He stared at her in amazement. ‘Are you serious? Are you honestly telling me you didn’t know?’
Alison put down her glass looking horrified. ‘Aw no, Mac, I didn’t. I swear it. I knew there was some gentle teasing but that’s all. Who bullied you?’
‘Who didn’t?’ He shrugged. ‘Not all the verbal stuff was gentle, but I could shrug it off. Well, I say I shrugged it off. It hurt, I can’t deny it. But it wasn’t as bad as the physical bullying. I lost track of how many bruises I had.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Her eyes had filled with tears, which made him uncertain whether he should feel glad that she cared or sorry that he’d made her so uncomfortable. For his own part, he was just relieved she hadn’t known. He’d always suspected she’d been all too aware and just hadn’t been bothered.
‘No need to be sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago. It really doesn’t matter now.’
‘But it does,’ she said. ‘I was so happy at primary school. I loved it there. Do you remember Miss Sayers? She was my absolute favourite teacher. She encouraged me so much and made me feel I could do anything.’
‘Is she what made you go into the same profession?’ he asked, noting the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about their old teacher.
‘I think she was, actually,’ Alison admitted. ‘I wanted to do for other kids what she’d done for me.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Not sure it worked out that way, but I gave it a good go.’
He nodded. ‘What made you give it up then? If you don’t mind me asking? Was it your husband’s death that caused you to leave or?—?’
‘No, I’d left a year before he died.’ She hesitated. ‘We’d talked it over, you see. We had plans. He knew that teaching wasn’t what it used to be, and I was increasingly unhappy, and he said we could manage without my salary and that I shouldn’t waste any more of my life on something that was making me so depressed.’
‘That was kind of him. Very understanding.’
‘He was a kind and understanding man.’ She took a large gulp of her Coke. ‘Then he got ill, and it all went pear-shaped. We were going to downsize and buy a campervan. Do some travelling. He was going to decrease his hours gradually until retirement. We were going to have a bigger garden, and I was going to make it beautiful…’ She blinked away tears and Mac wished he’d never started this conversation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
She cleared her throat and sat up straighter. ‘Nothing else to say really. I carried on alone for a year, then took a job at the petrol station. Four shifts a week. Not a great deal of money but enough. Drew had always been careful, you see, and he’d taken out life insurance. The mortgage was automatically paid off upon his death, so I could manage. I mean, I’m not rich by any means, but I’m not struggling either, so the job was never about the money. It was about having company, I suppose. Getting out of the house.’ She gave him a challenging look. ‘There’s nothing wrong with working in a petrol station, is there? I could have gone back to teaching if I’d wanted.’
‘Nothing wrong with it at all,’ he said, surprised. ‘And if you’d wanted to teach, you’d never have left, would you?’
‘I didn’t want the responsibility any longer,’ she said simply. ‘I like the fact that I can go to work, do my job and come home without having to stress about what’s happened that day and what might happen tomorrow.’
He could relate to that. ‘The main thing is you’re happy doing what you’re doing. There’s more to life than money.’ He gazed out of the window for a moment, almost forgetting she was there. ‘The root of all evil,’ he murmured.
‘Well, that might be true, but we don’t get very far without it, do we?’ she said. ‘Anyway, enough about me. What about you?’
His guard immediately came down and he nervously drummed his fingers on the table. ‘What about me?’
‘Well, anything really! You left here to go to university, didn’t you? Where did you go and what happened after that? Your mum gave us the odd update, but it was a long time ago and I can’t really remember what she told us.’
He smiled to himself, thinking that it was highly doubtful Alison had even listened to anything his mum had told her. She hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in him at school, so why would she start to care afterwards?
‘I went to university in the Midlands,’ he said. ‘Believe it or not, I intended to become a teacher myself, but I changed my mind before I went on to do myPGCE, thank goodness. I’d have been a terrible teacher.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she said, smiling at last. ‘You were always so sensible at school, as I recall. I can just imagine you standing in front of a group of children, inspiring them. Besides, you know how it feels to be treated badly at school. I reckon you’d have been on the lookout for that. It’s a shame you changed your mind.’
‘Well, maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll never know now, will we? The Cliff Notes version is that I left university, got a job in finance, made a gifted and fun best friend who got me into the company he was working for, made quite a bit of money, formed a partnership with said best friend, bought, developed and sold commercial property and had quite a comfortable life, thank you very much. That’s pretty much it.’
She frowned and he waited for the inevitable question, which wasn’t long in coming.
‘But what about your personal life? You were married, weren’t you? Your mum said?—’
‘Oh, yes.’ He forced himself to sound cheery. ‘I got married, too! Lovely woman and we were very happy. The marriage worked perfectly until it didn’t, but I don’t regret it. Not for a moment.’
It wasn’t a lie. He didn’t regret the marriage. It was how it ended that he hated.
‘And do you have children?’
