than she had, but she had had no idea he knew that Scott was his father. ‘Tell me about it,’ he insisted.
She supposed she owed him that, and if they were going to stay here.… If? Did she have any choice? And why had she given in? Because of some crazy impulse that there were still happy endings; that the past could be wiped out; that Scott could be made to see.… What?
She sat down, too wrapped up in her own thoughts for a moment to answer Simon’s questions. When she left Garston she had sworn that she would put Scott out of her mind, but had she ever done? Why, when she hadn’t lacked the opportunities, had she never had a relationship with anyone else? Why had she reacted as she did the moment she saw him? Did she still love him? Did she even know what love was? Certainly not that ridiculous overwhelming emotion; that adolescent self-sacrifice she had felt at seventeen—that had been part hero worship and part adoration, but she wasn’t indifferent to Scott, her senses told her that much, and she would like to wipe out the bitterness, the fierce resentment she saw in his eyes, and to replace it with what? Respect? Love? Who knew? To nurture resentment and anger as long as he had done a man would have to be very powerfully motivated; very powerfully.…
‘Come on, Ma, give. I want the whole story,’ Simon warned her.
‘Okay then…’ she glanced at her son, so like his father for all that Scott couldn’t see it, and said teasingly, ‘Once upon a time.…’
INCREDIBLY it had had a fairytale quality to it; two lonely young people who had found one another, who had come together, loving and giving without restraint, sharing their thoughts, talking, always talking.… At least that was how it had been at first. She had been in the garden, studying for her ‘A’ levels, Scott had been walking past, and instead of walking past had come in. They had started talking and discovered a mutual love of the Renaissance, and it had gone on from there. He had invited her up to the Hall, she remembered, to see some of the books in the library, including one which charted the history of the old Abbey which had stood where the Hall now stood and which had been a victim of Henry VIII’s nefarious Reformation. And it had continued, companionship giving way to love so sweetly and naturally that it had seemed the most natural, the most beautiful thing in the world. She had never felt a moment’s fear in Scott’s presence; never a moment’s dread, or apprehension.
The first time he kissed her she had given herself into his keeping absolutely. Her first kiss, but not his, but it had left both of them trembling and she, she remembered, had been the one who had reached out and touched him afterwards; the sun-burned skin of his throat and arms, the angles of his jaw, touching his skin wonderingly whilst he let her, his body held tightly under control. ‘I love you’.
Which of them had said it first? She couldn’t remember, only that the words seemed to dance round them in the lazy gold of a summer afternoon; that her body yearned for the touch of his; that their mutual loneliness intensified their love. And they were both lonely. She because of her aunt’s strict upbringing, him because he was a newcomer to the village, an unwelcome intruder in his grandfather’s life. His friends from university had gone and he was alone… they were both alone.
Even before they made love he had told her he wanted to marry her. And she had wanted to marry him and live with him at Garston.
Right from the start he had confided to her his love for Garston, the house which had become his by death. He knew and sympathised with his grandfather’s views, but that didn’t alter his own feelings for Garston. He worried about how he was going to keep it, where he would find the money to maintain and restore it, and it was with her that he shared his hopes and plans.
And then there had been his mother, Eve Garston, whom Philippa had liked on sight. Already even then severely disabled by arthritis, Eve had been wholly dependent on her irrascible father-in-law financially. Scott’s father had been an engineer, and with his death the family had lost their source of income. Without the small allowance Jeffrey Garston paid them it would not have been possible for Scott to go to university, he would have had to take a job to support himself and his mother.
Carefully Philippa explained all this to her son, watching compassion and understanding add an odd maturity to his youthful features, yielding to a traitorous inner impulse to paint his father for him in knightly colours, because that was how she had remembered him. All through the years she had cherished her memories of Scott, refusing to tarnish them, hugging them to her for comfort in those times when she needed it so badly—when she first arrived in London, virtually penniless; when Simon had been born six months later at the home for unmarried mothers. Jobs had been easier to get in those days and with the help of the people who ran the Home she had learned shorthand and typing at college during her pregnancy, and then afterwards she had found a job, gradually progressing in her career, gradually improving the quality of their lifestyle. It had been a slow and painful progress, but nothing to compare with the pain of leaving Scott.
‘Why didn’t he marry you—was it because of me?’ Pain and rejection mingled in the grey eyes so like her own.
‘No.’ Philippa reassured him quickly, ‘No, it was nothing like that. Scott wanted to marry me before… before I was having you, and…’ she bit her lip, forcing herself to speak calmly, ‘and if he’d known you were his nothing would have stopped him from marrying me… but I told him that someone else was your father.’
She saw the shock darkening Simon’s eyes and rushed into an explanation. ‘It was for his sake, Simon. His grandfather bitterly resented him and the fact that he would inherit Garston, but Scott loved it.…’
‘More than he loved you?’
‘Not more, just in a different way, and then there was his mother, Eve.’ She sighed. ‘She suffered from arthritis and needed an operation to help her to walk again. She would have had to wait years to have it done on the National Health but Scott’s grandfather had promised to pay for her to have it done privately. He found out that Scott and I were in love and he sent for me.’
Her eyes darkened unwittingly as she remembered that day. The message had arrived just after breakfast, and her aunt had compressed her mouth angrily. She hadn’t known anything about her relationship with Scott and had assumed that Philippa was being summoned for some other crime like riding her bike too close to the main gates. In many ways Jeffrey Garston was positively feudal, one of the conditions that went with Jane’s tenancy of the cottage was that she and her niece used the narrow back road to and from their home; that they ‘kept to their place’.
There had been no sign of Scott when Philippa was shown into the linenfold panelled library. Later she learned he had driven his mother into York to see a specialist, but at the time her nerves had tightened apprehensively when she realised she was alone with his grandfather. Jeffrey Garston had always unnerved her. Small and wiry he still had a full head of snow-white hair, and eyes the same deep sapphire as Scott’s, although in Jeffrey Garston they were cold burning with the touch of ice—like Scott’s had been last night, Philippa realised with a sudden start. He hadn’t offered her a seat or done anything to make her feel less uncomfortable.
He knew about their affair, he had told her contemptuously, and she remembered how darkly she had flushed at the implications of his comment. The first time they had made love had been in Scott’s bedroom. He had taken her up there quite innocently to show her the view. She had turned back from the window, dizzied by the panorama spread out in front of her, and Scott had caught her. After that events had run smoothly into one another until she couldn’t remember who had made the first betraying movement, who had touched whom first, or how they had arrived at Scott’s bed.
