by Penny Jordan
‘No, why should there be?’ he denied, without looking at his cousin.
‘No reason. Only you never explained why you had to fly back home like that and since you flew back to the States… well, it’s obvious that something is bothering you. You’re not having second thoughts about selling off part of the business, are you?’ Piers asked him.
Oliver relaxed slightly, and without taking his eyes off the road responded, ‘No, it was the right decision, but the timing could, perhaps, have been better. When is Emma due back?’ he asked, changing the subject.
His cousin’s girlfriend had been away visiting her family, and to his relief Piers, not realising that he was being deliberately sidetracked, started to talk enthusiastically about the reunion with her.
‘It’s official, by the way,’ he informed Oliver. ‘We’re definitely going to get married this summer. In Harrowby if that’s OK with you. We thought… well, I thought with Emma’s family being so scattered… We… we’re not sure how many of them will want to come up for the wedding yet, but the house is big enough to house twenty or so and…’ He paused and gave Oliver a sidelong glance.
‘I… I’d like you to be my best man, Oliver. Funny things, women,’ he added ruminatively. ‘Up until we actually started talking properly about it Emma had always insisted she didn’t want a traditional wedding, that they were out of date and unnecessary, and yet now… she wants the whole works—bridesmaids, page-boys… She says it’s to please her mother but I know different.
‘That will mean two big weddings for Harrowby this summer. I still can’t get over old Henry getting married—or rather his mother allowing him to… Hell, Oliver… watch out!’ he protested sharply as his cousin suddenly had to brake quickly to avoid getting too close to the car in front.
‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ he asked in concern. ‘Perhaps we should have stayed in London overnight instead of driving north straight from the flight. If you’re tired, I can take over for a while…’
Oliver made no reply but his mouth had compressed into a hard line and there was a bleak, cold look in his eyes that reminded Piers very much of a younger Oliver just after he’d lost his mother. Something was bothering his cousin, but Piers knew him well enough to know that Oliver wasn’t likely to tell him or anyone else exactly what it was.
‘What the hell is that still doing here?’
Piers frowned as Oliver glared at the Christmas tree in the hallway. There was nothing about it so far as he could see to merit that tone of icy, almost bitter hatred in his cousin’s voice. In fact, he decided judiciously, it was a rather nice tree—wilting now slightly, but still…
‘It’s not Twelfth Night until tomorrow,’ he pointed out to Oliver. ‘I’ll give you a hand dismantling it then, if you like, and—’
‘No,’ Oliver told him curtly. ‘I’ll give Mrs Green a ring and ask her to arrange for Tom to come in and do it. We’re going to be too busy catching up with everything that’s been going on whilst we’ve been in New York.’
Thoughtfully Piers followed Oliver into the kitchen. It wasn’t like his cousin to be so snappy and edgy, and, in point of fact, he had planned to drive across to York to see his parents whilst they were in the north, but now it seemed as though Oliver had other plans for him.
‘Well, if we’re going to work I’d better go and unpack and have a shower, freshen up a bit,’ he told Oliver.
Upstairs he pushed open the door of the room which traditionally was his whenever he visited. The bed was neatly made up with crisp, clean bedlinen, the room spotless apart from…
Piers’ eyes widened slightly as he saw the small, intimate item of women’s clothing which Mrs Green had obviously laundered and left neatly folded on the bed, no doubt thinking that the small pair of white briefs belonged to Emma.
Only Piers was pretty sure that they didn’t. So who did they belong to and where was their owner now?
Piers knew enough about his cousin to be quite sure that Oliver would not indulge in any kind of brief, meaningless sexual fling. Piers had endured enough lectures from his elder cousin on that subject himself to know that much.
So what exactly was going on? Oliver had made no mention to him of having any visitors recently, either male or female. He could always, of course, show him the briefs and ask him who they belonged to, but, judging from his current mood, such an enquiry was not likely to be very well received.
Another thought occurred to Piers. Was there any connection between the owner of the briefs and his cousin’s present uncharacteristic bad mood?
When Piers returned downstairs Oliver was in his study opening the mail that had accumulated in his absence.
‘Mmm… isn’t it amazing how much junk gets sent through the post?’ Piers commented as he started to help him. ‘Oh, this one looks interesting, Oliver—an invite to Henry’s betrothal party. Well, they certainly are doing things the traditional way, aren’t they?’
‘Give that to me,’ Oliver instructed, his tone of voice so curt that Piers started to frown. He knew that Oliver had never particularly liked either Henry or his parents, especially his mother, but, so far as he knew, the anger he was exhibiting now was completely different from his normal attitude of relaxed indifference towards them.
Silently Piers handed him the invitation and saw the way Oliver’s hands trembled slightly as he started to tear the invitation in two, and then he abruptly stopped, his concentration fixed on the black script which he had previously merely been glancing at furiously, his whole body so still and tense that Piers automatically moved round the desk to stand beside him, wondering what on earth it was that was written on the invitation that was causing such a reaction.
It had seemed unremarkable enough to him.
‘“The betrothal is announced of Miss Louise Saunders, daughter of Colonel and Lady Anne Saunders, to—” Henry is marrying Louise Saunders,’ Oliver intoned in a flat and totally unfamiliar voice.
‘That’s what it says,’ Piers agreed, watching him in concern. ‘It makes sense. They’ve known one another for ever and, of course, there’s money in the family. Louise stands to inherit quite a considerable sum from her grandparents.
‘Oliver, what is it, what’s wrong?’ he demanded as he saw the colour draining out of his cousin’s face, leaving it grey and haggard, the skin stretched tightly over his facial bones as he lifted his head and stared unseeingly across the room.
‘Nothing,’ he told Piers tonelessly. ‘Nothing.’ And then he added in a sharper more incisive voice, ‘Piers, there’s something I have to do. I need to get back to London. I’ll leave you here…’
‘London…? You can’t drive back there now,’ Piers protested. ‘It’s too late. You haven’t had any sleep in the last twenty-four hours that I know of, and not much in the three days before that. Oliver, what’s going on? I—’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ Oliver denied harshly.
‘Look, if you must go back to London, at least wait until the morning when you’ve had some sleep,’ said Piers. ‘Surely whatever it is can wait that long?’
‘Maybe it can,’ Oliver agreed savagely, ‘but I can’t.’
In London Lisa’s cold had turned into the full-blown virus, just as Fergus had predicted. Common sense told her that she ought to see a doctor but she felt too full of self-pity, too weak, too weighed down with misery to care how ill she was. And so instead she remained in her flat curled up in her bed, alternately sweating and shivering and being sick, wishing that she could just close her eyes and never have to open them again.
At first when she heard the sound of someone knocking urgently on her door after ten o’clock at night she thought she was imagining things, and then when the knocking continued and she realised that it was, in fact, real her heart started to bang so fiercely against her chest wall that it made her feel even more physically weak.
It was Oliver! It had to be. But it didn’t matter what he had to say because she wasn’t going to listen. She had always k
nown that sooner or later he would discover his mistake. But nothing—no amount of apologising on his part—could take away the pain he had caused her.
If he had really loved her he would never have doubted her in the first place. If he had really loved her he would never…
The knocking had stopped, and Lisa discovered that she was almost running in her sudden urgency to open the door.
When she did so, flinging it wide, Oliver’s name already on her lips, it wasn’t Oliver who was standing there at all…
It was…
She blinked and then blinked again, and then to her own consternation she burst into tears and flung herself into the arms that had opened to hold her, weepingly demanding, ‘Mother, what are you doing here?’
‘You sounded so unhappy when I rang that I was worried about you,’ her mother told her.
‘You came all the way home from Japan because you were worried about me?’
Lisa stared at her mother in disbelief, remembering all the times when, as a child, she had refused to give in to her need to plead for her parents to return from whatever far-flung part of the world they were working in, telling herself stoically that she didn’t mind that they weren’t there, that she didn’t mind that they didn’t love her enough to be with her all the time.
‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ her mother chided her gently. ‘You may be an adult, Lisa, but to us, your father and me, you are still our child… Your father wanted to come with me, but unfortunately…’ She spread her hands.
‘Now,’ she instructed as she smoothed Lisa’s damp hair back from her forehead and studied her face with maternal intuition, ‘tell me what’s really wrong… All of it… Starting with this Oliver…’
‘Oliver…’
Lisa shook her head, her mouth compressing against her emotions.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered, and then added, ‘Oh, Mum, I’ve been such a fool. I thought he loved me… I thought…’
‘Oh, my poor darling girl. Come on, let me put the kettle on and make us both a drink and something to eat. You need it, by the looks of you. You’re so thin… Oh, Lisa, what have you been doing to yourself?’
Half an hour later, having been bullied into having a hot bath by her mother, Lisa was ensconced on her small sofa, wrapped in her quilt, dutifully eating the deliciously creamy scrambled eggs that her mother had cooked for her whilst the latter sat on a chair opposite, waiting for her to finish eating before exclaiming as she removed the empty plate, ‘Right, now! First things first—who is this Oliver?’
‘He’s… He’s…’ Lisa shook her head. ‘I hate him,’ she told her mother emotionally, ‘and it hurts so much. He said he loved me but he couldn’t have done—not and said what he did…’
Slowly, under her mother’s patient and gentle questioning, the whole story came out. Although Lisa would not have said that she was particularly close to her parents, she had always felt able to talk to them. But, even so, she was slightly shocked to discover how easy it was to confide in her mother and how much she wanted to talk to her. Of course, there were bits she missed out—things so personal that she could not have discussed them with anyone. But she sensed from her mother’s expression that she guessed when Lisa was withholding things from her and why.
Only when it came to outlining what had happened the night that Oliver had discovered her kissing Henry did her voice falter slightly.
‘It must have been a shock for him to find Henry here,’ her mother suggested when Lisa had fallen silent.
‘He seemed to think that I was going to marry Henry. I…’
‘And you told him, of course, that you weren’t?’ her mother offered.
Lisa shook her head. ‘I tried to but…’ She bit her lip, turning away, her face flushing slightly. ‘He was so…
‘I had been honest with him right from the start, told him why I was marrying Henry, told him that I hadn’t… that I didn’t think that sex…’ She bit her lip again and stopped.
‘After what had happened between us I don’t understand how he could possibly have thought that I’d go back to Henry and to use what we had… all that we’d shared, to abuse it and destroy… To make me feel… How could he do that?’ she whispered, more to herself than her mother.
‘Perhaps because he’s a man and because he felt jealous and insecure, because a part of him feared that what he had to offer you wasn’t enough… that he wasn’t enough.’
‘But how could he possibly think that?’ Lisa demanded, looking at her mother, her eyes dark and shadowed with pain. ‘He knew how I felt about him, how I… He knew…’
‘When you were in bed together, yes,’ her mother agreed, softening the directness of her words with a small smile. ‘But it isn’t only our sex who fear that the emotions aroused when two people are sexually intimate may not be there once that intimacy is over.
‘Your Oliver obviously knew he could arouse you, make you want him physically, but you had already told him that he was not what you wanted, what you had planned for. He already knew that a part of you feared the intensity of the emotions he had for you and aroused in you. You said yourself that he was anxious for you to make a commitment to him.’
‘Initially, yes. But later… when I tried to tell him how I felt just before he left for New York, he didn’t seem to want to listen.’
‘Perhaps because he was afraid of what you might say,’ her mother suggested gently, adding, ‘He had no way of knowing you were going to tell him that you had changed your mind, that you were ready to make the commitment you had previously told him he must wait for. For all he knew, you might have wanted to say something very different—to tell him in fact that you had changed your mind and didn’t want him at all.’
‘But he couldn’t possibly have thought that,’ Lisa gasped, ‘could he? It isn’t important now anyway,’ she said tiredly. ‘I can never forgive him for—’
‘Is it really Oliver you can’t forgive, or yourself?’ her mother interposed quietly, watching as Lisa stared at her and then frowned.
‘You said that he was angry… that he made love to you,’ she reminded Lisa. ‘That he used your feelings to punish and humiliate you. But you never said that you didn’t want him, or that he hurt or abused you. Anger against the person we love when he is our lover can result in some very passionate sex.
‘For a woman, the first time she discovers that fact, it can be very traumatic and painful because it goes against everything that society has told us we should want from sexual intimacy. It can seem very frightening, very alien, very wrong to admit that we found pleasure in expressing our sexuality and desire in anger and, of course, that it was the only way we could express it…’
‘He was so angry with me,’ Lisa told her mother, not making any response to what she had said but mentally digesting it, acknowledging that her mother had a point, allowing herself for the first time since it had happened to see her own uninhibited and passionate response to Oliver as a natural expression of her own emotions.
‘Oliver was probably as shocked and caught off guard by what happened as you were,’ her mother told her wryly.
‘You’re not the only one something like this has happened to, you know,’ she added comfortingly. ‘I can still remember the first time your father and I had a major row… I was working on a piece for a gallery showing and I’d forgotten that your father was picking me up to take me out to dinner… He came storming into my work room demanding to know what was more important to me—my work or him… I had just finished working on the final piece for the exhibition. He picked it up and threw it against the wall.’
Lisa stared at her mother in shock.
‘Dad did that? But he always seems so laid back… so…’
‘Well, most of the time he is, but this particular incident was the culmination of a series of small misunderstandings. He didn’t take second place to my work at all, of course, but…’
‘Go on—what happened, after he had broken the piece?’ Lisa d
emanded, intrigued.
‘Well, I’m ashamed to say that I was so angry that I actually tried to hit him. He caught hold of me, we struggled for a while and then…’
As her mother flushed and laughed, Lisa guessed what the outcome of their fight had been.
‘Afterwards your father stormed off and left me there on my own… I vowed I wasn’t going to have anything more to do with him, but then—well, I started to miss him and to realise that what had happened hadn’t been entirely his fault.’
‘So what did you do?’ Lisa asked.
Her mother laughed. ‘Well, I made a small ceramic heart which I then deliberately broke in two and I sent him one half of it.’
‘What did he do?’ Lisa demanded breathlessly.
‘Well, not what I had expected,’ her mother admitted. ‘When I sent him the heart I had been trying to tell him that my heart was broken. I kept the other half hoping he would come for it and that we could mend the break, but when several days went by and he didn’t I began to think that he had changed his mind and that he didn’t want me any more.
‘I was in despair,’ she told Lisa quietly. ‘Exactly the same kind of despair you are facing now, but then, just when I had given up hope, your father turned up one night.’
‘With the broken heart,’ Lisa guessed.
‘With the mended heart,’ her mother told her, smiling. ‘The reason he had delayed so long before coming to see me had been because he had been having a matching piece to the broken one I had sent him made, and where the two pieces were bonded together he had used a special bond to, as he put it, “make the mended heart stronger than it had been before and unbreakable”.’
‘I never dreamed Dad could be so romantic!’ Lisa exclaimed.
‘Oh, he can,’ her mother told her. ‘You should have seen him the night you were born. He had desperately wanted you to be a little girl. He was overjoyed when you were born—we both were—and he swore that no matter where our work might take us, as long as it was physically possible, we would take you with us…’