No one had been more surprised than Heather when Winter first started accepting Tom’s dates. She had been going out with him for several months now, almost a year, in fact.
At first when Tom had bought the dilapidated Georgian house on the outskirts of town and announced that he intended turning it into a first-class small country hotel, complete with leisure club facilities, everyone had laughed at him, claiming that there was simply not the call locally for that sort of thing.
But they had reckoned without Tom’s determination, and without the new spur of the motorway which brought so much traffic and so many potential and discerning clients within easy reach of the hotel, and now Tom was talking about expanding, adding on extra bedrooms and buying up land for the creation of a championship golf course.
Winter rarely discussed Tom’s plans, even with her, her closest friend, but Heather knew that she must be aware of them. Would she marry Tom? They made a good couple, and Tom, although inclined to be slightly aggressive and perhaps a little more volatile and enthusiastic and perhaps even a little thoughtlessly arrogant in the way he compared himself and his achievements with those who were less successful, did genuinely care about Winter.
But not Charlie?
Heather often wondered if Winter was aware of the resentment and dislike that existed between her son and her employer-cum-boyfriend. If she was, she never mentioned it, and Heather had hardly liked to raise the subject with her. At first when she had seen the worried, drawn look on her friend’s face and had realised that she wasn’t really concentrating on what she was saying, she had been afraid that some problem had developed between Tom and Charlie.
Sometimes Heather had wondered if any man could ever be as important to Winter as her son. Perhaps because she had only the one child as opposed to Heather’s three, or perhaps because Charlie had been so frail as a baby and then so dependent on her once James had gone, Win had always seemed to be much more emotionally close to Charlie than Heather had been able to be to her own three.
She had sometimes envied her that, but, as Win had once ruefully confessed to her, she worried that she might be smothering Charlie with too much love; that she might as a single parent become guilty of over-protecting him, or not allowing him the freedom he needed to develop properly as an individual, and it was for that reason that she had tried to step back a little once Charlie was properly at school and to allow him the space to form other relationships.
In Heather’s eyes, Win was a wonderful mother, but she knew Win had always felt guilty about the resentment she had felt when, totally out of the blue when Charlie was six years old, his father had got in touch with her and asked her permission to make contact with his son.
‘For Charlie’s sake, I suppose I shall have to agree,’ she had told Heather bitterly at the time.
‘At least, with James living in Australia, he’s hardly likely to have the opportunity to disrupt your and Charlie’s lives too much,’ Heather had consoled.
‘I suppose Charlie’s quite excited,’ Heather ventured sympathetically now.
Win flashed her a bitter look. She was smaller than Heather, barely five feet two and enviably slender, but because she carried herself so well she always looked taller. Her hair was a thick mane of tawny brown which she normally wore severely controlled, sleeked back and tied in her nape with a soft bow. Her eyes always reminded Heather of rich warm sherry, and very occasionally when she dropped her guard and allowed her real feelings to show, as she was doing now, they could burn with an intensity disconcertingly at odds with her outwardly calm demeanour.
‘Quite excited? He’s practically delirious,’ Win told her grimly.
‘I take it, then, that his father’s return is an event even more exciting than the home team winning the boys’ league,’ Heather joked.
It was a joke that fell flat. Win looked at her, her delicately shaped face fiercely set.
‘If James thinks he’s going to take Charlie away from me…dazzling him, bribing him…’
‘Take him away from you? But he can’t do that. You were given custody, surely?’
‘Legally, yes,’ Win agreed, her eyes suddenly dark and sad as she confided unsteadily. ‘Heather, Charlie worships James. Since he had that holiday in Sydney with him, I don’t think a single day’s gone past without him mentioning his father. If James settles here in this town, as it seems he intends to do…Well, I don’t suppose it’s any secret to you that Charlie and I are going through a bad patch at the moment. He doesn’t get on with Tom. That’s my fault, I suspect. After all, he’s used to being the only male in my life.’ Win smiled sadly and wryly. ‘And let’s face it, Tom isn’t exactly the conciliatory type. It’s a bit like watching two bulls lowering their heads and pawing the ground at one another.’
Heather couldn’t help laughing a little, even though she sympathised with and understood her friend’s very real distress.
‘You’re afraid that having James back in the area is going to make things even more difficult between Tom and Charlie, is that it?’ she asked softly.
‘That’s part of it. But what I’m really dreading is James asking Charlie if he wants to go and live with him.’ Win saw her friend’s face and grimaced. ‘Oh, don’t think it isn’t possible. I know that legally I have custody of Charlie, but if James did make such an offer and Charlie wanted to go…Right now he’s in the middle of a love-affair with his father, or with the man he believes his father to be,’ Win added bitterly. ‘He’s too young to remember how it was when he was born, how angry James was with me for getting pregnant in the first place. Charlie wasn’t planned—in fact he was the classic accident. I’d had flu, and was too naïve to realise that the tummy problems I’d had made my pill totally ineffective. We’d only been married four months, and, as you know, neither my parents nor James’s wanted us to marry.
‘James was twenty-six, barely out of university and qualified. I was only nineteen. With hindsight I can see why they wanted us to wait, but we were in love—or at least I was in love. I suppose with James it was just sex. I was the classic example of an only girl in a family of boys—the only experimenting with sex I ever got to try, with my four big brothers always standing guard, was a furtive kiss or two at the odd party I managed to get to unchaperoned.
‘I was so sexually naïve, and I’d had it dinned into me so much by the boys just what their peers thought of girls who were sexually promiscuous, that I honestly believed that the boys—men—really did only respect a girl who said “no”.
‘And that was despite the fact that, had I had the wit to do so, I could have seen for myself that none of my brothers exactly practised what he preached, but of course I’d grown up so much in their shadow, and so over-protected. The male of the species most definitely does have one rule for himself and another for those females he considers to be his responsibility.’
A fact which Charlie was now endorsing by his antagonism towards Tom Longton, Heather reflected as she laughed at Win’s rueful words.
‘But surely, once Charlie was born, James changed—?’
Win shook her head, cutting her off.
‘He was away when Charlie arrived. After we discovered I was pregnant, he got another job, one where he earned more money, but it meant him travelling into the city every day, setting off at seven in the morning and not getting back most evenings until gone eight or nine. He was at a conference when I was in labour.’ Win’s mouth twisted a little. ‘I tried to ring him, but she told me he was unobtainable.’
Heather had no need to ask who ‘she’ was. She knew the story of how Win had discovered that her husband was involved in an affair with his personal