Stevie mouthed, ‘I will love you forever,' to her friend and Danny's eyes rounded to dinner-plates as the four-layer cake covered with crushed Maltesers, Buttons, Crunchie bits and melted down Mars Bar icing made its fanfare entrance into the Honeywell/Finch kitchen.
‘Wow!' said Danny, which, along with ‘cool', was his favourite buzzword of the moment.
‘Go get your shoes on,' said Stevie, spurring him on with, ‘The sooner you do so, the sooner you'll get to show off your cake at school,' which sent him flying down to the cabinet in the hallway as if his slipper was caught on Schumacher's tow bar.
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,' said Stevie, enfolding Catherine in a big hug.
‘Don't thank me, thank Kate. She did the cake, and after she'd put my hair right, I shoved all the bits on.' Catherine sniffed. ‘Wasn't that long a job,' she added, fobbing off the fuss.
Catherine had six children, a husband, four cats, a ferret, a Chihuahua called Chico and some huge mad-looking cross-breed called Boot that looked as if it ate prop forwards for snacks. She had her hands full, but she still had found the time to get Stevie out of a hole.
‘I owe you both big time for this, Cath.'
‘Don't be silly. So, did you sleep? How are you feeling? And did he ring?'
‘A little,' said Stevie, ‘crap and yes.'
‘What did he say?'
‘I let the answerphone pick it up. He said he was in Aberdeen.'
‘Did you 1471 it?'
‘Withheld.'
‘Sod it. So what's your gut feeling?' Catherine cringed in advance. It didn't look good from where she was standing.
‘He's in Majorca, I reckon.'
‘Holy shit! You're a lot calmer than I would be,' said Catherine, who would have been chewing on Eddie's cooked liver with some chips and a nice Chianti by now, if the same thing had happened to her.
‘Yes, but I've got a plan,' said Stevie, snapping off the conversation as Danny made a fully-shod appearance.
They both walked the proud little boy to school; he was champing at the bit to show off the Empress of all chocolate cakes to his friends and teacher. Lockelands was a nice little school, only a ten-minute, and very pleasant, tree-heavy walk away from Stevie and Matthew's house in Blossom Lane. Well, it was Matthew's house really. Stevie had sold her little terraced house, situated a few streets away, just after Christmas and moved in with him on New Year's Day. She had been so excited then, thinking how the next Christmas on she would be Mrs Finch and Danny would have a dad. What a year it was going to be! Well, at least she had got that last bit right, but alas, not in the way she had intended.
The two sides of Blossom Lane were very different, like a new world and an old world meeting in a Dr Who-like time warp. On one side were eight clones of early 1980s box-like dwellings with a short path at the front and small square gardens at the back; on the other side was a row of four early-1800s large detached cottages, all individual, very chocolate-box pretty. Ivy and honeysuckle rampaged over the stone and gave a delicious noseful of heady scent to passers-by in late summer. They had long gardens at the back all the way down to a little ribbon of stream and the railway line, and high crumbly walls overgrown with foliage secured each cottage's privacy from its neighbours. The far end cottage, opposite to Matthew's house, had been to let for a couple of months now. It was the largest of the four with a substantial old-stone garage tucked into its side. There had been no takers. It appeared character cottages went hand in hand with phenomenal ‘you-must-be-joking' rents.
‘So fill me in on the plan then,' said Catherine, who never failed to peer into the empty cottage window in the hope of seeing some new detail she had missed. It was her dream home: gnarled beams, big kitchen fireplace, exposed stonework. When all the children had grown up and left, she wanted a cottage just like this for her and Eddie to receive their grandchildren. She sighed at its gorgeousness.
‘Time for a coffee?'
‘Quick one. Eddie's sorted the kids out this morning, he'll be on his third nervous breakdown by now.' They both knew that was a joke. There was only one creature more laid-back than Eddie and that was Boot, the dog. Eddie had found him as a puppy on a landfill site. His head was stuck in a tatty Wellington boot and Eddie's initial thought, after extricating him, was that he was as ugly as an old boot, hence the name. He had been roughly the size of Chico the Chihuahua when Eddie brought him home. Now he could have dragged a gypsy caravan single-handed with a shire horse asleep in the back, yet he would let a baby take a bone from his mouth. He played the part of a family guard dog, though, and a cat burglar wouldn't have staked his chances – but you only had to look into his soft gentle eyes to know he didn't have the capacity to hurt anything. Everyone loved Boot, Danny especially, and the dog loved him back, as he did all kids.
Stevie made Catherine wait for the details until the kettle had boiled. Catherine humoured her strange hopefulness, despite having a heavy feeling about it all, but any positive plan that kept her friend from going down the path she had gone down last time had to be supported.
‘Right!' said Stevie, stirring in the milk. ‘Here's what I'm going to do.'
‘Go on then,' said Catherine, sitting comfortably.
‘I've got six days left until Matthew comes back. So at lunchtime tomorrow I'm having my hair done.'
‘Right,' Catherine nodded. ‘Good girl. Make yourself feel better.'
‘Then I'm going to join the gym to get some weight off.' Stevie beamed at Catherine waiting for her approval.
‘Well, that's great,' said her friend, trying her best to smile encouragingly. ‘But … '
‘But what?' Stevie's smile slipped a little.
Catherine sighed. With the best will in the world, Stevie wasn't going to get down to a size zero and look like a Supermodel in six days. Even if she did, that wasn't going to bring Matthew back to her. There were darker forces at work here, forces for which a hair-do fairy was no match.
Then again, it wouldn't do Stevie any harm to go to a gym and see some nice fit males with bulging biceps and trim bums. Surely that was better than sitting in and thinking about what those cheating scumbags were doing. She hoped their duplicity would catch up with them; after all, a sneaky week away on holiday was not the best way to cement a new relationship, if that's what it was and not a one-off fling. Matthew had a conscience, and Jo surely would be thinking of what the mad Scot would do if he found out. That was bound to get in the way of the enjoyment of their sun and sangria, and any other ‘s's' they were participating in with abandon.
Catherine smiled. ‘But nothing. In fact, I'll come with you for the first session if you like, for moral support. They're always giving out free day passes, aren't they, these gyms, trying to get you to join up? You can blag me one.'
‘Oh Catherine, that would be fab,' said Stevie, her smile lit up with gratitude.
‘Which gym?'
‘Well, Matthew goes to the Gym Village one, so maybe I'd be better going to the other – Well Life.'
‘Ooh, posh and expensive – go and do it immediately. Ring up and find out how you join before I go home.' Catherine slid the cordless phone over the table.
So, Stevie started the three-point plan that would totally absorb her over the next six days and get her man back for her.
1) have great new-image hairdo
2) join gym and start to get thinner
3) practise pretending to have suspected nothing about his affair
Easy.
Chapter 5
Listening to the gently shushing waves, savouring the scent of sun oil that smelt of coconuts, and lying next to a long, leggy woman with a Supermodel-type body nearly covered by a white bikini with a sexy little rhinestone clasp between the twin swells of her small but perfect breasts, Matthew waited for the guilt to kick in. A stray thought visited plump, ordinary little Stevie at home. She would be sitting at her computer, writing love stories for the lonely and rejected, blissfully unaware that she was about to join them in exactly five days' time. It made him feel guilty only for not feeling guilty.
He really had not meant for this to happen at all. He had been content enough with Stevie and sliding himself gradually into the role of dad for Danny, until he had found Jo MacLean, one of the new designers, crying by his black Punto in the company car park the day after Valentine's Day. He had only seen her a couple of times before but, Jo MacLean, with her big brown eyes and her long, dark hair and her even longer legs, was someone once spotted, never forgotten. They had spoken once, after a meeting in late January. A few of them had hung around the buffet table drinking the last of the coffee. He'd found himself puffing up in front of her, trying to impress, implying things. Then a fortnight later, there he was, offering her his handkerchief in the cold and the rain and asking if she wanted a coffee in the little café around the corner from work. There she had spilled out her life to him – a relative stranger – so desperate was she for consolation. She had told him how she had recently moved into a new house with the husband she so needed to get away from but didn't know how to because he watched her every move. She poured out stories of horrific verbal and physical abuse and Matthew had sat and patiently listened. Who could have predicted what she would be doing to the rest of his body, so soon after he'd offered up his shoulder?