genius. Philanthropist. Adviser to world statesmen. No doubt you’ve heard of him. Most people have.’
‘Actually I was thinking about a boy with the same name who was a year below me at school. Could he be your brother? His parents never came to take him out. Not even to prize-giving the year he won—’
‘Not even the year he won the Headmaster’s Prize,’ she said. ‘Yes. That would be Ivo.’
‘Clever bugger. My parents were taking me out somewhere for a decent feed and I felt so sorry for him I was going to ask him if he wanted to come along.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I wasn’t criticising you, Jago. It’s just that I know my brother. He never let anyone get that close. Not even me. Not until he met Belle. He’s different now.’
‘Well, good. I’m sorry I let him put me off.’
He’d meant to keep an eye out for him, but there had been so many other things to fill the days and even a single year’s age gap seemed like a lifetime at that age.
‘Don’t blame yourself. Ivo’s way of dealing with our parents’ rejection was to put up a wall of glass. No interaction, no risk of getting hurt. Mine, on the other hand, was to create havoc in an attempt to force them to notice me.’
‘That I can believe. What did you do once you’d run out of the livestock option? Kick the headmistress?’
‘Are you ever going to let me forget that?’
‘Never,’ he said, and the idea of teasing her about that for the next fifty years gave him an oddly warm feeling. Stupid. In fifty hours from now they would have gone on their separate ways, never to see one another again. Instead, he concentrated on what really mattered. ‘Tell me about your parents. Why did they reject you both?’
‘Oh, that’s much too strong a word for it. Rejection would have involved serious effort and they saved all their energy for amusing themselves.’
‘So why bother—to have children?’
‘Producing offspring, an heir and a spare, even if the spare turned out to be annoyingly female, was expected of them. The Grenville name, the future of the estate had to be taken care of.’
‘Of course. Stupid of me,’ he said sarcastically.
‘It’s what they had been brought up to, Jago. Generations of them. On one side you have Russian royalty who never accepted that the world had changed. On the other, the kind of people who paid other people to run their houses, take care of their money and, duty done, rear their children. They had more interesting, more important things to do.’
What could ever be more important than kissing your kid better when she grazed a knee? Jago wondered. The memory of his own mother kissing his four-year-old elbow after he’d fallen from his bike sprang, unbidden, to his mind. How she’d smiled as she’d said, ‘All better.’ Told him how brave he was…
He shut it out.
‘Chillingly selfish,’ he said, ‘but at least it was an honest response. At least they didn’t pretend.’
‘Pretence would have required an effort.’ She lifted her head to look up at him. ‘Is that what your parents did, Jago? Pretend?’
Her question caught him on the raw. He didn’t talk about his family. He’d walled up that part of his life. Shut it away. Until the scent of rosemary had stirred a memory of a boy and his bicycle…
Lies, lies, lies…
‘Jago?’
She said his name so softly, but even that was a lie. Not his real name. They were alone together, locked in a dark and broken world, reliant upon one another for their very survival and she had a right to his name.
‘Nick,’ he said.
‘Nick…’
It was so long since anyone had called him that. The soft sound of her voice saying his name ripped at something inside him and he heard himself say, ‘I was in my final year at uni when I was door-stepped by a journalist.’
She took the hand that he’d hooked around her waist to keep her close and the words, coiled up inside him, began to unravel…
He could see the man now. The first to reach his door. He hadn’t introduced himself, not wanting to put him on his guard. He’d just said his name. ‘Nick?’ And when he’d said, ‘Yes…’ he’d just pitched in with, ‘What’s your reaction to the rumour…’
‘My father was a politician,’ he said. ‘A member of the Government. A journalist knocked on my door one day and asked me if I knew my father had been having a long-term affair with a woman in his London office. One of his researchers. That I had a fourteen-year-old half-sister…’
He caught himself. He didn’t talk about them, ever.
‘Oh, Nick…’ She said his name again, softly, echoing his pain. He shouldn’t have told her. No one else had used it in fifteen years and to hear it spoken that way caught at feelings he’d buried so deep that he’d forgotten how much they hurt. How betrayed he’d felt. How lost.
‘That was when I discovered that all that “happy families” stuff was no more than window-dressing.’
She didn’t say she was sorry, just moved a little closer in the dark. It was enough.
‘It must have been a big story at the time,’ she said after a while, ‘but I don’t recall the name.’
‘It was fifteen years ago. No doubt you were still at school.’
‘I suppose, even so—’
‘A juicy political scandal is hard to miss.’
It hadn’t just been the papers. His father had been the poster boy for the perfect marriage, a solid family life. It had brought out the whole media wolf pack and the television satirists had had a field day.
‘You’re right, of course. The fact is that I don’t use his name any more. Neither of us do. My father was dignified, my mother stood by him and, in the fullness of time, he was rewarded for a lifetime of commitment to his country, his party, with a life peerage. Or maybe the title was my mother’s reward for all those years of keeping up appearances, playing the perfect constituency wife. Not making a fuss. But then why would she?’
It was obvious that she’d always known about the affair, the child, but she had enjoyed her life too much to give it up. Had chosen to look the other way and live with it.
‘She was the one who spent weekends at the Prime Minister’s home in the country,’ he said. ‘Went on the foreign tours. Enjoyed all the perks of his position. Got the title.’
‘What did they say to you?’
He shook his head. ‘I went home, expecting to find my mother in bits, my father ashamed, packing.’ It had taken the police presence
