7. THE MOTHER MANDY

A woman from Braxton's past has a baby...

Chantelle stared at him, her lovely eyes wide open and her face one big question mark. Had she heard this old, old man properly?

Then, after a moment, she said, “Say that again please, sir.”

That jolted him. Those were the very same words that Mandy had used when he’d asked the very same question. But the situation had been very different, very, very different. For a start they weren’t at his home but in the maternity hospital in Brumpton and Mandy was shrieking loud enough to waken the dead as her daughter emerged from the darkness of her womb into the light of life.

As she was at the peak of her sonic expressions of pain he took her by one hand and smiled soothingly at her.

“Will you marry me? Will you be the mother of my son?” he asked when it was clear she had produced a daughter and daughters still weren’t much good when it came to inheritance.

Back then there had been no way of determining the gender of an unborn child unless you used a dousing rod that had a particular vibration for a boy or hung a needle on a length of cotton and watched which way it swung. As no known method was actually totally reliable Braxton waited for certainty, and if it had been equipped with male genitals he would have claimed paternity and if it had been a daughter it would be a case of start all over again, this time with the preferred option of marriage to support any claim he might like to make.

She looked at him in disbelief.

When she recovered enough to actually reply to him, and that was with the daughter clamped securely to her breast, she glared angrily and asked him who he thought he was and why was he there anyway.

“I thought maybe...” he stammered, “it could have been mine, you know, that little wrinkled lump of a lass could quite easily be mine...”

“You think she’s got anything to do with you?” demanded Mandy. “Do you know the first thing about the facts of life? Have you any notion how babies are made and what a man has to do to claim that he’s … that he’s the father?”

He paused to think and then he nodded, but only slightly because he was aware that there could be glaring gaps in his knowledge. “Of course I know,” he murmured.

“Then it will have crossed your mind how long it’s been since you and I … since we … did it?” she demanded. “And if it helps you, I’ve had two periods since then! No, this little darling has a proper daddy and that’s the man I’m already married to, thank you very much!”

“You’re married?”

He hadn’t known but he was sure she’d been single in the summer last year when they’d gone to the coast for a couple of days and stayed in an unwelcoming Bed and Breakfast place as Mr and Mrs Jones. They were going to be Smith, but Mandy thought the name might be so common it could give the game away. So they were Jones, and unknown to them that name also suggested the actual truth.

Anyway, it was during that short holiday they’d slept together, and besides sleeping had made love just the once. But in Braxton’s mind just the once was sufficient for this baby to be born the best part of a year later. He might have been bright when it came to some things, but his understanding of human reproduction was sketchy, to say the least.

“You were away,” she spat at him, “so I couldn’t invite you, and if I had it would have been awkward, what with what we did in the B and B during last summer.”

“I was in Spain,” he mumbled.

“Sleeping with everyone who had a pulse I suppose,” was her sarcastic rejoinder, “and you’d better scarper before my Jim arrives and wonders who on Earth you are!”

“Jim?” he asked, vaguely, not properly understanding.

“My husband!” she explained to him briefly, “the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with and the undoubted father of my sweet little daughter. So go away, please, before I ring for help!”

And that had been that. He’d gone away, narrowly missing a collision with the anxious father and husband to Mandy who, he told himself bitterly, was the only woman he’d ever loved.

The two days at the coast (he’d have preferred a week or maybe even longer but Mandy, unlike him, had a job and could only manage the weekend) had been the highlight of his life thus far. She had been special, had Mandy, with her glowing red hair hanging free and the ready smile on her lips that were always shaped like a smile. And they had made love for ages that one time, taking their time, learning about each other as they explored the universe within themselves.

And when he learned, months later, that she was pregnant he automatically assumed that the child was his. He was about to be a father! His equipment worked! Every drop of semen produced by his precious gonads was like dew from the gods and he vowed there and then not to waste any of it from then on.

And he hadn’t. He’d been as good as his vow, which led to frustrations piling onto frustrations, but dew from the gods needed respect, and he respected it.

He’d asked Mandy to marry him, to father a son for him, but whilst he’d been enjoying the sun on the Costa Brava she’d gone behind his back and married Jim Nobody. He had to be that, a nobody because he, Braxton Spendthrift, was a somebody with keys to more bank vaults than he knew how to count.

And to his immense surprise, all these years later, he had Chantelle with him, the pretty, exquisitely pretty Chantelle whose blithe melodic voice cheered him up when he was in and she was walking by, was looking at him with almost exactly the same expression that had adorned Mandy’s face all those years ago.

He took the ornate key to his precious chest out of his pocket and held it up.

“Just you look her, young lady,” he said, “see what I can give you.”

He bent down and turned the key in the equally ornate lock and slowly, smiling at her, lifted the lid.

“What do you think of those beauties?” he asked.

Then he looked proudly back to the open chest.

It was empty. Absolutely, mind-bogglingly empty. There wasn’t a key in sight, but a scrap of paper had the words THANKS DAD scrawled on it.

© Peter Rogerson 06.12.19