Children were so precious and parenthood so very precarious. Did anyone ever think they had got it right one hundred per cent?
Taking a sip from her mug of tea, Naomi recalled with fond nostalgia her daughters in all the various incarnations of their lives. In the semi-darkness, she saw their childhood shadows dancing around the kitchen. She heard their cries of delight as she unveiled the birthday cakes she’d made for them,their cries when they were hurt and their howls of indignation at some unfairness or other. She heard their laughter too when Colin played a practical joke on them. One of their favourite games when they’d been small was for him to adopt the role of the giant inJack and the Beanstalk. For such a large man he had been surprisingly light on his feet and they never heard him creeping up on them, not until he was practically on top of them and they were shrieking with giddy terror at the wordsFee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a little-un, which was his spin on the classic line.
She drank some more of her tea, took a bite of biscuit and switched her thoughts back to yesterday, in particular to when everybody had gone, and Ellis was helping her with the clearing up. They had planned for him to stay the night with her, but she’d suddenly had a change of heart and told him that it had been an exhausting day and if he didn’t mind, she’d prefer to be alone. What she didn’t say was that she needed time on her own to think. Time to convince herself that she was doing the right thing, that she hadn’t rushed into things with Ellis.
If he had been disappointed by her request, he hadn’t shown it. He’d kissed her goodnight and said that he understood. But did he? And was he right when he said that Martha and Willow just needed to adjust to the idea of him?
Or would there be, as she feared, too great a price to pay in loving Ellis? But hadn’t she paid enough already? Had she made the sacrifice she had all those years ago only now to risk losing what she held most dear, her children’s love?
For the greater part of her adult life she had hidden her real emotions beneath an impenetrable layer of calm acceptance that enabled her to keep the ship – her family – on an even keel. How fitting that Anchor House was their home,a place that was safely tethered to weather the storms of everyday family life. Perhaps it made her sound too pliant, but was that such a bad thing, to be the one who ensured Anchor House was their safe harbour, their one true constant?
It still dismayed Naomi that Martha had been so overbearingly adamant that the time had come for her to sell the family home. Of course she accepted quite readily that one day she would be too old to manage such a large house on her own, but that was far off in the future, and besides, who said she would live the rest of her life alone? But then just like her father had been, Martha was a great planner; she liked to have every i dotted and every t crossed, all eventualities covered. But life was not like that, and as that old saying went, while mankind planned, God laughed.
She dunked the last quarter of biscuit into her tea, then popped it into her mouth, thinking that there were myriad moments that changed or defined a life. Some were definitely more significant than others.
For her, the day of Geraldine and Brian’s wedding would forever stand out as the one that would come to define her as a wife and mother for ever afterwards. Although it could be argued that it was Colin confessing that he’d slept with his secretary that was really the moment that defined Naomi’s role in their marriage.
While the shock of his confession had torn the ground from beneath her, it was later that she wondered at his need to confess. He claimed it was because he needed to clear his conscience, that he couldn’t live with the lie. Which was all very well, but had he not stopped to think of the consequences? What if she had said his confession had destroyed all that she valued in their relationship and she could no longer remain married to him?Or had he calculated the risk involved and assumed that her capacity for forgiveness would mitigate his crime?
What he could not have factored into his thinking was Ellis showing up at Geraldine’s wedding just days after he had sat Naomi down, taken her hands in his, admitted the awful thing he had done and then asked for her forgiveness. Appalled and sickened, she could barely bring herself to look at him, much less forgive him and had insisted that he sleep in the spare room.
For her friend’s sake – having bought at the last minute the largest hat she could find to hide beneath – she had squared her shoulders, put on a united front with Colin and had smiled her way through Geraldine and Brian’s wedding, just wanting it to be over.
But then Ellis had spotted her, and a collision course was set in motion and she had behaved in a way she would never have dreamt possible.
There was so much she shouldn’t have done that day. She shouldn’t have felt so pathetically sorry for herself and responded to Ellis in the way she had. She shouldn’t have used him in order to hurt Colin, to pay him back for hurting her.See, Colin,she wanted to scream in his face as she kissed Ellis,this is how it hurts. But it hadn’t hurt as Ellis had poured himself into her and her body had writhed in ecstasy beneath his in an explosion of angry desire.
Oh, it had been heady stuff! There on the floor of that summerhouse, for one euphoric beautiful moment, she had never felt more out of control, yet at the same time so utterly in control.
What she had thought would be a one-off moment of mad revenge proved to be no such thing.She met Ellis twice more in the week that followed, taking an extended lunch break to meet him in a hotel that was equidistant from their offices in London, where he was now working after a stint in Manchester. Afterwards she would return to work with his scent on her, fuelling her desire for the next time she would see him, the next time when his touch would ignite her.
She may well have lost her head, but she hadn’t lost her conscience entirely. With Colin still banished to the spare room, she would wake in the middle of the night full of remorse. This was not her. This was not the woman she thought she would ever be. Duplicitous. Revengeful. Reckless.
She came to her senses when a few days later she realised her period was now three weeks late. In all the emotional turmoil of the last week or so she had lost track of her dates, but when she checked her diary, she calculated she must have been pregnant before Colin’s confession. The knowledge that she was pregnant made her accept that she could no longer behave like a spoilt child getting her own back on Colin. They were now going to be parents; it was time put away childish things.
The only person who had an inkling as to what had gone on between her and Ellis was Geraldine. She had seen them slipping away into the darkness the night of her wedding reception, and then spotted them later furtively rejoining the party inside. She claimed that there had been an unmistakable look of guilt about them when they reappeared, a look that shouted from the rooftops that they’d just had sex. Whether or not that was true, Colin had been too drunk to notice anything different about Naomi.
Geraldine didn’t let on that she had guessed what had taken place between Naomi and Ellis until she and Brian were back from their honeymoon.By then Naomi had explained to Ellis the reason why they must never see each other again.
‘Are you sure the baby is Colin’s and not mine?’ he had immediately asked, and she’d explained why there could be no doubt.
‘Trust me, Ellis,’ she’d said, ‘it can’t be yours; the timing is wrong.’
The conversation had taken place on the telephone and she’d been deliberately and uncharacteristically brutal, telling him that it had been nothing more than a selfish act of revenge, her sleeping with him.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he’d said. ‘Yes, the night of the wedding that might have been true, but not in the days since. That was real between us.’
‘You’re wrong. None of it was real. We were both playing a part. Me the wronged wife, and you the—’
‘No,’ he said softly, ‘don’t go on. Please don’t twist or denigrate what this last week has meant to me. Or what I hoped it might lead to.’
‘Then, please, if that’s true, if you really care about me, let it end now. Let me get on with repairing my marriage. Because it’s the right thing to do. You’re a decent man, Ellis, so I know you’ll respect my decision.’
It said a lot about him that he did. She never saw him again, not until that day on the beach back in February.
Now, in the kitchen at Anchor House, and as the sky began to lighten and the first of the birds started to sing, Naomi feared that once again she might be forced to make a tough decision.
Would she have to put her children and their happiness before her own, or was there a way to have both?
