Undertaking Love

Chapter Forty




Cecilia poured two glasses of wine and put them down on the kitchen table along with the open bottle ready for the refills. She had a feeling they were going to need them.

She stood behind Marla’s chair and stroked her hair for a few seconds. She’d listened to her daughter cry herself to sleep every night for at least two weeks, and she wasn’t prepared to do it again tonight.



Marla didn’t want her hair stroked, and she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to go to bed.

‘What’s wrong, honey?’ her mother asked.

Marla fiddled with the belt of her dressing gown as Cecilia pulled up a chair beside her.

‘Nothing,’ she sniffed.

‘Nothing doesn’t make you cry as much as you have been these past few weeks.’

Marla’s shoulders slumped, defeated. She didn’t have enough fight left in her to deny the truth any longer. Gabe had laid his soul bare that day in the chapel, and she’d sent him away because she’d been too scared to be honest with him, or with herself.

‘It’s Gabe.’

Cecilia nodded and lifted her daughter’s chin.

‘You love him.’

Even though the answer 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.