A Perfect Family

‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ he responded without looking at Roderick. ‘It’s my father’s fiftieth birthday this weekend.’

‘Ah, you’ll have heard about old Benson, I expect,’ Roderick remarked, obviously getting down to the real purpose of his ‘visit’.

Even though he had been expecting it, waiting for it, in actual fact Max could still feel his body fighting to betray the rage that had been boiling inside him all day.

‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ he agreed.

‘Once he goes it will mean there’ll be a tenancy vacancy in chambers,’ Roderick told him unnecessarily.

‘Yes,’ Max responded neutrally, knowing that he had to make some response.

‘Applying for it, are you?’

Max could feel his control starting to slip. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ he lied.

‘Well, I should do if I were you, old chap,’ Roderick warned him, ‘because it seems that tenancies aren’t that easy to come by these days and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of interest being shown in this one. Not, of course, that there should be any problem if you did decide to go for it. After all, you did your pupillage here and you’ve been squatting here for … let me think, it must be well over a year, mustn’t it? God, is that the time? I’d better go … I promised Ma I’d be on hand at home this evening. Good luck with the Wilson brief,’ he drawled as he walked into the corridor.

Max waited until he was quite sure that Roderick had gone before balling up the piece of paper he had been reading and hurling it across the room with all the force of his rugger training. Damn Roderick, damn him to hell and back and damn his bloody uncle, as well.

It was over eight months now since Max had heard the first whisper that Clive Benson was going to be invited to become a judge. He had heard it initially on a visit to Chester to keep up with the Chester branch of the family; after all, in this business you needed all the help you could get. And ever since then he had been doing all he could to make sure that he got the vacancy when it came up.

On Wednesday morning, when the clerk had told him that the senior partner wanted to have a meeting with him, Max had confidently expected to be told officially about the vacancy and to be assured that once the tenancy did fall vacant, it would be his.

Instead he had been told following much harrumphing and throat clearing that after much discussion the partners had decided it was time they observed the rules against sexual discrimination and gave consideration to taking on a female barrister. Not that that necessarily meant that they were going to do so, nor that he was being passed over, Max had been assured. All applicants would be considered on their merits, of course.

‘Of course,’ Max had returned through gritted teeth but he knew exactly what he was being told and, without doubt, Roderick also knew exactly what was going on. How could he not do?

It was too late now for Max to wish he had not announced privately to his grandfather the last time he had gone home that the tenancy was as good as his. Gramps was already champing at the bit about the fact that he was only working as a squatter. In his day such a situation had been inconceivable; you did your pupillage and then went on to work as a fully fledged junior barrister. But things had changed; places in chambers were hard to come by.

And just who the hell was this female anyway? No names had been mentioned and mentally Max had run through the female barristers of his acquaintance who might be considered. Sod the bloody sex discrimination laws. What about him … what about discriminating against him?

He had gone out that night in a foul mood, picked up the girl he was currently dating, a leggy, passionate redhead who had made no objection when he had cut their dinner date short and taken her home. She had objected later on, though, on the fifth occasion he had woken her in the night to vent his pent-up fury and resentment, filling her body with his without taking sufficient time to arouse her completely first, using her ruthlessly and emotionlessly and refusing to let her go until he had driven his body into a state of physically exhausted detachment.

She had told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be seeing her again but he didn’t particularly care. He had more important things to worry about. Despite all the sexual energy he had discharged, he was still furiously, bitterly angry. He was owed that vacancy.

He had worked his butt off this last year, letting them throw every bit of dross they had at him. Gritting his teeth, he had managed to master the sometimes almost overwhelming urge to turn round and tell them just what to do with their non-fee-paying, thanklessly unrewarding juvenile bits of work they wouldn’t give a pupil to do but which they had no compunction about dumping on his desk, knowing he could not, dared not, object.

What had all that been for if he wasn’t going to get the vacant tenancy? He might as well have gone into industry; there at least he would be earning a decent salary. But he hadn’t gone into industry because as his Uncle David and his grandfather had desired, so Max wanted for himself the prestige of being a barrister, of rising to QC and ultimately being called to the Bench.

He wanted it, hungered for it, yearned for it, ached for it and, by God, he intended to have it, and no female, no sex discrimination law was going to stand in his way.

There was only one way to deal with the situation now and Max knew exactly what it was, but first he had to find out exactly the identity of the hopeful candidate for the vacancy. The partners would no doubt know and so, too, would the senior clerk, but Max quickly dismissed him from his calculations. He would never divulge that kind of information to him, which left only the partners and anyone who had their confidence or access to it.

Max was still mulling over what course of action he could take when he climbed into his car two hours later and headed for the North.

‘Here we are, home.’

‘Very impressive,’ Caspar murmured as Olivia brought her car to a halt and turned round in her seat to look at him.

‘Here’s Tiggy,’ she announced when she saw the front door open and her mother hurry towards the stationary car.

Caspar remained silent as he turned to take his first look at Olivia’s mother. Her use of her mother’s nickname whenever she spoke of her wasn’t anything unusual in the society in which he had grown up, but a certain undertone that was always in Olivia’s voice when she spoke about her mother made his study of the older woman thoughtfully assessing.

Physically, they were very alike; Olivia had inherited her mother’s beauty including her high-cheeked facial features. In contrast to her mother, however, Olivia’s beauty radiated from within her in a way that made it almost unimportant that she possessed the kind of looks that could take one’s breath away. Beside her daughter, Tiggy seemed to be a beautiful but blank two-dimensional image.

Caspar’s first feeling as he watched her was one of disappointment. Why so? he wondered as he got out of the car and waited for Olivia to introduce them. What had he expected … hoped for, if indeed he had hoped for anything? Perhaps despite that carefully neutral note he had already observed in Olivia’s voice, her mother would still turn out to be more rather than less of what her daughter already was.

‘Livvy darling … at last … Oh dear, look at your nails and your hair, and those jeans … Oh, darling—’

‘Tiggy, this is Caspar,’ Olivia interrupted her mother calmly. ‘Caspar, this is my mother.’

‘Tiggy, you must call me Tiggy,’ Tiggy announced in the slightly breathy voice that years ago admirers had told her was so incredibly sexy. ‘Come on in, both of you. I’m afraid your father and I are just on our way out,’ she told Olivia as she urged them into the house. ‘We’re having dinner with the Buckletons….’

The front door was already open, the parquet floor gleaming richly of wax, and as he stepped inside, Caspar’s initial impression was one of a room filled with soft colour and flowers. There were huge bowls filled with floral arrangements everywhere: in the fireplace, on a round polished table in the middle of the room, on a pair of small tables beneath imposing Georgian silver-framed mirrors that faced one another across the width of the room.

‘I do so think that flowers are important,’ he heard Tiggy telling him as she saw him staring at his surroundings. ‘They make a house come alive, turn it into a home,’ she was saying quietly, then … ‘Oh, Jack, no, don’t you dare bring that animal in here. Use the back door. You know the rules.’

Caspar frowned as a young boy and a large, slightly overweight golden retriever walked in through the still-open front door.

‘Well, if you’re going out, we’d better not keep you,’ he heard Olivia telling her mother. ‘I take it that we’re in my room. We—’

‘Oh dear … Darling, I’m sorry but that’s something your father wants a word with you about. It’s not that we mind, of course … but it’s your grandfather. You know how old-fashioned he is and how important public opinion is to him. Your father feels that he just wouldn’t be at all happy about you and Caspar … well, especially with the Chester family coming over for the party, your father felt—’

‘Are you trying to say that you expect me and Caspar to sleep in separate rooms?’ Olivia interrupted her mother incredulously. ‘But that’s …’ She started to shake her head, anger darkening her eyes, her voice crisping authoritatively as she remonstrated with her mother. ‘There’s no way—’

Caspar touched her lightly on her arm. ‘It’s okay, I understand. Separate rooms will be fine,’ he told Tiggy easily.

Olivia shook her head and pulled a rueful face at him. The sheer intensity of her love for him frightened her at times. Love was a word that was expressed freely and mercilessly in her home, but as an emotion, she wasn’t sure she fully understood it—and it left her feeling vulnerable and wary.

She had practically swooned at his feet with lust the moment she set eyes on him. Who wouldn’t have done? Six foot two with broad, well-muscled shoulders and physique to match, he had inherited from somewhere or other the facial bone structure of a Native American warrior chief along with the Celtic colouring that was the most compelling of all—black hair and dark blue eyes.

As she walked into his lecture, Olivia simply hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him—and she wasn’t the only one. She had almost fainted on the spot when he had asked her out, but she had retained enough sanity and enough sense of healthy self-preservation to insist that their first date be somewhere busy and public and to arrange her own transport home just so that she wouldn’t give in to the temptation—if it was offered—of going straight to bed with him.

She didn’t and it wasn’t, but not, as both of them confessed to one another later, because it wasn’t what they wanted.

Oh yes, she had wanted him all right—and still did—but now she loved him, as well, loved him intellectually and emotionally as well as physically. He was her lover, her mentor, her best friend … her everything, and she couldn’t envisage how on earth her life had ever seemed complete without him, how she had not, for all those years when he had not been there, somehow been conscious of a huge, aching, empty gap where he would one day be.

He was her whole world; he made her complete and yet she found it hard to tell him how much he meant to her emotionally. That was far, far harder than to tell him just what kind of effect he had on her physically, but then Olivia was very leery of emotions, of feeling them and exhibiting them. Her mother was emotional, everyone said so; they also said with varying degrees of sympathy that that was why her mother needed and deserved special handling, special allowances.

Even as a very small child, Olivia was aware that those special allowances made for her mother’s emotional nature always seemed to be given at the expense of other people, that in some way or other those closest to her mother had to be less emotional as though to compensate for her mother’s excesses.

‘You really are the most amazing person,’ Caspar had told her one day after she had spent weeks tracking down a particular book she knew he had wanted, presenting it to him with casual indifference. ‘You’ll do something like this, but just try to get you to tell me that you love me.’

‘You know I do,’ Olivia returned warily.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, adding lightly, ‘but it would still be nice to hear you say it, though.’

‘I know,’ Olivia admitted, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the small phrase then … and she still couldn’t, not even during the most intense moments of their shared heights of passion.