Uphill All the Way (26 page)

She opened it out as she turned towards the kitchen. Then halted at the sight of Kieran's hurried handwriting.

Mum, I came round to see you, but forgot it's Adam's son's wedding today. I wanted to tell you that me and Beth are going away. We need to be together and don't want any more hassles from Beth's parents. I'm dead sorry I didn't get to see you, and will be in touch. Don't worry about me. Love you. Kieran.

She sliced bread and broke eggs mechanically, lips set, her heart banging angrily.

It seemed to her that between Tom McAllister and the Sutherlands they'd shoved her son away, and he'd gone without trusting her enough to tell her where. Did he and Bethan even have a place to go? Her eyes prickled threateningly, and she wiped the corners with the back of her hand. Guilt struck her that it was at her insistence they'd done the right thing and told Bethan's parents about the baby.

And look what a mess her parents had made with the knowledge! Forced Bethan to choose between them and Kieran.

It was all very fine Adam supposing that those two tender young kids were safe in some little love nest, but what if they weren't? She pictured them trying to live in Kieran's small car, surrounded with their bags, chilled to the bone. Or battling to stake a claim to a corner of some horrendous squat.

Kieran wasn't the type to stick up for himself in such a hurly burly environment, and Bethan would be scared to back him up. She was as much a softie as he was. Judith had a sudden vision of herself bursting into some squalid terrace with boarded windows and extracting Kieran from under the noses of the lawless and the hopeless.

She set about the eggs with unnecessary gusto, splashing her hands and wrists as she beat. Of course, technically, crucially, Kieran wasn't actually her son. That's what Tom said. Despite all those years of cuddles and bedtime stories, bruised knees kissed better and homework explained, Kieran had only been on loan to her. And, according to Tom, when she'd written her marriage off she'd written off Kieran with it.

Kieran could visit her as much as he liked, but Judith had no rights, no legal kinship.

Kin or not, she was pretty sure she wouldn't have driven Kieran away, if she'd been able to exert control over the situation.

She showed Adam the note when he came down. 'Perhaps I should have let them move in here. Then at least we'd all know where they were, and that they were OK.'

He squeezed her waist and kissed her hair. 'You can't put everything right for everyone, Jude. If they'd lived here they would've been under constant attack from Tom, and Bethan's parents. And so would you. You might've stood it, but could they?'

They sat facing each other at the table. Adam cut the corner from his toast and scooped up fluffy egg. He had no gizmo to fit around his hand and the knife was obviously a struggle. 'Are you going back to Malta for good?' His voice was casual.

She sighed, dragging her mind from whether Kieran and Bethan could actually have done what was best for them. 'It's an option.'

He waited, clear grey eyes fixed steadily upon her.

She sipped her coffee. She was aware that it was always the person who filled a silence with explanations who was considered the weaker negotiator. And she was aware that, however obliquely, they were negotiating the terms of their relationship. 'I want to speak to Giorgio's daughter about the crucifix. It's becoming a burden instead of a comfort. I owe him and her some honesty.'

'Debatable.' He continued to watch her, pushing his food around.

'Then I owe it to myself.'

'You couldn't make your enquiries from England?'

'Probably. And it would prove to be frustrating and unsatisfactory. Also, Richard rang last week, he's organising his retirement. If I'm not going back to the business, he wants to buy me out, so he can pass Richard Morgan Estate to his children.'

'But you have the option to keep your stake? Reclaim your old desk?'

She chewed mechanically, picturing herself back at Richard Morgan Estate with the constant flow of traffic beyond the window, and the sea beyond that, bobbing with small boats at anchor. God, sometimes she felt driven to go back, feel the warmth again, smell the sea. And now to add to the mix was her unquiet conscience. 'I could pretty much reclaim my entire old life.'

He paused, thoughtfully. 'Except Giorgio.'

She swallowed. 'Except Giorgio. But it's not just him. I miss Malta. I miss the sea, the people and their approach to life. I miss hot days and warm evenings, the food, the beer, the fireworks at festa time, the amazing amount of traffic in the tiny streets. I even miss the storms.'

'But you'd feel closer to him, there?' He laid down his knife and fork.

She flinched. His calm couldn't disguise the hurt in his eyes. She should have organised this conversation earlier, not when they'd been to bed together. It was... uncaring. And still he remained the same decent Adam, he didn't bawl or glower or throw things or crash his fist on the table to make her jump.

She tried to be candid, but gentle. 'I don't know. It might be comforting. Or it might be torture. I'll find out.'

He abandoned his meal altogether. His brows cut thoughtful lines above his eyes as he helped her stack the dishes into the washer.

Then he leant against the table and folded his arms. 'Can I go with you?'

She knew her expression must be ludicrous with surprise. 'To Malta?'

'For a couple of weeks. I realise you might stay longer. Months. For ever. But I think you could do with someone for a while, a friend. I'm your friend. You know that?'

She nodded, swallowing a lump.

She picked up his hand, the one with only finger and thumb. Turned it over to examine the white scars and the pink knuckles. Casually, he changed hands so that he could curl a full complement of fingers around hers.

'You're one of the kindest men I ever met,' she said, looking up into his eyes. 'No one treats me with the same consideration that you do, no one else is quite so much in my corner. It's probably harder to find a friend like you, than a lover.'

He stiffened. 'Suggesting that I ought to be
pleased
to be your friend rather than your lover?'

She fidgeted, subdued by his unfamiliar anger. 'I'm not trying to organise your feelings. But let's think of you for a minute. What do you want? Where are you on the road to recovery? What comes next? Forget making me happy, tell me how you'd arrange your world, if you could.'

He squeezed her hand, his expression softening, lines shifting so that they edged his fine eyes. 'I'm ready to go forward. I wish we could do that together. But, so far as I can see, I'm still travelling on my own. I'll settle for dawdling for a while. See how steep you find Recovery Road.'

'I might never catch you up.'

'You might even turn back. I'd have to give up on you.'

'It seems a bad bargain for you, because I can't offer much.'

'I don't expect much. Are you going to Malta immediately?'

She dropped her eyes. 'Not straight away.'

With one finger, he lifted her chin. 'Because you'll be like a dog with a tick in its rear until you find out something about Kieran and Bethan?'

She grinned, viewing him through a sparkle of tears. 'You reveal me.'

The pad of his thumb wiped gently beneath her eye. 'By the way... I would.'

'Would?'

'Would like to make love again this morning.'

She blinked away her tears and slid her hand deliberately onto his thigh. 'Bring it on.'

The winter ground along, wet, cold, windy, and for ever.

Judith didn't get any fonder of it, and Adam declared that she'd need surgical intervention to prise her from her cocoon coat when the warmer weather eventually arrived.

He was quieter, these days.

His boys' lives were diverging steadily from his. Matthias and Davina had moved into an apartment in a building that used to be a Victorian factory, in Kettering, a market town deeper into the county. Adam helped them to decorate what he deemed upside-down rooms - spice-coloured ceilings and white walls.

And Caleb, to everyone's surprise, landed an advertising job and bought a grey suit and five white shirts. Then put cobalt blue streaks in his hair to celebrate becoming a London commuter.

Judith knew how troubled Adam was that Shelley put her heart on the plate with the fresh cream cakes she bought when she knew he would be dropping in, and asked him to go back to her. Something, he told her, that he couldn't do.

Judith felt sorry for Shelley. But couldn't help being glad, for herself.

However, to Judith's dismay, Adam took a unilateral decision to return his relationship with Judith to platonic. It wasn't a decision he voiced before he put it into practice, but, nonetheless, he stepped back into the old ways, without touching, without sex. 'Less confusing, for the time being,' he explained, when Judith frowned over his resolution.

He wavered only once, when Judith found an old cannabis stash of Caleb's tucked into the frame of the spare room cupboard, and tried to dispose of it by tipping it on the fire. Adam flung himself full length to snatch it from her hand. '
Are you mad
? What are you trying to do, Jude? Get the entire street stoned?'

And he laughed so much that he went weak, and somehow she ended up in his arms on the floor, her shirt open to her waist and two of the buttons on the floor as a testament to his impatience with his own lack of dexterity. They threw the cannabis in the wheelie bin, later.

But that had been their swan song.

Their old friendship was intact, but that didn't keep Judith warm these frosty nights. She knew that she wasn't being fair to want a loving relationship to comfort her while she decided what to do with a life that may or may not include him. But that didn't stop her wanting it.

Snow set into Northamptonshire, which Judith hated more than the rain. Trying to walk when it lay in a cottonwool-like six-inch layer had yesterday broken the heel of the only elegant pair of boots she owned, and today was putting white streaks in her new chocolate suede trainers as she slithered through the salted pedestrian area in town, the late winter afternoon as dark as midnight. It didn't cheer her any to look up and see Tom ploughing past in clumpy steel toe-cap work boots, looking dry-shod and certain of his step.

'Tom!'

Ignoring her, he flung through the aluminium-framed doors of the Norbury Centre.

She pulled a face after him. Awkward boor. Then went to reattach a hanging orange flier more securely to a post, one of many the Sutherlands had scattered through the town.
Have You Seen Bethan?
it asked. There was a picture of Bethan, laughing into the camera, in happier times, obviously. The posters were already shredding and blowing away.

They'd been a forlorn hope, at best. But parents soon got desperate as to the fate of their children.

Judith had received two visits from Nick and Hannah Sutherland. One hostile, when they refused to step over her threshold but bristled on the doorstep, insisting, 'You
must
know, you
must
know, you
must
!' The next conciliatory, accepting Earl Grey in the sitting room and being earnest. 'If you know anything, anything at all, if you can just reassure us that she's all right...'

Judith had shaken her head sadly. 'I've heard as much from Kieran as you've heard from Bethan. Nothing.'

She missed Kieran. A constant heartache, daily misery. Even when she'd lived in Malta they'd shared weekly phone calls, and e-mailed in between. God, she missed him!

She missed his trick of rushing his words together when he had a good story to tell, the way he laughed so much he could scarcely get the funny bit out. And she couldn't help cocking an eye for him as she slid through the town centre, as if he might suddenly emerge from a shop, or a pub, laughing with friends as the cold pinkened his face.

No news is good news
, it was said, she reflected, as she, not unexpectedly, failed to spot him. Well, whoever mooted such an optimistic view had never lain awake at night picturing her son sleeping rough, being beaten up for his cardboard box and left shivering in a shop doorway.

Trying to banish such images from her mind, she swung left at the edge of the precinct, stepping off the riven block pavers and onto the simpler flagstones of Henley Street as she made for Rathbone Leather, the leather goods shop that had been on the same spot ever since she could remember. Wilma had asked her to buy her a new purse.

'The zip's gone on this one,' she'd said. 'Can you get me a black one to match my bag, with a zip not a clasp - you know my hands - and a separate bit for the notes? But don't pay much, duck, it's not worth it. Go to the pound shop.' Wilma always insisted on buying the cheapest available, in case she didn't last long enough to get the wear out of anything of greater quality.

It was a habit that irritated Judith, and she had no intention of shopping for Wilma's new purse at the pound shop.

She got into Rathbone Leather just before they closed. The lady member of staff, smart in her maroon smock, slid a drawer full of black purses from beneath the glass counter. Judith fingered rapidly through them, selecting the one she thought Wilma would like most. Roomy, with chunky zips that should be easy to grip, supple and soft and smelling satisfactorily of leather.