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Did he and other people really believe she was so weak, had so little going for her, so few options open to her that she would welcome such an offer? Well, she would show them, she decided fiercely; she would show them all: her parents, her brother, Frank Jarvis… Blake Hamilton…
Blake Hamilton. She went very still. Now why on earth had she tagged him on to that list? Her subconscious must have been well and truly disturbed by Frank Jarvis’s visit for it to fling such a remote piece of her past at her.
She had put Blake firmly and permanently out of her mind the day she’d agreed to marry Andrew.
And out of her heart? She gave a small angry shrug. Now she was being ridiculous. She had had a crush on Blake, that was all, her feelings for him created by teenage hormones and fuelled by fantasy. They had been no more real than her romanticised, idealised image of him; his treatment of her, his rejection of her had proved that.
She tensed as she heard the phone ringing, tempted to ignore its summons, but common sense told her that it was hardly likely to be Frank Jarvis telephoning to pursue his suit of her.
A wry smile curled her mouth. No, indeed.
When she answered the phone she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not when she heard the boys’ headmaster’s voice.
‘Both boys are fine,’ he assured her, anticipating her anxious question. ‘Perhaps because they’ve got each other and maybe partly because they aren’t the only pupils we have here to have suffered some kind of personal trauma. The reason I’m actually calling is the Easter holidays.’
Guiltily Philippa recognised that she had been so concerned with making plans for the future that she had overlooked the present.
‘Both boys are down to go to Italy with the school, but I’m afraid that when your husband paid the school fees no extras were included.’
‘How much, exactly, is involved?’ she asked him unhappily.
When he told her her heart sank even further. The last thing she wanted to do was to cancel the boys’ trip at the last moment, but she couldn’t see what alternative she had. There was certainly no way she could afford that kind of money.
‘You don’t have to let me have your decision right now,’ she heard the headmaster telling her quietly. ‘But perhaps if you could telephone me tomorrow evening…’
‘Yes… yes, I’ll do that,’ Philippa told him.
After she had put the phone down, she stood where she was, staring unseeingly in front of her. What should she do? What could she do other than ring the boys and explain to them that she couldn’t afford to let them go to Italy?
They would be bound to feel humiliated and embarrassed in front of their friends and schoolmates at having to drop out at the last minute.
The last thing she had ever wanted for them was that they should grow up believing that they should judge themselves and others only by their material assets, but Andrew’s death was bound to have made them feel vulnerable and insecure.
And then there were the practicalities to consider. If they came home, she would have to feed and entertain them, and, much as she herself longed for the comfort of having them with her, for their sakes she could not give in to such selfishness.
For their sakes she would have to bite down on her pride and go cap in hand to her parents, she acknowledged tiredly. Not a prospect she relished one tiny little bit. In fact today had been a day filled with so many unpalatable realisations that it was a wonder she wasn’t suffering from mental and emotional indigestion, she admitted ruefully.
Half an hour later, as she got into bed wearing her plain cotton nightshirt, she tried to envisage the nightwear Frank Jarvis would have expected her to don had she accepted his offer.
What did his tastes run to? Something in black, and restricting, rendering her a passive object for him to paw over and play with; a physical present he had bought for himself all tied up in silk and ribbons.
That kind of relationship was the total antithesis of what she had once dreamed of having. The one she had once believed she would have… in the days before Blake had taken those dreams and deliberately destroyed them.
Then she had believed that the smiles Blake gave her, the way he watched her, talked to her, treated her meant that the exciting, overwhelming physical and emotional turmoil she was in whenever he was there wasn’t just felt by her; that he shared it… But that had been before he had told her the truth, before he had humiliated her, almost destroyed her, cruelly confronting her with the fact of the matter: that she was nothing more to him than the silly, immature, spoiled sister of one of his friends. It had been the shock of discovering how badly she had misjudged the situation, how little he really thought of her, how wrong she had been to believe that he cared about her that had been responsible ultimately for her marriage to Andrew. Unable to believe any longer that she could trust her own judgement, she had given up trying
to fight against her father’s control of her life.
But that, in the end, had turned out to be just as much of a mistake as loving Blake. How many more mistakes could she allow herself to make? Not many, and certainly not the one of becoming involved with someone like Frank. No, certainly not that one. Her flesh crawled at the thought.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Pippa…’
Startled, Philippa looked up, pushing her hair out of her eyes as she watched her visitor approaching her. She had been so busy digging over the weed-infested vegetable garden that she hadn’t even heard her arriving.
If she had ever been asked to name her closest woman friend, it would have been Susie’s name that she would have given.
They had met originally when both of them were doing voluntary work and immediately a rapport had developed between them despite their apparent differences.
