Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

Guy contritely rose to his feet and put his hand out to comfort her. ‘Hey, it’s only a piece of china,’ he reminded her gently, ‘and not even a particularly valuable one at that.’ He smiled reassuringly at her. It was so unlike Jenny to be clumsy. He couldn’t remember her ever fumbling with anything before, never mind actually dropping something. She was always so careful and deft.

She was crying now, silent tears flooding down her cheeks. As he watched in distress, she lifted her hands to cover her face, her shoulders heaving as the tears slid through her fingers. Such grief couldn’t possibly be caused by the simple loss of an ornament, Guy knew.

‘Jenny, what is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked.

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to tell him. The sight of her grief, all the more shocking because of its very silence, as though the pain was so great that she couldn’t endure the added agony of giving it voice, made his own stomach muscles clench in angry helplessness. Automatically he moved closer to her, wrapping both arms around her.

He was right. She had lost weight; he could feel her bones through her skin. She seemed tiny and fragile, frighteningly so.

‘Jenny,’ he urged, wanting to hold her even closer and yet afraid to do so in case he hurt her.

‘All right,’ she acquiesced, misunderstanding the reason for the pleading, questioning way he said her name. ‘If you must know, Jon has left me.’

Guy felt his whole body stiffen in surprise and disbelief. ‘Jenny,’ he muttered huskily, totally unable to voice his stunned emotions.

‘Jenny what?’ she demanded tearfully.

‘Jenny, it can’t be true….’

‘Oh, but it is true. You’ll hear all about it soon enough.’

He couldn’t see her face, but he sensed that she had stopped crying although she was trembling in his arms as though her body was unable to contain the intensity of her pain and outrage.

‘The whole town’s been talking about it … and who can blame them? If they think they’ve got something to talk about now, just wait until they find out why he’s gone.’

She began crying again. Great noisy, gulping sobs this time. Guy held her tightly.

‘Why has he gone, Jen?’ he questioned gently, as gently as though he were speaking to a child, somehow knowing that this was what she needed, that possibly for the first time in her life she needed to be allowed to behave instinctively and emotionally instead of sensibly and logically, to put herself first instead of others.

‘He’s fallen in love with Tiggy—Tania,’ she admitted painfully, pushing herself away from him slightly and looking up into his face, her eyes full of misery and despair. ‘And who can blame him? You only have to look at her …’

‘She’s nowhere near the woman that you are, Jen,’ Guy told her roughly. ‘My God, if he’s left you for her, then he’s a fool.’

‘No, not a fool. He’s just doing what he’s always been taught … trained to do. All his life he’s been taking responsibility for David and now that David is so ill, what could be more logical than taking responsibility for David’s wife, as well?’

She started to laugh a wild, dangerous laugh, one on the edge of hysteria, that made Guy’s heart ache unbearably for her.

He wanted to be able to offer her some form of comfort and reassurance but he suspected that there was none that she would accept—or at least not from him. He had always known how much she loved Jon and he assumed that Jon felt the same way about her, yet despite his awareness of her suffering, he could not help wanting to take advantage of the opportunity that fate had given him.

‘Look, why don’t we close the shop for an hour? We aren’t normally that busy on Monday morning. We’ll go and have a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.’

‘Oh, Guy.’ Fresh tears started to fall. ‘I still can’t really believe that it’s happening, that Jon has actually gone. A temporary separation, to give him time to think, that’s what he’s calling it. The children, everyone else, thinks …’ She bit her lip. ‘Everyone else thinks it’s because of David … the shock of his heart attack and that Jon is … that he will—’

‘That he’s having a mid-life crisis accelerated by David’s illness,’ Guy supplied for her. ‘Perhaps he is.’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know anything any more,’ she told him painfully.

‘It could just be a temporary thing,’ Guy felt bound to comfort her. ‘You’ve been married a long time and—’

‘Jon married me because he felt he had to, not because he loved me,’ she broke in tensely.

Guy stared at her.

It was the first time in all the years he’d known her that she had referred to the fact that she was pregnant when she and Jon had married.

There had been a certain amount of gossip at the time, of course. He, as a schoolboy, had overheard something about it without being particularly interested in what it meant and later he had assumed that the subsequent death of the child shortly after his birth had been so painful that the subject was simply never referred to. It had never occurred to him to question the happiness of the marriage.

‘The two of you may originally have married because you were carrying Jon’s child,’ he agreed, ‘but—’

‘No.’ Jenny shook her head, her eyes darkly sombre as she looked not so much at him as through him, he realised, as though she was looking back into the past. ‘No,’ she continued, ‘I wasn’t carrying Jon’s child. It was David’s….’

Guy willed himself not to betray his shock or to ask her any questions. Instead he simply took one of her hands and, holding it gently between his own, said quietly, ‘Come on … let’s go and have that cup of tea.’

She went with him as docilely as a small child, watching whilst he locked up the shop and then allowing him to guide her down the street.

He knew exactly where he intended taking her—the only place where they could be guaranteed the degree of privacy he knew they, she, needed—but cautiously he took a circuitous route towards it. Generation upon generation of Cookes had learned to value the habits and instincts of stealth and caution and to stake their lives on them. Now it wasn’t so much his life that was at stake as Jenny’s reputation. This was still very much a small country town after all and Jenny was now in the highly invidious position of being a ‘single’ woman.

He felt her tense slightly as he led her along the maze of narrow back streets and then out onto the road that led to his own house, but she didn’t say anything as he drew her arm through his own and walked her towards his home.

‘I’ve never been inside your house before,’ she commented as he led her through the small front door.

‘No,’ he agreed.

He wondered how she would react if he told her how often he had pictured her here, and not just here downstairs in his little living room, but upstairs in the huge old oak four-poster that virtually filled the open-plan upper storey of the house. When he had initially bought the bed he found he had to have the small existing bedrooms knocked into one to accommodate it and a small extension built out over the kitchen to house the bathroom.

The bed had at one time come from the local castle, or so local rumour had it, although how on earth it had ever actually been moved from its original place, Guy had no idea. He had bought it from a farmer’s wife who had complained that she was sick of the huge, ugly old thing. He had had to employ someone to take it apart and rebuild it again but it had been worth it.

From his neat and compact kitchen he could watch Jenny as she stood in the centre of his living room, slowly taking in her surroundings. Did she realise yet what she had told him? Had she meant to tell him or …?

The kettle boiled, he made the tea, poured two cups, put them on a tray and carried it through to the living room.

‘Now,’ he instructed, ‘sit down and tell me everything.’

‘I’ve already told you,’ Jenny said heavily. ‘Jon’s left me, he’s in love with Tiggy….’

‘Where is he living? Has he actually moved in with her?’ Guy frowned, trying to imagine old Ben’s reaction to the news that Jon had usurped his brother David’s place in his own marital bed.

‘No … no, he’s renting somewhere … a house … Oh, he keeps pretending that it isn’t because of Tiggy—he keeps saying that—but I know the truth,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I know it’s just a matter of time before …’

‘What about David? Does he know … is he …?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘No … I don’t think so, unless Tiggy’s told him. He’s out of hospital now but he isn’t at home. He’s staying in a nursing home at the moment. The specialist felt that he needed to rest and avoid any kind of strain, and of course Tiggy agreed. Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ she added bitterly.

‘So it isn’t just Jon who …? Tiggy feels the same way, does she?’

Guy hated himself for asking such a question when he saw the way Jenny winced and bit down hard on her bottom lip.

‘Yes,’ she agreed hoarsely. ‘Yes … she seems to be as much in love with Jon as he is with her.’

‘Jen …’ Guy paused delicately. ‘In the shop you said that … at least you implied—’

‘That when Jon married me I was pregnant with David’s child,’ she finished tiredly. ‘Yes, it’s true, I was.’ She looked up at the ceiling, trying to control the tears she could feel threatening to fall. This morning the last thing she had intended to do was confide in Guy like this; in fact, she had been dreading his return, passionately wishing that he wasn’t coming back. She had grown unexpectedly adroit at avoiding people recently, at refusing to allow them to get close enough to her to ask questions and offer sympathy. Even Olivia and Ruth had met with a firm rebuff when they tried to sympathise with her.

She didn’t want sympathy. What she wanted was to have her husband back and her life restored to normalcy and no amount of commiseration was going to achieve that for her. She even found, to her shame, far from welcoming people’s concern, she almost actively resented them for it. It made her feel like … like a beggar forced to accept the charity of others and be openly grateful for it.

And she had certainly never intended to tell Guy about David’s baby. She started to shiver slightly. She still had no clear idea of why she had done, apart from the fact that now Jon had gone, there seemed no real point in keeping it a secret any longer. It was as though the guilt and shame she had felt, both then and all through the years of their marriage, not in having conceived David’s child, but in having allowed Jon to sacrifice his own life in order to protect all three of them—herself, the baby and, of course, most importantly of all in Jon’s eyes at any rate, David himself—had finally been forced to a head, which had burst this morning like a suppurating wound expelling its poison.

‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded fiercely as she saw the way Guy was looking at her. ‘Have I shocked you?’

‘No, it’s not that,’ Guy denied quietly. ‘It’s just that I never imagined … you aren’t …’

‘I’m not what … not the type?’ Jenny smiled bitterly. ‘No, I don’t suppose I am, but that doesn’t make it less a fact.

‘David and I had been dating for some time when I found out that what I’d thought was love was in reality nothing more than a silly teenage crush on my part and just a way of passing the time before going to university on David’s. We went our separate ways without any animosity, David to university and me back to school.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘My mother had been unwell for a while and then we discovered that her illness was terminal. I was needed at home to help take care of her. Jon and I were … friends, nothing more … just friends. When I found out I was pregnant …’ She paused and bit her lip a second time.

‘You told him because he was David’s brother …?’

‘Something like that,’ Jenny agreed. ‘Although it was more him who told me. I fainted one day while he was up at the farm. It never occurred to me that I might be pregnant but Jon guessed straight away. When he suggested that we should get married, I was so relieved to have someone take the responsibility off my shoulders, that I agreed.’ She looked at Guy. ‘I know what you must be thinking, that I was selfish … that I used Jon … that I deserve to lose him now, but—’

‘No, I don’t think any of those things,’ Guy assured her gravely.

How old must she have been? Seventeen, eighteen at the most, a very young and very frightened girl whose mother was dying and who had no one she could turn to.

‘I knew that Jon didn’t love me … how could he? But he convinced me that it was the right thing to do, that the baby, David’s baby, had the right to be brought up amongst his own blood relatives. He told his parents that he was the father when his father tried to stop our marrying. I think … I always felt that perhaps their mother knew, but if she did, she never said anything. Sarah was very kind to me throughout and she …’

Jenny swallowed and forced back the aching burn of the tears searing the back of her eyes.

‘I was so well all through the pregnancy that I couldn’t believe it when they told me …’ She took a deep breath, her voice choking with tears. ‘They said it was his heart, that the …’

Jenny had to stop speaking as she relived the pain of hearing the doctor tell her that her baby had died shortly after his birth.

‘It was all for nothing, you see,’ she told Guy in anguish now. ‘All for nothing. Jon need never have married me after all, because in the end there was no baby.’

‘Jen, please, my darling, don’t …’ Guy begged her, unable to endure her suffering, the unguarded words of tender endearment spoken before he could recall them, but Jenny seemed not to notice.

‘Afterwards … after the funeral, I offered Jon his freedom but he wouldn’t take it and I didn’t …’ She raised her head and looked directly at Guy. ‘By then I had fallen in love with him. He was, is … all the things that David could never, ever be and I loved him desperately, but he never really loved me. He never said anything, but I’ve always guessed, always known.’

Guy could think of nothing to say, could find no words to comfort her.

Jenny had finished her tea. She looked at her empty cup and then said quietly, ‘We ought to get back to the shop. It’s almost lunch-time.’

She was curiously light-headed, Jenny realised as she walked towards the door without waiting to see if Guy was following her. She felt empty, purged almost, and strangely separate from herself, as though she had somehow gained the ability to step outside of her body and watch herself as an observer, curiously detached from her own pain, temporarily insulated from it…. Her heart temporarily missed a beat. Temporarily … How apt. Everything in life was, after all, temporary, wasn’t it? Life itself was fleetingly unstable and not to be relied upon.

14

David reached for the remote control switch of his television and settled himself more comfortably in his chair. He really ought to be taking more exercise. The specialist had reproved him the previous day when he had called at the nursing home to check up on him. These days, heart attack patients were not encouraged to spend too much time in bed, it seemed, even those who’d had attacks as serious as David’s.

Mr Hayes had been dubious at first when David had insisted that he wanted to go somewhere else to recuperate instead of going straight home from hospital, but ultimately David had managed to talk him round.

‘You’ve had a very lucky escape,’ the specialist had told him.

A lucky escape. If only that was true. He might have earned himself a respite but that was all. Sooner or later he was going to be called to account. By now, Jon would no doubt have discovered what he had been doing. It would probably have been better if he had not survived, David decided morosely. Had Jon said anything to anyone else yet? He got out of the chair and walked over to the window. The nursing home was surrounded by neatly manicured lawns and paths wide enough to take a wheelchair.

Tiggy had been to see him this morning; he had pretended to be asleep. She hadn’t stayed very long, thank God. The main drawback to his present existence was that it gave one too much time to think. And there was one thing he had definitely decided and that was, no matter what the outcome of the financial mess he had got himself into, he could no longer stay married to Tiggy. Didn’t any of them realise the burdens they had placed on him, the way they had controlled his life? His father, his brother, Tiggy, all of them, with their expectations and their demands.

Ben had filled him with such an unbearable mixture of resentment and guilt, weighing him down with the overwhelmingly relentless pressure of his love, his determination that David would be all the things he had not been able to be. God, he shuddered when he thought about the way he had been sacrificed on the family altar, his life mapped out for him virtually from the moment of his birth, no choice allowed, every indulgence given, just so long as he kept his feet immovably placed in the dead men’s shoes his father had created for him.

But he wasn’t his father’s dead twin. He wasn’t his grandfather. Had he been given a choice, the last career he would have chosen would have been the law. Deep down inside himself, soul deep if there was such a thing, he had a craving, a yearning, a need for challenge and change, limitless horizons, excitement and even danger.

In the drug-filled days following his heart attack, he had dreamt of it, travelling storm-swollen rivers through vast jungle terrain, beset by swirling, foaming rapids, huge thundering cataracts, and being swept along almost to the very brink of death—the ultimate adventure.

He had known then that he couldn’t go on with his present life. Oh for the days when a family’s black sheep was shipped out to some far-flung shore. Oh indeed.

And Jon, Jon with his quiet, watchful gaze, his loyalty. Jon should have been the chosen one. If he had … Jon who as a boy had covered for him and taken the blame for so many of his misdemeanours. Jon whom, if the truth were known, he sometimes almost hated for his very generosity towards him and whom he almost always envied because he was not their father’s favoured child. Jon, too, was a burden—a living reminder of all his own fallibilities and weaknesses, of all that he himself could never be.

And last but not least, of course, Tiggy … Tiggy … his wife. She was the greatest burden of them all. There was no way that he could ever live with her again. No way that he could ever go back to his old life. No way at all.

‘Is there still no word from Jemima Harding’s accountants?’ Olivia asked Jon anxiously a few weeks after her discovery of her father’s less than honest actions.

He shook his head. ‘Not as yet. The original meeting had been cancelled and the partner dealing with Jemima’s affairs was apparently on holiday. I called in at the home yesterday to see Jemima. She’s not at all well,’ Jon reported grimly.

‘What will happen if … when she dies?’ Olivia asked worriedly. But she already knew the answer to her own question. ‘Has … has Dad said anything to you about …?’

Again Jon shook his head.

It was incomprehensible to Olivia that her father could so apparently easily dismiss what he had done. Surely he must realise that his fraudulent activities, his theft, were bound to have come to light.

Olivia watched her uncle as he checked through the post. When she had first learned that he and Jenny had decided to separate, she had been stunned. They had always seemed so happy together. She was uneasily aware of how much her mother had started to lean and depend on Jon since her father’s heart attack and she just hoped …

So far, as far as she knew, there had been no recurrence of her mother’s nightmarish eating binge and Olivia had slowly started to relax a little and to tell herself hopefully that it might just have been a one-off incident and that her fears about her mother were groundless.

She had an appointment later on that morning to draw up the will of an old lady who lived several miles outside town and who, because of her incapacitating rheumatism, Olivia was to visit rather than the other way round.

Jon was due to appear in court in Chester that afternoon with one of his clients and Olivia had been slightly disturbed when her mother had announced the previous evening that she intended to travel to Chester with Jon in order to do some shopping.

Saul had returned home, but he had kept in touch, ringing her almost every day. They were light-hearted, amusing telephone calls, outlining the problems he was having in finding a suitable nanny for the children.

‘I don’t suppose you feel like taking pity on me and stepping into the breach,’ he had teased on one occasion.

‘Certainly not,’ Olivia had refused.

‘Ah, so you’ve heard the stories, as well, have you?’ he challenged her.

‘What stories?’ Olivia had asked curiously.

‘Oh, you know, the ones where the father always falls for the nanny,’ he had told her wickedly.

Be careful, Olivia had warned herself after he had rung off. It would be dangerously easy to resurrect her teenage fantasy for Saul, to assuage her damaged emotions and fill the empty space in her life with him.

She had heard nothing from Caspar and no longer expected to even though, ridiculously, her heart still started to beat much too quickly whenever the phone rang at home; and she still rushed to collect the post. But even if he did get in touch with her, what good would it do at this point? She was hardly likely to be granted a work permit in the US now or even an entry visa, not with a father who was soon to become a convicted criminal.

In a world where so much could be determined by human intervention, it came as even more of a shock to discover that fate, nature, destiny, call it what you would, could still have such a devastating and unanticipated effect on human lives.

‘So you’re Jon’s daughter, you say …?’

‘No, David’s,’ Olivia patiently corrected the old lady she had come to see. The niece who looked after her, calling at her cottage every day to check up on her, had been dismissed following Olivia’s arrival.

‘No doubt she’s decided that she wants to leave her bits and pieces to my sister instead of me,’ Margaret had told Olivia dryly. ‘She’s like that. Mind you, if you ask me, they’re all inclined to go a bit that way when they get old. I suppose we’ll be the same if we live that long. She’s ninety-one next time….’

‘Ninety-one …’ Olivia gazed at the tiny, wizened figure on the chair opposite her own.

‘David’s …’ The old lady’s gaze sharpened. ‘Oh yes, I remember now … came home with some young American, didn’t you? So our Margaret told me. What’s happened to him?’

‘He’s gone back to America,’ Olivia replied tersely. ‘Now, about your will …’

‘Gone back, has he? Oh well, he’s not the first to do that by a long chalk. You want to ask your Aunt Ruth about that. A real to-do over her Yank there was, her father up in arms about what was going on, and her mother sending her off to her family in Yorkshire.’

Olivia frowned. Caspar had said something about her great-aunt being involved with an American, but she had forgotten all about it in the turmoil of her father’s heart attack and the discovery that had followed.

‘Not told you about it, has she?’ the old woman asked. ‘Well, dare say she wouldn’t. Never liked the Yanks, her father, and there was a real to-do up at the house when he found out what was going on. My daughter Liza used to work there then and she came home full of it.’ She chuckled. ‘Not that your grandfather had it all his own way. She had plenty of spirit about her, did your Aunt Ruth, but my Liza told me that they’d found out he was married, this American of Ruth’s, and that was that, then. The poor girl was broken-hearted. Had to be sent to Yorkshire to get over it. It’s a long time ago now. Quick, before our Margaret comes back … about my will …’