‘I’m still totally in shock,’ Juno said as the four of them sat down in Pandora’s immaculate cream shaker kitchen and she poured a mug of coffee for Lexia. ‘After these two—’ she nodded towards Ariadne and Pandora ‘—revealed this little lot to me last night, I went home, put Mum in the taxi and then ended up doing a whole load of housework and ironing: you know, just to get my head round it all. I finally went to bed about three.’ Juno sighed. ‘I’m absolutely shattered now. I mean, it’s like something out of a bloody soap. Are you sure you haven’t made it all up?’
‘Oh yeah, as if.’ Lexia gave Juno a withering look. ‘I’ve lived with “this little lot” for the last sixteen years, Juno. You might think, with me banned from coming back home, I should have got over it all by now.’
‘I didn’t ban you,’ Pandora said, sobbing once again.
‘Of course you did, Pandora,’ Lexia said rather more gently. ‘But that was the agreement. I desperately didn’t want a baby. You desperately did.’
‘You never considered a… you know…?’ Juno took Lexia’s hand across the table.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Juno, you’re a doctor,’ Ariadne tutted. ‘Surely you can bring yourself to use the correct terminology?’
‘Well, you haven’t said it,’ Juno retorted huffily. ‘And yes, you’re right,’ she relented, ‘I’m hopeless at saying abortion, probably because I considered it myself when I found myself pregnant with Gabe.’
‘I never knew that, Juno. I’m sorry.’ Ariadne sat down at the table. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Why didn’t I what?’
‘You know…’
‘Have a…?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Because, although – and I can say this now – I knew I didn’t love Fraser in that heart-stopping way you should love someone who says it would, perhaps, be best, if you married him, I did want my baby. I couldn’t go through with a… you know…’
‘I probably could have had a termination,’ Lexia sighed. ‘There, is that a better word? Albeit a very late one. You know, I was pregnant at fifteen to a much older man – been taken advantage of, I suppose. Groomed, I guess you’d call it today. God, I was naïve. The daft thing is, I only ever did it with him once. And I hated the whole messy business so much that, although I really was convinced I was in love with him, that he would be the one to shoot me to stardom and I kept hanging round him, kept on going down to the Ambassador Club and spending afternoons with him down at his dad’s place, I made sure I didn’t do it with him again. I don’t think Damian was that bothered. He said sex with me was like humping a sack of potatoes.’ Lexia went quite pink. ‘There, bet that’s shocked you all, hasn’t it? Sexy Lexi, rubbish in the sack.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lexia, you were fifteen,’ Ariadne said crossly.
‘Yes, well.’
‘Can we just talk a bit more about the whole pregnancy thing?’ Juno asked. ‘You know, before Hugo arrives? Oh Jesus, my stomach churns every time I think about your telling him the truth, Pandora.’
‘Your stomach? What about mine?’ A fresh outburst of tears from Pandora at Juno’s words.
‘So just go back to the evening when you, you know, lost the baby, Pandora.’ Juno handed Pandora the roll of kitchen towel and held her hand, something she’d not done since they were kids.
‘Well, Jennifer told me I just had to go to hospital and that if I didn’t get in the car with her and let her drive me there herself she was going to ring 999 for an ambulance. I had no choice. Jennifer drove me there in her car and Lexia came with us. I lost the baby, ended up having a D&C the next day and then, basically, was told to go home and try to get pregnant again as soon as possible. Which I knew, with the Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, was never going to happen. I was never going to produce a Boothroyd heir to take over the mill.’ Pandora paused to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, before reaching into one of the drawers for a pack of Marlboro and a yellow plastic lighter.
‘Bloody hell, Pan, what are you doing?’ The others stared.
‘My guilty secret,’ Pandora sniffed, before lighting up and inhaling deeply.
‘Well, that’s not going to help your singing voice,’ Ariadne said crossly.
‘It’s never done mine any harm.’ Lexia smiled, reaching over and helping herself to the pack.
‘Or mine.’ Juno grinned, taking a cigarette for herself and lighting up as well. ‘God, that’s heaven.’
The three of them blew smoke towards the kitchen ceiling while Ariadne flapped her hands and went to open the kitchen door.
‘Anyway,’ Pandora went on, ‘I was so depressed when I came out of hospital. Richard was in China and knew nothing about either Lexia being pregnant or me losing the baby. Jennifer wanted to try to ring him and get him to come home, but I knew he’d be devastated. He was so excited about being a dad – proud that he’d done something right for once.’
‘What do you mean, something right?’ Juno squinted at Pandora through the smoke from her cigarette.
‘William Boothroyd’s always bullied Richard. Bullied and belittled him for not being a confident, public-school rugger-bugger like him.’
‘Blimey, Pandora, I always thought you really liked your father-in-law,’ Ariadne said. ‘I mean, I’ve never been able to stand the arrogant, bigoted tosser, but you’ve never said a word against the Boothroyds.’
‘No, well, Richard’s always tried to please him. Even when he was sent off to boarding school at seven and terribly homesick, he never said anything. He never told his father he cried every night because he was bullied there, too, for being, you know, a bit plump and hopeless at games. So, anyway, when we’d been trying to get pregnant for two years and nothing was happening, we were round at the Boothroyds’ at Christmas and, after downing a bottle of claret, and obviously thinking he was being very funny, William suggested perhaps Richard should be sitting on top of the Christmas tree, that he must be a bit of a, you know, a bit of a fairy not to have me up the duff, as he so eloquently put it.’
‘You are joking?’ Ariadne was furious. ‘I’d have told him to fuck off,’ she exploded, ‘and mind his own fucking business.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, Ariadne, because that would have made things worse. William would have had something else to have a go at Richard over – you know, was he a real man or a mouse to let his wife stand up for him against his father?’
‘Well, I don’t know how you’ve put up with the bloody Boothroyds all these years.’ Juno shook her head. ‘I thought my mother-in-law was bad enough but…’
‘Oh God, I feel sick,’ Pandora muttered, glancing up at the kitchen clock as she spoke. ‘How the hell am I going to tell Hugo I’m not his mother?’ She rubbed her hands over eyes that were red from crying. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, sighing hugely as she spoke, ‘Richard was so happy he’d got me pregnant and was going to carry on the Boothroyd name at the mill, I didn’t want him to be alone, by himself in China, when he found out, and I told Jennifer she absolutely must not phone him.’
‘And the whole totally ridiculous idea that Pandora was cooking up, even as she was trying to hold on to her own baby,’ Lexia began to contribute to the story, ‘would probably never have come to anything if Aunt Georgina hadn’t arrived from London to see Mum in hospital.’
‘Oh, yes, she came up quite a bit when Mum was first sectioned, didn’t she?’ Juno frowned, remembering. ‘It made me feel a bit less guilty that she was around, you know, when Ariadne and I couldn’t be with Mum as much as we should. Did she stay at Mum’s or with you, Pandora?’
‘A bit of both, really. She used to come up on the train – she never did learn to drive until much later – and the second time she came up was two days after I’d lost the baby. Because Richard was still away and because I was in a pretty bad state, she stayed with Lexia and me.’
‘And I wasn’t in a much better place,’ Lexia added and then smiled. ‘Poor Aunt Georgina. It must have been hell coming north for her, coping with a sectioned sister and finding two sobbing, equally mentally deranged nieces into the bargain. Being pregnant at just sixteen was the absolute end of the world for me; there was no way I could become a superstar if I had a baby to look after. And where was I going to live? Back at home? With Mum once she was out of hospital?’ Lexia actually shuddered at the thought. ‘You know, I adored Mum, but I was a kid myself for heaven’s sake, and a pretty naïve one at that. I wanted to be the next Holly Valance, not trapped at home with a baby and a mad mother to look after as well.’
‘Oh, don’t call Mum “mad” Lexia.’ Juno frowned.
‘Hang on a minute. It was OK for you, Juno. You were away in Scotland having a great time as a student. And you’d had Dad at home all the time you were growing up. You hadn’t been left to pick up the pieces and left to look after a mother spiralling out of control. You didn’t find Mum in the garden in the snow in just her purple pants…’ Tears filled Lexia’s eyes, but she dashed an angry hand to her face, cleared her throat and went on. ‘I even went down to Damian’s place to ask if I could live there with him and his dad.’ Lexia gave a short bark of laughter. ‘God, can you imagine, down on Emerald Street? Where every druggie and street walker in Midhope are doing their daily deals?’
‘So, you told Damian? About the baby?’
‘Of course I did. I thought he’d let me live with him, we’d have the baby together.’
Juno and Ariadne exchanged glances.
‘Don’t look at me like that, the pair of you. I was a kid, for heaven’s sake.’
‘OK, OK, sorry.’ Juno patted Lexia’s arm but she wasn’t to be mollified and shrugged it off crossly before reaching for another cigarette. ‘So, what did he say?’
Lexia folded her arms as she pulled smoke into her lungs and then sat back in her chair. ‘Laughed, basically. Said we’d only done it once, and then not properly. It couldn’t be his, and to find some other poor mug to blame it on and not come running to him for money to get rid of it.’
‘What a sleazebag.’
‘And, Jesus, this is Hugo’s real father?’ Juno pulled a face. ‘You can’t tell Hugo this, Pandora.’
‘If you remember, this is what this is all about,’ Pandora said angrily. ‘If Richard and I don’t tell him, Damian St Claire will – it’s going to be splashed all over the papers any day when we don’t come up with the money he’s wanting again. We’ve paid him off thousands, thousands of pounds over the years. Enough. I just can’t do this anymore.’
‘The night before Richard came home…’ Lexia went on, glancing at the clock. ‘Come on, Richard and Hugo are going to be here soon, let’s just tell you properly what happened. The night before Richard came back from China,’ she repeated, ‘Aunt Georgiana was here in the kitchen making supper for the three of us. She was singing something or other – you know, she and Mum used to sing together all the time when we were kids – and I joined in. And she just stood, and stared and said, “Lexia, I thought your Mum was good, but you are superb. You can’t let this go to waste.” Or something along those lines. Anyway, she called Pandora in from the sitting room where she was all huddled up, weeping on the sofa – do you remember, Pan? – and together we hatched The Plot, if that’s what you want to call it.’
‘So, did Richard know all along then?’
‘Well, yes. As soon as he returned home, expecting to find his happy pregnant wife, he found instead a sobbing no-longer pregnant wife, a sobbing now-pregnant teenager and a determined Aunt Georgina. Richard drove the four of us down to London the next evening and Pandora and Richard stayed the weekend and hatched more of The Plot before driving back north. I stayed with Aunt Georgina and Uncle Carl in Wimbledon where Aunt Georgina was on a mission to have me win TheBest, not letting up in her coaching and voice control sessions all the time I was pregnant until it was time for the TheBest auditions again when I was just seventeen.
‘I reckon you have a lot of Aunt Georgina in you.’ Ariadne smiled. ‘The same steely determination to get what you want.’
Lexia looked sad for the moment. ‘Well, that determination’s upped and gone over the years. I’m just an empty has-been now with a secret I’ve had gnawing at me for years.’
‘Stop that!’ Juno and Ariadne both interrupted Lexia at the same time.
‘But, Pandora, you didn’t have the… you know, you weren’t pregnant any longer…?’ Juno frowned.
‘You mean I didn’t have a bump any longer?’ Pandora smiled for the first time that morning and threw the cushion that had been at her back towards Juno. ‘Meet baby.’
‘You shoved a cushion up your jumper for the next five months?’ Juno and Ariadne stared at Pandora.
‘Well, you know I’ve always been rather good at amateur dramatics. I just played the part, carried on working until I would have done had I continued my original pregnancy, and then we told everyone we were going to London for the weekend to see Lexia. And that, while we were there, I’d gone into labour and had the baby in Wimbledon.’
‘And no one suspected anything?’
‘No, it really was rather easy. I mean, I did become a bit of a hermit, didn’t go out of the way to flaunt my cushion…’ Pandora smiled again. ‘And Jennifer DB was in on it all and helped enormously. She was probably risking everything by colluding with us, but she did it for me. Absolute brick, that girl…’
‘Anyway,’ Lexia took up the story, ‘I had the baby in Wimbledon with Jennifer DB, Pandora and Aunt Georgina in attendance and gratefully handed him over to Pandora and Richard as soon as he was born. Registering the birth once they drove back up to Midhope with him was, apparently, totally straightforward. No one suspected a thing. I mean, there was nothing to suspect. End of story really. Pandora has been a much better mother to Hugo than I could ever have been – I had no interest in him at the time – and well, obviously, Richard has been a much better father than scumbag Damian could have ever been.’
‘But why has it all had to be such a secret?’ Ariadne asked. ‘Why couldn’t you just admit to having the baby and letting Pandora and Richard adopt him? You know, have it all out in the open?’
Lexia sighed. ‘Knowing what we know now, we should have done that, but Aunt Georgina said my having a baby and giving it away at just sixteen would ruin my image for winning TheBest. I needed to be squeaky clean. To be honest, I think she loved the drama of it all, you know what she’s like.’
‘And I wanted Hugo to be mine,’ Pandora said fiercely, ‘really mine. I wanted the Boothroyds to know that Richard had fathered Hugo, that he was a proper Boothroyd, not a cuckoo in the nest.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pandora. What century do you live in? I think you spend most of your time imagining you’re in a Catherine Cookson novel. You’re a bright, independent woman. What’s all this with the sodding Boothroyds and cuckoos…?’ Ariadne actually slammed her mug onto the kitchen table, slopping the remains of her cold coffee onto its shiny wooden surface. She suddenly stopped, turning her gaze from Pandora and staring hard at Lexia. ‘But how did St Claire know about what you lot had cooked up?’
‘I told him.’ Lexia was pink with embarrassment.
‘You told him? What on earth for?’
Lexia shrugged. ‘Ariadne, I was a kid and stupid. Dad had gone off with Anichka and just had a new baby. He certainly didn’t want me turning up on his doorstep in Manchester. Mum was locked up for God only knows how long. I had nobody. I had no home. I had no education. I felt like I’d been abandoned and didn’t know where, or who to turn to. I suppose I just wanted to make sure Damian knew I was leaving. You know, see his reaction when I told him I was off to London. He just laughed when I found him in the Ambassador Club, drinking. Sort of waved cheerio and went back to his lager. I was really upset when he wasn’t a bit bothered I was going. I said something like, “You’ll be sorry when I’m famous,” and he said, “Oh, so it was all a big lie you made up about being pregnant then? I knew you were lying,” and I got really cross then and said, “I am going to have a baby, and it’s your baby, Damian St Claire, but that won’t stop me becoming famous because my sister, Pandora, has just lost her baby and she and Richard are going to have my baby – your baby – and pretend it’s theirs.” And he just laughed in my face and said “Whatever, babe, great story. Have a good life…”’
‘But surely, in years to come you could have denied it all, said he’d made it all up; it was all a load of rubbish?’ Ariadne shook her head, bewildered.
‘She sent him a letter,’ Pandora sighed.
‘A letter?’
‘From London,’ Pandora went on.
‘I was homesick, I was having a baby, I was living in some suburb of London where I didn’t know anyone. I was by myself all day while Aunt Georgina and Uncle Carl were out at work. I wrote to Damian, telling him again what we’d planned.’
‘Why in God’s name would you do that?’
Lexia shrugged once more. ‘I missed him. I wanted him to know Pandora and Richard were going to take the baby – that I wasn’t going to make him responsible, you know, have to pay maintenance.’
‘And he kept the letter?’ Ariadne raised an eyebrow. ‘Why on earth would he do that? Someone with his chaotic lifestyle?’
‘I really have no idea,’ Pandora snapped. ‘Unless somewhere in that drug-befuddled brain of his he saw a way of getting money out of us at some point down the line. When Lexia started to get famous, he must have thought his lottery ticket was up. You can just see him, can’t you, scrabbling around, trying to remember where he’d put the letter, and the glee once he found it at the back of a drawer or wherever. He wafts it in my face every time he comes round for his money.’
There was a silence in the kitchen as all four digested this somewhat undigestible little nugget of information.
And then Ariadne frowned. ‘I still don’t get it. Why have you both let this Damian chap have such a hold over you all these years? There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling us, the pair of you…?’
‘Mum?’ The kitchen door banged open and a blonde-haired, very good-looking boy stood on the threshold, brought to a sudden standstill when he saw all three of his aunts staring in an almost frozen tableau from their seats around the table. He glanced at Lexia, not quite grasping this was the famous aunt whom he’d never met, and then walked over to Pandora, staring down at her. ‘What’s up, Mum? What is it? Dad wouldn’t tell me. Have you got something? Cancer?’ His voice broke slightly. ‘Because, you know, it’ll be alright. It’s curable these days.’
When a single tear rolled down Pandora’s white face, he put his arms round her, hugging her tightly. ‘You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you? I can smell it. Is it lung cancer? Honestly, Mum, nobody dies from it these days. Anyway, you’re my mum – you can’t be ill. Honestly, you just can’t!’