The Accidental Mother (20 page)

Sophie took a step back and squinted hard at the vagrant in the glow of the streetlamp. “Oh,” she said bluntly. “It’s you. Hello, Louis.”

He looked older than Sophie remembered, which would be partly because of the beard and partly because of the fact that he
was
older, six years older, as was she.

“Your mum wouldn’t let me in at all,” Louis said amiably as they stood in the shared hallway. “She said you’d kill her if she did and that I’d better wait until tomorrow to talk to you. But I’ve waited so long—I couldn’t wait until then. So I sat here until you came back. At least it’s warm in here. It’s freezing outside.” He looked her up and down once again, with the benefit of electricity.

Sophie blinked at him in the bright hallway. The lights in this communal part of the converted house were set to stay on for only five or so minutes at a time. In two or three minutes, they would blink out, and she found herself hoping that when she turned them back on, he’d be gone. Now that she could see him clearly, it was obvious that he wasn’t a tramp, he was just rather travel-worn and scruffy. He had a sort of red quilted parka on over a thick sweater, and until he had taken it off a moment ago, a cap pulled down over thick, longish black hair. And his beard wasn’t initially as bushy as Sophie had first thought—at least a third of it was actually just the fringe of his black scarf tucked up under his chin against the cold.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” she said, glancing up the stairs to the front door of her flat and suddenly wishing that she was on the other side of it. “I mean, you said you were coming right away—about a week ago.”

It seemed unreal to be standing here in the hallway with Louis. She had almost stopped believing that he was real, and now that he was here, now that his physically imposing presence was making even deeper ripples in her previously tranquil life, Sophie found she did not know what to say to him. She had totally and uncharacteristically failed to prepare. Besides, she was irritated with him for being so relaxed. She unwound her pink beaded scarf from her neck and slipped off her faux fur coat. She suddenly felt very hot.

“Wow,” Louis said, and then, seeing Sophie’s expression, added, “Really nice dress I mean. I like pink.”

Sophie raised an eyebrow, gratified to see him unsettled at last by the oddness of their situation. “So what now?” she asked, sweeping her hair back over her shoulders, a haughty gesture Carrie used to tease her about endlessly.

“Well,” Louis said, looking around the hallway and showing a great deal of interest in the cornicing, “you know, just, right then, let’s…get on with it?” He clapped his hands and rubbed them like a classic silent movie villain. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t get here right away, but I couldn’t leave the school totally in the lurch. I had things to sort out. I had to get money together for a flight. Luckily, I already had most of it saved up. Look, I know I hung up on you—that was stupid and rude. I don’t think I really knew where my head was at just then, if you know what I mean.” Sophie supposed she did. “Anyway, I’m sorry about that and sorry it took me so long. It’s been a nightmare getting here, believe me.” If Louis expected any sympathy, he was disappointed. “So, like I say, I couldn’t just leave people in the lurch,” he finished.

“Couldn’t you?” Sophie heard herself say, her voice crisp with frost. “I rather thought that was your forte.”

Louis’s open, friendly smile froze and wilted. “Look, I’m here now, and I want to see my girls. My daughters. I’ve come a very long way, and all I’ve been thinking about is this moment. Let me see them, please.”

Sophie studied Louis, standing casually in her hallway. He looked perfectly comfortable with the situation. He didn’t look anything like a man whose ex-wife had recently died, leaving his abandoned children virtual orphans. Sophie had not expected him to come tonight, but now that he was here, she had at least expected him to be nervous, full of regrets and remorse, and sort of guilty-looking. He was none of those things, and that made her furious.

“The girls are asleep,” she told him briskly, stepping onto the bottom stair so that she was almost equal with his height. “Surely you must realize that you can’t just walk back into their lives, wake them up, and say, ‘Hey, girls, Daddy’s back!’ after three years!” She found she wanted to say something, anything to shake his almost indecent composure. “Besides, Izzy doesn’t really know who you are,” she told him bluntly. “And Bella doesn’t even want to see you.”

Louis’s face did not move a muscle as he returned Sophie’s direct look. “Listen,” he said in measured tones. “You are the one that found me. I thought you’d be glad to see me. And anyway—they are my children. And if I want to, I can go up those stairs and take them out of here tonight. You can’t stop me.”

Sophie moved up another step. She knew that he was right, at least about the first part: she had been the one to find him and should be glad to see him, but still, she had to will her simmering fury not to manifest itself by igniting her skin. She didn’t know why she was reacting to his arrival the way she was, perhaps because she was unprepared to find him on her doorstep, perhaps because all of the emotions she had been battling over the last few weeks had reached a critical mass. Sophie felt that
somebody
should be angry with Louis Gregory for leaving his family behind, and as she didn’t see anybody else available to do the job, she felt that it might as well be her.

“Actually, no, you can’t take the children,” she said, taking one step at a time. “And yes, I can stop you. I have been granted a residency order,
and
in the eyes of the law I’m their legal guardian. You’ll need a court order to take them anywhere.” Sophie stretched the truth a little, gambling that Louis knew as little about the legalities as she did.

“But I’m their father!” Louis looked crestfallen, and Sophie saw that he was not as bullish and confident as he had first appeared to be. She took a breath and evened out the tone of her voice. She realized she wanted something rather complicated from Louis. She wanted him to feel guilty and contrite, to show the level of remorse she thought appropriate for his crime. But she didn’t want to scare him off completely; she couldn’t afford for him to leave and never come back. She had to push her own emotional reaction to him to the back of the queue and remember the girls.

“Louis,” she said, “this is what I suggest you do. I suggest you go away and find a place to stay. And in the morning, when you look less like an escaped convict, you can come back.” She reached the top of stairs and looked down on him. “I’ll tell the girls you are here in the morning. We’ll take it from there, okay?”

Louis stood stock-still, his eyes locked on Sophie’s for a moment, and then shrugged. “I don’t have much choice, do I?” he said, heading for the door. “I’ll be back first thing.”

Just at that moment, the lights blinked out. Sophie stood at the top of the stairs in the darkness and held her breath. But when the light returned, Louis was still by the front door. Sophie watched as he unlatched it and zipped up his parka against the cold air.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, “the girls are coping really well, considering they’ve lost their mother. Thanks so much for asking.”

Louis’s face flashed with anger as he slammed the door behind him.

Sophie took a deep breath and found that she was shaking. Not once while she had been waiting, hoping for Louis to turn up had she considered that her reaction to him might be so physical, so visceral. Bright red blotches had already begun to blossom on the skin under the thin material of her dress, and her blood was ringing in her ears. Sophie knew that speaking to him the way she just had wouldn’t solve anything. But the moment he had stood in her hallway, his presence filling every corner, it had been as if he had ignited a spark in Sophie. She couldn’t just stand by and make this homecoming easy for him. She had to stand up to him for Carrie and her children.

Sophie let herself into the flat and found her mother standing in the hallway. “Has he gone?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yes, Mum, thanks for making him wait,” Sophie replied, following her mother back into the living room.

“How did it go?” Iris asked her. “He seemed like a very nice young man. He was disappointed when I said he couldn’t come in, but he didn’t make a fuss.”

Sophie thought carefully about her five minutes with Louis. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But your’re right—he seems normal, nice.”

And then Sophie realized. That was it. That was the reason he had made her so angry.

If he was so normal and nice, then why did he run away?

I
zzy had chosen to wear her new party dress for the occasion, over an orange jersey top with her favorite green and black striped tights, which had once belonged to a Halloween outfit. She was sitting on the edge of Artemis’s chair, drumming her heels against the leather-clad base with infuriating regularity, utterly unaware of the murderous looks she was incurring from the cat, which was balanced on the back of the chair just above the girl’s left shoulder. If it had been anybody else—apart from Bella—Sophie was fairly sure Artemis would have dealt with them by now with her usual violent efficiency.

“Is it time
now
?” Izzy asked, exactly thirty seconds after the last time she had asked when the man who was her daddy was coming.

Tess, who had arrived over an hour earlier, shook the silver bangles on her wrist until she could get a clear look at her watch. “No, darling. We’ll just have to wait a bit longer.” She raised an eyebrow at Sophie, who was standing in the small kitchen cradling a cup of coffee more for its warmth than for its contents.

“Okay, Bella?” Sophie asked the girl, who was lying on the floor where the rug had once been, staring blankly at the ceiling. She nodded and blew out a puff of air angled upward so it fanned out her thick bangs. Somehow, she had managed to dress herself entirely in black, quite a feat considering that black wasn’t exactly the color of choice in most six-year-olds’ wardrobes. Of course, when Sophie had looked closely, she’d noticed that Bella had committed a cardinal sin and gone into her wardrobe without permission. There she had found a black shirt, a black sweater, and a black belt, and had used the belt to adapt the other two items into a sort of dress, which she was wearing over a pair of Sophie’s black woolly tights, which even though they must have been pulled right up to her armpits, still wrinkled around her ankles. Bella must have judged that the gravitas of the occasion would prevent Sophie from being cross with her. She was right, of course, and also it was hard to be cross with someone who had shown such initiative and managed to look so funny when she was trying her best to look foreboding and cross. Perhaps it was the one small detail Bella hadn’t quite managed to cover that made her so sweet instead of surly. Her boots were still pink.

“We’re not going anywhere with him, are we though?” Bella asked after a while, her voice anxious despite her defiance.

“No,” Tess said, giving her a little pat on the shoulder. “Not today.”

Sophie put her mug down on the kitchen counter and, walking into the living room, knelt on the floor next to Bella and looked at her. Bella returned the look with her much practiced scowl.

“Are you going to be okay?” Sophie asked her.

“I said I was, didn’t I?” Bella replied.

It was true, Bella had said that at just after three that morning. About two-thirty she had padded into the living room and, kneeling by the side of the sofa, had stared at her godmother until finally Sophie’s sluggish and underused sixth sense had kicked in and she’d opened her eyes.

“Oh, good,” Bella had said. “You
are
awake.”

It had turned out, probably inevitably, Sophie concluded, that she had not had to break the news of Louis’s imminent arrival, not to Bella at least, because Bella already knew. She had overheard Sophie talking about him to her mother when she came in and heard her say that he would be back in the morning. Bella had tried to go to sleep and pretend she didn’t know about Louis, like she’d had to at Christmas, when she’d pretended she didn’t know that it was Grandma who put the presents at the bottoms of their beds and not Father Christmas. Obviously it wasn’t Father Christmas, because no one had told him where they had moved to, and she knew for a fact that Grandma hadn’t posted their letters to him because Bella had found them in her knitting basket. And anyway, even if she hadn’t seen Grandma doing it, she would still have known, because Father Christmas would have got her a
real
Barbie and not a fake one, whose head fell off almost right away. Sophie had nodded and rubbed her eyes, trying to keep up with six-year-old logic.

“But then,” Bella had told Sophie gravely, “I realized that I had only pretended about Christmas so that Izzy wouldn’t find out and get upset, but as Izzy is going to know about
him
in the morning anyway, I thought it would be better to get up and come and see if you were awake than to worry about it all by myself. And luckily you were,” Bella had finished. “After a bit.”

Sophie hadn’t known whether to be touched or terrified, but she’d somehow made room for Bella, who had clambered over her and tucked her feet under Sophie’s duvet.

“What worries you the most?” Sophie had asked her, imagining that she had to try to talk to Bella about her worries.

“Everything I can think of,” Bella had said, lifting Sophie’s arm so that she could wriggle under it. “We don’t have to go anywhere with him, do we?” she’d asked when she was positioned comfortably.

“No,” Sophie had said, adjusting to the warmth and weight of Bella’s small body against hers. She had expected to feel tense and awkward as Bella snuggled closer to her, but instead she’d felt a new kind of still calm. “Not at all. I don’t think anything much will happen tomorrow. I think you’ll all just say hello. Get to know each other again.” Sophie had moved her neck to an obtuse angle in order to look at Bella. “Look, I know how you feel, being worried about your dad coming back. It must be huge, not having seen him for so long. You must feel so nervous. But there are some things that, no matter how much we worry about them, we just have to face them, and most of the time they turn out not to be nearly as bad as we thought they would be. And
sometimes
they turn out to be wonderful.”

Bella had yawned, nestling deeper into Sophie’s body, and they had watched the headlights of the relentlessly passing traffic beam momentarily across the ceiling, minute after minute.

“We could hear the sea in my old house, sometimes,” Bella had said after a while. “You couldn’t see it, because it was sort of on the side, but in the summer when the windows were open, you used to be able to hear it.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
” Bella had swept her fingers back and forth to mimic the motion of the waves. “A bit like the cars going by outside your house.”

Sophie had listened for a moment longer. “Yes,” she’d said. “A little bit.” She’d doubled her chin in order to get a look at Bella. “Look, you’ll be all right tomorrow, won’t you?” she had asked Bella, when she should have been reassuring her. Selfishly, she’d wanted the little girl to say yes.

“I will be,” Bella had said, her answer distorted by a lengthy yawn. “Because I have to be, don’t I? Like you said.”

Sophie had fretted for a few minutes about what she had actually said. Had she really told a six-year-old to stop worrying and pull her socks up? That was how Bella had made it sound, but it wasn’t what Sophie had meant to say.

“Listen, Bella?” Sophie had wanted to try again. “Bella?”

But somehow, despite her anxieties, Bella had been sound asleep, something that Sophie had not quite managed to achieve for the rest of the night.

Which was why, on the following morning, she had a shooting pain from the top of her head into her left arm. Sharing the two-seater sofa with Bella had given her a very painful crick in her neck. Either that or she was having a heart attack. The latter option seemed to her entirely possible.

Tess jangled her bangles again and squinted at her watch. “He definitely said this morning?” Tess asked.

“Yep,” Sophie said. And he had seemed so adamant that Sophie had assumed he meant first thing in the morning, which was why she had called Tess on her cell phone at just after seven and got her over to the flat by eight. It was now almost ten. That was three hours of Izzy racing around like a demented tree fairy. Three hours of Bella sulking around like a kindergarten beatnik, and two hours of Tess jangling her bangles and squinting at her watch. Obviously, Louis Gregory’s concept of time was entirely different from the rest of the world’s. He seemed to think that “coming now” meant five days later and “first thing in the morning” could be any old time before midday.

“In my experience,” Tess said, “it’s a good idea to get a set time, so that everyone knows exactly what they are doing. I have several other cases I need to attend to. I really can’t stay much longer.”

Sophie was just about to complain that it was no good lecturing
her
when the doorbell sounded and all four females jumped.

“He’s here!” Izzy shouted, scrambling off Artemis’s chair and shooting out into the hallway, sending the cat flying in the opposite direction.

“Izzy!”
Sophie yelled, in hot pursuit. “Don’t you dare open—” The flat door slammed open farther, deepening the Izzy-manufactured dent on the corresponding wall. “Izzy, wait there! I mean it!” Sophie shouted. She wanted to close her eyes as she watched Izzy half-scramble, half-tumble down the communal stairs, but she was too busy chasing her to do either. Izzy made it to the front door and was jumping up to open the old-fashioned latch, which was halfway down the door and easily within her reach. It swung it open. Sure enough, Louis stood on the other side of the door and looked down at her. Sophie reached them a second later.

“Is that him?” Izzy said, looking upward openmouthed until her eyes reached Louis’s lofty head. Sophie put her hand on Izzy’s shoulder. It was unfair, she knew, but she somehow wished the three-year-old had been a bit less awe-inspired by her admittedly very tall and, objectively speaking, rather handsome long-lost father.

“Yes,” Sophie said. “Izzy, this is Louis. Louis is your daddy.”

Father and daughter regarded each other with equal hesitation until Louis held out a hand, presumably for a shake, and turning on her ballet-shoed heel, Izzy flew back up the stairs with the same haphazard technique and breakneck speed as she had descended them. A moment later the flat door slammed shut.

Sophie looked awkwardly at Louis and shrugged. At least he had spent the part of the morning that he was not here ridding himself of the last vestiges of tramphood. His hair, though still touching his shoulders, was washed and pushed back from his face, and he had shaved off his beard, revealing a clean, smooth jawline and generous mouth, his children’s mouth. Without the hat and the scarf and the facial hair, he looked much better, Sophie supposed with oblique regret.

“So, you finally made it then?” She was struggling not to sound bitchy, but somehow she did. She stepped aside and gestured for Louis to enter.

“Yes, finally,” he said, his tone carefully measured. Sophie shut the door behind him, and he took a breath. “Look, can we start again? I’m really sorry about last night. You were right, I was out of order. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or the shock, but I just didn’t want to wait. I didn’t even think I’d have to. But I was stupid coming over. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to piss
you
off.” He smiled at her. “Definitely not part of my plan after everything you’ve done for the girls and for me…”

Sophie was not surprised by the charm of his follow-up smile or its effect on her. It made her want to like him instantly, which in turn made her feel cross again. She couldn’t just go around liking people willy-nilly, not Louis anyway. Not when there were questions to be asked and serious arrangements to be made. It was all very well being likable, but was he responsible? Was he serious about being a dad again? Was he suitable? Instead of smiling back, Sophie nodded stiffly.

“And I know,” Louis continued after a moment, “I know I should have been here earlier, a lot earlier, but I—Oh, fuck—to be honest, I’ve just been walking up and down outside for about an hour. I’m so nervous…”

“Look,” Sophie told him, lowering her voice. “If you’re going to freak out, now is not the time to do it.” She sighed with exasperation. “
You
are the grown-up here. All
you
have to do is to get up those stairs and say hello to your daughters.
Apparently,
you’ve been working with children for years. You must know
something
about how to talk to them by now,” she told him with open sarcasm, neglecting to mention that her own experience was limited to a couple of weeks. “And anyway, how can
you
”—Sophie looked up at Louis and guessed he was about four inches over six feet—“be scared of that tiny girl and her slightly bigger sister?” She also conveniently forgot her own very real five-foot-six-inch terror of Izzy, which still reared its ugly head whenever the warning signs of a tantrum began going off.

Louis swallowed and nodded purposefully. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right.”

“Obviously I am,” Sophie said, slightly imperiously, which for some reason made Louis smile his irritatingly nice smile again.

Tess was the only person directly visible when Sophie showed Louis into the living room. She stood up and smiled broadly at Louis, delivering her extra-special all-purpose disaster-celebration smile with her usual warmth.

“Hello, I’m Tess Andrew,” she said, extending her hand. “The children’s social worker.”

Louis’s already hesitant smile faltered, but he shook her hand anyway with reasonable firmness and looked around the room. Like Sophie, who was leaning in the doorway, he spotted Izzy’s special fairy scrunchie, an extravagant affair made up of layers of white and pink net and sparkly bits, which was just visible over the back of Artemis’s chair.