Alison Fraser - The Strength Of Desire

‘Yes.’ Hope recalled that Maxine had informed her several times.

The bell rang and Maxine continued, ‘That’ll be him. He must have worked out that if we’re next door to twenty-one and seventeen we can’t possibly be sixteen. I suppose it’s one way of discouraging any totally moronic visitors, but I really would fix it, Mum, if I were you.’

‘Thank you, Maxine, I will.’ Hope wondered what she’d done to deserve a daughter so different from her.

A tidiness freak, Maxine couldn’t stand things out of place or not working. Her own room was immaculate at all times and she reserved her most expressive sighs for her mother’s hit-or-miss style of housekeeping.

She watched now with a disapproving eye as her mother riffled through a pile of papers on the kitchen table.

‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ she asked, when the bell rang again.

‘Could you?’ Hope appealed. ‘It’s a motorcycle courier from one of the ad agencies. He’s been sent to pick up some jingles I’ve written, only I’ve misplaced them.’

‘Really, Mum.’ Maxine despaired of her mother’s inefficiency, before running on, ‘He doesn’t look much like a courier to me. He doesn’t have a helmet, for a start.’

‘He’ll have left it on his bike,’ Hope declared. ‘Please, Maxine…before he decides to give up.’

‘All right.’ Maxine shrugged and disappeared out of the kitchen.

Hope continued searching for the lost music sheets she should have had ready. They represented three days’ work and a fairly good commission.

Maxine reappeared. ‘He wants to see you, but he’s not a courier.’

‘Did you ask him who he was?’ Hope frowned.

‘No, but he looks OK,’ Maxine assured her. ‘He’s wearing a suit and tie and he was fairly polite.’

‘Oh, no, he’s probably a double-glazing salesman.’ Hope had a disproportionately high number of such callers, possibly because the metal window frames of her 1930s semi were so rusted. ‘I’m hopeless at getting rid of them.’

‘Just tell him we have no money,’ Maxine suggested, before wandering back into the sitting-room to rejoin her friend.

Hope raised her eyes at Maxine’s comment, and wondered how she was meant to take it. Helpful advice? A statement of fact? A complaint? Or all three?

Years ago, she’d consoled herself that it must be easier to bring up alone a daughter rather than a son. She’d been wrong.

She approached the front door and looked through the opaque glass to find the man still standing on the step, his back to her. She took a deep breath and told herself to be assertive, then opened the door a fraction.

‘Look, if it’s about the windows, I like them like that,’ she said, before the salesman could launch into the usual sales patter.

But it wasn’t about windows or doors or insurance or anything safe and boring and ordinary. Hope realised that even before he turned and she saw his face. She recognised him from the back, tall, broad-shouldered, narrow in the hip.

Guy Delacroix wheeled round and stared at her for a moment, long and hard. She stared back, caught by the awful surprise of it. Years stripped away and she felt her treacherous heart flip over at the sight of him.

‘You’ve changed,’ he eventually said in his precise, accentless voice, and a shiver ran through her at the sense of déjà vu.

She just stopped herself from saying ‘you haven’t’, as her past life ran before her eyes like a drowning man’s.

But it was true. He’d hardly changed at all. It had been twelve years since they’d met, yet he seemed little altered. Slightly more grey hairs threaded through the black, and some laughter-lines now fanned from his grey eyes. The latter seemed a strange thing for him to have, a man who rarely laughed. Or maybe he had learned how to, since she’d run away from Heron’s View—and him.

She thought how different she must look to him. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been only twenty, with the face of a girl and with hair so long it touched her waist. People said she still looked young at thirty-two, but she had the face of a woman, more angular, and her hair had been cropped short. She wasn’t at her smartest, either, in jeans and white T-shirt.

‘That was your child.’ He dragged her back to the present, reminding her that he had just met Maxine.

‘I…’ She wanted to lie, to say no, to deny Maxine’s existence but that was absurd. He must have heard of her from Jack. ‘Yes…Maxine.’

‘After your father,’ he recalled then commented shortly, ‘She looks quite like mine.’

Hope stared back at him, like a rabbit caught in his headlights. He’d noticed the likeness. Of course he’d noticed. How could he not? Apart from her eyes, Maxine was pure Delacroix.

But it was all right. Like his father, he’d said. His father. Jack’s father. Same person. She tended to forget. They were so unalike, the brothers.

‘I have some news for you,’ he went on. ‘May I come in?’

She hesitated, wanting to say no again. He didn’t give her the chance. He walked past her into the ball. He waited for her to close the door and lead the way.

She avoided the living-room with Maxine in it, and took him to the kitchen.

It was a fair-sized kitchen, with room for a table and chairs.

He stood in the doorway and made it look small. Dressed in a dark lounge suit and conservative tie, he made the room look scruffy too.

‘Do you want to sit down?’ Hope resented the way he made her feel.

He shook his head. ‘This won’t take long. As I say, I have some news for you.’

‘It’s all right. I heard it over the radio,’ she informed him.

He looked at her again, as if to gauge her reaction. She lifted her head a little higher, not giving him the satisfaction of seeing she’d been upset.

‘And Maxine?’ he added shortly.

‘I’ve told her,’ she replied just as shortly.

He frowned. ‘How is she?’

Hope shrugged. She wasn’t going to explain Maxine’s feelings to him. He was obviously thinking that the girl who had answered the door to him had scarcely looked grief-stricken, but then what did he expect? He must realise Maxine had barely known Jack.

‘Will she want to go to the funeral?’ he pursued.

‘I—I’m not sure.’ Hope hadn’t thought that far herself. Jack had only died that morning.

‘Will you?’ he added.

Her eyes widened in surprise. Surely she wouldn’t be welcome—an ex-wife?

‘I don’t think Jack would have wanted it,’ she said eventually.

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘probably not…Is that why you didn’t come to my mother’s funeral?’

He really hasn’t changed, Hope thought as he directed another blunt question at her. He was so different from Jack. It had been ‘anything for an easy life’ with Jack, but Guy had always met things head-on.

Well, this time, Hope decided, he wasn’t going to walk all over her. Her heart might still be racing but her head was clear.

‘No, I didn’t think you’d want it,’ she responded sharply.

His eyes narrowed assessingly. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t,’ he acknowledged, then added on a note of accusation, ‘You came all the same, though, didn’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’ Hope’s face went a shade of pink, betraying her.

‘I returned to the graveyard after the service,’ he informed her. ‘I saw you.’

‘Oh.’ Hope couldn’t deny it.

She had kept in touch with Caroline Delacroix even after her split with Jack. Occasionally the older woman would call on her when she was in London. She had come to see Maxine, her only grandchild, but Hope knew she’d never mentioned these visits to her sons.