Roxy's Baby by Cathy MacPhail Read Free Book Online

Eight
    Mrs Dyce brought the tea in on a tray. On it were two mugs and a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar. ‘Getting to know our Anne Marie? That’s good.’ She laid the tray down on the table between the beds. ‘I’m going to have to leave you two girls. I’ve got so much to do. Anne Marie will bring you down to lunch.’ She adjusted a picture on the wall. Roxy had seen one like it before: a girl in a bar, staring out at them, her reflection behind her. Then Mrs Dyce smiled at them both and left. Roxy didn’t say a word until the two girls were alone again.
    â€˜How can they afford to do this?’ She was looking around at the fresh paint, the bright furniture. She bounced on the bed. ‘Good mattresses. How? Come on, they’ve got to have an angle.’
    Anne Marie shrugged and poured milk into her tea. ‘She’s very rich, I think. Or maybe he’s the one with the money. I don’t know. They haven’t got any children oftheir own. So this is how they spend their money. Are you complaining?’ Anne Marie suddenly sounded annoyed. Her face creased in a frown. ‘I don’t care how they afford it. They can go out robbing banks at the weekend for all I care. I just thank God, His holy mother and all the saints, that they
can
afford it.’
    Her face broke into a smile again. As if it wasn’t used to frowning. Smiling came as natural to Anne Marie as the moon at night.
    â€˜Won’t your parents be looking for you, Anne Marie?’ Wouldn’t they miss that smile, Roxy wondered, in their house every day?
    â€˜They won’t care tuppence, Roxy. Take my word for that. I’ll never go back there. Especially after he’s born.’ She patted her bump.
    â€˜Or she?’ Roxy said. ‘It could be a girl.’
    Anne Marie shook her head. ‘No, I know it’s a boy. I had a scan and they told me. Aidan, I’m going to call him. It’s a good name, isn’t it, Roxy?’
    â€˜It’s a lovely name, Anne Marie.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘They take you to the hospital to have your baby?’
    â€˜They don’t have to. We have everything we needhere at the house. There’s a delivery room too, in one of the wings.’ She waved a hand vaguely in another direction. ‘A doctor comes once a week to check us out, and we have our own resident nurse too. That’s Mrs Dyce. Oh, fair play to them, Roxy. They look after us awful well.’
    Too well, Roxy was thinking. Too good to be true. She was too afraid to relax in case this was some awful charade and suddenly the walls would tumble down, and there would be no yellow curtains, no beautiful grounds. There would only be her and Anne Marie caught in a dark menacing lie.
    Anne Marie’s giggling brought her out of her reverie. ‘Oh, Roxy, I can see already the type you are. Trusting nothing or no one. Just enjoy. Be grateful. You’ll feel better when you meet the rest of the girls at lunchtime. There’s only about a dozen of us. Most of them are foreign, can’t speak a word of English. It makes communication very difficult. There’s a couple of them you should stay well back from, but I’ll keep you right about them. But once you’ve met us all, and got to know us, you’ll see there’s no tricks, no mystery. We’ve just landed lucky.’
    The dining room was bustling with activity whenthey went downstairs. A couple of girls, dark-skinned, quiet girls, were laying tables. Another two were already sitting at their places reading magazines. Three were clattering about in the kitchen. All of them were in different stages of pregnancy. All of them, as far as Roxy could see, much further on in their pregnancy than she was.
    â€˜This is Roxy,’ Anne Marie called out without any warning to Roxy. ‘She’s only just arrived.’
    Roxy grabbed her arm. ‘You told them my real