One Glass Is Never Enough Read online

  He closed the folder abruptly and looked at her, his fingers knitted together as if in prayer.

  “You don’t think?” she suddenly asked, hearing her voice wobble slightly, “it could be the menopause? “

  Please don’t say yes. I am not ready for hot flushes and thinning bones and the slow shrivelling of my womb. I want to be young and fertile and ripe a little longer. I want…

  He cleared his throat. “It could,” he said slowly, “be any number of things.”

  Bastard! Say I’m too young!

  “Or nothing at all.” He looked hard at her for a moment, clearly assessing her neuroses and hypochondria ratings and coming to an unflattering conclusion.

  “What I should like you to do,” he said, getting brisk, “is to keep this chart for six months and then come and see me again.” He pushed a sheet of paper across the table towards her.

  “It’s very straightforward...”

  Things often were, when you came down to it. If it looked as though Victor was having an affair then he very probably was. Gaynor lowered herself gingerly into the driving seat of her car. She’d promised Sarah she’d go back to Greens for a couple of hours this afternoon but she really just wanted to go home and get into a hot bath.

  She looked at the carrier bag on the seat beside her. And she wanted to tackle Victor. If that was possible, with Chloe hanging about. At the thought of Chloe her stomach turned over again. No doubt Victor would be glad to have his daughter there. It was a good excuse not to talk and to contrive separate bedtimes. Her whole body felt strung out, her nerve endings humming with a restless energy.

  “Any loss of libido?” Mr Bradley-Lawrence had asked, clearing his throat.

  Unfortunately not.

  The bar was a veritable mass of libido-inducing muscle. A huge and rather tasty number in shorts was piling up planks of wood, aided by a young suntanned one. Mmmm . Sarah was polishing glasses, Claire had a folder under her arm and was frowning at a small mournful-looking man. He indicated the piece of pipe in his hand and shook his head sadly. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about this.”

  “We’re going to fix it, I hope,” said Claire briskly. “Gaynor, there’s a flow-chart on the wall downstairs, showing jobs to be done and progression of tasks. I’ve colour-coded them so all the red jobs have to be completed first and then…”

  “Hi!” Gaynor turned a big smile on Mr Huge.

  He looked her up and down appreciatively. “All right?”

  “You could make everyone tea.” Sarah pushed pint pots further back on the shelf. “That would be really helpful.” She turned and looked at Gaynor. “How did you get on?”

  Gaynor pulled a face. “I’ll tell you later.” She set off down to the kitchen. “Ugh. Mugs are a bit gross,” she called up the stairs.

  “Try hot water! You’ll find a bottle of green stuff by the sink – it’s called washing-up liquid …”

  Sarah nudged Gaynor in the ribs as she stood administering

  sugar to Muscle Man.

  “Don’t forget Sam.”

  Gaynor looked around her.

  “Outside,” said Sarah. “Claire thought one more bunch!”

  Gaynor went out on to the pavement. An old bloke, in a paint-splattered denim shirt was up a ladder, dabbing a small brush at a cluster of purple grapes beside the dark olive lettering of the Greens name.

  Gaynor preened at the bottom with her tray. “Would you like one?” Fresh from a bit of light flirtation with the other two, she giggled fetchingly. He didn’t look down.

  “One what?” he asked flatly.

  “Cup of tea?”

  “Not stopping.”

  “Suit yourself,” Gaynor retorted, not used to her charms being so blatantly ignored. “Sign looks good, anyway.” He didn’t reply.

  “You’re doing us a hanging one, too, aren’t you?” she enquired. He came down the ladder and walked past her back into the bar. He spoke to Claire.

  “The bracket’s rusted right through up there – you’ll need a new one before I put the other sign up or it’ll land on someone.” He put the little brush, bristles upwards, in his top pocket. “I’ll be back when it’s done.”

  “Oh.” Claire frowned. “Do you know anyone who…”

  But he’d already moved towards the door.

  “No,” he called over his shoulder.

  “How long…”

  Sam kept walking. They watched him cross the road.

  “Damn.” Claire frowned. “I was hoping he’d be finished by now.”

  “What’s his problem?” Gaynor said, as Sam disappeared under the arch into the alleyway beyond.

  Claire shrugged. “Brilliant sign-writer. But not very communicative. Jamie! Jamie.” She flapped her list at her boyfriend as he tentatively put a foot out of the door. “Where are you going? We need a blacksmith!”

  Jamie stopped and sighed. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  Claire nodded towards the packet of biscuits Sarah had bought for the builders. “Have one of those.”

  “And poor old Henry and Wooster are shut in,” Jamie added hopefully.

  “Oh.” Claire nodded grudgingly. “You’d better go home then.”

  “You are not hungry, Charlie. You can’t be.” Sarah surveyed the biscuit wrappers, crisp packets and remains of a takeaway pizza adorning the floorboards and wished she’d ignored the blood-curdling screams and not ventured up to the flat at all.

  She’d wanted the kids to stay at her mother’s longer – on her own she could just about stand sleeping among cardboard boxes, stripping wallpaper till the early hours and being woken at dawn by the plumber hacking the grimy tiles from the bathroom, but with the kids it was a nightmare. She’d managed to get their bedrooms habitable and there was finally hot water but their whole lives were piled in packing cases from floor to ceiling and the kitchen was still grim and cooker-less.

  Anything more complicated than a bowl of cornflakes and she had to run down three flights of stairs. And her children – as Charlie reminded her mutinously now – were growing, in constant need of nourishment, and didn’t get nearly as much to eat here as they had at their grandmother’s.

  “But they miss you,” her mother had said weakly, clearly frazzled from the rigours of the three of them battering each other.

  “How’s Dad coping?” Sarah had asked.

  “From the shed,” her mother replied with feeling.

  So here they were, running riot amongst the wreckage. Sarah gathered up plates and cups and items of clothing and tried to restore order, aware that there were less than two hours to opening time and Claire needed her in the kitchen downstairs. “Charlie, put that bat down, Luke, stop winding him up. Bel – leave Scarface alone now, he doesn’t want to wear a party dress.”

  Bel stuck her lip out. “He does.”

  “He does not,” said Sarah, looking at the long-suffering ginger tom. If it wasn’t enough to have three permanently starving and belligerent children going wild they’d now been adopted by a war-torn feline of enormous proportions who’d already made his presence felt by swapping a dead mouse for the cold chicken she’d foolishly left on the sofa. He was now dressed in fluffy pink. Judging from the lumps out of him he could take on the biggest and ugliest in town but was amazingly restrained when four-year-olds stuffed him into an Easter bonnet with matching socks.

  “I need you to be good for me tonight,” she told them all for the fourth time. “You’ve got to do exactly what Susannah says.” She paused, silently praying that the sixteen-year-old daughter of her mother’s neighbour, who seemed so willing to baby-sit, was up to the challenge. “I can’t keep running up and down the stairs when we’ve got customers. Not when I’m cooking.”

  “How many customers will you have?” Bel adjusted the ribbon beneath the cat’s chin and looked up at her mother.

  The little ripples of anxiety Sarah had felt all day rose up in a great wave. “I don’t know yet!” Claire seemed supremely confident sh
e would cope but, to Sarah, it felt like a long time since she’d worked in a professional kitchen.

  “Will there be a hundred?” Bel beamed at her.

  Sarah tried to smile back. Please God, I hope not.

  Please God let Chloe have gone home. Gaynor drove slowly along the esplanade towards North Foreland, composing her lines.

  “You’ll just have to talk to him,” Sarah had said as she left the bar. “Calmly!”

  She would be calm. When she’d decided what to say. She ran through the options.

  Victor/darling/you bastard

  I am worried/mortified/hopping mad

  That you may be tired/stressed/dipping your wick

  I’m sure you have a good explanation/excuse/one of your fat lies for this lipstick…

  She turned the car on to the open cliff-top road and crawled past the iron railings and electric gates and stone lions of her neighbours, frontages. She remembered when they’d first moved in, how she would drive slowly like this – looking at each house, amazed that she lived here. Incredulous that one of these imposing, detached residences was her home.

  It was a pretty house. Built in the 1920s by a local architect, it had low gables and mullioned windows, with a cottagey look, although it was very spacious inside. Gaynor had never lost her sense of wonder at being able to look though the windows and straight out over the sea.

  Victor’s Jag was on the gravelled driveway.

  Gaynor pulled in next to it and got out. Once she used to be so excited to come back here.

  She walked across to the heavy oak door and slid her key in the lock, turning it slowly, pushing the door quietly open, hoping maybe she could creep upstairs…

  “Ah, here she is!” Victor appeared in the beamed hallway. “We’ve been waiting for you.” He frowned: “Why didn’t you have your phone on?”

  “Oh!” Gaynor pulled it out of her handbag. “Turned it off when I went to see the gynae bloke. Forgot.”

  She followed him into the kitchen. Chloe was perched on a stool against the breakfast bar. Victor looked from her to Gaynor.

  “Chloe’s got to get back, after all.”

  Chloe giggled. “Ollie’s being a bit over-protective.”

  “And as you didn’t make lunch and Chloe wanted to see you –” Victor’s voice was pleasant but his eyes were flints as they flicked towards Gaynor “– I thought we’d have a little celebration before I take my daughter to the station.”

  Gaynor looked at the bottle of Moet in an ice bucket. White cloth in perfect ironed folds laid across the top, three crystal flutes waiting beside it. A small dish of olives, one of nuts.

  Victor popped the cork with a flourish. “We can drink it even if you can’t,” he joked, nodding at Chloe as he poured.

  “Oh, I’ll have a little one.” Chloe was flushed with pleasure, smiling at her father, catching Gaynor’s eye. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Gaynor did the best she could. Raised her glass, then crossed the kitchen and put her arms around Chloe to hide her face. “It is marvellous, such good news, is Oliver excited? Of course he must be. Are you feeling well? Not sick at all? I didn’t ask you how far gone you are – when’s it due?”

  Her voice rattled on gaily like a train, only faltering at the last. At the thought of that moment when Chloe would…

  She chinked glasses with both of them. “Congratulations!”

  She stood under the shower and squeezed a little more Grapefruit Body Grit on to the sisal sponge. She scrubbed briskly at her thighs, using circular movements, as recommended in the best magazines, guaranteed to dispel cellulite and boost the circulation. She did it automatically, moving up over her buttocks, across her abdomen.

  In the kitchen earlier, Chloe had passed a hand over her perfectly flat stomach. “I hope I’m not going to put on lots of weight.”

  Gaynor had a sudden vision of Chloe in a few months, her face filled out, bump swelling beneath some designer maternity dress, looking radiant. The vision she’d once held for herself.

  She scrubbed harder, working the sponge into her upper arms as the hot water hammered against her back.

  Of course Sarah was right – Chloe was young and healthy and doing what women did. She should have known it was only a matter of time. Something Gaynor didn’t seem to have much of.

  At your age. That’s what Mr Bradley-Lawrence had said “At your age, with a history of endometriosis…”

  “It got better.”

  “You took a course of Danol which was apparently successful at the time…”

  “Dreadful stuff – made me fat and spotty. But it did the trick.” She’d laughed.

  Mr Bradley-Lawrence hadn’t. “Endometriosis has a habit of recurring. It could be that this has happened now. You are tender in the same sites.”

  Victor had taken Chloe to the station. Back into the ever-loving arms of the Oracle. She’d hugged Gaynor as she left. “I must bring Ollie down to see the wine bar really soon.”

  “That would be lovely.” And then she’d wander among Gaynor’s friends, telling them her good news, Oliver beside her, his arm in hers, happy and proud…

  Victor had jiggled his car keys. “He’ll have to start working hard now he’s going to be a father.”

  Chloe’s eyes had narrowed. “He works hard already – he’s doing really well.”

  But not well enough for Victor. Nothing was ever good enough for him, these days.

  “So?” Chloe had popped an olive between her lips and bitten it in two with perfect white teeth “How’s the wine bar today?”

  “Yeah, great. It still needs a bit of work. We had the guys in to start building a proper cool-room in the cellar and the new windows are…”

  Victor had laughed. Sneered. “Place is a complete wreck. Falling down everywhere you look.”

  Gaynor forced a smile. “It’s a listed building. It needs a bit of work here and there but at least we’re open.”

  He’d talked over her. Once he’d have listened. Once he’d been lovely. Had encouraged her to make something of her life. To see what she could achieve. Once he’d even seemed proud.

  “Back soon,” he’d said tightly as he left.

  She’d be waiting for him.

  Gaynor wrapped herself in a big towel and rubbed at her hair. Even if Victor did still want a baby the chances seemed remote. This afternoon Mr Bradley-Lawrence had snatched her dream from her and slowly shredded it.

  “It is a disease particularly prevalent in women who have not had children. And, as I said, at your age …”

  “I still want them!”

  He’d raised his eyebrows. “I must tell you that if endometriosis is present your chances are significantly reduced. As you will be aware…” His voice had droned over her talking of hormone levels and scar tissue and effects on fallopian tubes.

  “But I could still have a baby.”

  “You could. Anything is possible. But I must impress…”

  Gaynor had stopped listening. There was only one phrase burned on her mind.

  Anything is possible.

  He came in banging the door.

  She was in a towelling robe, sat in the breakfast room, rubbing body lotion into her legs. She’d drunk the rest of the bottle of champagne and had worked herself up for a full confrontation. Her insides were a tight knot of outrage and apprehension. She heard him in the kitchen – the chink of ice cubes, the glug, glug of Scotch being poured. He appeared in the doorway, tumbler in hand. Here we go.

  “Where were you?”

  “You know where I was. At the gynaecologist’s.”

  “All day?”

  “No – I was in court this morning and then…”

  “Where did you have lunch?”

  “I didn’t. I had a drink with Sarah and then…”

  “Oh, so you can spend time with Sarah but you can’t come home and see my daughter when you’d promised to.”

  “I didn’t promise. We were having a meeting about Greens and…”

/>   “Pah!” Victor swirled his ice-cubes about and swallowed his Scotch in one. “How do you think she felt?” he asked aggressively.

  “How do you think I felt?” Gaynor’s voice rose. Victor’s brief and disastrous marriage to Marie, Chloe’s mother, had already ended by the time Chloe was a year old. He’d barely seen her until she was a teenager and never went to a huge effort to keep in touch now. It was Chloe who made all the running and Gaynor who ensured Victor responded. Yet he managed to take on this air of the devoted father and somehow make Gaynor feel selfish. She looked at him. “Aren’t you even going to ask how I got on this afternoon?”

  He looked back with contempt. “You’ll tell me anyway.”

  “I won’t bloody bother!” she cried, wounded. “You’re not interested. You’ve got rather more pressing things on your mind, haven’t you Victor?”

  His mouth tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know very well.”

  “No, I don’t, Gaynor. Try speaking plain English – I know it’s not always easy for you…”

  She felt herself flush. “You supercilious bastard. I know what you’re up to. You should have been more careful if you didn’t want to be found out.”

  For a moment she thought she saw alarm in his eyes, but he said, sounding bored. “What are you talking about?”

  “You! Your bit on the side. This woman you’re shagging!”

  He laughed. “I’m not ‘shagging’ anyone.”

  “Certainly not me!” It was out before she could stop it. All at once a humiliating wave of self-pity came up into her throat. She swallowed it.

  He didn’t answer, just gave her a strange smile and went across to the table in the corner and refilled his glass.

  Recklessly she ploughed on: “You never come to bed at the same time as me anymore. You never…”

  “Yes, I do. You’re usually drunk and pass out.”

  “That is not true! I don’t drink any more than you do and the other night I kept calling you to come up and...”

  “I had work to do. We had a big presentation in the morning.”

  “More like you’re getting it somewhere else.”