It was February. She and Ronnie, as she often called him, had been together over three years and Anthony was no longer her Anthony, despite the woman’s remark. So how could his name suddenly turn her mind back, right out of the blue, to prompt this sudden sharp pang of emotion?
She’d been on the way to her hairdresser’s, wondering why she was bothering in such weather, her head bent against a high wind, not so bad as that reported in the newspapers this time last year, when she’d been stopped by a female voice calling her name.
It belonged to a woman she’d not seen since she and Ronnie had taken up with each other. Gertrude Peel and herself together with several other friends would meet a couple of times a week for morning coffee. They’d all known Anthony and had sympathized with her over the break-up, she feeling entirely alone, grateful for a little company to get her through those long hours. These days she no longer had need of company and coffee mornings.
‘I thought it was you, my dear,’ chirped Gertrude as she came up to her through the thin crowd who’d braved the weather to shop. One hand was holding on to her fashionable domed suede cloche hat lest the wind take it, the brim like a downturned sail, the whole thing almost covering her eyes, not a strand of hair visible. The other held a couple of wide paper bags that threatened to break free from her grasp and sail away on the wind.
Though in her early forties she was dressed like a young flapper: her loose-fitting, wrap-over coat unnecessarily short, its fur collar and cuffs almost drowning her spare frame, its pockets way below the hips. Madeleine also dressed in the height of fashion but she was some ten years younger and still looked well in young clothes. She still did look young and just as well with Ronnie by her side.
‘Delightful to bump into you, my dear,’ Gertrude was saying, ‘and so unexpected. Simply ages since I saw you last! But what terrible weather,’ she twittered on, seeming ready to start a lengthy conversation. ‘This awful wind – almost as bad as last year after that awful winter we had – all that snow. And that flooding they had then, all those poor people washed out of their homes. Still that was last year. But you, my dear – you look so well, so wonderful. I heard about you and that new young man of yours. I must say, from looking at you, he seems to be doing you a power of good.’
Madeleine nodded, but Gertrude was still rattling on. ‘We must have coffee again some time. I still see several of the old faces – we still meet. But perhaps you’re too busy these days. You would appear so low spirited when we used to meet. But you had reason to be didn’t you, poor thing?’ Hardly pausing for breath, she went on, ‘By the way, I ran into your Anthony the other day. He seems to be getting on well too – with a lovely girl. We had a brief chat. They looked very happy and settled, and so it seems are you, my dear, from what I hear and—’
‘Sorry, but I have to go, Gertrude,’ Madeleine cut in. ‘I’m late for my hairdressers.’ She saw Gertrude beam widely.
‘Hardly worth it this weather. But do let us catch up with each other again, have coffee and a chat. I’ll tell the others I met you. I am still at the same address, dear, so you can always get in touch. See you soon then.’
‘Yes, bye then,’ Madeleine said, hurrying off, Gertrude having leaned towards her to bestow an air kiss just short of her ear.
Pushing through the indifferent shoppers, hardly aware of them or the noise of traffic or the buffeting wind, the hairdresser’s forgotten, she was aware only of this weight on her heart, Anthony’s face, and such a longing to see him again that she was almost on the verge of tears. How could she have walked out on him as she had, let all this time go by until it was too late to ask him to have her back – he was now with someone else; herself forgotten.
By the time she found a taxi to take her home, she’d sternly pulled herself together, set her mind to Ronnie. She had been having a wonderful life these past three years and until Gertrude Peel had spoken to her saw only happiness stretching ahead, everything in the past swept away, all her heartaches behind her, so why was she fretting now?
Even so it was hard not to think of Anthony – he and that young woman whom Gertrude had seen him with. Was marriage on their agenda? Something he had shied away from with her. Did they have their minds on starting a family? Something else that he had made clear he did not exactly look forward to. True, she too had now given up thoughts of children for the time being, having too good a time at the moment, so she could understand how he had felt, enjoying his life too much at the time.
Now the thought crossed her mind that maybe she and Ronnie might move towards a more permanent arrangement. But it couldn’t wait too long. He was twenty-four now but in a couple of months she’d be thirty-three and time was passing. But in broaching the subject, he might back off, saying that he could never afford to get married. To say she’d pay for the wedding would make him feel belittled and what man wouldn’t be? Fine when it was small things like clothes and jewellery and such, but something so very important and showy, she couldn’t see him accepting that.
There was one way out of it. She could arrange for him to come into her stock broker business, or maybe if she
