Undertaking Love (3 page)

Distaste dripped from his every word, and pure steel underscored his deceptively soft tone.

‘You’ve made it very clear that I’m not your ideal neighbour, and trust me, I’ll make every effort to minimise the impact I have on you.’

He shook his head with a look of derision and scraped his chair back. He crossed the tiny kitchen in a couple of paces, before turning in the doorway to deliver his parting shot.

‘But make no mistake. Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely
will
be opening for business next door.’

Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all too familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely even seen each other, let alone made love.

What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.

Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.

They hadn’t expected to score a homerun on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in Alphabetti Spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?

In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.

‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’

In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.

Emily was just glad Tom was away on business.
Again
. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.

Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.

Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.

How in hell had it got this bad?

God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.

‘Let’s make a baby.’

He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.

Somewhere along the way since then sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly
be
any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.

He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.

A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.

But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?

The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.

Jonny clanged his fork against the side of his wine glass.

‘Order!’

He looked from one face to another as they gathered around Marla’s kitchen table. It had been a little over a week since Gabriel Ryan had thundered into the village on his motorbike, and this was the first official meeting of the hastily cobbled together committee to get him thrown out again just as fast.

Emily paused with her fork full of lasagne midway to her mouth, and Dora, the chapel’s octogenarian cleaning lady, fiddled with her hearing aid until it whistled furiously. As the self-proclaimed campaign leader, Jonny shot her a mutinous look.

Dora’s husband, Ivan, smiled benignly at his wife.

‘You hum it, I’ll play it, dear,’ he muttered, and helped himself to a third glass of Merlot.

‘So,’ Jonny said with a theatrical flourish. He nodded pointedly at Ruth, village florist and gossip central, to start taking notes in the pad he’d thrust into her hands when she sat down. Taking a great slug of wine, she darted her eyes around the table, then picked up her pen and clicked the end a few times in a show of efficiency.

Satisfied that his every word would be recorded for posterity, Jonny cleared his throat and planted his hands on his snake hips.

‘Right. As we all know, the fucking Munsters are trying to set up shop next door to the chapel, and it’s our job to get shot of them. Like, pronto.’

He glanced around at the suddenly hushed group, who looked slightly shell-shocked by his rousing opening gambit.

Ruth raised a hesitant hand.

‘Err, Jonny? Do I have to write the ‘fucking’ bit down?’

‘Christ almighty, Ruth!’ he exploded. ‘Just get the general gist down, this isn’t CSI fucking Shropshire!’

‘Why is he reciting the alphabet?’ shouted Dora, her hearing aid now whacked up to full.

‘He isn’t, Dora. It’s a cop show,’ Emily supplied.

‘Oh. Oooh, You wouldn’t half make a lovely Bergerac, Jonny.’

Marla dropped her head into her hands, and Bluey flopped his massive head onto her knees under the table in silent solidarity. This was hopeless. Gabriel Ryan was going to open up his funeral parlour regardless, and there was precious little they, or anyone else, could do to stop him.

‘Drove a Jaguar, you know.’ Ivan nodded sagely. Jonny instinctively felt for his cigarettes.

‘What we need is a plan of attack.’ He flapped a hand at Ruth to put her wine glass back on the table.

‘Write that down. I’m thinking we should start with a petition. After all, lots of local businesses around here benefit from the chapel. Look at you, for instance, Ruth. You’ve never been so busy.’

Ruth looked up from her pad with a vigorous nod.

‘It’s true, Marla. The chapel’s brought in so much new work. I mean, I do almost as many weddings these days as I do, err … funerals …’ she tailed off, having inadvertently highlighted the fact that she could only benefit from Gabe’s arrival. She was dying to meet the man himself. The villagers had talked him up into a cross between Heathcliff and the devil incarnate, and if that beast of a motorbike she’d seen parked outside his place was anything to go by then they might not be too wide of the mark. Thoroughly overexcited, she knocked back the rest of her wine.

‘We could follow it up with a public meeting in the chapel,’ Emily suggested.

She tucked a stray strand of her neat, jet-black bob behind her ear and glanced up the table towards Marla. She desperately wanted to help, not just because Marla was her closest friend, but because the chapel was her lifeline. The idea of losing it horrified her. Tom was away so much that she’d be unbearably lonely without work, and truth be told, it was becoming her bolthole even when Tom
was
at home.

A fact that she wasn’t quite ready to dwell on.

‘Thank. You. Emily.’ Jonny said, banging his fist down on the table between each word in gratitude for a rational suggestion. ‘Stellar idea.’

Marla’s grateful smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. The locals could be a fickle bunch. It had taken them a good year to accept the chapel into their midst, especially since the majority of weddings they held were not local couples. The chapel’s kitsch appeal and Jonny’s colourful style as a celebrant ensured that it attracted more than its fair share of the weird and wonderful, usually rolling into town with a wedding party of even more weird and wonderful guests. It was never dull, and Marla loved it.

She gave herself a stern telling off for being so defeatist and vowed to try harder.

Besides, Jonny was right. Local businesses
did
benefit. The chapel had given the local tourist trade a massive shot in the arm, but would it be enough for them to actively come out and support her now?

Ivan raised his hand.

‘Think you should know, old boy. That Irish chappie has asked my Dora to clean a couple of times a week. Seems a decent sort, actually. Ate Dora’s shortbread, and it’s bloody awful.’

He nodded knowingly around at the others, clearly not feeling a jot of disloyalty towards Marla, nor to his wife for the slight to her cooking skills.

Jonny shot daggers at Dora.

‘Well, I hope you’ve told him to stick his job where the sun doesn’t shine.’

‘She starts Monday week,’ Ivan supplied merrily as he drained his glass in one gulp.

‘I don’t friggin’ believe this!’ Jonny howled. ‘Is there
anyone
here who isn’t planning to jump ship?’ An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. Ivan scrubbed a hand over his tufty grey hair and twiddled with his bow tie.

‘He’s asked me to look after his garden. Bit of maintenance, like. Told him I might as well, seeing as I do yours and it’s only next door.’

Marla, who’d stayed quiet throughout the meeting, finally spoke up.

‘Look guys, it’s okay, really.’ She turned to Ruth. ‘Ruth, of
course
you should do their flowers.’

Ruth smiled gratefully and wrote it down in case anyone forgot Marla had said it.

‘Ivan, Dora, it’s absolutely
fine
about the cleaning, and the gardening. If you don’t do it, someone else will.’

‘We can be your moles,’ Dora offered, with a gleam in her eye.

‘Hallelujah. We’re saved,’ Jonny muttered sourly.

Marla admonished him with a gentle frown and patted the older woman’s hand.

‘Hey, we’ve made an encouraging start, haven’t we?’

She stood up and started to gather the plates. ‘A petition and a public meeting seems like a good way to get the ball rolling. Let’s call it a night, okay?’

Emily carried the plates through as everyone else pulled on their coats and shuffled out in varying states of sobriety. Marla loitered on the doorstep whilst Bluey went for his constitutional evening stroll around the tiny garden. He was far too big a dog for Marla’s cottage, but he was inherently lazy and content to be the unlikely master of his mini-manor. When she came back into the kitchen a few minutes later, Marla found Emily bent double, rooting through the freezer. She emerged with a triumphant smile and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

‘Still hungry?’ Marla asked.

‘Not really, but isn’t ice-cream essential for American girly chats around the kitchen table?’

‘You’ve watched too many re-runs of The Golden Girls,’ Marla laughed as she placed a bottle of wine next to the ice-cream on the table.

‘This is my staple dinner when Tom’s away.’

Marla found spoons and glasses and sat down. ‘Which seems to be quite a lot these days?’ She twisted the lid off the chilly Pinot Grigio.

‘You noticed.’

Marla nodded and filled their glasses.

‘He’s just busy with work. You know how it is.’

Emily peeled off the ice-cream lid and sighed.

‘Who am I kidding? He’s avoiding me, Marla.’

‘Surely not. Why would he do that?’

‘Because we’re trying to have a baby.’

‘Well … I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that avoiding you isn’t going to help make
that
happen.’

Emily’s shoulders slumped. ‘That’s the problem. It
isn’t
happening.’

Oh.
Marla hated to see her friend so miserable and cast around for something encouraging to say. ‘It can take a while to catch, Em.’

‘Yeah, I know. But it’s been over eighteen months now.’ Emily started poking her spoon gloomily into the ice-cream.

Marla couldn’t believe her friend had kept this secret so long. ‘Have you seen the doctor?’ she asked.

Emily shook her head with a cynical laugh. ‘Why do we, as women, know that it’s okay to ask for help, but men see it as an insult to their manhood? Well, Tom does, in any case.’

Marla reached over and squeezed Emily’s hand. ‘Give him time, Em. He loves you. He’ll come around.’

‘You reckon? Think, Marla. When was the last time you even laid eyes on Tom?’

Marla cast her mind back. Actually, she couldn’t remember. Tom used to visit the chapel almost daily, but now she came to think about it she hadn’t seen him more than a handful of times in recent months.