The Real Katie Lavender (39 page)

Back at home now, and alone with Stirling, Gina felt tired and emotional herself. Relief and exhaustion had combined to assuage the worst of the anger she had felt earlier when she couldn’t get hold of him, but she knew it wouldn’t take much for her anger to resurface and for her to lash out at him. Her anger had been based entirely on fear, the fear that something awful could happen to Scarlet and that she would have to face that nightmare alone, without Stirling. It had thoroughly panicked her.

‘Shall I make us a drink?’ Stirling asked as they stood in the hallway.

At the bottom of the stairs, her hand on the newel post, she shook her head. ‘No thank you. I’m too tired. I need to go to bed.’

‘Have you eaten this evening?’

His question took her unawares. ‘Concern, Stirling?’ she said. ‘What’s brought this on?’

He frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t I be concerned?’

She stared at him impassively. ‘You tell me.’

‘Please, Gina, let’s not argue. Not tonight of all nights.’

‘Tomorrow then? Would that suit you better? Will it be business as usual in the morning? You not talking to me. You disappearing at the drop of a hat and not telling anyone where you are?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So you said.’

‘I mean it.’

‘And I meant it when I said I’m tired.’

‘But I want to talk.’

‘Well I don’t want to talk.’ She started moving up the stairs.

‘Gina, please.’

‘Good night,’ she said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you slept in the spare room tonight.’

As late as it was, Rosco wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. A bottle of beer in hand, he slid the patio door back and went outside. It was a chilly, starry, clear-skied night. He went and stood at the edge of the decking, rested a hand on the wooden rail and looked down on to the water. Having grown up on the river, he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. After leaving Cambridge, the bulk of his friends had headed straight for London. They were still there. One by one they were getting married. Soon there would be children arriving. A few of them teased him that he was getting left behind. In turn, he teased them that they were under the cosh, ruled by the tyranny of married life.

He took a long, satisfying swallow of his beer and thought of Scarlet. His little sister, a mother. Unbelievable.

He recalled the relief he’d felt when they’d known that Scarlet and the baby were OK. Until then, he hadn’t realized just how scared he’d been. With a smile, he pictured poor old Charlie keeling over in the delivery room. He’d never live it down. And rightly so. It was a worthy anecdote for the family annals. Nobody would ever tire of hearing it.

Rosco drank some more of his beer and thought of the enormity of what lay ahead for Scarlet and Charlie. No one in their right mind would think of them as being ideal parent material, but witnessing his sister’s instinctive need to protect her newborn baby, and seeing how proud Charlie was of both Scarlet and Louisa-May, Rosco had experienced a flash of envy. And respect. Marriage and fatherhood had never been something he had craved. He hadn’t exactly ruled it out; it had just never featured too highly in his plans. Certainly not his immediate plans. But seeing his niece for the first time, seeing her so tiny and so helpless, had moved him greatly. She was his niece. He was her uncle. They were family. They would forever be tied.

In the car on the way home, he had checked his mobile and found that Laura had texted him to ask how his sister was. Since Bank Holiday Monday, he and Laura had enjoyed several evenings together, and he’d been looking forward to seeing her again tonight. He’d been on his way to pick her up to go out for dinner when he’d got the frantic call from his mother asking him to meet her at the hospital. Laura had been fine about him cancelling dinner at the last minute, urging him not too worry too much and to drive carefully.

He was tempted now to ring her, to share the good news with her. But it was much too late. He would speak to her tomorrow. All the same, it was nice that she’d been thinking of him. Perhaps he’d send her some flowers by way of apology for messing up their evening. He wondered if it was too soon to ask if she’d like to go away for a weekend. Rome would be nice at this time of year. Definitely not Paris. The last girl he went there with, it ended in disaster. They’d had a blazing row – not only had she wanted to spend the whole of Saturday shopping, but she had expected him to pick up the tab. When he’d made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, she’d packed her case and got the Eurostar home a day earlier than arranged. Two days later, she’d phoned him as if the row had never happened and asked what they were doing the following weekend. He’d said he didn’t know about her, but he was going to Twickenham to watch the rugby. He didn’t hear from her again.

As a commercial litigation lawyer for a growing law firm in Reading, Laura didn’t strike him as being the kind of girl who would behave like that. He didn’t think she was the kind of girl who would want to spend all day shopping, either. In the meantime, flowers would definitely be a good idea. And while he was about it, he’d organize some for Scarlet as well.

His thoughts switched back to the evening spent at the hospital, and his parents. In particular his father and his breathtaking hypocrisy – being with that woman and then comforting Mum for all the world like he was a loving husband.

Tomorrow he would tackle Dad and tell him that he knew exactly what was going on. It wasn’t that he wanted to deliberately shame his father into doing the right thing, but if that was what it took, then so be it. It was a means to an end.

The cold night air had seeped through his clothes, and with his beer finished, he went back inside the house to get ready for bed. Before he turned out the light, he remembered his mobile needed recharging. He then remembered the photos he’d taken with it at the hospital. Looking at the images as he lay in bed, there was no getting away from it: Louisa-May was every inch her mother’s daughter. Rosco wouldn’t have thought it possible, but even at so young an age, the family resemblance was unmistakable. She was a true Nightingale.

In the bedroom furthest away from Gina, Stirling was wide awake. He couldn’t sleep.

When he’d left Oxford earlier that evening, he’d believed he had everything sorted. Now he saw that he’d been woefully deluded. He’d been mad to think he could choose Katie over his family. His family needed him. Gina needed him.

Tonight, at the hospital and downstairs when he’d tried to talk to her, to explain how sorry he really was, he had seen for the first time just how much he’d hurt her. He’d been so sorry, he’d wanted to hold her tight and beg her forgiveness. People spoke glibly about wanting to wipe the slate clean, but he truly did. And it was all down to Louisa-May. Her birth had brought him crashing to his senses.

Right from the start of Scarlet’s pregnancy, he’d been delighted at the prospect of being a grandfather. He’d joked with Neil about it. In turn, Neil had given him a bag of Werther’s toffees. ‘Here you go, Grandpappy,’ he had said, tossing the bag at him.

Remembering how they’d drunk a toast to the next generation of Nightingales, an awful thought crossed Stirling’s mind. Had his excitement been divisive or pejorative? Had he clumsily laboured the point about the family line continuing and inadvertently made Neil feel that he wasn’t a part of that line? If so, had Scarlet’s pregnancy held a different significance for Neil? Had it marginalized him in some way? Stirling sincerely hoped not.

He rolled over on to his other side, pulling his shoulder as he did so. He winced with both pain and shame. It served him right. What else should he expect after indulging in energetic sex with a much younger woman?

To ease the pain, he rolled on to his back. But sleep was never going to come to him. He was too restless. His brain was a maelstrom of activity and he felt breathless with the effort of trying to keep his anxiety under control. He was like a man spinning too many plates, madly running between them, backwards and forwards, trying to keep them from slowing and toppling to the ground.

He recalled how he’d felt the first time he’d driven to Oxford to see Simone, how he had wanted to be reckless, to be utterly out of control, and how he had speculated that maybe that was how Neil had felt. Now he feared that he was experiencing something akin to what his brother must have been going through, when everything had been spinning out of control for him.

To his utmost regret, Stirling had wilfully turned an already difficult situation into an even worse mess, and as far as he could see, the only way he could attempt to regain some kind of control of his life was to cut off all contact with Simone. There would be no more text messages. And absolutely no more sex. He hoped she would accept that things couldn’t go on as they were. He would try to explain to her what he had felt when he had looked at his granddaughter this evening, how he had seen the purity in her, and that it had made him want to cleanse himself of all that was grubby and reprehensible in him. The realization that he didn’t feel worthy to be Louisa-May’s grandfather had shocked him to his core. She deserved better. And better was what he wanted to be. What he
needed
to be.

But what if Simone wouldn’t accept that it had to end between them? What if her need of him was greater than his of her and she threatened to expose him to his family unless he agreed to carry on seeing her? He shuddered at the shame he would feel if anyone did find out about his visits to Oxford. How would he ever justify what he’d done?

Yet even if he dealt with the Simone situation, there was still the far greater problem of Katie to resolve. How was he ever going to do that?

It was a disgraceful and cowardly thought, but he now wished whole-heartedly that Katie had never wanted to meet him. If only she had stayed away. If only Fay had never written that letter.

He pulled the bed covers up over his head as though trying to hide from the world, wishing it would go away. But there was no place to hide. Not from himself anyway.

It was Thursday evening – four days since he had seen Katie – and in the last twenty-four hours Lloyd had notched up an unnatural number of hours cleaning and tidying his small house. It had been far from a state of rat-infested squalor, but with Katie coming to stay, and knowing what a neat-freak she was, he wanted to give a good impression.

Which was why he’d finished work earlier than usual, stopping off at the supermarket on the way home and stocking up. At home, and glad he’d got the heavy-duty cleaning done late last night, he’d changed the sheets on his bed, scrubbed the bathroom, emptied the kitchen bin and then given himself a good clean in the shower. At the workshop, Jim and Neville had teased him before he’d left, joking that the only reason they could think of for his leaving work early – a rare occurrence in itself, and compounded by his refusal to say why – was that he had to be going on a hot date. ‘Don’t forget to get the sawdust out of your ears!’ had been Jim’s parting shot.

The only people who knew that he and Katie were officially seeing each other were his mother and Cecily, and Stirling, although Stirling probably didn’t realize the extent of their involvement. Whatever his uncle knew or didn’t know, Lloyd reckoned it was safe to assume that it was unlikely he would have talked about it to the rest of his family. Besides, for now, they were all caught up in Scarlet and her baby.

Lloyd had visited Scarlet in hospital last night with his mother; they’d deliberately held back, waiting for the advance party of friends and family to launch the initial strike. The private room that Scarlet had been moved to was chock-a-block with flowers, balloons, cuddly toys and bottles of champagne. Scarlet, it had to be said, was looking amazingly well, and at the centre of all the attention, in an incubator, was the smallest baby Lloyd had ever seen, not that he was any kind of an expert. Two days old and healthy enough to be out of the special-care baby unit, Louisa-May was now allowed to be with her mother.

They hadn’t been alone with Scarlet – Stirling and Gina had been there, along with Charlie. For most of their visit, Louisa-May had slept soundly, but at one point, whilst everyone else had been talking about when she might be allowed home, Lloyd had taken a close look at this latest addition to the family through the lens of his camera – in line with Scarlet’s instructions, the pictures he’d taken had all been without flash so as not to harm her daughter’s eyes. He had been slightly unnerved when, and as if sensing his scrutiny, his niece had opened her eyes and stared steadfastly back at him. He’d snapped her picture and then, lowering the camera, he’d smiled at her. He was sure he’d read something about newborn babies not being able to see beyond a few inches, but the smile had been an instinctive response; she was, as Cecily had described her the day before, as cute as a button. Her dark bluey-grey eyes had held his steadily, and then she’d opened her mouth, wiggled her lips a little, blinked twice, relaxed her tiny fists and flexed her fingers, and then returned her efforts to the strenuous job of sleeping. ‘I think she’s just said hello to me,’ he’d joked with Scarlet. ‘Either that or goodbye.’

Shortly before he and his mother left, Rosco turned up. And not on his own; he had an attractive girl with him. Her name was Laura. Lloyd had met only a few of Rosco’s girlfriends over the years, but this one definitely seemed a cut above the usual selection, in as much as she didn’t appear to be the fluff-headed bit of arm candy he generally went in for, the type of girl to whom he could feel superior. For once it looked as if Rosco had found himself a decent girlfriend.

Lloyd gave the two cushions on the sofa a final positioning thump for good measure, checked his watch, then went to make a start on the preparations for the Jamie Oliver piri-piri chicken with which he was endeavouring to wow Katie.

Depending on traffic, she was due any minute. He poured himself a glass of wine and tried not to feel nervous. Stupid really to feel jittery, but there it was, he
was
jittery. Anticipation did that to him. The more he wanted something, the more anxious he became. Katie was staying for a few days, so there was plenty of time and opportunity for things to go wrong, for her to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake when it came to being with him.