Starting Over (23 page)

She lives full-time in a special home now. I go visit every week but she can't recognise me now.' Her eyes were bleak.

'My folks died some while back—of a broken heart some might say.... In my line of work you get to see all kinds of human misery and despair, but for me there's nothing out there that comes anywhere near to what a parent feels when they see their child destroyed and they just can't protect them.'

Caspar shook his head. What could he say? Any words would seem inadequate—and worse, an insult.

Instead, uncharacteristically he reached out and took hold of her hand clasping it warmly between both of his own.

'Thanks.' The look she gave him as she removed her hand from his grip spoke volumes.

'I guess over the years I've become a little cynical.

Telling that story...' She gave a small shrug. 'I tend to rate how much time I aim to give the person listening to it, how much access to my life by the way they react to what I've said.'

'So how did I score?' Caspar asked her levelly.

'You're off the board,' Molly told him, but she hadn't, Caspar noticed, said in which direction he was outside her scorecard.

'To tell you right now how much I miss my daughters seems kind of thoughtless and selfish,' he said quietly after several seconds of silence. 'But I do miss them...more and more every day.'

'Are you in contact with them?' Molly asked him.

'No. Not at this stage. We, or rather Olivia, decided that until things were legally settled it was best that we didn't make contact. They know that I'm driving around the States, but with Christmas coming up....

One of my half-siblings has a place out at Aspen. I'd have loved to have the girls out for at least a part of the holiday but I'm not sure the disruption would be good for them right now.'

Molly listened in silence noticing the very British

'the girls' instead of a more American and familiar

'the kids.'

He intrigued her, delighted her and drew her to him in a way that was already making warning bells ring for her.

She was in her thirties, no fool where men were concerned. There had been a youthful and very brief marriage after which she had decided that the only commitment she wanted to make was to herself, which was really just as well because Caspar, despite all his protests to the contrary, was very much still committed to his Olivia and their daughters.

'We'd better go,' she told Caspar, glancing at her watch. 'The garage promised me that they've got the right part for the car this time.'

The mishaps surrounding the repair of her ancient car had become almost a private special-couple-thing kind of a joke between them, only they were not a special couple and the loss of her ancient car was anything but a joke. She could always replace it, of course, but it had belonged to her parents and was the last remaining tangible bridge between the woman she was now and her childhood and for that reason she tended to treat it and value it much as one might a much loved elderly pet.

'If I were you I'd definitely ditch it and get a Harley,' Caspar teased her as they both stepped out into the cold, late-afternoon air.

'No way! Harleys are for teens and sad middle-aged lawyers,' Molly mock-taunted him back. The speed with which they had established an intimate verbal connection worried her a little when she allowed herself to question it.

But why worry about a problem that was soon going to disappear? Caspar had no long-term plans to stay in town and she was certainly not going to encourage him to do so. And just to reinforce that fact, as they walked towards the motorbike she asked him casually,

'What time do you plan to leave in the morning?'

'Straight after breakfast,' Caspar responded. He had been wondering about extending his journey and possibly even spending Christmas in Mexico. He'd de-cline the various family offers to stay because doing so would arouse far too many painful thoughts about home and Amelia and Alex.

At this time of the day—late afternoon—he would normally have collected them from school and taken them home. Just as soon as he had decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life and he had a settled place to live he was going to have them over to stay with him.

He could still visualise the way they had looked the last time he had seen them.

They had virtually reached the parked bike now but Molly had stopped to answer her ringing mobile.

'What...? Yes. Yes, I'll be right there,' Caspar heard her saying, her face was white with shock. Her voice broke up over the words as she told him shakily,

'That was the home. My sister... She...isn't well.... I need to be there.... I'm sorry, I can't delay.... It's been good meeting you, but I have to go.... Goodbye, Caspar...'

ANXIOUSLY
Olivia unlocked the door of her car. Provided there were no traffic hold-ups she would just about be able to make it to the school in time to avoid another telling off.

Her nerves felt as raw as the screeching of the car tyres she could hear as another driver exhibited the frantic impatience she could feel boiling up inside herself. She had barely arrived at the office this morning when Jon had collared her. Unsuspectingly she had followed him into his office, assuming he wanted to talk to her about work only to discover that he actually wanted to try to persuade her to allow her father to

'help' her.

'Your father desperately wants to be there for you, Livvy—to make amends.... Why don't you give him another chance?'

'I already did...many many times whilst I was growing up,' Olivia had informed him bitterly.

Her mobile started to ring just as she was approaching the school. For a moment she was tempted to ignore it but what if the call was important? What if
Caspar
was ringing her?

Pulling into the side of the road she reached for the phone frowning when she recognised Jon and Jenny's number.

'Livvy,' she heard Jenny demanding anxiously.

'Yes. Yes, I'm here,' she confirmed. 'I'm just on my way to school, though, to pick up the girls and I mustn't be late....'

'Livvy...the girls are here.'

'What? But that's impossible. I booked them into the after-school creche. How can they be with you?'

There was a small pause and then she heard Jenny saying quietly, 'They
are
here and... Look, I think it's best if I explain once you get here.'

'Once I get there— Jenny, is something wrong? The girls, are they—'

'They're both fine,' Jenny assured her quickly. 'But there's something... I'll go now and let you get here, Livvy.'

The girls were at Jon and Jenny's.... As she reversed her car and set off in the direction of her aunt and uncle's house, Livvy's thoughts were a seething mass of maternal shock and anxiety.

How could the girls have got there? Jon and Jenny lived nearly three miles away from the school and...

A traffic jam delayed her by several precious minutes so that it was over twenty minutes later that she pulled up on Jenny's drive, abandoning her car to open the door and run towards the house.

Jenny had obviously been waiting for her because she opened the front door immediately.

'I wanted to talk to you before you see the girls,'

Jenny was telling her as she ushered her into her sitting room.

'What's happened? What's wrong? Why—?'

'Nothing's wrong. They're both fine,' Jenny reassured her again firmly.

'But what are they doing here? How did they get here?'

'They walked,' Jenny told her, her eyes and her voice betraying what she was thinking and Livvy could sense the heavy cold sick feeling ricocheting through her own body as she contemplated the long country lane that led twisting and turning across the fields from the school to Jon and Jenny's home.

It was a narrow lane bordered by fields and woodlands, busy with speeding commuter traffic at certain times of the day and emptily quiet at others and it was the kind of lane that represented
every
type of danger to children that all parents feared—speeding traffic, no pavements, thick screening hedgerows which meant...

Olivia felt as though she wanted to be sick.

'They walked—on their own....' She was horrified by her negligence as a parent, a mother. How could she not have known the danger they were in?

'Apparently they left school once classes had finished somehow managing to evade their teacher,'

Jenny was continuing. 'I have to admit they planned it all very well.'

'But Amelia knows she must
never ever
leave the school without being with an adult—she knows—'

Olivia protested.

'As I understand it, it wasn't Amelia who was the driving force behind the enterprise,' Jenny told her ruefully.

Olivia stared at her.

'You mean Alex...' she began in disbelief. 'But she's...' She stopped. Of the two of them Alex
was
the more adventurous, the more stubborn.

'But why...why...?'

Jenny took a deep breath. This was the bit she had been dreading explaining to Olivia ever since the girls had arrived exhausted and bedraggled half an hour earlier.

How on earth they had managed such a long walk without being seen by someone and reported to the authorities, Jenny had no idea. What she did know, however, was that their guardian angel must have been watching over them to protect them.

'I know how much they've been missing you and Uncle Jon,' Olivia was saying shakily, 'But I've tried to explain to them that you've been busy....'

Jenny couldn't meet her eyes.

'It wasn't really me they came to see Olivia.... At least not in the sense that you mean. They wanted to ask me about their grandfather.'

'Their grandfather...?' Olivia couldn't conceal her feelings.

'What did you tell them?' she demanded harshly.

'I said that they should talk to you about him,'

Jenny said gently.

'He came to see me yesterday,' Olivia told Jenny huskily and reluctantly. 'My father...he offered to help me with the children. I told him no. I told him that I didn't want them to have
anything
to do with him and I don't. Leo had told them that he was their grandfather.'

Olivia continued in an uneven voice.

'The girls saw him...my father.... Alex had fallen over in the garden and he picked her up.... They guessed who he was...they asked me all sorts of questions....' She closed her eyes. 'What did they say to you?'

'They asked if it was true that the man they'd met was their grandfather and that he was Uncle Jon's brother. They wanted to know why they had never seen him before.'

'And what did you tell them?' Olivia asked her faintly.

Jenny touched her arm comfortingly.

'It wasn't my place to explain the situation to them, Livvy...and they're so young. I just said that he'd been living in another country but that now he was back.'

Olivia sighed. She could well understand how impossible it would have been for Jenny to even begin to attempt to explain the truth to girls so young.

'I'd better take them home,' she told Jenny wearily.

'Thank you for looking after them.'

She sounded so forlorn that Jenny took hold of her in silent commiseration.

'MUMMY...'

Amelia saw her first.

Without any preamble Olivia told them that she was taking them home, bidding them thank Jenny for looking after them.

The car wasn't the place to ask them the question she wanted to ask. At the end of the short drive Alex was yawning tiredly and had to be carried from the car to the house, shaking her head and announcing that she didn't want any tea when Livvy asked what she would like to eat.

'Aunt Jenny gave us something to eat whilst we were waiting for you,' Amelia told her quietly.

Olivia had promised herself that she wasn't going to frighten them by getting angry but the fear haunting her of what could so easily have happened to them was driving her. Why, when they were both safe and she was giving thanks for that fact, did she still feel like screaming at them that she was furiously angry with them for leaving school in the way they had when they knew that it was expressly forbidden for them to do so?

But to her despair and shame she could see in Amelia's eyes that her elder daughter was afraid of her doing just that so instead, she dropped down on her heels next to her and gently gathering them both to her in her arms she asked as calmly as she could,

'Haven't both Daddy and I always told you that you must never leave school unless one of us is with you—

or we've told you that someone else will collect you?'

Alex, still a baby really, trembled, her eyes filling with huge tears.

'When is my daddy coming home?' she whispered heartbreakingly. 'I want him to come home.'

'Oh, Alex.' Fresh guilt and a grief she didn't want to acknowledge filled Olivia.

'Daddy doesn't love us any more, does he?' Alex was continuing tearfully.

'Of course he loves you,' Olivia responded immediately and she knew truthfully.

"Then why isn't he here?' Alex demanded quickly.

'Sweetheart, you already know why,' Olivia reminded her gently.

'Daddy and Mummy aren't going to live together any more. You know that,' Amelia informed her younger sister sharply, but when she looked at her Olivia could see that if anything her elder daughter was even more upset than her younger.

She ought to have expected this and been prepared for it, Olivia knew, but somehow she had hoped...

convinced herself that the girls had accepted the separation.

'Well, if we can't have a daddy then I want to have a grandpa,' Alex announced, adding challengingly,

'Other children at school have grandpas and grandmas and they—'

'Oh, Alex,' Olivia protested realising painfully that Alex's small body was resisting all Olivia's attempts to offer her love and comfort.

'Amelia...' Olivia turned to her elder daughter. She loved both her children so much that it had never oc-curred to her that they might start to reject her...blame her...because they felt they had lost Caspar.

'You're older than Alex....
You
know you aren't allowed to leave school and that road...'