Jessica Hart - Juggling Briefcase & Baby

Freya loved to sit on his lap at the piano while Romy tidied up the worst of the mess. Lex was stiff with her at first, but Freya was irresistible when she put her mind to it. Romy wondered if Lex realised how much he had changed. She liked to listen to him talking to Freya. He made no concessions to the fact that she was a baby, but talked to her as if she were an adult.

‘That’s F sharp,’ he would say, pressing a key. ‘And this one here is E. Now listen to this chord… And then if I do this, see what happens…’

Conversation wasn’t a problem when Freya was around, but there was always a pool of silence once she was in bed. Occasionally Lex had some function to go to, but, if not, Romy usually prepared a meal for them to share.

‘You don’t need to cook for me,’ Lex had protested, but Romy didn’t like the prepared meals he was happy to cook straight from the freezer.

‘I’m cooking for Freya anyway,’ she said. ‘Besides, I enjoy it.’

It was true, and it gave her something to do in the evenings. Something that wasn’t remembering how sure, how warm, his hands had been. That wasn’t reliving that night at Duncardie. Something that wasn’t wishing that she had said yes instead of no, so that she could stand behind him and massage the tension from his neck and shoulders. If she could do that, she could press her mouth to his throat, trail kisses along his jaw until he turned his head to meet her lips with his own, let him pull her down onto his lap…

No, cooking was a much safer option.

AFTERWARDS she would pretend to read while Lex worked, but what Romy liked best was when he sat at the piano and forgot that she was there at all. During the day, he held himself rigid and guarded, shutting out the rest of the world, but at a piano his whole body seemed to relax and he swayed instinctively with the music while his fingers drew magic from the keys.

Her book would fall unheeded into her lap, and she would tip her head back and close her eyes. Romy had never had much of a feeling for music before, but when Lex played it felt as if he were strumming a chord deep inside her, and an intense feeling swelled in her chest and closed her throat.

‘You should play professionally,’ she said to him one night when he paused.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Lex. ‘And I don’t have time. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got a company to run.’

On the sofa, Romy tipped her head right back on the cushions until she could see him behind her. ‘You could let Phin run the company.’

‘Phin?’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Phin would give away all our assets and spend all our profits on staff development!’ He was only half joking. ‘Gibson & Grieve would never recover!’

‘He’s not as irresponsible as you think he is,’ said Romy, leaping to the defence of her old friend. She and Phin had been close long before she had thought of Lex as anything more than Phin’s intimidating older brother. ‘Everyone I know thinks very highly of him.’

‘Of course they do. Everyone likes Phin.’ Resentment he hadn’t even known he felt splintered Lex’s voice. ‘He’s one of the most successful people I know. He goes his own sweet way, and because he makes people laugh, he gets away with it.

‘Our father wanted him to join Gibson & Grieve when he left university, but you didn’t catch Phin knuckling down and doing what he was supposed to do. Oh, no, Phin was off, drifting around the world, doing exactly what he wanted to do! He never cared about responsibility or the family or putting something back into the company that had paid for everything he had.’

Romy twisted right round so that she could look at him over the back of the sofa. ‘Is that what you’ve been doing all these years?’

‘Someone had to.’ Lex closed the piano lid. ‘I was the eldest. I suppose it was inevitable that I was expected to be the sensible one. Phin just clapped me on the shoulder, told me not to let it get me down, and took off.’ His mouth twisted in a humourless smile at the memory. ‘My parents were beside themselves, but Phin didn’t care.’

‘He came back when your father had a stroke.’

‘Yes, he did. He’s the golden boy now that he’s married Summer and settled down. Talk about the prodigal son!’

‘You sound like you resent him,’ said Romy carefully.

‘I do, don’t I?’ Lex got to his feet and prowled over to the long, glass wall. He could see the lights along the Embankment and the dull gleam of the river.

‘I think I envy him more than resent him,’ he said at length. Everything seems to come easily to Phin. He’s never cared half as much about our father’s opinion as I do, but he’s got his approval by doing exactly what he wanted.’

He turned back to face Romy. ‘And I’ll admit, he hasn’t been quite such a disaster as a director as I feared he would be. Mind you, I think that’s mostly down to Summer. Marrying her was the most sensible thing Phin ever did. But he hasn’t got the dedication to run Gibson & Grieve, even if he wanted to.’

‘There must be other directors who could take over as Chief Executive,’ Romy pointed out. ‘It’s not as if you need the money.’

‘It’s not about money,’ he said curtly.

‘Then what is it about?’

Lex hunched a shoulder, wishing Romy would stop asking awkward questions. ‘It’s about my career. It’s what I do. What I’ve always done. What I am. If you think I’ve spent my life wishing I could have been a musician instead of going into the family firm, forget it. Music is just…an escape.’

Romy looked up at him with her great dark eyes. ‘Escape from what?’ she asked softly.

Lex didn’t answer immediately. He went back to the piano, laid his hand on the smooth mahogany. Even silent, he could feeling the piano’s power strumming through the wood, calling to something inside him.

‘We all make choices,’ he said finally. ‘I made mine, and I don’t regret it. Do you regret any of the choices you’ve made?’

Romy thought about hot wind soughing through palm trees. About desert skies and coral reefs and drinking beer at a roadside warung while the tropical rain thundered down. And then she thought about Freya and the friends she had made at Gibson & Grieve and this crazy pretence she and Lex were engaged in. She had chosen them all.

‘No,’ she said in low voice. ‘The only choices I regret are the ones that were made for me. I wasn’t allowed to choose whether my father stayed or not, and nor was my mother. We just had to live with the consequences of a choice he had made.’

She looked at Lex, still smoothing his hand absently over the piano. ‘I learnt from that,’ she said. ‘I learnt to never give anyone else the power to make a choice for me, and I never will.’

Freya was crying again. Lex squinted at the digital display on the clock by his bed. Three seventeen.

She had been restless the night before as well. Teething, Romy had said. This was the fifth time he had heard Romy get up tonight, and Lex couldn’t stand it any more. Pulling on a pair of trousers, he went to see if he could help.

Romy was walking Freya around the living room, just as he had done the night she had gone out to celebrate with the acquisitions team. She was barefoot, and wearing a paisley-patterned silk dressing gown that she had bought from a charity shop. The merest glimpse of it was usually enough to make Lex’s body tighten with anticipation, imagining the slippery silk against her skin, but tonight it was a mark of how exhausted Romy looked that his first thought was not what it would be like to pull at the belt and let the dressing gown slither from her shoulders, but to wonder how best he could help her.

He rubbed a tired hand over his face. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

Romy felt as if there were lead weights attached to her eyelids. The effort of putting one foot in front of another was like wading through treacle. And yet it seemed there were enough hormones still alert enough to stir at the sight of Lex’s lean, muscled body. His hair was rumpled, his jaw prickled with stubble, and the pale eyes shadowed with concern. She must look even worse than she felt, Romy realised. And that was saying something.

‘I’m sorry-’ she started but Lex interrupted her.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘Just tell me how I can help.’ He moved closer, craning his neck to try and see Freya’s face. ‘What’s the matter? Are you sure she’s not sickening for anything?’

‘No, she’s just miserable with this tooth coming through. And I’m just miserable because I’ve got to go to Windsor for a meeting tomorrow with Tim,’ she added wryly. ‘Although I’m not sure how much use I’ll be. I’ll be lucky if I can string two words together.’

A frown touched Lex’s eyes. ‘In that case, why don’t you let me take her while you try and get some sleep?’

Romy’s body was craving sleep. The need to lie down and close her eyes was so strong that, instead of insisting that she could manage on her own as she would normally have done, she said only, ‘But what about you?’

‘I haven’t got anything urgent on tomorrow-or today, I should say.’ Lex jerked his head in the direction of her room. ‘Go on, go back to bed. You won’t be any good to Gibson & Grieve otherwise,’ he said gruffly. ‘If I can’t manage, I’ll wake you, I promise.’

To Romy’s surprise, Freya allowed herself to be handed over to Lex without a murmur. She subsided, sniffling, into his bare shoulder, and for one appalling moment Romy actually found herself thinking, Lucky Freya. She must be more tired than she thought she was.

She managed four hours’ sleep and felt almost human when she woke. Freya was quieter than normal, but she seemed better, so in the end Romy decided to leave her in the crèche and headed off to Windsor with Tim. They were due back by four. Freya ought to be OK until then, she tried to reassure herself.