Coming Home

Max had surprised David. What had happened to the selfish, hedonistic young man who had looked up to him and on whose adulation David had often preened himself, whose envy of him had fed David’s own always vulnerable sense of self-esteem?

Only two days ago he had watched as Max walked in the garden with his younger brother Joss, the two heads close together as they talked earnestly. At one point they had stopped walking and Max had put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort and very real affection. There had been no mistaking the closeness between them and no mistaking, either, the love and pride in Max’s eyes as he played with his own children.

Seeing Max with his wife and children and witnessing the total transformation of his character had left David with a sharp sense of pain and regret.

The day he walked out of the nursing home where he had been recuperating from his heart attack and out of his old life, he had done so because he could no longer tolerate the unbearable weight not just of his own guilt but of his father’s expectations.

The onus of being the favourite son, the first-born twin, the good-looking husband and charming brother-in-law, the isolation of being the one all the others looked up to, had become so burdensome to him, so resented by him, that he had felt swamped by it.

He had needed to break free; to step away from the image others had created for him and be himself. At least that was what he had told himself at the time; that and the fact that he had every right to put himself first, that his brush with death had released him from any and every obligation he owed to anyone else; that his heart attack was a warning to him to live his own life.

A faint smile touched his mouth, creasing the lean planes of his face.

He weighed a good deal less now than he had done when he had left home and his body possessed the taut, muscle-honed strength of a man used to hard physical work. His skin was tanned by the Jamaican sun and the sea air, and his streaked blond hair was only just beginning to show some grey. But it wasn’t just his body that looked different; the long hours spent in often painful reflection and the even longer hours in discussion and debate with his friend the priest had also left their visible mark on him. His eyes now looked out on the world with reflection, compassion and wisdom, and he was able to smile warmly, generously and even sometimes tenderly at the frailties of his fellow man.

A stranger looking properly at him now would have found him something of an enigma. His physical appearance was that of a tough manual worker, but married to it was a depth of awareness and intelligence in his eyes that suggested a man of letters and deep reflection. But David no longer courted the approval of other people; he no longer needed either their admiration or their company. Solitude, physical, mental and emotional, had become his chosen friend rather than his feared foe.

It had taken some months of working beside Father Ignatius before David had been able to start confiding in him.

‘I have no family, no friends,’ David had told him. ‘If I were to go back home, they would disown me and rightly so. I have committed an unforgivable crime.’

‘No crime is unforgivable in God’s eyes,’ the priest had replied firmly. ‘Not if one truly repents it.’

‘What is true repentance?’ David had asked him, adding sardonically, ‘I’ve never been the sackcloth-and-ashes type. Too much of a sybarite, I suppose, and too selfish.’

‘You say that and yet you are prepared to acknowledge that you have sinned. It takes a brave man to submit himself to the judgement of his peers and an even braver one to submit to his own judgement and God’s. If to admit the existence of one’s sins is the first step on the road to self-forgiveness, then to make true atonement for them is the second.’

‘True atonement! And how am I supposed to do that?’ David had asked savagely. ‘There is no way I could ever repay the money I stole or undo the damage I have done.’

‘There is always a way,’ Father Ignatius had insisted, ‘but sometimes we can make it hard for ourselves to find it.’

Always a way! David shook his head as he remembered those words now. If he had imagined that his leaving, his absence, had created an emptiness in the lives of those he had left behind, he was discovering how vain that assumption had been. The jagged edges of the destruction he had caused had been repaired, and in the days he had spent silently witnessing the lives of his family, he had also discovered just who was responsible for the new closeness and harmony that now permeated their lives.

Jon, the brother he had always secretly pitied and sometimes openly mocked.

Jonathon. Only the previous evening his twin had walked so close to David’s place of concealment in the dusk-shrouded garden of Queensmead that by moving a few yards David could have been at his side.

His brother had changed, grown taller, or was it simply that his bearing had become more upright? As he watched him, David had been aware of how much more confident Jonathon seemed, of how much more content. Was it because he was no longer a part of Jon’s life?

David hadn’t always been kind to Jon or valued him as he ought to have done. It shamed him now to remember how often he had allowed their father to insist that Jonathon step back into the shadows to allow him to become more prominent, how easily and vainly he had allowed himself to be put up on a pedestal and fêted as the favourite son—to his twin’s detriment. How conceitedly and selfishly he had laid claim to all the virtues of their shared heritage, pinning on Jonathon the label of the one to inherit all the weaknesses. The truth was that, of the two of them, it was Jonathon who was the stronger, the purer of heart and deed.

He was beginning to feel hungry. He had very little money and no wish to be recognised by anyone. Last night he had raided Maddy’s vegetable garden. Tonight …

A car was coming down the drive. Not Maddy’s this time. This one had a different engine sound. Swiftly, he withdrew into the protection of the shrubbery surrounding the lawn, watching as the car came to an abrupt halt and a young woman got out, her cap of hair shining in the sunlight.

Olivia …

David’s heart skipped a beat as he watched his daughter head for the house. She looked preoccupied and much more on edge than either Maddy or Jenny appeared to be. A sharp surge of paternal anxiety plucked fiercely at his heartstrings.

Olivia was worrying about something. Why? What?

OLIVIA FROWNED as she hurried into Queensmead’s kitchen. She had come hoping to see Maddy who had obviously gone out.

‘She said she’d be back, that she wouldn’t be very long,’ Edna Longridge, the retired nurse who came to Queensmead a couple of times a week to keep an eye on Ben, explained to Olivia.

‘I can’t wait,’ Olivia told her. ‘I’ve got a meeting in half an hour.’

‘Oh dear, can I give her a message for you?’ Edna asked.

‘No, it doesn’t matter.’

Her decision to pay Maddy a call had been an impromptu one, an impulse of the moment, a need to talk over her present disenchantment with her life and her marriage with someone she knew would understand.

Maddy and Max might be happy together now, but their marriage had not always been a happy one. No one knew better than Maddy what it was like to be married to a man who didn’t love you … a man who was unfaithful to you….

Olivia tensed.

But Caspar did love her and so far as she was aware he had certainly never been unfaithful to her.

Not yet! That small, sharp inner voice that had become increasingly vociferous recently berated her smartly.

Not yet … not ever. Not Caspar …

No? Then why was he so irritable with her? He might claim that it was because he felt shut out of her life, because he felt that her work had become more important to her than either he or the children were. He must know that that simply wasn’t true. He must know how haunted she was by her fear that if she didn’t do everything she could to prove that she was not like her father—unreliable, selfish, incompetent, dishonest—she would be letting not just herself down but their children, as well. She would be condemning them to be tainted with their grandfather’s sins. It was all very well for Jon to claim that she bore no responsibility for her father’s crimes; that no one would ever think that just because her father had been dishonest she was going to be the same. Somewhere, deep down inside herself, Olivia could not bring herself to believe him. She was scared beyond measure that Jon was lying to her, that he really didn’t trust her, and that was why she drove herself so hard, why she felt compelled to prove herself over and over.

Only the previous week she had come back from an appointment out of the office to find Jon standing beside her desk. Her stomach had clenched with sick fear as she had a flashback to the day she discovered what her father had done. Was Jon simply in her office because he needed a file, as he had said, or had he been checking up on her?

She had tried to discuss her fears with Caspar, but her pride, that same stubborn pride that had always been her major sin had got in the way.