Penny Jordan - Cruel Legacy

When she had protested bewilderedly at his attitude, he had told her harshly that it was important to keep up appearances.

Appearances … Appearances were all-important to Andrew. She might not have much intelligence but at least she was pretty, her father had once said disparagingly.

Pretty …

‘Why do I want to marry you? Because I love you, pretty little thing,’ Andrew had told her when he proposed, then, ‘I can’t wait to show you off to everyone,’ he had told her when they got engaged, and, looking back, it seemed to her now that he had enjoyed her company in public far more than he had ever done in private.

Pretty … How she had grown to dislike that word.

She could hear a car coming up the drive. She got up, sliding out of bed and pulling on her housecoat. It was silk … a Christmas present from Andrew, ‘To wear when we stay with the Ronaldsons,’ he had told her with a smile.

‘I feel so sorry for him. That wife of his isn’t just plain, she’s downright ugly.’

‘He loves her,’ she had told him quietly.

‘Don’t be a fool. No man would love a woman who looks like that. He married her for her money; everyone knows that.’

The car had stopped. She frowned as she opened the bedroom door. The engine had sounded different from Andrew’s new Jaguar.

At first when he had started coming home later and later, she had assumed he was having an affair, and she had been surprised at how little she had minded, but then she had discovered that what he had actually been doing was working.

She had begun to worry then, but when she had tried to talk to him he had told her not to pester him.

‘For God’s sake, I’ve got enough on my mind without you nagging me,’ he had told her. ‘Just leave me alone, will you? This damned recession …’

‘If things are that bad, perhaps we should sell the house,’ she had suggested, ‘take the boys out of private school.’

‘Do what … ? You stupid fool, we might as well take out an advertisement in The Times to announce that we’re going bust as do that … have you no sense? The last thing I need right now is to have people losing confidence in us, and that’s exactly what will happen if we sell this place.’

Last weekend they had gone to see her brother and Robert and Andrew had played golf, leaving Philippa and Lydia to a rather disjointed afternoon of talk. When the men had got back there was a strained atmosphere between them and Andrew had announced that they had to leave.

Philippa hadn’t been sorry to go. She and Robert had never been close. She had always been much closer to her other brother, Michael, and Lydia she had never liked at all. Andrew still hadn’t come in. She went downstairs, thinking he must have forgotten his keys. When she opened the door and saw the police car outside, she tensed.

‘Mrs Ryecart?’

The policeman came towards her. There was a policewoman with him. Both of them had grave faces.

‘If we might just come in …’

She knew, of course … had known straight away that Andrew was dead, but she had thought it must be an accident … not this … not a deliberate taking of his own life. They had tried to break it to her gently. Found in his car … the engine running … unfortunately reached the hospital too late.

Suicide.

WPC Lewis would stay with her, the policeman was saying quietly. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like us to inform … your husband’s parents … ?’

Philippa shook her head.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ the WPC was saying. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

Suicide …

She started to tremble violently.

‘MUM, Paul’s still in the bathroom and he won’t let me in.’

Sally paused on the landing, grimacing as she stooped down to pick up the sock she had dropped on her last trip downstairs with the dirty washing. Her back still ached from working yesterday.

‘Paul, hurry up,’ she commanded as she rapped on the bathroom door.

‘He knows I’m going to Jane’s and I’m going to be late now,’ Cathy wailed.

‘No, you won’t,’ Sally soothed her daughter. ‘He’ll be out in a minute.’

‘He’s doing it deliberately. I hate him,’ Cathy announced passionately.

Sally had just finished loading the washing machine when Paul came into the kitchen. Was he never going to stop growing? she wondered. Those new jeans she had bought for him last month were already too short.

‘Where’s Dad?’ he demanded.

‘He’s not back yet,’ she told him.

Joel had been irritable and difficult to live with ever since they had heard the news that Andrew Ryecart had committed suicide. Sally knew that he was worried about his job, but there was no need to take it out on them—it wasn’t their fault!

‘He said he was going to come home early,’ Paul grumbled. ‘He was going to take me fishing.’

Sally’s face tightened. This wouldn’t be the first time recently that Joel had done something like this. Only last week they’d had a row about the fact that he’d forgotten that she’d arranged for them to go round to her sister’s and had arranged to play snooker instead.

‘You were the one who arranged to see them,’ he had countered when she had complained.

‘Well, someone had to,’ she had told him. ‘If it was left to you we’d never see anyone from one blue moon to another.’

‘I forgot,’ he’d told her, shrugging the matter aside as though it weren’t important. Unwilling to continue arguing with him in front of the children, Sally had gritted her teeth and said nothing, but inwardly she had been seething.

She had still been angry with him about it later that night when he had come in from his snooker match, walking away from him when he started telling her about it and later turning her back on him in bed, freezing her body into rejecting immobility when he had reached out and touched her breast.

They had argued about that as well. In hushed, angry whispers so as not to wake the children. They were getting older now and Cathy in particular was becoming sharply aware. Only a couple of months ago she had come home from school asking if Sally and Joel still had sex.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have had much problem answering that one,’ Joel had grunted when she’d told him.

She frowned again, remembering the conversation which had followed.

‘I suppose that’s going to be another excuse, is it?’ Joel had demanded aggressively. ‘You don’t want the kids overhearing us. Not that there is very much to overhear these days.’

‘Sex—you’re obsessed with it,’ she had countered. ‘We can’t discuss anything these days without your turning it into an argument about sex.’

‘Perhaps that’s because arguing about it is just about all we do,’ he had told her angrily.

It hadn’t always been like this between them—far from it. When they had first married … when they had first met …

She had been a shy, awkward girl of fourteen, her shyness made worse by the fact that she and her parents had only recently moved into the area. At school she had felt isolated and friendless. Her sister, seven years her senior, was already adult, and it was probably inevitable that the others should have picked up on her loneliness and started bullying her.

It had been Joel who had come to her rescue; two years older than her, a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered boy with an air of solid self-confidence about him on which she had instinctively and gratefully leaned.

He was the middle child in a family of five, with two older sisters and a pair of younger, twin brothers. The chaotic and unruly household absent-mindedly presided over by his mother had been in such direct contrast to her own orderly home lifestyle that it had fascinated her. Joel’s father was a loud, boisterous bear of a man who made his living in a variety of different ways, from running a market stall to working in a friend’s pub.