Authors: Penny Jordan
They were almost alone in the arrivals hall now and, to Ella’s relief, Olivia was fiddling with her transistor radio, which Ella had once bought her in London and which the little girl had brought with her, no doubt trying to tune it in to a pop music station, and hadn’t, Ella hoped, been able to hear Oliver’s fiercely angry speech.
His words had rained down on Ella like a fire storm, shocking her into immobility.
In fact, she was so taken aback, so stunned by what Oliver had said, that the only response she could manage was a shaken, ‘I have never been ashamed of you.’
‘Then why have you always refused to have your family over or let me meet them properly?’
Ella badly wanted to sit down but there was nowhere to sit apart from the bench where Olivia already was.
‘That was for your sake,’ she told Oliver truthfully. ‘Because you are always so busy and because I didn’t want you to feel that I expected you to behave like a
proper husband just because you’d married me. It was for your sake, Oliver,’ she repeated when she saw that he was simply looking at her, ‘because I wanted you to have your freedom. And don’t tell me that you didn’t want it. That model you rang on Christmas Day…’
‘Because she’d rung me earlier, out of her head on acid–she didn’t know what century she was in, never mind what day. She thought we’d got a shoot.’
Ella could see that he was telling her the truth. ‘You mean you aren’t in love with her?’
‘
What?
Are you crazy?’ Oliver made a sweepingly dismissive and frustrated gesture with his hand. ‘There was never anyone else after you–there couldn’t be.’
Her legs were threatening to stop supporting her. She felt shaky and filled with a mixture of disbelief and–ridiculously–hope.
‘You married me because of Olivia.’
‘Yes,’ Oliver agreed. ‘And, like the working-class lad I’d grown up as, once married my loyalty was to you–my loyalty and then my love. That’s how it is with us working-class boys. Our wives and the children they give us come first in our hearts and our lives, or at least that’s how it was with this working-class boy.’
‘You never said.’
‘How could I when you were mooning around over your lost American hero?’
‘I was doing no such thing.’
‘You were mooning around over something or someone.’
‘Didn’t it ever strike you that you might not be the only person to discover that the creation of a child can
lead to you finding that you love the person you created that child with? Especially when you’re a woman who knows all she does know about good sex because of the man who created that child with her.’
‘Are you saying that you loved me?’ Oliver’s voice was both hoarse and uncharacteristically lacking in its normal self-assurance.
‘No,’ Ella told him crisply, suddenly finding her courage. She could see pain in his gaze before he hid it from her. ‘I’m not saying that I loved you, Oliver, because my love for you isn’t in the past, it’s here now in the present, and it will be there in the future.’
It really was ridiculous for two people of their age, who were married to one another, and whose daughter was sitting within watching distance, to be kissing so passionately in public, and all the more so given the circumstances, but somehow the sweetness of the moment meant too much to be denied, and it was several long minutes before Ella could bring herself to let Oliver end the kiss.
Still held tight in his arms she reminded him, ‘We need to get to the hospital. My father…’
‘Is holding his own and doing very well,’ Oliver assured her. ‘I spoke to the Hospital when Olivia and I got through Customs. Emerald had left a message for you to say we’re to go straight to Denham, because that’s where the rest of the family are.’
The family. How easily and comfortably Oliver said those words, and how right they sounded coming from him. The family, her family, their family. She loved them, of course, but the reality was that the true
family of her heart was this family: Oliver and Olivia and her.
Sister had come in to insist that since Jay was now out of danger, Amber was to go and eat the meal she’d ordered to be taken to the waiting room for her.
‘There’s no sense in you making yourself ill,’ she had pointed out, ‘especially not now that Mr Fulshawe is over the worst.’
Amber was still smiling over those words: ‘Mr Fulshawe is over the worst’ when she pushed open the door to the waiting room, her contented smile turning to one of disbelief and joy at what, or rather who, she saw waiting for her.
‘Rose. Oh, Rose. My dearest dear girl.’
Overwhelmed by her emotions, Amber held nothing back, hugging Rose to her as tightly as she could, her tears spilling onto Rose’s face.
The familiarity of her aunt’s rose and almond scent, her warmth and, above all, the emotion she exuded instantly transported Rose back to a time when her world had held no greater joy than to be held in her aunt’s arms. How naïve she had been then.
‘The consultant said that Jay is going to get better,’ was all she could manage to say when Amber had finally released her.
‘Yes. Thank God. Oh, Rose, you don’t know how much it means to me to have you here.’
‘Emerald felt that one of us should stay, although I know you would probably have preferred it to be Emerald herself. After all, she is your daughter.’
Rose had meant the words to sound cool, unemotional, level; setting the demarcation line between the past she had once inhabited and the present where she now lived, but to her chagrin instead they sounded more like the jealous reproachful outburst of a small child.
Amber looked at her niece, her heart aching for the relationship they had had before Rose had retreated from her.
Amber abhorred emotional blackmail and yet she couldn’t stop herself from saying truthfully, ‘Yes, Emerald is my child, the daughter of my flesh, Rose, and I love her as I love all of you, but you are and always have been the daughter of my heart, and as such you are very special to me.’
It was more than Rose could bear.
‘If that’s the truth then why have you never told me that John might be my half-brother?’
Amber’s heart was pounding so heavily, it felt like an unbearable weight. She sank into a chair, her hand against her chest. It all seemed so long ago now, that terrible time and its dreadful consequences. She never spoke of it, not even to Jay.
‘Ella and Janey’s aunt Cassandra told me, if you’re wondering how I know,’ Rose continued. ‘She’d recognised that I had a bit of a crush on John and naturally she wanted to make sure that I didn’t get any ideas above my station. Not that she needed to worry. I was quite content to hero-worship John from a distance. I knew that with my background I could never be anything to a Lord Fitton.’
‘Oh, Rose…’
The pain and bitterness in Rose’s voice pushed aside Amber’s own anxiety, her heart returning to its normal steady beat, her one desire to reach out to her niece. This was Cassandra’s revenge, of course, for what had happened so long ago. The destruction of a very precious bond, a lifetime of pain for an innocent victim, and for Cassandra herself the satisfaction of having delivered those blows.
‘Cassandra told me how you’d all hoped that I wouldn’t survive, how it would have been better for everyone if I had died.’
‘Rose, that isn’t true.’
‘How my own father hated me and wished that I had never been born.’
Amber’s throat closed on the lump of pity and love that had formed there.
‘Come and sit down. Please,’ she begged.
Rose gave in and sat down in one of the other chairs.
‘The whole situation is so complicated, Rose. Your father, my cousin, was a charming, self-willed and spoiled young man, handsome, indulged by our grandmother, and loved by me. I thought him the best and the kindest of cousins. But Greg’s outward charm concealed a great deal of inner weakness. He had an inability to accept the responsibility for…for his own mistakes and errors of judgement. There was an…an affair with Lord Fitton’s wife.’
‘John’s mother?’
‘Yes. But John had already been born when the scandal broke and our grandmother had to send Greg away to Hong Kong. There was to have been another child,
but John’s mother…well, there was an accident, and she drowned in one of the Fitton Hall pools. Cassandra found her.’ Amber stopped and took a deep breath.
‘Rose, I must ask that what I am going to tell you now remains always just between the two of us.’
‘And if I can’t agree to that?’
‘Then I cannot tell you.’
They looked at one another.
‘Very well then,’ Rose agreed. ‘You have my word that I will never speak of it to anyone else.’
Amber nodded. ‘Greg wasn’t the only person with whom John’s mother was having a relationship outside her marriage.’
Rose tensed. This wasn’t what she had been expecting to hear.
‘There’s no easy way to say this, Rose, but the fact of the matter is that Cassandra was very much involved with her, almost obsessively so.’
Rose stared at her aunt, the colour draining from her face, her mind a whirlwind of barely possible thoughts.
‘You see, Rose, sometimes a secret isn’t simple but instead is the result of a complex tangle of things past and done, meaning that the secret can’t be brought out into the open without many innocent people being hurt. None of us can say that Greg could not have been John’s father, but neither can we say that he was. It is my belief that Cassandra hoped to have a son of her own with John’s father and that if she had done so she would have tried to have John disinherited. Without a son, when John’s father died it was in her own interests for John to inherit. John grew up believing himself to be Lord
Fitton Legh’s son. The estate is his whole world. Perhaps someone should have spoken out all those years ago.’
‘No,’ Rose said shakily. ‘No. It would have been cruel and unnecessary.’
‘I can see now that you should have been told once you were old enough to understand. Greg was your father, after all.’
‘And I was the child that no one wanted; the half-Chinese embarrassment, that you all wished did not exist.’
‘Rose, that isn’t true. I loved you from the first minute I saw you. You touched my heart as no other child has ever done. Here in my heart you have always been loved, always been mine.’
Against her will Rose could feel the tug on her emotions, but she wasn’t going to give in to it.
‘If that’s true, and you loved me so much, why did you leave me at Denham with a father who couldn’t care less about me and a great-grandmother who would have happily seen me dead? It is true, isn’t it, that Blanche ordered the doctor not to try to save me? And yes, before you ask, Cassandra did tell me. If you had really loved me you would never have left me there. You would have taken me with you.’
‘Rose, I couldn’t. There were reasons. Luc was already at school and you would have been alone in the nursery. Robert…’ Amber’s voice broke slightly as she remembered how hard those days had been. ‘I had a duty to Robert that meant I wouldn’t have been able to be with you.’
‘So you abandoned me, hoping that I would die; that
I wouldn’t grow up to ask the kind of awkward questions that might lead to the secrets that had to be protected being exposed. You didn’t love me at all. Cassandra was right, you just pretended that you did. Didn’t you ever stop to think about what you were doing? Wasn’t it bad enough that you had stolen from me the right to know that I might have a half-brother, without taking my love as well in exchange for worthless lies?’
Rose started to get up. She had said far more than she had ever imagined herself saying–too much–and now she felt drained and exhausted, but somehow still not cleansed of all the old hurt or the pain that went with it. She had loved her aunt with a child’s trusting love, and the hurt her aunt’s betrayal had caused her would always be a part of her.
‘Rose, please listen to me.’ Amber had stood up now as well. ‘I did leave you at Denham, yes, but you were never alone and unprotected just as you were never out of my thoughts. You see, Rose, I entrusted you to the one person I knew beyond any other I could rely on to look after you and be your guardian angel for me.’
Rose frowned. There was so much emotion in her aunt’s voice that she was compelled to listen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I entrusted you to Jay, Rose. He visited you every day, he wrote to me to tell me how you were. He took photographs of you for me; he was there for you all the time, when I could not be. He carried my love to you, and kept you safe.’
Rose bit her lip, trying to hold back her tears. Amber’s words had put a totally different slant on everything,
showing her a care and a commitment she had never known existed and which she knew as an adult could only have come from love.
‘The minute I looked at you, I felt such a bond with you, Rose. For me that bond is still there.’
‘I was so hurt by what Cassandra told me. I felt—’
‘Exactly what Cassandra wanted you to feel.’
They looked at one another, exchanging unsteady smiles.
It was Amber who moved first, reaching out to touch Rose’s hair and then her cheek, and then they were hugging one another, both of them crying and smiling.
There was no going back to the past and what had been lost there–that was impossible–but there was the future and the chance to rebuild their relationship together.
‘To Emerald. Many, many happy returns.’
Everyone raised their champagne flutes in acknowledgement of Drogo’s birthday toast, whilst Emerald herself looked ruefully at her own glass of lemonade. She was four and a half months pregnant now, and over the weeks of morning sickness, but the thought of alcohol still nauseated her.
Drogo and her mother had organised a family get-together at Denham to celebrate her birthday and, unexpectedly to Emerald, the whole family were there.
‘That was a wonderful suggestion of Drogo’s to John that we start holding an annual open-air rock festival at Fitton, Emerald,’ Janey told her. ‘John’s thrilled to bits about it. Oh, there’s Ella. I must go and have a word with her to congratulate her. How lovely that both of you are having babies this year.’
As Janey hurried over to her sister, Rose seized her opportunity to have Emerald to herself.
‘There’s something I want to know,’ she announced.
‘Mmm?’
‘Why did you tell me that Mama had asked me to stay at the hospital with her when Jay had his heart attack?’
The old closeness between Amber and Rose had returned to such an extent that Rose was now back to calling Amber ‘Mama’ again.
‘Oh, good heavens, Rose, that was months ago.’
‘That’s not good enough. You and I both know that she didn’t ask for me, and that it’s thanks to you that she and I are back to where we were.’
Emerald looked at her cousin. ‘Very well. Do you remember the night you took me to A&E after Max had hurt me?’
‘Yes,’ Rose said.
‘You left your jacket with me, it smelled of you and it made me feel…it made me feel that I wasn’t alone. Yo u made me feel that I wasn’t alone, Rose, despite the awful way I had treated you when we were growing up together. I clung to that jacket like a baby, but then you know that, don’t you?’
The question slipped in so unexpectedly had Rose’s eyes widening.
‘I saw you, you see,’ Emerald told her. ‘There was a mirror near to me and when I looked into it I saw you stop and then step back because you knew I wouldn’t want you to see me crying like a baby clinging to a rag comforter. That’s why I told you that Mummy had asked for you. I owed you. I had a debt to you I wanted to repay, and just as you’d seen my pain and misery, so I’d seen yours.’
‘Oh, Emerald.’
‘Oh, Rose.’
They looked at one another and then they both started to laugh.
‘You OK?’
Rose nodded her head and smiled up at Josh. This was their first outing together since Pete’s death six weeks earlier.
Rose still didn’t know just what had woken her that night, what had caused her, impelled her, to go to Pete’s bedroom, but as she had told Josh, she liked to think that it was love. Not the love she had for Josh–that was his alone–but a strong love nevertheless, a love that Pete had known she had for him and which he had called upon so that she would be there with him for that precious short time before his life slipped away. She had seen immediately that he had had some kind of seizure, or stroke, and had called out the emergency doctor, who had arrived within fifteen minutes. He had told her that he felt that Pete didn’t have very long to live and had asked her if she wanted him to send for an ambulance to take him to hospital. Rose had looked at Pete and something in his eyes had given her her answer.
She had reached for his hand and held it tightly, keeping her gaze on him as she told the doctor, ‘No, I think he would want to be here.’
Pete’s fingers had moved within her clasp and Rose had known she had done the right thing.
The doctor had nodded his head, said that he would see himself out and that she was to call him if she felt she needed to. They had had two hours, not a long time in which to say all that Rose wanted to say, but somehow
it had been enough. She had told him of her guilt, and her sorrow, she had asked for his forgiveness and given him her own, and once she had started to open her heart to him the words had flowed in a cleansing healing flood that washed away what wasn’t needed.
She had talked of the first time they had met, the night they had spent together, and she had seen him smile at her with the side of his face that could still move.
She had seen that he was sinking, his skin becoming soft and waxen, and she had got up from the bed to go to the windows and open them wide. Wasn’t it said that the soul needed to fly free?
It had taken her only seconds, but when she returned to the bed she could see that he had slipped further away from her.
She had held his hand, told him how special he was, and then kissed his forehead as he breathed his last breath.
They had never spoken of his death or his wishes, but somehow it had been as though they had and that she knew beyond any doubting what to do.
There had been a simple church service, and then a wake that was a magnificent celebration of his life to the sound of his music and the voices of those who remembered him best.
Life was such a precious gift. Rose smiled again at Josh.
They had agreed that she would sell the house and that they would be together without making any concrete plans. There wasn’t any need. They knew their own hearts
too well to need them. It was enough that they were together.
‘I still feel I’ve let you down.’
‘Well, you haven’t,’ Janey told John fiercely. ‘Marrying you has brought me so much happiness, John.’
‘When I damn near bankrupted us?’
‘You’ve given me something far more important than money. You’ve given me love, John. You’ve loved me without asking anything of me other than that I love you back. We’re so lucky, we’ve got each other and the boys, and Fitton.’
She would never, Janey promised herself, let him know just how frightened she had been or how much it had shocked her to discover that he could be vulnerable and weak, just as she could herself. More than ever now John needed to be her hero, her knight in shining armour–for his sake, not hers. She was the strong one now, the one on whom he depended, not the other way around. Swings and roundabouts, that was marriage, Janey thought to herself.
‘Have you told Emerald yet that she isn’t going to be the only one adding to the next generation?’ Oliver murmured in Ella’s ear.
‘I think everyone knows, though I am only just three months,’ Ella reminded him.
‘Mmm. I think I can remember the exact night,’ Oliver teased her.
Amber surveyed her family. So many years, so much love, she could almost feel it in the air, like the soft warm
wind of the South of France, carrying with it the mental images and memories of all those now gone who had played their part in creating the children and grandchildren who were here today, and carrying with it too their love.
Love didn’t die. It was always there, a rainbow dance just out of sight like laughter on the wind.
‘This would have made Robert so happy and proud.’
The sound of her husband’s voice had her looking at him with love and gratitude.
‘So you sense it too?’ she asked him. ‘You sense like me that Robert knows, that he and Luc know and share in this, in the family?’
Jay knew her so well; she never needed to explain things to him. She knew he would understand why she wanted to include her first husband and the son she had lost in today’s joy.
It was Emerald who, seeing her mother and her stepfather smiling at one another, went over to her own husband and whispered something to him, so that a few minutes later, with everyone’s glass refilled, Drogo raised his own to say warmly, ‘Another toast, this time to Amber, who is responsible for all of this, and all of us–in one way or another.’ His hand swept in an amused gesture, followed by appreciative laughter.
‘Amber.’
‘Mama.’
‘Grandma.’
Please let them all always have today’s happiness, Amber thought protectively. Please let them all have love.