Now or Never Read online

  ‘I did…It burst.’

  Nicki could see the Adam’s apple moving in Hughie’s throat as he swallowed. He was still a boy, really. A baby. Her baby! A wave of fiercely protective maternalism struck her. He was looking at her, waiting for her to say something, his puppy dog eyes pleading with her…trusting her…

  Trusting her, Stella recognised as she forced herself to bite back the words, Are you sure it’s yours?

  Richard, though, felt no such restraint, or tact, she realised as she heard her husband bursting out with the words that were hammering inside her own head.

  Instantly Hughie went white, his hands clenching as he stared accusingly at his father.

  ‘Of course I am sure. Julie was…I was her first,’ he mumbled, brick-red. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘Maybe not, but what is our business is that our son, our clever, clever son, has got his girlfriend pregnant while she is still at school and he is in his first year at university! I thought you told me it was virtually over between the two of you.’

  Richard was shaking his head, as though he still couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing.

  ‘It was…it is.’

  ‘It’s over?’ Stella knew she would never totally understand the world of the modern young, where a couple could fall in love, and commit to one another sexually only to tire of the relationship within months, if not weeks, and decide to go their separate ways. It had been so different in her own day. ‘So…so what…?’

  ‘Our relationship is over,’ Hughie agreed. ‘But that does not alter the fact that I am the father of Julie’s baby. And naturally I want to do the right thing for them both,’ he added proudly.

  ‘Naturally,’ Stella agreed, a small spiky shoot of hope beginning to emerge through the shocked chaos of her anxiety.

  ‘Of course, Julie wants to have the baby.’

  The spiky shoot withered.

  ‘Of course,’ Stella acknowledged hollowly. Well, they did, these modern girls, didn’t they?

  ‘I will have to help support it…financially, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, you damn well will,’ Richard told him savagely. ‘And if you think for one minute that I am going to put my hand in my pocket to pay for your—’

  ‘Richard!’ Stella interrupted him warningly. ‘Obviously, we’re still feeling the shock at the moment, Hughie, but tomorrow I think your father and I should get in touch with Julie’s parents to discuss things.’

  ‘No…you can’t. There isn’t any point.’

  ‘What? Why not?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Julie’s father refuses to accept what’s happened. He’s thrown Julie out. He says he never wants to see her again.’

  ‘What?’

  Now Stella was shocked. She had seen enough of what could happen to girls under such circumstances during her probation service days to feel genuinely protective towards Julie, and outraged by her father’s attitude.

  ‘Well, where has she gone—where is she?’

  ‘Here,’ Hughie told them uncomfortably. ‘Upstairs in my room. Ma…what else could I do?’ he appealed to Stella. ‘She is my responsibility. They both are, at least until the baby is born. I couldn’t just leave her. I mean, it’s not as if she’s got any other family to go to!’

  ‘All right, Hughie. I understand. You’d better go upstairs and bring her down.’ Stella sighed.

  As soon as the door had closed behind him Richard exploded. ‘No way. No way are we going to have her here. Stella…’

  ‘What else can we do?’ Stella asked him logically. ‘And anyway, I don’t imagine it will be for very long. Her father will probably come round. And since Hughie is the baby’s father, I feel—’

  ‘I doubt it, from what I know of him. He and I were both in a local “Think Tank Group” a couple of years ago. Originally he’s from somewhere in the North—a small, very strait-laced mining town. He’s still got an enclosed community mentality, he’s very narrow-minded—bigoted, I would say. He wasn’t a very popular member of our team, definitely got a chip on his shoulder from somewhere.’

  Stella frowned. ‘I didn’t know you knew Julie’s father—you never said.’

  Richard gave a brief shrug. ‘The project ended and we went our separate ways. Not the sort of chap one would want to keep in contact with, really. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t think he’d be someone who would budge once he’d taken a stand over something. Bit of a soap-box operator when it comes to modern morals and so on. Likes to hold forth about the subject. He’ll consider Julie’s situation to be a serious loss of face.’

  ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that she is his daughter…’

  Stella stopped speaking as the kitchen door opened and Hughie ushered Julie in.

  Dressed in baggy trousers and a huge loose top as she was, it was hard to tell that she was pregnant at all. Her face looked very pale, though, Stella acknowledged, and she could see the smudges of mascara on Julie’s cheeks where she had been crying.

  In fact she looked as though she was about to start crying now, Stella recognised.

  ‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said firmly, going up to the girl and putting her arms maternally around her. ‘Hughie has told us what’s happened. He says, though, that the relationship between the two of you is over…is that true?’

  Ignoring the angry look Hughie was shooting her, Stella waited patiently for Julie’s reply. There was no way she wanted Julie to turn round at a later date and claim that Hughie had dropped her because she was pregnant. But, to her relief, Julie immediately nodded, her voice papery thin as she whispered, ‘Yes. I…we…I’m not going to keep the baby,’ she burst out tearfully, ‘but I couldn’t let my dad make me kill it and I know that’s what he would have tried to do.’

  She was sobbing in earnest now, and Stella tried to calm her down.

  ‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said reassuringly. ‘No one is going to hurt your baby. When is it due, by the way?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Three months.’

  Stella thought she must have misheard her.

  ‘Three months,’ she repeated. ‘No…I don’t think…’

  ‘It’s three months!’ Julie insisted stubbornly, shaking her head and begging Hughie, ‘You tell her.’

  As she saw the confirmation in Hughie’s eyes Stella frantically grappled with the enormity of what she was facing.

  ‘Julie! Your parents…When did you tell them?’ she asked uncertainly. Three months! Had Julie registered with a doctor? The hospital? Had she…?

  ‘When Hughie came home. I couldn’t tell them before. I was too frightened…and I didn’t want to tell anyone until I knew it would be too late for anyone to make me do…anything.’ Her voice was stubborn, her facial expression saying that she felt proud of her actions, like a small child who thought she had outwitted the adults around her. Stella’s heart sank even further.

  And it was certainly too late for anyone to make her do anything now, Stella acknowledged. Julie was seventeen, six months pregnant and still at school, and her father had thrown her out. Stella closed her eyes.

  ‘What am I going to do? I can’t go home! My dad…’ Tears were brimming in the huge washed-out eyes.

  ‘What you’re going to do for the time being is stay here with us,’ Stella told her as calmly as she could, firmly taking control of the situation. Over Julie’s downbent head she saw the look of relief and hope that Hughie was giving her, and her own eyes threatened to mist.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ he told her gruffly, coming over to give her a hug. ‘I told Julie you’d know what to do!’

  Things would have to be sorted out with Julie’s parents, of course, a way found for her to go back home, but there was no point in them discussing that right now. Julie looked exhausted, and, now that she knew just how far advanced her pregnancy was, Stella felt seriously concerned for her.

  Their house was an old Victorian three-storey one with plenty of bedrooms, and a granny suite on the t
op floor where Richard’s mother had lived whilst she had still been alive, so there was no problem in finding room for Julie. But the sooner she was back at home with her own family, the better, Stella resolved.

  It was all very well for Hughie to face up to his responsibilities and to accept that he had them, but Julie’s parents had their responsibilities as well!

  ‘Mmm…I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I’ve only been gone for four hours,’ Maggie tried to protest, but Oliver was too busy kissing her to let her speak properly.

  ‘Four hours, fifteen minutes and several seconds,’ Oliver corrected her as he cupped her face and smiled down into her eyes.

  Irresistibly his glance was drawn to her mouth. Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable mouth he had ever seen. In fact, so far as he was concerned, Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable, the most lovable everything any woman possibly could have.

  ‘How was The Club?’ he asked her teasingly as he drew her closer, one hand in the small of her back, the other resting on her still-flat stomach. ‘I suppose they’ve all rushed home to knit baby clothes.’

  To his bemusement and her own chagrin, Maggie immediately burst into tears.

  ‘Baby hormones,’ she excused her reaction to Oliver, but as she said the words she could hear inside her head Nicki’s voice, taut with anger and contempt, insisting, ‘You can’t be pregnant!’

  As he registered the brief look of betraying bleakness in her eyes, Oliver demanded gently, ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

  Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep, painful breath.

  ‘You are far too perceptive,’ she told him wryly.

  ‘We made a pact, Maggie,’ Oliver reminded her. ‘No game playing, no hidden agendas, no hidden anything between us.’ Lifting her hand to his lips and placing a kiss in her open palm, he added, ‘We agreed that our love deserves better than that.’

  Now more tears were threatening her composure but for a different reason this time, brought on by a different emotion. Pain and joy—strange how in their intensity both could call forth the same physical response.

  ‘How could I ever forget us making that pact?’ Maggie answered him, her eyes luminous with her love.

  Self-protection had been a necessity following the breakup of her marriage and had become a way of life for her. Strong, feisty, successful career women in their forties were vulnerable in a way that women one or two decades younger were not. All the more so when, like Maggie, they broke one of society’s taboos by falling in love with a younger man. Because of that, Maggie was very protectively careful of her emotional responses. It was rare for her to make such an open admission of her feelings. That alone was enough to alert Oliver to the fact that something—or somebody—had seriously hurt her.

  ‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

  ‘It’s Nicki,’ Maggie admitted shakily. ‘She hates the idea of me having this baby.’

  ‘She what?’ Oliver frowned. He knew how important Maggie’s friends were to her; he had heard the full history of their relationship, their shared traumas, and the way they had always supported and protected one another. He knew too how excited Maggie had been about telling them the news, and he could see beneath the brittle bravery of her smile just how hurt and shocked she was.

  ‘She says that I’m too old,’ Maggie told him. ‘She says that I’m depriving another younger woman of the chance to have a child. She says that I’m doing it to…to keep you—’

  ‘To keep me!’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Maggie, there is no way on this earth that you could ever or will ever get rid of me. You know that. You know how much you mean to me. How much I love you. You know what I think…what I believe.’ He looked at her, holding her gaze with his own. ‘You…us…our love, they are my destiny, Maggie. You are the woman I have longed for all my adult life. If one of us deserves to be accused of holding the other to our love via our baby, then that one is me.’

  Maggie felt the tight lump of anguish inside her easing. This conviction that Oliver had, and spoke so naturally and easily to her about, that he had been destined to love her, which he made sound so down-to-earth, so much an irrefutable fact, was something she simply could not discuss with anyone else. Because she was afraid she, they, Oliver would be laughed at?

  Her friends were mature women and mature women did not believe in fate. Or that love could transcend time, cross the generation barrier? Why? Because she herself dared not allow herself to believe it, no matter what Oliver might say? Because she suspected that had any other man but Oliver spoken to her in such a vein she would have dismissed him as being some daydreaming crank?

  ‘Nicki’s main concern is that I’m not aware of the problems of being an older mother. She says she can’t understand how I can claim to want a child now when I refused to have one with Dan.’

  Now it was her turn to look into Oliver’s eyes.

  ‘Isn’t it time you told her the truth about that?’ he suggested gently.

  Restlessly Maggie moved away from him.

  ‘It isn’t as straightforward as that. Nicki has always thought a lot of Dan. He was her friend before he and I started dating. She actually introduced us. I don’t want to…’

  ‘Destroy her illusions?’ Oliver supplied.

  He had a habit of lifting one eyebrow when he asked a question and Maggie found herself wondering if it was a mannerism his son or daughter would inherit. Just to think about the coming baby made her heart turn over and melt with love and yearning.

  ‘Which do you least want to destroy, Maggie? Her illusions or your friendship? Which do you think she values the more? Which would be most important to you? Don’t you think she might even feel a little insulted to know that you believed both her friendship and her ego to be so fragile? Or are you afraid that she will be offended that you have withheld the truth from her for so long?’

  ‘It wasn’t a deliberate decision,’ Maggie defended herself. ‘And it wasn’t so much that I wanted to withhold the truth from my friends…’

  ‘No, what you wanted to do—your prime concern,’ Oliver emphasised, ‘was to protect Dan.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault that he was infertile,’ Maggie protested. ‘He was devastated when we learned that the problem lay with him…’

  ‘So devastated that he went out and had an affair!’ Oliver agreed dryly.

  ‘Oliver, you aren’t being fair! Try to put yourself in his position. He desperately wanted us to have children. He had always wanted to have a family, and when nothing happened, he was wonderfully supportive of me.’

  ‘Until he found out that he was the one who couldn’t give you a child and not the other way round.’

  ‘I think he had the affair to…to test out what he had been told,’ Maggie responded quietly. ‘I think it was a form of denial, coupled with a feeling of shock and bereavement, of grieving…and that afterwards he simply couldn’t bear to stay with me because of the destruction of the hopes we had both shared for so long and because…’

  ‘Because you knew the truth,’ Oliver inserted grimly.

  ‘Because he was afraid that my love might become pity,’ Maggie corrected him gently.

  ‘How long is it since he left you, Maggie?’ Oliver demanded.

  Would it ever go away, this tiny, gritty piece of jealousy over the man who had shared so much of her life before him; who had had so much of her, with her, before him? He knew how much she had loved her husband and how much she had suffered when their marriage had broken up, but his anger against Dan went deeper than jealousy. Dan was, so far as Oliver was concerned, responsible not just for hurting Maggie, but for undermining her, for letting her take the blame for the failure of their marriage and, even more importantly, for their failure to have children.

  Maggie watched Oliver warily. In her younger days she knew she would have been tempted to feel flattered by such evidence of jealousy, but Dan was an important part of her past and of herself, and not even to pleas
e Oliver could she deny what she and Dan had once shared. What they had once shared…but what about her ongoing protection of him?

  That was merely a habit, and nothing more, Maggie immediately reassured herself. But nonetheless, Oliver had raised an issue that Maggie knew she ought to deal with.

  No matter what she might have said in the heat of her distress earlier, the friendship she shared with the others meant far too much for her to see it damaged. Nicki’s reaction to her news had hurt her, yes, but that did not mean that she no longer valued what they shared.

  She could tell Nicki that, but somehow she did not feel able to tell her the truth about Dan. Why? To protect Nicki, or to protect her ex-husband?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Oliver apologising ruefully.

  A little guiltily Maggie shook her head. Oliver had obviously mistaken her absorbed silence in her own thoughts for anger and punishment.

  Immediately she went towards him, leaning her head on his chest and wrapping her arms as far around him as she could. He had done so much for her; given her so much. After Dan she had believed there would never be another man she could love, another man who would love her enough to heal the pain of her loss.

  ‘You should tell Nicki,’ Oliver was insisting.

  ‘I think there’s more to her reaction than just the fact that Dan and I never had children,’ Maggie responded. ‘I’m concerned about her, Oliver. She was so wrought up, so…so unlike her normal self.’

  ‘Maybe so, but my concern is all for you and our baby,’ Oliver informed her.

  Their baby…The baby her best friend felt she had no right to have!

  These years of their lives they were going through now were, Maggie knew, a very, very dangerous rite of passage; a rite of passage that in many ways had become the last female taboo.

  Maggie felt strongly that it was the responsibility of her own generation—the generation that had so successfully pushed back so many boundaries, and gifted so many freedoms to the decades of women following in their footsteps—to take up this challenge as they had done so many others.