Love on the Rocks (29 page)

She’d got through the service with a determined stoicism, not allowing herself to crumble, for she knew if she made a spectacle of herself that her cover would be blown and her life would never be the same, that she wouldn’t be in control of her own destiny. Besides, his parents and brother had carried themselves with such dignity. As had Tamara – Molly didn’t hold anything against the girl. It certainly wasn’t Tamara’s fault that Joe had been a two-timer. And for all she knew there had been countless other girls at the funeral nursing a broken heart.

But no matter how many times she told herself that Joe was rotten to the core, that he was feckless and a coward, she couldn’t forget the feelings he had awakened in her. Over and over again she relived the closeness they had shared, his wonder. As she watched the crowds disperse and the now empty hearse pull away and make its way back down the hill, she felt a crystal clarity descend on her. All the turmoil of the past few days and nights fell away. She couldn’t get rid of their baby now. It was the only connection Joe had with the world. His legacy. A living reminder of the love she had felt. Even though he had treated her abominably, she would never forget the feeling of being in his arms, the way he looked at her when they made love, the way he suddenly gazed at her and ran his hands through her hair and kissed her, as if she was his reason for living.

Her family didn’t ask too many questions when her condition became apparent. She said the father was someone who’d been to stay on the site and they’d accepted that without demur. Casual sex followed by pregnancy was far from unusual in the circles they moved in, after all, though her mother told her she was mad not to get rid of it.

‘Don’t make the same mistake I did,’ she said darkly. ‘It’ll ruin your life.’

Thanks, thought Molly wryly, even though she’d never been under any illusion that her mother was grateful for her offspring.

Siobhan’s only comment was that now she’d get her own flat. Which she did, but not a council flat. That wasn’t Molly’s style. She went and found a place of her own. She’d saved up quite a lot of money from her job, enough to pay a deposit and a few months’ rent, and there was plenty of accommodation in Tawcombe. No one was queuing up to live there, after all. The place she got was just a room in a Victorian house in a seedy row of terraces near the harbour. It was shabby, but it was her own, and she had one of the large rooms at the front of the house – the kitchen and bathroom were shared, but at least she had a sink so she could make a cup of tea.

Nobody at work noticed, for her pregnancy barely showed in the first few months and the uniform was capacious enough to hide any suspicious bulges. She stayed on until the end of October, until the campsite closed for the winter, then she got a job at the supermarket in Tawcombe until two weeks before her due date, squeezing her bump behind the till.

The day she gave birth she was in hospital on her own. The midwives were kind. They didn’t ask any questions or make her feel like a freak. Perhaps they were used to single girls who had been abandoned by their impregnators. The baby was a boy, which she’d known it would be. She called him Alfie, because she and Joe had watched a pirate DVD of the movie one afternoon in one of the caravans, and he had laughed and said he’d have played the part way better than Jude Law. And Molly had agreed with him. She was sure that was the afternoon she’d caught, because she’d been so happy.

They put her in a bed right at the end of the ward, so she wasn’t at the mercy of prying eyes, and didn’t have to watch all the proud fathers cradling their newborns. They kept the curtains drawn around her. It was a strange new world, with its strip lighting and regular deliveries of food on a tray. The only thing she could bear to pass her lips was the orange juice that came in a ridged plastic glass with a foil top: it was impossible to get it off without spilling half.

‘I want to get out of here,’ she said to the nurse.

‘I’d stay here for a few days, love. Get some rest, if you can.’

But Molly couldn’t wait to escape.

The only consolation was she could get straight back into her jeans. She’d barely put on any weight. It was all Alfie and water. Her skin just felt slightly loose on her tummy, but it all squodged in when she zipped herself up.

‘Look at you,’ said the nurse in envy. ‘You’re teeny tiny. How are you getting home?’

‘Taxi.’

The nurse frowned.

‘You haven’t got a baby seat.’

‘No point,’ said Molly. ‘I won’t be going in a car again after this.’

‘I’m not supposed to let you out without a proper baby seat.’

Molly looked at her impassively.

‘Well, I’m not staying here any longer.’

The nurse’s face screwed up in concern.

‘Are you going to be all right, love?’

Molly shrugged. She wished she’d been given one of the hard-nosed nurses who didn’t seem to have an ounce of sympathy – Molly couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a supposedly caring profession. Care didn’t seem to come into it. But the girl looking after her was going to make her cry if she didn’t stop being nice. Because Molly knew the niceness was going to end here.

It had been incredibly tough. But she wasn’t the only one doing it, as she found out when she went to the post-natal drop-in classes. There were girls younger than her, girls who were on their second or third, though Molly found she had little in common with them; all they wanted to do was smoke and gossip. But she soon struck up a friendship with an older mum called Skyla. Skyla was ten years older than her, with three kids, and was the most laid-back person Molly had ever met. She was a bit of a hippy, with pink dreadlocks and rainbow-coloured dresses and a pierced eyebrow, but her calm aura was infectious, and she imbued Molly with the strength to cope, giving her endless tips on how to help Alfie settle and how to manage him. Nothing seemed to faze her, and more than anything she clearly adored her children, which was more than Molly could say for any of the other girls she’d met. Skyla had a tiny fisherman’s cottage, painted in bright colours with murals all over the walls, and the kids all slept in a jumble on a big mattress on the floor of her bedroom. And Skyla always seemed to have time for them; she was always doing finger painting or baking flapjacks or building an ant farm, and all the while the baby was plugged into her breast. Molly loved it there and spent more time with Skyla than she did in her own home. One day, she promised herself, she would have a little place like this, a place that smelt of cinnamon and scented candles and was filled with the sound of laughter and music – no television. It was a haven, a place of safety, away from the harsh reality of her grimy flat and her self-centred family who’d never shown her a fraction of the affection she got from Skyla. She, meanwhile, had fallen head over heels with her little boy. She could gaze at him for hours, his tiny hand clamped around one of her fingers, unable to decide which bit of him she loved best – his cupid bow lips, his pronounced eyebrows, his shell-like ears, the dark down on top of his head. Sometimes it all closed in on her and she wanted to break down. He deserved so much better than what she had to offer him. But she had to remain tough. There was, after all, no alternative.

By the time Alfie was six months old, Molly knew she had to find work. She couldn’t survive on the paltry sum they were supposed to get by on. She struck a deal with Skyla – Molly would look after her kids while she did her aromatherapy massages at the healing centre, and Skyla would look after Alfie in return while Molly went to work.

Despite herself, she was drawn back to Mariscombe, taking a job as chambermaid at the Mariscombe Hotel. She got at least another pound an hour than she would in any of the tawdry hotels or guesthouses in Tawcombe, and she reasoned that at least she had pleasant surroundings to work in. And in a funny way it made her feel closer to Joe. She knew the hotel was owned by his brother and to her there seemed to be a certain justice that the Thornes were indirectly contributing to the upbringing of the baby they didn’t know existed.

For just over a year, she had managed. It was exhausting, for when she wasn’t working she was looking after Skyla’s kids, who were a wild but loving bunch. But the extra money meant she could buy things for Alfie she wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise, and make their lives a little more comfortable. And she enjoyed her work. Just as there had been at the campsite, there was a sense of camaraderie amongst the staff at the hotel. And although she never socialized with them, for she always had to rush back home, it was fun eating chocolate biscuits in the staffroom and listening to the torrid details of their private lives. They teased her for not coming out. They thought she was having an affair with a married man, and she let them. It was far easier than hinting at the truth. Not that anyone would work it out now. Joe had been dead for nearly two years; he had become a memory, almost a legend. But Molly wasn’t going to risk anyone putting two and two together.

She’d been careless, only a few weeks ago. It had been a beautiful spring day, and she was in charge of Sklya’s mob for the whole afternoon. She decided on impulse to take them to the beach. Why should Alfie be deprived of its pleasures, just because of his murky history – a history that was hardly his fault? She made a mound of egg sandwiches and piled them all on to the bus with their various buckets, spades, balls and swimming costumes. Alfie was in seventh heaven, digging concertedly as if for victory and splashing about at the edge of the water. When the inevitable happened and a gang of staff from the hotel spotted her, Molly’s heart clattered in her chest as she smoothly told them she was looking after a friend’s children. When Alfie pottered up, chanting ‘Mu-mu-mu’, she scooped him up, laughing.

‘Molly!’ she instructed. ‘Say Molly. Molly Molly Molly.’

It was only Hannah who looked at her strangely. Of everyone who worked at the hotel, she liked Hannah best. Hannah had confided in her, about wanting a nose job, and Molly sometimes felt guilty that she wasn’t being honest with her in return. Did Hannah suspect something? Hastily, she herded all the children together and gathered up their stuff, ready for the journey home. She couldn’t be sure one of them wouldn’t give something away.

Later, as the bus wound its way through the lanes back to Tawcombe, she determined not to go to the beach again with Alfie. She wasn’t sure why she’d risked it. But she’d felt drawn there, somehow. She resented being in exile, even if it was a self-imposed exile. But lately she’d felt as if Alfie deserved if not his birthright then at least the pleasure of the surroundings in which he’d been conceived. More and more she hated the fact that he was being brought up in Tawcombe, that his little world consisted of seedy flats and dreary corner shops, apart from the haven of Skyla’s cottage.

Now even that had been taken away from him. Skyla had told her last week that she was going off round the country over the summer, doing her massage at the alternative festivals, so she wouldn’t be there to help her out. She’d been very sorry; she’d even tried to persuade Molly to come too, but Molly didn’t have the confidence to up sticks and essentially camp for the next three months. And she couldn’t earn a living at a festival – what did she have to offer a load of spaced-out hippies? She had to stay put.

And she was becoming more and more alienated from her family. Her mother was hard and selfish. Her sister Siobhan was a little more sympathetic, but she had fallen in with a bad crowd, all drink and drugs and motorbikes, which meant Molly didn’t trust her. But she had to rely on their help to keep her job going. It was coming up to peak season; if she started missing shifts at the hotel she knew she would be out on her ear.

And now Bruno was back, which for some reason was making her twitchy. After all, he didn’t know her from Adam. For one second that morning, when he’d offered her the job, Molly had been tempted to confide in him. There was something about him that she instinctively trusted. She was tired, so tired, and Alfie didn’t have the life she wanted for him. Far from it. But she knew if she opened her mouth all hell would break loose. There would be any number of denials and accusations. And anyway, how would she prove that Joe was the father? They would think she was pulling a fast one, trying to get money out of them.

For the first time in her life, Molly was starting to realize the starkness of her plight. Bruno’s job offer that morning had only served to heighten it. There was no way out for her and Alfie. No way out at all.

L
isa was used to the wiles of women. Hysteria, bitchiness, neuroses and jealousy had competed with each other for supremacy in the world she had, until recently, moved in, and in general she was immune to them. Promotion work inevitably invited comparison, but somehow Lisa always managed to smooth out any rivalries she came across on the circuit. She was too down to earth to get involved in petty arguments.

So Lisa was surprised to find that she had a deep-rooted dislike combined with an instinctive mistrust of Victoria. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was George’s wife. It was the way she carried herself, the look she had in her eye, the way she courted attention. Everything was considered; everything was done for effect, from the way she crossed her legs to the way she pushed her hair back from her eyes to the languid way she spoke, as if she could barely be bothered to communicate. Lisa was observant and she sensed that every one of Victoria’s moves was carefully planned and rehearsed. There was nothing spontaneous about her behaviour. Which, despite all George’s reassurances that he was immune, made Lisa very cautious indeed.

Besides which, she made Lisa feel very self-conscious about her own shortcomings. Lisa had never been neurotic about her weight, but next to Victoria she felt cumbersome rather than curvaceous. And every time she spoke she was conscious of her bumpkin accent. She felt certain she’d heard Victoria mock her, muttering ‘ooh-aar’ behind her back, though she couldn’t prove it. To top it all, Victoria’s achingly hip designer wardrobe made her feel a total frump.