Second Chances Read online

  SECOND CHANCES

  Minna Howard

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  About this Book

  About the Author

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  www.ariafiction.com

  About Second Chances

  Succumbing to a rather clichéd midlife crisis, Dan Haywood swaps his family for an expensive red sports car and a younger woman. After 24 years of marriage, his wife Sarah is left to pick up the pieces.

  Trying her best to re-style her life, comfort hurt children, make time for 'helpful' friends and maintain her burgeoning career as a dress designer, Sarah feels pulled in a hundred directions. And it doesn’t help that obstacles - mostly in the form of other middle-aged men - seem to conspire against her.

  Proud of herself for moving house and starting to build an independent life, she is shocked when Robert Maynard, her rather dashing new next-door neighbour, insists that the house was promised to him. Now she is destined to be pulled into his life by events beyond her control.

  After one failed marriage, will she be able to find happiness again? And do second chances really come to those who wait? This book was previously published as The Orchid Lover under the name Mary De Laszlo

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Second Chances

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  About Minna Howard

  Also by Minna Howard

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  Copyright

  With much love and good luck to Oliver, Tricia, Thomas and Sam who are moving house

  One

  ‘Smile please. Say sex.’ The photographer smiled himself to show them what to do, his tombstone teeth flashing in his too pink face.

  Sarah smiled obediently. She must appear cheerful, so people seeing this group photograph later would not remark on how miserable she looked. Looking miserable always added years to your face anyway.

  Matthew Lawrence Bingham, the newly christened member of the Anglican Church, screamed loudly. Evie, his mother, vainly tried to soothe him. He was far too young to know that you had to put on a show for the outside world. This christening party was almost the same size as their wedding barely a year ago, but the Binghams were rich, liked to flash it about a bit, and Evie, Sarah’s god-daughter, had married Larry, their only son.

  Sarah studied Larry’s parents. His father had plump, roving hands that were as pesky as a persistent wasp to any young woman. He was well polished by wealth. He had a shiny face, shiny hair and a shiny Italian suit. Larry’s mother was expensively dressed in some designer creation better suited to a film premiere, not to mention someone younger. Under her impeccable make-up lurked a careworn anxiety.

  Despite all their money, they are middle-aged like the rest of us, Sarah thought grumpily. Too young to be old, too old to be young.

  Kate, Evie’s mother and her friend since childhood, came over to her.

  ‘Bit over-the-top,’ she said, in an undertone, glancing round at the expensively over done up room.

  ‘A touch of Florida meeting Notting Hill, I’d say,’ Sarah whispered back, making Kate giggle.

  ‘I’m sorry Dan can’t be here; he would have had some choice remarks to make,’ Kate said. ‘Does he really work on a Sunday?’

  ‘No, he had just made plans to…’ What had he made plans to do? If she couldn’t find a quick, plausible answer, Kate would suspect something was wrong and interrogate her. To her relief, another friend approached them and Sarah was saved from having to answer.

  Daniel, her husband of twenty-four years, had changed. It was nothing earth-shattering; he probably did just have too much work, which made him so preoccupied. Times were difficult as there seemed to be so much economic uncertainly today.

  Dan used to love parties, believing it was crucial to have a good time with friends to alleviate the tensions of the office. But recently he’d made excuses not to go out so often, saying there was something on at the office, or he had a client to see.

  ‘Christenings are not really my scene,’ he’d said with a self-conscious laugh, seemingly forgetting how they had enjoyed themselves at three last year. ‘Especially one the Binghams would put on.’

  She wanted him here with her in this over-decorated house – everything that could be was tasselled, frilled or gilded. She wanted to share it with him, joke about it on the way home. Hearing her description second-hand wouldn’t be half so amusing – and that was assuming he’d listen to her at all.

  A toast was drunk and there was loud laughter, faces turned towards the child. Mechanically, Sarah lifted her glass, aching with misery. Dan didn’t seem to want to communicate with her any more, share bits of gossip from the office, pass on news from friends he saw during his working day. He was always watching an important programme on television, or reading some vital article in the newspaper. When she talked to him, however cheerfully and lovingly, his face took on an expression of irritation, edged with boredom.

  ‘Great to see you, Sarah! Dan not here?’ Colin, an old friend, came up and kissed her.

  ‘No, he’s tied up with something else.’ She smiled; hoping she looked relaxed, happy, not worried out of her wits at the way Dan had changed over these last months.

  Naturally, she’d thought of everything, her imagination charging along in overdrive. Another woman, a mortal illness, depression, imminent bankruptcy, even redundancy and him pretending to go to work each day, as Gina’s husband had done. But when she’d asked him if something was wrong at work or at home, he’d become offended, as if she had insulted him; angry, as if she’d accused him of a crime. She had asked him again last week, when he had said he couldn’t come here today.

  ‘Why should anything be wrong, just because I don’t want to come to a christening?’

  Why, indeed? After all, they weren’t joined at the hip.

  When she got home some hours later, bursting to tell him about the whole charade in glorious Technicolour detail, he was not there. Where was he? He always used to ring or text her and tell her where he was; leave loving, jokey messages on her mobile or the phone at home. The answerphone sat dead and silent in the empty house, no little red light winking to tell her someone had called. Hideous pictures of twisted metal and his broken body loomed up to frighten her. It was past eight o’clock – if he had met up with friends, wouldn’t he have let her know? She checked her email on her mobile; there were no messages from him at all.

  When she heard him open the front door an hour later, she jumped up to greet him, all anxiety gone, words almost falling over each other in her relief.

  ‘And you should have seen the cake, Dan, big enough to skate on! And they had satin boxes of sugared almonds, like the French do, and a quartet playing discreetly in the background.’ Then she stopped. He looked awful, his back bowed, deep lines biting into that once boyish face. He could not meet her eyes.

  ‘What is it, darling?’ She held on to him. ‘Whatever it is I’m here for you. We’ll face it t
ogether.’ She pulled all her reserves of energy around her, making a mental list of all the disasters that could have struck him.

  ‘It’s nothing, really. I’m just tired.’ He extricated himself from her grasp, as if she were a stranger who had accosted him on the street. He went straight up to bed, leaving her bleating foolishly in the hall about getting him a drink, a hot-water bottle, anything he wanted.

  ‘Just leave me alone.’ His voice wavered on the edge of panic.

  ‘All right,’ she whispered, not knowing what to do with this new man, this new direction their life was taking.

  She should have guessed. How true that cliché was, the wife being the last to know. Was it because they buried their heads in the comfort of their homes, assuring themselves frantically that everything was really all right? Or had she been too smug with their relationship, imagining that he would always love her, would never stray?

  *

  Sarah could not watch Dan go as he left the house – the home they had built together – for the last time. She heard the now familiar throb of his new, red sports car, the little cough as it paused at the junction then picked up and spun away. He had driven away with her dreams, the very essence of her being, leaving the remnants of their family scattered like broken treasures at her feet.

  She did not cry. She imagined her tear-ducts as dried-up riverbeds; deep grooves cut in the earth, where water had once run. There were surely no more tears left in her, only the empty husk of pain deep in her chest. Twenty-four years of marriage gone in a moment.

  She had not seen it coming. She acknowledged that Dan had changed during the last months. He’d been bad-tempered, late coming home from the office tired and needing hours of sleep. When she’d questioned him he’d said there were a lot of problems at work, which she accepted. You only had to read the papers or listen to the news to know that. She had not seriously thought their marriage was in danger, that he wanted to walk away from it as if it were some tumour or bad habit he wanted to be rid of.

  ‘Not you and Dan, surely you’d be the last people…’ was repeated again and again by their friends and family, like a hideous refrain.

  Was she guilty of being too busy with the children, the house, the garden and her job? But if she had left it all to run itself, given all her waking moments to Dan, would he have loved her better? Or, would he, as she suspected, have been irritated by her molly-coddling? Should she have taken more time to question him, winkle out his fears? But every time she had tried to coax him into confiding in her, he had snapped at her, angry she should suggest that he had anything to say.

  Perhaps a wife could never win; for a middle-aged man, she’d learnt from him in these last weeks, didn’t seem to feel loved whatever you did for him. He could not see that the meals you lovingly prepared, the home you kept warm and clean, the way you put yourself out for him, was love.

  Love was not just having sex round the clock; love was not even a taut young body with pert breasts to stir the ageing loins. But he didn’t seem to know that. Their wives’ battle-scarred bodies, the slightly drooping breasts, the flabby stomachs that once held their children, reminded them of their own ageing bodies. This physical preoccupation seemed to eclipse other important things, such as shared tastes and interests over the years, loyalty and honour. Sadly it had ever been thus, some ageing men seeking to relight their fires with ever-younger women. They searched for lust, not love, but she had not thought Dan – sensible, solid Dan – would throw away twenty-four years of a successful marriage merely for lust.

  The room was filled with photographs. Laughing babies, held by her and Dan when they were young and happy. Small children, extra-polished in school uniforms for the school photograph. Dan at his fiftieth birthday party, grinning in a silly hat. Tim, tanned and glowing on a skiing holiday. Polly, unnaturally serious on her horse. One of them all, taken last June, happy and windswept on the beach in Portugal. Pictures of a life, her life, their life, now destroyed by Dan’s roller-coasting libido and his wish to ‘live while he had the chance’.

  He’d looked so foolish, she couldn’t help thinking that; might even have said it – anyway, she must have shown it in her expression, making him furious, got him shouting about how she wanted to stay cocooned in her domestic rut while the whole world rolled on outside without them. Only recently had she noticed that age seemed to have caught up with him. He was seven years older than she was, but he was still attractive – had his own teeth and hair, as he used to joke. But a man in his fifties, with a slight paunch and greying hair, does not look good in tight chinos and bright shirts which his own son would rather die than wear. As for the sports car – these older men might seem youthful driving them, but getting in and out of them with their bad backs and creaking knees destroys this youthful image. Bent half double on the pavement, slowly and painfully straightening up, knocks all the glamour into the gutter. Dan wasn’t the only man who’d done it. Philip and Garth, two of their friends, had done the same thing, leaving behind bewildered, shattered families.

  ‘I won’t leave you penniless. I know my responsibilities,’ he said piously. ‘You can keep the house for the moment. I’ll give you enough for my share of the bills. Of course, if you sell the house to buy something smaller,’ he’d smiled, as if he were being reasonable, ‘then we’ll share the proceeds. Property has gone up enormously over the years.’ Guilt money, paying her off to make him feel better.

  ‘Where will you live?’ Why had she asked that, put herself out for more pain?

  He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘I, well… we have a flat. It belongs to Nina.’

  Nina. Now she had a name, it was worse. When it was just ‘a woman I’ve met in the office, we’ve fallen in love’, it had been easier, as if he had contracted chicken-pox and it would soon be over and the real Dan would emerge again from this frightening chrysalis, and they would go on as before. Knowing her name made it sound final.

  He couldn’t kiss her goodbye, even on her cheek, not even shake her hand. He, who had known her body more intimately than anyone else, through all their youth and middle age. He, who had shared the birth of their children, had laughed and cried with her, now treated her as an awkward stranger.

  She was like a rudderless ship cast loose in a vast and troubled sea, bereft of the tugs that had been attached to her for so long. The children, Dan, his office colleagues, their lifestyle, the friends they had made together, who might now take sides and not stay with her. All this had gone with his leaving. Last month she had known who she was; who was she now?

  The cheerful tone of her mobile mocked her in the lonely house. It was Linda, who lived two doors down.

  ‘I saw him go. You must be feeling dreadful. Shall I come round?’

  ‘Oh, no, thanks… I’ve things to do.’ She didn’t want Linda with her round, cheerful face, her questing eyes, searching out her reactions. Her bracing ‘You’re bound to find someone else, you’re still quite young and attractive.’ Why did people always assume you could recover from the loss of one person by finding another?

  ‘You mustn’t be alone to brood, that’s fatal. I’ll come round, make you a coffee – or something stronger – and we’ll work out things to do. I know you have a job but remember you said you always wanted to learn bridge, and I need help with Save the Children and—’

  ‘No, thanks. I…’ She felt bulldozed by Linda’s manic cheerfulness. She didn’t want to learn bridge, help with a charity, even sit down at the kitchen table with Linda over a mug of coffee, or start drinking wine mid-morning. She wanted to creep off out of sight to lick her wounds. She felt alienated from normal life. Even going to work felt impossible now, as if she had lost half of herself and could not function alone.

  ‘Now, Sarah, we’re all with you. Men are shits, they bleed you dry when you’re useful to them, and the minute they no longer need you they’re off making fools of themselves with younger women.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.’ Sarah click
ed off her mobile. She didn’t want to go down that road, littered with shitty men who’d hurt women, though somehow the once decent Dan had become a shit. She hated him for the destruction he had caused, but she was not a man-hater.

  She drifted into the living room; a square, delphinium-blue room with muted yellow sofa and chairs; one chair rather daringly done up in bright yellow with blue cornflowers scattered across it brightened up the winter light. She’d chosen the material herself, trawling through the square blocks of safe colours first, then suddenly seeing this one in a display on the wall. It had called to her like a summer’s day, like the heady scent of flowers in a Mediterranean market, dazzling, and rich, lifting her up from her usual classical taste. Dan hadn’t liked it; too brash, he’d said. He preferred beige, or old gold.

  Her mobile rang noisily, making her jump. Not another concerned neighbour; she couldn’t stand it. She was weary of her friends’ and neighbours’ kindness, their knowing looks, their sympathy. How much did they know that she didn’t? Had they seen the cracks widen to chasms in their marriage before she had? Had they seen Dan frolicking with this girl not much older than his own daughter?

  The ring was strident, demanding as a baby’s cry. Bracing herself, she picked it up.

  ‘Mum, it’s me. How are you?’

  ‘Polly. I’m fine. What are you up to?’

  ‘Lots. Look, will you mind dreadfully if I don’t come home this weekend? There’s a party and someone – well, a bloke, of course – who’s going and…’

  Her heart smote in two as if battered on an anvil. ‘Of course not, darling. You have fun. Might you manage next weekend?’

  ‘’Fraid not, a gang of us are going over to Boulogne to buy some booze for Emma’s party; then there’s exams, but maybe after that. No, definitely after that.’

  ‘When you can, darling.’ She hoped she sounded as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Held back that yawning terror of being alone for so long. There would be no one to shop for, to cook for, no heaps of dirty laundry to transform into neat, fresh-smelling piles. She, who’d always grumbled at such tasks, now longed for the stability of them.