One Christmas Eve, page 10
‘Look, I don’t think I can talk to you about Duncan. It feels wrong. He’s my husband now…’ A flip of her stomach as she said that. Her husband. As a teenager, if she’d ever thought about who her husband would be in the future, the first and only candidate would be this guy right in front of her. Oh, and she didn’t think for a second that she’d ever have a husband at the age of twenty. Most of her classmates and friends were already married or engaged, but Cathy had always planned to buck the trend. Even after Mum and Dad passed, she was going to work really hard, save what she could, and one day find a way to open her own salon. That was the plan. Past tense.
Richie held up his hands. ‘I get it. Husband off limits. How about I just bore you to death all day talking about football?’
‘That was most of my teenage years,’ Cathy teased him. Wow, how easy that still came to her. Making fun of each other had been their favourite sport and she’d just slipped straight back into it.
He obviously felt the same because he immediately returned fire, his cheeky grin back in full force. ‘Yeah, well, it was a bit more interesting than talking about the Beatles all day. I mean, Paul McCartney isn’t exactly God’s gift. Have you seen him lately? He’s like an old man with that whole beard thing and the long hair.’
Gasping dramatically, she played along. ‘Shut your mouth right now. Loretta would do you an injury if she heard you say that in this house.’
‘You’re right. If I ever disappear, I’m probably tied up in your coal cellar.’
‘You did disappear.’ The short, sharp rebuke was out before she could stop it. And her tone made it obvious that she wasn’t playing any more.
He reeled back as if she’d slapped him, leaving a handprint of hurt all over his gorgeous face. ‘Cathy, I’m sorry. You know that wasn’t how it—’
‘Stop! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean it.’
‘Cath, you know I wanted to stay…’
‘I know. It’s fine. Really. I’m sorry.’ She couldn’t do this right now. Needed to think. Supressing a groan, she pushed up on to her feet, feeling like she’d gained ten stones since this morning. ‘I just need to go to the loo.’
Leaving him at the table, she passed him by, the urgency of needing to pee surpassed by the urgency of getting out of there before she burst into tears. This crying stuff was getting out of control. She couldn’t help herself.
Sally at the salon, the oracle of all knowledge when it came to pregnancy and motherhood (and also hairdressing, council regulations, a television show called Bonanza, and Cliff Richard), had told her there were things called hormones that you got when you were pregnant and they could affect your emotions, making you more sad, happy, upset, worried or short-tempered than usual. Cathy had thought she was just saying that as an excuse because the last time Sally was pregnant, she’d lost the plot and thrown all her husband’s clothes out the window, but now she wasn’t so sure. Whatever those hormone things were, she must have a load of them, because she didn’t know if she was happy, sad or ready to cry a river.
In the loo, she sat down, and leaned her head forward so that it rested on the green sink. This bathroom had been put in just a couple of months before her parents died and it had been her mum’s pride and joy. She swore she’d seen in a magazine that Cilla Black had one just like it. Cathy wasn’t quite sure that Cilla had a whole bathroom that was a dull shade of frog, but weirdly, the fact that her mum had picked it gave her some kind of sense of calm. Made her feel like a bit of her mum was still here.
Eyes squeezed shut to stop the tears, she let the cold porcelain of the sink cool her down. Cruel comments didn’t come naturally to her and she had no idea why she’d blurted that out to Richie.
They both knew that the truth was, he hadn’t wanted to take the job. She’d forced him. She’d never blamed him, because since the moment he’d packed his case and left, Cathy had known that she shared the responsibility for it. It was the biggest mistake that she’d ever made – even worse because he didn’t know the reason that she’d told him to go.
When they’d finished school, she’d got the job in the salon and Richie had gone to work in the shipyards, just like his dad and his grandad before him. Her dad had worked there too, but he’d been in the offices, not out on the ships. That was usually how the young lads got work there – if they had a relative or a friend who was already in the yard, then they were a shoo-in for the jobs. Richie was young, fit and strong, so he’d been sent to the boiler room, where he shovelled coal into the fires that the metal workers used to fabricate the panels. He did that for ten hours every single day until his hands bled, his back ached, and he hated every second of it.
He'd tried everything to get moved to another job in the yard, but he’d hit a brick wall. He had to pay his dues like everyone else and it wasn’t like there were a ton of better positions for someone who’d left school with a few O levels to his name. Cathy had watched him sink lower and lower, and it had broken her heart – a heart that was already fractured by the loss of her parents a couple of years before. So when Richie’s mum had knocked on her door one tea time, she’d taken in the desperation on the woman’s face, and the pain in her eyes as she’d let her in. Mrs Clark still had on an apron over her dress, and her hair was in a scarf, with two rollers sticking out at the front, so Cathy guessed she was on the way back from the steamie – a stone building at the back of the tenements in the next street, where the women went to wash their family’s clothes. Her mum had stopped going there when they got their shiny new twin tub and she’d said it was the best day of her life.
‘My Richie doesn’t know I’m here and I’d like to keep it that way,’ she’d announced straight away. His mum had always struggled with her nerves and it gave her a jittery way about her. Cathy saw that her hands were trembling as she sat down.
‘That’s okay, Mrs Clark. I won’t say anything. Do you want a cup of tea?’
Richie’s mum had shaken her head. ‘No, hen. Listen… I’m not quite sure how to say this, but I’m just going to have to come right out with it.’
Cathy could feel her stomach start to clench. What was wrong? Was Richie in trouble? Was he hurt? This wasn’t making sense.
‘You know how miserable my lad has been since he started in the yards.’ Richie was eighteen, but mothers around here referred to their sons as their lads until they were about forty-five. ‘Cathy, I’ve been heartsore worried about him.’
This wasn’t news. ‘I know. I’ve been worried too, Mrs Clark.’
‘The thing is… Oh hen, this makes me sick to my stomach to say this to you. But my brother, Ken, has managed to get him a job working with him.’
Cathy had been confused. She couldn’t remember meeting Richie’s Uncle Ken, but if he’d got him a new job, that had to be a good thing. Great, actually. So why weren’t they celebrating?
‘That’s smashing, Mrs Clark.’
‘Aye hen, but the thing is…’
Cathy had seen she was close to tears now and she was starting to feel sick. What was she missing here?
‘He works on the ships. Not the ones at the yard. The cargo ships that sail in and out of Southampton to America and Africa and all the far-away places. Richie would have to go down there and I’m just going to be honest with you, he’d be away for months at a time. Maybe longer.’
Cathy’s stomach had felt like it had dropped out of her body. No. He couldn’t go. She couldn’t lose anyone else.
‘He’s saying that he’s not going…’ she went on, and Cathy had felt a wave of relief. ‘Because he won’t leave you.’
In that instant, the relief had vanished as Cathy realised exactly what was happening. This was a mum who was about to ask her to let her son go.
‘`Cathy, pet, I know what you’ve been through, and och, it’s a heartbreak. You know how much we thought of your mum and dad. They were damn good people. But I would be no kind of mother if I didn’t try to do my best for ma boy. It’s a great job. Our Ken makes smashing money and he sees the world. Richie would learn a trade – he’d be an engineer at the end of it – and it would set him up for the rest of his life. So I’m begging you, Cathy. Give him a chance. Let him make a great life for himself, at least for a few years, and then, if you two are still sweet on each other, you can get back together and you’d have a man that was happy, with a good job and a different life from the one you’ll have if he stays in the yards.’
Cathy couldn’t find the words to reply, so she’d said nothing as Mrs Clark got up and went to the door.
‘I’ll never tell him that we had this conversation, but I hope you’ll do what’s best for him, Cathy. If you love him as much as I do, I know you will.’
Three months later, after Cathy had spent weeks persuading him that it was the right thing to do, that she’d wait for him, that if they were meant to be together, then it would work out somehow, Richie Clark got on the train from Glasgow to Southampton, and the next time Cathy had heard his voice or seen his face was almost a year and a half later, when he’d walked through her door this morning.
And still, even now, she knew she’d never tell him about the conversation with his mum because that had been the deal she’d made. Tell him to go. Don’t tell him why. If she loved him, that’s what she’d do. But if she’d known how things would turn out, would she do it again? She couldn’t bring herself to answer that. Not now. Maybe not ever. Instead, she dried her eyes, flushed the loo, washed her face and went back out there.
Richie was where she’d left him and she hoped he wouldn’t spot she’d been crying.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he said, as soon as she sat down and he saw her face. So much for hiding her feelings.
‘It’s okay, it wasn’t you. It’s these things called hormones that come when you’re pregnant. Sally at the salon told me about them.’
‘Has she left her husband for Cliff Richard yet?’ he asked, grinning as he moved the conversation on to old familiar territory.
‘Not yet, but she’s living in hope.’
That was the thing. They knew all the same people, all the same things, had this shared history. Duncan couldn’t compete with that and she shouldn’t expect him to.
For the next two cups of tea, they kept to neutral subjects, chatting about anything that didn’t come too close to being personal – his family, her job, the people he worked with and the places he’d been. It started to feel easier, more comfortable. As long as they stayed on neutral ground and avoided discussing their relationship past, present or future, it felt fine. More than fine. It felt like having someone she loved in her kitchen. She just couldn’t let herself think any deeper than that.
Richie suggested making them lunch, although the very thought of that made her laugh. In all the years that she’d known him, she’d never seen him prepare anything more than cheese on toast or a sandwich involving jam.
He opened the fridge and bent in to see what treats it held inside. ‘Okay, so there’s cheese. And butter. And’ – he stretched back up and opened the breadbin on the counter above the fridge – ‘we have bread and long strange stick things,’ he said, pulling a packet of spaghetti out of the breadbin. Cathy had no idea why it was kept there – probably because the box had fallen out of the cupboard above it a few times and the strands had gone scattering all over the floor.
‘That’s spaghetti. Pasta. Duncan likes to cook a thing called spaghetti bolognaise. It has that spaghetti in it and fancy mince. It tastes really good. Much better than the mince we used to eat out of the tin.’
Duncan had first made his spaghetti bolognaise for them after they’d been dating for a few weeks.
Cathy still remembered every single detail of that night, as vivid as if it happened yesterday. They had planned to go into town for dinner and then go to the cinema, but Loretta had gone down with the flu, and Cathy didn’t want to leave her. ‘I’ll come to your house then and I’ll cook dinner. I’ll bring the ingredients with me,’ Duncan had suggested.
Cathy had blushed to the very insides of her face. ‘No, don’t be daft.’ Her father had never cooked a meal in his life, and she just couldn’t picture a man throwing together dinner in their kitchen. ‘We could just get fish and chips. Or I could make us some ham and eggs.’
Duncan had given her a big grin as he shook his head. It made him look handsome when he did that. He wasn’t her usual type of man. Not that she had a type, given that she’d only ever been with Richie Clark. For a start, he wasn’t tall like Richie, who had been over six foot since they were about fourteen. She was five foot two and Duncan was maybe five inches taller. He had dark curly hair, with brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Which, Cathy had discovered, he did a lot. He could be quite serious sometimes though – always had his head stuck in a book and seemed to know about all different things.
His family went abroad every year on holiday. France. Spain. Italy. Cathy had only been out of Glasgow a handful of times in her life, and she’d certainly never been on an aeroplane. One of the highlights of her summers used to be a day trip with her mum and dad to Renfrew, a town about twenty miles away, and they’d go back and forth on the Renfrew Ferry a few times, a car and foot passenger vessel that crossed the couple of hundred yards stretch of the Clyde between Renfrew and Yoker. After that, they’d go for a walk around the Robertson Park and then they’d pick up some ice cream and go up to the airport at Abbotsinch to watch the planes taking off and landing. Now she knew that Duncan might even have been on one of those planes. So yep, there was no getting away from the fact that he was definitely posher than her, but, strangely, it didn’t make her feel uncomfortable or disinterested, because he had such a lovely way about him. His kindness and thoughtfulness was obvious just from meeting him.
That was why she’d gone out with him in the first place, but she wasn’t sure what the attraction was on his side. She was decent-looking, although she didn’t believe her mother’s claims that she was beautiful, and she’d left school at sixteen with barely a qualification. Yet, he’d seemed to think she was gorgeous, and they never ran out of things to talk about or things to laugh about either. Cathy hadn’t tried too hard to understand it. After months of working, looking after Loretta and not much else, it had been nice to have someone to spend time with and do fun things again – like eat the spaghetti bolognaise he’d rustled up for them that first night in her kitchen. She’d never even heard of it before then, but now it was a weekly favourite.
A clatter from the kitchen cupboard snapped her out of the memory and back to the present, and she saw that two tins of tomato soup had liberated themselves from the top cupboard of the kitchen and only a swift duck had saved Richie from a possible concussion.
‘Why don’t we go down to the café at the end of the road?’ he suggested, and Cathy experienced her first flutter of anxiety since he’d come back in the door.
The café. They’d spent a thousand days there when they were at school, bunking off at lunchtime and sitting there in the afternoons, passing the time with each other and their gang of pals amidst the heady aroma of sausage rolls. After they’d left school, they mostly went at weekends, after Cathy had been paid at the salon and Richie had his hard-earned wages from the shipyard.
The place had memories. Lots of wonderful ones. And a few, at the end, that had broken her heart.
Despite the trepidation, she pushed herself up from the chair. ‘Sure. I’ll just get my jacket and put my boots on.’
Maybe she could pretend, just for today, that this was her perfect life. Christmas. With Richie by her side. Making her heart flutter and her laugh. A baby on the way. The happy ever after that she’d always thought she’d have with him.
She just had to remember that this wasn’t reality.
She belonged to someone else. And no matter what Richie Clark said or did, he couldn’t change that.
2 P.M. – 4 P.M.
10
EVE
Christmas Eve 2023
‘It’s official, Gran,’ Eve said, glancing around the living room. ‘Harry and his guys are miracle workers. Or maybe superheroes. Either way, they are bloody marvellous.’
Two hours ago, it had been an empty space, but already the sofas were in and correctly placed in the middle of the room, opposite each other, on a huge cream rug, with Gran’s beautiful old walnut coffee table in the middle. At the end of each sofa, there was also a matching side table with Gran’s beloved Tiffany lamps on each one. Eve knew that she liked to lie on the sofa at night, her favourite cushion under her head, her fleecy throw over her legs, and read while having a cup of tea or a glass of wine within reach. Sonny had prearranged with the developers that there would be a TV fitted to the wall, above a real-flame, inset fire, and it looked stunning. On the opposite wall, Gran’s ancient but meticulously preserved burr sideboard sat, with a record player from the sixties on top that would now be considered a vintage treasure. A floor lamp in one corner, a gold art deco bar trolley in the other, and an armchair and footstool by the window completed the room.
The only sign of the move was a brown box in the corner, containing all Cathy’s ornaments, framed photos and art for the walls, and they were slowly but surely emptying that and placing things in the spots they belonged in.
Eve picked out a photo of her gran’s wedding day and put it in place on the sideboard, feeling a tug on her heartstrings as she looked at the face of the man who had been so much more of a father to her than her dad ever had. Her grandad was pure kindness. Measured. Someone who would think before he spoke. The type of person that made you feel safe and a little bit smarter just by being in the room. And he couldn’t have been more different from her wild, raucous, irreverent gran, yet he’d adored her. He once told Eve that he was like a planet and her gran was the sun, and life was brighter when he was near her. It had been one of his rare moments of poetic romance, but Eve had never forgotten it.
