girlfriend.
Good luck to him, she thought. He deserved his success, but his life and hers were worlds apart now. It was nice to know that he was well and successful, but there was no point in thinking about him anymore, she decided. She would put him out of her mind completely.
Absorbed in her thoughts, Nell didn’t realise that the green man was beeping at the lights until Clara dug her in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Mum!’
Nell started, and let her daughter bustle her across the road. Really, she must pull herself together. She was supposed to be looking after Clara, not the other way round.
Clara was eyeing her thoughtfully as they turned down a side street. They had walked to school so many times now that they followed the route automatically. Nell was sure that she could do it in her sleep.
‘Are you nervous about your date tonight?’
Nell sighed. She had been so busy thinking about P.J. that she had forgotten all about her blind date. ‘I wish I’d never agreed to go,’ she grumbled. ‘I don’t know why I let you and Thea bully me into these things!’
‘It would be nice for you to have a boyfriend.’
‘Clara, I’m thirty-seven! I’m too old for boyfriends.’
‘You’re not,’ said Clara loyally. ‘You’re not much older than Thea, and she’s just got married.’
That was unarguable. Her sister had been thirty-four when she’d met Rhys, and ready to give up on ever finding the right man for her.
‘Sometimes you just have to wait for fate to put the right person your way,’ said Nell, thinking that fate had done the best it could twenty-one years ago. It wasn’t fate’s fault that she had been too young and too silly to recognise the right person for her.
Not for the first time she wished that her daughter weren’t quite so interested in adult relationships. It was hard to explain some of the complexities to a ten-year-old, but from a very small child Clara had been fascinated by people and why they behaved the way they did.
She had been hardly more than a baby when her father had left, and took having divorced parents in her stride, but Nell really wanted to give her the example of a loving relationship, so that she could see that it was possible for adults to live together and be happy. That was the main reason why she had let Thea talk her into making an effort to meet men again, but so far her blind dates had not been a success, to say the least.
There had been Neil, who had, according to his own confession, thrived on a double life, Nick with the appalling table manners, Paul who had talked about himself all evening, and Lawrie, the latest disaster, who had spent the entire date describing his red sports car, apparently believing that it would be enough to make any woman fall at his feet. Thea had assured her that tonight would be different, but Nell wasn’t convinced.
‘I never really had boyfriends even when I was young,’ she told Clara now. ‘I married your father when I was twenty-one and before that there was only—’
She stopped. Somehow she had ended up back at P.J. It was uncanny the way all her thoughts seemed to lead back to him, in spite of the fact that she had decided so utterly and definitely that she absolutely was not, no way, going to think about him anymore.
‘Oh, look at that puppy,’ she said quickly as a scatty Labrador with huge paws and an eager expression gambolled along the pavement towards them, towing its owner in its wake.
‘Ah-h-h … cute …’ Clara cooed and let the puppy slurp at her fingers, quivering in ecstasy at all the attention, but the moment it had been dragged on its way she fixed a beady look on her mother, who had just begun to hope that she had been successfully distracted.
‘Only who?’
‘Only who what?’ Nell prevaricated. Clara was a darling, but sometimes she could be just a little too perceptive and persistent for comfort.
‘You said you’d only had one boyfriend before Dad,’ Clara reminded her.
‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ she said as carelessly as she could. ‘Just a boy I knew at school.’
‘What was his name?’
‘P.J.,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘What, like in pyjamas?’ said Clara, unimpressed.
‘Yes.’ Nell was conscious of a slightly defensive tinge to her voice. She had thought of P.J. as P.J. for so long that the initials no longer seemed odd to her.
‘Why was he called that?’
‘His real name was Peter John Smith,’ she explained. ‘He used to say that using his initials was the only way he could make himself sound interesting.’
Clara looked puzzled. ‘Was he really boring, then?’
‘No, he wasn’t boring.’ Nell couldn’t help smiling as she shook her head. P.J. had been a lot of things, but never boring.
His image rose before her, long and lanky, with that humorous, beaky face and eyes that were blue and very alert. P.J. would never have made it as a model, that was for sure, but he had been kind and clever and funny, and everybody had liked him.
‘He was … nice,’ she told Clara. ‘He was very easy to talk to. We had good fun together.’
The other girls had mooned over the better-looking boys in the year above, but P.J. had been much more fun. And it wasn’t as if he had been exactly ugly. He had had a stubborn jaw and laughing eyes and an unexpected, slightly lopsided smile that would suddenly make him seem much more attractive than he actually was.
Without meaning to, Nell sighed. If only she couldn’t remember him quite so vividly.
‘What happened?’ asked Clara. ‘Did you have a fight?’
‘No.’ Nell hesitated. It was hard to explain what had happened when she couldn’t even explain it to herself now. ‘We’d been going out since I was sixteen and he was seventeen. We’d been away to different universities and … well, I suppose we’d started to grow apart.’
They had been so young, too, she thought. She had been just twenty-one, and desperate to get married and have a family, while P.J. had wanted to wait. It had begun to seem as if they were just staying together out of force of habit.
‘And then I met your father …’
She trailed off, remembering how glamorous Simon had seemed at the time. A few years older, he had had all the swagger and sophistication that P.J. had lacked, while she had been too naive to realise that kindness was worth so much more than sophistication, or that good looks and self-confidence counted for little compared to someone you could rely on absolutely.
Like P.J., in fact.
‘Your dad swept me off my feet,’ she told Clara.
And he had. Simon had promised her everything she had ever wanted … and then spent the next eight years crushing her bright hopes one by one.
Clara swung her bag thoughtfully. ‘Do you wish you’d married
