Miranda's Big Mistake - Jill Mansell [34]
For a woman who wore Hush Puppies, Pamela Greening could certainly stomp her feet. Taking a deep breath, Chloe managed this time to fill the teapot. She was emptying the sugar bowl down the sink when the stomping grew louder. The floor began to quiver.
Oh, for heaven's sake, thought Chloe wearily, what now? It was like something out of Jurassic Park.
The split second before she turned round, she guessed. But since there was no chance of escape - not even through the tiny kitchen window, which would never accommodate her hips - she turned anyway.
Her mother was doing that Wyatt Earp thing again. Only this time she was clutching a copy of the paperback Chloe had been reading last night in bed.
Miriam Stoppard's Book of Pregnancy and Birth.
At that moment Chloe quite envied Greg. She wished she'd never given her mother this address.
`Oh yes.' Bracing herself, she mumbled, `I forgot to mention it. I'm expecting a baby.'
Pamela Greening's face went purple, then white, then purple again.
Finally she thundered, `Whose?'
It took Pamela no time at all to find out where her runaway son-in-law was now living.
Thirty seconds to look up the number of his insurance company in Chloe's Yellow Pages.
Another thirty seconds to learn that Greg had left the office early.
Forty-five seconds to inform his startled secretary that it was imperative - yes, imperative - she be given his new address. `I don't care what your company policy is. My name is Dr Blake and I'm calling from St Thomas's Hospital. I need to speak to Gregory Malone regarding a matter of extreme urgency.'
At the other end of the sitting room, cringing on the sofa, it occurred to Chloe that her mother had been watching too many episodes of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
When it came to intimidation, Patricia Routledge had nothing on her.
`There.' Pamela hung up the phone and stuck the address under her daughter's nose. `You could have done that.'
Chloe watched her grimly shove her arms back into her sensible navy mac.
`Oh no, you can't do this.'
`Watch me.'
`It'll just make things worse!'
The look her mother gave her was loaded with contempt. `You're pregnant. He's abandoned you. How much worse can it get?'
`He's not here.' Warily Adrian clutched the towel around his hips. He dimly remembered Chloe's ferocious mother
from the wedding, when she had told him in no uncertain terms to stop dancing on the tables.
`You mean he's hiding upstairs, too frightened to face me? Tell Gregory his motherin-law is here to see him and I'm not moving from this spot until I do.'
`But he isn't, I swear! You just missed him,' Adrian insisted. `He left five minutes ago. You can search the house if you like.'
Pamela Greening eyed the stranger before her with distaste. If Gregory wasn't there, she wasn't about to put herself at risk by entering a house with a naked man in it. `What time will he be back?'
This, Adrian thought fleetingly, rather depended on whether or not Greg got lucky with whoever he was seeing tonight. But since Chloe's battleaxe of a mother wasn't likely to appreciate this information, he said, `I don't know. Probably not too late.'
Just as well he was going out himself. He didn't envy Greg one bit.
Before leaving the house an hour later, Adrian wrote a note on the back of a gas bill and propped it up in full view on the kitchen table.
Poor Greg, the least he could do was warn him that his motherin-law was in town and on the loose.
At the end of the road, not taking any chances, Pamela Greening lurked behind a postbox. She watched Gregory's friend let himself out of the house and head up the road in the opposite direction.
No sign of Gregory.
She rang the doorbell again, to check. Still no reply. Never mind, she was in no hurry.
Grimly Pamela thought, I can wait.
It wasn't a terrible anticlimax. Miranda had been petrified it would be, but it wasn't. When she saw Greg climb out of his car outside the house - looking even more handsome than she'd remembered - she found