Megan of Merseyside (25 page)

‘Forget it!’ He laughed harshly. ‘I can see it’s not the solution you were looking for. I have no idea how you go about getting an abortion, but I can probably find out … if you are quite sure that is what you want.’

‘It’s the only way, Robert. Surely you can see that? And I’ve got to do it without my parents knowing.’

‘It might be expensive. Is Miles going to pay?’

‘Robert!’

His callousness shocked her as much as he intended. Her rejection, even though he had expected it, left him bitter. As he saw the distress in her eyes, though, Robert felt contrite. He didn’t want to hurt Megan, only to punish Miles Walker.

‘Don’t worry, I can lend you the money if necessary. The thing is to get something organised. Leave it with me. I’ll find out what has to be done. Come on.’ He stood up. ‘We’d better be getting back or your mother will start worrying.’

This time he did not take her arm.

The week that followed seemed endless. She hardly slept at all. There were days when she felt indifferent to everything around her, submerged in apathy, aware only of her own predicament.

She had almost given up hope of any help from Robert when unexpectedly he came into the office. ‘Everything is fixed for next Friday. You’ll have to take the day off but you should be OK for work
by
Monday. The details are all in there.’ His face was expressionless as he handed her an envelope.

He was gone before she could reply.

She sat staring at the envelope for a long time, then slipped it unopened into her handbag.

‘Jennie’s again! It’s only a couple of months since you went to see her … or so you said,’ Kathy Williams exclaimed when Megan told her she was going away for the weekend.

‘You must be mad, driving all that way for a weekend. You sure you’re not off for another fling with that Miles Walker?’ she asked with a penetrating look.

‘No, Mam, I’m not seeing Miles Walker.’

Megan’s tone was so flat that her mother said no more. She was worried about Megan. There was something different about her in recent weeks, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.

Chapter Twenty-five

RELIEF THAT THE
nightmare was over was uppermost in Megan’s mind as she came out of the anaesthetic. Although she still felt woozy, the surroundings helped her to focus on her private soul searching. The cell-like room was completely characterless. White walls and paintwork, white bed, white painted bedside table. The narrow window was so high up that it was impossible to see anything except the sky. A nurse, also all in white, came in to check her pulse.

‘Try and sleep,’ she ordered. ‘If you need anything use the bell,’ she added, indicating a white button by the side of the bed-head.

Obediently, Megan closed her eyes. She had no intention of sleeping; she needed to think, to plan ahead. This really would be a turning point in her life, she resolved grimly. Never again would she let anyone take advantage of her, or exert as much power over her as Miles Walker had done.

She knew she had only herself to blame for letting her feelings for him transcend reason, blinding her to his behaviour. She had been far too eager to please, too ready to give in to his demands. His cavalier attitude when she had told him she was pregnant had finally broken the spell and made her realise how naive she had been.

She cringed inwardly. She had been so completely hoodwinked by his promise of marriage. She had trusted him implicitly, honouring her side of the bargain, telling no one, not even her parents.

Their interlude in Wales had been the ultimate triumph for Miles. It had proved his power over her, she thought bitterly. She had held out for so long, resisting his pleas that they should make love, ignoring his jests about her prudishness and his jeers when she still steadfastly refused to give in to his demands. It made her even more embittered that she had fallen for the oldest trick of all: an empty promise of marriage.

Tears stung as she relived the events of the bittersweet time they had spent together at Tynmorfa. The tender, whispered pledges, and the passion of their love-making. She had been so convinced that he felt the same way about her as she did about him.

No matter how she looked at it, Miles had behaved despicably, leading her on, winning her trust, while all the time he was planning to marry Carol Brocklehurst.

She slid her hands down underneath the crisp white sheets, gaining comfort from the feel of the flat outline of her barren stomach. She closed her eyes. Although there was nothing in the room to distract her thoughts, she wanted to shut out the world, to concentrate on what measures she must take if she was to start afresh.

She didn’t intend to leave Walker’s. To disappear would be making things far too easy for Miles. She wanted revenge and as long as she was
working
at Walker’s the knowledge that he had made her pregnant would haunt him. It would be sweet vengeance! Even when he realised she’d had an abortion he would still worry in case she said anything to jeopardise his plans to marry Carol Brocklehurst.

Revenge, punishment, atonement: such thoughts were so alien to her that for a moment Megan wondered if she was still under the influence of the anaesthetic.

But so too were deception, lying, and subterfuge – and she had resorted to all of these, she reminded herself. Even over this weekend! Her mother’s words when she had said she was going to Beddgelert rang in her ears.

‘You must be mad! If that’s really where you’re going, of course, and not off seeing that Miles Walker.’

Although she’d emphatically denied the accusation, when she’d been saying goodbye as she left home, she knew that her mother was still suspicious.

She was grateful that her father neither cross-questioned her or tried to dissuade her from going. ‘If you break down or have any problems, mind you phone home,
cariad
,’ he counselled as he waved her off.

Problems! She wondered what he would do if she rang him now and said where she was, why she was there and what had just happened.

That was another difficulty. Her father would want to know why she was leaving and she didn’t want to add to his worries.

She often wondered how he coped with her mother’s vacillating moods. She seemed to alternate between long brooding silences and onslaughts of bitter accusations. There were times when she blamed him for Lynn’s death because he had brought them back to Merseyside to live.

He bore these tirades with commendable fortitude, but Megan knew he took them to heart. He had grown quieter. His face was drawn and there was a myriad of tiny lines around his dark eyes that hadn’t been there a year ago. At one time his great interest had been football but now he rarely went to a Saturday match.

The change in him was nothing compared with the alteration in her mother, of course. She was a totally different person from when they lived in Beddgelert. Her happy, sunny nature seemed to have gone for ever. The vacant, lost look that had been in her eyes when she’d sat week after week at Lynn’s bedside had been replaced by a hard, cold stare.

She was distrustful of everyone and Megan often felt saddened by her attitude. More than once she’d been tempted to leave home, but couldn’t bring herself to let her father cope alone.

But what of the future … her future?

Megan moved uneasily in the bed. Her aching body was a sharp reminder that her days of innocence were over. From now on she intended to guard against heartbreak. She would not allow herself to fall in love ever again.

Before she drifted into sleep she thought of Robert. She knew she owed him a lot and was
grateful
. Without his help she would never have had this second chance. Perhaps she should have married him when he had asked her, she thought wryly. He would make a wonderful husband. He was so sincere and dependable; so conventional and considerate. She would have been cherished and protected for the rest of her life. Even though she didn’t love him, they were the best of friends and she enjoyed his company.

Poor Robert. He, too, was one of life’s victims. His family had owned a dairy and it had been taken for granted that when he left school he would go into the business. He’d found delivering milk unexciting. The sight of the huge liners sailing down the Mersey, bound for unknown destinations, made him restless. He longed to travel, but his parents were opposed to the idea so he took matters into his own hands and ran away to sea.

‘I knew if I tried to discuss it with them they would try to talk me out of it so I just packed my bags and left a note to say I’d gone. I picked a boat bound for South America, one that would take me halfway round the world, so that I couldn’t change my mind if I felt homesick. We must have been somewhere in mid-Atlantic when my father died from a sudden heart attack. It was months before the news caught up with me and still longer before I could get back to Liverpool.’

His face had hardened at the memory and he was silent for so long that she’d had to prompt him to go on.

‘My mother was devastated,’ he told her. ‘She couldn’t run the dairy business single-handed and
by
the time I got back she’d acted on her solicitor’s advice and sold up and moved to a house in New Brighton.

‘I didn’t go back to sea again. She never fully recovered from my father’s death so I couldn’t leave her on her own. It was a pity about the business but I was never really interested in it.’

‘And that was when you went to work at Walker’s,’ prompted Megan.

‘That was a stop gap, a bit like treading water. It gave me independence yet kept me at my mother’s side. We could look after each other. When she died, shortly before you came to Merseyside, I fully intended going back to sea.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘Various reasons,’ Robert said with a wry smile.

When she left the nursing home next day, Megan still felt weak and slightly unsteady on her feet. The effort of walking to her car left her in a cold sweat.

She sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, waiting for her heart to stop thumping and her head to stop spinning, before she turned on the ignition. She wished she had agreed to Robert’s suggestion that he should collect her.

‘You look absolutely washed out,’ her mother commented when she arrived home. ‘I knew that journey was going to be too much for you!’

‘Give me your keys and I’ll get your case and garage the car,’ her father offered.

‘Did you have trouble with the car?’ he asked as he came back into the house.

‘No, it went fine. Why?’

‘All the way to Beddgelert and back?’

Something in his voice made her look up. There was disbelief in his eyes and she looked away quickly, a guilty flush staining her cheeks. He didn’t press the point, but his face tightened as he went out of the room.

A chill chased down her spine as she tried to work out why he suspected she was lying. He couldn’t know where she had been. No one did … except Robert, and he wouldn’t betray her. He had done everything possible to help keep her secret. He had not only booked her in under a false name, but had even taken the precaution of paying in advance, in cash.

Her mother might have voiced suspicions that she was going away with Miles Walker, but surely her father wouldn’t take any notice? Not now that Miles’ engagement to Carol Brocklehurst had been made public.

She longed to tell them the truth, but that would implicate Robert as well as denigrate her still further in her mother’s eyes.

A bewildering profusion of doubts tormented her. In the end she could stand it no longer and said that as her head still ached she would have an early night.

Her entire body felt bruised and sore as she undressed and crawled into bed. Sleep eluded her.

Next morning, while she was driving to work, she suddenly realised why her father had asked if she’d had trouble with her car. His words as he’d waved her goodbye echoed in her ears. ‘I’ve checked the oil and filled her up. There’s enough
petrol
in the tank to take you to Beddgelert and back.’

When he’d put the car away he had obviously checked them both again, she thought grimly. It was second nature for him to do so; it was something he did automatically every time he took a lorry out on the road. Not only was the tank still almost full but the reading on the milometer showed less than thirty miles difference. Beddgelert and back was almost two hundred miles.

It was too late now to try to explain, she thought miserably. He knew she’d been lying. It was one more secret to be buried in her past! She seemed to be digging herself deeper and deeper into the morass, she thought unhappily.

By the time she reached the office she felt far from well and hoped she would have the will-power to cope not only with the day’s work, but everything else that lay ahead. Being strong and resolute about the way she would treat Miles had been easy when she’d been half doped by anaesthetic.

Before going into the office she checked her appearance and frowned at her reflection. Dark circles made her brown eyes look too big for her face. The peach blouse she was wearing drained every vestige of colour from her cheeks.

She applied some more lipstick, but that seemed only to accentuate her pallor. She wished she had some rouge but it was something she never used. She ran her finger over the top of the lipstick and blended it onto her cheeks, then frowned at the result. It made her look more washed out than ever.

Megan hurried through the general office with
a
brisk, bright greeting. Myra and Mavis were talking to Olive, all three bunched together at the reception desk. Mavis tried to attract her attention, but she didn’t stop, she was in no mood for gossip.

In the sanctuary of her own office, she sat at her desk wondering how she was going to cope for the rest of the day, she felt so fragile. I should have said I had the flu and taken the day off, she thought exhaustedly as she picked up the white envelope that was propped prominently against her typewriter and opened it.

Inside was a deckle-edged invitation card. The silver-embossed words danced crazily in front of her eyes. She read them several times before they fully registered. Then, tight-lipped, her cheeks flaming, she slipped the card back into its envelope. That was one wedding she wouldn’t be attending, she decided grimly.