A Perfect Family

‘It’s just a small promotion, Gramps. Nothing really at all,’ Olivia was already hurriedly protesting. ‘Just an interdepartmental thing, but of course—’

‘But of course it no doubt carries a whacking great salary increase,’ Max interrupted, going over to join in. ‘You certainly fell on your feet there, old thing. I—’

‘Olivia did not fall on her feet,’ Caspar corrected him coolly. ‘She happens to be an extremely highly qualified and hard-working lawyer.’

‘You would say that,’ Max responded. ‘After all, she was one of your pupils—out of bed as well as in it.’

Jenny could feel her face burning with embarrassment on behalf of her son, but typically Max was oblivious both to his rudeness and his lack of generosity.

‘I hear that there’s shortly to be a vacancy coming up in your chambers. Do you intend to apply for it?’ Caspar asked Max.

Max frowned. How the hell had Caspar learned about that?

‘He doesn’t need to apply for it,’ Ben interjected, answering the question for him. ‘He’s already been told that the vacancy will be his and so it should be. He’s already had to stand aside once in favour of someone else.’

Max fought to conceal the irritation his grandfather’s comment was causing him. Normally he was only too glad to have the old man champion him, but on this occasion just how much did Olivia’s damned American know about what was going on?

He had to have some kind of inside information just to know that the vacancy was coming up. In any other circumstances Max would immediately have started pumping him to discover just how much he knew and if that information included the name of his female rival, but of course he could hardly do that now without admitting to his grandfather that his appointment wasn’t as cut and dried as he’d let him think.

Max could feel himself starting to sweat slightly. His grandfather was indulgent towards him—to a point—and Max knew how important it was to Ben that Max fulfilled his ambitions for him. He had already been disappointed once and ultimately David had been forgiven for that disappointment, but Max shuddered at the thought of having to live his uncle’s life.

It had been bad enough living under his grandfather’s restrictive eye when he was younger; to do so now … His grandfather still held the family purse strings and Max had seen the way he controlled his sons and their lives through them. Max had no illusions about the price attached to being his grandfather’s favourite.

But his success meant just as much to him as it did to his grandfather, probably more so. Max liked money and he liked the things it could buy. He wanted to be successful and, if possible, famous, and no mere woman was going to stand in his way.

‘Did your mother’s shoes arrive safely?’ Jenny asked Olivia as they walked back to the car.

‘No. She’s gone into Chester this morning to see if she can find another pair.’

Olivia hesitated for a moment, remembering the scene she had interrupted in her parents’ bedroom earlier. She still felt disturbed about it.

‘Aunt Jenny,’ she began, ‘I know that you and Mum aren’t particularly close, but have you, has she …?’

She stopped abruptly, recalling how on the way here after he had met her aunt and uncle, Caspar had mentioned how much everyone seemed to depend on Jenny. Seeing how not only Jenny’s own younger offspring but Olivia’s brother Jack, as well, had produced sets of grubby sports kits to be washed, Caspar had remarked wryly that the older members of the family dumped their problems on her in much the same way as the younger ones seemed to dump their dirty washing.

They all did have a tendency to turn to Jenny when things went wrong in their lives, Olivia acknowledged but she was an adult now and …

‘Is something wrong with your mother, Livvy?’ Jenny was asking her but Olivia shook her head, ignoring the temptation to confide in her aunt.

‘No,’ she replied lightly, ‘but you know Mum. She’d be worrying herself silly about those shoes….’

Olivia winced inwardly as she heard her own voice. What would Jenny have said if she had told her what was really bothering her?

She and Caspar had just been on the point of leaving the house that morning when Olivia realised that she had forgotten her jacket. As she dashed back upstairs to get it, she saw that her parents’ bedroom door was open and she could hear her mother inside the room apparently talking to herself.

Automatically Olivia had walked into the bedroom. The scene that met her eyes was one she doubted she would ever be able to forget. And neither was the mingled look of shame, guilt, defiance and fear she had seen in her mother’s eyes.

‘You won’t say anything, will you?’ she had pleaded with Olivia as she sat surrounded by dozens of glossy carrier bags, their contents plainly never unpacked, the result, Livvy felt sure, of many shopping trips. ‘Don’t tell your father. He wouldn’t … He wouldn’t understand….’

Olivia had left without making any response. Beneath her mother’s familiar perfume had been another smell, rank and unpleasantly pervasive, a smell Olivia had recognised as actually familiar to her. Her gorge had started to rise in response to it and she had had to leave the bedroom without responding to her mother’s plea of secrecy.

‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Caspar asking her quietly as they drove away from her grandfather’s. ‘You’re not brooding over what he said, are you?’

‘Who?’ Olivia questioned, her face set.

‘Your grandfather,’ Caspar reminded her. ‘I know he must have upset you, dismissing everything you’ve achieved professionally by …’

Olivia’s expression cleared then. Caspar thought she was upset because her grandfather had compared her adversely with Max. Once she might have been but not now, not when …

‘No. My grandfather’s too old-fashioned and chauvinistic to change now and Max has always been his favourite.’

‘Mmm … Well, things will be different in America,’ Caspar promised her. When Olivia made no immediate response, he gave her a thoughtful look. ‘You’re not having second thoughts about our plans, are you?’ he prodded, then added, ‘You still haven’t told your family?’

‘How could I have second thoughts?’ Olivia challenged him lovingly. ‘You know how much you mean to me … how much our future together means to me,’ she amended.

She laughed as he warned her softly, ‘Just watch it. I don’t know what your laws are over here about stopping on the freeway to—’

‘This isn’t a freeway,’ Olivia interjected mock-severely. ‘It’s a quiet country road and if you want to stop …’ She glanced at him provocatively, laughing again when Caspar shook his head at her.

The months they’d spent together had been the happiest of her life and when Caspar had told her that he was due to return to the States at the end of the summer, she had thought at first that he was trying to tell her that their relationship was not one he viewed as potentially permanent.

She had tried not to show her feelings, to reveal to him how devastated she felt, but something must have betrayed her because he had immediately taken her in his arms and held her tight, rocking her protectively.

‘No. No,’ he told her huskily, ‘I don’t mean to end our relationship. How could you think it? I love you, Olivia … I want you with me. I want you to come with me … it’s just … well, you’ve worked so damned hard for your promotion and …’

‘It’s just a job,’ Olivia had replied tremulously, and in the emotion of the moment she had meant it. ‘You are far, far more important.’ She had meant that, too.

Still meant it, even if sometimes she found somewhat daunting the fact that she would virtually have to retrain in the States if she wanted to achieve the same professional status there that she had been well on her way to achieving here at home.

Caspar would never ask or expect her to give up her career for him. She knew that. But he had made it equally plain that there was no way that he envisaged his professional future as lying anywhere other than in the United States.

‘We could always commute,’ he had whispered to her one night as they lay entwined in one another’s arms.

Commute. As Olivia contemplated the emptiness, the loneliness, the bleakness of all the nights they would have to spend apart if they did so, she had known that the option wasn’t one she could happily contemplate.

And so the decision had been made. Her notice was already handed in and worked through and she had intended to break the news about her plans for her future to her family at some stage during the weekend. She had not foreseen any problems. Why should there be?

She loved her parents, her family, of course, but they had their lives and she had hers. The old childhood and teenage envy she had felt for Max had long since faded away.

But what about the scene in her parents’ bedroom this morning? She bit down hard on her bottom lip. How long had the problem been going on? Did anyone else know? Her father? Surely he must have some inkling. And what about her? She simply couldn’t pretend or ignore what she had witnessed despite the pleading look she had seen in her mother’s eyes.

Caspar realised that something still troubled Olivia. It was just as well they were only here for the weekend, he acknowledged as he drove back towards Olivia’s parents’ home. Family gatherings of any kind tended to make him feel claustrophobic, to bring back memories and fears of which, to say the least, he wasn’t particularly proud. He could still vividly remember how he had disgraced himself at his father’s second wedding.

He’d been taken there by his mother, who had spent the entire previous day patiently explaining to him that her divorce from his father and their consequent relationships with new partners had absolutely no bearing on their shared love for him. He was still their very much loved child.

As a paediatrician, his mother had, of course, been well versed in the kind of trauma experienced by children when their parents’ relationship broke down, and not only had Caspar been carefully prepared for the break-up of his parents’ marriage and their subsequent divorce, he had also been equally carefully and slowly introduced to their new partners.

In his mother’s case, it was an old colleague and friend whom she had known before she married his father. Divorced now himself, he had two teenage children—a son and a daughter—both of whom had been politely distant with Caspar and his mother. His father’s inamorata was a younger ex-student who had been tireless in her determination to show Caspar and his father how much she acknowledged the importance of their relationship. Caspar had disgraced both himself and his parents by throwing up all over the bride.