Mother always overdressed. And she did not disappoint when she arrived for dinner at the flat. Robin had offered to cook for her, and I reckoned that would at least be marginally less embarrassing than taking her to a restaurant.
She was wearing a particularly gaudy polyester creation, too much jewellery and spangled spectacles. The very sight of her made me groan inside. And her mouth turned firmly down at the corners when she took in my jeans and tee shirt, which I am afraid I had chosen to wear quite deliberately. Childish, I suppose. Robin, however, emerged from the bedroom wearing one his smartest suits, shirt and tie. He really was a creep, and I whispered as much in his ear as he ushered a now-beaming mother into the sitting room.
‘Not much point in inviting her here and then upsetting her, is there?’ he hissed back with a smug smile. I slapped him playfully on the backside. He was right, of course. I resolved to try to be polite to my mother for a whole evening.
It was not easy.
‘Wonder how long it will be before you destroy this place, then, Rose,’ she remarked, looking snootily around my still remarkably uncluttered flat which I had managed to keep her out of until now.
I smiled through gritted teeth. The meal was a success. Mother raved over Robin’s home-made mushroom soup followed by grilled Dover soles. Well, there wasn’t much harm even I could have done putting a sole under the grill, I thought to myself grumpily.
Predictably Robin charmed my mother rotten. There was one moment, though, which confounded even him.
‘Have you got a pen, dear?’ asked mother, later on in the evening while Robin was out of the room. She often attempted to put on a really posh voice and usually ended up sounding plain peculiar.
I passed her a biro.
‘No dear, a pen for my blouse,’ replied mother.
Just as I was working this out Robin returned.
‘Could you please find me a pen, Robin?’ mother asked, in a rather exasperated way, as if I was thick, or something.
‘Of course,’ responded Robin, reaching in the breast pocket of his jacket for the Monte Blanc he invariably carried there.
‘Oh no, dear, a pen for my blouse,’ said mother again. ‘I seem to have lost a button...’
I swear this is a true story. How could anyone ever make it up?
Robin looked at me and I looked at Robin. We both started to giggle. Mother treated us to a puzzled frown. Robin pulled himself together first. Maybe it was his public school training. With wonderful control he straightened his features and adroitly changed the subject.
The rest of the evening was without notable incident and mother had to leave fairly early to drive back to Weston-super-Mare, which by then was as much of a relief to Robin as it was to me, I suspected.
For some days afterwards we each found ourselves asking at regular intervals if the other had a pen, before collapsing in hoots of merriment.
In general the weeks leading up to our wedding passed smoothly, at home if not in the job. Robin really was so kind and thoughtful and so understanding. He never seemed to mind the hours I put in at work, just said that it made our time together all the more precious. Certainly the joy of loving him became everything to me, whereas previously, and I suppose I have to admit that Simon had been quite right about it, when push came to shove my job had always come first.
However a couple of weeks before the wedding I sensed Robin back away from me a little. I already knew that he was capable of black moods, yet I suppose most of us are. Life can seem pretty impossible sometimes. But if Robin was unhappy, I was learning, then he withdrew into himself, falling fretfully silent. I would have much preferred the occasional outburst of temper, anything that involved some kind of communication.
Over the space of a few days the periods of morose silence grew longer and longer and I found that I sorely missed the easy companionship which was usually so much a feature of our time together. I sensed that the intelligent thing to do was to leave him alone, let him live through whatever was bugging him, but naturally I could not resist confronting him, and in fact he responded better than I might have expected.
‘Robin, what is it?’ I asked directly at the end of an entire evening together when he had seemed not to want to talk to me at all. ‘Are you having second thoughts? Do you have doubts now about marrying me? Is that it?’
He looked astonished. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking?’ he asked incredulously.
I shrugged. ‘To be honest, Robin, I haven’t known what to think.’
When he spoke again his voice was intense, his manner quite forceful. ‘Good God, Rose, possibly the one thing in the world I have no doubts about at all is you and my feelings for you.’
‘Well what is wrong then?’ I persisted.
He sighed. Suddenly and unusually he looked his forty-five years, and very tired indeed.
‘You have to realise the wrench it has been for me to hand Abri over to strangers,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it all gets too much. I feel that I can’t just live for a time twenty-five years hence when I might get it back, you were right about that. I may not even be alive...’
His voice tailed away. I studied him anxiously. There was real pain in his eyes. I thought he must be near to tears.
‘I’ve left so much behind, Rose,’ he said. ‘And then there’s so much I wish I could leave behind. So much death and sorrow.’
I could feel my own tears welling up. ‘Oh Robin, I just can’t bear to see you hurting,’ I blurted out.
He managed a small sad smile.
‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he responded. ‘It’s just that I come with rather a lot of baggage, I’m afraid.’
‘I just want you to be happy, want us to be happy, that’s all,’ I told him a bit pathetically. But this man had such control over my emotions, over my whole being. If he was unhappy, then so was I. He reached out for me and touched my cheek.
‘I try very hard not to think about the past, and most of the time with you I barely have to try at all. Just now and again I can’t help remembering.’
I took his hand in mine and kissed his fingers, breathing in the smell of him just as I always did when I was close to him.
‘I’ll try not to be such a terrible moody sod, too,’ he said. ‘I will be happy, Rose. We will be happy. I promise you.’
Then he smiled the to-die-for smile. I had been in love with my ex-husband Simon. Things may have gone badly pear-shaped in the end, but there was no doubt that I had been deeply in love with him for many years. Never before Robin Davey had a man been able to turn me into a blancmange.
A couple of days later Todd Mallett called in to my office. It was the first time we had spoken since he had balled me out on the phone for not telling him about me and Robin. He seemed to have forgiven me, though.
‘It’s that nasty con job you guys have been working on,’ he said conversationally, and I guessed he was referring to the moody builders who had been operating right across our district for months and whose unpleasant speciality was tricking old ladies out of their life’s savings. ‘Think they’ve been at it in North Devon now, just had a meeting with your team to touch base. Thought I’d look in on you.’
‘I see,’ I said non-committedly, wondering what he really wanted.
‘Reckoned you might be interested in this.’ He put a file on my desk. ‘It’s a case of suspected child abuse our boys have just started to look into. It could help you to compare notes with the Stephen Jeffries case.’
I opened the file and looked at it briefly. The case concerned an eleven-year-old girl who had allegedly been molested by a youth club leader. At a glance I could see no possible relevance to whatever had happened to Stephen Jeffries, and knowing how sharp Todd Mallett was I suspected that he was pretty damn sure of that too.