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‘Stay with me,’ she had begged frantically one summer a number of years ago.
‘I can’t. You know that,’ he had told her. ‘I think Carole-Ann might be beginning to suspect something. In fact, I think we might have to—’
‘No!’ Margot had burst out explosively before he could finish. ‘If she does suspect, then we’ll just have to find some way of … She can’t stop us being together, Lloyd. She has you all the time. Does she know how lucky she is to be your wife?’ she had demanded passionately. ‘How much I wish …’
Lloyd had turned and taken her in his arms. ‘You know that can’t be,’ he told her.
‘Oh, Lloyd,’ she cried. ‘God, why does it have to be like this? Why can’t we be together? Go away somewhere—abroad?’
‘You know we can’t do that. How would we live? Both of us are dependent on the business.’
‘The summer’s passing quickly.’ Margot shivered now. ‘Another three weeks and you’ll be going back. Oh, Lloyd, I don’t know how I can bear it.’
Helplessly, she started to cry.
Tiredly, Lloyd closed his eyes. They weren’t young any more. The UCLA branch of their business, which his aunt had originally set up as much to put some distance between him and Margot as anything else, had proved to be extremely profitable and certainly no sinecure. He loved Margot, of course he did, and he always would, but sometimes the intensity of her passion for him, her need, her dependency on him, wore him down.
These six weeks he spent on the island every summer, technically updating his aunt on everything that had been happening with his side of the business, were, for Margot, the pivot of her whole existence.
‘If we didn’t have this, there’d be no point in my going on living,’ she had told him more than once. Increasingly, though, he was guiltily aware that while Margot was so emotionally dependent on him, he was not free to live his own life.
It had been different when they were young. Then he had shared her passion, been as overwhelmed by his feelings for her as she was by hers for him. But now!
He was approaching forty and what did he have to show for it?
In material terms and so far as others were concerned, no doubt he seemed as though he was doing all right. He had a good job, money in the bank, a nice apartment, a new car.
But what about in other terms? What about those aspects of his life that could not be assessed in dollars or possessions?
He was divorced now with two stepdaughters whom he rarely saw, a few friends and Margot….
‘Lloyd, tell me everything’s going to be all right, that we’ll always be together,’ Margot was demanding passionately.
Tiredly, he reassured her but he knew his voice lacked conviction.
4
What was that noise? Groggily, Claudia tried to focus on the high-pitched ringing sound that had broken into her heavy drugged sleep, the doubled effect of the two pills she had taken so deadening that it was several seconds before she realised that the noise was the telephone and another several more before she came to enough to reach for the receiver.
‘Claudia, it’s Maxine,’ she heard her assistant announcing herself. ‘Is everything OK? I was a bit concerned when you didn’t arrive this morning.’
Guiltily, Claudia started to open her eyes and then widened them quickly in disbelief as she caught sight of her alarm clock. It was gone eleven in the morning. No wonder Maxine had been concerned.
‘Er … I’m sorry, Maxine,’ she apologised hastily. ‘I … I meant to ring you last night to warn you that I’d decided to work at home this morning. I’ve got some paperwork here I need to catch up on.’
It wasn’t completely untrue; she did have paperwork to attend to, Claudia comforted herself several minutes later after she had replaced the receiver.
Paperwork to do, maybe, but she certainly wasn’t in any fit state to accomplish very much, she admitted wearily.
She had slept so deeply that if she had had any bad dreams she certainly couldn’t remember them, but even so, the drugged oblivion of her night’s sleep was just as exhausting as though she had lain sleepless and tormented. The numbing lethargy that still gripped her made her feel both guilty and angry. Quickly, she got out of bed, collected fresh underwear and headed for the shower.
But as she stood beneath its stinging, reviving spray, she acknowledged that at least her sleeping tablets had been able to keep last night’s nightmares at bay.
She stopped soaping herself and stood motionless beneath the water, shuddering as she recalled the eager happiness in Tara’s voice when she told her excitedly about her plans. And she, what had she done to prepare and protect her precious, much-loved daughter from what she now feared and dreaded lay ahead of her?
Slow, painful tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids as Claudia acknowledged what she had done, or rather, not done. When faced with a crisis, the need to be strong and independent, to take control and confront the danger facing her, she had retreated to the security of the kind of behaviour more appropriate to her mother’s generation by asking, ‘Have you told your father yet?’
And then she had compounded her irresponsibility by escaping into a drug-induced sleep that had achieved nothing other than to worry her loyal and hard-working assistant.
But what could she do, what could she say? Maybe, after all, she was over-reacting, over-worrying.
If only. If only.
As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Claudia caught sight of her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The anguish she was feeling was clearly revealed in the drawn, drained tension of her expression. The last time she had seen that particular look on her face had been during the early days when she and Garth had agreed to divorce.
Garth …
It had been foolish of her to react so emotionally last night and try to ring him. She knew from Tara that he had been dating on a casual basis for the past few months. Tara had complained to her that she didn’t think the thirty-odd-year-old woman he had apparently been seeing was good enough for her father.
Like her, Garth hadn’t had anyone serious in his life since their marriage had ended, but hardly for the same reasons. Garth was an extremely attractive and very sensual man, the kind of man who, in the early days of their marriage, had been so emotionally as well as openly physically loving with her in public that her friends had often commented enviously to her on the depth and intensity of his love for her.
Perhaps unusually so for a man of his generation and upbringing, Garth was a highly tactile man, both as a lover and a father, and Tara was like him in that respect. She, too, was very much given to loving hugs and kisses while Claudia, as she was the first to acknowledge, tended to wait for the other person to make the first move, to hold herself back a little.
Even now, she disliked being reminded of how much she had missed Garth’s physical warmth in the early days after she had found out the truth, how often she had woken from the wretchedness of her merciless dreams and turned instinctively towards his side of the bed expecting him to be there to reach out for her and hold her close, only to remember that the emotional agony of her waking hours was even greater than that of her nightmares.
She was over that now, of course. Well over it, and as a woman of forty-five, the mother of a grown-up daughter, as well, she did not think it appropriate to allow herself to yearn helplessly like some lovesick teenager for the physical and emotional contact, the closeness of a lover, a someone of her own that her life now denied her. Divorcing Garth had been the right decision, the only decision she could have made in the circumstances. He had, after all, betrayed her and betrayed her in such a way, deceiving her, lying to her so comprehensively and for so long, that there had been no way the damage he had done to their relationship could ever be repaired. So yesterday, why had she turned, yearning so instinctively, to him for help?
Because he was Tara’s father. That was why and that was the only reason why, she assured herself sternly as she went back to her bedroom, securing the towel around her still-damp body, then reaching for the hair-dryer.
Since the break-up of her marriage, she had become fiercely protective, even defensive, about her independence and her ability to face the world alone, to manage whatever problems she might have alone. She had no need of anyone, any man, to lean on, to provide her with emotional support; she had proved that.
Last night, she had panicked, over-reacted unthinkingly with that silly and fortunately unanswered telephone call to Garth. This morning, she thankfully was much more in control of herself … much more herself, she decided firmly.
The hand holding the hair-dryer had started to tremble. Slowly, Claudia put the dryer down and took a deep breath, purposefully counting silently as she released it.
Now, she commanded herself sternly, let’s start again. Today is Thursday. It is nearly twelve noon. You have wasted a whole morning, so what are you going to do with the rest of your day?
Mentally, she reviewed her commitments.
She had an informal arrangement for lunch, following which she had a planning meeting at three and then, finally, her treat for the day, which was her first discussion with the man who she was hoping would design her garden for her. She had first heard about him earlier in the year when she had attended the Chelsea Flower Show as the guest of one of her corporate clients and had immediately fallen in love with his work, only to discover that he was extremely selective about whom he accepted as a client and that, in addition, he had a waiting list of people wanting to consult him over a yard long. Eventually, however, her determination had paid off and it was planned that she should have initial talks then meet with him in the very near future.
Her thoughts on the garden, she walked over to the bedroom window that looked out over it. The house had had a large rear garden when they bought it, to which they had added a couple of good-sized paddocks. When they first moved in, this garden had consisted of a shabby lawn framed by overgrown herbaceous borders and separated from the kitchen garden and greenhouse that lay beyond it by an unruly hedge.
Just before Tara’s sixth birthday, a space had been cleared on the lawn for the pretty chaletstyle Wendy house they had bought as a birthday present. Claudia had spent the whole of the previous month sewing pretty gingham curtains for it, complete with tie-backs and matching appliquéd gingham cushions for the child-sized furniture.
In time, at Tara’s insistence, a small ‘garden’ area had been fenced off around her ‘house’, taking the place of the slide and swing whose scuff marks had made bald patches in the lawn over the years. They had planted a rambling rose against the house, Garth insisting that she hold the rose straight while he dug and then filled in the hole he had made for it. It now virtually covered the small wooden building, but Tara had steadfastly refused to allow her to do anything to change her now-outgrown childhood retreat until last Christmas when she had suddenly announced that she was going to ‘clear her stuff’ out of the Wendy house and that it was high time that it was passed on to someone who could enjoy it.
Perhaps she should have guessed then, Claudia reflected. Perhaps that instinct that all mothers had, were supposed to possess and that she had believed she did possess, should have told her that it wasn’t just the Wendy house that Tara had now outgrown and was ready to leave behind, but it hadn’t fully sunk in. Perhaps she had been too engrossed with the adrenalin-spiked sense of urgency that Christmas, with its unique blend of planning and chaos, always brought her or it could be that she simply hadn’t wanted to face the truth. And even if she had, what could she have done? Prevented Tara from seeing Ryland, stopped her from loving him?
The garden, she reminded herself fiercely. Think about the garden. You were so excited about it … remember?
Remember! Of course she did. After all, for the past few months, she had spent virtually every spare moment she had poring over gardening books, her mouth watering as she studied the temptation of their photographs depicting formal yew hedges—the perfect green backdrop for a profusion of artlessly and deliciously blowsy massed plantings of cottage garden–type flowers, their softness relieving the architectural sternness of their supporting hedges—pergolaed walkways dripping with wisteria and soft pink roses, the picturesque tranquillity of a formal pond … She wanted them all like a child let loose in a sweet shop.
Yes, far better to think about her garden than to allow herself to fall back into the quicksand of panic and fear that recalling Tara’s visit brought, she decided quickly.
A friend had warned her against introducing koi carp to her as yet non-existent pond.
‘They might be beautiful, but they are also the most dreadful scavengers. I’ve watched them push my poor lilies from one end of our pond to the other,’ she had complained, ‘and then they’ve got the cheek to come up to the surface demanding food every time I walk past.’
Claudia pictured a pond, a double row of neatly clipped yew hedges bisecting her immaculate new lawn and framing the kind of borders that would be filled with a profusion of traditional perennials like delphiniums, poppies, alliums and lupins. A path would lead through them to a small, secluded, secret inner garden, perhaps with a weeping pear and a bed of pure white flowers, she decided frantically, attempting to visualise the garden plan she was hastily trying to construct but that kept on being obscured by the far clearer image of her daughter and the news she had brought her last night.
Sharply, Claudia warned herself not to give in to her panic. What good would it do? She looked away from the window, pushing her fingers into her hair.
She needed time. Time to think, time to …
5
Garth had left London later than he had planned due to an urgent phone call from a client. To compound things, he had been caught up in a series of roadworks that had delayed him by over another hour, so that it was gone eleven o’clock before he finally drove into Upper Charfont.
His own three-storey town house with its long narrow garden and neat Georgian sash windows backed onto the river and was part of a civic conservation area. The architect and the builder who had been responsible for the renovation and rebuilding of the original neglected Georgian terrace and its surrounding environs were both clients, and a little bit of old-style country bargaining had led to Garth’s getting the house at a very advantageous price.
In recent years he hadn’t spent as much time in it as he would have liked. During the recession the business had demanded his full attention, which had necessitated his living in London virtually full time, though he had always made sure that he could work from Upper Charfont during Tara’s school holidays.
As in everything else appertaining to their divorce, Claudia had been meticulous about ensuring that Tara was encouraged to spend time with him; there had been no set-down and rigidly enforced ‘visiting rights’.
‘Tara is, after all, your daughter,’ Claudia had told him, her back stiff, her face averted from him, her voice low and so calm that if he hadn’t known better, he would never have guessed that while she spoke to him she was crying, ‘and she loves and needs you in her life as her father.’
For once, the weather had lived up to its early-morning promise with clear blue skies and sunshine. It was market day and the town was thronged with sightseers and locals alike, dressed casually in shorts and T-shirts. This was one of the times when he regretted the uncharacteristic impulse that had led to his following the Prince of Wales’s example by driving a highly visible and highly enviable Aston Martin, he acknowledged as he saw the looks not just of envy but also of recognition greeting him as he drove through the town.
As he found a parking space close to the offices from which Claudia ran her business, he reflected wryly that knowing the town and its people, news of his arrival would probably reach her office before he did. Although he knew she would have argued to the contrary, pointing out with that chilly, distancing manner she almost always adopted towards him these days that since she was no longer a part of his life, nor he of hers, there was no reason or purpose to have him hold any views about anything she did, he was quite extraordinarily proud of her and all that she had achieved, not just in establishing her business and turning it into such a successful venture, but he was proud of her and for her in many other ways, as well.
She was a kind counsellor, a good friend, a loving daughter and daughter-in-law, and as a mother …
A female tourist in the town watching him as he climbed out of his car would have wondered who or what it was that could have brought such a pensive look of pain, mingled with compassion, to the face of so sexy a man. Whoever or whatever it was, she didn’t doubt for one moment that there would be plenty of female volunteers to help him banish it.
Maxine Jarvis, Claudia’s assistant, was in the reception area of the offices when he walked in. Recognising him, she told him quickly, ‘I’m afraid Claudia isn’t here. She’s working at home today.’
‘That’s no problem,’ Garth assured her, but Maxine noticed that he was frowning as he turned to leave.
After he had gone, she wondered if she ought to ring Claudia and warn her that her ex-husband had been in looking for her, and then, remembering the shuttered look with which Claudia tended to react to any comments about her ex-husband or her marriage, she decided that she might be better off simply saying and doing nothing.
Like everyone else who knew Claudia, Maxine admired the way she had handled her divorce, which, if the rumours that had gone round the town at the time were to be believed, had been brought on by Garth’s infidelity, and the way she had refused to allow her own feelings to damage Tara’s relationship with her father.
Not many women would be so altruistic, so determined to control their own feelings no matter what the personal cost, and to put those of their child first, but then, Claudia had always been a wonderfully devoted mother. Demanding though her work might be, there had never been a single occasion that Maxine could remember in all the years she had worked for her when Claudia had not put Tara’s needs first, even if that had meant risking losing an important contract by putting a client second to her daughter. In Maxine’s view, the friend who had suggested once when Claudia was out of earshot that if Claudia had more often put Garth’s needs ahead of those of his daughter or even given them parity to hers, then he and Claudia might still be married, in Maxine’s view, was no friend at all.
Garth frowned again as he turned into Ivy House’s driveway. After parking his car, he got out and started to walk towards the front door, and then, on impulse, he changed his mind and turned on his heel to walk round to the rear of the house towards the conservatory—the conservatory they had added to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary.
Appraisingly, he studied it. The heavy bronze frog he and Tara had chosen together as a pre-birthday present for Claudia that same year was still there standing guard to the left of the door. Quickly, he bent down and felt beneath it, his fingers curling over the familiar shape of the key he found there.
He and Claudia had not had the kind of divorce that had necessitated anything so aggressive or traumatic as changing the house’s locks. And some habits, it seemed, lasted longer than others. Quietly, he unlocked the conservatory door and walked in.
It wasn’t that he feared that Claudia would refuse to let him into the house; the relationship they presently shared was civil enough if coolly distant. It was just …
Just what? That he wanted to surprise her—to catch her off guard, to see her face before she had time to hide behind the barrier he knew she would throw up against him?
‘Why?’ he had asked her passionately in the early years after their divorce. ‘Why the hell do you have to treat me with this ridiculous blanket of cold civility, Claudia, after all we’ve—’
‘Why? Because I have to,’ she had flung back at him bitingly. ‘I have to because if I don’t, I might start letting you see how I really feel about you, Garth, and for Tara’s sake, I can’t afford to do that.’
‘Do you really hate me that much?’ he had asked her emotively.
‘Yes,’ she had told him. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, you know what they say,’ he had returned. ‘Hate and love are merely different sides of the same coin, and where there’s hate, there must also be love.’
‘Where there was love, there is now hate,’ Claudia had corrected him. ‘Hate for you and hate even more for myself that I was ever fool enough to love you … to trust you.’
Maxine had said that Claudia was working from home, but there was no sound of any kind of activity coming from the room where he knew she worked, and a sharp prickle of atavistic emotion jarred up his spine.
The mere fact that Claudia had actually telephoned him last night was a clear indication of just how distraught she must have been, not that he had needed any telephone call to warn him of the devastating effect Tara’s news would have on her.
The house felt alien and alarmingly silent, a house he remembered being filled with the sounds of Tara’s childhood. Suddenly impelled by a sharp sense of urgency, he started to take the stairs two at a time, calling her name as he did so.
Later, Claudia told herself that her instinctive automatic response to the sound of Garth’s voice—a response that had her racing to her bedroom door and flinging it open, ignoring the fact that she was still only wearing the towel she had wrapped around her naked body after her shower—was simply a reflex action and nothing more. Just in time, she realised what she was doing, and as Garth reached the landing, Claudia took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.
‘Garth, what are you doing here?’ she demanded unsteadily, an uncomfortable colour flooding her face and then slowly spreading to her body as she recognised how betraying her presence here at home and still not being dressed must be—especially to someone who had once known her as well as Garth did.
The relief Garth had felt when he first saw her evaporated as he saw the way she was reacting to his presence, her obvious discomfort, the way her face and body had coloured, the way she was looking almost furtively back into the bedroom, as though …
‘Why didn’t you go into work this morning?’ he demanded suspiciously.
Claudia stared at him.
‘That’s none of your business,’ she told him crisply, turning on her heel dismissively and walking back into her bedroom.
Garth followed her.
‘Isn’t it?’ he demanded, and then stopped. The bed was made up, no sign of an alien male presence to sully its immaculate neatness. Claudia’s hair-dryer lay on a chair on top of the clean underwear she had obviously put out to wear.
‘Garth, what are you doing … what are you looking for?’ Claudia demanded sharply as she quickly checked the bedside table, thankful to see that there was no sign of the bottle of sleeping tablets—not that it was any business of Garth’s what she did, not any more, but she knew him and knew he would fuss if he thought …
‘I’m not looking for anyone … anything,’ Garth denied quickly, catching himself up as he realised how much he had betrayed himself and the reason for his male aggression and hostility. Had he really expected to find someone else in Claudia’s bed?