Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

Tiggy had started to shiver and cry, wrapping her thin arms around her bent knees and rocking herself to and fro as she pleaded with Olivia.

‘Don’t tell anyone … don’t tell your father … I didn’t mean to spend so much … I couldn’t help it…. You understand, don’t you?’ she appealed to her daughter.

But Olivia, remembering how the sight of all the bags of unwrapped and unworn clothes strewn across her floor had shocked her, could not find the words to give her mother the reassurance she so desperately needed.

‘Don’t tell your father,’ her mother was repeating. ‘I promised him I wouldn’t do it again. He doesn’t love me when I’m sick,’ Olivia heard her mother saying, her eyes filling with fresh tears as she looked pathetically at her daughter. ‘He tries to pretend, but I can tell … he won’t come near me….’

She was sobbing noisily now like a small, hurt child. She even looked like a child with her thin arms and her hunched-up body. Olivia wanted to go over to her and put her arms round her, hold her, but the stench of the food she had consumed, the memory of how her bedroom had smelt after she had voided whatever she had stuffed herself with previously, made her gorge rise and she simply couldn’t do it … couldn’t bear to be near her.

As she swallowed against her own nausea, Olivia wondered why it had taken her so long to realise what was happening, why she had not guessed … questioned—

‘Olivia?’

She tensed as she heard Caspar coming into the kitchen. She had forgotten all about the tea she had promised him, and now as her eyes met his across the width of the room she saw that he had recognised what was going on as immediately as she had done herself.

‘I didn’t know,’ she heard herself whispering to him as though there was some need for her to justify her own ignorance.

Behind her, her mother was struggling to stand up.

‘I want to go to bed … I’m tired,’ Olivia heard her saying. She was speaking and moving like someone heavily sedated or drugged, which Olivia recognised dully she possibly was with so much food crammed into her body.

‘Let her go,’ Caspar told her as Olivia started to protest.

Could this really be her mother? Olivia wondered wretchedly as she watched her shambling out of the kitchen, heading, not for the stairs, but for the downstairs cloakroom.

‘Oh God,’ Olivia whimpered. ‘Oh God, Caspar. I don’t …’

Automatically she started to pick up the debris her mother had left behind. Then abruptly she paused and turned round, her eyes filling with tears. Wordlessly he held out his arms to her.

Still too shocked to articulate her feelings, she half ran, half stumbled into Caspar’s open arms, closing her eyes against the too-vivid images of her mother that refused to stop tormenting her as she buried her head against his chest.

In a world that had suddenly become frighteningly unreal, the warmth of Caspar’s embrace as he held her felt as blessedly familiar as the hardness of his body. She could feel the steady beat of his heart, so much calmer and slower than the frantic, raised pace of her own, smell his scent, hear his breathing, all of them things she knew well and could recognise, giving her a sense of safety and security that she badly needed.

Emotionally she felt much the same sense of shock and disbelief that people must have experienced when they discovered the unsinkable Titanic was actually sinking, the decks no longer stable beneath their feet but tilting; Caspar was her only place of refuge, her only piece of stable ground. How could her mother, her pretty, slim, delicate and dainty mother be that same gross, unrecognisable person she had just seen cramming food into her mouth like, like …?

She started to tremble violently, as distressed by her own thoughts as she was by what she had just witnessed.

‘Caspar …’ As she whispered his name she opened her eyes and looked anxiously up into his face, wrapping her arms tightly around him as she started to kiss him with a frantic, fierce passion.

For a second he seemed to hesitate, but then as though he sensed her need, he started to return her kiss, responding to its hunger and need, and inevitably, because he was a man, despite the fact that he knew it was an emotional need that was driving her rather than physical desire, becoming aroused by it, his hands coming up to cup her breasts.

‘Oh God, Livvy,’ he told her hungrily, ‘you feel so good I could eat you….’

Eat her!

Olivia stiffened, wrenching her mouth away from his, nausea churning her stomach.

The sound of the very word ‘eat’ brought back all the dreadful images she had been trying to suppress—the sight, the sound of her mother as she indulged in her orgiastic binge, a parody of sexual pleasure, which Olivia had instinctively recognised as bringing her physical release, a release from any form of self-control, of emotional restraint.

‘Livvy, what is it?’ Caspar demanded.

He was still holding her, still touching her, his hands caressing her breasts, his thumbs gently stroking over her nipples. Olivia gave a violent shudder of disgust and pushed him away. It was his love she wanted, his support, the reassurance of his arms around her, not sex.

‘Let’s go back to bed,’ Caspar whispered.

‘Go back to bed!’ Olivia’s eyes widened as she stared at him, the feeling of relief and gratitude she had experienced when he had first held out his arms to her replaced by a sense of alienation and resentment. ‘Caspar, how can you say that?’ she demanded. ‘Sex is the last thing I feel like right now … the very last thing. You saw my mother, you …’ She turned away from him, pacing the kitchen whilst Caspar frowned.

He should have guessed, of course, been prepared, but somehow he had allowed himself to believe that she would be different, that she was different, but here she was making it plain that for all she had said about them, when it came down to it, her family, her parents, other people, were far more important to her than he was himself.

Olivia was completely unaware of what he was thinking or of the effect her action in pushing him away from her had had on him. Neither did she have any inkling of the old childhood feelings of not being good enough, of not being wanted, it had awakened in him. Instead, completely absorbed by her own tangled feelings of shock, disgust, fear and guilt, she told him, ‘This morning when I walked into her bedroom, she was there surrounded by carrier bags, all of them full of clothes, still wrapped in their original tissue paper, never even worn. Not just one or two of them, there were dozens, everywhere, and the smell …’ She gave a small shudder, remembering the rank, muscle-clenching, gut-heaving odour that had filled her parents’ bedroom. ‘I should have said something then … done something …’

‘Like what?’ Caspar challenged her. ‘Your mother obviously has an addictive personality, Olivia. Binging, whether on food, shopping or love, is all part and parcel of the same thing. It’s a driving need, a compulsion, to fill an emptiness that can never be filled in the way that such an addict attempts to fill it.’

‘But I should have guessed … known … done something …’ Olivia protested, her voice thickening with tears of pity and compassion for her mother’s plight. Like an adult who has suddenly realised that they have failed a small child, she felt guilty, helpless, unbearably saddened and filled with an aching pity and the need to put things right, to make things better.

‘How could you have?’ Caspar asked her tardily, his own emotions under control now or so he told himself.

Unlike her, he seemed completely unmoved by her mother’s behaviour, Olivia reflected, but then Tiggy was not his mother, and Caspar, as she had already sensed, had a certain hardiness if not hardness about him, a certain tough outer shell he could draw around himself when he chose to do so.

‘Natural self-protection,’ he had called it when she had once questioned it. ‘Everyone needs some,’ he had added.

‘But you must have been moved by what we saw. Felt something,’ Olivia had pressed. They had been watching a current affairs programme at the time and she had been reduced to tears by the plight of the villagers in the far-off, achingly poor, barren environment in which they lived.

‘Of course,’ Caspar had agreed, ‘but my emotions are of no use or help to them.’

‘No, but through them you could be moved to do something that would help,’ Olivia had protested.

‘You mean I could allow my emotions to be manipulated to the point where I automatically put my hand in my pocket?’ Caspar had demanded cynically.

‘A multibillion-pound aid industry has been built on that very premise,’ he expounded, ‘and yet there are, as you have just seen, still thousands upon thousands of starving human beings. Yes, I feel that it’s wrong for any human being to have to live in pain and poverty. Yes, I know it’s wrong that we waste so much so thoughtlessly, that we’re so materialistic, but even though we have so much whilst others have so little, you cannot make all people equal, Livvy.

‘The best you can do, all you can do, is to help them to help themselves and that does not always necessarily mean giving financially. You wouldn’t applaud an adult who gave a child craving their attention a hundred dollars to play with instead, would you?’

‘It’s not the money, it’s what it can buy … what it can provide,’ Olivia had insisted, but she had known that it was an argument that Caspar would not allow her to win. He was much tougher than her, much harder, much more inclined to stick to his chosen convictions, not a man who could ever be influenced by the actions of those around him, not a man who would ever go with the crowd unless it suited him to do so.

She remembered all this now as she looked at him.

‘There must be something I could have done … something I still can do … to help,’ she faltered as she saw the cynical way that Caspar was watching her.

‘Such as?’ he derided. ‘From the looks of her I would suspect that your mother is in the grip of an addiction that she’s had for a long, long time. She does need help, yes—professional help,’ he added pointedly. ‘What you’re doing now,’ he added with curt emphasis as he indicated the rubbish-strewn floor that Olivia was cleaning, ‘only makes it easier for her to continue with what she’s already doing. In effect, what you’re doing is actually encouraging her to continue doing it.’

‘No. That’s not true,’ Olivia protested emotionally. ‘I’m just trying to tidy up in case—’

‘In case what?’ Caspar challenged her. ‘In case someone else realises what’s going on? Don’t you think your father already knows? He might have closed his eyes to the situation, but scenes like this must have happened before.’

When Olivia bit her lip, he reiterated harshly, indicating the littered floor, ‘The best way you can help your mother is not by doing this, by covering up for her and protecting her, but by compelling her to face reality and to seek professional help.’

‘But, Caspar, you saw her, she was … she’s—’