Wife For Hire

‘If you could let me finish, Mr Knight, without butting in?’ She made sure not to look at the principal when she said this, but even with her eyes strenuously averted she could easily imagine the look of warning that would have crossed Mrs Williams’s face.

‘I happen to live on the premises.’

‘We have what are called house mothers here,’ the principal explained. ‘Each dormitory section is manned by one. They basically live here and supervise the children out of school hours, make sure that everything is running smoothly. It’s not uncommon for them to have visits during the night, especially by the younger ones who are new and perhaps a little homesick.’

‘You’re a young woman. Why on earth would you choose to live in a boarding-school?’

‘As I was saying, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca carried on, overriding his question with the single-minded intent of a bulldozer, ‘Emily came to see me to talk about a rather…unfortunate situation.’ She glanced at Mrs Williams for support and the other woman nodded encouragingly.

Emily’s father, on the other hand, looked slightly less encouraging. His face was grim, unreadable and frankly terrifyingly forbidding.

‘I’m waiting,’ he said at last, when an uncomfortable silence had begun to thicken around them as Rebecca searched for the most tactful way of saying what she had to say. ‘Is she on drugs?’

‘No.’ She inhaled deeply, adopted her sternest expression and clasped her hands on her knees. ‘I’m sure you’ve been made aware, Mr Knight, over the past couple of years, that your daughter has been…’

‘Bloody difficult. Why don’t you just come right out with what you have to say, Miss Ryan? The facts don’t go away, however much you try and sugar-coat them. Yes. I have been all too aware of what she has managed to get up to. It hasn’t made pretty reading and I needn’t tell you that I’ve been losing patience fast.’

Charming attitude to adopt, Rebecca thought, directing a meaningless smile at him and suppressing the urge to clout him over the head.

‘To be honest, I was a little stunned when she knocked on my door at two in the morning. Emily isn’t one for confiding in her teachers. She enjoys being a law unto herself, doesn’t like anyone to glimpse her vulnerabilities, and before you object to what I’m saying I can assure you that all girls of sixteen are vulnerable, whatever air of bravado they might choose to wear.’

‘I’ll take you at your word, Miss Ryan. I have no experience of teenage girls.’

‘Including your own,’ Rebecca countered before she could censor her thoughts, and he shot her a hard, cold look.

‘Just carry on with the facts, Miss Ryan, and keep your thoughts to yourself.’

‘I think that what Miss Ryan is trying to say,’ Miss Williams took up hastily, ‘is that we are quite accustomed to dealing with unruly girls and we tend towards leniency in most cases. A stern talking-to usually does the trick. Boarding-school can seem restricting to some of our girls, at least initially. They are disoriented, and they react, occasionally, without thinking. These problems are by no means frequent, but they do occur, and we all recognise how to deal with them.’

‘Fine.’ He had not glanced in the direction of the principal. His eyes had remained focused on Rebecca the whole time. She began to feel hot and uneasy. She could also feel her ridiculous bun beginning to slip out of place, and she wondered whether she could halt its progress downwards by keeping her head very, very still.

She decided, as he continued to stare at her with the off-putting concentration of someone trying to move an immovable object by exerting will-power, that time had honed that natural self-assurance that had first attracted her into obnoxious arrogance. There was no other word for it. The man was a pig.

Was he totally incapable of taking any responsibility for his daughter’s behaviour? Did he imagine that young girls of sixteen operated in emotional vacuums?

‘She was in quite a state,’ Rebecca confessed. ‘I made her sit down, and she told me… I’m afraid to tell you, Mr Knight, that your daughter informs us that…that she’s pregnant.’

The word fell into the silence like a stone. Seconds passed. Minutes. He said nothing.

‘Perhaps you can understand now why we felt we had to get you up here, Mr Knight,’ the principal said gently. ‘I realise that this must come as a shock to you…’

‘How the hell was this allowed to happen?’ His words were soft and sharp, but they still managed to reverberate around the room like a thunderclap. He turned to look at Rebecca. ‘You say that you live on the premises so that you can make sure that everything is running smoothly. Well, you haven’t managed to do a very good job, have you? What were you doing while my teenage daughter was slinking along the corridors at night and heading into town to meet some man? And do we know the identity of this bastard?’

Under the controlled voice, she could sense a man who wanted to kill and, however much she disliked what she had seen of him so far, she could sympathise with him. He must feel as though a bomb had been dropped on him from a very great height.

‘First of all Emily isn’t on my floor…’

‘Then why would she come to you with her problems?’

‘Because…’

‘Perhaps,’ Mrs Williams said in a conciliatory tone of voice, ‘because Miss Ryan is one of our younger members of staff. Many of the girls turn to her for advice. She’s popular…’

‘Yes, well, a glowing appraisal of Miss Ryan’s character isn’t what I’m after right now. What I want—’ he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and the slight shift in position made Rebecca instinctively cringe back into the chair, causing further damage to her already precarious hairdo ‘—is a bloody explanation!’

‘Emily hasn’t gone into details, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca answered. Her hands were shaking and she steadied them on her lap, linking her fingers together. ‘She won’t say who the boy in question is and she won’t tell us how it happened. It’s highly unlikely that she slipped out at night. The doors would have been very securely locked to prevent the girls from doing just that sort of thing and there is a night watchman on the premises. It’s far more likely that she met him during the day, probably on a weekend when the girls are allowed a certain amount of freedom once they get to a certain age. They are not kept padlocked here. We hope that they have the right moral codes instilled that will guide—’

‘Oh, why don’t we just cut through all this claptrap? What you’re telling me here is that you accept no responsibility for what’s happened! It’s unfortunate that a child’s life has been ruined, but as far as you’re concerned you intend to wash your hands of it and put it all down to experience. Am I right?’

Why on earth doesn’t he direct this tirade at the principal? Rebecca thought distractedly. Why does he keep staring at me as though I’ve single-handedly engineered all of this? She squirmed uncomfortably, aware that he had struck close to a chord. Of course, it was an awful thing to have happened, but at the end of the day Emily would be expelled and, in time, forgotten.

‘Of course that’s not what we’re saying!’ she snapped angrily. ‘It’s distressing, not least for your daughter! But it’s happened, and she’s going to have to live with the consequences! Berating us, and berating her, isn’t going to make the situation change, Mr Knight. It’s just going to make it all the harder for her to cope with it!’

‘So what happens now?’ he threw at her. He glanced from her to the principal, his eyes cold with rage. ‘Would either of you ladies care to tell me? No, allow me to have a stab at guessing. She’s to pack her bags and leave the premises immediately. Her education will seize up and, wherever she ends up, may it all be a salutary lesson for one and all! Am I on target here?’

‘What choice do we have, Mr Knight?’ Mrs Williams said wearily. She looked exhausted, Rebecca thought. It had not been a wonderful thirty-six hours for her. This was the sort of incident that could wreak havoc amongst the school. Parents would be alarmed. The fallout was not worth thinking about, and it would be no use to suggest to concerned mothers and fathers that Emily had been in a category of her own. A time bomb waiting to explode.

‘We have no option but to ask you to remove Emily from the school. Naturally she will be given until the weekend to get her things in order.’

‘Naturally…’ His mouth twisted harshly, then he sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘So have neither of you any ideas on how this problem might be dealt with?’ He shot an accusing eye in the principal’s direction. ‘Even if you sit stiff-backed in your chair and accept no responsibility for what’s happened, this can’t be the first time…’

‘Absolutely the first time, Mr Knight. There are no precedents we can follow here.’

‘She’ll need your support,’ Rebecca interjected, and he turned to her with a cynical glint.

‘I must say that’s going to be a trifle difficult to muster up. It’s been impossible enough dealing with her since she came to me two years ago, but this is positively the last damned straw!’

That, Rebecca thought, was not quite the story that Emily had told her. In between her tears, she had bitterly informed her that her father had had zero time for her ever since she had been landed on him thanks to her mother’s death in a skiing accident. She had had little contact with him as it was as a child. With her parents divorced when she was two, her mother had not encouraged father/daughter bonding. In fact, she had expressly forbidden it and had moved to the opposite side of the world in an attempt to avoid any such thing. He hadn’t pursued her then, and ever since she had been returned to him he had chosen to ignore her because she was no more than a stranger who did not fit in with his lifestyle.

‘So what do you intend to do?’ Rebecca asked coolly. ‘I don’t believe homes for fallen women still exist.’

‘That’s a particularly constructive remark, isn’t it, Miss Ryan?’ he told her acidly. ‘Any more where that came from?’

Rebecca blushed, furious with herself for voicing thoughts that were better kept to herself, and ashamed that in the midst of this painful and difficult situation she could find herself distracted by Nicholas Knight. He was someone who was buried so deeply in her past that it surprised her to discover just how easily she could recover the image and the wounded feelings inflicted on her over a decade ago.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said sincerely. ‘There was absolutely no call for that, and you’re right, it wasn’t constructive. What you might find constructive is if I tell you Emily is not the first teenager to find herself in this situation, and she can come out of it. She might leave this school, but there’s no reason why her education has to come to an abrupt end because of it. She can be tutored at home. She’s an incredibly clever child and—who knows?—this might just be the thing that helps her find her way.’

‘How pregnant…is she?’ The distaste in his voice was audible and Rebecca shivered. Poor Emily, however downright stupid she had been, was not going to find her father easily forgiving.

‘Only just.’

‘Meaning?’

‘A week…overdue, apparently. But the pregnancy test, she informed me tearfully, was definitely positive. In fact, she said that she did two, just in case the first was wrong.’

‘Home tutoring,’ he said to himself. He stroked his chin with one finger, frowning, and Rebecca caught herself staring. She pulled herself up short and allowed her eyes to wander away from him. ‘I suppose that’s the only solution, isn’t it?’ he said to them. He looked at Mrs Williams for a while. ‘Could you excuse us for a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss in private with Miss Ryan.’

‘Well…’ The principal hesitated, taken aback by the request.