Chapter Four
We had to go through the rigmarole of air kisses and hugs again – well, Nick did, I didn’t.
Only Sophia half-heartedly brushed her ruby-red lips across my cheek; to everyone else, I might as well have not existed as they all fawned over Nick, stroking his lapels, fussing to make sure he was seated in prime position opposite Rosamund and next to – of all people – Sophia.
And meanwhile all I could think about was Aidan.
It took all my strength not to turn around and look at him.
I wanted to know if he was feeling as terrible as I was.
I doubted it; if he’d cared about me at all, he wouldn’t have done what he did, and a long time had passed since then.
Other than a brief moment of surprise, I didn’t imagine that seeing me would have any impact on him whatsoever.
His annoyingly perfect cheekbones were imprinted in my mind’s eye, like when you looked at the sun by mistake and then you could see it for ages afterwards.
He still had that tough-guy-meets-maths-nerd vibe.
For some reason, I’d noticed his long fingers, wrapped around his glass; the sexy, just-enough stubble.
‘Sit down, darling,’ said Nick, pulling my chair out for me.
I swallowed hard. Nick was irritating me, which wasn’t fair, but I kept wondering why he’d suddenly become all affected, calling me ‘darling’ when it was usually sweetie (which, OK, wasn’t great either, but then I wasn’t big on terms of endearment).
Pulling my chair out for me, like Aidan used to, when Nick had never done that before in his life.
All I wanted was to go back to my room and be quiet and think. Maybe I could feign a headache.
I sat down, all self-conscious, feeling like I was going to miss the seat completely and crash to the floor. That would have pleased Rosamund. And my mortification in front of Aidan would have been complete.
‘How was your walk in Florence earlier?’ asked Rosamund, smiling tightly at me. ‘I hear you had gelato. How lovely.’
‘It was,’ I said, practically blinded by the dazzle from her earrings. ‘Daisy’s cherry flavour looked particularly good.’
I wondered what Aidan thought of these people I was with; of Nick, whose hand I’d been holding.
He could hardly miss us, what with Sophia guffawing at something Nick had said and Rosamund, who might as well have had chandeliers hanging from her earlobes.
I repeated a mantra in my mind: Do not think about Aidan.
Do not think about Aidan. Do not think about Aidan and how much he hurt you or, at least, not until later.
I would give myself permission to think about him for an hour, and no more, when Nick was asleep and I was lying there in the moonlight, and then I would never think about him again.
Daisy, who was on the other side of me, was slouched down in her seat, sucking manically on a straw. She looked as delighted to be there as I was.
I gathered all my resolve and ploughed on.
‘We saw the Galleria dell’Accademia, didn’t we, Daisy, but the queue was huge? We didn’t bother waiting.’ I thought if I kept talking, it would stop this desire I had to look over my shoulder.
‘Oh, you should have gone in!’ exclaimed Rosamund, too loudly. She sounded quite put out. ‘If this is your first time in Florence, you absolutely must see David. Mustn’t she, Peter?’
Peter poured himself a glass of wine – not his first, by the looks of it. ‘It’s overhyped if you ask me.’
‘I thought that might be the case,’ I agreed, picking up the wine list.
Rosamund made a clacking sound. ‘That’s easy for you to say when you’ve seen it three or four times. But poor Maddie has never even been to Italy.’
Poor Maddie?
‘She has been to Italy,’ said Daisy, making a gurgling sound with her straw as she foraged around for more liquid at the bottom of the glass ‘She said earlier.’
I glanced sideways at her. Was she sticking up for me?
‘Although it’s true, I do tend to travel further afield,’ I said, catching the waiter’s eye as he put a basket of bread on the table. ‘Could I please order a glass of, um …’
I should have looked at the wine menu beforehand. Now what the fuck was I going to order, since I couldn’t pronounce a single one of the pretentious-sounding wines on here? I scanned up and down the list, the words blurring in front of my eyes as I began to panic.
‘This one, please,’ I said, pointing at random. ‘Large glass.’
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Nick to the waiter. ‘I trust your judgement implicitly,’ he said, rubbing my knee under the table.
‘Which wine did you go for, Maddie?’ asked Sophia sweetly, leaning forward so that she could catch my eye.
I didn’t know if I was being paranoid, but it felt like she’d asked me on purpose because she knew that wine wasn’t my thing and she wanted to make me look stupid.
‘The, um …’ I said, desperately scrabbling around for the name of an Italian wine. Any Italian wine. ‘Montepulciano,’ I replied with conviction, even though there was very a good chance it had not been that at all.
‘Oh I didn’t see that on the menu,’ said Sophia, flinging it open.
Thankfully, Rosamund distracted her by asking her which treatment she was planning to book at the spa for the following afternoon.
I half-listened in and eagerly kept an eye out for my wine.
After a bit, my mind began to wander again – could I risk a quick look over my shoulder?
I could almost feel Aidan’s eyes on the back of my neck.
He used to have this intense way of looking at me, as though he was trying to see right inside my head.
We’d had this instant connection, the kind I’d never had with anyone else – from the moment we’d met, I’d felt as though I could tell him anything.
Almost anything. I’d held some stuff back, of course I had, which I was glad about now, but I thought I’d probably showed him more of who I really was in the month we were together than I had revealed to Nick in two years.
Sometimes, with Nick, I sort of edited myself, because I knew he wouldn’t get it and I couldn’t be bothered to explain. Aidan always got it.
‘So, Maddie,’ said Sophia from the other end of the table. ‘Tell us about yourself. What do you do?’
I cleared my throat, pushing all thoughts of Aidan from my mind. This was my chance to show them that I was an equal for their doted-on son/father/ex. Somebody to be respected, not the pathetic pushover I thought I was probably currently coming across as.
‘I’m in TV,’ I said, smiling brightly around the table. ‘An assistant producer on a travel show.’
There, that didn’t sound bad. Lots of people wanted to work in TV, didn’t they, as Tim was forever telling me?
‘Interesting,’ piped up Peter, who so far hadn’t said more than a few words to me and instead had seemed much more interested in the contents of his glass. I noticed that the ice bucket had conveniently been placed just behind his left shoulder. ‘What do you do then, write scripts?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, there’s a lot of that. Then there’s researching locations, coming up with interesting new ways to present them to the audience. Making sure they’ve got all the legal jargon right. And I get to travel a lot, which is nice.’
‘I hadn’t realised you had such an exciting job,’ said Rosamund. ‘Nick hadn’t mentioned it.’
Yes! Finally I was getting somewhere. She definitely seemed impressed.
‘I’ve told you several times, Mummy. Maddie works at Holiday Shop, remember?’
I kicked his ankle. Honestly, what had he gone and said that for? Had I really needed to spell it out to him that I wanted to make my job sound more high-profile and alluring than it actually was? These people clearly wouldn’t watch Holiday Shop if it was the last channel on earth.
‘Ah …’ said Rosamund, smirking. ‘I do remember now. That package holiday thing, isn’t it? On one of those funny cable channels?’
Just then, the waiter brought our wine and I whipped it up as soon as he’d laid it down on the table, taking three large, syrupy gulps. Montepulciano or not, wine had never tasted better.
‘That’s right,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘It’s actually very popular – we get excellent viewing figures, especially at peak daytime hours.’
‘All those housewives,’ remarked Peter. ‘With nothing better to do than watch television, I suppose.’
‘That’s true, we do sell a lot of family-oriented holidays,’ I said, aware that this was all going down like a lead balloon. ‘So you’ll get mums at home with their little ones watching, that sort of thing.’
Sophie snorted.
‘You weren’t one of those, were you, Mum?’ piped up Daisy.
‘One of what, darling?’ said Sophie with the snippy undertone I’d noticed she adopted every time she spoke to her daughter.
‘A stay-at-home mum,’ replied Daisy, plonking her empty glass down on the table.
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering whether Daisy and I could actually be comrades in this.
She seemed to dislike her family as much as I was starting to.
Which perhaps wasn’t fair of me, since I’d known them for all of an afternoon.
But I was very good at picking up on ‘vibes’.
Lou teased me about this wild claim of mine, said it was paranoia, not vibes, but I disagreed: if somebody didn’t like me (which had happened relatively frequently over the years, for reasons I still couldn’t explain), it was very obvious to me, no matter how well they tried to cover it up.
And my overwhelming feeling about the Leveson-Gowers was that they weren’t exactly welcoming me into their family with open arms.
The thing was, though, I was marrying Nick – I was kind of going to be stuck with them, wasn’t I?
And so, to make things easier all round, I was going to have to pull out all the stops and find a connection.
I’d treat it like work, perhaps – even if it took years, I could just keep chipping away at it, doing my best. Which took focus and commitment – both of which were threatened by the arrival of Aidan, who annoyingly had dominated almost every single thought I’d had since the moment I’d walked into the restaurant.
I could picture him sitting there at his table for one, metres away, could imagine his mind whirring with all the things he wanted to say, or, more likely, didn’t know how to say.
Like why he’d stopped calling. Why he’d left me out of the blue.
How the heady feeling that we were falling for each other – not just me for him, but him for me – must have been a figment of my imagination.
‘Some of us had actual careers to pursue, Daisy,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s a given, is it, that women will give up everything they’ve worked towards just because they have a baby? That they can’t possibly expect to have both?’
‘Quite right, Sophia,’ said Rosamund. ‘You tell them.’
‘Who’s them?’ asked Peter. ‘I hope you’re not talking about us men. I’m all for women getting back in to the workplace.’
Sure you are, I thought. I bet he couldn’t possibly do without his secretary.
‘And you’re a wonderful mother, Sophia, isn’t she Nick?’ simpered Rosamund.
What was it with those two?
Nick nodded obediently. ‘Of course she is.’
‘Do you think you two will have children?’ asked Sophia, directing the question at me rather than Nick. She was staring at me so hard that I felt as though I had lasers drilling into me.
My heart sank. How to answer? Because the truth was, I still wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted.
I’d thought something might click once I turned thirty, like I’d suddenly start feeling broody, or being interested in other people’s kids, or not minding when I got seated behind a baby on a flight and finding it cute rather than irritating.
But I was thirty-one now and that hadn’t happened and what if it never did?
‘We’ll see,’ said Nick, jumping in to rescue me. ‘Plenty of time.’
I didn’t have to make any decisions yet, did I? I had to get my head around the idea of marriage first, and once I’d successfully got through that (although I was already dreading the coming together of Nick’s family and my mum and dad), then I’d give children some serious thought.
‘Hmmmn,’ said Sophia. ‘You mustn’t leave it too long, Maddie. So many friends of mine made that mistake and now they’re struggling down the IVF route.’
She was older than me – in her early forties – so possibly the fact that I was younger was riling her.
I looked over my shoulder before I could stop myself.
Aidan was still at his table, looking wistfully into his glass as though he had the problems of the world on his shoulders.
He’d always had that look about him, I remembered that was one of the first things I’d noticed.
He gave the impression that his mind was full, that he was considering something, planning something, trying to work something out.
I wondered what he was thinking about right now.
And then he looked up and caught my eye and I sort of knew.
Because I was startled, I think, I let myself hold his gaze for a second before whipping my head round so fast I gave myself neck ache.
I rubbed at it with the palm of my hand, trying desperately to tune in to a conversation about which starter we were all having.
Somebody was going for squid; somebody else for the consommé.
The menu, I’d look at the menu, that would buy me some time, give me a moment to get my head together.
My cheeks felt flushed and my heart was racing, and even though I felt as though my head was going to explode, I hoped it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else, particularly Nick, because how would I even begin to explain?
And so I focused hard on the words swimming in front of me with Aidan’s face annoyingly stamped in my mind’s eye.