by Penny Jordan
‘No thanks, Paul.’
Paul Davis was their local celebrity, the Managing Director of their local radio station. He was also married, although lie made no attempt to hide his many affairs from his wife.
‘Spoilsport.’
Jaime returned her attention to the meeting. Charles was speaking, and she groaned inwardly, knowing his propensity for long and dull speeches. Fern was with Mrs Widdows next door, as Sarah Cummings was also out that evening, and Jaime had promised that she would be back by eight. It was seven now. Paul Davis was also glancing at his watch, and when Charles paused he made full use of the opportunity to stand up and bring the meeting to a rather abrupt halt.
Charles looked pained and flustered. ‘Rather like an irritated St Bernard,’ Jaime thought watching him.
‘I hadn’t finished speaking,’ he complained to Jaime in aggrieved accents later. ‘Have you been to see Caroline yet?’
‘No, I’ll go tomorrow. But she and I were never friends, Charles, and I don’t think an approach from me will do the slightest good.’
‘Perhaps not, but at least she’d know that we mean to do something. It is a listed building after all. . . .’
Jaime thought of other listed buildings which had become piles of rubble in dubious circumstances, but said nothing—if she didn’t leave soon, she’d be late for Fern.
Her route took her past the entrance to the Abbey. As she drove past, a car was turning in at the gates, and she caught a glimpse of a male outline before the car disappeared. One of Caroline’s lovers? If so, this man must be rather more wealthy than they usually were. He had been driving a menacing-looking black Ferrari.
‘No . . . look, you do it this way. . . .’ Fern’s clear, high-pitched voice reached her as she knocked on Mrs Widdows’ door.
‘I was just showing Mrs Widdows how to make a house,’ she explained when she saw Jaime. ‘A man telephoned after you’d gone out and asked to speak to Granny. He asked me what my name was, and I told him. He was nice.’
It was rare for Fern to make any comment on other adults, but as her mother was out Jamie was unable to question her about the unknown male who had won her daughter’s approval.
It was perhaps cowardly of her to take Fern with her the following afternoon when she finally plucked up the courage to go and see Caroline, but Charles had telephoned in the morning, insisting that she go, and having Fern with her gave her something else to worry about other than the coming interview.
Caroline had never liked her; Jaime knew that they were worlds apart for all the similarity in their ages. Caroline had come to her wedding, and she could vividly remember the predatory look in her eyes when she saw Blake. There must be very few women immune to Blake’s wholly male, sexual aura. During their brief marriage she had soon come to recognise the look in other women’s eyes which said that they were imagining him as their lover. It had driven her into paroxysms of jealous insecurity. How could Blake genuinely prefer her to these sexy, assured women?
As it was a pleasant day she had elected to walk to the Abbey, her decision in no way connected with the fact that walking would delay the inevitable confrontation with Caroline, she taunted herself as she fastened Fern’s sandals.
One day her daughter was going to be an extremely attractive woman, and when she was Jaime was determined that she would have far more self-confidence than she had ever had.
‘I like this green dress,’ Fern told her complacently. ‘It’s my favourite.’
‘It matches your eyes,’ Jaime told her. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes, I like your dress too, Mummy.’
It had been a present from her mother the previous year. It was quite simple, white crinkle cotton, with shoe-string straps and an A-line skirt, the ideal dress for a hot, sunny afternoon. Her skin tanned well and the white fabric showed off her smooth golden arms and shoulders. She had taken more care than usual with her make-up and hair. When she looked happy, her eyes glowed like sapphires, Blake had once told her, and he had bought her a sapphire engagement ring to match them. She still had it, but could not wear it because of the memories it brought with it. She felt her heart contract with pain and regret.
Fern was an entertaining companion, chattering away at her side as they headed for the Abbey, Jaime matching her steps to her daughter’s slower ones.
‘It’s a very big house, isn’t it?’ Fern commented when they turned into the drive, ‘but I think I like Granny’s cottage best.’
Fern moved with a natural grace Jaime noticed, watching her daughter, unaware that her lithe delicacy had been inherited from her. Jaime had always enjoyed dancing. The discipline of teaching others, of helping them and watching their own appreciation grow with ability gave her an intense feeling of satisfaction. Fern tugged on her hand as she bent to examine a clump of ragged robin, and not for the first time Jaime gave mental thanks for the fact that her daughter had such an equable and sunny temperament. Fern would never suffer as she had done from an excess of sensitivity and over-emotionalism. ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ her mother always said when she voiced this fact. ‘You have many things to recommend yourself, Jaime, you just don’t realise it.’ It sometimes seemed to Jaime that her mother had been trying to bolster her self-confidence all her life, but she had just never possessed the sturdy independence which characterised both her mother and her daughter.
The Abbey loomed before them, grey and ivy-coloured. Although not a beautiful house, it possessed a mellow air of continuity that had always appealed to Jaime. It had once been an Abbey, although little of the original building remained. It had been rebuilt during the reign of Charles the Second and, although Caroline complained that she found the panelled downstairs rooms gloomy and depressing, Jaime loved them.
Mrs March, Caroline’s housekeeper, answered the door, beaming at Fern, who responded with a happy grin of her own.
‘Why don’t I take her into the kitchen and give her some of my home-made gingerbread?’ she suggested, not realising that she was depriving Jaime of the emotional support she felt she needed. ‘Miss Caroline’s in the drawing room,’ she added.
No doubt Mrs March knew quite well why she was here, Jaime reflected, watching her daughter follow the housekeeper without a backward glance. The panelling had been removed from the drawing room by Caroline’s father, but the graceful stucco ceiling remained, and the Adam fireplace added by a Georgian owner. Caroline had completely refurnished the house when she inherited it. Personally, Jaime loathed the cold starkness of the modern Italian furniture she had chosen, but there was no doubt that it made a stunning setting for her startling beauty. Dark red hair framed her face in an aureole of curls, the leather trousers and silk blouse she was wearing being a soft khaki colour which emphasised her colouring. As always, she was immaculately made-up. She had played at modelling when she first left school and had picked up enough tips to achieve what always seemed to Jaime to be an effortlessly glamorous look. She reminded Jaime of the women who had pursued Blake, both before and after their marriage. Brittle, expensive, beautiful predators who lived by their own rules. Women she could never hope to compete with. ‘Why bother?’ her mother had once said lightly when she had tried to confide her fears to her. Blake had chosen to marry her, but she had never been able to rid herself of the conviction that, somehow, she had coerced him into marriage and that had been something she hadn’t been able to tell her mother. She had been too deeply ashamed to admit to her that she didn’t have the strength to be as independent as Sarah was. She had always felt that, secretly, she must have been a disappointment to her mother; that although she had never shown or expressed any impatience, there must have been some. ‘You underestimate yourself too much Jaime.’ That was what she had always said, and Jaime would have been surprised if she had known that, far from comparing her with Caroline to her own discredit, most people would have found far more appeal in her own natural beauty and quiet intelligence than in Caroline’s showy, pushy manners.
‘Well, wel
l if it isn’t Miss Goody Two Shoes,’ Caroline mocked. The nickname was a throwback to their schooldays, and Jaime managed to hold back the humiliating scald of colour she could feel rising up under her skin.
‘No need to ask what you’re doing here,’ Caroline continued tauntingly. ‘But what happened to the cavalry?’
‘If you mean Charles, he’s had to go to Dorchester to a meeting,’ Jaime responded evenly. ‘Caroline, surely it can’t be true that you intend to sell the Abbey to a developer?’
‘Why not?’ Caroline asked carelessly, ‘After all, it’s mine to do with as I choose.’ Without inviting Jaime to sit down, she drifted elegantly over to one of the uncomfortable-looking modem chairs, crossing her legs at the ankle, sure of herself as a woman in a way that Jaime felt she could never emulate.
‘But it is a listed building,’ Jaime reminded her quietly. Caroline shrugged. ‘So what. . . . If you feel so strongly about it, you can always put in a more attractive bid. The current one is £250,000.’ She laughed unpleasantly at Jaime’s expression.
The sound of Fern’s excited voice interrupted Jaime’s thought flow. She could see her daughter in the garden, walking towards the French windows, chattering animatedly to the man at her side.
Jaime’s heart seemed to do a somersault and then stop beating as she stared disbelieving at the dark head bent towards her daughter’s. She started to shake, her sight blurring, the two heads of dark brown hair so similar that they merged into one. Caroline got up and opened the French doors.
‘Blake, darling, there you are. I thought you were writing. . . .’ There was malice in her eyes as she directed a contemptuous look at Jaime’s white face. ‘You seem to have given poor Jaime rather a shock, didn’t you let her know you were coming?’
As she watched the dark, hawklike profile of her husband turn in her direction, Jaime struggled to retain some composure.
‘Jaime and I aren’t exactly on intimate terms these days.’ The indifferent tone of his voice, the cool aloofness in his green eyes, both combined to increase Jaime’s feeling of nausea. She could scarcely believe that this handsome distant man had once possessed her body; had fathered her child.
‘I agree.’
‘Umm, it seems hard to believe that you were ever that,’ Caroline drawled, ‘but of course there is Fern.’
Fern! Trying to control the shudders of shocked reaction coursing through her, Jaime looked into her daughter’s shining eyes.
‘This is my Daddy,’ she told Jaime importantly, ‘I found him in the garden. He was looking at some flowers. I told him my name and he said that he was my Daddy.’
‘Fern, it’s time to go home.’ How weak and faint her voice sounded. ‘Go and say thank you to Mrs Marsh for your gingerbread and then we’ll go.’
‘I’m sorry about the interruption, Blake,’ she heard Caroline apologising as she hurried Fern away. ‘It’s Mrs Marsh’s fault, she should never have let the child loose in the garden.’
Blake’s response was an indistinct blur that Jaime didn’t stay to hear. Why should she? She already knew how Blake viewed his daughter; in much the same light as he did his wife; as an encumbrance he would prefer to do without.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Yes, staying up at the Abbey he is . . . writing a book or supposed to be. . . .’ The voice faded away as Jaime entered the small post office and her face burned as she recognised who they were talking about. It was as impossible to ignore Blake’s presence in the vicinity as it was the sympathetic glances that seemed to follow her everywhere she went these days. Even at the studio she was aware of the faint air of sympathetic concern that surrounded her.
‘It’s horrible,’ she complained to her mother that night. ‘I feel as though I’m being treated as the victim of an incurable disease.’
‘It’s only because people don’t want to hurt you,’ Sarah sympathised. ‘If you talk to them openly about it, they’ll soon accept the situation.’ ‘Why on earth did Blake have to come here?’
‘Presumably for the reason Caroline gave you. He needs somewhere to write.’
‘Or because he wants to flaunt his affair with Caroline in front of me.’
‘Why should he want to do that?’ Her mother’s glance was calmly shrewd. ‘You haven’t seen him for four years, and if he wanted to have an affair with Caroline, there’s nothing to stop him, although I doubt that she’s his type.’
‘But why should he need somewhere to write. . .?’ Frustration edged up under her voice, giving it a husky note of impatience.
‘Jaime, I know as little about, his motives as you do yourself. If you really want answers to all these questions, you must ask him yourself.’
‘But to tell Fern that he’s her father!’ Why must her mother always be so reasonable and fair-minded? Why couldn’t she simply side with her without question? Her impartiality was frustrating and, in some strange sense, vaguely threatening,
‘He is her father,’ Sarah pointed out mildly. ‘One of your criticisms of him has always been his lack of interest in her. Try to be consistent, Jaime, my love. What do you want of the man? Or is he just to be a whipping post?’
‘I don’t believe for one moment that he’s come down here simply for Fern’s sake.’
‘Jaime, I really can’t see the point in discussing him with you while you stay in this frame of mind. I can understand why seeing him should shock and even upset you, but for Fern’s sake you must try to set aside your own dislike of him, and remember that he is her father. Must he be damned for ever, because you quarrelled with him?’ she asked quizzically. ‘Perhaps he’s changed, people do you know,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t rush to meet trouble head on, Jaime. I personally can’t believe for one moment that Blake is staying with Caroline simply because he wishes to flaunt any relationship they might have in front of you. He isn’t that type of man. Now, I’m going shopping this afternoon. I need to restock my wardrobe for Rome, but I should be back for tea.’
On Wednesday afternoons Jaime closed the studio and usually spent the afternoon with Fern. .She had just collected her from playschool and was making a drink when she heard a car stopping outside. Her mother’s cottage was the middle one of a row of three with a long front garden and a pleasant, sheltered back one. The kitchen-dining room in which Jaime was standing had windows at either end, and her heart skittered to a standstill as she saw Blake unfold his lean frame from the low-slung black Ferrari she had seen entering the Abbey’s drive earlier in the week, and unlock the garden gate.
‘Mummy, you’re daydreaming again,’ Fern criticised sternly. She wanted to run but where was there to run to? And besides, she had left that sort of childish reaction behind her when she left London.
As she opened the door to him, he seemed to tower menacingly over her, dark and forbidding, his jean-clad figure familiar and yet totally alien.
He had always affected her in this way; the maleness in him calling out to her deeply feminine core so that her pulse rate quickened and her stomach ached.
‘Sensible of you,’ he commented when she let him in. His eyes were derisive as he added, ‘Knowing you as I do, I half expected to have to break the door down to get in. You always did have a taste for the dramatic.’
‘Not to say farcical,’ Jaime agreed, watching the faint surprise replace the derision. ‘We do have a back door,’ she pointed out, ‘and it is open.’
‘We have to talk.’
‘Do we? I can’t think what about.’
‘Well, there’s Fern for starters.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ It was her turn to sound derisive. ‘Forgive me for not recognising your concern for your daughter straight away, won’t you?’
‘You know the reason I haven’t shown any interest in her before.’ His voice was clipped, and if she had not known better she could have imagined there was a trace of angry pain in it. ‘What, besides Fern, brings you down here?’
‘You heard what Caroline said. I need the peace and quiet to write.
’
‘A new departure isn’t it? You always seemed to manage quite well at the fiat.’
‘With you for inspiration?’ His mouth twisted. ‘They were articles, this is a novel—my third to be exact.’
Her heart missed a beat and then hammered painfully. It hurt much more than she could say that there had been such drastic developments in his life and that she had known nothing about them.
‘I started the first one just after you left me, after I got back from El Salvador.’
She didn’t want to talk about the past. It held far too many unhappy memories. Fern heard their voices and came running out of the kitchen, launching herself at Blake with unabashed enthusiasm. ‘Daddy. . . .’
‘I’d like to take her out for the afternoon.’
‘No . . . Wednesday is the only afternoon I have her all to myself.’
‘Then come with us.’ It was a subtle challenge, reminding her of the many other challenges he had given her in the past and the often childish manner in which she had reacted to them. Fern’s smile widened and Jaime knew that if she refused 1 lie little girl would be disappointed.
‘Very well,’ she agreed coolly, suppressing wry amusement as she saw disbelief flicker briefly in Blake’s eyes. Had he expected her to refuse? She shrugged aside the thought. What did it matter what he had expected? She wasn’t going to leave Fern alone with him, at least not until she knew why he was making this attempt to get to know his daughter. Nor was she going to allow him to provoke her as he had done in the past. With a slight start, she realised she was experiencing none of the tongue-tied anxiety she had previously felt in his presence. Somehow the gulf she had always felt between them seemed to have narrowed, and she no longer stood so much in awe of him. Not that she underestimated him for one moment. Fern was already showing incipient signs of being dazzled by him and her heart ached for her daughter, the pain followed by a fierce wave of protective mother love. Blake would never hurt Fern the way he had hurt her.
‘How about the New Forest?’ Blake suggested blandly. Jaime bit her lip. They had once spent a weekend there shortly after they were married.