Chapter 11: Extended Family

I’m sure that Andi Smyth had always felt perfectly at home at The White House, my parents’ house. Her father Herbert Smyth, who had lived next door to my parents for nearly forty years, laid the foundations of his own considerable fortune as a senior manager in a merchant bank, before inheriting his father’s seat as an Underwriter Member at Lloyd’s of London as an insurance broker, mostly underwriting commercial shipping. Herbert later expanded into insuring National and larger commercial airlines and eventually into several specialist holiday companies and travel agents in general.

Andi’s two much older brothers also went into the banking sector, the merchant bank they joined being one that their father still had a financial interest in and they seemed to be doing well in their respective jobs although I personally had little contact with them. Andi was born a decade after her nearest brother and they were at school or Uni during her childhood so barely knew them and vice versa. Andi was also briefly drawn into the merchant banking sector but rather than mergers and acquisitions like her siblings, she headed up a team which concentrated on the international bond market and spent a lot of her time travelling to places foreign and negotiating the kind of loans that only countries or states could raise, or else refinancing deals where countries’ treasuries were unable to make the existing repayments or dividends on loans and threatened to default. Then, in her mid-twenties she turned her photography hobby into a new career as a fashion photographer. I think that the responsibilities of both her jobs had a huge bearing on her inability to carry on any romantic relationship long term.

Andi was extremely attractive and charming but I knew her very well and was therefore well aware of the hard core of ruthlessness that she swore by, masked by her alluring personality. She could charm but she could also bite and bite hard.

My parents had loved Andi from the very beginning and I’m sure that both sets of parents, the Singletons and Smyths, had hoped that we two would eventually form a romantic but also powerful partnership together. While I did love her dearly as a friend, I enjoyed her company and knew that we were honest, sometimes brutally honest with each other, this meant we were fiercely competitive and I never felt that we could compromise enough to live together harmoniously. Loving her as a friend who conversed weekly but only met half a dozen times a year, suited us both.

Now, having gate-crashed our little family gathering, Andi was as usual chatty and charming with Mum and Dad during which she virtually invited herself to have lunch with us.

I took the opportunity of my parents catching up with Andi, who had spent the summer in France, to take my leave of them and show Kay around the gardens, ostensively to show them off, to build up an appetite for lunch and to have a quiet word with the girl I had brought to the house. I think I detected a scowl from Andi as I gave my apologies and took Kay’s hand in mine, but maybe I was mistaken.

“Andi’s a piece of work, isn’t she?” Kay said with a hint of bitterness, soon after we left the parlour far enough along the passageway to be out of earshot, “she makes Godzilla seem like a baby bunny rabbit.”

I laughed out loud, stopped us in our tracks and took this lovely young girl in my arms before I kissed her long and hard, my arms around her pulling her tightly into me and she responded by squeezing me back. Our tongues tangled and tussled and I gradually released my hug and our lips parted with a mutual sigh.

“Lovely girl,” I said, “I was thinking along similar lines and was desperate to get away from Andi and surround myself with some refreshing sweetness and light.”

“So,” she said coyly, “she’s just your best friend and not a friend with benefits any more, is that right?”

“We did have history, Kay; I lost my virginity to her and she told me that she’d lost hers with me.”

“You’re not so sure?”

“On my part, yes, I’ll leave it at that. After our brief romance, we were friends with benefits without really going out publicly as boy/girl friends. We last made love when I was about 19 or 20, Kay my love, and that was a long time ago,” I said, “I do have some love for her, she is my oldest friend and we are still best friends who use each other as sounding boards. We still tell each other everything and, due to her travelling in her photography job I only see her half a dozen times a year, and those gaps are ever getting wider, but I do message her or she messages me more regularly, around every ten days or so on average and that initial message will set off a flurry of messages for the rest of the day. I know Andi so well that I am absolutely certain that I could never live with her as she always competitive and has to have the last word. Yes, we would drive each other absolutely round the bend. And I really was certain that she felt the same way about me, romantically, but...”

“But?” Kay asked.

“We are 30 seconds’ walk from the kitchen, boot room and the garden,” I said, after squeezing her again, “let’s get away from the house into the garden and I’ll get you up to date.”

“Okay, mister, but as soon as we’re in the clear and we’ve blue sky above us and no-one within earshot, you are spilling the beans!”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” I grinned, “we may be partners, but for the next few minutes I am at your command and will answer any and all questions.”

“So?” she started to ask as we walked quickly and arm in arm towards the kitchen, “does this mean that sometimes I’ll be the mistress in this relationship and sometimes you’ll be the master?”

“In any relationship of equals, if we are both equal to each other all the time, with no-one in charge at least until each separate decision is made, we may never decide anything, or the continual process of negotiation may end up boring each other or lead to what might become regretful or even resentful concessions. Let’s see where we go with each allowing the other a level of assertion and, if you don’t feel it works, then you take charge and decide what we should do instead. If one of us objects and we argue, well that’s no matter if we are respectful and reasonable about everything. And there’s always kissing and making up to look forward to.”

As we passed through the kitchen, I advised Ana that Andi was visiting and would join us for lunch. Ana answered that was fine, she had catered for plenty of leftovers for a later meal. I asked how long before lunch as Kay and I were going for a walk in the gardens and she gave us 45 minutes and no later.

The gardens are a glorious part of The White House and its estate. Most of the formal gardens were laid out a couple of hundred years ago and have only been modified a little over the years to make them a little less labour intensive, like installing pipes and sprinklers for watering; these are computer controlled based on a balance of timings and measured rainfall. It is a beautiful place to walk and I know that since she retired my mother has spent a lot of time out here, helped by a team of gardeners, some of whom had worked here for decades and had forebears as well as offspring who worked here.

I guided Kay over to a bench slightly set into a sharply clipped box hedge, which provided a little privacy and shelter from any wind. I sat down and pulled her onto my lap. I held her by her hips and she put her arms around my neck.

“Okay, Drew. Spill the beans, what did Andi say to you in the hallway and what did you say to her?”

“All right, I told her that you were right about my little medical problem when you spoke to her to prevent her entering the parlour on her arrival. I admitted that I have a minor op coming up that is so commonplace that almost every hospital in the country regularly carries out something similar probably every day of the year and with almost 100% success. Okay, she thinks I’m vaguely talking about bladder or bowel ops and accepted that I was too embarrassed to be specific about the general area other than ‘down there’. And, as it must be true that births by C-section are quite common and are generally very successful, so, though I may have misled her, I didn’t outright lie to her.”

“No, I think what you have said is reasonable,” Kay agreed, “and, if you ever need to tell you the truth you do have the trump card of keeping it secret for the sake of the babies.”

“I know I will have to tell her one day, we have too much history not to,” I agreed. “As for talking to my parents without being disturbed, I told Andi that I was making them aware of my circumstances purely between family members and that my running through my company financials etcetera was simply my quarter-yearly update to two of my favourite private investors, who happened to also be my parents. Then I mentioned to her that you were not the new housemaid that she thought you were but my girlfriend, a guest at my invitation, and that we were now sharing a household together and that we were even talking about having a family. And I also informed her that you were the woman I was in love with.”

“Oh,” Kay said very quietly, fidgeting on my lap and looking into my eyes with an even more doe-like look in her eyes. I looked back at her with a smile on my face. She continued just above a whisper, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that you said ‘that’ to anyone else, and the second time you’ve said the ‘love’ word to me Drew, and it is only first time you’ve said it to me when we were not in the middle of ... you know...”

“It is, and it is true. I love you and I should’ve said it to you earlier, as soon as I realised it myself, but I’ve said it now and I’m not taking it back.”

“Good.” She moved closer and kissed me very gently, I responded in like, just holding onto her hips with both hands. We kissed little butterfly kisses looking into each others eyes, sometimes licking each others lips gently, without penetration our tongues lightly meeting and noses gently rubbing, just smiling and exchanging sweet loving kisses, murmuring how much we love each other. Then she nipped my lower lip although also quite gently before pulling away a couple of inches until she could focus her eyes on my face.

“I told your Mum earlier that I loved you when we were in the dining room. I think she’d already worked that out for herself,” she whispered, “and, after she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, she told me to call her ‘Mum’ from then on. I know we haven’t known each other long, Drew, and circumstances have meant we have been in the middle of a state of turmoil ever since we first laid eyes on each other, but I am certain that I love you like no other man I’ve ever met and will do everything in my power to help you get through this ... this pregnancy. I want to be yours and I want you to be mine and I want your twins to be ours once this pregnancy ripens and hatches. But I’m also aware that there is a learning-about-each-other gap between us which I hope we can narrow down over the next few months.”

“Good. And later when we have time to sit down and talk, we will talk about developing our love more seriously. Anyway, I merely mentioned possibilities of my future family to Andi and she retorted that she too had seriously thought about settling down and having babies and she had settled on doing so with the only man in her life she had suddenly discovered she loved ... and then she told me that he was someone I knew but I couldn’t guess who it was and -”

“And then she said it was you,” Kay interrupted, “Andi, who has known you all her life, realises, as soon as she hears you’ve found someone, she was always in love with you.”

“Yes, indeed,” I replied, “although I didn’t get it that quickly and, when I asked who the guy was, she said ... me, well actually she said ‘you’, meaning me.”

“I know what you meant, honey,” Kay smiled, “so if I love you and you love me and we want your and our babies together, and now Andi says she also loves you and wants your babies, what happens now?”

“Well, number one, I better get you a ring on your finger and pretty damned quickly, then,” I grinned, “number two, make this loving relationship between the two of us official and announced to the world.”

“Well Drew, before you even think about getting a ring you’ve actually got to ask your intended the appropriate question and receive a positive response,” Kay pointed out, “and you better do it properly, you know, on your bended knee and everything.”

“Of course, Kay, you do need to be asked, and therefore I need to ask you that question now before we go back into the house. How about I go fetch my grandmother’s ring from my room here, and offer it to you after I propose properly?”

“You’ve really got a ring here with you, for me?” she asked, her mouth remained open.

“I have, not on me but I can lay my hands on it in a few moments. It is a ring that was given to me by my grandmother, expressly to give to my intended, I’ve had it a long time. Do you want to come with me to my room and see it?”

“This isn’t a line like, ‘come to my room and see my etchings’ is it Drew?”

“No, Kay not at all, as you know, you’ve been perfectly safe from any predatory notions on my part, in my bed, in my current bedroom for the last two nights until this morning, so what could possibly go wrong in my old bedroom here, with my parents sitting downstairs?” I laughed. “Or you could just wait here admiring my Mum’s wonderful garden tor two minutes while go I fetch it?”

“I thought you said that your grandmother was still alive?” Kay remembered an earlier conversation and asked doubtfully.

“My mother’s mother is indeed alive and in her late nineties and still going strong I’m pleased to say,” I replied,” and very soon you will be presented to her as my chosen bride. I think she may well also be keeping a few trinkets for you, in fact. But my father’s mother died about twenty years ago, when I was still at school, about 14 or 15, and she left me her engagement and wedding rings plus some other jewellery specifically listed in her Will for presenting to my future bride.”

“Oh ... look, I’m not sure if I could get my legs working at the moment, this is such an unexpected shock, I mean it was hoped for at some point in the future but now this wish is coming true I’m sure my legs are going to be a bit wobbly.”

I lifted her up off my lap, she was light as a feather. I plonked her back gently on the garden seat, arose and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll be two minutes, tops, my love.” And left her there while I ran all the way to my old bedroom.