

Rachel could feel her throat tightening. There wasn't any point evading the question, but she didn't trust her voice, so she just nodded.

Lexie reached over and took her hand. ‘I'm sorry it hasn't worked out,' she said. ‘You know what Scott told me?'

Rachel shook her head.

‘He reckons that Annie would have been happy for you two to be together.'

‘Did he?'

She nodded.

‘What do you think?' asked Rachel.

Lexie took a moment. ‘I think Annie would say, if it's meant to be . . .'

Catherine was sitting in the restaurant, positioned so she could see the door, preparing herself. She had made sure she got here a full fifteen minutes early, so there was little chance James would be the first to arrive. She needed time before she had to face him to get centred in the surroundings so she would be in control of this meeting.