Well, he'd married me. And I wasn't famous for blinking back the tears. Better out than in was always my motto. But looking at him now, at his fastidious expression, I marveled--and it wasn't for the first time--at what a bastard he had become.
"Oh golly." I smiled acidly. "She doesn't seem to like you."
I laughed as if it was a joke and took her back from James's yielding arms.
He couldn't get rid of her fast enough. I cooed and shushed her. She stopped crying. For a moment I felt bitter satisfaction that Kate had sided with me against him.
And then I felt sad and ashamed. James was Kate's father. I should do everything in my power to make them like each other.
I'd find another man to love. But Kate had only the one father. "Sorry." I smiled apologetically at him. "It's just that you're new to her. Give her a chance. She's scared."
"You're right. It'll probably just take a bit of time," he said, cheering up a bit.
"That's all," I reassured him. But at the same time thinking, horror-struck, when exactly does he propose spending this alleged "bit of time" with her?
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If he had come to Dublin to try to take Kate back to London, then he had to die. It was really quite simple.
He hadn't done the doting father bit up until now, so what did he want?
"Coffee."
"What?" I asked him sharply.
"Is there any chance of a cup of coffee?" he asked.
He was looking at me as if I was a bit peculiar.
How many times had he asked me before I heard?
"Sure," I told him.
I put Kate back in her crib and went into the kitchen to make him his coffee. I should have offered before. But in all the excitement it never crossed my mind. It was a bit of a relief to get into the kitchen. I sighed long and deep and hard when I closed the door behind me.
My hands shook so much I could hardly fill the kettle. Being with him was so hard. Having to pretend that I was fine was exhausting. And con- stantly keeping a lid on murderous anger was a demanding business--but I had to do it. I was going to salvage as much as I could for Kate out of this.
I brought the coffee back into the dining room.
And, no, I didn't offer cookies.
I'm sorry, but I just wasn't a big enough person.
He was leaning over the crib, attempting to talk to Kate.
He was having some kind of muttered, uptight discussion with her.
As if she were a business colleague and not a two-month-old baby.
He was not behaving the way nice, normal, warm people do in the presence of young babies. You know, as if they've left their brains out, overnight, in the rain. All singsong noises and doting rhetorical questions. Asking stupid things like "Who's the most beautiful girl in the whole world?" And the correct answer not, as you might expect, Cindy Crawford, but in fact Kate Webster.
Instead he sounded as if he was discussing tax reforms with her.
But he didn't seem to notice anything amiss.
I put the coffee down on the dining room table and the
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moment the china touched the mahogany I realized that I had automatically made James's coffee the way that James liked it.
I was furious!
Couldn't I even pretend to have forgotten?
Couldn't I have given him a milk and two sugars instead of a black, no sugar and half cold water?
And then, when he gagged on it, nursing his burned and oversugared mouth, couldn't I have airily said something like "Oh sorry, I forgot, you're the one who doesn't like sugar?"
But no.
I'd missed a precious chance to let him know that he didn't matter at all to me anymore.
"Oh thanks, Claire," he said, sipping from the mug. "You remembered the way I like it." And he smiled with satisfaction.
I could have happily gone to the kitchen and doused myself in kerosene and set myself alight, so angry was I.
"You're welcome," I said from between gritted teeth.
There was a little silence.
Then James started to speak.
He seemed to have suddenly clicked into Relaxed Mode. The apparent nerves at the front door had evaporated.
I only wish mine had.
"You know, I can't believe that I'm actually here," he mused easily, leaning back in his chair, nursing the traitorous coffee between his cupped hands.
He sounded as if he had no trouble at all in believing it.
"I can't believe you let me in."
Well, actually you're not the only bloody one, I felt like telling him, but didn't.
"Why's that?" I asked with icy politeness.
"Oh," he said, shaking his head with a wry little smile, as though he couldn't quite credit his runaway imagination. "I thought that perhaps your mother and sisters might have done something really nasty when I arrived. You know, poured boiling oil down on top of me. Something like that."
And he sat there and, looking straight into my eyes, he smiled smugly, accepting the ease with which he had been readmitted to the Lion's Den as nothing less than his due,
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confident that, although I was from a mad family and a nation of savages, he was really quite safe.
I resisted the urge to lunge across the table at him and rip out his larynx with my teeth, hissing, "Boiling oil would be too good for you."
Instead I gave a cold little smile and said "Oh don't be ridiculous, James. We're perfectly civilized around here, no matter what you might like to think. Why would we hurt you? And after all"--tinkly little laugh like shards of ice banging off the side of a glass--"we need you to be in good health so that you can afford Kate's child support payments."
There was a resonant silence.
"What are you talking about, `child support payments'?" he asked slowly, as though he had never before in his life heard of such a thing.
"James, you must know what child support payments are," I told him, faint with shock.
I just stared at him.
What the hell was going on?
He was a boring, accountant-type person.
He and child support agreements should be best buddies.
In fact, I was amazed that he hadn't arrived with a huge itemized agreement for me to sign. You know, detailing all kinds of things, such as the cost of keeping Kate in shoes for the rest of her life, projected economies of scale, sinking funds, amortization and suchlike.