PENNY JORDAN - A Perfect Family

‘It’s only for a couple of days,’ Caspar reminded her, adding teasingly, ‘and I don’t mind. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to the rest. Have you any idea how much you move around in your sleep?’ he asked her mock-aggrievedly. ‘It’s been months since I got a decent night’s sleep.’

‘Two months six days and … eight hours,’ Olivia told him lovingly, counting the actual hours on her fingers whilst Caspar grinned at her. ‘It’s ridiculous of Mum and Dad to expect us to sleep in separate rooms,’ she continued, perching on the end of his small single bed.

After studying it, Caspar had already decided ruefully that there was no way it was going to be long enough for him, and despite what he had said to her, he knew already that he was going to miss having Olivia next to him, and not simply because of the sex, in fact, not really at all because of the sex.

He was thirty-two years old and had had good sex before, and if he was honest, great sex before, but the difference now was that he had never been in love before, never loved before, never really believed that love, the kind of love he felt for Olivia, could actually exist. He had watched his parents go through various sets of mix-and-match relationships, taking on partners, then abandoning them to take on new ones. He had managed to avoid the trap of an early marriage fatally programmed for failure, had realistically accepted that he would marry perhaps some time in his thirties and that maybe it would last long enough for him and his partner to see their children through their teens or maybe it wouldn’t and that was all any sensible, mature right-thinking adult could expect.

‘It’s the fact that it’s all so damned hypocritical that really infuriates me,’ Olivia complained, nibbling at her lower lip in the same way that she worried over the issue of their not being able to sleep together. ‘It’s always the same. We’ve always got to fall in line behind what Gramps decides we should do.’

‘Morally speaking …’ Caspar started to say, but Olivia shook her head, refusing to let him continue.

‘Morally speaking nothing. Gramps just likes controlling other people. He isn’t in the least bit concerned about my moral welfare or about any aspect of my welfare,’ she declared fiercely. ‘He never has been. Now if I’d been a boy … a grandson …’ She broke off and shook her head a second time, a rueful smile curling her mouth. ‘Look at me. I haven’t been back for twenty-four hours and already it’s starting. I promised myself when I left home that I’d leave my chip behind me.’

‘You’ve said yourself that you wouldn’t really have wanted to go into the family practice,’ he reminded her.

‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed, ‘but I should have had the opportunity to choose. Gramps and Dad did everything they could to dissuade me from studying law. Only Aunt Jen supported me and encouraged me. Oh, and Aunt Ruth, as well. You’ll like them and Uncle Jon.’

‘Your father’s twin?’

‘Mmm … although they aren’t at all alike, well, physically they are, of course, because they’re identical, but Uncle Jon …’ She stopped in mid-sentence.

‘Uncle Jon …?’ Caspar pressed but Olivia shook her head.

‘I can’t really explain. You’ll see for yourself when you meet him. It’s as though somehow he’s always standing in the shadows—in Dad’s shadow—and yet …’

She stopped, her brow furrowed in thought. ‘It’s as though he deliberately makes less of himself and more of Dad. Everyone, but most especially Gramps, focuses on Dad and on Tiggy because she’s his wife, and yet to me it sometimes seems as though both of them are somehow unreal, that they’re just cut-out card-board figures with no substance to them….’ She gave a small shiver.

‘It used to frighten me a bit when I was younger, seeing them like that and wondering why no one else seemed to see them in the same way.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Sort of like the old fairy story about the emperor’s new clothes in a way, I suppose. You heard Tiggy going on earlier about the flowers, about them making a house a home. Everyone always says what a marvellous flair for décor my mother has, and granted, the house is always perfect but it’s not a home. Aunt Jen’s house is a home. This place is just like … like a set out of a film or a play … the right furniture, the right colours, the right flowers.’ She grimaced again.

‘Dad was originally supposed to qualify as a barrister, you know, but something went wrong. I’m not sure what exactly. Oh, Tiggy makes references to how they met, the fact that my father was playing in a pop group, the fact that she was modelling and he fell in love with her on sight. They were married at Caxton Hall—it was the fashion then. Tiggy was already pregnant with me and that was why they decided to move back to Haslewich. Dad wanted his children to be brought up here, so he abandoned his plans to work as a barrister for our sake … at least that’s what I’ve always been told and, of course, Gramps has never really forgiven me for it. He so desperately wants to have a QC in the family.’

‘But I thought there already was, your great-uncle Hugh.’

‘Hugh was a QC, yes,’ Olivia agreed. ‘He was actually appointed a judge last year, but Hugh isn’t true family, at least not as Gramps defines it. Hugh is merely Gramps’s half-brother. Gramps’s father, Josiah, remarried after Gramps’s mother died and Hugh is his second wife, Ellen’s, son.

‘Although Gramps would never admit it, secretly I think he’s always been a little bit jealous of Hugh. Ellen’s family had money and Gramps’s father was, according to Aunt Ruth at least, always that little bit more indulgent towards Hugh than he was towards them.

‘It was Ellen’s family’s money that paid for Hugh to train as a barrister. Gramps, of course, had to go into the family business—there wasn’t anyone else who could. I suspect that really he’s still disappointed that Dad wasn’t called to the Bar, which is why he’s so determined that Max will be.’

‘Ah, Max.’

‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Olivia questioned.

‘Do you?’ Caspar returned dryly.

‘We’ve never really got on, even when we were younger. Oh, I know everyone thinks I’m jealous because Max is Dad’s favourite, but it isn’t that. I just don’t think Max is a very likeable person. No one else agrees with me, of course. Tiggy thinks he’s wonderful. He flirts outrageously with her and she can’t see that underneath it all he’s really laughing at her. She’ll probably try to flirt with you as she would him. She doesn’t mean anything by it … it’s just her way … she can’t help it, she needs …’

Olivia paused, groping for the right words to explain her mother’s vulnerability and then abandoned the attempt, saying quietly instead, ‘Sometimes when I see Aunt Jenny watching Max I sort of get the impression that she doesn’t like him much herself but, of course, that can’t be true. She’s his mother after all and mothers always love their children.’

‘Do they?’ Caspar asked her wryly. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. What certainly isn’t true is that children always love their parents. There’s virtually a whole industry growing up now around analysing why so many adult and sometimes not-yet-adult children murder their parents.’

‘Mmm … I was reading about that case involving …’

They were off, both of them quickly becoming engrossed in the intricacies of the legal case Olivia had referred to.

She was more beautiful than ever when she was animated like this, Caspar acknowledged, watching her, but never, nowhere ever near so beautiful as she was when she lay in his arms and opened her eyes, her body, her soul to him.