Marion Lennox: Their Baby Bargain

‘It’s no great shakes,’ he said. ‘I can afford it. Just as long as none of you cause me any bother.’

‘And if we do?’

‘Then I’m out of here.’ His grin deepened. ‘I will be anyway. Emotional attachment is not my style. I’ll get the legalities all drawn up and then I’ll leave.’

‘Just as long as the house is liveable.’

‘It will be.’

It wasn’t.

The house hadn’t been entered for twenty years. It was like turning back a time machine, Wendy thought wonderingly. With Gabbie still pressed by her side she walked from room to room. Luke walked beside her carrying Grace, and he didn’t speak either.

The house was ghostlike. Windows had been broken and boarded up. Furniture was covered with dustsheets, and cobwebs hung in vast nets draped from the ceiling. Underneath it all, the house was big and gracious and old, and the furniture was of quality, but the curtains had disappeared into moth-eaten shreds, the carpets were threadbare and the dust lay in blankets over everything. Wendy’s nose wanted to sneeze the minute Luke opened the door.

They walked from room to room in stunned silence. It was a piece of history that time had forgotten, and its ambience almost overwhelmed her. How much more must it stun Luke, Wendy thought, when the house was full of memories-of how it had been when he’d been a boy?

There were photographs everywhere, and most of them were of Luke. There were frames of Luke as a baby, looking just like Grace. A cobwebbed portrait hung on the wall-it surely must be Luke as a chubby toddler, grinning from his mother’s knee. The woman who held him, even then, showed weariness, defeat and traces of illness on her face, and Wendy found herself wondering how she’d died.

There were more. She lifted a frame from a carved side table and blew away the dust, and there was Luke at about five years old. He was standing between an elderly couple and they were holding his hands with pride. Even covered with dust, the love shone through.

No wonder Luke had kept this place, Wendy thought. No wonder he’d instinctively brought Grace here. He might have been packed off to boarding school, but here, even dust-coated and tattered, this place had been his home.

And maybe it still was. She glanced sideways and caught the look that flashed across his face-and it was a look of raw pain.

‘Apart from the dustsheets and window boarding, it’s hardly been touched since they took my grandmother to hospital,’ Luke said at last. He was speaking in a hushed whisper-it was that sort of place.

‘It must have been a beautiful home.’

‘As you said, though,’ he said sadly, ‘it’s uninhabitable now.’

‘Not quite.’ Wendy braced her shoulders and looked down at Gabbie. ‘We like a challenge, don’t we, Gabbie?’

‘Is this where we’re going to live?’ Gabbie asked in a quavering voice and Wendy picked her up and hugged her close.

‘Yes. Absolutely. And it’s going to be the best home that girls like us could ever ask for. Underneath all this dust it’s beeyootiful! ’

‘We need to stay at a hotel tonight,’ Luke said doubtfully. ‘Maybe if we put in a team of cleaners and carpenters…’ He could see his trip to America being postponed indefinitely. Damn, this had seemed such a good idea. But now…

Wendy was shaking her head. ‘No. This is fine-better than I thought it might be. We don’t need to move any more. Gabbie spends her life moving, don’t you, Gabbie? If this is home, then it’s home from now on.’

She walked over to the window-they were standing in what must be the formal living room-grabbed a board from the window and pulled. The board broke free, a rush of warm salt air flowed into the musty room and outside she could see…

‘The sea!’ Wendy said exultantly. ‘Look, Gabbie, the sea!’ Beyond the wide, gracious veranda, across a paddock where Hereford cattle gazed in placid contentment under the shady gums, lay the sea. From here it looked as if there was a sandy beach, maybe even safe for swimming. It looked-wonderful!

‘The sea, the sea, the sea!’ Wendy lifted Gabbie and swung her round and round, delight shining from her eyes. She wasn’t sure how this had happened, but this was a dream! ‘We’re going to love living by the sea, Gabbie, love. Any time your mum doesn’t want you, then you’ll live here with me. By the sea. In this house which is going to be the most wonderful place on God’s earth.’

Then she set Gabbie firmly down, fixed her with a grin, hauled up her sleeves and turned to eye Luke with a speculative gleam.

‘All it needs is work.’

‘Hey, I’m a futures broker,’ Luke said in an alarmed voice, seeing the thoughts running riot behind the gleam. ‘I’m not a cleaner.’

‘And I’m a social worker, and Gabbie is a five-year-old ward of the state. But, as of now, we’re all of us cleaners. Needs must, Mr Grey. Gabbie, let’s choose you a bedroom first, and we’ll clean that out from stem to stern. Because Gabbie’s bedroom is the most important room in this house.’

‘Hey!’

‘Yes?’ Wendy raised her eyebrows politely at Luke. ‘You don’t agree?’

‘We can hire cleaners.’

‘Not tonight we can’t. We’re the cleaners. If you want us to make this a home, then you need to put some effort into it. Like now!’

‘I’m not dressed for it.’ He stared down at his leather jacket and immaculate trousers and Wendy grinned.

‘And you have lesser clothes at home? Go on, Luke Grey. Surprise me. Tell me you have old, paint-stained overalls in your garage-from all that odd jobbing you do at weekends.’

He had the grace to give a half-hearted smile. ‘Well, maybe not.’

‘So these clothes maybe aren’t your best clothes?’

He thought of his designer suits. ‘Hell, no.’

‘See, it could have been worse,’ she said cheerfully, arranging Grace’s carry-cot carefully in a dust-sheeted armchair and covering it with a shawl. ‘There you go. Your baby’s safe and sleeping, and it’s time for the rest of us to work. Gabbie’s room first.’

‘I thought…’ he was so stunned he could hardly get his voice to work ‘…the kitchen, maybe.’

‘We have children, Luke Grey,’ she said softly. ‘Get your priorities right. We need a fire-outside I think, because it’s my bet the chimney’s blocked and we need hot water. It’ll take a brave person to tackle that fire stove, and maybe I’m not the person to do it. At least not tonight. And if I’m not brave enough, I’m darned sure that you’re not. Bailing out to a hotel! Goodness, what a wimp! Right, Luke. Right, Gabbie. Let’s get this house habitable.’

If anyone had told Luke when he’d woken that morning that instead of flying to New York he’d spend the afternoon and evening on his knees with a scrubbing brush and a nose full of dust and cobwebs, he’d have told them they were dreaming.

But that’s just what was happening. Wendy didn’t let him off the hook for a minute. While Grace snoozed, she set them to work like there was no tomorrow and, with the wimp label ringing in his ears, he gritted his teeth and did it.

The room Gabbie chose was miniscule-a tiny boxroom added on to the end of the house. Its windows looked out over the ocean almost all the way to Hawaii, but that wasn’t why she’d chosen it.

‘You tell me where you’re sleeping,’ she’d demanded of Wendy, and Wendy had nodded and had carefully chosen the room with an adjoining door. To the boxroom…

‘We’ll be able to sleep with our doors open and talk,’ Gabbie had whispered and Luke had wondered not for the first time what was behind this little girl’s terror.

Not that he’d had time for much wondering. ‘We’re not going to bed until we have Gabbie’s room perfect,’ Wendy decreed, and while he scrubbed she was marching outside with linen and blankets and rugs and curtains to hang over the ancient clothes line. She armed Gabbie with a broom, she used a bigger one herself, and together they thumped them free of generations of dust.