The Price Of Deceit

‘You shouldn’t worry overmuch about that,’ Jane laughed, but her dark eyes rested on Katherine thoughtfully. ‘Children adapt far more easily than adults expect. By next week Claire Laudette will be well on her way to settling in. Even the language barrier will cease to be a problem. Have you ever noticed how children communicate? It’s all hands and expression at that age!’ They laughed, and Jane continued seriously, ‘Your problem will be that you’ll leave this school in the afternoon and you’ll take your worries about Claire home with you, and you mustn’t do that.’

‘I shan’t!’ Katherine protested. ‘I don’t!’

‘I’ll speak honestly, Katherine. I worry about you sometimes.’

There was a little silence. Katherine dreaded it when people decided to speak honestly to her. She knew how her life must appear to outsiders. Calm, placid, a lovely job, but lacking in excitement.

‘Do you mean that I’m not doing my job properly?’ she asked, deliberately misreading the statement, and Jane shook her head.

‘Oh, no, we were delighted when you reapplied for your job here after your six months away. You’re an extremely good teacher. You stimulate the children, get them interested in the basics—no, I can’t fault that.’ She sighed. ‘You know what I mean, don’t you?’

‘I’m happy.’ Katherine looked down at her fingers. Yes, I am happy, she told herself. I have a roof over my head, a job I enjoy, friends—what else could I ask for? In her more optimistic moments, she even tried to convince herself that in time she would be able to put that disastrous episode behind her. It couldn’t haunt her for the rest of her life, could it?

She should, she knew, be grateful that she had been given this second chance at life. She could still remember the private anguish of thinking that she was living on borrowed time, just as clearly as she could remember her dizzy, weak euphoria when she had returned to her cottage all that time ago and found that letter on her doormat, sandwiched between the usual circulars and out-of-date bills. The letter that had informed her politely about the confusion with her notes, apologised courteously for an error of mistaken identity, informed her gaily that she was perfectly healthy. Too late for her, of course, but, yes, she had told herself, I am grateful and I am happy, and she had continued telling herself that as time passed.

‘Perhaps I’ll give little Claire a bit of private tuition. Just a few minutes after class. She isn’t collected until four.’

‘I’m sure that would be very helpful,’ Jane said with a resigned smile, ‘but you mustn’t forget that you have a life of your own to live.’

Have I? Katherine would have liked to ask. Living, she thought, truly living, was something that entailed joy and despair, hopes and dreams and all the ups and downs that gave life its pleasing tempo.

Her life, when she thought about it, was like the flat, undisturbed, glassy surface of a pond. She was content, but she knew that contentment was not what Jane was talking about.

‘I won’t,’ she said dutifully, and that was the end of that. She had become adept at skirting around the details of her private life. She went to the movies, had meals out with her small circle of friends, read a lot, busied herself with her work, but her feelings and emotions she kept to herself.

It was as if, she frequently thought, those heady six months had never really existed. She could hardly believe that she had ever stretched her wings like that and flown free, although she remembered the pain of the landing as bitterly and as clearly as if it had all happened yesterday, and not six long years ago.

She was now no longer a girl. That was something she faced without flinching. She was in her thirties, almost thirty-two, and destined, she knew, to be on her own forever more. That was something she didn’t like to think about too hard. Forever. What a lonely ring that had to it.

The following day she began spending time after school with Claire. In the past week she had discovered that the child’s reserve had nothing to do with her intelligence. Claire Laudette was extremely bright.

They sat side by side in the empty classroom, and it was only when an elderly lady came in that Katherine realised that the few minutes which she had allocated to helping with reading had stretched into a full hour.

I won’t make this a habit, she told herself that evening. I’ll do as much as I can during the school day and then, occasionally, I’ll stay after class until her English has improved.

But there was something curiously vulnerable about the girl, and it touched something equally vulnerable in Katherine.

Little by little, over a period of a few weeks, she also began learning snippets of information about Claire’s home life and, much as she disliked her curiosity, she found herself becoming more and more interested in Claire Laudette as a little person, as opposed to Claire Laudette as a pupil and nothing more.

‘I have no mother and Papa is never at home,’ she would say, apropos nothing in particular. ‘We do not have any pets. He does not allow animals.’ This didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest, but it bothered Katherine.

‘He does not like me to trouble him,’ she would say casually, or, ‘Papa does not have much time for me,’ and the picture that began building in Katherine’s head was so alarming that she began to think about arranging to see him one evening.

She knew all about the damage an uncaring parent could do to a child. Hadn’t she suffered the slings of that when she was young?

‘What about the lady who comes to collect you from school?’ Katherine asked gently. ‘She looks very nice. Is she your aunt, perhaps?’

‘Papa pays her.’ Claire was busy colouring a picture she had drawn, a crooked house with lop-sided windows and disproportionately large flowers huddled on one side. ‘He says that money can buy anything.’

Katherine sent the note home with the child that evening. It was short and to the point. She wanted to see Claire’s father and, rather than leave it to him to arrange a time, she suggested one. That way, he would have to make an effort to cancel the time she suggested or else he would come along. She hadn’t yet worked out what she intended to say to this man, but she would let her intuition guide her. She could usually tell a great deal about the parents from the children, anyway.

The aggressive ones, who were prone to bullying if allowed to get away with it, tended to have socially aggressive parents, mothers who spent a fortune on their clothes and managed to persuade their little angels, without actually saying so in so many words, that they were superior to everyone else.

From what she had seen of Clair Laudette, and from what she had gleaned, she had already formed a very clear impression of her father. A strident man, too selfish to care about his offspring, driven by a need to stack up piles of money, who probably drank. She could imagine him storming through the house, his face ill-tempered, while his daughter cowered away somewhere in a bedroom. A child who seldom laughed, she thought, thinking back to her own silent childhood, rarely had anything to laugh about.

She had arranged to see him that evening at six at the school, and she had persuaded Jane to let her use her office for the meeting.

‘I shall be seeing your daddy this evening,’ she told Claire as the child was getting ready to leave, and the worried look, which had been absent for a while, settled on her face.

‘Why?’ she asked anxiously, chewing on her bottom lip and frowning. ‘You won’t say anything bad about me, will you?’ she asked with a tremor in her voice, and Katherine said huskily,

‘Of course not!’ She gave a bright smile. ‘A bright little thing like you? No, I just want to tell him how wonderfully you’re getting along. I’m sure he wants to know.’

In fact, she had dressed specially for the purpose of telling him just how well his daughter was doing, and dropping a few hints about the importance of parental support in a child’s life.

Warm though it was, she had worn her navy blue suit with a crisp white shirt underneath, and she would make sure that her long hair was pinned very tightly back from her face, no loose strands anywhere.

In six years she had let her hair grow, and it now reached almost to her waist. Soon she would have to have it cut. Long hair at her age was a bit inappropriate, but she didn’t look like a woman in her early thirties. She knew that. She might be plain, but her face was unlined and her grey eyes were clear. Her friends had stopped telling her that the lines would develop quickly enough, just as soon as she had a couple of children. Marriage and children were subjects which they tactfully avoided now that it looked as though neither was on the horizon.

At five to six she began wondering whether she should meander out to the entrance to wait for him. At five past six she decided not to, and at ten past, when she was beginning to wonder whether he would make an appearance at all, she looked up and saw him standing in front of her, his body outlined in the doorway of the office.

And he was precisely as she remembered him. He was even holding his jacket over his shoulder, exactly as he had done all those years ago as he had walked across to her in Regent’s Park.

She opened her mouth in shock and half rose out of the chair, feeling as though at any minute she would faint. The room felt close, as though there wasn’t enough air in it, making her dizzy, disorientated. She had to place her palms on the desk to support herself.

‘You!’ It was the only form of greeting she was capable of. If he was as shocked as she was, then he recovered quickly, moving towards her with the same graceful, economic stride she remembered.

‘Katherine Lewis,’ he said without smiling. His eyes were hard and shuttered.

‘I had no idea that you were Claire’s father,’ she said, finding her voice at last, and not managing to say what she wanted.

‘Nor,’ he said coolly, ‘did I think for a minute that the Miss Lewis whom my daughter talks about incessantly was none other than you.’ He paused, and his eyes raked her up and down with dislike. ‘What an unpleasant surprise for both of us.’

The memories of him were rushing over her, but that dislike in his eyes restored some of her balance, and she sat down again, indicating to him the chair facing her across the desk.

She could feel her heart beating wildly in her chest, like a trapped, fluttering bird wanting escape.

She had collected some of Claire’s work. It lay in front of her in a neat little pile and she rested her hand on it, hoping that it would remind her what the purpose of this meeting was, but she could feel Dominic’s hard eyes straying over her, and she didn’t have to try too hard to imagine what he was thinking.

Was this the same girl he had known all those years ago? This ageing woman with the neatly pinned hair and the severe suit? She felt momentarily unbalanced by the inspection and had to remind herself that this was one of the reasons why she had walked out on him in the first place. Because this was her, the last sort of person he would find attractive. More the sort of woman he would probably pity.

‘Unpleasant or not, the fact stands that I am Claire’s teacher—’ she cleared her throat ‘—and I called you in to see me so that we could discuss what your daughter has been doing.’

She had never really imagined that he would marry. In her mind, he had remained the startlingly attractive bachelor whom she had known, but, really, it would have been unusual if he hadn’t married.

Had he loved his wife? she wondered. What had happened to her? Were they divorced?

‘I have some of Claire’s work here,’ she said, staring down at the little bundle of papers with their childish drawings and round, uneven writing.