A Perfect Family
A Perfect Family
PENNY JORDAN
‘I can’t dance with you now, David,’ she told him huskily.
‘Of course you can,’ he replied, turning Jenny into his arms and beginning to move. ‘Mmm … you feel good.’ Helplessly Jenny realised that David wasn’t going to let her go and that it would cause less fuss to give in and dance with him than to go on protesting.
Unlike Jon, David had always been a good dancer, a natural dancer, and her face grew hot in the darkness of the subtly lit dance floor as she remembered what was said about men who were naturally good dancers. Too good, she decided shakily as he ignored her efforts to keep a respectable distance between them and pulled her closer to him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered against her hair. ‘You used to enjoy dancing with me like this once.’ Jon was standing on the opposite side of the dance floor talking to Ruth. He didn’t appear to have seen them.
‘You look wonderful tonight,’ David told her softly, his hands sliding up to caress her back. ‘You look wonderful, you feel wonderful … you are wonderful, Jenny, and I wish to hell I’d never been stupid enough to let you go.’
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The PerfectSinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Crightons (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
A Perfect Family
The Perfect Seduction
Perfect Marriage Material
Figgy Pudding
The Perfect Lover
The Perfect Sinner
The Perfect Father
A Perfect Night
Coming Home
Starting Over
A Perfect Family
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#u59de4edf-d287-5ca8-909a-613299856812)
Excerpt (#u7ca12caf-5550-52b3-80ec-defc2d4ffd80)
About the Author (#ucaaa6e39-6863-5ff9-9f65-b5c9bf797a44)
The Crightons
Title Page (#ue5d130ed-a46c-505d-b6ed-ac06ef59de4e)
Prologue
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Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
1917
It had been a cold, wet spring followed by an even wetter summer, and the crops lay flattened and battered beneath the relentlessly driving rain.
As Josiah Crighton wiped the condensation away from the railway carriage window to look outside he paused, turning instead to study the pale, set face of the girl seated beside him.
The girl … his wife, soon to be the mother of his child. His jaw tightened as he remembered his father’s fury when he learned what had happened.
‘For God’s sake, if you had to behave so … so stupidly, why the hell didn’t you do it outside your own backyard? Oxford … or the Inns of Court … surely you had ample opportunity there to—’
His father had broken off, drumming angrily on his desk whilst he surveyed him.
‘Well, there’s no help for it now. The girl will have to be found a suitable husband and as for you—’
‘She already has a husband,’ he had told his father quietly.
Just for a moment he saw that his father had misunderstood him, noting the relief expelling the impatient anger from his eyes as he exclaimed, ‘She’s married … then why the hell didn’t you say so …?’
His expression began changing as Josiah continued to look steadily at him and quietly explained, ‘We’re married, Father … Bethany and I …’
He had of course already anticipated the uproar that would follow his announcement and their mutual banishment from the lives of both their families. Hers had been no more pleased than his had been. Bethany was a yeoman farmer’s daughter who had been working up at the big house. He had bumped into her when he had gone there with some papers his father had instructed him to take to Lord Haver. They had recognised each other immediately from shared summer childhoods playing forbidden games on the muddy banks of the Dee.
One thing had led to another and the inevitable had happened. As soon as she had come to him with her news, ashen-faced and frightened, he had done what he had convinced himself was the only honourable thing he could do; never mind the fact that it was virtually an accepted thing within his family that one day he would cement the ties that kept the family together and, following its long-established tradition, marry his second cousin.
Bethany, too, had been destined for a family-arranged marriage to a distant relation, a widower with some well-stocked farmlands on the Welsh side of the city and two half-grown children in need of a mother’s care.
Refused the support of both families and the place that had been promised to him in the family firm of solicitors, Josiah had had no other course open to him but to find some alternative way of providing for his new wife and the child they were soon to have. And so he had taken a small set of rooms in the tiny market town of Haslewich, hoping that the business from the townspeople and the local rural community would be enough to sustain himself and his new family.
‘Do you really love me, Josiah?’ his new bride had asked him miserably, clinging tearfully to him on the day of their hurried and secret wedding.
He had held her tightly in his arms, unable to answer her honestly and unwilling to lie to her. The past and the comfortable security it had contained were now lost to him. The future stretched ahead as bleak and unwelcoming as the rain-lashed countryside. Turning his attention back to the scene beyond the railway carriage window, he tried not to contrast the life he had left to the one he was heading towards.
In Chester, his father’s secretary would just be bringing in afternoon tea. A fire would be burning warmly in the grate of his father’s panelled office. As the senior partner in Chester’s most prestigious firm of solicitors, his father was held very much in awe by those who worked for him and most especially Miss Berry, who guarded his privacy as jealously as any guard dog, even keeping a watchful eye on Josiah’s elder brothers who were also partners in the family firm.
The handsome silver teapot from which his father would take his afternoon tea had been a gift from a wealthy client, the china likewise, a particularly attractive and rare Sèvres teaset that had come to his father by way of a bequest.
In the bare spare rooms that were all Josiah could afford to rent and that must serve as his home as well as his place of business, he would be lucky if he managed the luxury of afternoon tea at all. There would certainly be no silver teapot from which to pour it and no Sèvres cup from which to drink it.
As he stared out of the window, his expression started to harden. The youngest of his father’s three sons, he had known even before his father had announced his rejection from the family that he was the least valuable of his father’s many assets. With his sons, Edward and William, already in the family business, a brother and a sister and countless numbers of nieces, nephews and other familial connections, his father could quite easily afford to dispense with one disobedient and disgraced son.
He would never treat his child, his own son, as his father had treated him, Josiah decided passionately, and he would, furthermore, ensure that his son would inherit a tradition every bit as proud and respected as the one that had been denied him. More so … much more so. As he glanced at the face of his now-sleeping wife, Josiah determined to found a dynasty that would one day rival that of his father and brothers. Rival it and outmatch it.
1969
As they drove north, the top down on the bright red sports car David Crighton had persuaded his father to buy him as a reward for obtaining his degree—not a first but at least he had passed—he turned his head to look at the girl in the passenger seat beside him, a feeling of fierce exultation running through him.
He had snatched her, virtually stolen her away, from under the nose of one of his friends, another member of the pop group that four of them had formed in their final year at college.
For a few months they had enjoyed a spell of dizzying success; a small fat man with a shiny bald head and even shinier suit, smoking a fat cigar, had come backstage after one of their gigs and offered to help them get a contract with one of the major recording studios.
It had been at a time when young unknowns were becoming overnight millionaires, their names whispered breathlessly and then screamed at in orgasmic frenzy by thousands of teenage girls throughout the land, and there had been no reason to doubt that the same thing could happen to them. Only the small fat man had turned out to be rather shrewder than they had realised, and whilst they had ridiculed his attempts to become one of them, he had been quietly skimming off most of their earnings.
All they had been left with were the remaindered copies of a record that had never made it out of the bottom fifty of the hit parade and a very large bill from the tax authorities.
His grandfather, Josiah, had paid off his share of it, angrily telling him that he was only doing so to save the family name from being disgraced. David hadn’t cared what had motivated him. Smiling genially at the older man in a marijuana-induced haze of goodwill, he had carelessly listened to the lecture he was being given and then as quickly as he could escaped back to London and his friends and the lifestyle he loved so much.
That had been over two years ago. Then he had laughed at his twin brother for wanting nothing more than to settle down in Cheshire and take his place in the family business. Now though …
Now though, things were different. He glanced again at the girl sleeping so peacefully beside him. They had been married at Caxton Hall three days ago. She had been wearing the tiniest minidress there had ever been, revealing yards of lovely, luscious legs, and smiling Bambi-eyed from between straight, glossy curtains of ash blonde hair. She was eighteen years old, just … and a model. The most sought-after, the most swingiest … the most wanted and lusted-after model there was on the London scene and now she was all his. She was also pregnant.
‘But how can I be?’ she had wailed in squeaky-voiced protest after the doctor had given them the results. ‘I’m on the pill….’
‘Obviously it doesn’t work when you go to bed with a man as sexy as me,’ David had told her, grinning.
She had refused to share his amusement, pouting sulkily at him as she reminded him of her modelling commitments.
And so here they were married and on their way to make a new life for themselves in Cheshire, and not just because Tiggy was pregnant. David frowned but there was no point in brooding on that other unfortunate matter. He had made a mistake and been found out, and as he had already defensively told his father, others did the same and got away with it. It wasn’t his fault that the senior partner in his set of chambers should be so ridiculously stuffy. After all, he had done nothing legally wrong.
* * *
1996
‘So tell me again about this family of yours and the birthday we’re going to help celebrate.’
Even now after six months together, the lazy, transatlantic drawl of Caspar Johnson’s voice still had almost as much power to stir her senses as his powerful six-foot-odd and very masculine body, Olivia acknowledged as she turned to smile at him.
‘Watch the road,’ Caspar warned her, adding softly, ‘and don’t look at me like that, otherwise …’
His openly and frequently expressed sexual desire for her was just one of the things that made him so different from any of the other men she had known, Olivia owned as she refocused her attention on the heavy north-flowing motorway traffic and answered his initial question.
‘Birthdays,’ she reminded him, adding, ‘and I’ve already told you umpteen times.’
‘I know,’ Caspar agreed, ‘but I like hearing it and I like even more watching your face when you talk about them. Just as well you decided against a career as a trial judge,’ he teased her. ‘Your expression, especially your eyes, would have given you away every time. They can be very revealing.’
Olivia Crighton grimaced but she knew he was right. They had met whilst she had been taking a postgraduate course in American law. Caspar had been her tutor and, like her, come from a legal background and also like her had chosen not to go into the family partnership but to make his own way in the world. Chosen … Caspar might have had a choice but she …
There were other reasons why the two of them made such a perfect couple, she told herself hastily, abandoning her earlier and far too dangerous train of thought—this was meant to be a happy family visit, not a means of resurrecting old problems—reasons that had nothing to do with their shared legal background, reasons of a very much more personal nature. Instinctively, as she dwelt on those reasons, her stomach muscles clenched, her toes curling into her shoes, her face flushing slightly as she mentally relived the previous evening’s blissful lovemaking.
It was just over two months now since she and Caspar had taken the decision to move in together and it had been a decision that neither of them regretted—far from it. She had not yet told her family about their plans for their shared future or her decision to go with Caspar when he returned to America and make her life there with him. Not that she expected them to have any objections; after all, as a female member of the family, she was easily expendable, neither wanted nor needed in the family partnership unlike its males. Their role was decided upon and planned for almost from the moment of their conception.
Caspar had been at first amused and then amazed at her family’s history, unable to believe that such an old-fashioned family still existed. Her upbringing and the whole of her family life was so different from his own. His parents had divorced when he was six, and Olivia had sensed that he was a man who was shy of emotional commitment, which had made his openly admitted desire for her all the more precious.
She knew that he loved her as she did him, but both of them had been hurt and bruised by their childhood experiences, and because of that, both of them were wary of the intensity of the emotions they shared. Both of them in their different ways feared love, Olivia suspected in her more introspective moments, but another thing she had learned young was the folly of questioning her feelings too deeply. Painful emotions, like painful cuts and bruises, were best left unprodded and not interfered with.
They had made no long-term plans for a shared future, Olivia recognised, other than that she would go to Philadelphia with Caspar when he returned to his home country. Insofar as her career plans went, it would definitely be a lateral move as she would have to requalify, but as she and Caspar had both agreed, the way they felt about one another was too important not to be given a chance. But a chance for what? A chance to develop into something permanent or a chance to die?
Olivia wasn’t sure which she actually wanted and neither, she suspected, was Caspar. Right now, the biggest commitment they could give one another was to say that they wanted to be together, that right now their relationship was of primary importance to both of them.
‘Your family …?’ Caspar prodded her from the passenger seat of her small, sturdy Ford—a twenty-first birthday present from her grandfather. She recalled that when Max, her cousin nearest in age to her, had turned twenty-one, Gramps had given him a sleek and dangerously fast sports car.
The family … Where should she start …? With her parents? Her grandparents? Or at the beginning with her great-grandfather, Josiah, who had initially founded the family business, breaking away from his own family in Chester to make a new life for himself and the bride his family had disdained.
‘How many of you exactly will there be attending this party?’ Caspar asked her, interrupting her train of thought.
‘It’s hard to say. It all depends on how many of the cousins and second cousins have been invited. The main family will be there, of course. Gramps, Mum and Dad, Uncle Jon and Aunt Jenny, Max, their son, and my great-aunt Ruth. Maybe some of the Chester lot.’
She glanced at the motorway sign by the side of the road. ‘Only another couple of exits now,’ she told him, ‘then we’ll be home.’
As she concentrated on the traffic, she didn’t notice his small frown as he heard her say the word ‘home.’ To him, home was wherever he happened to be living at the time. But to her …
She had come to mean a lot to him, this pretty, clever Englishwoman, who in some ways seemed so much younger than her American contemporaries and in others so much more mature. Unlike them, she seemed instinctively to put him first and that was very important to him—a legacy from all the years as a child when he had felt more like an unwanted parcel being passed from one parent to the other than a loved and wanted child.
Families—he was instinctively suspicious of them, but thankfully this visit would only be a short one and then he and Olivia would be leaving for America and their own life together—just the two of them.
1 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Do you think the weather will stay fine? It will be awful if it doesn’t, everywhere muddy and wet, and with a marquee out in the rain.’
Jenny Crighton looked up from the guest list she had been checking to smile at her sister-in-law.
‘With any luck the weather should stay fine, Tiggy,’ she reassured her. ‘But even if it doesn’t, the marquee will be heated and—’
‘Yes, but people will have to walk across the lawn and—’
‘The marquee people are putting a walkway down from the house to the marquee. It will be covered and quite dry,’ she promised her patiently as though this had not been a subject they had discussed many times before.
It had come as no surprise to her to discover that although Tiggy had spent a good deal of time on the telephone talking about what hard work organising the joint fiftieth birthday celebration for their husbands had been, it was she, Jenny, who had been left to do the actual work. But then, that was their relationship all over, she acknowledged wryly. Tiggy had always been the glamorous one of the two of them whilst she was the more homey, hard-working one.
People made allowances for Tiggy and for her vulnerabilities; men were bedazzled by her even now when both of them were in their forties, and Tiggy, because she was Tiggy, could never quite resist her need to respond to their admiration and soak it up and feed on it. She meant no harm, of course. She adored David, everyone knew that, and he clearly worshipped her.
Jenny could still remember the look of pride and dazed awe in his eyes that summer he had brought Tiggy, his bride, back home and introduced her to them all. David—how everyone loved him—his father, the clients, his friends, the children, everyone, but no one so fiercely nor so determinedly as her own husband, Jonathon, his twin brother.
It had been Jonathon’s idea that they should have this double birthday celebration and combine it with a grand family reunion.
‘Dad would love it. You know how much the family means to him,’ he had told Jenny when they were discussing it.
‘He may well love it, but he will carp like mad about the cost,’ Jenny had warned him dryly, ‘and it will be expensive if we are to do it properly.’
‘Of course we are and Dad won’t mind … not if it’s for David.’
‘No,’ Jenny had agreed, but she had had to turn her face away so that Jonathon wouldn’t see her expression.
She knew, of course, why so much family emphasis was placed upon David; why her father-in-law was so determined that these twins of his should be so close, so supportive of one another, or rather that Jonathon should be so supportive of his brother.
Ben himself had been a twin but his brother had died at birth, and that loss had marked and scarred virtually the whole of his life.
Jonathon had been brought up knowing that in his father’s eyes he should consider himself most fortunate to have such a twin there in life beside him.
Only once had Jenny seen the fierce pride in Ben’s eyes turn to disappointment and that had been when David had left the set of chambers where he had been in training for the Bar, following a career pattern that had been laid out for him from the first moment of his birth.
‘Well, I hope you’re right about the weather,’ Tiggy was saying fretfully now. ‘My shoes still haven’t arrived, you know, and they promised that they would be here. It’s far too late to get another pair made and dyed and—’
‘They’ll be here. There’s still plenty of time,’ Jenny soothed her.
Tiggy had been a model in the sixties and she still had the same haunting, high-cheeked beauty she had possessed then, although the years of dieting and worrying about her weight had, in Jenny’s opinion, left her too thin. Her almost waiflike appearance, so appealing in a young, immature girl, somehow, to Jenny at least, seemed oddly jarring in a woman of forty-five.
Not that Jenny would ever voice such views. She was well aware of how others judged her and her relationship with Tiggy, and those, apart from her closest friends, could interpret it as envy, as those same critics judged Jonathon as being jealous of David.
Her normally mild brown eyes showed a brief flash of emotion before she controlled it and turned her attention back to the large area of lawn in front of them. It had taken quite a bit of diplomatic manoeuvring to get her father-in-law, Ben, to agree that the birthday festivities could be held here.
He had grumbled as Jenny had known he would about the cost and the inconvenience, but of course, when the time came he would rise to the occasion as the convivial patriarchal host, accepting the admiration and praise of their guests without a flicker of conscience.
There had been battles over each and every stage of the preparations for the weekend’s celebrations, which was no more and no less than Jenny had anticipated, but the irony of it was that Ben would be the first to complain if even the slightest detail fell short of his exacting standards—a fact that he was as well aware of as she was herself, Jenny acknowledged.
Of course, she had had to use diversionary and indeed, at times, almost underhanded tactics to get her own way on some points. A reminder that at his own insistence, members of the Chester side of the family had been invited to the event and had to be impressed had proved a handy tool for digging out his deepest-rooted objections about cost and one that Jenny admitted she had wielded shamefully at times.
Not that she minded; indeed, she positively enjoyed the challenge of doing battle with her formidable father-in-law. Conversely, she knew that whilst in public he paid lip-service to the conventional view that Tiggy, on account of her looks, must take precedence in his affections and approval, privately, she was the one who had his respect.
Oh yes, men respected her, liked her, trusted her, turned to her for advice and comfort, but they did not flirt with her or see her as a desirable, sexual woman, a situation easy enough to smile over now, but not so easy when younger.
Jenny could still remember how she had felt the first time she had met Tiggy. She and Jon had been married for four or five years at that time and had been trying for a baby without success for the last two. The sight of Tiggy blooming with David’s love, basking in both that and her discreetly evident pregnancy had caused Jenny more than one pang of pain and self-pity. She had hardly been able to bring herself to look at Jon, and when she had, the withdrawn look in his eyes as he deliberately avoided looking at Tiggy’s pregnant body had made her bite her lip in a mixture of guilt and despair.
Jenny’s heart had sunk when they had received the telephone call summoning them to Queensmead to meet David’s new bride officially. It had been one of those sticky hot summer days when even the air they breathed had seemed heavy and tainted and somehow lacking in life-giving oxygen.
The partnership had been going through a rather lean time and Jon had quietly accepted his father’s decision that he should draw only a very small salary. David’s allowance was a large drain on the partnership’s profits but Jenny knew that Jon didn’t begrudge it any more than his father did. Luckily she was a careful housewife, scrupulously saving money where she could, especially when it came to spending money on herself, and she certainly had nothing in her wardrobe remotely suitable for the garden party-cum-belated wedding breakfast Ben was insisting on throwing for the newly married couple. In the end, having stubbornly refused Jon’s tentative suggestion they use some of their savings to buy her a new dress, she decided to make her own.
‘Get yourself something pretty,’ Jon had tried to coax her, but she had shaken her head, stubbornly folding her lips into a tight line, which he had interpreted as disapproval but which, in fact, had been her defence strategy against the tears she had been fighting not to let fall as she reacted to the unsubtle message his suggestion had concealed—that she was so plain that she needed to wear something eye-catching enough to draw attention away from that plainness and, even worse, that Jon was embarrassed by it.
She felt she was letting him down not just by her homely appearance but by the fact that she had not conceived another child. After all, she had fallen pregnant easily enough to David but that was something she refused to allow herself to think about even in her most private thoughts and it was certainly not something she could ever say to Jon. How could she? It would look as though she was comparing the two of them and finding Jon wanting. It didn’t need much intelligence to know that in the eyes of Jon’s family, and she suspected almost everyone else, David and Tiggy would be very much the golden couple whilst she and Jon were very much the dull also-rans.
Both of them had already been treated to a lengthy outpouring of praise from Ben about Tiggy’s exceptional beauty. So it had been with a feeling of tense trepidation plus the disadvantage of a bad tension headache and the disaster that was the home-made dress she had run up herself from a piece of fabric she had bought in the market that she had reluctantly pinned an unconvincing smile on her face and tried not to look as though she minded when she was finally confronted with Tiggy’s breathtakingly leggy, lithe and oh so slim reality.
Tiggy herself hadn’t quite been able to stop herself from betraying what Jenny had known humiliatingly was likely to be everyone else’s reaction to the difference between them, and her eyes widened just a little before she looked guiltily away from Jenny, obviously unable to meet her gaze as David introduced them.
David, too, managed to avoid meeting her gaze. David was clearly bursting with pride over the reaction Tiggy was causing amongst the male guests. They milled enthusiastically around her and barely had time to do much more than say a very brief hello not just to her but to Jon, his twin, before Tiggy caught hold of his arm and demanded to be told the names of all the men who were so eager to talk with her.
As she reached out to David, she had tilted her face up towards him, throwing her head back and laughing. The sun gleamed richly in the heavy thickness of her glossy hair, and the bones in her shoulders revealed by the cutaway neckline of her brief cotton minidress seemed as fragile and delicate as those of a bird. Jenny had watched her, mute with misery, contrasting her own flushed, shiny, wholesomely plain face with the fine-boned, high-cheeked beauty of Tiggy’s.
Everything about David’s new wife, from the polished tips of her fingernails to the artfully applied fake eyelashes—which, unlike her, Jenny was absolutely sure that Tiggy had little need of—spoke of someone who took it for granted that she was loved and desired. And why shouldn’t she? David was so obviously besotted with her, so completely in love, he couldn’t bear even to let go of her hand, never mind leave her side.
Jenny had felt her eyes start to well up with betraying and self-pitying tears as she watched them. Even Jon, quiet, slightly shy Jon, was watching Tiggy with a bemused and indulgent smile on his normally serious face.
‘Jenny, could you come and give me a hand with the food?’
Reluctantly Jenny had dragged her attention away from the group of enthusiastic admirers thronging round Tiggy and turned to look at Jon’s Aunt Ruth, answering automatically, ‘Yes, of course …’
‘Tiggy is very pretty, isn’t she?’ she had commented quietly to Ruth as they walked across the lawn together. Jon hadn’t even noticed her leaving. He was standing next to David but slightly behind him, slightly in his shadow. Was he wishing that like David he had married someone beautiful and lively, someone who was fun to be with, someone who other men envied him being married to and not …? Her throat, already uncomfortably dry, had become even drier as she added, ‘She and David look so right together and they’re obviously very deeply in love.’
‘Indeed they are,’ Ruth had agreed, but her voice had been wry rather than warm, carrying more of a hint of cynicism than the outright approval that Jenny had been expecting. When Jenny had looked uncertainly at her, Ruth had explained lightly, ‘David and Tiggy are in love, Jenny, but I suspect that both of them are rather more in love with themselves than they could ever be with anyone else. Perhaps I’m wrong … I certainly hope so.’
Jenny and Jon had left Queensmead and gone home shortly afterwards. She hadn’t been feeling very well, the oppressive heat making her feel sick, and she had felt guilty about dragging Jon away especially when she had seen the look of pity that Tiggy had given them both as they said their goodbyes.
As they walked away, she had heard Tiggy saying to David, ‘I can’t believe that you and Jon are twins. He looks older than you but then I suppose that’s because his wife is so frumpy and plain.’
Frumpy and plain. Tiggy hadn’t meant to be unkind, of course; she hadn’t even realised that Jenny had overheard her….
‘I think I’d better go and ring them again, just to check that they have sent my shoes. It will be a complete disaster if they don’t arrive.’
‘Mmm?’ Jenny murmured, coming back to the present.
‘My shoes, Jenny,’ Tiggy repeated irritably. Heavens, Jenny could be so dull and boring at times. She hadn’t even mentioned what she was going to wear for the ball. Tiggy had offered to go shopping with her, help her choose something suitable, but predictably Jenny had shaken her head and said that she was too busy … that she would find ‘something’.
Tiggy just hoped that the ‘something’, whatever it was, wouldn’t prove to be too horrendous. Her own dress, of course, was a dream by one of her favourite designers. David had baulked a little at the cost but she had soon talked him round.
The cream of Cheshire society had been invited after all. David’s people, through the Chester side, were extremely well-connected and when one included some of their long-standing county clients …
It was a pity that the house didn’t have its own ballroom … a marquee was all very well in its way but … She had been a little bit cross when Jenny had refused to agree with her that a black-and-white theme would be marvellously chic. As well as setting off her own colouring, black always looked good on blondes.
‘It’s too restricting, too dramatic, Tiggy,’ Jenny had argued in that quiet, calm voice of hers. ‘Not everyone will want to keep to the theme and wear black or white. We must be practical.’
Typical of Jenny, practical should have been her middle name. She was a dear, of course, frightfully worthy and good-natured and, oddly enough, she was more attractive now than she had been when she was younger. She had kept her figure, even if she was a good size twelve compared with her own delicate size eight and her hair was still a rich, glossy brown and naturally curly, even if it could do with a proper styling.
Tiggy had seen the way Jonathon looked at the two of them sometimes, no doubt comparing her elegance and Jenny’s lack of fashion sense. Jenny really ought to take a bit more trouble with her appearance. Jonathon was a very attractive man, though not quite as startlingly good-looking as David. The wheat blond of David’s hair was slightly less extravagantly film starrish in Jonathon. His was tinged with a soft caramel brown, but the twins shared the same impressive height and the same broad shoulders. Curiously it was Jonathon’s slightly more spare frame that seemed to carry the years well now; David had begun to develop a paunch, although he denied it vigorously and loathed any reference to it.
‘Ah, there you are….’
Jenny smiled as she saw their mutual father-in-law approaching them. He was in his seventies now, a widower, and he walked with a slight limp, the legacy of a bad fall three winters ago when he had dislocated his hip and broken his leg.
‘Have a few things I want to talk to you about,’ he announced as he reached them.
‘Father, you look wonderful,’ Tiggy told him, darting forward to give him a quick hug and to kiss him delicately on the cheek. Even with her father-in-law she still could not resist the impulse to flirt, Jenny realised.
No, not to flirt, she amended mentally. What Tiggy did, what she wanted, was to reassure herself that she was still desirable, still wanted. Poor Tiggy. Jenny wondered briefly what it must feel like to have one’s whole self-worth invested in the frightening transitoriness of one’s physical features. No wonder at times Tiggy seemed so brittle, so insecure.
‘Tania, I—’
‘Darling, I must fly. There’s so much I have to do….’
Their father-in-law was one of the few people who used Tiggy’s proper name and Jenny hid another wry smile as she watched Tiggy detach herself from him. She knew quite well why Tiggy wanted to avoid being questioned by Ben.
‘She does too much,’ Ben commented as they both watched Tiggy hurry round the side of the house to where her car was parked. ‘She’s never been very strong. Ellie tells me these marquee people are due to start work tomorrow.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Jenny agreed. Ellie was Ben’s housekeeper. ‘They’re due to arrive about lunch-time and most of the work should be completed by early evening.’
‘Mmm … Well, let’s just hope they don’t make too much of a damn mess of the lawn. Ruth tells me she’s doing the flowers,’ he added, referring to his unmarried sister. ‘Should have thought you’d have got somebody professional in to do that.’
‘Aunt Ruth is better than a professional,’ Jenny told him calmly. ‘When she does the church flowers—’
‘The church flowers,’ Ben interrupted, snorting dismissively, then shaking his head when he realised that Jenny wasn’t going to allow him to agitate her but instead was simply listening serenely.
That was the trouble with Jenny; she was too damn serene at times and too damn clever.
‘Young Olivia’s coming home, I hear, and bringing some American or other with her.’
‘Of course she’s coming home,’ Jenny agreed. ‘After all, she is David’s daughter—and Tiggy’s.’ But it was Jenny, her aunt, whom she had telephoned to tell her in the strictest confidence that she had decided to move in with Caspar, and Jenny whom she had contacted to sound her out about the wisdom of bringing Caspar home with her.
‘Exactly who is he, then, this American?’ Ben demanded, changing tack, having recognised that Jenny wasn’t going to rise to the bait he had originally been dangling and rush to defend his sister. They were having a particularly hot summer and since his accident the heat bothered him. It got into his broken joints and made them ache so much that the pain made him irritable.
‘He’s Livvy’s boyfriend,’ Jenny returned.
‘Boyfriend.’ Ben frowned at her under his heavy silver eyebrows. Like his sons he, too, had a good thick head of hair, although where theirs was still blond, his was now silver. ‘According to David he’s in his thirties—hardly a boy. Serious between them, is it?’ he demanded, shooting her a penetrating look.
‘That’s something you must ask Livvy,’ Jenny told him.
It was certainly serious enough for Olivia to tell her mother that the two of them would be sharing a room even though David apparently had put his foot down and said no.
‘David’s right, of course,’ Tiggy had told Jenny when relating the details of their conversation to her. ‘Father would not approve at all and we’d never hear the end of it for allowing it and really, it will only be for a few days….’
‘Mmm … at that age a few days can seem an awfully long time. What does Livvy say?’
‘We haven’t told her yet. David said it was best not to until she arrived. You know what she can be like. She’s so strong-willed at times….’ Tiggy pulled a small face. ‘You remember what it was like when she decided she wanted to study law. Of course, we all knew it was only because David and her grandfather had both told her that they really didn’t think it was a good idea and after all, she is—’
‘Female,’ Jenny had supplied dryly.
Personally she thought the views of the males of the Crighton family were decades out of date and that it was high time that someone challenged them. Olivia might be the first female of the family to do so, but she wasn’t going to be the only one.
Jenny knew that her own Katie already, at sixteen, had very strong views as to where her future lay. It was to be the Bar or nothing, she had told her parents emphatically. Louise, her twin, was less single-minded; she still hadn’t totally given up all hopes of becoming a film star. Failing that, she might well opt to study law, she had said judiciously.
‘But I wouldn’t want to stay here,’ she had told her parents.
‘No, neither do I,’ Katie had agreed. She was always the one who took control, and Louise, like her father before her, seemed quite happy to good-naturedly let her do so.
Jenny, however, had been determined from the moment they were born that there was not going to be a favoured child and a second best; that both of them were going to grow up knowing they were of equal importance, equal value.
‘I know,’ she had told Louise. ‘We’ll go to Strasbourg. That’s where all the important legal decisions are made on human rights….’
‘Does your father know that?’ Jenny had murmured sotto voce to her husband. ‘I sometimes think he has a hard time grudgingly acknowledging that even Chester has more impact on the legal world than Haslewich.’
‘Mmm … Dad is fiercely parochial,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘He inherited that from his own father, of course. Aunt Ruth says that their father, Josiah, never really got over being sent away from Chester in disgrace and that he always remained bitter about the way his family treated him.’
‘Well, your father certainly believes in keeping the old rivalries going,’ Jenny had agreed. ‘I was quite surprised when he insisted on inviting the Chester side of the family to your birthday do.’
‘Oh, that’s just because he wants to impress them and—’
‘Just like Max wants to impress Grandad and Uncle David,’ Katie had interrupted scathingly, tossing her sixteen-year-old head in sisterly contempt of her elder brother.
Over that head Jenny had looked warily at her husband. It was no secret that Max was very much the apple of his grandfather’s eye and that of his uncle David’s.
‘That boy should have been David’s son, not yours,’ Ben had once infamously remarked at a family gathering.
Jenny had never forgotten hearing him say it. Neither, unfortunately it seemed, had Max.
Much as it pained Jenny to admit it, her son had a streak of vanity and, yes, weakness in him that she felt had been exacerbated by his grandfather’s indulgence.
‘Max will never be called to the Bar,’ Katie had announced scathingly the day of Max’s twenty-first when their grandfather had beamingly made the announcement of his grandson’s career intentions and presented him with the keys to a Porsche Carrera that both Jonathon and Jenny had pleaded with Ben not to give him.
Max had finished his pupillage the previous year when he was twenty-three but so far had been unable to find a place as a junior in a set of chambers in London.
It would be left no doubt to Joss, their youngest child, to take his father’s place in the family business in due time, just as his cousin Jack would take David’s, but that lay well into the future. Jack was only ten and Joss an even younger eight.
As she walked back with her father-in-law across the lawn, Jenny paused to admire the outline of the house.
Originally a large farmhouse, it was built in a traditional hall house shape with the main central block from which two wings projected one at either end.
The rear of the property they were facing was the older portion built in the traditional Cheshire farmhouse style of huge oak beams infilled with wattle-and-daub panels. The front was a more modern seventeenth century instead of fifteenth in softly tinted locally quarried stone.
There had been those who had raised their eyebrows a little when Ben’s father had moved into the large farmhouse, wondering how on earth he had come to inherit such a valuable property. Valuable not so much because of the house, but rather because of the fertile Cheshire farmlands that went with it. And it had belonged to a lonely widow, as well.
One day, following the rules of primogeniture to which they all knew Ben intended to rigidly adhere, David, simply by virtue of the fact he had arrived into the world ten minutes ahead of Jon, would inherit Queensmead, but Jenny didn’t envy the inheritance. She was perfectly happy with their own much smaller house on the other side of town. Georgian in origin, it had once belonged to the church and Jenny particularly loved its walled garden and its proximity to the river that flowed through the paddock at the bottom of the garden.
She might not envy David and Tiggy their ultimate ownership of Queensmead but there was no doubt that it was the perfect setting for a large family gathering, she acknowledged.
In all, over two hundred and fifty people would be attending and over a hundred of them were in one way or another, however loosely, connected ‘family’. The rest were either friends, colleagues, clients or, in some cases, all three. Working out the table plans alone had taken Jenny the best part of a fortnight of winter evenings at her desk.
Fortunately Guy Cooke, her business partner, had been wonderfully understanding and accommodating.
Her work was still a source of acrimony between Jenny and her father-in-law. It had infuriated her that instead of taking the matter up with her, Ben had manipulatively attempted to dictate what she should do by objecting to Jonathon that he didn’t think it was a good thing for the family that she should be involved in a local business.
It was true that financially she didn’t need to earn her own living, but the business had brought her something she believed was equally vital to her: her own feelings of self-worth and self-justification. Her need to be something other than Jonathon’s wife, the plain one …
The plain one … How those words had once hurt. And still did?
No, not any more. In fact, if anything, she was grateful for the truth of them because they had forced her to fight against them, to look within herself, to find something there that she could hold on to and value.
She glanced at her watch. Jon wouldn’t be home yet and Joss was going straight from school to have tea with a friend. Katie and Louise had after-school tennis practice. She had a couple of hours in hand and her conscience had been pricking her for days about Guy and their business.
Being a partner in an antique shop and repairers might not have Ben’s approval but she enjoyed it. Even more she enjoyed the actual renovation and restoration side of the business, something that Guy freely admitted she had a definite talent for. Her career plans had been shelved when her mother had fallen ill within weeks of her sitting her A levels.
Her illness had mercifully been as swift as it was relentless. Within a few short weeks she was dead, but by then it was too late for Jenny to pick up the threads she had dropped and reapply for a course she had hoped to take—in more ways than one.
She and Jonathon had been married very quietly a matter of months after her mother’s death.
As she reached the main road, she paused and then turned right instead of left, heading for Haslewich instead of home. Guy had said he had picked up some silver he wanted her to see.
Tiggy exhaled in relief as she saw that the forecourt in front of the Dower House was empty. Good. David wasn’t home yet. She had stayed longer in Chester than she had planned. Guiltily she opened the boot of her car and removed the glossy carrier bags, grimacing as she stepped onto the gravel and felt it grate against her delicately pale high heels.
She would have preferred to have the forecourt paved, but since they merely leased the Dower House from Sir Richard Furness and since he was fiercely opposed to any kind of change, she knew that she had scant chance of doing away with the annoyance of the gravel.
Initially when, after their marriage, David had announced that they would be living in the Dower House, she had thought that he was joking. ‘But what’s the point when we’ll be going back to London?’ she had protested.
David had looked uncomfortable and then defensive as he told her that there was no way he could afford to live in London now, that they would have to live in Cheshire where he, at least, had the security of a partnership in the family business, which included a generous additional allowance to cover the cost of the lease on the Dower House.
She hadn’t minded too much at the time. She was a new bride, pretty and young, and everyone made a huge fuss over her. It was only sometime afterwards that she began to feel stifled, bored with life as a country solicitor’s wife and then later again that boredom had turned to …
Quickly she unlocked the front door and hurried into the house, going directly upstairs and into the privacy of her bathroom. She shuddered, her fingers trembling slightly as she unfastened the buttons of her silk shirt, then hastily bundled it into the linen basket along with the brief and very expensive silk bra she had been wearing underneath it.
Her skirt could only be dry-cleaned and she grimaced slightly in distaste as she saw the small mark on the creased cream fabric.
Cream was one of her favourite colours. She wore it a lot. It suited her, drew attention to her fragile bone structure and pale, carefully highlighted hair.
She stepped into the shower. She much preferred the pampering luxury of a bath but today she just didn’t have time. She and David were due to go out to dinner and she would have to wash her hair and do her nails. She had noticed as she parked the car that one of them was chipped. She had no idea how on earth Jenny could bear to leave hers unmanicured the way she did.
As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Tiggy studied her reflection in the bathroom’s full-length mirrors. Her breasts were still as high and firm as they had always been, her stomach as flat, her skin as silken, but for how much longer?
She was forty-five now and already she was beginning to discern a certain betraying slackness in the flesh of her face and those tell-tale lines around her eyes. She had had a discreet eye tuck the year she was forty, but that wouldn’t last for ever.
Tiggy dreaded the thought of growing old or not being beautiful and desirable any more. David laughed at her, but then he didn’t understand. How could he? Wrapped in her towel, she walked into their bedroom. A copy of the new edition of Vogue lay on the bed. She picked it up, studying the model on the cover.
She had been a fool to give up her own career when she had, but at the time … David had seemed so glamorous, so exciting … so sexy … so different from all those paunchy, middle-aged men she kept being introduced to by the agency. Men who looked at her with hot, avaricious eyes and wanted to touch her with even hotter and more avaricious hands.
Knowing how much David had wanted her, how much he’d desired and loved her, had thrilled her, but that thrill hadn’t lasted. It never did.
She wondered what time Olivia would arrive and what this boyfriend she was bringing with her would be like. Not too American, she hoped. Ben was bound to disapprove. Given the quite small age gap between them, it was odd that she and Olivia weren’t closer. People often commented that they looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. It had shocked Tiggy when Olivia had announced that she wanted to train for the law. Somehow she had expected that she would follow in her own footsteps and go into modelling or something similar, but then in many ways Olivia really was such an odd girl. Tiggy put it down to the fact that Olivia had spent so much time with Jenny when she was growing up.
Jack would be home tomorrow, as well. Tiggy knew that Ben hadn’t approved of their sending him to boarding school. Jack, like his father and all the male members of the Crighton family had attended the King’s School in Chester. But unlike them, Jack boarded there on a weekly basis.
Jenny, of course, being Jenny, would make nothing of driving first Max and now Joss there day in and day out—and had even offered to pick Jack up and take him with them but Tiggy had her own reasons for preferring to have her son out of the way on occasion.
She glanced impatiently at her nails. She was booked in tomorrow for a manicure at the beauty salon in the exclusive country club close to Chester, which she and David had joined shortly after it had opened. David didn’t use the facilities very often; he preferred playing golf at the same club where his father and brother were members.
Now, what was she going to wear tonight? The Buckletons were members of an old Cheshire family and well-connected; they lived in a huge, draughty, rambling Victorian house just outside Chester. In addition to the couple’s being clients of David’s, Ann Buckleton was a local JP. Tiggy suspected that Ann Buckleton didn’t particularly approve of her and would have preferred Jenny’s company, but David was the firm’s senior partner and as such it was David whom they invited to dinner.
Jenny parked her car in the large municipal car park just outside the town. The town itself was old; the Romans had mined salt in the area and so had others both before and after them.
The town had literally been built on salt and now there was concern that parts of it could be subject to subsidence because of the now-disused and extensive salt workings on its outskirts.
To Jenny, Haslewich was everything that a small rural English town should be—a neat, compact and harmonious blending of buildings actually built in some cases on top of one another, absurd Georgian growths sprouting from Tudor roots, handsome stone structures jostling for space with others made from brick. Some of the more flamboyant stone ones sported their purloined masonry without any hint of shame or subtlety.
During the Civil War, so much damage had been done to the town’s surrounding stone wall by the attacking Roundhead troops that after the war the stone had been used, in some cases, to repair the homes of the townspeople, and the only part of the original wall that now remained was the section that ran between the town and the river. The local council was presently running a campaign to raise money to have it restored. So far, the townspeople appeared stoically determined to leave their wall as it was and in many ways Jenny didn’t blame them.
The antique shop was in a small, narrow alley just off the town square, a pretty, double-fronted Tudor building with an upper storey that overhung the alleyway.
Guy Cooke was rearranging some delicate Staffordshire figurines when she walked in. He looked up and saw her, immediately stopping what he was doing to come over and greet her with a warm smile.
He was at least fifteen years younger than Jonathon and physically completely different. Where Jon was tall and blond with long arms and legs, Guy was shorter, broader, his hair pitch-dark and his colouring just short of swarthy.
He had once told Jenny that there was supposed to be gypsy blood in his family somewhere, and looking at him Jenny could well believe it. They had been partners for seven years and friends for much longer. Guy’s family had lived in the town for generations and his parents had run a pub several doors away from the shop before they retired and moved. He had sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all living within a stone’s throw of one another and all virtually united in their disapproval of Guy and what he was doing.
Guy had always been ‘arty’ as he had wryly described himself once to Jenny. Of course, his parents had tried their best to smother such an undesirable trait, which would have been bad enough in a daughter, but was totally unacceptable in a son….
The Cookes as a clan were notoriously macho; the thickset, dark-haired, very male men knew their place in life and what being a man and, more importantly, being a Cooke were all about.
Not so Guy. He had wanted something different out of life. He was something different.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been much in evidence lately,’ Jenny apologised, shaking her head when Guy offered her a cup of tea.
‘Mmm. How are things going?’ he asked her.
‘All right—I think,’ Jenny said, laughing. ‘Tiggy and I were up at Queensmead this morning just checking on the final details—’
‘You mean you were checking on the final details,’ Guy corrected her.
Jenny frowned. It was no secret to her that Guy didn’t particularly like her sister-in-law, which was quite odd really when one thought about how he felt about anything that was beautiful, and Tiggy was certainly that.
Tiggy didn’t like him, either. In fact, she had, on occasion, been uncharacteristically vindictive about him, making waspish comments about the fact that he wasn’t married.
Jenny had started to laugh. She could think of few men who were more masculinely heterosexual than Guy—not that it made any difference what his sexual preference was—and the only reason he hadn’t married was because he hadn’t wanted to tie himself down to one woman. In his sexuality at least, he was very much a member of the Cooke clan who had, to a man, what was tacitly understood to be a weakness for the female sex.
‘What about this silver you wanted me to look at?’ she reminded him.
‘Oh, yes. I think it’s Queen Anne but you’re the silver expert. I’ve got it in the safe.’
It was over an hour before Jenny finally left the shop. Like Guy, she was convinced that the silver was genuine although, as she had pointed out to him, the lack of any identifying marks could mean that it might have been stolen at some point in time.
‘It’s too good not to have had proper markings,’ she had observed. ‘I suppose the best thing we can do is to check with the police.’
After she left the shop, she crossed the square. She just had enough time left to call on Ruth; her husband’s aunt lived in a narrow, elegant Georgian town house on Church Walk, which she rented from the church commissioners. To get to it, Jenny made a small detour through the churchyard itself, pausing as she walked past the Crighton family plot to stop and bend down towards a small single headstone carved with laughing, naughty-looking cherubs. The epitaph read:
‘HARRY CRIGHTON
JUNE 19TH 1965–JUNE 20TH 1965.’
He had lived such a heartbreakingly short time, this first child of hers, and a part of her still mourned for him and always would. Time had eased the piercing sharpness of her initial grief, but she could never forget him, nor would she want to. Before she stood up, she touched the headstone, stroking it, caressing it almost, as she said his name.
Ruth was waiting for her with the front door open as she walked up the path. ‘I saw you in the churchyard,’ she told Jenny. ‘He would have been thirty-one this year if he’d lived.’
‘I know.’ For a moment both women were quiet. If having Ben as a father-in-law weighed heavily at times in the negative balance sheet of her marriage to Jonathon, then having Ruth in the family certainly added balance to the positive side of the equation, Jenny acknowledged.
‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’ Ruth asked her.
‘No,’ Jenny told her ruefully, ‘but I’d still love one.’
‘Come on in, then,’ Ruth invited her, and as Jenny followed her into the pretty sitting room at the front of the house, she paused to admire the huge profusion of flowers decorating the empty fireplace.
Ruth had a gift, not just for arranging flowers artistically, but for growing them, as well.
‘Pieter is coming with the flowers on the day of the party,’ she told Jenny, following the direction of her glance. ‘He’s catching the first ferry over that morning. The flowers will all be freshly picked and he knows exactly what we want.’
Ruth bought her flowers directly from a Dutch supplier whose younger son crossed the North Sea to Hull once a week delivering flowers to his regular customers but, for this weekend’s celebration, Pieter had agreed to make a special trip bringing only the flowers that Ruth had ordered especially for the event.
‘I imagine Ben’s driving you crazy, isn’t he?’ she asked now.
‘Just a little bit,’ Jenny agreed. ‘His hip bothers him at times although he won’t admit it….’
Half an hour later when Jenny left, Ruth watched her walk back across the churchyard and pause a second time for a few moments in front of the grave of her first-born son.
She sensed what Jenny was feeling. Some pains never ever faded; some things could never ever be forgotten, and it wasn’t always true that with time they eased.
2 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Jon, have you got a minute?’
Jonathon looked up from his desk as his twin walked into his office, then frowned slightly as he saw the way that David was massaging his shoulder. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked him.
‘Not really, just a bit of an ache. I must have pulled something playing golf on Sunday, which reminds me, we’re both down to play in the Captain’s Cup next month but Tiggy is getting a bit agitated about our getting away so I might have to pull out. Look, I’m going to get off early. We’re having dinner with the Buckletons tonight and there’s nothing pressing here.’
No, there probably wasn’t, not once you discounted the two wills waiting to be redrafted, the conveyancing for Hawkins Farm and a whole host of other complicated and fiddly commissions that increasingly recently seemed to find their way from David’s desk to his own because his brother couldn’t find the time to deal with them.
It had never really been intended that the two of them would go into the family business; David had been earmarked to become a member of a much more elevated rank of their profession—a barrister—and long before they had both even left school, their father was already talking about the time when David would be a QC.
All that had changed, though, the summer David had returned to Haslewich with Tiggy to tell the family that they were married and that Tiggy was expecting his child. No one had mentioned David’s failure to fulfil his father’s hopes for him by not qualifying for the Bar, just as no one had mentioned the debts David had run up whilst living in London or the distinctive and tell-tale, sickly sweet smell that emanated from the room that David and Tiggy were sharing at Queensmead until a new home was found for them.
Arrangements were very quickly made for David to join the partnership, but not as a practising solicitor because, of course, he wasn’t qualified, but Jon doubted that anyone remembered that these days. As the favoured brother, David was automatically assumed to be the firm’s senior partner and Jonathon, because he was Jonathon, had never done anything to dispel this myth. Equally David, because he was David, hadn’t, either.
Now as Jonathon looked at his twin and saw the signs of weakness that age was making increasingly plain in his features, the faint coarsening of the once healthily tanned taut flesh of his face, the inability of his gaze to hold Jon’s own, the fleshiness on a body that used to be as firmly muscular as Jon’s still was, these vulnerabilities if anything only made him love his brother more and not less. Jon loved him with a fiercely protective, unvocalised love so intense that sometimes it physically hurt him. He would never have dreamed of telling his twin or anyone else how he thought and knew instinctively that David did not have the same intensity of feeling for him.
Watching David massaging the shoulder he complained had been aching, Jon found he was automatically copying the movement even though his own shoulder was completely free of pain.
‘Looks like the weather is going to stay fine for the weekend,’ David commented as he turned to leave. ‘The girls will be pleased. By the way, young Max rang me the other night. He’s driving up from London tomorrow, he says.’
‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. Max might be his son, but it was David whom he treated more like a father. It was David who would have preferred to be his father, Jon suspected. They shared the same extrovert, almost extravagantly outrageous personality, the same needs, the same love of ownership and glory, the same gifts—and the same weaknesses. Jon started to frown.
‘Livvy’s due back tonight,’ David was continuing, and now he, too, was starting to frown. ‘She’s bringing this American with her. I’m not sure … look, I’d better go,’ he told Jon hurriedly as the phone started to ring. ‘I promised Tiggy I wouldn’t be late and she’s already in a bit of a state, something about the shoes she ordered for Saturday not arriving … You know how easily she gets upset.’
From his office window, Jon could see across the small town square with its neatly enclosed immaculate lawn and its tidy flower-beds. He could see Jenny, his wife, crossing the square on her way back to her car. She stopped to talk to David; David had obviously seen her, too, as he quickened his pace to catch up with her. Jon saw the way she smiled as she greeted his brother, the afternoon sun turning her brunette hair a nice warm chestnut. Once, a long time ago, so long ago now that most people had forgotten all about it, Jenny had been David’s girlfriend.
The telephone had started to ring again. Looking away from the window, Jon reached out to answer it.
‘What’s for tea?’
Jenny smiled at her youngest child. At forty she had thought herself too old and too careful to have another baby, but nature had proved her wrong.
Jon had been almost shocked when she had told him and she had felt oddly, awkwardly self-conscious about delivering the news to him herself.
‘You’re pregnant, but how …?’
‘Our wedding anniversary,’ she’d reminded him, adding simply, ‘We were supposed to be going out for a meal, remember, only you were delayed in court and instead we ate in and opened that wine that Uncle Hugh had given you.’
‘Oh God, yes,’ Jon had agreed. ‘That stuff was lethal.’
‘It was vintage burgundy,’ Jenny chided him severely, ‘and we shouldn’t have opened that second bottle. It’s my fault. It never occurred to me to think about taking any precautions.’
What she didn’t add was that sex between them had become so rare an event that her diaphragm was something that was pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer and largely forgotten. They had a comfortable, steady marriage and were not given to being physically affectionate with one another in public the way David and Tiggy often were and perhaps, because of the busyness of their lives, they had somehow grown out of the habit of being physically demonstrative with one another in private, as well.
However, as Jenny surveyed the result of their two bottles of vintage burgundy and her carelessness, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be without the consequences of their ‘accident’.
‘It’s lamb and new potatoes,’ she told Joss, named after his paternal great-grandfather, adding warningly, ‘And Joss, don’t forget—homework first.’
‘When’s Livvy coming back?’ Joss asked her, ignoring her warning. ‘She promised to come round.’
‘Some time this evening,’ Jenny responded, ‘but remember, Joss, she’s bringing a friend back with her and she won’t have time to go roaming all over the countryside with you.’
‘The badger cubs are coming out at night now. She’ll want to see them.’
Jenny grinned to herself as she heard the conviction in her young son’s voice. He was going to be a real heartbreaker when he grew up. By some magical alchemy he had managed to inherit the very best of both his father’s and his uncle’s genes. David’s overconfidence and flamboyance were toned down and backed up by Jon’s guarded personality; his nature was also enhanced by the ingredients of good humour and irrepressibility—a sense of fun, a love of life and the people around him.
‘Max is due back tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘So if you haven’t already removed your belongings from his room, I suggest that you do so this evening, and as long as we’re on the subject, your brother’s bedroom is not the place to dismantle your bike,’ she remonstrated severely.
Joss looked innocently at her. ‘But I had to do it there,’ he told her winningly. ‘There was nowhere else. There’s no room in the garage and …’
And the truth was that there was nothing quite so much fun for him as testing the strength of Max’s claim to seniority, Jenny knew, but Max was not like Olivia, indulgent of his sibling’s youthfulness and disposed to be amused and entertained by him.
Max had been horrified when she had told him that she was pregnant, and that disgust and dislike of her pregnancy had been transferred into a disgust and dislike for his younger brother.
‘It would be much better if Max went and stayed at Uncle David’s and Olivia stayed here,’ Joss grumbled.
Jenny gave him another warning look and reminded him sternly, ‘Homework.’ But she knew that there was an element of truth in what he said.
Max did prefer the company of his aunt and uncle, especially his uncle, whilst Olivia … Livvy was such a darling and so dear to her, Jenny just hoped that this young American, whoever he was, realised that he was a lucky man.
Max grimaced as the office door swung closed behind the chambers clerk. It was already gone six o’clock and now it looked as though he was going to have at least another couple of hours work ahead of him. He glanced in disgust at the papers Bob Ford had just placed on his desk.
It was no secret that he wasn’t exactly one of the clerk’s favourites, a legacy of the early days of Max’s pupillage at the chambers when Bob had unfortunately overheard his efforts to make fun of him by imitating the slight stammer he developed whenever he was under pressure.
Max shrugged.
He had inherited his father’s and his uncle’s tall, muscular body frame, and the years of playing rugby first at King’s School and then later at Oxford had developed the powerful physique of which he was now secretly rather proud.
He enjoyed it when he saw the sideways double take women gave him as they discreetly and sometimes not so discreetly assessed him. He liked it, as well, when he stripped off in the shower after a hard game of squash or rugby and saw the envy flare briefly in the eyes of other men. It gave him an advantage, and as Max was well aware, advantages were all plus points when it came to winning life’s games. And Max intended to be a winner. He wasn’t going to be like his father, content to be second best. No, Max only had to look at his Uncle David to see what he wanted to be.
He couldn’t remember the first time he had realised the difference in the way people treated his father and his Uncle David but he could remember that he had decided that people would treat him the way they did his uncle and not his father.
The knowledge that he would have much preferred it if David had been his father had come later. He had enjoyed it when David had begun to treat him more like a son than a nephew and he had enjoyed even more displacing Olivia in her father’s affections, had relished knowing that of the two of them he came first.
It had been David and his grandfather who had been full of praise and encouragement when he had announced his intention to train as a barrister.
‘You’ll need a first-class degree,’ his father had warned him. ‘And even then it won’t be easy.’
‘Stop trying to put the lad off,’ his grandfather had interrupted. ‘It’s time we had a QC on our side of the family.’
‘Well, that’s certainly what I intend to aim for,’ Max had agreed, taking advantage of his grandfather’s good mood, ‘but it isn’t going to be that simple. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get a part-time job whilst I’m at Oxford—not if I’m going to get a good degree,’ he added virtuously, ‘and as for my grant … And then I’m going to have to replace my car …’ He had paused hopefully, and as he had anticipated, his grandfather hadn’t disappointed him.
‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort something out. You’ve got some money coming to you eventually from your grandmother, and as for a car, haven’t you got a twenty-first coming up …?’
Later on he had overheard his parents discussing the incident.
‘It’s David all over again,’ he heard his mother saying angrily, ‘and Max encourages him.’
‘Yes, I know, but what could I do?’ Max had heard his father responding quietly. ‘You know what Dad’s like.’
The trouble with his mother was that she was too moralistic, Max decided, but then he supposed she had to be something. After all, she wasn’t as physically attractive as David’s wife, Tiggy, the kind of woman that men stopped to stare at in the street. The kind of woman that other men envied a man for having. He could still vividly remember the thrill it had given him the year David and Tiggy had come to his school sports day instead of his parents.
Old Harris, the sports master, had gone beetroot red and behaved like an idiot when Max had introduced Tiggy to him. Max had amused himself imagining his wanking off later in the privacy of his rented rooms as he relived the occasion. Pathetic sod. Max bet he didn’t know what it was like to have a woman, unlike Max himself, who had lost his virginity at fourteen with the able, the very able, help of a girl who worked behind the bar at the pub they all went into after Saturday morning sport.
Tucked away down a side street in Chester, it had possessed the kind of seediness that both excited and amused him. For a start it had so obviously been a place his respectable father would never have dreamed of going to, and as for his mother … But Max had enjoyed it. Just as he had enjoyed the slightly sweaty, earthy scent of the girl as she took him back to her room and let him kiss and grope her for several minutes before finally pushing him off and commanding him to wait whilst she stripped off her clothes.
It had been the first time he had seen a real naked female in the flesh, and she had had no inhibitions about letting him see her, even to the extent of laughing mockingly at him after she propped herself up on her pillows and spread her legs, inviting him to have a good look at what lay between them.
‘Bet you haven’t seen many of these before, have you?’ she demanded, grinning at him as he touched the thicket of dark, rough hair and then parted the thick, fleshy lips beneath it. ‘Know what this is, do you?’ she asked him, commanding him to look as she revealed the small inner nub of hard flesh.
‘Course I do,’ Max responded swaggeringly.
‘Good,’ she announced, ‘then you’ll know what to do with it, won’t you?’
Max certainly thought he did but she soon disabused him of this misapprehension.
‘God, you’re rough,’ she complained. ‘It’s not your own prick you’ve got there, you know, and besides,’ she added slyly, watching him, ‘it works much better if you suck it.’
She laughed when she saw his expression.
‘Never gone down on a girl before, have you? Well, now’s your big chance.’
She hadn’t let him put himself inside her until after she’d had her orgasm and by then … She had laughed again when he hadn’t been able to hold back or control his excitement or the thick gush of semen that shot from his tensely erect cock, but she hadn’t been laughing later when he had thrust into her and gone on thrusting until she was moaning and clawing at his back, urging him on and on and then screeching like the alley cat that she was as he took her through her orgasm and refused to stop until she had had another and then another. He hadn’t seen her again after that—there hadn’t been any need.
He could remember how shocked and disgusted he’d been when his mother had been pregnant with Joss, knowing that she and his father still did it.
He could remember her and his father attending one of his school functions and how furious and ashamed he had felt at the sight of her heavily pregnant body. She had no right, at her age … She was making a laughing-stock of herself and of him.
Max’s mouth hardened as he thought of his parents; sometimes there was a look in his mother’s eyes when she watched him….
His mother was crazy if she thought he was going to end up like his father, a second-rate man working for a second-rate out-of-touch family business in a second-rate county town. If it wasn’t for his Uncle David and his charismatic personality, the business would have gone to the wall years ago. Just because his uncle had made one foolish mistake and …
It wasn’t a mistake Max was going to repeat. Oh, he intended to enjoy his life but he also intended to make sure he didn’t get caught in the same trap as his uncle.
Max had made sure that he left Oxford with a good enough degree to get him into a decent set of chambers after his Bar finals; and once there not only had he made sure that he brought himself to the attention of those who could be of benefit to his future career, but additionally he had also made sure that his life wasn’t all hard work and paying lip-service to his professional ambitions. However, unlike his uncle, he had been discreet and careful.
‘Still here, old boy? I thought you were intending to get off early.’
Max tensed as Roderick Hamilton walked into his office. Roderick was just over twelve months his senior. They had been at Oxford at the same time but had not mixed in the same circles; Roderick’s parents were extremely wealthy and well-connected. His uncle was the present head of chambers, which was no doubt why of the two of them Roderick had been chosen to fill the vacancy for a tenancy at the end of their pupillage whilst Max had had to fall back on the ignominy of being allowed merely to stay on as a squatter. This meant, of course, that the only fee-paying work that Max could get was whatever had been passed over by the existing members of the chambers, including Roderick.
Max had never been the type to feel the need to make close friends; to Max his peers were rivals, obstacles he had to overcome, but in Roderick’s case, Max actively disliked the man, as well.
‘Mmm … the Wilson brief. Hard luck,’ Roderick commiserated as he picked up the papers on Max’s desk and glanced at them before tossing them to one side. ‘Pity you’re not free this weekend,’ he added. ‘Ma’s having a “do” for my sister. She’s coming out this year and Ma’s asked me to round up some men.’
Max didn’t take his eyes off the papers he was now pretending to study. He knew perfectly well that Roderick was trying to amuse himself at his own expense; there was no way Roderick’s mother would welcome any uninvited extra guests to the extremely prestigious and carefully planned ball she was hostessing for her daughter’s coming-out party.
‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ he responded without looking at Roderick. ‘It’s my father’s fiftieth birthday this weekend.’
‘Ah, you’ll have heard about old Benson, I expect,’ Roderick remarked, obviously getting down to the real purpose of his ‘visit’.
Even though he had been expecting it, waiting for it, in actual fact Max could still feel his body fighting to betray the rage that had been boiling inside him all day.
‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ he agreed.
‘Once he goes it will mean there’ll be a tenancy vacancy in chambers,’ Roderick told him unnecessarily.
‘Yes,’ Max responded neutrally, knowing that he had to make some response.
‘Applying for it, are you?’
Max could feel his control starting to slip. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ he lied.
‘Well, I should do if I were you, old chap,’ Roderick warned him, ‘because it seems that tenancies aren’t that easy to come by these days and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of interest being shown in this one. Not, of course, that there should be any problem if you did decide to go for it. After all, you did your pupillage here and you’ve been squatting here for … let me think, it must be well over a year, mustn’t it? God, is that the time? I’d better go … I promised Ma I’d be on hand at home this evening. Good luck with the Wilson brief,’ he drawled as he walked into the corridor.
Max waited until he was quite sure that Roderick had gone before balling up the piece of paper he had been reading and hurling it across the room with all the force of his rugger training. Damn Roderick, damn him to hell and back and damn his bloody uncle, as well.
It was over eight months now since Max had heard the first whisper that Clive Benson was going to be invited to become a judge. He had heard it initially on a visit to Chester to keep up with the Chester branch of the family; after all, in this business you needed all the help you could get. And ever since then he had been doing all he could to make sure that he got the vacancy when it came up.
On Wednesday morning, when the clerk had told him that the senior partner wanted to have a meeting with him, Max had confidently expected to be told officially about the vacancy and to be assured that once the tenancy did fall vacant, it would be his.
Instead he had been told following much harrumphing and throat clearing that after much discussion the partners had decided it was time they observed the rules against sexual discrimination and gave consideration to taking on a female barrister. Not that that necessarily meant that they were going to do so, nor that he was being passed over, Max had been assured. All applicants would be considered on their merits, of course.
‘Of course,’ Max had returned through gritted teeth but he knew exactly what he was being told and, without doubt, Roderick also knew exactly what was going on. How could he not do?
It was too late now for Max to wish he had not announced privately to his grandfather the last time he had gone home that the tenancy was as good as his. Gramps was already champing at the bit about the fact that he was only working as a squatter. In his day such a situation had been inconceivable; you did your pupillage and then went on to work as a fully fledged junior barrister. But things had changed; places in chambers were hard to come by.
And just who the hell was this female anyway? No names had been mentioned and mentally Max had run through the female barristers of his acquaintance who might be considered. Sod the bloody sex discrimination laws. What about him … what about discriminating against him?
He had gone out that night in a foul mood, picked up the girl he was currently dating, a leggy, passionate redhead who had made no objection when he had cut their dinner date short and taken her home. She had objected later on, though, on the fifth occasion he had woken her in the night to vent his pent-up fury and resentment, filling her body with his without taking sufficient time to arouse her completely first, using her ruthlessly and emotionlessly and refusing to let her go until he had driven his body into a state of physically exhausted detachment.
She had told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be seeing her again but he didn’t particularly care. He had more important things to worry about. Despite all the sexual energy he had discharged, he was still furiously, bitterly angry. He was owed that vacancy.
He had worked his butt off this last year, letting them throw every bit of dross they had at him. Gritting his teeth, he had managed to master the sometimes almost overwhelming urge to turn round and tell them just what to do with their non-fee-paying, thanklessly unrewarding juvenile bits of work they wouldn’t give a pupil to do but which they had no compunction about dumping on his desk, knowing he could not, dared not, object.
What had all that been for if he wasn’t going to get the vacant tenancy? He might as well have gone into industry; there at least he would be earning a decent salary. But he hadn’t gone into industry because as his Uncle David and his grandfather had desired, so Max wanted for himself the prestige of being a barrister, of rising to QC and ultimately being called to the Bench.
He wanted it, hungered for it, yearned for it, ached for it and, by God, he intended to have it, and no female, no sex discrimination law was going to stand in his way.
There was only one way to deal with the situation now and Max knew exactly what it was, but first he had to find out exactly the identity of the hopeful candidate for the vacancy. The partners would no doubt know and so, too, would the senior clerk, but Max quickly dismissed him from his calculations. He would never divulge that kind of information to him, which left only the partners and anyone who had their confidence or access to it.
Max was still mulling over what course of action he could take when he climbed into his car two hours later and headed for the North.
‘Here we are, home.’
‘Very impressive,’ Caspar murmured as Olivia brought her car to a halt and turned round in her seat to look at him.
‘Here’s Tiggy,’ she announced when she saw the front door open and her mother hurry towards the stationary car.
Caspar remained silent as he turned to take his first look at Olivia’s mother. Her use of her mother’s nickname whenever she spoke of her wasn’t anything unusual in the society in which he had grown up, but a certain undertone that was always in Olivia’s voice when she spoke about her mother made his study of the older woman thoughtfully assessing.
Physically, they were very alike; Olivia had inherited her mother’s beauty including her high-cheeked facial features. In contrast to her mother, however, Olivia’s beauty radiated from within her in a way that made it almost unimportant that she possessed the kind of looks that could take one’s breath away. Beside her daughter, Tiggy seemed to be a beautiful but blank two-dimensional image.
Caspar’s first feeling as he watched her was one of disappointment. Why so? he wondered as he got out of the car and waited for Olivia to introduce them. What had he expected … hoped for, if indeed he had hoped for anything? Perhaps despite that carefully neutral note he had already observed in Olivia’s voice, her mother would still turn out to be more rather than less of what her daughter already was.
‘Livvy darling … at last … Oh dear, look at your nails and your hair, and those jeans … Oh, darling—’
‘Tiggy, this is Caspar,’ Olivia interrupted her mother calmly. ‘Caspar, this is my mother.’
‘Tiggy, you must call me Tiggy,’ Tiggy announced in the slightly breathy voice that years ago admirers had told her was so incredibly sexy. ‘Come on in, both of you. I’m afraid your father and I are just on our way out,’ she told Olivia as she urged them into the house. ‘We’re having dinner with the Buckletons….’
The front door was already open, the parquet floor gleaming richly of wax, and as he stepped inside, Caspar’s initial impression was one of a room filled with soft colour and flowers. There were huge bowls filled with floral arrangements everywhere: in the fireplace, on a round polished table in the middle of the room, on a pair of small tables beneath imposing Georgian silver-framed mirrors that faced one another across the width of the room.
‘I do so think that flowers are important,’ he heard Tiggy telling him as she saw him staring at his surroundings. ‘They make a house come alive, turn it into a home,’ she was saying quietly, then … ‘Oh, Jack, no, don’t you dare bring that animal in here. Use the back door. You know the rules.’
Caspar frowned as a young boy and a large, slightly overweight golden retriever walked in through the still-open front door.
‘Well, if you’re going out, we’d better not keep you,’ he heard Olivia telling her mother. ‘I take it that we’re in my room. We—’
‘Oh dear … Darling, I’m sorry but that’s something your father wants a word with you about. It’s not that we mind, of course … but it’s your grandfather. You know how old-fashioned he is and how important public opinion is to him. Your father feels that he just wouldn’t be at all happy about you and Caspar … well, especially with the Chester family coming over for the party, your father felt—’
‘Are you trying to say that you expect me and Caspar to sleep in separate rooms?’ Olivia interrupted her mother incredulously. ‘But that’s …’ She started to shake her head, anger darkening her eyes, her voice crisping authoritatively as she remonstrated with her mother. ‘There’s no way—’
Caspar touched her lightly on her arm. ‘It’s okay, I understand. Separate rooms will be fine,’ he told Tiggy easily.
Olivia shook her head and pulled a rueful face at him. The sheer intensity of her love for him frightened her at times. Love was a word that was expressed freely and mercilessly in her home, but as an emotion, she wasn’t sure she fully understood it—and it left her feeling vulnerable and wary.
She had practically swooned at his feet with lust the moment she set eyes on him. Who wouldn’t have done? Six foot two with broad, well-muscled shoulders and physique to match, he had inherited from somewhere or other the facial bone structure of a Native American warrior chief along with the Celtic colouring that was the most compelling of all—black hair and dark blue eyes.
As she walked into his lecture, Olivia simply hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him—and she wasn’t the only one. She had almost fainted on the spot when he had asked her out, but she had retained enough sanity and enough sense of healthy self-preservation to insist that their first date be somewhere busy and public and to arrange her own transport home just so that she wouldn’t give in to the temptation—if it was offered—of going straight to bed with him.
She didn’t and it wasn’t, but not, as both of them confessed to one another later, because it wasn’t what they wanted.
Oh yes, she had wanted him all right—and still did—but now she loved him, as well, loved him intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. He was her lover, her mentor, her best friend … her everything, and she couldn’t envisage how on earth her life had ever seemed complete without him, how she had not, for all those years when he had not been there, somehow been conscious of a huge, aching, empty gap where he would one day be.
He was her whole world; he made her complete and yet she found it hard to tell him how much he meant to her emotionally. That was far, far harder than to tell him just what kind of effect he had on her physically, but then Olivia was very leery of emotions, of feeling them and exhibiting them. Her mother was emotional, everyone said so; they also said with varying degrees of sympathy that that was why her mother needed and deserved special handling, special allowances.
Even as a very small child, Olivia was aware that those special allowances made for her mother’s emotional nature always seemed to be given at the expense of other people, that in some way or other those closest to her mother had to be less emotional as though to compensate for her mother’s excesses.
‘You really are the most amazing person,’ Caspar had told her one day after she had spent weeks tracking down a particular book she knew he had wanted, presenting it to him with casual indifference. ‘You’ll do something like this, but just try to get you to tell me that you love me.’
‘You know I do,’ Olivia returned warily.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, adding lightly, ‘but it would still be nice to hear you say it, though.’
‘I know,’ Olivia admitted, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the small phrase then … and she still couldn’t, not even during the most intense moments of their shared heights of passion.
‘I just don’t believe this,’ she told him fifteen minutes later after her parents had left and Jack had gone out to a friend’s. She had gone from her childhood bedroom to the small attic guest-room where Caspar was unpacking his case. ‘They might at least have put you up in the room next to mine.’
‘It’s only for a couple of days,’ Caspar reminded her, adding teasingly, ‘and I don’t mind. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to the rest. Have you any idea how much you move around in your sleep?’ he asked her mock-aggrievedly. ‘It’s been months since I got a decent night’s sleep.’
‘Two months six days and … eight hours,’ Olivia told him lovingly, counting the actual hours on her fingers whilst Caspar grinned at her. ‘It’s ridiculous of Mum and Dad to expect us to sleep in separate rooms,’ she continued, perching on the end of his small single bed.
After studying it, Caspar had already decided ruefully that there was no way it was going to be long enough for him, and despite what he had said to her, he knew already that he was going to miss having Olivia next to him, and not simply because of the sex, in fact, not really at all because of the sex.
He was thirty-two years old and had had good sex before, and if he was honest, great sex before, but the difference now was that he had never been in love before, never loved before, never really believed that love, the kind of love he felt for Olivia, could actually exist. He had watched his parents go through various sets of mix-and-match relationships, taking on partners, then abandoning them to take on new ones. He had managed to avoid the trap of an early marriage fatally programmed for failure, had realistically accepted that he would marry perhaps some time in his thirties and that maybe it would last long enough for him and his partner to see their children through their teens or maybe it wouldn’t and that was all any sensible, mature right-thinking adult could expect.
‘It’s the fact that it’s all so damned hypocritical that really infuriates me,’ Olivia complained, nibbling at her lower lip in the same way that she worried over the issue of their not being able to sleep together. ‘It’s always the same. We’ve always got to fall in line behind what Gramps decides we should do.’
‘Morally speaking …’ Caspar started to say, but Olivia shook her head, refusing to let him continue.
‘Morally speaking nothing. Gramps just likes controlling other people. He isn’t in the least bit concerned about my moral welfare or about any aspect of my welfare,’ she declared fiercely. ‘He never has been. Now if I’d been a boy … a grandson …’ She broke off and shook her head a second time, a rueful smile curling her mouth. ‘Look at me. I haven’t been back for twenty-four hours and already it’s starting. I promised myself when I left home that I’d leave my chip behind me.’
‘You’ve said yourself that you wouldn’t really have wanted to go into the family practice,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed, ‘but I should have had the opportunity to choose. Gramps and Dad did everything they could to dissuade me from studying law. Only Aunt Jen supported me and encouraged me. Oh, and Aunt Ruth, as well. You’ll like them and Uncle Jon.’
‘Your father’s twin?’
‘Mmm … although they aren’t at all alike, well, physically they are, of course, because they’re identical, but Uncle Jon …’ She stopped in mid-sentence.
‘Uncle Jon …?’ Caspar pressed but Olivia shook her head.
‘I can’t really explain. You’ll see for yourself when you meet him. It’s as though somehow he’s always standing in the shadows—in Dad’s shadow—and yet …’
She stopped, her brow furrowed in thought. ‘It’s as though he deliberately makes less of himself and more of Dad. Everyone, but most especially Gramps, focuses on Dad and on Tiggy because she’s his wife, and yet to me it sometimes seems as though both of them are somehow unreal, that they’re just cut-out card-board figures with no substance to them….’ She gave a small shiver.
‘It used to frighten me a bit when I was younger, seeing them like that and wondering why no one else seemed to see them in the same way.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Sort of like the old fairy story about the emperor’s new clothes in a way, I suppose. You heard Tiggy going on earlier about the flowers, about them making a house a home. Everyone always says what a marvellous flair for décor my mother has, and granted, the house is always perfect but it’s not a home. Aunt Jen’s house is a home. This place is just like … like a set out of a film or a play … the right furniture, the right colours, the right flowers.’ She grimaced again.
‘Dad was originally supposed to qualify as a barrister, you know, but something went wrong. I’m not sure what exactly. Oh, Tiggy makes references to how they met, the fact that my father was playing in a pop group, the fact that she was modelling and he fell in love with her on sight. They were married at Caxton Hall—it was the fashion then. Tiggy was already pregnant with me and that was why they decided to move back to Haslewich. Dad wanted his children to be brought up here, so he abandoned his plans to work as a barrister for our sake … at least that’s what I’ve always been told and, of course, Gramps has never really forgiven me for it. He so desperately wants to have a QC in the family.’
‘But I thought there already was, your great-uncle Hugh.’
‘Hugh was a QC, yes,’ Olivia agreed. ‘He was actually appointed a judge last year, but Hugh isn’t true family, at least not as Gramps defines it. Hugh is merely Gramps’s half-brother. Gramps’s father, Josiah, remarried after Gramps’s mother died and Hugh is his second wife, Ellen’s, son.
‘Although Gramps would never admit it, secretly I think he’s always been a little bit jealous of Hugh. Ellen’s family had money and Gramps’s father was, according to Aunt Ruth at least, always that little bit more indulgent towards Hugh than he was towards them.
‘It was Ellen’s family’s money that paid for Hugh to train as a barrister. Gramps, of course, had to go into the family business—there wasn’t anyone else who could. I suspect that really he’s still disappointed that Dad wasn’t called to the Bar, which is why he’s so determined that Max will be.’
‘Ah, Max.’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Olivia questioned.
‘Do you?’ Caspar returned dryly.
‘We’ve never really got on, even when we were younger. Oh, I know everyone thinks I’m jealous because Max is Dad’s favourite, but it isn’t that. I just don’t think Max is a very likeable person. No one else agrees with me, of course. Tiggy thinks he’s wonderful. He flirts outrageously with her and she can’t see that underneath it all he’s really laughing at her. She’ll probably try to flirt with you as she would him. She doesn’t mean anything by it … it’s just her way … she can’t help it, she needs …’
Olivia paused, groping for the right words to explain her mother’s vulnerability and then abandoned the attempt, saying quietly instead, ‘Sometimes when I see Aunt Jenny watching Max I sort of get the impression that she doesn’t like him much herself but, of course, that can’t be true. She’s his mother after all and mothers always love their children.’
‘Do they?’ Caspar asked her wryly. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. What certainly isn’t true is that children always love their parents. There’s virtually a whole industry growing up now around analysing why so many adult and sometimes not-yet-adult children murder their parents.’
‘Mmm … I was reading about that case involving …’
They were off, both of them quickly becoming engrossed in the intricacies of the legal case Olivia had referred to.
She was more beautiful than ever when she was animated like this, Caspar acknowledged, watching her, but never, nowhere ever near so beautiful as she was when she lay in his arms and opened her eyes, her body, her soul to him.
‘Caspar,’ she complained when she realised that she didn’t have his full attention, ‘what are you doing?’
‘Just testing this mattress,’ he explained.
‘Why?’ she demanded curiously.
‘Why do you think?’ he responded softly, turning round to kiss her before asking, ‘How long do you suppose we have before your parents come back?’
‘My bed’s bigger,’ Olivia whispered between returning his kisses.
‘Mmm …’ he murmured distractedly, nuzzling the soft, tender flesh of her throat. ‘You can show me later. Right now, right now …’
He exhaled in masculine, sensual pleasure as he peeled down her top and exposed the taut curves of her breasts, teasing first one and then the other erect nipple with the tip of his tongue, feeling her whole body quiver in response to his touch.
He could still remember the first time he had gone down on her, the intensity of the quicksilver shudders of pleasure she hadn’t been able to conceal from him. Thinking about it now made his own body harden.
‘We haven’t had any supper,’ Olivia reminded him, gasping the words between tiny shivers of responsive pleasure.
‘Mmm … who wants supper? I’m going to eat you instead,’ Caspar told her lovingly.
Olivia closed her eyes; she loved the way Caspar was so wonderfully vocal in his lovemaking. He wasn’t poetic as one would-be admirer had been when she was at college, nor did he talk dirty as some men—and women—enjoyed doing, but he had a way that was somehow totally unique, totally Caspar, a way that was both deliciously erotic and entrancingly funny, and sometimes whilst she was laughing, her own arousal caught her unawares. But not Caspar. He seemed to sense that moment, that second, that heartbeat of time when between one breath and the next, laughter turned to desire and her need for him overwhelmed everything else. Just as it was doing now.
‘Caspar,’ she demanded, tugging urgently at his hair, feeling the hot sweetness of his breath feeding the soft, fluttering pulse he had so lovingly conjured up with his tongue.
‘Mmm …?’ he murmured teasingly, knowing full well what that urgent little tug on his hair actually meant.
‘I thought you said that Olivia was coming back tonight,’ Joss protested when his third attempt to telephone his cousin had met with no response.
‘I thought she was,’ Jenny agreed, deliberately keeping her back to him and to Jon.
‘Well, she can’t be there, otherwise she’d have answered the phone, so you must have got it wrong, and now there won’t be time to show her the badger cubs,’ Joss announced, patently aggrieved.
‘Livvy won’t want to see the badgers. She’s bringing her boyfriend back with her,’ Louise told her brother with elder-sister superiority.
‘Louise,’ Jenny warned, frowning her disapproval.
‘So … why should that stop her wanting to see the cubs?’ Joss demanded.
Behind her back, Jenny could hear the twins’ stifled, knowing giggles.
‘Girls!’ Joss pronounced with exasperated contempt, then added, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that pie, Lou, because if you’re not …?’ He stared hopefully at his sister’s plate.
‘You’re looking tired,’ Jenny commented quietly to her husband when they were finally on their own.
‘Not really. It’s just … well, I suppose this party brings home the fact that we’re not getting any younger.’
Jenny didn’t say anything; she knew quite well who carried the heaviest part of the burden at work in the practice. She knew equally well that any attempt by her to protest would meet with that same polite, distancing withdrawal that Jon used whenever he considered that anyone was attempting to attack his twin brother.
In the early years of their marriage she had found it unbearably hurtful, knowing that someone else would always come first; that his loyalty, his love for his twin, would always be the most important, would always come before his feelings for her. But then she made herself recognise that it was that same loyalty to David that made him the man he was, the husband he was … the father he was … and she had said to herself that she must not fall into the same trap as others and try to make her husband what she wanted him to be rather than appreciate what he was. In their marriage at least, he would have the opportunity to be himself—to be an individual. She owed him that much. That much, and much, much more. So very much more …
3 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Thank you, Mr Thompson, everything looks lovely, and you’ll be here in the morning to finish off?’ Jenny asked the man in charge of the team that had erected the marquee.
They had arrived earlier in the day, a dozen or more of them, all neatly dressed in an eye-catching uniform of jeans and T-shirts bearing the marquee company’s logo. Most of this group of energetic young men and women, Jenny had discovered, were students working through their summer vacations.
They had erected the marquee with commendable expertise and speed under the watchful eye of the forty-odd-year-old foreman, breaking only for an hour’s respite and a picnic meal before going on to hang the interior awnings, put up the lights and erect the connecting ‘tunnels’ that led from the house to the marquee, one for the guests and another for the caterers.
‘We’ll be here sharp on the dot at eight,’ the foreman assured Jenny.
‘And the tables will be set up and the chairs in place by twelve?’ she checked.
‘By twelve,’ he agreed.
‘It looks absolutely wonderful,’ Olivia approved as the foreman turned to gather his team together.
She and Caspar had called round just as Jenny was on the point of leaving home to check on how things were going and had elected to go with her. Max, who had arrived home late the previous evening, had also announced that he would join them. Jenny wasn’t sure why. He was standing on his own, scowling and looking thoroughly bored and irritated.
‘I hope having plain cream isn’t going to be too dull,’ Jenny worried as she turned back to study the interior of the marquee again.
‘No, it’s perfect,’ Olivia assured her. ‘So elegant—anything else would have been too fussy … too weddingy.’
The marquee team were piling into the vehicles that had brought them and that Jenny was relieved to see were all neatly parked well away from Ben’s precious lawn.
Apart from being present when they arrived to check that everything was in order, Jenny had left the marquee people to get on with their work on their own, having given them her telephone number in case there were any problems, but she had gathered from the comments Ben had made since they arrived that he had spent most of the day keeping a stern eye on their activities.
She wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that they had worked so efficiently without causing any damage, but she rather suspected it might be the latter.
‘Damn fuss,’ he muttered now. ‘In my day a fiftieth birthday was nothing to make any fuss about. They’re forecasting rain, you know.’
‘Not until Monday at the very earliest,’ Jenny returned serenely.
‘I was wondering if I ought to offer Aunt Ruth some assistance with the flowers,’ Olivia told her, ‘but I don’t know whether I’d be more of a hindrance than a help.’
‘I’m sure she’d be only too grateful to have another pair of hands, even if it’s only to help fetch and carry,’ Jenny assured her.
‘Make that two pairs of hands,’ Caspar joined in.
Jenny smiled at him.
Apart from being introduced to him by Olivia when she had brought him round, neither she nor Jon had had much opportunity to talk to Caspar at any length as yet, but Jenny had liked him immediately.
When one looked beyond the remarkable sexuality of his stunning good looks, there was a steadfastness about him that reassured her maternal heart as well as a certain strength of purpose that told her he was not a man to be deflected from any path he had chosen—any person he had chosen—and it was plain that the person he had chosen, the person he wanted was Olivia.
Jenny watched her niece affectionately. There was no doubt at all that Olivia wanted him, too.
Deep in her heart of hearts Jenny knew with that kind of knowing like a well-spring in the human psyche that cannot be ignored or dammed and was impossible to deny that out of all their children, her own as well as David and Tiggy’s, that Olivia was her favourite and extraordinarily special to her. It couldn’t be because she was David’s child … Her heart had started to beat a little too fast. Fiercely she started to mentally run through the list of things she still had to check up on.
‘So, young man, you’re a teacher, I gather.’
Caspar inclined his head towards Ben as he spoke. Ben was a tall man himself and it irritated him to acknowledge that this American Olivia had got herself involved with had the advantage over him in that department. Since his accident Ben had started to stoop slightly and he frowned in exasperation as he discovered that he was obliged to take a small step back and actually look up at Caspar.
Americans! Ben didn’t like them, never had. American servicemen had been stationed locally during the war, loud-mouthed, gum-chewing individuals with more money than sense, bragging and strutting about, turning the local girls’ heads and causing all manner of havoc.
‘I’m a lecturer,’ Caspar affirmed dryly.
‘And only over here temporarily, so I understand,’ Ben persisted.
‘That’s right,’ Caspar agreed.
‘Hmm … Well, over here in this country we have a saying,’ Ben told him disagreeably, ‘that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’
‘Gramps,’ Olivia protested, but Caspar shook his head gently at her and smiled. If he chose to take it, there was a partnership waiting for him with one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firms. It would certainly make him far richer than his present occupation, but he enjoyed what he was doing and as far as he was concerned that was more important than making money.
But then, as he would have been the first to admit if challenged, it was easy for him to make that decision when he was the beneficiary of a considerable family trust set up by his maternal grandfather.
‘That depends on the teacher,’ he said simply, both his face and his voice calmly neutral, but Jenny, who had overheard the conversation and who happened to be looking at Ben as Caspar made his response, knew that Caspar’s refusal to be dominated by him had reinforced Ben’s antagonism towards him.
It was just as well that Olivia lived and worked in London and not here, she decided, even though she knew how hurt Olivia had originally been when her tentative hopes of being allowed to join the family business had been contemptuously dismissed by her grandfather.
‘The law isn’t a business for women,’ he was fond of saying. ‘They’re too emotional, get too involved.’
Her own daughters were going to make him eat those words, Jenny suspected, especially Katie, but then Katie was far tougher emotionally than Olivia. She would never allow her grandfather’s views, or anyone else’s, Jenny surmised, to deflect her from her goals, a trait she had inherited from Ben himself, and one reinforced by her own family’s sturdy ability to withstand whatever shocks life chose to throw at them. As farming stock they had needed that characteristic; she had needed it at times.
‘No, the only way anyone can really come to know the law is to practice it,’ Ben was telling Caspar doggedly. ‘I know—I’ve done it and I don’t mean the namby-pamby diluted kind of work you get in some company’s legal department like Olivia here does,’ he added.
‘Olivia is a very highly qualified and professional young woman,’ Caspar retaliated.
‘Oh, she’s passed the exams right enough,’ Ben agreed, ‘but it takes more than a piece of paper to make a good solicitor. The law isn’t sitting at some desk shifting pieces of paper. It’s getting out there in it, doing the kind of work young Max is doing. That’s the law.’
Jenny could see Caspar stiffening slightly and her heart sank. She knew why, of course. Olivia for all her modesty and her grandfather’s deliberate hypocrisy was far more highly qualified than Max and, Jenny was convinced, of far more value to any prospective employer. For starters, Olivia’s experience was wider and for another … Well, Jenny knew which of the two of them she would want to handle her most personal affairs and it wouldn’t be her own son.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Caspar saying slowly and frowning slightly at the same time. ‘Forgive me … I’m still not completely au fait with the intricacies of the British legal system but so far as I understood matters Max is still merely a squatter in his present chambers and, as such, unable to take on any potential clients. Olivia, on the other hand, is in charge of her own highly specialised department and I know for a fact—’
‘Caspar,’ Olivia protested in a stifled voice, ‘Gramps doesn’t—’
But it was too late. Ben was swinging round to frown at her, sensing a much softer target than the unexpectedly obdurate barrier Caspar had thrown up against him. Ben wasn’t used to being challenged and he didn’t like it.
‘What’s this …? Her own department …? What’s this …?’
‘It’s just a small promotion, Gramps. Nothing really at all,’ Olivia was already hurriedly protesting. ‘Just an interdepartmental thing, but of course—’
‘But of course it no doubt carries a whacking great salary increase,’ Max interrupted, going over to join in. ‘You certainly fell on your feet there, old thing. I—’
‘Olivia did not fall on her feet,’ Caspar corrected him coolly. ‘She happens to be an extremely highly qualified and hard-working lawyer.’
‘You would say that,’ Max responded. ‘After all, she was one of your pupils—out of bed as well as in it.’
Jenny could feel her face burning with embarrassment on behalf of her son, but typically Max was oblivious both to his rudeness and his lack of generosity.
‘I hear that there’s shortly to be a vacancy coming up in your chambers. Do you intend to apply for it?’ Caspar asked Max.
Max frowned. How the hell had Caspar learned about that?
‘He doesn’t need to apply for it,’ Ben interjected, answering the question for him. ‘He’s already been told that the vacancy will be his and so it should be. He’s already had to stand aside once in favour of someone else.’
Max fought to conceal the irritation his grandfather’s comment was causing him. Normally he was only too glad to have the old man champion him, but on this occasion just how much did Olivia’s damned American know about what was going on?
He had to have some kind of inside information just to know that the vacancy was coming up. In any other circumstances Max would immediately have started pumping him to discover just how much he knew and if that information included the name of his female rival, but of course he could hardly do that now without admitting to his grandfather that his appointment wasn’t as cut and dried as he’d let him think.
Max could feel himself starting to sweat slightly. His grandfather was indulgent towards him—to a point—and Max knew how important it was to Ben that Max fulfilled his ambitions for him. He had already been disappointed once and ultimately David had been forgiven for that disappointment, but Max shuddered at the thought of having to live his uncle’s life.
It had been bad enough living under his grandfather’s restrictive eye when he was younger; to do so now … His grandfather still held the family purse strings and Max had seen the way he controlled his sons and their lives through them. Max had no illusions about the price attached to being his grandfather’s favourite.
But his success meant just as much to him as it did to his grandfather, probably more so. Max liked money and he liked the things it could buy. He wanted to be successful and, if possible, famous, and no mere woman was going to stand in his way.
‘Did your mother’s shoes arrive safely?’ Jenny asked Olivia as they walked back to the car.
‘No. She’s gone into Chester this morning to see if she can find another pair.’
Olivia hesitated for a moment, remembering the scene she had interrupted in her parents’ bedroom earlier. She still felt disturbed about it.
‘Aunt Jenny,’ she began, ‘I know that you and Mum aren’t particularly close, but have you, has she …?’
She stopped abruptly, recalling how on the way here after he had met her aunt and uncle, Caspar had mentioned how much everyone seemed to depend on Jenny. Seeing how not only Jenny’s own younger offspring but Olivia’s brother Jack, as well, had produced sets of grubby sports kits to be washed, Caspar had remarked wryly that the older members of the family dumped their problems on her in much the same way as the younger ones seemed to dump their dirty washing.
They all did have a tendency to turn to Jenny when things went wrong in their lives, Olivia acknowledged but she was an adult now and …
‘Is something wrong with your mother, Livvy?’ Jenny was asking her but Olivia shook her head, ignoring the temptation to confide in her aunt.
‘No,’ she replied lightly, ‘but you know Mum. She’d be worrying herself silly about those shoes….’
Olivia winced inwardly as she heard her own voice. What would Jenny have said if she had told her what was really bothering her?
She and Caspar had just been on the point of leaving the house that morning when Olivia realised that she had forgotten her jacket. As she dashed back upstairs to get it, she saw that her parents’ bedroom door was open and she could hear her mother inside the room apparently talking to herself.
Automatically Olivia had walked into the bedroom. The scene that met her eyes was one she doubted she would ever be able to forget. And neither was the mingled look of shame, guilt, defiance and fear she had seen in her mother’s eyes.
‘You won’t say anything, will you?’ she had pleaded with Olivia as she sat surrounded by dozens of glossy carrier bags, their contents plainly never unpacked, the result, Livvy felt sure, of many shopping trips. ‘Don’t tell your father. He wouldn’t … He wouldn’t understand….’
Olivia had left without making any response. Beneath her mother’s familiar perfume had been another smell, rank and unpleasantly pervasive, a smell Olivia had recognised as actually familiar to her. Her gorge had started to rise in response to it and she had had to leave the bedroom without responding to her mother’s plea of secrecy.
‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Caspar asking her quietly as they drove away from her grandfather’s. ‘You’re not brooding over what he said, are you?’
‘Who?’ Olivia questioned, her face set.
‘Your grandfather,’ Caspar reminded her. ‘I know he must have upset you, dismissing everything you’ve achieved professionally by …’
Olivia’s expression cleared then. Caspar thought she was upset because her grandfather had compared her adversely with Max. Once she might have been but not now, not when …
‘No. My grandfather’s too old-fashioned and chauvinistic to change now and Max has always been his favourite.’
‘Mmm … Well, things will be different in America,’ Caspar promised her. When Olivia made no immediate response, he gave her a thoughtful look. ‘You’re not having second thoughts about our plans, are you?’ he prodded, then added, ‘You still haven’t told your family?’
‘How could I have second thoughts?’ Olivia challenged him lovingly. ‘You know how much you mean to me … how much our future together means to me,’ she amended.
She laughed as he warned her softly, ‘Just watch it. I don’t know what your laws are over here about stopping on the freeway to—’
‘This isn’t a freeway,’ Olivia interjected mock-severely. ‘It’s a quiet country road and if you want to stop …’ She glanced at him provocatively, laughing again when Caspar shook his head at her.
The months they’d spent together had been the happiest of her life and when Caspar had told her that he was due to return to the States at the end of the summer, she had thought at first that he was trying to tell her that their relationship was not one he viewed as potentially permanent.
She had tried not to show her feelings, to reveal to him how devastated she felt, but something must have betrayed her because he had immediately taken her in his arms and held her tight, rocking her protectively.
‘No. No,’ he told her huskily, ‘I don’t mean to end our relationship. How could you think it? I love you, Olivia … I want you with me. I want you to come with me … it’s just … well, you’ve worked so damned hard for your promotion and …’
‘It’s just a job,’ Olivia had replied tremulously, and in the emotion of the moment she had meant it. ‘You are far, far more important.’ She had meant that, too.
Still meant it, even if sometimes she found somewhat daunting the fact that she would virtually have to retrain in the States if she wanted to achieve the same professional status there that she had been well on her way to achieving here at home.
Caspar would never ask or expect her to give up her career for him. She knew that. But he had made it equally plain that there was no way that he envisaged his professional future as lying anywhere other than in the United States.
‘We could always commute,’ he had whispered to her one night as they lay entwined in one another’s arms.
Commute. As Olivia contemplated the emptiness, the loneliness, the bleakness of all the nights they would have to spend apart if they did so, she had known that the option wasn’t one she could happily contemplate.
And so the decision had been made. Her notice was already handed in and worked through and she had intended to break the news about her plans for her future to her family at some stage during the weekend. She had not foreseen any problems. Why should there be?
She loved her parents, her family, of course, but they had their lives and she had hers. The old childhood and teenage envy she had felt for Max had long since faded away.
But what about the scene in her parents’ bedroom this morning? She bit down hard on her bottom lip. How long had the problem been going on? Did anyone else know? Her father? Surely he must have some inkling. And what about her? She simply couldn’t pretend or ignore what she had witnessed despite the pleading look she had seen in her mother’s eyes.
Caspar realised that something still troubled Olivia. It was just as well they were only here for the weekend, he acknowledged as he drove back towards Olivia’s parents’ home. Family gatherings of any kind tended to make him feel claustrophobic, to bring back memories and fears of which, to say the least, he wasn’t particularly proud. He could still vividly remember how he had disgraced himself at his father’s second wedding.
He’d been taken there by his mother, who had spent the entire previous day patiently explaining to him that her divorce from his father and their consequent relationships with new partners had absolutely no bearing on their shared love for him. He was still their very much loved child.
As a paediatrician, his mother had, of course, been well versed in the kind of trauma experienced by children when their parents’ relationship broke down, and not only had Caspar been carefully prepared for the break-up of his parents’ marriage and their subsequent divorce, he had also been equally carefully and slowly introduced to their new partners.
In his mother’s case, it was an old colleague and friend whom she had known before she married his father. Divorced now himself, he had two teenage children—a son and a daughter—both of whom had been politely distant with Caspar and his mother. His father’s inamorata was a younger ex-student who had been tireless in her determination to show Caspar and his father how much she acknowledged the importance of their relationship. Caspar had disgraced both himself and his parents by throwing up all over the bride.
Given his parents’ affiliations and careers, the result was perhaps not unexpected. His mother’s reaction was to have him and herself undergo months of ‘analysis’ during which Caspar came close to disliking his mother almost as much as he disliked his analyst. His father chose to proceed with an expensive lawsuit to have his mother proved unfit to have sole charge of him and guilty of poisoning their son against him.
Neither of them had believed him when he told them that his sickness was the result of too much ice cream and a bad case of nerves, and when eventually his father’s new wife produced the first of Caspar’s half siblings, Caspar was forbidden to go anywhere near the baby, a little girl, just in case his nervous stomach got the better of him.
Caspar was not deceived. His stepmother didn’t like him and he didn’t think he liked her very much, either.
It was not that Caspar was against families and family life; it was just that as yet he had not seen an example of it that made him feel it was a way of life he wanted for himself. Why, after all, make a liar out of yourself by publicly making promises that were more likely to be broken than kept?
He didn’t particularly want to share Olivia with her family; he wanted her all to himself and he freely admitted it. He hadn’t had a particularly high opinion of Olivia’s father or grandfather before he had met them and now that he had …
How could they value someone as obviously second-rate and unworthy as Max above Olivia? How nature must be laughing at them, mocking them, for their hypocrisy and chauvinism by gifting Olivia above Max.
The two of them hadn’t made any firm plans to marry as yet, but ultimately Caspar knew that they would. He had never expected to fall in love so deeply, to want to make the kind of commitment he wanted to make to Olivia, but now that he had …
He didn’t want to lose her, he admitted, and part of the reason he had been wary of meeting her family was because he had been concerned that they might oppose her decision to make her home and her life with him in the US.
As Caspar well knew from his own childhood, loving someone made you overly vulnerable, which was why he had initially been so reluctant to acknowledge his feelings for Olivia. He would be glad when this weekend was over and they were free to embark on the next stage of their own lives.
As he turned into the drive to her parents’ home, he studied Olivia’s profile. Something was clearly bothering her despite her refusal to admit it. He wondered what it was and, more importantly, why she hadn’t told him.
‘All women are liars and devious,’ his father had once said to him. He had been in between marriages at the time and complaining about the amount of alimony his second wife was claiming from him. ‘Don’t trust any of them, Caspar. Don’t make the same mistakes that I’ve made. They’ll tell you they love you with one breath and then with the next …’
Olivia could feel her body starting to tense as Caspar stopped the car. Was her mother at home?
Olivia couldn’t see her car. She hated herself for the sense of relief that brought.
Why had she been the one to find out? she asked herself, feeling a defensive, angry resentment that made her ache with shame as her initial shock began to wane. Why hadn’t someone else … her father for instance …?
‘Olivia?’
She realised that Caspar had said something to her and was waiting for her to reply. Giving him an apologetic smile, she tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
By rights she ought to be confiding in Caspar, telling him what she had seen, but how could she betray her mother when she herself wasn’t totally sure … when no one else seemed to know …?
Not sure. Of course you’re sure, an inner voice scorned her. You just don’t want to accept it, that’s all. You just don’t want to face up to the truth.
What truth? She only had to close her eyes to be back in her parents’ bedroom, to see the disarray, clothes everywhere, that smell … Her stomach started to heave.
‘What is it?’ Caspar demanded anxiously as she quickly turned to get out of the car.
‘Nothing,’ she denied.
When David heard his brother’s footsteps outside his office door, he reached for the file he had been studying and quickly pushed it out of sight beneath the leather blotter on his desk.
As Jonathon walked in, out of the corner of his eye David could see his bank statement next to the telephone.
Trying to be unobtrusive, he angled his arm across it. He could feel the heavy, uneven thud of his heartbeat.
‘I was looking for the Siddington Trust file,’ Jonathon said, smiling. ‘There’s a query from the accountants and—’
‘Oh, I must have left it at home. I was doing some work on it the other night. I’ll bring it in on Monday.’
‘You took it home, but—’
‘It looks like young Max is going to get his tenancy,’ David broke in, overriding his brother.
‘Yes … yes … it does,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘Although, of course, it isn’t always wise to take these things for granted.’
‘I’ll bet Dad can’t wait to start bragging to Hugh about it,’ David declared, ignoring Jonathon’s concern. ‘There’s always been a bit of rivalry between them on that score, at least in Dad’s eyes.’
‘I’m sure Uncle Hugh doesn’t see it that way,’ Jonathon objected. His uncle had been particularly kind to him when they were growing up and Jonathon suspected that any rivalry between the two half-brothers existed more for his father than it did for his uncle.
‘Well, Hugh wouldn’t, would he?’ David countered. ‘He’s—’
‘It will be good to have the family together,’ Jonathon commented, unwilling to pursue the matter.
David waited until he was quite sure that Jonathon had gone before retrieving the file he had hidden beneath his blotter and placing it in his briefcase. His fingers trembled slightly as he locked the case. He felt faintly sick and dizzy. It was this damned heat.
He picked up his bank statement and studied it in fresh disbelief. How could they have spent so much? He had warned Tiggy only last month that they simply could not afford to continue spending as they had been doing. He had even threatened to take away credit cards, but of course she had wept and pleaded and in the end he had given in.
It was all very well for Jonathon, he decided bitterly. His brother had never had expensive tastes and had always been careful with his money. Added to that, Jenny must be earning a very useful amount from that business of hers.
Not that he had ever envisaged Jenny as becoming a successful businesswoman all those years ago when they had first known one another. She had been such a shy, diffident girl, so different in every way from his wife.
He had first seen Tiggy perched on the counter of an exclusive and fashionable London wine bar, surrounded by a crowd of admirers whom she was inciting to vie with one another for the chance to take her out.
David had still been playing with the group then and they had just been featured in one of the countless trendy magazines that had mushroomed into existence during that era. Someone recognised him—one of the other models who had been in the wine bar with Tiggy—and she had attached herself to him.
He could still remember the sharp frisson of excitement and challenge he had felt when he glanced across the narrow room and saw Tiggy looking back at him, knowing that she was deliberately ignoring all the other men who were clamouring for her attention.
Impossible then and now, of course, to ever imagine Jenny posing negligently on a bar top wearing one of the shortest skirts ever made, revealing acres of long, coltish leg, her pouting mouth painted in the palest of frosted pink lipsticks, her face deadpan pale, her eyes enormous in their thick rim of black lashes and even blacker kohl.
Jenny never pouted, and had she worn kohl eye make-up her father would have made her wash it off. Her legs were sturdily and sensibly constructed to carry her over the fields of her father’s farm, not delicately thin and fawn-like. Where Jenny was healthily robust, Tiggy had been fragile, delicate and vulnerable. Where Jenny had stoically contained and controlled her emotions, Tiggy had gone from tears to laughter and back again in the space of a heartbeat. Where Jenny had been familiar, safe and dull, Tiggy had been deliciously different and dangerous.
And nothing had changed, he reassured himself. He had seen the expression, the envy, in other men’s eyes when they looked at Tiggy and compared her with their own dully comfortable middle-aged wives.
Tiggy was the kind of woman who flirted by instinct, who appealed to everything that was male in a man. She certainly had done to him. He had been completely bewitched by her. Bemused. Besotted.
They had gone on from the wine bar to a nightclub, a whole crowd of them, Tiggy giggling as she openly bought a small handful of ‘uppers’ and insisted that he take one of them.
It hadn’t been any particularly big deal—everyone took drugs in the sixties; it was part of the London scene—only unfortunately the senior members of the chambers where he was in pupillage hadn’t seen it that way.
There had been his late arrivals and early departures and the days when he had never made it into chambers at all, waking up late in the afternoon in Tiggy’s small flat and her even smaller bed to while away what was left of the day in her arms. This behaviour had ultimately cost him his career.
He had to make a choice, the head of chambers had told him sternly when David had been summoned to his room to account for himself. The Bar or Tiggy and the life he was leading with her.
There had been no choice to make, really. He already knew what was expected of him, what his grandfather would expect of him.
He had been given twenty-four hours to think it over and he had gone back to Tiggy’s flat to tell her what had happened and to collect his things. Only when he had arrived there he had found Tiggy in a flood of tears—and pregnant with his child.
The sight of her vulnerable face and childlike body, her copious tears, had swept aside all his carefully prepared speeches. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. She was having his baby. His grandfather would understand. He would have to understand.
They were married three days later at Caxton Hall.
As he kissed his new bride, David had told her sternly that henceforward there were to be no more drugs, no more partying all night and sleeping all day. They had their baby to think about.
Docilely Tiggy had agreed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him passionately whilst she told him how much she loved him.
It was a pity that he wasn’t still going to be a barrister, she told him. He would have looked so deliciously stern and forbidding in his court robes, but she would be just as happy married to a famous pop star and she had no doubts he was going to be famous.
David hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his career as a pop star had ended almost as soon as it began.
Three weeks later when the bank announced that he had overspent his allowance and that they couldn’t allow him to withdraw any more money from his account, he had told Tiggy that they were going to visit his family in Cheshire.
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PENNY JORDAN
‘I can’t dance with you now, David,’ she told him huskily.
‘Of course you can,’ he replied, turning Jenny into his arms and beginning to move. ‘Mmm … you feel good.’ Helplessly Jenny realised that David wasn’t going to let her go and that it would cause less fuss to give in and dance with him than to go on protesting.
Unlike Jon, David had always been a good dancer, a natural dancer, and her face grew hot in the darkness of the subtly lit dance floor as she remembered what was said about men who were naturally good dancers. Too good, she decided shakily as he ignored her efforts to keep a respectable distance between them and pulled her closer to him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered against her hair. ‘You used to enjoy dancing with me like this once.’ Jon was standing on the opposite side of the dance floor talking to Ruth. He didn’t appear to have seen them.
‘You look wonderful tonight,’ David told her softly, his hands sliding up to caress her back. ‘You look wonderful, you feel wonderful … you are wonderful, Jenny, and I wish to hell I’d never been stupid enough to let you go.’
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The PerfectSinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Crightons (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
A Perfect Family
The Perfect Seduction
Perfect Marriage Material
Figgy Pudding
The Perfect Lover
The Perfect Sinner
The Perfect Father
A Perfect Night
Coming Home
Starting Over
A Perfect Family
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#u59de4edf-d287-5ca8-909a-613299856812)
Excerpt (#u7ca12caf-5550-52b3-80ec-defc2d4ffd80)
About the Author (#ucaaa6e39-6863-5ff9-9f65-b5c9bf797a44)
The Crightons
Title Page (#ue5d130ed-a46c-505d-b6ed-ac06ef59de4e)
Prologue
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Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
1917
It had been a cold, wet spring followed by an even wetter summer, and the crops lay flattened and battered beneath the relentlessly driving rain.
As Josiah Crighton wiped the condensation away from the railway carriage window to look outside he paused, turning instead to study the pale, set face of the girl seated beside him.
The girl … his wife, soon to be the mother of his child. His jaw tightened as he remembered his father’s fury when he learned what had happened.
‘For God’s sake, if you had to behave so … so stupidly, why the hell didn’t you do it outside your own backyard? Oxford … or the Inns of Court … surely you had ample opportunity there to—’
His father had broken off, drumming angrily on his desk whilst he surveyed him.
‘Well, there’s no help for it now. The girl will have to be found a suitable husband and as for you—’
‘She already has a husband,’ he had told his father quietly.
Just for a moment he saw that his father had misunderstood him, noting the relief expelling the impatient anger from his eyes as he exclaimed, ‘She’s married … then why the hell didn’t you say so …?’
His expression began changing as Josiah continued to look steadily at him and quietly explained, ‘We’re married, Father … Bethany and I …’
He had of course already anticipated the uproar that would follow his announcement and their mutual banishment from the lives of both their families. Hers had been no more pleased than his had been. Bethany was a yeoman farmer’s daughter who had been working up at the big house. He had bumped into her when he had gone there with some papers his father had instructed him to take to Lord Haver. They had recognised each other immediately from shared summer childhoods playing forbidden games on the muddy banks of the Dee.
One thing had led to another and the inevitable had happened. As soon as she had come to him with her news, ashen-faced and frightened, he had done what he had convinced himself was the only honourable thing he could do; never mind the fact that it was virtually an accepted thing within his family that one day he would cement the ties that kept the family together and, following its long-established tradition, marry his second cousin.
Bethany, too, had been destined for a family-arranged marriage to a distant relation, a widower with some well-stocked farmlands on the Welsh side of the city and two half-grown children in need of a mother’s care.
Refused the support of both families and the place that had been promised to him in the family firm of solicitors, Josiah had had no other course open to him but to find some alternative way of providing for his new wife and the child they were soon to have. And so he had taken a small set of rooms in the tiny market town of Haslewich, hoping that the business from the townspeople and the local rural community would be enough to sustain himself and his new family.
‘Do you really love me, Josiah?’ his new bride had asked him miserably, clinging tearfully to him on the day of their hurried and secret wedding.
He had held her tightly in his arms, unable to answer her honestly and unwilling to lie to her. The past and the comfortable security it had contained were now lost to him. The future stretched ahead as bleak and unwelcoming as the rain-lashed countryside. Turning his attention back to the scene beyond the railway carriage window, he tried not to contrast the life he had left to the one he was heading towards.
In Chester, his father’s secretary would just be bringing in afternoon tea. A fire would be burning warmly in the grate of his father’s panelled office. As the senior partner in Chester’s most prestigious firm of solicitors, his father was held very much in awe by those who worked for him and most especially Miss Berry, who guarded his privacy as jealously as any guard dog, even keeping a watchful eye on Josiah’s elder brothers who were also partners in the family firm.
The handsome silver teapot from which his father would take his afternoon tea had been a gift from a wealthy client, the china likewise, a particularly attractive and rare Sèvres teaset that had come to his father by way of a bequest.
In the bare spare rooms that were all Josiah could afford to rent and that must serve as his home as well as his place of business, he would be lucky if he managed the luxury of afternoon tea at all. There would certainly be no silver teapot from which to pour it and no Sèvres cup from which to drink it.
As he stared out of the window, his expression started to harden. The youngest of his father’s three sons, he had known even before his father had announced his rejection from the family that he was the least valuable of his father’s many assets. With his sons, Edward and William, already in the family business, a brother and a sister and countless numbers of nieces, nephews and other familial connections, his father could quite easily afford to dispense with one disobedient and disgraced son.
He would never treat his child, his own son, as his father had treated him, Josiah decided passionately, and he would, furthermore, ensure that his son would inherit a tradition every bit as proud and respected as the one that had been denied him. More so … much more so. As he glanced at the face of his now-sleeping wife, Josiah determined to found a dynasty that would one day rival that of his father and brothers. Rival it and outmatch it.
1969
As they drove north, the top down on the bright red sports car David Crighton had persuaded his father to buy him as a reward for obtaining his degree—not a first but at least he had passed—he turned his head to look at the girl in the passenger seat beside him, a feeling of fierce exultation running through him.
He had snatched her, virtually stolen her away, from under the nose of one of his friends, another member of the pop group that four of them had formed in their final year at college.
For a few months they had enjoyed a spell of dizzying success; a small fat man with a shiny bald head and even shinier suit, smoking a fat cigar, had come backstage after one of their gigs and offered to help them get a contract with one of the major recording studios.
It had been at a time when young unknowns were becoming overnight millionaires, their names whispered breathlessly and then screamed at in orgasmic frenzy by thousands of teenage girls throughout the land, and there had been no reason to doubt that the same thing could happen to them. Only the small fat man had turned out to be rather shrewder than they had realised, and whilst they had ridiculed his attempts to become one of them, he had been quietly skimming off most of their earnings.
All they had been left with were the remaindered copies of a record that had never made it out of the bottom fifty of the hit parade and a very large bill from the tax authorities.
His grandfather, Josiah, had paid off his share of it, angrily telling him that he was only doing so to save the family name from being disgraced. David hadn’t cared what had motivated him. Smiling genially at the older man in a marijuana-induced haze of goodwill, he had carelessly listened to the lecture he was being given and then as quickly as he could escaped back to London and his friends and the lifestyle he loved so much.
That had been over two years ago. Then he had laughed at his twin brother for wanting nothing more than to settle down in Cheshire and take his place in the family business. Now though …
Now though, things were different. He glanced again at the girl sleeping so peacefully beside him. They had been married at Caxton Hall three days ago. She had been wearing the tiniest minidress there had ever been, revealing yards of lovely, luscious legs, and smiling Bambi-eyed from between straight, glossy curtains of ash blonde hair. She was eighteen years old, just … and a model. The most sought-after, the most swingiest … the most wanted and lusted-after model there was on the London scene and now she was all his. She was also pregnant.
‘But how can I be?’ she had wailed in squeaky-voiced protest after the doctor had given them the results. ‘I’m on the pill….’
‘Obviously it doesn’t work when you go to bed with a man as sexy as me,’ David had told her, grinning.
She had refused to share his amusement, pouting sulkily at him as she reminded him of her modelling commitments.
And so here they were married and on their way to make a new life for themselves in Cheshire, and not just because Tiggy was pregnant. David frowned but there was no point in brooding on that other unfortunate matter. He had made a mistake and been found out, and as he had already defensively told his father, others did the same and got away with it. It wasn’t his fault that the senior partner in his set of chambers should be so ridiculously stuffy. After all, he had done nothing legally wrong.
* * *
1996
‘So tell me again about this family of yours and the birthday we’re going to help celebrate.’
Even now after six months together, the lazy, transatlantic drawl of Caspar Johnson’s voice still had almost as much power to stir her senses as his powerful six-foot-odd and very masculine body, Olivia acknowledged as she turned to smile at him.
‘Watch the road,’ Caspar warned her, adding softly, ‘and don’t look at me like that, otherwise …’
His openly and frequently expressed sexual desire for her was just one of the things that made him so different from any of the other men she had known, Olivia owned as she refocused her attention on the heavy north-flowing motorway traffic and answered his initial question.
‘Birthdays,’ she reminded him, adding, ‘and I’ve already told you umpteen times.’
‘I know,’ Caspar agreed, ‘but I like hearing it and I like even more watching your face when you talk about them. Just as well you decided against a career as a trial judge,’ he teased her. ‘Your expression, especially your eyes, would have given you away every time. They can be very revealing.’
Olivia Crighton grimaced but she knew he was right. They had met whilst she had been taking a postgraduate course in American law. Caspar had been her tutor and, like her, come from a legal background and also like her had chosen not to go into the family partnership but to make his own way in the world. Chosen … Caspar might have had a choice but she …
There were other reasons why the two of them made such a perfect couple, she told herself hastily, abandoning her earlier and far too dangerous train of thought—this was meant to be a happy family visit, not a means of resurrecting old problems—reasons that had nothing to do with their shared legal background, reasons of a very much more personal nature. Instinctively, as she dwelt on those reasons, her stomach muscles clenched, her toes curling into her shoes, her face flushing slightly as she mentally relived the previous evening’s blissful lovemaking.
It was just over two months now since she and Caspar had taken the decision to move in together and it had been a decision that neither of them regretted—far from it. She had not yet told her family about their plans for their shared future or her decision to go with Caspar when he returned to America and make her life there with him. Not that she expected them to have any objections; after all, as a female member of the family, she was easily expendable, neither wanted nor needed in the family partnership unlike its males. Their role was decided upon and planned for almost from the moment of their conception.
Caspar had been at first amused and then amazed at her family’s history, unable to believe that such an old-fashioned family still existed. Her upbringing and the whole of her family life was so different from his own. His parents had divorced when he was six, and Olivia had sensed that he was a man who was shy of emotional commitment, which had made his openly admitted desire for her all the more precious.
She knew that he loved her as she did him, but both of them had been hurt and bruised by their childhood experiences, and because of that, both of them were wary of the intensity of the emotions they shared. Both of them in their different ways feared love, Olivia suspected in her more introspective moments, but another thing she had learned young was the folly of questioning her feelings too deeply. Painful emotions, like painful cuts and bruises, were best left unprodded and not interfered with.
They had made no long-term plans for a shared future, Olivia recognised, other than that she would go to Philadelphia with Caspar when he returned to his home country. Insofar as her career plans went, it would definitely be a lateral move as she would have to requalify, but as she and Caspar had both agreed, the way they felt about one another was too important not to be given a chance. But a chance for what? A chance to develop into something permanent or a chance to die?
Olivia wasn’t sure which she actually wanted and neither, she suspected, was Caspar. Right now, the biggest commitment they could give one another was to say that they wanted to be together, that right now their relationship was of primary importance to both of them.
‘Your family …?’ Caspar prodded her from the passenger seat of her small, sturdy Ford—a twenty-first birthday present from her grandfather. She recalled that when Max, her cousin nearest in age to her, had turned twenty-one, Gramps had given him a sleek and dangerously fast sports car.
The family … Where should she start …? With her parents? Her grandparents? Or at the beginning with her great-grandfather, Josiah, who had initially founded the family business, breaking away from his own family in Chester to make a new life for himself and the bride his family had disdained.
‘How many of you exactly will there be attending this party?’ Caspar asked her, interrupting her train of thought.
‘It’s hard to say. It all depends on how many of the cousins and second cousins have been invited. The main family will be there, of course. Gramps, Mum and Dad, Uncle Jon and Aunt Jenny, Max, their son, and my great-aunt Ruth. Maybe some of the Chester lot.’
She glanced at the motorway sign by the side of the road. ‘Only another couple of exits now,’ she told him, ‘then we’ll be home.’
As she concentrated on the traffic, she didn’t notice his small frown as he heard her say the word ‘home.’ To him, home was wherever he happened to be living at the time. But to her …
She had come to mean a lot to him, this pretty, clever Englishwoman, who in some ways seemed so much younger than her American contemporaries and in others so much more mature. Unlike them, she seemed instinctively to put him first and that was very important to him—a legacy from all the years as a child when he had felt more like an unwanted parcel being passed from one parent to the other than a loved and wanted child.
Families—he was instinctively suspicious of them, but thankfully this visit would only be a short one and then he and Olivia would be leaving for America and their own life together—just the two of them.
1 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Do you think the weather will stay fine? It will be awful if it doesn’t, everywhere muddy and wet, and with a marquee out in the rain.’
Jenny Crighton looked up from the guest list she had been checking to smile at her sister-in-law.
‘With any luck the weather should stay fine, Tiggy,’ she reassured her. ‘But even if it doesn’t, the marquee will be heated and—’
‘Yes, but people will have to walk across the lawn and—’
‘The marquee people are putting a walkway down from the house to the marquee. It will be covered and quite dry,’ she promised her patiently as though this had not been a subject they had discussed many times before.
It had come as no surprise to her to discover that although Tiggy had spent a good deal of time on the telephone talking about what hard work organising the joint fiftieth birthday celebration for their husbands had been, it was she, Jenny, who had been left to do the actual work. But then, that was their relationship all over, she acknowledged wryly. Tiggy had always been the glamorous one of the two of them whilst she was the more homey, hard-working one.
People made allowances for Tiggy and for her vulnerabilities; men were bedazzled by her even now when both of them were in their forties, and Tiggy, because she was Tiggy, could never quite resist her need to respond to their admiration and soak it up and feed on it. She meant no harm, of course. She adored David, everyone knew that, and he clearly worshipped her.
Jenny could still remember the look of pride and dazed awe in his eyes that summer he had brought Tiggy, his bride, back home and introduced her to them all. David—how everyone loved him—his father, the clients, his friends, the children, everyone, but no one so fiercely nor so determinedly as her own husband, Jonathon, his twin brother.
It had been Jonathon’s idea that they should have this double birthday celebration and combine it with a grand family reunion.
‘Dad would love it. You know how much the family means to him,’ he had told Jenny when they were discussing it.
‘He may well love it, but he will carp like mad about the cost,’ Jenny had warned him dryly, ‘and it will be expensive if we are to do it properly.’
‘Of course we are and Dad won’t mind … not if it’s for David.’
‘No,’ Jenny had agreed, but she had had to turn her face away so that Jonathon wouldn’t see her expression.
She knew, of course, why so much family emphasis was placed upon David; why her father-in-law was so determined that these twins of his should be so close, so supportive of one another, or rather that Jonathon should be so supportive of his brother.
Ben himself had been a twin but his brother had died at birth, and that loss had marked and scarred virtually the whole of his life.
Jonathon had been brought up knowing that in his father’s eyes he should consider himself most fortunate to have such a twin there in life beside him.
Only once had Jenny seen the fierce pride in Ben’s eyes turn to disappointment and that had been when David had left the set of chambers where he had been in training for the Bar, following a career pattern that had been laid out for him from the first moment of his birth.
‘Well, I hope you’re right about the weather,’ Tiggy was saying fretfully now. ‘My shoes still haven’t arrived, you know, and they promised that they would be here. It’s far too late to get another pair made and dyed and—’
‘They’ll be here. There’s still plenty of time,’ Jenny soothed her.
Tiggy had been a model in the sixties and she still had the same haunting, high-cheeked beauty she had possessed then, although the years of dieting and worrying about her weight had, in Jenny’s opinion, left her too thin. Her almost waiflike appearance, so appealing in a young, immature girl, somehow, to Jenny at least, seemed oddly jarring in a woman of forty-five.
Not that Jenny would ever voice such views. She was well aware of how others judged her and her relationship with Tiggy, and those, apart from her closest friends, could interpret it as envy, as those same critics judged Jonathon as being jealous of David.
Her normally mild brown eyes showed a brief flash of emotion before she controlled it and turned her attention back to the large area of lawn in front of them. It had taken quite a bit of diplomatic manoeuvring to get her father-in-law, Ben, to agree that the birthday festivities could be held here.
He had grumbled as Jenny had known he would about the cost and the inconvenience, but of course, when the time came he would rise to the occasion as the convivial patriarchal host, accepting the admiration and praise of their guests without a flicker of conscience.
There had been battles over each and every stage of the preparations for the weekend’s celebrations, which was no more and no less than Jenny had anticipated, but the irony of it was that Ben would be the first to complain if even the slightest detail fell short of his exacting standards—a fact that he was as well aware of as she was herself, Jenny acknowledged.
Of course, she had had to use diversionary and indeed, at times, almost underhanded tactics to get her own way on some points. A reminder that at his own insistence, members of the Chester side of the family had been invited to the event and had to be impressed had proved a handy tool for digging out his deepest-rooted objections about cost and one that Jenny admitted she had wielded shamefully at times.
Not that she minded; indeed, she positively enjoyed the challenge of doing battle with her formidable father-in-law. Conversely, she knew that whilst in public he paid lip-service to the conventional view that Tiggy, on account of her looks, must take precedence in his affections and approval, privately, she was the one who had his respect.
Oh yes, men respected her, liked her, trusted her, turned to her for advice and comfort, but they did not flirt with her or see her as a desirable, sexual woman, a situation easy enough to smile over now, but not so easy when younger.
Jenny could still remember how she had felt the first time she had met Tiggy. She and Jon had been married for four or five years at that time and had been trying for a baby without success for the last two. The sight of Tiggy blooming with David’s love, basking in both that and her discreetly evident pregnancy had caused Jenny more than one pang of pain and self-pity. She had hardly been able to bring herself to look at Jon, and when she had, the withdrawn look in his eyes as he deliberately avoided looking at Tiggy’s pregnant body had made her bite her lip in a mixture of guilt and despair.
Jenny’s heart had sunk when they had received the telephone call summoning them to Queensmead to meet David’s new bride officially. It had been one of those sticky hot summer days when even the air they breathed had seemed heavy and tainted and somehow lacking in life-giving oxygen.
The partnership had been going through a rather lean time and Jon had quietly accepted his father’s decision that he should draw only a very small salary. David’s allowance was a large drain on the partnership’s profits but Jenny knew that Jon didn’t begrudge it any more than his father did. Luckily she was a careful housewife, scrupulously saving money where she could, especially when it came to spending money on herself, and she certainly had nothing in her wardrobe remotely suitable for the garden party-cum-belated wedding breakfast Ben was insisting on throwing for the newly married couple. In the end, having stubbornly refused Jon’s tentative suggestion they use some of their savings to buy her a new dress, she decided to make her own.
‘Get yourself something pretty,’ Jon had tried to coax her, but she had shaken her head, stubbornly folding her lips into a tight line, which he had interpreted as disapproval but which, in fact, had been her defence strategy against the tears she had been fighting not to let fall as she reacted to the unsubtle message his suggestion had concealed—that she was so plain that she needed to wear something eye-catching enough to draw attention away from that plainness and, even worse, that Jon was embarrassed by it.
She felt she was letting him down not just by her homely appearance but by the fact that she had not conceived another child. After all, she had fallen pregnant easily enough to David but that was something she refused to allow herself to think about even in her most private thoughts and it was certainly not something she could ever say to Jon. How could she? It would look as though she was comparing the two of them and finding Jon wanting. It didn’t need much intelligence to know that in the eyes of Jon’s family, and she suspected almost everyone else, David and Tiggy would be very much the golden couple whilst she and Jon were very much the dull also-rans.
Both of them had already been treated to a lengthy outpouring of praise from Ben about Tiggy’s exceptional beauty. So it had been with a feeling of tense trepidation plus the disadvantage of a bad tension headache and the disaster that was the home-made dress she had run up herself from a piece of fabric she had bought in the market that she had reluctantly pinned an unconvincing smile on her face and tried not to look as though she minded when she was finally confronted with Tiggy’s breathtakingly leggy, lithe and oh so slim reality.
Tiggy herself hadn’t quite been able to stop herself from betraying what Jenny had known humiliatingly was likely to be everyone else’s reaction to the difference between them, and her eyes widened just a little before she looked guiltily away from Jenny, obviously unable to meet her gaze as David introduced them.
David, too, managed to avoid meeting her gaze. David was clearly bursting with pride over the reaction Tiggy was causing amongst the male guests. They milled enthusiastically around her and barely had time to do much more than say a very brief hello not just to her but to Jon, his twin, before Tiggy caught hold of his arm and demanded to be told the names of all the men who were so eager to talk with her.
As she reached out to David, she had tilted her face up towards him, throwing her head back and laughing. The sun gleamed richly in the heavy thickness of her glossy hair, and the bones in her shoulders revealed by the cutaway neckline of her brief cotton minidress seemed as fragile and delicate as those of a bird. Jenny had watched her, mute with misery, contrasting her own flushed, shiny, wholesomely plain face with the fine-boned, high-cheeked beauty of Tiggy’s.
Everything about David’s new wife, from the polished tips of her fingernails to the artfully applied fake eyelashes—which, unlike her, Jenny was absolutely sure that Tiggy had little need of—spoke of someone who took it for granted that she was loved and desired. And why shouldn’t she? David was so obviously besotted with her, so completely in love, he couldn’t bear even to let go of her hand, never mind leave her side.
Jenny had felt her eyes start to well up with betraying and self-pitying tears as she watched them. Even Jon, quiet, slightly shy Jon, was watching Tiggy with a bemused and indulgent smile on his normally serious face.
‘Jenny, could you come and give me a hand with the food?’
Reluctantly Jenny had dragged her attention away from the group of enthusiastic admirers thronging round Tiggy and turned to look at Jon’s Aunt Ruth, answering automatically, ‘Yes, of course …’
‘Tiggy is very pretty, isn’t she?’ she had commented quietly to Ruth as they walked across the lawn together. Jon hadn’t even noticed her leaving. He was standing next to David but slightly behind him, slightly in his shadow. Was he wishing that like David he had married someone beautiful and lively, someone who was fun to be with, someone who other men envied him being married to and not …? Her throat, already uncomfortably dry, had become even drier as she added, ‘She and David look so right together and they’re obviously very deeply in love.’
‘Indeed they are,’ Ruth had agreed, but her voice had been wry rather than warm, carrying more of a hint of cynicism than the outright approval that Jenny had been expecting. When Jenny had looked uncertainly at her, Ruth had explained lightly, ‘David and Tiggy are in love, Jenny, but I suspect that both of them are rather more in love with themselves than they could ever be with anyone else. Perhaps I’m wrong … I certainly hope so.’
Jenny and Jon had left Queensmead and gone home shortly afterwards. She hadn’t been feeling very well, the oppressive heat making her feel sick, and she had felt guilty about dragging Jon away especially when she had seen the look of pity that Tiggy had given them both as they said their goodbyes.
As they walked away, she had heard Tiggy saying to David, ‘I can’t believe that you and Jon are twins. He looks older than you but then I suppose that’s because his wife is so frumpy and plain.’
Frumpy and plain. Tiggy hadn’t meant to be unkind, of course; she hadn’t even realised that Jenny had overheard her….
‘I think I’d better go and ring them again, just to check that they have sent my shoes. It will be a complete disaster if they don’t arrive.’
‘Mmm?’ Jenny murmured, coming back to the present.
‘My shoes, Jenny,’ Tiggy repeated irritably. Heavens, Jenny could be so dull and boring at times. She hadn’t even mentioned what she was going to wear for the ball. Tiggy had offered to go shopping with her, help her choose something suitable, but predictably Jenny had shaken her head and said that she was too busy … that she would find ‘something’.
Tiggy just hoped that the ‘something’, whatever it was, wouldn’t prove to be too horrendous. Her own dress, of course, was a dream by one of her favourite designers. David had baulked a little at the cost but she had soon talked him round.
The cream of Cheshire society had been invited after all. David’s people, through the Chester side, were extremely well-connected and when one included some of their long-standing county clients …
It was a pity that the house didn’t have its own ballroom … a marquee was all very well in its way but … She had been a little bit cross when Jenny had refused to agree with her that a black-and-white theme would be marvellously chic. As well as setting off her own colouring, black always looked good on blondes.
‘It’s too restricting, too dramatic, Tiggy,’ Jenny had argued in that quiet, calm voice of hers. ‘Not everyone will want to keep to the theme and wear black or white. We must be practical.’
Typical of Jenny, practical should have been her middle name. She was a dear, of course, frightfully worthy and good-natured and, oddly enough, she was more attractive now than she had been when she was younger. She had kept her figure, even if she was a good size twelve compared with her own delicate size eight and her hair was still a rich, glossy brown and naturally curly, even if it could do with a proper styling.
Tiggy had seen the way Jonathon looked at the two of them sometimes, no doubt comparing her elegance and Jenny’s lack of fashion sense. Jenny really ought to take a bit more trouble with her appearance. Jonathon was a very attractive man, though not quite as startlingly good-looking as David. The wheat blond of David’s hair was slightly less extravagantly film starrish in Jonathon. His was tinged with a soft caramel brown, but the twins shared the same impressive height and the same broad shoulders. Curiously it was Jonathon’s slightly more spare frame that seemed to carry the years well now; David had begun to develop a paunch, although he denied it vigorously and loathed any reference to it.
‘Ah, there you are….’
Jenny smiled as she saw their mutual father-in-law approaching them. He was in his seventies now, a widower, and he walked with a slight limp, the legacy of a bad fall three winters ago when he had dislocated his hip and broken his leg.
‘Have a few things I want to talk to you about,’ he announced as he reached them.
‘Father, you look wonderful,’ Tiggy told him, darting forward to give him a quick hug and to kiss him delicately on the cheek. Even with her father-in-law she still could not resist the impulse to flirt, Jenny realised.
No, not to flirt, she amended mentally. What Tiggy did, what she wanted, was to reassure herself that she was still desirable, still wanted. Poor Tiggy. Jenny wondered briefly what it must feel like to have one’s whole self-worth invested in the frightening transitoriness of one’s physical features. No wonder at times Tiggy seemed so brittle, so insecure.
‘Tania, I—’
‘Darling, I must fly. There’s so much I have to do….’
Their father-in-law was one of the few people who used Tiggy’s proper name and Jenny hid another wry smile as she watched Tiggy detach herself from him. She knew quite well why Tiggy wanted to avoid being questioned by Ben.
‘She does too much,’ Ben commented as they both watched Tiggy hurry round the side of the house to where her car was parked. ‘She’s never been very strong. Ellie tells me these marquee people are due to start work tomorrow.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Jenny agreed. Ellie was Ben’s housekeeper. ‘They’re due to arrive about lunch-time and most of the work should be completed by early evening.’
‘Mmm … Well, let’s just hope they don’t make too much of a damn mess of the lawn. Ruth tells me she’s doing the flowers,’ he added, referring to his unmarried sister. ‘Should have thought you’d have got somebody professional in to do that.’
‘Aunt Ruth is better than a professional,’ Jenny told him calmly. ‘When she does the church flowers—’
‘The church flowers,’ Ben interrupted, snorting dismissively, then shaking his head when he realised that Jenny wasn’t going to allow him to agitate her but instead was simply listening serenely.
That was the trouble with Jenny; she was too damn serene at times and too damn clever.
‘Young Olivia’s coming home, I hear, and bringing some American or other with her.’
‘Of course she’s coming home,’ Jenny agreed. ‘After all, she is David’s daughter—and Tiggy’s.’ But it was Jenny, her aunt, whom she had telephoned to tell her in the strictest confidence that she had decided to move in with Caspar, and Jenny whom she had contacted to sound her out about the wisdom of bringing Caspar home with her.
‘Exactly who is he, then, this American?’ Ben demanded, changing tack, having recognised that Jenny wasn’t going to rise to the bait he had originally been dangling and rush to defend his sister. They were having a particularly hot summer and since his accident the heat bothered him. It got into his broken joints and made them ache so much that the pain made him irritable.
‘He’s Livvy’s boyfriend,’ Jenny returned.
‘Boyfriend.’ Ben frowned at her under his heavy silver eyebrows. Like his sons he, too, had a good thick head of hair, although where theirs was still blond, his was now silver. ‘According to David he’s in his thirties—hardly a boy. Serious between them, is it?’ he demanded, shooting her a penetrating look.
‘That’s something you must ask Livvy,’ Jenny told him.
It was certainly serious enough for Olivia to tell her mother that the two of them would be sharing a room even though David apparently had put his foot down and said no.
‘David’s right, of course,’ Tiggy had told Jenny when relating the details of their conversation to her. ‘Father would not approve at all and we’d never hear the end of it for allowing it and really, it will only be for a few days….’
‘Mmm … at that age a few days can seem an awfully long time. What does Livvy say?’
‘We haven’t told her yet. David said it was best not to until she arrived. You know what she can be like. She’s so strong-willed at times….’ Tiggy pulled a small face. ‘You remember what it was like when she decided she wanted to study law. Of course, we all knew it was only because David and her grandfather had both told her that they really didn’t think it was a good idea and after all, she is—’
‘Female,’ Jenny had supplied dryly.
Personally she thought the views of the males of the Crighton family were decades out of date and that it was high time that someone challenged them. Olivia might be the first female of the family to do so, but she wasn’t going to be the only one.
Jenny knew that her own Katie already, at sixteen, had very strong views as to where her future lay. It was to be the Bar or nothing, she had told her parents emphatically. Louise, her twin, was less single-minded; she still hadn’t totally given up all hopes of becoming a film star. Failing that, she might well opt to study law, she had said judiciously.
‘But I wouldn’t want to stay here,’ she had told her parents.
‘No, neither do I,’ Katie had agreed. She was always the one who took control, and Louise, like her father before her, seemed quite happy to good-naturedly let her do so.
Jenny, however, had been determined from the moment they were born that there was not going to be a favoured child and a second best; that both of them were going to grow up knowing they were of equal importance, equal value.
‘I know,’ she had told Louise. ‘We’ll go to Strasbourg. That’s where all the important legal decisions are made on human rights….’
‘Does your father know that?’ Jenny had murmured sotto voce to her husband. ‘I sometimes think he has a hard time grudgingly acknowledging that even Chester has more impact on the legal world than Haslewich.’
‘Mmm … Dad is fiercely parochial,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘He inherited that from his own father, of course. Aunt Ruth says that their father, Josiah, never really got over being sent away from Chester in disgrace and that he always remained bitter about the way his family treated him.’
‘Well, your father certainly believes in keeping the old rivalries going,’ Jenny had agreed. ‘I was quite surprised when he insisted on inviting the Chester side of the family to your birthday do.’
‘Oh, that’s just because he wants to impress them and—’
‘Just like Max wants to impress Grandad and Uncle David,’ Katie had interrupted scathingly, tossing her sixteen-year-old head in sisterly contempt of her elder brother.
Over that head Jenny had looked warily at her husband. It was no secret that Max was very much the apple of his grandfather’s eye and that of his uncle David’s.
‘That boy should have been David’s son, not yours,’ Ben had once infamously remarked at a family gathering.
Jenny had never forgotten hearing him say it. Neither, unfortunately it seemed, had Max.
Much as it pained Jenny to admit it, her son had a streak of vanity and, yes, weakness in him that she felt had been exacerbated by his grandfather’s indulgence.
‘Max will never be called to the Bar,’ Katie had announced scathingly the day of Max’s twenty-first when their grandfather had beamingly made the announcement of his grandson’s career intentions and presented him with the keys to a Porsche Carrera that both Jonathon and Jenny had pleaded with Ben not to give him.
Max had finished his pupillage the previous year when he was twenty-three but so far had been unable to find a place as a junior in a set of chambers in London.
It would be left no doubt to Joss, their youngest child, to take his father’s place in the family business in due time, just as his cousin Jack would take David’s, but that lay well into the future. Jack was only ten and Joss an even younger eight.
As she walked back with her father-in-law across the lawn, Jenny paused to admire the outline of the house.
Originally a large farmhouse, it was built in a traditional hall house shape with the main central block from which two wings projected one at either end.
The rear of the property they were facing was the older portion built in the traditional Cheshire farmhouse style of huge oak beams infilled with wattle-and-daub panels. The front was a more modern seventeenth century instead of fifteenth in softly tinted locally quarried stone.
There had been those who had raised their eyebrows a little when Ben’s father had moved into the large farmhouse, wondering how on earth he had come to inherit such a valuable property. Valuable not so much because of the house, but rather because of the fertile Cheshire farmlands that went with it. And it had belonged to a lonely widow, as well.
One day, following the rules of primogeniture to which they all knew Ben intended to rigidly adhere, David, simply by virtue of the fact he had arrived into the world ten minutes ahead of Jon, would inherit Queensmead, but Jenny didn’t envy the inheritance. She was perfectly happy with their own much smaller house on the other side of town. Georgian in origin, it had once belonged to the church and Jenny particularly loved its walled garden and its proximity to the river that flowed through the paddock at the bottom of the garden.
She might not envy David and Tiggy their ultimate ownership of Queensmead but there was no doubt that it was the perfect setting for a large family gathering, she acknowledged.
In all, over two hundred and fifty people would be attending and over a hundred of them were in one way or another, however loosely, connected ‘family’. The rest were either friends, colleagues, clients or, in some cases, all three. Working out the table plans alone had taken Jenny the best part of a fortnight of winter evenings at her desk.
Fortunately Guy Cooke, her business partner, had been wonderfully understanding and accommodating.
Her work was still a source of acrimony between Jenny and her father-in-law. It had infuriated her that instead of taking the matter up with her, Ben had manipulatively attempted to dictate what she should do by objecting to Jonathon that he didn’t think it was a good thing for the family that she should be involved in a local business.
It was true that financially she didn’t need to earn her own living, but the business had brought her something she believed was equally vital to her: her own feelings of self-worth and self-justification. Her need to be something other than Jonathon’s wife, the plain one …
The plain one … How those words had once hurt. And still did?
No, not any more. In fact, if anything, she was grateful for the truth of them because they had forced her to fight against them, to look within herself, to find something there that she could hold on to and value.
She glanced at her watch. Jon wouldn’t be home yet and Joss was going straight from school to have tea with a friend. Katie and Louise had after-school tennis practice. She had a couple of hours in hand and her conscience had been pricking her for days about Guy and their business.
Being a partner in an antique shop and repairers might not have Ben’s approval but she enjoyed it. Even more she enjoyed the actual renovation and restoration side of the business, something that Guy freely admitted she had a definite talent for. Her career plans had been shelved when her mother had fallen ill within weeks of her sitting her A levels.
Her illness had mercifully been as swift as it was relentless. Within a few short weeks she was dead, but by then it was too late for Jenny to pick up the threads she had dropped and reapply for a course she had hoped to take—in more ways than one.
She and Jonathon had been married very quietly a matter of months after her mother’s death.
As she reached the main road, she paused and then turned right instead of left, heading for Haslewich instead of home. Guy had said he had picked up some silver he wanted her to see.
Tiggy exhaled in relief as she saw that the forecourt in front of the Dower House was empty. Good. David wasn’t home yet. She had stayed longer in Chester than she had planned. Guiltily she opened the boot of her car and removed the glossy carrier bags, grimacing as she stepped onto the gravel and felt it grate against her delicately pale high heels.
She would have preferred to have the forecourt paved, but since they merely leased the Dower House from Sir Richard Furness and since he was fiercely opposed to any kind of change, she knew that she had scant chance of doing away with the annoyance of the gravel.
Initially when, after their marriage, David had announced that they would be living in the Dower House, she had thought that he was joking. ‘But what’s the point when we’ll be going back to London?’ she had protested.
David had looked uncomfortable and then defensive as he told her that there was no way he could afford to live in London now, that they would have to live in Cheshire where he, at least, had the security of a partnership in the family business, which included a generous additional allowance to cover the cost of the lease on the Dower House.
She hadn’t minded too much at the time. She was a new bride, pretty and young, and everyone made a huge fuss over her. It was only sometime afterwards that she began to feel stifled, bored with life as a country solicitor’s wife and then later again that boredom had turned to …
Quickly she unlocked the front door and hurried into the house, going directly upstairs and into the privacy of her bathroom. She shuddered, her fingers trembling slightly as she unfastened the buttons of her silk shirt, then hastily bundled it into the linen basket along with the brief and very expensive silk bra she had been wearing underneath it.
Her skirt could only be dry-cleaned and she grimaced slightly in distaste as she saw the small mark on the creased cream fabric.
Cream was one of her favourite colours. She wore it a lot. It suited her, drew attention to her fragile bone structure and pale, carefully highlighted hair.
She stepped into the shower. She much preferred the pampering luxury of a bath but today she just didn’t have time. She and David were due to go out to dinner and she would have to wash her hair and do her nails. She had noticed as she parked the car that one of them was chipped. She had no idea how on earth Jenny could bear to leave hers unmanicured the way she did.
As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Tiggy studied her reflection in the bathroom’s full-length mirrors. Her breasts were still as high and firm as they had always been, her stomach as flat, her skin as silken, but for how much longer?
She was forty-five now and already she was beginning to discern a certain betraying slackness in the flesh of her face and those tell-tale lines around her eyes. She had had a discreet eye tuck the year she was forty, but that wouldn’t last for ever.
Tiggy dreaded the thought of growing old or not being beautiful and desirable any more. David laughed at her, but then he didn’t understand. How could he? Wrapped in her towel, she walked into their bedroom. A copy of the new edition of Vogue lay on the bed. She picked it up, studying the model on the cover.
She had been a fool to give up her own career when she had, but at the time … David had seemed so glamorous, so exciting … so sexy … so different from all those paunchy, middle-aged men she kept being introduced to by the agency. Men who looked at her with hot, avaricious eyes and wanted to touch her with even hotter and more avaricious hands.
Knowing how much David had wanted her, how much he’d desired and loved her, had thrilled her, but that thrill hadn’t lasted. It never did.
She wondered what time Olivia would arrive and what this boyfriend she was bringing with her would be like. Not too American, she hoped. Ben was bound to disapprove. Given the quite small age gap between them, it was odd that she and Olivia weren’t closer. People often commented that they looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. It had shocked Tiggy when Olivia had announced that she wanted to train for the law. Somehow she had expected that she would follow in her own footsteps and go into modelling or something similar, but then in many ways Olivia really was such an odd girl. Tiggy put it down to the fact that Olivia had spent so much time with Jenny when she was growing up.
Jack would be home tomorrow, as well. Tiggy knew that Ben hadn’t approved of their sending him to boarding school. Jack, like his father and all the male members of the Crighton family had attended the King’s School in Chester. But unlike them, Jack boarded there on a weekly basis.
Jenny, of course, being Jenny, would make nothing of driving first Max and now Joss there day in and day out—and had even offered to pick Jack up and take him with them but Tiggy had her own reasons for preferring to have her son out of the way on occasion.
She glanced impatiently at her nails. She was booked in tomorrow for a manicure at the beauty salon in the exclusive country club close to Chester, which she and David had joined shortly after it had opened. David didn’t use the facilities very often; he preferred playing golf at the same club where his father and brother were members.
Now, what was she going to wear tonight? The Buckletons were members of an old Cheshire family and well-connected; they lived in a huge, draughty, rambling Victorian house just outside Chester. In addition to the couple’s being clients of David’s, Ann Buckleton was a local JP. Tiggy suspected that Ann Buckleton didn’t particularly approve of her and would have preferred Jenny’s company, but David was the firm’s senior partner and as such it was David whom they invited to dinner.
Jenny parked her car in the large municipal car park just outside the town. The town itself was old; the Romans had mined salt in the area and so had others both before and after them.
The town had literally been built on salt and now there was concern that parts of it could be subject to subsidence because of the now-disused and extensive salt workings on its outskirts.
To Jenny, Haslewich was everything that a small rural English town should be—a neat, compact and harmonious blending of buildings actually built in some cases on top of one another, absurd Georgian growths sprouting from Tudor roots, handsome stone structures jostling for space with others made from brick. Some of the more flamboyant stone ones sported their purloined masonry without any hint of shame or subtlety.
During the Civil War, so much damage had been done to the town’s surrounding stone wall by the attacking Roundhead troops that after the war the stone had been used, in some cases, to repair the homes of the townspeople, and the only part of the original wall that now remained was the section that ran between the town and the river. The local council was presently running a campaign to raise money to have it restored. So far, the townspeople appeared stoically determined to leave their wall as it was and in many ways Jenny didn’t blame them.
The antique shop was in a small, narrow alley just off the town square, a pretty, double-fronted Tudor building with an upper storey that overhung the alleyway.
Guy Cooke was rearranging some delicate Staffordshire figurines when she walked in. He looked up and saw her, immediately stopping what he was doing to come over and greet her with a warm smile.
He was at least fifteen years younger than Jonathon and physically completely different. Where Jon was tall and blond with long arms and legs, Guy was shorter, broader, his hair pitch-dark and his colouring just short of swarthy.
He had once told Jenny that there was supposed to be gypsy blood in his family somewhere, and looking at him Jenny could well believe it. They had been partners for seven years and friends for much longer. Guy’s family had lived in the town for generations and his parents had run a pub several doors away from the shop before they retired and moved. He had sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all living within a stone’s throw of one another and all virtually united in their disapproval of Guy and what he was doing.
Guy had always been ‘arty’ as he had wryly described himself once to Jenny. Of course, his parents had tried their best to smother such an undesirable trait, which would have been bad enough in a daughter, but was totally unacceptable in a son….
The Cookes as a clan were notoriously macho; the thickset, dark-haired, very male men knew their place in life and what being a man and, more importantly, being a Cooke were all about.
Not so Guy. He had wanted something different out of life. He was something different.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been much in evidence lately,’ Jenny apologised, shaking her head when Guy offered her a cup of tea.
‘Mmm. How are things going?’ he asked her.
‘All right—I think,’ Jenny said, laughing. ‘Tiggy and I were up at Queensmead this morning just checking on the final details—’
‘You mean you were checking on the final details,’ Guy corrected her.
Jenny frowned. It was no secret to her that Guy didn’t particularly like her sister-in-law, which was quite odd really when one thought about how he felt about anything that was beautiful, and Tiggy was certainly that.
Tiggy didn’t like him, either. In fact, she had, on occasion, been uncharacteristically vindictive about him, making waspish comments about the fact that he wasn’t married.
Jenny had started to laugh. She could think of few men who were more masculinely heterosexual than Guy—not that it made any difference what his sexual preference was—and the only reason he hadn’t married was because he hadn’t wanted to tie himself down to one woman. In his sexuality at least, he was very much a member of the Cooke clan who had, to a man, what was tacitly understood to be a weakness for the female sex.
‘What about this silver you wanted me to look at?’ she reminded him.
‘Oh, yes. I think it’s Queen Anne but you’re the silver expert. I’ve got it in the safe.’
It was over an hour before Jenny finally left the shop. Like Guy, she was convinced that the silver was genuine although, as she had pointed out to him, the lack of any identifying marks could mean that it might have been stolen at some point in time.
‘It’s too good not to have had proper markings,’ she had observed. ‘I suppose the best thing we can do is to check with the police.’
After she left the shop, she crossed the square. She just had enough time left to call on Ruth; her husband’s aunt lived in a narrow, elegant Georgian town house on Church Walk, which she rented from the church commissioners. To get to it, Jenny made a small detour through the churchyard itself, pausing as she walked past the Crighton family plot to stop and bend down towards a small single headstone carved with laughing, naughty-looking cherubs. The epitaph read:
‘HARRY CRIGHTON
JUNE 19TH 1965–JUNE 20TH 1965.’
He had lived such a heartbreakingly short time, this first child of hers, and a part of her still mourned for him and always would. Time had eased the piercing sharpness of her initial grief, but she could never forget him, nor would she want to. Before she stood up, she touched the headstone, stroking it, caressing it almost, as she said his name.
Ruth was waiting for her with the front door open as she walked up the path. ‘I saw you in the churchyard,’ she told Jenny. ‘He would have been thirty-one this year if he’d lived.’
‘I know.’ For a moment both women were quiet. If having Ben as a father-in-law weighed heavily at times in the negative balance sheet of her marriage to Jonathon, then having Ruth in the family certainly added balance to the positive side of the equation, Jenny acknowledged.
‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’ Ruth asked her.
‘No,’ Jenny told her ruefully, ‘but I’d still love one.’
‘Come on in, then,’ Ruth invited her, and as Jenny followed her into the pretty sitting room at the front of the house, she paused to admire the huge profusion of flowers decorating the empty fireplace.
Ruth had a gift, not just for arranging flowers artistically, but for growing them, as well.
‘Pieter is coming with the flowers on the day of the party,’ she told Jenny, following the direction of her glance. ‘He’s catching the first ferry over that morning. The flowers will all be freshly picked and he knows exactly what we want.’
Ruth bought her flowers directly from a Dutch supplier whose younger son crossed the North Sea to Hull once a week delivering flowers to his regular customers but, for this weekend’s celebration, Pieter had agreed to make a special trip bringing only the flowers that Ruth had ordered especially for the event.
‘I imagine Ben’s driving you crazy, isn’t he?’ she asked now.
‘Just a little bit,’ Jenny agreed. ‘His hip bothers him at times although he won’t admit it….’
Half an hour later when Jenny left, Ruth watched her walk back across the churchyard and pause a second time for a few moments in front of the grave of her first-born son.
She sensed what Jenny was feeling. Some pains never ever faded; some things could never ever be forgotten, and it wasn’t always true that with time they eased.
2 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Jon, have you got a minute?’
Jonathon looked up from his desk as his twin walked into his office, then frowned slightly as he saw the way that David was massaging his shoulder. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked him.
‘Not really, just a bit of an ache. I must have pulled something playing golf on Sunday, which reminds me, we’re both down to play in the Captain’s Cup next month but Tiggy is getting a bit agitated about our getting away so I might have to pull out. Look, I’m going to get off early. We’re having dinner with the Buckletons tonight and there’s nothing pressing here.’
No, there probably wasn’t, not once you discounted the two wills waiting to be redrafted, the conveyancing for Hawkins Farm and a whole host of other complicated and fiddly commissions that increasingly recently seemed to find their way from David’s desk to his own because his brother couldn’t find the time to deal with them.
It had never really been intended that the two of them would go into the family business; David had been earmarked to become a member of a much more elevated rank of their profession—a barrister—and long before they had both even left school, their father was already talking about the time when David would be a QC.
All that had changed, though, the summer David had returned to Haslewich with Tiggy to tell the family that they were married and that Tiggy was expecting his child. No one had mentioned David’s failure to fulfil his father’s hopes for him by not qualifying for the Bar, just as no one had mentioned the debts David had run up whilst living in London or the distinctive and tell-tale, sickly sweet smell that emanated from the room that David and Tiggy were sharing at Queensmead until a new home was found for them.
Arrangements were very quickly made for David to join the partnership, but not as a practising solicitor because, of course, he wasn’t qualified, but Jon doubted that anyone remembered that these days. As the favoured brother, David was automatically assumed to be the firm’s senior partner and Jonathon, because he was Jonathon, had never done anything to dispel this myth. Equally David, because he was David, hadn’t, either.
Now as Jonathon looked at his twin and saw the signs of weakness that age was making increasingly plain in his features, the faint coarsening of the once healthily tanned taut flesh of his face, the inability of his gaze to hold Jon’s own, the fleshiness on a body that used to be as firmly muscular as Jon’s still was, these vulnerabilities if anything only made him love his brother more and not less. Jon loved him with a fiercely protective, unvocalised love so intense that sometimes it physically hurt him. He would never have dreamed of telling his twin or anyone else how he thought and knew instinctively that David did not have the same intensity of feeling for him.
Watching David massaging the shoulder he complained had been aching, Jon found he was automatically copying the movement even though his own shoulder was completely free of pain.
‘Looks like the weather is going to stay fine for the weekend,’ David commented as he turned to leave. ‘The girls will be pleased. By the way, young Max rang me the other night. He’s driving up from London tomorrow, he says.’
‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. Max might be his son, but it was David whom he treated more like a father. It was David who would have preferred to be his father, Jon suspected. They shared the same extrovert, almost extravagantly outrageous personality, the same needs, the same love of ownership and glory, the same gifts—and the same weaknesses. Jon started to frown.
‘Livvy’s due back tonight,’ David was continuing, and now he, too, was starting to frown. ‘She’s bringing this American with her. I’m not sure … look, I’d better go,’ he told Jon hurriedly as the phone started to ring. ‘I promised Tiggy I wouldn’t be late and she’s already in a bit of a state, something about the shoes she ordered for Saturday not arriving … You know how easily she gets upset.’
From his office window, Jon could see across the small town square with its neatly enclosed immaculate lawn and its tidy flower-beds. He could see Jenny, his wife, crossing the square on her way back to her car. She stopped to talk to David; David had obviously seen her, too, as he quickened his pace to catch up with her. Jon saw the way she smiled as she greeted his brother, the afternoon sun turning her brunette hair a nice warm chestnut. Once, a long time ago, so long ago now that most people had forgotten all about it, Jenny had been David’s girlfriend.
The telephone had started to ring again. Looking away from the window, Jon reached out to answer it.
‘What’s for tea?’
Jenny smiled at her youngest child. At forty she had thought herself too old and too careful to have another baby, but nature had proved her wrong.
Jon had been almost shocked when she had told him and she had felt oddly, awkwardly self-conscious about delivering the news to him herself.
‘You’re pregnant, but how …?’
‘Our wedding anniversary,’ she’d reminded him, adding simply, ‘We were supposed to be going out for a meal, remember, only you were delayed in court and instead we ate in and opened that wine that Uncle Hugh had given you.’
‘Oh God, yes,’ Jon had agreed. ‘That stuff was lethal.’
‘It was vintage burgundy,’ Jenny chided him severely, ‘and we shouldn’t have opened that second bottle. It’s my fault. It never occurred to me to think about taking any precautions.’
What she didn’t add was that sex between them had become so rare an event that her diaphragm was something that was pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer and largely forgotten. They had a comfortable, steady marriage and were not given to being physically affectionate with one another in public the way David and Tiggy often were and perhaps, because of the busyness of their lives, they had somehow grown out of the habit of being physically demonstrative with one another in private, as well.
However, as Jenny surveyed the result of their two bottles of vintage burgundy and her carelessness, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be without the consequences of their ‘accident’.
‘It’s lamb and new potatoes,’ she told Joss, named after his paternal great-grandfather, adding warningly, ‘And Joss, don’t forget—homework first.’
‘When’s Livvy coming back?’ Joss asked her, ignoring her warning. ‘She promised to come round.’
‘Some time this evening,’ Jenny responded, ‘but remember, Joss, she’s bringing a friend back with her and she won’t have time to go roaming all over the countryside with you.’
‘The badger cubs are coming out at night now. She’ll want to see them.’
Jenny grinned to herself as she heard the conviction in her young son’s voice. He was going to be a real heartbreaker when he grew up. By some magical alchemy he had managed to inherit the very best of both his father’s and his uncle’s genes. David’s overconfidence and flamboyance were toned down and backed up by Jon’s guarded personality; his nature was also enhanced by the ingredients of good humour and irrepressibility—a sense of fun, a love of life and the people around him.
‘Max is due back tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘So if you haven’t already removed your belongings from his room, I suggest that you do so this evening, and as long as we’re on the subject, your brother’s bedroom is not the place to dismantle your bike,’ she remonstrated severely.
Joss looked innocently at her. ‘But I had to do it there,’ he told her winningly. ‘There was nowhere else. There’s no room in the garage and …’
And the truth was that there was nothing quite so much fun for him as testing the strength of Max’s claim to seniority, Jenny knew, but Max was not like Olivia, indulgent of his sibling’s youthfulness and disposed to be amused and entertained by him.
Max had been horrified when she had told him that she was pregnant, and that disgust and dislike of her pregnancy had been transferred into a disgust and dislike for his younger brother.
‘It would be much better if Max went and stayed at Uncle David’s and Olivia stayed here,’ Joss grumbled.
Jenny gave him another warning look and reminded him sternly, ‘Homework.’ But she knew that there was an element of truth in what he said.
Max did prefer the company of his aunt and uncle, especially his uncle, whilst Olivia … Livvy was such a darling and so dear to her, Jenny just hoped that this young American, whoever he was, realised that he was a lucky man.
Max grimaced as the office door swung closed behind the chambers clerk. It was already gone six o’clock and now it looked as though he was going to have at least another couple of hours work ahead of him. He glanced in disgust at the papers Bob Ford had just placed on his desk.
It was no secret that he wasn’t exactly one of the clerk’s favourites, a legacy of the early days of Max’s pupillage at the chambers when Bob had unfortunately overheard his efforts to make fun of him by imitating the slight stammer he developed whenever he was under pressure.
Max shrugged.
He had inherited his father’s and his uncle’s tall, muscular body frame, and the years of playing rugby first at King’s School and then later at Oxford had developed the powerful physique of which he was now secretly rather proud.
He enjoyed it when he saw the sideways double take women gave him as they discreetly and sometimes not so discreetly assessed him. He liked it, as well, when he stripped off in the shower after a hard game of squash or rugby and saw the envy flare briefly in the eyes of other men. It gave him an advantage, and as Max was well aware, advantages were all plus points when it came to winning life’s games. And Max intended to be a winner. He wasn’t going to be like his father, content to be second best. No, Max only had to look at his Uncle David to see what he wanted to be.
He couldn’t remember the first time he had realised the difference in the way people treated his father and his Uncle David but he could remember that he had decided that people would treat him the way they did his uncle and not his father.
The knowledge that he would have much preferred it if David had been his father had come later. He had enjoyed it when David had begun to treat him more like a son than a nephew and he had enjoyed even more displacing Olivia in her father’s affections, had relished knowing that of the two of them he came first.
It had been David and his grandfather who had been full of praise and encouragement when he had announced his intention to train as a barrister.
‘You’ll need a first-class degree,’ his father had warned him. ‘And even then it won’t be easy.’
‘Stop trying to put the lad off,’ his grandfather had interrupted. ‘It’s time we had a QC on our side of the family.’
‘Well, that’s certainly what I intend to aim for,’ Max had agreed, taking advantage of his grandfather’s good mood, ‘but it isn’t going to be that simple. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get a part-time job whilst I’m at Oxford—not if I’m going to get a good degree,’ he added virtuously, ‘and as for my grant … And then I’m going to have to replace my car …’ He had paused hopefully, and as he had anticipated, his grandfather hadn’t disappointed him.
‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort something out. You’ve got some money coming to you eventually from your grandmother, and as for a car, haven’t you got a twenty-first coming up …?’
Later on he had overheard his parents discussing the incident.
‘It’s David all over again,’ he heard his mother saying angrily, ‘and Max encourages him.’
‘Yes, I know, but what could I do?’ Max had heard his father responding quietly. ‘You know what Dad’s like.’
The trouble with his mother was that she was too moralistic, Max decided, but then he supposed she had to be something. After all, she wasn’t as physically attractive as David’s wife, Tiggy, the kind of woman that men stopped to stare at in the street. The kind of woman that other men envied a man for having. He could still vividly remember the thrill it had given him the year David and Tiggy had come to his school sports day instead of his parents.
Old Harris, the sports master, had gone beetroot red and behaved like an idiot when Max had introduced Tiggy to him. Max had amused himself imagining his wanking off later in the privacy of his rented rooms as he relived the occasion. Pathetic sod. Max bet he didn’t know what it was like to have a woman, unlike Max himself, who had lost his virginity at fourteen with the able, the very able, help of a girl who worked behind the bar at the pub they all went into after Saturday morning sport.
Tucked away down a side street in Chester, it had possessed the kind of seediness that both excited and amused him. For a start it had so obviously been a place his respectable father would never have dreamed of going to, and as for his mother … But Max had enjoyed it. Just as he had enjoyed the slightly sweaty, earthy scent of the girl as she took him back to her room and let him kiss and grope her for several minutes before finally pushing him off and commanding him to wait whilst she stripped off her clothes.
It had been the first time he had seen a real naked female in the flesh, and she had had no inhibitions about letting him see her, even to the extent of laughing mockingly at him after she propped herself up on her pillows and spread her legs, inviting him to have a good look at what lay between them.
‘Bet you haven’t seen many of these before, have you?’ she demanded, grinning at him as he touched the thicket of dark, rough hair and then parted the thick, fleshy lips beneath it. ‘Know what this is, do you?’ she asked him, commanding him to look as she revealed the small inner nub of hard flesh.
‘Course I do,’ Max responded swaggeringly.
‘Good,’ she announced, ‘then you’ll know what to do with it, won’t you?’
Max certainly thought he did but she soon disabused him of this misapprehension.
‘God, you’re rough,’ she complained. ‘It’s not your own prick you’ve got there, you know, and besides,’ she added slyly, watching him, ‘it works much better if you suck it.’
She laughed when she saw his expression.
‘Never gone down on a girl before, have you? Well, now’s your big chance.’
She hadn’t let him put himself inside her until after she’d had her orgasm and by then … She had laughed again when he hadn’t been able to hold back or control his excitement or the thick gush of semen that shot from his tensely erect cock, but she hadn’t been laughing later when he had thrust into her and gone on thrusting until she was moaning and clawing at his back, urging him on and on and then screeching like the alley cat that she was as he took her through her orgasm and refused to stop until she had had another and then another. He hadn’t seen her again after that—there hadn’t been any need.
He could remember how shocked and disgusted he’d been when his mother had been pregnant with Joss, knowing that she and his father still did it.
He could remember her and his father attending one of his school functions and how furious and ashamed he had felt at the sight of her heavily pregnant body. She had no right, at her age … She was making a laughing-stock of herself and of him.
Max’s mouth hardened as he thought of his parents; sometimes there was a look in his mother’s eyes when she watched him….
His mother was crazy if she thought he was going to end up like his father, a second-rate man working for a second-rate out-of-touch family business in a second-rate county town. If it wasn’t for his Uncle David and his charismatic personality, the business would have gone to the wall years ago. Just because his uncle had made one foolish mistake and …
It wasn’t a mistake Max was going to repeat. Oh, he intended to enjoy his life but he also intended to make sure he didn’t get caught in the same trap as his uncle.
Max had made sure that he left Oxford with a good enough degree to get him into a decent set of chambers after his Bar finals; and once there not only had he made sure that he brought himself to the attention of those who could be of benefit to his future career, but additionally he had also made sure that his life wasn’t all hard work and paying lip-service to his professional ambitions. However, unlike his uncle, he had been discreet and careful.
‘Still here, old boy? I thought you were intending to get off early.’
Max tensed as Roderick Hamilton walked into his office. Roderick was just over twelve months his senior. They had been at Oxford at the same time but had not mixed in the same circles; Roderick’s parents were extremely wealthy and well-connected. His uncle was the present head of chambers, which was no doubt why of the two of them Roderick had been chosen to fill the vacancy for a tenancy at the end of their pupillage whilst Max had had to fall back on the ignominy of being allowed merely to stay on as a squatter. This meant, of course, that the only fee-paying work that Max could get was whatever had been passed over by the existing members of the chambers, including Roderick.
Max had never been the type to feel the need to make close friends; to Max his peers were rivals, obstacles he had to overcome, but in Roderick’s case, Max actively disliked the man, as well.
‘Mmm … the Wilson brief. Hard luck,’ Roderick commiserated as he picked up the papers on Max’s desk and glanced at them before tossing them to one side. ‘Pity you’re not free this weekend,’ he added. ‘Ma’s having a “do” for my sister. She’s coming out this year and Ma’s asked me to round up some men.’
Max didn’t take his eyes off the papers he was now pretending to study. He knew perfectly well that Roderick was trying to amuse himself at his own expense; there was no way Roderick’s mother would welcome any uninvited extra guests to the extremely prestigious and carefully planned ball she was hostessing for her daughter’s coming-out party.
‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ he responded without looking at Roderick. ‘It’s my father’s fiftieth birthday this weekend.’
‘Ah, you’ll have heard about old Benson, I expect,’ Roderick remarked, obviously getting down to the real purpose of his ‘visit’.
Even though he had been expecting it, waiting for it, in actual fact Max could still feel his body fighting to betray the rage that had been boiling inside him all day.
‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ he agreed.
‘Once he goes it will mean there’ll be a tenancy vacancy in chambers,’ Roderick told him unnecessarily.
‘Yes,’ Max responded neutrally, knowing that he had to make some response.
‘Applying for it, are you?’
Max could feel his control starting to slip. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ he lied.
‘Well, I should do if I were you, old chap,’ Roderick warned him, ‘because it seems that tenancies aren’t that easy to come by these days and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of interest being shown in this one. Not, of course, that there should be any problem if you did decide to go for it. After all, you did your pupillage here and you’ve been squatting here for … let me think, it must be well over a year, mustn’t it? God, is that the time? I’d better go … I promised Ma I’d be on hand at home this evening. Good luck with the Wilson brief,’ he drawled as he walked into the corridor.
Max waited until he was quite sure that Roderick had gone before balling up the piece of paper he had been reading and hurling it across the room with all the force of his rugger training. Damn Roderick, damn him to hell and back and damn his bloody uncle, as well.
It was over eight months now since Max had heard the first whisper that Clive Benson was going to be invited to become a judge. He had heard it initially on a visit to Chester to keep up with the Chester branch of the family; after all, in this business you needed all the help you could get. And ever since then he had been doing all he could to make sure that he got the vacancy when it came up.
On Wednesday morning, when the clerk had told him that the senior partner wanted to have a meeting with him, Max had confidently expected to be told officially about the vacancy and to be assured that once the tenancy did fall vacant, it would be his.
Instead he had been told following much harrumphing and throat clearing that after much discussion the partners had decided it was time they observed the rules against sexual discrimination and gave consideration to taking on a female barrister. Not that that necessarily meant that they were going to do so, nor that he was being passed over, Max had been assured. All applicants would be considered on their merits, of course.
‘Of course,’ Max had returned through gritted teeth but he knew exactly what he was being told and, without doubt, Roderick also knew exactly what was going on. How could he not do?
It was too late now for Max to wish he had not announced privately to his grandfather the last time he had gone home that the tenancy was as good as his. Gramps was already champing at the bit about the fact that he was only working as a squatter. In his day such a situation had been inconceivable; you did your pupillage and then went on to work as a fully fledged junior barrister. But things had changed; places in chambers were hard to come by.
And just who the hell was this female anyway? No names had been mentioned and mentally Max had run through the female barristers of his acquaintance who might be considered. Sod the bloody sex discrimination laws. What about him … what about discriminating against him?
He had gone out that night in a foul mood, picked up the girl he was currently dating, a leggy, passionate redhead who had made no objection when he had cut their dinner date short and taken her home. She had objected later on, though, on the fifth occasion he had woken her in the night to vent his pent-up fury and resentment, filling her body with his without taking sufficient time to arouse her completely first, using her ruthlessly and emotionlessly and refusing to let her go until he had driven his body into a state of physically exhausted detachment.
She had told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be seeing her again but he didn’t particularly care. He had more important things to worry about. Despite all the sexual energy he had discharged, he was still furiously, bitterly angry. He was owed that vacancy.
He had worked his butt off this last year, letting them throw every bit of dross they had at him. Gritting his teeth, he had managed to master the sometimes almost overwhelming urge to turn round and tell them just what to do with their non-fee-paying, thanklessly unrewarding juvenile bits of work they wouldn’t give a pupil to do but which they had no compunction about dumping on his desk, knowing he could not, dared not, object.
What had all that been for if he wasn’t going to get the vacant tenancy? He might as well have gone into industry; there at least he would be earning a decent salary. But he hadn’t gone into industry because as his Uncle David and his grandfather had desired, so Max wanted for himself the prestige of being a barrister, of rising to QC and ultimately being called to the Bench.
He wanted it, hungered for it, yearned for it, ached for it and, by God, he intended to have it, and no female, no sex discrimination law was going to stand in his way.
There was only one way to deal with the situation now and Max knew exactly what it was, but first he had to find out exactly the identity of the hopeful candidate for the vacancy. The partners would no doubt know and so, too, would the senior clerk, but Max quickly dismissed him from his calculations. He would never divulge that kind of information to him, which left only the partners and anyone who had their confidence or access to it.
Max was still mulling over what course of action he could take when he climbed into his car two hours later and headed for the North.
‘Here we are, home.’
‘Very impressive,’ Caspar murmured as Olivia brought her car to a halt and turned round in her seat to look at him.
‘Here’s Tiggy,’ she announced when she saw the front door open and her mother hurry towards the stationary car.
Caspar remained silent as he turned to take his first look at Olivia’s mother. Her use of her mother’s nickname whenever she spoke of her wasn’t anything unusual in the society in which he had grown up, but a certain undertone that was always in Olivia’s voice when she spoke about her mother made his study of the older woman thoughtfully assessing.
Physically, they were very alike; Olivia had inherited her mother’s beauty including her high-cheeked facial features. In contrast to her mother, however, Olivia’s beauty radiated from within her in a way that made it almost unimportant that she possessed the kind of looks that could take one’s breath away. Beside her daughter, Tiggy seemed to be a beautiful but blank two-dimensional image.
Caspar’s first feeling as he watched her was one of disappointment. Why so? he wondered as he got out of the car and waited for Olivia to introduce them. What had he expected … hoped for, if indeed he had hoped for anything? Perhaps despite that carefully neutral note he had already observed in Olivia’s voice, her mother would still turn out to be more rather than less of what her daughter already was.
‘Livvy darling … at last … Oh dear, look at your nails and your hair, and those jeans … Oh, darling—’
‘Tiggy, this is Caspar,’ Olivia interrupted her mother calmly. ‘Caspar, this is my mother.’
‘Tiggy, you must call me Tiggy,’ Tiggy announced in the slightly breathy voice that years ago admirers had told her was so incredibly sexy. ‘Come on in, both of you. I’m afraid your father and I are just on our way out,’ she told Olivia as she urged them into the house. ‘We’re having dinner with the Buckletons….’
The front door was already open, the parquet floor gleaming richly of wax, and as he stepped inside, Caspar’s initial impression was one of a room filled with soft colour and flowers. There were huge bowls filled with floral arrangements everywhere: in the fireplace, on a round polished table in the middle of the room, on a pair of small tables beneath imposing Georgian silver-framed mirrors that faced one another across the width of the room.
‘I do so think that flowers are important,’ he heard Tiggy telling him as she saw him staring at his surroundings. ‘They make a house come alive, turn it into a home,’ she was saying quietly, then … ‘Oh, Jack, no, don’t you dare bring that animal in here. Use the back door. You know the rules.’
Caspar frowned as a young boy and a large, slightly overweight golden retriever walked in through the still-open front door.
‘Well, if you’re going out, we’d better not keep you,’ he heard Olivia telling her mother. ‘I take it that we’re in my room. We—’
‘Oh dear … Darling, I’m sorry but that’s something your father wants a word with you about. It’s not that we mind, of course … but it’s your grandfather. You know how old-fashioned he is and how important public opinion is to him. Your father feels that he just wouldn’t be at all happy about you and Caspar … well, especially with the Chester family coming over for the party, your father felt—’
‘Are you trying to say that you expect me and Caspar to sleep in separate rooms?’ Olivia interrupted her mother incredulously. ‘But that’s …’ She started to shake her head, anger darkening her eyes, her voice crisping authoritatively as she remonstrated with her mother. ‘There’s no way—’
Caspar touched her lightly on her arm. ‘It’s okay, I understand. Separate rooms will be fine,’ he told Tiggy easily.
Olivia shook her head and pulled a rueful face at him. The sheer intensity of her love for him frightened her at times. Love was a word that was expressed freely and mercilessly in her home, but as an emotion, she wasn’t sure she fully understood it—and it left her feeling vulnerable and wary.
She had practically swooned at his feet with lust the moment she set eyes on him. Who wouldn’t have done? Six foot two with broad, well-muscled shoulders and physique to match, he had inherited from somewhere or other the facial bone structure of a Native American warrior chief along with the Celtic colouring that was the most compelling of all—black hair and dark blue eyes.
As she walked into his lecture, Olivia simply hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him—and she wasn’t the only one. She had almost fainted on the spot when he had asked her out, but she had retained enough sanity and enough sense of healthy self-preservation to insist that their first date be somewhere busy and public and to arrange her own transport home just so that she wouldn’t give in to the temptation—if it was offered—of going straight to bed with him.
She didn’t and it wasn’t, but not, as both of them confessed to one another later, because it wasn’t what they wanted.
Oh yes, she had wanted him all right—and still did—but now she loved him, as well, loved him intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. He was her lover, her mentor, her best friend … her everything, and she couldn’t envisage how on earth her life had ever seemed complete without him, how she had not, for all those years when he had not been there, somehow been conscious of a huge, aching, empty gap where he would one day be.
He was her whole world; he made her complete and yet she found it hard to tell him how much he meant to her emotionally. That was far, far harder than to tell him just what kind of effect he had on her physically, but then Olivia was very leery of emotions, of feeling them and exhibiting them. Her mother was emotional, everyone said so; they also said with varying degrees of sympathy that that was why her mother needed and deserved special handling, special allowances.
Even as a very small child, Olivia was aware that those special allowances made for her mother’s emotional nature always seemed to be given at the expense of other people, that in some way or other those closest to her mother had to be less emotional as though to compensate for her mother’s excesses.
‘You really are the most amazing person,’ Caspar had told her one day after she had spent weeks tracking down a particular book she knew he had wanted, presenting it to him with casual indifference. ‘You’ll do something like this, but just try to get you to tell me that you love me.’
‘You know I do,’ Olivia returned warily.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, adding lightly, ‘but it would still be nice to hear you say it, though.’
‘I know,’ Olivia admitted, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the small phrase then … and she still couldn’t, not even during the most intense moments of their shared heights of passion.
‘I just don’t believe this,’ she told him fifteen minutes later after her parents had left and Jack had gone out to a friend’s. She had gone from her childhood bedroom to the small attic guest-room where Caspar was unpacking his case. ‘They might at least have put you up in the room next to mine.’
‘It’s only for a couple of days,’ Caspar reminded her, adding teasingly, ‘and I don’t mind. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to the rest. Have you any idea how much you move around in your sleep?’ he asked her mock-aggrievedly. ‘It’s been months since I got a decent night’s sleep.’
‘Two months six days and … eight hours,’ Olivia told him lovingly, counting the actual hours on her fingers whilst Caspar grinned at her. ‘It’s ridiculous of Mum and Dad to expect us to sleep in separate rooms,’ she continued, perching on the end of his small single bed.
After studying it, Caspar had already decided ruefully that there was no way it was going to be long enough for him, and despite what he had said to her, he knew already that he was going to miss having Olivia next to him, and not simply because of the sex, in fact, not really at all because of the sex.
He was thirty-two years old and had had good sex before, and if he was honest, great sex before, but the difference now was that he had never been in love before, never loved before, never really believed that love, the kind of love he felt for Olivia, could actually exist. He had watched his parents go through various sets of mix-and-match relationships, taking on partners, then abandoning them to take on new ones. He had managed to avoid the trap of an early marriage fatally programmed for failure, had realistically accepted that he would marry perhaps some time in his thirties and that maybe it would last long enough for him and his partner to see their children through their teens or maybe it wouldn’t and that was all any sensible, mature right-thinking adult could expect.
‘It’s the fact that it’s all so damned hypocritical that really infuriates me,’ Olivia complained, nibbling at her lower lip in the same way that she worried over the issue of their not being able to sleep together. ‘It’s always the same. We’ve always got to fall in line behind what Gramps decides we should do.’
‘Morally speaking …’ Caspar started to say, but Olivia shook her head, refusing to let him continue.
‘Morally speaking nothing. Gramps just likes controlling other people. He isn’t in the least bit concerned about my moral welfare or about any aspect of my welfare,’ she declared fiercely. ‘He never has been. Now if I’d been a boy … a grandson …’ She broke off and shook her head a second time, a rueful smile curling her mouth. ‘Look at me. I haven’t been back for twenty-four hours and already it’s starting. I promised myself when I left home that I’d leave my chip behind me.’
‘You’ve said yourself that you wouldn’t really have wanted to go into the family practice,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed, ‘but I should have had the opportunity to choose. Gramps and Dad did everything they could to dissuade me from studying law. Only Aunt Jen supported me and encouraged me. Oh, and Aunt Ruth, as well. You’ll like them and Uncle Jon.’
‘Your father’s twin?’
‘Mmm … although they aren’t at all alike, well, physically they are, of course, because they’re identical, but Uncle Jon …’ She stopped in mid-sentence.
‘Uncle Jon …?’ Caspar pressed but Olivia shook her head.
‘I can’t really explain. You’ll see for yourself when you meet him. It’s as though somehow he’s always standing in the shadows—in Dad’s shadow—and yet …’
She stopped, her brow furrowed in thought. ‘It’s as though he deliberately makes less of himself and more of Dad. Everyone, but most especially Gramps, focuses on Dad and on Tiggy because she’s his wife, and yet to me it sometimes seems as though both of them are somehow unreal, that they’re just cut-out card-board figures with no substance to them….’ She gave a small shiver.
‘It used to frighten me a bit when I was younger, seeing them like that and wondering why no one else seemed to see them in the same way.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Sort of like the old fairy story about the emperor’s new clothes in a way, I suppose. You heard Tiggy going on earlier about the flowers, about them making a house a home. Everyone always says what a marvellous flair for décor my mother has, and granted, the house is always perfect but it’s not a home. Aunt Jen’s house is a home. This place is just like … like a set out of a film or a play … the right furniture, the right colours, the right flowers.’ She grimaced again.
‘Dad was originally supposed to qualify as a barrister, you know, but something went wrong. I’m not sure what exactly. Oh, Tiggy makes references to how they met, the fact that my father was playing in a pop group, the fact that she was modelling and he fell in love with her on sight. They were married at Caxton Hall—it was the fashion then. Tiggy was already pregnant with me and that was why they decided to move back to Haslewich. Dad wanted his children to be brought up here, so he abandoned his plans to work as a barrister for our sake … at least that’s what I’ve always been told and, of course, Gramps has never really forgiven me for it. He so desperately wants to have a QC in the family.’
‘But I thought there already was, your great-uncle Hugh.’
‘Hugh was a QC, yes,’ Olivia agreed. ‘He was actually appointed a judge last year, but Hugh isn’t true family, at least not as Gramps defines it. Hugh is merely Gramps’s half-brother. Gramps’s father, Josiah, remarried after Gramps’s mother died and Hugh is his second wife, Ellen’s, son.
‘Although Gramps would never admit it, secretly I think he’s always been a little bit jealous of Hugh. Ellen’s family had money and Gramps’s father was, according to Aunt Ruth at least, always that little bit more indulgent towards Hugh than he was towards them.
‘It was Ellen’s family’s money that paid for Hugh to train as a barrister. Gramps, of course, had to go into the family business—there wasn’t anyone else who could. I suspect that really he’s still disappointed that Dad wasn’t called to the Bar, which is why he’s so determined that Max will be.’
‘Ah, Max.’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Olivia questioned.
‘Do you?’ Caspar returned dryly.
‘We’ve never really got on, even when we were younger. Oh, I know everyone thinks I’m jealous because Max is Dad’s favourite, but it isn’t that. I just don’t think Max is a very likeable person. No one else agrees with me, of course. Tiggy thinks he’s wonderful. He flirts outrageously with her and she can’t see that underneath it all he’s really laughing at her. She’ll probably try to flirt with you as she would him. She doesn’t mean anything by it … it’s just her way … she can’t help it, she needs …’
Olivia paused, groping for the right words to explain her mother’s vulnerability and then abandoned the attempt, saying quietly instead, ‘Sometimes when I see Aunt Jenny watching Max I sort of get the impression that she doesn’t like him much herself but, of course, that can’t be true. She’s his mother after all and mothers always love their children.’
‘Do they?’ Caspar asked her wryly. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. What certainly isn’t true is that children always love their parents. There’s virtually a whole industry growing up now around analysing why so many adult and sometimes not-yet-adult children murder their parents.’
‘Mmm … I was reading about that case involving …’
They were off, both of them quickly becoming engrossed in the intricacies of the legal case Olivia had referred to.
She was more beautiful than ever when she was animated like this, Caspar acknowledged, watching her, but never, nowhere ever near so beautiful as she was when she lay in his arms and opened her eyes, her body, her soul to him.
‘Caspar,’ she complained when she realised that she didn’t have his full attention, ‘what are you doing?’
‘Just testing this mattress,’ he explained.
‘Why?’ she demanded curiously.
‘Why do you think?’ he responded softly, turning round to kiss her before asking, ‘How long do you suppose we have before your parents come back?’
‘My bed’s bigger,’ Olivia whispered between returning his kisses.
‘Mmm …’ he murmured distractedly, nuzzling the soft, tender flesh of her throat. ‘You can show me later. Right now, right now …’
He exhaled in masculine, sensual pleasure as he peeled down her top and exposed the taut curves of her breasts, teasing first one and then the other erect nipple with the tip of his tongue, feeling her whole body quiver in response to his touch.
He could still remember the first time he had gone down on her, the intensity of the quicksilver shudders of pleasure she hadn’t been able to conceal from him. Thinking about it now made his own body harden.
‘We haven’t had any supper,’ Olivia reminded him, gasping the words between tiny shivers of responsive pleasure.
‘Mmm … who wants supper? I’m going to eat you instead,’ Caspar told her lovingly.
Olivia closed her eyes; she loved the way Caspar was so wonderfully vocal in his lovemaking. He wasn’t poetic as one would-be admirer had been when she was at college, nor did he talk dirty as some men—and women—enjoyed doing, but he had a way that was somehow totally unique, totally Caspar, a way that was both deliciously erotic and entrancingly funny, and sometimes whilst she was laughing, her own arousal caught her unawares. But not Caspar. He seemed to sense that moment, that second, that heartbeat of time when between one breath and the next, laughter turned to desire and her need for him overwhelmed everything else. Just as it was doing now.
‘Caspar,’ she demanded, tugging urgently at his hair, feeling the hot sweetness of his breath feeding the soft, fluttering pulse he had so lovingly conjured up with his tongue.
‘Mmm …?’ he murmured teasingly, knowing full well what that urgent little tug on his hair actually meant.
‘I thought you said that Olivia was coming back tonight,’ Joss protested when his third attempt to telephone his cousin had met with no response.
‘I thought she was,’ Jenny agreed, deliberately keeping her back to him and to Jon.
‘Well, she can’t be there, otherwise she’d have answered the phone, so you must have got it wrong, and now there won’t be time to show her the badger cubs,’ Joss announced, patently aggrieved.
‘Livvy won’t want to see the badgers. She’s bringing her boyfriend back with her,’ Louise told her brother with elder-sister superiority.
‘Louise,’ Jenny warned, frowning her disapproval.
‘So … why should that stop her wanting to see the cubs?’ Joss demanded.
Behind her back, Jenny could hear the twins’ stifled, knowing giggles.
‘Girls!’ Joss pronounced with exasperated contempt, then added, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that pie, Lou, because if you’re not …?’ He stared hopefully at his sister’s plate.
‘You’re looking tired,’ Jenny commented quietly to her husband when they were finally on their own.
‘Not really. It’s just … well, I suppose this party brings home the fact that we’re not getting any younger.’
Jenny didn’t say anything; she knew quite well who carried the heaviest part of the burden at work in the practice. She knew equally well that any attempt by her to protest would meet with that same polite, distancing withdrawal that Jon used whenever he considered that anyone was attempting to attack his twin brother.
In the early years of their marriage she had found it unbearably hurtful, knowing that someone else would always come first; that his loyalty, his love for his twin, would always be the most important, would always come before his feelings for her. But then she made herself recognise that it was that same loyalty to David that made him the man he was, the husband he was … the father he was … and she had said to herself that she must not fall into the same trap as others and try to make her husband what she wanted him to be rather than appreciate what he was. In their marriage at least, he would have the opportunity to be himself—to be an individual. She owed him that much. That much, and much, much more. So very much more …
3 (#ub3fc8e3b-e803-58a1-86cf-cb0dbf918eb8)
‘Thank you, Mr Thompson, everything looks lovely, and you’ll be here in the morning to finish off?’ Jenny asked the man in charge of the team that had erected the marquee.
They had arrived earlier in the day, a dozen or more of them, all neatly dressed in an eye-catching uniform of jeans and T-shirts bearing the marquee company’s logo. Most of this group of energetic young men and women, Jenny had discovered, were students working through their summer vacations.
They had erected the marquee with commendable expertise and speed under the watchful eye of the forty-odd-year-old foreman, breaking only for an hour’s respite and a picnic meal before going on to hang the interior awnings, put up the lights and erect the connecting ‘tunnels’ that led from the house to the marquee, one for the guests and another for the caterers.
‘We’ll be here sharp on the dot at eight,’ the foreman assured Jenny.
‘And the tables will be set up and the chairs in place by twelve?’ she checked.
‘By twelve,’ he agreed.
‘It looks absolutely wonderful,’ Olivia approved as the foreman turned to gather his team together.
She and Caspar had called round just as Jenny was on the point of leaving home to check on how things were going and had elected to go with her. Max, who had arrived home late the previous evening, had also announced that he would join them. Jenny wasn’t sure why. He was standing on his own, scowling and looking thoroughly bored and irritated.
‘I hope having plain cream isn’t going to be too dull,’ Jenny worried as she turned back to study the interior of the marquee again.
‘No, it’s perfect,’ Olivia assured her. ‘So elegant—anything else would have been too fussy … too weddingy.’
The marquee team were piling into the vehicles that had brought them and that Jenny was relieved to see were all neatly parked well away from Ben’s precious lawn.
Apart from being present when they arrived to check that everything was in order, Jenny had left the marquee people to get on with their work on their own, having given them her telephone number in case there were any problems, but she had gathered from the comments Ben had made since they arrived that he had spent most of the day keeping a stern eye on their activities.
She wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that they had worked so efficiently without causing any damage, but she rather suspected it might be the latter.
‘Damn fuss,’ he muttered now. ‘In my day a fiftieth birthday was nothing to make any fuss about. They’re forecasting rain, you know.’
‘Not until Monday at the very earliest,’ Jenny returned serenely.
‘I was wondering if I ought to offer Aunt Ruth some assistance with the flowers,’ Olivia told her, ‘but I don’t know whether I’d be more of a hindrance than a help.’
‘I’m sure she’d be only too grateful to have another pair of hands, even if it’s only to help fetch and carry,’ Jenny assured her.
‘Make that two pairs of hands,’ Caspar joined in.
Jenny smiled at him.
Apart from being introduced to him by Olivia when she had brought him round, neither she nor Jon had had much opportunity to talk to Caspar at any length as yet, but Jenny had liked him immediately.
When one looked beyond the remarkable sexuality of his stunning good looks, there was a steadfastness about him that reassured her maternal heart as well as a certain strength of purpose that told her he was not a man to be deflected from any path he had chosen—any person he had chosen—and it was plain that the person he had chosen, the person he wanted was Olivia.
Jenny watched her niece affectionately. There was no doubt at all that Olivia wanted him, too.
Deep in her heart of hearts Jenny knew with that kind of knowing like a well-spring in the human psyche that cannot be ignored or dammed and was impossible to deny that out of all their children, her own as well as David and Tiggy’s, that Olivia was her favourite and extraordinarily special to her. It couldn’t be because she was David’s child … Her heart had started to beat a little too fast. Fiercely she started to mentally run through the list of things she still had to check up on.
‘So, young man, you’re a teacher, I gather.’
Caspar inclined his head towards Ben as he spoke. Ben was a tall man himself and it irritated him to acknowledge that this American Olivia had got herself involved with had the advantage over him in that department. Since his accident Ben had started to stoop slightly and he frowned in exasperation as he discovered that he was obliged to take a small step back and actually look up at Caspar.
Americans! Ben didn’t like them, never had. American servicemen had been stationed locally during the war, loud-mouthed, gum-chewing individuals with more money than sense, bragging and strutting about, turning the local girls’ heads and causing all manner of havoc.
‘I’m a lecturer,’ Caspar affirmed dryly.
‘And only over here temporarily, so I understand,’ Ben persisted.
‘That’s right,’ Caspar agreed.
‘Hmm … Well, over here in this country we have a saying,’ Ben told him disagreeably, ‘that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’
‘Gramps,’ Olivia protested, but Caspar shook his head gently at her and smiled. If he chose to take it, there was a partnership waiting for him with one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firms. It would certainly make him far richer than his present occupation, but he enjoyed what he was doing and as far as he was concerned that was more important than making money.
But then, as he would have been the first to admit if challenged, it was easy for him to make that decision when he was the beneficiary of a considerable family trust set up by his maternal grandfather.
‘That depends on the teacher,’ he said simply, both his face and his voice calmly neutral, but Jenny, who had overheard the conversation and who happened to be looking at Ben as Caspar made his response, knew that Caspar’s refusal to be dominated by him had reinforced Ben’s antagonism towards him.
It was just as well that Olivia lived and worked in London and not here, she decided, even though she knew how hurt Olivia had originally been when her tentative hopes of being allowed to join the family business had been contemptuously dismissed by her grandfather.
‘The law isn’t a business for women,’ he was fond of saying. ‘They’re too emotional, get too involved.’
Her own daughters were going to make him eat those words, Jenny suspected, especially Katie, but then Katie was far tougher emotionally than Olivia. She would never allow her grandfather’s views, or anyone else’s, Jenny surmised, to deflect her from her goals, a trait she had inherited from Ben himself, and one reinforced by her own family’s sturdy ability to withstand whatever shocks life chose to throw at them. As farming stock they had needed that characteristic; she had needed it at times.
‘No, the only way anyone can really come to know the law is to practice it,’ Ben was telling Caspar doggedly. ‘I know—I’ve done it and I don’t mean the namby-pamby diluted kind of work you get in some company’s legal department like Olivia here does,’ he added.
‘Olivia is a very highly qualified and professional young woman,’ Caspar retaliated.
‘Oh, she’s passed the exams right enough,’ Ben agreed, ‘but it takes more than a piece of paper to make a good solicitor. The law isn’t sitting at some desk shifting pieces of paper. It’s getting out there in it, doing the kind of work young Max is doing. That’s the law.’
Jenny could see Caspar stiffening slightly and her heart sank. She knew why, of course. Olivia for all her modesty and her grandfather’s deliberate hypocrisy was far more highly qualified than Max and, Jenny was convinced, of far more value to any prospective employer. For starters, Olivia’s experience was wider and for another … Well, Jenny knew which of the two of them she would want to handle her most personal affairs and it wouldn’t be her own son.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Caspar saying slowly and frowning slightly at the same time. ‘Forgive me … I’m still not completely au fait with the intricacies of the British legal system but so far as I understood matters Max is still merely a squatter in his present chambers and, as such, unable to take on any potential clients. Olivia, on the other hand, is in charge of her own highly specialised department and I know for a fact—’
‘Caspar,’ Olivia protested in a stifled voice, ‘Gramps doesn’t—’
But it was too late. Ben was swinging round to frown at her, sensing a much softer target than the unexpectedly obdurate barrier Caspar had thrown up against him. Ben wasn’t used to being challenged and he didn’t like it.
‘What’s this …? Her own department …? What’s this …?’
‘It’s just a small promotion, Gramps. Nothing really at all,’ Olivia was already hurriedly protesting. ‘Just an interdepartmental thing, but of course—’
‘But of course it no doubt carries a whacking great salary increase,’ Max interrupted, going over to join in. ‘You certainly fell on your feet there, old thing. I—’
‘Olivia did not fall on her feet,’ Caspar corrected him coolly. ‘She happens to be an extremely highly qualified and hard-working lawyer.’
‘You would say that,’ Max responded. ‘After all, she was one of your pupils—out of bed as well as in it.’
Jenny could feel her face burning with embarrassment on behalf of her son, but typically Max was oblivious both to his rudeness and his lack of generosity.
‘I hear that there’s shortly to be a vacancy coming up in your chambers. Do you intend to apply for it?’ Caspar asked Max.
Max frowned. How the hell had Caspar learned about that?
‘He doesn’t need to apply for it,’ Ben interjected, answering the question for him. ‘He’s already been told that the vacancy will be his and so it should be. He’s already had to stand aside once in favour of someone else.’
Max fought to conceal the irritation his grandfather’s comment was causing him. Normally he was only too glad to have the old man champion him, but on this occasion just how much did Olivia’s damned American know about what was going on?
He had to have some kind of inside information just to know that the vacancy was coming up. In any other circumstances Max would immediately have started pumping him to discover just how much he knew and if that information included the name of his female rival, but of course he could hardly do that now without admitting to his grandfather that his appointment wasn’t as cut and dried as he’d let him think.
Max could feel himself starting to sweat slightly. His grandfather was indulgent towards him—to a point—and Max knew how important it was to Ben that Max fulfilled his ambitions for him. He had already been disappointed once and ultimately David had been forgiven for that disappointment, but Max shuddered at the thought of having to live his uncle’s life.
It had been bad enough living under his grandfather’s restrictive eye when he was younger; to do so now … His grandfather still held the family purse strings and Max had seen the way he controlled his sons and their lives through them. Max had no illusions about the price attached to being his grandfather’s favourite.
But his success meant just as much to him as it did to his grandfather, probably more so. Max liked money and he liked the things it could buy. He wanted to be successful and, if possible, famous, and no mere woman was going to stand in his way.
‘Did your mother’s shoes arrive safely?’ Jenny asked Olivia as they walked back to the car.
‘No. She’s gone into Chester this morning to see if she can find another pair.’
Olivia hesitated for a moment, remembering the scene she had interrupted in her parents’ bedroom earlier. She still felt disturbed about it.
‘Aunt Jenny,’ she began, ‘I know that you and Mum aren’t particularly close, but have you, has she …?’
She stopped abruptly, recalling how on the way here after he had met her aunt and uncle, Caspar had mentioned how much everyone seemed to depend on Jenny. Seeing how not only Jenny’s own younger offspring but Olivia’s brother Jack, as well, had produced sets of grubby sports kits to be washed, Caspar had remarked wryly that the older members of the family dumped their problems on her in much the same way as the younger ones seemed to dump their dirty washing.
They all did have a tendency to turn to Jenny when things went wrong in their lives, Olivia acknowledged but she was an adult now and …
‘Is something wrong with your mother, Livvy?’ Jenny was asking her but Olivia shook her head, ignoring the temptation to confide in her aunt.
‘No,’ she replied lightly, ‘but you know Mum. She’d be worrying herself silly about those shoes….’
Olivia winced inwardly as she heard her own voice. What would Jenny have said if she had told her what was really bothering her?
She and Caspar had just been on the point of leaving the house that morning when Olivia realised that she had forgotten her jacket. As she dashed back upstairs to get it, she saw that her parents’ bedroom door was open and she could hear her mother inside the room apparently talking to herself.
Automatically Olivia had walked into the bedroom. The scene that met her eyes was one she doubted she would ever be able to forget. And neither was the mingled look of shame, guilt, defiance and fear she had seen in her mother’s eyes.
‘You won’t say anything, will you?’ she had pleaded with Olivia as she sat surrounded by dozens of glossy carrier bags, their contents plainly never unpacked, the result, Livvy felt sure, of many shopping trips. ‘Don’t tell your father. He wouldn’t … He wouldn’t understand….’
Olivia had left without making any response. Beneath her mother’s familiar perfume had been another smell, rank and unpleasantly pervasive, a smell Olivia had recognised as actually familiar to her. Her gorge had started to rise in response to it and she had had to leave the bedroom without responding to her mother’s plea of secrecy.
‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Caspar asking her quietly as they drove away from her grandfather’s. ‘You’re not brooding over what he said, are you?’
‘Who?’ Olivia questioned, her face set.
‘Your grandfather,’ Caspar reminded her. ‘I know he must have upset you, dismissing everything you’ve achieved professionally by …’
Olivia’s expression cleared then. Caspar thought she was upset because her grandfather had compared her adversely with Max. Once she might have been but not now, not when …
‘No. My grandfather’s too old-fashioned and chauvinistic to change now and Max has always been his favourite.’
‘Mmm … Well, things will be different in America,’ Caspar promised her. When Olivia made no immediate response, he gave her a thoughtful look. ‘You’re not having second thoughts about our plans, are you?’ he prodded, then added, ‘You still haven’t told your family?’
‘How could I have second thoughts?’ Olivia challenged him lovingly. ‘You know how much you mean to me … how much our future together means to me,’ she amended.
She laughed as he warned her softly, ‘Just watch it. I don’t know what your laws are over here about stopping on the freeway to—’
‘This isn’t a freeway,’ Olivia interjected mock-severely. ‘It’s a quiet country road and if you want to stop …’ She glanced at him provocatively, laughing again when Caspar shook his head at her.
The months they’d spent together had been the happiest of her life and when Caspar had told her that he was due to return to the States at the end of the summer, she had thought at first that he was trying to tell her that their relationship was not one he viewed as potentially permanent.
She had tried not to show her feelings, to reveal to him how devastated she felt, but something must have betrayed her because he had immediately taken her in his arms and held her tight, rocking her protectively.
‘No. No,’ he told her huskily, ‘I don’t mean to end our relationship. How could you think it? I love you, Olivia … I want you with me. I want you to come with me … it’s just … well, you’ve worked so damned hard for your promotion and …’
‘It’s just a job,’ Olivia had replied tremulously, and in the emotion of the moment she had meant it. ‘You are far, far more important.’ She had meant that, too.
Still meant it, even if sometimes she found somewhat daunting the fact that she would virtually have to retrain in the States if she wanted to achieve the same professional status there that she had been well on her way to achieving here at home.
Caspar would never ask or expect her to give up her career for him. She knew that. But he had made it equally plain that there was no way that he envisaged his professional future as lying anywhere other than in the United States.
‘We could always commute,’ he had whispered to her one night as they lay entwined in one another’s arms.
Commute. As Olivia contemplated the emptiness, the loneliness, the bleakness of all the nights they would have to spend apart if they did so, she had known that the option wasn’t one she could happily contemplate.
And so the decision had been made. Her notice was already handed in and worked through and she had intended to break the news about her plans for her future to her family at some stage during the weekend. She had not foreseen any problems. Why should there be?
She loved her parents, her family, of course, but they had their lives and she had hers. The old childhood and teenage envy she had felt for Max had long since faded away.
But what about the scene in her parents’ bedroom this morning? She bit down hard on her bottom lip. How long had the problem been going on? Did anyone else know? Her father? Surely he must have some inkling. And what about her? She simply couldn’t pretend or ignore what she had witnessed despite the pleading look she had seen in her mother’s eyes.
Caspar realised that something still troubled Olivia. It was just as well they were only here for the weekend, he acknowledged as he drove back towards Olivia’s parents’ home. Family gatherings of any kind tended to make him feel claustrophobic, to bring back memories and fears of which, to say the least, he wasn’t particularly proud. He could still vividly remember how he had disgraced himself at his father’s second wedding.
He’d been taken there by his mother, who had spent the entire previous day patiently explaining to him that her divorce from his father and their consequent relationships with new partners had absolutely no bearing on their shared love for him. He was still their very much loved child.
As a paediatrician, his mother had, of course, been well versed in the kind of trauma experienced by children when their parents’ relationship broke down, and not only had Caspar been carefully prepared for the break-up of his parents’ marriage and their subsequent divorce, he had also been equally carefully and slowly introduced to their new partners.
In his mother’s case, it was an old colleague and friend whom she had known before she married his father. Divorced now himself, he had two teenage children—a son and a daughter—both of whom had been politely distant with Caspar and his mother. His father’s inamorata was a younger ex-student who had been tireless in her determination to show Caspar and his father how much she acknowledged the importance of their relationship. Caspar had disgraced both himself and his parents by throwing up all over the bride.
Given his parents’ affiliations and careers, the result was perhaps not unexpected. His mother’s reaction was to have him and herself undergo months of ‘analysis’ during which Caspar came close to disliking his mother almost as much as he disliked his analyst. His father chose to proceed with an expensive lawsuit to have his mother proved unfit to have sole charge of him and guilty of poisoning their son against him.
Neither of them had believed him when he told them that his sickness was the result of too much ice cream and a bad case of nerves, and when eventually his father’s new wife produced the first of Caspar’s half siblings, Caspar was forbidden to go anywhere near the baby, a little girl, just in case his nervous stomach got the better of him.
Caspar was not deceived. His stepmother didn’t like him and he didn’t think he liked her very much, either.
It was not that Caspar was against families and family life; it was just that as yet he had not seen an example of it that made him feel it was a way of life he wanted for himself. Why, after all, make a liar out of yourself by publicly making promises that were more likely to be broken than kept?
He didn’t particularly want to share Olivia with her family; he wanted her all to himself and he freely admitted it. He hadn’t had a particularly high opinion of Olivia’s father or grandfather before he had met them and now that he had …
How could they value someone as obviously second-rate and unworthy as Max above Olivia? How nature must be laughing at them, mocking them, for their hypocrisy and chauvinism by gifting Olivia above Max.
The two of them hadn’t made any firm plans to marry as yet, but ultimately Caspar knew that they would. He had never expected to fall in love so deeply, to want to make the kind of commitment he wanted to make to Olivia, but now that he had …
He didn’t want to lose her, he admitted, and part of the reason he had been wary of meeting her family was because he had been concerned that they might oppose her decision to make her home and her life with him in the US.
As Caspar well knew from his own childhood, loving someone made you overly vulnerable, which was why he had initially been so reluctant to acknowledge his feelings for Olivia. He would be glad when this weekend was over and they were free to embark on the next stage of their own lives.
As he turned into the drive to her parents’ home, he studied Olivia’s profile. Something was clearly bothering her despite her refusal to admit it. He wondered what it was and, more importantly, why she hadn’t told him.
‘All women are liars and devious,’ his father had once said to him. He had been in between marriages at the time and complaining about the amount of alimony his second wife was claiming from him. ‘Don’t trust any of them, Caspar. Don’t make the same mistakes that I’ve made. They’ll tell you they love you with one breath and then with the next …’
Olivia could feel her body starting to tense as Caspar stopped the car. Was her mother at home?
Olivia couldn’t see her car. She hated herself for the sense of relief that brought.
Why had she been the one to find out? she asked herself, feeling a defensive, angry resentment that made her ache with shame as her initial shock began to wane. Why hadn’t someone else … her father for instance …?
‘Olivia?’
She realised that Caspar had said something to her and was waiting for her to reply. Giving him an apologetic smile, she tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
By rights she ought to be confiding in Caspar, telling him what she had seen, but how could she betray her mother when she herself wasn’t totally sure … when no one else seemed to know …?
Not sure. Of course you’re sure, an inner voice scorned her. You just don’t want to accept it, that’s all. You just don’t want to face up to the truth.
What truth? She only had to close her eyes to be back in her parents’ bedroom, to see the disarray, clothes everywhere, that smell … Her stomach started to heave.
‘What is it?’ Caspar demanded anxiously as she quickly turned to get out of the car.
‘Nothing,’ she denied.
When David heard his brother’s footsteps outside his office door, he reached for the file he had been studying and quickly pushed it out of sight beneath the leather blotter on his desk.
As Jonathon walked in, out of the corner of his eye David could see his bank statement next to the telephone.
Trying to be unobtrusive, he angled his arm across it. He could feel the heavy, uneven thud of his heartbeat.
‘I was looking for the Siddington Trust file,’ Jonathon said, smiling. ‘There’s a query from the accountants and—’
‘Oh, I must have left it at home. I was doing some work on it the other night. I’ll bring it in on Monday.’
‘You took it home, but—’
‘It looks like young Max is going to get his tenancy,’ David broke in, overriding his brother.
‘Yes … yes … it does,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘Although, of course, it isn’t always wise to take these things for granted.’
‘I’ll bet Dad can’t wait to start bragging to Hugh about it,’ David declared, ignoring Jonathon’s concern. ‘There’s always been a bit of rivalry between them on that score, at least in Dad’s eyes.’
‘I’m sure Uncle Hugh doesn’t see it that way,’ Jonathon objected. His uncle had been particularly kind to him when they were growing up and Jonathon suspected that any rivalry between the two half-brothers existed more for his father than it did for his uncle.
‘Well, Hugh wouldn’t, would he?’ David countered. ‘He’s—’
‘It will be good to have the family together,’ Jonathon commented, unwilling to pursue the matter.
David waited until he was quite sure that Jonathon had gone before retrieving the file he had hidden beneath his blotter and placing it in his briefcase. His fingers trembled slightly as he locked the case. He felt faintly sick and dizzy. It was this damned heat.
He picked up his bank statement and studied it in fresh disbelief. How could they have spent so much? He had warned Tiggy only last month that they simply could not afford to continue spending as they had been doing. He had even threatened to take away credit cards, but of course she had wept and pleaded and in the end he had given in.
It was all very well for Jonathon, he decided bitterly. His brother had never had expensive tastes and had always been careful with his money. Added to that, Jenny must be earning a very useful amount from that business of hers.
Not that he had ever envisaged Jenny as becoming a successful businesswoman all those years ago when they had first known one another. She had been such a shy, diffident girl, so different in every way from his wife.
He had first seen Tiggy perched on the counter of an exclusive and fashionable London wine bar, surrounded by a crowd of admirers whom she was inciting to vie with one another for the chance to take her out.
David had still been playing with the group then and they had just been featured in one of the countless trendy magazines that had mushroomed into existence during that era. Someone recognised him—one of the other models who had been in the wine bar with Tiggy—and she had attached herself to him.
He could still remember the sharp frisson of excitement and challenge he had felt when he glanced across the narrow room and saw Tiggy looking back at him, knowing that she was deliberately ignoring all the other men who were clamouring for her attention.
Impossible then and now, of course, to ever imagine Jenny posing negligently on a bar top wearing one of the shortest skirts ever made, revealing acres of long, coltish leg, her pouting mouth painted in the palest of frosted pink lipsticks, her face deadpan pale, her eyes enormous in their thick rim of black lashes and even blacker kohl.
Jenny never pouted, and had she worn kohl eye make-up her father would have made her wash it off. Her legs were sturdily and sensibly constructed to carry her over the fields of her father’s farm, not delicately thin and fawn-like. Where Jenny was healthily robust, Tiggy had been fragile, delicate and vulnerable. Where Jenny had stoically contained and controlled her emotions, Tiggy had gone from tears to laughter and back again in the space of a heartbeat. Where Jenny had been familiar, safe and dull, Tiggy had been deliciously different and dangerous.
And nothing had changed, he reassured himself. He had seen the expression, the envy, in other men’s eyes when they looked at Tiggy and compared her with their own dully comfortable middle-aged wives.
Tiggy was the kind of woman who flirted by instinct, who appealed to everything that was male in a man. She certainly had done to him. He had been completely bewitched by her. Bemused. Besotted.
They had gone on from the wine bar to a nightclub, a whole crowd of them, Tiggy giggling as she openly bought a small handful of ‘uppers’ and insisted that he take one of them.
It hadn’t been any particularly big deal—everyone took drugs in the sixties; it was part of the London scene—only unfortunately the senior members of the chambers where he was in pupillage hadn’t seen it that way.
There had been his late arrivals and early departures and the days when he had never made it into chambers at all, waking up late in the afternoon in Tiggy’s small flat and her even smaller bed to while away what was left of the day in her arms. This behaviour had ultimately cost him his career.
He had to make a choice, the head of chambers had told him sternly when David had been summoned to his room to account for himself. The Bar or Tiggy and the life he was leading with her.
There had been no choice to make, really. He already knew what was expected of him, what his grandfather would expect of him.
He had been given twenty-four hours to think it over and he had gone back to Tiggy’s flat to tell her what had happened and to collect his things. Only when he had arrived there he had found Tiggy in a flood of tears—and pregnant with his child.
The sight of her vulnerable face and childlike body, her copious tears, had swept aside all his carefully prepared speeches. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. She was having his baby. His grandfather would understand. He would have to understand.
They were married three days later at Caxton Hall.
As he kissed his new bride, David had told her sternly that henceforward there were to be no more drugs, no more partying all night and sleeping all day. They had their baby to think about.
Docilely Tiggy had agreed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him passionately whilst she told him how much she loved him.
It was a pity that he wasn’t still going to be a barrister, she told him. He would have looked so deliciously stern and forbidding in his court robes, but she would be just as happy married to a famous pop star and she had no doubts he was going to be famous.
David hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his career as a pop star had ended almost as soon as it began.
Three weeks later when the bank announced that he had overspent his allowance and that they couldn’t allow him to withdraw any more money from his account, he had told Tiggy that they were going to visit his family in Cheshire.
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Пенни Джордан
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A Perfect Family, электронная книга автора Пенни Джордан на английском языке, в жанре современная зарубежная литература