Seeing her in the flesh, gorgeous, sexy, self-possessed, awoke something raw and savage inside himself. He wanted to lash out at her for being so damned fanciable, at himself for finding her so, at fate for pushing them together again.
He said a brusque goodnight and walked out of the room. He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. Looking at her created a pain it was impossible to describe.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE dream had been haunting her far less regularly. But that night she dreamed of the baby. The baby that was dead.
She woke and felt the weight of guilt, and wept, and couldn’t stop. The dream had been more heart-wrenching because of its long absence.
At the funeral, at the gathering of the handful of mourners back at the house, she kept the tears inside her, silent, smothered, but no less real. She couldn’t weep for Harold, with whom she had made her peace; the silent tears were for her baby, with whom she had not, and never would while the guilt stayed with her. If only she hadn’t allowed herself to get so distraught over what had happened, over Harold’s lies and Jason’s contempt, she might not have miscarried, she might have kept her baby!
She’d done her best to hide the ravages of her restless, grieving night, used far more make-up than usual, worn a slate-grey business suit with a white silk scarf tucked into the neckline. But her face felt unnaturally stiff, like stone, and she caught the penetrating appraisal of Jason’s grey and narrowed eyes and wondered if he knew the reason for her grief.
But of course he didn’t. He’d
turned that strong, broad back on her and their baby, shut them out of his mind. He didn’t know what had happened to the child he had fathered—apart from Sue, and her loving, supportive family, no one did.
And he hadn’t even asked, didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know if he’d fathered a boy or a girl, if the child was doing well at school, happy and strong. If the child was alive.
The pain of it nagged her like an aching tooth, an abscess eating away at an exposed nerve. The pain wouldn’t go away and so she knew she must, and as quickly as possible.
She saw Jason escort the last of the mourners out through the hall and began to stack plates and glasses on to a tray. She carried it through to the kitchen.
Mrs Moody, her small eyes red-rimmed, folded her hands across her stomach and said, ‘You don’t need to do that; it’s my job—while I still have a job.’
‘That’s what I’d like to talk about.’
Georgia put the heavy tray down on one of the gleaming work surfaces. She was doing her best to put aside the intensity of the pain that was growing inside her. She would be leaving soon, just as soon as she could throw her things together and get out of this house, and this was probably the last opportunity she would get to talk to the housekeeper face to face. She didn’t want to set foot inside Lytham again, and meet the taunting, haunting ghosts of the past.
‘If you’ve no immediate plans I’d like you to stay on and look after the house until everything’s settled. I’ll be leaving shortly to meet with my stepfather’s solicitor.’ She had phoned him first thing, at his rooms in Gloucester, and he’d said he could see her any time after four. ‘I’d like to be able to tell him you’re staying on, and then he’ll make arrangements for your wages and the usual bills to be paid out of the estate.’
Mrs Moody, staring at her, wasn’t making this easy. Her face had always reminded Georgia of a rat trap. She picked up her faltering voice and stated, ‘I won’t have any use for Lytham, and eventually it will be sold.’
‘I imagined that would be the case.’
Georgia met the unwavering, pebble-like eyes with respect. This elderly woman—had she ever been married, or was ‘Mrs’ a courtesy title?—was facing redundancy, the loss of her home and very little likelihood of re-employment, all with an icy stoicism that was almost unbelievable. If there was internal, invisible anxiety then Georgia did what she could to relieve it.
‘When that happens, you’ll be provided with a comfortable pension from my stepfather’s estate, enough to retire on. That’s one of the things I’ll be discussing with the solicitor this afternoon.’ And Baines, the gardener. She would make provision for him because Harold hadn’t. And then, of course, there was Blossom and Elijah, and the house on Blue Rock island.
Some of the tension that had been holding her spine rigid eased out of the way. She had done what Harold should have done, and didn’t expect any thanks or protestations of relieved gratitude. That wasn’t Mrs Moody’s way. And then the pain started bubbling up to the surface again, barely containable now, the hurt of old betrayal and cruel loss.
She turned to leave, quickly, before she broke down, and the housekeeper said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be staying tonight, or coming back.’
Georgia shook her head, unable to speak because the tears she’d mistakenly believed all cried out years ago were threatening to take over again.
‘Then I have something for you, if you can spare a few minutes.’
Something for her? Georgia turned, fighting the tight ache in her chest, her throat.
Mrs Moody had never given her so much as a smile in the past. What could she possibly want to give her now? The housekeeper had gone to one of the tall, fitted wall cupboards and was pulling out a chunky cardboard box which she carried to the table.
‘When you left home, and stayed with that friend of yours before you went to America, your mother asked me to clear your room. I guessed there’d been a disagreement because I was told to send every single thing you owned to a charity shop.’ She ran her work-coarsened hands over the top of the box, then stood back. And stunned Georgia by confiding, ‘My husband died before we’d been married a year. We never had a child. But if we had I know I couldn’t have wiped it out of my life, no matter what. I thought your mother might relent one day, or, more likely, you might come back, so I put some things aside. Little things. Keepsakes, really.’
Touched more than she could say, Georgia opened the box and found bits of the innocent and gullible creature she had been, slices of the past she had never wanted to see again.
An old exercise book full of romantic twaddle—the vapid love poems written by the child who had imagined herself passionately, eternally in love. Jason’s photograph, taken from a family album and put into a silver frame. Her collection of records, sickly sentimental ballads all. A scarf Jason had worn when he’d visited one bitterly cold winter weekend and left behind. It and the photograph had gone with her everywhere—school, Sue’s, Lytham.
Other things: books that had been favourites, a few trinkets that her gran had given her—inexpensive, but valuable to Georgia because Gran, at least, had loved her, had given her the pretty, sparkly things when she could afford to. There hadn’t been money to spare before her mother had met and married Harold, and by then Gran had been dead for over three years.