And Mother Makes Three
Liz Fielding
Dear Miss Lawrence, (#ub3cf6b3c-c8cc-5c1f-a1cc-28738bf3aff7)About the Author (#u937c789e-c9f5-5edd-afae-c70fc7905455)Title Page (#u2a9a7535-f6e2-5051-b690-61c82d4e6bfe)CHAPTER ONE (#ub3c79da0-458e-5a1e-81cb-29b2e0439899)CHAPTER TWO (#u7400e8fd-e176-5511-9543-c0759d6758cc)CHAPTER THREE (#ud124dffc-3dac-5605-a378-d5e2bc978542)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Dear Miss Lawrence,
It is my school sports day on Friday, June 18th, and I am writing to ask if you could possibly come.
When I told my friend Josie that you were my mother, she didn’t believe me. And now all the girls in my class are saying I made it up about having a famous mother.
I know you’re really busy saving the rain forest and the poor animals, and I don’t want to be a nuisance, but if you would just do this I wouldn’t ask anything ever again. I promise.
Your loving daughter,
Lucy Fitzpatrick.
Bronte turned over the envelope for a moment, wondering if she’d misread the name. Miss B. Lawrence. Then the penny dropped. “A famous mother...saving the rain forest...” The letter was not meant for her but for her sister, Brooke. Brooke had a daughter—and she, Bronte, had a niece!
Born and raised in Berkshire, England, Liz Fielding started writing at the age of twelve when she won a hymnwriting competition at her convent school. After a gap of more years than she is prepared to admit to, during which she worked as a secretary in Africa and the Middle East, got married and had two children, she was finally able to realize her ambition and turn to full-time writing in 1992.
She now lives with her husband, John, in West Wales, surrounded by mystical countryside and romantic, crumbling castles, content to leave the traveling to her grown-up children and keeping in touch with the rest of the world via the Internet.
And Mother Makes Three
Liz Fielding
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘FITZ, thank you for stopping by. I know how busy you are.’
James Fitzpatrick took the small, perfectly manicured hand extended to him. ‘Any time, Claire. I’m never too busy for anything that concerns Lucy, you know that.’ But Claire Graham’s response to his smile was the closest she ever came to a frown. More trouble, then. ‘Has she broken another window?’
‘Nothing so simple.’
‘A window and a washbasin?’ Lucy, tall for her age, with arms and legs that seemed to have a life of their own, had been causing chaos since she had first discovered that she could climb out of her cot. She didn’t mean to break things, it was just that anything within a three foot range of her was likely to spontaneously disintegrate.
‘Not even the drinking fountain. It’s been a peaceful term.’
‘It’s not over yet.’
‘Please, do sit down, Fitz.’ Beneath her slightly prim and spinsterish exterior, Claire Graham was as soft as butter and could usually be teased to a smile; after a school governors’ meeting with a glass of sherry inside her she could even be teased to a blush, but not today it seemed.
‘So. What’s she done?’ Fitz enquired, lowering himself gingerly onto the elegant chair fronting her desk. He’d come with his cheque-book in his back pocket, prepared for a catalogue of Lucy’s latest string of accidents; Claire Graham’s reassurance about school property, far from easing his mind, suggested that this summons boded something far worse. ‘Her last report suggested that she was doing well enough,’ he said, ‘so I don’t imagine this is about her schoolwork.’
‘Lucy is a bright child. She has a particularly vivid imagination, as I am sure you know.’ Claire’s confirmation of something he already knew only increased his uneasiness. ‘You’ve done a good job, Fitz.’ Then she paused, as if searching for the right words. ‘I’ve never asked you this before, but under the circumstances I think I have to now. Is there any contact at all between you and Lucy’s mother?’
The apprehension took form and, despite the summer heat that was drying up the playing fields beyond the window, balled like ice in the pit of his stomach. ‘None.’
‘Could you contact her? If you had to?’
‘I can think of no reason that would make any contact between us likely.’
‘Not even for Lucy’s sake?’
‘She has no interest in Lucy, Claire. If it had been left to—’ He stopped himself from even thinking the name. ‘If it had been left to her mother, Lucy would have been adopted.’
‘Then this is going to be very difficult.’ She regarded him with steady grey eyes. ‘I have to tell you, Fitz, that Lucy has begun fantasising about her mother.’
‘Fantasising?’
‘She’s been making up stories about her, pretending that she’s someone famous.’
The ice ball swelled like a snowball rolling down a hill but he couldn’t let his concern show. He attempted a smile. ‘You did say that she has a vivid imagination.’
‘Yes, I did, but this isn’t like her usual flights of fancy. She’s very intense about it. You haven’t noticed anything?’ He shook his head and Claire Graham regarded him sympathetically. ‘Under the circumstances I’d have to say that this is a fairly normal response. It’s something that most adopted children will go through—’
‘But Lucy is not adopted.’ Did he sound as desperate as he felt?
‘I realise that, but in the total absence of the birth mother, the situation becomes somewhat similar.’ Fitz was too busy searching his mind, trying to think how his daughter could possibly have discovered what he had taken such trouble to hide, to respond to the sympathy in the woman’s voice. ‘It’s the same longing,’ she continued, ‘the need to believe that the unknown mother is someone special, that only some great drama or tragedy could have caused her to give up her precious child. Where there is no information children will fill the vacuum with fantasy, creating a situation where the mother is someone exciting, someone admired—’
‘I see,’ he said, stopping her before she could continue.
‘Do you?’ Claire Graham looked doubtful. ‘You mustn’t be angry with her, Fitz. Her curiosity, her longing, is quite natural.’
He finally gave her his full attention as an escape route was dangled tantalisingly before him. ‘If it’s normal,’ he asked, ‘what’s the problem?’
Claire Graham sat back, lifted her hands in a small gesture that invited his understanding. ‘The other girls are the problem. They think she’s putting on airs, trying to make herself special. I’ve spoken to Lucy, suggested that she would be wise to keep her stories to herself, but perhaps if you could try and talk to her about her mother, show her a photograph if you have one so that she would have an image to fix her feelings on. Maybe even try and arrange a meeting, if that’s at all possible. I’d be happy to help in any way I can. As a neutral party I might make a suitable go-between—’
Fitz stood up, putting an end to the discussion, needing to get out of the hot, stuffy little office so that he could think. ‘Thank you for letting me know what’s happening, Claire. I’ll deal with it.’
‘You can cut off contact, Fitz, you can destroy every physical memory, but you can’t stop a little girl wanting to know about her mother. There is a need, an unbreakable bond.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. She may not have wanted Lucy, but her mother too must be wondering what she’s like, how she’s grown up. Maybe she would welcome the chance to know her. It would be quite natural.’ Except that Lucy’s mother had been anything but natural. Claire walked with him to the door. ‘School breaks up soon—are you going away for the summer?’
He wanted to tell her to mind her own business, the way he’d been telling the world ever since he’d brought Lucy home and had been confronted with the massed ranks of health visitors, social workers, caring citizens who all wanted to know who would be looking after this little girl, convinced that a mere man was incapable of such a thing. But Claire Graham’s expression was kind, she was doing what she thought right, so he was polite. ‘Yes. We’re spending the summer in France.’
‘Then that might be a good time to talk to her. Let her ask questions, and try to be fair. A child needs to love both her parents even if they don’t love one another.’ But what if the mother didn’t love the child? Didn’t want to know? ‘For Lucy’s sake it’s something you are going to have to face, Fitz, no matter how painful it is for you.’
But not yet. Lucy was eight years old, far too young to have her precious dream-world shattered... ‘I’ll talk to her. Soon.’
Claire never frowned, but her forehead creased in something very close. ‘It would be better if she got it out of her system before school begins next autumn,’ she warned as they reached the main doors. Then, having said her piece and recognising a brick wall when she was faced with it, she changed the subject. ‘Will we see you at sports day, Fitz?’
‘Sports day?’
‘It’s on Friday. Didn’t you get the letter? I’m surprised Lucy isn’t full of it. She’s doing the high jump and the fifty metres. She’ll certainly win the high jump—if she doesn’t demolish the jump first. It would be a pity if you weren’t there.’
‘I will be.’
‘Good.’ She held onto his hand for a long moment, her head slightly on one side. ‘You haven’t asked who she picked out for her mother, Fitz. Aren’t you in the least bit curious?’
Claire Graham, Fitz realised, like Lucy’s friends, had made the mistake of believing that she was lying. Perhaps, under the circumstances, that was just as well. ‘I’d rather pick out my own fantasies, thanks all the same, Claire. I’ll see you on Friday.’
‘Such a shame that Brooke couldn’t make it home in time for the funeral. We don’t see much of her these days.’
‘I haven’t been able to speak to her, let her know about Mother,’ Bron said, for what seemed like the hundredth time that afternoon. Had anyone come to the funeral simply to pay their respects to her mother? Or was this huge turnout simply in hope that her famous sister would put in an appearance? She dredged up her hundredth smile. ‘She’s filming in Brazil. In the rainforest. A thousand miles from the nearest telephone.’ Although surely not from the nearest satellite uplink? She’d have got the message, she was just too busy doing her earth-mother bit to get in touch.
‘That is so sad.’ Bron was dragged back to the present. ‘You’ve taken on the burden of caring for your dear mother all these years and now you have to go through this alone, too.’
‘It can’t be helped.’
‘No, I suppose not. And she’s doing so much to help save the earth that we just have to excuse her.’ The woman smiled. ‘She’s made me think twice these days before I use the car and I’m recycling all my newspaper and glass now and when we needed a new door I wouldn’t let Reggie buy mahogany, although how she copes with the snakes and the spiders... I practically faint at the sight of one in the bath—’
‘Oh, Brooke is just the same,’ Bron, close to screaming herself, interrupted. ‘Yells blue murder at the sight of one. I have to put them out of the window for her. And earwigs give her nightmares.’
‘Really?’ Bron immediately felt guilty. She shouldn’t tease this kindly woman who had no way of knowing what Brooke was really like. ‘There’s hope for us all, then. Would you like me to stay and help you clear up, dear?’ There was a touch of anxiety in the woman’s voice as she surveyed the fine china and crystal glasses scattered about the living room.
Bron raised a wry smile. Her inability to wash a cup without the handle falling off was legendary. ‘Mrs Marsh has kindly offered to clear up for me.’ Even as she spoke that lady began to load a tray with a speed and deftness of touch that left Bron awestruck with admiration.
‘But you will call me if I can do anything, if there’s anything you want?’
Bron made up for her earlier lapse from grace with a generous smile. ‘I’d be glad of someone to help me sort through Mother’s things one day next week. I’m sure you’d know what would be the best way to deal with them,’ she said. ‘That would be such a help.’
‘Of course, just give me a call.’ She looked around. ‘What will you do now? Sell the house, I imagine. I know your mother would never have wanted to leave, but you’d be much more comfortable in a nice little flat.’
A nice little flat with no room to swing a cat and no garden. She’d loathe it. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Brooke about that when she gets home.’
‘Well, there’s no rush. Take a holiday before you decide anything—you’ve had a rough time of it these last few weeks.’
Weeks. Months. Years.
An hour later, Bron finally shut the front door on Mrs Marsh, leaned against it, eyes closed, and the silence swept back like a wave bringing with it a feeling of utter loneliness, the realisation that there was no more cushion against the darkness. Her mother was gone and now it was just the two of them: she and Brooke.
And deep down she knew that she was glad that Brooke hadn’t come racing home. Her appearance would inevitably have turned the whole thing into a media circus. It wasn’t as if her sister were the kind of woman to put her arms around her and offer the comfort she needed. She’d simply have pointed out that their mother was no longer suffering. Brooke had always been able to see things in black and white. They were so alike on the outside it seemed impossible that they could be so different in every other way.
It took an enormous effort to push herself away from the door. She felt utterly drained. Empty. Maybe everyone was right, maybe she should go away for a few days, get right away and decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
Rest of it? That was a joke. Twenty-seven years old and she had never had a life. Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed the lack quite so painfully if she hadn’t had her sister to measure herself against.
It shouldn’t have been like that. She and Brooke had been different in character, different in every way except for their looks and their brains. She had been all set to pack her bags and follow her sister to university when their mother had been diagnosed with the illness that had finally killed her.
So she had stopped making lists of the things she would need. Called the university and told them that she wouldn’t be coming after all. What else could she have done? There had been no one else to look after her mother. One of them had had to stay at home and Brooke had already started her degree course. The assumption had always been that once she had graduated she would come home and then it would be Bron’s turn.
But with the ink scarcely dry on her degree Brooke had been offered the kind of job that only came along once in a lifetime.
‘You do see, Bron?’ she’d said, with that winning smile. ‘I just can’t let this go.’ Well, of course she’d seen. It would have been unreasonable... ‘And you’re so good with Mother. I couldn’t do what you do for her. She’s comfortable with you.’
But she loves you best. She hadn’t said it out loud, but she’d thought it, known it to be true. It was so much easier to love someone who was beautiful, successful. Loving the daughter who saw you day in, day out, struggling with pain, at your most vulnerable, was not so easy.
So, she had never had a life—or, at least, nothing that her sister would have called a life. No career, no holidays, no adult relationshp with a man. If it hadn’t been for a surfeit of champagne on her eighteenth birthday, coupled with a determination not to be the last girl in the sixth form to taste the forbidden delights of the flesh, she would probably have been that saddest of things: a twenty-seven-year-old virgin.
Probably? Who was she kidding? Who was interested in a woman whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother? A five-foot-eleven-inch woman, all feet and elbows, whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother?
And as her peer group had left town, gone to university, married, moved away, what little social life she’d been able to maintain in the early years had gradually dwindled away to visits from her mother’s friends, women who ran the WI and the Mother’s Union and did good works and were kind. But there was precious little fun. No one her own age.
Short of dragging the milkman in from the street and having her wicked way with him, she didn’t stand a chance.
Her reflection in the hall mirror suggested that even the milkman would have thought twice. Her hair, which she’d hacked off when she was ten years old and sick to death of everyone saying she looked so like her pretty sister but... hadn’t been near a hairdresser in the last terrible six months. She’d stuck it up in a bun for the funeral and it made her look nearer forty, and with an impatient little tug she pulled out the pins and let it fall to curl untidily around her shoulders.
Her skin, which until a week ago had had the pallid complexion of someone who spent too little time outdoors, was now suffering from the effects of too much sudden exposure to sunlight. She had told herself that the lawn had to be perfect, the borders weeded and neat for the funeral. Her mother had loved her garden, would have hated anyone to see it so neglected. At least that was. what she’d told herself. In truth, without her mother to care for, she had simply felt useless, unneeded...
She pulled a face at herself. ‘Feeling sorry for yourself, Bronte Lawrence?’ Then she laughed. ‘Talking to yourself, too? That desperate, hmm?’
She glanced at the mail where she had dumped it on the hall table that morning. Condolence cards mostly. She picked them up, sorting through them as she walked through to the kitchen. Then she stopped. Tucked in amongst the cards was a letter carefully addressed in a round childish hand. Miss B Lawrence, The Lodge, Bath Road, Maybridge. She eased open the flap, glanced through the letter and then, a frown creasing her forehead, sat on one of the wooden kitchen chairs and read it again, more slowly.
Dear Miss Lawrence,
It is my school sports day on Friday, June 18th and I am writing to ask if you could possibly come.
So formal. Bron frowned. So polite.
When I told my friend Josie that you were my mother she didn’t believe me and now all the girls in my class are saying I made it up...
At this point the careful formality lapsed, the neat handwriting wavered and there was a smudge that looked as if a tear had dropped on the page and been quickly dashed away. Bron’s hand flew to her throat as she continued reading.
...made it up about having a famous mother and everyone is making fun of me. Even Miss Graham, my head teacher, doesn’t believe me and that’s not fair because although I break things, I never tell lies so will you please come...
The please had been heavily underscored.
...so they’ll know I’m telling the truth? I know you’re really busy saving the rainforest and the poor animals and I don’t want to be a nuisance and if you would just do this I wouldn’t ask anything ever again, I promise
And it was signed:
Your loving daughter, Lucy Fitzpatrick
Then:
PS You won’t have to see Daddy because I put the letter about sports day in the bin so he doesn’t know about it.
Then:
PPS I don’t suppose you know that my school is Bramhill House Lower School in Farthing Lane, Bramhill Parva.
And then:
PPPS 2 o’clock.
Bron turned over the envelope, for a moment wondering if she’d misread the name, opened a letter addressed to someone else.
No. The handwriting might be that of a child but it was clear enough. Miss B Lawrence. Bronte Lawrence. So what on earth...? Then the penny dropped. ‘...a famous mother...saving the rainforest...’ The letter wasn’t meant for her, but for her sister. It was an easy enough mistake to make. It had happened fairly frequently in the days when they had both lived at home but it was a long time since anyone had written to her sister at this address.
But she still didn’t understand.
Brooke had never had a baby. This must be from some poor child who had no mother, who had seen Brooke on the television and had fallen under her spell. Well, didn’t everyone?
She read the letter again. ‘Dear Miss Lawrence.’ If it hadn’t been so desperately sad it would have made her smile—as if anyone would write to their mother in such a way. And the idea of her sister as a mother, now that was funny!
She read it again. For heaven’s sake, how could Brooke have had a child without any of them knowing? How could she have kept the fact hidden all these years, because it must have been years—the careful lettering had to have been the work of a child of eight or nine years old.
Yet even as she was discounting the possibility, her busy brain was doing the mental arithmetic, working out where her sister had been eight or nine years before. She would have been twenty, or twenty-one—and at university.
Bron read the address at the top of the letter. The Old Rectory, Bramhill Bay. Bramhill was on the south coast, just a few miles from her sister’s university. Then she shook her head. The whole idea was ridiculous. Impossible.
She went upstairs, changed out of her black dress and into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, tied her hair back with an elastic band. Then she picked up the letter from the dressing table, where she had dropped it.
During her third year Brooke hadn’t come home after Easter even though their mother had been going through a crisis, had been asking for her. And Easter hadn’t been much fun for any of them. Brooke hadn’t been feeling well, had moped about complaining about feeling cold all the time, wrapped up in a huge baggy sweater, eating practically nothing.
Bron sat on the bed, her skin prickling with foreboding. Easter. After that she’d stayed away, pleaded fieldwork that she hadn’t been able to put off. Then after her finals she’d been offered a chance to take part in some project in Spain. Not that they’d had any postcards from her. She’d be too busy, Mother had said.
And she hadn’t been exactly tanned when she’d come back on a flying visit, high on her first-class honours and the offer of a dream job with a television company famous for its natural history programmes. She’d spent the next two months on some Pacific island and, naturally photogenic, had been an instant hit with viewers. After that the visits had been few and far between.
Hand to her mouth, she read the letter through again. It was polite, formal even, for a little girl at a primary school—formal, but just a little desperate too, Bron thought as the questions flooded through her head. Could Brooke have had a baby and put her up for adoption?
But then how would this little girl have found out who her real mother was? Surely you had to be eighteen before you could even begin to search the records?
But no, that couldn’t be right. It was there in the letter. ‘...You won’t have to see Daddy...’ Oh, God bless the child, it was enough to break your heart.
She stuffed the letter in her pocket and went downstairs, picked up the kettle, filled it and switched it on, then took out the letter again.
No, really. It had to be a mistake. It was impossible. Brooke wasn’t the kind of girl to get pregnant, after all. She was too focussed, too smart, too selfish. She’d known what she wanted and had set out to achieve it with a single-mindedness that had taken her to the top. She had known their mother was dying when she had left for Brazil, chasing the latest in a long line of television awards for her Endangered Earth series.
If she hadn’t wanted her precious car tucked up safely in the garage while she was away it was entirely possible that she would have made some excuse not to find the time to come home and say goodbye.
Yet if it was impossible why was it so difficult to simply brush away the idea?
She read the letter again, felt the tug at her heartstrings. Lucy. The child could be her niece...
No. She refused to believe it Or was she afraid to believe it? Afraid to believe that her sister could be that heartless? No. It had to be some little girl in a world of hurt latching onto a woman who had made caring for the planet her personal crusade. A little girl hoping that a woman with so much compassion would have some love left over to spare for her.
Fitz turned from the cooker. Lucy was drawing a picture, working at the kitchen table, her arm curled protectively about the paper. ‘Will you be long, sweetheart? Tea’s nearly ready.’
She tucked her pencils and the picture carefully away in her school bag then looked up, her bright blue eyes unusually shadowed, like someone with a secret.
And she did have a secret. How long had she known? When had she found her birth certificate, the photograph of Brooke Lawrence, all the things he had kept locked away at the back of his desk, at the back of his life?
He had been going to tell her. One day. He had fooled himself into believing that he would know when it was the right moment to sit her down and explain about her mother, tell her what had happened. But what time was ever right to tell a child that her mother hadn’t wanted her?
‘I’m done,’ she said with a quick smile. ‘Shall I lay the table?’
God, when she smiled she looked so like Brooke. He hadn’t anticipated that. The chestnut hair and blue eyes had fooled him into thinking that there was nothing of Brooke to see in the child. But that enchanting smile...
‘Please,’ he said quickly and looked away, making a performance of stirring the sauce. Why did it still get to him? Brooke Lawrence might have had a smile like an angel but that was as far as it went. Somewhere, deep inside him he’d always known that, even when he’d been pursuing her with a single-mindedness that had been nine parts testosterone to one part common sense.
How on earth was he to tell this child, this little girl that he loved so much that he sometimes thought his heart might break just looking at her, how was he to tell her that her mother had never wanted her, had handed her over to him and walked away without a backward glance the day after she was born?
He had never believed she would do it. He had always believed that once her baby was lying in her arms she would love her.
No. He could never tell Lucy how it had been. But Claire Graham was right—he would have to tell her something, as much of the truth as she could manage. When she was old enough she could confront Brooke herself, ask her why. Ask her how she could do that. Maybe she would be able to tell him, because he had never understood.
He should tell her now, before she fabricated a dozen fantasies about how it might be. He stared into the saucepan as if the contents might provide him with inspiration. Nothing. ‘Lucy—’
‘What are we having?’ She hooked a long, thin arm about his waist as he stood at the cooking range and, standing on tiptoe, peered into the saucepan.
‘Spaghetti carbonara.’
‘Oh, yummy. Can I have a Coke with it?’
He glanced down at her and his courage failed him. ‘If I can have a beer.’
‘Yeuch. Beer’s disgusting.’
‘Oh? And how do you know what beer tastes like?’ She giggled and his heart did its usual somersault. ‘Go on, then, get the drinks while I dish up.’
Later, he tried again. ‘Lucy, Miss Graham asked me to visit her today.’
A brief startled glanced then a casual, ‘Oh?’ Then, ‘Can I turn on the television?’ She was avoiding asking him why her head teacher had wanted to see him.
‘Leave it a minute.’
‘It’s something I want to see,’ she protested, unusually sulky. This was worse, far worse than he had ever imagined. Or maybe he had just refused to imagine this moment.
‘She told me...’ he began, then cleared his throat. ‘She told me...’ He stared at the top of her head as she suddenly became totally engrossed in her trainers. ‘She told me about sports day,’ he said, finally. ‘Did you forget, or didn’t you want me to come?’
She flung her head up. ‘No! You mustn’t! You mustn’t come!’
‘Why?’ Her reaction startled him but he tried not to show it, tried to hide his concern beneath a grin. ‘Are you going to come last in everything?’
For a moment he saw her struggle with a lie, with the temptation to tell him that she was going to be terrible. But maybe she realised he didn’t give a hoot where she came in the fifty metres, or whether she fell over her feet in the high jump, that he would come because he loved to see her having fun. ‘No. But if you come it will spoil—’ She stopped.
‘Spoil what, sweetheart?’
‘I...I...’ She reddened, swallowed. ‘I’ve done something that’s going to make you really angry. Daddy.’
He was almost afraid to ask, but he had to know, so he pulled her towards him, picked her up and settled her against his chest. ‘Let me decide about that. I don’t suppose it’s as bad as you think.’
The words were a long time coming and when they did come they were mumbled into his chest. ‘I—wrote—to—my...’ His heart seemed to stop beating during an endless pause.
‘Who did you write to, sweetheart?’ he prompted, when be could no longer bear it.
‘My mother. I wrote to my mother and asked her to come to sports day.’ And then the words tumbled out, unstoppable. ‘I asked her to come because they said I was lying, they wouldn’t believe me, but it’s true, isn’t it?’ She sat back and looked up at him, every cell in her body appealing to him to tell her it was so. ‘Brooke Lawrence is my mother.’
His throat was tight, a lump the size of a tennis ball blocking the words. But he had to say them. ‘Yes, Lucy. Your mother is Brooke Lawrence.’
If he’d expected anything, it would have been reproach that he hadn’t told her before. Her triumphant, ‘Yes!’ was like a knife to his heart. ‘And she’ll come to sports day and everyone will know—’ She slid from his lap and twirled giddily across the living room floor.
‘Look out!’ His warning came too late as she swept a small china spaniel from the top of the television. It hit the carpet and bounced and would have been safe but before she could stop herself Lucy trod on it and there was an ominous crunching noise.
Fitz caught her by the arms as she catapulted back towards him, holding her still, his arms about her in a protective vice, a safe place he had made for her, a place where nothing could hurt her...or so he had thought.
He eased away and bent to pick up the china dog. ‘Just a little chip here,’ he said, rubbing his thumb over the dog’s nose. Then, ‘And we can stick his ear back on.’ He picked up the ear and it crumbled in his fingers. It was a sensation that was rapidly becoming familiar.
When he finally looked up, dared to face her, Lucy was standing exactly where he had left her. He had never seen her so still.
‘I took the key to your desk from your dressing table,’ she said. ‘We were doing a project about family history and Josie brought in her birth certificate. It had her mother’s name on it and I realised...’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy.’
Oh, no. He was the one who was sorry. She should never have been reduced to taking keys, hunting in drawers to find out what she should always have known. ‘You saw the photographs, the custody papers?’ She frowned, not understanding the word, but of course she had found them. How else would she have known where to write?
‘She will come, won’t she, Daddy?’ She looked so desperate, so needy. How long had she been feeling this way? Why hadn’t he noticed? ‘I told her you wouldn’t be there, that she wouldn’t have to meet you.’
‘Did you?’ He almost smiled at her bluntness. Almost. ‘In that case I’m sure she will. If she can. But she might be abroad, making one of her films.’ Please, God... ‘Had you thought of that?’
Lucy’s face fell momentarily, then immediately brightened. ‘No, she can’t be. I saw her on television last week.’
Yes. He’d seen her too, trailing a new series that was starting next month. But they were clips from the series and meant nothing. Except of course that a new series meant a book tie-in, the endless round of the chat shows, breakfast television, the whole publicity circuit.
He would have to find out, because Fitz, despite a cast-iron certainty that Brooke wouldn’t want to come within a country mile of her daughter, found himself making a silent promise to the child that if it was humanly possible, even if he had to hog-tie the woman and bring her in the boot of his Range Rover, she would put in an appearance at sports day.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE couldn’t put it off any longer. Bron bit into her toast, putting it off. She would have to call Lucy’s father and tell him about the letter.
The idea was sufficient to dull her appetite and she abandoned the toast. If only she hadn’t opened the letter. If only she could forget she’d ever seen it. It hadn’t been meant for her, after all. If it hadn’t been for the coincidence of their initials, if her mother’s first gift to her father hadn’t been a hand tooled leather bound edition of the complete works of Rupert Brooke and if he hadn’t responded with an equally beautiful copy of Wuthering Heights, she would never have opened it...
She’d drink her coffee first. She reached for her mug, sent the jar of marmalade flying, flinched as it hit the quarry-tiled floor and smashed. She spent the next few minutes carefully picking out the glass, cleaning up the sticky mess. It had to be done, she told herself, but she knew she was simply prevaricating. Putting off the moment.
The important thing was that she had opened the letter; whatever the truth, Lucy Fitzpatrick was a child who needed help and maybe she was the only person in the world who knew that
She’d spent the long wakeful hours of the night—still unable to get used to the silence, the fact that no one needed her—telling herself that getting involved in other people’s domestic problems was simply asking for trouble. Telling herself was one thing, however, convincing herself something else.
At first light she’d given up the struggle for sleep and taken herself into the cool, early-morning garden and tried to forget about Lucy in a furious blitz on the weeds that seemed to leap out of the ground in full flower at this time of year. She had her own problems. Like what was she going to do with the rest of her life?
She had no job skills: all she knew was caring for her mother. The thought had led her back to Lucy, to wonder who was caring for her. A housekeeper or nanny, perhaps? Or did she go home to an empty house after school while her father worked?
Eventually hunger had kicked in, reminding her that she had had no breakfast and she straightened, easing her back, dead-heading the roses as she walked slowly back towards the empty house, she finally acknowledged that nothing was going to drive Lucy from her mind. The need to do something was at war with common sense and common sense didn’t stand a chance. She could not possibly ignore the letter.
But that decided, what was she going to do about it?
She had taken the envelope from her pocket, smearing it with green that had adhered to her fingers from her weeding. She had wiped her hands on her shorts before she’d taken out the letter. Lucy hadn’t put a telephone number. Well, she wouldn’t. From the comment about not having to meet her father, Bron guessed that Lucy was hoping to keep the whole thing a secret from him.
She had unhooked the telephone, dialled 192. ‘Directory Enquiries. What name please?’
‘Fitzpatrick. I don’t have an initial. Bramhill Bay, in Sussex.’
‘One moment, please.’ Then, ‘Would that be Fitzpatrick Studios?’
Fitzpatrick Studios? What kind of studios? Film studios? ‘That could be it,’ she said, her heart sinking. That could very well be it She’d all but managed to convince herself that Lucy had chosen Brooke because she was well known, admired. Saving the rain-forest was such a big issue these days, but if her father was a filmmaker the coincidence was just too much... She stopped herself.
What kind of film studios would be in some tiny village in Sussex? A place called The Old Rectory was far more likely to be an artist’s studio, or a pottery, or both. She could just imagine a picturesque tithe barn housing some artists colony... ‘The address is The Old Rectory,’ she said quickly.
There was a click and then she heard the recording, ‘The number that you require is...’ Bronte wrote it down, double-checked it and then hung up. She stared at the number. Well, it seemed to say, you’ve got me, now what are you going to do with me?
The child’s father needed to know what was going on, she rationalised as she made coffee, dumped the bread in the toaster. She couldn’t just ignore it. If Lucy was so desperate for love that she needed Brooke as a fantasy mother... And if she wasn’t fantasising?
It made no difference. She would have to ring. But after breakfast. No one could be expected to deal with something like this on an empty stomach.
Bronte stared at her empty mug, the abandoned toast. Now. Do it now. Delaying was not going to make it any easier. And it might be all right. Lucy might do this once a week, or whenever her mother refused to be blackmailed into more sweets, later TV, a day off school, and she’d get a resigned apology from an embarrassed parent. Maybe. Why didn’t she believe that?
Whatever she believed, she could no longer put off making the call. She picked up the telephone, dialled the number. It rang once. It rang twice. Three times. There was no one there. Relief surged through her and she had the receiver halfway back to the cradle when she heard it being picked up. She couldn’t just hang up...she just hated it when people did that...
‘James Fitzpatrick.’ James Fitzpatrick had a voice like melted chocolate. Dark, expensive chocolate. It rippled through her midriff like a warm wave of pleasure and left her gasping. ‘I can’t come to the telephone right now but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.’ There was a click and the long bleep of an answering machine. She was still holding the receiver when there was a long, insistent ring on the doorbell.
Fitz had found it impossible to talk to Lucy about her mother. The other way round would not be so difficult, he assured himself, yet when he pulled up outside the steeply gabled house with a large garden overgrown with blowsy midsummer roses, he still wasn’t certain that he was doing the right thing.
It might be wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Brooke knew where to find him but in nearly nine years had never once bothered to call him, enquire after her daughter, show the slightest interest in her health or happiness.
Well, that was the deal he’d agreed to.
Until the moment when he’d finally realised that Brooke had meant it when she’d said she would have her baby adopted, Fitz had never given much thought to what that would involve. He had never thought of himself as a man wanting a child of his own, but the unseen, unknown life that had been so carelessly created had, with the threat of rejection, become so real to him, so precious that he had been overtaken with the longing to protect her. And with her lying, hours old, in his arms, he’d known he could never bear to let her go.
He would have promised Brooke anything at that moment and he had never once doubted that he’d had the better of the deal. He’d supported her through her pregnancy, looked after her, certain that once the baby was in her arms she would love her. Then after Lucy was born, when Brooke had calmly announced that she was going to give her baby away, she’d seen his reaction and she’d made her bargain with him.
What had been so galling, so unforgivable, had been her amusement...her callous assurance that within weeks he would see it her way and hand the child over to some anonymous couple and be glad to do it. The truth was she really hadn’t cared what he’d done with her baby as long as she hadn’t been the one kept awake at night, hadn’t been the one changing nappies. She hadn’t had time for such mundane nonsense, she’d been going to make something of her life and in return for her baby he’d been going to help her do that. Well, he had to admit that she hadn’t wasted her opportunity.
Maybe somewhere, hidden in the untrodden byways of his mind, he had nursed a secret hope that one day she would realise what she was missing, would come back. Eight years should have been long enough for him to come to terms with the truth, but perhaps Lucy was not the only one with a penchant for fantasy.
Maybe that was why he had found it so hard to tell Lucy the truth; maybe he hadn’t wanted to believe that any mother could be so callous. Well, he could no longer fool himself. Lucy had taken the matter out of his hands, chosen the moment.
But now he was here, parked outside a house which until this moment had simply been an address on the document which gave him sole custody of Lucy, it occurred to Fitz that he was almost certainly on a wildgoose chase.
This had been Brooke’s family home. It was highly unlikely that she had lived here since university, but it was the only address he had. She’d long since left the television natural history unit where he’d got her that first job, easily finding a backer to start her own film company, but no one there would give him an address, advising him to write in and his letter would be passed on. There wasn’t time for that. And his contacts in the business who could have told him what he needed to know would have been just too damned interested.
He watched the postman making his way down the street, dropping letters through the boxes. The man reached The Lodge, turned in at the gate, but he had more than letters—he had something that needed signing for, or wouldn’t fit the box, because he rang the bell. Who would answer? Her mother, a middle-aged version of Brooke? Her father...
‘Brooke...’ Her name escaped him on a breath. It was the last thing on earth he had expected. But she was there, she had opened the door, was talking with the postman, giving the man one of those blazing smiles as she pushed back her hair in an achingly familiar gesture before taking the pen he offered and signing for a letter. Before he knew what he was doing he was out of the Range Rover and across the street. The postman saw him coming, held the gate for him, but halfway up the path he stopped.
Suppose she refused to speak to him, this spectre coming back from the past to haunt her, determined to remind her of something she had chosen to forget? Suppose she shut the door on him? Refused even to discuss Lucy? She had every right to. He had promised he would never contact her, never betray her secret. But then he had never expected to have to keep that promise. And Lucy’s happiness was more important than any promise.
He stepped off the path, followed the lawn around to the back of the house.
Bron put the registered letter from her mother’s insurance company on the kitchen table unopened. Her mother was dead and nothing would change that, but Lucy was alive and needing help now. She picked up the telephone again, pressed redial. She would leave a message, ask James Fitzpatrick to call her. It rang once, twice. A shadow passed the kitchen window, someone coming round to the back of the house, no doubt Mrs Marsh checking up on her, making sure she was coping...
‘Come along,’ she muttered impatiently. And then the voice again. Except it wasn’t the answering machine.
‘Brooke...’ he said and as she spun around, saw the shadowed figure in the doorway, she knew exactly who he was.
‘James Fitzpatrick,’ she said. And as if to confirm it his voice repeated the name in her ear.
For a moment he didn’t move, stayed in the open doorway with the sun streaming in around him. ‘That’s a little formal under the circumstances, Brooke. I still answer to Fitz.’
‘Fitz,’ she repeated dully, while the cogs in her brain freewheeled, trying to catch up with what was happening. Apparently taking this as an invitation, he stepped into the room, into the light. Oh, God, the voice was perfect, the man was perfect. More than perfect, he was beautiful. Tall, broad-shouldered, lean as a whippet beneath a white linen shirt that draped loosely about his torso, beneath old faded denims that stretched tight across narrow masculine hips, clinging to his thighs as though moulded to them. His hair was black, a dishevelled mass of thick dark curls that flowed over his shirt collar, his mouth was sinfully sensuous, his eyes the colour of ripe blueberries. No man had the right to be that good-looking, that sexy, that... ‘I—I was just trying to call you,’ she said.
‘Then that answers my question. You did get Lucy’s letter.’
Bron tore her gaze away from this apparition of manly perfection long enough to glance at the crumpled, slightly grubby envelope lying on the kitchen table. Unfortunately she tried to replace the telephone receiver at the same time. She missed. It swung down and hit the wall, jerking the telephone from its bracket. The whole lot landed on the floor with a crash.
James Fitzpatrick crossed the room, bent to retrieve the instrument. ‘It’s cracked,’ he said, straightening beside her.
‘It was already cracked.’ A bit like her voice.
‘I see.’ He checked the dialling tone, replaced it on the wall before turning to her, his forehead creased in a thoughtful frown. ‘I’ve often wondered where Lucy gets that from.’
Lucy was clumsy? ‘You made me jump,’ she said defensively. ‘Why did you come to the back door?’
‘I thought it might be a good idea to take you by surprise—’ he’d certainly done that ‘—before you had time to put the chain up.’
Close up to him, Bron was finding it difficult to breathe. This was Lucy’s father? Brooke had walked away from this man to film monkeys and spiders and frogs and any number of unspeakable creatures in mosquito infested swamps? If anyone had ever doubted her dedication... His words suddenly got through to her. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I made a promise. The fact that I’m here must tell you that I’m about to break it.’
What promise? His right hand was against the wall, trapping her in the corner, but it made no difference, her legs weren’t planning on taking her anywhere. She swallowed. ‘Because of Lucy? How is she—?’
‘You’ve had nearly nine years to ask that question,’ he said, cutting off her concern, refusing to acknowledge it.
‘I didn’t mean—’ She hadn’t meant it in that meaningless, ‘How are you?’, kind of way. She meant, What kind of child is she? What are her dreams? Is she happy? But his left hand, the fingers loosely curled, was rubbing mesmerisingly against her cheek, stealing her wits. ‘You don’t have to pretend you care, Brooke, not for me. Save that for your daughter.’
Brooke?
Brooke was looking at him as if she had been knocked sideways and it gave him a small charge of satisfaction to know that he wasn’t the only one struggling for breath. But surely she must have expected him? If she had reached the point where she was going to call she must have realised that he was going to come looking for her. No doubt she had been trying to stop him. As if anything could.
It was odd—he’d seen her on television dozens of times during the years and he’d felt nothing. He’d been so certain that she was incapable of doing this to him again yet it was as if the years had never happened, as if Lucy had never happened and she was still twenty years old and looking up at him from a bench on her university campus.
Her skin was still peachy soft beneath his fingers, a little pink from the recent heatwave but surprisingly unlined by the months, years spent in tropical sunlight. He had expected her harder, tougher, despite the girlish sweetness with which she managed to charm her audience, had long ago charmed him. She was older and yet disconcertingly still the same; looking at him with the same misty, melting grey eyes, still with that look of surprised innocence that she had done so well, that had so captivated him. She still smiled with that made-for-pleasure mouth that had never needed lipstick and, heaven help him, his blood was still hot for her and the heat was straining against the tightness of his jeans.
She had been like a madness in his head when he had first met her. It was apparently a recurring madness and he was having to make a conscious effort to remember his reason for seeking her out.
‘If you’ve got her letter,’ he said, ‘you know why I’m here. Lucy desperately needs you to come to her school sports day, Brooke.’
‘No,’ she began. ‘Not me—’
‘Yes, you.’ His voice was harsher than he had meant as he refused to listen to her excuses. If that was what it took, he could be as hard as she was beneath all that phoney sweetness. ‘You’ll be there at two o‘clock dressed in that Queen of the Amazon chic you do so well...’ As she tried to interrupt him he covered her mouth with his hand. ‘I’m not taking no for an answer. This isn’t for me, this is for Lucy.’ As the warmth of her lips heated his fingers and the heat flickered through him like fire through matchwood, he snatched them back.
‘Please, just listen to me—’
‘No, I’ve done listening. This time you’ll do it my way. You’ll do it or I’ll let all your precious fans know just how you bargained away your baby.’ Fitz was horrified at what he had said. He hadn’t meant it...didn’t know where the threat had come from. But as he surveyed her shocked expression he realised that his instincts had been right—her image meant more to her than her child ever would. ‘I’ll give the story to the tabloids, Brooke. Do you think they’ll still love you then?’
Her watered-silk grey eyes widened, he could almost have sworn in pain. ‘You can’t do that!’
Not pain. Fear. Well, that was good. He could use that, she’d taught him how. ‘Try me,’ he said and the threat arced between them like a lightning fork hitting the ground with explosive force, pure electricity that he could almost taste and because he was human, because despite everything she could still switch him on like a hundred-and-fifty-watt light bulb, he carried her back against the wall and he pinned her there with his mouth, with his tongue, with his body, wanting her, hating her, hating her for wanting her so much.
Bron, pinned against her kitchen wall by the hard body of a man who thought she was her sister, trapped between his hands, pinned by his body, by his mouth, went rigid with shock. Then because she had to tell him, explain, she began to struggle. She grabbed his muscle-packed shoulders in an effort to push him away but her fingers, her short nails, made no impression; the only impression being made in that room was upon her, by James Fitzpatrick’s mouth.
It was hard and angry and demanding, punishing her for what her sister had done. But beneath the anger was a hungry, sensuous longing and everything in her that was feminine, everything that had been stifled during the long barren years when her youth had slipped away, responded to that longing with a reckless disregard for what was right, what was proper, what was the truth. Her breasts tingled, her thighs melted and savage instinct, old as time, took over as her fingers stopped pushing him away and instead slid behind his head, tangling in the thick curls at his nape, her mouth parting beneath his onslaught, her tongue meeting his as her own hunger, her own long-suppressed need kicked in...
Fitz had wanted to punish her, wanted her to feel what he had felt, all the anger, the pain, the resentment, yet after the first moment of shocked resistance, as she softened against him, melted into his arms, he knew that he was only punishing himself. As her lips parted to him, as her hands stopped pushing him away and instead drew him closer, as her body moulded itself to his, he could no more stop himself than fly.
Her scent, the pure woman scent of her was overlaid with the freshness of wind-dried clothes, of grass and roses, and he could have drowned in it, drowned in her... And suddenly he was the one struggling for control, struggling to resist the clamour of his body’s need as he dragged himself back from the brink of self-destruction.
For a moment he remained where he was, hands flat against the wall, his mouth inches from hers, looking down into the face of the one woman in the world it seemed who had it in her power to drive him over the edge, to make him behave in a manner that he despised. Her lips were parted softly, her mouth gentler than he remembered, her lashes darker as she raised them over eyes that looked just a little dazed, eyes in which the pupils were dilated, black with desire. And she was smiling...laughing at him... again...
‘Friday,’ he said hoarsely as he reeled back, putting urgently needed space between them. ‘Two o’clock. Be there, or expect to read about yourself in the Sunday papers.’ And he turned, walking swiftly from the bright sunny kitchen, trying very hard to erase from his head the look on Brooke’s face, the bee-stung lips parted for him, breasts peaked hard against her T-shirt, her eyes a sultry invitation to stay. Dear God, how did she do it? Why did he let her when he knew it was nothing but play-acting? Next time he would be on his guard, keep his distance.
And he found himself smiling too, but grimly. He should be safe enough at a primary school sports day. Brooke would be kept too busy by teachers, parents and children alike clamouring for a moment with her. Lucy would enjoy that. He considered calling Claire Graham and warning her. Then, as sanity returned and he dropped his forehead against his hands on the steering wheel, he decided against it.
How on earth could he have handled that so badly? He had come intending to ask Brooke to do this one thing for Lucy and he had been prepared to offer her anything that it was within his power to give her. Instead he had behaved like an ape on an overdose of testosterone. Then he grimaced. Brooke would almost certainly say that he was being unkind to apes. He undoubtedly was. And how she had enjoyed it One look and she had switched him on like the Christmas illuminations. He had thought himself totally immune to her charm, but maybe it was one of those viruses that needed regular booster jabs.
And maybe knowing that she still had him on a string would be enough.
It would have to be, because someone as bright as Brooke, someone who knew him as well as she did, would realise soon enough that he would never expose her the way he had threatened to. Not to protect her, but to protect Lucy. He would never expose his little girl to the glare of the tabloid press, the nightmare of reporters camped out on the doorstep, at the school gates. That being so, if she decided to ignore her daughter’s plea and his stupid threat it would be better if no one was expecting her. Claire would have to cope with her surprise celebrity as best she could.
Bronte remained perfectly still for what seemed an age after James Fitzpatrick—Fitz—left. One moment she had been quite innocently using the telephone, planing to leave a message asking someone she had never met to call her back, the next she’d been kissed as if the end of the world were nigh by that very same man. How on earth had that happened? How on earth had she let it happen? The moment his hand had touched her cheek she had known...
She touched her lips with the tip of her tongue. They were hot, swollen, throbbing with heat. But it wasn’t just her lips, her whole body felt like that and she finally understood how her sister, her careful, life-under-control sister, had made the age-old mistake of getting pregnant. She touched her cartwheeling waist.
If she were young and foolish, she might have thought that being kissed by James Fitzpatrick would be all it took.
She finally moved, stumbled to the kitchen chair and sank down on it. Then she laughed, a touch hysterically, as she reached for Lucy’s letter. She’d tried to tell him that she wasn’t Brooke, but he hadn’t been listening. Well, he’d only had one thing on his mind.
She couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen the difference straight away. Brooke was so stylish, so confident, so beautiful.
It was true that they were superficially alike with matching bones and skin, the same beanpole height, the same streaky blonde hair, but there the similarity ended. Even at school Brooke had always been the elegant, the poised, the perfectly groomed one, while she had been the one with a torn skirt, inky fingers and bruised shins from constantly falling over the furniture. She looked down at her grass stained knees, her hands which bore the scars of her tussle with the garden.
Then she shrugged. If it had been eight years since they met, if he had only seen her on the television battling against the elements, sweaty, her hair sticking to her forehead, no make-up, if he didn’t know that Brooke had a sister, well, maybe the mistake was not so difficult to understand.
Eight years was a long time—long enough to blunt the details. Not long enough to dull the passion though. She shivered despite the sun spilling through the window, the open doorway, and rubbed at the gooseflesh on her arms. She had tried to tell him...
She should have tried harder.
She glanced at the telephone. She would have to call him, explain. Later. It would take him a couple of hours to get home. Then she swallowed, hard. How on earth could she call a man and tell him that he’d made a mistake like that?
On an answering machine, that was how. Right now. She would just leave a message explaining about the mistake, explaining that Brooke was abroad. That would avoid what could only be an embarrassing conversation for both of them. She would do it now and then she could put it out of her mind.
She dialled the number, waited for the tone. ‘Mr Fitzpatrick,’ she began firmly. ‘Fitz—’ She stopped. Suppose someone else listened to the message? Suppose Lucy came in from school and switched it on? She had assumed he would be going straight back, but he might not. She hung up, unwilling to risk it. She would have to do it face to face. Or rather ear to ear. She was twenty-seven years old, a grown woman. She could handle it. In the meantime she went in search of her secateurs. Cutting back the spring-flowering shrubs would help to take her mind off Mr James Fitzpatrick’s hot mouth. Maybe.
The day dragged interminably, the clock seemed on a go-slow. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to call James Fitzpatrick and make him listen while she explained that he had kissed her by mistake. Yet in some secret part of her she knew that she was just like a child counting down the endless hours of Christmas Eve, waiting to hear his voice...
Seven o‘clock came. Lucy’s bathtime? Time for homework? What had she and Brooke done at seven o’clock when their father was alive? Played, talked, laughed. Laughed a lot. Did Lucy and Fitz laugh together?
Eight o‘clock. Eight o’clock had been bedtime for them. Indisputable. They’d been able to read, they’d been able to listen to the radio for half an hour, but they’d had to be in bed by eight. Old-fashioned rules. Nine o‘clock, she decided. She would be safe at nine o’clock.
At a quarter to nine o’clock she could wait no longer. She picked up the telephone and dialled the number. Mr Fitzpatrick? she’d rehearsed the casual tone. My name is Bronte Lawrence. We met this morning when you mistook me for my sister... A little gentle laughter. No, no need to apologise, I quite understand... She hadn’t got beyond that part. At that point she was hoping he would be too busy grovelling to recall how eagerly she had kissed him back.
‘Bramhill six five three seven four nine.’ A child’s careful voice enunciated the numbers perfectly. ‘Lucy Fitzpatrick speaking.’
‘Lucy...’ Bron’s hand flew to her throat as the word escaped her lips. She sounded so grown up...
‘Mummy?’ The word was an essay in uncertainty, hope, longing. ‘Mummy? It is you, isn’t it?’ Mummy. The word seemed to echo over and over in her head so that she didn’t know if it was Lucy shouting it or just in her imagination, but as Lucy’s careful telephone answering voice disintegrated into childish excitement Bron froze, unable to answer. In her uncontrollable eagerness to speak to James Fitzpatrick, she had done precisely what she had wanted to avoid. ‘Daddy said you wouldn’t get my letter, that you must have moved but I prayed...’
‘Who is it, Lucy?’ James Fitzpatrick’s voice reached her, distantly.
‘It’s my mummy. My mummy! Daddy, she’s rung, she’s going to come. I told you she would—’
Then the mouthpiece was covered so that there was only a distant murmur. Then his voice in her ear. ‘Brooke?’ She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. This was all her fault. She should have made him listen this morning. She should have rung straight away, left a number for him to call back. Suddenly all the things she should have done seemed so obvious, so simple. Why hadn’t she seen? Because she hadn’t wanted to? ‘Brooke, is that you?’ His voice was sharper. How could she have raised the child’s hopes like that when she could only dash them...? ‘Brooke!’
She came to with a start. ‘Fitz, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
He wasn’t interested in apologies. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, ringing here when Lucy might answer the phone?’ He practically hissed the words into the phone.
‘She should have been in bed,’ she hissed back.
‘Motherly advice? From you?’
‘No... I’m sorry... Look, I had to ring. I had to tell you—’
‘What? Tell me what? After what you’ve just done, the only thing I’m prepared to hear right now is that you’ll be here on Friday.’
Oh, Brooke! How could you get me into a situation like this? What on earth am I going to do? And as clearly as if her sister were speaking in her ear she heard Brooke laughing at her dilemma, saying, Do, darling? Why, do whatever you want. If you’re so concerned about Lucy, why don’t you go and play happy families for an afternoon? They already think you’re me and you always were so much better at the caring stuff...
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What am I to tell Lucy?’
They already think you’re me. ‘Yes.’ She heard her voice as if at a great distance. ‘Tell her I’ll be there. I—um—I need directions.’
‘I’ll fetch you.’
‘No.’ Her brain was back-pedalling as fast as it would go. ‘No, don’t do that.’ An afternoon pretending to be her sister just to make a little girl happy would be difficult enough; a couple of hours in a car with James Fitzpatrick would be impossible.
‘It’s no trouble.’
Then she realised why he was offering, more than offering—insisting. ‘You don’t have to worry that I’ll let Lucy down.’
‘Don’t I?’ The words sounded as if they had been wrenched from him. She didn’t answer because her brain was yelling in her ear: Tell him! Tell him, now! Before it’s too late. But it was already too late. Lucy had heard her, thought she was Brooke. No explanation, a thousand times ‘I’m sorry for raising your hopes’ could ever make up for that disappointment. ‘Have you got a pen there?’
‘What?’
‘A pen. For the directions.’
‘Oh, yes... No, wait,’ she said as she grabbed for a pen and it skittered from her grasp, slid across the floor. ‘I’ve dropped it.’ He waited patiently while she retrieved it and then, assuming she knew where Bramhill Parva was, explained how to find the school.
‘Have you got that?’ Got it? She looked at the notepad with its incoherent scribble, but she didn’t ask him to explain it again, certain if she did he would insist on fetching her, wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’d already had a firsthand example of his inability to listen.
‘Yes, yes. I’ll find it.’
Then, as if talking to her was putting too great a strain on his good nature to be sustained, he said, ‘I’ll fetch Lucy to say goodnight.’
‘Mummy? Are you really coming on Friday? Can I tell Miss Graham? Can I tell Josie?’
Still stunned by the sudden turn of events, Bron took in a deep breath. ‘I’ll be there, Lucy, you can tell who you like. Goodnight, darling, sleep tight.’
The nightly ritual of her own childhood. Goodnight. Sleep tight. Watch the bugs don’t bite. Oh, dear God. What on earth had she promised? More to the point, how on earth was she going to carry it through?
CHAPTER THREE
QUEEN of the Amazon chic. Easier said than done, Bron thought the following morning as she regarded the arid desert of her wardrobe. It didn’t need a critic to tell Bron that her wardrobe was short on any kind of chic. Her whole life was short of the kind of glamour that came as second nature to Brooke.
Her hair, for instance. She fluffed it up, more in hope than expectation. It flopped right down again. Brooke might get away with that when she was chatting up orang-utangs in the steam of a Borneo forest, but when in London she visited her Knightsbridge hairdresser as often as necessary to keep the image diamond-bright.
Bron turned from the mirror to the framed photograph of her sister at an awards ceremony, picked it up to looked more closely at the fashionable jaw-length bob her sister had adopted—a bob with attitude was the way one magazine had described it. Actually, she looked more like a little girl who had forgotten to comb her hair, a cheeky, flirty little girl, an impression that was enhanced by the backless Ribeiro dress she was wearing. Nearly wearing. A dress that showed her tanned skin off to perfection, a dress that stopped a foot shy of her knees and showed her legs to perfection too. Not much cloth to show for so much money... but what there was certainly did the trick.
Their mother had tutted when she’d seen it—tutted, but smiled indulgently. Well maybe it was her time for a little self-indulgence, time to find out exactly what it was like to be her sister.
Hair first, then. And nails. She called the Knightsbridge hairdresser to enquire if they could fit Miss Lawrence in during the morning. They fell over themselves to help and when she arrived she was treated with the kind of deference that would have amused her if she could have relaxed sufficiently to enjoy it. She didn’t tell them that she was Brooke, they just assumed. Did she really look so like her sister?
They tutted over the condition of her hair, muttered about too much sun, cut it and cosseted it. Her nails were gentled into gleaming plum-dark ovals. Her skin was cleansed and toned and made up. Before her eyes she was transformed into her sister. But the likeness must have been there all along, it was just that people saw them differently.
The beauty salon expected Brooke and never considered the possibility that she might be someone else. Fitz had expected Brooke and that was who he had seen. It suddenly occurred to her that no one would question her. That if she kept her nerve getting away with it would be easy. All she needed now were some of her sister’s clothes.
She left the salon and hailed a taxi, directing the driver to her sister’s flat.
‘Could I have your autograph for my little girl, Miss Lawrence?’ he asked as he handed her a receipt for the fare without being asked. ‘She’s a real fan of yours. Says she wants to save the world when she grows up, just like you. Gives me hell, begging your pardon, when I spray the greenfly. Says I should leave them for the ladybirds.’
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