Upper Charfont was the kind of vintage small English town where up until very recently back doors were frequently left unlocked and neighbours knew all of one another’s business. Claudia had been a little wary at first about moving into that kind of environment, but Garth had gently reassured her, pointing out the advantages of a semi-rural upbringing for Tara and the fact that the town was less than an hour’s drive away from the small Cotswold village to which her parents had recently retired.
Her father was an army man, Brigadier Peter Fulshaw, and it had been through him that she had originally met Garth, who had been one of his young officers. The peripatetic nature of her childhood, moving from one army base to another, had meant that Claudia had a very strong yearning to give her own child the kind of settled existence she herself had never experienced, the chance to develop friendships that would be with her all her life, and Garth had agreed with her. On that, as well as on so many other subjects, they had thought exactly alike, but even then he …
Claudia tried to shake aside her memories as she let herself into the house and locked the door behind her. But tonight for some reason, success in burying thoughts of the past eluded her. Everywhere she looked there were reminders of Garth and the life they had shared. The wall lights in the hallway, which she had just switched on, had been a find they had made in an antique shop in Brighton, pounced on with great glee and borne triumphantly home where Garth had carried them off to his workroom above the garage to clean and polish them.
He had left the army by then, working initially for the PR firm run by an old school friend of his father’s and then later setting up his own rival business.
Like her own, Garth’s parents were still alive, living just outside York in the constituency that Garth’s father had represented as a Member of Parliament before his retirement.
Claudia still saw them regularly and loved them dearly. Just like her own parents, they adored Tara and spoiled her dreadfully. She was, after all, for both of them, their only grandchild since she and Garth were themselves only children.
‘I’m so sorry that there can’t be any more little ones, darling,’ her mother had tried to comfort her after she had broken the news to her that Tara would be her only child. ‘But sometimes … Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure, Mummy,’ Claudia had told her, her voice raw with pain.
‘But at least you have Tara, and she’s such a beautiful, healthy baby. You’d never know that she’d been born prematurely. You can’t imagine how your father and I felt when we got Garth’s telephone call. I wanted to come home straight away, but of course we couldn’t get flights, and with Garth’s parents being away at the same time … I must say I was surprised that the hospital allowed you home with her so soon.’
‘They knew we were planning to move,’ Claudia had reminded her mother quickly before adding, ‘Anyway, that’s all behind us now. I do wish you wouldn’t keep harping on about it. I’m sorry, Mummy,’ she had apologised when she saw her mother’s expression. ‘It’s just that I don’t like being reminded …’ She bit her lip.
‘It’s all right, darling, I do understand,’ her mother had assured her, patting her hand. ‘I know how dreadful it must have been for you, especially when … Well, after losing your first baby and then to nearly lose our darling, precious Tara, as well …’
‘Yes,’ Claudia had agreed. Even nearly eighteen months after the event, she had still hated being reminded of the early miscarriage she had suffered with the baby she had been carrying before Tara’s arrival. Friends had told her then that it was a relatively common occurrence and that the best thing she could do was to get pregnant again just as quickly as she could.
She had still been working at that time, of course, with Garth still in the army, and it had seemed to make sense for her to continue with her probationary work, a very newly qualified and raw probation officer, she reminded herself bleakly now, remembering the interview she had had with her supervisor at the end of her initial training period.
‘Idealism and concern for others are all very praiseworthy, my dear,’ the older woman had told her, ‘but in this job you have to learn to achieve a certain amount of detachment. It’s essential if one is to do one’s job properly.’
In those days, twenty-odd years ago, the problems and pitfalls in the field of social work she had chosen weren’t as widely recognised as they were now, Claudia acknowledged as she opened the door into the drawing room and walked in. The traumas and trials, accusations of negligence and lack of expertise, of pointless meddling in other people’s lives had still lain ahead, but she had known that the older woman was right and that she was too sensitive, too much in danger of becoming overinvolved with the problems of her clients to be truly effective on their behalf.
She had been sensitive, too, to the unspoken criticism of her colleagues, suspicious of her prosperous and, to them, protected upper-middle-class background and upbringing. What could she possibly know of the difficulties and dangers that beset the people they were dealing with and their poverty-trapped, inner-city lives? In the end, her conscience had coerced her into accepting that no matter how much she cared, no matter how passionately she wanted to help, no matter how praiseworthy her commitment to the job and excellent her qualifications for it, she was simply not the best person, the right person, to help those she was supposed to be helping.
The drawing room was Claudia’s second favourite room in the house. Elegantly proportioned, it faced south and always seemed to be flooded with light. It still had the same soft yellow colour scheme Claudia had chosen for it when she and Garth had first moved in. The Knoll sofas that faced one another across the fireplace had been a gift from her and Garth’s parents and, if anything, Claudia loved them even more now over twenty years later than she had done then, their heavy damask dull gold covers softened and gentled with age. Mellow and lived-in, the whole room had the kind of ambience about it, the kind of feel, that made newcomers comment on how welcoming it was.
Above the fireplace was a portrait of her father in his full regimentals. It had been presented to him on his retirement and her mother had insisted that she had spent enough of her life looking at him in his uniform and that Claudia and Garth should have it.
On the stairs, Claudia had a further collection of family portraits, some simple pencil sketches, others more detailed, along with the totally un-recognisable ‘picture’ that Tara had drawn of her parents in her first term at school.
On the opposite wall from the fireplace above the pretty antique side table that Garth’s mother had inherited from her own family and passed on to Claudia hung a portrait of another man in regimentals.
Instinctively, she walked over to it, switched on the picture light above it and studied it sombrely.
Garth had been twenty-seven when it had been painted and it had been a wedding gift from the regiment to them—a surprise wedding gift as the artist had painted the portrait from photographs. It was still a good likeness, though, with Garth’s face turned slightly to the left so that the clear thrust of his jaw could be seen along with the aquiline profile of his nose.
Put Garth in a Roman centurion’s outfit and he would immediately fulfil every Hollywood mogul’s ideal of what a sexy man in uniform should look like, a friend had once commented to Claudia, and it was true. Garth’s predecessors had originally come from Pembrokeshire in Wales and there was a joke in the family that it wasn’t merely driftwood washed up from the shipwrecks of the fleeing remnants of the Spanish Armada that his ancestors had salvaged from the Pembroke beaches.
Clearly, Garth’s skin tone and thick dark hair suggested that he could have Latin blood somewhere in his veins, and those who knew the family history had been very quick to point out that Tara’s lustrous dark curls could also be a part of that inheritance.
Fact or fiction, what was true was that Garth was a stunningly