After Forever Ends (71 page)

Those two men could look amazingly innocent at times.

“We weren’t up to anything,” Oliver lied. “We were just going to the pub for a pint.”

“Give us some credit!” Alexander chimed in. “A good stiff drink would calm us down!”

“Lying to cover each other’s backs,” I shook my head, “Some old habits never die!”

“You must know we’re on to you by now,” Lucy told them and Natalie laughed out loud.

Our little Nattie’s original thought was that she wanted to live with Oliver and I in the wood. In the end, she did the best thing and moved in with her parents. They saw her through her pregnancy and six months later she had herself a wee baby girl she called Maria.

When Maria was eight months old, Natalie opened her own seamstress shop in Welshpool. A young real estate agent named Mickey De Long wandered in with a tear in his trousers. As she mended them, the two struck up a conversation. He asked her out for coffee and she declined. That afternoon after his office, which was just around the corner, had closed, Mickey appeared in her doorway holding two coffees and two pasties. Natalie said his smile was so silly and so sincere she had to invite him to sit.

Mickey wasn’t rich and he wasn’t immensely handsome, but he was clever and funny and he treated Nattie like a precious gem. Best of all, he fell in love with little Maria as quickly as he had Nattie. They became a couple and saw each other regularly for two years. He asked her to marry him on least ten occasions that I was aware of.

“I want us to be a family!” He told my niece over and over, “Please, consider me, Natalie! I love you both with all my heart!”

Nattie, however, had been hurt deeply by Maria’s father, and was not interested in having her heart shattered and her life turned upside down ever again. This was terribly frustrating for Mickey, who, having never been destroyed himself, could not understand why she wouldn’t move forward with the relationship.

“Oh, Daddy,” She sobbed as the three of us sat by the pond one autumn afternoon after she and Mickey had had a spat about her indecision, “I don’t know what to do!”

“He loves you,” Alexander told her softly, “What else do you want?”

“Nothing! He’s my best friend!” She told him. “I love him, too!”

“Well, that makes it even better,” I rubbed her back.

“I’m so afraid, though! I’m so afraid everything will change!”

Alexander looked at her slowly, “So what if everything changes?” His dark eyes searched her face, “Are things so fantastic now? You living alone with Maria in a one bedroom flat over a seamstress shop?” He smiled softly as he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her against his side, “Natalie, my love, listen to me. I’d have gone and found you a prince. I’d have plucked him straight out of a faerie story. I would have! And I have this feeling that if I had, he might have been a lot like Mickey.” He paused, “Oh, shut up, Silvia! Stop your laughing and stop looking at me like that! I’m about as romantic as that chair you’re sitting on, but I have eyes! That man loves our Nattie and he loves her daughter. You can’t ask for much more. And you, Nattie, you keep pulling him in and pushing him away. It’s cruel. He won’t wait forever.”

Funny, I thought, he’d done the same thing to Lucy until he’d figured it out, but I didn’t say a word since he’d told me not to. I didn’t want to ruin a rare and perfect moment when Alexander had said the right thing.

“I don’t mean to be cruel, but I’m scared, Daddy.”

“Well, that’s normal. I’d worry if you weren’t. But if you don’t get past it and take the chance, I’ll worry even more. You deserve to be happy. I see he makes you happy when you let him. It’s all I want for you and Maria to be happy.”

She looked at me with wide blue eyes. “What do you see, Sil?”

“I see that your heart has wings,” I told her, “Set it free and see where it takes you.”

Mickey proposed once again to Natalie on Valentine’s Day that same year. Without hesitation, she accepted and they were married the following year. Natalie wore my mother’s wedding dress as Caro and Lucy had before her. Four years later they had a baby girl together they called Kaleigh. Mickey and Natalie still live happily today, together in a little stone cottage on the outskirts of Cardiff.

Our Gryffin did finally marry his Lakshmi in the summer of the year he turned twenty-seven. He called once he’d gotten back to Edinburgh, so excited you’d have thought that he’d just met and fallen in love with her.

“We were in Glasgow for the weekend, so we thought we’d get on with it! It was great! I told her we should have done it a long time ago!”

“I thought you two were planning a big wedding!” Oliver grinned.

“We were, but…fuck it!”

“He pulled an Ollie!” Alexander exclaimed, laughing out loud, “You can’t get mad at him when you did it yourselves!”

“Who’s mad?” I asked seriously,

“It’s about time, that’s all I have to say about that!” Oliver added.

Gryffin laughed, “Yeah, well, everybody else is doing it!”

What he meant by that was that Annie had just gotten engaged to one of the creative directors at her advertising firm and Bess had just gotten married. The bizarre thing about that was that Bess had married a fellow identical twin, whose name was Chad Montgomery. He was not overly good to my niece and was a bit too charming for my taste, but Bess was stuck on him. He was a computer professional from Manchester, but Bess had met him by chance at a twin convention in the United States they had both attended on invitation from a mutual friend who had never introduced them previously.

“Talk about increasing the odds for multiples,” I muttered to Oliver as she walked down the aisle with Alexander, dressed as the others in my mum’s wedding gown, “Double the chance for twins?”

“We’ll have to wait and see,” Gryffin answered softly from the other side of me, “Bet a quid?” Lucy shot us a look of death and we stopped talking for a moment. “Oy, Mum, Dad, Gryff, look there…” Warren pointed to one of the groomsmen, whose zipper was wide open and his shirt was hanging out the opening. “Look at that poor sot! Hope they didn’t capture that disaster in any of the wedding photos!”

The four of us sat and tried not to attract attention to the fact that we could not stop giggling. Within a moment I could hear Carolena and Adam laughing behind us and I knew our daughter had spotted it as well.

It turned out that neither of Bess’ children looked anything alike, nor were they twins, but both of them had the Cotton red hair. Those two were called Joseph and Mark. She finally came to her senses after fifteen years of marriage and divorced that dodgy Chad Montgomery, exchanging him a few years later for a nice lad from Devonshire called Blake O’Malley, whom she met at a tennis match in London. Blake was a few years older than her, widowed, and had three children of his own, but he shined on Bessie in a way that made Lucy and I smile. In the end, Bess got a man who loved her truly.

Annie married her husband, Steffen Doran, a year after Annie married her first. I quite liked Steffen. In fact, I absolutely adored him. He was an American, actually, from Chicago, and he came to London for school, but never quite left. He was incredibly clever, so much so you had to pay close attention to what he’d say or he’d have you contradicting yourself in a debate. He had a dry sense of humour and a laid back personality, plus he would eat anything you put before him without complaint like he was starving. He was handsome, too, blonde haired and had sleepy, clear blue eyes. It was obvious that he was mad about our Annie and her about him. “Nia," He called her, taken from her name Antonia, because when he’d first met her she’d been wearing a nametag and the first part of her name was covered. Annie lit up whenever he came around. Sometimes you can take one look at a couple and see how much love was between them. That was the way it was with those two. They oozed affection.

Annie wore Mum’s dress at her wedding like the others, but nearly threw herself off the balcony when she realised she’d torn the hem with the heel of her shoe. “Oh, damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Look what I’ve done!”

“No worries!” Natalie, ever the seamstress, pulled needle and thread from her purse, “I’ll fix it! Don’t cry or you’ll muss your eyes and look like a raccoon!”

Catastrophe averted, Annie looked lovely and she married Steffen with a smile on her face. They live in Abergavenny now in a big house up on a hill that sits behind an iron gate. They own about five border collies and a Chihuahua and a huge, fat yellow cat. Aside from their numerous pets, they produced and raised had a daughter called and Isabella son called Daniel. Not twins. Isabella is married and lives in Lancanshire now and last I knew, Daniel was in Cornwall, forever single, as he enjoys the company of men far more than women. And who cares? He‘s happy and he‘s healthy and there‘s not one of us in the family who doesn‘t think he‘s brilliant.

It was on my birthday five years after that that Gryffin and Lakshmi gave us our next grandson. He arrived two weeks early and “Not at all too bloody soon!” Lakshmi said. His mother being one hundred percent Indian and Gryffin having the Egyptian blood, the baby was tiny, dark, and utterly beautiful. They called him Andrew after Lakshmi’s brother, an Army medic, who’d died when his helicopter was shot down in the red zone.

“It took them bloody long enough! They do everything so slowly!” Oliver exclaimed after we got the call. “Wow!”

“Personally,” I told him proudly, “I’m thrilled! That grandson of mine was born in Edinburgh! There’s another Scot in this family! They should have a pile more! Bring on the Scots!”

“Yes, yes,” Oliver used his best Edmond-like voice, “We’ll be certain we teach him to speak properly, of course.”

And then there was Warren. Now, there was a lad who had an interesting sort of life. Shortly after he finished performing in Austria, he moved back to Wales and into his grandparent’s old house where he puttered about for about a year giving music instruction from his front room. Soon enough, however, he found himself reunited with his lost love, Gwenllian Hughes. Now Gwen was a musician, too. She’d been classically trained on piano and guitar by her mother, but was blessed more so with an amazing Soprano voice that could send shivers through even the hardest heart. Gwennie had just gotten herself signed to a record contract and, being in London after ten years in Berlin, sought her old friend Warren out to collaborate on some material. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that it took little less than a few days before there was more than song writing going on. Theirs was a reunion fraught with composition, sex, passion, vast amounts of alcohol, and emotions and entanglements that neither of them were quite prepared to deal with.

Warren not only helped to compose many of the songs of Gwen’s debut record, but he played guitar on all of the studio tracks as well. When she asked him to join her on her first European tour to support that album, my son was gone in a flash. It was surreal to flip by stations on the television and occasionally see a video of Gwennie on some music channel. It was incredible how fast she became popular, but really was no surprise to anyone who knew her and Ollie and I had known her for most of her life. From the time she was a small child, Gwen had possessed a certain regal quality about her. It’s hard to explain. She had beautiful dark brown eyes and long, thick jet black hair. Her face was small and round, dotted with freckles. She had the cutest two dimples on either cheek and a constant expression of being excited to be where she was. Gwenllian was a pretty girl, but not breathtaking by any means and yet when she walked into a room people turned and stared. Medium height, small framed, a bit heavy breasted, she had a nice body, but was not particularly sexy, yet men yearned for her. Gwen snapped her fingers and people jumped. She was used to being obeyed.

Warren worshipped her. He had from the time he was a just a baby and it certainly seemed that she revered him in return. They grew up together and it only seemed natural that they would become involved as teenagers, and then be lovers as adults, even if the stress and grind of the tour and lifestyle was taking a toll on Warren. I could hear it in his voice, the strain and the stress of doing something he was no longer enjoying.

“I can’t wait until this blasted tour is over so I can go home,” He confessed one night through static on his mobile phone, “I’m so tired, Mum. It’s go, go, go all the time, one city to the next, one bus to the next or on to a plane and back off again into another hotel room and off to a show. It’s a blur, all of it. I’m so flipping tired. There’s people all over all the time, everybody wants something from you. I just want to go home. All I want is just to sit in Granddad’s old chair in my front room with a mug of tea and my headphones and be alone.”

“Well,” I said, “It must still be exciting!”

He sighed, “Excitement runs thin after a while. I mean, it’s fun up on stage. That’s all there’s really to look forward to, though. The rest of it is just…work. Gwen loves it. She was born to be in the spotlight. She‘s always off doing this or that. I don‘t get to see her much, honestly.”

“How’s she doing then?” Ollie asked, leaning toward the speaker so Warren could hear.

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s great. She’s at some rock star do with her pretentious rock star friends. I skipped it. I’ve had enough of that, thank you. I crave silence these days.”

We thought that there might be some tension brewing and it seems we were right. About a month later, the proverbial shit hit the fan.

The story as I understand it went like this. Warren accompanied Gwen to an awards ceremony where she won the award for Best New UK Pop Artist. After her formal acceptance, they went to an after party at a nightclub where they both got a bit pissed and became overtly friendly on the dance floor. Several photographers caught them at it and the photos quickly hit the internet. Not that Warren cared, in particular. It was all publicity, he told me, for him as well as Gwen, as he was a songwriter and the more people that knew he wrote songs for Best New UK Pop Artist the more likely he was to be able to feed himself. “It’s fine,” He assured us, “We weren’t having sex or anything! They’re not that graphic!”