Lifelong Affair

She couldn’t believe this was happening, that her sister could actually have been on the plane that had crashed late last night. She had heard the first reports of it early this morning, had felt saddened for the families of the people on the plane, never dreaming that she would be one of them!

Glenna had been a successful actress herself until two years ago she had married Mark Hammond, an English businessman she had met and fallen in love with in Florida. The marriage had been far from idyllic—had been? Heavens, already she was talking in the past tense, as if she accepted that Glenna and Mark were dead.

She and Glenna had been born and brought up in the States, had always lived here apart from a few holidays abroad, and having to give up her career as a successful actress to go and live in England with her husband had not been something Glenna accepted without a fight. And she had continued to fight, had hated living with her in-laws at the Hammond house in southern England. The Hammonds were almost part of the aristocracy, something Glenna’s mother-in-law had taken great pains to point out to Glenna any opportunity she could. Morgan could just imagine how her sister had reacted to that! In fact, she knew how Glenna had reacted to it; she had spent hours talking to her sister long-distance—calls her sister had made, claiming the Hammonds could more than afford the telephone bill. She knew from those calls that Glenna had been far from happy, had longed for her career and the physical, if not emotional freedom, she had always had in the States. The Hammonds had put restrictions on her behaviour and her social life, restrictions Mark had seemed happy to accept for his wife.

The one stipulation Glenna had made when she had had her pregnancy confirmed five months ago had been that the baby be born at her home and not Mark’s. In the face of strong family opposition, mainly Rita Hammond’s, Mark had finally agreed, and the two of them had flown to their deaths.

‘I have to call my parents,’ said Morgan in short jerky gasps. ‘If they should hear the news in the same way …!’

‘They probably already have,’ Sam soothed.

Oh God, this was a nightmare! Her mother had probably collapsed, her father would be bottling his emotions inside him as usual. He wasn’t a man who found it easy to show his love, although she and Glenna had never doubted his love for his family. But this was something no one had expected in their wildest nightmares!

‘I have to get home—–’

‘I’ll drive you,’ Sam instantly offered as she stood up agitatedly.

‘My parents’ home,’ she pointed out. ‘They’re going to need me.’

‘I’ll still drive you,’ he insisted.

‘You still have a scene to shoot this evening,’ she reminded him calmly, thinking logically despite the panicked racing of her brain. ‘Jerry was only complaining yesterday that we’re behind schedule.’

Sam shrugged. ‘So we finish shooting mid-September instead of the end of August,’ he dismissed. ‘The network can’t complain, not with the ratings we’re getting. I hear we’re very popular with the English audience. Hell, what am I going on like this for?’ he muttered. ‘What do you care about the reaction of the English audience at a time like this! I’ll just go and tell Jerry we’re leaving.’ He gently touched her cheek before going to talk to their director.

Morgan stood in numbed silence waiting for him to return. Sam was wrong about her not caring about what the English audience thought of the show. A couple of months ago Glenna had telephoned her in a great state of agitation, crying and muttering what a bitch her mother-in-law was. Apparently Rita Hammond had taken great delight in the fact that Glenna’s sister should be appearing in something so lowly as a soap-opera, had taken every opportunity she could to be derogative about Power Trap and Morgan’s part in it. Normally Glenna would have been unmoved by such taunts, but her pregnancy had made her more susceptible to showing emotion, and she had been very distraught.

Jerry himself came into the room just then, his weatherbeaten face creased into lines of sadness. ‘Hell, Morgan, Sam just told me.’ He grasped her forearms, frowning down at her. ‘That’s a hell of a thing to hear on the television,’ he growled.

‘Yes.’ She was still too numb to respond to the sincerity of his regret.

‘I was fond of Glenna,’ he continued softly. ‘She and I worked together a couple of years ago, before she married her stuffed shirt,’ he grimaced. ‘We’re all going to miss her.’

Morgan swallowed hard, as nausea started to rise within her, the numbness leaving her at Jerry’s way of talking about her sister as if she no longer existed. ‘Excuse me,’ she muttered, pushing past him to run into the wash-room, waves of nausea racking her body as the full horror of her beautiful and fiery sister dying in such a horrendous way struck her. Glenna had always been too busy in her life to think of death, and Morgan certainly doubted she ever expected it to happen in such a violent way. None of them had.

‘All right?’ Jerry was helping her wash her face in cold water when Sam came back into the room.

‘Better,’ she nodded, swallowing the nausea down. She had to pull herself together, had to be strong for her parents’ sake, her strong attorney father, her homemaking mother. They were going to be devastated. ‘I’ll have to pick up some things from my apartment,’ she told Sam as he drove her.

‘Sure,’ he agreed easily, not intruding on her private thoughts as she lapsed into silence.

Strangely her apartment still looked the same as when she had left it early this morning, the same casual untidiness that she liked, the galley kitchen, scatter cushions placed on her corner unit in the lounge, a cup still standing on the dining-room table from where she had had breakfast, plants arranged about the whole apartment, one of her weaknesses, her other one being the Walt Disney posters in her bedroom. She knew that the general public, after her portrayal of Mary-Beth, would never believe her liking for all things Disney, but it had remained with her from a trip to Disneyland when she was a child. A trip both she and Glenna had loved. Oh God, Glenna …!

All this was a terrible dream, one that she couldn’t believe until someone could tell her it was true, someone who really knew. After all, the news item could have been wrong; maybe Glenna and Mark hadn’t been on that flight, maybe they should have been but something had prevented them making it, maybe—–

The telephone at her bedside began ringing, and she snatched up the receiver, feeling her heart plummet at the sound of her mother’s voice, a strangely strong voice, her mother seeming filled with a determination that wasn’t a normal facet of her nature, their father the strong one.

‘You’ve heard, Morgan?’ she asked briskly.

‘Yes,’ her voice caught huskily. ‘It was on the television just now.’

Her mother sighed. ‘I wonder if they realise how cruel they can be,’ she said waspishly, a small black-haired woman of fifty, filled with a restless energy that put younger women to shame. ‘Alex Hammond called us a short time ago, so at least we didn’t hear that way.’

Alex Hammond. A picture of a tall dark-haired man with a remote manner, autocratic features; piercing grey eyes, aquiline nose, thinned lips, determined jaw, and a lithe athletic body came to mind. Mark’s brother, the elder by eight years at thirty-eight, he ran the family business like a well-oiled cog, had little time for the rest of the human race, having no wife and apparently no steady woman in his life either. Morgan had met him only once, at the wedding two years ago, and she hadn’t liked him, not his arrogance or his haughtiness.

‘I would have telephoned you at the studio,’ her mother continued, her voice showing some sign of strain now. ‘But I’ve been busy with—Your father collapsed, Morgan,’ her voice broke, still a little trembly as she continued. ‘He answered the telephone to Mr Hammond, and he seemed all right at the time. Then he just—he’s had a heart attack!’

This was worse than a nightmare, the whole world was going crazy! ‘I—Is he—–’

‘He’s in hospital, but his condition has stabilised,’ her mother hastily assured her. ‘The doctors are sure he’s going to be all right.’

‘I’m coming home—–’

‘No! Morgan, I told Alex Hammond we would be coming to you—that was before your father collapsed, of course. He said he would get in touch again when he knew anything more than that Glenna and Mark were on the plane.’ The line went silent for several minutes, as her mother fought for control. ‘He was expecting to know more later today.’

Alex Hammond would be the type of man who demanded, not asked for, that information. And he had such a presence of authority that he would get the answers too!

‘I’d rather come home. Mr Hammond will realise I’m there when he gets no answer here.’

‘I’m not at home, Morgan,’ her mother told her softly. ‘I’m going to stay at the hospital with your father tonight.’

‘Are you sure there’s no danger?’ Morgan asked sharply, wondering if her mother was telling her everything.

‘The doctors assure me there isn’t,’ she was hastily assured. ‘But I’d rather be with him tonight. Please stay in Los Angeles and wait for Mr Hammond to contact you. I’d hate for us to miss his call.’

Her mother was right, she knew she was, and yet she felt she should go to her father. But if Alex Hammond should telephone while she was in transit …! ‘I’ll wait, Mom,’ she said softly. ‘And I’ll call you at the hospital as soon as I know anything.’ There was only one hospital in the small California town her parents lived in. ‘Give Dad my love.’

‘I will, dear. And don’t worry, things could still be all right with Glenna and Mark.’

She couldn’t move after putting down the receiver. Her mother was being optimistic, and they both knew it. Glenna was going to be dead, Mark too, and their poor little baby that hadn’t even begun to live. And no matter how light her mother made of the heart attack she knew her father was gravely ill.

‘I thought I heard the telephone—–’

With a strangled cry she turned and flung herself into Sam’s waiting arms, a dam seeming to burst as she sobbed it all out to him, finding comfort in his lean strength as he led her back to the lounge, holding her close against his chest as she sat close beside him on the corner unit.

‘She was so beautiful, Sam,’ she choked, her tears having wet his shirt front. ‘I can’t believe she’s dead—and in that way. No wonder Dad took it so hard,’ she shuddered.

‘I know, honey. I know,’ he soothed, smoothing back her hair with a gentle hand, surprisingly so considering their size and strength. Tall and slender as she was, Sam made her feel cherished and cared for, his manners were always without fault, never too forward, but always friendly.

‘You never met Glenna, did you?’ she mumbled into his shirt.

‘I’ve seen her in the movies. She was beautiful,’ he acknowledged. ‘Very like you.’

Again they were talking in the past tense, and it was with a sense of deep pain that she realised she would probably never see her sister again. Of a similar age, the two of them had always been very close, had shared friends and clothes during their teenage years, continuing to keep those same friends as the years passed. Everyone was going to be heartbroken when they learnt the fiery-haired Glenna was no longer with them.

‘Everyone loved her, Sam,’ she continued huskily. ‘She was so much fun, so—so full of life!’ Her voice broke over the last.

Everyone had loved Glenna—except the Hammonds. Glenna and Mark had a private wing in the Hammond house, the widowed Rita Hammond and her bachelor son occupying the other wing, while the married daughter Janet lived several miles away with her husband and two daughters. Rita Hammond and her daughter Janet had shown their disapproval of Mark marrying an American actress from the first; the formidable Alex Hammond had been indifferent. Mark was a charming rogue, very dark and handsome, but he was no match for the rest of his family, resisting all Glenna’s efforts to persuade him to move to America, claiming that he had to stay in England to work in the family firm, and also claiming it was unnecessary to have a house of their own when the family house was so big.