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And then her uncle called round, supposedly to buy some plants but in reality to tell him that Verity had decided to stay on in New York for a further year.
The business wasn’t building up as fast as Silas had expected. He was struggling to service the bank borrowing he had taken out to buy and develop the garden centre, and when his bank manager telephoned him a week later to inform him that they had had an anonymous offer from someone wanting to buy the newly established garden centre from him he was so tempted to take it, to move away and make a fresh start somewhere else. What, after all, was there to keep him in the area any longer? His parents had decided to retire to Portugal, and he knew there was no way he could bear to live in the same town as Verity once she did return to take over her uncle’s business—but then fate stepped in, throwing him a wild card.
He had obtained tickets for the annual prestigious Chelsea Flower Show—two of them—because he had assumed by then that Verity would be back from New York and he had wante
d to take her with him.
Almost, he decided not to go. He had lost his love, and it looked very much as if he could soon be losing his business as well, but the tickets were bought and paid for and so he set out for London.
He saw Sarah when he was booking in at his hotel. She was staying there too, a thin, too pale girl who looked nothing like Verity and whom, if he was honest, he felt more sympathy for than desire. Her attempts to pick him up were so obvious and awkward that he had took pity on her and offered to buy her a drink. She was, she told him, originally from Australia where she had lived with foster parents, and she had come to England trying to trace her birth mother.
Whilst living in London she had met and fallen in love with a fellow Australian who had now left the country to continue his round-the-world tour, refusing to take Sarah with him.
‘I thought he loved me,’ she told Silas sadly, ‘but he didn’t, he was just using me.’
Her words and her sadness struck a sombre chord within Silas. In an attempt to cheer her up he offered her his spare ticket for the flower show, which she accepted.
They spent all that day together and the next, although there was nothing remotely sexual between them. Silas simply didn’t feel that way about her. Verity was the only woman he wanted. Emotionally he might hate her for what she had done to him, but physically, at night alone in his bed, he still ached and yearned for her.
Even now he still didn’t know what prompted him to knock on Sarah’s door the second night after they had met. She didn’t answer his knock but when, driven by some sixth sense, he turned the handle and pushed open the door, he found her seated on the bed, a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of pills on the bed beside her.
He shook her so savagely as he demanded to know how many she had taken that it was a wonder her neck didn’t snap, he acknowledged later.
‘None,’ she told him dull-eyed, ‘not yet…’
‘Not yet. Not ever!’ Silas told her sharply, picking up the bottle and going through to the bathroom to flush the contents down the lavatory.
When he came back she was crying soullessly into her hands.
‘Don’t go,’ she begged him. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’
And so he stayed and, inevitably perhaps, they had sex, out of compassion and pity on his part and loneliness and need on hers.
In the morning they went their separate ways, but not before Silas had insisted on giving Sarah his telephone number and getting her own address from her.
He was concerned enough about her to telephone her as soon as he got home and to ring her regularly twice a week after that.
Always, at the back of his mind, was the concern that she might succumb and try a second time to take her own life. She had told him sadly that when her boyfriend had moved on she had felt she had nothing left to live for. His own pain at losing Verity had enabled him to understand what she had been feeling. He had counselled her to think about returning to Australia and her foster parents and friends, and she had promised him she would think about doing so, and then he received the tearful telephone call that was to completely change his life—to change both their lives.
She was pregnant, she told him, an accident. She was on the pill but had forgotten to take it. He was not to worry, she said, she intended to have the pregnancy terminated.
Silas reacted immediately and instinctively, taking the first train to York where she was living.
‘I can’t afford a baby,’ she protested when he told her that he didn’t want her to have a termination.
‘This is my baby as well as yours,’ Silas reminded her sombrely. ‘We could get married and share the responsibility.’
‘Get married? Us…? You and me? But you don’t…It was just sex,’ she protested shakily.
Just sex maybe, but they had still created a new life between them, and in the end she gave way and they were married very quickly and very quietly.
From the start Honor had been an independent, cheerful child. Until she had started school Silas had often taken her to work with him and the bond between them was very close and strong. She had asked about her mother, of course, and Silas had told her what little he knew, but until recently she had always seemed perfectly happy for there just to be the two of them.
He had named her Honor as a form of promise to Sarah that he would always honour the bargain they had made between them to put the welfare of the child they had created first, and he believed that he had always honoured that bargain.
He could hear Verity coming back downstairs now.
‘I…I’m sorry about…about the car…’ she told him awkwardly as she walked into the kitchen.
