Page 47 of One Moment in Time
‘We don’t need them, Brenda. Fuck them. We were always closer than they were anyway.’ It had been a slight exaggeration, but only just. She and Colin had known each other the longest, had introduced the other two. ‘I’ll help with the baby, and you won’t need to explain to everyone you meet for the rest of your life who the father is and what happened to him. Marry me. We’ll do this together.’
Somehow, in that moment, the young, terrified, devastated Brenda had agreed. It was his point about Gary that had swung it. She never wanted to mention his name again, to explain where he’d gone, didn’t want to think about him, and she really thought marrying Colin would make that happen. That was the naivety of youth right there.
‘Your dad asked me to marry him, right there in the street. And just by sheer chance, I was already wearing the white sundress I’d bought when Eileen and I had gone shopping. We had no marriage licence, but we went into the chapel anyway and discovered that Elvis had a free slot. He married us there and then and I still can’t listen to “Suspicious Minds”. Then we flew home a day early so we wouldn’t have to see them on the flight. Turns out, they didn’t come back anyway, so we never saw them again.’
Zara jumped forward in her seat, spilling her drink. ‘Wait, wait, wait, rewind, Mum – you were pregnant? And Dad wanted to marry you even though the baby wasn’t his? Hang on… Oh shit. Were you pregnant with me? Oh my God, is Garymydad?’
Brenda could see her first-born daughter trying to do the maths in her head, but before she could put her out of her misery, Zara got there first. ‘No, what am I saying? I’m twenty-nine next month, so he can’t be. So that means… Oh, Mum.’
Brenda nodded, feeling the pain of what she was about to say, the gut-wrenching travesty of a life lost before it even began. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to scare you and of course it wasn’t you. I was pregnant with another baby. Your brother or sister. We’ll never know because a couple of weeks after we got back home, out of the blue, I began to bleed and it was gone. I was maybe five or six weeks pregnant at the most.’
Not that the length of the pregnancy had mattered to her. It had been so much more than just a simple fact of life. Brenda had sobbed her heart out for weeks, slumped into a deep depression, until Colin and her mother became seriously worried and Ada had called in the doctor. He’d given her tablets to make her sleep at night, and it was slow progress, but after a few weeks they began to work. After a couple of months, she didn’t need them anymore and in a moment of something – maybe gratitude or desperation to feel human again - she and Colin had somehow ended up in bed, seeking solace, closeness, attachment. By that time, she didn’t know what she would do without him. He’d become the only person she could talk to, the only one who understood.
‘Then, a month later, I found out I was pregnant again with you.’
Millie still wasn’t satisfied with all the details. ‘Wait – I’m back at the marriage license bit now. You said you didn’t have one? So are you and Dad not actually legally married?’
That had been the most significant crossroads in her life. Her Sliding Doors moment. She and Colin could have respectfully separated, found a way to stay friends and to bring their daughter up together, or…
‘We got married in the registry office in Glasgow three months later. Just your dad, his parents, me and Gran Ada.’ Colin had said he loved her, she’d said it too – they’d both known it was the friendship kind of love, but for them, back then, it had been enough. In fact, they were both so wounded, it had been all that either of them could bear. They had each other, and they had their baby on the way to make them whole –that had felt like all they needed.
‘And you made it work,’ Zara mused, tears sliding down her face.
‘We made it work,’ Brenda told her. She wasn’t lying. For a huge chunk of their lives, they’d been happy, bringing up the girls, being the family that Brenda had loved. It was only in recent years, after the girls had left, that it had stopped being enough.
‘Wait – so when is your actual wedding anniversary?’
‘The twenty-fourth of October,’ Brenda admitted ruefully. ‘We just always told everyone that it was the nineteenth of May because that was the date of the Vegas wedding and well before I fell pregnant. Stopped any doubts and questions and it wasn’t a complete lie.’
Zara pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them. ‘Nooooooo. All this and it isn’t even the right fricking date. Next year I’m sending you flowers and a card. In October,’ she wailed.
Brenda exhaled, glad that she’d finally told them the truth. She could have gone even further, explained why her lifetime of care and affection with Colin was no longer working, why she felt now that it was time for a different life, but she made the decision to leave the next chapter closed for now. This was enough for one day. It was a plan that held for about thirty seconds, until Millie, over on the bed, piped up with a question.
‘Hang on, then, Mum. When you and Dad got married here, you weren’t in love with each other. Is that right?’
Brenda felt a red rash of discomfort rise up her neck. This was way too close for comfort. This was a conversation for another time, but hadn’t she vowed to be honest with them? There had been too many secrets in this family for too long.
‘We loved each other,’ she began, then saw from the quizzical expressions that greeted her reply, that it wasn’t going to suffice. Full disclosure. ‘But no, we weren’t in love.’
‘But you fell in love later, right?’ Zara asked, and the hope in her words made tears spring to Brenda’s eyes. She blinked them away. Truth. No lies.
‘Honestly? I don’t know that we ever did. We’ve been best friends for all of our married lives, but I’m not sure that we ever actually fell in love. I think Gary and Eileen left too many shadows for that.’
Her daughters were both staring at her now, Millie in something that seemed like horror, Zara with very obvious sympathy.
‘Mum, can I ask you something? Do you think that’s enough? The friendship and the love, but without all the bells and whistles of the head-over-heels stuff? Is it enough to make a great life together?’ Of course that came from Zara. And Brenda had to think about her answer before she spoke, because she just couldn’t shift the nagging worry that her daughter was following in her footsteps.
‘I don’t think so, my love. I really don’t.’
24
AIDEN
His dad had been lying on his bed for a full ten minutes, and the nosebleed that had started in the elevator had finally stopped. Still, he howled as Aiden held a towel full of ice on his face. Aiden chose not to point out that growing up, whenever he got injured playing sport, his dad would just tell him to slap some ice on and work through the pain. Somehow, he didn’t think that advice would go down too well right now with the bloke lying on the bed making noises about potential concussion. Instead, he went with a more reassuring, ‘Dad, he punched you on the nose. I think a concussion is pretty unlikely.’
Over in the corner, his mom had barely said a word, as if she’d slipped into some kind of self-reflective trance. And no wonder. Aiden’s brain was still pretty close to exploding thanks to the events of the last couple of hours. His mom and his dad, both cheating on their partners when they got together? And getting caught in such a brutal way? It cast a whole new light on their relationship, and he had no idea how he felt about it. The one thing he did know was that he couldn’t really blame Zara’s dad for trying to knock out his former pal. Thankfully, no one in the restaurant other than their group had actually witnessed the blow, so they’d managed to avoid a brush with the law. Small consolation.
‘You okay over there, Mom?’
