The Accidental Family

by Rowan Coleman

  It was a brilliant chilly morning as Sophie walked into the heart of the town. The sky dazzled her, reflecting light off the flat and glassy ocean that ricocheted in turn off the whitewashed houses. This was the light that Carrie had loved so much, Sophie thought as she headed instinctively for the shoreline, the magical radiance that seemed to bend over the coastline throwing even the smallest rock into sharp relief, making it seem possible to see every blade of grass or grain of sand from miles and miles away. Sophie had lived with the St. Ives light for a while, but it was only now, when her head was so muddled and brimming with confusion, that she really felt that particular atmosphere, that sensation that you were just a little closer to the sky here than anywhere else in the world. She paused, taking a moment to breathe in deeply, feeling the cold air numbing her from the inside.

  The tourists were almost completely gone, and the cobbled streets were largely empty, so Sophie decided to take the long way round to the B & B, walking through the town and around the harbor, stopping briefly at the tacky gift shop, its entrance garlanded by pirate hats and slogan T-shirts. This was where Izzy had been pestering her father to buy a life-size inflatable dolphin for weeks.

  She paused in the crook of the harbor, looking out at the boats that were currently bobbing on the high tide. In a few hours the tide would be out and the boats would be stranded on the soft golden sand, beached on their sides, many of them, their fat bellies billowing skyward, waiting for the water to come back and make them beautiful again. Only a month ago she and Bella and Izzy had walked in among the boats almost every day, when the tide was out, collecting rocks and interesting shells. The girls had liked to imagine that they were mermaids swimming beneath the surf, in and out and under the hulls looking for treasure. That had been only a few weeks ago, but it seemed like centuries, so much had changed since then.

  “Where are you?” Sophie whispered into the wind, absently hoping that it would carry her words to wherever Louis was. “Please, Louis, don’t do this to me. Don’t disappear on me now that I finally know how much I need you.”

  Nineteen

  You never know, he might be lying in a hospital bed somewhere,” Mrs. Alexander said, patting Sophie gently on the shoulder, offering her own unique brand of comfort as she set an extra-large cooked breakfast down in front of her. “From the sound of things, I wouldn’t say he’s really left you, love. It’ll be something to do with the boy and that Wendy woman.”

  “Of course he hasn’t left you,” Grace Tregowan affirmed. “Not for good anyway. He might be having a final fling before he settles down with you, that’s not uncommon. You can’t move at the Wednesday-afternoon tea dances for fellers feeling you up in the hopes of getting their way one last time before they pop their clogs. It might be a bit like that for your young man—although in his case he has sown a fair bit of his wild oats already.”

  “Oh great,” Sophie said, poking at her scrambled eggs with her fork, feeling her stomach turn at the thought of it. “So he’s either dead or groping some woman under a mirror ball. What on earth am I worrying about?”

  “I didn’t say dead,” Mrs. Alexander reminded her, refilling the salt and pepper cellars. “I said lying in a hospital bed. He doesn’t necessarily have to be dead.”

  “He doesn’t necessarily have to be anywhere!” Sophie’s anger flared like a lit match. “He should be here with me, looking after his daughters, looking after his pregnant fiancée, that’s what he should be doing.”

  “Pregnant?” Mrs. Alexander gasped.

  “He’s got you up the duff, has he?” Grace asked her. Sophie nodded, pushing the plate of bacon and eggs away.

  “I knew it wasn’t like you wanting the decaffeinated tea,” Mrs. Alexander said. “Pregnant. Well, I’ll say one thing for Louis. If there was a sperm Olympics, that man’s stuff would win the gold.”

  “You poor love,” Grace said, covering Sophie’s hand with her own, her palm feeling tight and cold against Sophie’s boiling skin. “But he won’t have walked out on you.”

  “Won’t he?” Sophie asked her in dismay. “After all, he’s done it before. He did it to Carrie.”

  “Well yes, that was a scandal,” Mrs. Alexander said thoughtfully.

  “You knew about that when we first met you?” Sophie asked her. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”

  “Didn’t really seem appropriate to mention it before, and besides, it was gossip and you know I’m not one for gossip,” Mrs. Alexander said, pursing her lips. “And you were my guests here then and now you’re my friends. I know Louis and I know that he’s not the sort of man who’d just run off and leave his little girls and pregnant wife.”

  “Oh, he’s left a pregnant wife before, has he?” Mrs. Tregowan said. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Yes, but this is different, totally different,” Sophie said desperately. “Carrie told Louis to go. She told him she wanted to start a life with another man. He was hurt and shocked and overreacted by going halfway around the world and not coming back for three years. But he didn’t run out on her because she was pregnant. And anyway, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. In fact, Louis is probably the only person in the entire world who doesn’t know I’m pregnant. I was just about to tell him when he walked out on me. And now I don’t know what to think. What if by himself he worked out I’m pregnant and did run a mile? He was saying only the other day that he didn’t want any more kids.”

  “Don’t be so silly. You two are getting married, of course he was going to want kids,” Mrs. Alexander told her. “You’re a family. A little unit. Louis wouldn’t mess that up; he’s been through too much to get you.”

  “Don’t you worry, he’ll turn up,” Grace said. “Mr. Tregowan always turned up in the end. Well, except for the last time …”

  “So what was he up to then?” Sophie asked her, a little hysterically. “Was he an international spy or an octogenarian Casanova or both? What was he getting up to when he disappeared?”

  “Alzheimer’s,” Grace Tregowan said, nodding once. “He’d go out and forget where he was.”

  “Oh god, I’m sorry,” Sophie said, aghast at her thoughtlessness.

  “Don’t be,” Grace told her, rubbing her hand. “I’m not sorry. I had the happiest years of my life with my William.”

  Mrs. Alexander pushed Sophie’s plate toward her. “Come on, Sophie. Have a bite of toast.”

  “I’ve not a single regret in my life,” Grace assured Sophie. “Not a one. Maybe I could have had a safer life, a more stable one. Married some nice, safe, steady man and stayed with him, ticking all the moments of my life away. Maybe that’s what being alive is about for some. But it’s not for me. It’s never been that way for me. William was my swan song, my last great love. I’m not sorry I found him, and if it’s one thing that I know because of him it’s that love doesn’t waver through the hard times. It sticks fast and it grows stronger than ever. And I know your love for Louis will stick fast too. Even through all of this, just like that baby in your belly, it will grow and will flourish.”

  “Especially if you eat the toast,” Mrs. Alexander reminded her gently.

  “But what if his love doesn’t stick fast for me?” Sophie asked, chewing the bread that tasted like burnt cardboard in her mouth. “How will I cope with a baby on my own? I mean, I’ve got this business idea that I think will really work, but how do I start that up and have a baby, and what about the girls? I need to be near them; how will it be, my living here with Louis’s baby and Louis and the girls living in their house? Oh god, how did I get in this mess, how will I cope?”

  “Well, you’ve coped perfectly well so far,” Mrs. Alexander pointed out. “People do cope, women cope—better than that, we make it right. That’s what we’re good at. Men are good at general knowledge and parking. Women are good at life—you’ve shown that already.”

  “It’s just that starting my own international wedding-services company will have some of the shine taken off it if I’ve jus
t been left at the altar, knocked up.”

  “You haven’t been left at the altar,” Mrs. Alexander said. “He’ll be back.”

  “And when he gets back,” Grace told her, “you can bloody kick his arse, the insensitive fool.”

  Sophie wasn’t sure if it was the pregnancy itself, or simply the fact that now that she knew about it, she was suddenly exhausted. There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day or night for her to sleep sufficiently as her body labored over making another human life and her head and heart tried to reconcile everything that had happened to her since that moment almost a year ago when she’d found out that Carrie was dead and she was responsible for her two little girls. Telling her she was far too pale for her liking, Mrs. Alexander had sent Sophie up to her room for a nap after she’d finally eaten her toast and Sophie had fallen asleep before she’d even had a chance to think of taking a shower.

  “I’ll call you when it’s time to pick up the girls, okay? You and that baby get some rest.”

  She had been deep in a dreamless sleep when Mrs. Alexander came to wake her, having to resort to gently shaking her shoulder to get her to open her eyes.

  “Sophie, it’s time to fetch the girls.”

  Sophie sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Really? Is it one o’clock already?”

  “No, love,” Mrs. Alexander said slowly. “It’s just before three. I thought I’d leave you to the last minute, you looked like you needed it.”

  Sophie had to think hard for a moment about why that was a bad thing and then it hit her. Izzy finished school at one o’clock, not three. She was more than two hours late to pick her up.

  “Oh god,” Sophie said, pulling on her shoes. “The school is going to kill me. They must have tried phoning Louis’s house and his cell phone and not had any luck, and they don’t have my number! How am I ever going to cope with a baby when I can’t even get them to school and pick them up on time?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think,” Mrs. Alexander said as Sophie raced past her and out to her car.

  “It’s not your fault,” Sophie called back. “I should have remembered.” But when she reached the curb, she realized her car wasn’t there, that she had left it outside the school, and now she had less than five minutes to cover a twenty-minute walk.

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no!” Sophie cried, stamping her feet on the pavement in despair. “No car!”

  “Calm down,” Mrs. Alexander said, hurrying down the path in her slippers. “I’ll call you a taxi.”

  “Thanks, but no, a taxi will take twenty minutes just to get here. I’ll run up there—you call the school, tell them I’m on my way.”

  This time Sophie took the most direct route to the school, which was all uphill. She felt the sweat trickling down her back on the chilly afternoon even as her breath misted in the air. The sharp jab of a stitch lodged in her side and her heart pounded as she powered up the hill, forcing the deadweight of exhaustion to the back of her mind. She was still perhaps ten minutes away when children from the school started filtering past her, in ones and twos at first and then a steady stream of excited children chattering about their day to mothers, some of them scooting down the hill a little too fast for a mother’s comfort. As the hill steepened, and the downward flow of children thickened, Sophie’s progress slowed even further and it seemed it took an age for her to make the last five hundred yards. But as weary and worn out as she was, once she was in the playground she ran to the school entrance where she was sure she would find the girls waiting for her and a cross-looking teacher with her arms folded.

  “I’m here,” she announced breathlessly as she skidded to a halt on the parquet tiles. But the reception area was empty except for the school secretary doing some photocopying and one of the cleaners.

  “Oh, sorry, excuse me,” Sophie asked the secretary. “I’m Sophie Mills? I’m late to pick up my …my fiancé’s daughters. Izzy and Bella Gregory? I’m really late to pick up Izzy, and I’m so, so sorry. I’m pregnant, you see, and I’ve lost their father and apparently the ability to stop talking when it’s inappropriate. And now you’re another person who knows about the baby when he doesn’t.”

  The school secretary blinked at her.

  “Anyway, if you could just tell me where they’re waiting?”

  “They haven’t been brought here,” the secretary told Sophie hesitantly. “I haven’t heard about any late parents or …helpers today. And I would have been the one to make the calls if Izzy had still been here at one. Are you sure their father didn’t fetch them today? After all, if you’ve lost him …”

  “I …I don’t know,” Sophie said, battling the rising wave of nausea and frustration surging through her.

  “Try their classrooms,” the secretary suggested. “But really, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. We’re very careful here. We don’t let our children run off onto the streets on their own, you know. I bet their daddy’s got them and he just forgot to tell you. Men, hey? They never tell you anything.”

  Could Louis have come back without letting her know and picked up the girls? Sophie wondered as she turned on her heel and headed toward the classrooms. That had to be what had happened. The secretary was right. The school wouldn’t just let Izzy wander off with no one to look after her. It had to mean that Louis was back, a thought that flooded Sophie with a sense of relief and fury in equal measure. What was he playing at, not letting her know he was back in town?

  Sophie knew the nursery would be long empty, so she went to find Bella’s classroom where her teacher, Mrs. Sinclair, was pinning some artwork to the walls.

  “Hello,” Sophie called out, breathless.

  “Hello,” Mrs. Sinclair said, looking up, not pleased by the interruption.

  “I just wanted to confirm that it was Louis Gregory who picked up Bella today, wasn’t it?”

  “No.” Mrs. Sinclair spoke to her as if she were ever so slightly stupid.

  “No?” Sophie’s heart stopped beating for a few terrifying seconds. “Then who was it?”

  “It was her big brother.”

  Twenty

  He came at lunchtime and took Izzy,” Mrs. Sinclair explained. “I know because young Miss Aster was quite flustered by him. When they came back at three to pick up Bella, they had a huge inflatable dolphin in tow. I asked Bella about him and who he was and she told me he was her brother and that he was picking her up today. It came as a surprise to me, I didn’t know she had a big brother, but she seemed very excited about going with him. All three of them went off together.”

  “Her brother picked her up,” Sophie repeated, wide-eyed with horror and a million other half-formed thoughts running through her head that she didn’t quite understand yet.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Sinclair said slowly. “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sophie said. “There is the rather large problem that she has never met her brother before,” Sophie said. “She doesn’t know anything about him. I don’t know anything about him. The last thing I knew, he was in a dive in London, off his head on drugs and alcohol, and you just let her go with him?”

  Mrs. Sinclair stood frozen to the spot. “But Bella told me he was her brother, and she’s such a sensible girl, not at all the sort to go off with a stranger.” Sophie thought of Bella’s plan to sneak out of school and make a phone call. She had been worried about how Bella would react if Louis pushed her too far, and now she knew. Izzy was tiny and trusting. Seth probably charmed her out of the young and inexperienced nursery teacher’s arms as easily as he would have charmed birds from a tree, and Izzy would not have denied that he was her brother or said she didn’t want to go with him. If anything, she would have been delighted to meet him. Bella, on the other hand, would know that Seth was not supposed to pick them up from school. Perhaps she wanted to be the one to solve the mystery and find him, or perhaps she just wanted all of her own questions and fears answered. Maybe she saw that he already had Izzy and decided she had to go with h
im to protect her little sister, but either way, she had decided to go with him. Whether she knew it consciously or not, Bella had made the decision to show her daddy what happened when he walked out on her. Sophie found that she had stopped breathing.

  “I had no reason to be suspicious. Izzy had already been with him all afternoon. He didn’t look like he was drunk or on drugs, he was smart and clean. He looked fine.”

  “No adult told you that they were going to be picked up by their brother. You shouldn’t have let them go with anyone but me or their father!” Sophie shouted at her.

  “But Bella told me he was her brother, and she wanted to go.”

  “She’s seven years old and Izzy is four. They don’t know when or where they should be going. Oh god.” Sophie turned away from Mrs. Sinclair as the enormity of what had happened finally hit her. “Oh god, I don’t know what to do.”

  “I would never have let her go—but he already had Izzy and she looked so happy with her dolphin. And Bella told me it was fine, she said, ‘He’s my brother’ …”

  “Oh god …” Sophie struggled with the fact that she couldn’t get through to Louis, that she didn’t know Wendy’s number, and that she had no idea what Seth was like other than angry and confused and possibly on drugs and he had her two girls.

  “I’ve got to find them,” she said. “I’ve got to. I’ve got to find them.”

  She turned on her heel, suddenly desperate to be out and looking for them, even if she didn’t have the faintest idea where to start.

  “I’ll call the police …,” Mrs. Sinclair said after her. “I’m so sorry! Bella said he was her brother …I thought it would be fine.”

  Sophie ran to her car, pulling the ticket off the window and screeching when she saw that it had been clamped for a parking violation.