Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

It wasn’t, he knew, the differences between himself and David that made him dislike David so much—and to some extent Max, who was very much the same type of man—but the similarities. He feared that the weaknesses he could see so clearly in them might somehow be a family trait that he, too, had inherited and that, although now he had well under control, could one day push its way to the surface….

And what hurt him was that Hillary couldn’t recognise this, couldn’t, didn’t love him enough to try to find out and understand what really lay at the root of his dislike for David.

David overslept primarily because he had been woken up in the night by the sound of Tiggy in the bathroom. He had known what that meant, of course, and had turned over, pulling the duvet up high around his ears, trying to blot out the sound of her nausea.

In the early days of their marriage when he had naïvely assumed that her constant bouts of sickness were caused initially by her pregnancy and then afterwards by her delicate stomach, he had been overwhelmed by a mixture of helplessness and protective concern towards her, anxiously hovering, wanting to do something to help ease her discomfort, even though the sound and smell of her sickness made his own stomach heave. He had loved her then, blinded by her fragile beauty and the feelings of triumph and relief that had followed their marriage. Triumph because he had won such a prize away from the other men who had surrounded her in London and relief because her pregnancy and their marriage had taken everyone’s attention away from the real reason he had been asked to leave chambers and give up his plan to qualify as a barrister.

By silent collusion and an unacknowledged mental sleight of hand, it became an accepted part of the folklore of their family history; the reason he had returned home had been because of his marriage, because of his desire to do the right thing and stand by Tiggy. Publicly at least, his decision not to continue with his training for the Bar had been seen not as a failure, but as a tribute to his sense of honour and fair play.

Only his closest family had known the real truth and even they….

To their clients it had been delicately hinted that Jon was having trouble coping with the amount of work in the practice, and when anyone asked, he had simply shrugged gracefully and assured them that no, he was not too disappointed to have had to give up his plans to qualify as a barrister, and those who heard him make this statement had decided that such a man, a man who put his duty and his responsibility towards his family and more specifically his brother first, was exactly the kind of upright, honest and morally sound man they wanted dealing with their most intimate legal affairs.

Business had boomed, and if Jon had ever resented being cast as the less able of the pair of them, he had certainly never said so. But then, Jon had never been one for voicing what he thought or felt. Look at the way he had married Jenny so quickly after his own romance with her had ended without ever having said a word to him about wanting her for himself.

He tensed as he felt Tiggy stirring beside him. He wanted to ignore her but she was already reaching out to touch him, running her fingertips hungrily over his chest. His heart sank even though he knew that her surge of sexual energy meant that today was going to be one of her good days.

He had come to know her moods so well. They followed a recognisable pattern and he’d learned them almost by heart. All week she had been edgy, highly emotional, clingy, demanding, in tears one moment and so filled with anger and bitterness the next that it seemed her fragile body could scarcely contain such intense feelings.

He knew exactly what to expect—the frantic bouts of shopping, the purchase of clothes, shoes, make-up, anything to fill yet more glossy carrier bags that would never be emptied but merely hidden away in an agony of guilt and self-disgust as she abased herself in an orgy of remorse, begging for his forgiveness, promising that she would never, ever do it again, theatrically pleading with him to destroy her cheque-book, her credit cards. But what was the use?

Once he had played her games with her, believing her, hoping that this time she meant it; that in time she would realise what she was doing to herself, to him, to their lives, but why bother destroying a cheque-book when he knew she had others secreted away just as she had other credit cards? But the game had to be played according to her rules and these were simply things he was not permitted to say. She had to be allowed to play out her role of guilt-ridden supplicant to the full, unable to cease berating herself verbally until he had granted her the ‘forgiveness’ she required.

After that would come the lull … sometimes for a few days, sometimes only a few hours, and then it would start … the furtive disappearance from their bed in the middle of the night, the inexplicable appearance of mounds of food in the kitchen followed by …

The first time he realised that her bouts of sickness were not caused by any weakness or by the fact that, as he had always thought, she barely ate enough to keep herself alive, but by her huge consumption of food in eating binges that could last for hours before she finally fed herself into a state of emotional and physical stupor, he had been shocked rigid.

Afterwards, of course, would come the purging, going on and on until she was satisfied that her stomach was finally empty, her body restored from its temporarily bloated, obscene distension to its normal svelte, almost too thin, delicacy, and then and only then and oh, the blessed relief of it, finally those few wonderful hours when she was relaxed and at peace, sated by her orgy of self-punishment almost like a drug addict after a mammoth fix. Contented, calm, until the whole cycle started again with the frantic need for reassurance that she was loved. The refusal to let him touch her because her body was loathsome was almost immediately followed by what amounted to an almost frenzied need for sex.

Lately, as she was doing now, she had become increasingly sexually aroused during what he normally thought of as his own period of respite from the stress of what she was.

Sex … God, what a joke, and to think that when he had met her, when he had married her, he had wanted her so much….

Now the mere thought of having to touch her, of being touched by her, brought him out, as it was doing now, in a cold, drenching sweat of impotency and a physical rejection not just of her but of everything and anything to do with sex.

Even though he knew that in refusing her he was doing the worst possible thing he could do and that this refusal only served to hasten the speed of the whole appalling cycle of her unbalanced behaviour, he just couldn’t force himself to behave any differently.

It wasn’t simply that he didn’t want her any more, he recognised, he … He what? Loathed her, hated her, resented her.

In the early days before he realised there was no point, that the whole situation … that she was beyond any kind of help, he had tried to persuade her to seek professional advice. Her response had been to threaten to kill herself. She had rung him at work to tell him that he would soon be free of her and he had rushed home to find her sprawled naked and drunk across their bed, an empty bottle of painkillers at her side. He had no way of knowing how many she had managed to take. Fortunately their doctor had been very understanding, but that had been over fifteen years ago and David knew that such a situation would never be handled with such discretion now.

Duncan Flitt had been a contemporary of his father. They had played golf together and been old friends. Between them they were the unofficial keepers of much of the area’s secrets. Today things were different. The local medical practice was serviced by four doctors, all of them several years his junior. It also boasted an acupuncturist, a reflexologist and several counsellors.

Tiggy’s caressing hand had reached his belly. He froze, tensely aware of the resistant slackness of his penis and the fact that it was going to remain in that limp state.

Beneath the bedclothes, Tiggy moved towards him, rubbing her naked breasts against his arm as she did so. David cringed. The odour of her vomit still clung to her skin or perhaps it was being exuded from it, he decided as he swallowed down his own reciprocal nausea. As she leaned across to kiss him, her breath smelled initially of mint but beneath the mouthwash’s sharpness he could still smell the sour taste of her night-time activities. The bathroom would stink of it, as well, and because Olivia was home he couldn’t use the spare bathroom, not without the risk of arousing her suspicions.

Olivia … No doubt it was her arrival that had precipitated Tiggy’s latest attack. Not that she needed much of an excuse any more; anything and everything could set her off. Increasingly, though, she had recently begun to fret over the fact that she was growing older, flirting increasingly openly with younger men, behaving in a way that was totally inappropriate for the wife of a man in his position. As yet he did not think that she had actually gone so far as to have a real affair but he suspected that given the right opportunity …

An affair. Dear God, if only she would. If only she would find someone else to take over from him the unwanted burden of her emotional and physical demands, her constant need for reassurance, her screaming outbursts that he did not love her, her accusations that there was someone else, that he no longer wanted or loved her.

‘Happy birthday, darling….’

Mutely he endured the unwanted intimacy of her kiss, not daring to provoke her by withdrawing from her and yet, at the same time, aching to be able to do so. Her hand had reached his penis now. He cringed.

‘What a poor, sad little boy,’ she was cooing in his ear. ‘Doesn’t he want to come out and play, then …?’

David gritted his teeth.

‘Is he all hurt and sulky, then?’ Tiggy teased. ‘Does he want Mummy to stroke him and kiss him better …?’

David shuddered violently in a reaction of rejection and disgust. ‘We’ve got to get up,’ he reminded her hoarsely. ‘The birthday …’

‘I thought that was what I was trying to do,’ Tiggy countered, pouting, but David was already moving away from her, throwing back the duvet.

‘You said last night that you’d got to help Jenny,’ he reminded her as he pulled on his robe.

David was beginning to look dispiritedly middle-aged, Tiggy decided. He had recently put on weight and that, coupled with the flaccid smallness of his penis, was decidedly unerotic. Unlike her, he seemed to have no interest in looking after himself, in keeping his body fit and his weight down. Surreptitiously she touched her own stomach. It felt reassuringly taut and flat. She breathed out in relief and examined her polished nails. One of them was scratched. She frowned. She must have done that last night when … Hurriedly she pushed the thought to one side.

What had happened last night? What happened on all those dark, frightening nights like last night wasn’t something she wanted or needed to think about during the day. It was over now and best forgotten … a silly habit she had fallen into but which she could break … end … any time she liked. David knew that and she knew it, too. She realised she had been a bit naughty of late, overspending, but David didn’t understand how lonely she felt sometimes. He had his own busy life at work and she was at home here all day on her own.

Of course, she had her girlfriends … but … she wasn’t like Jenny, the kind of woman who could busy herself with good works, children and cooking. She needed more than that. She was not a country person. David should take her out more … make more fuss of her, show her that he loved her. She might be in her mid-forties but she was still a beautiful and desirable woman. All right, Olivia might be younger than her but she would never be as attractive. Why, when she had been Livvy’s age she could have had her pick of a couple of dozen men even though she had been married to David at the time, and a mother.

Her dress was hanging up over the bedroom door, a body-hugging shimmer of silver-shot silk that looked like mother-of-pearl when she moved in it. It was a size eight, a perfect fit; she touched her stomach again. She could hear the shower running. David was still in the bathroom. Perhaps she ought to try it on again, just to make sure …

6 (#ufcc4f2fd-df2c-5918-87db-8cfc05f14296)

‘Anything else I can do?’

‘No. I think we’ve just about finished now,’ Ruth assured Olivia as she stepped back to eye the arrangement for the top table, tweaking a couple of stems judiciously.

‘The flowers look wonderful.’

Ruth gave her great-niece a wryly amused smile, hearing the genuine admiration in her voice and guessing what lay behind it. ‘What were you expecting,’ she mocked her gently, ‘or can I guess? Something twee and stilted, overwired flowers that would have looked more artificial than real, poor things?’ She shook her head reprovingly.

Olivia laughed. ‘Something like that,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘Certainly nothing like this.’

She gestured towards the vibrant tumble of softly natural flowers set in some sort of wire concoction filled with moss—a theme that Ruth had repeated throughout the huge marquee in varying forms. Moss, fruit and even vegetables as well as flowers had all been utilised to create the wonderfully rich falls of cascading colour that Olivia was now admiring.

‘No wonder Aunt Jenny was so insistent on plain cream hangings for the marquee,’ she commented to Ruth.

‘Jenny and I were both in agreement that we wanted to get away completely from the prettiness of bridal tulle and dainty pastels.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly done that,’ Olivia assured her, gently touching the silky petal of one of the vividly coloured geums and poppies Ruth had used to create the harmonising masses of reds, oranges and yellows that were her colour theme for the event.

On the far side of the marquee, Jenny herself was going round each of the tables checking that everything was in place. The caterers had already arrived and were busy getting themselves organised.

Ben, who had been generally getting in everyone’s way and grumbling all afternoon, had finally allowed Hugh’s wife, Ann, to coax him back to the house, leaving Jenny free to make her final inspections in peace.