Chapter 5

Lyndsey drove over to Mason’s place, 25 Sycamore Gardens, using the Sat Nav in her Smart Car. She was expecting a block of apartments, not a short cul-de-sac of well-spaced out semi-detached family houses. She soon worked out where No 25 was. It had a neat lawn in front and a currently leafless deciduous tree in the middle of the lawn. To the right was a long drive leading up to an attached garage, which presumably contained his car. There were lights outside displaying occupancy inside. So she parked in the drive, got out of the car and, grasping her two bottles of sparkling red grape juice, marched up to the front door.

The door swung open as she approached.

“Come straight on in, it’s still pretty cold out there.”

“Hi Mason, nice house. Had it long?”

“About twenty years in all, but for most of that time it was rented out. I moved in about two years ago, when I got out of the Army.”

“Did you live here with Leone?”

“Not at first.” he said, “I better explain. Just let me sprinkle the cheese on top and pop these into the oven, then we can relax for a few minutes.”

Lyndsey watched as he placed two oval dishes, each with an individual portion of cottage pie, onto a baking sheet and popped it into a hot oven. Two more similar dishes sat on the side cooling until ready to freeze. The kitchen table was set for two, so she sat down at one of the chairs.

“When Leone and I got to know each other over a series of simple dates, the real reason for her computer dating came up. She was adopted by her parents when she was about six years old and was brought over here with them when she was about eight, so she had been here for about 20 years when we met. However, when she was in her early twenties, she tried to get a passport for a holiday in France, but was turned down because her adoption papers were only photocopies. She didn’t worry about it at the time, but just before I met her, she started getting letters from immigration threatening her with deportation.”

“So she wanted a marriage of convenience, and you offered to get her out of a fix?”

“I did. I had no-one else in my life and didn’t know or care too much about where our relationship was going, but it seemed a solution at the time. So I offered, she accepted, and we had a quick ceremony. I didn’t tell my parents otherwise they would have got the wrong idea.”

“And the baby?”

‘Ha! Right. Do you want some grape juice? The dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”

“Thank you.”

“Even after we married,” he said as he filled the glasses on the table, “the immigration interviews continued and Leone took in the marriage certificate, but they wanted to know more and more about our relationship, especially as, although we said we were cohabiting, she was still renting a flat and working in an office in Wendbury.”

“I thought she trained as a nurse?”

“It was her parents’ wish to be a nurse, not hers, she started a course when she was about 18 but soon dropped out and worked in general offices, mostly as a temp, so she has no qualifications. She had this idea of opening a shop making craft greetings cards to order, while manufacturing and shrink wrapping generic ones for retail sales. It was something she had been doing privately online for years. I had attended some web-designing classes ready for demob so I designed a new website for her and helped her get her shop underway with a £10k loan. I looked at a lot of shops and thought she needed a High Street presence. She trained up some housewives and young girls to work in the back of the shop and it seemed to take off, at least at first.”

“And that still didn’t satisfy immigration?”

“No. We had moved into this house, but not sleeping together as or relationship was, well, we didn’t have a relationship. But then she mentioned the baby. Which was a big question. I mean she was an attractive woman, but I didn’t feel any spark between us. We were going through the motions dating in case she was being followed and some of her clothes were kept in my room. Basically she was a lodger. Being 30, she started to tell me she wanted a baby, so she asked why not have one with her husband? So, we went for it. At first it was fairly mechanical but then I started to develop feelings, difficult not to, especially when she fell pregnant almost immediately and we started going to prenatal classes together. Immigration backed off, she said, we had the baby, Maisie was small and premature and we couldn’t get her home at first. Then, within hours of getting home, Leone disappeared, leaving me to bond with Maisie; she came home, I went shopping for essential supplies and when I got back they had both gone.”

“You look gorgeous honey, good enough to eat. How’s your new boy taking it, not being able to take his Cinderella to the Ball?” Sir Alan chuckled.

His daughter really did look good in a sky blue and silver shimmery cocktail dress that she looked as though she had been poured into; he thought it brought out the colour of her eyes perfectly, while her blond hair piled up as it was made her neck look poised and graceful, graced with a tiny string of pearls that Sir Alan recognized were once her mother’s.

“Oh, he’s out running for an hour, then he’ll shower and get ready for the weekend; we are visiting his mother for lunch on Sunday. He is also celebrating receiving his Decree absolute on his own by doing some painting.”