by Hyland, Tara
By the time she turned eighteen, Isabelle suspected she’d already been half in love with William. He’d had little time for her, though; she was far too frivolous for his tastes. While many of her friends had embraced the sixties’ feminist spirit—striking out for careers as doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen—Isabelle never harbored any such ambitions. Her greatest achievement in life was making her debut, at a time when that no longer meant very much. She was aware that William, who was even then a very serious young man, found her terribly silly.
That all changed the year she turned twenty-three. At the ball held to celebrate her birthday, for the first time ever William had sought her out, dancing with her and paying attention to her in a way she couldn’t remember him doing before. That summer, he escorted her to the social events of the season—Henley and Ascot; Goodwood and Glyndebourne. At the time, Isabelle hadn’t wanted to question his change of heart. It was easier to assume that she had simply matured in his eyes; that he was finally seeing her for who she really was. But looking back now, she could see that it was Rosalind, her formidable mother-in-law, who had encouraged their courtship. Isabelle guessed that, to Rosalind, she would have seemed like the perfect choice of wife for William: a pretty, docile little thing—and, most important, sole heir to her father’s factories.
William’s reasons for going along with his mother’s wishes were less clear. He’d spent his twenties parading an ever-changing cast of long-limbed models through Tramp and Annabel’s. None had held his interest. By that time, Isabelle suspected, he’d resigned himself to never falling in love, so making a good match with her probably seemed like the best alternative. Whatever his motivation, he’d finally proposed to Isabelle in the autumn of 1970, and she, happy to have William on any terms, had readily accepted.
In hindsight she realized that her unhappiness had started long before his affair. The loneliness had begun that first year of marriage. Stuck on her own at Aldringham during the week, she could still remember her mounting excitement as Friday evening approached, waiting for William to come home; only to be fetched to the phone at the last minute and told that there had been some emergency at the office. “I’ve decided to stay in London for the weekend. You don’t mind too much, do you, darling?”
“No, of course I don’t,” she’d always said bravely, ignoring the crushing disappointment at the thought of spending yet another weekend alone.
Of course she’d had friends around—like-minded women whom she’d met through the endless charity committees that she sat on. But they’d always seemed to have so much else going on. “Now I have the children, I’m quite happy to see the back of Tim on Monday morning,” Penelope Whitton, one of her old school pals, had confided. And so it was that Elizabeth was born, a respectable eighteen months after William and Isabelle’s marriage.
But for Isabelle, having a child didn’t ease her loneliness. William’s trips back to Aldringham remained infrequent. And Elizabeth didn’t fill the void in her life as Isabelle had hoped. In fact, the little girl seemed rather more taken with her father than her mother. “Daddy home soon?” she would ask hopefully once she was able to talk, her little face brightening on hearing that he would be. Sunday evenings became a battle to calm the child down as she cried for hours after William’s departure. Once again, Isabelle was left with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.
She remembered feeling hurt, but not surprised, when she learned of William’s affair. It was Penelope who’d told her; Penny, who’d spotted William on the street the last time she’d been in London. “Called out to him of course, darling, but he didn’t seem to hear me,” she’d told Isabelle, before adding that he’d been far too engrossed in talking to the person he was with . . . the girl he was with. “Didn’t know her myself,” she’d said, watching Isabelle’s reaction carefully. “Frightfully young, though—and pretty, too . . .”
It had made sense, of course. Deep down, Isabelle had known there was someone. Over that long hot summer of 1974, her husband’s trips home had been even less frequent than usual, and on the rare occasions he was around, he’d stopped sharing her bed. It was almost a relief to know there was a reason behind his growing distance from her.
But even once his affair had ended—which she’d intuitively sensed it had, a few months later—things hadn’t improved. He might have been home more often, but everything she did seemed to irritate him. She wasn’t sure if it was this in itself that had tipped her over the edge. She hadn’t exactly been happy before that, but as 1975 wore on, she began to have episodes. They would start innocuously enough, with her breaking out in a cold sweat. But then she would begin to tremble, her chest would tighten, and she would find it hard to breathe.
On Penelope’s suggestion, she went to see a discreet young doctor in Harley Street. He listened sympathetically to Isabelle’s symptoms, gave her a thorough examination, and told her that it sounded as though she was having panic attacks.
“Everyone has stress in their lives, Mrs. Melville, and we all cope with it in different ways. Some of us need more help than others.” He began to write out a prescription. “A lot of women in your situation have found that this helps them through the difficult periods.”
He tore off the paper and held it out. It was for Valium. He advised her to take one pill every time she felt an attack coming on, and to come back within a month so he could check on her progress.
When she woke the following morning, and felt the familiar tightening of her chest, she reached into her bedside drawer for the bottle. One little white pill later, she was much calmer. To Isabelle, it was a miracle.
She hadn’t told William about her visit to Dr. Hayward or the tablets that she was taking. She knew that he wouldn’t approve. But, even if he didn’t know what she had been up to, he was delighted with the results. “I’m so pleased you’re feeling better, darling,” he said on Christmas Eve, as they watched Elizabeth hang up her stocking.
She smiled dreamily at him. The past few weeks, the drugs hadn’t been working so well, and so Dr. Hayward had suggested upping the dosage. She had been a little worried at first, but now, seeing how pleased William was with her progress, she knew it had been the right thing to do.
Over the next few months she graduated from the white to the yellow pills, and then on to the blue. Maybe she was a touch drowsy and confused sometimes, her reflexes perhaps slower than normal, but at least the crippling anxiety was gone.
She remembered little of the day that Elizabeth, not yet five years old, had found her unconscious. As usual, the child had been picked up from school by her nanny, and as soon as they’d gotten home, she’d raced upstairs to her mummy’s bedroom, eager to recount her latest adventures. Even at that age, she had known something was very wrong when she couldn’t rouse her mother and had gone to fetch the housekeeper. An ambulance was called, William summoned home. And, after several fraught conversations, Isabelle spent the next few weeks in a private clinic.
No one was especially surprised when she announced, six months later, that she was pregnant again. Some people have another baby to save their marriage; for Isabelle, it was to save herself.
If Elizabeth was a Daddy’s girl, from the start Amber was very much her mother’s daughter. While their first child had been called after William’s paternal grandmother, this time Isabelle chose the name herself.
Rosalind was appalled. “Amber? I’ve never heard such a ridiculous name. What about Anna or Amanda instead? Something more sensible.”
But, for once, William let his wife have her way. “It’s her choice, and I won’t have you upsetting her,” he told his mother, with uncharacteristic firmness.
Amber was in every way the perfect daughter for Isabelle. She even looked like her mother—with her white ringlets and peaches-and-cream complexion—and was far more delicate than her robust older sister. Unlike Elizabeth, she wasn’t strong and independent—from the start she needed Isabelle. When a boy pushed her over on the playground, she cried for
her mummy; if it had been Elizabeth, she would have stood up and pushed him back harder. With Amber, Isabelle was able to do all the things that she’d never been able to do with Elizabeth: shopping, gossiping, discussing falling-outs with friends.
Since Amber’s birth eleven years ago, the Melville household had settled into a state of equilibrium. Isabelle wasn’t sure if she’d have described herself as happy exactly, but she’d found peace.
And then Katie O’Dwyer had come back into their lives.
Isabelle still couldn’t find it within herself to be angry with William. She had seen how distraught he was when he’d received Katie’s letter. She had witnessed his anguish at the years he had missed with her and their child. She knew the pain he’d felt at not being able to see Katie before she died. And she had comforted him as best she could. Isabelle knew she would never be the love of her husband’s life, but she was his confidante, his best friend, and the only person who ever saw his vulnerable side, and that was enough for her.
Now, in half an hour’s time, his other daughter would arrive. Isabelle hadn’t questioned William’s decision to bring the girl to live with them, and she would do what she could to make the child feel at home. But, however understanding Isabelle might be, she couldn’t help feeling apprehensive. Caitlin’s presence would disrupt everything at Aldringham. And she wasn’t sure it would be for the better. Especially not for Elizabeth, who so adored her father and was so disappointed by what he had done.
Elizabeth stood on the north front, watching James’s motorbike disappear down the driveway. It was only once he was out of sight that she finally allowed the smile to slip from her face.
God, how she was dreading this afternoon. It had been bad enough learning about her father’s indiscretion. But having her half sister come to live with them, a constant reminder of his weakness, made it all so much worse. It irritated Elizabeth no end, the amount of fuss he seemed to be making over this girl—mostly because her own life had always been a constant battle to win his attention. It was a fight Elizabeth had been losing since the day she was born.
While Caitlin had grown up in a house filled with love but not much money, Elizabeth’s experience had been diametrically opposite. Materially, she had never wanted for anything. Her birth had been fit for royalty: a private maternity wing of St. Mary’s Hospital, London, with a world-renowned professor of obstetrics and gynecology on hand at the delivery. The one crucial element missing from the scene had been the proud father.
“I’ve been delayed in New York,” he’d told an exhausted, tearful Isabelle over the phone. He’d eventually arrived a day later than his firstborn. This careless neglect set the tone for the future relationship between father and daughter.
Elizabeth grew up with every privilege and advantage money could buy. A new horse every year; tennis lessons with an ex–seeded player; taught to ski by a one-time Olympic champion. But what she didn’t have was the one thing she yearned for: her father’s attention. To the young girl, he was an enigmatic figure, holding the kind of fascination that came from a lack of availability. She understood from an early age that he was an important man, busy running the family business.
“Daddy had to work,” Isabelle would say when he failed to make another prize-giving, carol concert, or ballet recital. But, even though he never turned up, Elizabeth never stopped hoping he would.
To Elizabeth, her father’s blatant lack of interest had always seemed curious as well as hurtful. From an early age, she was aware that she was his firstborn child, which meant she would one day inherit the controlling stake in Melville. Surely that meant she should be important to him? Her grandmother and Uncle Piers, her father’s younger brother, certainly doted on her—lavishing far more attention on her than on her younger sister Amber. What was she doing wrong that made her father so ambivalent toward her?
God, how she loved her father—and how she ached for his approval. She wanted to please him, to prove that she was worthy of taking over from him one day, so she reacted by becoming a compulsive overachiever. To Elizabeth, second place meant failure. Even if she wasn’t naturally gifted at something, she would work hard to become the best. Nothing ever got in the way of achieving what she wanted. When she was just ten years old, she fell off her horse while trying to jump a new fence. The groom rushed over to her.
“Are you okay, Miss Melville?”
But she was already on her feet, gathering the reins. “Just help me back up.”
Only when she’d jumped the fence did she finally let him examine her arm. By then it was purple and swollen—broken in three places.
This determination translated into every aspect of Elizabeth’s life—even her appearance. She used expensive makeup to emphasize her best features and found out which clothes suited her figure. She had a standing six-weekly appointment at Hari’s in Chelsea, to have her mouse brown hair precision-cut and highlighted golden blonde. Hours of tennis and horseback riding gave her slender figure definition and muscle tone, as well as a year-round tan. It was a high-maintenance look, but Elizabeth didn’t resent it. Nothing worthwhile ever came easy, that was her motto.
It was this attitude which had made her the winner she was. She was always first in her class at Greycourt and had been unanimously elected student council president, and everyone expected her to be accepted at Cambridge that Christmas. Everything in her life had been perfect until her father, the one person she looked up to most, had let her down. Unfortunately, unlike most other aspects of her life, there was nothing she could do about his failings.
With a sigh of resignation, she walked back into the house and headed upstairs. She was halfway along the corridor when she spotted her bedroom door ajar. She frowned. She was certain that she remembered closing it on the way out—which left only one explanation. Amber, she thought to herself, quickening her pace.
Sure enough, inside she found her eleven-year-old sister standing at her dressing table, with Elizabeth’s antique jewelry box open in front of her.
“Amber!” Hearing her sister’s voice, Amber looked up guiltily. “What did I tell you about asking permission before you start going through my stuff?”
“I was going to ask,” Amber said, with a touch of petulance, “but I looked really hard for ages and couldn’t find you. And I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
Elizabeth had heard all the excuses before. She stalked over and slammed the lid closed. The box was handcrafted ebony, dating back to the nineteenth century. Her grandmother, Rosalind, had given it to her, along with several pieces of jewelry, for her last birthday. The present had great sentimental as well as monetary value to Elizabeth, and she had forbidden her careless younger sister to play with it. But that didn’t seem to stop Amber.
“And you can give those back, too.” Elizabeth reached out for the rope of pearls around her little sister’s neck.
But as she started to take the necklace off, Amber made a grab for it, too. For a split second, they were both tugging in opposite directions, and then the string snapped. Pearls clattered across the polished wood floor.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Elizabeth cried. “Look what’s happened now.” She knelt down and started to gather up the pearls. “Come on, the least you could do is help.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” the younger girl insisted, a slight tremor in her voice.
Elizabeth snorted. “Of course it wasn’t. It never is.” She scowled up at her sister. “Wait until I tell Granny about this.”
With that, Amber burst into tears.
“Girls? What’s going on?”
Elizabeth and Amber both looked over to see their mother in the doorway. Before Elizabeth could explain, Amber fled from the room, howling loudly.
“Amber!” Isabelle called, but the girl didn’t stop. After a moment, her bedroom door slammed shut.
Isabelle turned reproachful eyes on her eldest daughter. “What on earth’s the matter with Amber?”
“She’s being a drama queen. As usual.�
�� Elizabeth explained about the broken necklace.
“Well, it sounds to me as if it was an accident,” Isabelle said tentatively, once she’d finished.
Elizabeth made no effort to disguise her outrage. “An accident! You know full well that she shouldn’t have been going through my stuff.”
Elizabeth wondered why she bothered. It was just like her mother to turn a blind eye to anything Amber did wrong. Three nannies had told Isabelle that she was far too lenient on her spoiled youngest daughter. “You’re storing up a lot of problems for later on,” the last one had warned. “She can’t be allowed to feel that acting out is an acceptable way to get your attention.” Elizabeth had wholeheartedly agreed—but, yet again, Isabelle had failed to listen, allowing Amber to wear makeup and clothes that were far too old for her, no matter what William said.
Now Isabelle lowered her voice. “Please, Elizabeth. You know this . . . well, none of this has been easy on her.”
“It hasn’t exactly been easy on any of us, has it, Mummy?”
Elizabeth waited for an answer. When none was forthcoming, she sighed. That was the problem with her mother—she was weak. She always took the path of least resistance. Like having this Caitlin O’Dwyer come to live with them. Elizabeth didn’t understand why she couldn’t have just said no to William—told him that it was unfair to her and his two legitimate children. But, as usual, she let herself be walked all over. What kind of woman stayed with someone who had humiliated her like that?
The girl gave an impatient shrug. “Anyway, I should have a shower.”
“Yes, of course.” Isabelle glanced at her watch. “You’d better get ready quickly. Caitlin—”
“—will be here soon,” Elizabeth cut in. “Yes. I know.”
Isabelle looked pained at the scornful tone in her child’s voice.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said quietly.
Elizabeth was about to snap off a reply, when a sound from outside—car tires creeping up the gravel driveway—stopped her. Instinctively, both mother and daughter turned toward the window. Damn, Elizabeth thought. There would be no time to shower or change now. She was here.