Maggie protested, but she was smiling too. ‘They are my best and closest friends, The four of us have known one another since we were at school.’
‘And you share a bond that no mere male can possibly understand,’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘I have never said that,’ Maggie denied.
‘You don’t need to,’ Oliver told her wryly.
‘They aren’t going to be very pleased with me for keeping it a secret from them,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Especially Nicki. After all, I was the first to know when she was pregnant with Joey. In fact I knew even before Kit! And they still haven’t really forgiven me for not telling them about you sooner.’
‘So the phone lines are going to be burning, once we get home?’ Oliver smiled.
Maggie shook her head vigorously, her curls dancing.
‘No. We’re due to go out for a meal together, on Friday. I think I’ll wait until then when we’re all together.’
It would be a relief to tell them, to bask in their amazement and excitement. She had never let any of them know just how much she had envied them as one after the other they had given birth to their babies, partially because she hadn’t wanted their pity and partially because of Dan, and by the time she had realised that they had come to assume that she simply did not want children it had been too late to correct their misconceptions.
Even in a friendship as close as theirs there were sometimes secrets, Maggie acknowledged.
‘What’s wrong?’
They had had dinner an hour earlier and were just preparing for bed. Maggie was more tired than she wanted to acknowledge—because of her pregnancy or because …
‘I just hope that we’re doing the right thing,’ she answered Oliver quietly.
‘Of course we are,’ he reassured her robustly. ‘Why shouldn’t we be?’
Silently Maggie looked at him.
‘You know why,’ she told him. ‘I’m fifty-two years old Oliver. A woman who has gone through the menopause, who without the intervention of modern science and the gift of another woman’s eggs could not be carrying your child. You, on the other hand, are a young man in the prime of your life. You’re in your thirties, with a whole lifetime of impregnating younger fertile women ahead of you.’
‘Maggie. Stop it! The fact that we are different ages, the fact that you went through an early menopause, they mean nothing in comparison to our love.’
Maggie looked away from him. They had argued so many, many times before about this. She might not feel her age, she might not even look it—certainly Oliver had flatly refused to believe she could possibly be a day over thirty-five when they had first met, just as she had initially completely believed him when he had told her that he was in his late-thirties—but the cruel facts were that there were an inarguable, an inescapable sixteen years between them.
She had known, of course, that he was younger than her—but she had assumed the age gap was much less than it actually was. She had been in her mid-forties then, and had Oliver been speaking the truth when he had claimed to be in his late thirties she could just about have persuaded herself that the difference between them was acceptable.
Had she known then just how great it was she would never, ever have allowed a relationship to develop between them.
‘He’s how old?’ Nicki had demanded in disbelief when Maggie had finally, at Oliver’s insistence, told her friends about him.
She had to admit that once they had got over their shock her friends had been very supportive.
As she remembered that conversation a small secret smile curved Maggie’s mouth. They had teased her a little, asking her if it was true what was said about the sex between an older woman and a younger man, and mock primly she had refused to either encourage or answer them.
They had laughed at her, of course, and she had laughed with them, knowing, as Nicki had openly told her, that the air of suppressed sensuality that surrounded her told its own story.
‘You positively glow with it,’ Nicki had remarked ruefully.
‘You were the same when you first met Kit!’ Maggie had reminded her friend.
Suddenly Maggie longed to be able to talk to her friends. She, Nicki, Alice and Stella had been friends since their schooldays and their regular once-a-month evening out together to share a meal, a bottle of wine and their hopes and fears was so sacrosanct that only births and deaths had been allowed to interrupt them.
Oliver had nicknamed them ‘The Club’ or sometimes ‘The Coven’, claiming that between the four of them they had both the talents and the power to make magic, and that she, his wonderful, wise, wicked Maggie, was the witchiest of all of them.
The girls, her friends, Maggie knew, would understand all the things she had not been able to bring herself to admit to them before. All those feelings and fears she had experienced when, soon after her fortieth birthday, her doctor had had to explain that the cause of the health problems she had been suffering was the onset of a premature menopause. Nothing had prepared Maggie for the realisation that nature was closing certain doors against her; that shockingly an era of her life she had somehow believed would last for ever was over; or for the despair and anguish that realisation had so unexpectedly and uncontrollably brought her.
At the time she had been too overwhelmed by her own feelings to admit them to anyone. But she could admit to them now just how awesomely miraculous it was for her that, because of Oliver, she had found a way to halt nature in its tracks. To snatch from its closing, grinding jaws that which it was relentlessly taking from her.
Motherhood. She had told herself when she and Dan had split up that it just wasn’t meant to be for her, and she had believed truly that she had accepted that situation. It had taken Oliver to show her just how much she had lied to herself. And how very much a part of her still ached for that fulfilment. Why had she never realised until it had been all but too late just how important, how elemental, how essential such an experience would be to her?
Silently Oliver watched her. Why couldn’t she accept that the difference in their ages meant nothing to him; that he loved her as she was and for what she was?
He truly believed that in spirit Maggie was far younger than he was himself; she had the enthusiasm for life of a young girl and a rare kind of physical beauty that would never age.
He had always been drawn to older women. He liked their emotional maturity; he felt at ease with them.
Maggie’s achievements filled him with pride for her; he loved being able to claim her as his partner and he knew she was going to be a wonderful mother.
Oliver loved children. And he loved even more knowing that Maggie was going to have his child … their child.
So she was over fifty. What did that mean? Nothing as far as he was concerned! The specialist at the clinic had agreed with him that Maggie was in perfect health; he had even offered the information that had Maggie not experienced an early menopause she could have become pregnant naturally and that it was not unusual for women of her age to do so.
‘Maggie,’
