father had left them both for a younger woman and, in her misery, his mother had jettisoned him to chase her own second chance of happiness.
Much in the same way that, justifying himself that it was in her best interests, he’d walked away from Grace. Had pursued and married the girl every other man he knew had wanted to bed, without a thought what marriage to him would be like. Alone for weeks on end. Not anger, no sense of betrayal, only relief when she’d found someone to console her…
Then, realising that Grace was still watching him, trying to read his expression, he said, ‘If I could have hated her, it wouldn’t have hurt so much when she left.’ Facing a truth he’d fought since she’d left him with Michael. Sharing it with Grace because she was the one person he knew would understand.
‘I tried to hate my mother, too,’ she said. ‘Hate is so much easier. But the bad stuff is mixed up with all kinds of good memories.’
‘What good memories?’ he asked. She had never talked about her life with her crazy hippie mother, her life on the road, and he’d never pushed her, even in teasing, instinctively knowing that it was beyond painful. ‘What good memories?’ he repeated.
Grace thought about it as Josh returned the bacon to the hotplate, cracked an egg into the pan and dropped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.
‘Stringing beads is my first stand-out memory,’ she said. ‘My mother was making jewellery to sell at a craft fair and, to keep me from bothering her, she gave me a thin piece of leather and a box of big bright beads so that I could make my own necklace.’
She remembered sitting at a table in the old minibus they were living in, sorting through the box of painted wooden beads, totally absorbed by the smooth feel of them, the different sizes, vivid colours. Laying them out in rows until she found a combination of colours and sizes that pleased her. Her delight as each shiny bead slid down the dark leather and the vision in her head became real.
Best of all, she remembered her mother’s smile of approval.
‘I bet you still have it somewhere,’ Josh said, bringing her back to the present.
‘No.’ She grabbed the toast as it popped up, put it on a plate, reached for a clean slice and flipped the egg over. ‘Someone saw me wearing it at the craft fair and asked my mother if she had another one like it.’
‘Absolutely not,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘It was a Grace McAllister original. Your first.’
‘Absolutely. My fate was sealed with that first sale.’
‘Sale?’ His smile faded as he realised what she was saying. ‘Are you telling me that your mother sold the necklace you’d made for yourself?’ Shocked didn’t cover it. ‘That’s a good memory?’
‘Of course. I’d made something someone liked enough to pay for,’ she said, glancing up at him. ‘That made me feel special. I bet you didn’t feel a bigger thrill when you signed your first contract, Josh. And I made myself another one when I got home.’
‘She still shouldn’t have done it.’ He made no attempt to disguise his disgust. ‘If that is as good as it got, I dread to think what the bad stuff was like.’
There were the times they’d been hungry, cold, but she and her mother had cuddled up together—they weren’t the bad times. Bad wasn’t her mother. It was other people…
‘Bad was angry people. Shouting, forcing us to move on in the middle of the night.’ She stared at the bacon sizzling in the heavy-bottomed, expensive pan standing on the Aga. The kind of luxury that she took for granted these days. ‘Bad is never knowing where you’re going to be when you wake up. Another new school where the kids call you filthy names because you live in a camper van parked on the land of someone who wants you gone. Seeing your mother dragged off by the police, arrested, just because she lashed out at someone who’d smashed the windscreen of her home. Running into the woods to hide so that the police wouldn’t take you away, put you into care…’
She stopped. Where had all that come from? All those long-buried memories. Things she’d hadn’t thought about in a long time. A world she’d left behind on the day Phoebe and Michael had picked her up from Social Services, brought her home. On the day that Josh had tossed her his spare crash helmet and taken her into school on the back of his motorbike.
Memories that she’d almost blotted from her mind. Apart from that apparently everlasting residual fear, the one about waking up and not knowing where she was. The one that still had the power to give her nightmares. That still brought her out in a cold sweat when she had to spend a night away at a craft fair….
Then, having apparently rendered him speechless, she said, ‘There’s juice in the fridge, Josh. Help yourself.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked, pouring juice into a couple of glasses she’d put on the table, bringing one over to her. ‘I knew your mother was a “traveller”, that she’d got into a bit of bother with the law. That Phoebe rescued you from care and was granted a Parental Responsibility Order so that your mother couldn’t take you back on the road. But not the rest.’
When she didn’t answer, he looked up.
‘I thought we were friends, Grace.’
Were. Past tense. Because once you’d spent the night naked with a man, utterly exposed, all barriers down, it could never be that simple ever again.
‘Are you saying that you told me everything?’ she said flippantly. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Everything that mattered. Do you think I talked to anyone else about my parents the way I talked to you?’
She knew exactly how much his father’s desertion had hurt him. What it had done to him when, six months later, his mother had flown off to the other side of the world with someone new.
He’d put on a couldn’t-care-less face for the rest of the world but, a few weeks after she’d moved in, when life was suddenly unbelievably wonderful, she’d rushed into the garden with a letter that had arrived for him from Japan. Thrilled by the strangeness of it.
He’d taken it from her, glanced at it and then, without bothering to open it, he’d torn it in two, then torn it again and again before finally discarding it, letting the breeze take the pieces, the savagery of it shocking her into a little scream.
‘It was from my mother,’ he said, as if that explained everything. Then, ‘Sorry. Did you want the stamps?’
The line had been a study in throwaway carelessness, but a shake in his voice had betrayed him, as had a suspicion of brightness in his eyes that she’d recognised only too well. And she’d put her thin arms around him and hugged him while he cried.
This was the first time either of them had ever referred to that moment and their eyes connected as they remembered, relived that moment of anguish when he’d been more completely hers than even at the moment of sexual release.
‘So?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me how it was?’
‘Fear.’ Faced with the disaster of the last week, the deceit, how could she be anything but honest with him?
‘Fear?’
Fear
