Lesson To Learn

Quietly, so that Robert couldn’t overhear her, Sarah contradicted equally flatly, ‘No…what I see is a little boy who’s lost everyone who loves him…a little boy who has apparently been left in the charge of a woman who neither likes nor cares about him…a little boy who has no one he can turn to other than his dead mother’s housekeeper.’

Sarah knew that she was being deliberately emotive, but she couldn’t help it. There was something about this impatient, critical man that pushed her into needing to bring home to him his child’s emotional plight. ‘What I can also see is that you don’t appear to know very much about children, Mr Philips.’

Sarah drew in her breath at the way he looked deliberately at her own bare left hand before taunting softly, ‘And you do? Do you have children of your own, then?’

To her mortification, Sarah felt her skin flushing as she was forced to admit, ‘No…no, I don’t.’

‘Then I suggest you wait until you do before you start handing out the homespun advice,’ he told her grittily.

Thoroughly incensed by his attitude, Sarah corrected him impetuously, ‘I might not have any children, but professionally—’

‘Professionally?’ Gray Philips cut in sharply, frowning at her. ‘What exactly does that mean? What exactly is your profession?’

‘I’m a teacher,’ Sarah told him, wondering even as she said the words just how much longer they would be true, and then pushing her fears and doubts behind her as she felt Robert’s hand trembling in her own.

No matter how much she might dislike his father, she was not helping Robert by allowing her antagonism to take hold of her.

He ‘hated’ his father, Robert had said with childish intensity, and Sarah had not missed the brief look of pain that had touched Gray Philips’s mouth as he had listened to his son’s rejection of him. Despite her sympathy with Robert, she had to acknowledge that his father had every right to insist on taking the little boy back home.

She could not stop him from doing that, but what she could do was to go with him and to satisfy herself as much as she could that it was the confusion and grief of losing those people that he loved that was upsetting Robert so much and not any actual mistreatment by his father.

Oddly, despite his antagonism towards her, she could not quite convince herself that Gray Philips was mistreating his child. He had been too angry for that…his reaction to his son’s disappearance too free of guilt and deception to suggest that he knew exactly why Robert had been running away.

He was walking ahead of them now, pausing to hold aside the vicious brambles blocking the path, his frown deepening as he saw the way Robert clung to her side.

It was twenty minutes before they were in sight of the village, but Gray Philips didn’t walk towards it, instead branching off on to an even narrower and more overgrown path, which came to an abrupt end outside a solid wooden gate set into a high brick wall.

Gray Philips opened the gate for her, standing to one side so that she and Robert could precede him through it. Out of good manners, or as a means of ensuring that…that what? That she didn’t pick Robert up and run off with him…What chance would she have had of outpacing a tough adult male like him?

The garden inside the brick wall was overgrown, the brambles even thicker than those on the path outside. Beyond the wilderness of undergrowth a cordon of trees guarded a green lawn and formal flowerbeds, and beyond that lay the house, all mellow brick and unevenly leaded windows.

It was old, Sarah recognised, Elizabethan, and much, much larger than her cousin’s farmhouse.

Whatever Robert’s father might not be, he was quite obviously a very wealthy man. But wealth did not buy happiness, and, even while she was admiring the house, she was not envying him the money that had enabled him to buy it. What good was money when his son was so obviously afraid of him…when his wife had presumably left him? Had she been afraid of him as well? But she must have loved him once. She had married him, after all…they had had a child.

A tiny shudder went through her as she recognised the dangerous course of her thoughts. To question someone’s personal life so intimately and intensely, even within the privacy of her own thoughts, was so alien a response within her that she instinctively recoiled from acknowledging what she was doing.

Robert’s footsteps lagged as they crossed the lawn. He was holding back, dragging his feet. His father stopped, frowning down at both of them.

‘Is Mrs Jacobs still here?’

Sarah found she was holding her breath, praying that Gray Philips would deal sensitively with his son…would hear as she did the thread of fear that ran beneath the words.

If he did, he gave no sign of it.

‘No, she isn’t,’ he told Robert curtly, and then, as though unable to stop himself, he dropped down on one knee in front of the small boy and placed his hands on his shoulders, demanding gruffly, ‘Robert, why did you do it? Why did you run away? You must have known how worried Mrs Jacobs would be. You know you aren’t allowed to go outside the garden…you know.’

Robert was still clinging to Sarah’s hands. He had started to tremble violently, and tears poured down his face as he burst out passionately, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home…I want Nana…I want Mrs Richards. I don’t like it here.’

Immediately his father’s hands dropped from Robert’s shoulders. His face was in shadow as he turned slightly away, his voice harsh and low as he said roughly, ‘Robert, your grandmother is dead. You know that.’

He stopped as Sarah made an instinctive sound of shocked distress.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he challenged her. ‘Lie to him? Pretend that none of it happened…that his mother, her lover and his grandmother are still alive?

‘Come on, Robert. Let’s get you inside, and this time no running away.’

As he stood up he took hold of Robert’s arm, firmly taking charge of him, but Robert still clung to Sarah, pleading with her not to leave him.

His father might not be actively unkind to him, but he seemed to have little or no idea of how to deal with him, Sarah recognised as she instinctively tried to soothe Robert’s panic, smoothing the soft hair back off his hot face as she promised, ‘If you’re a good boy and go with your father now, Robert, I’ll come and see you tomorrow if you like.’

‘There’s no need for that.’

She met the look Gray Philips gave her with an equally challenging one of her own.

‘Not according to you,’ she agreed coldly. ‘But Robert—’

‘I don’t want you to leave me. I want you to stay with me,’ Robert said, and burst out crying.

Kneeling down beside him, she tried to comfort him as best she could.

‘I can’t stay now, Robert,’ she told him. ‘My cousin will be wondering where I am, but I promise I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

She looked defiantly at Gray Philips as she said the words, challenging him to refuse to allow her to see his son, and then, before Gray could say anything to her, and desperately trying to blot out Robert’s tearful pleas to her to stay, she turned her back on both of them and hurried back towards the wooden gate.

CHAPTER TWO

HALF an hour later, as she walked towards her cousin’s house, Sarah was still trembling with a mixture of shock and disbelief. She still could not entirely believe it had all actually happened. That poor little boy. He had been so upset…and his father had been so remote…so…so irritated and impatient…so completely unaware of how to respond to his son’s misery and despair.

Sally was in the garden when Sarah opened the gate, dead-heading her roses.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked with some concern. ‘You look upset.’

Sally was frowning when Sarah had finished explaining to her what had happened.

‘Gray Philips…I’d heard that his son had recently come to live with him. The boy’s mother, Gray’s ex-wife, was killed in a car accident. She was pretty wild, according to local gossip. She was having affairs with other men almost before the ink had dried on their marriage certificate.

‘I never met her, but apparently they separated before the little boy was born. I believe that Gray fought for custody of him, but lost, and that there were difficulties over access, which might explain the child’s apparent antipathy towards his father. It must be very traumatic for him.’

‘Yes, dreadfully,’ Sarah agreed vehemently. ‘The poor little mite was in a terrible state.’

Sally’s eyes rounded.

‘I didn’t mean for the boy, I meant for his father…Gray.’

When Sarah frowned she asked quietly, ‘Think about it. You’ve never been allowed to see your child, never had anything to do with him, and suddenly he’s there living with you…hating you…probably blaming you for his mother’s death. Imagine the state he must have been in when he found out that Robert had gone missing.’

Sarah’s frown deepened. Sally was making her feel quite guilty…as though she had somehow been unfair towards Gray Philips, as though she had deliberately misjudged and condemned him.