Free The Way to a Woman's Heart by Christina Jones Page A

benevolence suddenly took a massive dip in her estimations.
    ‘Look,’ Poll said, smiling, ‘I wasn’t going to go into any of this until much later, but since we’ve started…’
    Ella listened in increasingly stunned silence to Poll’s story of a venture into innocent middle-aged speed-dating and a rapid brief-lived marriage and the delight of George’s arrival and the even more rapid divorce.
    ‘. . . so you see, I made a huge mistake in marrying Dennis, the first man I’d ever been out with – the only man I’ve ever slept with – but it was worth every mismatched minute because it resulted in George.’ Poll smiled happily. ‘Married at forty, a mum at forty-two, divorced by the time I was forty-five. Not a great track record, but still, nothing’s ever truly bad, is it?’
    ‘Er, no, probably not. But, hadn’t you had, um,
any
boyfriends before?’
    Poll shook her head. ‘Dennis was my first – and last – attempt at a relationship. Oh dear, it’s probably better to start at the beginning. You see, my parents weren’t particularly young when they met and had been married for well over twenty years when I was born. Unlike my own venture into unplanned mature motherhood, my arrival was, well, a complete disaster for them. They didn’t want me.’
    Ella winced.
    Poll topped up their juice glasses. ‘Oh, don’t look so upset. It’s a long time ago. I assume my mother thought she was menopausal. I don’t know – we never talked about anything like that. They were old in mind and body when I was born. I grew up in a sort of strange, grim, restricted and unloving house. Then they both got ill. And I was their carer. From the age of sixteen when I left school, until they died twenty-three years later. I’ve never had a job – or a life.’
    Ella swallowed. Poor, poor Poll. What an appallingly sad story. What a hatefully miserable life. No wonder she wanted to change it completely.
    ‘Um,’ Ella said, lowering her voice as George abandoned his convoy of small lorries and scrambled up at the table with a
Thomas the Tank Engine
colouring book and a fistful of crayons, ‘that’s truly awful. And I’m so sorry, but then, why after all that misery, did you get married to someone you hardly knew?’
    ‘Because I wanted to be loved. I’d never been loved. I thought having a husband would guarantee it. It didn’t.’
    Ella sighed. This really was turning into a two-hankiesaga. Poor Poll. ‘But surely, you could have just, well, started going out, and meeting people and having dates?’
    ‘I was thirty-nine. I’d had no teenage years to experience that sort of thing. No experimental time. I had no idea how to go about
dating
or talking to men or anything. My one and only friend, Marie, suggested the speed-dating as a joky way to ease me into meeting blokes.’ Poll laughed. ‘Poor Marie. She was horrified when I told her Dennis – my first speed-dating experience – and I were getting married.’
    ‘Blimey, yes, I can imagine. And I can understand why you – given the circumstances – might have dived in head first. But surely, Dennis –’
    ‘Oh, Dennis went to speed-dating and married me because he simply hadn’t had time to meet women socially. He was always too busy. Dennis had reached the stage in his life where he just wanted a nice compliant non-ambitious yes-woman to keep his out-of-work hours running smoothly.’
    ‘And you sort of clicked?’
    ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t love.’ Poll sighed. ‘But we at least both thought we’d found what we were looking for. We were, of course, both bitterly disappointed.’
    Oh, God… Ella scraped up the last of her scrambled eggs. How truly dreadful. ‘Still, at least you got George and this lovely house from your marriage.’
    ‘George, yes.’ Poll nodded, pushing her wayward hair behind her ears and helping George with a tricky bit of colouring-in. ‘And from George, I got the unconditional loving and being loved that I’d