Page 15 of A Midlife Gamble

He took two of her fingers and made a quarter-inch space between them. ‘They’re this big,’ he whispered, looking straight at her. ‘Very hard to keep hold of.’

‘That’s good,’ she managed. Grown-up Caro yearned to go with this moment, open herself up to all the messy, unpredictable highs and maybe lows it would facilitate. But she was sitting in her childhood home, on her mother’s settee, and that Caro didn’t stand a chance. The child inside did what it had learned over the course of so many rejections. Battened down the hatches, pulled up the drawbridge. Retreated before it was wounded. Releasing his hand, she stood up. ‘We should get on,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do.’ Turning away from his bemusement, she went into the kitchen and rinsed her cup under the tap, unaware that he had followed her and was now standing in the doorway watching.

‘Caro?’ he said gently.

Caro turned the tap off. ‘Is your mother still alive?’ she said, staring at it.

‘Very much so.’

‘And… are you close?’ Now she turned to him.

‘Yes.’

The simpleness of his response was like a sting. Caro looked away. ‘I think,’ she whispered, ‘I think, my mother was too damaged to be able to… She could never show me that she loved me.’

‘No.’ It was a very gentleNo,but she couldn’t turn to it. ‘Caro,’ he said. ‘Look at me.’

‘Shook… I don’t think you understand. There’s…’

'Sssh,’ he said, stepped forward and cupped his hands against her cheeks. ‘She gave you her mother’s name. She must have loved you very much.’ And then his lips were on hers, warm and forceful, and closing her eyes, Caro heard the voice in her head.Please let this work, please let this work.

Hours later,with Shook driving, Caro sat in the passenger seat of her BMW, a bag full of empty seed trays on her lap, thinking about what Shook had said. Fifty-one years and she hadn’t understood that her name had been an act of profound love. How smart she’d been in some ways, and how unbelievably stupid. It was so obvious now. If her mother had never been able to say it, she’d shown her love in the only way she could. Caroline. She leaned her elbow on the rim and looked out of the window.

Where, she was thinking, did that leave her? How had she shown her love to the people in her life that had mattered the most? It occurred to Caro now, as she looked out at the suburban spread that indicated the proximity of London, how stunted her empathy skills were. It was almost to be expected. She’d been handed a much-reduced example to begin with. She didn’t belong to the Kays and Helens of this world, who had grown up wrapped around in demonstrated affection, who had understood, before they could talk, how to give and receive love, and for whom it was all natural as sunshine. And again she was thinking of three years back, when Helen’s mother had died. How present had she been for Helen then? Or further back, during Kay’s divorce? These were times when she’d barely been in the country. Business class flights and after-hours drinks filling her diary.

The thought had her leaning forward and reaching for her handbag, pulling out her phone and opening the calculator app. Her mother’s house would raise a considerable sum. Fifty percent of which was hers. She didn’t need any more money. She did need her friends, and one of them was dying and now that she too had had her feet held at the fire of bereavement, the loss of both her baby and her mother, she had come away wiser.

‘Are you ok?’ Shook glanced at her phone.

She reached across and took his hand. This afternoon with one wonderful kiss, they’d taken another step forward on the way to a lovely warm place she knew she’d never want to leave. It scared her. ‘I’m fine,’ she managed. ‘I’m just thinking.’

He nodded. ‘What are you thinking?’

Caro looked up. ‘Vegas. I’m thinking about Vegas.’

7

‘Amazing!’ Caro nodded seriously.

‘Wow… just, wow!’ Kay added.

‘Beats a trek up Box Hill,’ Craig said.

‘Lawrence, this is an incredible achievement.’ Shook, who was standing beside the elegant inbuilt fireplace in Helen’s living room, nodded at the now blank TV screen. ‘Incredible,’ he repeated.

Across the room Lawrence turned his palms to the ceiling, an almost genuine embarrassment creeping across his face. ‘Well, getting up is only half the equation. There are as many climbers lost on the way down as on the way up.’

‘Not you though,’ Helen said brightly. ‘So that’s a relief.’ And she turned to the light switch.

But Lawrence didn’t seem to hear. He’d leaned over his laptop, reading glasses halfway down his nose. ‘The descent,’ he was saying, ‘is a whole other story. It took us eight hours. The next video shows—’

‘Which we’ll have to save for another day!’ Helen finished.

The overhead light burst on and the room jumped as if a lid had been lifted from a pan of live frogs.

Kay put her hand across to shield her eyes.

Sitting beside her, Craig frowned.

---