An Excellent Wife?. CHARLOTTE LAMB

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Did your father tell you that? And all this time you’ve believed she was...? Oh, that’s terrible.’ Tears actually formed in those eyes. One began sliding down her cheek while James watched it incredulously.

      ‘Stop that!’ he muttered. ‘What are you crying about?’

      ‘It’s so sad...when I think of you... How could your father lie to you like that? Only ten years old, to be told your mother was dead! You must have been heartbroken.’

      He had been. He remembered the coldness that had sunk into him, the misery and anguish, the sense of betrayal, of desertion. Of course, his father hadn’t told him his mother was dead. His father wasn’t a man given to telling lies. He had told him the cold, bitter truth.

      ‘Your mother has run off with another man and left us both,’ his father had said curtly. ‘You’ll never see her again.’

      James had been taken off to stay with an aunt who had a bungalow at Greatstone, on the Kent coast, and had stood, day after day, on the beach, staring out at the grey, heaving waters of the English Channel, listening to the melancholy cry of gulls, the slow, sad whisper of the tide rising and falling on the sand. Whenever he heard those sounds something inside him ached, a stupid emotional echo of almost forgotten pain.

      ‘But she isn’t dead! She’s alive!’ said Patience Kirby.

      ‘She’s dead to me,’ James said tersely.

      It was too late now for his mother to come back. He had spent a quarter of a century living without her; he had no need of a mother now.

      Three security men burst into the room, big men in dark uniforms and peaked caps, ready to do battle with whatever they might find.

      ‘Get her away from me,’ James ordered.

      The girl turned her small, heart-shaped face to them. They stared at her tear-wet eyes and trembling lips, then all three men shuffled their feet and looked sheepish.

      One of them said uneasily, ‘Better get up, miss.’

      Another offered her a hand. ‘Come on, miss, let me help you up.’

      ‘No, I’m not moving!’ she obstinately refused, shaking her head so that the red curls flew around like the petals of a flower in wind.

      ‘Well, don’t just stand there, pick her up!’ ordered James, and leaned down to loosen her grip on his legs.

      Her hands were smaller than he had expected; soft little fingers curled around his like tendrils of vine around a tree and he felt a queer tremor in his chest. Clutching them, he stood up, pulling her up with him. She came without a struggle, her head just below his shoulder level.

      Was she an adult, or a child pretending to be grown up? he wondered, looking down at her in closer, sharper assessment. Five foot two or three, and, no, not a child, just a very small girl in her early twenties, in scruffy blue jeans and a cheap dark blue cotton sweatshirt which clung to small breasts and a skinny waist. Yet she was not boyish; indeed she was amazingly female in a way he found hard to explain to himself.

      ‘Your mother’s alive, Mr Ormond,’ she said softly. ‘She’s old and broke, and lonely. It would make her so happy to see you. She’s all alone in the world and she needs you.’

      ‘You mean she needs money,’ he said with a cynical twist of his lips. Now and then he wondered if his mother would one day get in touch and ask for money; he had never been quite sure whether or not he would give her any. In the divorce settlement she had been given a pretty considerable sum. his father had assured him; she was not entitled to anything else. But she had always been extravagant, his father had said; she would probably run through her money and be back for more one day.

      Patience Kirby bit her lip. ‘Well, she hasn’t much, it’s true—just her old-age pension, actually, and when she has paid her rent she has barely enough to live on—but I throw in three meals a day and...’

      ‘You throw in three meals a day?’ he interrupted sharply.

      ‘She’s living with me.’

      My God, is this girl her child? His stomach sank. He hated the idea. Is this my half-sister, daughter of whatever man his mother had run off with twenty-five years ago? He searched her face, looking for some resemblance, but found none. The girl did not look like his mother or any of their family.

      ‘I run a little hotel, a sort of boarding-house,’ Patience Kirby said. ‘The local Social Services people send me old people who need somewhere cheap to live. That’s how I got your mother; she came three months ago. She’s very frail; she’ll only be sixty next week, but she looks much older, she’s had such a hard life. She’s been living abroad, in France and Italy, singing in hotels and bars, she told me. Earning very little, just enough to keep her going.

      ‘I thought she had nobody in the world, then one day she told me about you, said she hadn’t seen you since you were ten. She thinks about you all the time; she has pictures of you and cuttings from newspapers about you stuck up everywhere around her room. She would give anything to see you at least once. You’re all she has in the world now, and she’s sick; the doctor doesn’t think she’ll live for more than a couple of years.’

      James was furiously aware of their audience—the three security men, Miss Roper, the bird-brained assistant—all standing on the other side of the room, listening with obvious sympathy, their eyes moving from the girl’s emotional face to his set, cold one, their expressions reproaching him for being so hard-hearted.

      Harshly, he said, ‘My mother chose to go away with some man twenty-five years ago, leaving me and my father without a backward look. It’s too late now for her to turn up and ask for help, but if you leave your name and address with my secretary I’ll make arrangements for her to start receiving some sort of pension.’

      ‘That isn’t what she wants!’ Patience Kirby burst out. ‘She wants to see you!’

      ‘But I don’t want to see her! Now, I’m very busy, I have a lunch appointment and I am going out.’

      ‘I’m not leaving here until you promise to come and see her, at least once!’

      James told the security men, through clenched teeth, ‘Get her out of here, will you?’

      They shuffled forward. ‘Please come along, miss!’

      She sat down in James’s chair, hazel eyes defiant, red hair tumbling over her small face, and held on tightly to the arms. ‘I am staying put!’

      Helplessly, they looked at their employer.

      ‘Pick her up and carry her out!’ James snarled. ‘Unless you no longer want your jobs?’

      Galvanised by this threat, the three took reluctant hold of Patience Kirby’s arms and legs, in spite of her struggles, and began to carry her towards the door.

      ‘How can you be so heartless? Whatever she did all those years ago, she’s still your mother!’

      ‘She should have remembered that fact years ago. Now, don’t come back or next time you’re going out of the window!’ he shouted after her disappearing red curls, surprised to hear his own voice sounding so out of control.

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