Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

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.

‘Cheshire?’ she had repeated. ‘But we will come back to London?’ David hadn’t told her before the trip up North that a return to their London lifestyle would not be possible.

In the end, though, she had seen that there wasn’t any alternative.

The wild crowd she had run with had dropped her as quickly and carelessly as it had picked her up. She was yesterday’s news now, yesterday’s girl; the sixties were like that. And neither of them had been willing to consider terminating her pregnancy although for different reasons.

A part of David was proud of the fact that he had fathered Tiggy’s child while Tiggy had heard all the terrifying stories the models passed around and frightened themselves with—tales of unimaginable horror about girls who had been left to die in their own blood, or worse.

Tiggy’s own family, a respectable middle-class shopkeeper and his wife would have disowned her had she tried to go home to them. David loved her, she knew that, and she desperately needed to be loved. David would keep her safe, protect her from the demons that stalked her and surely they wouldn’t have to live in Cheshire for ever.

To David’s relief, his father had taken to Tiggy straight away and even semi-growled his reluctant approval when David had explained to him just why they had had to marry so quickly.

The dismissal from his training for the Bar had been less easy for Ben to accept but David had known how to win him round. He always had.

Oddly enough, it had been his mother, Sarah, the quiet, self-effacing one, always willing to fall in with whatever her husband wished, who seemed almost to dislike Tiggy. But then, as David himself had observed, Tiggy was not the kind of woman that other members of her sex took to easily. Jenny, thankfully, had been the exception, welcoming Tiggy into the family with genuine warmth.

She and Jon had been married for several years by then. David suspected that Jenny had been so kind to Tiggy because she herself had been pregnant when she married Jon, but since he was not given to introspection he had not dwelt too deeply on the subject. He was thankful that he had managed to appease his father enough for him to agree to settle all his debts and that he and Tiggy could make a fresh start in the secure environment of his birthplace.

David grimaced as he refocused on his bank statement. He would have to talk to Tiggy again, make her understand…. He had started to sweat heavily and there was a pain in his jaw. He touched it experimentally. He would have to make an appointment to see Paul Knighton, their dentist.

Unlike Jon, he was not looking forward to the weekend. Fifty! Where the hell had all the years gone? Fifty … and look at him. He pushed the bank statement into a desk drawer and then locked it. His head ached and he felt slightly sick.

Probably that damned high blood pressure young Travers had warned him about the last time he had had a check-up.

It wasn’t going to be easy talking to Tiggy … making her listen. She had been very upset the previous evening, complaining to him that Olivia thought more of Jenny than she did her and then in the same breath begging him to reassure her that she still looked as attractive as ever, fretfully comparing herself with Olivia.

‘Olivia’s in her twenties,’ he had pointed out unwisely, cursing himself under his breath as he recognised his folly. Only it had been too late to recall his words then; the damage had been done and the consequences so predictable that he could reel off each stage of them. He knew exactly what he would find when he went home this evening and exactly how Tiggy would react if he tried to talk to her about what she was doing to herself, to him, to their life together.

If anyone had told him on the day they married what lay ahead of them, he would have laughed at them in disbelief.

Wearily he passed a hand over his eyes as though unwittingly trying to obliterate the painful memories from his consciousness.

4

‘Tiggy.’

Olivia paused hesitantly on the threshold of the small sunny sitting room. Her mother was seated at the pretty antique desk Olivia could remember her father buying her one Christmas. As she turned round to smile at her daughter there was no hint of the morning’s anxiety and trauma in her expression. In fact, she looked almost serene, Olivia recognised as she watched her tuck the cheque she had been writing into an envelope and seal it.

‘I’m just paying a few bills,’ she informed Olivia. ‘Your father isn’t back yet. I thought we’d have dinner in Knutsford at Est Est Est tonight. It’s always been one of your favourite places and … Where’s Caspar, by the—’

‘I’m here,’ Caspar responded, following Olivia into the sitting room.

‘He really is the most deliciously gorgeous-looking man,’ Tiggy told Olivia, dimpling Caspar a teasing, flirtatious smile.

This was her mother at her best, at her most irresistible, Olivia acknowledged as she watched her. It was impossible to feel irritable or envious of her ability to charm or even to question her need to have to do so.

‘And so tall,’ Tiggy was trilling as she stood provocatively close to Caspar, looking doe-eyed up at him as she asked him, ‘Just how tall exactly are you?’

‘Six-two or thereabouts,’ Caspar obliged her good-humouredly.

‘And you’ve got the muscles to match,’ Tiggy breathed poutingly as she ran one polished fingertip down Caspar’s bare forearm. ‘Oh my …’

Over her mother’s averted head, Olivia sent Caspar a pleading look as she witnessed his withdrawal from her mother’s touch. She knew how volatile her mother’s mood swings were, how quickly she reacted to other people’s opinion of her, how vitally important it was to her that others liked and approved of her.

As a child Olivia had simply accepted her mother’s needs as an intrinsic part of her character, but now that she was an adult … Her forehead started to pleat in an anxious frown of concern.

‘I’d better set my alarm when I go to bed tonight,’ Olivia told her mother. ‘I promised I’d be at Queensmead early tomorrow morning to help Aunt Ruth with the flowers. Oh, and Aunt Jenny said to remind you that the Chester crowd would be arriving about lunch-time. She said to let her know if you needed any extra bedding or anything. Apparently she’s been through the old linen cupboard at Queensmead making sure that Gramps would have enough of everything to cope with Hugh’s family. Nicholas, Saul and Hillary and the children are staying there and she says she found enough bedding to equip a small hotel.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked uncertainly as she saw the way her mother’s expression had changed, her fingers plucking tensely at the cuff of her silk shirt.

‘I don’t know why we have to have Laurence and Henry and their families staying here,’ she fretted. ‘After all, it isn’t as if … That’s far more than anyone else is having to put up and Mrs Phillips can’t give me any extra time because Jenny has already booked all her spare hours.’