A Father for Philip (3 page)

So Eleanor waved goodbye to her love the
next morning, smiling for him, saving her tears for later. He had written long
letters, for once there he had found that he must go far into the jungle for
more training. He would send for her in three months when that phase of his
training was completed. Just as his letters to her were full of love, so were
hers to him and it was with joy that she wrote of her pregnancy even though it
meant she was unable to travel just yet. She would be with him long before the
baby was due, but if he could just be patient until the morning sickness was
over...

And there was a great deal of morning
sickness, so much in fact that on the orders of Dr. Grimes, who’d delivered her
and been her physician all her life, George had no difficulty moving Eleanor
out of her small house and back to the farmhouse with him for the winter. “You
don’t even have a phone down there,” he’d said. It was true. David hadn’t
wanted one, saying they’d have a lot more privacy without one. If her dad
wanted to talk to them, he’d have to walk down the hill from the farmhouse.
Since she spent most of the day up there with him when David was at work,
anyway, it didn’t bother her, and she liked his insistence on maintaining their
life apart from her father as much as possible. The nights, after milking,
other farm chores and dinner, belonged just to the two of them.

It was there in the farmhouse kitchen
that she stood as her father, with a grave face, read her the telegram that
tore Eleanor’s world apart. David’s university professor in Ecuador was “sad to
inform” her, David was missing with three others somewhere in the jungle. A
search had been under way for more than a week, but little hope could be held
for the safe return of the party. He wished her, most inexplicably,
Feliz Navidad
.

At first she was inconsolable and her
father grew more and more desperate as he realized at last the depth of the
love his daughter had for the man who had wanted to take her from him. He tried
to console her by saying “the boy” would return, that it could take weeks to
travel only a short distance in the jungle, that all she had to do was have
hope.

Weeks passed with no word, then months,
and as the time for the birth of her baby approached, George recognized the
futility, not only to her, but to himself, of his preaching hope to the
heartsick woman. He gave up trying to bolster her. She must begin to forget
now, he told her, to live again for herself, for him, and for her unborn child.
Her man was dead, and the sooner she quit moping and weeping for someone she
could not bring back, the better would be for all of them.

Eleanor pulled her grief inside herself,
hid it away and got on with the business of becoming a mother. “You’re
recovering, I can see,” her father had said one day when he came across her
singing as she sewed clothes for her baby. “It’s for the best.”

“I know, Dad. I don’t want to endanger
David’s child.”

“
Your
child,” he’d replied, his tone firm. “I reared you alone. You can raise yours
the same way. You’ll be a better mother now you’ve accepted David’s death.”

What George did not know, however, was
that she had not accepted any such thing. His insistence that David was dead had
lit within her a small spark of defiance of the fates. The tiny seed of hope in
Eleanor’s heart had taken root, and grew daily into a strong healthy plant
which, in spite of all odds, refused to die.

Over the years, it stayed with her, day
and night from every summer into each succeeding winter and grew higher every
spring when the roses on the arbor spread their tendrils longer and farther. As
her roses grew, determined hope filled her soul. The sweet-scented climbing
roses eventually covered the entire structure as the wood grew gray with age
and weather.

Philip had been born on a gentle May
morning just as the sun rose. Dr. Grimes and a midwife, for the sake of the old
man more than the mother, who seem not to care, had agreed to deliver the child
at home, rather than in the hospital. The nurse looked down the face of the new
mother as she held her son for the first time. Tears ran down the pale cheeks
and the nurse had to mop them up, asking kindly if there were something Mrs.
Jefferson wanted. “I want to go home,” Eleanor had whispered.

The other woman had patted her
comfortingly. “What is this, if not your home?”

Eleanor had no choice but to agree. The
farmhouse was her home.

It took three years and a further
trauma, but not an unexpected one this time, for Eleanor to go home to her
small house with her son. The day she laid her father to rest she packed up her
belongings and Philip’s and carried them alone to the two-bedroom house David
had built for them. She rented the farm and the house to Bill Robbins. She’d
wanted only to hire him as a manager, but he wanted to be his own boss. That
attitude pleased her and she agreed, knowing him to be hard-working and honest,
and she truly had no interest herself in maintaining a dairy farm. She had a
toddler to raise.

Eleanor smiled, there in the dark rose
arbor, as she remembered when life had been so difficult and yet so simple.

Needing something to do, she’d returned
to an old hobby—writing children’s stories. Only this time, she intended to
make it more than just a pastime. She wanted not only to occupy her mind but to
earn money apart from the rent Bill paid her. If she’d relied on her writing
income for her living, though, she and Philip would surely have starved. It was
the income from the rental of the farm, plus the fact that most of her
foodstuffs were free, that had kept them going. Unfortunately, no one seemed
interested in what she had to offer. They were good stories. This, Eleanor
knew, yet she had been unable to find the one editor, the one firm of
publishers out in the thousands available, who would see the value in her work.
Then came Grant Appleton.

Grant... Short, fair-haired, stocky and
quick moving, a bulldog, a go-getter of a man, bought a seedy, rundown old
mote; and turned it, with great determination, into a prosperous resort hotel
by snapping up every available acre of land bordering it. With farming becoming
less and less profitable, many farmers found their grown children moving away
to make better lives for themselves and Grant cashed in on that trend. Marginal
lands could be removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve if a developer went
about it the right way, and Grant, apparently, did.

Apart from the main hotel, he’d built
what he advertised as honeymoon-cabins built in secluded cut-outs along narrow,
winding roads through the wooded grounds, put in an artificial lake with a
waterfall and meandering canals through the place, a massive swimming pool, a
smaller one with waterslides, riding stables, trails, and an excellent
restaurant.

This last was where Eleanor came in.

Grant appeared at the farm one day when
the tenant farmer were out. He came, instead, to the cottage. He wanted a
steady source of fresh fruits and vegetables in season, plus top quality dairy
products, and someone had pointed him this way. Could they provide them? They
could, and did, and Grant returned again and again.

Eleanor welcomed his friendly visits in
the evenings while her small son slept. She was, she had to admit, lonely, and
he did play a mean game of cribbage. Her tenant, Bill Robbins, had just married
at the time Grant came into her life, and she wanted to give him and his bride,
Kathy, the privacy she and David had cherished. Though they repeatedly offered
her and Philip meals and hospitality, Eleanor, more often than not, refused.
She remembered the time she’d had with David, remembered how short it had been,
and how much she had resented, in retrospect, having to share him.

Grant, while she was tending to Philip
one evening, picked up a few of the printouts she’d been correcting, and began
reading. “I like this,” he said when she returned to the living room. Though
she considered his snooping an invasion of privacy, she forgave him when he
added, “It’s really quite good, Ellie. Who have you sent it to, if anyone?”
Eleanor explained her inability to interest anyone in her ideas and Grant said,
“Let me send it to my brother. He’s publisher and editor of a house that puts
out a limited number of books for schools... Not texts, but supplementary
readers.”

And at last Eleanor had her break. Frank
Appleton, on Grant’s recommendation, had read her work, and Eleanor Bear, as
she called herself, was launched with a short adaptation of a British Columbia
First Nations legend, made suitable for and interesting to school children.

The main difficulty in her friendship
with Grant, right from the outset, had been his inability to get along with
Philip. He called Philip spoiled, which he was not. A crybaby, which he was
not. He frequently claimed that all the child needed was someone to teach him
to act like a man.

“What three-and-a-half-year-old child
needs to act like a man?” Eleanor had asked indignantly.

When Philip started kindergarten at the
age of five, Eleanor was left on her own all morning. Grant, who by then had the
hotel operating in such a manner that he could periodically leave it in the
capable hands of his managers, started trying to make her see him as more than
a casual friend.

“Ellie,” he said, “you’ve got to give up
on the guy. If he had been going to come back, he’d have done it years ago.
It’s no good hanging onto the past. I’m here. And I want you.”

She had to admit his kisses made her
feel warm and that a few mild twinges of what could be desires rose up when he
held her. She began accepting small gifts, lunch and dinner dates, and the odd
antiquing trek. It was easier to do so than to argue, but she would not accept
the ring he wanted to give her last Christmas.

“I can’t, Grant. I’m married,” she
pointed out gently.

“Then get unmarried!” he’d cried. “For
heaven’s sake, Ellie, neither of us is getting any younger. Grant was nearly
forty—she, twenty-six at the time. “And not only that, the kid needs a father.”

“I can’t get unmarried,” she replied,
taking no notice of the rest of his speech. “If you’re talking of divorce, I
have no grounds.”

“How about desertion?”

“Not good enough for me. I don’t know
that I’ve been deserted. There could be any number of reasons David hasn’t come
back.”

“Name one,” he’d challenged, his blue
eyes filled with anger.

“Amnesia?”

“Pfft!” he scoffed. “If he’s alive,
which I doubt, he’s made a new life for himself somewhere. You need to do the
same.”

“I don’t choose to, Grant.” And that,
she knew, was the crux of the matter. She kept David alive in her heart, her mind,
because she chose to. Maybe if someone had come along and she’d felt more for
him than she did for Grant, she’d give up what she admitted privately was
surely a futile hope. But no one had..

He rammed a blunt-fingered hand into his
blond hair, sending the usually firmly controlled waves into disarray. “Dammit,
I want to marry you, Ellie!” He shook her by the shoulders in his rage and
frustration. “Let the past go!”

“I can’t marry you or anyone,” she
argued, wrenching herself out of his ungentle grasp, “while I have a husband.”

“He’s dead.”

“Maybe... But my heart tells me he’s
not. The law says I must wait seven years to be sure.” That law could be
overridden if there was adequate reason to believe in the demise of the missing
person, but she—again, she knew this was an arbitrary choice on her part—did
not want to ask for an exception.

Grant ignored the part about the law and
pounced again, having heard the small element of doubt in her tone. “Oh, Ellie,
let your heart tell you to belong to me. Let me look after you. Nowadays most
couples aren’t married. We could just move in to—”

“Grant!” She cut him off. “I don’t want
to move in with you. I don’t want you to move in with me. Even if I loved you
and I don’t think I do, not enough, anyway, I couldn’t do that. I have Philip
to think about. What kind of message would I be sending him morally, if I lived
with a man I wasn’t married to?”

“It would be none of his business.”

“None of his business? How can you say
that? He’s my child. He goes where I go. He lives where I live. I would not put
him into the position of having to explain his mother’s living arrangements to
his friends at school.”

“Then we’ll send him away to school,”
Grant said carelessly. “I mean, if he starts to ask questions.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Eleanor stared at
him in disbelief. “I will never send my son to live somewhere else for any
reason at all unless he wants to go, such as when he’s an adult and wants to
make his own way in life.”

To her surprise, Grant ceased arguing.
“All right, all right, so that was a poor idea. I—It’s just that I want you and
you haven’t really tried to get over your past love. I think if the kid wasn’t
around as a constant reminder you might find it easier to forget.”

“Forget? I don’t imagine I’ll ever
forget.”

“But you must, Ellie, because if you
don’t, you’ll never give yourself a chance to move on and learn to love me.
First love?” Again, he made a disparaging sound. “First love’s like a dream.
It’s hard for a living man to compete with, but I know I can convince you the
present, the future, will be better than any past you so fondly recall.”