‘Miss Caroline’s in the drawing room,’ she added.
No doubt Mrs March knew quite well why she was here, Jaime reflected, watching her daughter follow the housekeeper without a backward glance. The panelling had been removed from the drawing room by Caroline’s father, but the graceful stucco ceiling remained, and the Adam fireplace added by a Georgian owner. Caroline had completely refurnished the house when she inherited it. Personally, Jaime loathed the cold starkness of the modern Italian furniture she had chosen, but there was no doubt that it made a stunning setting for her startling beauty. Dark red hair framed her face in an aureole of curls, the leather trousers and silk blouse she was wearing being a soft khaki colour which emphasised her colouring. As always, she was immaculately made-up. She had played at modelling when she first left school and had picked up enough tips to achieve what always seemed to Jaime to be an effortlessly glamorous look. She reminded Jaime of the women who had pursued Blake, both before and after their marriage. Brittle, expensive, beautiful predators who lived by their own rules. Women she could never hope to compete with. ‘Why bother?’ her mother had once said lightly when she had tried to confide her fears to her. Blake had chosen to marry her, but she had never been able to rid herself of the conviction that, somehow, she had coerced him into marriage and that had been something she hadn’t been able to tell her mother. She had been too deeply ashamed to admit to her that she didn’t have the strength to be as independent as Sarah was. She had always felt that, secretly, she must have been a disappointment to her mother; that although she had never shown or expressed any impatience, there must have been some. ‘You underestimate yourself too much Jaime.’ That was what she had always said, and Jaime would have been surprised if she had known that, far from comparing her with Caroline to her own discredit, most people would have found far more appeal in her own natural beauty and quiet intelligence than in Caroline’s showy, pushy manners.
‘Well, well if it isn’t Miss Goody Two Shoes,’ Caroline mocked. The nickname was a throw-back to their schooldays, and Jaime managed to hold back the humiliating scald of colour she could feel rising up under her skin.
‘No need to ask what you’re doing here,’ Caroline continued tauntingly. ‘But what happened to the cavalry?’
‘If you mean Charles, he’s had to go to Dorchester to a meeting,’ Jaime responded evenly. ‘Caroline, surely it can’t be true that you intend to sell the Abbey to a developer?’
‘Why not?’ Caroline asked carelessly, ‘After all, it’s mine to do with as I choose.’ Without inviting Jaime to sit down, she drifted elegantly over to one of the uncomfortable-looking modern chairs, crossing her legs at the ankle, sure of herself as a woman in a way that Jaime felt she could never emulate.
‘But it is a listed building,’ Jaime reminded her quietly. Caroline shrugged. ‘So what.… If you feel so strongly about it, you can always put in a more attractive bid. The current one is £250,000.’ She laughed unpleasantly at Jaime’s expression.
The sound of Fern’s excited voice interrupted Jaime’s thought flow. She could see her daughter in the garden, walking towards the French windows, chattering animatedly to the man at her side.
Jaime’s heart seemed to do a somersault and then stop beating as she stared disbelievingly at the dark head bent towards her daughter’s. She started to shake, her sight blurring, the two heads of dark brown hair so similar that they merged into one. Caroline got up and opened the French doors.
‘Blake, darling, there you are. I thought you were writing.…’ There was malice in her eyes as she directed a contemptuous look at Jaime’s white face. ‘You seem to have given poor Jaime rather a shock, didn’t you let her know you were coming?’
As she watched the dark, hawklike profile of her husband turn in her direction, Jaime struggled to retain some composure.
‘Jaime and I aren’t exactly on intimate terms these days.’ The indifferent tone of his voice, the cool aloofness in his green eyes, both combined to increase Jaime’s feeling of nausea. She could scarcely believe that this handsome distant man had once possessed her body; had fathered her child.
‘I agree.’
‘Umm, it seems hard to believe that you were ever that,’ Caroline drawled, ‘but of course there is Fern.’
Fern! Trying to control the shudders of shocked reaction coursing through her, Jaime looked into her daughter’s shining eyes.
‘This is my Daddy,’ she told Jaime importantly, ‘I found him in the garden. He was looking at some flowers. I told him my name and he said that he was my Daddy.’
‘Fern, it’s time to go home.’ How weak and faint her voice sounded. ‘Go and say thank you to Mrs Marsh for your gingerbread and then we’ll go.’
‘I’m sorry about the interruption, Blake,’ she heard Caroline apologising as she hurried Fern away. ‘It’s Mrs Marsh’s fault, she should never have let the child loose in the garden.’
Blake’s response was an indistinct blur that Jaime didn’t stay to hear. Why should she? She already knew how Blake viewed his daughter; in much the same light as he did his wife; as an encumbrance he would prefer to do without.
‘YES, staying up at the Abbey he is… writing a book or supposed to be.…’ The voice faded away as Jaime entered the small post office and her face burned as she recognised who they were talking about. It was as impossible to ignore Blake’s presence in the vicinity as it was the sympathetic glances that seemed to follow her everywhere she went these days. Even at the studio she was aware of the faint air of sympathetic concern that surrounded her.
‘It’s horrible,’ she complained to her mother that night. ‘I feel as though I’m being treated as the victim of an incurable disease.’
‘It’s only because people don’t want to hurt you,’ Sarah sympathised. ‘If you talk to them openly about it, they’ll soon accept the situation.’
‘Why on earth did Blake have to come here?’
‘Presumably for the reason Caroline gave you. He needs somewhere to write.’
‘Or because he wants to flaunt his affair with Caroline in front of me.’
‘Why should he want to do that?’ Her mother’s glance was calmly shrewd. ‘You haven’t seen him for four years, and if he wanted to have an affair with Caroline, there’s nothing to stop him, although I doubt that she’s his type.’
‘But why should he need somewhere to write…?’ Frustration edged up under her voice, giving it a husky note of impatience.
‘Jaime, I know as little about his motives as you do yourself. If you really want answers to all these questions, you must ask him yourself.’
‘But to tell Fern that he’s her father!’ Why must her mother always be so reasonable and fair-minded? Why couldn’t she simply side with her without question? Her impartiality was frustrating and, in some strange sense, vaguely threatening.
‘He is her father,’ Sarah pointed out mildly. ‘One of your criticisms of him has always been his lack of interest in her. Try to be consistent, Jaime, my love. What do you want of the man? Or is he just to be a whipping post?’
‘I don’t believe for one moment that he’s come down here simply for Fern’s sake.’
‘Jaime, I really can’t see the point in discussing him with you while you stay in this frame of mind. I can understand why seeing him should shock and even upset you, but for Fern’s sake you must try to set aside your own dislike of him, and remember that he is her father. Must he be damned for ever, because you quarrelled with him?’ she asked quizzically. ‘Perhaps he’s changed, people do you know,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t rush to meet trouble head on, Jaime. I personally can’t believe for one moment that Blake is staying with Caroline