To Love, Honour & Betray

It was still light as Claudia turned off the road and in through the arched gateway in the brick wall that surrounded her home.

She and Garth had first seen Ivy House on a cold snowy day when the branches of the tree had been bare and the ivy clothing the house itself and the brick wall around it frosted white against the mellow backdrop of the Cotswold stone.

The house had originally been built in the eighteenth century as a dower home attached to the estate of the then Sir Vernon Cupshaw. The main house had fallen into disrepair after the Great War, when all three sons of the family had been killed, and the estate had eventually been broken up. Claudia and Garth had bought the house and learned of its history from the last surviving spinster aunt of the original family. Claudia could still remember how the old lady had looked from her to the small bundle that was Tara, whom she had been holding, as she told them, ‘This house needs love and I can see that you have it. It also needs children … just as our family needed children.’ Claudia hadn’t been able to tell her what she already knew, which was that Tara would be an only child.

They had had to do a great deal of work to turn the house into the comfortable home it now was and, after the breakdown of their marriage, one of the hardest things Claudia had had to prepare herself for was the prospect of losing Ivy House, but Garth had insisted that she was to keep it.

‘It’s Tara’s home,’ he had reminded her quietly when she had pointed out to him with fierce, bitter passion that she didn’t want his charity … that she didn’t, in fact, want anything of him. But even then … even then that had not been entirely true and they had both known it. But Garth, whether out of guilt or compassion, had refrained from telling her so.

To discover that the man she had loved, trusted, put her faith, her whole self in, had betrayed her, had been almost more than Claudia could bear. To know that he had slept with another woman, touched her, embraced her, physically known and shared with her the intimacy that Claudia had believed was hers alone had almost destroyed her and it had certainly destroyed their marriage. How could it not have done so?

But Chris was right about one thing. She and Garth had made a pact to remember that, whatever their own differences, whatever their own pain, they would not allow the death of their love for one another to touch Tara, their precious and much loved daughter, all the more loved because for Claudia she would always be her only child. The doctors had told her that after … ‘You are so lucky,’ Chris had commented enviously and Claudia was remembering those words as she stopped her car and climbed out.

The ivy still clothed the front of the house but now it had been joined by the wisteria she and Garth had planted the year after they moved in. It had finished flowering now, and its silvery green tendrils rustled softly in the evening air as Claudia inserted her key in the lock.

Upper Charfont was the kind of vintage small English town where up until very recently back doors were frequently left unlocked and neighbours knew all of one another’s business. Claudia had been a little wary at first about moving into that kind of environment, but Garth had gently reassured her, pointing out the advantages of a semi-rural upbringing for Tara and the fact that the town was less than an hour’s drive away from the small Cotswold village to which her parents had recently retired.

Her father was an army man, Brigadier Peter Fulshaw, and it had been through him that she had originally met Garth, who had been one of his young officers. The peripatetic nature of her childhood, moving from one army base to another, had meant that Claudia had a very strong yearning to give her own child the kind of settled existence she herself had never experienced, the chance to develop friendships that would be with her all her life, and Garth had agreed with her. On that, as well as on so many other subjects, they had thought exactly alike, but even then he …

Claudia tried to shake aside her memories as she let herself into the house and locked the door behind her. But tonight for some reason, success in burying thoughts of the past eluded her. Everywhere she looked there were reminders of Garth and the life they had shared. The wall lights in the hallway, which she had just switched on, had been a find they had made in an antique shop in Brighton, pounced on with great glee and borne triumphantly home where Garth had carried them off to his workroom above the garage to clean and polish them.

He had left the army by then, working initially for the PR firm run by an old school friend of his father’s and then later setting up his own rival business.

Like her own, Garth’s parents were still alive, living just outside York in the constituency that Garth’s father had represented as a Member of Parliament before his retirement.

Claudia still saw them regularly and loved them dearly. Just like her own parents, they adored Tara and spoiled her dreadfully. She was, after all, for both of them, their only grandchild since she and Garth were themselves only children.

‘I’m so sorry that there can’t be any more little ones, darling,’ her mother had tried to comfort her after she had broken the news to her that Tara would be her only child. ‘But sometimes … Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure, Mummy,’ Claudia had told her, her voice raw with pain.

‘But at least you have Tara, and she’s such a beautiful, healthy baby. You’d never know that she’d been born prematurely. You can’t imagine how your father and I felt when we got Garth’s telephone call. I wanted to come home straight away, but of course we couldn’t get flights, and with Garth’s parents being away at the same time … I must say I was surprised that the hospital allowed you home with her so soon.’

‘They knew we were planning to move,’ Claudia had reminded her mother quickly before adding, ‘Anyway, that’s all behind us now. I do wish you wouldn’t keep harping on about it. I’m sorry, Mummy,’ she had apologised when she saw her mother’s expression. ‘It’s just that I don’t like being reminded …’ She bit her lip.

‘It’s all right, darling, I do understand,’ her mother had assured her, patting her hand. ‘I know how dreadful it must have been for you, especially when … Well, after losing your first baby and then to nearly lose our darling, precious Tara, as well …’

‘Yes,’ Claudia had agreed. Even nearly eighteen months after the event, she had still hated being reminded of the early miscarriage she had suffered with the baby she had been carrying before Tara’s arrival. Friends had told her then that it was a relatively common occurrence and that the best thing she could do was to get pregnant again just as quickly as she could.

She had still been working at that time, of course, with Garth still in the army, and it had seemed to make sense for her to continue with her probationary work, a very newly qualified and raw probation officer, she reminded herself bleakly now, remembering the interview she had had with her supervisor at the end of her initial training period.

‘Idealism and concern for others are all very praiseworthy, my dear,’ the older woman had told her, ‘but in this job you have to learn to achieve a certain amount of detachment. It’s essential if one is to do one’s job properly.’

In those days, twenty-odd years ago, the problems and pitfalls in the field of social work she had chosen weren’t as widely recognised as they were now, Claudia acknowledged as she opened the door into the drawing room and walked in. The traumas and trials, accusations of negligence and lack of expertise, of pointless meddling in other people’s lives had still lain ahead, but she had known that the older woman was right and that she was too sensitive, too much in danger of becoming overinvolved with the problems of her clients to be truly effective on their behalf.

She had been sensitive, too, to the unspoken criticism of her colleagues, suspicious of her prosperous and, to them, protected upper-middle-class background and upbringing. What could she possibly know of the difficulties and dangers that beset the people they were dealing with and their poverty-trapped, inner-city lives? In the end, her conscience had coerced her into accepting that no matter how much she cared, no matter how passionately she wanted to help, no matter how praiseworthy her commitment to the job and excellent her qualifications for it, she was simply not the best person, the right person, to help those she was supposed to be helping.

The drawing room was Claudia’s second favourite room in the house. Elegantly proportioned, it faced south and always seemed to be flooded with light. It still had the same soft yellow colour scheme Claudia had chosen for it when she and Garth had first moved in. The Knoll sofas that faced one another across the fireplace had been a gift from her and Garth’s parents and, if anything, Claudia loved them even more now over twenty years later than she had done then, their heavy damask dull gold covers softened and gentled with age. Mellow and lived-in, the whole room had the kind of ambience about it, the kind of feel, that made newcomers comment on how welcoming it was.

Above the fireplace was a portrait of her father in his full regimentals. It had been presented to him on his retirement and her mother had insisted that she had spent enough of her life looking at him in his uniform and that Claudia and Garth should have it.

On the stairs, Claudia had a further collection of family portraits, some simple pencil sketches, others more detailed, along with the totally un-recognisable ‘picture’ that Tara had drawn of her parents in her first term at school.

On the opposite wall from the fireplace above the pretty antique side table that Garth’s mother had inherited from her own family and passed on to Claudia hung a portrait of another man in regimentals.

Instinctively, she walked over to it, switched on the picture light above it and studied it sombrely.

Garth had been twenty-seven when it had been painted and it had been a wedding gift from the regiment to them—a surprise wedding gift as the artist had painted the portrait from photographs. It was still a good likeness, though, with Garth’s face turned slightly to the left so that the clear thrust of his jaw could be seen along with the aquiline profile of his nose.

Put Garth in a Roman centurion’s outfit and he would immediately fulfil every Hollywood mogul’s ideal of what a sexy man in uniform should look like, a friend had once commented to Claudia, and it was true. Garth’s predecessors had originally come from Pembrokeshire in Wales and there was a joke in the family that it wasn’t merely driftwood washed up from the shipwrecks of the fleeing remnants of the Spanish Armada that his ancestors had salvaged from the Pembroke beaches.

Clearly, Garth’s skin tone and thick dark hair suggested that he could have Latin blood somewhere in his veins, and those who knew the family history had been very quick to point out that Tara’s lustrous dark curls could also be a part of that inheritance.

Fact or fiction, what was true was that Garth was a stunningly handsome man, an outrageously sexy man, so Claudia had been told enviously at their wedding, but oddly enough, it wasn’t Garth’s strongly sensual physical appeal that had initially attracted her.

Perhaps because of his career and his knowledge of the more base and raw instincts of the male sex, her father in particular had always been very protective of her, over-protective perhaps in some ways. Certainly it had taken a good deal of persuasion and coaxing on both her own part and that of her mother to gain his approval when she had wanted to go to university.

Garth, as one of her father’s junior officers, had been deputised to escort her to a regimental ball. He had called to collect her in the shiny, bright red Morgan sports car that had been his parents’ twenty-first birthday present to him and Claudia remembered that she had found both the car and the man rather too over the top, too stereotypical and obvious in many ways for her own taste.

It had been a warm June night and still light as they set out for the ball. They had had the country lane that led from her parents’ house to the main road to themselves, and typically, or so she had decided, Garth had insisted on driving his car rather fast if admittedly very dexterously. Then, just as they had straightened out of a sharp bend, Claudia had seen a hedgehog crossing the road. Her immediate instinct was to call out in protest as she anticipated the animal’s fateful demise, but to her astonishment as he, too, spotted the small creature, Garth had immediately taken evasive action, braking and turning the front of the car away from the road and plunging it instead nose first through a muddy ditch and up a bank into a thorny hedge.

Neither the hedgehog nor Claudia and Garth themselves suffered any physical damage but the same could not be said for the car. Along with the mud spattering its immaculate paintwork, Claudia had also been able to see the long and quite deep scratches the sharp thorns of the hedge had inflicted. But it wasn’t the state of his precious car and its paintwork that had Garth virtually leaping out of the car the moment he had it back on the road. No, it was the still dazed and obviously petrified little animal that he ran to rescue from its plight. He carefully picked it up and, opening a nearby farm gate, carried it to a much safer environment.

It had been then that she had fallen in love with him, Claudia remembered. Not because of his astounding good looks, nor even because of the way he apologised to her for the fact that they would now be rather late arriving at the ball, but because of the completely natural and instinctive way he had put the hedgehog’s safety above the value of his clearly very personally precious car, and it had been an honest and automatic reaction, Claudia had known, not something showy and false done simply to impress her. And she had loved him for it … for the personality, the warmth, the genuine caring and concern she had felt it revealed. The same love and caring he had always shown to Tara.

There was a telephone on the small coffee-table next to the fire. She walked over to it and, before she could change her mind, quickly dialled the number of Garth’s London penthouse. After their divorce, he had bought a small property on the other side of the town but during the week he stayed in London in order to be close to his work.

The phone rang five times and then the receiver at the other end was lifted and an attractively husky female voice that Claudia didn’t recognise said hello.

Without responding, Claudia replaced the receiver. Her hand was trembling and for some ridiculous reason she could feel the aching sensation at the back of her throat that presaged tears.

Why on earth should she cry just because a woman answered Garth’s phone? They had been divorced for years and she, after all, had been the one to agitate for the divorce. She knew that there had been other women in Garth’s life since they went their separate ways and she knew, too, that …

Straightening her spine, she readjusted several stems of the lilies she had already perfectly arranged earlier in the day. She was at a very vulnerable age, she reminded herself, that certain age where, while physically her looks might say that she was still a very attractive and sexually valuable woman, her hormones were beginning to tell her a different story. How many times lately had she heard other women of around the same age or slightly older bemoaning the fact that it wasn’t just in their almost-adult offsprings’ lives that they now felt redundant but in their partners’ beds, as well? ‘I still want sex,’ one had complained frankly to her only the other day. ‘But somehow these days I feel that it doesn’t want me very much any more.’

Claudia sympathised. She didn’t have a man, a lover, in her life. She had had offers, of course, approaches … men who had hovered on the edge of her life during the years of her marriage to Garth, moving a little closer, making their intentions, their desires, a little bit plainer, some of them married, some of them not. No, she certainly needn’t have gone short of sex and perhaps even love if she had wanted it … them. But she had been too busy with other and more important concerns. Tara for one … and then there had been her business, her charity work, her friends.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ someone had asked her curiously in the early years after the divorce. ‘The sex. The having someone to snuggle up to in bed, the comfort of having someone there to hold you. You must get—’

‘Frustrated,’ Claudia had supplied calmly for her before shaking her head and denying, ‘No, not really … I don’t have the time.’

And it had been true, and besides … besides … Her sex drive had always been inextricably linked to her emotions, driven by them almost; love for her was even more important, more driving, than lust.

And after Garth—well, after Garth it wasn’t just that she couldn’t ever imagine wanting another man, loving another man the way she had loved and wanted him, she had actively not wanted to become so emotionally involved with anyone else again.

The devastation upon discovering that Garth had been unfaithful to her had quite simply been so complete, so overwhelming, that she had never wanted to allow anyone else close enough to risk it again. Her love for Garth might have died, been destroyed, annihilated, by her discovery of his infidelity and the fact that, for so many years, she had been living a lie, a myth—believing in their marriage, in him—but her fear of the pain it had caused her had certainly not died.

She did have men friends, yes, and she went out on dates with them; but she had certainly never come anywhere near close to wanting to share anything more than friendship with them. Or at least she hadn’t until she met Luke Palliser.