Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘And so tall,’ Tiggy was trilling as she stood provocatively close to Caspar, looking doe-eyed up at him as she asked him, ‘Just how tall exactly are you?’

‘Six-two or thereabouts,’ Caspar obliged her good-humouredly.

‘And you’ve got the muscles to match,’ Tiggy breathed poutingly as she ran one polished fingertip down Caspar’s bare forearm. ‘Oh my …’

Over her mother’s averted head, Olivia sent Caspar a pleading look as she witnessed his withdrawal from her mother’s touch. She knew how volatile her mother’s mood swings were, how quickly she reacted to other people’s opinion of her, how vitally important it was to her that others liked and approved of her.

As a child Olivia had simply accepted her mother’s needs as an intrinsic part of her character, but now that she was an adult … Her forehead started to pleat in an anxious frown of concern.

‘I’d better set my alarm when I go to bed tonight,’ Olivia told her mother. ‘I promised I’d be at Queensmead early tomorrow morning to help Aunt Ruth with the flowers. Oh, and Aunt Jenny said to remind you that the Chester crowd would be arriving about lunch-time. She said to let her know if you needed any extra bedding or anything. Apparently she’s been through the old linen cupboard at Queensmead making sure that Gramps would have enough of everything to cope with Hugh’s family. Nicholas, Saul and Hillary and the children are staying there and she says she found enough bedding to equip a small hotel.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked uncertainly as she saw the way her mother’s expression had changed, her fingers plucking tensely at the cuff of her silk shirt.

‘I don’t know why we have to have Laurence and Henry and their families staying here,’ she fretted. ‘After all, it isn’t as if … That’s far more than anyone else is having to put up and Mrs Phillips can’t give me any extra time because Jenny has already booked all her spare hours.’

Laurence and Henry were brothers and her father’s second or third cousins. Olivia was never quite sure which. They were a little older than her father. Laurence had three grown children and Henry four plus three grandchildren; they belonged to the original Chester family from which her own family had sprung.

‘Is the competitiveness with the Chester side of the family shared by you?’ Caspar had asked her curiously.

Olivia had shaken her head. ‘No, it’s all past history so far as I’m concerned and although technically they are family, we’ve never been that close—weddings, christenings and funerals are about the only times we get to meet these days.’

‘Why on earth couldn’t they have stayed with Jenny and Jon?’ her mother was still protesting.

‘Probably because they don’t have enough room,’ Olivia pointed out gently.

‘There’s plenty of room at Queensmead,’ her mother retorted.

‘Yes,’ Olivia agreed, ‘but Uncle Hugh and his family are staying there.’

Although she didn’t say so, she suspected that Jenny would have been reluctant to place so much of a burden on Ben’s shoulders by filling the house.

‘Come on, Tiggy,’ Olivia coaxed her. ‘You know you’ve always enjoyed entertaining.’

‘Yes, but that was before … You know I like to do things properly but your father keeps complaining that we can’t afford …’ She stopped, chewing on her cheek, her eyes suddenly filling with tears whilst Olivia felt a small, cold finger of unease run warningly down her spine. So far as Olivia knew, her parents were reasonably well off.

Certainly as a child she had never been aware of any lack of money or any necessity to economise. She had always assumed that the practice, although only small, brought in a comfortable and secure income for her father and his brother, given that it was the only firm of solicitors serving the town and its outlying rural district.

Her mother, she realised, was given to exaggeration and Olivia reassured herself that her petulant outburst was probably caused by her father’s complaining about her mother’s well-known propensity to indulge in designer clothes and expensive make-up.

Olivia was aware that her mother had very little idea of what it meant to watch her spending or live within a given budget. It was not unknown for her to send all the way into Chester for a specific item she required for one of her dinner parties, or to order her current favourite fresh flowers from some expensive Knightsbridge flower shop in London because they were unavailable closer to home.

‘I expect Gramps wanted to have the Chester contingent staying with you because he wanted them to be impressed.’ Olivia did her best to soothe her mother, biting betrayingly on her bottom lip when she saw the sardonic look Caspar was giving her as he witnessed her overt attempt at flattery. He would, no doubt, take her to task for it later. If Caspar had a fault it was that he did not believe in any gilding of lilies or any sugar-coating of pills.

‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re right,’ her mother conceded, brightening a little. ‘Jenny is a dear, of course, and a wonderful cook but … well … she doesn’t have much idea of interior design, does she, and the house always seems to be full of children and animals.’

Olivia privately thought her aunt and uncle’s home with its lovingly polished antiques, its bowls of home-made pot-pourri and freshly cut garden flowers came as near to her ideal of what a home should be as anything possibly could. She much preferred her aunt’s use of the wonderful old fabrics she found on her buying trips—rich brocades, velvets as soft and supple as silk and finely woven cottons and linens—to the modern, and to Jenny’s eye, often too pretty, flounced and frilly fabrics that her mother chose to decorate her own home with. But she said nothing.

She knew that her mother took pride in keeping her home as up to the minute and fashionable as she did her wardrobe. Growing up she had become used to the mood of dissatisfaction that would descend on her mother every year when the glossy style bibles she liked to buy pronounced their views on what was currently either in or out of fashion. And whole rooms were refurbished to fit in with their dictates, her mother worrying almost obsessively over every tiny detail, not satisfied until she had found just the right lampshade or the favoured objet d’art.

‘Has she always been so dependent on other people’s good opinion?’ Caspar asked her later on that night when they were in bed. Olivia had sneaked upstairs to his attic room, feeling very much like a naughty schoolgirl—it was ridiculous that her mother should feel she had to comply with Gramps’s outdated and old-fashioned ideas when he wasn’t even there to see them.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘although …’

‘Although what?’ Caspar prodded when she paused.

‘I … I’m not sure. I can’t remember her ever being quite so … I suppose it’s very difficult for her. She’s always relied so much on her looks as a means of bolstering her self-confidence and she still looks stunning, of course, but …’

‘But she’s getting older … and more desperate,’ Caspar supplied for her.

In the darkness Olivia nodded her head.

Because a part of her had always secretly wished that Tiggy could be more like Jenny … more of a traditional mother and not the almost fey, childlike creature she actually was, the whole issue of her mother and her mother’s vulnerability and her own feelings of guilt was one that even now Olivia didn’t feel entirely comfortable with.

It was bad enough feeling the way she did without adding to that sense of betrayal by discussing her mother’s shortcomings even with someone as close to her as Caspar. She had seen earlier how much he had disliked her mother’s overcoy, flirtatious behaviour and had felt torn between protecting Tiggy and agreeing with him.

Slipping out of the narrow bed, she told him, ‘I’m thirsty. I think I’ll go down and make myself some tea. Would you like some?’

‘Please. Want me to come with you?’

Olivia shook her head. ‘I shan’t be long,’ she promised, bending down to kiss him lightly on the mouth before pulling on her robe and padding barefoot to the door.

She knew the house well enough not to need to switch on any light, and besides, the moon was almost full, casting a sharp, clean light in through the windows.

Only the odd creaking board betrayed her presence as she went downstairs. In the hallway she could smell the scent of the white lilies that were her mother’s favourite flower.

The kitchen door was ajar and she paused outside it, tensing as she heard the sound of a packet of food being torn open. Biscuits by the sound of it, she guessed as she heard the crunch of someone eating them far too quickly for the health of their digestive system.

It must be Jack. He had obviously sneaked downstairs to get something to eat, Olivia decided as she heard the fridge door being opened. Growing boys were notorious for their appetite, and according to her father’s complaints at dinner tonight, Jack was no exception.

Hesitating no longer, Olivia walked into the kitchen and reached for the light switch as she did so. Light flooded the kitchen, revealing the figure crouched almost coweringly in front of the half-open fridge door.

All around her the floor was littered with empty food cartons and packages and even cans, Olivia noticed in shocked bewilderment and disbelief as she stared from the rubbish-strewn floor and work surfaces to her mother’s ashen face.

‘Tiggy …’ she whispered, ‘what is it … what’s …?’

But even as she asked the question, Olivia knew the answer, just as she had known earlier that morning when she’d walked into her mother’s bedroom and seen those glossy, expensive bags of brand-new, unworn clothes scattered all over the room and had smelled that sickening, nauseous smell of fresh vomit overlaid by the heavy, cloying, non-disguising scent of her mother’s perfume. Had known and had tried desperately all day to ignore what she had seen just as she had tried to ignore her own shaming feelings of anger and resentment at having been confronted by the evidence of her mother’s abject misery and despair. For whatever else could be responsible for what her mother was so plainly doing and what, Olivia had guessed with a burst of unwanted, sickening self-awareness, she must have been doing for many, many years?

Anorexia, bulimia—these were the words one associated with vulnerable, almost self-destructive young adolescents and surely not adult women in their forties, but there was no escaping the evidence of her own eyes.

‘Oh, Mum,’ she whispered chokily, still half-hoping that it was all a mistake, that her mother would stand up and smile at her and that somehow the chaos, the carnage all around them would disappear; yet it was all too clear from the remains of the food her mother had obviously just forced down for whatever reasons of self-hatred and hunger and need that she had been motivated into the kind of behaviour that left the kitchen looking as though it had been ravaged by a dozen or more starving people.

Torn food wrappers, empty cans, opened cartons of ready-made meals, scattered remnants of a loaf of bread and more, were tossed on the floor as though someone had just emptied a dustbin on it.

Sickly Olivia stared at the mess. How could any one person possibly eat so much? She looked at her mother, her face waxy and sallow, her eyes dull and heavy. She was struggling to breathe properly, her hand surreptitiously massaging her stomach beneath her robe.

‘Why?’ Olivia whispered achingly. ‘Why …?’

‘I don’t know … I don’t know …’