She shook the thoughts away and rummaged about for her phone. Better check that Kerry was all right. She dialled the familiar number and heard it ring and ring, but the girl didn’t answer. Eventually the answer phone kicked in, sending her own voice hurtling back at her, telling her the shop was closed for now, and inviting her to leave a message. It wasn’t closed, of course. Well, she bloody well hoped not! No, either the shop was so busy that Kerry couldn’t get to the phone in time or – God forbid – something dreadful had happened. Geraldine bit down on her lower lip and wondered when she had become such a worrier.
With jumbled images flooding into her brain – of armed robbery, heart attacks, fire engines or worse – she finally saw her son walking across the terminal towards her, and felt the tears welling up quite unexpectedly from somewhere deep inside her as she rushed forward and threw herself into his open arms.
*
William Munro took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. He was worried about his mother. Since his divorce had come through – a quickie, his wife had called it, not unlike their rare forays into a sex life – and Susan, with hardly a backward glance, had driven away to pastures new, he’d suddenly found he had more time on his hands, and a lot more space in his head.
Susan had been the main breadwinner and had borne the brunt of the costs, but not without a lot of spitting and hissing along the way. If this was a quickie, he hated to think what a long and protracted divorce would have been like. But it was over now. After all the bitter rows and sleepless nights, the letters bargaining and counter-bargaining, and a pile of solicitors’ bills that added up to more than the cost of his latest car, at last the house was his again. Originally quite rundown and shabby, it had been William’s long before Susan’s arrival, but it had become their marital home, added to and preened over the last few years to within an inch of its life, until it met her exacting executive requirements. And now she’d gone, and both he and the house seemed to be on the decline again.
Quite apart from the salary she brought home from the publishing house where she worked, a staggering figure which seemed to rise by leaps and bounds as she clawed her way by her long shiny fingernails towards the top of the corporate tree, she’d been sitting on a sizeable nest egg since the death of her parents and had been persuaded to use a small percentage of it to reluctantly pay off what was left of the mortgage, so at least he wasn’t weighed down by a debt he had no way of repaying. She had even been ordered, by a surprisingly understanding judge, to settle a small additional lump sum in William’s favour at the time of the divorce, which she had done grudgingly and with predictably bad grace. He hadn’t felt too sure about that. It wasn’t quite right, was it? A husband being seen as dependent on his wife, not able to provide for himself. But now the money nestled expectantly in his bank account until he made up his mind what to do with it, and finally he had the time to stop and take stock of his life. And what a mess he had made of it.
Agnes, his mother, had never particularly liked Susan. She had never actually said it aloud, but he had always known it, and had decided, probably wisely, to ignore it. Susan had been his choice and his mother had respected that, although the thin pursing of her lips and the uncharacteristic silence that surrounded her during their irregular visits had rather given the game away.
Susan had three major faults. In Agnes’s eyes, at least.
Number one. She worked, not just from nine to five, or more likely to seven or eight, but often at the weekends too. She brought paperwork home and shut herself away in the study for hours at a time, leaving William to fend for himself. William hadn’t minded too much. At least she was there with him at night, even if she often didn’t come to bed until the early hours and usually turned her back towards him as she slept.
William had been proud of his wife’s achievements, the successful authors she had discovered and nurtured, and her occasional appearances on TV book programmes and at awards ceremonies, to which he was rarely invited. He had always enjoyed having a go at various DIY projects, but more recently he had become a dab hand at shopping and dusting and cooking too. Well, if he didn’t do it, then nobody would. He didn’t like the term ‘house husband’, but perhaps, particularly in the two years or so since he had been made redundant, and with very little prospect of finding another job at his age, that was what he had gradually and unwittingly become. Looking back, that was probably when it had all started to go so horribly wrong, with a vengeance. Susan wasn’t the type of woman who wanted to be shackled to a failure, a man in an apron with no real reason even to leave the house every day. As her star rose, his had dropped like a stone, and his self-esteem along with it.
His mother was incensed on his behalf and no longer made any attempt to disguise her feelings. Yes, he was at home all day, and his spaghetti carbonara may have been so good it could win prizes, but it was the principle of the thing. Leaving the domestic side of life to the man of the house was not the way a wife should behave, and certainly not something Agnes, who had devoted her entire adult life to the needs and comfort of her own dear husband Donald until his untimely death, could ever understand.
Fault number two. Susan had never wanted children. An only child herself, and determined to stick to her belief that there were other more rewarding, and less messy and demanding things to be enjoyed in life, she had made William’s promise not to cajole, trick or persuade her an absolute condition of their marriage. And, short of signing in his own blood, William, who had met and married her a little late in life and had already resigned himself to the probability of a childless future, had felt there was no option but to agree, thus depriving Agnes of the grandchildren she could now only dream of.
And then there was number three. Susan didn’t like cats. This, in his mother’s eyes, was beyond all reason, and utterly unforgivable. Whenever they had visited Agnes in her old cottage, poor Smudge had been banished to the garden or the bedroom, his pathetic cries and the claw marks he scratched into the panelling of the old oak door frames failing to touch even the tiniest part of Susan’s cold, unfeeling soul.
Now that Susan was gone, William had found he had both the time and licence to consider his mother’s opinions, and had realised, to his dismay, that, on all three counts, she just might have been right all along. Susan wasn’t the woman he had hoped she was and, looking back, it was hard to figure out just why she had married him in the first place. He had certainly believed, at the time, that it had been for love, but Susan’s idea of love had turned out not to be quite the same as his.
With his own parents’ marriage the only model he could base his expectations on, he knew he would have liked a wife who, if not necessarily putting her husband first in all things in that old-fashioned way his mother had done, would at least have sat with him on the sofa in the evenings and rubbed his feet, or massaged his neck as they watched the news; brought him a nice mug of tea every now and then, and a couple of digestives to go with it. Perhaps, in the early years, before her career had exploded into the all-consuming passion that seemed to overshadow all else, that just might have been a possibility, but it had never happened. It was just the way she was.
In truth, she had probably accepted his proposal in the same way a drowning woman accepts a lifebelt. She was getting older, she was embarrassingly single, and he was there. He was presentable enough, and solid, and convenient. They had met during the rehearsals for an amateur production of The Sound of Music, she having just moved to the area and keen to find something to do, and someone to do it with, and him doing battle with producing lights and sounds from an ancient backstage control panel, understudying for just about all the walk-on parts, including the nuns, and wishing he’d had the nerve to try out for the part of Captain Von Trapp.
As it turned out, she had quickly realised that treading the boards was not for her and had moved on to joining, and then running, the book club at the library, and he had discovered that messing about with spotlights was far less stressful than standing beneath them. Still, some sort of spark had been lit and they had found that they enjoyed being in each other’s company and later, as things progressed, in each other’s beds. He may not have been her Mister Darcy but he just might have been her last chance. Nowadays, he thought, she probably wished she had simply carried on bobbing along without him.
He