it. The story had even been picked up by a couple of the nationals; at lunchtime a call had come through from the Daily Mail, who were keen to include Liza in a feature on star-crossed lovers.
‘We’ve got a pair of besotted MPs so far – one Labour, one Tory – and a vegan who’s fallen in love with a butcher,’ the journalist explained with maddening cheerfulness. ‘The third couple were going to be Catholic- Protestant, but to be frank,’ she lowered her voice to a confiding whisper, ‘your story sounds much more fun.’
Liza stood at the kitchen window, sipping lukewarm tea she didn’t even want. Her so-called story might sound fun to the girl from the Mail but it was a lot less entertaining being on the business end, Liza could promise her that.
She gazed out at the tiny patio garden bursting with tubs of geraniums and petunias, and tried to remember if exam nerves, the real stomach-churning kind when you actually felt sick with fear, had ever been this bad.
Except with exam nerves, at least you knew when the exam would be over.
She shuddered as something alien sloshed into her mouth. Ugh, she’d forgotten to fish out the tea bag.
Uselessly Liza checked her watch again. Still only twenty-six minutes to five.
I’m a grown woman, she thought, willing herself to believe it. In four days’ time I’ll be thirty-two. I can handle this.
But the sick feeling showed no sign of going away.
Liza bit her lip. It was fifty-four hours since Kit Berenger had oh so casually said he would phone her.
It hadn’t happened yet.
Three times a week Pru drove Eddie to Bristol, to Elmlea House, a nursing home in Clifton overlooking the suspension bridge. While she waited in the car, passing the time with one of Dulcie’s eye-boggling sex-and-shopping paperbacks, Eddie disappeared inside the ivy-fronted building to visit his mother- in-law, now frail and in her late eighties but still mentally all there.
‘She’s a darling,’ he told Pru when she had commented – quite daringly, for her – that not many men would put themselves out as much as he did for their mother-in-law.
Eddie had simply looked amused. ‘It’s no hardship. We’re great friends. Anyway, I’m all the family she has left.’
Their regular trips to and from Bristol had proved the ideal opportunity for him to talk to Pru about his marriage. Simply and without drama, Eddie described Catherine’s bizarre mood swings in the early days, and the difficulties he’d faced trying to control her when neither of them had had any idea there could be an actual medical reason for it all.
Then the petrifying roller-coaster of full-blown manic depression had taken hold. The first of many hospital admissions had given Eddie a few months’ much-needed respite.
‘The doctors would spend ages juggling her medication, getting it just right,’ he explained to Pru, ‘but as soon as she was well again, they’d discharge her. Catherine would then decide she felt so much better she didn’t need the medication any more. Even if I stood over her she’d just hide the capsules under her tongue and spit them out later.’ Eddie shook his head sorrowfully at the memory of those times.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, while Pru concentrated on the road ahead, ‘it got worse. Then, twelve years ago, she ran out of the house one night when I was trying to persuade her to take her pills.
She was only wearing a nightdress. My car keys were hanging up by the front door. She grabbed them, yelling that she’d had enough, and drove off. There was a high wall at the end of our cul-de-sac. Catherine must have been doing sixty when she smashed into it.’ For a second Eddie’s voice wavered. He cleared his throat. ‘Oh well, could have been worse. At least she was killed outright.’
Pru didn’t know what to say so she didn’t say anything. But her grey eyes filled with tears.
‘Hey, don’t you cry.’ Eddie sounded alarmed. ‘I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought you’d cry.’
‘Sorry.’ Ever obedient, Pru wiped her wet face with the back of her hand.
He shook his head, half smiling as he passed her a clean handkerchief. ‘I thought you were tougher than that.’
She spluttered with surprised laughter. ‘Me, tough? I am the original wet lettuce!’
‘That isn’t true. Your marriage broke up. And in dramatic fashion,’ Eddie pointed out. ‘But you’re coping with it.’
‘Am I?’ Pru sighed and blew her nose. ‘Inside, I wonder if I’ll ever feel normal again.’ She glanced across at Eddie in the passenger seat. ‘How long before you did?’
It was Eddie’s turn to be stuck for words. Twelve years since Catherine’s death and he still hadn’t been able to bring himself to form any kind of emotional attachment. The barriers had gone up and stayed up. Well and truly up. The prospect of getting involved with someone else was still too terrifying to contemplate.
‘Well ... not long, not long at all,’ Eddie lied heartily. He gave Pru a clumsy pat on the arm to cheer her up. ‘You’re okay. You’ll be fine, you’ll see.’
The book Dulcie had passed on to her this week was all bonk and no plot. Pru waded through a couple more
Chapters then gave up, bored. She fiddled with the car radio instead, zipping from station to station in search of something – at 7.01 p.m. – that wasn’t the news. Next she tried out all the mysterious switches and buttons she’d never bothered to investigate before, unexpectedly locating the electronic wing mirror wagglers, a well-hidden lever to open the boot and an astonishingly efficient mechanism for tipping the seats back in a trice.
Whoomph, Pru was flat on her back. She pressed the switch a second time. Whoomph, upright again! What brilliant fun. Grinning to herself, Pru catapulted up and down a few more times.
Until, mortified, she realised she was being watched.
An ancient old dear, one of the residents presumably, was standing less than six feet away.
Indicating with a jab of her walking stick that she wished to say something, she moved creakily towards the car while Pru, crimson with embarrassment, slid open the driver’s window.
‘You’ll do yourself an injury, child,’ the old woman observed. ‘Whatever are you playing at?’
