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  At least she still had a job, Perdita reminded herself constantly, although she worried, too, that her performance was not as good as it should be. Still, the situation could be so much worse. She ought to feel grateful for what she had.

  But as the days turned into a week and one week into two, and she was still staying with her mother, it became harder and harder to feel grateful instead of exhausted and frustrated and dangerously near the end of her tether.

  She reached the end of it one cold, wet November evening when she put some of her mother’s clothes into the washing machine and helped her upstairs to bed, only to find when she came down again some time later that there was water all over the floor.

  Close to tears of tiredness and strain, Perdita rang a few numbers, but it was almost ten o’clock at night and nobody would come out until the next morning. Which meant another morning off work while she waited for the engineer to arrive. Hearing the desperation in her voice, one of them suggested that she pull out the machine and see if one of the hoses at the back had come off. ‘If that’s the case, you could fix it yourself, love.’

  Well, yes, if she had the strength to pull the machine out of its slot. Sloshing around in the great pool of water, Perdita struggled to get a grip of the machine, but it was hopeless and in the end she gave up. She would go and ask if Tom would give her a hand. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

  But it was Ed who answered the door, not one of the children, as she had hoped, and Perdita was horrified at her body’s instant, instinctive and quite uncontrollable reaction. It was as if every sense, every nerve ending, had forgotten that she was tired and miserable and was jumping up and down and cheering instead. It was a worrying sign when a month of severe talking-tos had simply left her body overjoyed at the mere sight of him again.

  ‘Perdita!’ he said in surprise.

  Still smarting from her rejection, Ed had tried to make things easier for both of them by avoiding her as much as possible, but now he was shocked at her appearance. Once his own instinctive leap of joy had subsided, he saw that she was pale and drawn and so tightly wound that she looked as if she would snap if he touched her with his finger. ‘What is it?’ he asked in concern.

  To her horror, Perdita felt tears grab at her throat and for one terrible moment she thought she wasn’t going to be able to speak at all as she forced them desperately down.

  ‘I was wondering if Tom could come and help me move my mother’s washing machine,’ she managed, but her voice was shamefully cracked and wavering all over the place. ‘I’ve had a bit of a flood.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Ed.

  Shouting up the stairs to tell his children where he would be, he walked back with Perdita, who was intensely grateful that he wasn’t going to ask questions. It would take so little for her to burst into stupid tears, and the quiet reassurance of his presence was making her worse, not better. It would have been so much easier to pull herself together if he had rolled his eyes at her uselessness, or been annoying or patronising.

  But Ed wasn’t like that. He pulled the washing machine out easily, found the hose that had come off and reattached it without the slightest fuss. Pushing the machine back into place, he turned to find Perdita mopping ineffectually at the water that covered the floor.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

  ‘I was just coming to make something when I found this mess,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t think I can face anything now.’

  ‘You need something or you’ll be ill too.’ Ed hesitated. ‘Why don’t you go and have a bath or shower and I’ll have a look in the fridge?’

  The thought of a bath was so inviting that Perdita had to close her eyes to resist it. ‘I need to dry this floor first,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do that.’ Ed took the mop from her and it was a measure of Perdita’s tiredness that she simply didn’t have the strength to snatch it back. ‘Go on, off you go-but don’t fall asleep in the bath or I’ll have to come up and get you!’

  ‘I can’t let you do this,’ she said helplessly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, what about Lauren and Cassie and Tom?’

  ‘They’ve had something to eat, and they know where I am. They’re all supposed to be doing their homework, but I have no doubt that the minute they heard I was going out they all sloped downstairs and are happily watching some rubbish on television,’ said Ed in a dry voice.

  ‘Still…’ Perdita hesitated and he glanced at her.

  ‘Still, what?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me when…well, you know…’

  ‘When you don’t want to kiss again, and have been avoiding me ever since?’

  At last there was some colour in her cheeks. ‘You said you didn’t want to be friends,’ she reminded him.

  Ed sighed. ‘I was angry and disappointed, and I didn’t act in the grown-up way I should have done,’ he admitted and then he smiled. ‘Of course we are friends, Perdita,’ he said gently. ‘And what any friend would do now is insist that you go and have a bath. Go on, off you go,’ he said, making shooing motions with his hand, and Perdita succumbed to the wonderful temptation of being told what to do.

  When she came down after her bath, the floor was clean and dry, the washing machine whirring to catch up with its interrupted programme, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of grilling cheese.

  ‘I’ve made you macaroni cheese,’ Ed told her, seeing her sniff appreciatively. ‘It’s not very glamorous, but I couldn’t find much in the fridge and, anyway, it felt like good comfort food. I’ve also taken the liberty of finding another bottle of your father’s wine. I’m sure he’d agree that you need a glass right now.’

  Taking the dish of macaroni out from under the grill, he pulled out a chair from the kitchen table with a flourish. ‘If madam would care to take a seat?’

  Perdita sat obediently. There was a horrible constriction in her throat which made it impossible to speak but she managed a smile, albeit a very wobbly affair.

  Ed set a plate in front of her and presented the dish with a serving spoon. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

  But Perdita couldn’t. All at once the pressure of tears was too much and she had to press her fingers to her eyes to hold them in, and even that wasn’t enough to stop the humiliating trickle from beneath her lashes.

  ‘Hey, what have I said?’ Ed put down the dish and allowed himself the luxury of touching her. How could he not rest his hand on her shoulder when her head was bent so that the dark, silky hair swung forward to hide her face and she was so clearly in need of comfort?

  ‘Nothing. I’m just being pathetic.’ Pride helped Perdita draw a deep breath and lift her head, and she brushed the traces of tears furiously from her cheeks. ‘I’m just not used to anyone looking after me,’ she tried to explain. ‘It’s only because you’re being so nice to me,’ she added almost accusingly.

  The grey eyes filled with humour. ‘Would you rather I was horrible to you?’

  ‘At least I wouldn’t snivel,’ said Perdita with a return to her old form, and Ed smiled as he pulled out a chair and sat down at the end of the table.

  ‘You’re tired and overwrought,’ he pointed out. ‘A few tears is the least you’re allowed. Now eat up your macaroni before it gets cold!’ he pretended to scold her.

  Perdita picked up her fork. ‘This looks delicious.’

  ‘I’m afraid the sauce is a bit lumpy,’ Ed apologised with a grimace. ‘I can never get it to go smooth. The kids are always moaning about my sauces.’

  The sauce was, indeed, lumpy but to Perdita, tired and hungry and desperately in need of some warm, comforting stodge, it was one of the best things she had ever eaten.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ she said in between mouthfuls.

  ‘I feel sure you’re just being kind,’ said Ed, but she could tell that he was pleased. ‘You should hear Cassie and Lauren when I make it for them. They get down on their knees an
d beg me to go on a cooking course where I can learn to make a sauce properly, the minxes!’ he finished with a grin.

  ‘You don’t need to go on a course,’ said Perdita. ‘I can teach you how to make a sauce. I’ll teach you all, in fact. There’s no reason why your kids shouldn’t learn, too-there’s no mystery to it!’

  Ed brightened. ‘Would you really do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s what any friend would do,’ she quoted his own words back at him.

  There was a tiny pause. ‘So is friends really all we can be, Perdita?’ Ed asked after a moment.

  Perdita didn’t answer directly. She put down her fork and reached for her wine. ‘Did I ever tell you about Nick?’ she asked, her eyes on the glass she was turning slowly between her fingers.

  Has she told you about Nick yet? Ed remembered Millie’s words at Perdita’s lunch party.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is Nick an ex-boyfriend?’

  ‘He was more than a boyfriend,’ said Perdita quietly. ‘Nick was the centre of my world for two years. I loved him the way I’ve never loved anyone else. I would have done anything for him.’

  Ed wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear all this, but he had asked, he supposed. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in compromise?’ he said, remembering what she had told him when they’d first met. ‘You must have compromised somewhere along the line if you lasted two years.’

  ‘I did,’ she said, her expression sad. ‘I compromised everything I believed about myself. I thought I was strong and independent and confident, and it was a shock to realise when I met Nick that I was ready to chuck all of that out of the window as long as I could be with him.’

  Ed frowned. ‘Didn’t he love you?’

  ‘He said that he did,’ said Perdita, wondering how to explain Nick to a man like Ed, ‘but he was always afraid of committing himself to me.’

  ‘What, even after two years together?’

  She bit her lip. It still wasn’t easy to think about how blindly she had believed in Nick, how determinedly she had closed her eyes to what she didn’t want to see. It hadn’t all been Nick’s fault.

  ‘Nick hadn’t been separated from his wife that long when I met him,’ she tried to explain. ‘He still felt guilty about splitting up the family, and he was very concerned about his two children, although they actually adapted to the new situation better than either of their parents.’

  ‘Were you the reason Nick and his wife separated?’ Ed made himself ask, and was relieved when Perdita shook her head.

  ‘No, there was nobody else involved. Their relationship had simply broken down and it had all got very nasty-and it went on to be even nastier with the divorce settlement going to court. I understood why Nick was wary of getting married again after that, but I didn’t mind. Getting married and having children of my own honestly wasn’t an issue for me. I just wanted to be with him,’ she said simply. ‘And when we were together, it was wonderful.’

  Her expression was wistful and Ed poured himself a glass of wine to distract himself from it. He wasn’t enjoying hearing about how much she had loved bloody Nick at all.

  ‘What was the problem, then?’ he asked, conscious of an edge to his voice that shouldn’t have been there.

  Still twisting the glass between her fingers, Perdita sighed. ‘Nick didn’t want us to live together. He thought it might be too difficult for his children to accept me at first, so initially I was introduced as a friend who went back to her own flat at the end of the day.

  ‘The custody arrangements were that Nick saw them one day a week and alternate weekends, but his ex-wife was constantly wanting to change the arrangements.’ Perdita’s mouth thinned at the memory. ‘I’m still sure she was just trying to make trouble between us. She used to go in for a lot of emotional blackmail, telling Sasha and Robin that Nick didn’t love them enough, didn’t want to see them, all that kind of nonsense, and Nick fell for it every time.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’d tell him to just ignore her, but he would tie himself into knots trying to placate her because he believed that made life easier for the kids. Maybe he was right, I don’t know. All I know is that I was always the one pushed down his list of priorities. You wouldn’t believe how often we’d have something planned for the weekend and it would get changed at the last minute because Nick had agreed to do something with the children.’

  Ed tried to imagine Perdita meekly accepting the way her plans were continually changed, but he just couldn’t do it. She was much too strong a person for that…wasn’t she?

  But even the strongest people could be vulnerable, he knew, and love made you more vulnerable than anything else.

  ‘It sounds to me as if this Nick was jerking you around,’ he said bluntly, and Perdita lifted her shoulders in a strange gesture of defeat.

  ‘He wasn’t doing it deliberately, but yes, that was what was happening,’ she said. ‘And I put up with it.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘FORtwo years?’

  Perdita winced at the incredulity in Ed’s voice. ‘That’s the reality of being involved with a single father,’ she said, feeling defensive as she always did when she talked about Nick. ‘I told myself that I had to accept it. I mean, it was right that he should put his children first. I wouldn’t want to be involved with a man who didn’t put his children first and take his responsibilities as a father seriously.

  ‘The trouble was that those responsibilities took up so much of his attention that there was none left over to deal with his responsibilities as half of a relationship,’ she went on after a pause. ‘There never seemed to be a time when it could just be about the two of us, and I began to resent the fact that I was the only one he didn’t think he had to make an effort for.’

  ‘He was taking you for granted, in fact?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said bleakly. It had taken her so long to get over Nick that it was depressing to even remember those days. ‘It sounds pathetic when I talk about it now, but you need to understand how much I loved Nick. I couldn’t imagine life without him, and so I bent over backwards to be accommodating. I tried to be understanding, and I completely accepted that his children came as part of the package, as it were, so I did my best to help make life easier for him.’

  Perdita flushed, still faintly humiliated by the memory of how abject she had been. ‘I used to cook and clean and make cakes and do all that sort of stuff in the hope that Nick would start to think of me as a real part of his life but, instead of appreciating me, I think he just took it for granted that I’d always be there doing what was needed. He didn’t have to do anything to keep me there. I think he thought that letting me love him was all he needed to do-and I let him get away with that for too long.’

  Ed was puzzled. Perdita seemed such a strong personality, and her face was full of character; it was hard to imagine her diminished by her love for this Nick, who sounded deeply selfish and complacent to Ed.

  ‘You’ve never struck me as a doormat type,’ he commented and she flushed.

  ‘I wasn’t myself. I was trying to be somebody else, somebody I thought Nick would want, but all I did was make a fool of myself. I was always waiting for things to improve, for Nick to be less stressed, for his job to settle down, for his wife to be less vindictive, but, after two years, I realised none of that was ever going to happen.’

  ‘So what was the point when you realised you’d had enough?’

  ‘My father died very suddenly a couple of years ago,’ she told him. ‘It was a terrible shock. He was always so…Well, anyway,’ she said briskly before she let the memories get the better of her. ‘My mother’s always had a very strong personality too, but she was distraught and it took my brothers a couple of days to get there.’

  ‘So you were holding it all together?’ Ed knew exactly how it felt to be the one who couldn’t let go, the one everyone else relied on to get them through the grief and the pain.

  ‘Well…yes…I suppose so,’ Perdita remembered. ‘I had
to be strong for my mother, but I really wanted Nick to be there for me.’ Pain filled the expressive brown eyes before she looked away. ‘I asked him to come for the funeral. I told him I needed him but…’

  ‘He let you do it on your own,’ said Ed in a dangerously flat voice as she trailed off, and she nodded miserably.

  ‘His ex-wife wanted to go out and had asked him to have the kids that day and he didn’t feel that he could say no.’

  Ed looked at Perdita’s averted face and swallowed the angry words that he really wanted to say. She didn’t need him to tell her what she already knew. How could Nick not have been there for her when she’d needed him so badly?

  ‘That must have hurt a lot,’ he said quietly instead.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed on a long sigh, still unable to meet his eyes. The worst thing about remembering that time was how humiliated she had felt. People had kept asking where Nick was, and she had had to make excuses for him, when all she had wanted to do was to shout and to scream.

  Drawing a breath, she forced a smile. Not a very good one, but still, a smile. ‘It made me realise that he might say that he loved me, but he didn’t really. Or at least he didn’t love me enough. Certainly not enough to show me that he did, or to think about what I needed for once, rather than about what he wanted and needed.’

  ‘Why did you put up with him for so long?’ Ed couldn’t help asking, brows drawn together in a ferocious scowl.

  ‘Because I loved him,’ Perdita said simply, turning her dark eyes to look at him directly at last. ‘When I was with him, it all made sense. It was only when I was on my own that I realised that I was making myself a fool for not standing up for what I needed, but I was always terrified of losing him. If I thought about life without him, I’d panic. I couldn’t even bear to imagine it. So every time I’d persuade myself that he loved me really and if I just hung on everything would be OK.