And Mother Makes Three

‘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.