by Penny Jordan
A tiny shudder went through her as she recognised the dangerous course of her thoughts. To question someone’s personal life so intimately and intensely, even within the privacy of her own thoughts, was so alien a response within her that she instinctively recoiled from acknowledging what she was doing.
Robert’s footsteps lagged as they crossed the lawn. He was holding back, dragging his feet. His father stopped, frowning down at both of them.
‘Is Mrs Jacobs still here?’
Sarah found she was holding her breath, praying that Gray Philips would deal sensitively with his son…would hear as she did the thread of fear that ran beneath the words.
If he did, he gave no sign of it.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he told Robert curtly, and then, as though unable to stop himself, he dropped down on one knee in front of the small boy and placed his hands on his shoulders, demanding gruffly, ‘Robert, why did you do it? Why did you run away? You must have known how worried Mrs Jacobs would be. You know you aren’t allowed to go outside the garden…you know.’
Robert was still clinging to Sarah’s hands. He had started to tremble violently, and tears poured down his face as he burst out passionately, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home…I want Nana…I want Mrs Richards. I don’t like it here.’
Immediately his father’s hands dropped from Robert’s shoulders. His face was in shadow as he turned slightly away, his voice harsh and low as he said roughly, ‘Robert, your grandmother is dead. You know that.’
He stopped as Sarah made an instinctive sound of shocked distress.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he challenged her. ‘Lie to him? Pretend that none of it happened…that his mother, her lover and his grandmother are still alive?
‘Come on, Robert. Let’s get you inside, and this time no running away.’
As he stood up he took hold of Robert’s arm, firmly taking charge of him, but Robert still clung to Sarah, pleading with her not to leave him.
His father might not be actively unkind to him, but he seemed to have little or no idea of how to deal with him, Sarah recognised as she instinctively tried to soothe Robert’s panic, smoothing the soft hair back off his hot face as she promised, ‘If you’re a good boy and go with your father now, Robert, I’ll come and see you tomorrow if you like.’
‘There’s no need for that.’
She met the look Gray Philips gave her with an equally challenging one of her own.
‘Not according to you,’ she agreed coldly. ‘But Robert—’
‘I don’t want you to leave me. I want you to stay with me,’ Robert said, and burst out crying.
Kneeling down beside him, she tried to comfort him as best she could.
‘I can’t stay now, Robert,’ she told him. ‘My cousin will be wondering where I am, but I promise I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’
She looked defiantly at Gray Philips as she said the words, challenging him to refuse to allow her to see his son, and then, before Gray could say anything to her, and desperately trying to blot out Robert’s tearful pleas to her to stay, she turned her back on both of them and hurried back towards the wooden gate.
CHAPTER TWO
HALF an hour later, as she walked towards her cousin’s house, Sarah was still trembling with a mixture of shock and disbelief. She still could not entirely believe it had all actually happened. That poor little boy. He had been so upset…and his father had been so remote…so…so irritated and impatient…so completely unaware of how to respond to his son’s misery and despair.
Sally was in the garden when Sarah opened the gate, dead-heading her roses.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked with some concern. ‘You look upset.’
Sally was frowning when Sarah had finished explaining to her what had happened.
‘Gray Philips…I’d heard that his son had recently come to live with him. The boy’s mother, Gray’s ex-wife, was killed in a car accident. She was pretty wild, according to local gossip. She was having affairs with other men almost before the ink had dried on their marriage certificate.
‘I never met her, but apparently they separated before the little boy was born. I believe that Gray fought for custody of him, but lost, and that there were difficulties over access, which might explain the child’s apparent antipathy towards his father. It must be very traumatic for him.’
‘Yes, dreadfully,’ Sarah agreed vehemently. ‘The poor little mite was in a terrible state.’
Sally’s eyes rounded.
‘I didn’t mean for the boy, I meant for his father…Gray.’
When Sarah frowned she asked quietly, ‘Think about it. You’ve never been allowed to see your child, never had anything to do with him, and suddenly he’s there living with you…hating you…probably blaming you for his mother’s death. Imagine the state he must have been in when he found out that Robert had gone missing.’
Sarah’s frown deepened. Sally was making her feel quite guilty…as though she had somehow been unfair towards Gray Philips, as though she had deliberately misjudged and condemned him.
‘So you’re going back to see him, the little boy, tomorrow, then?’ Sally asked her.
‘I promised I would, although his father wasn’t very pleased.’
Sally gave her a thoughtful look.
‘You’re such a soft touch,’ she told her wryly, ‘but don’t get too involved, will you, love? Rumour has it that Gray Philips is a man who, because of the breakdown of his marriage, doesn’t have a very good opinion of our sex.’
‘That’s his problem, not mine,’ Sarah responded firmly, and yet she was aware of a sense of dismay as she listened to her cousin’s words, even though they only confirmed what her instincts had already told her.
And yet why should she feel dismayed? Gray Philips meant nothing to her; she hadn’t even particularly liked him, and she certainly hadn’t liked the way he was treating his son.
But she had responded to him physically. She had been very, very intensely aware of him as a man, aware of him in a shockingly sexual and intimate way that was totally foreign to her nature.
She had had a brief love-affair when she was at university, a relationship with a fellow student which had lasted a little over six months, but the sexual side of that relationship had never been as important to her as the emotional one. Even before she was ready to admit that she had fallen out of love with Andy, she had lost all interest in him sexually.
Since then she had been too busy, her life filled with too many other things to allow her the time to develop a committed relationship. She had male friends, went out on dates, but none of the men she knew had ever had one tenth, one hundredth of the effect on her that Gray Philips had had.
Trembling a little, she pushed that knowledge away from her, not wanting to confront or analyse it.
Beside her Sally was saying, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Let’s go in and have something to eat.’
* * *
OVER DINNER that evening Sally related the events of Sarah’s encounter to Ross.
‘Gray Philips…’ his eyebrows rose ‘…hmm. That’s interesting. What did you make of him, Sarah? He’s very well thought of by the local business community. A sort of local boy made good. He took over an ailing family business when his uncle died, a light engineering concern in Ludlow, and he’s managed to turn it right round and make it very successful. I have met him, although I don’t know him very well. He’s the sort who seems to prefer to keep himself to himself. Doesn’t play golf…and he isn’t a member of the new private sports centre that’s opened outside Ludlow recently, and yet he certainly looks pretty fit.
‘I had heard that he’d got his son living with him. My boss happened to mention the other day that Philips had been in touch with him, asking if his wife could recommend a good agency to supply him with someone to take charge of the child. Apparently he’s been having problems in that direction. A wealthy single man…’ Ross gave a small shrug. ‘It seems the kin
d of woman he wanted to employ is reluctant to work in a household without another woman in it, and the kind that does want the job seems to be more interested in keeping him company than his son. He has got a housekeeper now, though, I believe.’
‘Elsie Jacobs from the village,’ Sally told him, pulling a face. ‘And you know what she’s like. Hardly the ideal person to have charge of a small child.’
‘Mm. So what did you think of him, then, Sarah? Impressive, isn’t he?’
‘If you happen to like arrogant, bad-tempered and completely insensitive men, then I suppose he is,’ Sarah agreed tartly.
Ross loved to tease her, and was constantly telling her that it was time she found herself a man and settled down, so she knew quite well what lay behind his question. This time, though, she wasn’t going to rise for Ross’s very obvious bait, nor his assumed mock-chauvinistic pose.
‘It’s the little boy, Robert, I feel sorry for,’ Sally told her husband. ‘From what Sarah was saying, he was almost distraught. He was trying to run away to London to find his grandmother’s housekeeper. It must have been awful for him to lose everyone he loved, everyone who was familiar to him, like that.’
‘Mm…although by all accounts his mother was far from the madonna type,’ Ross interrupted. ‘People locally don’t seem to have a very high opinion of her, but then, I suppose, with Gray being local and her not, and the marriage only lasting for such a short time…And to deny Gray any kind of access to the boy…’
‘Surely no court would do that without good reason?’ Sarah pointed out, frowning.
‘Well, you’d think not, but get yourself a good enough lawyer and who knows? And apparently she, the mother, was pretty good at putting on a performance when she deemed it necessary, whereas Gray, from what I know and have heard of him, isn’t the type to actively sue for people’s sympathy and compassion.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ Sarah agreed feelingly, remembering how much Robert’s father had antagonised her with his curt dismissal of her and his manner towards his son.
Ross shot her a very thoughtful look.
‘All the same, he’s very well thought of locally, and he’s done quite a lot for the community.’
‘Pity he hasn’t done something for his son,’ Sarah said grimly. ‘If you could have seen him…He was so upset…so…so unhappy.’
Ross frowned. ‘You’re not trying to suggest that Philips is actually harming the boy in some way, are you?’
Immediately Sarah shook her head.
‘No…at least not in any physical sense, and not deliberately, but emotionally…There doesn’t seem to be any kind of bond between them at all. I suspect he…Gray Philips looks on his son as just another responsibility, a burden he’s had to assume. He seemed more concerned about a meeting he was supposed to attend than Robert…and, of course, to Robert he’s a stranger. If there hasn’t been any contact between them since Robert’s birth…’
‘And if, as you seemed to think was the case, his mother talked to him about Gray as though he was some kind of monster, he’s bound to be afraid, isn’t he?’ Sally put in.
‘Not an easy situation for any man to deal with, but in Gray Philips’s present position it must be doubly difficult,’ Ross commented, explaining, ‘There’s been some talk of a large multi-national wanting to take over the company. Gray is the major shareholder, but there are other family members holding shares, who, it seems, are in favour of the take-over because it will give them instant cash. Gray, on the other hand, quite naturally wants to retain ownership of the business, so there’s an awful lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating going on. I suspect that ultimately he’ll have to buy out the other shareholders; that will mean raising one hell of a lot of money. No, I shouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now,’Ross concluded.
* * *
THAT NIGHT in bed, for the first time since her historic and depressing interview with her superiors, Sarah found that it wasn’t their criticisms of her that were going round and round in her brain as she tried to go to sleep, but that instead she was reliving her run-in with Gray Philips.
Strange how powerful the human mind was. Without even the slightest conscious effort of will she could mentally visualise him in such clear and sharp detail that she could see the changing expressions cross his face; could hear the strong male sound of his voice; could picture each gesture, each movement he had made, almost as though the man himself were there with her.
She turned over in bed, fiercely closing her eyes, trying to block him out of her mind. It didn’t matter what Ross had said to her; she still felt that Gray Philips could have done more, ought to have done more to help his son. That poor little boy, to be so cruelly robbed of those he loved…to be removed from a familiar and loved environment to one that to him must appear totally hostile and unfriendly. To be forced to live with a father who all his young life he had been told was someone who did not love him.
‘I hate you,’ Robert had said to his father with all the vehemence of a frightened child, and just for a moment Sarah had thought she had seen some flicker of emotion burn in those so cold ice-blue eyes. But what that emotion might have been she did not know. Anger and impatience most probably…certainly he had not displayed any other kind of emotion…any kind of warmth or love.
Perhaps in one way it had been wrong of her to promise to visit Robert without first obtaining his father’s permission…perhaps she had done so deliberately because she had known that that permission would have been withheld, but how could she have lived with herself if she had deliberately and uncaringly turned her back on the little boy, shrugging her shoulders and telling herself that he was not her concern? No, she could not have done that. It ran completely counter to her whole nature. Tiredly she allowed herself to drift towards sleep.
* * *
‘LOOK, WHY DON’T you take my car? I shan’t be using it today, so you might as well.’
They were sitting having coffee in the kitchen, and Sally’s offer of the use of her car made Sarah say gratefully, ‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind, although I’m not sure how to find the house. The path went to a back gate and…’
‘I’ve got a map of the village. The house isn’t difficult to find. I’ll get the map and show you…
‘It was Gray Philips’s grandfather who originally bought it,’ Sally explained when she returned with the map, which she spread out on the kitchen table, pinning it down with her half-full mug of coffee.
‘Gray’s father was the older brother and should have inherited both it and the business, but he was in the army. He was killed in action when Gray was quite small. At least, that’s what Mrs Richards told me. His mother apparently remarried and went to live in America, leaving Gray here. He was brought up by his grandfather, his uncle never married, and—again according to Mrs Richards—Gray was sent to boarding-school and then on to university, so that he virtually only spent his holidays here when he was growing up.’
Sarah was frowning as she listened to her cousin. Against her will she felt an aching tenderness, an awareness of how very lonely Gray Philips’s childhood must have been, but surely that loneliness should have made him more compassionate towards his own child and not less? Then again, she knew enough about psychology to know that an adult would often inflict on his or her own children the same miseries they themselves had suffered, sometimes deliberately, but more often than not quite subconsciously, unaware that, out of their own deeply buried pain and resentment, they were unable to let go of the past and their subconscious resentment of another child, their child, enjoying a happier childhood than they had known.
Most people when confronted with such a truth were both appalled and angry, repudiating it immediately, even when it was explained to them that they were not consciously aware of what they were doing.
Was Gray Philips like that? Did he subconsciously resent his son’s happiness?
She was leaping to unfounded conclusions, Sarah warned herself as she forced herself to con
centrate on studying the map…allowing her emotions to take control of her. What Robert needed right now was not someone to reinforce his lack of trust and love for his father, but someone to gently encourage him to form a bond with Gray.
That task was not hers, she warned herself half an hour later as she got into Sally’s car. All she could do was to try to comfort Robert as best she could and to gently point out to him the dangers of trying to run away. It was a pity that Gray Philips had not taken the trouble to find someone more sympathetic and understanding than Mrs Jacobs to take charge of his son, since he plainly was not prepared to give Robert the emotional comfort and support he needed himself.
She found the entrance to the house easily enough. Automatic gates swung open as she drove towards them, admitting her to the gravel-covered drive.
The front view of the house betrayed that it was even larger than she had first imagined and built in the traditional Elizabethan E-shape. The drive swept round not to the front of the house, but through a brick archway and into what had once been the stable-yard. Parking her car here, Sarah climbed out.
Was it her imagination or did the sound of her shoes crunching over the gravel seem preternaturally loud?
She walked round to the front of the house, pausing to admire the double row of clipped yews that framed the main path as she did so. Beyond them in the distance she could see the shape of a formal pond and the spray of a fountain. Reflecting that it must cost a fortune to keep the house and garden in order, she mounted the steps and pulled the bell chain.
For a long time nothing happened, and she was just about to wonder angrily if Gray Philips had given Mrs Jacobs instructions not to admit her, when the door suddenly opened to the extent of its safety chain and a small, familiar voice asked uncertainly, ‘Is that you, Sarah?’
‘Robert…Where’s Mrs Jacobs?’ she asked the little boy as he reached up to release the safety chain.