with their cousin? They were not unintelligent kids, far from it.
He took a deep breath.
‘Okay … your Aunt Justine has told me all about this afternoon. What you were doing was very, very wrong, and very dangerous. Peter could have been seriously injured if you had set that bonfire alight, killed even.’
Two pairs of unblinking hazel eyes regarded him without expression. It was like talking to a brick wall. He knew that he was simply not getting through to them. Exasperated and exhausted, he pushed irate fingers through his hair. His hand itched to administer punishment of a more basic nature than a lecture, but Heather had been resolutely against any form of physical punishment and he had felt bound to abide by her wishes, even though he himself as a boy had felt his father’s hand against his backside on more than one occasion—events which he remembered without rancour when he recalled the misdeeds that had given rise to them.
‘Your Aunt Justine can’t look after you any more.’ He frowned, a solution presenting itself to him, and added slowly. ‘Perhaps I ought to send you both away to school.’
Briefly both sets of hazel eyes mirrored fear, and he had a momentary urge to reach out and enfold them reassuringly, but he knew that any attempt on his part to touch them would be fiercely repudiated. He had already talked over with Justine the wisdom of sending them away to school but she had been vehemently against it. ‘If you do they will grow up institutionalised, Lyle,’ she had told him. ‘They haven’t got enough self-confidence in themselves for that. They’d think of it as punishment.’ And now looking at them he could see that she was right.
‘Okay, no boarding school.’ He felt rather than saw them relax, and wished a little despairingly that they were not so close to the long school holiday. Previously they had stayed with Justine during the week, coming home to him at weekends, but today she had made it plain that that could not continue.
Justine had forced him into a corner with marriage as his only escape. But marriage was the last thing he wanted. His marriage to Heather had been a living hell, and he had loved her. But this marriage that Justine was promoting would not be like that, it would be a business arrangement, like employing a housekeeper or a nanny.
‘Why can’t the pair of you make more of an effort to get on with Peter?’ he demanded wearily as he got to his feet. ‘Your Aunt Justine loves you, but …’
‘No, she doesn’t.’ Stuart’s lip curled as he spoke. ‘She doesn’t love us at all,’ he continued, watching him. ‘She just puts up with us because you’re our father.’
There was enough truth in what he was saying for Lyle to be lost for a way to answer.
‘No one loves us,’ James piped up. ‘And we don’t love anyone, just each other.’
Slowly Lyle backed towards the door. Poor wretched little brats … But what on earth could he say to them? That he had loved the four and two-year-old sons he had been forced to leave when Heather wanted her divorce, but that the ten and twelve-year-olds they now were were strangers to him? Heather had demanded sole custody and had told him that she thought it would be better for the children if they didn’t see him, and his solicitor had advised him to accept her demands, so they had come to him virtually strangers.
Justine was right, he thought, opening the door abruptly. They did need someone of their own. She was also right about the pressure of his personal problems and the effect it was likely to have on his work, and as a doctor he could not afford to make mistakes.
What was she like, this woman who advertised so boldly for a husband, merely describing herself as twenty-six, single and self-supporting?
Well, thanks to Justine it looked as though he might soon find out.
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