David Wilder handed him a file.
‘Let me read this and then I’ll come back to you. In the meantime, don’t do anything. If I think it necessary, I’ll go and see Miss Oakley myself. It may be that I will be able to persuade her to see the advantages of the child’s coming to me,’ he said grimly.
A few hours later, when David Wilder was relating the story to his wife while she was preparing dinner, she turned her head and said thoughtfully, ‘Buy her off, did he mean?’
David winced, but admitted that it was a strong possibility.
‘Well, I hope she turns him down,’ Elaine told him roundly. ‘That poor baby…What on earth does he want it for, anyway? He doesn’t strike me as a man who would want to take on such a responsibility. Heavens, he’s never in one place long enough to bring up a child.’
‘He wants an heir, I suppose,’ David told her.
‘Oh, I see, and rather than go to the trouble of finding himself a wife, he’s decided he’d prefer to take on a ready-made son without the nuisance of a woman who might make emotional and financial demands on him. Typical! Just the sort of thing I would have expected from a man like him,’ she said scathingly.
David patted his wife’s hand, and put her outburst down to the fact that she herself was four months pregnant with their first child, a very emotional time for a woman, but of course there was a thread of truth in Elaine’s argument.
Despite the fact that over the course of the years Garrick Evans had had several long-standing relationships with women, it was rumoured that he always made it plain to them that they could forget marriage. A hard man. A man it would be very difficult to get to know. A man who wore an air about him of always getting what he wanted. And what he now wanted was a nine-month-old boy, currently living with his guardian; a woman who, according to her file, was an orphan herself, without either wealth or family to support her.
Even if she wanted to keep the child, she would never be able to stand out against Garrick. Feeling rather sorry for her, David Wilder applied himself to his dinner.
Not all that very far away from the elegant terraced house which had been Elaine Wilder’s parents’ wedding gift to her and her husband, Kate Oakley sat cross-legged on her sitting-room floor, the telephone receiver jammed into the crook of her neck while she painted her nails with her free hand.
Her house, although not in as fashionable part of London as the Wilders’, was every bit as elegantly decorated and furnished. As a PR consultant running her own business, Kate was well aware of the importance of creating the right image; hence the nail polish.
She finished one hand and studied the effect with a frown, while listening to her friend exclaiming in amusement.
‘Kate…you with a nine-month-old baby! This I have to see. How in the world are you managing?’
‘I’m not,’ Kate told her firmly. ‘That’s why I’m ringing you. In the last six weeks I’ve gone through four supposed nannies, Camilla. It can’t go on. I came in tonight all set to go out to dinner with James, only to discover the latest one waiting for me with her bags packed.’
‘Good heavens! Is the child so difficult, then?’
‘No, not at all. If anything, he’s inclined to be too subdued. The shock of losing his parents, poor little thing…No, the problem is me. Three nights this week, I haven’t managed to get in until gone ten at night. Everyone the agency has sent me expects to work a regulation seven-hour day; they don’t like being alone all the time with Michael; they don’t like the fact that I can’t provide them with a private sitting-room and a whole host of other luxuries, and as for their salaries—’ She gave a groan. ‘The agency is starting to do quite well, but not that well.’
She didn’t want to tell Camilla what a struggle it had been even for her to afford the new house. Up until the arrival of small Michael into her life, she had lived in a flat, but she had strong views on how a child should live, and those did not include being cooped up with no outside area to play in. The reason she had bought this particular house had been because of its walled-in back garden.
Admittedly it wasn’t very large, but it was certainly large enough for a small boy to vent his energy in. Of course, she was looking ahead. Michael was only nine months old, but in another couple of years…
‘I see. I sympathise, my dear, but why have you come to me?’
‘Oh, come on, Camilla. You know everyone there is to know in London. If anyone can help me, it’s you. You must know where I can find a reliable nanny who isn’t going to cost me the earth…’
It was so unusual for her friend to sound so exasperated that Camilla frowned and stopped doodling on her notepad.
She had known Kate for almost ten years. In fact, Kate had worked for her when she first came to London. Camilla had sold out her interest in her own PR firm several years ago, and now spent all her time helping her husband in his own business and looking after their twin daughters. She was proud of Kate’s success and drive, feeling that she had been the one responsible for recognising and nurturing them, and she sympathised with her in her present dilemma.
She and her husband had only just returned from a six months’ working visit to New York, and this was her first real opportunity to catch up with her friend’s life.
‘I think you’d better start at the beginning and tell me the whole story,’ she suggested firmly. ‘Apart from a frantic message on my answering machine, I know nothing whatsoever about this baby who suddenly seems to have taken over your life. He’s not yours, of course…’
‘No,’ Kate agreed quietly, adding, ‘He’s my godson.’
Start at the beginning, Camilla had said, but she didn’t want to. She had put those years at the orphanage and all the insecurities that went with them firmly behind her now, hadn’t she?
‘His parents were killed in a car crash. Neither of them had any close family.’
‘No one? But, Kate, surely…’
‘Alan has a second cousin, but they rarely met.’ She said it in such a clipped voice that, even without seeing her, Camilla could sense her friend’s reluctance to discuss what had happened. Kate could be like that at times, erecting fences behind which she quietly disappeared. They had known one another a long time, and yet Kate rarely talked about her past.
Camilla knew better than to press her now, saying merely, ‘I see. So there’s no question of you—er—handing over the responsibility of this baby to someone else?’
‘No!’ Kate told her explosively, and then, realising how much she had betrayed, felt obliged to explain reluctantly, ‘I can’t do that, Camilla…I can’t explain it to you, but I feel I owe it to Jennifer, his mother, to bring Michael up myself. You see, I know she’d want him to have all the things that she and I didn’t have. A real home life..she and I didn’t have. A real home life…family…’
Abruptly Kate stopped. Already she had betrayed too much, revealed too much, and she started to shake a little as she clutched the receiver. This was the reason she hated to discuss the past: it opened up too many vulnerable areas, too many heartaches that had never properly healed.
‘I see,’ Camilla said compassionately.
