Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ his elder son, his wife, Hillary, and their three children had arrived late the previous evening—several hours after they had originally been expected, with both adults in what was plainly not the best of moods and three children very obviously fractious.

      Hillary, Saul’s American wife, and his own wife, Ann, had put the children to bed whilst he and Saul and his younger son, Nicholas, had broken open a bottle of wine.

      As Nicholas had remarked to his parents after supper, Saul and Hillary were apparently going through a rather difficult patch in their marriage.

      ‘All married couples encounter problems from time to time,’ Ann had responded protectively.

      ‘Mmm … but there are problems and there are problems,’ Nicholas had countered and then refused to be drawn on exactly what he had meant.

      Hugh knew that Saul and Hillary’s marriage had been stormy, but this was the first time he had seen the children so obviously affected by their parents’ differences.

      Saul had a tendency to retreat to a position of lofty solitude and disdain when he was angry, an aggravating habit that Hillary, who was far more emotional and volatile, insisted was sulking. Saul could be exasperating, Hugh admitted, but Hillary seemed to take delight in fuelling the fires that lit that particularly unproductive side of his personality rather than taking the trouble to use her inherently feminine skills of diplomacy and tact to coax him round.

      ‘You’d better not let Hillary hear you saying that,’ Ann had warned him mildly when he voiced the comment to her. ‘She’s a very modern young woman and modern young women do not believe in coaxing men round.’

      ‘No,’ Hugh had agreed regretfully. During the course of his career, he had seen at firsthand considerable evidence of this refusal on the part of what had once been deemed the gentler sex to make good and full use of the assets nature had given them and could only inwardly regret it.

      Perhaps he was old-fashioned, but it seemed to him that male and female relationships had lost something with the onset of modern feminism.

      Ann, thank goodness, just like his own mother, was one of those quiet, gentle, loving women who liked nothing better than mothering and spoiling everyone who came within their ambit.

      Their marriage had been a good and happy one and if occasionally his hormones had been given a potentially dangerous tug by the sight of a slender female leg or the curve of a pretty pair of breasts, he had always had the good sense to remind himself of what he stood to lose by following his natural male instincts.

      As a barrister and now as a judge, he had seen all too clearly for himself the havoc that could be wreaked when men and, regrettably all too commonly these days, women gave in to their basic urges. Take away the human lust for sex and money and there would be no need for men like him, no need for courts or prisons or even for laws.

      Little Meg had finally stopped crying but it was too late for him to go back to sleep now.

      They were due at Ben’s at lunch-time and they were staying with him overnight after the birthday festivities. He would much rather have come straight home to avoid too much socialising with the family. Saul and David did not really get on. Saul was always at his sarcastic worst with David, a fact that had led Hillary the last time they had all got together to accuse Saul of being jealous of his elder cousin.

      Her accusation had had just enough truth to make Hugh wince and the silence between them on the drive back home afterwards had been more difficult to bear than an outright argument.

      Just enough truth and yet, at the same time, no way near enough understanding either of him as her husband, her lover and father of her children, or of him simply as another human being and, as such, flawed and vulnerable and in need of a gentle touch on any tender places.

      Saul, too, had heard Meg’s cries and gone to her. His thoughts were also on the day ahead. He generally enjoyed any family gathering, but he’d keep clear of David if at all possible. To Saul there was something exceedingly irritating about a man who went through life so carelessly, so openly filled with self-satisfaction and approval of himself, who expected others to automatically accord him the same high esteem and respect that he was accustomed to receiving from his father and his twin brother when it was patently obvious that he was simply not deserving of them.

      Oh yes, David had the charisma, the self-confidence to initially blind a new acquaintance with the fool’s gold of a magnetic personality, but in Saul’s view this persona had no depth and no real foundation. Moreover, he was dismayed by David’s selfishness and lack of regard for others. It galled him that people should be so easily deceived by David’s shallow charm and it galled him even more that he himself should feel not only resentful of his possession of it but sometimes almost actually envious.

      Even now, adult though he was, he still felt uncomfortable with the way his reaction to David focused his attention on the dual aspects of his own personality that he would prefer to ignore. In the main he was the dedicated, serious professional that other people assumed him to be, but he was also aware that there was a far less, to him at least, acceptable side to his personality, a tendency to seek the limelight, to crave the attention and, yes, admiration of others, a weakness that he both disliked and mistrusted.

      It wasn’t, he knew, the differences between himself and David that made him dislike David so much—and to some extent Max, who was very much the same type of man—but the similarities. He feared that the weaknesses he could see so clearly in them might somehow be a family trait that he, too, had inherited and that, although now he had well under control, could one day push its way to the surface….

      And what hurt him was that Hillary couldn’t recognise this, couldn’t, didn’t love him enough to try to find out and understand what really lay at the root of his dislike for David.

      David overslept primarily because he had been woken up in the night by the sound of Tiggy in the bathroom. He had known what that meant, of course, and had turned over, pulling the duvet up high around his ears, trying to blot out the sound of her nausea.

      In the early days of their marriage when he had naïvely assumed that her constant bouts of sickness were caused initially by her pregnancy and then afterwards by her delicate stomach, he had been overwhelmed by a mixture of helplessness and protective concern towards her, anxiously hovering, wanting to do something to help ease her discomfort, even though the sound and smell of her sickness made his own stomach heave. He had loved her then, blinded by her fragile beauty and the feelings of triumph and relief that had followed their marriage. Triumph because he had won such a prize away from the other men who had surrounded her in London and relief because her pregnancy and their marriage had taken everyone’s attention away from the real reason he had been asked to leave chambers and give up his plan to qualify as a barrister.

      By silent collusion and an unacknowledged mental sleight of hand, it became an accepted part of the folklore of their family history; the reason he had returned home had been because of his marriage, because of his desire to do the right thing and stand by Tiggy. Publicly at least, his decision not to continue with his training for the Bar had been seen not as a failure, but as a tribute to his sense of honour and fair play.

      Only his closest family had known the real truth and even they….

      To their clients it had been delicately hinted that Jon was having trouble coping with the amount of work in the practice, and when anyone asked, he had simply shrugged gracefully and assured them that no, he was not too disappointed to have had to give up his plans to qualify as a barrister, and those who heard him make this statement had decided that such a man, a man who put СКАЧАТЬ