LITMIR.BIZ

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of him, he’d have got married. But Maggie obviously wasn’t the right sort of wife for him. She was an experiment between the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy types, the trophy women. She wasn’t worth giving up other women for. That was what this was all about.

      The demons of anxiety and the self-doubt she’d grown up with rushed back howling into her mind and it was as if they’d never been away.

      ‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I swear this will never happen again, never.’ He looked up at her but Maggie was away in her head, remembering the years when she’d lived with a permanent clench of anxiety in her gut.

      Sunday nights were the worst, when the weekend was careening to an end and Monday loomed, Monday with Sandra Brody and her taunting crew who’d made it their mission in life to destroy Maggie Maguire. Maggie had never done anything to them but that didn’t appear to matter. Maggie was the chosen scapegoat. Daily verbal torture and cruel tricks were her punishment. The self-loathing – because it had to be her fault, hadn’t it? – felt just like it did now.

      ‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ Grey repeated. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

      ‘Really?’ she asked with a bitter laugh. Why was he bothering to pretend? She’d prefer it if he told her the truth: that he loved her but just not enough. She wasn’t quite good enough.

      ‘You’re different, Maggie,’ Grey began and sat at her feet, pulling both her hands from around her knees, trying to make her hold him. ‘I love you, I never meant to hurt you. I am so, so sorry. Can’t you forgive me?’

      She whisked her hands away, but he laid his dark head on her chair, pleading, imploring. It would be so easy to reach out and touch him, make it all go away and start again. Go on holiday, sell the apartment, move somewhere else, anything to paper over the crack. Maggie felt her fingers reach out, an inch away from brushing the softness of his hair.

      Marriage – that would be the ultimate Band-Aid. A sign that they were together despite it all. Her mum would love it if she got married. Poor Mum, always hoping for the fairytale ending for her daughter. But Grey had never discussed marriage with her. Perhaps she wasn’t worth that, either.

      Maggie’s hand stilled on its way to his hair. She could forgive Grey, she could forgive him almost anything. But then it would happen again. Other women, who’d work at the university and pity her, understanding that a prince like Grey wouldn’t be satisfied with just one woman. That was the price a woman like Maggie had to pay to be with a man like Grey. Why hadn’t she realised that there was a trade-off, a price?

      She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t pay that price.

      Suddenly, her running shoes seemed very inviting. Even home, the confines of Summer Street where her life had never been storybook perfect, was better than this.

      It was familiar, somewhere she could lick her wounds. Shona and Dr Phil were probably wrong about running away. Now, staying was the hard option and running was easy.

      

      Christie had cooked a beautiful goulash by the time she heard James’s key in the lock.

      Goulash in honour of her dear Hungarian friend, Lenkya, who’d once said, ‘You can kill a man or cure him in the kitchen.’ This had been nearly forty years before, when Christie’s culinary expertise extended to making porridge or boiling eggs.

      ‘Cooking is the heart of the home and is the place where the woman is queen,’ Lenkya pointed out in the husky Hungarian accent that would have made the phone book sound fascinating, should she ever want to recite it.

      Lenkya had lived below Christie in a house on Dunville Avenue that contained a veritable warren of bedsits.

      ‘If you can kill in the kitchen, I’ll end up in the dock for murder,’ Christie had said merrily.

      She was dark-haired then and when she and Lenkya walked the half-mile to Ranelagh to buy groceries, people often mistook the two women with their flashing dark eyes, hand-span waists and lustrous curls for sisters.

      ‘You should learn to cook,’ said Lenkya, who could rustle up the tenderest stew from a handful of root vegetables, a scattering of herbs and a scraggy piece of meat. ‘How have you never learned before this? In my country, women learn to look after themselves. I can grow vegetables, raise chickens, kill chickens, pouf –’ She twisted both hands round an imaginary chicken’s neck. ‘Like that. If you are hungry, you soon learn.’

      ‘My mother cooked for all of us, my father, my brothers and sister,’ Christie told her. It was harder to explain the family dynamics which meant cooking was the only power her mother had ever had. Under Christie’s father’s thumb all the time, it was only when Maura was in front of her stove that she was in charge. If it was possible to kill or cure a man in the kitchen, Christie wondered how her mother had resisted the impulse to kill her overbearing husband.

      James hadn’t known Lenkya well, but he’d been benefiting from her cooking expertise ever since. Food was all about love, Christie knew now. Feeding your family, giving them chicken soup when they were sick, and apple cake to take away the bitterness in their mouth when they were lovelorn: that was how you could cure them. Love and healing flew out of her kitchen into her home. Her life was nothing like her poor mother’s and she had no need of killing.

      ‘Hello, Christie.’ James put his arms round her and held her tightly. He smelled of the train, of dusty streets and other people’s cigarette smoke. He looked, as he so often did these days, tired and in need of a long, long sleep.

      ‘Hard day?’ Christie took his briefcase and jacket, resisting the impulse to push him up to their room, tuck him into bed and make him stay there until the exhausted look had gone from his face.

      ‘Ah no, fine,’ he said, removing his shoes and pulling on the old leather slippers he kept on the second step of the stairs. ‘The trip takes it out of me, I don’t know why. I’m sitting on the train half the day, not driving, so I should be in fine fettle.’

      ‘Travelling is exhausting,’ Christie insisted. ‘There’s a difference between sitting in your own armchair at home and sitting on a train at the mercy of leaves on the track, worrying about missing your meeting.’

      ‘I’m hardly Donald Trump,’ he joked.

      ‘He has a limo, I’d say, so he’s not at the mercy of the leaves.’ Christie handed her husband a glass of iced tea. ‘And someone else to drag his briefcase around after him. How did the meeting about the emissions go?’

      ‘We’re getting there. But one of the people was sick today, so there’s a chance we’ll have to go through it all again.’

      ‘For heaven’s sake,’ exclaimed Christie. ‘Surely if they’re sick, they have to catch up with the rest of you, not the other way round.’

      ‘You know how it works, love,’ said James. ‘For some people, the more meetings there are, the better. Then nothing actually gets done, but lots of minutes are typed up and the department’s accounts’ people are kept busy printing out expenses cheques for tea and coffee. Global warming won’t kill the planet: bureaucracy will.’

      He followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a low stool to pet the dogs, who’d been clamouring for love since he arrived.

      He normally knelt on the floor to pet them, she knew. His hip must be bothering him again. Not that James would ever say so. Christie knew many women with husbands whose flu symptoms were always at least on a par with Ebola, if the patient was to be believed. She was the lone dissenting voice with a husband who never magnified his illness to the power of ten, which worried her because James could be having a heart attack in front of her and he’d probably say he had ‘a bit of an ache’ and that a moment sitting down would cure it. How could you look after a man like that?

      ‘Now, what was that all about this morning?’ he asked when Tilly’s inner ears had been rubbed to her satisfaction and Rocket had snuffled wetly all over his shoes to establish that no other dogs had been

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