Part of her nerves were for her son, the familiar dread of a mother anticipating the aftermath of her child making a spectacle of themselves. His line was short and she knew it backwards. Seeing Rohan dart a sideways look at her, Emma leaned towards him and whispered, “I really hope he doesn’t forget his line.”
Rohan snuffed gently and kissed her on the forehead. “He has nine words to say, dorogaya. His address is longer! He doesn’t forget that.”
Emma nodded, reassured. Then she focussed on the other object of her nerves. Felicity sat behind the ticket table, checking the number on the ticket against the seating plan in front of her. She gave Emma a haughty look and snatched the ticket from her hand, glaring up at Rohan with an acerbic look in her eyes. “You got the wrong tickets,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Yours are on the back row.” She glared at Emma in challenge and pulled the tickets towards herself, reaching into a biscuit tin and dragging out two replacements. As Emma reached out to take them from her hand, she deliberately dropped them onto the table.
Rohan gave a hiss of displeasure and Felicity looked up at him, her face screwing up in fury. “Thank you,” he said politely, his accent sounding sexy in his throat. “Back is fine.” He nudged Emma with his crutch, recognising the glint in her eye which signified she was about to jump across the table and rip the other woman’s head off. As they moved away, Felicity noticed the crutches and stood up. Her eyes fixed on Rohan’s lower half, seeing the right trouser leg neatly pinned up, folded over and over in a garish hem. Emma had struggled with it, knowing Rohan tried so hard not to get frustrated with her fumbling.
“What happened?” Felicity’s voice rapped out as a screech amidst the dull hum of adults talking quietly. She pointed at Emma. “What did you do to him?”
Emma’s body stiffened as she drew herself up to her full height, hearing the hissed warning from Rohan as she turned back towards the officious secretary. “No!” he told his wife. “Please find a seat for me? I can fight my own battles.”
Emma’s brown eyes flashed as black as coals in her fury and her jaw worked. The smirk in Rohan’s eyes and his dilated pupils told her he found it sexy, infuriating her further. “She menaced my son!” she hissed at him through gritted teeth and Rohan nodded once.
“My son,” he replied.
Emma walked woodenly to the hall door, aware of hundreds of eyes boring into her back with avid curiosity in an otherwise boring situation. The beam of the headmaster met her and he held out his hand for the tickets, chatting to her with a cheer she no longer felt.
Emma’s eyes watched Rohan turn to face Felicity, the crowd around him abruptly silent. He jerked his head towards his missing shin and spoke. “I lost my leg six years ago in Afghanistan serving my chosen country.” Felicity gulped and there was an outbreak of interested whispering and acknowledgment from around him. “I came to see my son be a wise man, if that’s ok with everyone?” Rohan’s hidden temper accentuated his Russian accent as he looked around for approval.
The crowd behind and around him nodded with acceptance and an elderly male voice called, “Bless you for your sacrifice, son.”
“Bloody right,” another male voice called and Rohan addressed the group with his beautiful smile, flashing his white teeth and gorgeous blue eyes with the skill which made him an officer whom men were willing to follow to their death.
“Danke,” he said with gratitude.
Felicity sat down with a bump in her seat behind the ticket table, her cheeks flaring red and her lips pressed tightly shut. Emma wondered what backlash the twisted woman would plan as a suitable revenge for her and shuddered. But the way her husband said thank you in Russian made Emma’s cheeks flush. His whispered words in their shared bed the night before came back to her as a hot memory and she bit her lip against the inappropriate smirk of pleasure.
“I’m so looking forward to you starting here with us,” Mr Dalton intoned, oblivious to Emma’s absence in the one sided conversation until now. “It’s bothered me all our precious photographs shoved in that attic up there.” His Welsh accent sparkled through his speech in lyrical bounces, making it feel as though he called to her from a trampoline. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “These aren’t your tickets! Staff sit in the front row.” He waved a hand to a small child next to him. “Mr and Mrs Andreyev sit on the end, please, Angela.”
The child skipped off ahead, her flowing white costume drifting round her legs in an elegant swish of sumptuous net curtain. Emma thanked the headmaster and took a step after her, watching the yellow ponytail swing from side to side as she bounced happily down the centre aisle towards the stage. Emma heard Rohan’s crutches behind her and waited, seeing the headmaster grip her husband’s right hand without dislodging the metal support. “I dealt with that other little business,” Mr Dalton said, leaning in towards Rohan to prevent those bottle necked behind from hearing. “She gave her notice and won’t be back next term.” He rolled his ‘r’s,’ creating a sound like a purr in his throat. His eye line reached the centre of Rohan’s chest but his character rose far above that in stature. He let go of Rohan’s hand with a nod and the men parted, Rohan clacking slowly behind his wife.
“I like Nicky,” the little girl informed them as Emma held the child sized seat still for Rohan to fold himself into. His leg stuck out forwards for what seemed like miles and he tried to poke his crutches under his own and Emma’s miniature seat.
“That’s nice,” Emma said with a smile, experiencing a maternal flush at hearing her child was accepted.
“Yeah, I like him a lot.” Angela’s blue eyes widened in meaning and Emma gulped as the little girl scratched at an itchy looking lace collar on the front of her angel costume. “I was a sheep,” she informed Emma, distracting herself temporarily and staring at Rohan’s pinned trouser leg. She turned her huge liquid blue eyes back on the mother of the object of her desire. “Mrs Clarke made me be a sheep but I cried and cried to be an angel. Angels get to sit with the wise men.” She scratched again at her neck and extended the movement down her chest to her stomach, her nails making a scritching sound across the starchy cloth. “Do wise men ever marry angels?” she asked pointedly, her confidence ebbing away.
Rohan sat up and slipped his arm around Emma, fixing his handsome smile on the child. “Oh, da!” he replied with enthusiasm. “I did.”
Angela beamed, showing all the reasons she was easily absorbed into the angel-brigade. She looked up at an agonised shout from her leader. “Where’s my angel gone?” Mr Dalton yelled into the darkened hall. “I’ve lost my angel!” With a cute wave, Angela was gone, skipping off back up the aisle to the teacher.
“Idiot!” Emma snorted, digging Rohan in the ribs. “I’m definitely no angel.”
He grunted with the impact of her elbow and kissed her temple. “It’s ok. I’m no wise man.” His deep voice sounded sexy in the darkness and Emma sighed with contentment.
“I heard what Mr Dalton said at the door,” she whispered. “Thank you for sorting it out.”
“It was all my fault,” Rohan admitted. “Was my mess to clear up. Loneliness made me unclear so I was wrong.” He squeezed her shoulder and then let go as Allaine settled herself in the seat behind them.
“I hope you’re ready for this!” she warned. “Why Mrs Clarke would let those three even sit together let alone act together, is beyond me.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Emma snorted. “They’re like the three musketeers.”
Rohan shrugged and looked confused. Allaine’s husband, Will, leaned forward to shake Rohan’s hand. “It sounds ominous, mate. I’ve no idea what they’re talking about. My Kaylee’s been practicing with me most days. She’s word perfect.”
Allaine rolled her eyes and snorted. Her Scottish husband eyed her nervously. “Well, I don’t trust those three!” she said sagely with a mother’s intuition and Emma nodded in agreement.
The men shrugged and devoured their coffee and mince pies. Rohan ate Emma’s too as she rejected it
after a single bite. “It’s nice,” she said apologetically, “I just don’t feel so good.”
“Ah, poor devotchka!” Rohan pulled her chair into his in a single easy movement, not realising they were fixed together. The whole row came scuttling a few inches to the right and an elderly granny squealed at the other end.
Emma heard Allaine burst out laughing behind her, quickly silenced by her husband’s muffled rebuke.
The darkness seemed oppressive as silence descended, marred only by the odd shuffle of feet or the loudly whispered question from a bored pre-schooler.
Light burst from a spotlight overhead, blinding the audience as the nativity began, an annual feast of colour, inappropriate behaviour and forgotten lines. It was Rohan’s first experience of the fiasco and his eyes shone with a mix of bafflement and hilarity as the disasters unfolded one after another. The first narrator was word perfect and amazing, the second passable but cute and the third, apoplectic. A loud fart issued from the collected menagerie of animals seated in darkness to the right of the stage. There was a lot of shuffling as the animals divided around the offender, leaving a wide area of floorboards for the boy dressed as a chicken to comfortably stretch out in. Assorted sheep, cows and what looked like a gorilla in the gloom, crushed up one end, hugging the stage and forcing it to wobble dangerously.
The narrator giggled and spluttered for three minutes without saying a word before Mrs Clarke’s level voice cut through the confusion with, “The inn was full.” She rapped it out like an order and the child sniggered his way to the side and flopped down into nothingness.
The light remained trained on centre stage as Mary and Joseph rode a tricycle dressed as a donkey around it for a while. The cardboard donkey head looked sad and Rohan pulled a face at Emma which set her off giggling, exacerbated by her urge for the toilet whenever her stomach constricted. He leaned in close so she felt his breath on her cheek and whispered,
“It’s comedy? Da?”
Emma caught the sound of Allaine behind, trying to keep it together in the presence of an adoring crowd. She shook her head to tell Rohan, no, this was serious stuff.
The donkey’s head fell off before it reached the stable and Mary gave birth to Baby Jesus with incredible speed, whipping him out from underneath her skirts with practiced skill.
“Half her luck!” muttered a woman from somewhere in the audience and Emma heard Allaine’s muffled squeak from behind. There was a blinding flash as some overenthusiastic parent ignored the no photography rule and snapped themselves a photograph of a bicycle pile-up and a stunned Mary and Joseph with an upside down Cabbage Patch doll falling to the ground.
The chicken farted again, producing a collective groan from the other animals and Mrs Clarke hastily dispatched her classroom assistant. All manner of acceleration was employed to ensure the egg was laid in the appropriate place and the chicken was escorted to the bathrooms.
Emma tensed as the threesome arrived on stage with a fanfare, like a recipe for disaster. The two wise men and one wise woman strode in like something from the Wild West, Mo clutching his trousers in an accurate rendition of a black gun slinger. “Me belt broke!” he announced, peering out into the audience like Long John Silver with his hand shading his eyes. Mel sat in the same row as Allaine and Emma saw her slide down into her tiny seat in an attempt to pretend Mo belonged to someone else. He gave a small, painful squeak as Kaylee hoisted his trousers up from behind and hauled him backwards. In deference to her broad Scots father, she performed her words perfectly, although the forced Scots accent sounded a little weird.
Nicky whipped out a long telescope made from toilet roll holders and held it to his left eye, spinning on the spot to get a good look from every angle. He wavered a bit as he accidentally focussed on the spotlight above the audience and rubbed his eye. “Bloody blinded meself!” he told Mo.
“Oh yeah, it’s bright, is that!” Mo agreed, his eyes rolling at the ferocity of Kaylee’s grip on his pants. Nicky was taller than his friends, built like his father and with all Rohan’s natural Russian beauty. He drew himself up to his full height, his bare toes showing underneath his great grandmother’s old dressing gown. “Der is a star, vot shine in de east!” he said, sounding exactly like Rohan, when tiredness reverted his speech into its heavily accented state.
“Ay up! Will us find it then? Is it over Manchester?” Mo asked, a suggestion more than a stage direction. Nicky and Kaylee conferred with him, producing nods of affirmation eventually.
Nicky poked his eye against the end of his wobbly telescope and focussed on Rohan, sitting right at the front. “That’s my dad,” he announced proudly. “He’s a war hero.”
There was a muted, impromptu round of applause and Rohan sank down in his seat, cringing. Nicky waved his telescope at his parents and the end flew off and landed amongst the angels. Angela dived for it and had a tug of war with another girl, their scrap divinely lit from above by a spotlight.
Mrs Clarke waved them frantically off the stage from her seating position near the animals, her shoulders slumped as though she had finally reached breaking point. Nicky and Kaylee went one way and Mo the other, meaning he was on his own with his troublesome trousers. There was a whump as his pants hit the wooden stage and a squeal as he pitched off it, followed by a muffled, “I’m ok!”
Everyone worked hard not to look at Mel, who squirmed her way slowly out of a private mortification in her seat and came up smiling. The final bow was loud and raucous, with ample opportunity for parents to photograph the cast.
Emma stood to the side and clicked snaps of the wise men and woman on Rohan’s phone, gratified when Nicky threw himself into his father’s arms with obvious pleasure. She snapped one of the two of them which they smiled for and one which Rohan wouldn’t know about until later. She stroked the screen, seeing two blonde heads close together in conversation, animated blue eyes and the same striking facial structure. Peas in a pod.
Needing the toilet urgently, Emma handed the phone back to Rohan and set off in search of the ladies toilets, finding them blessedly empty half way along the wide, brightly lit corridor. Looking up whilst washing her hands, she found herself observed by Felicity. Her heart sank. “You disgust me!” the other woman bit, raising her voice to hysterical proportions. “He was my boyfriend! We were getting married!”
“Did Rohan ever say that to you?” Emma asked, drying her hands on a paper towel. In her angst, she shredded it and reached for another.
“He didn’t have to!” Felicity spat. “We were in love.” Her eyes looked crazed and Emma took a step back, shades of Alanya colouring her view.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so, Felicity. I think you saw what you wanted.” She cast her mind back to Rohan’s interactions with the woman, seeing only tolerance and a need for company amidst Felicity’s insipid grasping. “If I’m honest, it’s not the impression I ever got.”
“I’m pregnant!” Felicity snapped, resting a speculative hand over her abdomen.
Emma tutted. “By a man you called impotent?”
Felicity’s cheeks flushed harder and Emma took a step towards the doorway. Felicity’s eyes snapped in the same direction and she moved slowly sideways, blocking it. “I lied. He...we...”
“Oh come on!” Emma shouted. “You didn’t even know about his leg! He didn’t trust you. Surely that tells you something? I’m his wife, Felicity. I’m sorry for how this has turned out, but threatening a child? Really? That was sick! You made him terrified of you. It’s unforgiveable.”
“He’s a brat!” Felicity answered, her voice laden with venom. “I knew he was Rohan’s son from the start. I’ve seen pictures of Rohan’s brother and that brat is nothing like him. I hate you for what you’ve done. My life was great until you appeared. You turned it to crap!”
Realisation lit Emma’s face with a sneer. “Is that why you hired a private investigator even before I turned up, Felicity? You paid someone to drive up and down the country following my husba
nd to business meetings. It must have cost you a fortune and the silly man didn’t even tell you the basics about Rohan Andreyev. You didn’t know he’d lost his leg and you still don’t know what he does for a living. For goodness sake, Felicity. What is wrong with you?”
Emma took another step towards the open doorway, anger making her eyes flash dangerously. Felicity was unhinged, but nothing compared to some of the women on the estate in Lincoln. Emma braved it out, refusing to show weakness. “Get out of my way!”
She should have seen the slap coming, but wasn’t quite quick enough to stop it landing hard on her face. Felicity put her whole grievance into it; her broken hopes and dreams went into the blow and the obsession with Rohan Andreyev which cost her everything. Emma’s ears were deafened by the sound of tinkling glass as her head hit the mirror above the sinks and she was showered with sharp debris.
The cunning left hander made her right cheek ring with the vibrations from the blow, but her head smarted above her left ear and blood trickled down her face and onto her new coat. “Damn!” she heard herself say as the word tumbled from her lips and nothingness shrouded her head like a blanket.
Emma felt the soft cushion of Allaine’s arms beneath her as she crumpled and Nicky’s shrill, hysterical screams overhead as help was summoned.