Promoted: to Wife and Mother

for it. Sometimes it took a lot more strength to acknowledge pain or weakness than it did to bluff and bluster and pretend that feelings weren’t important.

‘Mike didn’t tell me to pull myself together or pat my shoulder and say that it would be all right. He just sat there and wasn’t embarrassed and, when I’d finished, he handed me a cup of coffee and apologised he didn’t have anything stronger.’

‘He sounds like a good friend.’

‘The best,’ said Ed. ‘I was better after that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said inadequately. ‘Does it still hurt as much?’

He shook his head. ‘No, you get used to it, of course. Some times are worse than others.’

Perdita nodded. She knew what that was like. It had taken her a very long time to get over Nick. She would think that she was doing OK. At first a few days would go by, then weeks and latterly a whole month or so, when she hardly thought about him, but then the old misery would swamp her without warning and for no obvious reason, plunging her back into wretchedness of long hours spent fighting tears, of nights when she would wake in the early hours and lie alone in the darkness, churning with loss. That was when she would miss Nick so much she felt as if she were drowning in it, until she managed to drag herself out of it once more. Even now, two years later, the memory of how he had let her down when she’d most needed him still had the power to make her wince at odd moments.

‘I miss Sue most when something’s happened with the kids,’ Ed said. ‘If I’m worried about one of them, or if there’s something to celebrate, it seems all wrong that she isn’t there. I miss just being married too,’ he went on slowly. ‘I miss having someone to make plans with, someone to talk to at the end of the day, someone to hold… God, listen to me!’ He broke off with a humorous roll of his eyes. ‘I’m not usually this maudlin.’

‘It must be lonely,’ Perdita said, conscious of a strange pang of envy, mixed with guilt and disgust at herself. How could you envy a woman who was dead?

‘Yes, it is sometimes,’ said Ed, but not in a self-pitying way. Reaching across the table, he topped up Perdita’s glass. ‘What about you? Have you never wanted to be married?’

Perdita swirled the wine in her glass, studying it intently as if it held the answer. ‘Once,’ she admitted after a long pause. If Nick had ever asked her to marry him, of course she would have said yes. ‘It didn’t work out.’ She shrugged, managed a smile as she lifted her eyes to Ed. ‘It was probably for the best.’

‘In what way?’ he asked quietly, watching her face.

‘Maybe if I’d met the right guy in my twenties…’ Perdita was very conscious of his eyes on her, and she bent her eyes to her wine once more, swirling it mindlessly round and round. ‘Maybe then I would have settled down, done the whole marriage-and-kids thing…but I didn’t. I’ve had my share of relationships, and some of them were more fun than others, but there wasn’t anyone I could really imagine wanting to wake up with every single morning.’

Except Nick, of course.

‘And now I’ve been on my own too long,’ she went on. ‘I’m used to having my own space. I like being able to go home and close the door and do whatever I want, whenever I want, without consulting anyone else. I don’t get lonely. I earn a good salary. I’ve got good friends, a nice flat, I can afford to travel…Why would I want to give up all that to get married?’

‘No reason, unless you think of marriage as sharing rather than giving up your freedom.’ Ed’s voice was carefully neutral.

‘Sharing means compromising,’ said Perdita. ‘I’m forty now. I’m set in my ways, and the chances are that anyone I meet is going to be too. Relationships are more complicated now. We’ve all got baggage-failed relationships, grief, disappointment, responsibilities-and that all has to be part of the compromise too. You have to really want someone to be prepared to compromise your whole life.’

‘And you never have?’

Irritated by her own endless swirling, Perdita put her glass down with a click. ‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes sliding away from his. ‘But he didn’t want me enough to compromise, and a relationship takes two. You can’t do it all on your own.’

‘No,’ said Ed, wondering what sort of man a woman like Perdita would love. What sort of man wouldn’t love her enough to compromise even a little.

‘So I’ve given up on compromise,’ said Perdita, and she snapped on a bright smile. ‘When I meet a man, I don’t think about anything except having a good time, and when it’s not fun any more, it’s over.’

Well, that told him, Ed thought wryly. ‘If you’re happy to be on your own, I suppose that’s the best attitude,’ he said after a tiny pause.

‘You obviously don’t like being on your own.’ For some reason, Perdita found herself wishing that she hadn’t been quite so adamant about the joys of single life. ‘Have you thought about getting married again?’

It was Ed’s turn to play with his glass. ‘When Sue knew that she was dying, she made me promise that I would move on and make a new life, try to find someone else, but it’s easier said than done. For a long while I couldn’t imagine being with anyone but her, and then, as time went on, I did think about what it might be like to find someone else but, between the kids and work, there hasn’t been that much time to think about meeting the right woman,’ he said dryly. ‘Even supposing I knew who or what the right woman was! But Lauren is fourteen now, so she’s getting more independent, and it means that I don’t need to struggle to find an acceptable babysitter if I do want to go out in the evening. I’m hoping that moving here will make a difference to all of us.’

‘Has it yet?’

‘It’s a bit soon to tell. In spite of moaning constantly about missing their friends, Cassie and Lauren already seem to have made new ones. Tom’s finding it harder. He doesn’t have their social skills.’

And you? Perdita wanted to ask. What kind of woman would be the right one for you?

‘Tom was fine with me this afternoon,’ she said instead, feeling that she was straying into very intimate territory. Perhaps it would be better to get back to more impersonal topics. ‘I felt sorry for him being landed with an old bag like me instead of having one of the other kids as a partner, but he certainly didn’t make it obvious.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Ed, evidently happy to follow her lead and steer the conversation back on to safer ground. ‘I don’t know what he thought at first-Tom’s not exactly chatty, as you’ve probably gathered-but I doubt very much that he considered you an “old bag”! He liked you.’

‘You didn’t ask Grace to put us together, then?’

‘Of course not. In spite of what my children think, I’m not that much of a control freak! I have to say that I was glad to see that he had been paired up with you, though. It meant he worked a lot harder than he would have done otherwise-swept along in your wake! I think he enjoyed it a lot more than he expected to, thanks to you.’

Perdita made a face. ‘I don’t know that “enjoy” was the operative word!’

‘Oh, come on, Perdita, it wasn’t that bad, was it?’

‘It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting,’ was all she would acknowledge. ‘I just can’t see how the project is going to work, though.’

‘Didn’t Grace show you the plans?’

‘Yes, but the project needs investment as well as a few people with forks,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s a huge area- the hard landscaping alone will cost a fortune.’

Ed’s mouth quirked in amusement. ‘There speaks a practical businesswoman! But I agree. Substantial investment is going to be needed. Grace tells me that she’s hoping to get sponsorship for all the materials and wants to persuade skilled craftsmen to volunteer to teach the kids how to lay bricks, make hedges and fences and that kind of thing.’

‘It all sounds a bit vague to me,’ said Perdita crisply, wondering when Ed had had all these cosy little chats with Grace and what else they had been talking about. ‘Fund-raising takes a lot of time. Grace told me that she’s organising all this from her front room at the moment and trying to run her own consultancy. She won’t be able to keep that going indefinitely.’

‘No,’ Ed agreed, getting up to stir his sauce. ‘Which is why I’ve offered to sponsor the cost of getting someone to work part-time on the project, doing all the administration and chasing up potential sponsors. Grace thought that was a brilliant idea.’

He lifted the lid of the big saucepan to check whether the water had come up to the boil, while Perdita turned