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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’.
