For His Little Girl. Lucy Gordon

on it. His hair was tousled, and his expression was desperate. She hadn’t enjoyed a sight so much in years.

      “Oh, no!” he yelled as he saw the empty bench. He raised his arms to the sky. “Please, please, no!”

      “Hm!” she said, coming from behind a tree to stand before him.

      He leaped a foot in the air. “You waited! Bless you!”

      “I most certainly did not wait. I left after five minutes. I just happened to come back this way.”

      “Really!”

      “Really. I hope you’ve got a good excuse.”

      “Actually,” he said airily, “I forgot all about our meeting.”

      “It looked like it.”

      “Well, I thought I’d better drop by in case you’d hung around in hope.”

      Hands on hips, she confronted him. It was hard because she was five foot seven to his six foot two, but she did her best.

      “Oh, yeah?” she challenged.

      “Oh, yeah!” he returned.

      “Oh, yeah?”

      “Oh, yeah!”

      “OH, YEAH?”

      “OH, YEAH!”

      They both began to laugh at the same moment. He took firm hold of her hand and said, “There was a last-minute crisis in the kitchen, and I couldn’t get away. I was going crazy thinking of you here. Still, I knew you’d wait for me, no matter how long.”

      “I’d thump you if I could get my hand free.”

      “Great. I’ll consider myself thumped. Now let’s find something to eat.”

      She thought he meant a burger bar, but when she mentioned it, he said, “Burgers?” in such a tone of loathing that she knew him at once for a kindred spirit.

      He took her back to the guest house where he lived, and where he partly paid his rent by cooking the evening meal twice a week. The rest of the time he had the run of the kitchen to do his own experiments. Pippa watched in admiration as he concocted a delicious salad, unlike anything she’d ever eaten before.

      “I’ll show you what real food is,” he said with unashamed arrogance. “Burgers, indeed!”

      “Hey, I’m a cook, too. I don’t like burgers, either,” she said.

      “Then what made you think I would?”

      “Well—you’ve got an American accent—”

      He gave her a speaking look.

      “Sorry, sorry!” she said hastily.

      “I’m American, and it therefore follows that I have the taste buds of an ox and the refined sensibilities of a fence post,” he said, sounding nettled.

      “I’m sorry I spoke.”

      “You should be!” But he was grinning. “I thought prejudice against foreigners was outlawed in this country.”

      “It is, but Americans don’t count as foreigners, despite the hideous things you do to our language.” She added provocatively, “After all, most of you are descended from us.”

      “Not guilty,” he said at once. “My ancestors are French, Spanish and Irish. If there are any British in that tree they’re hidden in the closet with all the other skeletons. Now, come upstairs and eat.”

      His room consisted of a bed, a table, two chairs and shelves full of cookery books. In these shabby surroundings he gallantly pulled out a chair for her and served up the meal with as great a flourish as if they were in the Ritz dining room.

      “What were you doing down there, anyway?” he wanted to know.

      “I just wanted to look at the kitchens, to know what I’m aiming for.”

      “And what’s that?”

      “I’m not really a chambermaid,” she confided. “I’m actually the world’s greatest cook in disguise. Well, I will be, when I’ve finished learning. I’m going to be so great that one day the Ritz will beg me to return, to reign over its kitchen. And people will come from far and wide to taste my creations.”

      Luke was a good listener, and soon she’d told him everything, especially about her mother, her most precious memory.

      “She was a fantastic cook. She’d have liked to be a chef, but she got married instead. Women did in those days,” she said, speaking as though it was a distant age instead of twenty years ago. “And all my dad wanted was fish and chips, egg and chips, beans and chips.”

      “Chips? Oh, you mean French fries.”

      “I mean chips,” she said firmly, trying to not respond to his grin. If she died for it she wouldn’t let him tease a rise out of her. Well, not that easily, anyway.

      “If she offered him anything imaginative he’d say, ‘What’s this muck?’ and storm off to the pub. So she started teaching me how to cook properly. I think it was her only pleasure in life. We used to plan how I’d go to cookery college. She got an extra job so that she could save up to give me a start. But it was too much for her. We didn’t know it then but she had something wrong with her heart. Mitral stenosis, the doctor said. It killed her.”

      For a moment her pixie face was sad, but she recovered.

      “Rough deal,” Luke said sympathetically. And through the conventional words she could sense the real kindness.

      “Yes. The next thing I knew, Dad got married again, and suddenly I had a stepmother called Clarice, who loathed me.”

      “Real Cinderella stuff.”

      “Well, to be fair, I returned the compliment with interest. She used to call me Philippa,” she added with loathing. “It wasn’t enough that I never had time to do my homework because she developed a headache whenever there was any dusting to be done, but she actually addressed me as Philippa.”

      “A hanging offense,” Luke said gravely.

      “Yeah!”

      “Any wicked stepsisters?”

      “One stepbrother. Harry. But he made enough mess for ten and expected me to be his slave.

      “When I mentioned going to college, Clarice glared at me and said, ‘Where do you think the money for that’s coming from? You’ve got grand ideas, think you’re better than everyone else.’

      “I argued, though you’d think I’d have known better by then. I said most people went to college these days. She sniffed and said, ‘Not Harry.’ And I said that since Harry was a moron that didn’t come as a surprise, and she said I was an insolent little cow, and I said—well, you get the drift.”

      He was chuckling. “I wish I’d been there to see it. I’ll bet you’re a heckuva fighter.”

      “I am,” she said, stating the simple truth.

      “What about your mom’s savings?”

      “Dad took them. I remember him looking at the bank passbook and saying, ‘I knew the bitch was hiding money from me!’ I think he spent most of it on a honeymoon with Clarice.”

      “Wasn’t there anyone to stick up for you?”

      “Frank, my mother’s younger brother, had a go at Dad. But Dad just told him to mind his own business. What could he do? I stuck it until I left school, then I got out.”

      “Cheered on by the dreadful Clarice?”

      “No, she was furious. She’d got it all planned for me to work in her brother’s grocery store for slave wages, and go on doing all the housework.” Pippa’s eyes gleamed with mischief.