Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

of the addiction is the same. It’s just that the substance, the pattern of behaviour your mother is addicted to to find release from reality, to escape from life, is different, less socially disruptive—’

      ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more tonight,’ Olivia told him. ‘I can’t. It’s the party tomorrow,’ she added unnecessarily, ‘and I can’t …’ She closed her eyes, fighting back the relentless surge of panic she could sense threatening her.

      It was pointless feeling that she couldn’t cope with what she had discovered; that she didn’t want to cope with it. Someone had to. How long had her mother been behaving like this? Why had no one else seen, recognised … heard what was obviously a cry for help, the soundless, agonized wail of a soul in torment. And Caspar wasn’t helping. Why couldn’t he be more compassionate, more understanding? Why couldn’t he understand how guilty she felt, how afraid, how compelled almost to do something, anything, to help her mother to ease her own guilt for having gone on so carelessly and unknowingly with her own life without realising what was happening at home?

      When they got to the top of the first flight of stairs, it was almost a relief to be able to turn away from Caspar and announce, ‘I’d better sleep in my own room, just … just in case—’

      ‘Just in case what?’ Caspar challenged her acidly. ‘Just in case your mother needs you?’ He shook his head. ‘You’re heading down a no-exit street, Olivia,’ he warned her. But Olivia shook her head mutinously, inclining only her cheek for him to kiss and maintaining a stiff distance between their bodies.

      Couldn’t he see how upset she was, how shocked, how much she needed him to be on her side, to show her that he understood, that he cared? Couldn’t he for once forsake the higher ground of his own beliefs and come down to where she stood for her sake, instead of expecting her to make the too painful journey up to him?

      ‘It’s all very well for you to sit in judgement of my mother and say what should be done,’ she told him tiredly, ‘but it’s my mother we’re talking about … oh, what’s the point?’ She shook her head, too emotionally drained to continue arguing with him but still half-hoping as she heard him walk towards the second flight of stairs that she would hear him pause and turn round, come back to her, but of course he wouldn’t … didn’t …

      Oh no … his principles were much too important to him to do that. So important in fact that they obviously mattered far more than her … than her feelings … her needs … her.

       5

      Ruth opened her eyes cautiously and then expelled her breath in a quiet sigh of relief. The weather forecasters had been right; it was going to be a fine day.

      She had purposely left her curtains open the previous night and now, through the uncovered window, she could see the clear, pure light blue of the dawn sky already being warmed by the strength of the rising summer sun.

      Swinging her bare legs out of bed, she started to hum one of her favourite hymns—not because she was particularly religious but, living so close to a church that was home to one of the county’s best choirs, one naturally became accustomed to hearing them sing and this particularly rousing hymn had always appealed to her and somehow seemed suitable for the bright promise of the day.

      Not that the weather was of any special concern to her other than as to how it might affect her floral displays, but it was important to Jenny and Jenny was important to Ruth, far more important than even she, Jenny, realised, Ruth acknowledged. In fact, in her heart, Ruth cherished the same intensity of emotion and love for Jenny that she would have given to the daughter she had never actually had.

      A small shadow crossed her face as she padded barefoot across her bedroom floor, the boards waxed and polished, their rich darkness broken here and there by soft rugs.

      Ruth knew that her brother, Ben, would not have approved of her bare feet and even less of her bare body, which was perhaps not the prettiest sight in the world, she admitted wryly to herself. She was, after all, a woman in her late sixties, but these days mercifully she no longer needed to be constricted or constrained by the disapproval and wishes of the male members of her family, and if she chose to sleep in her skin instead of bundling herself up in something society deemed appropriate for a woman of her age, then so be it.

      She had not always enjoyed this kind of freedom—far from it—which was perhaps why she valued and appreciated it so much now, she reflected.

      As a girl her behaviour had been very rigidly controlled by her parents, especially her father; he had had very old-fashioned ideas about the way a girl should be brought up and allowed to behave. She paused on her way to the bathroom, sadness momentarily clouding the still-bright cornflower blue of her eyes. When she was young many men had been smitten by the intensity and vivaciousness of her eyes. More than one young man had actually proposed to her on the strength of them, but then those had been dramatic times with the young men on the verge of adult life, poised also and much more precariously on the edge of death, as well, about to go to war with no knowledge of whether or not they might survive, and because of that …

      She had far better things to think about this morning than the past, Ruth reminded herself briskly as she prepared to step into her shower. It was going to take her the best part of the morning to do the flowers for the boys’ party and that was if everything went according to plan.

      Pieter was due to arrive with the order in less than an hour’s time. She had arranged to meet him at Queensmead, which would save her the trouble of having to transport the flowers there and risk any damage to them. And no doubt when they did arrive, Ben would be on hand to carp and complain. She and her elder brother had never entirely seen eye to eye. He reminded Ruth far too much of their father. Hugh she liked more.

      Ben’s sons were her nephews but she loved Jenny, Jon’s wife, above them. And as for the coming generation, she had never made any secret of the fact that she simply could not take to Max despite the fact that he was Ben’s favourite—despite it or because of it. She hesitated a moment before stepping into the shower, a new and necessary addition to her bathroom the previous winter. She had finally been forced to admit that the rheumatism that had plagued her for several years was making it not just difficult but also downright dangerous for her to climb in and out of the huge, antiquated Edwardian bath the house possessed.

      Not even the fact that Jenny was his mother could endear Max to her, but Olivia she quite liked as well as Jenny’s twins, and as for Joss, he might have been named after her own father but that was the only similar thing they shared in common. A mother might not be allowed to have favourites but there were no such embargoes placed on great-aunts.

      She looked forward immensely to Joss’s unheralded visits, his unexpected arrivals at her front door, almost always bearing some small odd gift, odd to other people, that was. She herself had found nothing odd in the smooth, water-washed pebbles he had brought her from the river or the fossils he had found on one of his forays into the countryside; the hedgehog he had rescued and the litter of kittens he had found abandoned and half-drowned in a sack in a muddy pond. The hedgehog had recovered, to be released back into her long back garden; the kittens had thrived and been found safe homes—none of them her own—and the pebbles and fossils had pride of place on one of the shelves of her antique marquetry china cupboard. She had drawn the line at the fox cub and announced firmly that he would be better cared for in a local animal sanctuary, but she had visited the place with Joss and been with him when the cub was eventually set free.

      Ruth had accompanied him on long country rambles and imparted to him all her own not inconsiderable knowledge of the area and its history. He was her special link with the future just as she was his with the past.

      Somehow, out of their family gene pool, the two of them shared a bond that made them close in ways she had not experienced with any other member of her family.

      Ben didn’t approve, of course, and she knew quite well that had Joss been an elder child, an elder son, there was no way he would have been allowed to follow his own inclinations