Undertaking Love

Chapter Forty-Two




Gabe wandered along Beckleberry High Street with his head bowed against the snow and his hands shoved deep into his jean pockets.

Ahead of him loomed the boarded-over windows and smoke-damaged walls of the burnt-out funeral parlour. He couldn’t look. Melanie hadn’t only torched the bricks and mortar of his career. She’d taken with it his hopes and dreams, his achievements to date, and his plans for the future.

‘Time to grow up, Gabe.’

If nothing else, he’d certainly achieved that. Maybe not in the successful, admirable way that would have made his father proud, but his naïve, rose-tinted glasses had gone up in smoke along with his business.

He didn’t let his mind linger on the funeral parlour. He wasn’t here for that today. He turned before he reached it and walked up the chapel path instead. He wasn’t surprised to find the front door unlocked. Marla wasn’t likely to let the small matter of Christmas keep her away from work.

‘Marla?’

His voice echoed around the cold chamber of the chapel. He hesitated, and reached inside his coat to double check the small parcel was still there.

The fast click-clack of heels against stone told him that she’d heard him, but it wasn’t Marla who appeared through the stone archway seconds later.

It was her mother, dressed in a ridiculous gold dress with a look of complete panic on her face.

‘Thank God!’ she squawked, and crossed herself towards the stained glass window. ‘Who ever said this place was deconsecrated was wrong. This way.’

She turned and dashed back through the archway. Gabe glanced backwards in confusion, in case someone else had come in after him, but found no one. He scratched his head and followed her.

The reason for Cecilia’s odd behaviour became obvious when he reached the kitchen and caught sight of Emily, heavily pregnant and doubled up over the table. Relief flooded her face when she saw Gabe. Whether it was because her contraction had ended or because he was there, he wasn’t entirely sure.

‘I can’t drive her to the hospital because I’ve had a glass of sherry,’ Cecilia wailed.

Emily gulped and held up four fingers behind her back to Gabe, the almost empty bottle of sherry on the kitchen table verifying Emily’s estimations.

Great. One in labour, one half-cut, and Marla nowhere to be seen.

Gabe sighed. As usual in Beckleberry, things weren’t going to plan, but life as an undertaker had taught him to stay cool in a crisis, and Gabe could see that Emily badly needed someone to take charge. He put his arm around her shoulders.

‘How far apart are your contractions?’

He might be more accustomed to dealing with death rather than birth, but he’d grown up in a huge Irish family where pregnant women and babies were part of the fabric of life.

‘About four minutes, I think?’

‘Okay.’

Gabe thought fast. He wasn’t sure, but four minutes sounded urgent and the hospital was at least twenty minutes away on a normal day. And today wasn’t a normal day. It was Christmas Eve, and there was a snowstorm outside.

‘Do you have a car, Cecilia?’

Cecilia put down the sherry glass she’d just refilled and shook her head.

‘I do.’ Emily groaned as another contraction started to build. ‘The keys are in here.’ She shoved her handbag across the table at him.

‘Right then. Good. Here’s what were going to do. Cecilia? You lock up and fetch Emily’s coat.’

Marla’s mother shot off, and Gabe put both hands on Emily’s shoulders.

‘Okay Emily.’ He locked his gaze on hers. ‘We’re going to get you to the hospital. You just try to stay as calm as you can, and breathe through the contractions when they come.’

She nodded, and clutched his elbows as she panted through the pain.

‘Thank you,’ she managed, as the contraction eased. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Gabe.’

He smiled and helped her put on the coat Cecilia proffered.

‘Can you walk?’

‘I think so.’

Gabe opened the back door and stepped outside, then held his hand out to help Emily down the step.

‘Careful, it’s slippery out here.’

Together they negotiated the snowy pathway. Another contraction hit as they reached Emily’s Nissan Micra.

‘That’s it sweetheart, you’re doing great.’

Gabe held her up as her fingers squeezed his hard enough to snap the bones.

‘Has anyone called Tom?’ he muttered over his shoulder to Cecilia.

‘Answerphone,’ she whispered back, with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

Gabe thrust Emily’s bag at Cecilia as she climbed into the back of the car. ‘Emily’s mobile is in there. Keep trying. Tell him to meet us at the hospital.’

He glanced at Emily, who he’d finally managed to maneuver into the passenger seat in between contractions.

‘And tell him he’d better make it quick.’



Marla and Jonny collapsed into the car in a fit of euphoric giggles.

‘That was inspired,’ Jonny said, as his phone started to jingle out a Christmas version of YMCA.

‘You are a walking, talking cliché,’ Marla laughed as she turned the key in the ignition, then gasped as the clock glowed neon blue on the dashboard.

‘We’re going to have to step on it if the County Hotel are going to get their glitter balls,’ she said as Jonny hung up the phone.

He shook his head. ‘Forget about the glitter balls. That was your mother. Emily’s gone into labour at the chapel.’

‘Oh my God! With just my mother for company?’

Marla gripped the wheel in horror at the idea of her mother as a midwife. She couldn’t imagine anyone less competent. Jonny laid a hand over hers on the gear stick as she threw the car into reverse.

‘Wait. They’re not at the chapel anymore. They’re on their way to the hospital.’

‘In the name of all that is holy, tell me my mother isn’t driving.’

Marla could barely breathe. Her mother couldn’t drive on the left if her life depended on it, let alone the lives of Emily and her unborn child.

‘You’re mother isn’t driving.’

She sagged with relief and flicked on the wipers to clear the fresh snow from the windscreen. ‘Who is then?’

Jonny pursed his lips and rubbed his hands together with excitement.

‘Angel Gabriel.’



Gabe pushed Emily’s Micra as hard as he dared through the snowy lanes towards the hospital. He was well aware that every four minutes had become more like every two minutes, and Cecilia’s constant nasal chatter from the back seat was doing more to hype Emily up than calm her down.

At last the lights of the hospital loomed into view through the swipes of the windscreen wipers, and he screeched to a halt outside maternity. He dashed inside to grab a wheelchair from the foyer, then dashed back and flung Emily’s door open.

‘Ready?’

She nodded with a wince of pain and held her arms out to him.

Gabe had never known relief like the moment when a flurry of nurses crowded in and took charge of Emily. One look at her contorted face had been enough to galvanise them into action. In a blink Cecilia, Gabe and Emily were hurried down a corridor into a room full of scary-looking lights and metal equipment strapped to the walls. A small woman in a dark blue uniform looked him over expectantly.

‘Right then, dad. Let’s get Emily up on the bed so we can check what’s going on down there.’

‘Oh, I’m not the father,’ Gabe said, thoroughly alarmed.

‘No, I am.’

Everyone turned at the sound of a new voice in the room.

‘Thanks Gabe. I’ll take it from here.’

Emily burst into noisy tears.

‘Tom. Thank God.’



Snowflakes settled on Gabe’s shoulders as he leaned against the wall outside the maternity unit. He was frozen, but it was preferable to the cloying heat of the waiting area and having Cecilia snoozing on his shoulder.

Why did things never go as he expected them to around here?

This was the first time he’d set foot near Beckleberry since the day after the fire, and already his well-laid plans had been ripped to shreds. His phone bipped in his pocket, and he grinned as he scanned the predictable message from Dan. Everything else in his life might shift like quick sand, but Dan would always be Jack the lad.

‘Pub. Now. Wall 2 Wall totty.’



In the hot pub, which was packed out with tinsel-draped revellers, Dan felt his mobile vibrate in the back pocket of his jeans. He reached down for it without disturbing Trisha, the comely barmaid, who at that very moment was in the process of delivering his Christmas snog with considerable tonsil-probing skill.

He flicked the message onto the screen and squinted at it over her naked shoulder.

Sorry bud. Sink a Guinness for me. Mercy dash to the hospital with Emily.

Dan read it twice over then shrugged Trisha off unapologetically and shouldered his way through the crowd, his jacket and cigarettes forgotten on the table behind him.

He had to get to the hospital.



Gabe stood in the shadows and watched Marla skate across the snowy car park towards him. He shook his head at her thoroughly unsuitable choice of footwear. Did the woman possess anything else except high heels? Her hair swirled around her pink cheeks, and her laugh danced on the crystal cold air as she clung to Jonny’s arm – not that he was much of an anchor for her in those ridiculous cowboy boots.

He liked Jonny a lot, but at that moment he’d have loved nothing more than for the other man to disappear in a puff of smoke. For it to be his arm that Marla clutched, and his jokes that brought out that big laugh.

She drew closer, and he could so easily have stepped out of the darkness and called her name, but fear held him still as she rushed by. Besides, it was bloody freezing. Romantic as the notion was, he didn’t want to say what he needed to in an icy car park.



Marla spotted her mother straight away. She was difficult to miss, snoring and resplendent in her gold dress with her shoes kicked off underneath her chair. She was cuddled up against the water cooler, and behind her, a rather sparsely decorated Christmas tree flashed in time with the piped Christmas carols.

‘Christ. It seems the world’s oldest fairy has fallen off the top of the tree,’ Jonny tittered, but Marla was too distracted to laugh with him. Her eyes skittered around the room in search of a familiar dark head, her entire body braced with the anticipation of seeing Gabe again. The disappointment of his absence felt rather like the entire hospital had crumbled on her head.

She touched her mother’s shoulder.

‘Mom?’

Cecilia woke up and detached herself from the side of the water cooler in an undignified manner that involved drool and lop-sided hair.

‘Marla, darling, you’re here.’

Her eyes slid from Marla to Jonny, and then flickered around reception.

‘Where’s Gabriel gone?’

Jonny glanced at Marla’s stricken expression and came to her rescue.

‘I was just about to ask you the same question.’

Cecilia frowned. ‘Oh. Well, he was here, and then …’

‘You fell into a drunken stupor and have no idea when he left?’ Jonny supplied in a sympathetic voice, and batted his eyelids at Cecilia with a knowing smirk.

Marla sank down into the seat next to her mother and dropped her head in her hands.

She was too late.

It had been too much to expect that he’d still be here, and the flame of hope within her fizzled out.

He’d gone.



On the other side of the glass entrance doors, Gabe watched Marla drop down dejected next to her mother.

What was wrong?

Had something happened to Emily, or the baby?

He couldn’t stand it any longer.

He knocked the snow out of his hair and went inside.