A Daughter For Christmas

‘Can’t we just find someone else to run it?’ she had asked a little wildly. ‘I mean, what’s going to happen to the men in the company? Bob and Nicky and Dan?’

‘What happens to all people who find themselves out of work.’ The accountant had shrugged, not entirely unsympathetic but businesslike. ‘There’s no point, employing someone to try and rescue the business,’ he had told her in a kinder voice.

‘Think about it. It doesn’t make sense, does it? To spend money hiring someone for a business that’s in the process of failing. There have been no new orders for your sister’s side of things since...’ he glanced down at a sheet of paper ‘...the middle of the year. No one wants to spend money on redesigning the insides of their houses!’

‘But it can’t fail! There’s Amy! I can’t help with money! I’m still at college...’

‘You could always put your studies on hold for a while, try and see what you can do. I’ll give you my services free...’

That had been one and a half years ago and she had given it everything she had. She had abandoned her beloved dreams of a career in art and had taken an interminably mundane office job, the only merit of which was that it brought some money in. And it seemed as though, overnight, she had aged into an old woman.

It hadn’t been enough. The creditors, circling at first, had gradually moved in closer and closer. The bank had lost sympathy. By the time Ed, the accountant, advised her to let go, she was utterly defeated.

Heaven knows, she might have been able to carry on with the office job, scraping pennies together and dreaming her pointless dreams in the privacy of her head, but then the bank had foreclosed on their house, and that had been the last straw.

It was only then that the piece of paper, lying at the back of the drawer like some forgotten incantation, had begun to beckon.

She would be opening a can of worms and might well end up making things even worse than they already were, but the time had come for the gamble to be taken.

For the next two days Leigh wavered somewhere between dread and a despairing kind of forced optimism which would break down the minute she questioned it too closely.

In front of Amy she preserved a façade of carefree joviality, but it was a strain and once or twice she had caught her niece looking at her with huge, worried eyes. It hurt tremendously that there was very little she could do to reassure her, apart from promising faithfully never to leave her. That much she could do at least.

There were absolutely no other promises of security she could hope to offer, and she still hadn’t decided what she would tell Amy when the time came for decisions to be made. A lot rested on what this Nicholas Kendall had to say, whether some sort of meeting ground could be reached, but of that she held out very little hope.

What man, presented with the sudden appearance of a seven-year-old daughter he never knew existed, would greet the situation with a chuckle and open arms? The most she could hope for was someone who would at least hear her out.

But, Lord, she knew precious little about him, though considerably more than she had done a year and a half ago. She had done her homework, and it hadn’t been that difficult to discover who he was—a mover and shaker in financial circles, a wealthy, dynamic man, apparently, whose listing in Who’s Who had made her swallow with nerves. This, it seemed, was the man who had fathered her niece.

Oh, Jen, why? But there was no point in crying over spilt milk. Besides, she knew why.

She dressed very, very carefully that Friday morning. Admittedly, there wasn’t much she could do with her face. It steadfastly resisted all attempts to be glamorised and she had faced that fact a long time ago. Her reddishgold hair was too short to look chic, her eyes were too blue and too widely spaced to look feline and sexy and, of course, the freckles everywhere were the final straw. Winter or summer there they were, forever sabotaging her efforts to look her age—giving her the gamin-like appearance of an overgrown elf, or so she thought whenever she looked in the mirror.

She looked in the mirror now and concentrated on the wardrobe she had donned, wondering whether it looked right. She wasn’t quite sure what she was aiming for, considering she had never met the man, but she knew that whatever she wore would have to give her confidence.

Amy sat on the bed and watched Leigh while she fiddled with her long hair, brushing it and plaiting it.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, when her hair had been neatly pulled away from her face and plaited.

‘What makes you think that I’m going anywhere?’

‘You don’t normally take this long getting dressed.’

‘Sometimes I do!’ Leigh protested, glancing at the reflection of the child in the mirror and grinning. ‘OK. I give in. Hardly ever. I just thought that this might make a nice change. What do you think?’

She twirled on the spot, holding one corner of the flowing red and black skirt between her fingers.

‘You look beautiful,’ Amy said honestly, and Leigh could have hugged her. ‘Are you meeting someone?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual.’ She shrugged and smiled vaguely. ‘What are you going to be doing in school today?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘Maths, science, sports.’ Their eyes met and Leigh smiled.

‘Have you had the results of that test you had last week?’

‘We get them today,’ Amy said glumly.

‘We can treat ourselves to a burger and a milkshake after school if you do OK,’ Leigh said. A rare indulgence, she thought, and Amy deserved it. When times had been good she had had as many burgers and milkshakes as she could have eaten, and now that times were rocky she hadn’t complained once about what she was now missing. She had just adapted, in that curious, malleable way children had, accepting their straitened circumstances without complaint.

‘What if I do badly?’ Amy asked with concern.

‘Well, we’ll treat ourselves anyway. Consolation prize, so to speak.’ By four this afternoon, Leigh thought, I’ll be in much the same boat myself. Whether things go well or not, I’ll be just so damn relieved that a burger and milkshake will be just the thing.

‘Anyway,’ Leigh told her niece, as an afterthought, ‘it doesn’t matter whether you pass or fail that comprehension test, just so long as you put all your efforts into trying.’

‘That’s what Mrs Spencer keeps telling us.’

‘Well, there you go, then. We can’t both be wrong, can we?’ She turned to the little figure on the bed and grinned reassuringly. What she saw, though, wasn’t Amy sitting on the bed with folded legs, but Amy in the future, bombarded by revelations that would redefine the whole contours of her life.

She slipped the long-sleeved woollen turtleneck over her head and only inspected herself again when they were about to leave the house.

She looked, she decided, reasonably all right—neat and combed, at any rate, which for her made a change, and for once colour co-ordinated—black and red skirt, black, clingy turtleneck just showing under the black jumper, black coat because although it was only the end of October the weather was unseasonably cold and flat black shoes. Sober attire, she reflected. Highly appropriate, given the mission in hand.

Her first stop was to drop Amy off at school, then there was an hour and a half during which time she knew that she would simply freefall in a fever of apprehension. She had never been as strong and assertive as her sister. Jenny had always protected her from unsavoury problems, and it had only been in the last sixteen months or so that she had begun to show her own strengths.

Of course, it was the uncertainty which was gnawing away at her. She knew that. That and the knowledge that everything depended on her. The whole of Amy’s future rested on her shoulders because there were no other relatives to fall back on—no conveniently placed grandparents who could help out, no aunts and uncles to tide them over. Leigh had never missed the presence of a family as much as she did now.

It wasn’t even as though she had a boyfriend to lean on, someone to give her strength when she felt her own failing. True, there had been someone. Sensitive, moody, artistic Mick, with his long hair tied back into a ponytail and his enviable contempt for the bourgeoisie, but that hadn’t lasted. It seemed that he was also allergic to responsibility. The thought of helping her to share the strain of bringing up a young child had been just a little too much like hard work for him. ‘I’m a free soul,’ he had told her. ‘Can’t be tied down.’ And that had been that. Leigh couldn’t think about it, without feeling the sour taste of bitterness in her mouth.

It took her ages to find the club, which was about as far from the Underground as it could be, and as she couldn’t afford the luxury of a taxi she had to walk the distance, getting lost several times along the way, despite her A to Z.

She was feeling quite frazzled by the time she stood outside the club, which resembled a large Georgianfronted house more than anything else.

Her legs, which had covered the distance on autopilot, now seemed to be nailed to the pavement outside. She literally couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t take a step forward. She just stood there, a small, motionless figure amidst a throng of pedestrians, with her hair blowing in every direction as she looked nervously at the edifice. The cold October air pinched her cheeks, turning them rosy, and made her eyes smart.

It was only when she felt the chill

seeping into her bones, that she took a deep breath and made herself walk forward.

Inside was like stepping into another world. Leigh caught her breath and gazed around her in a disoriented fashion. Everything was so subdued. There was no noise. It was as though the twentieth century was something that was happening outside, something that was abandoned once the doors had closed behind her.

The furnishings were lavish, though faded, with the sort of well-worn elegance she associated with country mansions which had been handed down through the generations.

She looked a little wildly around her, feeling thoroughly out of place in what she was wearing. Her carefully co-ordinated outfit was frankly a joke in a place like this. She raked her fingers through her short hair in a nervous gesture, and then summoned up her courage to start looking for the dining room.

She wasn’t allowed to get very far.

A middle-aged man materialised in front of her and asked, pointedly, whether she was a member.