Alison Fraser – Tainted Love (страница 5)

Guilty of some, too.

CHAPTER TWO

‘LOUISE!’ Clare was taken aback at the sight of the other woman standing outside her room in the hostel.

‘I did telephone,’ Louise Carlton explained, ‘but there was no answer.’

‘No, the caretaker’s hardly ever there,’ Clare answered absently, still staring in surprise at her visitor.

It had been over two weeks since the interview. She hadn’t heard from Fenwick Marchand or Louise in that time, but then she hadn’t really expected to. She’d assumed Marchand would relay their quarrel and his sister would naturally take his side.

But here was Louise, saying in her kindly manner, ‘I meant to come last week, only I had a touch of flu... May I come in?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Clare waved her inside the room and cleared her only chair of a bag of shopping so that the older woman could sit down. ‘I was going to write to apologise, but...’

‘Apologise?’ Louise looked quizzical.

‘Well, I know I let you down.’ That had been Clare’s main concern over that fiasco of an interview. Louise had given her a chance, and she’d done her best to blow it.

‘On the contrary,’ Louise rejoined, ‘it’s I who should apologise. I hadn’t realised my brother could be so narrow-minded. I should have, though. He’s never been easy, even as a small boy.’

Clare could believe that, although she found it hard to imagine Fen Marchand as anything but fully grown and mean with it.

‘He was a late baby,’ Louise confided, ‘and tragically our mother died shortly after his birth. Fen’s upbringing was left to a series of housekeepers, before our father packed him off to prep school at the age of eight.’

Clare was struck by the similarity between Marchand senior’s childhood and Marchand junior’s. ‘Is Miles at boarding-school, too?’

Louise shook her head. ‘Fen has been educating him at home, but boarding-school is definitely on the cards. He’s at his wits’ end, you see. That’s why I’m here...’

Clare frowned, wondering what Louise was leading up to. Surely Marchand wasn’t considering employing her?

It seemed not as Louise ran on, ‘I might as well be frank. He took on another housekeeper last week when I was ill. He got her through an agency. Anyway...’ She hesitated mid-tale.

Clare misunderstood, saying, ‘It’s all right, Louise. I knew he’d never offer me the job. I don’t mind.’

‘Oh, but he is,’ Louise insisted, ‘offering you the job. Now. If you’ll take it... You haven’t got another, have you?’

‘Well, no, but...’ Clare had lost the thread of this conversation somewhere ‘...if he has someone else?’

‘Had,’ Louise corrected drily. ‘She lasted two days. I’m afraid Miles didn’t take to her and, well...I might as well tell you—he put a frog in her bed. A dead one. I know it sounds absolutely disgusting. Actually it was. But I can honestly say he’s never done anything quite like it before. Been rude, certainly, and answered back, but nothing quite like that. I don’t know where he got such an idea from.’

Clare did. She remembered giving it to him.

‘Fen was livid,’ Louise continued, ‘and duly announced that Miles was to go to boarding-school in the autumn, whether he liked it or not. Well, Miles obviously doesn’t like it because he’s been in a state of dumb misery ever since.’

‘Oh.’ Clare’s face clouded in sympathy with the boy.

‘Not that I blame Fen,’ Louise hastened to add. ‘What else can he do? He can’t work and look after Miles, and it’s too late for him to take a year’s sabbatical. He’s tried.’

‘Really?’ Clare didn’t hide her surprise. Because he was well-off and successful, she hadn’t seen Fen Marchand in the role of a single parent, struggling to do the right thing for his son.

‘He doesn’t say so, but I know he feels guilty,’ Louise confided. ‘He thinks he’s letting Miles down again, although what could he have done the first time?’

‘The first time?’ Clare echoed automatically.

‘When Diana won custody of Miles,’ Louise explained, before asking her, ‘Fen did tell you about his wife, didn’t he?’

‘Not really.’ Clare didn’t think Fen Marchand was the type for confidences. His sister, however, had no such reservations.

‘They met at Oxford. Diana was an undergraduate while Fen was working for his doctorate,’ she ran on. ‘She was very beautiful, Diana. Head-turning, you might say. Quite clever, too, I suppose. It was the first and last time Fen acted on impulse. He married her within six months of their meeting...’ Louise paused to shake her head over the fact.

Clare kept quiet, unable to visualise a Fen Marchand who acted on impulse.

‘Unfortunately Miles came along after a year,’ Louise added, ‘and motherhood was the last thing Diana was suited to. Miles was barely a month old when she disappeared on a cruise with her rich father, leaving Fen and Miles to look after themselves. That pretty much set the pattern for the next five years until she bowed out altogether.’

‘But she fought for Miles’s custody,’ Clare replied, frowning.

‘Only at her father’s insistence,’ Louise revealed. ‘A self-made man, he wanted a male heir to take over his electronics firm. He footed her legal bill, and, unbelievably, some idiot judge decided Miles would be better off with his mother. So, after spending eight years of his life at Woodside, the boy suddenly found himself living in South Kensington with his grandfather.’

‘Not his mother?’ Clare was a little lost.

‘Officially, yes—’ Louise pulled a face ‘—but, by that time, Diana was following her latest boyfriend round the polo circuit. Fen saw the boy more often on access visits. It was hell for him. He could see old man Derwent ruining Miles as he had ruined Diana, but could do little about it.

‘Then disaster really struck,’ Louise went on unhappily. ‘Derwent died and that left Diana with custody. She might have handed Miles back, only Derwent left the bulk of his fortune to the boy in trust, and where he went control of his trust went.’

‘So she kept him,’ Clare concluded, her heart going out to the boy caught in the middle.

Louise nodded. ‘Fen was disraught. He didn’t trust Diana to take care of him properly and immediately filed for custody. Diana countered by whisking Mikes away abroad.’

‘To America?’ Clare recalled Miles saying he’d lived in L.A.

‘Via Australia and South America,’ Louise recounted. ‘Diana spent six months country-hopping, with Miles as excess baggage, while Fen desperately tried to locate them long enough to get a court order implemented, forcing her to return the boy to the UK.’

Once more Clare was surprised. From their brief encounter, she’d thought Fen Marchand almost indifferent to his son.

Louise read her mind, and claimed, ‘They’d been so close, Miles and his father, but their years apart have done untold damage. Miles feel his father let him down, and, I suspect, Fen feels the same. He wants to make it up to him, but doesn’t want to spoil him in the process... Which sort of brings me to the point of my visit,’ Louise concluded finally. ‘As Miles plainly loathes the idea of boarding-school, Fen asked him what would make him happy? And you’ll never guess what he said!’

While Louise paused for effect, Clare guessed the truth. She just didn’t believe it.

‘Well...’ Louise could hardly contain her satisfaction ‘...it seems Miles took a real shine to you, Clare, and he’s promised that if you were to come and housekeep for them he’d be on his absolutely best behaviour. Can you credit it?’ The older woman smiled as if something miraculous had occurred.

Clare didn’t see it that way. If she held some appeal for the boy, it was a momentary thing and based on all the wrong reasons. He saw her as a fellow traveller, at odds with the rest of the world. She wouldn’t dispute that—but it hardly made her a candidate for the role of Mary Poppins.

‘How did the professor react?’ she asked point-blank.

‘Well...he was taken aback,’ Louise admitted carefully, and Clare’s lips spread in a thin smile as she imagined how taken aback Marchand would have been. ‘However,’ Louise added quickly, ‘he’s come round to the idea now.’

‘The idea?’

‘Of your being housekeeper.’

Clare still couldn’t take it in. Marchand was willing to give her the job to please his son?

‘He feels he may not have been very fair to you on the day of the interview,’ Louise relayed, ‘and he’s prepared to give you a month’s trial. What do you think?’

The older woman’s smile said she expected Clare to be grateful for the opportunity.

Because she liked Louise Carlton, Clare forced a smile in return. But inside she wondered how the other woman had managed to reach the age of fifty-odd and remain one of life’s innocents. Didn’t she realise that this was just a way of Marchand hiring her until the boy got over his ‘fancy’ for her? When that happened, she’d be out the door quicker than she could say ‘month’s trial’.

‘You’ll have your own little flat in the house,’ Louise went on persuasively, ‘with shower, kitchenette and television, and a salary of eight thousand pounds plus keep.’

‘Eight thousand pounds?’ Clare was shocked by the amount.

Louise misunderstood. ‘Yes, it didn’t seem much to me, either, but at least you wouldn’t have living expenses,’ she pointed out.