still had it, but could not wear it because of the memories it brought with it. She felt her heart contract with pain and regret.
Fern was an entertaining companion, chattering away at her side as they headed for the Abbey, Jaime matching her steps to her daughter’s slower ones.
‘It’s a very big house, isn’t it?’ Fern commented when they turned into the drive, ‘but I think I like Granny’s cottage best.’
Fern moved with a natural grace Jaime noticed, watching her daughter, unaware that her lithe delicacy had been inherited from her. Jaime had always enjoyed dancing. The discipline of teaching others, of helping them and watching their own appreciation grow with ability gave her an intense feeling of satisfaction. Fern tugged on her hand as she bent to examine a clump of ragged robin, and not for the first time Jaime gave mental thanks for the fact that her daughter had such an equable and sunny temperament. Fern would never suffer as she had done from an excess of sensitivity and over-emotionalism. ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ her mother always said when she voiced this fact. ‘You have many things to recommend yourself, Jaime, you just don’t realise it.’ It sometimes seemed to Jaime that her mother had been trying to bolster her self-confidence all her life, but she had just never possessed the sturdy independence which characterised both her mother and her daughter.
The Abbey loomed before them, grey and ivy-coloured. Although not a beautiful house, it possessed a mellow air of continuity that had always appealed to Jaime. It had once been an Abbey, although little of the original building remained. It had been rebuilt during the reign of Charles the Second and, although Caroline complained that she found the panelled downstairs rooms gloomy and depressing, Jaime loved them.
Mrs March, Caroline’s housekeeper, answered the door, beaming at Fern, who responded with a happy grin of her own.
‘Why don’t I take her into the kitchen and give her some of my home-made gingerbread?’ she suggested, not realising that she was depriving Jaime of the emotional support she felt she needed. ‘Miss Caroline’s in the drawing room,’ she added.
No doubt Mrs March knew quite well why she was here, Jaime reflected, watching her daughter follow the housekeeper without a backward glance. The panelling had been removed from the drawing room by Caroline’s father, but the graceful stucco ceiling remained, and the Adam fireplace added by a Georgian owner. Caroline had completely refurnished the house when she inherited it. Personally, Jaime loathed the cold starkness of the modern Italian furniture she had chosen, but there was no doubt that it made a stunning setting for her startling beauty. Dark red hair framed her face in an aureole of curls, the leather trousers and silk blouse she was wearing being a soft khaki colour which emphasised her colouring. As always, she was immaculately made-up. She had played at modelling when she first left school and had picked up enough tips to achieve what always seemed to Jaime to be an effortlessly glamorous look. She reminded Jaime of the women who had pursued Blake, both before and after their marriage. Brittle, expensive, beautiful predators who lived by their own rules. Women she could never hope to compete with. ‘Why bother?’ her mother had once said lightly when she had tried to confide her fears to her. Blake had chosen to marry her, but she had never been able to rid herself of the conviction that, somehow, she had coerced him into marriage and that had been something she hadn’t been able to tell her mother. She had been too deeply ashamed to admit to her that she didn’t have the strength to be as independent as Sarah was. She had always felt that, secretly, she must have been a disappointment to her mother; that although she had never shown or expressed any impatience, there must have been some. ‘You underestimate yourself too much Jaime.’ That was what she had always said, and Jaime would have been surprised if she had known that, far from comparing her with Caroline to her own discredit, most people would have found far more appeal in her own natural beauty and quiet intelligence than in Caroline’s showy, pushy manners.
‘Well, well if it isn’t Miss Goody Two Shoes,’ Caroline mocked. The nickname was a throw-back to their schooldays, and Jaime managed to hold back the humiliating scald of colour she could feel rising up under her skin.
‘No need to ask what you’re doing here,’ Caroline continued tauntingly. ‘But what happened to the cavalry?’
‘If you mean Charles, he’s had to go to Dorchester to a meeting,’ Jaime responded evenly. ‘Caroline, surely it can’t be true that you intend to sell the Abbey to a developer?’
‘Why not?’ Caroline asked carelessly, ‘After all, it’s mine to do with as I choose.’ Without inviting Jaime to sit down, she drifted elegantly over to one of the uncomfortable-looking modern chairs, crossing her legs at the ankle, sure of herself as a woman in a way that Jaime felt she could never emulate.
‘But it is a listed building,’ Jaime reminded her quietly. Caroline shrugged. ‘So what.… If you feel so strongly about it, you can always put in a more attractive bid. The current one is £250,000.’ She laughed unpleasantly at Jaime’s expression.
The sound of Fern’s excited voice interrupted Jaime’s thought flow. She could see her daughter in the garden, walking towards the French windows, chattering animatedly to the man at her side.
Jaime’s heart seemed to do a somersault and then stop beating as she stared disbelievingly at the dark head bent towards her daughter’s. She started to shake, her sight blurring, the two heads of dark brown hair so similar that they merged into one. Caroline got up and opened the French doors.
‘Blake, darling, there you are. I thought you were writing.…’ There was malice in her eyes as she directed a contemptuous look at Jaime’s white face. ‘You seem to have given poor Jaime rather a shock, didn’t you let her know you were coming?’
As she watched the dark, hawklike profile of her husband turn in her direction, Jaime struggled to retain some composure.
‘Jaime and I aren’t exactly on intimate terms these days.’ The indifferent tone of his voice, the cool aloofness in his green eyes, both combined to increase Jaime’s feeling of nausea. She could scarcely believe that this handsome distant man had once possessed her body; had fathered her child.
‘I agree.’
‘Umm, it seems hard to believe that you were ever that,’ Caroline drawled, ‘but of course there is Fern.’
Fern! Trying to control the shudders of shocked reaction coursing through her, Jaime looked into her daughter’s shining eyes.
‘This is my Daddy,’ she told Jaime importantly, ‘I found him in the garden. He was looking at some flowers. I told him my name and he said that he was my Daddy.’
‘Fern, it’s time to go home.’ How weak and faint her voice sounded. ‘Go and say thank you to Mrs Marsh for your gingerbread and then we’ll go.’
‘I’m sorry about the interruption, Blake,’ she heard Caroline apologising as she hurried Fern away. ‘It’s Mrs Marsh’s fault, she should never have let the child loose in the garden.’
Blake’s response was an indistinct blur that Jaime didn’t stay to hear. Why should she? She already knew how Blake viewed his daughter; in much the same light as he did his wife; as an encumbrance he would prefer to do without.
‘YES, staying up at the Abbey he is… writing a book or supposed to be.…’ The voice faded away as Jaime entered the small post office and her face burned as she recognised who they were talking about. It was
