It was cold and windy outside and the wind had tousled his dark hair, which somehow made him look less intimidating but rather more dangerous.
‘I was about to ring the doorbell.’
‘Oh.’ Lisa stepped outside firmly and shut the door behind her. ‘As you can see, I’m on my way out. I’m afraid you’ll have to call back. It might be an idea if you phoned me in advance.’ She hoped, with something approaching nausea, that his visiting times weren’t going to be along these lines. Just showing up when it suited him and not giving her any advance warning. She had to brace herself for him. She didn’t think that she could cope with surprise calls. She would have to make sure that he understood that when they discussed arrangements.
She began walking laboriously towards her car and he fell into step with her.
‘Where are you going?’ His questions never seemed to emerge as questions, she thought, more like politely phrased commands. All part and parcel of a man who had no time for uncertainties, who was accustomed to taking the lead and being followed.
‘Shopping,’ Lisa said, not looking at him. Her thick coat seemed to weigh ten times what it should and was pressing down on her, making her movements even more sluggish. The wind was blowing against her as well, so that it felt as though she had to do battle with it. At this rate she doubted that she would make it further than a few shops. ‘There are some things I have to get,’ she added vaguely.
‘I’ll come with you.’
He took her arm and steered her away from her car and towards his, which was a gleaming, high-powered anachronism among the other run-of-the-mill cars.
She tried to pull away and opened her mouth to tell him that she intended going on her own, but before she could say anything he told her, with silky authority in his voice, ‘And don’t even think of being stubborn and arguing with me. You’ve finally realised that you need to buy a few things for this baby, like something to sleep in, and I’m coming with you whether you want me there or not.’
‘How did you know...?’ she asked, blushing, surprised.
He said drily, ‘I looked. No nursery. Nothing but a small spare room hastily cleared away and half-empty.’
‘You nosed around my house!’
‘Hardly. Your house is so small that I could sit in one spot and have a pretty good view of every room in it.’
He held the passenger door open for her and she settled herself inside, tucking her coat around her.
His appearance had thrown her. She now felt as though she had lost command over her own day but she was too stunned and taken aback to feel angry.
‘Where to?’ he asked, slipping in beside her.
She said stiffly, ‘Reading, please. There are some children’s shops there.’
‘We’ll go to Harrods,’ he told her, and she bristled and twisted to face him.
‘We will not go to Harrods! I can’t afford anything from Harrods!’
‘But I can,’ he said smoothly. He drove off, heading out towards London.
‘You can’t take control like this,’ she spluttered.
‘Of course I can. We’re going to Harrods and I shall be paying for whatever we get and there’s no point in getting in a state over it.’
‘You’re impossible,’ she muttered under her breath, staring out of the window and watching the built-up countryside of Berkshire give way to the busy network of roads leading into London.
After a while, he said, with a hint of amusement in his voice which made her even crosser, ‘I can feel you simmering there next to me, ready to explode. Very bad for a woman in your condition. We don’t want you going into premature labour, do we?’
‘I’ll make sure I spare you the experience,’ Lisa snapped sarcastically, which left him unperturbed.
‘I told you I intended taking responsibility. I have no idea why you’re so surprised that I’m buying a few necessities for you.’
‘Because I can buy them myself!’
‘Now listen to me,’ he said, with an edge of steel in his voice. ‘I don’t intend to go round in circles every time this business of money comes up. You just have to accept that I have a lot of it and I’m going to make sure that our child gets the best, whether you like it or not.’
She tried to think of something suitably cutting as a rejoinder to this high-handedness, but she couldn’t, so she lapsed into sulky silence until they were in Central London, when she said, sweetly, ‘And where do you intend to park?’
He laughed, not looking at her. ‘I don’t.’ He reached for his car phone, spoke into it and replaced the receiver. ‘There. All done. George will meet us outside Harrods and take the car.’ He flashed her a quick, sidelong glance, then returned his attention to the packed roads.
‘How convenient, having a chauffeur at your beck and call,’ she said under her breath.
‘Isn’t it?’ He was smiling, and she shot him a look full of resentment. How was it that he could be so cheerfully immune to anything she had to say, when what she wanted most at the moment was to pick an argument with him?
She had come to the conclusion that if loving him was bad, then liking him was almost equally so, and she had caught herself doing both in the past few weeks. She would have to be frosty and polite and the only way she could achieve this would be to set him at a distance, to shift him out of this ‘be kind to Lisa’ approach which he appeared to have adopted recently. She didn’t want him to be kind to her. She preferred his coldness to that.
George was faithfully waiting at the agreed spot for them, rubbing his gloved hands together, hurrying to the car as soon as it pulled over so that he could drive away with the least possible delay, and she allowed herself to be guided up to the Children’s floor of Harrods, her body stiff with hostility.
If he noticed a thing, then he made no comment, just held her elbow and cleared a path through the crowds with seemingly very little effort.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘where do we start?’
Lisa, who had perversely made up her mind to be as unhelpful as she could possibly get away with being, told him what she needed, and they proceeded to look at every cot, from every angle, until reluctantly she felt some of the coldness beginning to thaw.
She had had no idea that such a variety of cots existed. Some of them were works of art. She ran her hands along the smooth, dark wood and shyly began to relax.
He had told her that she was not to look at the prices of anything, had forbidden her to, but she still did and she flushed guiltily at the cost of some of the various bits they were looking at.
From their joint positions of inexperience, they amicably discussed the merits of this or that over something else, and it was only after a while that she discovered she was enjoying herself, that this was the first time her eyes had been opened to what it must be like to be pregnant and involved with someone and that she liked it.
Why couldn’t it have been different? she asked herself sadly. Why did I have to fall in love with a man as out of reach as Angus Hamilton? Why did I have to get pregnant? Why couldn’t it have been Mr Ordinary from next door, so that we could have lived happily ever after like two people in a fairy tale? Why, why, why?
She looked up to find him watching her narrowly, and she forced herself to smile and carry on.
The cot they decided on wasn’t the most expensive one, but it was getting there, and then they moved on to other things, other things which she had had no idea she might need, but which looked so wonderful, so tempting that she let herself be swayed by him, so that by lunchtime she was exhausted and uncomfortably aware that the money he had spent made her paltry savings look like bits of copper.
They had lunch at the café in Harrods, and she dabbled about with her sandwiches, so that he said wryly, ‘I thought pregnant women were supposed to eat enough for two?’
Lisa laughed and looked at him briefly before lowering her eyes. It hurt too much to keep them on his dear face. It raised too many if onlys and whys in her mind, which made her feel te
arful.
‘Difficult when you’re at this stage of the pregnancy,’ she said, concentrating on another bite of sandwich. ‘There’s nowhere much for the food to go. I find it easier to pick.’
‘And how’s your conscience getting along?’ he asked, pushing his plate aside and then leaning back in his chair to look at her. ‘I watched you while we were up there, like a tiny little orphan who’s suddenly found herself transported into the biggest toy shop in the world and can’t quite believe that she’s really there.’
‘I’m not used to such extravagance,’ Lisa told him with a small smile. ‘I kept trying to tot up the cost of everything we were buying, but after a while my head couldn’t hold such big sums and I had to give up.’
‘I told you not to do that,’ he drawled, but with amusement in his voice, and she felt the same pleasure she had felt earlier on when they had been looking at everything together—a feeling of absolute unity—so that she had to pull back and remind herself that any such feeling was an illusion.
‘So you did,’ she agreed, and he laughed and continued to look at her.
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ he asked abruptly, sitting forward and resting his elbows on the table, his blue eyes intent on her face.
The place was humming with activity, people coming and going, tables being cleared, but when he looked at her like that it was as if there was no one around them; it was as if the whole universe had narrowed down to just the two of them. She could feel her heart pounding.
‘Did you?’ he pressed softly, and she nodded and pushed her plate aside as well.
‘It’s easier with two, isn’t it?’ he asked her, though he didn’t wait for a reply to a question which she would have found virtually unanswerable without giving herself away. ‘Easier not having to cope on your own, easier not having to look at things which aren’t meant to be looked at alone. Isn’t it?’
This time he waited, his head tilted slightly to one side, his dark, powerful features revealing nothing.
‘I don’t suppose I would have browsed so much,’ Lisa answered, hedging the question the best she could.
‘Easier not to have complete and total responsibility on your own.’
‘What are you trying to say, Angus?’ she asked at last, raising troubled eyes to his. ‘It’s always easier sharing responsibilities; of course it is. But sometimes it’s just not possible.’
‘Yes, it is.’ His voice was low and urgent. ‘Marry me, Lisa.’
She licked her lips and shifted in her chair. She felt like a rabbit which had been run to ground and was cornered. She was no longer even on her own home patch.
Was that why he had been so nice to her recently? Because he had been trying to warm her up to the thought of marrying him? But in a way that would not make her suspicious and have her running off in the opposite direction like a frightened deer?
She wished that she could explain to him how much she would have wanted to marry him, but not like this, not under these circumstances. It was the cruellest of tricks that she should find herself with everything she wanted so nearly within her reach and yet so far.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered, and he flushed darkly, with anger.
‘Why not? Haven’t I proved to you that we can coexist? That I’m not some kind of monster?’
‘I never said you were,’ she protested. It was easy for him to speak of coexisting, she thought. From where he was sitting, she must appear stubborn and stupid, because as far as he was concerned they could rub along well enough together, well enough for their child to grow up in the presence of both parents, where a harmony of sorts existed.
If he could see deep into her mind, he would soon realise why any such situation was out of the question.
He would be able to give her the security of a house, with all the trappings, and that kind of security, she knew, was important. For a long time, she had thought that it was the only security she needed. But then she had met him and she had realised that there was a greater security than that. The security of being emotionally bonded to someone else, of having your love returned, of being anchored.
It had never occurred to her before, but in a blinding flash she could understand why her parents had never considered their nomadic lifestyle destabilising. Quite simply, it hadn’t been. Their stability had lain in one another, it had transcended such things as geography. At night, they’d lain in one another’s arms, and the fact that they were in a different bed, in a different house, in a different county had been immaterial.
‘You’re wasting your time, Angus,’ she said, more sharply than she might otherwise have done, and he brought his closed fist down hard on the table, so that the people sitting around them glanced across briefly, before looking away. ‘And you can’t threaten me or blackmail me or persuade me into seeing your point of view.’
‘If you could give me just one good, coherent reason why you won’t marry me, then I would understand,’ he said harshly, in a low voice, leaning towards her so that his presence filled her head and made her feel a little dizzy.
‘I already have!’
‘You’ve told me that if we got married our child would grow up in an unhappy, inhibiting atmosphere. But when we’re together, in case it’s escaped you, you can enjoy yourself.’
‘You don’t understand.’ He made it sound so easy. To make him understand seemed like a tortuous, uphill struggle. ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘It’s as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so keen to...to get married,’ Lisa said in a low voice. She had only made the observation with a view to buying time until she could work out some plausible line of defence, but when she looked at him she was surprised to see a dark flush of discomfiture cross his face, and vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Too quickly for her to try and work out what it meant, if anything.
‘I mean,’ she persevered, ‘marriage and children were never part of your long-range plans.’ Or maybe they were, she thought to herself, but just not with me. I was only ever good enough to fool around with. Isn’t that how these upper-class types think? They might. have their dalliances with any number of women but in the end they marry the ones who are suitable, whether or not love and attraction come into it.
Part of her told her that this didn’t quite tie up with the Angus Hamilton that she knew, but then that was an emotional reaction to him.
‘No,’ he conceded abruptly.
‘Well, then.’
‘Well, then, what?’
‘You can begin to understand how I must feel, Angus.’ She took a deep breath and decided to lay as much of her hand on the table as she possibly could. ‘We had a fling, not even an affair. A fling, for heaven’s sake! Something that would have fizzled out after a few weeks under normal circumstances. Except that the unexpected happened. The unthinkable.’ She lowered her eyes and stirred her now ice-cold coffee with the teaspoon, swirling the liquid round and round so that it formed ripples like the surface of a dirty pond.
‘Something that can’t be ignored, or locked away in a cupboard somewhere,’ he pointed out curtly, which kind of made her want to cry because they had had such a wonderful morning and she didn’t want it all to end on a sour note.
‘I know that. But marriage is going from one extreme to the other, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a solution to a fairly extreme situation, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Do you want to marry me because you’re an important person in an important, high-profile job and an illegitimate baby would discredit you?’ She looked at him evenly and saw something like the ghost of a smile cross his face.
‘And where did that line of reasoning suddenly spring from?’
‘Well...now that you mention it, Caroline...’
‘Ah, yes, it had something of a Caroline ring about it,’ he said grimly. ‘Caroline lives her life playing to an audience. I don’t. I really don’t give a hang what the rest of the world thinks o
f me because I don’t live my life for the rest of the world.’
‘Then why...?’
‘Because this is my child. I never considered marriage or a family, at least not in the foreseeable future. I also never considered what I would feel when fatherhood presented itself to me.’
She knew what he meant. Children, before, had been other people’s problems. Now he looked at her, only a couple of weeks away from giving birth, to his child, and he wanted this child with a fierceness which he had never foreseen. That was why he didn’t want to be a part-time father. That was why he wanted to marry her.
Chances were that even if she had continued their relationship, even if their relationship had stretched beyond a few weeks, he would never have married her because there would never have been a need to marry her. There was a need now, as far as he was concerned, except that she was playing only a secondary role in the whole proceedings.
‘Yes, I see that, but...’
‘But you can’t have marriage without the trimmings. Without the declarations of love, without the magic and stardust.’ His voice, when he spoke, was impatient and he made the whole concept of romantic dreams sound like the whimsical imaginings of a fool, which was probably how he saw them. ‘Fine.’ He looked straight at her. ‘Marry me, Lisa. I love you.’
For just a second, time stood still. She had a second of intense, perfect happiness, then the bubble burst and reasoning reasserted itself and told her that those were empty words. They didn’t mean a thing.
‘I think we should go, Angus. I’m beginning to feel a little tired.’
He didn’t say anything. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket, called George and then said that he would be there by the time they made their way down to the street.
He didn’t mention another word about marriage until they were in the back seat of the car, when he turned to her and informed her that he was still waiting for her answer.
‘I won’t give up,’ he said smoothly, when she didn’t reply. ‘I never give up on anything I want.’
‘And you want this child.’
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