as she saw how Kit was looking at her, his voice tense as he told her, ‘This isn’t just about Laura, is it, Nicki? This goes back to before Laura’s arrival.’ He paused. ‘Look, if it’s because …’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Nicki denied, jerking frantically away from him. ‘Just like you didn’t want to talk about it when … All I want is for you to leave me alone.’
She could feel the emotions surging up inside her with frightening force. Pain; guilt; the horrible tormenting, debilitating fear that robbed her of the ability to think or function properly, and with it the full force of her anger against Kit, and against life itself.
‘Nicki …’
She could hear the anxiety in his voice, but she felt too isolated and distant from him to want to respond to it. It was safer feeling like this, she recognised. Safer and easier. Let him turn to his precious daughter if he wanted someone to sympathise with him. She no doubt would fully endorse his feelings—his behaviour!
‘Look, Nicki, what happened happened to both of us.’
Nicki gave him a bitter look.
‘Oh, really? You can say that now, Kit, but at the time, according to you, it was my problem … my decision.’
‘Your decision, yes. But …’
They both tensed as Laura knocked on their bedroom door and called out, ‘Dad, are you in there? Can I have a word?’
‘You’d better go,’ Nicki told him fiercely, and rejectingly. ‘Laura needs you!’
‘No Hughie? I thought you said he was coming home today?’
Accepting her husband’s perfunctory kiss on her cheek, Stella nodded. ‘I did and he has. He’s gone round to see Julie,’ she told Richard wryly. ‘He seemed to be a bit on edge before he left, and he’s lost weight.’
‘Students always do,’ Richard pointed out equably, ‘and I shouldn’t worry too much about Julie. To be honest I rather got the impression that things had cooled off somewhat between them.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Stella denied. ‘But it has occurred to me that Hughie might have given us that impression deliberately, because he knows it’s what we want to hear. He’s an intelligent boy, after all. I mean, it’s like I was saying to Alice earlier. It’s not that I don’t like Julie, I do. I just want them both to be sensible and look beyond the here and now, the immediacy of the moment, and think about the future. Hughie is far too young to even think of tying himself down to a steady relationship. Apart from anything else, with him away at university and Julie here, it just isn’t practical!’
As she spoke Stella suddenly heard Maggie’s voice from their own teenage years, teasing her. ‘Oh, Stella! Miss Practicality, that’s what I think we should call you!’
Funny the things one remembered … and why. At the time she had found nothing wrong in Maggie’s comment, even preening herself a little for it, telling herself that she had more common sense than the other three put together, and that without her to put an end to some of their more outrageous exploits and sometimes too silly attitude towards life they would have been in a sorry mess indeed. They needed her to remind them of what was what—to stop them behaving foolishly. Yes, she had prided herself on her role within the quartet—the sensible one, the cool, non-flirtatious one whom boys knew better than to approach with too-familiar overtures. The one whom, in fact, the male sex tended to treat more as a pal and an honorary member of their own sex that they could confide in, rather than a mysterious and exciting object of desire and lust. And she had continued to pride herself on it, feeling both empowered and ever so slightly superior to the other three because of her foresight, her ability to rationalise and plan, her sheer sensibleness.
But just lately …
‘Are you in this evening or out?’
Although Stella no longer had any paid employment, having given up her social services job after Hughie’s birth, over the years she had been co-opted onto the committees of a variety of voluntary organisations, starting with the Parent-Teachers Association of Hughie’s junior school, and picking up along the way a position on the Board of Governors for his senior school, an appointment as a local JP, and three local charity organisations, all responsibilities on which she had thrived, with which she dealt with her famed efficiency, and which kept her just as busy as Richard since his promotion to Chief Clerk of the Local County Council.
‘In but I’m out tomorrow,’ she told him pragmatically. ‘Dinner with Maggie and the others. Apparently Maggie has something she wants to tell us!’
Richard shook his head. He was a hard-working, honest, but unimaginative man who found it hard to get to grips with the emotional intensity of the bond the four women shared. For a start they were all so very different. Alice, the quiet, gentle, stay-at-home mother; Nicki, the glossy, immaculate businesswoman; his own Stella with her formidable efficiency and practicality, and who—thank the Lord!—had never and would never exhibit any of the passionate intensity that was so much a part of Maggie’s vibrant personality. But that was women for you. And Richard, one of the last of a dying race of a certain type of man, was quite happy to openly admit that, so far as he was concerned, the female sex was a complete enigma!
‘So why couldn’t Maggie tell you whatever this news is before tomorrow night?’ Richard asked.
‘You know Maggie,’ Stella responded wryly. ‘Typically, Alice is convinced that she’s going to announce that she and Oliver are planning to get married.’ She gave a small exasperated shrug. ‘I hope she’s wrong. You’d think after what she went through when she and Dan split up that Maggie would be very wary about inviting any more emotional pain—and that’s what she’s going to get ultimately, because, no matter what he feels about her now, sooner or later Oliver is going to want a younger woman.’
‘Mmm. I always thought that was a rum business—Maggie and Dan splitting up. I mean, you never saw them apart. Whenever we went out together, they were always all over one another.’
‘Well, according to Nicki, Dan wanted children and Maggie didn’t, so—’
‘I thought they split up because Dan had that affair,’ Richard interrupted her, looking confused.
‘Well, yes, they did, but we always knew that there had to be a reason why he had the affair. I mean, Dan just wasn’t that kind of man.’
‘He was a damn good-looking chap,’ Richard mused.
‘Very good-looking,’ Stella agreed ruefully.
All of them had at one time or another been a little bit in love with Dan, even her, although she had kept her feelings determinedly to herself, firmly lecturing herself against being foolish.
People might nowadays describe her approvingly as a striking looking and confident woman, but in her youth she had quite definitely been plain. Yes, she had had regular features, healthy, clear skin, and good teeth, but what they had added up to had always fallen short of the head-turning male-attention-getting looks the other three had in their different ways possessed.
Not that she had minded. Prettiness had been in her opinion, then, a dangerously two-edged sword, in that it encouraged her sex to rely on it and, if they were weak and silly enough, to trade on it. Not that any of her friends had ever been guilty of that!
At
