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‘That’s sad. I kind of get the sense from Ben that they had a troubled relationship,’ Liz said.
‘Mmm. I shouldn’t wonder. So many young men grow up in the shadows of their fathers, and Jim Douglas was one of those men who was obsessed with perfection. He lost his wife, Gillian, when Ben was young. Packed the poor boy off to boarding school. That was just what was done in some families, of course. I expect the same thing was done to Jim when he was young. Just six when they get sent away, many of them. Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s very young to be away from your parents so permanently.’ Liz felt a pang of sadness for Ben, and his father. ‘Neither of them ever stood a chance.’
‘Well. It can make you resilient, I suppose.’ Gretchen raised an eyebrow. ‘Some sink, some swim. I don’t wonder that boarding school helped make Jim Douglas as hard a man as he was. But Ben… well. He’s a very different character.’
‘He told me he doesn’t really want to be CEO. I think he’d rather be a farmer, or a painter or something.’ Liz smiled, thinking of Ben. ‘He’s good with people, but he doesn’t have the killer instinct. And he doesn’t want to put the hours in, in the way that you have to, to make a company a success. Especially in an industry as competitive as the one we work in.’
‘You’d make a good CEO. I can tell that already.’ Gretchen sipped her coffee, giving Liz a shrewd look.
‘I’d like to. And, yes, I think I could do it.’ Liz wasn’t embarrassed to admit that. It had always been her ambition.
‘Good. Then you will, I’m sure.’ Gretchen nodded. ‘Now. Tell me about why you really came here. I know it wasn’t just for a job, because someone like you would never come to Loch Cameron unless you were escaping something.’ She sat back in her chair. ‘You might as well tell me. And, if you think I’m going to tell anyone, look around. Half of these old duffers are deaf, anyway.’
‘You don’t miss much, Gretchen.’ Liz ate some of the pastry she’d chosen for herself, thinking about what to say. She found that she did want to tell Gretchen about the IVF, and about Paul. There was something about the woman that inspired trust.
FOURTEEN
‘I always had a picture in my mind. You know, of the family I wanted,’ Liz began. She looked nervously at Gretchen, her rational mind wondering whether it was okay to open up, but Gretchen patted her hand reassuringly.
‘Yes. We all grow up with that, I think,’ the older woman said. ‘Either society makes us think we want it, or we really do.’
‘Well, I really did. Do,’ Liz corrected herself. ‘Unfortunately, my body had other ideas. I couldn’t get pregnant. I had a long-term partner, Paul. When we met, we knew that was what we both wanted: two kids, a house in the suburbs, security. You know? All the things you’re supposed to want.’
‘Indeed.’ Gretchen looked wistful.
‘Yeah. Well, it turned out that I couldn’t get pregnant without help, so we started IVF,’ Liz went on. ‘The first round didn’t work, but we were hopeful. And Paul was so lovely. He really looked after me. I’d get home from work, and he’d run me a bath, he’d have dinner ready. He’d rub my feet, give me back massages, everything. Hug me when I felt tired and overwhelmed.’
‘He sounds like a real find,’ Gretchen observed.
‘He was. Is, I suppose,’ Liz sighed. ‘But we did three rounds of fertility treatment and it still hadn’t happened. And in that time, I had two pretty distressing miscarriages. I’m sorry. Do you really want to hear about this?’ She stopped herself, feeling anxiety bloom in her chest. Yet, it was a relief to talk about all of it.
She’d talked to Sharon, especially over the past year, about the IVF and her worries about Paul who had grown more and more distant. But, though she and Sharon had agreed to stay in touch, Liz felt they’d lost touch a little recently. It was understandable, seeing as she’d moved more than two hours away, and they no longer worked with each other, so it wasn’t as easy to grab a quick coffee and catch up between meetings. Life was busy; she knew Sharon was always juggling her own family and a frantic work life.
‘I’m happy to listen.’ Gretchen bit off one side of a biscuit and regarded Liz with a kind expression. ‘Honestly, dear, you have to remember that, at this point in my life, there’s not much I haven’t heard before. And I can tell you that there’s absolutely nothing that can shock me anymore, either. So, you’re in safe hands.’
‘Okay.’ Liz gave Gretchen a grateful smile. ‘It’s good to have someone to talk to that isn’t a work colleague, too. It would be really inappropriate to tell them this. But still…’
‘Of course. I was the same, when I was working.’ Gretchen nodded. ‘I worked mostly with men, then, and as far as they were concerned, I didn’t have a personal life. I couldn’t be a woman, to them. In many ways, I sympathised with Margaret Thatcher at the time. She was a woman working with a lot of chauvinist pigs, of course. So, she had to be stronger than all of them. The Iron Lady.’
‘Were you the Iron Lady of the book world?’ Liz wiped her eyes, where a tear was threatening to leak out. ‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘Oh, yes, I was.’ Gretchen chuckled. ‘I had a couple of women friends I worked with, as time went on. By the time I retired, things were a lot better in terms of women having decision-making roles in the industry. But, when I started as an editor, I had a choice: be a woman, and have all the men I worked with continually asking me out and never listening to anything I said, or beat them at their own game. So, I worked twice as hard as them, and I got results. I found new authors, worked on their manuscripts, made them bestsellers. I got promoted above most of those young men, in the end. Hired Andrew as a secretary, and I ruled over them all with a rod of iron. Just the men, of course. I hired as many female editorial staff as I could, and treated them very nicely.’
‘I love that.’ Liz had to smile. ‘I wish I’d had a mentor like you at work.’
‘I would have been very happy to mentor a bright young thing like you.’ Gretchen patted her hand. ‘Anyway. You were telling me about Paul. And the miscarriages. I’m sorry to hear about that. It’s a very distressing experience. Even though it’s so common, so they say, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens, does it?’
‘No.’ Liz took a deep breath. ‘I lost the first baby at two months. But there were complications, so I had to go into hospital to have a D&C. The nurses were so lovely. But it was still awful. And I felt like such a failure.’
‘I had one in my thirties. I was seeing a man, but we weren’t that serious.’ Gretchen frowned. ‘Lovely man, really. He wanted us to get married when he found out I was pregnant, but I didn’t want to. Then, I lost the baby. So, I understand the feeling of being a failure. But you know that you’re not, don’t you?’ Gretchen gripped both of Liz’s hands. ‘It’s important that you know that.’
‘I know. I mean, I guess so.’ Liz let out a long breath. ‘It’s hard not to feel like I failed as a woman, you know? My body didn’t do the one thing it was designed to do. And I… I lost Paul because of it.’ She started to cry. ‘Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed, trying to stop, but failing. Liz was aware that she was in a public place, with many of the tables and seating areas around her occupied with the other residents of Gretchen’s care home.
‘Here you are, dear,’ someone handed her a large cotton hanky, ‘keep it. I’ve got plenty.’
Liz looked up blearily and saw an elderly man wearing a bow tie, shirt and obligatory old-man knitted jumper over his cord trousers standing by the table. His face was lined, but his eyes twinkled softly. Gretchen smiled up at him affectionately.
