Love-40 Read online

  Estelle raised an eyebrow. ‘When a woman gets to a certain age…’ She let the words hang.

  Miaow. Suzi grinned. In fact, Estelle, at thirty-nine, was the older of the two, and it was unlike her to get her claws out. But who could resist bitching about someone so rich, gorgeous and upper class? And Suzi had to admit that Amanda deserved it, being the babe who had everything – with knobs on. They were all staring at her through the open double doors. But Liam’s mouth was practically gaping open. Suzi glared at him. How could he be so obvious?

  ‘Ping pong,’ Erica was saying, waving red-varnished fingernails towards the games room of the youth club next door. Her chest heaved within the white Aertex tennis shirt she wore. ‘What do you think, Amanda … of a restaurant?’

  ‘A restaurant?’ Amanda’s tone – always lazy, rarely expressive – indicated precisely how she felt. Bored. She flicked a strand of fine blonde hair from her face and gave Erica a cool once-over.

  ‘An exclusive one, of course,’ Erica elaborated, lips twitching to reveal a brief flash of horsy teeth, complete with smear of crimson lipstick. ‘Sushi perhaps?’

  ‘What the bloody hell’s sushi?’ Liam yelled, jumping to his feet and standing in the doorway like a man possessed.

  It was at times like these, Suzi thought, as she tried to cringe away out of sight, that her brother revealed their Irish ancestry. Their mother had loved their father to distraction – had lived in her own kind of lost world when he died. But by God, she’d had a temper the few times Suzi had seen her let rip. And she’d passed it on to her son, who tended to make use of it rather more often.

  ‘And where would the kids play table tennis?’ Liam went on. ‘And pool?’

  ‘Liam…’ Erica, who had clearly forgotten Liam’s role as youth club co-ordinator, not to mention his Socialist principles, blinked her sparse eyelashes. ‘It’s only at the ideas stage. It would have to go to committee –’

  ‘Outside, on the barbecue area perhaps?’ His voice dripped sarcasm.

  Suzi exchanged a glance with Michael, who shrugged and drained his glass in response. But what did she expect? Liam’s excesses, Liam’s views and the propensity with which he aired them, were not Michael’s problem, any more than they should be Suzi’s. Though they were. They always had been and probably always would be. Because whatever his faults, Suzi thought, clenching both knuckles tight, at least he wouldn’t allow the tennis club to elbow the youth club out of existence. At least he still cared enough to get angry.

  ‘Of course not, Liam.’ Erica adopted a patronising tone. ‘The barbecue patio would be most inappropriate. Fire risk, you know.’

  ‘You take the games room away from the kids over my dead body,’ said Liam, crashing his fist down on the bar counter.

  Amanda laid a hand on his arm. ‘Liam’s absolutely right,’ she said, with the authority of a woman who has always got her own way. ‘It’s a crap idea, Erica. CG’s belongs to the kids too. It always has.’

  Liam looked like a cat who’d won a mouse a day for the next six months. Suzi hoped Estelle hadn’t noticed, but thought it unlikely.

  Erica sniffed. ‘We’ll see what the committee thinks,’ she muttered darkly.

  ‘I know what Daddy will think.’ Amanda’s hand slipped down to cover Liam’s. ‘And presumably it would be his money that would be paying for it.’

  Take it away, thought Suzi. C’mon, Liam. Think daddy’s money. Just take your hand away.

  ‘Not at all. I wouldn’t dream…’ Erica spluttered, looking as if nightmares would be nearer the mark, ‘… other ways of raising money,’ she continued unintelligibly, her colour rising beneath the rose-pink of her foundation. ‘Higher subscription fees,’ she concluded.

  ‘If you think we’ll agree to higher fees,’ Liam began, ‘then … then…’

  Amanda appeared to be absent-mindedly stroking Liam’s thumb with her forefinger. Suzi downed the remainder of her gin and tonic and wondered how she could create a diversion. A quick river dance on the table top? Grab Michael’s hand and fake an orgasm?

  ‘Daddy won’t support a restaurant,’ Amanda informed them. ‘Not at the expense of the games room. Daddy…’ she squeezed Liam’s hand ‘… is pro youth.’

  ‘Good old daddy.’ Estelle rose from her chair. ‘So much for parasites, eh, Suzi?’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Suzi couldn’t believe that Liam was just standing there. Just standing there, gazing at Amanda like a lovesick teenager. What was the matter with him? She looked helplessly at Estelle.

  ‘Home. You can tell Liam I’ll see him there.’ Estelle grabbed her multi-coloured rucksack. ‘Although to tell you the truth, Suzi,’ she went on, ‘I’m not altogether sure it’ll be home much longer.’

  Chapter 2

  Not looking where she was going as she spun through the revolving doors of CGs, and with her mind muttering, I should have left him years ago, Estelle bumped slap-crash into Nick Rossi.

  ‘Hey!’ The tennis balls he was carrying spilled to the ground, promptly sprang out of their neat, plastic packaging and began skipping, bumpity-bump down the steps.

  ‘Sorry.’ Estelle blushed and quickly bent to retrieve the nearest one. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘Anywhere interesting?’ Nick Rossi smiled that easy, sensual smile of his and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Not really.’ Like Amanda Lake, Estelle thought grimly, feeling the warmth and oh-so-slight pressure of it. He seemed to think a beautiful body and female admiration entitled him to intimate contact with whomever, wherever, whenever. Like an advert for Martini, Estelle thought.

  ‘Let me,’ he said, still smiling.

  Let him what? Estelle knew herself to be at a disadvantage but found herself smiling back anyway. Well honestly, who could resist? Nick was in his early thirties, unmarried, tall, dark blond and hunky. He was also the best player CG’s had to offer. Estelle wondered why he came here. Because the club was so traditionally English? Because he liked playing on grass? Because he liked playing with Amanda Lake? They weren’t exactly an item, but you’d have to be insensitive as stone not to catch that chemistry zinging between them. But for some reason, it had apparently gone no further than chemistry.

  ‘Playing today?’ she asked. Stupid. Why else would he and his tennis gear be here? She straightened up and noticed with relief that his eyes were set just a little too close together. Thank heavens for imperfections. She’d have to take a closer look at Amanda next time their paths crossed.

  He nodded, his hand staying right where it was. ‘Mixed. Got to keep in practice for the American tournament.’ Those eyes were hazel with green and orange circles around the iris, she registered, the close proximity making her nervous. ‘Are you entering?’

  Estelle repressed a shiver. ‘I certainly am,’ she decided on the spot, though she had told Liam earlier today that he and the American tournament could go and fornicate with themselves.

  Nick smiled again – soft, like a caress. ‘Then perhaps we’ll be playing together once or twice.’ He made the proposition sound erotic. ‘That would be fun, don’t you think?’

  Better than playing with Liam at any rate, Estelle thought. With Liam, win or lose, she’d be beaten into a mental and emotional pulp. ‘Terrific fun,’ she purred back, indicating with a slight raise of one eyebrow that she knew what game he was playing (and it wasn’t tennis) that she could play too, and that her heart would not be bruised by the casual flirting of Nick Rossi. He was several years younger than she. And unspeakably sexy. So she was flattered – but not convinced.

  He acknowledged all this with a flicker of respect in those gorgeous hazel eyes and let his hand slip from her shoulder at last. ‘Ciao,’ he murmured.

  ‘Ciao,’ she tossed back at him, turning away with a graceful sweep of the shoulders, a flounce of her dark red hair and, damn it, a stumble as she tripped over one of the tennis balls.

  ‘I should have left him years ago.’ And this time she said it out loud as she ran d
own the steps and into the late afternoon sunshine. Just think what fun she could have had with all the Nick Rossis of this world.

  * * *

  Michael watched Suzi watching Liam and wondered when he should tell her his news. Would she be pleased? He examined the gamine face for clues. Imagined himself sliding a finger against the soft hollow of her cheek, down, down, into the cleft of the narrow chin. He hoped she’d be pleased, though he couldn’t be sure. He’d known Suzi Nichols for over a year, been seeing her regularly for twelve months, staying weekends for most of that time. And yet, he didn’t know her – not in any way that would make her remotely predictable. Perhaps that was what made her, he thought, so hard to resist.

  ‘Another?’ he asked her, waggling his empty glass to get her attention.

  She debated this, head on one side, eyes flicking towards Liam and Amanda Lake. Wondering if her services would be required, he guessed, also wondering how much he minded. It was a bit like loving a woman already married to another man, he thought. Knowing there was part of her that would always be attached elsewhere. Worse, since she and Liam were unlikely to ever divorce. Trying to catch hold of what was tantalisingly out of reach could make a guy blind to limitations. Did they have limitations? He caught Suzi’s eye. Whatever, it was bloody frustrating – feeling you were second best.

  ‘What time have you got to get back to Fareham?’ Suzi asked, instead of answering the question. ‘Do you want to eat first?’

  He captured her small hand in his. ‘I’d like to take a shower first,’ he said meaningfully. ‘And then eat.’

  Suzi’s answering squeeze told him he had her undivided attention for the first time that afternoon. ‘And then…?’ she teased.

  He might tell her his news … ‘I’ll go back to Fareham.’ He released her hand again and pushed his glass aside. ‘So shall we hit the road?’

  Once again, Suzi’s glance shifted to the Formica bar. Michael watched Nick Rossi stride in, place himself firmly between Liam and Amanda, plant a kiss on each of her golden cheeks.

  Suzi seemed to come to a decision. ‘Let’s,’ she agreed. ‘Will you miss me next week, Michael?’

  ‘So much, that…’ Michael almost told her. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he bit it back at her look of surprise. Will you miss me, was his cue to say, you bet, followed by her, how much, then, this much, a dialogue of foreplay that invariably led to making love. Suzi, he sensed, was unsettled by his unfinished variation on their theme.

  So, ‘I’ll show you how much,’ he whispered into her cropped dark hair, as he leaned forward to get to his feet. She smelled of tennis after-glow, her Suzi-smell, for she never bothered with perfume, and the scent of something vaguely animal that probably lived at her riverbank cottage along with the rest of the menagerie. It was a comforting fragrance. Comforting and familiar.

  Yes, he’d miss her and he’d miss Pridehaven. The truth was, that Michael had never much liked Fareham, and neither did he enjoy working as a pharmaceutical assistant in a factory that belched out fumes unconvincingly declared harmless to the atmosphere.

  His fault, he knew. When he’d made the decision ten years ago, to turn his hobby of building and repairing sound systems into an up and running business, he had failed to research the project thoroughly enough. Suffused with energy – Michael always was – he had created ambitious plans, advertised everywhere he could think of, ignored his budget, re-mortgaged his house, launched himself into the business without so much as a look over his shoulder.

  Michael frowned his perplexed frown. He still wasn’t sure how it had happened. It might have been the outlay – of business premises, brochures, advertising. It might have been the perfectionism and Michael’s seeming inability to quote the correct price for a job. He knew his faults. But whatever it was, he had lost virtually the lot, lucky, he supposed, that he had not got further into debt, that he had escaped relatively unscathed from a venture that had left him living in a rented furnished flat in Fareham, working in a factory that he loathed.

  What Michael really wanted was very different. He wanted to be a musician – a successful musician, the kind who received critical acclaim rather than hero worship (at forty he felt too old for hero worship, pleasant though it might be in small doses). And so, during every white-coated, nine to five day that led inexorably into another just the same, he dreamed of himself on stage. Sometimes in a modest venue, but more often playing Earls Court, where he had once seen the Rolling Stones. The image of Mick Jagger swinging on a rope down from a platform suspended high in the air on to centre stage, was one of his treasured memories.

  And when he wasn’t enjoying this pleasant fantasy, for Michael could swing on a rope as easily as the next man, he was waiting for Friday nights and thinking of Suzi Nichols.

  He waved goodbye to Liam and followed her out of CG’s clubhouse. Suzi Nichols dressed not in blue joggers and sweatshirt, but in a power suit with the kind of short black skirt Suzi never wore, in black stockings and suspenders that would probably compromise all her feminist principles, with pouting lips that whispered sweet nothings – not to Liam, but only and always for Michael alone.

  * * *

  Estelle’s feet were hot in her trainers, so when she got to the riverbank, she tugged them off, digging deep into her multi-coloured rucksack for her flat strappy leather sandals. At the same time, she pulled out an indigo wrap-around skirt and wound it round her waist, conscious of her pale legs in lycra shorts – OK on the tennis court, but not so appropriate to Pridehaven on a late Sunday afternoon in March. And it was getting chilly … She pulled on her sweater and observed the clouds, gathering quickly, as though suddenly realising it was not summer, no, not even spring, and that they should never have left the sky alone in the first place because people would assume too much.

  Estelle leaned on the parapet of the blue bridge over the River Pride. She loved this narrow river that wound its way from the Dorset hills in the north, through the town itself, past Suzi’s riverbank cottage to the south and down to the tiny harbour with its sheltered, shingle bay and sandstone rocks not quite imposing enough or pretty enough to attract hordes of tourists to Pridehaven in the summer. Thank God, Estelle thought. She loved the river, despite – or maybe because of – what it had done to her.

  To stare into the water was a therapy, she told herself, since water, and especially moving water, water that dragged along bits of twigs, reed and bulrushes, the seeds and dying flowers from wilting plants of the riverbank, made her remember too much. It would be easier, of course, not to recall events from thirty-five years ago, if that were possible. Memory played tricks – one could never be sure how experiences had been trimmed or frilled by time and other people’s voices. But some internal spectator told her, to be strong you must remember, deal with, resolve. And so Estelle would often stand here at the bridge, gripping this blue parapet with white knuckles, staring down at the River Pride. Like a madwoman, she thought.

  She was almost forty. At least half her life had gone and what did she have? A career that had only just stuttered into being. No children, maybe no man, certainly no mother. Perhaps she was wrong to come here to the bridge. Perhaps she should have moved away years ago. Why hadn’t she?

  The water was hypnotic and Estelle swayed slightly. Liam, she thought. Liam was the answer to that, just as he was the answer to most things. Except contentment, she reminded herself, watching a family of sleek, caramel and green ducks as they scooted along the surface of the water, each staring straight ahead, as focused on their journey as Estelle herself was not.

  How could you be contented, living with a man who at any moment might move on to … she frowned, to something more interesting? A man you could never feel secure with.

  Estelle released her hold of the parapet, flexing her fingers with some surprise at their stiffness. She and Liam had always fought. They pitted their strengths against each other rather than combining them; it was one of the things, she knew, that had kept them t
ogether so long. That and … she trailed her hand along the railing … the fact that they had always seemed to belong together. That there had never been – for either of them – another.

  Apart, of course, from Suzi, Estelle thought wryly as she gathered up her rucksack and finally crossed to the other side of the river. Suzi was always there, had always been there, had been there even before Liam, when they had first become friends.

  Estelle’s steps quickened as she thought of those days, a tentative friendship begun by a teacher at her new school. ‘Suzi will look after you. She’s very kind.’ The sympathy in the teacher’s eyes, in all their eyes.

  ‘You can come back to my house for tea,’ Suzi had told her that first day. ‘If your auntie will let you.’

  And Estelle had shrugged, knowing that Auntie Mo, immersed in the romantic short stories she wrote for women’s magazines, kind but never in a million years maternal, would probably not even notice she’d gone. ‘Won’t your mum mind?’ she had asked Suzi.

  ‘Course not.’ Suzi was clear on this point. ‘We do what we want, Liam and me. Mum never minds.’

  And it had been easy, Estelle reflected now, to slip into the routine that was so far from what she had always understood to be routine, at the Nichols’. Liam and Suzi’s father had died years before, which gave them some common ground, and their mother – though clearly loving her children with intensity – still seemed somewhat lost without him.

  Liam and Suzi, Estelle soon realised, had taken advantage of this fact, taken advantage of the independence their mother had inadvertently offered them. Liam, though (who had seemed to Estelle at the time to be scarily sure of himself), had taken a while to accept her. Only Suzi’s stubborn insistence that Estelle be included in every game, every outing, every treat and as time went by, every secret, had made him tolerate her.

  They had fought even then, she recalled, as she opened the church gate and slipped through to the graveyard. Once Estelle had found her feet. Fought and then loved and fought some more.