‘I’m not going back. I want to go and live with Mrs Richards,’ Robert was protesting, still clinging to her, adding piteously, ‘Don’t let him take me. I hate him.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Very well, then, you’d better come back with us. It’s this way.’
Some people had no sense of gratitude, Sarah reflected grimly as he turned on his heel, patently expecting her to follow, but to her surprise he stopped, lifting back the branches of the tree so that she could step through, and then picking up her rucksack before saying more quietly to Robert, ‘You’ve got two legs, Robert, and you’re far too heavy for…’
‘Sarah. Sarah Myers,’ Sarah supplied automatically for him.
‘…for Miss Myers to carry you all the way back to the house.’
‘Don’t want to walk,’ was Robert’s response, his bottom lip jutting out stubbornly as he turned his head and looked at his father. Sarah’s neck was wet from his tears and she felt a wave of tenderness and concern wash over her as she willed his acerbic parent to at least try to understand and to have some compassion for him.
‘Very well, then, if you won’t walk I’ll carry you.’
As she felt the way Robert shrank back from his father Sarah’s tender heart ached for the little boy.
‘Why don’t you show me the way, Robert?’ she suggested, gently putting him down but protectively keeping her own body between him and his father as she took hold of his hand.
As she turned her head she saw that her gesture had not been lost on Robert’s father. His mouth was curved into a line of bitter cynicism.
‘Quite the little mother, aren’t you?’ he goaded her grimly. ‘What is it about your sex that makes you so obsessively unable to behave with any kind of logic where children are concerned? Can’t you see that he’s—?’
‘That he’s what, Mr…?’ Sarah intervened furiously, challenging him.
He looked at her, frowning as though surprised by both her attack and her desire to know his name.
‘Gray. Gray Philips,’ he introduced himself flatly. ‘And you must be able to see that Robert is deliberately working himself up into a hysterical state.’
Quietly, so that Robert couldn’t overhear her, Sarah contradicted equally flatly, ‘No…what I see is a little boy who’s lost everyone who loves him…a little boy who has apparently been left in the charge of a woman who neither likes nor cares about him…a little boy who has no one he can turn to other than his dead mother’s housekeeper.’
Sarah knew that she was being deliberately emotive, but she couldn’t help it. There was something about this impatient, critical man that pushed her into needing to bring home to him his child’s emotional plight. ‘What I can also see is that you don’t appear to know very much about children, Mr Philips.’
Sarah drew in her breath at the way he looked deliberately at her own bare left hand before taunting softly, ‘And you do? Do you have children of your own, then?’
To her mortification, Sarah felt her skin flushing as she was forced to admit, ‘No…no, I don’t.’
‘Then I suggest you wait until you do before you start handing out the homespun advice,’ he told her grittily.
Thoroughly incensed by his attitude, Sarah corrected him impetuously, ‘I might not have any children, but professionally—’
‘Professionally?’ Gray Philips cut in sharply, frowning at her. ‘What exactly does that mean? What exactly is your profession?’
‘I’m a teacher,’ Sarah told him, wondering even as she said the words just how much longer they would be true, and then pushing her fears and doubts behind her as she felt Robert’s hand trembling in her own.
No matter how much she might dislike his father, she was not helping Robert by allowing her antagonism to take hold of her.
He ‘hated’ his father, Robert had said with childish intensity, and Sarah had not missed the brief look of pain that had touched Gray Philips’s mouth as he had listened to his son’s rejection of him. Despite her sympathy with Robert, she had to acknowledge that his father had every right to insist on taking the little boy back home.
She could not stop him from doing that, but what she could do was to go with him and to satisfy herself as much as she could that it was the confusion and grief of losing those people that he loved that was upsetting Robert so much and not any actual mistreatment by his father.
Oddly, despite his antagonism towards her, she could not quite convince herself that Gray Philips was mistreating his child. He had been too angry for that…his reaction to his son’s disappearance too free of guilt and deception to suggest that he knew exactly why Robert had been running away.
He was walking ahead of them now, pausing to hold aside the vicious brambles blocking the path, his frown deepening as he saw the way Robert clung to her side.
It was twenty minutes before they were in sight of the village, but Gray Philips didn’t walk towards it, instead branching off on to an even narrower and more overgrown path, which came to an abrupt end outside a solid wooden gate set into a high brick wall.
Gray Philips opened the gate for her, standing to one side so that she and Robert could precede him through it. Out of good manners, or as a means of ensuring that…that what? That she didn’t pick Robert up and run off with him…What chance would she have had of outpacing a tough adult male like him?
The garden inside the brick wall was overgrown, the brambles even thicker than those on the path outside. Beyond the wilderness of undergrowth a cordon of trees guarded a green lawn and formal flowerbeds, and beyond that lay the house, all mellow brick and unevenly leaded windows.
It was old, Sarah recognised, Elizabethan, and much, much larger than her cousin’s farmhouse.
Whatever Robert’s father might not be, he was quite obviously a very wealthy man. But wealth did not buy happiness, and, even while she was admiring the house, she was not envying him the money that had enabled him to buy it. What good was money when his son was so obviously afraid of him…when his wife had presumably left him? Had she been afraid of him as well? But she must have loved him once. She had married him, after all…they had had a child.
A tiny shudder went through her as she recognised the dangerous course of her thoughts. To question someone’s personal life so intimately and intensely, even within the privacy of her own thoughts, was so alien a response within her that she instinctively recoiled from acknowledging what she was doing.
Robert’s footsteps lagged as they crossed the lawn. He was holding back, dragging his feet. His father stopped, frowning down at both of them.
‘Is Mrs Jacobs still here?’
Sarah found she was holding her breath, praying that Gray Philips would deal sensitively with his son…would hear as she did the thread of fear that ran beneath the words.
If he did, he gave no sign of it.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he told Robert curtly, and then, as though unable to stop himself, he dropped down on one knee in front of the small boy and placed his hands on his shoulders, demanding gruffly, ‘Robert, why did you do it? Why did you run away? You must have known how worried Mrs Jacobs would be. You know you aren’t allowed to go outside the garden…you know.’
Robert was still clinging to Sarah’s hands. He had started to tremble violently, and tears poured down his face as he burst out passionately, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home…I want Nana…I want Mrs Richards. I don’t like it here.’
Immediately