‘Theo...’ Magenta cautioned. Getting into Andreas’s car was the last thing she wanted to do.
‘You bet it does!’ Andreas promised. While the child was looking excitedly towards the Mercedes he said to Magenta, ‘May I?’
She nodded in response to his gesture to lift Theo off the pony, and yet he still enquired of his son, ‘Would you like a hoist out of that saddle, little man?’
‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ Theo exclaimed again.
Watching the gentle way in which Andreas lifted their son down from the pony, and seeing the two of them together at last, Magenta felt as though her heart was being squeezed.
‘It suits you,’ she whispered, racked by emotion, but earned herself only a ravaged look from him before he set Theo safely down on his feet.
The stable girl had come back and was taking the reins from Magenta.
‘You’re both coming home with me,’ Andreas told her as the girl led the pony back to its stall.
‘I can’t. Aunt Josie’s cooking lunch for us,’ she said, grabbing Theo by the hand as another, larger horse was being led into the yard.
It sounded a lame excuse after he had just cancelled what was doubtless an important meeting, having found out he was a father. She knew, though, that he would demand to know why she hadn’t told him he had a son, and she didn’t feel like explaining—especially when the fear that had kept her silent when she’d first found out she was pregnant, and again more recently, was still as rampant in her as it had ever been.
‘What’s wrong, Magenta? Afraid to be alone with me?’ he suggested with an edge of steel in his voice, yet softly enough so that Theo couldn’t hear.
Well, she was, wasn’t she? she thought with a little shiver, but she said only, ‘Of course not.’
‘Then perhaps dear Aunt Josie won’t mind stretching lunch four ways,’ he proposed, the endearment mocked by his cynical tone. ‘After all, I think it’s time I met this paragon of virtue who had leave to look after my child when I wasn’t even allowed to know I had one.’
‘You were in America!’ Magenta exhaled, knowing it was yet another black mark against her in his long list of grievances.
His jaw was set rigid as they came up to the car. ‘Not two weeks ago!’
It didn’t help Magenta telling herself that she deserved his anger as he held the car door open for the little boy to scramble onto the back seat.
‘You’ve had him to yourself for five years,’ he rasped as she stepped into the car beside her son. ‘And if he really is mine then things are going to change. As of now!’
* * *
Josie Ashton was wearing her apron with a cheery fireside scene when she opened the front door of her modest home. A labourer’s cottage, with just two rooms up and two down, and the addition of a small bathroom on the back, it was one of a terrace of twelve homes fronting onto a street that had been built for the workforce of a nineteenth-century printing factory, which had since been pulled down to accommodate a more lucrative and modern trading estate at the end of the road.
‘Aunt Josie, this is Andreas Visconti,’ Magenta told her uncomfortably, conscious that Theo was still standing there looking up at him with a kind of hero-worship instead of rushing in and down the passage as he usually did.
‘Well, I didn’t think he was the window-cleaner,’ Josie expressed, with a grimace at the gleaming Mercedes that looked even more out of place parked outside her humble home than it had outside Magenta’s flat a couple of streets away.
‘Andreas, this is my great-aunt. Josie Ashton.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs Ashton,’ Andreas said, shaking her hand and taking her a little off-guard, Magenta realised, with his effortless charm.
‘And I suppose you’re hungry too.’
Josie Ashton never did stand on ceremony, Magenta thought, but from the glow that lit the woman’s face as she held the door open for them all Magenta could tell that her aunt had warmed instantly to Andreas Visconti.
The smell of roast chicken and parsnips met them as they stepped inside.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Ashton, and I do regret having to turn down your offer, but I have some pressing business to discuss with Magenta. I hope it won’t inconvenience you too much if I take her away for an hour or so?’
‘Not at all,’ Josie Ashton responded with obvious and increasing pleasure, unaware of the tension that was twisting Magenta’s stomach muscles into tight knots. ‘Take all the time you need, Andreas. It won’t be any trouble reheating her lunch.’
‘I’ll only be a little while,’ she told Theo, stroking his dark hair.