Undertaking Love Page 0,95

to her mother’s question was quite obviously yes, still she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud; instead, she nodded.

‘I’m in a mess, mom. Over the last few months I’ve poured all my energy into hating him. I wouldn’t know how to love him.’

Cecilia frowned. ‘Why not?’

Marla looked at her mother. The woman called herself a sex therapist. Did she really not know? She sighed heavily.

‘Because all I know of love and marriage is what I’ve learned from you.’

Cecilia laid a hand over Marla’s on the table, and sat in silence for a minute or two. ‘You think I like being this way, Marla?’

Marla chewed her lip. ‘I don’t know, mom.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess you’re just not the settling kind.’

Cecilia threw her hands up in the air with an exasperated laugh.

‘Is that really what you think of me?’

Marla didn’t answer, and instead reached for her wine glass.

Cecilia rubbed her chin.

‘I was too young when I married your father,’ she said, quietly. ‘We were a terrible match, but I loved him too much to see it at the time.’

Marla looked up and waited. Her mother never talked about the past.

‘And then when he …’

Cecilia waved her heavily ringed hand around to infer intimacies she’d never shared with her daughter.

‘When he what, Mom?’

Cecilia studied the scrubbed pine tabletop and sighed.

‘He was a good father, Marla, but he wasn’t a very good husband. Not long after our first wedding anniversary he slept with his research assistant. And our cleaner.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘The nanny was the last straw.’

Marla stared at her mother in shock. She’d been too young at the time to understand the goings-on in the grown-up world around her, and from that day to this her mother had never spoken a bad word about her father.

‘I never knew.’

Cecilia nodded and patted Marla’s hand. ‘Good. And I wouldn’t be telling you now if I didn’t think it would help you to hear it.’

Marla looked at her mother with new eyes, and finally saw behind the confident, self-centred butterfly facade.

‘I spent the next however-many years ricocheting from one man to the next, always trying to fill the hole your father left in my heart.’

Regret rang clear in her mother’s small voice.

‘And did you?’

Please say yes, because I can’t live with this hole in mine.

Cecilia sighed. ‘You know what, honey? I lost sight of what love was after a while, and even when I finally found it again I somehow managed to let it slip through my fingers.’

Marla suddenly remembered the way her mother had lit up when she saw Robert again that night at Franco’s.

‘It’s not too late, is it?’ she whispered.

‘For me? It probably is, yes.’ Cecilia’s smile was bittersweet. ‘But not for you, Marla. Gabriel is a fine man. If you love him, be brave and grab him.’

Marla was lost for words. She’d invested so much time and effort into making sure she didn’t tread in her mother’s footsteps, but all along her mother had been trying to recapture the only true love she’d ever known.

Who knew? If her father had been a faithful man, her parents might have stayed together, saving her mother from a lifetime of discontent.

And Marla from a lifetime of confusion.

Her head ached.

All of her long-held beliefs about love and marriage were on shifting sands, and somewhere in amongst it all, she knew that she might have missed her one chance for happiness.

Chapter Forty-One

‘If I hear White Christmas one more time I’m going to make like Van Gogh and cut my own ears off.’

Jonny swished down the aisle in his purple satin flares to blast the Scissor Sisters in defiance of the season.

It was a little after midday on Christmas Eve, an hour since they’d waved off their final bride and groom of the year. Not that Jonny could complain that it had been a staid, traditional affair. Anything but; the only thing white about the wedding had been the snow that dusted the ground outside. The happy couple had made a surprisingly convincing Agnetha and Bjorn, and Marla’s eyes ached from a morning surrounded by wall-to-wall flower power and kipper ties. Unlike Jonny, she was quite content to listen to the mellow sound of Bing Crosby; her ears ached from one too many renditions of Abba’s ‘Oh I do, I do, I do, I do, I do’.

Emily looked up from her seat next to the aisle. She was dressed in a swirl-patterned maxi dress that drew attention to her massive bump. She crossed her