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‘What a monster you were.’
‘I did my best,’ she assured him. ‘I actually managed to get expelled from three prep schools before I discovered that was a waste of time since, if your family has enough money, the right contacts, there is always another school. That there’s always some secretary to lumber with the task…’
‘You didn’t like school?’
‘I loved it,’ she said. ‘Getting thrown out is what’s known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.’
In other words, he thought, crying out for attention from the people who should have been there for her. And, making the point that whatever happened he would be there for her, he put his arm around her, wincing under cover of darkness as he eased himself back against the wall, pulling her up against his shoulder.
‘Are you okay, Jago?’
She might not be able to see him wince, but she must have heard the catch in his breath.
‘Fine,’ he lied. Then, because he needed a distraction, ‘Ivo?’ It wasn’t exactly a common name. ‘Your brother’s name is Ivo Grenville?’
‘Ivan George Grenville, to be precise.’ She sighed. ‘Financial genius. Philanthropist. Adviser to world statesmen. No doubt you’ve heard of him. Most people have.’
‘Actually I was thinking about a boy with the same name who was a year below me at school. Could he be your brother? His parents never came to take him out. Not even to prize-giving the year he won—’
‘Not even the year he won the Headmaster’s Prize,’ she said. ‘Yes. That would be Ivo.’
‘Clever bugger. My parents were taking me out somewhere for a decent feed and I felt so sorry for him I was going to ask him if he wanted to come along.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I wasn’t criticising you, Jago. It’s just that I know my brother. He never let anyone get that close. Not even me. Not until he met Belle. He’s different now.’
‘Well, good. I’m sorry I let him put me off.’
He’d meant to keep an eye out for him, but there had been so many other things to fill the days and even a single year’s age gap seemed like a lifetime at that age.
‘Don’t blame yourself. Ivo’s way of dealing with our parents’ rejection was to put up a wall of glass. No interaction, no risk of getting hurt. Mine, on the other hand, was to create havoc in an attempt to force them to notice me.’
‘That I can believe. What did you do once you’d run out of the livestock option? Kick the headmistress?’
‘Are you ever going to let me forget that?’
‘Never,’ he said, and the idea of teasing her about that for the next fifty years gave him an oddly warm feeling. Stupid. In fifty hours from now they would have gone on their separate ways, never to see one another again. Instead, he concentrated on what really mattered. ‘Tell me about your parents. Why did they reject you both?’
‘Oh, that’s much too strong a word for it. Rejection would have involved serious effort and they saved all their energy for amusing themselves.’
‘So why bother—to have children?’
‘Producing offspring, an heir and a spare, even if the spare turned out to be annoyingly female, was expected of them. The Grenville name, the future of the estate had to be taken care of.’
‘Of course. Stupid of me,’ he said sarcastically.
‘It’s what they had been brought up to, Jago. Generations of them. On one side you have Russian royalty who never accepted that the world had changed. On the other, the kind of people who paid other people to run their houses, take care of their money and, duty done, rear their children. They had more interesting, more important things to do.’
What could ever be more important than kissing your kid better when she grazed a knee? Jago wondered. The memory of his own mother kissing his four-year-old elbow after he’d fallen from his bike sprang, unbidden, to his mind. How she’d smiled as she’d said, ‘All better.’ Told him how brave he was…
He shut it out.
‘Chillingly selfish,’ he said, ‘but at least it was an honest response. At least they didn’t pretend.’
‘Pretence would have required an effort.’ She lifted her head to look up at him. ‘Is that what your parents did, Jago? Pretend?’
Her question caught him on the raw. He didn’t talk about his family. He’d walled up that part of his life. Shut it away. Until the scent of rosemary had stirred a memory of a boy and his bicycle…
Lies, lies, lies…
‘Jago?’
She said his name so softly, but even that was a lie. Not his real name. They were alone together, locked in a dark and broken world, reliant upon one another for their very survival and she had a right to his name.
‘Nick,’ he said.
‘Nick…’
It was so long since anyone had called him that. The soft sound of her voice saying his name ripped at something inside him and he heard himself say, ‘I was in my final year at uni when I was door-stepped by a journalist.’
She took the hand that he’d hooked around her waist to keep her close and the words, coiled up inside him, began to unravel…
He could see the man now. The first to reach his door. He hadn’t introduced himself, not wanting to put him on his guard. He’d just said his name. ‘Nick?’ And when he’d said, ‘Yes…’ he’d just pitched in with, ‘What’s your reaction to the rumour…’
‘My father was a politician,’ he said. ‘A member of the Government. A journalist knocked on my door one day and asked me if I knew my father had been having a long-term affair with a woman in his London office. One of his researchers. That I had a fourteen-year-old half-sister…’
He caught himself. He didn’t talk about them, ever.
‘Oh, Nick…’ She said his name again, softly, echoing his pain. He shouldn’t have told her. No one else had used it in fifteen years and to hear it spoken that way caught at feelings he’d buried so deep that he’d forgotten how much they hurt. How betrayed he’d felt. How lost.
‘That was when I discovered that all that “happy families” stuff was no more than window-dressing.’
She didn’t say she was sorry, just moved a little closer in the dark. It was enough.
‘It must have been a big story at the time,’ she said after a while, ‘but I don’t recall the name.’
‘It was fifteen years ago. No doubt you were still at school.’
‘I suppose, even so—’
‘A juicy political scandal is hard to miss.’
It hadn’t just been the papers. His father had been the poster boy for the perfect marriage, a solid family life. It had brought out the whole media wolf pack and the television satirists had had a field day.
‘You’re right, of course. The fact is that I don’t use his name any more. Neither of us do. My father was dignified, my mother stood by him and, in the fullness of time, he was rewarded for a lifetime of commitment to his country, his party, with a life peerage. Or maybe the title was my mother’s reward for all those years of keeping up appearances, playing the perfect constituency wife. Not making a fuss. But then why would she?’
It was obvious that she’d always known about the affair, the child, but she had enjoyed her life too much to give it up. Had chosen to look the other way and live with it.
‘She was the one who spent weekends at the Prime Minister’s home in the country,’ he said. ‘Went on the foreign tours. Enjoyed all the perks of his position. Got the title.’
‘What did they say to you?’
He shook his head. ‘I went home, expecting to find my mother in bits, my father ashamed, packing.’ It had taken the police presence to get him through the television crews and the press pack blocking the lane, but inside the house it was as if nothing had changed. ‘It was just another day in politics and they assumed I’d come down to put on a united family front. Go out with them for the photo call. My mother was furious with me for refusing to play the game. She said I owed my father total loyalty. That the country needed him.’
He could still see the two of them going out to face the cameras together, the smiling arm-in-arm pose by the garden gate with the dogs that had made the front page of all the newspapers the next day. Could still smell the rosemary as the photographers had jostled for close-ups, hoping to catch the pain and embarrassment behind the composed smiles. As if…
‘What I hated most, couldn’t forgive,’ he said, ‘was the way the other woman was treated like a pariah. Frozen out. She had to give up her job, go into hiding, take out an injunction against the press to protect her daughter. Start over somewhere new.’
‘You don’t blame her at all? She wasn’t exactly innocent, Nick, and someone must have leaked the information to the press. Maybe she hoped to force your father’s hand.’
‘If she did she was a fool,’ he said dismissively.
‘She didn’t go for the kiss-and-tell? Even then?’
‘No. Everyone behaved impeccably. Kept their mouths shut and my father was back in government before the year was over.’
‘She loved him, then.’
‘I imagine so. She was a fool twice over.’
‘I suppose.’ Miranda’s shivering little sigh betrayed her. Was that how she saw herself? A fool?
‘If it wasn’t for herself, maybe it was for her daughter.’
She swallowed nervously, as if aware of treading on dangerous ground.
‘Perhaps she wanted some of what you had,’ she said when he didn’t respond. ‘To be publicly acknowledged by her father. In her place…’
‘In her place, what?’ he demanded when she faltered.
‘It’s what I would have done,’ she admitted.
‘Poking a stick into a wasps’ nest,’ he said, realising that she was probably right. ‘Poor kid.’
‘She’s a woman, Jago. About my age. Your sister. And you’re wrong about your parents losing nothing,’ she said before he could tell her that he didn’t have a sister. That she was nothing to him. ‘They lost you.’
‘The people I thought were my parents didn’t exist. Their entire life was a charade.’
‘Truly? All of it? Even when they came to your school open day?’
‘They did what was expected of them, Miranda,’ he said, refusing to give them credit for anything. ‘It was just another photo op. Like going to church when they were in the constituency. Pure hypocrisy. It didn’t mean anything.’
She sucked in her breath as if about to say something, then thought better of it. ‘You changed your name? Afterwards?’
‘I use my grandfather’s name. Part of it, anyway. He emigrated from eastern Europe. Nothing as grand as Russian royalty, you understand, just a young man trying to escape poverty. They put him off the boat at the first port they came to and told him he was in America. We have a lot in common.’
‘Don’t you think—’
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t.’ It was the last thing he wanted to think about. ‘What about you? Do you see your parents these days? Did they manage to find time for their granddaughter’s christening?’
She shook her head, then, realising that he couldn’t see, said, ‘They died in an accident years ago. When Ivo was just out of university and I was in sixth form taking my A levels.’
Jago found himself in the unusual situation of not having a clue what to say.
To offer sympathy for the loss of parents who had never been there for her would have been as hypocritical as anything his parents had ever done. Saying what was expected. Hollow words. Yet he knew there would still be an emptiness. A space that nothing could ever fill…
‘How did you cope?’ he asked finally.
Manda caught a yawn. She ached everywhere, her hands were sore, her mouth gluey. The only comfort was the heat of Jago’s shoulder beneath her head. His arm keeping her close. His low husky voice drowning out the small noises, the scuffling, that she didn’t want to think about.
‘Everything suddenly landed on Ivo’s shoulders. He’d been about to take a year off to travel. Instead, he found himself having to deal with all the consequences of unexpected death. Step up and take over. He was incredible.’
‘I don’t doubt it, but I was asking about you. Singular.’
‘Oh.’ How rare was that…? ‘I suppose the hardest thing was having to accept that, no matter what I did, how good I was, or how bad, my mother and father were never going to turn up, hold me, tell me that it was going to be all right because they loved me.’
It was all she’d ever wanted.
‘And?’ he said, dragging her back from the moment she’d stood at their graveside, loving them and hating them in the same breath.
She wished she could see him. See his eyes, read him… Cut off from all those visual signals that she could read like a book, she was lost. And in the dark she couldn’t use that cool, dismissive smile she’d perfected for when people got too close. The one that Ivo said was like running into a brick wall.
She had no mask to hide behind.
‘There must have been an “and”,’ he persisted. ‘You’re not the kind of woman who just sits back and takes it.’
‘Not only a hero but smart with it,’ she said, letting her head fall back against this unexpected warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.
No visual clues, but his voice was as rich and comforting as a mouthful of her sister-in-law’s chocolate cake. And, like that sinful confection, to be taken only in very small quantities because the comfort glow was an illusion.
She wasn’t fooling herself. The magic would fade with the dawn as such things always did in fairy stories, but for now, in the dark, with his shoulder to lean on, his arm about her, she felt safe.
‘And…’ he insisted, refusing to let her off the hook.
He really wanted to know what she’d done next, did he? Well, that would speed reality along very nicely and maybe that was a good thing. Illusions were made to be shattered, so it was best to get it over with. The sooner the better.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said. ‘There’s always an “and”.’
‘You’re stalling.’
‘Am I?’
Who wouldn’t?
‘And so I went looking for someone who would,’ she said. ‘Just one more poor little rich girl looking for someone who’d hold her and tell her that he loved her. Totally pathetic.’
