Sheer Abandon (83 page)

She looked at her watch: five twenty. If she legged it over to Boots now, or to the chemist in the North End Road, she should be just in time.

When she got to Boots it was shut. So that meant either one of the late-night chemists, or waiting till tomorrow. It was no contest. There was one in Wandsworth, open until seven, she was sure. But when she got there, that was closed too: from one o’clock every Saturday, a sign informed her, with an infuriating smugness. She drove home and started frantically leafing through the Yellow Pages.

Kate was getting ready to go out with Nat.

It was extraordinary how much happier she felt all of a sudden, knowing Josh was her father, knowing he had wanted to tell her, wanted to be her friend. He’d actually said that: “I don’t feel quite like your father, not yet anyway, it seems so—odd. Maybe we could start by being friends.”

Kate had liked that so much; she had never entertained any ideas about falling into her birth parents’ arms, she had simply wanted to know who they were and to find out how it had all happened. Of course it wasn’t exactly nice to discover you were the result of what amounted to a holiday romance, but they’d been awfully young: only a bit older than she was now.

She could tell from some of the answers Josh had given her about Martha that he really hadn’t known her at all well. She’d have preferred it to have been some passionate, forbidden affair. But Josh was so nice, even if he was a bit silly, so she was sure he must have liked Martha quite a lot, it hadn’t been just sex. And if he’d known about—about her, he would have helped Martha. She could tell. She’d never know why Martha hadn’t told him, she’d never know an awful lot of things, but she was discovering that a great many people had liked Martha, thought a lot of her. Which was nice. You didn’t want your mother to be a one hundred percent bitch. You wanted her to be nice. And Ed, that gorgeous Ed, he was so nice too, and he’d really loved Martha. She’d never seen a man cry like he did at the funeral; it had been very upsetting.

Anyway, feeling happier had made her want to see Nat again. There seemed some point in it. There seemed a point to quite a lot of things. She thought she might even go and see Fergus, and really talk through the contract with Smith. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He’d said something about the door still being open. Three million dollars really was a lot of money to turn down. She’d already told him she’d do the
Style
cover, which had seemed to cheer him up a bit. She was quite looking forward to that, mostly so she could talk to the photographer.

She was just trying to untangle her hair, when Jilly rang. “Hello, my darling, how are you?”

“I’m fine. Mum told you about Josh? Jocasta’s brother?”

“She did indeed. What an extraordinary coincidence. Although not really, when you think about it. Just imagine, Kate, if I hadn’t fallen on the step that night, none of this would have happened.”

“Yeah, I know. I was thinking that.”

“And I hear you like him?”

“I do. I really like him. He doesn’t feel like my dad, exactly, but he’s good fun and it’s lovely talking to him and everything. He can’t answer all my questions, but he tries. He’s well posh, Granny, you’ll love him.”

What had her mother said? Oh, yes: “Just wait till Granny knows where he went to school, she’ll have a heart attack with excitement.”

“There’s more to liking someone than their social class,” said Jilly slightly stiffly.

“Course there is,” said Kate.

Jocasta stood in her bathroom, her heart thudding so hard she felt her body could hardly contain it. She had gone to Boots in Piccadilly in the end, because it was always open round the clock. The pregnancy test had cost her £90 so far, because she couldn’t find anywhere to park, and so she’d left her car on a yellow line in Jermyn Street with a note on it thinking she’d only be five minutes, and of course she had been about fifteen, by the time she’d found the wretched things and read all the instructions and decided which one would be best and then queued to pay for it. It had been a long queue. A long, hot queue, composed largely of tourists. There was also a very long queue at the pharmacy end, presumably all the druggies getting their stuff. Anyway, by the time she got back to her car, it had a ticket. A self-satisfied-looking female warden was just placing it on the windscreen.

Anyway, she had the test. She would go home and use it and get the matter settled. Maybe she was getting her period anyway, she felt a bit…achy.

She did the test.

The instructions were very clear; you had to hold the end of the stick thing—it looked a bit like a thermometer—into your pee for five seconds only (this bit was in bold type) and then keep it pointing downwards for one minute. There were two little windows at the other end of the stick. At the end of the one minute, a blue line should appear in the end window and then you could read the result window. A plus meant pregnant, a minus not.

She timed the five-second dip into the pee she’d collected (in a clean dry container as they had said, a large breakfast cup actually) and dipped what they called the absorbent sampler into it. And then waited. For one minute. In one minute she’d be fine, in one minute a nice neat minus sign would tell her she was not pregnant, and—God! It was there! Unmistakably a minus. She wasn’t pregnant. She was fine. For heaven’s sake. How ridiculous to think she could have been! How could she? Of course she wasn’t. She felt quite dizzy, light-headed with relief. She—The doorbell rang. She stuffed the box into the cupboard under the bathroom sink and went to answer it. It was a young man, asking her to sponsor him on a trek over the Himalayas. Jocasta gave him £25 and then opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

“You look rotten.”

“Thanks. I expect it’s the heat. You know how much I hate it.”

Gideon was not on a business trip in the States, as he had told the reporter at Heathrow, he was in Barbados.

“Possibly.” Aisling Carlingford shrugged her slender, pale brown shoulders, took a sip of her crushed fruit cocktail. “You didn’t have to come.”

“I know that. I wanted to see Fionnuala.”

“Well, you’ve seen her now. There she is, swimming up and down. So you can go again, back to the rainy mists of Ireland. She does look lovely, doesn’t she?”

“Very lovely.”

Fionnuala saw them admiring her, got out of the pool, dived neatly back in again, and swam the length of it underwater. She surfaced near them and smiled, inviting him to join her. He refused irritably.

Aisling looked at him rather intently. “So where’s the lovely young wife?”

“I told you. In London. Possibly in Berkshire. Not sure.”

“And why did you leave her behind?”

“Aisling, I was hardly going to bring her here.”

“It’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?”

Gideon hesitated, then said with great reluctance, “Yes. It has.”

“You shouldn’t have married her. It was a terrible mistake.”

“I think it probably was. She hasn’t turned out as I hoped.”

“I meant it was a terrible mistake for her, Gideon. Mistake on your part. Wrong of you, you know?”

“I think that’s a little unfair.”

“Is it? Anyone could see, just looking at her, she was completely overwhelmed by you.”

“Aisling, she wasn’t some naïve child. She was a very sophisticated girl, a successful journalist. Her father is a rich and successful man.”

“Oh come on, Gideon. What did she know of your life? Of what it meant? She’s nearly twenty years younger than you for a start. Marriage has come to mean something very different in the last twenty years, for girls like her. There’s no way she could be expected to understand her role as your consort. I feel very sorry for her.”

Gideon raised his eyebrows. “This is a ridiculous conversation.”

“Don’t start losing your temper. Just think about it for a bit. I suppose you thought you were in love with her.”

“I was very much in love with her. I still am.”

“Rubbish. You’re in love with love, you always have been. You’re a romantic old thing, that’s why I fell in love with you. And I’m sure it tickled your fancy, having a lovely trophy like that on your arm. ‘Look what I can still catch,’ that’s what that said. Honestly, Gideon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I suppose she was more impressive as a wife than a girlfriend, but still—”

“She was very anxious to marry me,” said Gideon. “It was all her idea, she practically dragged me into the registry in Vegas.”

“Oh, yes, and you’re such a pushover, aren’t you? It’s so extremely easy to make you do something you don’t want! Gideon, honestly, you can’t expect me to believe that. It’s all horribly plain to me. And then the honeymoon was over and that wonderful party, that sounded fun, I’d have liked to be there, and you got back to work, and she was left alone twiddling her pretty little thumbs. Feeling all the worse for the fact that she’d actually had a career before. So what are you going to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She wants a divorce.”

“Well, give it to her. I know you find that hard, but what’s the point otherwise? You’re probably not even properly married, anyway. Think of it as a wedding present for her,” she said, and started laughing at her own joke.

Gideon stood up and dived into the pool, swam a few lengths, and then settled at the other end, looking at his ex-wife. His second ex-wife. She was a lovely thing—still. Blond, reed-slim, but full-breasted, her sleek body and almost unlined face a testimony to the wonders of cosmetic science. He had loved her so much. As much as he had loved Jocasta. Probably more. Aisling was right; he
was
a romantic old fool. And he shouldn’t have married Jocasta. Who he still loved—in a way. Enough, just maybe, to set her free again.

Jocasta sat staring at the little blue plus sign. Plus. Not minus, this time, but plus. Plus meant pregnant. It was very simple. She was plus something. Plus a pregnancy. Plus a baby. Plus Nick’s baby.

She felt odd, very odd indeed. Not entirely as she would have expected. She felt shocked and horrified and terrified; but she felt something else, as well. Almost—awed. That it could have happened. That she and Nick could have made a baby. They had made love and made a baby. Something that was partly her and partly Nick. It was an extraordinary thought.