Equal Opportunities. PENNY JORDAN
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feeling that somehow or other someone else is taking your place with the baby.
Look, I know an agency that specialises in finding male nannies. Why don’t I give them a ring on your behalf and see what they can come up with?’ she suggested.
A male nanny! Kate frowned. Did she really want a strange young man sharing her home?And yet the suggestion had its good points. She had been conscious of rather more than mere covert disapproval from a couple of the girls she had been employing, as though they felt that she was somehow not doing her best for Michael by going out to work, and yet what alternative had she? If she didn’t work, she could not support herself. She had no money, no family, nothing to fall back on other than her own skills in the workplace.
‘Look, give it a try,’ Camilla urged her. ‘What have you got to lose? I’ll give the agency a ring, get them to send someone round, and if you don’t like them…Well, there’s nothing lost, is there?’
‘All right,” Kate agreed hesitantly. From upstairs she caught the sound of a small, fretful wail. ‘I’ll have to go. Michael’s just woken up.’
‘OK. Leave everything to me. I’ll sort something out. Oh, and by the way, how are you getting on with James?’
James Cameron owned, among other things, a chain of supermarkets spread throughout the country, and through Camilla’s good offices Kate had got the opportunity to take over his PR work. The supermarkets, for one reason or another, did not have a good image, and if Kate could get the contract to change this it would be a very healthy boost to her profits.
‘He’s taking me out to dinner next week. I’ve got to prepare a couple of presentations for him. He wants to start going up-market with the supermarket acquisition.’
‘Watch out for him, Kate,’ Camilla warned. ‘He regards himself as something of a stud.’
‘Don’t they all?’ was Kate’s grim response, and Camilla sighed at her tone of voice.
‘Some do,’ she admitted, ‘but there are others. Men who like and respect women as well as desire them. The problem with you is that because you prefer to think that all men are like the Jameses of this world, you deliberately close your eyes to the existence of the other sort. I’ve often wondered why.’
‘It’s safer that way,’ Kate told her, and then stopped abruptly. She was giving too much away. Betraying more about herself than was wise. Good friend though Camilla was, if she were to learn of Kate’s fear of committing herself emotionally to someone, and through that commitment being hurt as she had been hurt as a child, Camilla would, for the very best of reasons, try to change her outlook. And she didn’t want her outlook changing. She felt safer with it the way it was.
Their conversation over, she went upstairs and walked into Michael’s bedroom, switching on the light. She had purposefully put a soft light in this room, so that no brightness would distress the baby.
Michael had been premature, and was still slightly small for his age. He was wide awake and not crying now that he saw her. As she reached down into the cot, he raised his arms to her.
Kate picked him up, and comforted him automatically. She felt the dampness of his mouth where he sucked her shoulder and her silk shirt. Damn! She normally changed when she got home from work, but tonight, what with the rumpus with the nanny, she hadn’t had time.
He had thrown off his blankets and his hands felt cold. She reached down into the cot and picked one up, wrapping him securely in it. Thinking he was going to be put down, he started to cry, his small features puckering.
The social worker who had interviewed her following Alan and Jen’s deaths had warned her that for some considerable time Michael was going to feel insecure. So far this insecurity had manifested itself in bouts of tears in the middle of the night which had necessitated Kate getting up to take the baby into her own room, while his nanny slept on, apparently undisturbed by the noise.
Years of living with small children had given Kate an expertise she had not even realised she possessed until Michael came into her life. She was half appalled by her own inherent skill in looking after him, at least physically. Emotionally, she wasn’t anything like as sure that she would be able to cope with his needs.
She adjusted her stance to cope with his weight with an expertise that would have astounded most people who knew her, easily rocking her body so that its rhythm soothed his whimpers.
The tears had stopped now, but she knew from experience that the moment she tried to put him back in his cot they would start again; it was all too understandable, really, this defiant bid to claim her attention.
None of the nannies she had had so far had been pleased by her ruling that Michael was to remain upstairs. The house was only small, and the sitting-room and dining-room she had had so carefully furnished sometimes had to double as an extension of her office.
Clients sometimes visited her at home; she entertained them at small, elegant dinner parties, using the recipes she had carefully and meticulously learned at nightschool. She wasn’t an inspired cook, but she had the intelligence to realise that every tiny skill she added to her repertoire increased her chances of ultimate success.
A male client, dubious about dealing with one of the new breed of city career woman, could have his fears soothed by the production of a delicious home-cooked meal, thus restoring his innate belief that women, even career women, enjoyed pandering to men. It was because she had to look upon her sitting-room and dining-room as extensions of her office that Michael was barred from them. A scatter of toys and baby things, no matter how domestic, would not serve to enhance the image she was careful to project.
Instead she had given Michael the largest of the three bedrooms, and what was more she had decorated it herself—another learned skill.
Nor could she simply abandon her responsibility to him. Jen had been as close to her as if they were sisters. Closer in some ways. And she owed it to her friend to do the very best she could for Michael.
It would be easier once he was old enough to go to school…once she had her business firmly established. Already it was doing well, but not well enough for her to be able to sit back and relax. She would just have to hope that Camilla came up with someone suitable.
Michael was asleep…Very gently she removed him from her shoulder and walked over to the cot. Before she got there, he was awake, blue eyes regarding her with solemn regard, the baby mouth starting to pucker.
‘All right, you win,’ Kate told him wryly. They had been through this routine several times before. So often, in fact, that it was beginning to become a habit.
Not that she actually minded. There was something quite soothing about working in Michael’s room, at the desk that would one day be his, and he seemed to find her presence a calming influence. He didn’t even seem to mind the desk-lamp she used to illuminate her work.
Holding him against her shoulder with one arm, she went downstairs for her briefcase. The final details of the plans she intended to put before James were inside it. It was still four days before their meeting, but she wanted to be sure she had everything right.
Back in Michael’s room, she put him in his cot again. This time, as though he knew that he had won and that she would stay, he closed his eyes immediately.
Kate wasn’t fooled. She knew the moment she attempted to leave the room they would be open again, and he would start howling—that thin, fretful cry that tore at the nerves and penetrated so tormentingly every barrier raised against it.
She ought to be used to crying babies; after all, there had been enough of them at the children’s home.
She opened her briefcase and extracted her papers.
James Cameron’s supermarkets were in the main small stores in country towns—often shabby and run-down, from the information she had received. She had driven out to some of them to check on the location and size, as well as reading the reports he had given her, and she was going to suggest to him that, since he could not