PENNY JORDAN - Scandals

‘If he accepts what Alessandro’s mother offers him,’ Emerald went on, ‘then he won’t be part of us any longer. I worry for him, Drogo. We’ve brought him up to be comfortable in the life he has here in England; Alessandro’s mother will want him to be Alessandro’s son, charming but weak, royal but malleable, a handsome puppet prince.’

‘You’re underestimating Robert,’ Drogo tried to comfort her. ‘He is his own man, Emerald.’

‘It would all have been so much better if he had been your son – not that I’d want James disinherited, of course – but, Drogo, how on earth am I going to face owning up to a son who is the Crown Prince of somewhere as ridiculous as Lauranto? Everyone who’s anyone knows that a European title is merely a joke compared with a British title.’ Emerald gave a small shudder, reassuming her normal mantle of assured superiority. ‘We can’t let him make even more of a Ruritanian comedy of himself by marrying some girl with the trumped-up title of “Princess” just because it suits Alessandro’s mother.’

‘No, better by far that he marries someone we have chosen for him,’ Drogo agreed straight-faced.

Emerald leaned back within the circle of his arms and looked up at him. It’s all very well you laughing, but these things are important, Drogo.’

‘I’m prepared to agree that if Robert does step into Alessandro’s shoes then it will be important that he marries someone he loves, someone who understands the demands of his role and her own, and who can deal with the problems those demands may cause them both, but as for us choosing that someone – just think how you would have felt if your mother had chosen your husband for you.’

Still looking up at him, Emerald told him derisively, ‘She did – she chose you, even if she has never said so.’

‘Mmm. Well, there are exceptions to every rule,’ Drogo allowed, with a grin, before bending his head to kiss her.

‘It’s definite then, Nick? This separation, I mean. There’s no chance of the two of you…?’ Rose Simons asked her stepson sadly.

‘No, none. Sarah has made that more than clear. She’s even had the locks changed. Her father’s idea, no doubt.’

Nick’s voice might be as crisp as the shirt he was wearing – laundered, no doubt, professionally rather than by his wife – Rose thought wryly, but she knew her stepson, and she knew the vulnerabilities and insecurities Nick was so adept at hiding. Too adept? Was that part of the reason why he and his wife had separated? Because the experiences of the first twelve years of Nick’s life had made him wary of trusting others?

To the outside world Nick might be an aggressive and very successful corporate raider, whose photograph appeared regularly in the financial press, accompanied by articles praising his economic acumen, but to her he was still, in part, the troubled orphaned child she had taken to her heart.

Nick pulled out one of the matt chrome bar stools from the kitchen island unit where his stepmother had been chopping vegetables for the curry she planned to make for supper. The kitchen of the Chelsea town house Josh and Rose had bought together after their marriage, with its streamlined and highly individual chrome and glass décor, might not look as cosy and domesticated as the hand-painted, extortionately expensive Smallbone kitchen Sarah had insisted on having fitted in the overpriced house in The Boltons she had fallen in love with, but Nick knew which kitchen he felt most at home in and where he felt most valued.

His stepmother had her own unique style, which owed much to the fact that she was a very successful designer of both commercial and private house interiors, working from the family-run Walton Street shop, first opened by her aunt Amber, and something to the oriental genes inherited from her Chinese mother. To those who didn’t know her, from the top of her polished still-black pixiecut hair, to the hem of her strikingly simple black dress, Rose Simons breathed a style that appeared intimidating, but Nick knew the loving heart Rose concealed beneath her couture clothes and her businesslike manner.

He couldn’t think of any other woman he knew and he knew plenty – who, on opening her front door to a scruffy, dirty, snotty-nosed unknown boy of twelve, who was announcing that her husband was his father, would have reached out, as Rose had done to him, to say calmly, ‘Well, I am pleased to hear that because if there’s one thing this house lacks, it’s a boy living here.’

‘Nick…’

‘It’s all right,’ he told her now. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid, like going round there and kicking up a fuss. I’ve already tried that, after all.’ He rubbed his hand against his jaw, the contact making a faint rasping sound. He was the image of his father, Rose thought, as she put the sliced vegetables into a bowl, and covered it, her movements practised, calm and minimal, in harmony with the pared-down elegance of the kitchen. Rose liked things to be easy to understand and assess instead of complicated; she liked things to be out in the open instead of hidden away, and all that was reflected in her designs. Just as a cluttered, overfilled mind could conceal forgotten secrets and thoughts that ultimately could grow and fester, so, she felt, could cluttered ‘space’ lead to the same potential hazards.

Nick wasn’t like that, though. Nick was a child damaged by the misery of the early years of his life, and Rose’s heart ached for him.

Although he was trying to conceal them, she could see his bitterness and his anger over the draining, long-drawn-out misery that had been the ending of his marriage, even if those emotions were now banked down under a thin seal of acceptance.

‘What…what’s going to happen about the children?’ Rose had dreaded asking. She and Josh adored their grandchildren, and Rose considered herself fortunate to see as much of them as she did, thanks to the fact that she and Josh lived virtually within walking distance of Nick and Sarah’s house.

‘Sarah’s agreed that I’ll be able to have reasonable access. Reasonable access. Hell, they are my kids, I made them, I—’ He broke off and pushed his hand into his hair. ‘Sorry…but when I think of what this is doing to them, and all because of Sarah’s ruddy father. The poor little sods were crying their eyes out when I left. Bloody Sarah – you think she’d have spared them that, at least until after Christmas.’

Christmas.

Rose bent her head over the bowl, not wanting Nick to guess what she was thinking. For her Christmas meant going ‘home’ to Denham Place, near Macclesfield, and to Amber, her aunt. It meant being part of the large gathering of siblings, cousins and parents that now spanned three generations. But Nick had never truly been comfortable within that group, always holding himself deliberately outside it, and since the boys had been born he had opted out of going altogether, ‘because Sarah wants to go up to Scotland to be with her parents.’

‘Will you be seeing the boys over Christmas?’ Rose asked.

‘Not a hope in hell. Sarah’s taking them to her parents. They’ve never liked me, especially her father. No doubt they’ll have some kilt-wearing chinless wonder waiting in the wings to offer her the comfort of a male shoulder and the right kind of background. Jesus,’ Nick exploded, ‘when I think of the way I’ve bloody half-killed myself to give her the kind of lifestyle she kept on whining that she wanted, only to have her turn round and say that she wants us to separate because I’m always working.’

Rose didn’t say anything. How could she? She knew as well as Nick did himself that there was some justification in Sarah’s accusation, and that the reality was that he loved his work. It enabled him to express the aggression within him that came from his struggle to withstand the cruelty of his childhood, living with a stepfather who had beaten both him and his mother, until the man had fallen into the road after a heavy bout of drinking and had been hit by a bus, dying of his injuries in hospital. Nick’s work gave him not just financial independence, but also something he needed very badly, and that was the triumph that came from out doing others who, for one reason or another, considered themselves to be his betters.