firebrand who’d publicly deplored all such elitism and died of a fever after giving birth in some desperately inadequate hospital in the Third World with no father in evidence.
If her mother had lived, he thought, May might well have launched a counter-rebellion, demanding her right to a privileged education if only to declare her own independence of spirit; but how could she rebel against someone who’d died giving her life?
Like her mother, though, she’d held on to who she was, refusing to give an inch to peer pressure to slur the perfect vowels, drop the crisp consonants, hitch up her skirt and use her school tie as a belt. To seek anonymity in the conformity of the group. Because that would have been a betrayal, too. Of who she was.
It was what had first drawn him to her. His response to being different had been to keep his head down, hoping to avoid trouble and he’d admired, envied her quiet, obstinate courage. Her act first, think later response to any situation.
Pretty much what had got them into so much trouble in the first place.
Nancie, deciding that she required something a little more tangible than a ‘sh-shush’ and a jiggle, opened her tiny mouth to let out an amazingly loud wail. He replaced the photograph. Called May.
The water had stopped running a while ago and, when there was no reply, he tapped on the bedroom door.
‘Help!’
There was no response.
‘May?’ He opened the door a crack and then, since there wasn’t a howl of outrage, he pushed it wide.
The room, a snowy indulgence of pure femininity, had been something of a shock. For some reason he’d imagined that the walls of her bedroom would be plastered in posters of endangered animals. But the only picture was a watercolour of Coleridge House painted when it was still surrounded by acres of parkland. A reminder of who she was?
There should have been a sense of triumph at having made it this far into her inner sanctum. But looking at that picture made him feel like a trespasser.
May pushed open the door to her grandfather’s room.
She still thought of it as his room even though he’d long ago moved downstairs to the room she’d converted for him, determined that he should be as comfortable as possible. Die with dignity in his own home.
‘May?’
She jumped at the sound of Adam’s voice.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, but Nancie is getting fractious.’
‘Maybe she needs changing. Or feeding.’ His only response was a helpless shrug. ‘Both happen on a regular basis, I understand,’ she said, turning to the wardrobe, hunting down one of her grandfather’s silk dressing gowns, holding it out to him. ‘You’d better put this on before you go and fetch your trousers.’ Then, as he took it from her, she realised her mistake. He couldn’t put it on while he was holding the baby.
Nancie came into her arms like a perfect fit. A soft, warm, gorgeous bundle of cuddle nestling against her shoulder. A slightly damp bundle of cuddle.
‘Changing,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, tying the belt around his waist and looking more gorgeous than any man wearing a dressing gown that was too narrow across the shoulders, too big around the waist and too short by a country mile had any right to look.
‘You knew!’
‘It isn’t rocket science,’ he said, looking around him. ‘This was your grandfather’s room.’
It wasn’t a question and she didn’t bother to answer. She could have, probably should have, used the master bedroom to increase the numbers for the arts and crafts weekends she hosted, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that. While he was alive, it was his room and it still looked as if he’d just left it to go for a stroll in the park before dropping in at the Crown for lunch with old friends.
The centuries-old furniture gleamed. There were fresh sheets on the bed, his favourite Welsh quilt turned back as if ready for him. And a late rose that Robbie had placed on the dressing table glowed in the thin sunshine.
‘Impressive.’
‘As you said, Adam, he was an impressive man,’ she said, turning abruptly and, leaving him to follow or not as he chose, returned to her room.
He followed.
‘You’re going to have to learn how to do this,’ she warned as she fetched a clean towel from her bathroom and handed it to him.
He opened it without a word, lay it over the bed cover and May placed Nancie on it. She immediately began to whimper.
‘Watch her,’ she said, struggling against the instinct to pick her up again, comfort her. ‘I’ll get her bag.’
Ignoring his, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ which was on a par with the ironic ‘Mouse’, she unhooked Nancie’s bag from the buggy, opened it, found a little pink drawstring bag that contained a supply of disposable nappies and held one out to him.
‘Me?’ He looked at the nappy, the baby and then at her. ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’ She continued to hold out the nappy and he took it without further comment. ‘Okay. Talk me through it.’
‘What makes you think I know anything about changing a baby? And if you say that I’m a woman, you are on your own.’
Adam, on the point of saying exactly that, reconsidered. He’d thought that getting through the door would be the problem but that had been the easy part. Obviously, he was asking a lot but, considering Saffy’s confidence and her own inability to resist something helpless, he was meeting a lot more resistance from May than he’d anticipated.
‘You really know nothing about babies?’
‘Look around you, Adam. The last baby to occupy this nursery was me.’
‘This was your nursery?’ he said, taking in the lace-draped bed, the pale blue carpet, the lace and velvet draped window where she’d stood and watched his humiliation at the hands of her ‘impressive’ grandfather.
‘Actually, this was the nanny’s room,’ she said. ‘The nursery was out there.’
‘Lucky nanny.’ The room, with its bathroom, was almost as big as the flat he’d grown up in.
May saw the casual contempt with which he surveyed the room but didn’t bother to explain that her grandfather had had it decorated for her when she was fifteen. That it reflected the romantic teenager she’d been rather than the down-to-earth woman she’d become.
‘As I was saying,’ she said, doing her best to hold onto reality, ignore the fact that Adam Wavell was standing in her bedroom, ‘the last baby to occupy this nursery was me and only children of only children don’t have nieces and nephews to practise on.’ Then, having given him a moment for the reality of her ignorance to sink in, she said, ‘I believe you have to start with the poppers of her sleep suit.’
‘Right,’ he said, looking at the nappy, then at the infant and she could almost see the cogs
