Giles said. “You’ve met her before at school. She’s to stay with us now, and look after you.”
There was no response. The child regarded her in a silence that held no friendliness.
“David—” Giles began with an edge on his voice.
“Never mind,” Melanie said. “There’ll be plenty of time.”
He sighed. “All right. We’ll discuss money in my office. When can you move in?”
“My job finishes in two days. I’ll come immediately after that.”
“Fine. I’ll have a room made ready for you.”
She smiled at the little boy. “Goodbye, David. I’ll be back soon, and then we can get to know each other properly.”
Still saying nothing, the child backed into his room, keeping his eyes fixed on her. They were the eyes of a stranger, cold, withdrawn. The eyes of her son.
Late that night, in the bleak little flat where she lived alone, Melanie took out a photograph and studied it. It was battered from long use, frayed around the edges and stained with her tears. It showed a week-old baby sleeping in its mother’s arms, and it was the only memento she had of the child she’d borne when she was sixteen.
She hadn’t been married to the father. He’d vanished as soon as he learned of her pregnancy, but at that moment she hadn’t cared. Her love for Peter, her baby, had been immediate, passionate and total. She would spend hours holding him, looking down into his face, knowing total fulfillment. As long as Peter needed her, nothing else mattered.
Even at that age he was an individual. While she smiled at him he would stare back, as grave as a little old man. Then his smile would break suddenly, like sun coming from behind clouds, always taking her by surprise and filling her with joy. For a while only the two of them existed in all the world.
Then her mother had said coolly, “It’s time you decided to be sensible about this. Of course you can’t keep the baby. It’s a ridiculous idea.”
“He’s mine. I’m going to keep him,” she cried.
“My dear girl, how? That layabout who fathered it has gone—”
“Peter isn’t an ‘it,’” she protested fiercely. “He’s a person, and he’s my son.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have been if you’d had the common sense to have an abortion. But I thought at least now you’d see how impossible the whole thing is.”
“You could help me…” Melanie pleaded.
But her mother had raised four children and considered she’d ‘done her bit.’ Besides, she had a job now, one that she liked. She made it plain that her babyminding days were in the past.
“Then I’ll look after him by myself. I’ll get a flat—”
“Oh, yes, a flat—in some ghastly high-rise block with an elevator that never works and the stairs littered with syringes, living off welfare payments that aren’t enough. You say you love him. Is that the life you want for him?”
Dumbly Melanie shook her head while tears began to roll down her cheeks, and she held onto her child more tightly than ever. She hadn’t yielded at once, but the euphoria of the first few days was insidiously being replaced by postpartum depression.
In the blackness that seemed to swirl around her after that, only one thing remained constant, and that was her love for Peter. She breast-fed him, pouring out her adoration as she poured out her milk, clinging to the hope that something would happen to let her keep her baby.
But it didn’t. Instead there was the constant verbal battering from her family, always on the same theme, “If you loved him you’d give him up—a child needs two parents—a better life—if you loved him you’d give him up.”
At last, distraught, deep in depression, barely knowing what she was doing, she signed the papers and said goodbye to her child. For six months the conviction of doing the right thing supported her. And then, with brutal timing, the clouds lifted from her brain on the day after the adoption was finalized by the court, and with dreadful clarity she saw what she’d done.
The separation from her baby was an agony that wouldn’t heal. Her desperate pleas to be told where he was were met with bland official statements about confidentiality. All the legal processes had been completed. It was too late for her to change her mind.
Her last hope was a friend who worked for the council and who broke all the rules to give her the names, Mr. and Mrs. Haverill, and an address. Frantically she raced to their house to plead with them, only to find that Giles Haverill had already left the country to start a new firm in Australia, as part of the business empire he ran for his father. His wife, Zena, was in the middle of final packing. If Melanie had hoped to find an understanding maternal heart, she was bitterly disappointed. Zena Haverill was a strong-featured young woman with a cold voice, who had no intention of giving up what she considered hers.
“There are other babies,” Melanie pleaded.
“Other babies? My dear girl, do you know how hard it is to get a baby these days? Now I’ve got David, there’s no way I’m going to give him back.”
“His name’s Peter.”
“Giles, my husband, prefers David, after his own father. He’s a very rich man, you know. David will have the best of everything, and I daresay he’ll be better off than with an unmarried and—if you’ll pardon my saying so—rather unstable young woman. Look, I’ll lay it on the line because I’m tired of arguing. I can’t have children myself, and David is exactly what Giles wants.”
“Giles—Giles,” Melanie raged. “You don’t say that you want him.”
“There’s no need to discuss this,” Zena Haverill said coolly, and something in her voice told Melanie the terrible truth.
“You don’t want him, do you?” she accused. “Your husband wants an heir, that’s all it is. You don’t love him.”
“I see nothing to be gained by hysteria. David will have every advantage.”
“But he won’t have a mother who loves him,” Melanie screamed. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Zena regarded her dispassionately. “The welfare worker told me you gave up David because you wanted to play in a rock band. I can only say that if this performance is anything to go by you should have been an actress. However, it doesn’t move me, you know.”
“Rock band?” Melanie echoed, dazed. “I don’t know what you mean. I may have mentioned to her that I once thought of something like that, but I didn’t give Peter up because of it. I don’t care about a career now. I just want my baby.”
“My baby,” Zena said calmly. “Mine and my husband’s. Now I think you’d better go.”
She’d pleaded for one last sight of Peter, a chance to say goodbye, but Zena had been like flint.
“He hasn’t seen you for months. You’d only
