Separate Beds (45 page)

She wasn’t there either and, on inquiry, the smart-as-paint blonde at the first-class check-in desk refused to confirm or deny if a Mrs Jocasta Nicholson had checked in for the seven-fifteen flight.

‘She’s taken my daughter,’ Jake explained.

The girl’s expression registered alarm and a weary acceptance that, yet again, she probably had a difficult scenario on her hands. ‘Is she the mother?’ And when Jake confirmed this, she said, ‘We never interfere between parents and children.’

‘This time you can.’

The girl eyed Jake and, as he turned away, she picked up the phone and hissed urgently into it.

His brain was on fire. ‘She’ll have to be here by five thirty at the latest and, if she has Maisie, she’ll leave it to the last minute. But if by six there’s no sign, I’ll demand to go through to Departures. I’ll get the police if I have to.’

His father touched him on the arm. ‘Jake, she’s here.’

Jake swung around.

Threading expertly through the sea of passengers, Jocasta was talking into her phone. Following closely and wheeling the buggy, in which sat a contented-looking Maisie, was Lin, the former nanny.

Despite everything, Jake’s lips twitched. How like Jocasta. How typical of her. If there was any chance of
getting other people to do the hands-on work, she would take it.

Occupied with manipulating phone, luggage, laptop and tickets, and with issuing orders to Lin, she failed to notice Jake and Tom until they stepped up to her.
Oh, God
, went across her face.

‘Check,’ she said.

‘Checkmate,’ he pointed out.

‘And?’

‘And you’re in trouble.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said coolly.

Maisie saw Tom and shrieked, and he bent down to kiss her. ‘Hallo, Bird.’

‘Did you think you’d get away with this?’

‘As far as I’m aware, the word “mother” still features in the language.’

‘Didn’t feature when you left.’

Jocasta stepped aside to allow a flotilla of luggage trolleys to ease past. ‘One of us had to go, Jake, so there’s no need to stand on your high horse.’

Sweat ran coldly down Jake’s back. ‘Dad, why don’t you take Lin and Maisie and have a coffee over there?’ He turned back to Jocasta. ‘When the judge hears about this, it won’t look good,’ he said.

A pretty crude threat, as threats went, but it would have to do.

She fiddled with her phone.

‘I loved you.’ He didn’t bother to lower his voice, and the passengers flowed around the two of them like a river around an island. ‘
Many people don’t get any love
… he stared at Jocasta
and they spend their lives aching for just a bit. I had enough for us both, he told her silently. If you could have accepted that it was enough then none of this – mess would have happened
.’

She took a pace towards him and he had a close-up of the strand of hair behind her ear, the gold stud thrust into the lobe and the smudged lipstick line that haunted him. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I really am.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Do you believe that?’

Curiously, he knew she meant it. ‘Maybe. But you can’t take Maisie.’

At that, her eyebrows snapped together. ‘Stop me.’

‘I’ll call the police.’

Her eyes were contemptuous. ‘I don’t think so.’

The fires roared in Jake, welding his anger from molten to set-in-stone. ‘Watch me, Jocasta.’

As he pulled his phone out of his pocket, she put up her hands in surrender. ‘Save your histrionics. OK?’ Her gaze fixed on the group in the café. ‘As a matter of interest, why is it right for you to have her and not me?’

‘That’s for the courts to decide,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. We have to accept their ruling.’

‘Even if it goes against you?’

‘Yes.’ His voice lashed: ‘If you do this, Jocasta, I promise I’ll pursue you until you beg for no more.’

Her face drained of colour and she whispered a confession he thought he would never hear. ‘In the end, I couldn’t give her up, Jake. Do you understand?’

Of course Jake understood. He could not, would not, give up his daughter either.

‘There is something else.’ She sighed. ‘Do I always have to explain everything?’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘If I lose the legal battle to take Maisie to the US, she needs to know that I did not leave her willingly.’

‘But you did.’

‘But to know will hurt her, Jake. Even I can see that. Consider. Your daughter, whom you love, knowing that her mother abandoned her.’

The music of the airport – Tannoys, conversations, the whoosh of passenger conveyances, the hiss of coffee machines – swelled and rose.

Jocasta stepped closer and he smelt her perfume – so different from Ruth’s. Her eyes had grown large and dark – and were filled with a foreign emotion. ‘I won’t hesitate to tell her that I tried to take her and was prevented.’ She wrapped an arm across her stomach. ‘I could even tell her that it was you who prevented me.’

There was no further Jocasta could go. Nothing more she could do to Jake. ‘Try it,’ he invited, through rigid lips. ‘I will tell her the truth.’

Jocasta’s eyebrows flew up. ‘And you’re so sure she’ll believe you?’

Jocasta had a point. Children were told one thing and believed another. He glanced to where Lin was moodily contemplating her coffee, and Tom was feeding a giggling Maisie bits of bun. He had a vision of his entire life being directed by his failed marriage and rejected love. He could see it darkening all he said and thought and, worse, darkening his daughter’s happiness and equilibrium. He could feel himself being swept up in its grip – until it ground away everything else in him. He could see himself in years to come: hollow and self-centred as only the truly damaged were.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘This is not going to happen.’

‘I’m her mother, Jake.’ Jocasta’s lips trembled and her eyes filled with tears – no doubt ultra-painful because they were so rare.

A man and a woman dragging suitcases the size of fridges peered at them curiously.

Jocasta sobbed audibly.

Once upon a time, Jake would have done anything, gone anywhere, to prevent those tears but this final encounter sealed the change in him. Now he was driven by an emotion far more urgent and imperative than his love for Jocasta. It drove him to strike the bargain: ‘Give up your claim to take Maisie permanently to the States and I will agree never, ever to tell to her that you left her. That will be the pact between us.’

‘And the divorce and settlement?’

‘That’s out of our hands. But if you take her now, the judge will almost certainly rule against you.’

‘But I’d have her,’ she pointed out, scrabbling at her wet cheeks. ‘The judge could rule away till kingdom come but he couldn’t do anything.’

‘Jocasta. Look at me.’ Reluctantly, she did as he asked. He turned the full force of a new-minted authority on her. ‘Don’t.’ She shrank back, glanced over to Maisie, and her bottom lip trembled. A tiny seedling of pity lodged itself in Jake and he softened his tone. ‘Do we have an agreement? You tell the courts that you will abandon your claim to have main custody, and I will never tell her.’

Again, her mobile trilled and she snapped it off. ‘I can’t think in this place,’ she said, and her voice shook. ‘It’s like Hell.’

‘Jocasta?’

Jocasta searched in her bag and produced a pristine passport and envelope. She thrust them at Jake. ‘Here. Maisie’s passport and her birth certificate. You win.’

Jake’s relief was so profound that his legs threatened to give way.

‘Oh, don’t look like that,’ she said, ‘all conciliatory now that you’ve got your way. I’ll be glad not to see you again, Jake.’ They walked towards the group at the coffee bar.

‘You never loved me, did you?’

She halted so abruptly that he almost knocked into her. Again, there was a suggestion of painful tears. ‘I see you in Maisie,’ she admitted, after a long, long pause. ‘And I love her …’

The Tannoy called all passengers for Flight AA 287.

Jocasta shrugged sadly. ‘It’s all too late.’

Annie was puzzled by the number of text messages Tom had left on her phone.
Ring; Ring soonest;
and the last,
In airport. Will explain
.

The day had been one long meeting – with the trustees and senior managers taking soundings from the results of a public consultation before they discussed business and financial models and board-to-board practice. Chuck was snapping the joints of his forefinger, which meant he was pleased with the way things had gone. ‘Plenty of opportunities for cock-ups, though,’ he had warned before the meeting.

Airport?

Before she could ring Tom back, he rang her.

He sounded odd and as if he was surrounded by fifty
thousand other people. ‘I’m at Heathrow,’ he said, and explained what had happened.

Annie’s heart pounded. ‘Poor Jocasta.’

‘Poor Jocasta?’ Tom growled. ‘What do you mean?’ Then, he said, ‘You’re right. It’s not an easy situation.’

‘But all is well?’

‘As well as it can be, I suppose. We’ll be bringing Maisie back in a minute.’

‘And Jake?’ She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of what he must be feeling.

‘He’s fine,’ he said. ‘He’s absolutely fine.’

Later, as she was going through a list of hearings for the Samuel Smith case, she shivered suddenly and felt cold.

Jocasta had tried to take Maisie away from them.

‘Anything the matter?’ Chuck was passing and bent over her desk.

‘No. I’m fine.’

‘You looked as though a goose had stamped on your grave.’

Maisie could have been in a plane flying away from them, knocking a final nail into Jake’s unhappiness. To have a child taken away – to have a child go away and stay away – was almost unendurable. Except that one did endure it. One had to put up with the pain second by second, day by day and year by year. She did, Tom did, and the price it exacted was incalculable.

Again she shivered. Poor Jocasta. Terrible Jocasta.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Mike had been surprisingly sympathetic and shocked when Emily related the story of the kidnap, beefing it up a trifle – just a trifle – for maximum drama.

‘My parents were divorced,’ he said. ‘I hated it. I used to dread the swap-over each week. They did their best but …’ He shrugged – a little defensively, she decided. ‘What’s the phrase? “The kindness of strangers.” I couldn’t help feeling I was a perpetual stranger.’

He had his hand on Emily’s cheek. Yet again she was enchanted by the difference between the inscrutable, contained Mike of the office and the man who, in their private meetings, revealed a vulnerable side. The contrast triggered in Emily a deep-rooted excitement and, to be quite frank, desire.

‘Poor little Maisie,’ he said. ‘A football.’

‘No.’ Emily didn’t like that idea. ‘Not a football.’

‘She is.’ He was firm. ‘But if she isn’t now …’ his eyebrow did its climbing trick ‘… she will be in the future. I know all about not-being-a-football but actually being one. They’re the ones who get kicked around the most.’

Emily took a risk. ‘Would you like to come home and have a meal? They’d love to meet you.’

‘Is that you offering amends for my upbringing?’

‘Not really,’ she said, a little offended and also worried that she had gone too far too quickly. ‘But sort of.’

‘I’ve a better idea. I’ll take you for pasta in Polygon’s and we could go back to mine.’

Family could, and would, wait. ‘OK,’ she said, hotly anticipating squeezing into the single bed and the opportunities it offered to demonstrate her sympathy in other ways.

A couple of days later, Emily was still dreaming over various private recollections of the evening (and the night, during which they hadn’t slept that much). Humming under her breath, she ran up the stairs at number twenty-two to her bedroom. Maisie’s bath noises filtered from the bathroom, and she put her head around the door. Sponge in hand, Jake was dripping water over his chirruping daughter.

‘Come on in, Emily.’ He smiled at her.

Like a pair of stone and bronze figures in a church, they knelt up against the bath and diverted Maisie – all pink skin and chubby legs – until she was almost choking with laughter.

‘Bad move to excite her,’ said Jake. ‘But, hey.’ He lifted his daughter out of the water.

‘Dada …’

‘Hey,’ said a delighted Jake. ‘Listen to that.’

Emily gave him the towel and observed Jake deftly controlling Maisie’s flailings. ‘Jocasta wasn’t all bad.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t like to think of her longing for her daughter.’

Jake wrapped the towel around Maisie and looked up at Emily. ‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘In fact, I can’t think about it.’ He bent over and kissed one of Maisie’s tiny fingers. ‘It’s muddled, isn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘What happens next?’

‘We have to wait for the court hearing. It’s in a couple of weeks.’

‘Worried?’

‘Yes and no.’ He draped Maisie over his shoulder and carried her into the bedroom. Emily followed. ‘How’s work going?’ he asked.

Emily hesitated. ‘Don’t laugh.’

‘Would I?’

‘You would.’ She paused. ‘I enjoy it.’

‘That’s no laughing matter. That’s serious.’ Jake inserted Maisie into her nightclothes and, when done, sat her tenderly on his lap for a final bottle.

Emily watched. ‘It comes as a bit of a shock. Liking work, I mean.’

‘And the writing?’

The writing?
Where was the urge to wrestle the passionate, unhappy forces warring in her head on to the page? ‘Condor Oil is committed to reducing the level of carbon emissions … etc., etc.’ did not come under the heading of passionate forces.

‘Oil got to you, Em?’

‘Tamed me.’ She blushed. ‘For the time being.’

Jake settled Maisie more comfortably in the crook of his arm. Her eyelids were drooping and the milk intake had slowed. She had the glazed, spaced-out look of a very sleepy child. ‘Most of us are tamed in the end.’ His smile admitted Emily to his inner, complicit circle.

A little while later, she was following instructions left by Annie to put a chicken casserole into the oven – actually, her mother had written ‘Moloch’ – when Jake joined her.