Her mother looked disappointed, but there was no lessening of her warmth. ‘Some other time then, Jay, and soon. We’re your family now, so you must feel free to drop in at the Dower House whenever you like.’
Mirry began to collect up the last of the glasses so she didn’t hear Jay’s reply. Her tray was overloaded and her father took it from her. Mirry removed three dangerously balanced glasses and followed him to the kitchen. As they were passing the open door of the library Mirry heard Annabel’s voice say, ‘You can’t spend the evening alone here, Jay. Why not come back with us for a meal?’
Expecting Jay to give the same excuse he had offered her mother, she was stunned to hear him accept with real pleasure. So much for his ‘other commitments’, Mirry thought indignantly, exchanging glances with her father.
‘I must say he’s different from what I expected,’ Sandra declared as they all walked back to the Dower House. ‘Much more sophisticated.’
‘A bit of a cold fish, I thought,’ Richard commented.
‘Annabel didn’t think so,’ Sandra pointed out with no thought for Andrew. ‘She was all over him like a rash. And you have to admit, he is attractive. Didn’t you think so, Mirry?’
Glancing at Andrew’s set expression, she declared loyally, ‘Not as handsome as any of my brothers, and certainly not as nice.’
‘Oh, you…’ Sandra pouted.
Cathy Grey, well aware that her daughter-in-law had always been a little jealous of the closeness of the Greys, steered the topic into safer waters, not knowing that her regretful, ‘Such a pity Jay had to rush back to London,’ brought an indignant retort bubbling to Mirry’s tongue.
But a warning shake of her father’s head had Mirry biting back the words, and as the path narrowed he dropped back beside her, saying in an undertone, ‘No sense in hurting your mother’s feelings, pet.’
Mirry sighed her agreement, but her resentment hadn’t quite died. ‘Would you believe he’s got some cock-eyed idea that we must resent him for inheriting Wenlow instead of one of us having it!’
Her father’s left eyebrow shot upwards.
‘Oh, I soon put him right,’ Mirry dismissed, ‘but he still seems… well, to bear our family a grudge.’
Donald was silent for several paces, staring thoughtfully at the ground. ‘Human nature’s a funny thing,’ he said at last. ‘At eighteen Jay might have decided to go it alone, but that wouldn’t necessarily prevent him resenting the people who have been close to his father.’
‘You mean he could be jealous of us, growing up here while he…’
‘Something like that,’ her father agreed. ‘And you have to remember he was thrown in at the deep end today. It can’t have been easy for him.’
‘I suppose not,’ Mirry said thoughtfully. ‘What do you think we should do, Dad? Georgie was so keen for us to help him settle down here.’
‘We’ll go about our business as usual and do our best to draw Jay in, however much he kicks.’ He grinned at his daughter’s dubious expression. ‘It won’t be the first time your mother and I have come up against hostility— and overcome it. Some of your foster brothers and sisters were very antisocial when they first came to us.’
Mirry thought about what her father had said. Her parents might be able to turn the other cheek to Jay’s hostility, but she wasn’t sure she could. It was an unpleasant feeling to be disliked on sight, something that had never happened to her before.
Stripping off, she showered quickly and put on fresh underwear before dressing in a full black calf-length skirt printed with emerald-green flowers round the hem and a matching emerald-green shirt, cinching them together with a wide black belt.
Blessed with a fine, clear complexion that needed no more than a little moisturiser as protection from the wind, she brushed a bronze shadow on to her eyelids and found herself wishing she had the kind of looks that would make Jay smile at her the way he had smiled at Annabel.
‘And if wishes were horses, pigs might fly,’ she mocked her reflection, deciding there and then to follow her father’s advice. Had she been a raving beauty it might have softened Jay’s attitude towards her and her family, but she wasn’t and never would be. She could only be her natural self and hope she could achieve results by sheer persistence. She grinned. Like water dripping on stone. Sweeping the mascara wand over her long lashes, she finished her perfunctory make-up with a browny-pink lipgloss. Pulling the pins out of her hair, she brushed it hard before catching the sides up on the crown of her head with a pretty slide and leaving the rest loose, and without bothering to glance in the mirror again she hurried downstairs.
The Greys were rarely all together under one roof, so there was more than enough to talk about over dinner, catching up on each other’s news. After the meal was eaten and cleared away, most of the family were eager to attend this special meeting of the jazz club, taking the path beneath the trees that skirted the garden centre’s nursery beds and approached the Hall from the back.
Like so much at Wenlow, the music-room’s original opulence was a little faded now, the painted panels in the elaborate plasterwork ceiling in need of cleaning, the velvet upholstery on the gilt-legged chairs and sofas too worn to be sure what the original colour had been. But the polished oak floor had the patina of age and the grand piano was always kept in tune.
By the time they were ready to begin, the room was full to overflowing. The programme had been carefully chosen, every number with a reason for its inclusion, Abby Minto’s arrangement of the Beatles’ song ‘Hey, Jude’ because it had been one of Georgie’s favourites. Closing her eyes as she coaxed the running, soaring notes out of the clarinet, Mirry liked to think Georgie’s spirit was still around, listening.
After the applause had died down, Keir Minto got to his feet. ‘We’re here tonight to pay tribute to one very remarkable lady,’ he said. ‘A lady who showed us all by example how to take life by the throat and get the best possible out of it. If the last number was one of her favourites, the next one could be called her theme song. She always took the solo lead herself, but there’s no one better qualified to assume her mantle than Mirry Grey.’
Mirry got to her feet, tears she was powerless to stem welling in her eyes. Letting them run unashamedly down her cheeks while she waited for Keir to give the lead-in to ‘I Did It My Way’, she poured all the emotion into the music, her slender body swaying, her long hair flying as she made the clarinet sob and sing.
There was laughter as well as applause as number followed number, especially when Simon took a turn on the double bass. Last but one, they played a blues which expressed the grief they all felt at losing a well-loved friend, but they finished with a triumphal ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, the audience rising to their feet to join in, singing and clapping, and Mirry was easily able to imagine Georgie’s delighted chuckle.
The audience surged around the players, offering their congratulations; Mirry, still on a high, sparkled back, accepting a can of lager and drinking thirstily.
She had her head tipped back as she heard Annabel enthuse, ‘Mirry, you were fantastic! Wasn’t she, Jay?’
Mirry lowered the can to meet Jay’s cold, enigmatic gaze, and again she felt the half-painful, half-pleasurable jolt. Though Annabel was casually dressed she looked bandbox fresh, her hair swinging in a smooth bell to her shoulders, while Mirry felt hot and untidy.
‘Indeed, extremely talented,’ Jay agreed. ‘Do you play professionally… er… Mirry?’
Her eyes widened. Was he actually paying her a compliment, or merely being sarcastic? ‘No, only for the fun of it,’ she said warily.
‘But you’re good enough to turn professional if you wanted to, Mirry,’ Annabel claimed with genuine admiration. She turned a smiling face up to the man at her side. ‘Are you musical, Jay?’
His poker face melted into real amusement. ‘Efforts were made to teach me the piano, but with minimal success, so no, I can’t claim to be musical.’
Taken off guard by hi
s smile, Mirry said reminiscently, ‘Your father wasn’t, either. He couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.’
She saw a smile freeze on Jay’s face, but unaware that they were straying into a subject that was unwelcome to him, Annabel enlarged, ‘He still came to all the jazz club meetings, didn’t he, Mirry? And enjoyed them, too. But then Sir David and Lady Georgie always did everything together. Devoted to each other right to the end.’ Only then did she suddenly remember she was talking to Sir David’s illegitimate son, and her cheeks flooded with colour. ‘I mean… I didn’t… Oh, dear!’
To make matters worse, Andrew said pointedly, ‘If Jay wants to know anything about David and Georgie, he should talk to Mirry. She knew them far better than you, Annabel.’
Mirry knew her brother’s intervention had been prompted by his jealousy of the attention Annabel was paying Jay, but she wished he hadn’t. She tried to head him off. ‘People are beginning to leave, Andrew, so perhaps we could start straightening up…’ She reached out to put her half-empty lager can on a side-table, missed the edge and gasped as the can fell to spill the remaining beer in a sticky pool on the polished floor. ‘Oh, no! I’ll get a cloth…’
Cheeks hot with mortification at her clumsiness, she hurried along the lengthy passageways to the kitchen. At least she had broken up an uncomfortable scene, but she wished she hadn’t made quite such a fool of herself to do it.
The music-room had cleared considerably when she returned with the floor cloth, her brothers straightening up the chairs. Of Jay and Annabel there was no sign, though Andrew’s glowering expression told her they had left together. She mopped up the mess she had made and, collecting the empty cans in a plastic bin-liner, returned them to the kitchen. Martha had long since gone to her quarters, but with the familiarity of long practice Mirry unlocked the back door and deposited the plastic bag by the dustbins before carefully locking it again and crossing to the sink to awash out the sticky floor cloth.
The Wenlow kitchen was even more enormous than the one at the Dower House, and as Mirry had switched on only one of the lights it was gloomy too, so, hearing a sudden sound behind her, she whirled round, her heart pumping in fright, to see Jay standing in the doorway.
‘Oh! Oh, you did startle me!’ she gasped.
‘I startled you?’ He surveyed her sardonically. ‘The last thing I expected was to find the Little Miracle playing Cinderella in the kitchen.’
CHAPTER FOUR
It seemed to Mirry she had blushed more today than in her whole life before. Hearing Jay use the full version of her nickname came as a shock, and the way he said it showed there was no lessening of his dislike.
He was still wearing the sleek grey business suit, but now his tie had been discarded and his collar was undone. Mirry couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from the strong column of his throat as he said, ‘I assumed Mirry was short for Miranda until Mr Golding read out your real name. I was curious, so I asked Mrs Barks.’
Mirry cringed inwardly, for of course Martha would explain that, after Donald and Cathy had produced five sons, unexpectedly getting the little girl they had longed for had seemed like a miracle. The story had never bothered her before, but now, beneath Jay’s silvery, sardonic gaze, it seemed embarrassingly sentimental.
‘I suppose you find it stupid,’ she said defensively, her small chin lifting, ‘but as there was already a Catherine and a Georgina, it caused less confusion when Mirry stuck.’
‘Ah, yes, Lady Georgina.’ Jay pushed away from the door and moved slowly towards her, making Mirry’s heart thump disturbingly. ‘Your brother claims you knew her better than Annabel did, and my—Sir David. So do you subscribe to her theory of their mutual devotion?’
Mirry had noticed that stumble before, whenever Jay had spoken of David. Curiously she blurted, ‘You never refer to him as your father, do you?’
Her question halted him a couple of feet away. ‘It takes more than impregnating a woman to become a father,’ he said curtly. ‘And you didn’t answer my question. Not that you need to when we both know that I’m the living proof that their so-called devoted marriage was a sham.’
‘Oh, Jay…’ Unaware that she was clutching the damp floor cloth to her chest, Mirry said earnestly, ‘I don’t expect you to find it easy to understand, but David and Georgie did share a deeply loving relationship all their lives. No…’ she held up a hand as he would have made an angry denial’… I’m not glossing over David’s affair with your mother, but in the circumstances… Well, let’s just say Georgie was able to understand and forgive.’
‘It was so important to her to be Lady Jayston?’ he sneered, and if Mirry thought those grey eyes cold before it was nothing to the frost in them now.
She shook her head vehemently. ‘As if that mattered to her! In fact, she offered David a divorce at the time. She knew she could never give him the children he wanted, you see, and she loved him enough to give him the chance of a family with someone else. And it says a lot for the strength of David’s love that he begged her not to leave him. Because he did want you, Jay. He wanted you enough to plead with your mother to allow him to adopt you, and when she refused, to go on hoping for years that she might change her mind.’ The strength of her emotion brought tears to her eyes, and she could only see Jay through a haze.
But both his sneering tone and his words told her she hadn’t convinced him. ‘So that’s the line you Greys are taking! Such a touching story, too, so tell me, if my father wanted me so much, why did he rarely make the effort to see me? Never more than a few times a year, and then only for an hour or two. Not that I wanted to see him at all.’ For the first time there was a ring of real emotion instead of the sneering distaste. ‘God, those are the worst memories of my childhood, dressed in my best clothes and threatened to be on my best behaviour…’
‘But, Jay…’ Mirry’s heart was wrung for the bewildered, hurt small boy he had once been. ‘That wasn’t your father’s doing. It was your mother who rationed the visits.’
‘Well, of course, you would blame my mother.’ Jay’s lips curled contemptuously. ‘The Greys made mischief then, and it seems they’re still bent on making it.’
Mirry’s eyes widened. ‘What do you mean, the Greys made mischief?’
‘They didn’t mention that when they fed you that heart-wrenching saga?’ His eyebrows rose in mock surprise. ‘The way your parents raked up old scandals about my mother? Told David downright lies to blacken her character, like suggesting some other man was responsible for her pregnancy?’ His mouth thinned to a grim line while his eyes took on the blankness of the inward-looking. ‘If there was one thing my mother was most consistent about it was her bitterness over the way Donald and Cathy Grey split her and David up in their determination to hang on to their corner of Wenlow.’
For just a few moments a little worm of doubt crept into Mirry’s mind: not that her parents had interfered because they feared to lose the Dower House and garden centre, but when she remembered how forceful her mother had been in her opinion of Valerie Elphick, it was quite possible that they had pressured David into standing by his wife. It was only natural that their sympathies would be with Georgie.
As if sensing Mirry was no longer so sure of herself, Jay pressed home his attack. ‘And if the allegedly so concerned Sir David Jayston was really so keen to acknowledge the product of his liaison—according to you to the lengths of wanting to adopt me—then how come he never provided a penny piece towards my support?’
Mirry was too taken aback to do anything but gape at him, and as if relishing her speechlessness Jay went on, ‘All right, so my mother was a comparatively wealthy woman, but that fact runs a coach and horses through your cosy little theory, wouldn’t you say?’
At last Mirry managed to close her mouth. ‘But that’s just not true! David always supported both you and Valerie, right up to the time you finished university. Before you were born he sold the Dower House to my father and settled the money on your mother. And since then
there have been other sales—Dicken’s Farm, Odden Wood. That’s why the estate’s in such a bad way now. It’s a downright lie to suggest your father didn’t take his responsibility towards you seriously.’ Indignation was nearly shooting flames through the top of her skull, and it occurred to her that, if Valerie had lied to Jay about this, she might also have lied to him about her parents’ responsibility in breaking up David’s affair.
But if Mirry was close to losing her temper, Jay was suddenly very cool. ‘How old did you say you were?’
She blinked, the seemingly irrelevant question taking some of the steam out of her. ‘Twenty-three, but what’s that—’
‘So how do you come to be such an expert on what happened thirty years ago?’ he asked with steely logic. ‘The way you tell it, you might have watched it happen. But it’s only hearsay, isn’t it?’ He took a deep breath, releasing the air from his lungs in a hissing, ‘Whereas I lived through it.’
Mirry was silenced, conceding that he had every justification for disbelieving her view of the events. It was all second-hand knowledge, passed on by Georgie and by her mother, both of whom were admittedly prejudiced on the subject of Valerie Elphick. And yet the close, loving partnership that had been David and Georgie’s marriage was not hearsay. That was something she had observed for herself. And Jay’s allegation that his father had made no contribution towards his maintenance was certainly untrue.
She shivered as a feeling of clammy coldness crept over her, only then discovering she had been hugging the damp floor cloth all this time. She tossed it into the sink, saying quietly to Jay, ‘I don’t pretend to be an expert on something that happened before I was born. There’s no way I can prove to you that your father’s marriage was a good one, or that both he and Georgie would have given anything for you to have shared in their closeness. But there is something you can prove.’
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