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‘I see love… love in its purest, most selfless and giving form, and I see Anya growing in the warmth of that love like a starved plant.’
‘She has grown, hasn’t she?’ Philippa had agreed quickly, anxious to change the subject. His compliments warmed her heart in much the same way that his presence warmed her life, and that knowledge, that admission was something far too dangerous for her to dwell on…
‘I think she’s put on weight as well,’ she had continued, speaking, she knew, far too quickly. ‘I was going to ask you if it would be all right to buy some new clothes. I expect I’ll have to buy the boys some things anyway…’
But the boys’ clothes would be second-hand, while the allowance Blake had set aside for her to use for Anya’s needs was so generous that she could buy an entire new wardrobe without making much of a dent in it.
Blake had already told her that he was perfectly happy to leave it to her discretion how much she spent and on what, but she was scrupulously careful about checking with him first before she bought anything, something which she felt sometimes irritated him for some reason.
‘Fine,’ he said now. ‘Why don’t you leave it a few days, though, until they’ve all settled down, and then I’ll take a day off and we’ll have a proper shopping trip?’
Philippa glanced across at him, digesting his suggestion in silence. Blake had revealed several unexpected traits over these last few weeks, not the least his desire to be involved not just with Anya’s day-to-day life, but, it seemed, with her sons’ lives as well.
He had already mentioned taking time off to take them all out on various day trips to enliven the long summer holiday, and when Philippa had demurred that there was no need for him to feel he had to include her sons in his plans he had reminded her of his original conversation with her. ‘It will be good for Anya to mix with her peers in a family situation.’
‘We don’t know how well they get on with one another yet,’ she had reminded him.
‘Probably not very well
at first,’ he had surprised her by saying. ‘Learning to interact with others in a close family unit isn’t easy even when you’ve been doing it from birth.’
When she had moved into Blake’s large rambling house he had made over one of the downstairs rooms to her as her own private sitting-room, an act which Philippa had assumed was more to protect his privacy than hers.
But in the evening after supper, when she and the boys had retreated to this sitting-room, Anya had wanted to come too, and of course Philippa hadn’t felt it was fair to exclude her, so that the room, instead of being somewhere where she spent the evening alone as befitted Blake’s employee, had become instead the focal point of their joint lives.
And not just for Anya but for Blake too.
Of course it was only natural that he would want to spend time with Anya and develop his relationship with her, but some evenings it was her sons who gravitated towards Blake, bombarding him with questions about some apparently wholly masculine pursuit, while Anya curled up on the sofa with her.
It had amazed her to hear Rory talking quite openly and easily to Blake about his relationship with his father, amazed her and humbled her a little as well as she’d recognised the man already growing in her elder son in that he had quite obviously felt he had to protect her from the concerns she’d overheard him expressing to Blake.
Perhaps it was only natural that her sons should relate more easily to another male—they were, after all, used to being at an all-male school and used to relating to their male teachers—but she didn’t want them to grow up isolated from contact and familiarity with her own sex. Perhaps now that she was going to send them to a local mixed school for their next school year, that would help redress the balance.
Although she had tried to insist on Blake’s reducing her salary to cover the cost of the boys’ food and board, he had been so grimly sarcastic about it that she had had no option but to give in.
‘Oh, yes, feeding a couple of half-grown boys is going to make me bankrupt, is that what you think?’ he had asked her, and then she had heard him curse as he saw her wince, and immediately apologise for his unfortunate choice of words.
‘I’m sorry,’ he had said. ‘I didn’t think…’
He had been standing close enough to her to catch hold of her hand, holding it between both of his own in a gesture of comfort and remorse.
For a moment she had been terrified that she might make a complete fool of herself and actually cry.
There had been no physical displays of affection for her from her father when she was growing up, and not really from her mother either, and, while she had made sure that both her sons knew what it was to give and receive spontaneous physical affection, Andrew had been cast in much the same mould as her father.
To be touched like this by a man in a gesture of physical apology and reassurance was so rare that she couldn’t even remember the last time it had happened.
And, not for the first time since she had come to live with Blake, she had been starkly aware of the bleakness and paucity of her emotional life.
Watching him with Anya, and with Rory and Daniel, seeing the way all three of them responded to him and he to them, the natural gestures of affection and comradeship they exchanged, made her achingly aware of the difference between her and Andrew’s relationship and the relationship a man like Blake would have with a woman with whom he was intimately involved.
‘When’s Blake coming home?’ Rory asked her now, walking into the kitchen. ‘He said we could play that new computer game he got us tonight.’
‘I don’t know,’ Philippa responded, adding firmly, ‘And when he does, you mustn’t pester him…’
‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ Rory assured her. ‘He’s not like Dad,’ he added innocently. ‘He likes being with us. What’s for tea, Mum? I’m starving…’
Philippa closed her eyes on the wave of emotion.
