Nobody in their right mind would trust her to raise a child.
But she wasn’t alone, was she? She had Rick. Unlike her previous boyfriends, Rick was decent and dependable, and he couldn’t do enough to show her how much he cared for her.What was it he’d said about having children? She thought back to the conversation they’d had.
‘I’d love to be a father.’That’s what he’d said. Or something very like it.
But would he want to be one right now? The thought of telling him that she was pregnant made her stomach churn even more than it was already.
What a mess she kept making of her life. Would she never learn?
Chapter Fifteen
Ellis observed his mother’s face light up at the sight of the colourful anemones Naomi had picked from her garden first thing that morning.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Rose said, ‘how kind of you. Now shall we send Ellis off to find a vase while we get to know each other?’
‘No point in asking if I have any say in this, is there?’ he enquired.
Both Naomi and his mother said no.
With a smile on his face, Ellis left the room to go in search of somebody who could provide a vase. It was clear that Naomi meeting Rose was going to go a lot better than when he finally met her daughters.
Once Naomi had told Martha and Willow about him, Ellis had anticipated an immediate showdown, but it seemed they couldn’t organise themselves to be in the one place at the same time and so the date kept being shifted. He knew from the way his stepson behaved that this was common practice amongst the younger generations. Even with all the available technology they used, it seemed that the simple act of putting a date in a diary and sticking to it was fraught with difficulty.
Each time he tried to speak to Lucas in LA, it was never quite the right moment. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he’d say, ‘gotta run, I have a meeting. I’ll call you later.’ Sometimes he did, several days later, but often he forgot. For a while now Ellis had been trying to nail Lucas down for a proper chat, to tell him about Naomi. He wanted, out of respect for Diana, Lucas’s mother, to do the thing correctly. A text or an email didn’t feel right. Perhaps that was just him being old-school. Him being an old duffer.
Which ironically was the last thing he felt. He felt vibrantly alive, as though life was now overflowing with wonderful opportunities. Opportunities that he wanted to grab hold of and enjoy to the full. With Naomi.
It still didn’t seem possible that their paths should have crossed the way they had. Thank God his mother had insisted she wanted to live out her last days here on the West Sussex coast. When he thought of the miraculous coincidence of choosing to rent a cottage that was slap-bang next door to where Naomi lived, he could almost believe that fate had intervened, that it was meant to be, how it had always meant to be.
He’d felt something similar at Geraldine and Brian’s wedding all those years ago when, after losing touch with her, he’d spotted Naomi amongst the guests. It had been a complete fluke him actually being there in the first place; a new girlfriend had invited him to accompany her and hadn’t even told him whose wedding it would be, other than to say the groom was a cousin of hers. As much as the wedding was a lasting memory for him, he couldn’t remember the girl’s name, but then it had been a short-lived relationship, if you could even call it that. He’d ended it the next day in fact.
It wasn’t until the marriage service was over and guests filed out of the church and they stood around in the wintry cold while the photographer took an age taking the required photos,that Ellis spotted Naomi beneath the extravagantly large brim of a navy-blue hat she was doing her best to hold on to in the blustery wind. From the moment he had realised who the bride was – that it was Naomi’s best friend from their university days together – he’d craned his neck in the pew to see if she was there, but had drawn a blank. She later told him that she’d been seated at the front and hidden from view by a pillar.
Leaving the girl he’d come with chatting to a group of other guests, the photographer still ordering people about to have their picture taken, Ellis had gone over to say hello to Naomi. Such was his delight at seeing her again, he was tempted to approach her from behind, put his hands over her eyes and say, ‘Guess who!’ But he checked himself and instead approached with the words, ‘Hello Naomi, long time no speak.’
‘Ellis!’ she’d exclaimed, ‘what a surprise to see you here.’
‘A good surprise, I hope.’
She smiled. ‘A lovely one.’
They did the usual thing of kissing cheeks, no small feat given the size of her hat, and saying that neither of them had changed, then asking exactly how long it had been since they’d last seen each other.
‘It must be five years,’ she said.
‘Seven,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he repeated. ‘And that’s some hat you’re wearing,’ he added as a gust of wind nearly ripped it from her head and she had to hold on to it with a gloved hand.
‘It was an absurd choice, especially given the weather,’ she said.
‘I think it’s great and easily marks you out as the most strikingly beautiful woman here.’ To his satisfaction he saw her blush.
‘Don’t let the bride hear you speak like that,’ she said, ‘no one is supposed to gain more attention than her.’
‘And talking of the bride, I had no idea whose wedding it was until I saw the order of service and Geraldine walk up the aisle with her father.’ He then explained the hows and the whys of his being there.
