Sins (57 page)

For the first time ever, Emerald found herself exchanging looks of shared understanding with her stepsister.

The nausea Emerald had felt earlier returned, but she fought it back. Now was not the time for her to acknowledge how fearful the prospect of being without Drogo made her feel.

‘I’ve never imagined something like this happening. Yo u don’t, do you?’ Janey asked her almost plaintively. ‘Dad’s always seemed so…so just there, and you don’t stop to think that one day he might not be. I’m so afraid
for him, Emerald. I don’t want him to die.’ She started to cry again.

‘Then you mustn’t start thinking that he might,’ Emerald told her firmly. ‘You must tell yourself that he’s going to get better.’

Her words had more of an effect on Janey than she had expected. Her stepsister gave her a watery attempt at a smile and told her, ‘I wish I was more like you, Emerald. You’re always so…so in control of things. Nothing ever seems to go wrong for you. You and Drogo are so lucky.’

Lucky? Her? If only Janey knew!

‘Janey, you have a husband who loves you, and two healthy sons,’ Emerald pointed out firmly. Two sons, not just one, and certainly not none at all, she thought. Was Janey really so blind that she couldn’t see that Emerald was the one who envied her and that she had something that Emerald wanted desperately? At her lowest moments she’d often envisaged her siblings, and especially Janey and Polly with their sons, exchanging conspiratorial looks as they discussed her inability to give Drogo an heir. But Janey seemed oblivious to the direction of Emerald’s thoughts. Instead she was shaking her head and giving a bitter little attempt at laughter.

‘Two healthy sons who any day now will be sent home because we can’t pay their school fees any more–that is, if Fitton is still ours and they still have a home to come back to. I was going to ask Daddy if he could help us. Now I feel so selfish for even thinking of that.’

Janey had no idea what had made her admit so much to Emerald, but it was too late now to call back the words
and in a strange sort of a way it was actually a relief to have said them. It must be something to do with the immediacy of the situation and the intimacy of the waiting room and all that both portended.

Emerald frowned. She had always assumed that John and Janey were comfortably off.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked her bluntly. ‘And don’t tell me nothing because something must have.’

The role of sibling confidante was a new one for her and she was surprised at how easily she slipped into it, and even more surprised by how comfortable it felt, almost as though she was taking on something that she had secretly wanted and had felt incomplete without.

‘John invested all our money with a…a friend, who then went and lost it all, is what’s happened,’ Janey told her equally forthrightly, for all the world as though she had been confiding in her all her life. ‘He’s worrying himself sick about it all. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Emerald. If Dad survives this I can’t possibly worry him by telling him and asking him for help.’

‘How much have you lost?’ Emerald asked.

Janey hesitated, looking over her shoulder even though they were the only two people in the waiting room, before admitting, ‘Just over a million pounds–everything we had. You see, when the investment didn’t make the profit they had been expecting they all put more money in on the advice of this so-called friend. Poor John. It’s all so difficult for him. You see, he’s always been so good with money, and so…so sensible and dependable. I’ve leaned on him all through our marriage, and now I feel–well, I feel guilty, Emerald. I should have taken more interest
in our financial affairs. I shouldn’t have just expected him to shoulder all the responsibility.’

Emerald thought quickly as she absorbed what Janey had told her. Drogo had said that the family would need her, but even Drogo could not have anticipated something like this.

‘Look, why don’t you let me help you?’

Janey’s face went bright red. ‘You? But…well, why should you?’

Why indeed?

‘We are family,’ was the only answer Emerald could give her, ‘and my mother is bound to sense that something is wrong. You know what she’s like.’

‘Well, yes,’ Janey agreed. ‘But I couldn’t take money from you, Emerald.’ She sounded mortified. ‘I didn’t tell you because…of that, and besides, John would never agree. His pride would be dreadfully hurt.’

‘Then don’t tell him,’ Emerald said practically.

Ignoring her, Janey said shakily, ‘I can’t let you give me a million, Emerald.’

She had always known how independently wealthy Emerald was, but to make such an offer…Janey was torn between the emotions of gratitude and disbelief, and the more practical awareness that John would not want her to accept.

‘You mean you’d rather your boys were embarrassed by being asked to leave their school and that you lost Fitton?’ Emerald’s voice was deliberately scornful. ‘I thought better of you than that, Janey.’

‘I can’t accept it,’ Janey repeated, but Emerald sensed that her resolution was wavering.

‘It’s what Jay would do, if he could, and it’s what my own father would want me to do. We’re family, after all, Janey. Your boys are my nephews, and I’d like to think that if anything happened to me or to Drogo that my girls would be able to turn to someone—’

‘Of course they could. You know that.’ Immediately Janey’s maternal instincts were aroused, just as Emerald had known they would be.

Secretly Janey would have loved a daughter and she adored Emerald’s girls.

How strange, Emerald reflected, she hadn’t realised or understood until now just how much and how easily she had always deep down inside herself taken it for granted that her daughters would, if necessary, be mothered by one of the siblings she had grown up resenting.

‘I’m not doing this for you, Janey,’ she continued determinedly, ‘I’m doing it for all of us. You live closest to Denham, after all, and you won’t be able to help my mother and your father properly if you are worrying about John’s debts.’

What Emerald was saying was true, Janey acknowledged.

‘We’re a family,’ Emerald repeated, ‘and we’ve got a difficult situation ahead of us. You will be called upon to contribute your time, and it’s only right that I should make my contribution, which in this case will be helping to enable you to play your part.’

‘Well, since you put it that way…’ Janey gave in. It would be such a relief not to have that dreadful worry hanging over them, and it would enable her to concentrate fully on doing everything she could to support Amber.

‘I do,’ Emerald told her. ‘And I’m sure there’s some way we can arrange for the trustees to discover that there is some money owing to you from your trust fund, so that John’s pride doesn’t have to be affected.’

Janey made a small sound that could have been a protest or a giving in.

‘So that’s settled, then,’ Emerald said firmly, seizing on Janey’s response as the latter. ‘We’ll get everything sorted out properly as soon as we can.’

Before Janey could come up with any more objections she changed the subject, filling her in on the practical arrangements Drogo had put in hand, and adding, ‘Drogo should be back soon. He phoned Robbie after John telephoned us, and then Polly, and he’s arranged to pick them both up from Manchester airport and bring them straight here. We’ve sent a car to collect Cathy.’

‘Will Rose come, do you think, and Ella?’

‘I don’t know.’

Would Rose come, Emerald wondered. There had never been any discussion of the rift between her mother and the niece to whom she had always been so close, but they were all aware of it.

Initially Emerald had been pleased, even triumphant. Amber was her mother, after all, and it was only right and proper that she, not a usurper like Rose, should be her favourite. But then her triumph had somehow lost its savour. It was funny how one act could wipe out the whole history of a relationship and change it for ever, be it an act of great generosity or an act of great unkindness.

In the space of one evening, a handful of hours, Rose
had, through her own act of kindness, changed Emerald’s own life completely. Neither of them ever spoke of that night on the rare occasions when they met, but it still lay between them, a secret that linked them and which for Emerald had provided a vital escape from perpetual envy.

Would Rose come? It surprised Emerald to discover just how much she hoped that she might.

What was happening in Macclesfield? Rose looked at the telephone. She so desperately wanted to be there, she realised with a small surge of shock.

It had been so many years now since she had stepped back from the old special closeness of her relationship with her aunt, filled with the bitterness and pain of discovering that Aunt Amber had simply been using her and had never loved her as she had pretended to do.

She had seen less and less of ‘the family’ as Pete’s health had deteriorated–not that there had been an open breaking-off of her relationship with them. She was actually godmother to one of Janey’s sons, and the elder of Emerald’s daughters, but she had not expected to feel this irrational driven need to be ‘there’.

Why should she? Aunt Amber did not need her to be there. After all, she had three daughters and two stepdaughters who all meant far more to her than Rose did.

But
she
needed to be there, Rose recognised. She wanted to be there; she had to be there.

Quickly she crossed the kitchen floor and picked up
the telephone receiver, dialling the number she knew by heart.

The moment the ringing at the other end was silenced, she knew instantly it was Josh, just from his breathing.

‘It’s me,’ she told him. ‘Rose. I need your help.’ She wasn’t really giving in to her own desire or to her love for him, she wasn’t doing this for her own sake, she was doing it for Amber, to whom she owed so very much.

In less than five minutes it was all arranged. Josh would come and keep watch over Pete, freeing her to go to Macclesfield. She had struggled so hard to keep Josh out of her life, to deny herself and him any opportunity to share their love for one another because she was married to Pete, but now fate had stepped in and she really had no choice.

‘So what am I to say to Mr Oliver when he comes in?’ Maria demanded.

Looking up from checking that she had her passport safely in her wallet, Ella said, ‘Tell him that I have had to go home because my father has had a heart attack. I must go, Maria, the cab’s waiting. Look after Olivia for me and give her lots of hugs from me, won’t you?’ She couldn’t delay any longer, otherwise she would miss her flight and there wouldn’t be another one until the morning. Please God, let her father still be alive when she got there. It was pointless now to wish that she had spent more time with him during that last visit in January.

Josh arrived exactly when he had promised he would. Just the sight of him was enough to fill Rose with all the
emotions she knew she had no right to have. She had married Pete willingly; no one had made her. She could not simply walk away from him because she loved Josh.

She felt so dangerously close to giving way to what she felt, to being weak. It was heaven to be in Josh’s arms and held safely there, in their familiar comfort and warmth.

‘I shouldn’t have telephoned you.’

‘Of course you should.’ Josh’s thumb wiped an escaped tear from her cheek, as he added softly, ‘I’d have been as jealous as hell if you’d asked someone else. I want you to feel that you can always turn to me, Rose, for whatever you need.’

‘I know that I can, and…and I wanted you to be here, but it’s so wrong of me to…to involve you.’

Josh smoothed her hair off her face and then cupped it in his hands so that he could look into her eyes.

‘Nothing that happens between us or that we feel for one another could ever be anything other than perfect and right. What was wrong was my stupidity in not realising how much I loved you, and letting you go. No, don’t say anything. I know you are married to Pete, I know you won’t leave him, but that doesn’t have to mean that you and I can’t be friends, does it?’

‘Friends?’ Rose’s voice broke over the word. ‘Josh, I can’t trust myself to be just friends with you.’

‘Then trust me instead to protect you and the future we will one day have, because I promise you that you can. I know how you feel about the duty you believe you owe to Pete.’

‘He needs twenty-four-hour care, Josh. He can never
be well–his drinking has done too much damage to his body–but he could live for years as an invalid. No matter how much I love you and want to be with you, I can’t abandon him.’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to. Let me help you, Rose. Let me share your life with you, even if it is only as a friend.’

‘I couldn’t ask that of you.’

‘You don’t have to ask. I’m the one making the offer. I love you and without you my life has been unbearably empty. When I bumped into Ella on Fifth Avenue and she told me about Pete, I knew that I had to come back to be with you. Don’t shut me out, Rose. I need you just as much as Pete does. One day we will be the same age as your aunt and uncle. I know more than anything else that when the time comes I want yours to be the last hand I hold and the last face I see. You may be Pete’s wife but you are my love, and you always will be. Somehow we’ll find a way to make it work, Rose, I promise you.’

And Josh always kept his promises, she knew that.

‘We’ve been here ages, Emerald. What do you think’s happening? No one’s told us anything.’

Emerald could hear the anxiety in Janey’s voice.

‘You stay here,’ she told her. ‘I’ll go and see if I can find out anything.’

The hospital was busier now than it had been when she had first arrived. One of the two women on the reception desk for the intensive care ward looked sympathetic when Emerald pointed out that they hadn’t seen anyone who was able to explain how Jay was, but the woman wasn’t able to say exactly when they would see the consultant.

‘I can organise some tea for you,’ the receptionist offered, ‘and I’ll try to have a word with the ward sister.’