Chapter 21
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
Celia has picked up the trowel and is hurrying away from the crocus patch. She is mortified that this man saw her trying to dig up the plants. Is he a park warden or someone from the council? Is she going to be arrested?
He catches up with her and says, ‘Hey, it’s okay. I was only messing about. You can dig up all the flowers you want.’
Dammit, she is blushing now, radiating a fierce heat. This good-looking man keeps glancing at her and smiling as they walk. Celia isn’t used to being the focus of attention like this. She’s spent a lifetime keeping her head down, trying to blend in, and now she doesn’t know what to do.
‘I’m Scott.’ She looks round, registering his cool grey-blue eyes and thick wavy hair, dark as treacle. His lips are full and he has a dimple on his chin. He looks like a film star, she thinks. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
‘Celia,’ she replies, trying to sound bolder than she feels. And somehow a conversation sparks up. She learns that he’s just returned to his home city of Glasgow, having worked abroad for some years.
Gradually, Celia relaxes a little, and is flattered when he asks if she’d like a coffee in a nearby cafe. ‘What’s your surname?’ she asks.
‘Chegg,’ he replies.
‘That’s unusual.’
‘My dad’s from Yorkshire,’ he says. ‘It’s a common Yorkshire name.’ She has no reason not to believe him.
They go for coffee and cake in a funny little chintzy cafe.
After her initial shyness the conversation starts to flow and she realises she is enjoying his company.
It’s a novelty to her, chatting to a man like this.
She has never had a boyfriend – or even kissed anyone – and her dad didn’t have much time for her, even before he left.
He’d never been to a school parents’ evening, and after her mum had tottered into one fuelled by vodka and intent on flirting with her history teacher, Celia had simply avoided mentioning them.
Her mum didn’t seem to notice and clearly wasn’t interested anyway.
However, this handsome stranger appears to be extremely interested.
They meet again, and again, always at a pre-arranged time by the pond in the park.
Soon, their strolls and cafe visits are exchanged for drinks in the pub.
The first time, Celia doesn’t know what drink to have, so she says vodka because that’s what her mum likes.
She enjoys the rush of it, the way it melts away her shyness and makes everything feel so right.
From the start, Celia made the decision not to tell Amanda about Scott.
She’d never had secrets from her before but she knew what her reaction would be.
What are you doing, meeting up with someone that old?
You don’t know anything about him. He could be anybody!
She might even have told her parents – Amanda’s family are exceptionally close – and Celia can’t bear the thought of adults who aren’t her own mum and dad being worried about her.
That kind of second-hand caring; she’s encountered it before, from neighbours, and it makes her crumple inside with shame.
For so long now she has lived virtually self-sufficiently and anyway, she is eighteen years old – legally an adult – and there’s nothing dodgy going on.
Scott has never tried to kiss her or even hold her hand. He’s just bought her copious drinks.
There’s a point, Celia believes, when it’s too late to share a secret anyway. Because people will only be hurt that you’ve kept it to yourself for so long. She doesn’t want to upset Amanda, whose focus is firmly fixed upon moving to London now.
Anyway, it’s Celia’s private business and she loves Scott’s company, and how he actually listens when she tells him about her plans to study horticulture. Being listened to by an older person is an entirely new and intoxicating experience for Celia.
As the weeks go on she is hardly attending school and is seeing Amanda less and less. Now no one is paying any attention to what Celia might be getting up to.
Then one day Scott kisses her passionately by the lake. She feels as if she is levitating out of her own body.
‘Shall we go to my flat?’ he murmurs.
‘Yes,’ she says, without hesitation.
Whenever she thinks back to that day, she sees herself approaching a fork in the road and simply taking the wrong route. Instead of heading home, she goes with Scott. And later that afternoon it is too late to swerve back to how things had been before.
In his flat their kisses are hot and urgent. At least Celia thinks that’s what they are. Her only point of reference are her mum’s Mills Amanda has always done everything first. But of course she isn’t here now.
It’s just Celia – pale and naked and wondering what to do.
When it happens, it’s not like it is in her mother’s novels. Celia doesn’t swoon with desire or feel herself being ‘swept away’. But Scott wants her and says she is so, so beautiful and that he loves her. ‘I love you, my beautiful baby,’ he murmurs, kissing her.
And that wintry, gravy-smelling afternoon, as her hair crackles with static on his bobbly nylon sheets, Celia’s life changes forever.