Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

They were married three days later at Caxton Hall.

As he kissed his new bride, David had told her sternly that henceforward there were to be no more drugs, no more partying all night and sleeping all day. They had their baby to think about.

Docilely Tiggy had agreed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him passionately whilst she told him how much she loved him.

It was a pity that he wasn’t still going to be a barrister, she told him. He would have looked so deliciously stern and forbidding in his court robes, but she would be just as happy married to a famous pop star and she had no doubts he was going to be famous.

David hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his career as a pop star had ended almost as soon as it began.

Three weeks later when the bank announced that he had overspent his allowance and that they couldn’t allow him to withdraw any more money from his account, he had told Tiggy that they were going to visit his family in Cheshire.

‘Cheshire?’ she had repeated. ‘But we will come back to London?’ David hadn’t told her before the trip up North that a return to their London lifestyle would not be possible.

In the end, though, she had seen that there wasn’t any alternative.

The wild crowd she had run with had dropped her as quickly and carelessly as it had picked her up. She was yesterday’s news now, yesterday’s girl; the sixties were like that. And neither of them had been willing to consider terminating her pregnancy although for different reasons.

A part of David was proud of the fact that he had fathered Tiggy’s child while Tiggy had heard all the terrifying stories the models passed around and frightened themselves with—tales of unimaginable horror about girls who had been left to die in their own blood, or worse.

Tiggy’s own family, a respectable middle-class shopkeeper and his wife would have disowned her had she tried to go home to them. David loved her, she knew that, and she desperately needed to be loved. David would keep her safe, protect her from the demons that stalked her and surely they wouldn’t have to live in Cheshire for ever.

To David’s relief, his father had taken to Tiggy straight away and even semi-growled his reluctant approval when David had explained to him just why they had had to marry so quickly.

The dismissal from his training for the Bar had been less easy for Ben to accept but David had known how to win him round. He always had.

Oddly enough, it had been his mother, Sarah, the quiet, self-effacing one, always willing to fall in with whatever her husband wished, who seemed almost to dislike Tiggy. But then, as David himself had observed, Tiggy was not the kind of woman that other members of her sex took to easily. Jenny, thankfully, had been the exception, welcoming Tiggy into the family with genuine warmth.

She and Jon had been married for several years by then. David suspected that Jenny had been so kind to Tiggy because she herself had been pregnant when she married Jon, but since he was not given to introspection he had not dwelt too deeply on the subject. He was thankful that he had managed to appease his father enough for him to agree to settle all his debts and that he and Tiggy could make a fresh start in the secure environment of his birthplace.

David grimaced as he refocused on his bank statement. He would have to talk to Tiggy again, make her understand…. He had started to sweat heavily and there was a pain in his jaw. He touched it experimentally. He would have to make an appointment to see Paul Knighton, their dentist.

Unlike Jon, he was not looking forward to the weekend. Fifty! Where the hell had all the years gone? Fifty … and look at him. He pushed the bank statement into a desk drawer and then locked it. His head ached and he felt slightly sick.

Probably that damned high blood pressure young Travers had warned him about the last time he had had a check-up.

It wasn’t going to be easy talking to Tiggy … making her listen. She had been very upset the previous evening, complaining to him that Olivia thought more of Jenny than she did her and then in the same breath begging him to reassure her that she still looked as attractive as ever, fretfully comparing herself with Olivia.

‘Olivia’s in her twenties,’ he had pointed out unwisely, cursing himself under his breath as he recognised his folly. Only it had been too late to recall his words then; the damage had been done and the consequences so predictable that he could reel off each stage of them. He knew exactly what he would find when he went home this evening and exactly how Tiggy would react if he tried to talk to her about what she was doing to herself, to him, to their life together.

If anyone had told him on the day they married what lay ahead of them, he would have laughed at them in disbelief.

Wearily he passed a hand over his eyes as though unwittingly trying to obliterate the painful memories from his consciousness.

4

‘Tiggy.’

Olivia paused hesitantly on the threshold of the small sunny sitting room. Her mother was seated at the pretty antique desk Olivia could remember her father buying her one Christmas. As she turned round to smile at her daughter there was no hint of the morning’s anxiety and trauma in her expression. In fact, she looked almost serene, Olivia recognised as she watched her tuck the cheque she had been writing into an envelope and seal it.

‘I’m just paying a few bills,’ she informed Olivia. ‘Your father isn’t back yet. I thought we’d have dinner in Knutsford at Est Est Est tonight. It’s always been one of your favourite places and … Where’s Caspar, by the—’

‘I’m here,’ Caspar responded, following Olivia into the sitting room.

‘He really is the most deliciously gorgeous-looking man,’ Tiggy told Olivia, dimpling Caspar a teasing, flirtatious smile.

This was her mother at her best, at her most irresistible, Olivia acknowledged as she watched her. It was impossible to feel irritable or envious of her ability to charm or even to question her need to have to do so.

‘And so tall,’ Tiggy was trilling as she stood provocatively close to Caspar, looking doe-eyed up at him as she asked him, ‘Just how tall exactly are you?’

‘Six-two or thereabouts,’ Caspar obliged her good-humouredly.

‘And you’ve got the muscles to match,’ Tiggy breathed poutingly as she ran one polished fingertip down Caspar’s bare forearm. ‘Oh my …’

Over her mother’s averted head, Olivia sent Caspar a pleading look as she witnessed his withdrawal from her mother’s touch. She knew how volatile her mother’s mood swings were, how quickly she reacted to other people’s opinion of her, how vitally important it was to her that others liked and approved of her.

As a child Olivia had simply accepted her mother’s needs as an intrinsic part of her character, but now that she was an adult … Her forehead started to pleat in an anxious frown of concern.

‘I’d better set my alarm when I go to bed tonight,’ Olivia told her mother. ‘I promised I’d be at Queensmead early tomorrow morning to help Aunt Ruth with the flowers. Oh, and Aunt Jenny said to remind you that the Chester crowd would be arriving about lunch-time. She said to let her know if you needed any extra bedding or anything. Apparently she’s been through the old linen cupboard at Queensmead making sure that Gramps would have enough of everything to cope with Hugh’s family. Nicholas, Saul and Hillary and the children are staying there and she says she found enough bedding to equip a small hotel.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked uncertainly as she saw the way her mother’s expression had changed, her fingers plucking tensely at the cuff of her silk shirt.

‘I don’t know why we have to have Laurence and Henry and their families staying here,’ she fretted. ‘After all, it isn’t as if … That’s far more than anyone else is having to put up and Mrs Phillips can’t give me any extra time because Jenny has already booked all her spare hours.’

Laurence and Henry were brothers and her father’s second or third cousins. Olivia was never quite sure which. They were a little older than her father. Laurence had three grown children and Henry four plus three grandchildren; they belonged to the original Chester family from which her own family had sprung.

‘Is the competitiveness with the Chester side of the family shared by you?’ Caspar had asked her curiously.

Olivia had shaken her head. ‘No, it’s all past history so far as I’m concerned and although technically they are family, we’ve never been that close—weddings, christenings and funerals are about the only times we get to meet these days.’

‘Why on earth couldn’t they have stayed with Jenny and Jon?’ her mother was still protesting.

‘Probably because they don’t have enough room,’ Olivia pointed out gently.

‘There’s plenty of room at Queensmead,’ her mother retorted.

‘Yes,’ Olivia agreed, ‘but Uncle Hugh and his family are staying there.’

Although she didn’t say so, she suspected that Jenny would have been reluctant to place so much of a burden on Ben’s shoulders by filling the house.

‘Come on, Tiggy,’ Olivia coaxed her. ‘You know you’ve always enjoyed entertaining.’

‘Yes, but that was before … You know I like to do things properly but your father keeps complaining that we can’t afford …’ She stopped, chewing on her cheek, her eyes suddenly filling with tears whilst Olivia felt a small, cold finger of unease run warningly down her spine. So far as Olivia knew, her parents were reasonably well off.

Certainly as a child she had never been aware of any lack of money or any necessity to economise. She had always assumed that the practice, although only small, brought in a comfortable and secure income for her father and his brother, given that it was the only firm of solicitors serving the town and its outlying rural district.

Her mother, she realised, was given to exaggeration and Olivia reassured herself that her petulant outburst was probably caused by her father’s complaining about her mother’s well-known propensity to indulge in designer clothes and expensive make-up.

Olivia was aware that her mother had very little idea of what it meant to watch her spending or live within a given budget. It was not unknown for her to send all the way into Chester for a specific item she required for one of her dinner parties, or to order her current favourite fresh flowers from some expensive Knightsbridge flower shop in London because they were unavailable closer to home.

‘I expect Gramps wanted to have the Chester contingent staying with you because he wanted them to be impressed.’ Olivia did her best to soothe her mother, biting betrayingly on her bottom lip when she saw the sardonic look Caspar was giving her as he witnessed her overt attempt at flattery. He would, no doubt, take her to task for it later. If Caspar had a fault it was that he did not believe in any gilding of lilies or any sugar-coating of pills.

‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re right,’ her mother conceded, brightening a little. ‘Jenny is a dear, of course, and a wonderful cook but … well … she doesn’t have much idea of interior design, does she, and the house always seems to be full of children and animals.’

Olivia privately thought her aunt and uncle’s home with its lovingly polished antiques, its bowls of home-made pot-pourri and freshly cut garden flowers came as near to her ideal of what a home should be as anything possibly could. She much preferred her aunt’s use of the wonderful old fabrics she found on her buying trips—rich brocades, velvets as soft and supple as silk and finely woven cottons and linens—to the modern, and to Jenny’s eye, often too pretty, flounced and frilly fabrics that her mother chose to decorate her own home with. But she said nothing.

She knew that her mother took pride in keeping her home as up to the minute and fashionable as she did her wardrobe. Growing up she had become used to the mood of dissatisfaction that would descend on her mother every year when the glossy style bibles she liked to buy pronounced their views on what was currently either in or out of fashion. And whole rooms were refurbished to fit in with their dictates, her mother worrying almost obsessively over every tiny detail, not satisfied until she had found just the right lampshade or the favoured objet d’art.

‘Has she always been so dependent on other people’s good opinion?’ Caspar asked her later on that night when they were in bed. Olivia had sneaked upstairs to his attic room, feeling very much like a naughty schoolgirl—it was ridiculous that her mother should feel she had to comply with Gramps’s outdated and old-fashioned ideas when he wasn’t even there to see them.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘although …’

‘Although what?’ Caspar prodded when she paused.

‘I … I’m not sure. I can’t remember her ever being quite so … I suppose it’s very difficult for her. She’s always relied so much on her looks as a means of bolstering her self-confidence and she still looks stunning, of course, but …’

‘But she’s getting older … and more desperate,’ Caspar supplied for her.

In the darkness Olivia nodded her head.

Because a part of her had always secretly wished that Tiggy could be more like Jenny … more of a traditional mother and not the almost fey, childlike creature she actually was, the whole issue of her mother and her mother’s vulnerability and her own feelings of guilt was one that even now Olivia didn’t feel entirely comfortable with.

It was bad enough feeling the way she did without adding to that sense of betrayal by discussing her mother’s shortcomings even with someone as close to her as Caspar. She had seen earlier how much he had disliked her mother’s overcoy, flirtatious behaviour and had felt torn between protecting Tiggy and agreeing with him.

Slipping out of the narrow bed, she told him, ‘I’m thirsty. I think I’ll go down and make myself some tea. Would you like some?’

‘Please. Want me to come with you?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘I shan’t be long,’ she promised, bending down to kiss him lightly on the mouth before pulling on her robe and padding barefoot to the door.

She knew the house well enough not to need to switch on any light, and besides, the moon was almost full, casting a sharp, clean light in through the windows.

Only the odd creaking board betrayed her presence as she went downstairs. In the hallway she could smell the scent of the white lilies that were her mother’s favourite flower.

The kitchen door was ajar and she paused outside it, tensing as she heard the sound of a packet of food being torn open. Biscuits by the sound of it, she guessed as she heard the crunch of someone eating them far too quickly for the health of their digestive system.

It must be Jack. He had obviously sneaked downstairs to get something to eat, Olivia decided as she heard the fridge door being opened. Growing boys were notorious for their appetite, and according to her father’s complaints at dinner tonight, Jack was no exception.

Hesitating no longer, Olivia walked into the kitchen and reached for the light switch as she did so. Light flooded the kitchen, revealing the figure crouched almost coweringly in front of the half-open fridge door.

All around her the floor was littered with empty food cartons and packages and even cans, Olivia noticed in shocked bewilderment and disbelief as she stared from the rubbish-strewn floor and work surfaces to her mother’s ashen face.

‘Tiggy …’ she whispered, ‘what is it … what’s …?’

But even as she asked the question, Olivia knew the answer, just as she had known earlier that morning when she’d walked into her mother’s bedroom and seen those glossy, expensive bags of brand-new, unworn clothes scattered all over the room and had smelled that sickening, nauseous smell of fresh vomit overlaid by the heavy, cloying, non-disguising scent of her mother’s perfume. Had known and had tried desperately all day to ignore what she had seen just as she had tried to ignore her own shaming feelings of anger and resentment at having been confronted by the evidence of her mother’s abject misery and despair. For whatever else could be responsible for what her mother was so plainly doing and what, Olivia had guessed with a burst of unwanted, sickening self-awareness, she must have been doing for many, many years?

Anorexia, bulimia—these were the words one associated with vulnerable, almost self-destructive young adolescents and surely not adult women in their forties, but there was no escaping the evidence of her own eyes.

‘Oh, Mum,’ she whispered chokily, still half-hoping that it was all a mistake, that her mother would stand up and smile at her and that somehow the chaos, the carnage all around them would disappear; yet it was all too clear from the remains of the food her mother had obviously just forced down for whatever reasons of self-hatred and hunger and need that she had been motivated into the kind of behaviour that left the kitchen looking as though it had been ravaged by a dozen or more starving people.

Torn food wrappers, empty cans, opened cartons of ready-made meals, scattered remnants of a loaf of bread and more, were tossed on the floor as though someone had just emptied a dustbin on it.

Sickly Olivia stared at the mess. How could any one person possibly eat so much? She looked at her mother, her face waxy and sallow, her eyes dull and heavy. She was struggling to breathe properly, her hand surreptitiously massaging her stomach beneath her robe.

‘Why?’ Olivia whispered achingly. ‘Why …?’

‘I don’t know … I don’t know …’

Tiggy had started to shiver and cry, wrapping her thin arms around her bent knees and rocking herself to and fro as she pleaded with Olivia.

‘Don’t tell anyone … don’t tell your father … I didn’t mean to spend so much … I couldn’t help it…. You understand, don’t you?’ she appealed to her daughter.

But Olivia, remembering how the sight of all the bags of unwrapped and unworn clothes strewn across her floor had shocked her, could not find the words to give her mother the reassurance she so desperately needed.

‘Don’t tell your father,’ her mother was repeating. ‘I promised him I wouldn’t do it again. He doesn’t love me when I’m sick,’ Olivia heard her mother saying, her eyes filling with fresh tears as she looked pathetically at her daughter. ‘He tries to pretend, but I can tell … he won’t come near me….’

She was sobbing noisily now like a small, hurt child. She even looked like a child with her thin arms and her hunched-up body. Olivia wanted to go over to her and put her arms round her, hold her, but the stench of the food she had consumed, the memory of how her bedroom had smelt after she had voided whatever she had stuffed herself with previously, made her gorge rise and she simply couldn’t do it … couldn’t bear to be near her.

As she swallowed against her own nausea, Olivia wondered why it had taken her so long to realise what was happening, why she had not guessed … questioned—

‘Olivia?’

She tensed as she heard Caspar coming into the kitchen. She had forgotten all about the tea she had promised him, and now as her eyes met his across the width of the room she saw that he had recognised what was going on as immediately as she had done herself.

‘I didn’t know,’ she heard herself whispering to him as though there was some need for her to justify her own ignorance.

Behind her, her mother was struggling to stand up.

‘I want to go to bed … I’m tired,’ Olivia heard her saying. She was speaking and moving like someone heavily sedated or drugged, which Olivia recognised dully she possibly was with so much food crammed into her body.

‘Let her go,’ Caspar told her as Olivia started to protest.

Could this really be her mother? Olivia wondered wretchedly as she watched her shambling out of the kitchen, heading, not for the stairs, but for the downstairs cloakroom.

‘Oh God,’ Olivia whimpered. ‘Oh God, Caspar. I don’t …’

Automatically she started to pick up the debris her mother had left behind. Then abruptly she paused and turned round, her eyes filling with tears. Wordlessly he held out his arms to her.

Still too shocked to articulate her feelings, she half ran, half stumbled into Caspar’s open arms, closing her eyes against the too-vivid images of her mother that refused to stop tormenting her as she buried her head against his chest.

In a world that had suddenly become frighteningly unreal, the warmth of Caspar’s embrace as he held her felt as blessedly familiar as the hardness of his body. She could feel the steady beat of his heart, so much calmer and slower than the frantic, raised pace of her own, smell his scent, hear his breathing, all of them things she knew well and could recognise, giving her a sense of safety and security that she badly needed.

Emotionally she felt much the same sense of shock and disbelief that people must have experienced when they discovered the unsinkable Titanic was actually sinking, the decks no longer stable beneath their feet but tilting; Caspar was her only place of refuge, her only piece of stable ground. How could her mother, her pretty, slim, delicate and dainty mother be that same gross, unrecognisable person she had just seen cramming food into her mouth like, like …?

She started to tremble violently, as distressed by her own thoughts as she was by what she had just witnessed.

‘Caspar …’ As she whispered his name she opened her eyes and looked anxiously up into his face, wrapping her arms tightly around him as she started to kiss him with a frantic, fierce passion.

For a second he seemed to hesitate, but then as though he sensed her need, he started to return her kiss, responding to its hunger and need, and inevitably, because he was a man, despite the fact that he knew it was an emotional need that was driving her rather than physical desire, becoming aroused by it, his hands coming up to cup her breasts.

‘Oh God, Livvy,’ he told her hungrily, ‘you feel so good I could eat you….’

Eat her!

Olivia stiffened, wrenching her mouth away from his, nausea churning her stomach.

The sound of the very word ‘eat’ brought back all the dreadful images she had been trying to suppress—the sight, the sound of her mother as she indulged in her orgiastic binge, a parody of sexual pleasure, which Olivia had instinctively recognised as bringing her physical release, a release from any form of self-control, of emotional restraint.

‘Livvy, what is it?’ Caspar demanded.

He was still holding her, still touching her, his hands caressing her breasts, his thumbs gently stroking over her nipples. Olivia gave a violent shudder of disgust and pushed him away. It was his love she wanted, his support, the reassurance of his arms around her, not sex.

‘Let’s go back to bed,’ Caspar whispered.

‘Go back to bed!’ Olivia’s eyes widened as she stared at him, the feeling of relief and gratitude she had experienced when he had first held out his arms to her replaced by a sense of alienation and resentment. ‘Caspar, how can you say that?’ she demanded. ‘Sex is the last thing I feel like right now … the very last thing. You saw my mother, you …’ She turned away from him, pacing the kitchen whilst Caspar frowned.

He should have guessed, of course, been prepared, but somehow he had allowed himself to believe that she would be different, that she was different, but here she was making it plain that for all she had said about them, when it came down to it, her family, her parents, other people, were far more important to her than he was himself.

Olivia was completely unaware of what he was thinking or of the effect her action in pushing him away from her had had on him. Neither did she have any inkling of the old childhood feelings of not being good enough, of not being wanted, it had awakened in him. Instead, completely absorbed by her own tangled feelings of shock, disgust, fear and guilt, she told him, ‘This morning when I walked into her bedroom, she was there surrounded by carrier bags, all of them full of clothes, still wrapped in their original tissue paper, never even worn. Not just one or two of them, there were dozens, everywhere, and the smell …’ She gave a small shudder, remembering the rank, muscle-clenching, gut-heaving odour that had filled her parents’ bedroom. ‘I should have said something then … done something …’

‘Like what?’ Caspar challenged her. ‘Your mother obviously has an addictive personality, Olivia. Binging, whether on food, shopping or love, is all part and parcel of the same thing. It’s a driving need, a compulsion, to fill an emptiness that can never be filled in the way that such an addict attempts to fill it.’

‘But I should have guessed … known … done something …’ Olivia protested, her voice thickening with tears of pity and compassion for her mother’s plight. Like an adult who has suddenly realised that they have failed a small child, she felt guilty, helpless, unbearably saddened and filled with an aching pity and the need to put things right, to make things better.

‘How could you have?’ Caspar asked her tardily, his own emotions under control now or so he told himself.

Unlike her, he seemed completely unmoved by her mother’s behaviour, Olivia reflected, but then Tiggy was not his mother, and Caspar, as she had already sensed, had a certain hardiness if not hardness about him, a certain tough outer shell he could draw around himself when he chose to do so.

‘Natural self-protection,’ he had called it when she had once questioned it. ‘Everyone needs some,’ he had added.

‘But you must have been moved by what we saw. Felt something,’ Olivia had pressed. They had been watching a current affairs programme at the time and she had been reduced to tears by the plight of the villagers in the far-off, achingly poor, barren environment in which they lived.

‘Of course,’ Caspar had agreed, ‘but my emotions are of no use or help to them.’

‘No, but through them you could be moved to do something that would help,’ Olivia had protested.

‘You mean I could allow my emotions to be manipulated to the point where I automatically put my hand in my pocket?’ Caspar had demanded cynically.

‘A multibillion-pound aid industry has been built on that very premise,’ he expounded, ‘and yet there are, as you have just seen, still thousands upon thousands of starving human beings. Yes, I feel that it’s wrong for any human being to have to live in pain and poverty. Yes, I know it’s wrong that we waste so much so thoughtlessly, that we’re so materialistic, but even though we have so much whilst others have so little, you cannot make all people equal, Livvy.

‘The best you can do, all you can do, is to help them to help themselves and that does not always necessarily mean giving financially. You wouldn’t applaud an adult who gave a child craving their attention a hundred dollars to play with instead, would you?’

‘It’s not the money, it’s what it can buy … what it can provide,’ Olivia had insisted, but she had known that it was an argument that Caspar would not allow her to win. He was much tougher than her, much harder, much more inclined to stick to his chosen convictions, not a man who could ever be influenced by the actions of those around him, not a man who would ever go with the crowd unless it suited him to do so.

She remembered all this now as she looked at him.

‘There must be something I could have done … something I still can do … to help,’ she faltered as she saw the cynical way that Caspar was watching her.

‘Such as?’ he derided. ‘From the looks of her I would suspect that your mother is in the grip of an addiction that she’s had for a long, long time. She does need help, yes—professional help,’ he added pointedly. ‘What you’re doing now,’ he added with curt emphasis as he indicated the rubbish-strewn floor that Olivia was cleaning, ‘only makes it easier for her to continue with what she’s already doing. In effect, what you’re doing is actually encouraging her to continue doing it.’

‘No. That’s not true,’ Olivia protested emotionally. ‘I’m just trying to tidy up in case—’

‘In case what?’ Caspar challenged her. ‘In case someone else realises what’s going on? Don’t you think your father already knows? He might have closed his eyes to the situation, but scenes like this must have happened before.’

When Olivia bit her lip, he reiterated harshly, indicating the littered floor, ‘The best way you can help your mother is not by doing this, by covering up for her and protecting her, but by compelling her to face reality and to seek professional help.’

‘But, Caspar, you saw her, she was … she’s—’

‘An addict,’ Caspar repeated relentlessly, adding, ‘Just ask yourself this, Olivia. If you’d come down here and found your father surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol, would you have been so keen to clear up after him and help him conceal what he was doing? I don’t think so. Can’t you see?’ he asked her. ‘The nature of the addiction is the same. It’s just that the substance, the pattern of behaviour your mother is addicted to to find release from reality, to escape from life, is different, less socially disruptive—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it any more tonight,’ Olivia told him. ‘I can’t. It’s the party tomorrow,’ she added unnecessarily, ‘and I can’t …’ She closed her eyes, fighting back the relentless surge of panic she could sense threatening her.

It was pointless feeling that she couldn’t cope with what she had discovered; that she didn’t want to cope with it. Someone had to. How long had her mother been behaving like this? Why had no one else seen, recognised … heard what was obviously a cry for help, the soundless, agonized wail of a soul in torment. And Caspar wasn’t helping. Why couldn’t he be more compassionate, more understanding? Why couldn’t he understand how guilty she felt, how afraid, how compelled almost to do something, anything, to help her mother to ease her own guilt for having gone on so carelessly and unknowingly with her own life without realising what was happening at home?