A Baby for Eve. Maggie Kingsley

tell me of all the things he could have done—would have done—if my mother hadn’t become pregnant, and her family hadn’t forced him into marrying her, and when she died he hated me even more.’

      ‘I know,’ she said, sitting down beside him, aching at the pain she saw in his face, feeling a different kind of pain in herself, but he rounded on her furiously.

      ‘No, you don’t. You have no idea of what it’s like to live with a man whose dreams you’ve shattered. No idea to feel, even as a seven-year-old child, that it would have been better if you’d never been born.’

      She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘You’re right. I don’t know.’

      Silently she brushed the sand from her feet, then pushed her feet into her shoes, but when she made to stand up he put out his hand to stop her.

      ‘You’ve forgotten your stockings.’

      ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied, and, for a second he said nothing, then he thrust his fingers through his hair, and she saw his hands were shaking.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice so strained it almost broke. ‘So sorry for yelling at you.’

      ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

      ‘It’s not,’ he declared. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it out on you, and I’m sorry, too, that Audrey saw you in my arms. I know what this place is like—the gossip, the innuendo…’

      ‘It’s all right, Tom,’ she insisted, and saw a small smile creep onto his lips.

      ‘I’ve always created trouble for you, haven’t I?’ he said.

      ‘Of course you haven’t,’ she lied. ‘And now, come on,’ she added, ‘or we’ll be completing this tour of Penhally by moonlight.’

      ‘Which would really set the local tongues wagging, wouldn’t it?’ he declared as he fell into step beside her. ‘Audrey—’

      ‘Forget her,’ Eve ordered as they began walking back down Harbour Road, and he shook his head.

      ‘This is a professional observation, not a personal one,’ he replied. ‘Her colour’s very high.’

      ‘She has angina, and she’s hopeless about remembering to use her glyceryl trinitrate spray. “I keep forgetting, Nurse Dwyer”,’ Eve continued in a perfect imitation of Audrey’s voice. ‘I don’t think she realises, or will accept, how serious her condition is.’

      ‘Denial can be a form of self-protection when people are scared,’ Tom observed, kicking a pebble at his feet so that it ricocheted down the street in front of them. ‘If they don’t think about it, it hasn’t happened.’

      It was true, Eve thought, but denial had never worked for her. All the denying, and pretending in the world, had never made it go away for her, and when they reached Harbour Bridge she came to a halt.

      ‘Tom, why did you come back?’ she asked. ‘You always said you wouldn’t, so why are you here?’

      For a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer, then he shrugged.

      ‘My dad’s solicitor has been bending my ear about the house, wanting to know whether I want to sell it, or rent it out.’

      ‘You didn’t have to come back to Penhally for that,’ she pointed out. ‘You could just have told him over the phone.’

      ‘I suppose,’ he murmured as he stared down at the river Lanson flowing gently under the bridge beneath them, then he grinned. ‘OK, you’ve rumbled me. I thought it might be interesting to see Penhally again.’

      He wasn’t telling her the truth. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

      ‘Tom—’

      ‘What happened to the cinema?’ he interrupted. ‘It used to be up there, in Gull Close, didn’t it, on the right-hand side of the river?’

      ‘It was on the left-hand side of the river, in Bridge Street, but it closed down years ago,’ she replied, all too aware that he was changing the subject, but she had secrets so she supposed he was entitled to secrets, too. ‘People gradually stopped wanting to go so much once they had television in their own homes.’

      ‘I took you to see RoboCop.’

      ‘No, you didn’t.’

      ‘I did, too,’ he insisted as they began walking again. ‘I remember us kissing in the back row.’

      ‘Must have been someone else. Come to think of it,’ she added wryly, ‘it undoubtedly was someone else considering you were Penhally’s answer to Casanova.’

      ‘I was not,’ he replied, the grin reappearing on his face.

      ‘Yes, you were!’ she exclaimed. ‘Even when we were at school, every girl fancied you like mad despite you having the most dreadful reputation.’

      ‘You didn’t.’

      Oh, but I did, I did, she thought, but you never noticed me. It was only when you came back from med school that summer that you realised I was alive.

      ‘That’s the Penhally Bay Surgery,’ she continued, deliberately changing the conversation, and Tom let out a low whistle as his gaze took in the large building to the left of the Serpentine Steps.

      ‘I remember when the doctor’s surgery was that pokey little place in Morwenna Road,’ he observed.

      ‘Nick’s made big changes since he took over the practice,’ Eve replied. ‘And he’s making even more, as you can see,’ she added, pointing to the scaffolding at the back of the surgery. ‘In less than a week Lauren will have a state-of-the-art physiotherapy suite, and we’ll have an X-ray room, and even more consulting rooms.’

      ‘Well, he may have grown into a grumpy old so-and-so,’ Tom said, ‘but at least he wants the best for his patients.’

      ‘He does,’ Eve said, ‘but you haven’t told me anything about yourself, your work with Deltaron.’

      ‘Not much to tell,’ he said.

      ‘There’s bound to be,’ she said, but he wasn’t listening to her. He was already crossing the road, heading for the children’s play park and playing field. ‘Tom, where are you going?’

      ‘I fancy a swing,’ he shouted back, and though she shook her head she followed him.

      ‘Big kid,’ she said when she’d caught up with him.

      ‘You’d better believe it,’ he replied, then frowned slightly as he looked up at the new houses on the hill, then down at the older buildings clustered round the harbour. ‘It’s odd, but it seems so much smaller than I remembered it.’

      ‘Hicksville. That’s what you used to call Penhally,’ she said. ‘“There’s a whole world out there, Eve, and I want to see it, be a part of it.”’