Пэнни Джордан – Coming Home (страница 2)

‘He still misses Uncle David, doesn’t he?’ Joss cut in.

Jenny and Jon exchanged speaking looks. Joss had accurately and swiftly highlighted the true cause of Ben’s deep-seated malaise.

David Crighton, Jon’s twin brother, had disappeared just a few weeks after their joint fiftieth birthday party, only a short time ahead of Jon’s discovery that David had fraudulently plundered the bank account of an elderly widow whose business affairs he had been responsible for.

Had it not been for the fact that Jon’s aunt Ruth had stepped in and offered to repay every penny of the money David had ‘borrowed’, the resultant scandal would have damaged not just the guilty but the innocent, as well. David could have put into disrepute the family’s legal firm in which he was the senior partner although, in truth, it had been run by his quieter and less flamboyant brother, Jon.

Even so, Jon had argued passionately against Ruth’s decision, insisting that the interests of truth and honesty must be put before those of the family and himself.

In the end, though, Ruth had prevailed upon him to listen to what she was saying because, as she had insisted at the time, since David had disappeared, none of them had any means of knowing if David himself had intended to repay the money or indeed if the now deceased widow had actually loaned or given it to him.

Initially, only Jon, Olivia and Ruth knew the truth, but after an emotional discussion it had been decided that they would tell their ‘nearest and dearest’ because, as Ruth had put it, secrecy between couples and close family members could be very hurtful and damaging. But the truth had been kept hidden from Ben for the most altruistic of reasons.

Since his disappearance, nothing had been heard of David despite Jon’s attempts to discover his whereabouts.

The last contact they had had from David had been from Jamaica, but when Max had flown out there to look for him, no trace could be found. All Max had got for his pains was a vicious knife attack on one of the local Jamaican beaches.

After David’s disappearance, his wife Tania had returned to her parents’ home on the south coast. The marriage was well and truly over and Jon and Jenny had brought up Jack, David and Tania’s son, alongside their own.

There were only a couple of years between Jack and Joss. They had always got on well together and were as close as brothers.

Right now, though, Jenny’s concern was not for the younger contingent of the Crighton family, but for its oldest member, Ben, who was visibly getting frailer with each month that passed.

‘He called me David last week,’ Joss told his mother sadly.

Jenny frowned. There was no way Joss looked anything like his uncle.

‘Do you think Uncle David will ever come back?’ the boy asked.

Jenny looked helplessly at her husband.

‘I doubt it, Joss,’ Jon told him gently. ‘David was … is …’ He stopped and shook his head, not wanting to tell his son that David had not just been a braggart and as careless with other people’s feelings as he had been with their money, but that he had been a coward, as well. Thanks to their father, David had grown up believing he could do no wrong. Ben had shielded David from the harsh consequences of his behaviour all through his life, often at Jon’s own expense. David was the favoured child, the blue-eyed boy, and Ben had set him upon a pedestal, which, it seemed now to Jon, was so high, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would have had to fall.

Despite the cruel comparisons his father had made over the years, Jon had always loved David—did still love him—but no longer with the blind love that his father had compelled him to give his sibling, no longer in a way that meant he had to subjugate his own needs and feelings to those of his brother.

Without David’s presence casting its dark shadow over his life, Jon’s personality had flourished and blossomed, but that did not mean that he had stopped loving his twin—not for a moment.

‘I don’t think he would ever want to come back,’ Jon offered quietly.

‘Not even if he knew how much Gramps wants to see him?’ Joss asked.

Helplessly, Jon looked at Jenny.

‘It isn’t quite as easy as that, Joss,’ Jenny told him. ‘There are problems … and—’

‘Because of the money,’ Joss interrupted her. ‘But he could still come back. He could still see Gramps. Surely if he knew how much Gramps wants him …’

‘Maybe if he did,’ Jenny agreed. Privately, she didn’t think it would make the least difference. David had always been self-absorbed and selfish; a vain, weak man who had never put another person’s feelings or needs before his own in the whole of his life. ‘But since we have no idea where he is nor any way of contacting him—’

‘But he and Dad are twins,’ Joss interrupted, startling them both by adding not entirely jokingly, ‘There’s supposed to be a bond between twins that means they are telepathically linked.’ When neither of his parents responded, he reminded them urgently, ‘Katie and Louise have it.’

Jenny sighed. It was true their twin daughters did have that special bond that twins do sometimes experience, that ability to know when the other was in need or in pain despite the miles separating them.

‘Joss, I don’t think …’ she started to respond, then stopped, turning to look at Jon.

‘David and I were never close in that kind of way,’ Jon told Joss gruffly.

‘But you could try,’ the boy persisted. ‘For Gramps’s sake.’

Uneasily, Jenny studied his set face. Something was bothering him, something that he wasn’t saying.

‘Joss—’ she began gently, but as though he had read her mind, Joss continued quickly.

‘When Gramps mistook me for David, he …’ He hesitated and then told her chokily, ‘He started to cry … he said that he had missed me … and that life hadn’t been worth living without me. I never really had much to do with Uncle David and I know what you all think about him. Even Jack says he wishes that you were his father, Dad, but Gramps …’

Wordlessly, Jon reached out and put his arm around his son. Tall as he was, just that little bit taller than Jon himself now, his body, his bones, still had that terrifyingly vulnerable feeling of youth.

As he hugged him fiercely and ruffled his hair, Jon knew that the tears he could see gleaming in his son’s eyes were mirrored in his own.

‘We’ve tried to find him, son,’ he told him huskily. ‘But sometimes people just don’t want to be found. He could be anywhere,’ he added gently.

‘But what about Gramps? Doesn’t he care that Gramps is missing him and that he’s getting older?’

Not knowing what to say, Jon sighed as he heard the emotion breaking up his son’s voice.

His twin and their father had always been close, far closer than he had ever been to either of them, but it had been a closeness founded on their mutual promotion of David into a person he had never actually been. Keeping up that kind of fiction, that kind of falsity, year after year, decade after decade, had ultimately resulted in the relationship self-destructing or being destroyed, which, in effect, was what David had done with his disappearance.

Of course, Jon knew how much his father missed David, but the David Ben missed was someone he himself had created.

Jon suspected that the realisation that he was not the superhuman that his father had always lauded him as being had been as traumatic to David as its discovery would have been to their father. But that was in the past now. David’s dramatic exit from their lives had heralded a series of transformations that had seen his own marriage develop into the deeply fulfilling emotional and physical bond he had always longed for.

If David were to return now, Jon suspected that he would be thoroughly bemused by the changes that had taken place. David’s daughter, Olivia, was now married and a mother. Jack, his son, had grown from a boy into a young man, just nineteen and about to start his first year at university. Max, Jon’s son, was married and the father of three.

Yes, there had been plenty of changes and a whole new generation of babies born, including David’s own granddaughters.

Olivia, he knew, had never forgiven her father for what he had done nor for the fact that his actions had almost resulted in the destruction of her relationship with her husband, Caspar.

Her mother, Tania, a victim of the eating disorder, bulimia, had been more the child in the relationship between herself and Olivia than Olivia herself had ever been, and although she had never said so, Jon knew that Olivia placed a large part of the blame for her mother’s disorder on David’s shoulders.

Olivia. Jon frowned as he released his son. He had become increasingly concerned about his niece over the past few months. When he had tried to suggest to her that she was working too hard and that for her to be at the office before him in the morning and still there when he left at night was an excessive devotion to duty, she had snapped crossly at him.

Later, she had apologised, explaining tiredly that it was impossible for her to take work home. ‘Caspar feels that when we’re at home we should spend as much time as we can with the children. Of course I agree with him, but sometimes when I’ve got statements or counsel’s opinions to read through …’