Whiteout - Ken Follett [154]
Tom was not really a little boy anymore. He had grown two inches in the last six months, and he had stopped telling his mother everything. It made her sad. For twelve years she had been all in all to him. He would continue to be dependent on her for a few more years, but the separation was beginning.
She left the boys and went to the next hut. Sophie was sharing it with Caroline, but Caroline had already left and Sophie was alone. She stood at her wardrobe in her underwear, choosing a dress. Miranda saw with disapproval that she was wearing a sexy black half-bra and matching thong panties. “Has your mother seen that outfit?” Miranda said.
“She lets me wear what I like,” Sophie said sulkily.
Miranda sat on a chair. “Come here, I want to talk to you.”
Reluctantly, Sophie sat on the bed. She crossed her legs and looked away.
“I’d really prefer your mother to say this but, as she’s not here, I’ll have to.”
“Say what?”
“I think you’re too young to have sexual intercourse. You’re fifteen. Craig is only sixteen.”
“He’s nearly seventeen.”
“Nevertheless, what you’re doing is actually illegal.”
“Not in this country.”
Miranda had forgotten they were not in the UK. “Well, anyway, you’re too young.”
Sophie made a disgusted face and rolled up her eyes. “Oh, God.”
“I knew you’d be ungracious, but it had to be said,” Miranda persisted.
“Well, now you’ve said it,” Sophie rejoined rudely.
“However, I also know that I can’t force you to do what I say.”
Sophie looked surprised. She had not been expecting concessions.
Miranda took the package out of her evening bag. “So, if you decide to disobey me, I want you to use these condoms.” She handed them over.
Sophie took them wordlessly. Her face was a picture of astonishment.
Miranda stood up. “I don’t want you getting pregnant when you’re in my care.” She went to the door.
As she went out, she heard Sophie say, “Thanks.”
***
GRANDPA had reserved a private room in the hotel restaurant for the ten members of the Oxenford family. A waiter went around pouring champagne. Sophie was late. They waited a while for her, then Grandpa stood up, and they all went quiet. “There’s steak for dinner,” he said. “I ordered a turkey, but apparently it escaped.”
They all laughed.
He went on in a more somber tone. “We didn’t really have a Christmas last year, so I thought this one should be special.”
Miranda said, “And thank you for bringing us, Daddy.”
“The last twelve months have been the worst year of my life, and the best,” he went on. “None of us will ever completely get over what happened at Steepfall one year ago today.”
Craig looked at his father. He certainly would never recover. One eye was permanently half-closed, and the expression on his face was amiably blank. He often seemed just to tune out, nowadays.
Grandpa went on, “Had it not been for Toni, God alone knows how it would have ended.”
Craig glanced at Toni. She looked terrific, wearing a chestnut-brown silk dress that showed off her red hair. Grandpa was nuts about her. He must feel almost the same way I do about Sophie, Craig thought.
“Then we had to relive the nightmare twice more,” Grandpa said. “First with the police. By the way, Olga, why do they take statements that way? They ask you questions, and take down your answers; then they write out something that isn’t what you said, and is full of mistakes, and doesn’t sound like a human being at all, and they call it your statement.”
Olga said, “The prosecution likes things phrased a certain way.”
“ ‘I was proceeding in a westerly direction,’ and so on?”
“Yes.”
Grandpa shrugged. “Well, then we had to live it all over again during the trial, and we had to sit and listen to suggestions that somehow we were at fault for injuring people who had come into our house and attacked us and tied us up. Then we had to read the same stupid innuendoes in the newspapers.”
Craig would never forget it. Daisy’s advocate had tried to say that Craig had attempted