The Fleeting Years Page 23

  ‘I know,’ he said, drawing her close. ‘I hope she’s happy. He seems a pretty decent chap and I’m glad we’ve had this chance to get to know him better before they disappear. Do you think she’ll be all right with him? There are so many broken marriages out there; do you think they have the makings of a lifelong bond in that environment? God, darling, I’m so thankful we didn’t let ourselves be drawn into it.’

  ‘Um …’ She snuggled close to him. ‘Me too.’

  ‘I don’t want her to go, and yet it’ll be lovely to be just the two of us again.’

  ‘Remember what we always used to say? I love you, Mr Marchand.’

  ‘Used to say? Yes, I suppose that’s true. When did it happen that there was no need to use words any more? I love you, Mrs Marchand,’ he said with a gentle laugh, ‘perhaps we ought to tell each other more often like we used to.’

  ‘No need. Time does funny things, doesn’t it. Two people young and at the start of their time together like Fiona and Ivor, two people like we were all those years ago, I suppose you need to say it. But now, it’s different, isn’t it. Of course I love you and you love me, but the difference is that we sort of become like two halves of the same whole.’ She shivered even though she was warm. ‘Quite frightening really.’

  He didn’t answer except to draw her closer. Would it ever be like this for Fiona and Ivor, she wondered. But she wasn’t ready to look for the answer. Instead she nuzzled her face against Peter’s neck, so familiar, so much part of life.

  ‘I’m not very tired,’ she whispered. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Five minutes ago I might have been, but now I’m not. Fancy us with a married daughter. She probably sees us as over the hill.’

  Zina’s hand moved down his naked body, knowing his mind had kept pace with hers.

  ‘She knows nothing,’ she whispered. Then for both of them, Fiona was forgotten.

  Next morning the lie continued when, still lying in bed, they heard Fiona’s door open, then the family bathroom door shut with force enough to make sure no one could avoid hearing it. Fiona was acting out her part. They heard the flushing of the cistern, then it seemed she was coming out but instead, to be doubly sure she’d been heard, she ran back with another slam of the bathroom door and a minute later another flush of the cistern. Next time she came out, instead of going back to her own room she padded along the corridor to theirs, tapping on the door and opening it at the same time.

  ‘Mum, I feel awful. Been ever so sick. Are you both all right? Could it be something I ate?’ She gave a loud belch, her body convulsing, then fled back with another slam of the bathroom door. Zina felt wretched that this Oscar-meriting performance was for Peter’s benefit.

  ‘We can’t let them fly today,’ he said, suddenly wide awake and sitting upright. ‘They must change their flight.’

  ‘Ivor has to be back, that’s why they chose the flight they did.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right? There’s nothing wrong with me. We all ate the same food. Shall I ring for the doctor?’ He was more than worried; he was frightened. Even as a child Fiona had never suffered anything more than a mild bout of measles and the occasional cold. The thought of her being thousands of miles away and perhaps being ill was unbearable. ‘Well, if he has to go back, so be it. But she can’t travel like that. You can’t drive up with us today, you must stay here to look after her and we’ll keep her until she is quite better, then if I’m not home you can drive her to Heathrow.’

  It was all going just as Fiona and Ivor had planned. Zina had never felt so wretched. By ten o’clock she had said goodbye to her new son-in-law, received a worried kiss of farewell from Peter and was watching the car disappear down the drive.

  ‘They’ve gone, Mum,’ Fiona called from her viewpoint at the landing window. ‘I’ll get up now. What shall we do today? It’s going to be lovely and sunny, we could go to the beach this morning.’

  Barefoot and in her pyjamas Fiona looked very little older than she had when she’d gone off to the States with Peter more than eight years ago. Zina hated herself that she could feel so unsympathetic. If Fiona had no thought for anyone but herself, was that anything new? But this morning her attitude couldn’t be ignored.

  ‘For heaven’s sake! Sometimes the way you carry on makes me so angry!’

  Fiona made a mock frightened face. ‘Oh dear, Mum. You haven’t caught that bug, have you?’ she teased. ‘You sound a real old grouch. Come on, cheer up. Let’s go to the beach.’

  ‘I may be an old grouch, but if I am then you can blame yourself. I hate deceiving Peter, lying to him. I’ll drop you off at the beach, but make sure you take money with you so that you can get a taxi home. I’m going to London.’

  ‘But you told Dad you’d stay here because of me not bei—’ One look at Zina’s expression and she fell silent.

  ‘I might even get to the flat before Peter does, by the time he’s taken Ivor to departures. It’s a long drive, there and back in a day, so I’ll stay overnight. Anyway, after what I shall have told him I don’t want to leave Peter by himself.’ She knew she was being spiteful and hated herself that she could behave like it and feel such a need to hurt her own daughter.

  ‘I’m not the first girl to have been taken advantage of,’ Fiona said sulkily.

  ‘What? Oh, I wasn’t thinking about the baby. It’s your whole attitude, Fiona. It’s no use talking to you. Perhaps we’ve been to blame. We’ve always let you get away with behaving as if no one mattered but yourself. We saw how when you were children you always made Tommy give way to you, so perhaps the whole thing is our own fault.’

  ‘Tom would want to help me. He cares about me.’

  Zina ignored the implication behind the remark. ‘If you’re going to the beach you’d better get your swimming things on under your clothes. But don’t be long; I want to get on the road.’

  ‘Shan’t go on the beach. When I said it I forgot what I’d look like in a bikini. Leave me here. Perhaps later on I’ll go for a walk.’ Then more cheerfully, she added, ‘Or I could go and see Gran and Granderek. There’s a bike in the shed, isn’t there?’ Already she’d turned cheerfully to the next thing. ‘I shan’t tell them anything. I’ll just say I was very sick in the night and couldn’t face a journey but Ivor had to get back – and that you’ve gone with Dad to London. When she has to be told I’ll let you do it. She won’t notice, will she?’ she added, smoothing her skirt over her still almost flat stomach.

  ‘It’s hardly likely. She saw you a couple of days ago. She may ask you to eat there but anyway there’s plenty of food in the fridge. I’ll be back probably early afternoon tomorrow.’

  Peter not only drove Ivor to Heathrow but he decided to wait with him until the sign came up that his flight was checking in. This time with just the two of them together was important. This young man was Fiona’s husband, the foremost man in her life, which was something her doting father found hard to accept. But he knew he had no alternative if he were to keep his special relationship with her and so, during their short stay, he had gone out of his way to be friendly to the newcomer to his family. Strangely though, considering how unexpectedly Ivor had been thrust on them, he found nothing to dislike in ‘the boy’ as he thought of the handsome young god less than half his own age. In the refreshment bar they sat together drinking coffee and talking with remarkable ease.

  ‘You take me back a quarter of a century,’ he said, ‘in years if not in the state of your career. At your age I was permanently hard up, moving from town to town every six weeks acting in rep. I was pretty well thirty when my first break came in films.’

  ‘I guess a few years in rep, as you call it, gave you a pretty sound base to build on when you went back to the theatre. Did it feel strange?’

  ‘Not actually strange and yet not familiar. I shouldn’t wonder you think it’s nonsense when I say one can feel the atmosphere – the vibes – from the audience. But it’s true. There will never be the money in stage work that there is in the
film world, but there is an indefinable something. You know how it is in films, the sequence of events has little or nothing to do with when the scenes are shot. Wonderful training for an actor; tears today, laughter tomorrow, tears again the day after, all emotions you have to conjure up as necessary. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing in this world like the moment when you step out onto the stage, hearing the very silence in the auditorium and yet drawing the audience to you so that they are moved by the emotion … hark at me, don’t let me get on my hobby horse.’

  ‘But Fiona said you have a film coming up?’

  ‘A war story. I read the script before I accepted. One great advantage of the passage of time, I accept what I want to do. Shooting isn’t due to start until the back end of the year. Ah, that’s your flight. They’re starting to check in. If Fiona isn’t better by tomorrow I’ll see she has the doctor to look at her.’

  Ivor was biting his lip, clearly worrying about something. Then, not quite looking at Peter, he rushed into what he knew he had to say.

  ‘Last check-in won’t be for ages. Look, sir, look Peter, I gotta tell you. We fixed it like this so that Fiona could stay behind. She’s not sick, not like she wanted you to think. She’ll be with you for months. She’s pregnant. Zina refused to tell you till I’d gone, maybe in case you kicked me out.’ In stunned silence Peter listened as he was told the whole story. ‘We arranged I would go and then Zina would break it to you. I guess I may be a heel, but I can’t go off without giving you the chance to tell me what you think of me. But I do love her, that’s God’s truth. For months I’d been begging her to say she’d marry me, but she wanted us just to go on living together like we were. Then this happened.’ He made himself meet Peter’s gaze. ‘I wish, honest to God I wish, it wasn’t like this. I wish we had got hitched when I moved in with her and now maybe it wouldn’t have been this way. I wish you’d say something, tell me I’m a bastard, because that’s how I feel running off back home and leaving her like this. But she won’t come back, you see, not while she’s altering and getting, well, fat and all that. I wish you’d say something.’

  The tic in Peter’s cheek was working overtime, he could feel it but had no control over it. This boy had made his beloved Fiona pregnant. But be fair, he told himself, Fiona would never agree to anything she didn’t want. If they loved each other and wanted to share their lives surely they should be happy. Zina and he would be grandparents. His mouth twitched into something that might have been from the working of the nerve in his cheek or it might have been a sign that he was trying to make himself smile.

  ‘If you and Fiona are happy about it, does it matter that the child will be born so soon? All that will get forgotten.’

  ‘Sure it will. But happy about it? She’s dead against it. Coming like it has when she’s doing so well, you can understand how she feels.’

  Silence for a moment while Peter considered what Ivor had said, his mind taking him back to when Zina had first been pregnant. Then, speaking his thoughts aloud, he said, ‘Zina was being hailed as a violinist with a great future when she first found she was expecting the twins. She gave up and it was years later that she went back to it, never as a soloist but as a member of quite a leading quintet.’

  ‘Zina plays the violin? Fancy that. Fiona never told me.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she was ever very concerned, not like Tom was.’ He tried not to admit to the hurt he felt that something so important to Zina could have meant nothing to Fiona. ‘She doesn’t play now; not since the accident.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘She had a very serious accident. She was standing on the edge of the cliff in a gale when it crumbled taking her down with it. She has very limited use of her shoulders.’

  ‘Gee, but that’s tough. I never knew. Is that how she got the scar on her face? What rotten luck. You know something? The more you hear of things other folk have had to get over, the less of a tragedy you see in your own troubles.’

  ‘Troubles? Surely a child to a married couple is hardly that.’

  ‘Oh, not troubles for me. I was thinking of poor Fiona. I just wish she could think of the good side. Here we are, hitched for life and what better than a nipper to sort of hold us together. You reckon once she’s out of the limelight she’ll get used to the idea? Then once the baby is born and she comes home, she can find a real nice pad for us out Beverly Hills way and get a nanny and she’ll be right back where she was.’

  ‘You must go, man. There will be a long queue for checking in by this time.’

  And so they parted, Ivor happy with the way the last half hour had turned out and Peter, if not happy with what he had heard, at least feeling far closer to the young man who had usurped his place in Fiona’s affection.

  There was garaging at the flat for only one car so Zina drove to an underground public car park where she could leave the car overnight, then walked the half mile or so, hurrying in the hope of arriving before Peter. She had wanted to make the place welcoming, some quite irrational feeling telling her that that might take some of the hurt out of what she had to tell him. But as she opened the door she knew she was too late.

  ‘Hello? Who’s that?’ he called from the living room.

  Not answering she went straight to join him. For a second they looked at each other in silence, she suddenly groping for words to explain why she had come and he, having heard what Ivor told him, knowing exactly why.

  ‘Peter, I have to talk to you now. I couldn’t until Ivor had gone.’

  There was something in the way he was looking at her that made her uncomfortably conscious of the charade Fiona had acted out and her own silence.

  ‘Ivor told me himself.’ But his tone gave no hint of how he had received the news. ‘How long have you known and not seen fit to tell me?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, as if it’s me who’s made such a bloody mess of things.’

  ‘How long? All the time they’ve been in Devon?’

  ‘Of course not. Since yesterday afternoon. She came to find me in the garden and told me.’

  ‘And you decided it wasn’t important to let me into your secret? And this morning when she pretended to be ill, you played along with her, still thinking it wasn’t anything to do with me?’

  She was tired, driving all the way from Devon had given her a knife in her shoulders. It took all her willpower not to burst into tears, but anger came to her rescue.

  ‘Don’t be so beastly childish. I knew if I told you, you would probably have blown your top, maybe even kicked Ivor out, as if whatever happened hadn’t been her doing as much as his – probably more. He’s her husband now, like it or not.’

  ‘He’d been begging her for months to marry him but she wanted to stay as they were.’

  ‘He had? She didn’t tell me that bit.’ She began to wonder what else Fiona had seen fit to omit.

  ‘He said he’d wanted them to marry when he moved in to live with her.’

  ‘It seems you know more than I do; she didn’t tell me they’d actually been living together, just that they came to London hoping for an abortion. And here I’ve driven all this way to break it to you gently.’ A minute or two ago anger had helped her regain her control, but now, as they looked at each other, both of them feeling helpless in the face of problems they couldn’t solve for someone they loved, her face crumpled and she was in his arms. The tears were healing; they washed away much of the anger she had felt towards Fiona’s selfish view of life. She, who had come meaning to give support to Peter, found the positions were reversed.

  ‘The usual?’ he asked unnecessarily a minute or two later as he went to the drinks trolley.

  ‘A bit early in the day but, yes please, I need it.’ She sat down on the settee and closed her eyes, not even looking when he put her glass on the little table by her side. Then he sat down next to her and she felt his hand massaging the top of her back. ‘Um,’ she purred. ‘That’s nice.’

  It wasn’t often he lost his pati
ence with Fiona, but at that moment he did as he recalled his conversation with Ivor where he learnt how Fiona hadn’t even considered her mother’s lost career or the repercussions of the accident.

  ‘I’ll drive you to Exeter in the morning and get the train back. That journey is too long for you to do on your own.’

  ‘I thought you were due to start rehearsals?’

  ‘Not until the afternoon. I’ll leave you to drive on from Exeter and phone from there saying I may be a bit later, then when I get back to Paddington I’ll get a taxi straight there.’ With the sort of smile that Jenny had always found so annoying, accompanied by a half wink, he added, ‘They’ll just be glad to see me.’

  ‘That’s a very un-Peterish remark.’

  ‘This has been a day enough to jog anyone off course.’ Then, lifting her hand to his mouth he kissed it and said, ‘Take your drink and go and have a hot bath, it’ll ease your shoulders after that drive.’

  ‘You’ve had a long drive too and actually my shoulder is getting easier already.’

  He heard the invitation in her voice and, standing up, held out his hands to pull her onto her feet. Then together, carrying their glasses, they went to the bathroom.

  ‘Three o’clock in the afternoon,’ she chuckled, ‘I feel like a naughty child doing something she shouldn’t.’

  ‘Child? I prefer you as a naughty woman spending her Sunday afternoon in just the way we want.’

  There was something wonderful about being together in their fourth-floor flat, the world shut away from them. In the last twenty-four hours they had had the foundations of their family life rocked almost off course, but now the truth was out they were happy with where it had brought them. Fiona would be home for probably eight or nine months, for she wouldn’t want to go back to California until she saw herself in good enough shape; there was going to be a new member of the family for them to love; they approved of their new son-in-law, although to that Peter added the rider that he would now find it difficult not to be the most important male in her life. So, all in all, they gave themselves to the rest of the day looking no further than the present and each other.