A Daughter For Christmas

by Cathy Williams

  ‘You know damn well that there will be no paternity test. The child—’

  ‘Is the image of you.’ Leigh finished on his behalf.

  ‘And that gives you a sense of satisfaction?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘What the hell gave your sister the right to do what she did? To find herself pregnant and then play God with someone else’s child’s future?’ He leaned forward, an aggressive movement which had Leigh flinching back into her seat.

  ‘We’ve been through all this,’ she said warily, eyeing him the way a zoologist might have eyed a new and potentially dangerous species of animal.

  ‘Well, we’ll damn well go through it again!’ He banged his closed fist on the table and it was almost a shocking physical display of the hostility behind his words. Now that Amy wasn’t present there was no need for him to maintain any semblance of politeness, and the speed with which he shed it was frightening.

  Now Leigh could see what it was that had been bothering her from the start. It was his thinly disguised rage.

  ‘She only did what she thought was best at the time,’ Leigh answered, leaning forward and refusing to be cowed by this display of menacing emotion. ‘She hadn’t anticipated getting pregnant—’

  ‘But she did!’

  ‘Yes, I know, but—’

  ‘But you’re obliged to stand up for her, aren’t you?’ he said with scathing disgust. ‘Heaven only knows, you probably think along precisely the same lines. After all, you both come from the same mould, don’t you?’

  That’s not fair. How dare you!’ She clasped her fingers together and waited, trembling, for the rush of blood to her head to ebb.

  ‘Your sister had my child and had no intention of ever letting me find out that I was a father.’

  There was no point denying the truth behind that and Leigh didn’t bother to try. In a way she could understand why her sister had acted the way she had. However, in another way she could see the injustice of it and in the long term the possibility of a great deal of complications. It was one of those situations which seemed to preclude a good outcome for all involved. Somewhere along the line someone was going to get hurt.

  ‘Amy would have found you sooner or later,’ she said, doing her very best to understand what he must be going through. ‘And it’s pointless to continue arguing about this—’

  ‘And you had the cheek to examine my ethics in sleeping with your sister!’

  Out of the corner of her eye Leigh saw Amy climbing up the steps and she plastered a smile on her face, even though the effort of it made her jaw ache.

  ‘May I have some dessert?’ she asked, as soon as she had sat down at the table. ‘I saw a banana split downstairs and it looked yummy.’ She slurped some of her drink noisily through the straw and eyed her aunt from under her dark lashes, the same lashes that fringed her father’s eyes. How was it that she couldn’t see her startling resemblance to the man sitting next to her? But, then, children often failed to notice the most glaring things.

  ‘I really think that it’s time for us to go now, Ames.’ Leigh scrunched her paper napkin up in a meaningful way and glanced around for a waiter. ‘You haven’t done your homework yet.’

  ‘It’s just maths,’ Amy said.

  ‘You like maths, do you?’ Nicholas asked, concealing his brooding anger with difficulty, and Amy bestowed on him one of those indulgent, faintly superior looks that children were wont to give adults who were trying their hardest to make conversation.

  ‘I’m good at it.’ She shrugged, thought a bit, then continued, ‘Mum and Dad used to say that I was better than them.’

  ‘I was very good at the sciences as well,’ Nicholas said conversationally, his eyes hooded. ‘Comes in useful in later life.’

  Amy appeared not to quite follow what he was getting at. ‘You mean, looking for a job?’ she asked, frowning and draining her glass of the very dregs of her drink.

  ‘That’s right, though I don’t suppose you’ve given much thought to what you want to do when you grow up.’

  ‘I want to be a ballerina,’ she said, after a while.

  ‘That sounds...interesting,’ Nicholas said, at a loss for words.

  ‘Do you know any ballerinas?’

  ‘Can’t say that I do. But we could perhaps go to a ballet one of these days.’

  ‘Could we?’ Amy’s eyes lit up momentarily like a Christmas tree.

  ‘Maybe,’ Leigh said stiffly, feeling like a stick in the mud and resenting having been placed in the position of sounding like one.

  ‘The Nutcracker usually comes around Christmas time.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Leigh pressed on sharply, and Nicholas met her eyes with steely determination.

  ‘Do you have a problem with me taking Amy out somewhere?’

  ‘Oh, no, not at all...’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘It’s just that Christmas is such a busy time...’

  ‘But, Aunty Leigh...’

  ‘Anyway, it’s time for us to go.’ Leigh looked around desperately for a waiter and signalled to the first one she saw.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nicholas said to Amy, reaching into his pocket for his wallet, ‘you could spare your aunt for a short while when we get back. Have you any friends you could spend an hour or two with? There are one or two things I need to talk to her about.’

  ‘I’m sitting right here,’ Leigh said coldly, dropping the happy, smiling mask. ‘Kindly leave Amy out of it.’

  Amy was beginning to look confused at this turn of events. She glanced from one to the other and then took refuge in playing with the box containing the bracelet.

  ‘We need to have a little chat.’ His voice contained a quiet, disturbing edge to it that started off a little nervous reaction in her stomach. She wasn’t accustomed to dealing with men like this. His eyes held hers and she had a sudden sensation of complete disorientation.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but we could arrange—’

  ‘Sooner rather than later...’

  ‘Yes, but it’s terribly difficult to find someone to babysit Amy at such short notice...’

  ‘I could go and play with Sophie,’ Amy volunteered, pleased with herself for having found a solution to the problem.

  ‘Sophie might be busy on a Sunday afternoon,’ Leigh pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps we could try anyway,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘Is this a neighbour? I’ll take you both there in my car.’

  Leigh nodded and watched with a sinking feeling as he settled the bill and stood up. He was taking over. She supposed, when she thought about it, that it was to be expected, but she realised that the possibility had never really crossed her mind.

  She had, she now saw, been unbelievably naïve. She had wanted help and had been vaguely pleased that she was doing the right thing, in telling Nicholas Kendall about the existence of his daughter, but she had still assumed that her life would carry on as it had, perhaps with fewer financial headaches.

  Naïve or else just plain stupid.

  His car was parked on double yellow lines outside the restaurant, and on closer inspection Leigh could see that it hardly mattered since there was a chauffeur behind the wheel. He sprang out as soon as he saw Nicholas, opened the car door so that she could slip into the back seat with Amy and, in the manner of all good chauffeurs, showed an admirable lack of curiosity.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Nicholas asked from the front seat, and Leigh leaned forward and told him.

  The car eased its way out of Covent Garden like a sleek, jungle animal—a top-of the-range BMW, deep blue, polished and gleaming. People turned to watch as it drove past. Sitting in the back seat, Leigh felt a complete phoney but Amy was delighted, and peered out of the window with a solemn but pleased expression.

  They covered the distance to the house in record time, and while Leigh reluctantly fixed up with Sophie’s mother for Amy to pop across for an hour Nicholas remained outside.

  It was clear what he had been doing as soon as she re-e
merged because the chauffeur was no longer in evidence.

  ‘He’s making his own way back to the apartment,’ Nicholas said tightly. ‘Gives us more flexibility.’ His hands were thrust into his pockets and the stiff, cold breeze blew his hair across his face. ‘Have you arranged for Amy to go and visit her friend?’

  ‘I’ll drop her across now—it’s just a couple of houses along.’ Leigh hesitated, not quite sure what was to happen next. ‘Perhaps it might be easier if you just came in and had a cup of coffee,’ she said.

  Nicholas nodded curtly and followed her inside the house, looking around him as he entered as though the surroundings were yet more pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that needed to be slotted in.

  Amy emerged, clutching two books. She glanced fleetingly at Nicholas and thanked him again for the bracelet as she was leaving the house with Leigh. Turning around to shut the door, Leigh could see that Nicholas’s eyes were fixed on the small figure who had her back to him. Drinking her in.

  As she sprinted back, having dropped Amy off, she wondered viciously what she had got herself into.

  Had Jenny anticipated this sort of response from her one-night stand? Possibly not. How much could you tell about a person in the space of a few hours, even if you did go to bed with them? Not much. It had been a moment’s impulse, but Jenny had never anticipated this sort of situation arising—of that Leigh was quite certain.

  Nicholas was standing just where she had left him, and she briskly offered him coffee, aware of him following her into the kitchen and watching as she took the cups from the cupboard and the milk from the fridge.

  It was better, she had decided on the way back to be businesslike about the whole thing. No sentimentality, no dawdling over her sister’s motives, no emotional explanations of what had driven her to look him up in the first place.

  She handed him his cup and said, without preamble, ‘Well, what happens now?’

  Nicholas sat at the kitchen table, a solid pine affair, showing the indentations of countless pencils dragged across the surface by Amy as she was growing up. Leigh watched him levelly. She didn’t want to indulge in any more speculations as to why Jenny had done what she did.

  ‘I take it that this is the house which is in the process of being repossessed?’

  Leigh looked around her and saw the years roll back to better times. ‘Yes,’ she answered shortly.

  ‘It’s charming. It must have been a delightful place for a child to grow up in.’

  ‘Amy was happy, yes,’ she said, looking at him over the rim of the cup and not particularly liking this turn in the conversation. Was it leading somewhere? He didn’t strike her as the sort of man who indulged in too many vacuous pleasantries.

  ‘Has the bank given you some sort of deadline?’

  Ah, this was more like it.

  ‘Not as such, but I know that it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Jen’s accountant is sorting through all the financial mumbo-jumbo, and then the house will be sorted out.’

  ‘What had you planned to do?’

  ‘Rent, Mr Kendall...’

  ‘Nicholas.’

  ‘I had planned on coming to see you and perhaps being loaned some money so that I could see my way to getting a roof over our heads, provided, of course, that you were satisfied with...the situation.’

  ‘What a very delicate way of phrasing it.’ He met her stare unflinchingly. “‘Satisfied” is the last adjective I would have used but, as you said, debate on the subject is beside the point. You have presented me with a fait accompli and now we deal with it.’

  ‘I agree.’ She looked at him, then lowered her eyes because the sensation of being swept along on a tide was too overpowering to bear.

  ‘What did you intend to do with the money?’

  ‘The money?’ She frowned, confused.

  ‘The money you envisaged me handing over.’

  ‘Lending.’ She corrected him acidly. ‘I never intended to take anything that was given, without paying it back. And I planned to rent somewhere for Amy and myself to live, I suppose.’

  ‘And precisely how did you see me fitting into this picture?’ The cold, green eyes watched her as she reddened.

  ‘Naturally, you can maintain contact with Amy...’

  ‘How generous of you. Define what you mean when you say “maintain contact”.’

  Leigh’s chin tilted defensively. ‘If you want the truth, I didn’t think that you would be that keen on anything too close. I’m not an idiot. I know that this has been thrust upon you and that you probably have very little experience of children by choice.’ She nervously swallowed a mouthful of coffee. ‘I know that all this interrupts your lifestyle—’

  ‘You know precisely nothing of my lifestyle so please do me the courtesy of not making any sweeping generalisations.’

  Leigh stiffened but chose to ignore the sarcasm in his voice. Instead, she asked in a controlled voice, ‘Do you have any experience of children, Mr Kendall? Nicholas?’

  ‘Not very much, though I don’t see where the question is leading.’

  ‘I came to you because I was in desperate need of money. I’m not going to bother to hide that because you probably know it already anyway. I’m quite happy to make do on a day-to-day basis but everything changes the minute a child is involved.

  ‘Amy needs looking after. She can’t eat whatever, whenever. She has to be clothed. Roy and Jennifer—I had no idea how heavily in debt they were. I guess they thought that they would ride out the recession and come out the other side. But I’ve tried that, I’ve tried making a go of what’s left of their business, and it’s not feasible.’ She paused for breath.

  He looked at her. ‘She’s a delightful child.’

  ‘Yes. She is.’

  ‘How damned odd to be referring to my own flesh and blood in such a detached, impersonal manner.’ There was frustration and anger in his voice, but when he looked at her some of the hostility had gone, although there was still no warmth there. His eyes were cool and speculative, but less judgmental than they had been earlier.

  ‘I understand that...that it’s a difficult situation for you, which is why I want to intrude on your life as little as possible. I’m very sorry about all this.’

  ‘Save the regrets,’ he said dismissively. ‘Now that I’ve seen her there’s no doubt that Amy is my child and, that being the case, I have no intention of sweeping her under the carpet after I’ve salved my conscience, by giving you a fistful of money to tide you over.’

  ‘It would just be a loan.’ What, she wondered, was he trying to tell her? Something behind his words was making her feel uneasy. She had foreseen some kind of mutually agreeable arrangement over visitation, perhaps in the nature of a friend calling round so that Amy would not suspect anything and would have the necessary time to accustom herself to his presence. It seemed he wanted more.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He shook his head impatiently and then sat forward, resting his hands on the table. ‘The money is incidental.’ He made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Leigh asked, chilled at the suspicion that was taking root at the back of her mind.

  ‘I intend to make her a permanent fixture in my life,’ he said bluntly, and Leigh blanched in horror as her worst fears were confirmed.

  ‘Yes, well, naturally she’ll be a permanent fixture. I mean, I don’t expect you—’

  ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying.’ His eyes held hers and she felt suddenly sick with apprehension. ‘I don’t want the role of part-time father. Or part-time father, masquerading as family friend.’

  Leigh found that she couldn’t say anything. She had a weird, dizzy feeling that seemed to spread up from her toes, engulfing every bone and muscle and pore in her body. She had to sit on her hands to stop herself from trembling violently.

  ‘We can reach some kind of agreement...’ she whispered desperately.

  What had she gone and done? Why had she ever assume
d that Nicholas Kendall would obligingly lend her some money, enough to see her through, and then, still obligingly, vanish out of their lives whence he had come? Or at least semi-vanish. Somewhere safely tucked away in the background.

  ‘You do realise that I am Amy’s next of kin,’ he continued implacably. Leigh could barely nod her response. If he thought that he was going to manoeuvre Amy, her wonderful, beloved niece, out of her life then he was in for a big surprise. Although, a little voice was telling her, he was the father, wasn’t he? And he did have an awful lot of money, whereas she, as guardian, had none. And money, unfortunately, did talk, didn’t it?

  ‘She doesn’t know you from Adam,’ Leigh pointed out weakly, finding her voice at last.

  ‘If I went to court I would be able to present a very powerful argument for getting control of her.’

  ‘The court would be sympathetic to me! Amy has never seen you in her life before today.’ Her eyes were beginning to glisten and she took a deep breath to control her emotions. There was no point breaking down. What good would that do? He would be the last person on earth who would sympathise.

  ‘Hardly my fault, as I would be compelled to point out.’

  There was no arguing this point. ‘I’d fight you every step of the way, and in the long run it wouldn’t do Amy any good at all, would it? And she’s the one who matters, isn’t she?’

  ‘My point exactly. Let’s face facts here, Leigh. Your sister had my baby and, whatever her intentions at the time, she withheld the information from me for nearly eight years. God knows, if circumstances hadn’t turned out the way they have, I would never have been any the wiser. You are now Amy’s guardian, but you’re staring penury in the face by your own admission. How much money do you actually have in the bank?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Leigh said almost inaudibly, hating the man opposite her with a passion she had not felt herself capable of. ‘Not much.’

  ‘In other words, you need financial assistance, and that’s unlikely to come from a bank when the bank is currently in the process of repossessing your house.’

  Everything Nicholas said sounded so logical that she had a very vivid picture of what would happen if Nicholas Kendall decided to fight for his daughter in a court of law.