Ignoring her, Janey said shakily, ‘I can’t let you give me a million, Emerald.’
She had always known how independently wealthy Emerald was, but to make such an offer…Janey was torn between the emotions of gratitude and disbelief, and the more practical awareness that John would not want her to accept.
‘You mean you’d rather your boys were embarrassed by being asked to leave their school and that you lost Fitton?’ Emerald’s voice was deliberately scornful. ‘I thought better of you than that, Janey.’
‘I can’t accept it,’ Janey repeated, but Emerald sensed that her resolution was wavering.
‘It’s what Jay would do, if he could, and it’s what my own father would want me to do. We’re family, after all, Janey. Your boys are my nephews, and I’d like to think that if anything happened to me or to Drogo that my girls would be able to turn to someone—’
‘Of course they could. You know that.’ Immediately Janey’s maternal instincts were aroused, just as Emerald had known they would be.
Secretly Janey would have loved a daughter and she adored Emerald’s girls.
How strange, Emerald reflected, she hadn’t realised or understood until now just how much and how easily she had always deep down inside herself taken it for granted that her daughters would, if necessary, be mothered by one of the siblings she had grown up resenting.
‘I’m not doing this for you, Janey,’ she continued determinedly, ‘I’m doing it for all of us. You live closest to Denham, after all, and you won’t be able to help my mother and your father properly if you are worrying about John’s debts.’
What Emerald was saying was true, Janey acknowledged.
‘We’re a family,’ Emerald repeated, ‘and we’ve got a difficult situation ahead of us. You will be called upon to contribute your time, and it’s only right that I should make my contribution, which in this case will be helping to enable you to play your part.’
‘Well, since you put it that way…’ Janey gave in. It would be such a relief not to have that dreadful worry hanging over them, and it would enable her to concentrate fully on doing everything she could to support Amber.
‘I do,’ Emerald told her. ‘And I’m sure there’s some way we can arrange for the trustees to discover that there is some money owing to you from your trust fund, so that John’s pride doesn’t have to be affected.’
Janey made a small sound that could have been a protest or a giving in.
‘So that’s settled, then,’ Emerald said firmly, seizing on Janey’s response as the latter. ‘We’ll get everything sorted out properly as soon as we can.’
Before Janey could come up with any more objections she changed the subject, filling her in on the practical arrangements Drogo had put in hand, and adding, ‘Drogo should be back soon. He phoned Robbie after John telephoned us, and then Polly, and he’s arranged to pick them both up from Manchester airport and bring them straight here. We’ve sent a car to collect Cathy.’
‘Will Rose come, do you think, and Ella?’
‘I don’t know.’
Would Rose come, Emerald wondered. There had never been any discussion of the rift between her mother and the niece to whom she had always been so close, but they were all aware of it.
Initially Emerald had been pleased, even triumphant. Amber was her mother, after all, and it was only right and proper that she, not a usurper like Rose, should be her favourite. But then her triumph had somehow lost its savour. It was funny how one act could wipe out the whole history of a relationship and change it for ever, be it an act of great generosity or an act of great unkindness.
In the space of one evening, a handful of hours, Rose had, through her own act of kindness, changed Emerald’s own life completely. Neither of them ever spoke of that night on the rare occasions when they met, but it still lay between them, a secret that linked them and which for Emerald had provided a vital escape from perpetual envy.
Would Rose come? It surprised Emerald to discover just how much she hoped that she might.
Chapter Sixty
What was happening in Macclesfield? Rose looked at the telephone. She so desperately wanted to be there, she realised with a small surge of shock.
It had been so many years now since she had stepped back from the old special closeness of her relationship with her aunt, filled with the bitterness and pain of discovering that Aunt Amber had simply been using her and had never loved her as she had pretended to do.
She had seen less and less of ‘the family’ as Pete’s health had deteriorated–not that there had been an open breaking-off of her relationship with them. She was actually godmother to one of Janey’s sons, and the elder of Emerald’s daughters, but she had not expected to feel this irrational driven need to be ‘there’.
Why should she? Aunt Amber did not need her to be there. After all, she had three daughters and two stepdaughters who all meant far more to her than Rose did.
But she needed to be there, Rose recognised. She wanted to be there; she had to be there.
Quickly she crossed the kitchen floor and picked up the telephone receiver, dialling the number she knew by heart.
The moment the ringing at the other end was silenced, she knew instantly it was Josh, just from his breathing.