What You Made Me

His eyes were bitter and Philippa sensed that Scott was looking back to that time when he first came to Garston and was very much an outsider, very much the unwanted grandson taking the place—usurping the place—of the favourite dead one, his grandfather bitterly resentful of him and taking no pains to conceal his resentment.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow to take you and the boy up to the house. Don’t try running out on me, Philippa, I’ll come running after you and I won’t be in any mood to be generous.’

The sound of his car had died away completely before Simon came downstairs. Philippa gave him a shaky smile and he came over to her, putting his arm around her waist, so very like his father in the quiet seriousness of his gaze that her heart ached. She ruffled the dark hair. ‘He’s gone then?’

‘Umm.…’

‘And he doesn’t know?’

Something in his tone alerted her, some inner voice urging her to tread carefully. ‘Know what?’

Simon looked at her directly. ‘That he’s my father,’ he said quietly. ‘You didn’t tell him that I’m his son? I saw it on my birth certificate,’ he told her quickly, ‘ages ago, but it never really clicked until we came here and everyone was Scott Garston this and Scott Garston that.…’ Of course! He had spent far more time in the village than she had, but she had had no idea he knew that Scott was his father. ‘Tell me about it,’ he insisted.

She supposed she owed him that, and if they were going to stay here.… If? Did she have any choice? And why had she given in? Because of some crazy impulse that there were still happy endings; that the past could be wiped out; that Scott could be made to see.… What?

She sat down, too wrapped up in her own thoughts for a moment to answer Simon’s questions. When she left Garston she had sworn that she would put Scott out of her mind, but had she ever done? Why, when she hadn’t lacked the opportunities, had she never had a relationship with anyone else? Why had she reacted as she did the moment she saw him? Did she still love him? Did she even know what love was? Certainly not that ridiculous overwhelming emotion; that adolescent self-sacrifice she had felt at seventeen—that had been part hero worship and part adoration, but she wasn’t indifferent to Scott, her senses told her that much, and she would like to wipe out the bitterness, the fierce resentment she saw in his eyes, and to replace it with what? Respect? Love? Who knew? To nurture resentment and anger as long as he had done a man would have to be very powerfully motivated; very powerfully.…

‘Come on, Ma, give. I want the whole story,’ Simon warned her.

‘Okay then…’ she glanced at her son, so like his father for all that Scott couldn’t see it, and said teasingly, ‘Once upon a time.…’

CHAPTER TWO (#ub67ef469-16ed-5cfe-ac09-c61b1a0dd6c9)

INCREDIBLY it had had a fairytale quality to it; two lonely young people who had found one another, who had come together, loving and giving without restraint, sharing their thoughts, talking, always talking.… At least that was how it had been at first. She had been in the garden, studying for her ‘A’ levels, Scott had been walking past, and instead of walking past had come in. They had started talking and discovered a mutual love of the Renaissance, and it had gone on from there. He had invited her up to the Hall, she remembered, to see some of the books in the library, including one which charted the history of the old Abbey which had stood where the Hall now stood and which had been a victim of Henry VIII’s nefarious Reformation. And it had continued, companionship giving way to love so sweetly and naturally that it had seemed the most natural, the most beautiful thing in the world. She had never felt a moment’s fear in Scott’s presence; never a moment’s dread, or apprehension.

The first time he kissed her she had given herself into his keeping absolutely. Her first kiss, but not his, but it had left both of them trembling and she, she remembered, had been the one who had reached out and touched him afterwards; the sun-burned skin of his throat and arms, the angles of his jaw, touching his skin wonderingly whilst he let her, his body held tightly under control. ‘I love you’.

Which of them had said it first? She couldn’t remember, only that the words seemed to dance round them in the lazy gold of a summer afternoon; that her body yearned for the touch of his; that their mutual loneliness intensified their love. And they were both lonely. She because of her aunt’s strict upbringing, him because he was a newcomer to the village, an unwelcome intruder in his grandfather’s life. His friends from university had gone and he was alone… they were both alone.

Even before they made love he had told her he wanted to marry her. And she had wanted to marry him and live with him at Garston.

Right from the start he had confided to her his love for Garston, the house which had become his by death. He knew and sympathised with his grandfather’s views, but that didn’t alter his own feelings for Garston. He worried about how he was going to keep it, where he would find the money to maintain and restore it, and it was with her that he shared his hopes and plans.

And then there had been his mother, Eve Garston, whom Philippa had liked on sight. Already even then severely disabled by arthritis, Eve had been wholly dependent on her irrascible father-in-law financially. Scott’s father had been an engineer, and with his death the family had lost their source of income. Without the small allowance Jeffrey Garston paid them it would not have been possible for Scott to go to university, he would have had to take a job to support himself and his mother.

Carefully Philippa explained all this to her son, watching compassion and understanding add an odd maturity to his youthful features, yielding to a traitorous inner impulse to paint his father for him in knightly colours, because that was how she had remembered him. All through the years she had cherished her memories of Scott, refusing to tarnish them, hugging them to her for comfort in those times when she needed it so badly—when she first arrived in London, virtually penniless; when Simon had been born six months later at the home for unmarried mothers. Jobs had been easier to get in those days and with the help of the people who ran the Home she had learned shorthand and typing at college during her pregnancy, and then afterwards she had found a job, gradually progressing in her career, gradually improving the quality of their lifestyle. It had been a slow and painful progress, but nothing to compare with the pain of leaving Scott.

‘Why didn’t he marry you—was it because of me?’ Pain and rejection mingled in the grey eyes so like her own.

‘No.’ Philippa reassured him quickly, ‘No, it was nothing like that. Scott wanted to marry me before… before I was having you, and…’ she bit her lip, forcing herself to speak calmly, ‘and if he’d known you were his nothing would have stopped him from marrying me… but I told him that someone else was your father.’

She saw the shock darkening Simon’s eyes and rushed into an explanation. ‘It was for his sake, Simon. His grandfather bitterly resented him and the fact that he would inherit Garston, but Scott loved it.…’

‘More than he loved you?’

‘Not more, just in a different way, and then there was his mother, Eve.’ She sighed. ‘She suffered from arthritis and needed an operation to help her to walk again. She would have had to wait years to have it done on the National Health but Scott’s grandfather had promised to pay for her to have it done privately. He found out that Scott and I were in love and he sent for me.’

Her eyes darkened unwittingly as she remembered that day. The message had arrived just after breakfast, and her aunt had compressed her mouth angrily. She hadn’t known anything about her relationship with Scott and had assumed that Philippa was being summoned for some other crime like riding her bike too close to the main gates. In many ways Jeffrey Garston was positively feudal, one of the conditions that went with Jane’s tenancy of the cottage was that she and her niece used the narrow back road to and from their home; that they ‘kept to their place’.

There had been no sign of Scott when Philippa was shown into the linenfold panelled library. Later she learned he had driven his mother into York to see a specialist, but at the time her nerves had tightened apprehensively when she realised she was alone with his grandfather. Jeffrey Garston had always unnerved her. Small and wiry he still had a full head of snow-white hair, and eyes the same deep sapphire as Scott’s, although in Jeffrey Garston they were cold burning with the touch of ice—like Scott’s had been last night, Philippa realised with a sudden start. He hadn’t offered her a seat or done anything to make her feel less uncomfortable.

He knew about their affair, he had told her contemptuously, and she remembered how darkly she had flushed at the implications of his comment. The first time they had made love had been in Scott’s bedroom. He had taken her up there quite innocently to show her the view. She had turned back from the window, dizzied by the panorama spread out in front of her, and Scott had caught her. After that events had run smoothly into one another until she couldn’t remember who had made the first betraying movement, who had touched whom first, or how they had arrived at Scott’s bed.

Afterwards he had been anxious and filled with self-anger for taking her virginity, but Philippa had gloried in his possession of her, giving herself willingly and glad of the sharp pang of pain which meant she was his and his alone. It was true that his response to her had rather overwhelmed her. He had always seemed so strong and sure and it was startling to discover that her touch could make him tremble, that his body could riot out of control; that his need for her could make his voice raw and hungry and that his body could over-rule his mind.

‘Now you’ll have to marry me,’ he had told her in deep satisfaction, ‘and your aunt will have to give her permission.…’

She smiled sadly, coming to with a start to realise that Simon was watching her curiously. ‘Go on,’ he pressed, ‘what happened when Scott’s grandfather sent for you?’

‘He told me that he wanted Scott to marry the daughter of a friend of his,’ Philppa told him calmly. ‘This man was very rich and had promised that if Scott married his daughter he would give him enough money to restore and run Garston. Scott didn’t know anything about it, but his grandfather knew how much he loved the house and believed that if I wasn’t there to distract him he would soon turn to Mary.’

‘But how did he make you agree? Why didn’t you tell my father what he had said?’

Philippa sighed. How could she explain to Simon how she had felt, wanting Scott and yet knowing that if she married him she would be depriving him of his birthright; she would be saddling him with the double burden of a wife and an invalid mother. And then she hadn’t known about Simon.

‘Try to understand, Simon,’ she begged her son. ‘Your father would have married me, he wanted to even before… we… but he was in a difficult position. His mother was totally dependent on him, his grandfather was threatening to disinherit him which he could quite easily have done. I didn’t realise then about you, and I felt that I just couldn’t allow him to throw everything away because of me.…’

‘If you had known about me would you have changed your mind?’ Simon asked her gravely. Philippa sighed, reaching out and taking his hand and for once he did not withdraw. ‘No. In fact.…’ She might as well tell him the whole truth. ‘Scott wouldn’t believe me when I told him it was over between us, and then I found out about you. I was desperate, Simon, I knew if Scott ever guessed I was carrying his child he would insist on marrying me. He had just left university… he had no job, and I knew he wanted to study computer technology, so I… so I told him that there was someone else and that I was having this other man’s child.’

Simon’s face was as white as her own. In silence they stared at one another and for the first time Philippa reflected on what she had cost her son in her attempts to protect his father. Even now she could still remember that final scene—vividly. Scott had come to the cottage, furiously angry at her refusal to see or speak to him. ‘Cut it out, Philippa,’ he had stormed at her. ‘I know damned well how you feel about me… I was your lover.…’

‘That means nothing.’ She had said the words more on impulse than anything else, totally unprepared for the way his face drained of blood, for the way he looked at her, his pride stripped to the bone, his love for her darkening his eyes with pain.

‘Dear God, you can’t mean that,’ he had whispered, ‘you don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Of course I do.’ She had seen then what she must do, and had played her part with a recklessness born of sheer desperation. ‘You haven’t been my only lover, Scott,’ she taunted. ‘Just my first.…’

‘You’re lying.…’

‘No.’

‘Prove it to me.’ His voice had been a whiplash of pain and agony, and she had had to close her eyes against her need to give in to tell him everything, knowing that if she did so he would leave Garston. ‘All right… I’ve been having an affair with someone, and I’m having his child.’

Dear God, even now she could feel the reverberations of her announcement; she could almost feel the quality of the deep silence that followed, Scott’s bitter, ‘Who?’ throwing her off-guard so that she snatched the first name she could think of, Geoff Rivers; the local Lothario son of a wealthy businessman who streaked through the village at the wheel of his scarlet Ferrari.

‘Him?’ His face and voice had tortured her. ‘Dear God, how could you…?’

‘Quite easily, actually.’ She had tossed her head, wondering why he didn’t know she was crying inside, wondering why he didn’t come to her and say ‘I know you’re lying, you could never give yourself to anyone but me, and nothing matters but that we’re together, nothing.…’

But he didn’t, he simply stood there and condemned her with his eyes watching her with such contempt that she had wanted to die. ‘And to think I was prepared to defy my grandfather, to give up Garston for you.’

‘We’ve both had a lucky escape, then, haven’t we?’ She had tossed her head again, aching inside with anguish but refusing to give in to it. ‘I thought you were fun, Scott, but you’re not.…’

‘Fun? Is that why you went to Rivers? Well go to him again and try telling him about his bastard, I’ll bet he won’t be much “fun” then.’

He had left then, and she had only waited until he had gone to give way to her tears. Later that day an envelope had come to her from his grandfather. When she opened it there had been five hundred pounds in cash inside. She remembered the acute feeling of nausea which had stormed over her even now. She had torn the notes up and sent them back, and then she had packed her clothes leaving only a brief note of explanation for her aunt which simply told her that she was pregnant. That had been the last contact she had had with anyone from Garston until her aunt’s death.

‘Did you really love each other?’ Simon looked pale and uncertain.