Stevie gulped. This was the moment she had been waiting for. Adam's plan had come through for her too, it seemed. So why wasn't she hearing brass bands playing in her heart? There was nothing but the faint piercing sound of retreating bagpipes.
That week she had finally faced up to the fact that her love for Matthew had started to die as soon as Adam showed her the holiday confirmation; its roots had been wrenched out with the break of trust. She knew she had clung on blindly to the fantasy that it was still a plant alive and growing because a buried but determined part of her wanted to win Matthew back from Jo, to make up for the fact that she had lost Mick to Linda. She wanted so much to see him as the strong, reliable bloke her heart was waiting for. But he wasn't that man. Someone else was.
‘No, I don't suppose … you would, would you? C-consider – you … me – again?'
‘No, Matthew.' She answered him in a kind voice because there had been too many hearts broken, too many emotional casualties.
‘I was a thick twat,' he said with genuine frustration. ‘My grass was lovely and green and I went looking for better stuff and ended up with Astroturf.'
She hoped his next job wasn't going to be writing romantic fiction, because he just might give her a run for her money with lines like that.
Matthew looked at her, her spun-gold hair, her lovely blue eyes, warmth and nice-person radiating out from her in waves, and once again he could not believe he had let her go. Ironically, her strength in saying, ‘No' to him made him want her even more, but her eyes were only looking back at him as if he was ordinary. They weren't registering that he was special any more. They looked at Adam MacLean quite differently, he had noticed. Jim Bowen's voice welled up in his head with the Bull's-eye tune playing in a minor key: Look at what you could have won.
‘It's him, isn't it – Adam? You really fell for him then?'
‘Yes, Matthew, hook, line and sinker.'
‘I thought you were just joking at first, you know. You'll laugh but I thought it was all a sort of plan to get us jealous.' He laughed at how stupid that seemed now. As if! ‘So what happened?'
‘I don't know,' she shrugged. ‘I presume Adam and Jo are together somewhere, planning a new start. I haven't seen or heard from him since … well, since … '
‘Since I came round that night, by any chance?' Matthew said, his shoulders scrunching up with shame and embarrassment. Stevie didn't answer; she couldn't. There was a big lump in her throat, and there was no Adam around to perform a Heimlich manoeuvre on her to shift it.
‘I'm sorry,' he said apologetically. ‘I seem to have developed rather a habit of wrecking your life.'
For once she didn't say her customary kind, ‘No, don't be silly,' to let him off the hook. Matthew knew, by that, just how deeply he had hurt her. The sooner he got to London the better. Maybe there he would finally grow up.
‘When the house is sold, I'll give you some money from it to cover Danny's holiday and of course the wedding costs. I'm sorry, Stevie. I've been a total bastard. I look at myself and I don't like what I've become. I used to think I was a good bloke. I don't want to be this Matthew. I want to get right away from him.'
‘When do you leave?' she asked.
‘Next week – got to pack up the stuff I need and get rid of the rest. Might even do a car boot sale.'
‘You can earn quite a bit on those.'
‘Hey, remember when we did that one, that freezing Sunday morning?'
‘Yes, I remember,' she said, smiling a little at an old faded memory, of a time when they were happy. A lifetime ago. Those two people didn't exist any more though.
Matthew was viewing the same memory, although his mind glasses had deeper rose-shaded lenses at the moment: snapshots of them eating burgers at eight o'clock in the morning just to keep warm; the old woman bartering them down from thirty to twenty pence for a leather wallet; the man in the Shredded Wheat wig they'd tried so hard not to giggle at. Stevie had been so sweet, so much fun. He hoped there would be another Stevie in London to meet.
‘Thanks, Stevie, you're a diamond and I owe you big time,' he said, and he threw his arms around her and hugged her for the last time. She wasn't as pliant as he remembered. She didn't melt against him and envelop him in her affection. But then, she wasn't his any more.
‘Goodbye, Matthew, and good luck,' she said, and kissed his cheek, and though she smiled, the light seemed to have gone from her eyes. He wished, at least, he could put that back there for her.
That afternoon, Adam MacLean was watching something mindless on the television about doing up gardens hosted by a woman with jolly features and wayward breasts, as he imagined Stevie's would be in that garb. He'd always gone for women with scraps of meat on their bones, like his mother, but Stevie had a bottom he wanted to bite lumps out of. She was so soft and curvy and warm, but Jo's words in the letter had haunted him. Stevie would want more for herself and her son than a ‘unique' (i.e. ugly) man who made noise wherever he went.
He knew he would have to speak to her soon about the arrangements for the cottage, but he was scared he would turn the corner and see her back in Matthew's house, and find Humbleby Cottage lying as empty as his heart felt. He would have to face it, but not now. Just a few more days until he found the strength to look her in the eye, wish her all the luck and happiness in the world, let her go for ever.
He looked around at the cold, characterless room and decided that he really needed to clean up. The house hadn't been vacuumed in days, nor had the dishwasher been switched on. Then again, there had been no plates to wash because he hadn't been eating. He had managed to drag himself to the shower, but not over to the shaving mirror. He looked half-wild with his auburn stubble and flat, tired eyes. He caught sight of his reflection in the smoky glass of the display cabinet and decided he wouldn't have liked to meet himself up a dark alley.
He ignored the first ‘bing bong' of the doorbell, as he wasn't in the mood for visitors. After the fifth bing bong, he thought he had better address the irritation and get rid of it by telling them that, no, he didn't want to convert to their religion, thanks, he was quite happy being a Satanist. No, he didn't want to sponsor them, vote for them, buy their windows, look at their brochure or convert his energy supplies. He had no energy to convert.
The fuzzy shape that he saw through the glass was a man's, and when he opened the door, it was to a rather pale-looking Matthew.
‘Hi,' his unexpected visitor said with a big gulp and a hand held up in a ‘how'-like greeting. ‘I realize you might want to murder me, but before you do, can I please tell you something?'
Chapter 58
Stevie dropped Danny off at school then picked up some empty boxes from the Happy Shopper en route to home. As she opened the cottage door, silence greeted her and the quiet was uncomfortably deafening in a way that Adam's noise could never be. She missed his big, booming voice more each day. She missed seeing his cavernous sports bag by the door. She missed his boxers on the washing line. She missed the heavy tread of his large feet on the stairs, the way he crashed through doors and blasted out ‘Flowers of Scotland' at three billion decibels in the shower. She missed everything about the man. And Danny's insistent questioning didn't help. Where's Adam? When is he coming back? Will he be back tonight? He hadn't asked half as many questions over Matthew or Mick combined. It seemed that her little boy was hurting as much as she was.
Her mind had taken her to some horrible places that week – to Majorca, spying on Jo, in her white size-10 bikini and blissfully stretched out at the side of Adam in the sun. She wished she could wish she had never laid eyes on the man, but then she might never have discovered she had the capacity to love to that tremendous depth. This had been no love on the sidelines that made compromises, this had been a fall into an abyss out of which she had never wanted to crawl.
She hoped Matthew would find contentment down south, although she knew deep down that he would. She hoped Colin Seed would enjoy his new life in New York and find someone he could love and look after who would drag him into Burtons occasionally. And most of all she hoped Jo would realize what she had nearly lost and take better care of Adam's beautiful big heart. Stevie found out that true love made it possible to let someone go to be happy with another.