Liz Fielding: The Marriage Miracle

And she smiled. So few people were able to handle the wheelchair without embarrassment, but he’d passed every test with flying colours.

The journalist who’d been so anxious to interview her about her work hadn’t been able to get away fast enough. Promising to phone. And maybe she would. ‘Plucky wheelchair-bound woman illustrates cute book…’ had to be a bigger story than one about just any ordinary, able-bodied woman illustrating a cute book.

Or maybe it had been her fault. Maybe the woman’s carefully phrased questions had been in such sharp contrast to Sebastian’s matter-of-fact attitude that she’d been unusually difficult. Prickly, even.

But for a few minutes he’d talked to her as if she was whole. Saying things that no one else would have dreamed of saying. Asking her if she tap-danced…

And even when he’d realised that tap-dancing was not, never would be, part of her repertoire he hadn’t changed—hadn’t started talking to her as if she was witless. Dinner with him would have been a rare pleasure. Sitting at a candlelit table, she could have pretended for a few dizzy hours that on the outside she was like any other woman. The way she was deep inside. With the same longings. The same desire to be loved, to have a man hold her, make love to her.

She closed her eyes for a moment, shutting out the reminders that she was not, would never be, like other women. How dared he joke with her, talk as if she could get up and dance as soon as she made the effort?

Then, with a deep breath, she opened them again. It was unfair to blame him. She’d seen him staring into his glass as if into an abyss and just hadn’t been able to keep her mouth shut. She’d only got herself to blame for her disturbed nights.

Because it wasn’t just this morning that she’d been thinking about him. He’d been there, in her head, since the moment he’d taken her hand, held it a touch too long. Been there the minute she’d stopped concentrating on something else.

But Monday was a working day. She couldn’t afford to allow her mind to wander when she had a tight deadline, and she picked out a fresh pastel and concentrated on the illustration in front of her.

‘Go on, Toby, you can do it!’

She looked up again just in time to catch Toby’s attempt at scaling the brightly coloured climbing frame set up in the garden. It was a bit of a stretch, and he was finding it frustratingly hard to reach the top. She leaned forward in her chair, physically encouraging him with her body, yearning to be out there, giving him the boost he needed. Her frustration, unable to find any other outlet, vented itself on the paper in front of her, and with a few swift strokes of the colour in her hand Hattie Hot Wheels, her cartoon alter ego, was lunging from her wheelchair, arms outstretched, as she flew to Toby’s side, scooping him up and lifting him up.

Another triumph for her superheroine, whose special powers allowed her to convert frustrated helplessness into action…

Then Fran placed a steadying hand at Toby’s back, in case he should falter, smiling encouragement, and, putting in a big effort, he finally made it. Of course he did. Why would Toby need a fantasy superheroine when he had a mother with two good arms and legs?

‘Matty!’ Toby, spotting her from his vantage point, wobbled as he gave her an ecstatic two-armed wave from the top, and her heart rose to her throat. ‘Look at me!’

‘Oh, bravo, Toby!’ she called, waving back. ‘How did you get all the way up there?’

‘I climbed. All by myself.’

‘No!’ she said, doing the whole amazed thing. ‘But it’s so high! How did you do it?’

‘Do you want to see?’ he asked.

‘You betcha I want to see.’

And by the time he’d done it for a third time, just to prove to his apparently sceptical godmother that it wasn’t just a fluke, he could indeed manage it ‘all by himself’.

Her smile faded as she saw the half-finished picture she’d just ruined with her cartoon. Deliberate vandalism? Or was that just a load of psychological mumbo-jumbo?

She’d illustrated dozens of romantic stories for women’s magazines, and while she’d known from the beginning that this one—a wide, deserted beach with the distant lovers silhouetted against the setting sun—was going to be tough, she was a professional. This was her living, and she couldn’t afford to turn down commissions just because they tugged at painful memories.

‘Come and join us, Matty,’ Fran called, encouraging her to play truant. ‘It’s going to rain tomorrow.’

It was hard to resist such siren calls, but every minute spent with Toby was a wrenching reminder of how much she’d lost in the split-second lapse that had robbed her of that future. And Fran’s new baby, joy that she was, just made things worse.

Matty was beginning to feel as if she was trapped on the wrong side of the glass, a spectator to a life she was denied. If only she could afford to move away, get out of London and make a new kind of life. One that wasn’t just a fantasy.

When the phone began to ring, it was almost a relief to call back, ‘Maybe later,’ before turning to pick up the receiver.

‘Matty Lang.’

‘Hello, Matty Lang.’

For a moment her heart seemed to stop beating. It was as if her mind, conjuring up the image of the sleeping man, had somehow woken him.

When it started again, very slowly, she said, ‘Hello, Sebastian Wolseley.’ Then, ‘You’re an early riser. Isn’t it some unearthly hour of the morning in New York?’

‘That is true. But here in London it’s just coming up to eleven o’clock.’

No, well, she hadn’t really thought he was calling from the other side of the Atlantic just to say hello. That would have been totally ridiculous.

‘You said you’d have dinner with me when I came back, but I wondered if you might be able to make lunch? I’ve booked a table at Giovanni’s.’

Giovanni’s? A restaurant so famous that it didn’t have to bother with anything as functional as an address. The kind of restaurant where the rich and famous went to be seen. And it was nearly eleven now.

She had two hours to shower, change, find a parking space. Her hair! She…

She was living in cloud-cuckoo land. Getting carried away.

She never went anywhere without checking it out first. Calling the restaurant to make sure it was wheelchair accessible. That the cloakroom wasn’t upstairs. That, even if it was on the ground floor, she wouldn’t get stuck in the loo door.

Okay, she could still do that.

But she wouldn’t.

‘I said perhaps,’ she reminded him. ‘When you came back. You haven’t been anywhere.’

‘On the contrary, I went to Sussex yesterday,’ he said, and she could see the teasing spark that would be lighting his eyes, the tiny lift at the corner of his mouth that presaged a smile. ‘Command invitation to lunch with the family.’

‘Why is it that I find it hard to believe that you’d respond to anyone’s command?’

‘Well, I did want to borrow a car.’

‘Your family has spare cars lying around?’

‘It’s old. Just taking up space in the garage. I wish I’d taken you with me.’

‘I’m jolly glad you didn’t.’

‘You’re right. Dead boring. Utterly selfish to even consider it. So, anyway, I’ve been somewhere, and now I’m back.’

‘You know I didn’t mean that.’

‘I don’t recall you stipulating a destination. Doesn’t Sussex count?’

It counted. That was the problem. She wanted to have lunch with him.

It would be so easy, sitting opposite him, surrounded by luxury, pretending that they were just two people having lunch together. But then he’d get up and walk away.

She’d already had that dream, but then she’d woken up.