A Perfect Family

She sensed what Jenny was feeling. Some pains never ever faded; some things could never ever be forgotten, and it wasn’t always true that with time they eased.

2

‘Jon, have you got a minute?’

Jonathon looked up from his desk as his twin walked into his office, then frowned slightly as he saw the way that David was massaging his shoulder. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked him.

‘Not really, just a bit of an ache. I must have pulled something playing golf on Sunday, which reminds me, we’re both down to play in the Captain’s Cup next month but Tiggy is getting a bit agitated about our getting away so I might have to pull out. Look, I’m going to get off early. We’re having dinner with the Buckletons tonight and there’s nothing pressing here.’

No, there probably wasn’t, not once you discounted the two wills waiting to be redrafted, the conveyancing for Hawkins Farm and a whole host of other complicated and fiddly commissions that increasingly recently seemed to find their way from David’s desk to his own because his brother couldn’t find the time to deal with them.

It had never really been intended that the two of them would go into the family business; David had been earmarked to become a member of a much more elevated rank of their profession—a barrister—and long before they had both even left school, their father was already talking about the time when David would be a QC.

All that had changed, though, the summer David had returned to Haslewich with Tiggy to tell the family that they were married and that Tiggy was expecting his child. No one had mentioned David’s failure to fulfil his father’s hopes for him by not qualifying for the Bar, just as no one had mentioned the debts David had run up whilst living in London or the distinctive and tell-tale, sickly sweet smell that emanated from the room that David and Tiggy were sharing at Queensmead until a new home was found for them.

Arrangements were very quickly made for David to join the partnership, but not as a practising solicitor because, of course, he wasn’t qualified, but Jon doubted that anyone remembered that these days. As the favoured brother, David was automatically assumed to be the firm’s senior partner and Jonathon, because he was Jonathon, had never done anything to dispel this myth. Equally David, because he was David, hadn’t, either.

Now as Jonathon looked at his twin and saw the signs of weakness that age was making increasingly plain in his features, the faint coarsening of the once healthily tanned taut flesh of his face, the inability of his gaze to hold Jon’s own, the fleshiness on a body that used to be as firmly muscular as Jon’s still was, these vulnerabilities if anything only made him love his brother more and not less. Jon loved him with a fiercely protective, unvocalised love so intense that sometimes it physically hurt him. He would never have dreamed of telling his twin or anyone else how he thought and knew instinctively that David did not have the same intensity of feeling for him.

Watching David massaging the shoulder he complained had been aching, Jon found he was automatically copying the movement even though his own shoulder was completely free of pain.

‘Looks like the weather is going to stay fine for the weekend,’ David commented as he turned to leave. ‘The girls will be pleased. By the way, young Max rang me the other night. He’s driving up from London tomorrow, he says.’

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed. Max might be his son, but it was David whom he treated more like a father. It was David who would have preferred to be his father, Jon suspected. They shared the same extrovert, almost extravagantly outrageous personality, the same needs, the same love of ownership and glory, the same gifts—and the same weaknesses. Jon started to frown.

‘Livvy’s due back tonight,’ David was continuing, and now he, too, was starting to frown. ‘She’s bringing this American with her. I’m not sure … look, I’d better go,’ he told Jon hurriedly as the phone started to ring. ‘I promised Tiggy I wouldn’t be late and she’s already in a bit of a state, something about the shoes she ordered for Saturday not arriving … You know how easily she gets upset.’

From his office window, Jon could see across the small town square with its neatly enclosed immaculate lawn and its tidy flower-beds. He could see Jenny, his wife, crossing the square on her way back to her car. She stopped to talk to David; David had obviously seen her, too, as he quickened his pace to catch up with her. Jon saw the way she smiled as she greeted his brother, the afternoon sun turning her brunette hair a nice warm chestnut. Once, a long time ago, so long ago now that most people had forgotten all about it, Jenny had been David’s girlfriend.

The telephone had started to ring again. Looking away from the window, Jon reached out to answer it.

‘What’s for tea?’

Jenny smiled at her youngest child. At forty she had thought herself too old and too careful to have another baby, but nature had proved her wrong.

Jon had been almost shocked when she had told him and she had felt oddly, awkwardly self-conscious about delivering the news to him herself.

‘You’re pregnant, but how …?’

‘Our wedding anniversary,’ she’d reminded him, adding simply, ‘We were supposed to be going out for a meal, remember, only you were delayed in court and instead we ate in and opened that wine that Uncle Hugh had given you.’

‘Oh God, yes,’ Jon had agreed. ‘That stuff was lethal.’

‘It was vintage burgundy,’ Jenny chided him severely, ‘and we shouldn’t have opened that second bottle. It’s my fault. It never occurred to me to think about taking any precautions.’

What she didn’t add was that sex between them had become so rare an event that her diaphragm was something that was pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer and largely forgotten. They had a comfortable, steady marriage and were not given to being physically affectionate with one another in public the way David and Tiggy often were and perhaps, because of the busyness of their lives, they had somehow grown out of the habit of being physically demonstrative with one another in private, as well.

However, as Jenny surveyed the result of their two bottles of vintage burgundy and her carelessness, she acknowledged that she wouldn’t be without the consequences of their ‘accident’.

‘It’s lamb and new potatoes,’ she told Joss, named after his paternal great-grandfather, adding warningly, ‘And Joss, don’t forget—homework first.’

‘When’s Livvy coming back?’ Joss asked her, ignoring her warning. ‘She promised to come round.’

‘Some time this evening,’ Jenny responded, ‘but remember, Joss, she’s bringing a friend back with her and she won’t have time to go roaming all over the countryside with you.’

‘The badger cubs are coming out at night now. She’ll want to see them.’

Jenny grinned to herself as she heard the conviction in her young son’s voice. He was going to be a real heartbreaker when he grew up. By some magical alchemy he had managed to inherit the very best of both his father’s and his uncle’s genes. David’s overconfidence and flamboyance were toned down and backed up by Jon’s guarded personality; his nature was also enhanced by the ingredients of good humour and irrepressibility—a sense of fun, a love of life and the people around him.

‘Max is due back tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘So if you haven’t already removed your belongings from his room, I suggest that you do so this evening, and as long as we’re on the subject, your brother’s bedroom is not the place to dismantle your bike,’ she remonstrated severely.

Joss looked innocently at her. ‘But I had to do it there,’ he told her winningly. ‘There was nowhere else. There’s no room in the garage and …’

And the truth was that there was nothing quite so much fun for him as testing the strength of Max’s claim to seniority, Jenny knew, but Max was not like Olivia, indulgent of his sibling’s youthfulness and disposed to be amused and entertained by him.

Max had been horrified when she had told him that she was pregnant, and that disgust and dislike of her pregnancy had been transferred into a disgust and dislike for his younger brother.

‘It would be much better if Max went and stayed at Uncle David’s and Olivia stayed here,’ Joss grumbled.

Jenny gave him another warning look and reminded him sternly, ‘Homework.’ But she knew that there was an element of truth in what he said.

Max did prefer the company of his aunt and uncle, especially his uncle, whilst Olivia … Livvy was such a darling and so dear to her, Jenny just hoped that this young American, whoever he was, realised that he was a lucky man.

Max grimaced as the office door swung closed behind the chambers clerk. It was already gone six o’clock and now it looked as though he was going to have at least another couple of hours work ahead of him. He glanced in disgust at the papers Bob Ford had just placed on his desk.

It was no secret that he wasn’t exactly one of the clerk’s favourites, a legacy of the early days of Max’s pupillage at the chambers when Bob had unfortunately overheard his efforts to make fun of him by imitating the slight stammer he developed whenever he was under pressure.

Max shrugged.

He had inherited his father’s and his uncle’s tall, muscular body frame, and the years of playing rugby first at King’s School and then later at Oxford had developed the powerful physique of which he was now secretly rather proud.

He enjoyed it when he saw the sideways double take women gave him as they discreetly and sometimes not so discreetly assessed him. He liked it, as well, when he stripped off in the shower after a hard game of squash or rugby and saw the envy flare briefly in the eyes of other men. It gave him an advantage, and as Max was well aware, advantages were all plus points when it came to winning life’s games. And Max intended to be a winner. He wasn’t going to be like his father, content to be second best. No, Max only had to look at his Uncle David to see what he wanted to be.

He couldn’t remember the first time he had realised the difference in the way people treated his father and his Uncle David but he could remember that he had decided that people would treat him the way they did his uncle and not his father.

The knowledge that he would have much preferred it if David had been his father had come later. He had enjoyed it when David had begun to treat him more like a son than a nephew and he had enjoyed even more displacing Olivia in her father’s affections, had relished knowing that of the two of them he came first.

It had been David and his grandfather who had been full of praise and encouragement when he had announced his intention to train as a barrister.

‘You’ll need a first-class degree,’ his father had warned him. ‘And even then it won’t be easy.’

‘Stop trying to put the lad off,’ his grandfather had interrupted. ‘It’s time we had a QC on our side of the family.’

‘Well, that’s certainly what I intend to aim for,’ Max had agreed, taking advantage of his grandfather’s good mood, ‘but it isn’t going to be that simple. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get a part-time job whilst I’m at Oxford—not if I’m going to get a good degree,’ he added virtuously, ‘and as for my grant … And then I’m going to have to replace my car …’ He had paused hopefully, and as he had anticipated, his grandfather hadn’t disappointed him.

‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort something out. You’ve got some money coming to you eventually from your grandmother, and as for a car, haven’t you got a twenty-first coming up …?’

Later on he had overheard his parents discussing the incident.

‘It’s David all over again,’ he heard his mother saying angrily, ‘and Max encourages him.’

‘Yes, I know, but what could I do?’ Max had heard his father responding quietly. ‘You know what Dad’s like.’

The trouble with his mother was that she was too moralistic, Max decided, but then he supposed she had to be something. After all, she wasn’t as physically attractive as David’s wife, Tiggy, the kind of woman that men stopped to stare at in the street. The kind of woman that other men envied a man for having. He could still vividly remember the thrill it had given him the year David and Tiggy had come to his school sports day instead of his parents.

Old Harris, the sports master, had gone beetroot red and behaved like an idiot when Max had introduced Tiggy to him. Max had amused himself imagining his wanking off later in the privacy of his rented rooms as he relived the occasion. Pathetic sod. Max bet he didn’t know what it was like to have a woman, unlike Max himself, who had lost his virginity at fourteen with the able, the very able, help of a girl who worked behind the bar at the pub they all went into after Saturday morning sport.

Tucked away down a side street in Chester, it had possessed the kind of seediness that both excited and amused him. For a start it had so obviously been a place his respectable father would never have dreamed of going to, and as for his mother … But Max had enjoyed it. Just as he had enjoyed the slightly sweaty, earthy scent of the girl as she took him back to her room and let him kiss and grope her for several minutes before finally pushing him off and commanding him to wait whilst she stripped off her clothes.

It had been the first time he had seen a real naked female in the flesh, and she had had no inhibitions about letting him see her, even to the extent of laughing mockingly at him after she propped herself up on her pillows and spread her legs, inviting him to have a good look at what lay between them.

‘Bet you haven’t seen many of these before, have you?’ she demanded, grinning at him as he touched the thicket of dark, rough hair and then parted the thick, fleshy lips beneath it. ‘Know what this is, do you?’ she asked him, commanding him to look as she revealed the small inner nub of hard flesh.

‘Course I do,’ Max responded swaggeringly.

‘Good,’ she announced, ‘then you’ll know what to do with it, won’t you?’

Max certainly thought he did but she soon disabused him of this misapprehension.

‘God, you’re rough,’ she complained. ‘It’s not your own prick you’ve got there, you know, and besides,’ she added slyly, watching him, ‘it works much better if you suck it.’

She laughed when she saw his expression.

‘Never gone down on a girl before, have you? Well, now’s your big chance.’

She hadn’t let him put himself inside her until after she’d had her orgasm and by then … She had laughed again when he hadn’t been able to hold back or control his excitement or the thick gush of semen that shot from his tensely erect cock, but she hadn’t been laughing later when he had thrust into her and gone on thrusting until she was moaning and clawing at his back, urging him on and on and then screeching like the alley cat that she was as he took her through her orgasm and refused to stop until she had had another and then another. He hadn’t seen her again after that—there hadn’t been any need.

He could remember how shocked and disgusted he’d been when his mother had been pregnant with Joss, knowing that she and his father still did it.

He could remember her and his father attending one of his school functions and how furious and ashamed he had felt at the sight of her heavily pregnant body. She had no right, at her age … She was making a laughing-stock of herself and of him.

Max’s mouth hardened as he thought of his parents; sometimes there was a look in his mother’s eyes when she watched him….

His mother was crazy if she thought he was going to end up like his father, a second-rate man working for a second-rate out-of-touch family business in a second-rate county town. If it wasn’t for his Uncle David and his charismatic personality, the business would have gone to the wall years ago. Just because his uncle had made one foolish mistake and …

It wasn’t a mistake Max was going to repeat. Oh, he intended to enjoy his life but he also intended to make sure he didn’t get caught in the same trap as his uncle.

Max had made sure that he left Oxford with a good enough degree to get him into a decent set of chambers after his Bar finals; and once there not only had he made sure that he brought himself to the attention of those who could be of benefit to his future career, but additionally he had also made sure that his life wasn’t all hard work and paying lip-service to his professional ambitions. However, unlike his uncle, he had been discreet and careful.

‘Still here, old boy? I thought you were intending to get off early.’

Max tensed as Roderick Hamilton walked into his office. Roderick was just over twelve months his senior. They had been at Oxford at the same time but had not mixed in the same circles; Roderick’s parents were extremely wealthy and well-connected. His uncle was the present head of chambers, which was no doubt why of the two of them Roderick had been chosen to fill the vacancy for a tenancy at the end of their pupillage whilst Max had had to fall back on the ignominy of being allowed merely to stay on as a squatter. This meant, of course, that the only fee-paying work that Max could get was whatever had been passed over by the existing members of the chambers, including Roderick.

Max had never been the type to feel the need to make close friends; to Max his peers were rivals, obstacles he had to overcome, but in Roderick’s case, Max actively disliked the man, as well.

‘Mmm … the Wilson brief. Hard luck,’ Roderick commiserated as he picked up the papers on Max’s desk and glanced at them before tossing them to one side. ‘Pity you’re not free this weekend,’ he added. ‘Ma’s having a “do” for my sister. She’s coming out this year and Ma’s asked me to round up some men.’

Max didn’t take his eyes off the papers he was now pretending to study. He knew perfectly well that Roderick was trying to amuse himself at his own expense; there was no way Roderick’s mother would welcome any uninvited extra guests to the extremely prestigious and carefully planned ball she was hostessing for her daughter’s coming-out party.

‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ he responded without looking at Roderick. ‘It’s my father’s fiftieth birthday this weekend.’

‘Ah, you’ll have heard about old Benson, I expect,’ Roderick remarked, obviously getting down to the real purpose of his ‘visit’.

Even though he had been expecting it, waiting for it, in actual fact Max could still feel his body fighting to betray the rage that had been boiling inside him all day.

‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ he agreed.

‘Once he goes it will mean there’ll be a tenancy vacancy in chambers,’ Roderick told him unnecessarily.

‘Yes,’ Max responded neutrally, knowing that he had to make some response.

‘Applying for it, are you?’

Max could feel his control starting to slip. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ he lied.

‘Well, I should do if I were you, old chap,’ Roderick warned him, ‘because it seems that tenancies aren’t that easy to come by these days and I’ve heard that there’s a lot of interest being shown in this one. Not, of course, that there should be any problem if you did decide to go for it. After all, you did your pupillage here and you’ve been squatting here for … let me think, it must be well over a year, mustn’t it? God, is that the time? I’d better go … I promised Ma I’d be on hand at home this evening. Good luck with the Wilson brief,’ he drawled as he walked into the corridor.

Max waited until he was quite sure that Roderick had gone before balling up the piece of paper he had been reading and hurling it across the room with all the force of his rugger training. Damn Roderick, damn him to hell and back and damn his bloody uncle, as well.

It was over eight months now since Max had heard the first whisper that Clive Benson was going to be invited to become a judge. He had heard it initially on a visit to Chester to keep up with the Chester branch of the family; after all, in this business you needed all the help you could get. And ever since then he had been doing all he could to make sure that

he

 got the vacancy when it came up.

On Wednesday morning, when the clerk had told him that the senior partner wanted to have a meeting with him, Max had confidently expected to be told officially about the vacancy and to be assured that once the tenancy did fall vacant, it would be his.

Instead he had been told following much harrumphing and throat clearing that after much discussion the partners had decided it was time they observed the rules against sexual discrimination and gave consideration to taking on a female barrister. Not that that necessarily meant that they were going to do so, nor that he was being passed over, Max had been assured. All applicants would be considered on their merits, of course.

‘Of course,’ Max had returned through gritted teeth but he knew exactly what he was being told and, without doubt, Roderick also knew exactly what was going on. How could he not do?

It was too late now for Max to wish he had not announced privately to his grandfather the last time he had gone home that the tenancy was as good as his. Gramps was already champing at the bit about the fact that he was only working as a squatter. In his day such a situation had been inconceivable; you did your pupillage and then went on to work as a fully fledged junior barrister. But things had changed; places in chambers were hard to come by.

And just who the hell was this female anyway? No names had been mentioned and mentally Max had run through the female barristers of his acquaintance who might be considered. Sod the bloody sex discrimination laws. What about him … what about discriminating against him?

He had gone out that night in a foul mood, picked up the girl he was currently dating, a leggy, passionate redhead who had made no objection when he had cut their dinner date short and taken her home. She

had

 objected later on, though, on the fifth occasion he had woken her in the night to vent his pent-up fury and resentment, filling her body with his without taking sufficient time to arouse her completely first, using her ruthlessly and emotionlessly and refusing to let her go until he had driven his body into a state of physically exhausted detachment.

She had told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be seeing her again but he didn’t particularly care. He had more important things to worry about. Despite all the sexual energy he had discharged, he was still furiously, bitterly angry. He was

owed

 that vacancy.

He had worked his butt off this last year, letting them throw every bit of dross they had at him. Gritting his teeth, he had managed to master the sometimes almost overwhelming urge to turn round and tell them just what to do with their non-fee-paying, thanklessly unrewarding juvenile bits of work they wouldn’t give a pupil to do but which they had no compunction about dumping on his desk, knowing he could not,

dared

 not, object.

What had all that been for if he wasn’t going to get the vacant tenancy? He might as well have gone into industry; there at least he would be earning a decent salary. But he hadn’t gone into industry because as his Uncle David and his grandfather had desired, so Max wanted for himself the prestige of being a barrister, of rising to QC and ultimately being called to the Bench.

He wanted it, hungered for it, yearned for it,

ached

 for it and, by God, he intended to have it, and no female, no sex discrimination law was going to stand in his way.

There was only one way to deal with the situation now and Max knew exactly what it was, but first he had to find out exactly the identity of the hopeful candidate for the vacancy. The partners would no doubt know and so, too, would the senior clerk, but Max quickly dismissed him from his calculations. He would never divulge that kind of information to him, which left only the partners and anyone who had their confidence or access to it.

Max was still mulling over what course of action he could take when he climbed into his car two hours later and headed for the North.

‘Here we are, home.’

‘Very impressive,’ Caspar murmured as Olivia brought her car to a halt and turned round in her seat to look at him.

‘Here’s Tiggy,’ she announced when she saw the front door open and her mother hurry towards the stationary car.

Caspar remained silent as he turned to take his first look at Olivia’s mother. Her use of her mother’s nickname whenever she spoke of her wasn’t anything unusual in the society in which he had grown up, but a certain undertone that was always in Olivia’s voice when she spoke about her mother made his study of the older woman thoughtfully assessing.

Physically, they were very alike; Olivia had inherited her mother’s beauty including her high-cheeked facial features. In contrast to her mother, however, Olivia’s beauty radiated from within her in a way that made it almost unimportant that she possessed the kind of looks that could take one’s breath away. Beside her daughter, Tiggy seemed to be a beautiful but blank two-dimensional image.

Caspar’s first feeling as he watched her was one of disappointment. Why so? he wondered as he got out of the car and waited for Olivia to introduce them. What had he expected … hoped for, if indeed he had hoped for anything? Perhaps despite that carefully neutral note he had already observed in Olivia’s voice, her mother would still turn out to be more rather than less of what her daughter already was.

‘Livvy darling … at last … Oh dear, look at your nails and your hair, and those jeans … Oh, darling—’

‘Tiggy, this is Caspar,’ Olivia interrupted her mother calmly. ‘Caspar, this is my mother.’

‘Tiggy, you must call me Tiggy,’ Tiggy announced in the slightly breathy voice that years ago admirers had told her was so incredibly sexy. ‘Come on in, both of you. I’m afraid your father and I are just on our way out,’ she told Olivia as she urged them into the house. ‘We’re having dinner with the Buckletons….’

The front door was already open, the parquet floor gleaming richly of wax, and as he stepped inside, Caspar’s initial impression was one of a room filled with soft colour and flowers. There were huge bowls filled with floral arrangements everywhere: in th