I was sorry to have confirmation that man hating ran so firmly on the female side of the family. “But does she know you’re here?”
She began to eat. “I don’t care what she thinks. I want to live with you. It’s smashing, all those fields.”
There was nothing I would have liked more. “Did you come on the train?”
She smiled as if expecting a compliment for making the trip. “I thumbed a lift all the way. It was easy as far as Grantham. Then I was picked up by a dirty old man.”
“Don’t tell me. He put a hand on your leg, and asked you to go to bed with him. You told him to stop his game and let you out of the car or you’d smack him in the chops, so that he would have such a crash his false teeth would fly away.”
She looked at me gone out, then laughed. “How did you twig all that?”
“Dirty Horace is well-known for it. He’ll get locked up if he’s not careful. At least I hope so. He’s the pensioner-rapist of the Great North Road. I’ll ram his hearing aid down his throat one of these days, if the police don’t confiscate it first.”
“You know everything, don’t you? I’m ever so glad you’re my father.”
“Even though I’m a man?”
“But you’re different. You wouldn’t carry on like crumbly old Horace. When we stopped he went on bended knees and asked me to marry him. He said his wife had died and he was lonely. He swore he would leave me everything in his will when he kicked the bucket.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I didn’t. I kicked him in the cobblers. He couldn’t chase me, because his glasses fell off. Then I walked to a lay-by and a lorry driver picked me up. I was all right with him. He gave me a Mars bar.”
I felt my stomach turn to a bag of ice cubes. “Don’t ever hitchhike again. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can look after myself. All we talk about at school is how to cut up men if they try anything. I’ve got lots of good tricks.”
“I’m sure you have. You can stay here tonight, but I’ll get you back to Nottingham in the morning.”
She pushed her plate to the middle of the table, tears sliding down her peerless face. “I’d rather die. You’ve got to take me in for good, now I’ve come all this way.”
I didn’t want my one and only daughter to go, but if she didn’t Claudine would set droves of social workers onto me. They’d leap the dikes like troops in a Picardy rush, determined to overwhelm our slit trench, because the more useless people’s jobs the more they fight like tigers to keep them. Claudine would have me marched off by the police for kidnapping minors. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. But we can write to each other any time you like. A few years from now you won’t even need your mother’s permission to come and see me.”
It was an evening when Frances was due. Sam and I were holding hands by the gate, looking across the fields whose greenery, under the light from high clouds, lay with an uncanny glisten on the landscape. Frances got out of the car carrying two large plastic bags as her food tax, as she called it, for the weekend. Her pale brown coat was open to show a white blouse and loose attractive bosom, a gold chain holding the tiny watch I’d given her some years ago.
After our kiss I introduced Sam, who almost fell down with pleasure on my letting it drop that Frances was a doctor, though she rallied when handed one of the bags to carry inside, then was commandeered to get more stuff from the car. After they’d installed France’s luggage upstairs I looked through the living room window from the garden. They were talking and laughing, and I thought what a pity it was that they weren’t really mother and daughter.
“She’s so nice and gentle,” Sam said later. “And she treats me like a real grown up person.”
I wasn’t surprised. “How old are you now?”
“I was fourteen last week.”
I took a twenty from my wallet. “That’s for your birthday, then.”
She pulled me down for a kiss. “Can I have a party for it when I come here next year?”
“I’ll think about it.”
In the remaining hour of light before supper Frances took her for a walk across the fen, leaving Clegg and I working on a loose post of the outside fence, hammering a new support deeply in, looked on by Dismal who was waiting for one of us to bludgeon a finger with the mallet. Threatened with a dab of creosote, he walked off to chase a cat, which ran across the line and mocked him from the other side. A few days ago I had seen him letting the same moggie sample his Bogie.
Clegg took the tools away, and went in to see about supper, while I smoked a cigarette, until Sam and Frances returned hand in hand from their stroll, Sam glowing as if she had made a conquest and was already half in love.
During supper she was unable to stop looking at my wife, and seemed about to faint when Frances smiled kindly at her. I laid a couple of chops on Sam’s plate, who made a spoiled little mouth to show she wasn’t much hungry, till Frances told her that a growing girl should eat whatever was set before her.
“Oh, all right.” Sam flushed with pleasure at having been spoken to again, and finished everything, as well as the fruit for dessert, and the cheese that followed.
After Sam had gone to bed, and Dismal trailed up the stairs to sleep, I supposed, by her side, Frances and I talked about what was to be done. I had related as many details as were necessary concerning my youthful affair with Claudine, and she said that as it should need little more than an hour to drive to Nottingham she would deliver Sam there in the morning. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble then, in persuading her to go.”
Sam, who would have travelled anywhere to be alone with Frances, got in the car as if set for a trip to heaven. She kissed me on saying goodbye. “See you soon then, dad.”
“You will, I know.”
Frances told me that on getting to Nottingham Claudine was also overwhelmed by her status as a doctor, and easily believed there had been no hanky-panky on my part for Sam’s overnight stay, though it was noted that she hadn’t informed the authorities that her daughter had gone missing, which Frances said she ought to have done.
Claudine laid out coffee cups and biscuit plates from her best Littlewood’s china, and Frances stayed until certain that Sam would get no aggravation after she had gone. Claudine even promised that Sam would be allowed to stay with me from time to time, most likely because, as Sam whispered on seeing Frances off at the door, she would have more privacy with her boyfriend.
Frances and I usually talked after making love, often straying into lickerish topics to get us going again. Or we ended by holding each other and drifting into sleep. Had she been jealous of the situation between me and Sophie I would have sent all thought of my would-be sister away, because I knew who I really belonged to. Perhaps she didn’t force the issue because, as a physician, she looked on my affair (if that’s what it was) as if she had written a prescription to cure me from getting into a more threatening relationship. She was so understanding I didn’t even feel guilty, which she’d have regarded anyway as just another sickness, and torn off a further healing chit.
Thinking of Sam, I said one night: “I’d love it if you had a child.”
Her lack of immediate response was filled with pleasurable kissing, until she spoke: “Michael, there’s something I have to tell you with regard to that. I don’t know why I haven’t before. Perhaps I didn’t dare. But it’s my turn now to ask for some understanding from you.”