Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

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 …?’

‘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 …