Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

She stepped into the shower. She much preferred the pampering luxury of a bath but today she just didn’t have time. She and David were due to go out to dinner and she would have to wash her hair and do her nails. She had noticed as she parked the car that one of them was chipped. She had no idea how on earth Jenny could bear to leave hers unmanicured the way she did.

As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Tiggy studied her reflection in the bathroom’s full-length mirrors. Her breasts were still as high and firm as they had always been, her stomach as flat, her skin as silken, but for how much longer?

She was forty-five now and already she was beginning to discern a certain betraying slackness in the flesh of her face and those tell-tale lines around her eyes. She had had a discreet eye tuck the year she was forty, but that wouldn’t last for ever.

Tiggy dreaded the thought of growing old or not being beautiful and desirable any more. David laughed at her, but then he didn’t understand. How could he? Wrapped in her towel, she walked into their bedroom. A copy of the new edition of Vogue lay on the bed. She picked it up, studying the model on the cover.

She had been a fool to give up her own career when she had, but at the time … David had seemed so glamorous, so exciting … so sexy … so different from all those paunchy, middle-aged men she kept being introduced to by the agency. Men who looked at her with hot, avaricious eyes and wanted to touch her with even hotter and more avaricious hands.

Knowing how much David had wanted her, how much he’d desired and loved her, had thrilled her, but that thrill hadn’t lasted. It never did.

She wondered what time Olivia would arrive and what this boyfriend she was bringing with her would be like. Not too American, she hoped. Ben was bound to disapprove. Given the quite small age gap between them, it was odd that she and Olivia weren’t closer. People often commented that they looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. It had shocked Tiggy when Olivia had announced that she wanted to train for the law. Somehow she had expected that she would follow in her own footsteps and go into modelling or something similar, but then in many ways Olivia really was such an odd girl. Tiggy put it down to the fact that Olivia had spent so much time with Jenny when she was growing up.

Jack would be home tomorrow, as well. Tiggy knew that Ben hadn’t approved of their sending him to boarding school. Jack, like his father and all the male members of the Crighton family had attended the King’s School in Chester. But unlike them, Jack boarded there on a weekly basis.

Jenny, of course, being Jenny, would make nothing of driving first Max and now Joss there day in and day out—and had even offered to pick Jack up and take him with them but Tiggy had her own reasons for preferring to have her son out of the way on occasion.

She glanced impatiently at her nails. She was booked in tomorrow for a manicure at the beauty salon in the exclusive country club close to Chester, which she and David had joined shortly after it had opened. David didn’t use the facilities very often; he preferred playing golf at the same club where his father and brother were members.

Now, what was she going to wear tonight? The Buckletons were members of an old Cheshire family and well-connected; they lived in a huge, draughty, rambling Victorian house just outside Chester. In addition to the couple’s being clients of David’s, Ann Buckleton was a local JP. Tiggy suspected that Ann Buckleton didn’t particularly approve of her and would have preferred Jenny’s company, but David was the firm’s senior partner and as such it was David whom they invited to dinner.

Jenny parked her car in the large municipal car park just outside the town. The town itself was old; the Romans had mined salt in the area and so had others both before and after them.

The town had literally been built on salt and now there was concern that parts of it could be subject to subsidence because of the now-disused and extensive salt workings on its outskirts.

To Jenny, Haslewich was everything that a small rural English town should be—a neat, compact and harmonious blending of buildings actually built in some cases on top of one another, absurd Georgian growths sprouting from Tudor roots, handsome stone structures jostling for space with others made from brick. Some of the more flamboyant stone ones sported their purloined masonry without any hint of shame or subtlety.

During the Civil War, so much damage had been done to the town’s surrounding stone wall by the attacking Roundhead troops that after the war the stone had been used, in some cases, to repair the homes of the townspeople, and the only part of the original wall that now remained was the section that ran between the town and the river. The local council was presently running a campaign to raise money to have it restored. So far, the townspeople appeared stoically determined to leave their wall as it was and in many ways Jenny didn’t blame them.

The antique shop was in a small, narrow alley just off the town square, a pretty, double-fronted Tudor building with an upper storey that overhung the alleyway.

Guy Cooke was rearranging some delicate Staffordshire figurines when she walked in. He looked up and saw her, immediately stopping what he was doing to come over and greet her with a warm smile.

He was at least fifteen years younger than Jonathon and physically completely different. Where Jon was tall and blond with long arms and legs, Guy was shorter, broader, his hair pitch-dark and his colouring just short of swarthy.

He had once told Jenny that there was supposed to be gypsy blood in his family somewhere, and looking at him Jenny could well believe it. They had been partners for seven years and friends for much longer. Guy’s family had lived in the town for generations and his parents had run a pub several doors away from the shop before they retired and moved. He had sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all living within a stone’s throw of one another and all virtually united in their disapproval of Guy and what he was doing.

Guy had always been ‘arty’ as he had wryly described himself once to Jenny. Of course, his parents had tried their best to smother such an undesirable trait, which would have been bad enough in a daughter, but was totally unacceptable in a son….

The Cookes as a clan were notoriously macho; the thickset, dark-haired, very male men knew their place in life and what being a man and, more importantly, being a Cooke were all about.

Not so Guy. He had wanted something different out of life. He was something different.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been much in evidence lately,’ Jenny apologised, shaking her head when Guy offered her a cup of tea.

‘Mmm. How are things going?’ he asked her.

‘All right—I think,’ Jenny said, laughing. ‘Tiggy and I were up at Queensmead this morning just checking on the final details—’

‘You mean you were checking on the final details,’ Guy corrected her.

Jenny frowned. It was no secret to her that Guy didn’t particularly like her sister-in-law, which was quite odd really when one thought about how he felt about anything that was beautiful, and Tiggy was certainly that.

Tiggy didn’t like him, either. In fact, she had, on occasion, been uncharacteristically vindictive about him, making waspish comments about the fact that he wasn’t married.

Jenny had started to laugh. She could think of few men who were more masculinely heterosexual than Guy—not that it made any difference what his sexual preference was—and the only reason he hadn’t married was because he hadn’t wanted to tie himself down to one woman. In his sexuality at least, he was very much a member of the Cooke clan who had, to a man, what was tacitly understood to be a weakness for the female sex.

‘What about this silver you wanted me to look at?’ she reminded him.

‘Oh, yes. I think it’s Queen Anne but you’re the silver expert. I’ve got it in the safe.’

It was over an hour before Jenny finally left the shop. Like Guy, she was convinced that the silver was genuine although, as she had pointed out to him, the lack of any identifying marks could mean that it might have been stolen at some point in time.

‘It’s too good not to have had proper markings,’ she had observed. ‘I suppose the best thing we can do is to check with the police.’

After she left the shop, she crossed the square. She just had enough time left to call on Ruth; her husband’s aunt lived in a narrow, elegant Georgian town house on Church Walk, which she rented from the church commissioners. To get to it, Jenny made a small detour through the churchyard itself, pausing as she walked past the Crighton family plot to stop and bend down towards a small single headstone carved with laughing, naughty-looking cherubs. The epitaph read:

‘HARRY CRIGHTON

JUNE 19TH 1965–JUNE 20TH 1965.’

He had lived such a heartbreakingly short time, this first child of hers, and a part of her still mourned for him and always would. Time had eased the piercing sharpness of her initial grief, but she could never forget him, nor would she want to. Before she stood up, she touched the headstone, stroking it, caressing it almost, as she said his name.

Ruth was waiting for her with the front door open as she walked up the path. ‘I saw you in the churchyard,’ she told Jenny. ‘He would have been thirty-one this year if he’d lived.’

‘I know.’ For a moment both women were quiet. If having Ben as a father-in-law weighed heavily at times in the negative balance sheet of her marriage to Jonathon, then having Ruth in the family certainly added balance to the positive side of the equation, Jenny acknowledged.

‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’ Ruth asked her.

‘No,’ Jenny told her ruefully, ‘but I’d still love one.’

‘Come on in, then,’ Ruth invited her, and as Jenny followed her into the pretty sitting room at the front of the house, she paused to admire the huge profusion of flowers decorating the empty fireplace.

Ruth had a gift, not just for arranging flowers artistically, but for growing them, as well.

‘Pieter is coming with the flowers on the day of the party,’ she told Jenny, following the direction of her glance. ‘He’s catching the first ferry over that morning. The flowers will all be freshly picked and he knows exactly what we want.’

Ruth bought her flowers directly from a Dutch supplier whose younger son crossed the North Sea to Hull once a week delivering flowers to his regular customers but, for this weekend’s celebration, Pieter had agreed to make a special trip bringing only the flowers that Ruth had ordered especially for the event.

‘I imagine Ben’s driving you crazy, isn’t he?’ she asked now.

‘Just a little bit,’ Jenny agreed. ‘His hip bothers him at times although he won’t admit it….’

Half an hour later when Jenny left, Ruth watched her walk back across the churchyard and pause a second time for a few moments in front of the grave of her first-born son.

She sensed what Jenny was feeling. Some pains never ever faded; some things could never ever be forgotten, and it wasn’t always true that with time they eased.

2

‘Jon, have you got a minute?’

Jonathon looked up from his desk as his twin walked into his office, then frowned slightly as he saw the way that David was massaging his shoulder. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked him.

‘Not really, just a bit of an ache. I must have pulled something playing golf on Sunday, which reminds me, we’re both down to play in the Captain’s Cup next month but Tiggy is getting a bit agitated about our getting away so I might have to pull out. Look, I’m going to get off early. We’re having dinner with the Buckletons tonight and there’s nothing pressing here.’

No, there probably wasn’t, not once you discounted the two wills waiting to be redrafted, the conveyancing for Hawkins Farm and a whole host of other complicated and fiddly commissions that increasingly recently seemed to find their way from David’s desk to his own because his brother couldn’t find the time to deal with them.

It had never really been intended that the two of them would go into the family business; David had been earmarked to become a member of a much more elevated rank of their profession—a barrister—and long before they had both even left school, their father was already talking about the time when David would be a QC.

All that had changed, though, the summer David had returned to Haslewich with Tiggy to tell the family that they were married and that Tiggy was expecting his child. No one had mentioned David’s failure to fulfil his father’s hopes for him by not qualifying for the Bar, just as no one had mentioned the debts David had run up whilst living in London or the distinctive and tell-tale, sickly sweet smell that emanated from the room that David and Tiggy were sharing at Queensmead until a new home was found for them.

Arrangements were very quickly made for David to join the partnership, but not as a practising solicitor because, of course, he wasn’t qualified, but Jon doubted that anyone remembered that these days. As the favoured brother, David was automatically assumed to be the firm’s senior partner and Jonathon, because he was Jonathon, had never done anything to dispel this myth. Equally David, because he was David, hadn’t, either.

Now as Jonathon looked at his twin and saw the signs of weakness that age was making increasingly plain in his features, the faint coarsening of the once healthily tanned taut flesh of his face, the inability of his gaze to hold Jon’s own, the fleshiness on a body that used to be as firmly muscular as Jon’s still was, these vulnerabilities if anything only made him love his brother more and not less. Jon loved him with a fiercely protective, unvocalised love so intense that sometimes it physically hurt him. He would never have dreamed of telling his twin or anyone else how he thought and knew instinctively that David did not have the same intensity of feeling for him.

Watching David massaging the shoulder he complained had been aching, Jon found he was automatically copying the movement even though his own shoulder was completely free of pain.

‘Looks like the weather is going to stay fine for the weekend,’ David commented as he turned to leave. ‘The girls will be pleased. By the way, young Max rang me the other night. He’s driving up from London tomorrow, he says.’

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. Max might be his son, but it was David whom he treated more like a father. It was David who would have preferred to be his father, Jon suspected. They shared the same extrovert, almost extravagantly outrageous personality, the same needs, the same love of ownership and glory, the same gifts—and the same weaknesses. Jon started to frown.

‘Livvy’s due back tonight,’ David was continuing, and now he, too, was starting to frown. ‘She’s bringing this American with her. I’m not sure … look, I’d better go,’ he told Jon hurriedly as the phone started to ring. ‘I promised Tiggy I wouldn’t be late and she’s already in a bit of a state, something about the shoes she ordered for Saturday not arriving … You know how easily she gets upset.’

From his office window, Jon could see across the small town square with its neatly enclosed immaculate lawn and its tidy flower-beds. He could see Jenny, his wife, crossing the square on her way back to her car. She stopped to talk to David; David had obviously seen her, too, as he quickened his pace to catch up with her. Jon saw the way she smiled as she greeted his brother, the afternoon sun turning her brunette hair a nice warm chestnut. Once, a long time ago, so long ago now that most people had forgotten all about it, Jenny had been David’s girlfriend.

The telephone had started to ring again. Looking away from the window, Jon reached out to answer it.

‘What’s for tea?’

Jenny smiled at her youngest child. At forty she had thought herself too old and too careful to have another baby, but nature had proved her wrong.

Jon had been almost shocked when she had told him and she had felt oddly, awkwardly self-conscious about delivering the news to him herself.

‘You’re pregnant, but how …?’

‘Our wedding anniversary,’ she’d reminded him, adding simply, ‘We were supposed to be going out for a meal, remember, only you were delayed in court and instead we ate in and opened that wine that Uncle Hugh had given you.’

‘Oh God, yes,’ Jon had agreed. ‘That stuff was lethal.’

‘It was vintage burgundy,’ Jenny chided him severely, ‘and we shouldn’t have opened that second bottle. It’s my fault. It never occurred to me to think about taking any precautions.’

What she didn’t add was that sex between them had become so rare an event that her diaphragm was something that was pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer and largely forgotten. They had a comfortable, steady marriage and were not given to being physically affectionate with one another in public the way David and Tiggy often were and perhaps, because of the busyness of their lives, they had somehow grown out of the habit of being physically demonstrative with one another in private, as well.

However, as Jenny surveyed the result of their two bottles of vintage burgundy and her carelessness, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be without the consequences of their ‘accident’.

‘It’s lamb and new potatoes,’ she told Joss, named after his paternal great-grandfather, adding warningly, ‘And Joss, don’t forget—homework first.’

‘When’s Livvy coming back?’ Joss asked her, ignoring her warning. ‘She promised to come round.’

‘Some time this evening,’ Jenny responded, ‘but remember, Joss, she’s bringing a friend back with her and she won’t have time to go roaming all over the countryside with you.’

‘The badger cubs are coming out at night now. She’ll want to see them.’

Jenny grinned to herself as she heard the conviction in her young son’s voice. He was going to be a real heartbreaker when he grew up. By some magical alchemy he had managed to inherit the very best of both his father’s and his uncle’s genes. David’s overconfidence and flamboyance were toned down and backed up by Jon’s guarded personality; his nature was also enhanced by the ingredients of good humour and irrepressibility—a sense of fun, a love of life and the people around him.

‘Max is due back tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘So if you haven’t already removed your belongings from his room, I suggest that you do so this evening, and as long as we’re on the subject, your brother’s bedroom is not the place to dismantle your bike,’ she remonstrated severely.

Joss looked innocently at her. ‘But I had to do it there,’ he told her winningly. ‘There was nowhere else. There’s no room in the garage and …’

And the truth was that there was nothing quite so much fun for him as testing the strength of Max’s claim to seniority, Jenny knew, but Max was not like Olivia, indulgent of his sibling’s youthfulness and disposed to be amused and entertained by him.

Max had been horrified when she had told him that she was pregnant, and that disgust and dislike of her pregnancy had been transferred into a disgust and dislike for his younger brother.

‘It would be much better if Max went and stayed at Uncle David’s and Olivia stayed here,’ Joss grumbled.

Jenny gave him another warning look and reminded him sternly, ‘Homework.’ But she knew that there was an element of truth in what he said.

Max did prefer the company of his aunt and uncle, especially his uncle, whilst Olivia … Livvy was such a darling and so dear to her, Jenny just hoped that this young American, whoever he was, realised that he was a lucky man.

Max grimaced as the office door swung closed behind the chambers clerk. It was already gone six o’clock and now it looked as though he was going to have at least another couple of hours work ahead of him. He glanced in disgust at the papers Bob Ford had just placed on his desk.

It was no secret that he wasn’t exactly one of the clerk’s favourites, a legacy of the early days of Max’s pupillage at the chambers when Bob had unfortunately overheard his efforts to make fun of him by imitating the slight stammer he developed whenever he was under pressure.

Max shrugged.

He had inherited his father’s and his uncle’s tall, muscular body frame, and the years of playing rugby first at King’s School and then later at Oxford had developed the powerful physique of which he was now secretly rather proud.

He enjoyed it when he saw the sideways double take women gave him as they discreetly and sometimes not so discreetly assessed him. He liked it, as well, when he stripped off in the shower after a hard game of squash or rugby and saw the envy flare briefly in the eyes of other men. It gave him an advantage, and as Max was well aware, advantages were all plus points when it came to winning life’s games. And Max intended to be a winner. He wasn’t going to be like his father, content to be second best. No, Max only had to look at his Uncle David to see what he wanted to be.

He couldn’t remember the first time he had realised the difference in the way people treated his father and his Uncle David but he could remember that he had decided that people would treat him the way they did his uncle and not his father.

The knowledge that he would have much preferred it if David had been his father had come later. He had enjoyed it when David had begun to treat him more like a son than a nephew and he had enjoyed even more displacing Olivia in her father’s affections, had relished knowing that of the two of them he came first.

It had been David and his grandfather who had been full of praise and encouragement when he had announced his intention to train as a barrister.

‘You’ll need a first-class degree,’ his father had warned him. ‘And even then it won’t be easy.’

‘Stop trying to put the lad off,’ his grandfather had interrupted. ‘It’s time we had a QC on our side of the family.’

‘Well, that’s certainly what I intend to aim for,’ Max had agreed, taking advantage of his grandfather’s good mood, ‘but it isn’t going to be that simple. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get a part-time job whilst I’m at Oxford—not if I’m going to get a good degree,’ he added virtuously, ‘and as for my grant … And then I’m going to have to replace my car …’ He had paused hopefully, and as he had anticipated, his grandfather hadn’t disappointed him.

‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort something out. You’ve got some money coming to you eventually from your grandmother, and as for a car, haven’t you got a twenty-first coming up …?’

Later on he had overheard his parents discussing the incident.

‘It’s David all over again,’ he heard his mother saying angrily, ‘and Max encourages him.’

‘Yes, I know, but what could I do?’ Max had heard his father responding quietly. ‘You know what Dad’s like.’

The trouble with his mother was that she was too moralistic, Max decided, but then he supposed she had to be something. After all, she wasn’t as physically attractive as David’s wife, Tiggy, the kind of woman that men stopped to stare at in the street. The kind of woman that other men envied a man for having. He could still vividly remember the thrill it had given him the year David and Tiggy had come to his school sports day instead of his parents.

Old Harris, the sports master, had gone beetroot red and behaved like an idiot when Max had introduced Tiggy to him. Max had amused himself imagining his wanking off later in the privacy of his rented rooms as he relived the occasion. Pathetic sod. Max bet he didn’t know what it was like to have a woman, unlike Max himself, who had lost his virginity at fourteen with the able, the very able, help of a girl who worked behind the bar at the pub they all went into after Saturday morning sport.

Tucked away down a side street in Chester, it had possessed the kind of seediness that both excited and amused him. For a start it had so obviously been a place his respectable father would never have dreamed of going to, and as for his mother … But Max had enjoyed it. Just as he had enjoyed the slightly sweaty, earthy scent of the girl as she took him back to her room and let him kiss and grope her for several minutes before finally pushing him off and commanding him to wait whilst she stripped off her clothes.

It had been the first time he had seen a real naked female in the flesh, and she had had no inhibitions about letting him see her, even to the extent of laughing mockingly at him after she propped herself up on her pillows and spread her legs, inviting him to have a good look at what lay between them.

‘Bet you haven’t seen many of these before, have you?’ she demanded, grinning at him as he touched the thicket of dark, rough hair and then parted the thick, fleshy lips beneath it. ‘Know what this is, do you?’ she asked him, commanding him to look as she revealed the small inner nub of hard flesh.

‘Course I do,’ Max responded swaggeringly.

‘Good,’ she announced, ‘then you’ll know what to do with it, won’t you?’

Max certainly thought he did but she soon disabused him of this misapprehension.

‘God, you’re rough,’ she complained. ‘It’s not your own prick you’ve got there, you know, and besides,’ she added slyly, watching him, ‘it works much better if you suck it.’

She laughed when she saw his expression.

‘Never gone down on a girl before, have you? Well, now’s your big chance.’

She hadn’t let him put himself inside her until after she’d had her orgasm and by then … She had laughed again when he hadn’t been able to hold back or control his excitement or the thick gush of semen that shot from his tensely erect cock, but she hadn’t been laughing later when he had thrust into her and gone on thrusting until she was moaning and clawing at his back, urging him on and on and then screeching like the alley cat that she was as he took her through her orgasm and refused to stop until she had had another and then another. He hadn’t seen her again after that—there hadn’t been any need.

He could remember how shocked and disgusted he’d been when his mother had been pregnant with Joss, knowing that she and his father still did it.

He could remember her and his father attending one of his school functions and how furious and ashamed he had felt at the sight of her heavily pregnant body. She had no right, at her age … She was making a laughing-stock of herself and of him.

Max’s mouth hardened as he thought of his parents; sometimes there was a look in his mother’s eyes when she watched him….

His mother was crazy if she thought he was going to end up like his father, a second-rate man working for a second-rate out-of-touch family business in a second-rate county town. If it wasn’t for his Uncle David and his charismatic personality, the business would have gone to the wall years ago. Just because his uncle had made one foolish mistake and …

It wasn’t a mistake Max was going to repeat. Oh, he intended to enjoy his life but he also intended to make sure he didn’t get caught in the same trap as his uncle.

Max had made sure that he left Oxford with a good enough degree to get him into a decent set of chambers after his Bar finals; and once there not only had he made sure that he brought himself to the attention of those who could be of benefit to his future career, but additionally he had also made sure that his life wasn’t all hard work and paying lip-service to his professional ambitions. However, unlike his uncle, he had been discreet and careful.

‘Still here, old boy? I thought you were intending to get off early.’

Max tensed as Roderick Hamilton walked into his office. Roderick was just over twelve months his senior. They had been at Oxford at the same time but had not mixed in the same circles; Roderick’s parents were extremely wealthy and well-connected. His uncle was the present head of chambers, which was no doubt why of the two of them Roderick had been chosen to fill the vacancy for a tenancy at the end of their pupillage whilst Max had had to fall back on the ignominy of being allowed merely to stay on as a squatter. This meant, of course, that the only fee-paying work that Max could get was whatever had been passed over by the existing members of the chambers, including Roderick.

Max had never been the type to feel the need to make close friends; to Max his peers were rivals, obstacles he had to overcome, but in Roderick’s case, Max actively disliked the man, as well.

‘Mmm … the Wilson brief. Hard luck,’ Roderick commiserated as he picked up the papers on Max’s desk and glanced at them before tossing them to one side. ‘Pity you’re not free this weekend,’ he added. ‘Ma’s having a “do” for my sister. She’s coming out this year and Ma’s asked me to round up some men.’

Max didn’t take his eyes off the papers he was now pretending to study. He knew perfectly well that Roderick was trying to amuse himself at his own expense; there was no way Roderick’s mother would welcome any uninvited extra guests to the extremely prestigious and carefully planned ball she was hostessing for her daughter’s coming-out party.

‘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.