The Accidental Mother

by Rowan Coleman

  Louis’s face was very still. “I know I have a lot of bridges to build,” he said quietly. “A future to build, but this is my chance to do the right thing by my daughters. I want you to know that.”

  Sophie’s next words sprang out of her mouth before she had a moment to consider them. “It’s a shame you had to wait for their mother to die before you made the effort.”

  The moment she had completed the sentence she regretted it, but she lifted her chin and held his gaze. Louis looked at her as if reassessing his opinion of her and said nothing for a moment. Then he opened the latch and pulled the flat door open an inch. “I’ll be back at the same time tomorrow,” he said, his tone perfectly even. “I’ll see you then.”

  Louis pulled the door shut behind him, and Sophie stood for a second or two, looking at its smooth surface.

  “Should have stuck to Plan Nice,” she told herself. She knew that Plan Nice would have worked eventually, but for some reason at that moment when she had looked into his eyes, she’d felt like she could ask him anything and he’d tell her the truth. But whatever she had felt then must have been wrong.

  Nineteen

  Sophie had taken the girls to see Tess at her office for a change because she had to get out of the flat and Louis had said he would come in the afternoon because he had some business to attend to.

  The last eight days of constant heavy rain and no sunlight during the day had finally filled her head with cotton wool that was scarcely improved by the frantic visits she had managed to make to the office. She knew she should be gearing up for the next big event, but where work was concerned she couldn’t seem to get out of neutral. It was just as well that the success of the ship party was still carrying her high.

  She’d had eight days of Louis filling the flat with his presence to such an extent that Sophie thought it must be shrinking, or else he was growing even taller, Alice in Wonderland style. Eight days of Bella often secluded in the bedroom, alone except for Artemis and her felt-tips, producing drawing after drawing of a sea filled with mermaids. And eight mornings of Louis’s perfect politeness, his initial attempt at a warmer friendliness seemingly abandoned.

  There had been one occasion when Sophie had thought that perhaps there could be a thaw in relations between them. On the sixth day, a beam of sunlight had fought its way through the clouds, and there had been a break in the relentless wet weather. Louis and Sophie had simultaneously come to the decision that they should take an immediate trip to the park without even having to confer. Sophie had gone and grabbed the girls’ wellies from under the bed just as Louis was finding coats and hats. They had bumped into each other in the hallway.

  “I thought we could—” Sophie had begun.

  “Take them to the park,” Louis had concluded. They had laughed awkwardly and set about rousing the girls from their fifth viewing of The Little Mermaid that week.

  They’d taken the short trip to the park in a truncated column of two by two. Louis and Izzy had led the party, with Izzy skipping, hopping, and swinging on her father’s hand, and Bella and Sophie had brought up the rear in almost complete silence.

  “You must have seen it a hundred times,” Sophie had said, trying to placate Bella’s annoyance at having her favorite movie cut short.

  “I wanted to see the end,” Bella had replied petulantly.

  “Look, Bella, you can see it when we get back. Why don’t you try doing something radical—like enjoying yourself?”

  Bella had looked up at her and sighed deeply. “I’m trying,” she’d said. “It’s all these days inside that are making me cross. I’m sorry.”

  Sophie had smiled at her and picked up her hand. “I know how you feel. Come on,” she had said as they entered the park. “Let’s see how high we can swing on the swings!”

  Sophie had been pushing Bella as high as she could when Izzy fell off the slide. She didn’t fall very far or very hard, but as she had put out her hands to break her landing, she had grazed her palms quite badly. Sophie had had to resist the urge to run to her in a way that had become an everyday reaction in the last few weeks, especially as Izzy was an expert in getting into the kinds of scrapes that usually resulted in minor injury. She had watched Louis pick the girl up and hold her tightly, but still Izzy had cried.

  “So-So-Sophie,” Izzy had wailed and stretched out her arms. Louis had brought her over to the swings right away, and as Sophie had sat down on one, he’d lifted Izzy onto Sophie’s lap.

  “Let me see,” Sophie had said, examining the grazed palms very carefully. “Ohhh, that must sting ever so,” she’d said and kissed each palm gently. “Is that a bit better?”

  “A bit,” Izzy had confirmed bravely with a noisy sniff. Sophie had reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue to blot Izzy’s face and a tube of antiseptic cream that had usurped her lip gloss’s usual home. In the meantime, Louis had crouched down, his hands on either side of Sophie, holding the swing chains steady. It had felt strange to have this virtual stranger in such close proximity. It had given Sophie a curious tilted feeling, almost like being drunk in the daytime.

  Bella had peered over Sophie’s shoulder at Izzy’s wounds. “Hardly anything there!” she’d scoffed as Sophie smoothed the antiseptic cream on.

  Sophie had turned around and shot Bella a warning look. “Don’t worry, this magic cream will make it all better, okay?” she’d said.

  “’Kay.” Izzy had sniffed again. “But you carry me though.” And the small group had returned to the confines of the flat just as they had left it, except this time Louis had walked on his own a few paces behind the slow and lumbering girls, and Sophie had been sure she had developed a hernia.

  When Louis had left a little while later, Sophie had followed him downstairs, hoping there’d be some mail for her to collect that wasn’t a credit card bill.

  “She wanted you, didn’t she?” Louis had said as he opened the door. “Wanted you to comfort her, I mean. Kiss it better.” He had dropped his chin. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, she’s known you longer than she’s known me, but well, it made me realize that, even with Izzy, getting her to trust me isn’t as easy as just turning up and making her laugh. She still wanted you.” It had been the first time in days that Louis had said anything to Sophie that wasn’t strictly necessary, and for a moment she hadn’t known how to respond.

  She had taken a step closer to him. “It will take time,” she’d said eventually and inadequately. “But you have to be prepared for it to take as long as the girls think it should take.” Sophie had decided to share with him one of the many things she had learned about children recently. “You can’t rush the way people are feeling, even little people. They feel emotions too. Properly and really, I mean,” she had said, nodding with emphasis.

  Louis’s mouth had twitched in a smile.

  “What now?” Sophie had demanded, fighting her impulse to return the smile. “Look, you might think I’m funny, but I’ve only been doing this for a month, I’ve only just realized that children are humans!”

  Louis had laughed, and Sophie hadn’t been able to help but join in. “I don’t know what Carrie was thinking when she made me the girls’ guardian,” she had said wryly.

  “You’re doing really well, Sophie. You were so good with Izzy today. It must be amazing to be three and really believe in magic, really believe that someone’s kisses can take away all the pain.” Louis’s smile had dimmed fractionally. “I wish they had wanted me.”

  Without thinking Sophie had stretched out a hand and rested it on his arm. “One day they will, I’m sure,” she had said, knowing that it was probably true and feeling a little jealous of the time when she wouldn’t mean so much to the children. When she would just be distant “Aunty Sophie” again.

  “You should go now,” she’d said, a little abruptly.

  “Same time tomorrow?”

  Sophie had considered the prospect with resignation. “No chance of a break, is there?” she’d asked him o
n impulse.

  Louis’s face had darkened. “A break?” he’d asked. “I thought you understood how much I’ve got to make up. A break for who? For you? Because this isn’t about you.”

  “I know that,” Sophie had snapped angrily. “I sort of guessed that when my normal life went totally to pot just so I could babysit your children!” She’d caught the rise in her voice and forcefully subdued it. “I thought for the girls,” she’d lied shamelessly. “A break for them to clear their heads, a chance to relax a bit without you…being…everywhere they look.”

  Louis’s face had been perfectly still for a moment, and then he’d shaken his head. “Sophie, I’m sorry you don’t like me, but like I said, this isn’t about you. Same time tomorrow.”

  The thaw was definitely over.

  Tess was trying to explain Louis’s position to Sophie, who was only half-listening as she watched the girls run up and down the corridor outside of Tess’s office like a pair of Muppets. Occasionally a flash of pink and purple sped by, having been preceded by demented giggles. “He was married to Carrie, you see, which means he is automatically granted parental responsibility—”

  “Yes, but every dad has that. It doesn’t mean every dad deserves it,” Sophie said tartly.

  “Well, no, actually, if they hadn’t been married he would have no automatic rights at all, not according to the law. But anyway, by leaving the family home, by not contacting the girls or making formal arrangements to support them financially or emotionally, he has contravened the terms of parental responsibility, so if the court considers it proper, they could forfeit his rights. Ultimately it’s up to a judge to decide whether or not he should have parental responsibility reinstated and whether or not he should be granted a residency order and with it full custody of the children.”

  Sophie blinked at her. “And?” she said. “What are they going to decide?”

  Tess shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. “I’d say it was almost clear-cut. Louis has come out of his background checks extremely well. Not a blemish on his record in this country, and did you know that when he was in Peru he helped a charity that took homeless and abandoned disabled kids off the streets of Lima? These kids were given a chance at education and a life other than fending for themselves instead of trying to scrape an existence picking over rubbish bins. He was quite literally giving them a chance to grow up.”

  Tess was going all misty-eyed, so Sophie tutted loudly. “Yes, well,” she said. “You see, that whole St. Francis of Assisi thing would play a lot better with me if he hadn’t actually abandoned his own children.”

  “Yes, it is a dilemma,” Tess admitted, “but the court makes a point of accepting that good people make bad mistakes. It does not like to split up a family unless it absolutely has to.” She was more or less quoting from the book on family law she had been reading the night before just to make sure she was clear on all the proceedings that were even now under way. Louis had not come back from Peru with much money, but what little he did have he had invested in a respectable boarding house and a good solicitor. And although the legal side was, strictly speaking, down to the authorities’ legal team, Tess prided herself on knowing what she was talking about. “And, of course, what the girls want has an awful lot to do with it. That and my recommendations. I have to file my report by the end of this week.”

  Another flash of color whizzed by the open door. Tess leaned forward on her desk. “What interests me most at the moment, Sophie,” she said, “is what you think. What do you want to happen?”

  Sophie jerked her head around to look at Tess. “How do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, I more or less pressed you into taking the girls, didn’t I?”

  Sophie nodded, pursed her lips, and crossed her arms just to show that she still hadn’t entirely forgiven Tess for that.

  “Well, then it meant either you took them or they went into foster care. I had to rush through the temporary residency order because I was so scared you’d change your mind. That was twenty-odd years of collecting favors gone in two days.”

  Sophie raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t realized.

  “When you were looking for Louis, you were doing so in order to provide an alternative to you,” Tess went on. “So that it would be between Louis and going into to foster care. So you could get back to your life and not feel guilty.”

  Sophie looked a bit sheepish. “Ah well. See, that’s not exactly true…”

  But Tess waved away her feeble protest. “It is,” she said. “But that’s not my point. My point is, if I understand what’s happening here, you’re not just prepared to keep the girls indefinitely until they go somewhere else to live. I think if it came down to it, you would actually have the girls for keeps.”

  Sophie expected herself to scoff, but the scoff did not arrive. Instead she examined the very last remnants of her nail polish and let a nagging and terrifying thought that had been lingering in the back of her mind since her conversation on the stairs with Bella finally form itself.

  “I don’t know,” she said carefully. “But if it really wasn’t going to work out with Louis, then, well—Do you think that I could do it? Give them a good home?”

  Tess looked at her. “Actually, I think you could,” she said seriously. “But Louis is here now. Something would have to go badly wrong for that situation to arise. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Sophie said. “It’s stupid to even think about it really. It would never work. I have my career and…” She could not think of anything else to say.

  Tess shifted in her seat. “Well, the girls have a natural parent alive, present and correct and prepared to take them. And he is doing his best to make himself viable. He’s lined up an interview with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and soon he’ll probably have a job and a permanent place to stay. He’s been asking about when Bella will be found a temporary school. He’s worried she’s missed too much already, and she has.”

  “It’s the Christmas holidays,” Sophie said, as if she knew what she was talking about.

  “Sophie, it’s February! Anyway, Louis’s been in touch with their old school. They are holding a place for Bella. Apparently she was their star pupil. And Izzy’s nursery would be delighted to have her back.”

  Sophie cursed herself. The reason she didn’t know about any of this was that she had rashly abandoned Plan Nice. She’d pushed Louis too far, and now he didn’t seem to like her much, a consequence she found curiously disturbing because if—as Tess said—it was inevitable that they be returned to him, she didn’t want to lose the children completely from her life.

  Then she thought about exactly what Tess had just said.

  “Their old school, in St. Ives?”

  Tess leaned back in her chair. “Yes,” she said. “They won’t be going anywhere until this is all settled and the supervision order is lifted, but I ought to tell you it will be settled soon, Sophie. It could even be in the next couple of weeks. All being well, I think the girls will go back home to Cornwall with their father. And I think that will be the best thing for them.”

  Sophie tried to imagine what it would be like to have her whole old, peaceful, ordered life back again. “But Bella hates him,” she said, deciding not to imagine such a restoration to civilization just then. “She really hates him, and you said it matters what the children want.”

  Tess nodded. “It does,” she said carefully. “It does matter what the children want, but I don’t think Bella hates him, not really. She is hurt and angry and worried and confused. But she doesn’t hate him.” Tess smiled and, reaching over the desk, placed her warm, heavy hand over Sophie’s light, cold one, squeezing it for a moment. “I think that what you’ve done for the girls so far is wonderful, much, much more than I ever expected. You’ve brought Bella out of her shell, and I know that Izzy’s taking short trips in the car now. All that means so much to them. But there’s one thing you have to do, the only thing you can do re
ally—you have to help Bella come to terms with what has happened. You have to help her make friends with her dad, and then Izzy won’t have to worry about who to be loyal to all the time. And perhaps while you’re at it, you could make friends with Louis yourself. It would be so much easier for the girls,” Tess added cautiously.

  The shouts outside grew louder, and suddenly Tess’s office was filled with noise as the girls crash-landed into Sophie, giggling and laughing.

  She grinned at them. “Ready, steady—go!” she shouted, and they were off again.

  She turned back to Tess, her smile vanishing instantly. “But I mean, what about the reasons why Louis and Carrie split up? What about why he didn’t stay in touch with the girls? Doesn’t that matter at all?”

  “It matters to you, I can see that. But families drift apart for all the wrong reasons every day. It’s a tragic fact. It’s up to people like me to try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place, or to try to repair it when it does. We have a really good chance to repair a family here, Sophie—to repair lives. And I have to admit that it is largely thanks to you. Louis is not a criminal, or an abuser. The kind of man he is now is what is important. The past doesn’t really matter anymore,” Tess said, echoing Louis’s words. “If I could just see that Bella and Louis were making progress together, I’d feel so much better,” she went on. “Then I think this terrible time of their lives would be over at last. I think they’d be able to start again. Will you help them? Because, I’ll be honest, I think that you’re the only person who really can.”

  Sophie paused, feeling as if the pit of her stomach was filling gradually with heavy black stones. There was really only one thing she could say. “Of course I’ll help her,” she said. “I’ll help them both. I just want them to be happy.”

  It was curious, Sophie thought, as she hurried the girls back to the flat for that day’s meeting with Louis, that she didn’t feel happier. Elated even. She had managed somehow through all the chaos to pull off quite a coup. She’d rescued the girls from foster care and kept a promise to Carrie, made her boss love her, and possibly even secured a promotion in the process. She had located the apparently perfect father more or less single-handedly and was now helping to restore the girls to family life, a family life in the place that they loved and called home. She should feel triumphant. In less than a month she’d have back her bed, she might well have a new job and much more shoe money than she could ever need—well, perhaps not that much—and she would have peace and quiet and all the time in the world to pluck her eyebrows and wax her legs and watch films featuring scenes of sex and violence. She could even start smoking properly again. She should feel ecstatic.