Loe raamatut: «Marriage Reunited»

CHAPTER ONE

‘THANK YOU for coming in. I’ll be in touch.’ Georgia closed the door firmly behind the latest applicant for the post of senior photographer on the Askerby and District Gazette and let the bright, polite smile drop from her face.

Mentally she began to compose a letter for Rose to type up and send to all five of the hopefuls who had responded to the advertisement.

Dear X, Thank you so much for coming in and wasting my time today. While admiring your nerve in applying for a job for which you have no experience and absolutely no talent, I am afraid that I am unable to offer you the post. I am desperate for a photographer, but not that desperate. Yours sincerely, Georgia Maitland, Editor.

What a shame you couldn’t tell it how it was, instead of wrapping it in meaningless phrases, thought Georgia, already resigned to drafting a letter that would make her sound kind and encouraging instead of cross and impatient, which was how she really felt.

As if she didn’t have enough to do.

Taking off her glasses, she dropped them on to her desk and threw herself into the battered executive chair with a gusty sigh, spinning round to face the window behind. The view over the rooftops of the town to the hills beyond was one of the few bonuses of the Gazette’s location on the third floor of a bleak Victorian warehouse which had been badly converted in the Seventies.

On this March afternoon, a weak winter sun was struggling to stay above the horizon and the hills, still dusted with snow from a cold snap earlier in the week, were reflecting a pinkish glow. It would make a nice picture, thought Georgia morosely.

If only she could find a photographer capable of taking it.

Behind her, she heard the door to her office open. This would be Rose, still struggling to learn the ropes as the Gazette’s secretary, and almost as anxious as Georgia to find a new photographer. She would be wanting to know how the last interview had gone.

‘He seems terribly nice,’ she had whispered to Georgia confidentially before ushering the last candidate in.

Nice he might have been, a talented photographer he most certainly wasn’t.

‘Please tell me that guy wasn’t the best photographer Askerby can come up with,’ Georgia said without turning round.

‘I could tell you that if you want, but then I’d be lying, and you know I’ve never lied to you, Georgia.’

The voice that answered her was far from her secretary’s cut-glass tones. Instead it was warm and amused, with a Scottish lilt that was more a softening of the hard edges than a full-blown accent.

It was a voice Georgia hadn’t heard for four long years. A voice so unexpected and so bizarrely out of place in her dull provincial office that she froze for a moment, certain that she must be imagining things.

Then, very, very slowly, she swivelled her chair round to face her husband.

‘Hello, Georgia,’ he said.

Georgia’s heart, which had lurched into her throat at the sound of his voice, did a series of spectacular somersaults before landing with a sickening thud that left her reeling and breathless.

Mac Henderson, the love of her life. The man she had married. The man who had broken her heart.

The first instinctive surge of joy at the sight of him was rapidly succeeded, much to Georgia’s relief, by a welcome rush of therapeutic anger. It was typical of Mac to turn up when she was least expecting him!

Just when she had managed to convince herself that she was over him.

How dared he come here looking just the same, with the same heart-shaking smile and the same unsettling humour gleaming in his navy-blue eyes, making her senses pirouette and her bones dissolve exactly the same way they always had?

It wasn’t fair.

Georgia took a deep breath and wished she could remember some of those calming yoga exercises she had once tried.

‘Mac,’ she said, hating the way shock had made her voice husky, although, to be fair, it was a miracle she was able to speak at all given the way her heart was carrying on, cavorting around her ribcage like a red setter out of control. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you.’

Mac looked as if he would have liked to have strolled around, but her office simply wasn’t big enough for him to do more than take a couple of steps in any direction.

There you go, Georgia told herself. Another bonus to add to the view.

In the end, Mac sat down uninvited in the chair recently vacated by the would-be photographer. ‘It took me a little while to track you down,’ he said. ‘You didn’t tell me that you’d left London.’

‘Is there any reason why I should have done?’ asked Georgia coolly.

‘We are married,’ he pointed out.

‘Technically, perhaps,’ she conceded, ‘but we’ve been separated for nearly four years and, since you haven’t made any other attempt to contact me in that time, it didn’t occur to me to keep you informed of my movements.’

Hey, who would have thought she would have been able to come up with a coherent sentence like that? Georgia marvelled. Who needed yoga anyway? She could do this. She could deal with her soon-to-be ex-husband without falling apart or letting the frantic churning get the better of her. Ha!

‘I don’t recall you letting me know whenever you went off to the Middle East or Angola or Liberia or all the other trouble spots you’ve been to over the last few years,’ she added, feeling more confident now.

‘You’ve been keeping track of me?’

The undercurrent of amusement in Mac’s voice made Georgia grit her teeth. He had never really taken her seriously, and it looked as if nothing had changed.

‘I read the papers,’ she said, managing a careless shrug. ‘I see your name under the pictures so I know where you’ve been, that’s all.’

And every time it had been like a knife turning in her heart, knowing that he was in danger, never getting a phone call to say that he was safe, knowing only that he had survived one conflict the next time his photographs of another appeared in the paper.

Of course, Mac had always thrived on risk. His was an odd mixture of recklessness and competence, a confidence bordering on arrogance that he could deal with any obstacle that stood between him and a good picture.

It was what made him a wonderful photographer and a terrible husband. How many nights, Georgia wondered, had she lain awake worrying about where he was and what he was doing, only for him to breeze back, to laugh at her fears and tell her that she should learn to live dangerously, life was so much more fun that way? But it hadn’t been fun for Georgia, just waiting for him to come home. He had never understood how hard it was for her.

She looked across the desk at him now. No, he hadn’t changed. Nobody could call Mac a handsome man, his features were too irregular for that, but he was undeniably attractive, with those dark, lean looks, and that reckless, good-humoured assurance that gave his mobile face its compelling charm.

He was a little thinner now, maybe, a little more battered around the edges, but then, weren’t they all? Georgia thought wryly. You didn’t have to spend your life in wartorn countries to lose your sheen after you hit forty.

He had aged better than she had, she had to acknowledge, but then men always did. Mac’s lines made him look rugged and humorous, hers just made her look tired and tense.

‘Besides,’ she went on, abandoning that depressing line of thought, ‘I am a journalist. It wouldn’t have been that hard to have found you if I’d needed to, which I haven’t until now. I sent the divorce papers care of the Picture Desk at the paper. I presume that’s why you’re here?’

‘Got it in one,’ said Mac, not feeling nearly as casual as he sounded.

Her letter had been forwarded to him in Mozambique. He had been sitting in a bar in Maputo, having collected the mail that had accumulated in his post box while he’d been covering a story up country. He had ordered a beer while he leafed through the letters, opening anything that seemed interesting and leaving the rest until later.

Mac remembered the moment exactly. Remembered frowning slightly at the solicitor’s stamp, turning the envelope over, ripping it open with his thumb. Even at the time he’d thought of Georgia, who would undoubtedly have used a letter opener or a knife to open it neatly rather than leave a jagged tear like that. It was the kind of memory that would catch at him like barbed wire, just when he least expected it.

He remembered shaking the thought of her aside as he’d pulled out the papers and unfolded them, remembered the sickening jolt as he’d read the solicitor’s covering letter and the words sank in. After all this time, Georgia wanted a divorce.

‘I appreciate the effort,’ she said now in a dry voice, ‘but there was no need for you to come. All you had to do was sign the papers and send them back to my solicitor.’

‘But I don’t want to sign,’ said Mac, tipping the chair back so that he was balanced alarmingly on the back legs. ‘I want to talk.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Georgia, trying to ignore his balancing act and failing miserably. ‘And stop doing that!’ she snapped, succumbing to the blatant provocation in spite of herself. ‘You’re only doing it to wind me up anyway. You know I hate it when you take stupid risks.’

‘Georgia, I’m only sitting on a chair!’ Mac rolled his eyes, but let the chair legs drop back to the floor.

‘You’re the only person I know who can sit on a chair dangerously,’ she said with a trace of resentment and he grinned.

‘That almost sounds as if you still care about me!’

‘Well, I don’t,’ said Georgia, not quite truthfully. ‘It’s nothing to me if you want to break your neck. Just don’t do it in my office when I’m trying to work!’

‘You’re not working now,’ Mac pointed out. ‘We’re just talking.’

‘We’re not talking,’ she insisted crossly. ‘What is there to talk about?’

‘Our marriage.’

‘Mac, we don’t have a marriage.’ Georgia sighed. ‘We agreed to separate four years ago. It was a mutual decision and since neither of us has changed our mind since then, there doesn’t seem much point in carrying on being married on paper only. Surely you can see that it’s sensible to sort everything out now?’

Sensible. There was a word to describe Georgia, thought Mac, studying her over the desk. She looked tired, he decided, and there were new lines around her smoky-grey eyes, but her blonde hair was still drawn neatly away from her face in a French plait, and she was as immaculately groomed as ever, wearing one of those little suits that always made her look crisp and elegant and just a little buttoned up.

The contrast in the two sides of Georgia had always intrigued him. There was the cool, controlled Georgia who faced the world, and then there was the other, much more alluring Georgia who shed her inhibitions with her neat suit and her sensible shoes, whose smile as she shook her beautiful hair free of its tidy plait had never failed to send a frisson of excitement down his spine.

Look at her now, sitting at her perfectly organised desk, crisp and capable in a scoop-necked silk top and discreet earrings. Who could guess that behind that practical façade was a warm, vibrant, alluring woman? Mac liked to think that he was the only one who knew, the only who had glimpsed the potential in the steady, sensible girl who had escaped the confines of a small Yorkshire town for London all those years ago, the only one to be fascinated and infuriated by her in equal measure.

The realisation that he might not be the only one after all had brought him all the way back from Mozambique, jealousy churning in his gut.

The amusement evaporated from Mac’s face. ‘The thing is, Georgia, you said that neither of us had changed our mind, but that’s not quite true. I have.’

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean, you’ve changed your mind?’

‘About being better off apart than together. I don’t think that any more.’ The navy-blue eyes looked directly into hers. ‘I don’t want a divorce.’

For one long, long moment Georgia couldn’t say anything at all. She was too busy struggling to control her wayward heart which, contrary to all its hard training over the past four years, had done the equivalent of leaping to its feet and punching the air with an exhilarated yes!

How pathetic was that? All those tears, all that heartache. The pain, the confusion, the desolation…she had got over it all. She had survived, she was over him, and now all her body could do was thrill at the mere suggestion that he might, after all, still want her.

Georgia was disgusted with herself. Well, her heart could do what it liked, but her will was stronger now—it had had to be—and she had absolutely no intention of going back to the arguments and the disappointments and the being taken for granted. It had taken her a long time to recover and be ready to move on. This was not the time to slide back down the slippery slope of desire, however sweet and seductive it might be.

‘You may not want a divorce, Mac, but I do,’ she said, hoping that her face didn’t show the turmoil inside her. ‘We’ve been perfectly happy separated for the last four years. What’s the point of us staying married?’

‘What’s the point of us getting divorced?’ he countered.

Tension began to tug at the edge of Georgia’s eye, in spite of her best efforts to stay calm. That tic was a bad habit, one she thought she had kicked along with their marriage.

She could feel the old familiar frustration uncoiling inside her, leaving her taut and jittery. She had tried so hard to get rid of that feeling. Yoga, Pilates, relaxation classes, exercise…all utterly pointless when all it took was for Mac to walk into the room to bring it all back.

Breathe deeply, Georgia told herself. Don’t let him get to you. You’re forty-one, a professional woman, and you don’t need to prove anything to anyone, least of all Mac.

‘I want to move on,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Move on?’ Mac echoed, raising derisive brows. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means, Mac.’ Georgia had to clamp down hard on the irritation that threatened to boil over. She was not going to let this descend into one of their old, circular arguments.

‘Look, we agreed,’ she reminded him. ‘We wanted different things, and neither of us was prepared to compromise, so we decided to separate, and we’ve both led our own lives since then. We should have got divorced four years ago, but it was difficult with you away so much and, since nobody else was involved, there didn’t seem any particular reason to go through all the hassle of a divorce.’

‘But now there is?’ said Mac in a hard voice.

‘Yes.’ Georgia let out a breath. ‘Yes, there is. My life has changed.’

‘So it seems.’

Mac looked pointedly around her cramped office, with its dreary beige walls, old-fashioned filing cabinets, chipped desk and its view through the one glass wall of a newsroom so dated that it was almost a surprise to see computers instead of antiquated typewriters on the desk.

Georgia followed his gaze, knowing that he was remembering the newsroom in the national newspaper where she had worked in London, all steel and glass and technology and endlessly ringing phones. Did he have any idea how trapped she felt here?

‘Why Askerby?’ he asked abruptly. ‘It’s the last place I expected to find you. You couldn’t wait to get away, and it was only guilt that brought you back to sort out family problems. Every time you came home, you’d breathe a sigh of relief to be back in London.’

It was true. She had never wanted to come back and live in Yorkshire, but sometimes you didn’t have a choice.

‘I had my reasons,’ she said in a restrained voice.

His expression hardened. ‘To do with the little boy you’ve adopted?’

‘Yes, Toby. You remember him, don’t you?’

Expecting her to be defensive about her adopted child, Mac was thrown. ‘No…Toby? Who’s Toby?’

‘He’s Becca’s son.’

He might have known Becca would have been behind all this. Mac remembered Georgia’s sister all right. Talk about chalk and cheese. Becca was wild and chaotic, Georgia cool and determined. Forever held up as a contrast to her clever, ambitious sister, Becca had, perhaps inevitably, taken to her role as the black sheep of the family with gusto.

He sighed with exasperation. ‘What’s Becca up to now?’

With Becca you could never tell. She might be in prison, or simply have abandoned her child to go off and live in a commune, and either way it would no doubt fall to Georgia to clean up the mess she had left behind her. Becca had always relied on Georgia to help her out of whatever trouble she was in. Mac hadn’t liked the emotional blackmail she had exerted, implying that it was somehow Georgia’s fault that she hadn’t made a success of her life.

‘Just let her sort it out herself,’ he used to tell Georgia. ‘She’ll never learn to look after herself if she knows all she has to do is pick up the phone to you when things go wrong. I’d let her stew.’

But Georgia never would. ‘She’s my sister,’ she would protest, but Mac knew she felt guilty about being their parents’ favourite, guilty about having the brains and the beauty, guilty about the fact that Becca had never really been able to struggle out from under her shadow.

And now it seemed Becca never would.

‘She’s dead,’ said Georgia tonelessly.

Mac stared at her, shocked. ‘Dead? How? What happened?’

Georgia sighed and ran her fingertips under her eyes. ‘A car accident. She’d been out at a nightclub in Leeds, and she’d been drinking. She should never have been driving at all, but you know Becca.’ Shaking her head, she blew out a breath. ‘It was just fortunate that no one else was involved. Sometimes she could be so…so…’

‘Irresponsible?’ Mac suggested, watching Georgia’s hands clenching and unclenching with frustration.

Her grey eyes met his and then slid away. ‘She was my sister, and I loved her, but sometimes I feel so angry with her for what she’s done to Toby,’ she confessed in a low voice, not looking at him.

‘It’s normal to feel angry at times when you’re grieving,’ said Mac in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about it.’

He was wasting his breath, of course. He didn’t need to look at her face to know that. Georgia was bound to feel guilty. She always had felt guilty about Becca, and Becca dying wasn’t going to change that.

‘I’m sorry about Becca, Georgia,’ he said sincerely. ‘It must have been a shock for you.’

‘Yes.’ Georgia remembered that terrible phone call, more than a year ago now. Her mother’s distress had been so acute that it had taken ages before Georgia could understand what had happened and, when she had finally grasped what her mother was trying to tell her, she had known at once that her life would never be the same again.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘It was terrible, but not as terrible as it was for Toby. He was only seven, and he’d lost his whole world. Becca might have been irresponsible, but she did love him, and she was his mother. No one else will ever be able to take her place.’

‘But you’re trying?’

Georgia looked up at that. ‘I’m doing the best I can,’ she said quietly. ‘But it’s never going to be enough.’

‘Why you?’ asked Mac after a moment. ‘Where’s Toby’s father?’

‘Who knows?’ Georgia lifted her shoulders helplessly. ‘I don’t think Becca did. He took off before Toby was born, and she never tried to find him. Even if it were possible to somehow track him down, I couldn’t hand Toby over to a perfect stranger. That’s why I adopted him.’

Mac shifted restlessly in his chair. He wanted to get up and prowl around, but the office was simply too small, so he was stuck there, struggling to assimilate what she had told him. It was totally unreasonable to resent Georgia for doing the right thing by her nephew, but he still did. He didn’t like the fact that she had gone ahead and changed her life for her sister’s child when she hadn’t been prepared to change it for a child of his.

He didn’t like himself for not liking it. He knew he was being unfair and unkind and unreasonable.

But that was how he felt.

‘What about your mother?’ he said. ‘Couldn’t she have taken Toby?’

‘She couldn’t cope, Mac. She used to babysit him when Becca went out, but he was really too much for her. And anyway—’ Georgia stopped as she felt her voice wobble treacherously.

Damn Mac. There was something about him that brought all her emotions to the surface and left her feeling raw and vulnerable. She hadn’t cried for ages, and she wasn’t about to start again in front of him.

Fiercely swallowing down the tears, she cleared her throat. ‘Anyway,’ she said again, more strongly this time, ‘Mum never got over the shock of Becca’s accident. She had a fatal stroke three months later.’

‘Oh, Georgia.’ Mac half rose out of the chair, then checked himself. Her father had died before they were married, and it was Georgia who had supported her mother and sister ever since.

He looked at her sitting behind her desk, her chin lifted defensively as if to ward off any attempts at sympathy for the fact that she had recently lost all her family. And he hadn’t been there to help her through any of it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said inadequately.

Georgia gave a brief smile of acknowledgement, and then went on. ‘Mum did her best with Toby, and I came down every weekend, but it wasn’t really working, and the social services were suggesting that they tried to find him a foster family when she died. I was due to have a meeting with them after the funeral, but I just looked at Toby that morning and realised I couldn’t go through with it. I was the only family he had—and he was the only family I had.’

Her eyes darkened with the memory of those dreadful days. ‘I told them that I would take him.’

‘So that’s why you’re here in Askerby?’ said Mac after a moment.

She nodded. ‘I tried taking Toby to London, but he hated it. I had a super-cool loft apartment by the Thames, but no garden and there were no other children there. He was miserable at school and childcare arrangements were a nightmare…

‘Toby just closed down,’ she told him, shuddering at the very memory. ‘He stopped talking, and I realised I was either going to have to give up on him or give up on my career.’

She mustered a smile and looked at Mac. ‘I didn’t really have a choice. He’s been better ever since I brought him back. I’d sold Mum’s house, but I’ve bought a new one, and he’s back at his old school. I thought I might have to try freelancing, but then I got this job…and look at me now.’ She waved grandly around her tiny office, her expression ironic. ‘I always did want to be an editor.’

Of a national newspaper, maybe. Georgia’s plans had never included a dusty little local rag like this, Mac knew. She had given up a lot for Toby.

‘It can’t have been easy for you,’ he offered. ‘We all thought you were going far and that you would be editor of The Times at least by now!’

‘Oh, come now, why would I want The Times when I can have all this?’ said Georgia with a wry smile. Through the glass wall she could see the shabby newsroom whose only occupant, Kevin, the sports reporter, was leaning back in his chair reading a tabloid. God only knew where the others were. They seemed to drift in and out at will, as far as Georgia could make out.

The sense of torpor that hung over the place depressed her anew, and Mac’s presence only made the contrast with her previous life the crueller. He sat there exuding recklessness and an exotic mix of danger and glamour that belonged with breaking news and rush of adrenalin, the sense of being where important things were happening and news was being made, not just reported.

Mac looked as out of place in this dull, provincial office as she felt. He didn’t have to be here, though, and she did. It wasn’t about what she wanted any more. Toby came first now, she reminded herself fiercely.

But, oh, there were times when she longed to wake up and find that it was all a bad dream and that she was back at the newsdesk in London, two phones at each ear and emails from around the world bombarding her inbox, with the clock ticking towards the deadline and the whole office buzzing with excitement.

Georgia suppressed a sigh and focused on Mac once more. ‘This is my life now,’ she said, wishing she could sound more excited and positive about it. ‘I’ve accepted that I need to make a new life here in Askerby, and I can’t do that as long as I’m legally married to you.’

‘You’ve met someone else.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

She hesitated, although she couldn’t think why. ‘Yes,’ she said after the tiniest of pauses.

‘And you want to get married again?’ he asked in an abrasive voice.

‘No.’ She shook her head firmly, surprised at the way she had instinctively recoiled at the very idea of marrying anyone else.

Although, if she was honest, marriage was probably what Geoffrey had in mind. Georgia wasn’t prepared to go that far just yet, though.

‘There’s no question of marriage at the moment,’ she said. ‘It’s true that I’ve met someone…a nice man who cares for me and who I think can offer me what I need, but it doesn’t seem fair to embark on a serious relationship with him until I’ve resolved things with you. He’s made me realise that by always putting off the idea of divorce I’ve never really moved on, and that’s what I think I need to do now.’

Mac began to feel a little better. It didn’t sound as if this so-called ‘serious relationship’ had got very far. It was typical of Georgia to want to play fair and start a new relationship uncluttered by baggage from the old one—she always did like things tidy—but this man, whoever he was, couldn’t be that keen if he was prepared to hang around and wait until she had sorted everything out.

‘Who is this guy?’ he demanded, wondering why the man didn’t just sweep Georgia off her feet, the way he would do.

The way he had done, he remembered.

‘I don’t think he’s any of your business,’ said Georgia with a quelling look. Mac had met Geoffrey once, soon after they were married, and it couldn’t be said that the two of them had got on. It was hard to imagine two men more different from each other, in fact.

Typically, Mac wouldn’t let it go. ‘Do I know him? Who would you know in Askerby?’ He leant back in his chair once more, tipping dangerously, and pulled his upper lip down in an effort of memory, until it struck him. ‘Ah…I know! ‘It’s that guy who always pined after you, isn’t it? The one who came to dinner once when we were staying with your mother? Bit of a stuffed shirt?’