Her Sister's Baby

by Alison Fraser

  ‘I could do it,’ he offered surprisingly.

  ‘No! No, thank you,’ she tempered her rejection.

  ‘All right.’ He didn’t insist but gently pressed her arm as he said, ‘Look, I really am sorry—’

  ‘It’s okay, honestly,’ she stopped him before he could go on. ‘Pen says—said worse to my face. It just sounded so like her, that was all… About the funeral—’

  ‘If Tom agrees, we’ll make it public.’

  ‘You’re right, of course. It’s up to him. But what I was about to say is: I can’t go.’

  ‘What?’ He was clearly shocked.

  ‘I can’t go,’ she repeated as the hand on her arm finally dropped away.

  She couldn’t stand at a graveside and bury her sister. It was too hard. No matter that things hadn’t always been right between them.

  ‘I’m on duty all week,’ she claimed as an excuse.

  Drayton Carlisle stared at her as if she were mad. ‘The supermarket could surely spare you for a day.’

  Cass stared back, questioning his sanity in turn. Then she realised. Pen hadn’t told them of her career change. Why was that?

  ‘All right, I won’t go,’ she said with blunt honesty. ‘Satisfied?’

  Drayton Carlisle shook his head. It was hard to reconcile this Cass Barker with the one who had been crying in his arms just a few minutes ago.

  ‘I don’t understand you, but then I never did.’

  ‘Did you try?’

  It slipped out before Cass could stop it. She heard her own bitterness and was scared of giving more away.

  She turned from him and opened the door. She held it wide, waiting for him to leave.

  He took the hint, putting on his coat and walking towards the door, but said as he drew level, ‘We haven’t resolved this yet. I’ll call tomorrow.’

  Cass shrugged, as if to say, Do what you like. Tomorrow she might be up to the fight. Tonight she just wanted him to go before she broke down again.

  His eyes rested on her a moment longer, intense, searing blue eyes, then he was gone. Thank God.

  She closed the door and leaned heavily against it, drained of strength and anger.

  Another death to face. It felt like familiar territory. Perhaps because it was. Father. Mother. Sister. Hard not to take personally. Why me? Why us? Why Pen?

  She went back through to the sideboard and took out the family photograph album. It contained a record of their lives before their father’s death from cancer when Cass was fifteen and Pen nine. Here were the memories of happy holidays and birthday parties and dressing up for school plays.

  These photographs had always made Cass a little mournful. Now, as she turned page after page, and saw Pen, a blonde-haired angel, smiling into cameras, sitting on knees, pulling faces, she felt utterly bereft. This time, when she cried, her grief was for all of them, for her beloved little sister and her strong, clever father and her pretty, laughing mother, and even for herself, the once carefree child she’d been.

  The guilt came stealing in later, and, with it, that familiar question: what should I have done? It seemed she’d been asking it for ever. It seemed she’d always got it wrong.

  She’d gone away to study medicine at university, imagining that one day she would provide her widowed mother with a better life. When her mother had died in a road accident, how she’d wished she’d never gone away!

  The only thing that had kept her from folding then had been her sister. In those first hours and days she had held Pen and comforted her and they had been so close it was hard to imagine they would ever be anything else.

  Reality, however, had come to call on the afternoon they had buried their mother. It had been in the shape of a boy, more Cass’s age than Pen’s. Cass had taken in the earring and tattoo and the sullen manner, and stood, aghast, while Pen had grabbed a coat and disappeared before she’d been able to do anything. It had seemed that, in Cass’s absence, Pen had grown up fast—too fast.

  When Pen had finally reappeared at two in the morning, Cass’s mind had been made up. She wouldn’t abandon Pen to a life of no-hope boyfriends and, for want of any willing relatives, a year in care. Surely she could do better?

  She had fully believed so and had transplanted what had been left of the family to this tiny terraced house in London. Pen had protested loudly and had managed to sulk continuously for a fortnight in between tearful phone calls to the boyfriend. Then gradually she had made friends at her new school and had stopped pining for Pontefract, and Cass had breathed a sigh of relief.

  That relief had been short-lived. Within a couple of months, Pen had been going up West—to nightclubs and bars where looks had counted more than birth dates—and Cass had been left to wonder how she could possibly control her.

  All those years gone by and Cass still didn’t know the right answer. She just felt if she’d done it, Pen might still be alive.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WORK was Cass’s salvation. Having finally fallen asleep in the small hours, she was woken at seven a.m. by her pager bleeping. It was the hospital. One of the A and E doctors was himself sick. Would Cass cover for him? She agreed readily. Anything rather than spend a day brooding on her sister’s death.

  She told no one and no one would have guessed the serious-faced Dr Barker had cried herself to sleep. She stitched cuts, pumped stomachs, jump-started a heart, all with her normal cool efficiency.

  Of course, grief didn’t go away. She put it on hold while she worked the accident unit and coped with other people’s pain, but it returned the moment she was home.

  She managed to make phone calls to a great aunt and her mother’s cousin—the only known relatives left—before the cousin’s well-meaning words overwhelmed her. When the phone rang shortly afterwards, she didn’t pick it up. She was crying too hard to talk to anyone.

  It was much later when she remembered the call and lifted the receiver to find a message had been left for her. In fact, there were three messages, timed throughout the day, each more terse than the last. They were all from Drayton Carlisle, requesting that she call him on his mobile to discuss funeral arrangements.

  He had obviously lost what little sympathy he’d had for her. Cass told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t need his concern. He had never understood her or her relationship with Pen. He knew nothing of the past which had linked them inextricably before driving them apart.

  Sometimes secrets did that to families. Pen had wanted to take hers and parcel it up tight and bury it so deep no one would ever discover it. The trouble was Cass. Cass knew the secret, had lived with it, helped her over it. Cass would have kept it, too, but Pen had never been sure of that. Pen hadn’t been able to keep other people’s secrets. She’d assumed Cass was the same and lived in fear of the day Cass would tell. So Pen had kept her at a distance, away from the Carlisle family and her new life.

  Cass had accepted this, because she felt partly responsible for the past. If she’d controlled Pen better, she wouldn’t have been pregnant at sixteen, five months gone before realising, sobbing her heart out and suddenly a little girl again. Cass had concealed her own horror and offered comfort rather than recrimination until Pen had become resigned, then excited about the life moving inside her. She’d talked endlessly of possible names and impossibly expensive baby clothes.

  It was not to be, however. The baby had made a sudden entrance to the world in a bedroom upstairs. He had struggled and gasped for life. Cass had tried and failed to breathe life into his small perfect body. Pen had been left empty-armed and devastated.

  Cass, questioning her very vocation, had abandoned her studies to concentrate on getting Pen through the dark times. For a while it had seemed her sister would stay broken, defeated, unable to get over the pain of it, but in time she had emerged from the whole affair with a new, tougher edge.

  Pen had decided she wanted to be a model. Cass had quelled any doubts and happily paid for a portfolio of photographs—anything rather than have Pen aimle
ssly sitting around. She’d sold her textbooks and stethoscope, believing she’d never go back to medicine. It had been money well spent when Pen had come home in seventh heaven at having been accepted on the books of a modelling agency.

  But dreams of being a supermodel hadn’t quite become reality. Pen hadn’t been tall enough for catwalk and had been too slim for glamour. She’d managed to win a few catalogue assignments, mostly for the teen market, and when they’d dried up she’d settled for PR work at trade shows.

  It had been through promotional work she’d met the Carlisles and, almost from day one, what had once been a joke—marrying money—had turned into a mission statement. Initially the talk had been of a Drayton Carlisle until Pen had decided he was too ancient and had subsequently transferred her affections to his younger brother, Tom.

  Cass should have been appalled and had been really, but it had kept Pen happy. She hadn’t anticipated Pen being successful. Pen had still been only seventeen and, though scarred by experience, had been surely transparent to any man with insight.

  She hadn’t reckoned on Thomson Carlisle. Some years older than Pen, but oddly immature. A privileged childhood fractured by the loss of his parents. Sweet, if a little weak-natured.

  Had Pen loved Tom Carlisle? Cass had never been certain. Pen had appeared in triumph, waving a diamond engagement ring. At that point Tom had been an unknown quantity, and Pen had been infuriatingly vague. He’d been around twenty-two or -three or -four, had had a flat somewhere in South Ken and had been something in the family engineering business. She’d been more specific about the sporty Merc he’d driven and his two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year trust fund.

  In fact, Cass hadn’t met Tom first, but Drayton Carlisle. He had appeared on the doorstep one evening, this tall, immaculately dressed, studiously polite, breathtakingly handsome creature from another planet. Cass had felt this curious twisting sensation in her stomach, seconds before her normal barriers had gone up.

  She’d already been in a bad mood; his uninvited presence had put her in worse. She’d spent the day cleaning the house and worrying about Pen who had been out all night, and in ten minutes she’d been due to start an evening shift as a checkout girl at the local supermarket where she’d been working since abandoning her studies.

  ‘Yes?’ she’d fairly barked the word at this stranger.

  He returned politely. ‘I’m not sure if I have the right address. I’m looking for a family called Barker.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cass repeated, without committing herself.

  ‘Are you Penelope’s sister?’ he added after studying her face.

  He sounded mildly surprised. He’d possibly expected a petite, short-skirted blonde like Pen, and ended up with a tall, nylon-overalled mouse.

  ‘You’re Tom?’ Cass was surprised, too. This man looked far too mature for Pen.

  He shook his head. ‘I’d better introduce myself. I’m Drayton Carlisle, Tom’s brother. And you are…’

  Confused, that was what she was. She had yet to meet Tom and here was his big brother on the doorstep. She smelled a rat.

  ‘Cass,’ she replied abruptly.

  ‘Cass?’ He checked he had it right, ‘That’ll be short for…?’

  Cass thought it fairly obvious and said with irony, ‘Castleford.’

  ‘Castleford?’ he repeated quizzically.

  ‘Town up t’North,’ she relayed, exaggerating her Yorkshire vowels.

  His eyes narrowed briefly. Did he realise she was winding him up?

  ‘How unusual,’ he commented dryly.

  ‘And Drayton isn’t?’ she couldn’t resist countering.

  ‘Family name,’ he grimaced. ‘My mother was a Drayton.’

  ‘Really.’ Cass pretended to be impressed. ‘One of the Draytons?’

  Of course, she’d gone too far. She’d put him down as an upper-class twit. She was right on one count but not the other.

  He stared straight at her for a moment. It was an intense scrutiny. His eyes were ice-blue and hard and intelligent.

  ‘More Northern humour, I presume,’ he finally concluded before directing at her, ‘Is Penelope in?’

  ‘No, sorry.’ She shrugged into the jacket already in her hand. ‘Is there a message I can pass on?’

  ‘Are you expecting her back soon?’ he persisted.

  How to answer that? Pen came and Pen went. Cass had long since lost any control over her movements.

  Cass confined herself to a shrug.

  ‘In that case, perhaps you and I could have a talk about matters?’ he suggested, a hint of steel now behind the polite, well-modulated tones.

  Matters being his brother marrying a nobody that he’d known five minutes. Even Cass could see the family would be less than thrilled.

  ‘Look—’ she glanced at her watch ‘—I don’t mean to be rude, Mr Carlisle, but can we make it some other time? I have to be in work in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Is your work close?’ he asked as she shut and locked the door behind her.

  ‘A mile or so.’ She was going to have to run.

  He must have read her mind as he said, ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

  Cass was briefly tempted, before replying, ‘It’s all right. I can be a little late and I don’t want to put you to any bother—’

  ‘It’s no bother.’ He followed her out on the pavement, and directed a remote unlocking device to the row of cars ahead.

  She saw a set of tail-lights briefly illuminate but it wasn’t until they were level that she read the logo and had a good look at the sleek sports car.

  She kept her face impassive. Pen might be impressed by fast cars but she refused to be.

  He opened the passenger door for her, and waited as she debated whether to accept this lift or not. He looked safe. Well, safe as in unlikely to turn out to be a psychopath or safe as even less likely to be interested in girls dressed in supermarket overalls.

  She climbed in and found herself sinking into opulent leather. How the other half lived.

  She gave him directions and, though it wasn’t far, they were caught in the rush hour.

  ‘I wondered—how do you feel about their relationship?’ he asked as they inched along the High Street.

  ‘I really can’t say.’ Cass knew Pen would never forgive her if she did. ‘I haven’t met your brother.’

  ‘Then you must have some doubts,’ he was quick to conclude. ‘Your sister’s only…what, seventeen? Rather young to be rushing into marriage, don’t you think?’

  Quite, Cass could have agreed, but she wasn’t willing to give him the satisfaction—especially when she remembered Tom wasn’t the only Carlisle Pen had gone out with.

  ‘Not too young to be dated by men in their thirties, though,’ she said pointedly.

  His eyes narrowed briefly from the road to her. ‘You mean me?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘That was once only.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ Cass returned with heavy irony.

  ‘No, it isn’t—’ he sounded annoyed ‘—and I didn’t date her. The company had an exhibition stand at Earls Court. I took those involved to dinner on the final day and somehow ended up with your sister. When I discovered how young she was—not to mention immature—I sent her home in a taxi, unsullied.’

  Cass swivelled her head in his direction and saw from his tight-lipped expression he was being totally serious.

  She felt an odd rush of relief, although she was not quite sure why. If Pen hadn’t slept with this man, there were others.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she finally said.

  ‘Do,’ he said with insistence, before shifting back to his original argument. ‘At any rate, I’d say she’s too young for commitment.’

  ‘Really,’ she replied archly. ‘How kind of you to be concerned for her.’

  His eyes went from the road to Cass, checking if she were that naive. The curve of her lips told him otherwise.

  ‘Yes, all right,
it’s obviously my brother’s interests I’m protecting,’ he admitted.

  ‘Or even his trust fund,’ she suggested somewhat recklessly.

  He was quick to observe, ‘You know about his fund, do you?’

  Cass could have kicked herself. She’d never met his brother yet she knew his financial situation!

  She shrugged as if it had been just a guess. ‘All you rich types have trust funds, don’t you? Turn left here, by the way,’ she added, relieved to see they’d arrived.

  He drove into the supermarket car park and Cass jumped out the moment he drew into a bay, muttering an offhand, ‘Thanks,’ as she went.

  He wasn’t so easily dismissed, however. A detaining hand was laid on her arm before she reached the outer door.

  ‘I’m late,’ she protested.

  ‘Tough.’ Unmoved, he resumed their conversation. ‘So, having a trust fund, that makes Tom fair game, does it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Cass tried and failed to shrug off his hand.

  He tightened his grip. ‘But you think it.’

  Cass’s temper rose along with his. ‘Pardon me, but have we met before?’

  He frowned at this non sequitur. ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘No,’ she said archly, ‘so what makes you an expert on how I think?’

  It stopped him in his tracks for a moment and a cloud gathered over his high, handsome brow. Cass waited for it to descend on her but, though their eyes met and clashed, he surprised her with his reaction.

  ‘You’re right. I was being presumptuous,’ he finally responded. ‘Perhaps you could clue me into how you really feel?’

  Cass didn’t see that she could, and be loyal to her sister, so she dodged the question and said instead, ‘I don’t know how old your brother is—’

  ‘Twenty-five—’ was supplied.

  ‘But I imagine, like my sister, he’ll do what he wants, regardless,’ she ran on.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he countered. ‘Not if he considers who controls his trust fund.’

  His tone was understated, but his meaning was obvious.

  ‘You,’ she concluded.