Women of a Dangerous Age (6 page)

He'd put down his drink and crossed his arms over his chest, wearing an expression that was new to her: distant, calculating.

‘But of course, I was being stupid,' she went on, desperate to rewind the whole conversation and start again. ‘It was a silly fantasy. I shouldn't have said anything.'

‘I would've thought I'd done my bit towards populating the world. I'd never imagined us …' Words failed him as he tried to imagine. ‘And, well, aren't you a bit …' He paused, searching for a kinder way of putting it and failing. ‘… too old?'

He had no idea how hearing him say that hurt. Fired up by his insensitivity, she retorted, ‘Women can have babies any time before the menopause. It just gets more difficult.' To her fury, she felt her chin wobble, and her voice began to crack. ‘Just forget it. Please. I shouldn't have said anything.' She went to pour herself a glass of wine. She took a big gulp before turning to look at him. He had emptied his own glass and returned to stare out of the window. Something had happened to make this evening go way off track. He'd arrived in the wrong mood and she had only made it worse. Much worse. But why should she make it easy for him? A few weeks ago, he had been desperate for them to be together. What had changed? Perhaps she had
gone a bit too far, but she didn't deserve to be knocked back so cruelly. She sat down again, and waited, dreading whatever he was building up to say.

Eventually he turned, but his face was hidden as he concentrated on his right thumb, pushing at the cuticle of his left. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘So sorry.'

‘So am I.' A sigh of relief escaped her. They would sort out their differences and things would be all right after all. ‘I got far too carried away. Of course we can live here – to start with, anyway. Whatever you like.' She plumped up the deep red cushion beside her and rested it against the back of the sofa, making a space for him, but he made no move to join her.

Instead, he murmured, almost as if he was talking to himself, ‘It's too late.'

Nervousness churned in the pit of her stomach. ‘For what? We've got plenty of time.'

He seemed to summon all his energy, lifting his shoulders and closing his eyes. ‘I didn't mean to tell you this today, but …'

‘But what?'

‘I've met someone else.' His shoulders dropped with the evident relief at having got it off his chest.

‘Someone else? I don't understand.' The shock took her breath away for a moment. ‘But I've only been away for two weeks. How can you have?'

At least he had the grace to look shamefaced before he spoke again. ‘She's someone at work who I've known for months. Then, at one of the Christmas parties …'

‘At one of the Christmas parties,' she repeated. ‘But that
can only have been weeks, days after we agreed we were going to live together.'

‘I know. But you've been so busy we've hardly seen each other over the last month or two.' He shifted from one foot to the other, his thumb worrying at the cuticle.

‘And you couldn't wait?' Her outrage was mixed with a profound sense of injustice. She had trusted him. ‘For God's sake, Ian. You sprang the idea of living together on me. I had to work every hour God sent to complete my Christmas orders. It's my busiest time of the year. We agreed. I offered to cancel India, but you said I should go while you sorted everything out.'

There was a long pause. An unpleasant thought wormed its way into her head. ‘Have you just come here from her?'

An even longer pause.

His thumbs were still as he stared at his feet and nodded.

She shook her head. ‘I loved you.' The three words were laced with recrimination, regret and sorrow as she realised how little she knew him.

‘I know.' He crossed the room to stroke her head with a gesture that, only hours ago, would have made her shiver with pleasure.

‘Don't,' she said, shrugging him off, as he went on.

‘Surely you understand that I can't provide the sort of commitment you're asking. I'd no idea that's what you wanted. Yes, my wife and I are separating but we've still a lot to work through. I can't take on the responsibility of a new house and I certainly don't want a baby.'

‘So, what exactly were you planning?' she spat, knowing
the answer. ‘You were going to live with me and have another mistress on the side. Same pattern all over again?'

‘I hadn't planned anything. It's just the way …'

‘I thought so much more of you. You should go.'

There was nothing else to be said. She went to get his coat, her eyes blurring with tears that she refused to shed until he had gone. Suddenly, all she wanted was Ian out of her home with the minimum fuss and with her dignity intact. Then she would allow herself to absorb what had happened between them.

He pulled on his coat. ‘Thank you for being so understanding.' He leaned forward to kiss her but she jerked out of reach. ‘Perhaps in a week or two, we could have a drink or something.'

She looked at him, astonished by his nerve. Eyes burning, she opened the door and stood back to let him pass. ‘I don't think that would be a good idea.'

‘Ali, you can't …'

She silenced him with a look as he edged by her, then shut him out of her life for good.

For the next half-hour, she moved around the flat taking down her Christmas decorations. She wrenched off the balls hanging from the twisted arrangement of willow, breaking their threads and stuffing them disorganised into their box. Cards with new addresses were saved while the others were ripped and thrown away, the lid of the recycling bin snapping loudly every time. Her shock and hurt alternated with fury. She had let down her guard, fallen in love, and been completely screwed over as a result. Other relationships had broken up and she'd recovered, but none of them had been
with a man who had led her to expect so much. Most of them went home to their wives, their marriages sometimes reinvigorated by the liaison with Ali. Others drifted away, found someone else. She had believed Ian was different. How could she have been so stupid?

Ali had resolved a long time ago never to let herself be cast in the role of victim. As a result, whenever one of her lovers decided to move on, she always picked herself up and got on with her life, however painful. That was part of the deal. And she would survive this too, despite the intense hurt that she felt right now. She slammed the box of decorations into the cupboard with a bang.

When the flat was back to normal, she went upstairs and ran herself a deep bath where she lay for ages, thinking, every now and again topping it up with hot water.

Still pink from its heat, she wrapped herself in her kimono, her hair in a towel, and came downstairs to pour herself a glass of the champagne she'd bought specially for them to toast their new life. She picked up the Nehru shirt that he'd left behind, draped over the arm of the sofa. Taking the kitchen scissors, she cut and ripped it into the smallest possible pieces. Then, and only then, did she allow herself to cry.

Arriving at the studio the following morning, Ali immediately saw that Rick wasn't far away. The kettle was hot, and the beginnings of a bridesmaid's tiara lay across his soldering brick, beside a half-drunk cup of coffee. Beneath the large window, their long, shared workbench was the usual organised jumble of pliers, hammers, files, cutters, tweezers and soldering equipment crowded round the two semicircular cut-outs, each underhung with a leather skin to catch precious cut-offs and filings. Every time she walked into this room, Ali felt this was the place she belonged, the place where she could lose herself in creating beautiful pieces of jewellery, where the world could be kept at bay.

However much she wanted to bury herself under the duvet for the rest of the week, she had dragged herself out of bed. Whatever it had done to her, she wasn't going to allow Ian's bombshell to blow away her business. Cleo Fellowes was due at eleven thirty to see the sketches for the pendant necklace that Ali had designed using the diamonds from a brooch belonging to Cleo's grandmother. After that, if the design was approved, Ali would spend the rest of the
day untangling a chain that had got mixed up in the tumble polisher before polishing a couple of rings. She switched on her laptop for the first chore of the day: dreary admin. Her heart sank as she went to her mailbox and saw the number of incoming emails. She ran her eye down them, deleting any junk or spam that had found its way through the firewall. What was left was mostly bills.

She pulled up her accounts on the laptop again and grimaced. She remembered Mrs Orlov coming to her a couple of years ago, ordering an elaborate floral brooch using pink tourmalines and tiny round diamonds. For pieces that valuable, she rarely took on a customer without a personal recommendation and Mrs Orlov had been introduced by a previous client. That sort of word-of-mouth business had been crucial to her livelihood so far. However, in her excitement over Ian's proposal followed by her rush to get away to India, Mrs Orlov's failure to collect the new pieces had slipped her mind. As a result, over three thousand pounds' worth of jewellery was languishing in her safe, contributing to the hole in her finances. A customer's failure to collect an order was unusual but it did happen. Ali was uneasy, furious with herself for allowing her eye off the ball for the first time that she could remember. Bloody, bloody Ian.

She tried ringing the Orlovs. An automated voice picked up the call, informing her that the number she was calling was no longer recognised. She swiftly fired off an email. Within minutes, it pinged back into her in-box marked
Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
. The gentle pealing of alarm bells went crazy. Was Mrs Orlov going to be one
of those rare customers who didn't collect? It never failed to amaze Ali that anyone could pay a hefty deposit for a piece of beautiful bespoke jewellery and then go away for weeks on end without a word or even never turn up again. She looked up at the sound of the door slamming.

‘Happy New Year.' Rick walked over to his end of the bench, touching Ali's shoulder as he passed her, simultaneously slipping on his overall over his checked shirt and jeans. ‘Good time away?' He sat down and slugged his lukewarm coffee before picking up the tiara.

‘Happy New Year. Yes, wonderful, thanks.' On her way to the studio, she had resolved not to discuss her personal life with Rick. Saying aloud what had happened would only drive home what she already knew: how stupid she had been to believe in Ian. Not talking about herself meant she could focus on something else. However crushed she was feeling, she was not going to risk her business any more than she had to. Life had to go on. So, sharpened by grief, she addressed her most pressing problem. ‘One of my customers hasn't collected, so I'm going to have to ask you for that money you owe me. I'm sorry. Things are a bit tight.'

He ground some borax into a bowl and, with a drop of water, mixed it into a paste. As he brushed it onto the tiara, he said, ‘They're probably on holiday – skiing or something. And I'm really sorry but I can't pay you back at the moment. I don't have the spare cash. Simple as that.'

His laissez-faire attitude to life usually amused her, but not today. She watched him cut the solder into tiny squares that he placed on the joints with precision, then she
back-pedalled. ‘You don't have to pay me the full whack immediately. What about two grand? That should tide me over. If I had another big client on the horizon, it wouldn't matter so much.'

‘Haven't you got any exhibitions coming up?' He swivelled his stool to face her, picking at a stray bit of borax on his jeans.

‘Not until the spring and anyway, that's not the point,' she insisted, irritated by his attitude. ‘We agreed when I lent you the money that it was a loan, not a gift.'

‘Al, be reasonable.' He switched on his blowtorch, focusing as the solder flooded the joints of the tiara. ‘It's hardly my fault if your business is going through a bad patch. You can't expect me to repay you without giving me any notice.' His look challenged her to an argument but Ali was stunned into silence. She had always considered Rick a friend. They spent hours in the studio together, working, gossiping or discussing their respective designs. They had shared so much heartache and heartbreak – his mostly as he flitted from one woman to another in the wake of his divorce. His indifference was shocking.

His face relaxed as he switched off the torch. ‘I'm sorry. Really. But I don't
have
the money. I paid off my credit cards and I'm just about on course with my overdraft, but Anna's still bleeding me dry. Christmas was expensive. I'm only just keeping on top of things. Can't you give me a little bit longer?'

How many times had she heard that? She was sympathetic to the drains on his pocket, especially from his ex-wife and young daughter, but, given the circumstances, she couldn't
let this go. ‘OK, let's say in two months you start paying me back. Fair? And if you can't, I'm going to have to get someone else in to share this place. I can't go on supporting both of us.'

‘That's fair. That gives me time to find the money. Thanks.' Although his voice was cheery, his eyes betrayed his anxiety. But, Ali reminded herself, she couldn't let that concern her. For the rest of the day, they worked in silence apart from when Cleo Fellowes turned up to go over Ali's sketches for the pendant design. Otherwise the studio was filled with music from Radio 3. Ali relaxed, concentrated on polishing the first of her rings and put her finances and Ian to the back of her mind.

On her way home, she decided to call at the Belgravia address Mrs Orlov had given her. In her bag was the uncollected jewellery. From across the street, the imposing six-storey Georgian terraced house looked uninhabited. The upper windows were uncurtained, the ground floor and basement were shuttered up. Two plant pots chained to the railings on either side of the porch were empty. Thinking she saw a faint light in the basement, Ali crossed the road and rang the bell. While she waited in vain, a diminutive Filipino maid in a navy uniform came out of the neighbouring house. She blinked quizzically over the fence at Ali.

‘I'm looking for Mrs Orlov,' Ali explained.

The maid looked uncertain. ‘Mrs Orlov?' She shook her head. ‘Mrs Orlov not here. They gone.'

‘What do you mean “gone”? Gone where?' Ali thought of the gems in her handbag. ‘They can't have.'

‘I'm not sure. They don't live here no more. Maybe home – Russia. Sorry.' With no more to say, she ran down the steps, leaving Ali staring after her.

Perhaps giving her fortunes a couple of months to turn about was way too optimistic after all.

 

The four-hour drive north to visit her father in Preston was no more nightmarish than usual. Long queues of traffic crawled by stretches of unmanned roadworks. As Ali drove, her thoughts turned repeatedly to Ian. Eighteen hours had passed since she'd asked him to leave and she was still reeling. What had he been thinking? Had he really been trying to leave his wife to live with her when, all the time, he had another woman waiting in the wings? Had he been hedging his bets all along just in case this mystery woman turned him down? Ali couldn't believe that anyone, least of all a man she believed she had loved, would be so calculating, so careless of the lives of people he professed to care for. How she had misjudged him. How she had misjudged herself.

As the miles passed, her mind flitted between what had happened and what she was going to do with her life now, one possibility fading out as quickly as another came into focus: move to another country, change career, find a man, adopt a child, run away, become a recluse, retire under the duvet for good. Time for a change. But a change was impossible without a cash injection to pay her bills. Her father was unlikely to help her. She knew exactly what he'd say.
‘It's your mess. You get out of it.' She couldn't count the number of times she'd heard that as she grew up. He believed in the school of hard knocks and, thanks to that, she'd learned her independence.

She eventually turned in between the two brick gateposts and parked beside her father's old silver Honda. Her heart sank a little as she envisaged the twenty-four hours that lay ahead, but at least she would have to think about something other than herself. Grabbing her overnight bag from the boot, she walked through the side gate and round the corner of the house to enter it by the back door. Her father would be in his study, tuned out from any interference including the doorbell.

‘Dad!' Ali yelled.

She was greeted by the muffled sound of barking: Sergeant, the ageing but still sprightly Border terrier who was her father's fierce and constant companion.

She tried again. ‘Dad! I'm here.'

‘Be down in a minute.' His voice travelled from the study where Ali knew he would be at his battered but trusty Corona typewriter, the laptop she'd given him ignored, surrounded by what mattered most to him: shelves containing his library of history books, including those he'd written himself; maps stuck about with pins marking out military campaigns hung beside pictures of the historical figures who fascinated him; a huge noticeboard littered with hundreds of yellow Post-it notes tracing the structure of his latest book. By his desk was a table covered in toy soldiers that he manoeuvred as if he was in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Ali went into the kitchen where she poured herself a gin
and tonic – no ice, no lemon. Her father hated his drink diluted. The tonic was the only concession he made to his few guests.

When her mother had walked out, Ali had been thirteen. From that day, everything in this house had changed. She leaned against the sink, looking around the room. Without her mother to put a bunch of flowers at the centre of the table, to weigh in against the nasty aluminium Venetian blinds that replaced the floral curtains, or object to the removal of the dining chair cushions, the room had taken on the shipshape air of an officer's mess. There was no feminine touch here. The welcoming smells of baking and stewing, washing and ironing belonged to the time when they had been a family. Her father had done his best and so had Ali, but this kitchen had stopped being the heart of the family home long ago. Anything not put away was neatly aligned on the pristine worktop. Without thinking, she pulled open a drawer to discover his cooking utensils regimented, all handles to the right. Knowing the contents of the other drawers would all be similarly arranged almost made her laugh. The stainless-steel sink shone. Dishcloths were draped on the Aga bar, all folded and hung in exactly the same way, their edges level. The pans hung above it in descending sizes. Order. That was what stopped you from going under. Like father, like daughter.

‘Al! There you are.' He entered the room just as she shut the drawer. ‘Having a good poke around? Don't blame you. Checking up, I suppose. No need.' He laughed grimly as he grasped the whisky bottle and a tumbler, and poured himself a generous slug. ‘See you've helped yourself. Cheers.'

‘How are you, Dad?' Ali ignored his accusation. No point in getting her visit off on the wrong foot. Plenty of time for that. He looked well. Despite the hours he spent at his desk, writing and researching, he still held himself ramrod straight. The legs of his trousers were sharply creased, the brass buttons on his blue jacket bright. His moustache was neatly trimmed although there was a piece of tissue stuck with dried blood just beside his nose.

‘Can't complain. Deep in research over a little-known aspect of the Wars of the Roses. Made some fascinating discoveries. Won't bore you with them though.' He tipped back his head and sucked his whisky through his teeth with a noisy hiss.

Ali gritted hers in dislike of a drinking habit that had something unnervingly Hannibal Lecterish about it.

‘I wouldn't be bored,' she protested, despite knowing that within minutes of him detailing whatever historical minutiae he was studying, she would be yawning. She longed to be able to sit down and share his enthusiasm and had often thought how being thrown together should have made them closer. Instead, her mother's departure thirty-two years ago had driven a wedge between them. A bitter cocktail of blame and guilt had driven each of them into their respective shells as they struggled to cope with the loss. As a teenager, Ali had blamed herself for not being a good enough daughter. As an adult, she learned that nothing was ever that clear-cut. Always, at first in the forefront of her mind and then, as time passed, fading to an infrequent fantasy, was the idea that her mother might come back for her. But they never heard from her again. Ali came to
understand how devastated her father must have been, how humiliated when his wife left. His reaction had been to clam up, retiring to his study as frequently as he could, refusing even to mention her mother's name. Moira Macintyre. Ali wondered whether he ever thought that he might have behaved differently towards her, his daughter, by trying to explain what had happened to her mother so that she would understand. She had long wanted to bridge the gap that had existed between them since her mother left, but he'd always rebuffed her.