Time Fuse. PENNY JORDAN
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thought she was going to be sick but somehow she had managed a smile, inwardly berating herself for ever laying herself open to this pain.
‘No doubt if you eventually come to work for me you will meet my family. I normally work from home during the summer recess. I have a place in Dorset.’
She nodded her head, fighting to stay calm. She knew all about Sir Gerald’s Dorsetshire home and his family.
‘So you heard of the post through my old friend Judge Seaton?’ he was saying. ‘Well, you certainly come very highly qualified… Never thought of trying for the bar yourself?’
It was a natural enough question, but it was still one that brought pain, thin colour touching delicate cheekbones as she said quietly, ‘I should have loved nothing more, but there was a question of finance.’
‘Of course…quite…’ There was a moment’s pause and then Sir Gerald was smiling again. ‘We have a very busy set of chambers here, with the bulk of the work being handled by my nephew Piers Gresham—a QC like myself—one of the youngest in the country.’ He said it with pride and she had an irrational surge of dislike against his unknown nephew. He went on to describe the type of work she would be involved in and asked several more questions all of which Selina was able to answer. He had not exaggerated when he said she was highly qualified—almost excessively so for the post she was applying for, but even so she knew she ought to be flattered when he said frankly, ‘Well my dear, I think I’d be a fool not to snap you up straightaway, if you are in agreement?’
For a moment caution warred with emotion. She ought to refuse; it was the only sane thing to do. She had already experienced first hand the anguish that would be a part of her everyday life if she stayed but the old compulsion was too strong to resist and almost as though it was someone else speaking for her, she heard herself accepting.
‘Excellent.’ His smile was genuinely warm. Who looking at him could doubt that he was exactly what he seemed; a strong, compassionate man dedicated to the cause of justice?
‘Marvellous. Now if you could just check through a few personal details? Your parents are dead?’
Her nails bit deeply into her palms but she barely felt the pain.
‘Yes,’ she agreed briefly, ‘a car accident when I was eleven.’
‘And after that you were brought up by foster parents?’
‘I was too old for adoption.’ How coolly she said it, her grey eyes calm and unshadowed. ‘And you have no other family?’
How she hated the compassion thickening his voice. She wanted to strike out at him physically but she curbed the emotion.
‘None at all.’ She wouldn’t allow herself to think of the grandparents who might have done so much to ease the misery of her life, but who had repudiated their only daughter, too ashamed and bitter to give her and her illegitimate child any support. They were simply another link in the long chain of betrayals that began with the man who had fathered her and who had then callously and publicly spurned her mother in a blaze of publicity that had burned scars into Selina’s soul that could never be erased. This man, she thought emotionlessly, watching him; this man who sat opposite her with a photograph of his family placed cosily on his desk; this man who represented the law of the land in its highest state; this man who had promised her foolish, greedy mother everything and who had given her nothing bar a child she did not want. No, that last was not strictly true. Her mother had wanted her initially when she had hoped to use her as her weapon in the war she was waging against her lover’s wife; but it had all backfired on her and in order to get her revenge on her lover she had proclaimed their affair to the press.
Selina couldn’t remember when she first realised how different she was from other children; perhaps it was when she started nursery school and men were always waiting to take her photograph, asking her to smile, but she had been about seven before the nightmare really began, when she began to learn what all the curiosity and muted whispers were about. Sometimes it seemed as though there wasn’t a single person in the world who didn’t know who she was. Her mother had never made any secret of it, she remembered bitterly. In those years her mother was still able to excite press interest. After all it had been the scandal of the year; the successful barrister, who had promised to leave his wife and family for his mistress and who had then reneged on the bargain, leaving said mistress pregnant.
It had been said in the press at the time that her pregnancy had been a deliberate ploy to break up his marriage; her mother would have been capable of that, Selina reflected, but it still took two. Even now she still bore the scars of those early years when it seemed that everyone knew her as Gerald Harvey’s bastard. The illegitimacy in itself was no big deal; there were many other single-parent children at school with her. No, what had caused the bitterness to take seed and root inside her had been the inescapable knowledge that she had been rejected; that her father had chosen his other children over and above her; that even her conception had been no more than another move in a power game. If she hated her father then she despised her mother; loathed the way in those early years she herself had been paraded about as though she were some sort of freak. She could still vividly remember the headlines she had stolen into the local library to read; the sick sense of betrayal that reading them had brought her.
Financially her mother had done extremely well out of her relationship. There had been a generous lump sum payment but, as she had complained to Selina on more than one occasion, it hadn’t been the same as being Gerald’s wife; of enjoying the security and prestige such a role would have brought.
Her father hadn’t been her mother’s only lover; as an ambitious social climber, who had seen an opportunity and taken it, there had been men before him and men after. The man she had died with in the wreck of his car had just been the latest in a long list. Selina had grown up in the knowledge that sex between men and women was a bargaining counter; a weapon that both sides wielded without thought or guilt.
She had been a pawn, used ruthlessly by her mother in her campaign to reinforce her claim on her father. He had promised her mother marriage—that much had been made clear in the press, and then had rescinded that promise. She had been her mother’s last-ditch attempt to sway that decision.
All her life until her mother’s death she had been an object of curiosity and pity. Other children knew her story and repeated it to her with various embellishments; her progress at school had been compared with that of her father’s legitimate children at the same age. Her mother’s death and the consequent muddle when the overworked social worker had mistakenly given her surname as that of her mother’s current lover had brought a welcome release from all the publicity.
By that time she had craved anonymity with such intensity that her foster parents had a long struggle to even converse with her in the initial stages. They had been a kind couple and with them she had found a sort of peace, but all the time she had been tense and wary, waiting for the knowing smile, the mocking words.
They had never come and she had been free to pursue her own life as her own person. Deep inside her had grown an intense need to know this man who had fathered her; a feeling that until she did so the past would continue to trap her. She had had her life all mapped out. She intended to enter the legal arena—to enter it and conquer it, she admitted. None of her father’s legitimate children had followed him into the law and not even to herself was she really prepared to admit that her fierce thirst for success owed its being to a deep-rooted need to show her father and the rest of the world what she could do.
The information that her father was looking for a new PA had been a gift from fate she could not refuse, giving her as it did the opportunity she had craved for since childhood; that of observing first-hand the man who had given her life. Did he ever think of her, she wondered bitterly; when he looked at the photograph of his wife and family, did his mind stray to her? Or did he simply consider that the money he had paid her mother had absolved him from all responsibility?
She knew quite well that it was a common fantasy of illegitimate children to crave their absent father’s approval and attention just as she had done, but now, confronted