‘You barely look old enough to have a daughter of sixteen.’
‘What are you trying to say, Mr Newman?’
‘How old were you when you had her?’
‘That’s none of your business!’
‘You expect me to sit back in silence and allow you to lecture me on the behaviour of my son without asking you any questions?’ He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat back, and regarded her unsmilingly over the rim of the cup. Jessica was deeply regretting her impulse to seek this man’s help. He had no intention of co-operating with her and he never would have. He was typical of that breed of person who throws money at their children and assumes that that does the trick. She had seen examples of them often enough where she worked. Parents with too much money and too little time, who sat upright on chairs in the law offices, bewildered by a child who had been brought in for driving a stolen car, or causing damage to property. How could he do this to us? was their invariable lament. After all we did for him! ‘Let’s just get one thing straight, Mr Newman.’ She refused to call him Anthony. ‘My daughter is not pregnant.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t—?’
‘I make that clear from the start?’ She looked at the unyielding face. ‘Because I was curious to hear precisely how you would have handled such a problem.’
‘And I take it from that stony expression on your face that my reply was not what you would have wanted to hear?’
‘Very good, Mr Newman.’
‘The name is Anthony! Will you stop calling me Mr Newman? I’m not conducting an interview for a job!’ Jessica reddened and looked away.
‘And what would have been your solution to that particular little problem, Miss Hirst? How would you have suggested that I deal with it?’
‘It’s irrelevant, since Lucy isn’t pregnant.’
‘Why don’t you answer my question?’ He leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and subjected her to intense, cool scrutiny. ‘I’m interested in your answer.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Maybe you would have suggested that I encourage my son to adopt the mantle of fatherhood at the age of seventeen? Marriage as soon as possible?’
‘It’s always preferable for a child to have both parents.’
‘And does yours? I take it that she doesn’t, since you’re not a ‘Mrs’.’
‘No, there’s just me.’
‘What happened?’ he asked, after a while, and Jessica looked away, feeling cornered but not quite knowing how to extricate herself from the situation.
‘There was never a potential husband, if you must know.’
He didn’t say anything, and she could well imagine what sort of sordid possibilities were going through his head.
‘I’m afraid it just didn’t work out quite the way that I’d imagined it.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you, Mr Newman?’
‘Shall I tell you what I see, Miss Hirst?’ He paused, though not long enough for her to reply, then he leaned forward slightly, and his voice when he spoke was grim. ‘I see an anxious young mother who’s desperate that her daughter doesn’t repeat the same mistakes that she made. That’s fair enough, but I really don’t think that you’ve looked at the whole picture, have you? You’ve somehow got it into your head that my son is to blame for your daughter’s behaviour, and I’d be interested in finding out how you arrived at that conclusion.’ The tables had been turned. She had hoped to surprise this man into some sort of favourable response, or at least shared sympathy. But sympathy didn’t appear high on his list of virtues, and every word he had just spoken was tantamount to an attack.
‘I’m not blaming you in any way,’ Jessica informed him, her face burning with anger. She took a deep breath. She was here, he wasn’t going to suddenly vanish like a bad dream, and she might just as well make the best of the situation. ‘You’re right: I’m worried about my daughter and I’m desperate enough to approach someone I’ve never laid eyes on in my life before.’ Fortunately. ‘I don’t know that your son is responsible for Lucy’s change of attitude...’
‘But you’re more than willing to jump to the conclusion...’
‘I’ve put two and two together!’
‘And come up with ...what...Miss Hirst? Three? Five? Sixteen?’
‘Maybe!’ Jessica exploded, keeping her voice down, though she would have loved to yell her head off.
‘But then again maybe not! I’m willing to take the chance because I can see my daughter going off the rails bit by bit, and I have no idea how to stop the downward trend!’ Her jaw ached from anger and frustration, and a refusal to allow tears to blur the issue. ‘Over the past few months she’s changed,’ Jessica continued in a calmer tone.
‘Become difficult. More and more parties, sneaking back into the house at all odd hours. Her schoolwork’s taken a back seat. It’s only a question of time before her grades start to suffer.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Lucy doesn’t have the advantages of money to tide her through, Mr Newman. She has her brains, but her brains are nothing without her willingness to use them, and right now I’m very much afraid that she might decide not to.’
‘What did you have in mind when you came to see me, Miss Hirst?’ The coldness had given way to something else, although for the life of her she didn’t know what. His expressions, she was fast realising, were difficult to read. He could be thinking anything. But at least he seemed prepared to hear her out. ‘I thought perhaps that you could have a word with your son, Mr Newman. I’ve tried talking to Lucy on numerous occasions, but she switches off.’
‘And you think that that would achieve anything?’
‘It would achieve more than what’s being achieved at the moment, Mr Newman. Right now, I’m more or less living on a battlefield. Occasionally there’s a cease-fire, but it never lasts very long, and they seem to be getting increasingly shorter.’
‘You still haven’t told me why you think my son’s responsible. Surely your daughter has lots of friends? How do you know that she isn’t being led astray by someone else?’
‘I know all of my daughter’s friends.’
‘All of them?’
‘To the best of my knowledge. I mean, obviously I have no definite proof that your son is behind Lucy’s change.’ In a court of law, she thought, I’d already have lost the case. ‘I haven’t overheard him forcing her to rebel, I haven’t found letters from him encouraging sabotage. But his name’s been on her lips ever since she started ... ever since... this... problem arose.’
‘You make my son sound like some sort of subversive force to be reckoned with.’ He laughed shortly, as though the notion was utterly ridiculous. As though, she thought suddenly, he was vaguely contemptuous of his son. ‘Have you met him?’
‘No, but...’
‘Then you should reserve judgement until you do, Miss Hirst. What, incidentally, do you think is going on?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Jessica admitted.
‘It’s just that your son seems to be very influential over my daughter’s life at the moment.’
‘Do you think they’re sleeping together?’ he asked flatly, and she threw him a long, resentful stare.
‘It’s a possibility, I suppose.’ Not one that she was willing to indulge in, but the truth had to be faced.
‘Would your daughter tell you if they were?’
‘I’m not sure. I’d like to think that she would, but I really just don’t know.’ It all sounded so vague. Impulse had made her take action, but these questions made her realise that what she felt was so instinctive and nebulous that she could hardly blame him if he refused to co-operate. Aside from which, he was a father, after all, and no one liked the implication that their child was a corrupting influence, least of all when the implication came from a perfect stranger.
‘Maybe,’ she suggested helpfully, ‘you could just tell Mark to back away a little, leave her to get on with her life...?’
‘He’s seventeen years
old,’ he told her. ‘He’s hardly likely to relish me telling him what he can and can’t do.’
‘You’re his father!’
‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll bow his head and listen to a word I say to him,’ he informed her tersely. ‘You’re an intelligent enough woman.’ He made it sound as though he had his suspicions about that. ‘I’m sure you know precisely what I’m trying to say.’
‘That you won’t do a damn thing to help. That you’ll allow your son to ruin Lucy’s life.’
‘‘Ruin’’s taking it a bit far, isn’t it?’
‘No, it is not!’ This time it was Jessica’s turn to sit forward, her hands tightly clenched. She had first-hand experience of what happened when your life suddenly veered off at a tangent and you were left to pick up the pieces. Mark and her daughter might or might not be sleeping together, and if they weren’t then she was going to make damn sure that they didn’t. Accidents happened, and accidents could change the whole course of your life.
‘Look,’ she said, in a more controlled voice, ‘all I’m asking you to do is have a chat with your son—tell him to wait until Lucy gets a little older if he wants to see her.’
‘Maybe send him off to a boarding school somewhere just to make sure?’
‘I could do without your sarcasm, Mr Newman.’
‘And how do you intend to control your own daughter? How do you know that if Mark obliges and disappears from the scene altogether she isn’t going to find another focus of attention?’ It was a sensible enough question, but Jessica still resented him asking it. She stared at him speechlessly, and he looked back without flinching. ‘Well?’ he asked silkily.
‘Of course I don’t know!’ she exploded furiously. ‘But I prefer to cross that bridge when I get to it.’
They both sat back and regarded one another like adversaries sizing up the competition.
‘I’ll compromise with you,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll talk to Mark, with you and your daughter present. That way there’ll be less of an atmosphere of confrontation and more an air of discussion.’
Jessica stared at him. She hadn’t banked on this solution being proffered, and she suspected, judging from the look on his face, that he had only suggested it on the spur of the moment, to get her off his back.
‘Would they agree to that?’ she asked finally, and he shrugged. ‘Possibly not.’
‘In which case, at least you can say that you tried...?’
‘That’s right,’ he said with staggering honesty.
‘Where do you want this meeting to take place?’ Jessica asked, making her mind up on the spot. What he offered was better than nothing.
‘I can reserve a private room at a restaurant in Hampstead. Thursday. Eight o’clock. It’s called Chez Jacques, and I know the owner.’
‘I can’t afford that restaurant, Mr Newman.’ She voiced the protest without even thinking about it, but she had read reviews of the place and the prices quoted were way out of her reach.
‘Fine.’ He shrugged and began standing up, and she glared at him.
‘All right.’
He sat back down and looked at her.
‘But we don’t make it an arranged meeting,’ she said, deciding that his manipulation had gone far enough.
‘I don’t want Lucy to think that I’ve been manoeuvring behind her back...’
‘Which you have been...’
She ignored that. ‘So we meet by accident. It’ll be tricky persuading her to go there, but I’ll make damn sure that we turn up.’
‘Why should it be tricky? Doesn’t she like going to restaurants? Is this part of the teenager phase you say she’s going through?’
‘Lucy and I don’t eat out very often, Mr Newman—Anthony. I take her somewhere on her birthday, and we usually go out on mine, but it’s not a habit...’
He frowned, trying to puzzle this one out. ‘You surely can’t be that impoverished, if your daughter’s at private school...?’
‘Private school...? Whatever gave you that impression?’
‘Isn’t that where she met my son?’
‘No, it isn’t. I work as a secretary in some law offices. My pay cheque, generous though it is, manages to cover the mortgage and pay the bills and buy the essentials. However, it doesn’t quite run to private schooling.’
She hoped that she didn’t sound resentful of her state of affairs, or else defensive, but she had a suspicion that that was precisely how she sounded. And she also had a suspicion that that was precisely how he saw her. Wealthy people often led an insular life. They mixed in social circles where foreign travel was taken for granted, as were expensive meals out, best seats at the opera, and cars that were replaced every three years. Anthony Newman had just been brought face to face with one of those more lowly creatures who didn’t lead the charmed life. It wasn’t apparent in his expression, but she found herself reading behind the good-looking, detached exterior, even though she was appalled by this inverse snobbery. She wondered whether he was horrified by the thought of his son mixing with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. There was nothing in his manner to suggest any such thing, but then he struck her as a man who was clever at concealing what he didn’t want the world to see.
He signalled for the cheque, and was irritated when she made an attempt to settle her half of the bill.
‘Right. So that’s settled then. Eight at Chez Jacques. Thursday.’
‘Unless you change your mind and decide to have a quiet word with Mark.’
‘Naturally.’
But he had no intention of changing his mind, and when they parted company outside the hotel she wasn’t quite sure whether she had done the right thing after all, or not. She was also taken aback at the reaction he had provoked in her. She had gone to his office to ask for his help, one parent to another. Now she found herself thinking of him, and not simply as a parent. She found herself thinking of him as a man, and a disturbing one at that, although she couldn’t put her finger on the reason why. She just knew that his face kept popping up in her head.
For nearly seventeen years she had steered clear of any involvement with the opposite sex. She worked amongst them, went out for drinks occasionally with some of them, in a group, but she was careful never to get involved. Never to get involved was never to be hurt. It was a self-taught lesson. She had her daughter—life would only be complicated if she allowed a man to intrude.
And the decision had hardly cost her dear. In all those years she had never met anyone who had tempted her with the possibility of romance. A few had tried, and she had kindly steered them away. It hadn’t been difficult. Most men were frankly unwilling to get involved with a ready-made family unit anyway.
Anthony Newman, however, was in a league of his own. He wasn’t like any man she had ever met in her life before. Something about him had aroused a certain curiosity inside her, made her wonder for the first time what she had missed out on during all these years of self-imposed celibacy. She had to remind herself that curiosity killed the cat. She was sorely tempted to phone and cancel the dinner arrangement. She knew that he would not have objected. But that, she realised, would have amounted to running away, and it was ridiculous because she didn’t even know what she would have been running away from.
He was hardly going to pounce on her, was he? As it was, he had only suggested the arrangement with reluctance, and no doubt he would have been very happy never to clap eyes on her again.
On Thursday morning, just as Lucy was about to head off to school, and Jessica was busy in the kitchen, trying to do twelve things at once before she set out to work, she said, casually, ‘By the way, don’t arrange anything for this evening. We’re going out.’
She could tell from the silence behind her that she might as well have announced that they were departing for a last-minute trip to the moon.
‘Going out? Going out? Going out where?’
‘Going out for a meal, actually.’ She turned around, wiped her hands on
the kitchen towel, and looked at her daughter.
‘People occasionally do things like that.’
‘People may do things like that, but we don’t!’
Lucy’s eyes were narrowed with suspicion. Her knap-sack was half-open and slung over one shoulder, and her long hair was gathered over the other. At sixteen, she was already a couple of inches taller than her mother, and she didn’t look like a child.
Sixteen. Jessica thought that she looked like an adult of twenty going on thirty something. It was frightening where all the time had gone.
‘I thought it might make a nice change,’ Jessica said, refusing to be provoked.
‘Why?’
Jessica could feel the familiar irritation gathering up inside her, and she swallowed it down and smiled.
‘Because it’s been a rough few months for us. You’ve got exams on the horizon. I thought it might be nice to eat out for a change.’
Lucy shrugged and looked suddenly bored with the conversation. ‘Okay.’
‘So please be home on time!’ Jessica told the departing back, a remark which didn’t even warrant a response.
Lucy was already out of the door and on her way.
By seven-thirty, Jessica was bathed and dressed and waiting in the sitting room for her daughter, who still had not shown up from school. She had taken a magazine to read, so that she could at least pretend to herself that her frame of mind was still relaxed, but the magazine lay unopened on her lap, and her fingers were clasped together.
The Unmarried Husband Page 3
