the bald statement, and he rubbed his hand wearily over his face. ‘Look, you’re right. I need to start at the beginning.’
‘When you slept with Molly’s mother?’
‘Yes,’ he said, flinching slightly at her directness. ‘Her name was Hannah and she was a technician at the office. She’d do the technical drawings and…Well, it doesn’t matter what she did. I’d known her for a few years, ever since I went to work there, and we’d always got on well. Hannah was attractive, I suppose, but I never really thought about that much. She was just a friend.’
She wasn’t you, he wanted to say to Rose, but didn’t.
‘If you had a baby together you were clearly more than friends,’ Rose said crisply.
Typical Rose, thought Drew with rueful affection. She looked so sweet, but there was a refreshing and sometimes uncomfortable astringency to her, as well.
‘That really was all we were until my leaving party,’ he insisted. ‘But that night I was…Well, the truth is that I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing in going to Africa, but I didn’t want anyone to know that I was having doubts, so I did my best to cover it by having a good time. Drinking too much, in fact,’ he added dryly. ‘Hannah was in a strange mood, too—almost wild. I didn’t realise at the time, but her parents told me today that she had decided that she really wanted a baby.’
‘And she’d picked on you as the father?’ Rose raised her brows in disbelief.
‘I know what it sounds like…but she definitely didn’t want a relationship. She told her parents that she liked me, and thought I’d have some healthy genes to pass on, but that I’d be a disaster as a father.’
‘Hah!’ snorted Rose, thinking that Hannah had obviously had no illusions about Drew. Sensible woman.
‘I’d told her about why we’d split up, so she knew I didn’t want children myself, but she didn’t care about that. She just wanted to get pregnant.’
Jack was beginning to squirm. He had evidently decided that Drew and Molly weren’t going to do anything alarming, and was ready to go back to his toys. ‘It takes two to get pregnant,’ Rose pointed out, putting out a protective hand just in case Jack fell as he scrambled down from the sofa. ‘Didn’t you take any precautions?’
Drew shifted in his seat. ‘The thing is, I wasn’t expecting to sleep with anyone that night. I thought I was just going out for a few drinks, but one thing led to another, and then Hannah was inviting me back to her flat, and…When things started getting a little…you know…’
‘I know,’ said Rose expressionlessly.
‘I think I did say that I didn’t have anything with me, but Hannah was insistent that she was on the Pill and…’ He glanced at Rose’s face. ‘Don’t look like that! I know it was irresponsible, but it wasn’t as if she was a total stranger.’
‘Hannah lied to you?’
‘She wanted a baby. That’s what her parents said, anyway. It was just luck, from her point of view, that she managed to get pregnant that night, but apparently she knew that she was ovulating and all the signs were good. It even suited her that I was going away a couple of days later, as I wouldn’t be around to put two and two together.’
‘She told her parents all this?’ said Rose in disbelief. Her own parents had died in an accident when she was nineteen. She had loved them dearly, and missed them still, but she certainly couldn’t imagine telling them that she was ovulating and hoping to become pregnant by a man she knew didn’t want to be a father. It would have been hard enough to tell them about Jack.
‘Hannah was a very strong personality. You’d have liked her,’ said Drew. ‘No, you would,’ he insisted, when she looked sceptical. ‘Her parents told me that she’d been completely straight with them about wanting to do it on her own. All she would say about me was that I worked at the office and that she liked me, but that I was the last person she wanted to get involved with.’
He didn’t add that Hannah had told her parents that he was still in love with Rose, and that she knew that any attempt at getting together for the baby’s sake would be doomed to disaster.
‘So you went off to Africa none the wiser?’
‘Exactly. Hannah was very casual about it when I saw her the next day. She said it was just a fling for both of us, and that as far as she was concerned we were just friends. And that was a bit of a relief, to be honest.’
‘I’m sure it was,’ said Rose acidly. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to have to take any responsibility for your actions, now, would you?’
A dull flush crept up his cheeks. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said. ‘And I’ve taken responsibility now. When I heard that Hannah had died, I wanted to see her parents and say how sorry I was, how much I’d liked her…it seemed like the right thing to do somehow.’
It had been. Rose studied him, a little frown between her brows. She had been so staggered to see him, and so thrown by the news that he was a father, that she hadn’t had a chance to look at him properly yet. Now she looked at him more carefully. He was browner, yes, and leaner. There were more lines around the green eyes, but otherwise he looked just as she had remembered him.
But something had changed. He seemed more solid somehow. His face was still humorous, with that long, curling mouth and the glinting amusement in his eyes, but there was a new assurance to him now, a thoughtfulness that hadn’t been there before. Africa had changed him. His time there seemed to have made him responsible rather than reckless.
He was different. Rose couldn’t quite put her finger on why or how, but she knew that it was true. And it wasn’t just to do with the baby sleeping in his lap.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘I wasn’t looking forward to it,’ Drew said. ‘I didn’t know what on earth I was going to say, but in the event I didn’t really have to say anything. As soon as Mrs Clarke opened the door she just stared at me, and then stood back to let me inside. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but she showed me into a sitting room and there was a baby in one of those bouncy chair things.’
‘This is Molly,’ Hannah’s mother had said.
‘Is she Hannah’s?’ he had asked, and she had nodded with a wavering smile as Drew approached the baby. His tentative smile had been wiped off his face as he’d looked at her properly and seen the telltale splodge in the baby’s soft dark hair. Dumbly, he had raised his eyes, and Betty Clarke had nodded again.
‘And yours,’ she had said.
Now Drew pulled the cap off Molly’s head, and Rose saw for herself. It hadn’t taken her long to get so used to Drew’s hair that she hadn’t even noticed it after a while, but she vividly remembered how startled she had been to meet his father and see exactly the same pattern on his head.
‘It’s a form of vitiligo,’ Drew had explained to her once. ‘It’s an auto-immune thing. For some reason melanin isn’t produced, and in our family it’s inherited, a sort of genetic quirk, because if we get it at all, it always shows up in exactly the same pattern.’
Molly was dark-haired, with a distinctive
