Hand On Heart: Sequel to Head Over Heels Read online

  ‘I can’t do all this memory lane stuff, Mark, I’m sorry,’ Grace said, heaving herself to her feet. She would go and sort out some things in one of the bedrooms and leave Mark to it down here. If he wanted to wallow in the past, he would have to do it alone.

  As she passed through the hallway there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Frannie!’ Grace exclaimed, letting her in. ‘Great to see you, how are you? How’s Gerald?’

  ‘Oh I’ve left him mowing the lawn. You know how particular he is. Likes to get it just right, and I’m only in the way.’ She smiled fondly, quite obviously still so very loved up with her new husband. And so she should be, thought Grace. The fact that this elderly lady had found love finally, in her old age, was still a source of immense pleasure for Grace. It just went to show there is someone for everyone, even if you have to wait almost your entire lifetime to find them. ‘I saw your car on the drive and thought I’d just pop over and see if you’re OK with, well, everything.’

  Frannie looked so well. Clearly married life suited her, and for someone who had never shared her living space with anyone else, she was adapting very well to the day to day trials – and rewards – of a conjugal life. Good for her, Grace thought, pleased to see her so happy.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she replied, rolling her eyes in the general direction of Mark, who stood awkwardly in the doorway. ‘Glad you’re here, actually, Frannie,’ Grace went on, leading Frannie through to the kitchen and putting the kettle on. She looked across at Mark, hoping he would take the hint and leave the two women alone. He did, and disappeared out through the patio doors, off to his shed. ‘I have something I’d like to ask you.’

  ‘Oh, how exciting,’ said the old lady, settling herself down in the kitchen chair.

  ‘Tom and I would be honoured if you would be Godmother to one of the twins. To our daughter, actually. I know it’s still a while to go and all that, but I like to be organised, you know me!’

  ‘Oh Grace, darling, that’s so lovely of you to ask. But why would you young things want some old battle-axe like me? God knows I might not even be around to see the little darlings born, let alone do all those Godmotherly things a Godmother’s supposed to do!’

  Grace had thought she might get that reaction from Frannie, but the old lady had been a big part of her life, especially around the time she’d started having problems with Mark. She’d been like a grandmother to her, a calming influence, and given that Frannie would never have grandchildren of her own, it would be wonderful to formally mark her inclusion in her own children’s upbringing. She was a wise old woman, as well as having a wicked sense of humour, and Grace hoped she would be there to see her through the twins’ early years, as a minimum. Knowing Frannie, she’d live to be a hundred and five, and be bright as a button until the day she popped her clogs. The twins could well be grown and gone before Frannie departed this earth.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Frannie began, ‘much as I’d simply love to be Godmother, I will do it as long as you choose two of your fit, young and healthy friends to be proper Godmothers too. Just in case I turn up my toes someday soon, you know. I’ll be your little baby daughter’s Fairy Godmother, how about that? A crazy old lady in her life who will bring a bit of madness and sprinkle fairy dust on her. Every child should have one. I’ll have to get myself a sparkly magic wand and a tutu. And then when she’s a bit older, I’ll teach her how to smoke pot.’ She looked to Grace for a reaction. ‘That last bit was a joke. The tutu wasn’t, though. Gerald would love me in pink tulle.’

  Grace laughed at Frannie’s suggestion. To be honest, the recreational side of things – minus the drugs, of course – was more in keeping with Grace and Tom’s view of the role a Godparent should play in a child’s life. Neither was particularly religious, but they both liked the formality of a Christening ceremony and the idea of marking and celebrating their children’s arrival into the world, and then finding some lovely friends or family members who would mean something special in their lives. ‘Oh thank you Frannie, that’s brilliant.’ She kissed her friend on the cheek and gave her a hug.

  ‘Anyway, I won’t stop for that cuppa just now, Grace, my dear. I just wanted to pop across and make sure you were alright with… well, everything, you know,’ she said, ‘but I can see you are, and what a lovely thing you have asked me, I’m truly honoured.’ She raised her eyebrows in the direction of Mark, who was now back from the shed and hovering with intent in the kitchen. He waved an awkward ‘Hi’ back at her.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it. Better get back to that gorgeous husband of mine. He gets a bit hot when he’s been working in the garden. And I don’t just mean sweaty!’ She smiled, a lascivious twinkle lighting up her eyes.

  ‘Oh Frannie, don’t ever change,’ Grace laughed, embracing the old lady and seeing her out of the front door.

  December 2009

  Grace lived with Tom in his flat in Worcester for a while, but with the babies on the way, they both wanted to move to one of the villages near the school, so when a tiny black and white cottage Grace had always admired came on the market, they put in an offer and secured it with relatively little hassle. It was a perfectly clichéd little ‘chocolate box’ home with wisteria around the door and a slightly larger than postage stamp sized garden, which would be more than enough space for the twins to charge about in for the next few years, especially as they had the park opposite and fields directly behind them.

  ‘Hey, put me down! I’m too fat for this! You’ll break your back,’ Grace screeched as Tom gallantly scooped up his hugely pregnant fiancée and carried her over the threshold. She was amazed his knees had stood up to it. The pair of them glanced around at their new abode and smiled. This house they had bought together ticked all the right boxes, and it had the feel of a happy place to live. It was only a few short months since the lowest point of her life, but now Grace couldn’t be happier. Secure in her relationship with Tom, they had the impending arrival of the twins to look forward to, followed by their wedding day. Life couldn’t be better.

  July 2015

  Grace was enjoying the freedom of the summer holidays; the past year had been more than a little hectic as she’d gone back to working full time once the twins started at her school. The two days a week she’d worked whilst they were still in nursery seemed a dim and distant memory, and so easy, compared to the stresses and strains of a full week of work. She was finding that fitting in the job during the working day was the easy part, but the juggling started when they all left for the day. Lily and Jack were too young to stay for afterschool clubs yet, and so she was unable to stay either, to get on top of her marking and prep like she used to. That all had to be left to the evenings, and fitted in when they had gone to bed. And so most nights she was utterly ravaged by the routine of feeding, bathing and reading stories by the time she could get her books out and get down to work.

  It was only fair that the twins had her full attention when they came home from school; she felt guilty about not spending enough time with them anyway – which she knew was ludicrous really, but it was every parent’s dilemma – and couldn’t even bring herself to park them in front of the TV for an hour to get a little work done before she cooked their tea. Life would be a lot easier next year when they would be allowed to stay for a couple of clubs and she would have an extra hour at the end of school. It would make some small difference, at least.

  ‘You have to stop beating yourself up all the time, Grace,’ Tom had said one night, when the pressures of her mad work/life balance were proving particularly stressful. She had collapsed in tears as they were going to bed, feeling guilty about not giving her all to either the twins or her job. Tom thought she was doing perfectly well at both, but she wouldn’t be told, and thought he was just trying to placate her. ‘You can’t do everything. Look, we’re a bit better off now, aren’t we, so why don’t you increase Karina’s hours a couple of afternoons a week when we go back in September?’

  Karina was the you
ng Polish woman they had taken on to do the cleaning and a bit of ironing when the babies had been small. She was an absolute Godsend; diligent in her cleaning and ironing duties, she had also proved herself a real hit with the twins, and they gazed at her with their big googly baby eyes as she babbled to them and tickled their tummies as they lay in their cots. Grace had hung onto her, just for a couple of hours a week, when she went back to work, to help keep the housework under control, and it seemed now that they could really do with more of her help again. Karina would be thrilled to be asked to do some childcare, Grace was sure of it. It was just her own conscience she needed to convince.

  ‘We can afford it, you’re right. I have to learn to let go a little here. But they’re my babies, I want to be the one to bring them up.’

  ‘Look, a couple of hours a week after school isn’t going to make them think Karina is their mother and not you, is it? Even if all she does is take them to the park for an hour, then bring them back and do their tea, then you can stay on at school till you’re all done, and the time you have at home with them will be quality time, no work, and no stressing about when you’re going to get it done.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Grace said. It wasn’t like she was handing them over to a nanny or anything; it would only be a few hours a week but would make such a difference to their lives. She’d have more time to spend with Tom, too, which would be great. He tended to go into school early and get home late, usually just in time to see Lily and Jack before they went to bed, but at least, most nights, when he did get back he had generally done everything he needed to do for the next day.

  ‘I am right, and don’t you forget it,’ Tom laughed, pulling her closer and stroking her hair.

  ‘Whatever did I do to deserve you?’ she replied, nestling in to his warm and comforting body.

  ‘Nothing. I just know what makes you happy, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re a star, my lovely husband.’ Grace could feel some of the weight of the world lifting from her shoulders already.

  Three - Mark

  July 2015

  ‘Ha, beat you, loser,’ Archie yelled, flinging the PlayStation handset – slightly more aggressively than the situation called for – across the room and, fortunately for him, onto the soft landing of the sofa. The fourteen-year-old had just thrashed his stepdad, yet again, at Just Cause II, one of those bloodthirsty, shooting everyone and everything games that Mark wasn’t entirely sure were appropriate for a child of such a young and impressionable age. Alex had given in, somewhat reluctantly, to the All my friends have it argument on his last birthday, and was pleased that, despite its content, it was an activity that he could share with Mark. There was no point in her trying to join in, she wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with the handset; she just wasn’t programmed with gaming genes. Or enough patience to even want to try.

  ‘You’re really crap at this, Mark,’ Archie spat, making the L for Loser sign on his forehead and skulking off to the kitchen to replenish his drink. Mark stood open-mouthed.

  ‘Hey, young man, what’s all this with the bad language?’ Alex confronted her son as he came through the kitchen door. ‘Go and apologise to Mark now. No one speaks to him like that, least of all you.’

  ‘Sorreee,’ Archie said pointedly, in the vague direction of his stepfather. Alex didn’t think it was worth trawling out the ‘Say it like you mean it’ comment when her son was in a mood like this. He stalked off, the reason for his sudden change of mood still unclear. Teenagers appeared not to need a reason to flip from happy one minute, to monster the next. You simply had to be prepared for whatever they would throw at you.

  ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Alex said. Mark put his arms round his wife’s waist as she stood peeling the vegetables for their Sunday lunch. ‘I really don’t know what’s got into him lately.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise to me, love. It’s just his hormones. I can remember what it was like.’ Mark didn’t want to get his stepson into too much trouble, and tried to gloss over it, hurtful though Archie’s comments might be. Archie had been a mild-mannered thirteen-year-old, and Alex thought naively that maybe her son was going to be the exception to the teenage rule. But on hitting fourteen, almost overnight he had morphed into standard teen mode. His arms seemed to have grown by several inches, and hung disproportionately and gorilla-like at his sides. Good deportment was a thing of the past; slouching seemed to go with the territory now. His hair, once short, dark and gleaming seemed forever to look greasy, despite Alex’s insistence on a daily shower and her presumption that ‘having a shower’ actually involved the use of shampoo and shower gel, not just getting wet, getting out and getting dry again. But the worst trait belonging to this new era in his life was the permanently down-turned mouth, the constant frown he wore, as though the world was ‘so not fair’ and everything he was required to do, ‘so boring.’ Things had never been that straightforward between Mark and Archie, not like they were with the girls, but his apparent coming of age as a fully-fledged teenager had definitely made them worse.

  ‘Don’t worry about silly, grumpy Archie, Daddy. I still love you.’ Nine-year-old Rosie came up from behind, hugging him round the waist, and the three of them stood there, Mark the male filling in a female sandwich, contemplating the whirlwind that was her eldest brother.

  But that was just it. He wasn’t their daddy, even if that was what Rosie called him. To give him his due, he hadn’t tried to be either; he certainly wanted to be a father figure to them all, but he would never force them to accept that he was their ‘new dad’, because he wasn’t. Peter, Alex’s first husband, was a hard act to follow, his premature death putting him high on a pedestal to which no living mortal could ever hope to be elevated. When it came to the children, there was no way Mark would even think about trying to step into Peter’s shoes, but as far as little Rosie was concerned, who had never even met her father, and twelve-year-old Millie, who had very little memory of Peter, Mark was the daddy. He had been around for such a large proportion of their little lives, so it was only natural that he should slip into the role of the father that they loved and looked up to.

  It was very different with Archie; he had been almost six when Peter died. Peter was so ill during his final months that he had been unable to meet even the simplest of his personal needs himself. Archie had helped Alex look after him, in as much as a small child was able, and although she had tried to protect her son from the trauma of seeing his father like that, she would never forget watching Archie spoon-feeding Peter and helping him sip water from the baby beaker he was reduced to using. Although Archie had wanted to help, each night he would cry himself to sleep with frustration at the unfairness of it all. It had broken Alex’s heart.

  The brain tumour had effectively taken his father away from him even before Peter’s death, and Archie still hadn’t really come to terms with that. Alex wasn’t sure he ever would, which made her view episodes like this one with a degree of laxity. Although she couldn’t condone him speaking to other people like that, and wouldn’t stand for extremes of bad behaviour, he had coped with more pain in his life already than any child of that age should ever have to deal with.

  Archie wished he could block out the memory of the shell of a man his father had become. A man who barely recognised his own son when the time came to say goodbye. The memories he wanted to cling onto were the ones of Daddy chasing him down the garden on their mountain bikes, climbing the hill with him, making shelters in the bluebell woods, and snuggling up together in front of a roaring fire and watching the black and white films that Peter had such a penchant for. Those were the memories that Alex tried to perpetuate too, although it was impossible for her to completely overlay the sad memories with thoughts of happier times, no matter how hard she tried. And she tried very hard. Mark didn’t mind all that; Peter was their father, it was important for them to grow up with as much knowledge and memory of him as they could.

  There was a small area on their ups
tairs landing dedicated to Peter, a patch of wall covered in photos of him throughout his life, as a child himself, with his children, and on various trips around the world for research for the travel guides he had written. Alex wanted it to be somewhere the children could go to talk to Daddy. They could write messages to him if they wanted to; there was a little white board with a pen, and it usually bore some kind of positive remark, something happy which had happened to one of them that day.

  Mark didn’t feel at all threatened by this shrine to Peter; he knew Alex was happy and settled with him and glad to have found love again. But Peter had been her first true love, and – even more importantly than that – was the father of her three eldest children, and Mark had no doubt that were he still alive now, Peter and Alex would still be together. There would be absolutely no reason for them not to be; theirs had been an extremely happy marriage. But life often throws us a curve ball, sending us on paths we wouldn’t have expected to follow. For Alex, the next best thing to having Peter here was to have Mark. He knew that was how things were, and had come to terms with it. The only thought which often made him feel sick to the core was that, were Peter still alive, little Bertie wouldn’t exist. That was the hardest thing in the world to get his head round. He adored his three stepchildren, but the love he felt for his own flesh and blood was something else entirely.

  ‘Come on, chicken, let’s go and pick some apples for that crumble you and I are going to make,’ Mark said to Rosie, stroking her long blond hair and breaking the mood. He wanted to give Alex some time alone to have a chat with her eldest, if she felt she needed to. ‘Call Bertie, he can come too.’

  ‘Bertieeeeeee!’ Rosie yelled upstairs, in a voice that would have made a Drill Sergeant envious.

  ‘Coooooommmminggggg!’ Bertie yelled back, and there was a crash and a bump as he climbed down off his bed and hurtled down the stairs.