Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN
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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 …’
‘How do you feel about taking pity