Last Child Page 3

  Kate cried quietly for a moment. I had to do something, so I got up to refill her glass and squeeze her shoulder, then sat back down.

  “Do you know what hurts the most? All the fuss he made when I married Harry, and all the promises he made me, then less than one sodding year later—Harry would never have done anything like this to me. I was right to choose him, wasn’t I?” She stopped, and gave a little moan, a whimper. “Oh, and we were so happy—Aiden and me, I mean, not Harry, sorry, I’m rambling—but I always knew that this would happen, that’s why I chose Harry, I knew that for Aiden the novelty of being with me would wear off, and I wouldn’t be able to hold him, I knew I wouldn’t be enough for him forever, I knew it.” She took a huge gulp of brandy. “God forgive me, I hate that girl. I don’t think I can ever look at her again.” Another gulp. “I can’t look at him, either. How can I ever be near him again, knowing he’s fantasising about her?”

  “He probably wouldn’t be. I bet he hates himself for it already; you know men, it’s all about the conquest, the ego.”

  “With some, yes.” She looked up at me and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of my cardigan. “There’s no point, though. There’ll always be another Erin.”

  I shoved a box of tissues at her. “Or maybe he’ll learn from this.”

  “No, no. No, he won’t. Not a man like him.”

  “Harry used to be like that, but he wasn’t with you.”

  “Harry was over fifty and jaded, overweight and not in the best of health, but Aiden’s still young and gorgeous—and he knows he can get eighteen-year-olds, now, doesn’t he? When I left he was crying and pleading, saying how weak he was, but he’ll be weak again, won’t he? You know how these things go.” She was still shaking.

  “Yes.” I breathed out. “Yes. I do.”

  “He’ll do it again, won’t he?”

  “I think you’re probably right, yes.”

  “I thought it all through before I rang you—oh, you should have seen me then, I was a lot less calm than I am now.” I smiled; she looked anything but calm. “He’ll be oh so contrite,” she went on, “and then, not yet but in year or so, there will be another. I knew, Hannah, I always knew. So the question is: do I stick around and put myself through this, all over again, in a couple of years’ time? It’s like men who hit women, you see. Once they’ve taken off the restraints, it keeps happening.”

  Sadly, I feared she’d summed the situation up perfectly. I’d never seen her so stricken before, not even when Harry died.

  “You don’t have to make any decisions now,” I said. “You don’t have to see either of them, or anyone else. Jaz can go to Ned’s, or Will and Rosie’s, and you can stay here. There’s no hurry. Do what animals do: curl up in a corner and lick your wounds.”

  “I will stay here, thanks,” she said, nestling inside my cardigan as though it was protecting her, and yawning; I remembered how such emotion tires you out. “I already know what I’m going to do, though. I knew as soon as I left the house, when I stopped in the village to ring you. It was so quiet out there, it made everything straight in my head. I know what I’ve got to do. I never want to set eyes on Erin again, and my marriage is wrecked.” She leant forward, head in hands, running her elegant fingers through that silky blonde hair. “Four marriages, Hannah. I’ll be a four time divorcée. What a bloody failure.”

  “You’re not. You would have stayed married to Harry, happily, if he hadn’t died, and your marriage to Jack was a good one, wasn’t it?”

  She sat back and gave me a sort of grimace. “Yes, it was, apart from the fact that I was having an affair with Aiden when he was ill. Maybe this is judgement on me.” Her glass was empty again; I poured out more, for both of us.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” she went on, “as I was leaving, he had the nerve to say that now I knew how he felt when I chose Harry over him. He said I’d only married him because Harry was dead and I couldn’t exist without a man in my life.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Aiden was always ‘the one’, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He knows that. Even Harry knew, he told me he did. But it did make me think. He must have been harbouring a grudge.”

  I pondered on that for a minute. “I don’t think so. I think it’s just an excuse. He knows what he’s done and he’s terrified he’s going to lose you, so he tried to make you feel guilty.”

  “Perhaps.” Her brandy glass was nearly empty again. “It’s too late, though. I know that. I can’t go back.”

  “Erin’s eighteen. It’s time she moved out, anyway.” I thought back to her eighteenth birthday party in Hampton’s wine bar, a couple of weeks before. Aiden hadn’t attended, claiming a stomach bug; maybe he was scared that Erin, buoyed up by alcohol and high spirits, might betray them.

  “Yes, of course it is, but I can’t live with Aiden either. It’s all ruined. Oh dear, oh dear—and what are we going to do about Jaz?”

  Good old Hannah sorted it all out, of course. Give me a problem to sort out, people who need helping, and I step up to fulfil the role for which I was put on this earth.

  Kate didn’t want to move from my house, and Aiden said he would go to Ned’s, while Isabella would stay at Lanchester Hall with Erin for a while, as soon as Aiden was gone.

  The girls returned to the house on Sunday, and I went along too; their relationship not being an easy one at the best of times, I thought my presence might be welcome.

  Aiden should have already left, but we saw his car outside the pub as we passed, and I feared he’d abandoned packing in favour of alcoholic sustenance. I was right; he arrived back at the house soon after. We three sat in the kitchen in silence and listened to him go from room to room, getting his belongings together.

  We heard him clatter down the stairs and heave various items outside. The front door slammed, and Erin’s ears perked up. I followed her out into the hall, where she stood at the open front door, arms folded.

  “Thank God for that,” she said, as his car screeched off down the gravel.

  I turned to her, utterly bewildered. Her affair with this man had been important enough for her to tear her kind, unselfish stepmother’s life apart, so I’d presumed she at least fancied herself in love with him, to give some sort of reason for the whole fiasco. Thank God for that. Was that all she had to say? Was she really that shallow? I looked at her pretty, petulant face, and was saddened by my sudden and intense dislike for her.

  “How can you say that?” I asked. “You were in bed with him only five minutes ago. At least tell me it meant something to you, that it wasn’t just sport.” Oh dear, she wasn’t my little girl anymore.

  “We all make mistakes,” she said. She fiddled with a strand of hair, then she looked up at me, and, just for a moment, I saw my Erin once more. “I really am sorry about what I did to Kate. I am, honestly. I realised what I’d done as soon as I saw how upset she was. I never thought we’d get caught; it was meant to be just a bit of naughty fun.”

  “What you did was evil,” I said. “I feel as if I don’t know you, Erin. It was a wicked thing to do. After all she’s done for you—but, Kate aside, you can’t go around luring married men away from their wives, just for the hell of it.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I know, I know,” she said, “but with some of them it’s just so damn easy.” With that, she flounced back into the house and up the stairs. I was glad; I was scared I might slap her.

  I stood there for a while, leaning against the door and looking out at the beautiful day, feeling wiped out. The leaves on the trees were already turning red, golden, fluttering down to the immaculate lawn, and I closed my eyes for a moment to breathe in the wonderful end-of-summer smells. Having grown up within a sprawl of dismal, litter-strewn concrete, the grounds of Lanchester Hall never failed to bring joy to my heart—and there was something about the unchanging beauty of trees and sky that always made me feel that none of this emotional rubbish really mattered. Love, who needed it? I’ve long believed that a husba
nd or wife cannot be ‘stolen’ if he or she doesn’t want to be, but girls like Erin are enough to test the strongest mettle.

  Poor dear Kate stayed with me for a while; her spirits were very low, as you can imagine, but I was impressed by her attitude to her situation. Aiden rang her constantly, though she rarely took his calls because, she said, she knew he could talk her round. She was adamant that she would not wait around for the next Erin.

  “Because she will arrive, eventually,” she said, when we took our morning coffee into the garden to enjoy one of the last warm days. “For goodness sake, I’m forty-two and I’ve been married four times—if I hadn’t learned a bit about men during that time it would be a pretty poor show, wouldn’t it?”

  Shortly after that, she left. She went to her house up in Yorkshire, to spend some time on her own until she decided what to do, and where to go.

  “I’ve had enough of the Lanchesters and the Seymours and everything associated with them,” she told me. “Except you, of course—I’ll keep you posted, okay?”

  She phoned me every few days, but became increasingly distant; I realised later that her move to Yorkshire was the effective severing of all ties. The phone calls became fewer, and eventually I received a letter to say that she couldn’t face coming back, ever; she was still afraid that if she saw Aiden again she’d be lost.

  Eight months later I heard that she was to marry a breeder of racehorses, and live on his sprawling ranch in Kentucky. She sounded happy, and I was so glad for her. Women like Kate don’t stay single for long.

  Meanwhile, back at our own ranch that September, the immediate problem was what to do about Harry’s kids.

  “If you say I’ve got to go and live with Auntie Dahlia in Scotland I’m running away now!” Jaz declared; happily for him, Dahlia declared herself ‘hopeless with children and even worse with teenagers’, so the option was discarded almost immediately.

  Both of them wanted to stay at Lanchester Hall. Erin was officially an adult and Jaz years too old for a nanny, but someone else would have to be on the premises nevertheless; the house needed proper upkeep, and Jaz required supervision from a presence other than his eighteen-year-old sister. Ned and I presumed Isabella would move in but she thought too many sparks would fly between her and Erin, so I made the most of my contacts at Heaven Sent and found a marvellous lady called Pat Ashley. At thirty-eight she had years of experience as a nanny, and now sought work as a live-in housekeeper. Without my delving into her personal background any more than was necessary, she told me she was made for domesticity and had always wanted a home and family but the right man had never come along. Pat’s aura was more PE teacher than mother figure, which fitted the bill perfectly. I had been a mum replacement for Erin and Jaz but a different approach was required at this time in their lives; they spent a couple of hours with Pat, and liked her. I was concerned that they should appreciate her and not treat her as a servant, and realised that boundaries would have to be established early on. Meanwhile, Isabella and I would stay over one or two nights a week each, and I organised a daily ‘popping in’ rota involving the two of us and Ned and Angie, to give the children (I would have to stop calling them that) a good network of adults to support them. Will and Rosie Brandon also insisted on being included.

  “Harry made me Jasper’s godfather, and I don’t take that lightly,” Will said. “Alas, the boy’s as mischievous as his father—did I ever tell you about the time Harry suggested we steal diet pills from a chemist to sell as speed at school?” He laughed as he recalled this tale that had passed into family legend; if I hadn’t been so fearful of what Jaz might do next, and if I hadn’t known, word for word, exactly how Will would relate it, I might have laughed too.

  Yes, the situation was an unusual one, but I was confident it was workable—and the Lanchesters had never been a conventional family, after all.

  Erin kept a low profile after the upset she’d caused, but Jaz tested us all in the weeks to come. The general consensus of opinion was that he was led astray by certain friends, though I didn’t think he needed much leading. I didn’t voice this opinion. I may have been almost family, but I wasn’t blood.

  Ned made him attend meetings at the office now that he was old enough to understand some of what went on. Harry had wanted this, too.

  “He may be working his way up from the post room, in time-honoured Lanchester tradition, but by the time he starts work he should have a full picture of what the company is about, not go in as a green kid who can’t tell an architect’s specification from a budget report.”

  Alas, Jaz showed only enough interest to ‘keep Uncle off my back’, I heard him tell one of his friends. I worried about what happened during sleepovers at his friends’ houses, but we had to allow him a certain amount of freedom. He was one of those almost-thirteen-year-olds who is knocking on the door of young adulthood, not the type who is still a child; Will reminded us, often, that Harry had been exactly the same.

  Oh, how we all missed Harry. Without the authority of his presence we were all just feeling our way through in the dark.

  There was something else that worried me, too.

  Jaz was given a generous allowance for a boy his age, but as well as spending vast amounts of money on DVDs, games, sweets, hair products and magazines, I began to notice, that autumn, that he always had the latest trainers, the ‘must-have’ PlayStation accessories, the immediately updated phone the minute a new model came out; seriously expensive stuff. He muttered about unwanted gifts passed on by Ollie but I didn’t believe him. I had a horrible feeling he was stealing; I hadn’t a clue how or from where, but something wasn’t right.

  Jaz may have been just like his father, but he had yet to learn how to lie as convincingly.

  I couldn’t accuse him, though, could I?

  My suspicions were validated, however, when I went up to Lanchester Hall one afternoon in late November and was let in by a rather huffy Pat, who said she’d been kicked out of the kitchen.

  “I was getting dinner ready,” she said, “and Ned and Angie just stormed in and asked me to leave them; Jaz was actually sitting there doing his homework, for once, too.”

  “Oh dear,” I said, “perhaps I’d better go and see what’s up.”

  I knocked on the door, and poked my head around it.

  Ned whirled round; when he saw it was me he picked up Jaz’s new iPhone and brandished it at me.

  “Didn’t you think to question where my nephew was getting all this booty from? I don’t have time to nip in and out all day to keep an eye on him—I thought that was what you two were doing.”

  “Don’t blame Hannah, Ned,” said Angie, “she’s got her own business to run, she’s probably as busy as you are. She doesn’t have to do everything she does for this family.”

  Ned shut his eyes, hand on brow. “Yes. Yes. Oh, I’m sorry, Hannah. Sorry, sorry, sorry, do forgive me.” He looked up. “Of course it’s not your fault—look, can you leave us? Both of you? I need to talk to Jasper, alone.”

  Angie took my arm and led me into the living room, where we found Pat pretending to dust some speck free shelves.

  “I think I’ll go and clean the bathroom until normal service is resumed,” she said, bottle of Mr Muscle in hand.

  “I’ll give you a shout when the coast is clear.” I turned to Angie. “Okay. What’s going on?”

  Angie sat down. “It’s my pesky brother-in-law. Aiden. He’s been skimming off the company.”

  I sat down, too, somewhat heavily. “What? How?”

  She leant back in her chair. “Oh, he’s excelled himself this time; he and some chap at Thompson’s Building Supplies had a nice little scam going with some barn conversions out at Weldon. You know how smaller purchase orders for building materials need Jasper’s signature?” She laughed. “Great idea, eh, Harry? Well, Aiden’s been ordering surplus goods, faking Ned’s scrawl, and getting Jaz to countersign so that the invoices got paid by the company, to keep everything straight at Thomp
son’s. But of course the goods were never delivered to site, because they weren’t needed; the Thompson’s fella has been selling them on to various local rogue builder types, for cash. Aiden was paying Jaz a nice bit of pocket money, letting his partner in crime take his cut, and pocketing the rest. He’s doubled his salary over the past few months. Jim Dudley found out when he questioned how much the project was costing.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What a little shit! As if he hasn’t caused enough trouble for this family.”

  “Yeah, well, no more. He’s gone. Instant dismissal, and Ned’s told him to pack his bags and find somewhere else to live, too.”

  “Bloody Norah,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say that didn’t sound too Fuller Council Estate. “Are they going to prosecute?”

  “Thompson’s chap, yes. Aiden, no.”

  “Lucky old Aiden.”

  “Oh, he’ll always be alright, he’s got one of those faces,” she sniffed. “He’ll find some woman to move in with, I imagine. Ned thinks that, aside from the money, he was doing it to curry favour with Jasper, bearing in mind that he’s going to hold the purse strings in five years’ time, but I think that says more about Ned than anything else. Aiden’s just an idiot—especially when you think of all he had with Kate, that he threw away for—oh, well, you know.”

  “That’s men for you. Brains in their dicks.” Perhaps it was okay to be just a little bit Fuller Estate.

  A predictable but brief shadow of disapproval drifted across Angie’s face before she forced a smile. “Amen to that.” She got up. “Oh well, I suppose I’d better go and see if I can calm Ned down. Poor Pat—she was in the middle of stuffing a butternut squash, too.”

  This time I did bite my tongue, though I wasn’t quite sure what I might catch myself saying. “Let’s give it five minutes, shall we?”

  We gave it ten. All was silent as we approached the kitchen; I pushed the door open. Ned stood with his hands on his hips, gazing out of the window, and Jaz sat at the table with a sulky look on his face.