A Daughter For Christmas. Cathy Williams

Leigh hadn’t asked a thing. She had been too aghast at what she had been hearing. Roy had been Amy’s father. Amy’s father and Jenny’s husband. Or so she had always thought

      Now she was being told that it had all been an illusion. A third party had been brought in, some man she had never heard of in her life before. It had been a one-night stand, Jenny had said, a moment’s impulse when she had been driven by despair and desperation, a moment’s insanity that she and Roy had put behind them, but all things came home to roost in the end, didn’t they?

      Leigh desperately wished that she had asked questions, instead of simply sitting there, mouth agape, as though this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time. All she had been told by her sister during her last, frantic jumbled ramblings had been the man’s name and the fact that he lived in London.

      And Leigh had stuffed the insidious information to the back of her mind for well over a year and a half.

      At first it had been easy just to bury the name she had scribbled on that piece of paper to the back of a drawer. There had been so much to do, arrangements to be made, and, of course, Amy to look after now both her parents were dead. One minute Leigh had been cruising along, going to art school, planning a future as a graphic artist in some advertising firm—dreaming her dreams—and the next minute she’d been handed the mantle of responsibility.

      Almost immediately the financial problems had reared up, like a freakish, multi-headed monster, twisting in every direction and blocking all the exits. The painting and decorating business, which had been Roy’s domain, and the interior design side of it, which had been Jenny’s—both of which Leigh had naïvely thought had been doing well—had been breaking under the weight of the economic recession.

      Their accountant had given Leigh precisely one week’s reprieve after the funeral, before calling her and laying all the cards on the table.

      Leigh had sat through it all in a daze. She’d had no idea of finance and had stared in bewilderment at the sheets of figures which had been produced for her to see.

      ‘Can’t we just find someone else to run it?’ she had asked a little wildly. ‘I mean, what’s going to happen to the men in the company? Bob and Nicky and Dan?’

      ‘What happens to all people who find themselves out of work.’ The accountant had shrugged, not entirely unsympathetic but businesslike. ‘There’s no point, employing someone to try and rescue the business,’ he had told her in a kinder voice.

      ‘Think about it. It doesn’t make sense, does it? To spend money hiring someone for a business that’s in the process of failing. There have been no new orders for your sister’s side of things since...’ he glanced down at a sheet of paper ‘...the middle of the year. No one wants to spend money on redesigning the insides of their houses!’

      ‘But it can’t fail! There’s Amy! I can’t help with money! I’m still at college...’

      ‘You could always put your studies on hold for a while, try and see what you can do. I’ll give you my services free...’

      That had been one and a half years ago and she had given it everything she had. She had abandoned her beloved dreams of a career in art and had taken an interminably mundane office job, the only merit of which was that it brought some money in. And it seemed as though, overnight, she had aged into an old woman.

      It hadn’t been enough. The creditors, circling at first, had gradually moved in closer and closer. The bank had lost sympathy. By the time Ed, the accountant, advised her to let go, she was utterly defeated.

      Heaven knows, she might have been able to carry on with the office job, scraping pennies together and dreaming her pointless dreams in the privacy of her head, but then the bank had foreclosed on their house, and that had been the last straw.

      It was only then that the piece of paper, lying at the back of the drawer like some forgotten incantation, had begun to beckon.

      She would be opening a can of worms and might well end up making things even worse than they already were, but the time had come for the gamble to be taken.

      For the next two days Leigh wavered somewhere between dread and a despairing kind of forced optimism which would break down the minute she questioned it too closely.

      In front of Amy she preserved a façade of carefree joviality, but it was a strain and once or twice she had caught her niece looking at her with huge, worried eyes. It hurt tremendously that there was very little she could do to reassure her, apart from promising faithfully never to leave her. That much she could do at least.

      There were absolutely no other promises of security she could hope to offer, and she still hadn’t decided what she would tell Amy when the time came for decisions to be made. A lot rested on what this Nicholas Kendall had to say, whether some sort of meeting ground could be reached, but of that she held out very little hope.

      What man, presented with the sudden appearance of a seven-year-old daughter he never knew existed, would greet the situation with a chuckle and open arms? The most she could hope for was someone who would at least hear her out.

      But, Lord, she knew precious little about him, though considerably more than she had done a year and a half ago. She had done her homework, and it hadn’t been that difficult to discover who he was—a mover and shaker in financial circles, a wealthy, dynamic man, apparently, whose listing in Who’s Who had made her swallow with nerves. This, it seemed, was the man who had fathered her niece.

      Oh, Jen, why? But there was no point in crying over spilt milk. Besides, she knew why.

      She dressed very, very carefully that Friday morning. Admittedly, there wasn’t much she could do with her face. It steadfastly resisted all attempts to be glamorised and she had faced that fact a long time ago. Her reddishgold hair was too short to look chic, her eyes were too blue and too widely spaced to look feline and sexy and, of course, the freckles everywhere were the final straw. Winter or summer there they were, forever sabotaging her efforts to look her age—giving her the gamin-like appearance of an overgrown elf, or so she thought whenever she looked in the mirror.

      She looked in the mirror now and concentrated on the wardrobe she had donned, wondering whether it looked right. She wasn’t quite sure what she was aiming for, considering she had never met the man, but she knew that whatever she wore would have to give her confidence.

      Amy sat on the bed and watched Leigh while she fiddled with her long hair, brushing it and plaiting it.

      ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, when her hair had been neatly pulled away from her face and plaited.

      ‘What makes you think that I’m going anywhere?’

      ‘You don’t normally take this long getting dressed.’

      ‘Sometimes I do!’ Leigh protested, glancing at the reflection of the child in the mirror and grinning. ‘OK. I give in. Hardly ever. I just thought that this might make a nice change. What do you think?’

      She twirled on the spot, holding one corner of the flowing red and black skirt between her fingers.

      ‘You look beautiful,’ Amy said honestly, and Leigh could have hugged her. ‘Are you meeting someone?’

      ‘Oh, you know, the usual.’ She shrugged and smiled vaguely. ‘What are you going to be doing in school today?’ she asked, changing the subject.

      ‘Maths, science, sports.’ Their eyes met and Leigh smiled.

      ‘Have you had the results of that test you had last week?’

      ‘We get them today,’ Amy said glumly.

      ‘We can treat ourselves to a burger and a milkshake after school if you do OK,’ Leigh said. A rare indulgence, she thought, and Amy deserved it. When times had been good she had had as many burgers and milkshakes as she could have eaten, and now that times were rocky she hadn’t complained once about what she was now missing. She had just adapted, in that curious, malleable way children had, accepting their straitened circumstances