Unfriendly Alliance Page 2

  'You can't do that!' Hazel declared, immediately alarmed. 'You can't leave Rosie with just anybody!'

  Anstey too hated the very idea. 'What else can I do? I have to work,' she stated. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was as near flat-broke now as she was ever likely to be. Never had she suspected that infants were such a drain on the resources! With only one salary coming in now that Joanna had resigned her job, it was a constant headache to hang on until pay day.

  'But a baby-minder—a highly recommended one,' Hazel inserted, 'will cost the earth.'

  Anstey inwardly groaned at the prospect of another hefty chunk having to be found out of her monthly pay cheque. But, agreeing with Hazel that nothing but a highly recommended baby-minder would do, she sighed as she added in vain, 'If only my parents lived anywhere but in Long Kinnington, I'd take Rosie to my mother. She loves children, but…'

  'But your mother lives right next door to Joanna's mother,' Hazel caught on, having over the last few years learned something of the background of the two friends. She also knew that Joanna felt it imperative that her downtrodden mother should not know about the baby.

  'Exactly,' said Anstey. 'Joanna's stepfather would never cease to crow if he heard so much as a whisper about Rosie. My mother's a darling,' she went on, 'but I've been so afraid she might one day slip up and let something out that I've not breathed a word to her about Joanna's baby.'

  'You couldn't very well take Rosie to her without a word of explanation of where she came from or whose child she is,' Hazel agreed. 'Besides…' suddenly, she stopped, 'I've just thought,' she cried, and started to smile, 'why can't I look after her!'

  Astonished, Anstey stared. 'You!' she exclaimed, such a possibility never having occurred to her, 'I wouldn't charge you anything. Oh, do let me,' Hazel begged eagerly, and was so taken with the idea that Anstey was half-way to thinking it a splendid solution—until she remembered Hazel's husband.

  'Kenneth,' she said, and as the light went out of Hazel's eyes, she did not have to say more.

  'Oh—crumbs,' Hazel muttered, and looked thoroughly down cast. Suddenly, though, she brightened. 'Kenneth leaves for work before you,' she said quietly. 'Also, he comes home after you.'

  'You wouldn't?' Anstey gasped, and realised that Hazel's loyalty to her husband was straining at the leash when she replied, 'Joanna might be back tomorrow. I needn't tell him— not for just one day.'

  That one day had stretched into one week, and then two, with still no sign of Joanna. And while the baby continued to thrive, and Hazel had never looked more content, Anstey was growing more and more anxious.

  After nights spent walking the floor with Rosie—about the only thing which seemed to keep her quiet—Anstey would be awakened in the early morning by another release of energy from the fractious infant. The fact that, as a result of her lack of sleep, her work at Elton Diesel was suffering was the least of her worries. For the longer Joanna stayed away, the larger her problems grew.

  When one day her mother rang and in conversation asked after Joanna, Anstey was sorely struck by a wish to know where Joanna was. 'She's away—on holiday,' she invented on the spur of the moment.

  'She's chosen some lovely weather for it,' Mrs Eldridge commented humorously. 'It's done nothing but rain this past month!'

  'You haven't seen anything of her, then?'

  'Whatever made you think she might ever return to Long Kinnington ?' Anstey's mother asked in astonishment. 'It was the best day's work Joanna ever did when she packed her bags and, vowing never to return, got permanently away from her vile, self-righteous stepfather. Even if,' she added, 'I was more worried at the time that you decided to shake the dust of Long Kinnington off your boots to go to London with her.'

  'I… You never said!' Anstey exclaimed. At nineteen she had thought it a marvellous idea to leave the village of her birth and try her wings in London. She had been so excited she had barely paused to consider that her parents might be upset that she wanted to leave her happy and comfortable home.

  'Your father said not to raise any objection,' her mother replied. 'He said it was time to allow you to let go of the apron strings, and reminded me that—apart from the times when Jo used to disappear for weeks on end—the two of you had always been inseparable. He said he couldn't see how I'd ever thought that, when Joanna made that final break, you wouldn't want to go with her.'

  'He's pretty smart, that father of mine,' Anstey said affectionately, reminded that in the old days it would be weeks before Joanna turned up to face the music.

  'Why aren't you with Joanna this time?' Mrs Eldridge asked. 'I thought the two of you always spent your holidays together.'

  'We're busy at work,' said Anstey off the top of her head.

  'They can't spare you both away at the same time, I suppose,' her mother observed, aware that she and Joanna had worked for the same company, but unaware that Joanna had left some months previously. 'Talking of holidays,' she went on drily, 'you do know that you don't need a passport to pay a visit to Long Kinnington?'

  Smitten with guilt that she hadn't paid her parents a visit since Rosie was born, Anstey excused, 'It's a bit hectic my way of the world just now,' that statement not covering a quarter of it.

  'Well, don't let them work you too hard,' her mother replied, seeming to believe that she was putting in hours of overtime.

  'I won't,' said Anstey, with more guilt on her conscience.

  She came away from the phone, realising that she must have been supremely optimistic to think Joanna would be back within a few days. Even without her mother reminding her of her friend's track record, Joanna herself had said that the way she felt she would need a year to think Lester out of her system. True, it had been said half in jest, but, remembering how heart-and-soul in love Joanna had been, Anstey could only hope and pray that it wouldn't take that long.

  Joanna had been gone three weeks when calamity struck. Anstey hurried home from her office, thanking her lucky stars for Hazel. The rate Rosie was growing she would very soon need a new three of everything in a larger size, but with the cost of baby clothes so prohibitive, it made employing the services of a professional baby-minder way beyond her means.

  Wondering when, if ever, she would be able to pay a baby-minder, Anstey turned into the street where she lived. She was just musing that by the time she had got herself straight Rosie would no doubt need yet another larger size in clothes when she suddenly stopped dead.

  That was Kenneth's car! Oh, lord, the unthinkable had happened—he had arrived home early! Fearing to upset the arrangement, she had not asked Hazel if she had told her husband that she was looking after Rosie during the day. But as she neared the outside door, Anstey knew in her bones that he had been kept in ignorance.

  Sensing trouble, she squared her shoulders as she entered the building. Her senses had not played her false, she discovered when she knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat. Kenneth—a near apoplectic Kenneth—violently pulled back the door, to let forth hot and strong. The gist of it all, as Anstey looked past him to a tearful-looking Hazel who held Rosie in protective fashion, was that he had never come across such blankety-blank underhandedness, and that first thing tomorrow he was going to report the brat's presence to their landlord.

  'I'm—sorry,' Hazel whispered as she handed Rosie over. 'I w…'

  'You're sorry!' Kenneth shouted, his face livid.

  Anything else he had to say was mercifully shortened by Rosie, who in her tender lifetime had taken it upon herself to believe that when it came to yelling, yelling was her prerogative, and promptly gave forth. Anstey thought it politic to take her upstairs.

  With her monthly income more vital than ever, Anstey was forced to ring her boss the next day to ask if she could take the remainder of her holiday entitlement.

  'I've noticed of late that your mind doesn't appear to be with your job,' Mr Sallis replied, disgruntled. 'You do wish to continue to work for this company?' he asked pointedly, more interested in profit than in taking into account the four years she had put in with the firm.

  'Of course,' Anstey answered, and although it went against the grain, because she needed the income more than she wished to stay in his employ, she tended a placatory, 'It's just that I've a few—domestic problems, at the moment.'

  'Let us both hope that your domestic problems are soon resolved,' he replied, with underlying threat.

  Anstey rarely lost her temper, but, 'Men!' she fumed as she put down the phone. Rebelliously, she lumped all men together—her boss with his pound-of-flesh mentality, Lester Quartermaine with his careless regard for his own child, and Frank Wyatt, Joanna's beastly stepfather, who made it impossible for either her or Joanna to ask for help from home.

  There was no sign of rebellion in Anstey the following morning when, if she had not done so already, she discovered that troubles never came singly. The postman delivered an electricity bill of such enormous proportions that she just could not believe it. Nor, she realised a short time later, could she pay it. Her spirits were flattened, and for a while all she could do was to stare at the demand and ponder on the possibility of some mistake having been made.

  She surfaced later to realise that, since this summer had to be the wettest summer on record, and with it being essential that Rosie's bedding and clothing were daily washed, dried and aired, mammoth quantities of manufactured heat had been gobbled up. Added to that, it was important, according to the baby books she'd read, that if a baby were to flourish, the surrounding temperature must be maintained at a constant level. Where she and Joanna might only switch on the heating if the evening turned chilly, since the arrival of Rosie, the heating had never been turned off!

  By nightfall Anstey was at her wits' end. Certain that yesterday Kenneth would have reported a baby in residence in the first-floor flat, she reckoned that all she needed now was to receive an eviction notice in tomorrow's post.

  A stiffness in her left arm brought Anstey to an awareness that she had drifted off into a brown study of all that had happened, and that she had been sitting with Rosie crooked in her left arm for ages.

  Rosie whimpered as she adjusted her position, but did not awaken. What did awaken, though, was something in Anstey. She had experienced a flicker of anger, of rebellion, two days before. But, as she looked down at the defenceless and totally dependent bundle in her arms, the slow fuse of her anger was ignited. Alight suddenly, that flame would not dim until she had taken some positive action.

  She and Joanna thought alike in many ways, and they both had a high degree of pride. But while Anstey went along with her when Joanna's pride had decreed that her stepfather should not know the smallest cause to crow, 'I knew it, I said you'd come to a bad end,' Anstey discovered that pride concerning Lester Quartermaine was another matter.

  Knowing her friend well, she was aware that when Joanna had got herself sorted out, her pride would see her wanting nothing from Lester for the child he had disowned. But he was the child's father, and—dammit—enough was enough. The least he could do was to pay something towards his child's upkeep.

  Fear of waking Rosie prevented Anstey from going to the telephone right there and then. And when Rosie was awake she cried solidly until she had been fed. When finally she was settled in her cot, it was too late to ring Lester. But rebellion took a firmer and firmer hold when, through the night, between snatched hours of sleep, Anstey walked the floor with the baby.

  She rang Lester Quarter Maine's number early the next morning, but did not get any reply. Twice that day she went with Rosie to his address. He was not in. On the second occasion, she pushed a note through his letterbox asking him to phone her urgently.

  The only use her phone had that evening was when she dialled his number, for Lester never rang her.

  During her floor-walking excursions that night, Anstey racked her brains to try to remember if Joanna had said where Lester now worked. She was made more angry by the fact that he had ignored her urgent note, and that made her more determined to contact him, even if it meant she had to ring him at his place of work.

  Although she couldn't remember where he worked, she could remember many other things about him. Thinking back, recalling how she had quite liked him until he had treated Joanna so shabbily, Anstey remembered that he hadn't had it too easy just lately either. When his elder brother had so heartlessly got rid of him during some rationalisation scheme or other at Quartermaine Holdings, Lester had set up his own business. That business had folded before Lester had it off the ground. Even his mother had taken against him over something at one time, Anstey recalled Joanna once telling her. Although, since Cale was his mother's favourite, Lester probably wasn't given as much rope as his brother.

  Realising that she was starting to feel sorry for Lester, Anstey hardened her heart. Feeling sorry for him was not going to help pay the electricity bill, nor assist in paying for the services of a baby-minder.

  On Monday, Anstey's rebellion was spurred on by a letter from her landlord. 'Thank you, Kenneth,' she muttered, as she read how it had come to her landlord's ears that the flat now housed a baby. The letter sternly reminded her of the terms of her lease, and politely asked for her comments.

  At nine o'clock she rang Elton Diesel and by then cared not if she had to lie her head off as she told Mr Sallis that she had gone down with flu. Under the pretext of a coughing bout, she rang off before he could request that she supply him with a note from her doctor.

  With a week of the same trauma stretching before her— with no positive action having been taken—Anstey sat down to think. Figuratively speaking, she had worn her finger out dialling Lester's number, all to no avail, for he was never in. Nor had she been able to come up with the name of the firm he worked for. The prospect of having to ring Elton Diesel again next Monday with the invention of some fresh ailment was enough to make Anstey think hard.

  Within fifteen minutes, her pretty chin set at a stubborn angle, she knew just what she was going to do. To seek help from her family, or Joanna's family, was definitely out. But—what about Lester's family ? Confound it, Rosie was a Quartermaine—let them jolly well help!

  Two minutes later she was on the line to Quartermaine Holdings. 'I'd like to speak to Mr Quartermaine, please,' she requested.

  'Ringing for you.' Anstey grew hopeful.

  'Mr Quarter Maine's secretary,' said a different voice.

  'Oh, good morning,' said Anstey brightly. 'I'd like to speak with Mr Quartermaine.'

  She came away from the phone of the view that it would be easier to get to speak to the Russian premier than to get past Cale Quarter Maine's secretary. Her call had been efficiently, if politely, blocked. Even her, 'It's a very personal matter,' had not got her past the charming but steel-plated Miss Impney.

  'If you'd like to leave your name, address and telephone number, I'll advise Mr Quartermaine of your wish to contact him most urgently,' Miss Impney had replied when, refusing to give more details, Anstey had told her that the matter was most urgent.

  Half an hour later, sitting waiting for the phone to ring, Anstey began to seethe that Cale Quartermaine had not rung back. She was starting to grow angry at being treated as if she was just one of a long line of females who regularly rang him under the guise of their business with him being very personal and most urgent, and an hour later her fury peaked.

  At twelve-thirty, with Rosie in her arms, she entered the plush offices of Quartermaine Holdings. There were two receptionists on duty, but both were engaged with immaculately attired callers. Anstey went smartly to the lift. She pressed any button at random, and the lift reacted. Stepping out at the fifth floor, she adopted a lost look and addressed the first person she saw.

  'I was directed to Mr Quarter Maine's office, but…'

  'You want the top floor,' answered the greying-haired lady, who appeared more interested in smiling at Rosie than in wondering what their business was.

  Anstey thanked her, and stepped back into the lift. There was no one to be seen on the top floor, but it was a small matter to open any one of the doors in the corridor and to pop her head round.

  'Mr Quarter Maine's office?' she queried of the busy-looking executive who looked up.

  'Last door on the right.'

  'Thank you,' she smiled.

  The last door on the right yielded an office occupied not by the male she had hoped to see, but a fortyish person of the female gender.

  'Miss Impney?' Anstey enquired.

  'How can I help you?' asked Miss Impney, warily eyeing the baby in Anstey's arms as if she considered her a time-bomb.

  'I…' It was as far as she got. Used to admiration from any and every passer-by, Rosie took a dislike to being inspected in such an adverse manner, and suddenly took it into her head to tell the whole world of her existence.

  'My goodness!' Miss Impney exclaimed above the din. 'How can such a tiny being create so much noise?'

  'She gets lots of practice,' Anstey replied drily, and had bent her head to try to quieten the infant when the sudden sound of the other door in the room being angrily thrust open caused her to look up.

  An all too obviously irritated man strode into the room, halting when he saw them to demand, 'What the hell's going on?'

  Hearing a voice louder than hers caused Rosie to stop yelling for a few seconds. In those few seconds Anstey knew that, quite definitely, this was the man she was here to see. Even though this man was the entire opposite of Lester in every way—tall where Lester was stocky, dark-haired where Lester was fair, grey-eyed where Lester's were blue—she just knew that this authoritative-looking man was Lester's brother. The biggest difference between them was that, whereas Lester's mouth held a trace of weakness, in this man's firm and well-shaped mouth, of weakness Anstey could see no sign.

  Lester had said that his brother was seven years older than himself, which would make Cale Quartermaine thirty-seven. Suddenly though, as cold grey eyes pierced hers, and she realised that he was waiting, none too patiently, for an answer to his question of 'What the hell's going on?' Anstey decided that it had been folly to spend some of her precious resources on a taxi ride across London. She could have saved herself the expense, because she was going to get no help from Cale Quartermaine—she knew that before she started.