скачать книгу бесплатно
There was a long pause before Melanie said, “I’m not in touch with my family anymore—not for some years.”
He waited to see if she would elaborate on this, but she didn’t. He sat considering her for some moments, a frown darkening his face. Then he said abruptly, “I can’t see you properly there. Come over here.”
He rose and went to the big bay window. She followed him and stood in the light while he studied her. She too could see better now. He was in his mid-thirties, with a stern face that seemed made for authority. His mouth surprised her, being well made and mobile, a mouth that many women would have found attractive. It was relaxed now as he looked at her, and both from his mouth and his dark eyes, she gained an impression that this was an unhappy man. But she had no pity for him. He’d contributed too much to her own unhappiness for that.
“Take your hair down,” he commanded.
“What?” She stared at him. “What difference does my hair make?”
“I don’t make pointless requests. Please do as I ask.”
She pulled the pins from her fair hair, letting it tumble in waves around her shoulders, and stared at him defiantly. He laid his hand on it, taking a strand between his fingers, savoring its silkiness. “It’s lovely hair,” he said quietly.
“I don’t see what my physical attributes have to do with anything,” she snapped.
“I think you do. That’s why you pinned your hair back, to hide its beauty. That’s why you don’t wear makeup, because you want to look severe and professional. It doesn’t work. You’ve got a lovely, delicate face, wonderful green eyes and a figure that must keep the men chasing after you.” He said this in a cool, appraising voice that robbed the words of any tinge of flattery. “And you know as well as I do why I can’t possibly employ you.”
Her heart thundered. She recovered herself enough to say, “But I don’t know.”
“David needs stability. He needs a woman who’ll stay with him through thick and thin. I had in mind somebody middle-aged, a widow or divorcée, perhaps with grown-up children, even grandchildren. You’re a young, beautiful woman, which means you won’t stay long.”
“It doesn’t mean that at all—”
“Oh, come! At your age the natural sequence of events is to fall in love and get married. I don’t want you vanishing in a few months, just when he’s learned to trust you.”
“There’s no question of that,” Melanie said desperately.
“No question?” he echoed, with a satirical look that made her want to scream at him.
“No question whatever,” she said, trying to speak calmly.
“You don’t mean to tell me that there isn’t a man in your life this minute?”
“There isn’t.”
“I don’t believe you. The very gifts that nature gave you are an incitement. They don’t affect me because I’m armored, but other men aren’t. They must be around you like flies around a honey pot.”
“Possibly,” Melanie said, fighting to keep her temper. “But they don’t get invited in. Any of them. Like you, Mr. Haverill, I’m armored.”
“Oh, I see,” he said grimly. “It’s like that, is it?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“When a woman renounces love it usually means she’s suffering from a broken heart. Who is he? Is he going to come back and sweep you off?”
Melanie’s eyes glinted with anger. “Mr. Haverill, this really isn’t any of your business, but—”
“Everything is my business that I choose to make so.”
“But the only time I imagined myself in love was nine years ago. And it’ll be the last. You can count on it.”
There was a long silence. She guessed he wasn’t used to being answered back. Oh, God! she thought, don’t let him refuse!
At last he said, “I’ll have to take your word for that. I want someone who can make David feel safe and loved. Are you the woman who can do that?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at him steadily. “I can do that as nobody else can.”
He was startled by the intensity in her voice. Again he knew the inner prompting to get rid of her. She was dangerous. But he dismissed the notion as fanciful. “In that case,” he said, “let’s go and find him.”
He led her out into the hall, toward the wide staircase.
Careful, she thought. Don’t let Giles Haverill suspect that you’ve been in this house before, that you know your way up these very stairs—the right turn at the top toward the room at the end—it’s the same room, and the door’s shut against you as it was before…
A middle-aged woman in an apron was standing outside the closed door, arguing with someone inside. She looked up as they appeared. “I’m sorry, Mr. Haverill. David’s locked himself in his room again.”
He knocked hard on the door and called, “David, come out here at once. You know I won’t stand for this behavior.”
Melanie bit her lip. She wanted to cry out, “Don’t bully him. He’s only a hurt, confused child.” But she said nothing.
“David.”
Slowly the key turned in the lock and the door was opened. The little boy who stood there was fair and would have looked angelic but for the sullen defiance written on his face.
“This is Miss Haynes,” 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 disturb him. Besides,” she added belatedly, “he isn’t here.”
“He is, I can hear him.”
She ran out of the room, up the stairs toward the sound of a baby’s crying. In her distraught state it seemed that Peter was calling to her. But she never got to him. A nurse came out of a room at the end of the corridor, closed it firmly behind her and stood with her back to it.
“Peter,” Melanie screamed. “Peter.”
Then Zena caught up with her, and together she and the nurse wrestled her downstairs into the hall.
“I suggest you leave now before I call the police and charge you with attempted kidnapping,” Zena said breathlessly.
She’d stumbled out of the house, tears streaming down her cheeks. As the front door was slammed shut, she turned and screamed, “He’s my baby. I’ll get him back, whatever I have to do.”
But the next day Zena had gone to Australia, taking Peter with her.
Melanie had tried to put the past behind her and plan for a career. She’d been a talented pianist and for a while she had played keyboard with a rock band that had some modest success. Men pursued her, attracted as much by her haunting air of melancholy as by her gentle beauty. But she had nothing to give them. The trauma she’d been through had frozen her, until now she was sure she would never fall in love. Only one kind of feeling still lived in her, and it was one she couldn’t acknowledge. Each year she celebrated Peter’s birthday with a breaking heart, and each night she prayed for a miracle.
At last the rock band broke up. Melanie was growing weary of the futility of the life and she left music completely to take business courses. She joined a temping agency and took a succession of jobs until at last she was hired for a month by Ayleswood School, a select, fee-paying establishment, whose secretary was off sick. And there she found her miracle, in the school records.
His name was David Haverill, son of Giles and Zena Haverill, and his address was the very same house where she’d confronted Zena. There could be no doubt. The family had returned from Australia, and now her child was here, within a few yards of her.
When her first transports of joy had calmed, she began to search for him slowly, careful not to attract attention. There were three boys who were possible. None of them had her features, or Oliver’s, but they were fair haired, like herself. She’d cherished dreams of an instant thunderbolt of recognition, but it didn’t happen that way.
It happened through stealing.
She’d come into the anteroom of the headmistress’s office one afternoon to find one of the “possibles” there. He was sitting on the edge of a seat, his face set in a mask that might have concealed defiance or indifference or just plain misery. “Hello,” Melanie said cautiously. “I’ve got some files for Mrs. Grady. Do you know if she’s in there?”
He stared at her for a long moment before nodding. “She told me to wait here,” he said at last.
“I’m Melanie. What’s your name?’
“David.”
Her heart began to hammer. “David Haverill?” she asked breathlessly.
He nodded again. He seemed strangely listless for a boy of eight.
“Are you here because you’re in trouble?” she asked gently.
For the first time, he raised his head and looked at her directly. His nod was almost imperceptible and his eyes were wary.
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s so very bad,” she said in a rallying voice.
Before he could speak, the headmistress had opened her door and said, “You can come in now, David.”
