by Penny Jordan
Her heart flooded with love and pleasure. She ran towards her and they hugged one another.
‘Hello, little mama,’ Sophy whispered tremulously, reverting to the silly pet name which had evolved when she was tiny and people had confused Kate’s role in her life. She had then started calling Kate ‘my little mama’ and the nickname had stuck, especially when Sophy had started shooting up above her mother.
Once she had released her, Kate stepped back to look at her daughter. This incredibly special and beautiful child who she still could not entirely believe was hers.
Every bit of her gleamed with vitality and happiness, right from the crown of her silky bobbed hair to the polished nails of her toes, peeping through the high-heeled sandals she was wearing.
Looking at them, Kate remarked absently, ‘It’s just as well John is so tall.’
‘Mm.’ The dark grey, black-lashed eyes that Sophy had inherited from her father gave Kate a laughing look, as the girl said irrepressively, ‘We fit very well together…’
She had never been able to resist teasing, and she laughed again as she saw the faint surge of colour sting her mother’s face. ‘Don’t worry, little mama,’ she added chidingly. ‘I’m not about to repeat your mistake. I am most definitely not pregnant. At least, not yet,’ she added thoughtfully.
There was a small silence, and then Kate said emotionally, ‘You, my love, are most definitely the best mistake I ever made.’
It was true. Nearly twenty-one years ago, terrified, pregnant…she had just made the discovery that the man she thought loved her was in fact married to someone else…had had a child with that someone else. She had thought then that her whole world had come to an end, and so it might have done if her parents hadn’t been so wonderful…
If…so many ifs, which had brought her to this day and this place, surely one of the proudest women alive.
She had achieved so much, this daughter of hers…done so much in her short life. A first-class degree from Oxford…holidays spent working abroad, so that she could be self-supporting, a wide circle of friends, leisure activities that ranged from skiing to abseiling… A job that promised to sustain her intellectually all through her life…and now marriage to a man who would genuinely be a true partner to her; moreover, a man whose family had opened its arms to welcome her.
With fervent gratitude she acknowledged that, whatever her own feelings about the circumstances of Sophy’s birth, her daughter had never betrayed a moment’s chagrin or resentment over them. She was a girl who was naturally likeable, who was open and friendly with others, who met life on its own terms. Sophy had grown so much into being the woman she herself had always wanted to be and never could be, and now here she was, adult, confident, in love, with the whole world spread out in front of her for the taking.
Kate felt her heart swell with maternal pride…a pride that was tinged with sadness. It was an intrinsic part of Kate’s personality that she took no credit herself for Sophy’s well-adjusted attitude to life.
Today marked the start of a new life for Sophy…and the end of an old life for her.
‘Well, come on,’ Sophy demanded. ‘Let me see what you’re planning to wear tomorrow…I can’t wait to see the guests’ faces when they realise that you are my mother.’
Tears stung Kate’s eyes. It was an added gift, this one—that Sophy should always have been so proud and supportive of her…almost as though from a young age she had known how vulnerable she was.
She touched her arm now and smiled through her tears.
‘You are the one everyone will be focusing on,’ she chided her maternally, and then a frown touched her forehead and she said quietly, ‘Sophy, I’m sorry that your father won’t be here to give you away. I…’
Sophy hugged her swiftly. ‘Don’t be,’ she told her promptly. ‘Any man who could do what he did to you is a rat and, quite honestly, I wouldn’t want him in my life. I mean it,’ she assured her firmly, and then added, ‘John’s mother was asking me the last time I saw her if I ever wondered about him, or was curious about him.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Kate asked her quietly. It had always hounded her, this fear that one day Sophy would naturally want to seek out the man who had fathered her. Her fear had not been for herself but for her child…that Sophy would be rejected as she had been rejected.
‘The truth. That you explained to me when I was old enough to understand what had happened… That you had fallen in love with someone who you thought was free to love you in return…and that you had then discovered that he was in fact already married with a child. That on the advice and counselling of Gran and Gramps you had decided not to get in touch with him and tell him about me because, as they had pointed out to you, he had already made it plain that he didn’t want anything to do with you, and that anyway, a man who had already betrayed his marriage vows and his child was only going to cause us both a great deal of unhappiness.
‘I’ve always agreed with what Gran and Gramps told you,’ she added calmly. ‘He couldn’t have been much of a man, to hurt you the way he did. You and Gran and Gramps have always given me so much love…been so honest and truthful with me.’ She looked steadily at her mother. ‘I admire you tremendously for not giving in to the temptation to confront him with your pregnancy, especially when you loved him so much. He has no place in my life or in my heart. How could he have? If I had one wish it would not be for my father, but that Gran and Gramps were still alive and that Gramps was here to walk down the aisle with me.’
They hugged one another silently for a moment, both of them acknowledging the huge emotional debt they owed to Kate’s parents, who had always been so wise and caring, never reproaching her for what she had done but instead gently helping her to understand that for her own sake and her child’s she must put the past behind her.
‘I think what you and I need right now is a bottle of champagne and a weepy movie,’ Sophy said shakily.
Kate laughed.
‘Maybe, but what we have is a potential strawberry mountain waiting to be hulled and washed.’ She saw Sophy’s grimace and reminded her, mock-severely, ‘You were the one who wanted the June wedding…the country setting…the fresh strawberries and cream…’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Sophy protested as they went together to the car to bring in the fruit.
CHAPTER TWO
‘THE MOST beautiful girl…’
‘Such a lovely dress…’
‘What a fabulous day…’
The comments washed past Kate as she stood on the steps of the church with Sophy and John and John’s immediate family.
The June sunshine was dazzlingly bright and hot after the cool, cloistered peace of the church. The vicar had held a private memorial service for her parents in that same church after the plane crash… Her breath locked in her chest as she reminded herself that, today of all days, she must not allow anything to cloud Sophy’s happiness.
And Sophy was happy. It radiated out of her.
As she watched, the newly married pair touched hands, a small, private gesture of shared love and reassurance, and then Sophy commented curiously, ‘Heavens, John, who’s that gorgeous dark-haired man over there with the redhead?’
All of them turned to look in the direction Sophy was discreetly indicating.
A couple were standing apart from the rest of the guests, in the shadowy seclusion of the quiet graveyard.
Kate looked at them absently, and then focused abruptly on the man, her heart feeling as though it had suddenly been clamped in a giant vice. The whole world seemed to spin crazily around her as her throat went dry, and she fought off the panic engulfing her. It couldn’t be… Not here! Not now! Not today!
Somewhere in the distance John was pretending to be jealous, and his mother was saying in amusement, ‘That’s my cousin, Joss Bennett.’
‘Oh, is it? I’ve heard you mention him,’ Sophy was responding, enlightened. ‘Funny, I’d envisaged him being much older than that.’
‘You mean rather more around my age,’ John’s mother teased.
Kate heard their conversation. It lapped round her, a lulling, distant noise that couldn’t calm her jangled, discordant nerves. She was concentrating on the man standing within the shadows of the ancient yews, sunlight dappling his features, obscuring them slightly, but not so much that she had not recognised him immediately.
It had been almost twenty-two years…by rights her heart and mind should have forgotten everything about him…but they hadn’t.
She had a confused awareness of a desperate need to keep up appearances, to act as though nothing untoward had happened…as though she hadn’t looked across a sun-dappled churchyard and seen standing there the man who had deserted her all those years ago, leaving her to bear his child…this child who was now a young woman.
Somewhere in the distance, John’s mother was saying easily, ‘Well, of course, Joss is much younger than me, I suppose now he must be forty-two, going on forty-three.’
‘He doesn’t look it,’ Sophy was saying admiringly. ‘Heavens, I would have thought he was somewhere in his late thirties at the most.’
‘Hey,’ John cautioned her teasingly. ‘Watch it…I’m beginning to get worried. I shall definitely not introduce you to him.’
The sun’s heat, the laughter and warmth of the day…all of them might not have existed, Kate felt so cold and alone.
Was it mere coincidence that had brought him here today of all days, or…?
It was coincidence! It had to be. If by some remote chance he had discovered that Sophy was his child, surely he wouldn’t have waited until today, until she was getting married, to claim their relationship?
The vice loosened its grip a little. She drew a deep, shaky breath, trying to control the trembling she could feel threatening her composure. It was just a horrible coincidence. He was John’s mother’s cousin, a coincidence…
Someone touched her arm and she turned her head to look into Sophy’s concerned eyes.
‘Are you all right, Mum? You’ve gone quite pale, and you feel cold.’
Momentarily she was the focus of the small group’s attention. This was Sophy’s day, she reminded herself fiercely, and nothing was going to be allowed to spoil it. Nothing. She could see that John’s mother was already beginning to frown a little, as though picking up the vibrations of shock emanating from her…the kind of shock that had nothing to do with a beloved daughter getting married.
‘It was colder than I’d expected inside the church,’ she managed, forcing herself to smile.
The outfit she had chosen for the wedding consisted of a black and white silk spotted dress with short cap sleeves, in a vaguely twenties style, with a plain white silk jacket and a white silk hat trimmed in black, the colours being perfectly acceptable since Sophy had chosen to wear a dress of heavy cream silk rather than the traditional white she had claimed would look awful with her olive-tinted skin.
Skin she had inherited from her father, Kate acknowledged, unable to resist darting another tormented look at the couple in the churchyard.
They were standing facing one another, Joss bending towards the redhead while she removed something from the lapel of his jacket. She was tall, almost as tall as Sophy, and he didn’t have to angle his head far to look down at her. When he had been with her… Her heart jolted frantically in her chest as memories she didn’t want came surging past the barriers of her self-control. Memories of the first time they had met on the cliffs beyond the windy Cornish fishing village, devoid of tourists during that wet cold summer. She had run into him, having got caught out in the rain. She had been running back to her mother’s aunt’s cottage, her head down, not looking where she was going.
He had caught hold of her as she staggered, and she had lifted her head to apologise and had promptly fallen fathomlessly in love, as only a girl of just sixteen could.
He had seemed so distant and sophisticated: almost twenty-two to her sixteen, a huge distance in terms of life experience. He was already a man, she still a child, but he had offered to walk back to her aunt’s with her, offering her a few personal details about himself as he did so. It was over a mile from the clifftop path to the village where her great-aunt lived, and despite the buffeting wind and icy rain she had wished it might be twenty.
When he had told her how old he was, she had lied about her own age, claiming to be nineteen.
He had almost caught her out, asking her what she was doing, what kind of post-school training, but she had fibbed that she was having to resit A levels and so was having an extra year at school.
She hadn’t known then what had made her lie about her age, only that she desperately wanted to be seen as his equal and not as a silly adolescent schoolgirl.
She had been speechless with bliss when he’d asked her out. He’d been working in Cornwall for the summer, a job with the National Trust, helping to maintain the cliff-paths. He’d been lodging in the village at a house not far from her aunt’s…and so it had begun.
‘Mama…the photographer’s ready.’
Sophy’s calm, firm voice broke into her private world. She blinked, and the vision of the tall, dark-haired young man who had charmed and delighted her so much was gone, and in its place she saw the reality of a man in his forties who, as Sophy had so rightly said, could easily have been mistaken for someone in his late thirties—a man who wore his obvious wealth and sophistication as casually as the boy she had known had worn his jeans.
The arrival of the photographer gave her a much-needed excuse to slip into the background and be alone. The shock of seeing Joss so completely unexpectedly had made her feel sick and faint. Long, long ago she had accepted that he was gone from her life and that it was right that he should have done so, so that to see him here today of all days was appallingly painful. The redhead must be his wife…and she, like Joss, looked younger than her forty-odd years. She gave another quick, hunted look at the woman’s immaculate make-up and hair. Her clothes were expensive, designer label most likely, but there was a petulant set to her mouth and a frown marring her forehead. Where was their child? Odd that she had never known whether it was a boy or a girl…Sophy’s half-brother or -sister. Her heart gave a frantic twist as the pain splintered inside her. Still, after all this time, when it should have long ago died.
She was starting to shake. Another moment and her distress would be so obvious that it would cause comment. There were still the photographs to get through, and then the reception. The day seemed to stretch endlessly in front of her, like some kind of refined torture.
What would happen when they met? Would he recognise her…and, if he did, would he acknowledge her…or pretend that they had never met?
The latter, most probably. And what about Sophy, standing there with John, laughing up into her bridegroom’s face? She would go through the rest of her life never knowing that John’s mother’s cousin was in reality her own father.
Her heart seemed to bolt with fright. If only her parents were still alive… If only she had someone to turn to…to confide in.
She felt a light touch on her shoulder and jumped in panic, but it was only Sophy’s godfather, James Phillips, the local doctor.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked her frowningly. Today he had stood in for the father Sophy had never had and the grandfather she had lost…giving her away… Tears rose and stung her throat and the backs of her eyes.
‘Just being sentimental and stupid,’ she assured him.
‘Ma…the photographer wants you,’ Sophy called, and distractedly she hurried over to join John’s parents, while James followed at a more leisurely pace.
It was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real…but it was, and sooner or later she was going to have to come face to face with Joss. She shuddered sickly, and the photographer frowned. It was normally the bride who looked faint and sick, and not her mother…although this particular bride’s mother was rather unusual, slim as a gazelle, and young enough to pass for the bride’s sister. It
seemed impossible to believe the reality of their relationship. She must have been a child herself when she had had her, he reflected consideringly.
She was a very beautiful woman, and would have been more so if she had not looked quite so strained.
When the photographer had finished, Mary Broderick, who had seen three daughters married herself, went over to Kate and said quietly, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? You know you should be happy for them…and yet you feel so lost, and you hate yourself for feeling like that. It does get better,’ she informed Kate with a smile.
Privately, when John had announced that he was getting engaged and had explained the circumstances of his new fiancée’s birth, she had been worried about the situation, but she needn’t have been. Sophy was everything she could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, and as for Kate…
Something about the petite woman who was now her son’s mother-in-law made her want to mother her in much the same way she had mothered her own four children. It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t mature and capable. She was both. The way she had brought up Sophy was testimony to that. No, it was her vulnerability—that and the youthfulness of her face and figure. No one looking at her would ever have imagined she was a day over thirty.
‘We’d like you to come and spend a couple of days with us when you can spare the time. We feel we’ve hardly had an opportunity to get to know you yet.’
There was no doubting the sincerity and warmth of the invitation, but Kate could barely respond to it. The moment she was dreading was fast arriving, and it was too late now to bitterly regret that Sophy had ever opted for the formality of a receiving line.
There was no way of avoiding it. She and Joss were going to come face to face.
Face to face with the man who twenty-one years ago had given her her dearly beloved daughter, and who had then walked out on her without even knowing that she had conceived.
The garden was everything a country garden should be, the scent of roses, from the traditional walkway bisecting the lawn, heady with musk. All around her Kate could hear people commenting appreciatively as they congregated on the drive. A light breeze stirred the blue and white awnings of the marquee.