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‘If you could let me finish, Mr Knight, without butting in?’ She made sure not to look at the principal when she said this, but even with her eyes strenuously averted she could easily imagine the look of warning that would have crossed Mrs Williams’s face.
‘I happen to live on the premises.’
‘We have what are called house mothers here,’ the principal explained. ‘Each dormitory section is manned by one. They basically live here and supervise the children out of school hours, make sure that everything is running smoothly. It’s not uncommon for them to have visits during the night, especially by the younger ones who are new and perhaps a little homesick.’
‘You’re a young woman. Why on earth would you choose to live in a boarding-school?’
‘As I was saying, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca carried on, overriding his question with the single-minded intent of a bulldozer, ‘Emily came to see me to talk about a rather…unfortunate situation.’ She glanced at Mrs Williams for support and the other woman nodded encouragingly.
Emily’s father, on the other hand, looked slightly less encouraging. His face was grim, unreadable and frankly terrifyingly forbidding.
‘I’m waiting,’ he said at last, when an uncomfortable silence had begun to thicken around them as Rebecca searched for the most tactful way of saying what she had to say. ‘Is she on drugs?’
‘No.’ She inhaled deeply, adopted her sternest expression and clasped her hands on her knees. ‘I’m sure you’ve been made aware, Mr Knight, over the past couple of years, that your daughter has been…’
‘Bloody difficult. Why don’t you just come right out with what you have to say, Miss Ryan? The facts don’t go away, however much you try and sugar-coat them. Yes. I have been all too aware of what she has managed to get up to. It hasn’t made pretty reading and I needn’t tell you that I’ve been losing patience fast.’
Charming attitude to adopt, Rebecca thought, directing a meaningless smile at him and suppressing the urge to clout him over the head.
‘To be honest, I was a little stunned when she knocked on my door at two in the morning. Emily isn’t one for confiding in her teachers. She enjoys being a law unto herself, doesn’t like anyone to glimpse her vulnerabilities, and before you object to what I’m saying I can assure you that all girls of sixteen are vulnerable, whatever air of bravado they might choose to wear.’
‘I’ll take you at your word, Miss Ryan. I have no experience of teenage girls.’
‘Including your own,’ Rebecca countered before she could censor her thoughts, and he shot her a hard, cold look.
‘Just carry on with the facts, Miss Ryan, and keep your thoughts to yourself.’
‘I think that what Miss Ryan is trying to say,’ Miss Williams took up hastily, ‘is that we are quite accustomed to dealing with unruly girls and we tend towards leniency in most cases. A stern talking-to usually does the trick. Boarding-school can seem restricting to some of our girls, at least initially. They are disoriented, and they react, occasionally, without thinking. These problems are by no means frequent, but they do occur, and we all recognise how to deal with them.’
‘Fine.’ He had not glanced in the direction of the principal. His eyes had remained focused on Rebecca the whole time. She began to feel hot and uneasy. She could also feel her ridiculous bun beginning to slip out of place, and she wondered whether she could halt its progress downwards by keeping her head very, very still.
She decided, as he continued to stare at her with the off-putting concentration of someone trying to move an immovable object by exerting will-power, that time had honed that natural self-assurance that had first attracted her into obnoxious arrogance. There was no other word for it. The man was a pig.
Was he totally incapable of taking any responsibility for his daughter’s behaviour? Did he imagine that young girls of sixteen operated in emotional vacuums?
‘She was in quite a state,’ Rebecca confessed. ‘I made her sit down, and she told me… I’m afraid to tell you, Mr Knight, that your daughter informs us that…that she’s pregnant.’
The word fell into the silence like a stone. Seconds passed. Minutes. He said nothing.
‘Perhaps you can understand now why we felt we had to get you up here, Mr Knight,’ the principal said gently. ‘I realise that this must come as a shock to you…’
‘How the hell was this allowed to happen?’ His words were soft and sharp, but they still managed to reverberate around the room like a thunderclap. He turned to look at Rebecca. ‘You say that you live on the premises so that you can make sure that everything is running smoothly. Well, you haven’t managed to do a very good job, have you? What were you doing while my teenage daughter was slinking along the corridors at night and heading into town to meet some man? And do we know the identity of this bastard?’
Under the controlled voice, she could sense a man who wanted to kill and, however much she disliked what she had seen of him so far, she could sympathise with him. He must feel as though a bomb had been dropped on him from a very great height.
‘First of all Emily isn’t on my floor…’
‘Then why would she come to you with her problems?’
‘Because…’
‘Perhaps,’ Mrs Williams said in a conciliatory tone of voice, ‘because Miss Ryan is one of our younger members of staff. Many of the girls turn to her for advice. She’s popular…’
‘Yes, well, a glowing appraisal of Miss Ryan’s character isn’t what I’m after right now. What I want—’ he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and the slight shift in position made Rebecca instinctively cringe back into the chair, causing further damage to her already precarious hairdo ‘—is a bloody explanation!’
‘Emily hasn’t gone into details, Mr Knight,’ Rebecca answered. Her hands were shaking and she steadied them on her lap, linking her fingers together. ‘She won’t say who the boy in question is and she won’t tell us how it happened. It’s highly unlikely that she slipped out at night. The doors would have been very securely locked to prevent the girls from doing just that sort of thing and there is a night watchman on the premises. It’s far more likely that she met him during the day, probably on a weekend when the girls are allowed a certain amount of freedom once they get to a certain age. They are not kept padlocked here. We hope that they have the right moral codes instilled that will guide—’
‘Oh, why don’t we just cut through all this claptrap? What you’re telling me here is that you accept no responsibility for what’s happened! It’s unfortunate that a child’s life has been ruined, but as far as you’re concerned you intend to wash your hands of it and put it all down to experience. Am I right?’
Why on earth doesn’t he direct this tirade at the principal? Rebecca thought distractedly. Why does he keep staring at me as though I’ve single-handedly engineered all of this? She squirmed uncomfortably, aware that he had struck close to a chord. Of course, it was an awful thing to have happened, but at the end of the day Emily would be expelled and, in time, forgotten.
‘Of course that’s not what we’re saying!’ she snapped angrily. ‘It’s distressing, not least for your daughter! But it’s happened, and she’s going to have to live with the consequences! Berating us, and berating her, isn’t going to make the situation change, Mr Knight. It’s just going to make it all the harder for her to cope with it!’
‘So what happens now?’ he threw at her. He glanced from her to the principal, his eyes cold with rage. ‘Would either of you ladies care to tell me? No, allow me to have a stab at guessing. She’s to pack her bags and leave the premises immediately. Her education will seize up and, wherever she ends up, may it all be a salutary lesson for one and all! Am I on target here?’
‘What choice do we have, Mr Knight?’ Mrs Williams said wearily. She looked exhausted, Rebecca thought. It had not been a wonderful thirty-six hours for her. This was the sort of incident that could wreak havoc amongst the school. Parents would be alarmed. The fallout was not worth thinking about, and it would be no use to suggest to concerned mothers and fathers that Emily had been in a category of her own. A time bomb waiting to explode.
‘We have no option but to ask you to remove Emily from the school. Naturally she will be given until the weekend to get her things in order.’
‘Naturally…’ His mouth twisted harshly, then he sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘So have neither of you any ideas on how this problem might be dealt with?’ He shot an accusing eye in the principal’s direction. ‘Even if you sit stiff-backed in your chair and accept no responsibility for what’s happened, this can’t be the first time…’
‘Absolutely the first time, Mr Knight. There are no precedents we can follow here.’
‘She’ll need your support,’ Rebecca interjected, and he turned to her with a cynical glint.
‘I must say that’s going to be a trifle difficult to muster up. It’s been impossible enough dealing with her since she came to me two years ago, but this is positively the last damned straw!’
That, Rebecca thought, was not quite the story that Emily had told her. In between her tears, she had bitterly informed her that her father had had zero time for her ever since she had been landed on him thanks to her mother’s death in a skiing accident. She had had little contact with him as it was as a child. With her parents divorced when she was two, her mother had not encouraged father/daughter bonding. In fact, she had expressly forbidden it and had moved to the opposite side of the world in an attempt to avoid any such thing. He hadn’t pursued her then, and ever since she had been returned to him he had chosen to ignore her because she was no more than a stranger who did not fit in with his lifestyle.
‘So what do you intend to do?’ Rebecca asked coolly. ‘I don’t believe homes for fallen women still exist.’
‘That’s a particularly constructive remark, isn’t it, Miss Ryan?’ he told her acidly. ‘Any more where that came from?’
Rebecca blushed, furious with herself for voicing thoughts that were better kept to herself, and ashamed that in the midst of this painful and difficult situation she could find herself distracted by Nicholas Knight. He was someone who was buried so deeply in her past that it surprised her to discover just how easily she could recover the image and the wounded feelings inflicted on her over a decade ago.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said sincerely. ‘There was absolutely no call for that, and you’re right, it wasn’t constructive. What you might find constructive is if I tell you Emily is not the first teenager to find herself in this situation, and she can come out of it. She might leave this school, but there’s no reason why her education has to come to an abrupt end because of it. She can be tutored at home. She’s an incredibly clever child and—who knows?—this might just be the thing that helps her find her way.’
‘How pregnant…is she?’ The distaste in his voice was audible and Rebecca shivered. Poor Emily, however downright stupid she had been, was not going to find her father easily forgiving.
‘Only just.’
‘Meaning?’
‘A week…overdue, apparently. But the pregnancy test, she informed me tearfully, was definitely positive. In fact, she said that she did two, just in case the first was wrong.’
‘Home tutoring,’ he said to himself. He stroked his chin with one finger, frowning, and Rebecca caught herself staring. She pulled herself up short and allowed her eyes to wander away from him. ‘I suppose that’s the only solution, isn’t it?’ he said to them. He looked at Mrs Williams for a while. ‘Could you excuse us for a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss in private with Miss Ryan.’
‘Well…’ The principal hesitated, taken aback by the request.
‘I’m sure anything that needs to be discussed can be discussed in front of—’
‘We’ll be twenty minutes.’ He gave them both a bland, impenetrable look and Rebecca watched in frustrated silence as Mrs Williams left the room, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWO
‘HOME tutoring.’ He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs and looked at her. ‘Carry on.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You were giving a little pep talk on all the opportunities still available to a teenager who has been stupid enough to get herself pregnant. You mentioned home tutoring as an option.’
‘Yes.’ He had removed his jacket before entering the room, and now he slowly began to roll the sleeves of his shirt up, exposing strong forearms, black-haired, and lightly bronzed. Although he was English by birth, she remembered him telling her years ago that there was Greek blood in him. Lust had apparently got the better of common sense, and his maternal grandmother had shocked everyone by throwing caution, and her very British fiancé, to the winds and marrying the son of a Greek tycoon. The tale had amused him, had appealed to that element in him that rebelled against convention.
She dragged her eyes away from his wretched arms and fastened them on his face. ‘Home tutoring. I didn’t mention that because I felt any kind of obligation to point out a bright side to this whole sorry business. I mentioned it because it’s a perfectly viable option, and actually I think Emily would do very well on it. She’s incredibly bright. She picks things up very easily. It would more be a matter of steering her towards her exams, making sure that certain levels of work were maintained.
‘I’m not saying that it would be a piece of cake for her, or for her tutor for that matter. She’ll still have to deal with all the ups and downs of the pregnancy, still have to come to terms with it, and she can be difficult.’ Rebecca laughed a little. ‘Possibly one of the bigger understatements of my lifetime. But she should be all right, at least academically, provided you find the right tutor. Someone patient, I think.’
‘You didn’t explain why my daughter chose you for her confidante.’
‘Well…’ Rebecca blushed ‘…as Mrs Williams said, I am one of the younger members of the staff here, and, well, I do pride myself on having a certain rapport with the girls. I do a fair amount of stuff with them after school hours. I run the amateur dramatic society, for example. Actually, that was about the only class that your daughter really seemed to enjoy. I think she liked being able to slip in and out of characters. Perhaps she found it relaxing.’
‘Yes, that would make sense.’ His mouth twisted cynically. ‘Her mother was fond of amateur dramatics herself.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Probably runs in the genes.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Rebecca said vaguely.
‘No. I don’t suppose you would. You just know Emily as a child who joined your school approximately two years ago and has proved troublesome from day one. Do you ever take an interest in their backgrounds?’
He was looking at her curiously now, and there was something ever so slightly critical about his appraisal.
‘To some extent,’ she said stiffly. ‘But if you imagine that I spend half my leisure time going through their personal records, reading up on what their parents do for a living, then no. I don’t.’
‘So you are unaware of the circumstances surrounding my daughter…’
‘I know that her mother died two years ago…’ Actually, she did have some idea of Emily’s background from what the child had told her, but she had no intention of admitting that. Trust was something that teenagers held very dear, and she was not about to break Emily’s.
‘So you’re not aware that she and I were divorced when Emily was only a toddler.’
‘I don’t see how this is relevant…to what we were discussing earlier, Mr Knight. Namely, home tutoring for your daughter.’
‘Oh, but you were so quick to judge me earlier on, Miss Ryan,’ he said smoothly, and a little caustically. ‘I thought you would be eager to slot together the little mental puzzle you had formed of my relationship with Emily. I mean, there’s no point in jumping to lots of amateur deductions if you only know the surface gloss, is there?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ Rebecca said, blushing furiously. She pressed her head against the back of the chair in an attempt to stop her hair from unravelling totally. Why she had bothered with these ridiculously uncomfortable clothes, she had no idea. Nicholas Knight was about as intimidated by her as an elephant by a flea. And she felt as though she was suffocating in her jacket, which she had not had the foresight to remove from the beginning. ‘Anyway, Mrs. Williams will be returning shortly…’
‘But I’m sure she’ll leave again if we’re not quite finished.’
‘Not quite finished with what? I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you on the subject of home tutoring. If you like, I’m sure Mrs Williams can recommend a few people…’ A few brave, intrepid people, she thought to herself. Emily would need brave and intrepid. She would need the sort of private tutor who did bungee jumping for fun in his spare time. Such creatures were thin on the ground.
‘I shouldn’t like to leave you with any deluded impressions of me, Miss Ryan. I know your conscience couldn’t bear it if you thought that you were dispatching my daughter off to face a life of despair and misery at the hands of an unsympathetic, absentee father.’
‘Why would I think that?’
‘Because if Emily ran to you with tales of what had happened, then it’s more than likely that she confided all about her unhappy family life.’ He gave her a shrewd, knowing look. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’
‘Well, she just mentioned one or two things. In passing,’ Rebecca answered feebly.
‘Care to fill me in?’
‘I did happen to know that you and your wife split up when she was two, and she was taken to Australia to live.’
‘Did she also tell you that I did my damnedest to keep in touch, and that it was only years later that I was informed by her mother that every letter and present I had sent over the years had been shredded and destroyed? By which time she had been inculcated in the belief that I was the big bad wolf who had driven her innocent, victimised mother into a divorce she never wanted, and then, not content with that, had forced her to flee to the opposite ends of the earth?’
Not precisely, Rebecca thought. She couldn’t quite understand why Nicholas Knight felt obliged to fill her in on any of this, but, as a teacher, she knew that she had a duty to listen. Underneath his cool, self-contained acknowledgement of the situation, he no doubt was feeling pangs of guilt and this was his way of releasing some of it. That being the case, she tilted her head obligingly to one side, prepared to listen. He wasn’t to know that everything he said she would take with a hefty pinch of salt. Emily might have done a fair bit of exaggerating, but the truth doubtless lay somewhere between the two accounts.
‘When Veronica died, I found myself with a teenager I didn’t know and who seemed quite incapable of accepting the generous efforts made by us to smooth the path.’
‘Us?’ Rebecca’s ears pricked up. This introduced a complete new line into the story. Had Nicholas Knight remarried? Emily had made no mention of a stepmother. In fact, she had made no mention of a woman on the scene at all, but now, thinking about it, and delving back into her memories of him, he was not the sort of man who cultivated celibacy as a chosen lifestyle.
‘So she didn’t mention Fiona to you?’ The black eyes narrowed. He uncrossed his legs and stretched them out in front of him.
‘Fiona being…your wife?’
‘Fiona being my girlfriend. My dearest ex-wife rather tarnished my belief in the institution of marriage, I’m afraid.’
‘No, Emily didn’t mention a Fiona.’
‘I’m surprised. Fiona did her utmost to get to know her.’
Rebecca thought that that manoeuvre was probably the one thing guaranteed to put off someone like Emily. She would have seen it as the threat of a mother substitute in the offing and would have instinctively reacted against it.
‘Well, I’m sure that you and your girlfriend will be able to sort everything out suitably,’ she said vaguely.
There was a knock on the door and Mrs Williams poked her head around it, her eyes flitting between the two of them questioningly. Rebecca smiled, relieved, but her relief lasted approximately three seconds, until he said, without the slightest hint of apology in his voice, ‘We’re not quite finished here. Perhaps you could give us another…’ he glanced at his watch ‘…half an hour?’ It was just lip-service to politeness. The three of them knew that the principal would give him just as long as he wanted, and she nodded and retreated back, shutting the door behind her.
‘Where were we…?’ he asked, settling back to look at Rebecca.
‘You were just agreeing that once you get Emily back everything will be fine. I’m sure your girlfriend will rise to the occasion and give you both all the support you need.’
‘Well, now, I’m not at all sure I want to throw poor little Fiona into any such situation…’ he ruminated, and Rebecca ground her teeth together in sheer frustration. She had no idea where all this was going, but she had a suspicion that it was going somewhere.
‘If she loves you,’ Rebecca said firmly, ‘then she’d want to help you deal with it. And she’d also want to help Emily deal with it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’d like nothing better than to busily try and make herself indispensable, but, you see, I don’t want any such thing.’
‘Oh, right. Well, that’ll be up to the two of you to sort out between yourselves.’
‘But then I’m back with my little problem, aren’t I? One wayward, pregnant daughter who needs home tutoring. Even if I find the time to interview a series of prospective candidates, I’m abroad a hell of a lot, and I won’t be available to supervise how things are going. And you have to admit, knowing Emily as you seem to do, that supervision is going to be essential.’
‘Not if you find someone you feel confident in.’
