‘Tiggy.’
Olivia paused hesitantly on the threshold of the small sunny sitting room. Her mother was seated at the pretty antique desk Olivia could remember her father buying her one Christmas. As she turned round to smile at her daughter there was no hint of the morning’s anxiety and trauma in her expression. In fact, she looked almost serene, Olivia recognised as she watched her tuck the cheque she had been writing into an envelope and seal it.
‘I’m just paying a few bills,’ she informed Olivia. ‘Your father isn’t back yet. I thought we’d have dinner in Knutsford at Est Est Est tonight. It’s always been one of your favourite places and … Where’s Caspar, by the—’
‘I’m here,’ Caspar responded, following Olivia into the sitting room.
‘He really is the most deliciously gorgeous-looking man,’ Tiggy told Olivia, dimpling Caspar a teasing, flirtatious smile.
This was her mother at her best, at her most irresistible, Olivia acknowledged as she watched her. It was impossible to feel irritable or envious of her ability to charm or even to question her need to have to do so.
‘And so tall,’ Tiggy was trilling as she stood provocatively close to Caspar, looking doe-eyed up at him as she asked him, ‘Just how tall exactly are you?’
‘Six-two or thereabouts,’ Caspar obliged her good-humouredly.
‘And you’ve got the muscles to match,’ Tiggy breathed poutingly as she ran one polished fingertip down Caspar’s bare forearm. ‘Oh my …’
Over her mother’s averted head, Olivia sent Caspar a pleading look as she witnessed his withdrawal from her mother’s touch. She knew how volatile her mother’s mood swings were, how quickly she reacted to other people’s opinion of her, how vitally important it was to her that others liked and approved of her.
As a child Olivia had simply accepted her mother’s needs as an intrinsic part of her character, but now that she was an adult … Her forehead started to pleat in an anxious frown of concern.
‘I’d better set my alarm when I go to bed tonight,’ Olivia told her mother. ‘I promised I’d be at Queensmead early tomorrow morning to help Aunt Ruth with the flowers. Oh, and Aunt Jenny said to remind you that the Chester crowd would be arriving about lunch-time. She said to let her know if you needed any extra bedding or anything. Apparently she’s been through the old linen cupboard at Queensmead making sure that Gramps would have enough of everything to cope with Hugh’s family. Nicholas, Saul and Hillary and the children are staying there and she says she found enough bedding to equip a small hotel.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked uncertainly as she saw the way her mother’s expression had changed, her fingers plucking tensely at the cuff of her silk shirt.
‘I don’t know why we have to have Laurence and Henry and their families staying here,’ she fretted. ‘After all, it isn’t as if … That’s far more than anyone else is having to put up and Mrs Phillips can’t give me any extra time because Jenny has already booked all her spare hours.’
Laurence and Henry were brothers and her father’s second or third cousins. Olivia was never quite sure which. They were a little older than her father. Laurence had three grown children and Henry four plus three grandchildren; they belonged to the original Chester family from which her own family had sprung.
‘Is the competitiveness with the Chester side of the family shared by you?’ Caspar had asked her curiously.
Olivia had shaken her head. ‘No, it’s all past history so far as I’m concerned and although technically they are family, we’ve never been that close—weddings, christenings and funerals are about the only times we get to meet these days.’
‘Why on earth couldn’t they have stayed with Jenny and Jon?’ her mother was still protesting.
‘Probably because they don’t have enough room,’ Olivia pointed out gently.
‘There’s plenty of room at Queensmead,’ her mother retorted.
‘Yes,’ Olivia agreed, ‘but Uncle Hugh and his family are staying there.’
Although she didn’t say so, she suspected that Jenny would have been reluctant to place so much of a burden on Ben’s shoulders by filling the house.
‘Come on, Tiggy,’ Olivia coaxed her. ‘You know you’ve always enjoyed entertaining.’
‘Yes, but that was before … You know I like to do things properly but your father keeps complaining that we can’t afford …’ She stopped, chewing on her cheek, her eyes suddenly filling with tears whilst Olivia felt a small, cold finger of unease run warningly down her spine. So far as Olivia knew, her parents were reasonably well off.
Certainly as a child she had never been aware of any lack of money or any necessity to economise. She had always assumed that the practice, although only small, brought in a comfortable and secure income for her father and his brother, given that it was the only firm of solicitors serving the town and its outlying rural district.
Her mother, she realised, was given to exaggeration and Olivia reassured herself that her petulant outburst was probably caused by her father’s complaining about her mother’s well-known propensity to indulge in designer clothes and expensive make-up.
Olivia was aware that her mother had very little idea of what it meant to watch her spending or live within a given budget. It was not unknown for her to send all the way into Chester for a specific item she required for one of her dinner parties, or to order her current favourite fresh flowers from some expensive Knightsbridge flower shop in London because they were unavailable closer to home.
‘I expect Gramps wanted to have the Chester contingent staying with you because he wanted them to be impressed.’ Olivia did her best to soothe her mother, biting betrayingly on her bottom lip when she saw the sardonic look Caspar was giving her as he witnessed her overt attempt at flattery. He would, no doubt, take her to task for it later. If Caspar had a fault it was that he did not believe in any gilding of lilies or any sugar-coating of pills.
‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re right,’ her mother conceded, brightening a little. ‘Jenny is a dear, of course, and a wonderful cook but … well … she doesn’t have much idea of interior design, does she, and the house always seems to be full of children and animals.’
Olivia privately thought her aunt and uncle’s home with its lovingly polished antiques, its bowls of home-made pot-pourri and freshly cut garden flowers came as near to her ideal of what a home should be as anything possibly could. She much preferred her aunt’s use of the wonderful old fabrics she found on her buying trips—rich brocades, velvets as soft and supple as silk and finely woven cottons and linens—to the modern, and to Jenny’s eye, often too pretty, flounced and frilly fabrics that her mother chose to decorate her own home with. But she said nothing.
She knew that her mother took pride in keeping her home as up to the minute and fashionable as she did her wardrobe. Growing up she had become used to the mood of dissatisfaction that would descend on her mother every year when the glossy style bibles she liked to buy pronounced their views on what was currently either in or out of fashion. And whole rooms were refurbished to fit in with their dictates, her mother worrying almost obsessively over every tiny detail, not satisfied until she had found just the right lampshade or the favoured objet d’art.
‘Has she always been so dependent on other people’s good opinion?’ Caspar asked her later on that night when they were in bed. Olivia had sneaked upstairs to his attic room, feeling very much like a naughty schoolgirl—it was ridiculous that her mother should feel she had to comply with Gramps’s outdated and old-fashioned ideas when he wasn’t even there to see them.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed,