CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I may be
marrying your father, Pip, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever try to take him away
from you. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“You
couldn’t anyway,” said young Pip with that infuriating smile that always made
Nina Fox want to scream; it wasn’t quite a smirk, but might as well have been.
What do I have to do to make you like
me? Nina wanted to
scream at the girl, but restrained herself. After a year, she still couldn’t
work out what made Nathan’s daughter tick. It was not as if the
fourteen-year-old was openly hostile towards her. On the face of it, she was
all smiles and anxious to please. No one would suspect, even to look at her
now, that she harboured any ill feeling towards her father’s new fiancée. So
why, Nina asked herself for the umpteenth time, did she always feel so
uncomfortable whenever she found herself alone with Pip? In her father’s
presence she was a different person altogether. In Nina’s company she was…but
the actress had no words to describe how the girl gave her goose pimples and
invariably made her wish she was some place else. “I have to collect a few
things from the flat later. Perhaps you’d like to come with me?”
She
expected Pip to politely refuse, as she usually did, and was somewhat put out
when the girl asked, “Will Sammy be there?”
Nina felt
her cheeks burning as she nodded, “I expect so.”
“You
haven’t had him put down yet then.” It was not a question.
Nina
bristled. “Sammy is my cat and my responsibility, no one else’s.” The girl
merely shrugged. “I can’t help it if your father is allergic to animal fur can
I? Okay, I promised to have Sammy put
down because he’s old and I couldn’t bear to give him away and I will. But in
my own good time, alright?”
“Today…?
Will you take him to the vet today?”
“I might.”
Nina conceded, inwardly seething.
“In that
case, I’ll come with you for moral support. I know Daddy would want me to. So
when do we leave?”
“In about
ten minutes,” said Nina lightly, calling upon all her reserves of patience not
to storm out of the room as she left at a steady pace, quietly closed the door
behind her and resisted an impulse to scream. Once inside the bedroom she now
shared with Nathan, she leaned against the door and muttered a string of oaths.
How had Pip found out about the cat, she wondered? Nathan had been adamant about her getting rid
of it while she, Nina, had been equally determined to keep her beloved Sammy. A
friend, Ray Bannister, who lived in the upstairs flat, had promised to feed and
generally keep an eye on the cat. She took every opportunity to visit whenever
she had a spare moment, especially if Nathan happened to be out of town on
business. Pip, a very self-contained child, had always chosen to do her own
thing on such occasions, preferring to watch TV or a video, play computer games
or get on with some homework, a task at which she was particularly diligent.
“She has
her father’s brains,” Nathan would joke, “Nothing less than Oxford for my
girl.”
Nina, for
one, couldn’t wait. Oh, she felt sorry for the child, of course she did.
but…“Oh well, what’s the use?” she muttered aloud and crossed to a dressing
table where she told the troubled
looking face in a handsome oval mirror, “I’ll just have to make the best of a
bad job, as usual.” She let her gaze
wander critically around the room. The décor was not to her taste although
there was no denying its antique furnishings were impressive if a trifle
incongruous in a small semi-detached house on a nondescript street. But Pip had
helped her father choose everything in the house and neither was receptive to
any changes she, Nina, felt inclined to propose.
Glad that
she had moved in with Nathan, she nevertheless had no intention of staying in
this house longer than proved necessary. Once they were married, she had long
since decided, they would move. She hated this house, not least because she was
prevented from making it hers. It belonged to Nathan and Pip. Their presence
was everywhere. Sometimes she felt almost suffocated by their closeness. It
bothered her a lot because she loved Nathan Sparrow very much, and this
overwhelming antipathy towards the house seemed like a betrayal. She blamed Pip, without quite knowing why. It
was, after all, only natural that father and daughter should be so close,
especially given all that had happened. Even
so, Pip must learn to take second place in her father’s affections. Nina
sighed. While in no doubt that she could win Nathan round to her point of view,
she was equally sure that Pip’s co-operation would require some very careful
stage managing.
They
arrived at the Brixton flat about lunchtime. It was Pip’s first visit. She knew
her father was keen for Nina to sell the flat and was hurt that she hadn’t
already done so. He saw it as a lack of commitment on her part and she, Pip,
had to agree. Nina wants a bolthole, a
safeguard in case her relationship with Daddy doesn’t work out as planned. Pip frowned and kept reassuring herself that
it wouldn’t. No way, not if I can help
it.
Nina drove
them in her own car, not least because Pip was always commenting on the
unnecessary expense of her taking taxis everywhere. Pip looked out of the
window, saying nothing and observing little of the shabby, cluttered, urban
landscape through which they passed. For the first time in ages, the girl’s
thoughts returned to the fire. They waited at traffic lights for a woman to
cross the road. She was holding a young boy by the hand. Pip watched them reach
the pavement. The boy pushed a battered front gate. A few minutes later, the
pair entered a semi-detached house whose cracked windowsills and red brick
walls exuded poverty. As a dull, badly scratched front door closed behind them,
it seemed to smoulder in front of her eyes and burst into flames. Nor did the
illusion vanish once Nina drove off. She
was back at the old house; now in the street, watching the fire take hold, now
back inside… striking a match and staring, vaguely surprised, at the subsequent
flame.
She’d had to do it of course. Her mother and brother were
destroying her father with their incessant demands for attention, Johnny
especially. Sometimes she adored her brother. Mostly, she hated him. Why?
She often asked herself that. The answer, in the end, was always the same. No
matter what excuses she found or allowances she tried to make, she could not
forgive him for being her mother’s natural child while she…She had to live with
the fact that she was adopted. Her father and Johnny were flesh and blood. Her
mother…But she didn’t care to think too much about her mother.
She had been on a school trip to the Natural History Museum
that fateful day and arrived home bursting to tell her mother and Johnny all
about it. Her father was away on business so she would save her extra special
memories of the museum for his return. Even so, there had been lots she
couldn’t wait to tell, especially about seeing the dinosaurs. She was already
chattering away as she entered the living room with her mother and brother only
to stop in mid-sentence as something struck her as strange. Something was
wrong. For an instant, she couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she saw it, a
huge cream coloured leather armchair where her father’s old rocking chair
should have been. She turned on her mother, eyes blazing. “Where’s Daddy’s
rocking chair?”
“It was practically falling to bits, darling,” her mother had
responded with a nervous laugh. “So Johnny and I went out and bought him a new
chair. Do you like it?”
“I hate it! Daddy will too. He loved that rocking chair.”
“He’ll love this one even better,” her mother had insisted
with a certainty that inflamed young Pip’s anger all the more.
“No he won’t, he’ll hate it. It’s ugly and…horrible!” She
went to the chair and lashed out at it with her foot.
“Stop that, Pip. Now you’re being silly!” Jane Sparrow had
snapped, and then tried another tack. “Try it darling. It’s so comfortable.
Daddy will love it, you’ll see.”
“He won’t,” the child yelled, “He won’t!” and started to cry.
“You’re only jealous because I bought it for him and you
didn’t,” said Johnny.
“It’s a present from all of us,” his mother hastily corrected
him.
“Where’s the old chair?” Pip wanted to know.
“The delivery men took it away. It was only any good for
firewood. I’m just thankful they didn’t charge for getting rid of the wretched
thing. It was an eyesore, Pip. Even you can see that, surely?”
“It was a lovely chair. Besides, it belonged to Grandpa and
Daddy would never, ever, have wanted to get rid of it. I hate you, I hate you!”
she screamed at her mother.
“Now your being silly…” Jane Sparrow protested.
“My Daddy will love the chair,” said Johnny, “He will, he
will, he will!”
“What would you know about it?” Pip sneered, “You’re just a
silly little boy no one really wants. Mummy and Daddy chose me. You just
happened along and no one had any say in it at all, worse luck,” she added
malevolently.
“Pip!” her mother exclaimed in horror.
“At least they’re my real parents, not yours,” shouted
the boy, “...and my daddy will be glad to see that back of that old
rocking chair, he’s always saying so.”
“Children, stop it. Pip, tell Johnny you’re sorry for what
you said. You say sorry, too, Johnny.”
“I won’t!” both children cried simultaneously.
“Then you can go to your rooms, the pair of you, and don’t
come downstairs until you’re ready to apologize to me and to each other for you
appalling behaviour.”
“I’m sorry mummy,” Johnny whined, throwing both arms around
his mother’s waist in floods of tears.
Jane Sparrow automatically hugged her blond, blue-eyed son.
This was the last straw for Pip who stomped out of the room in high dudgeon,
successful fighting off tears of anger, hurt and frustration only until she
reached the sanctuary of her bedroom. Nor did she go downstairs for the rest of
that evening but nursed a growing rage until she could bear it no longer.
It was late. Her mother would be in bed by now, Johnny too.
She had refused to reply to her mother’s tap on the door nor rushed to unlock
it as she saw the handle move slowly forward. A piled carpet had drowned the
sound of her mother’s footsteps but she imagined them stopping outside Johnny’s
room, entering, her mother planting a goodnight kiss on the sleeping child’s
cheek. She would never know that Jane Sparrow, still upset after the incident
earlier, had been desperate to make her peace with both children, any more than
Jane herself would ever know that Johnny had feigned sleep or that Billy Pike,
the boy next door, was hiding under his best friend’s bed.
A thirst had come upon young Pip and she tiptoed downstairs
to the kitchen with no other intention than getting a drink of water. She
turned on the tap, took a cup from a cupboard over the sink and drank. It was then that she spotted a packet of ten
cigarettes and matches on a shelf. “That didn’t last long,” she retorted with
reference to her mother’s recently avowed intention to give up smoking. She
drained the glass, dropped it in a bowl of soapy water and would have returned
to her room. It was then a weird compulsion she neither quite understood nor
could resist came over her. She had to stretch to reach the two items on the
shelf but finally succeeded.
Matches in one hand, cigarettes in the other, she had stared
at them until she could no longer see them, only a monstrous green dragon
exhaling billows of smoke and tongues of flame. In terror, she tried to flee
the dragon but it followed her into the living room. Suddenly the new armchair
that had resulted in such painful exchanges earlier burst into flame. As if
hypnotized, she watched the flames rise and spread. At first, she could not
hear or feel a thing. It was much like watching a video. Only, there was no
pause or stop button available. The fire began noisily fast-forwarding of its
own volition. Heat, smoke and a terrible roaring sound brought her back to
reality with a sickening lurch of the stomach. She ran to the kitchen door,
slammed it shut behind her and laid her whole weight against it. But it was a
powerful dragon. Hadn’t she seen it with her own eyes? She had run into the garden, along the side
of the house and into the street. It struck her that she should…what? Who, in Spencer Street, could tackle a dragon
that size and win? Not Mummy or Johnny,
that’s for sure.
A huge sense of relief had come over her and she’d felt quite
light-headed. Thank goodness Daddy was
not in the house. As for her mother and brother, what did she care about
them?
She had stood and watched the house burn, scarcely aware of a
new cacophony of raised voices, sirens all around her and well-meaning hands
gently leading her away from the scene. All she could properly grasp was that
the dragon continued to wreak its destruction, a roaring in her ears offset
only by a rising exultation that her father was safe and that she was now all
he had to look after him.
A sudden jerk on her seat belt returned Pip to the present.
Dismissing the dragon as sheer fairy tale, she hid a smile behind the back of
her hand and pretended to stifle a sneeze.
“Don’t you dare go down with a cold,” Nina wailed, “The last
thing I need at the moment is a bloody cold!”
Both climbed out of the car. Pip was still on the passenger
side when a door opened and a tall young man with a mop of auburn curls ran
down the steps of a tall building and embraced Nina warmly. They hugged each
other, laughing, like old friends. Pip watched in wide-eyed disbelief. There
was an unmistakeable air of intimacy about the couple that made her hackles
soar. How dare Nina betray her father like this? Worse, these two were carrying
on like a pair of reunited lovers, in full view of twitching curtains, with
neither a trace of self-consciousness or shame?
Pop had barely recovered from the shock of this revelation
when she suffered another of an altogether different kind. She had emerged from the car now, and could
see more clearly. “Ray!” she shouted excitedly, “Ray Bannister!”
“Why, now, if it isn’t little Pip!” The young man became aware of her presence
for the first time, and it was Nina’s turn to watch in astonishment as Pip
Sparrow ran to the pavement and flung herself at him.
“I never dreamed Nina’s upstairs neighbour was you!” the girl
cried, both arms around Ray Bannister’s neck. She turned accusingly at Nina.
“You never told me you knew Ray.”
“You never asked,” Nina retorted with a surge of irrational
anger and struggling to regain her composure. She had seen the look in Pip’s
eyes before she recognized Ray. Heaven only knew what the girl would report
back to Nathan. Report back, though, she certainly would as Pip always did
whenever she and Nathan spent any time
together.
Once inside, Nina learned that Ray and Pip had been next-door
neighbours at the time of the fire. “You should have told me,” the child kept
saying with petulant, almost vicious looks.
“I didn’t know,” was all Nina could say. It was true. On
reflection, she realized that she had only ever mentioned Ray’s first name to
either Nathan or Pip. There had been no reason for her to do otherwise. Now she
fervently wished she had left the spoilt little brat at home.
“My parents still live there,” Ray was telling Pip, “but I
bought this place after I left university. An aunt died and left me a packet,”
he explained with a grin. “It was a massive stroke of luck, I can tell you,
especially as I was broke at the time…” he went on.
Nina left them to it and went in search of Sammy. The cat
must have heard or sensed her presence because it appeared on a windowsill as
soon as she entered the kitchen, leapt a little unsteadily on to the table and
waited to be scooped up in her arms where it lay, purring incessantly. For his
age, Nina reminded herself, Sammy was a remarkably active cat still. No way
would she entertain the idea of having him put down. Besides, she was convinced
that Nathan’s allergy was only an excuse. The way he saw it, she only kept the
flat on for Sammy’s sake. It followed therefore, he reasoned, that if she got
rid of the damn cat, she would also get rid of the flat. “Well, you can think
again Nathan Sparrow,” she murmured, and laid a fond cheek against the moggie’s
sleek, well-groomed flank. Later, she must thank Ray again for taking such good
care of Sammy. She looked on the cat as,
among other things, a lucky mascot. On the same day a friend had given her the
tiny kitten, she had won the part of April Divine in April Showers, her
first major TV break. She sighed. The current series had been getting mixed
reviews lately. Having slipped disastrously in the ratings, its future was not,
to say the least, looking as rosy as everyone had first predicted.
Putting the cat down on its favourite chair, Nina proceeded
to look out three mugs, pour some milk Ray had thoughtfully left in the fridge
into a small jug and grab a somewhat battered biscuit tin from a wall cupboard
before making a pot of tea and carrying it through to the other room on a tray.
She loved freshly made tea while Nathan actually preferred tea bags.
“I don’t want tea,” declared Pip scornfully, “You know I
prefer juice.”
“There isn’t any so it’s tea or go without,” Nina returned
coolly, choosing to ignore Ray’s amused glance.
“Then I’ll have a glass of water instead,” said Pip.
“By all means, help yourself. The kitchen is through there,”
Nina pointed the way she had come.
“I will,” returned the girl with a stubborn thrust of the
jaw, and left the room.
“I had no idea!” Nina exclaimed, almost apologetically, to
her old friend.
“You never talk about Nathan or Pip to me,” he said quietly
and she wondered if it was an accusation.
“I come here to get away from all that,” she said without
thinking.
“But you’re marrying the guy…” Ray Bannister reminded her.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nina added, blushing, “I simply
meant I have such happy memories of this place and Nathan doesn’t feature in
any of them. It’s always been a bolthole for me, away from press, fans,
everything and everyone who sees me as fair game.”
“And Nathan Sparrow doesn’t?”
“We love each other.”
“So why do you hang on to the flat if not for insurance?”
“You know why. I can’t throw poor Sammy out on the street.
Besides…” She grinned. “…it’s an excuse to see you too.”
“You don’t need an excuse for that and well you know it.” He
got up from his chair, crossed to hers, gave her a hug and was planting a kiss
on her forehead just as Pip re-entered the room.
“Don’t mind me,” the child said peevishly before resuming her
seat then proceeded to deal Sammy, who had leapt on to the chair arm, a hefty
push that sent him flying. The cat landed on the floor adroitly enough, albeit
mewing furiously.
“How could you?” demanded Nina as she scooped up the
distressed animal in her arms.
“I might ask you the same question,” the girl replied
cheerfully, treating Nina and Ray Bannister alike to a look that, in spite of a
surface child-like blandness, still managed to convey a knowing, almost
sinister air. Not for the first time, Nina had to remind herself that Pip was
still only a child or she would have taken great pleasure in slapping her.
Instead, she chose yet again to grit her teeth and say nothing.
Seeking beyond the girl’s dimpled cheek that would have made
most girls look pretty, but didn’t quite manage it in Pip’s case, Nina found
what she feared most. In eyes so resembling Nathan Sparrow’s that it seemed
barely credible to her that Pip was adopted, she glimpsed and thought she
understood the same threat that had hung between them since their very first
meeting. True, it was a threat so far left unspoken, but one that both woman
and child alike had increasingly if surreptitiously acknowledged to themselves
and to each other.
Nina felt her blood run cold.
She had long since given up hoping that she and Pip could ever be bosom
friends, but neither had she thought of the child as her enemy. Now it struck
her forcibly that she had gravely misjudged young Pip. The girl was dangerous.
Almost at once, Nina pushed the thought aside. What could she
possibly have to fear from the girl? Pip
could and probably would continue her efforts to drive a wedge between herself
and Nathan. It’s only to be expected, she and Nathan
being so close? But she’s only a child, after all. As for being
dangerous...Jealous, yes, but dangerous...? Oh, but I dare say I’m being more
than a teeny bit melodramatic.
As if to confirm that last suspicion, Pip flung her a
disarming smile. Nina gave an audible sigh of relief. It even crossed her mind
that she might yet establish a bond of sorts with Nathan’s strange daughter.
