She sighed, and returned her attention to her appearance, pulling a wry face. Dressed in a pair of shabby jeans which had shrunk and were now barely decent, an old t-shirt which showed only too clearly that she had kept the slender figure she had had before Simon’s birth, her hair tied back in a ponytail, wisps escaping to frame her face, she looked more like Simon’s sister than his mother. Add to that, the fact that he was already two inches above her small five foot four, and their true relationship seemed even more ridiculous.
Thinking of her son, where was he? She glanced at her watch again. If he had one fault it was that when it came to time Simon was something of a dreamer. Once involved in some task time no longer seemed to matter to him. That he was extremely clever had been emphasised to her the last time she had visited his school. His headmaster considered him very gifted, and he had also pointed out rather wryly that it was unfortunate that in the modern secondary school of the type he would probably attend in London, he might not receive the individual tuition needed to make the most of his special gifts. The fact was that Simon, although brilliantly clever with his hands, with anything mechanical or mathematical, had, when it came to English and related subjects, something of a mental block, and as his headmaster had pointed out to Philippa, if Simon was to realise his full potential he would need to work hard to bring his English up to standard.
‘Without at least an “O” level in it, he will never make it to university,’ he had told Philippa frankly, adding ‘Private tuition would be the thing, but it would be very expensive. Another alternative would be a smaller, country school where they have more time to concentrate on individual subjects.’
Both were out of the question. Her salary was a good one, but living in London was expensive, too expensive for her to be able to afford private tuition, unless of course she could get an evening job, but that meant leaving Simon on his own. As it was she felt bitterly conscious of the fact that she was at best a ‘part-time mother’ but what alternative did she have? She was both mother and father to Simon. She had to go out to work.
She heard a sound outside, a car coming towards the cottage, and frowned. The lane the cottage was on was the back road leading to the Hall but was, according to the Vicar, not in use any more, the company which had made Garston Hall its headquarters using the main entrance. The discovery that Garston Hall had been taken over by Computex, a highly successful computer company, had rather surprised her. For one thing Garston was so remote, fifty miles from York, right in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales. That meant that Scott must have sold it, but then she had known he would have to when he refused to marry Mary Tatlow. His grandfather had been desperately keen for him to marry her. Her father was a millionaire and once married to her Scott could have looked to his new father-in-law to provide the money to restore Garston. But Scott had apparently refused to comply with his grandfather’s wishes. That had been something else her aunt had written in her last letter.
The sound of the car engine was getting louder. Philippa leaned out of the small casement window, frowning as she saw the enormous gleaming Rolls pushing its way down the overgrown lane, her frown deepening when she saw the huge dent and scraped paint on the front wing. The damage had obviously been caused recently and, to judge from the extent of it, would be horrendously expensive to repair. But then perhaps to a man who could afford to buy such a car the cost of a repair which she judged would probably buy her a very nice small car, meant nothing. The car stopped outside the cottage. The rear door opened and Philippa saw Simon getting out.
She hurried downstairs, wondering how on earth her son had managed to cadge a ride in the car, torn between amusement at his enterprise and maternal anger that he should have ignored all her warnings to him on the subject of strange cars and potentially even stranger men.
The first thing that struck her as she opened the door was that Simon looked extremely pale; the second was that her normally voluble son was suspiciously quiet. A car door slammed and her eyes tracked automatically to the man walking down the narrow weed-infested path, her heart doing a double somersault before lurching to a spectacular standstill. ‘Scott!’
‘So he is your son.’ He had ignored her whispered acknowledgement of him and stood behind Simon, dwarfing her tall, gangly son. As Philippa knew from experience Scott would have to duck his head a good six inches to pass under the low lintel to the cottage. Ten years had effected various changes in him but the one she registered first was the total lack of pleasure or warmth in his eyes as they rested on her, their deep blue depths which she remembered as warm and sunny, freezing her with the dislike he made no effort to conceal.
Eleven years since she had last seen him. He had been twenty-three, almost twenty-four, now he would be thirty-five. He was wearing an expensively tailored suit very much in keeping with the Rolls parked outside the cottage, but totally out of keeping with the Scott she remembered who had worn faded, ancient jeans, whose hair had brushed his shirt collars untidily, whose face had been open, always brimming with humour, his eyes always darkening with teasing laughter.
She shivered suddenly despite the warmth of the May sun. It was like standing in the path of a blast of arctic weather looking into his eyes. His face hadn’t changed though really, merely settled. He had always been very physically attractive, although time had added a certain degree of muscled hardness to the body she remembered as thinner, more boyish, and his face, the face that betrayed the hint of Spanish blood on his mother’s side of the family, was more arrogant, the grooves running from nose to mouth more defined. As a young man growing to maturity he had been devastatingly attractive and yet in many ways unaware of his appeal for her sex.
He was still every bit as physically compelling, perhaps even more so, but now there was a look in his eyes that told her he knew exactly what effect he had on her sex, and Philippa withdrew from the sexual explicitness it with a distasteful grimace she only realised he had witnessed when she saw the anger flare in his eyes.
So that at least had not changed. He still possessed a temper… the temper which had perhaps led him to defy his grandfather and refuse the marriage the old man had planned for him?
‘Simon, where have you been?’ Philippa asked her son, turning her attention to him and hoping that Scott wouldn’t notice the hot colour painting her skin. ‘You know I wanted to leave early.’ If his hair and his bone structure were his father’s it was from her that Simon had inherited his grey eyes and the shape of his face. His mannerisms were hers as well, and she watched him scuffing his toes, his expression woebegone and guilty. Her mind too bemused with Scott’s wholly unexpected arrival to pay more than fleeting attention to Simon, she was startled when Scott said grimly, ‘I’ll tell you where he’s been. Trespassing on Computex land; riding a motorcycle for which I imagine I am correct in saying he has no licence. A motorbike which, moreover,’ he continued inexorably, ‘he crashed into my car.’
In a daze Philippa looked out of the window at the huge dent in the gleaming car, her glance going from that to her son’s milk-white face. Her appalled ‘Oh, Simon, how could you…’ drawing a gruff, ‘It was an accident honest, Mum.… It was broken and I’d been helping to mend it and then Tommy Hargreaves said I could have a go on it for helping them… I didn’t know it was private land.’
He shot a scared glance at Scott and Philippa’s heart went out to him. Poor Simon, what on earth had Scott been saying to him to make him look so terrified? And
that dent in the car? Surely that hadn’t been caused simply by Simon? ‘Tommy told me they always used it for racing on… I told him I didn’t have a licence but he said it wouldn’t matter. And then.…
‘… and then I was on my way to the home farm to check on something with my Manager when this young fool came riding out of the trees and nearly ran straight into me. If I hadn’t swerved to avoid him, I doubt he’d be here in one piece now,’ Scott concluded grimly, whilst several facts hit Philippa at the same time. ‘On my way to the home farm,’ Scott had said, which must mean he was back living at Garston… And ‘swerved to avoid Simon’, which meant that Simon hadn’t run into him after all!
She went up to her son, hugging him tightly and for once Simon didn’t squirm away. For all his size he was very much her little boy, his eyes dark and afraid. ‘It was an accident, Mum,’ he said desperately. ‘I tried to explain, but Mr… Mr.…’
‘Garston,’ Scott supplied sardonically, glancing coldly at Philippa. ‘I see you haven’t told him much about that part of your life which preceded his birth, Philippa… I wonder why?’
‘You said you swerved to avoid Simon, which means he didn’t do the damage to your car,’ Philippa interrupted, without answering.
‘Not physically perhaps,’ Scott agreed, ‘but I don’t doubt that any court would lay the blame at his feet, as well as taking a pretty dim view of the fact that he was riding the machine without the benefit of a licence and trespassing on private land. It’s going to cost several thousand pounds to put the damage right.’
Philippa’s mouth went dry. Several thousand pounds, and how Scott would delight in making her pay, in extracting every last penny. He had sworn vengeance on her, eleven years ago, and she had laughed it aside, never dreaming that the future might hold this. Was he remembering that hot summer afternoon, when she told him she was leaving?
She looked at him and knew that he was. Once she had thought she loved him and once too he had thought he loved her, but it had all been a long time ago, an adolescent romance for her, a summer affair for him, both of them poised on the brink of other things with a summer to spare, but she had hurt his pride when she threw his love back in his face, and it showed in his eyes that he had not forgiven her.
‘Scott.…’ She took a step towards him and saw his instant recoil and knew that the plea which had been on her lips to let the past lie could not be uttered. He wanted it to remain alive; he wanted to punish her, and could she really blame him? She had told him she loved him and then she had gone to tell him that she had made a mistake and that she loved someone else. He had every right to resent, perhaps even hate her, whilst she.…
‘Mum.…’ She came out of her thoughts to find Simon watching her. Sometimes he saw too much and worried her with his maturity.
‘Go upstairs, Simon,’ she told him. ‘You still haven’t packed, and I want to leave as soon as possible.’
When he had gone she faced Scott, neither asking him to come in or preventing him from doing so. This house which had been her aunt’s belonged to the estate and would revert to it with her death, and Scott had every right to walk into it with or without her permission.
‘I’m sorry about your car.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Simon doesn’t tell lies, and we haven’t been here long enough for him to know that the estate is private.…’
‘What are you trying to say? That he was misled? He’s how old? Twelve? Thirteen?’