A Perfect Family

‘Girls!’ Joss pronounced with exasperated contempt, then added, ‘Aren’t you going to eat that pie, Lou, because if you’re not …?’ He stared hopefully at his sister’s plate.

‘You’re looking tired,’ Jenny commented quietly to her husband when they were finally on their own.

‘Not really. It’s just … well, I suppose this party brings home the fact that we’re not getting any younger.’

Jenny didn’t say anything; she knew quite well who carried the heaviest part of the burden at work in the practice. She knew equally well that any attempt by her to protest would meet with that same polite, distancing withdrawal that Jon used whenever he considered that anyone was attempting to attack his twin brother.

In the early years of their marriage she had found it unbearably hurtful, knowing that someone else would always come first; that his loyalty, his love for his twin, would always be the most important, would always come before his feelings for her. But then she made herself recognise that it was that same loyalty to David that made him the man he was, the husband he was … the father he was … and she had said to herself that she must not fall into the same trap as others and try to make her husband what she wanted him to be rather than appreciate what he was. In their marriage at least, he would have the opportunity to be himself—to be an individual. She owed him that much. That much, and much, much more. So very much more …

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‘Thank you, Mr Thompson, everything looks lovely, and you’ll be here in the morning to finish off?’ Jenny asked the man in charge of the team that had erected the marquee.

They had arrived earlier in the day, a dozen or more of them, all neatly dressed in an eye-catching uniform of jeans and T-shirts bearing the marquee company’s logo. Most of this group of energetic young men and women, Jenny had discovered, were students working through their summer vacations.

They had erected the marquee with commendable expertise and speed under the watchful eye of the forty-odd-year-old foreman, breaking only for an hour’s respite and a picnic meal before going on to hang the interior awnings, put up the lights and erect the connecting ‘tunnels’ that led from the house to the marquee, one for the guests and another for the caterers.

‘We’ll be here sharp on the dot at eight,’ the foreman assured Jenny.

‘And the tables will be set up and the chairs in place by twelve?’ she checked.

‘By twelve,’ he agreed.

‘It looks absolutely wonderful,’ Olivia approved as the foreman turned to gather his team together.

She and Caspar had called round just as Jenny was on the point of leaving home to check on how things were going and had elected to go with her. Max, who had arrived home late the previous evening, had also announced that he would join them. Jenny wasn’t sure why. He was standing on his own, scowling and looking thoroughly bored and irritated.

‘I hope having plain cream isn’t going to be too dull,’ Jenny worried as she turned back to study the interior of the marquee again.

‘No, it’s perfect,’ Olivia assured her. ‘So elegant—anything else would have been too fussy … too weddingy.’

The marquee team were piling into the vehicles that had brought them and that Jenny was relieved to see were all neatly parked well away from Ben’s precious lawn.

Apart from being present when they arrived to check that everything was in order, Jenny had left the marquee people to get on with their work on their own, having given them her telephone number in case there were any problems, but she had gathered from the comments Ben had made since they arrived that he had spent most of the day keeping a stern eye on their activities.

She wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that they had worked so efficiently without causing any damage, but she rather suspected it might be the latter.

‘Damn fuss,’ he muttered now. ‘In my day a fiftieth birthday was nothing to make any fuss about. They’re forecasting rain, you know.’

‘Not until Monday at the very earliest,’ Jenny returned serenely.

‘I was wondering if I ought to offer Aunt Ruth some assistance with the flowers,’ Olivia told her, ‘but I don’t know whether I’d be more of a hindrance than a help.’

‘I’m sure she’d be only too grateful to have another pair of hands, even if it’s only to help fetch and carry,’ Jenny assured her.

‘Make that two pairs of hands,’ Caspar joined in.

Jenny smiled at him.

Apart from being introduced to him by Olivia when she had brought him round, neither she nor Jon had had much opportunity to talk to Caspar at any length as yet, but Jenny had liked him immediately.

When one looked beyond the remarkable sexuality of his stunning good looks, there was a steadfastness about him that reassured her maternal heart as well as a certain strength of purpose that told her he was not a man to be deflected from any path he had chosen—any person he had chosen—and it was plain that the person he had chosen, the person he wanted was Olivia.

Jenny watched her niece affectionately. There was no doubt at all that Olivia wanted him, too.

Deep in her heart of hearts Jenny knew with that kind of knowing like a well-spring in the human psyche that cannot be ignored or dammed and was impossible to deny that out of all their children, her own as well as David and Tiggy’s, that Olivia was her favourite and extraordinarily special to her. It couldn’t be because she was David’s child … Her heart had started to beat a little too fast. Fiercely she started to mentally run through the list of things she still had to check up on.

‘So, young man, you’re a teacher, I gather.’

Caspar inclined his head towards Ben as he spoke. Ben was a tall man himself and it irritated him to acknowledge that this American Olivia had got herself involved with had the advantage over him in that department. Since his accident Ben had started to stoop slightly and he frowned in exasperation as he discovered that he was obliged to take a small step back and actually look up at Caspar.

Americans! Ben didn’t like them, never had. American servicemen had been stationed locally during the war, loud-mouthed, gum-chewing individuals with more money than sense, bragging and strutting about, turning the local girls’ heads and causing all manner of havoc.

‘I’m a lecturer,’ Caspar affirmed dryly.

‘And only over here temporarily, so I understand,’ Ben persisted.

‘That’s right,’ Caspar agreed.

‘Hmm … Well, over here in this country we have a saying,’ Ben told him disagreeably, ‘that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’

‘Gramps,’ Olivia protested, but Caspar shook his head gently at her and smiled. If he chose to take it, there was a partnership waiting for him with one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firms. It would certainly make him far richer than his present occupation, but he enjoyed what he was doing and as far as he was concerned that was more important than making money.

But then, as he would have been the first to admit if challenged, it was easy for him to make that decision when he was the beneficiary of a considerable family trust set up by his maternal grandfather.

‘That depends on the teacher,’ he said simply, both his face and his voice calmly neutral, but Jenny, who had overheard the conversation and who happened to be looking at Ben as Caspar made his response, knew that Caspar’s refusal to be dominated by him had reinforced Ben’s antagonism towards him.

It was just as well that Olivia lived and worked in London and not here, she decided, even though she knew how hurt Olivia had originally been when her tentative hopes of being allowed to join the family business had been contemptuously dismissed by her grandfather.

‘The law isn’t a business for women,’ he was fond of saying. ‘They’re too emotional, get too involved.’

Her own daughters were going to make him eat those words, Jenny suspected, especially Katie, but then Katie was far tougher emotionally than Olivia. She would never allow her grandfather’s views, or anyone else’s, Jenny surmised, to deflect her from her goals, a trait she had inherited from Ben himself, and one reinforced by her own family’s sturdy ability to withstand whatever shocks life chose to throw at them. As farming stock they had needed that characteristic; she had needed it at times.

‘No, the only way anyone can really come to know the law is to practice it,’ Ben was telling Caspar doggedly. ‘I know—I’ve done it and I don’t mean the namby-pamby diluted kind of work you get in some company’s legal department like Olivia here does,’ he added.

‘Olivia is a very highly qualified and professional young woman,’ Caspar retaliated.

‘Oh, she’s passed the exams right enough,’ Ben agreed, ‘but it takes more than a piece of paper to make a good solicitor. The law isn’t sitting at some desk shifting pieces of paper. It’s getting out there in it, doing the kind of work young Max is doing. That’s the law.’

Jenny could see Caspar stiffening slightly and her heart sank. She knew why, of course. Olivia for all her modesty and her grandfather’s deliberate hypocrisy was far more highly qualified than Max and, Jenny was convinced, of far more value to any prospective employer. For starters, Olivia’s experience was wider and for another … Well, Jenny knew which of the two of them she would want to handle her most personal affairs and it wouldn’t be her own son.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Caspar saying slowly and frowning slightly at the same time. ‘Forgive me … I’m still not completely au fait with the intricacies of the British legal system but so far as I understood matters Max is still merely a squatter in his present chambers and, as such, unable to take on any potential clients. Olivia, on the other hand, is in charge of her own highly specialised department and I know for a fact—’

‘Caspar,’ Olivia protested in a stifled voice, ‘Gramps doesn’t—’

But it was too late. Ben was swinging round to frown at her, sensing a much softer target than the unexpectedly obdurate barrier Caspar had thrown up against him. Ben wasn’t used to being challenged and he didn’t like it.

‘What’s this …? Her own department …? What’s this …?’