if we can write yet. Programs which will have to be individually tailored for each person who uses them.’
‘Programs which will give people who would otherwise not be able to do so, the ability to communicate,’ Bram had told him. ‘Think what that means, Jay.’
‘I am. It’s a complete waste of time and money,’ Jay had insisted.
‘My time and my money,’ Bram had reminded him gently.
His father’s time, his father’s money. They ran through Jay’s life in a twisted skein that rubbed continuously against his soul, chafing and scarring it.
One of his earliest memories of life with his father had been of a woman’s voice, cool and remote, saying impatiently, ‘Bram, for goodness’ sake, think. The last thing you’ve got time for now is the responsibility of a child. We’re on the brink of getting our first real break, of finally making some money, and God knows we need it.’
He had hated that woman then and he still hated her now. A feeling which he knew, for all her cool distance and remoteness, Helena fully returned.
‘What time is your flight to New York?’ he heard his father asking now.
‘Six-thirty this evening.’ He added suspiciously, ‘why?’
‘No reason,’ Bram responded. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a meeting with Anthony at four-thirty—he’s looked out some research material he thought I’d like to study—and I thought you might like to join us.’
‘What for?’ Jay challenged him sourly. ‘Like you said, it’s your time you’re putting on the line—and your money.’
‘Jay—’ Bram started to protest, but the younger man was already turning to leave the office. Despite Jay’s six-foot-two height and the powerful male strength barely cloaked by the conventional dark business suit, Bram was achingly reminded of a much younger but equally surly Jay turning his back on him and stalking off in stubbornness, his shoulders stiff with anger, the power of his emotions making his then much smaller body virtually vibrate with their intensity.
‘He’s manipulating you and you’re letting him get away with it.’ Helena had warned him in exasperation. And of course she had been right—in a sense—but how did you tell a small, furiously angry and bitterly resentful child who still sometimes, two years after their deaths, cried out in the night for his mother and grandparents—a child who you knew used his aggression and manipulation to mask his terrified fear that you, too, might desert him—how did you convince such a child that he had absolutely nothing to fear? How could you deliberately strip away from him the comfort blanket of his stubborn pride by revealing to him that you knew, far from hating you as he claimed, just how much he actually craved your love? How did you tell him that the arms he stubbornly resisted and rejected were, in reality, only too ready to close around him and hold him protectively, safe from the rest of the world and all its hurts?
It had made Bram ache with a throat-closing pity to watch as Jay fiercely rejected any attempt on his father’s part to be physically close with him. To Bram, a very tactile man who had no problems in expressing the emotional side of his nature, Jay’s rejection of the kisses and cuddles he so obviously craved made Bram want to weep.
‘You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,’ Helena had protested when he had tried to explain.
‘Oh, but I do,’ Bram had corrected her softly. ‘After all, I fathered him.’
‘You were fourteen,’ Helena had reminded him. ‘A boy…a child still, yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Bram had agreed steadily. ‘But while that might be an excuse, Helena, it is Jay who pays the price for my immaturity. No child of fourteen can be a parent…a father, in any real sense of the word. In being responsible for Jay’s conception, I have robbed him of his right to a real parent, of being born into a relationship where he was wanted and loved, of having a father who could protect him…give him the security he needs.’
‘You have given him security,’ Helena had insisted. ‘You’ve given him a home, abandoned your own life, your own plans, your own friends because of him. He should be grateful to you instead of…of trying to completely destroy your life.’
‘Helena, no child should ever feel he needs to be grateful to a parent for being loved and wanted. No human being should ever have to grow up under that weight of emotional hunger. I know Jay can be difficult….’
‘Difficult! He’s impossible, Bram. He’s ruining your life. You should put him in a home—have him fostered—for his sake as well as your own….’
What Bram could still see in his adult son and what other people could not see was the fear of a child who believes that he has to earn his parent’s love. What he, as a father, could never forgive himself for was causing that fear.
He had hoped that as Jay matured he would come to recognise for himself what motivated him and see that his fear was needless, that the angry possessive grasp he insisted on keeping over both their lives deprived them both; that allowing other people into their lives could only enrich them both. But this had simply not happened.
And just as Jay had so jealously guarded his relationship with his father and been fiercely antagonistic to anyone else coming into their lives, so now he guarded his own privacy. Bram knew from the brief scraps of gossip that percolated through the office grapevine that Jay was a highly sexed man whom women found dangerously attractive, until they realised that sex was all he wanted from them, and all they were going to get from him.
Inadvertently listening in on a conversation at a dinner party between one of his son’s ex-lovers and her friend, he had heard her say dryly, ‘Physically, Jay is just about the best lover I’ve ever had. He knows all the right moves, all the right buttons to press, but after a while you start to realise that this is all he is doing. It’s as though he’s written a program for sexual success—it’s cold and clinical. I pity the woman he eventually marries. He’s the type who’ll go for some fresh, virginal, up-market aristocratic girl, long on pedigree and short on savvy. He’ll seduce her, marry her, pack her off to a house in the country as soon as he’s got her pregnant and then go back to the real business of his life.’
‘Which is?’ her friend had asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Or need I ask?’
‘Oh, it’s not sex,’ she had been told. ‘No, Jay’s real purpose in life, his real consuming passion, is his relationship with his father…making sure that nothing and no one comes between them.’
‘Because he’s afraid of losing the business, you mean,’ the friend had suggested.
‘I’m not sure. I remember once, though, when he was supposed to be taking me out to dinner and I happened to mention that Bram was going to spend the weekend with my cousin. She was just newly divorced then, and she and Bram have always been good friends. Jay cancelled the dinner date without any proper apology and my cousin rang me a few days later, very aggrieved, to complain that less than a couple of hours after Bram had arrived, Jay turned up, insisting he needed to see his father on some vital company business, and he stayed on almost all weekend.’
‘Well, I suppose if Bram did marry again Jay could lose out to any children of that marriage, and let’s face it, Bram might not have the same kind of stud reputation as Jay, but there’s no doubt about it, he is a very, very sexy man….’
‘Very,’
