LITMIR.BIZ

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him at his place of business? She was used to visiting clients in their own homes—she’d have thought he would have instructed that she call and see him at his home.

      But perhaps he was too busy dating sensational-looking females to have any spare time! Astra grinned at the sourness of that thought—good luck to him.

      She wished, though, that he had given Norman Davis some sort of hint about what kind of package he was after. Surely it couldn’t be some kind of a pension plan? Laughable! He’d have stocks and shares by the thousands, endless funds salted away to cover any eventuality; of that she was certain.

      Astra liked to be well prepared before she saw any of her clients, but had just resigned herself to hoping she would have the answers to any questions Sayre Baxendale threw at her, without having to call back to base, when her telephone rang. It was her cousin, Yancie.

      ‘I’ve interrupted you and you hate me?’ Yancie apologised in advance.

      ‘You didn’t and I don’t.’

      ‘You’re in your study.’

      ‘I’m not—I’m in the kitchen and I’ve just finished eating a lasagne Fennia made some time ago.’

      ‘Have you heard from her?’

      ‘Not yet.’

      ‘Neither have I—which isn’t at all surprising. Now—what am I going to do about you?’

      ‘Don’t you dare!’ Astra threatened, recalling again her horror when, at Fennia’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, Yancie had said ‘And then there was one’ with such a meaningful gleam in her eye—Astra now the only one of the three cousins remaining unmarried. Astra had had to tell her cousin to scrap at once any embryo notion she might have of seeing to it that she met ‘Mr Right’.

      Yancie laughed at her fierce ‘Don’t you dare’. ‘I wouldn’t, love,’ she promised. ‘But with both Fen and me finding such utter bliss it doesn’t seem right that you haven’t. I know, I know,’ she went on quickly before Astra could butt in, ‘you’re a career woman, happy as you are and absolutely, positively, have no interest in getting married. But, honestly, Astra, if it does happen, and you do fall in love, please—let it happen. Promise me!’

      In Astra’s view the possibility that she, like her two cousins, might fall head over heels in love was so remote as to be extinct. It was, therefore, no hardship to give Yancie the promise she wanted.

      ‘Oh, I will,’ she answered lightly, and changed the subject. ‘How are things with you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t answer—it’s there in your voice. You’re still on cloud nine.’

      ‘Fly in the ointment,’ Yancie confessed.

      At once Astra wanted to do anything she could for her cousin. Yancie had been married to Thomson Wakefield only three months—nothing should be allowed to mar her happiness. ‘Your mother?’ she guessed.

      ‘How well we all know one another!’ And, to show that she wasn’t too distressed, Yancie laughed. ‘Mother’s broken up with Henry and…’

      ‘That didn’t last long!’

      ‘Does it ever? Anyhow, for some unknown reason, my mother wants to come and stay with me for a while.’

      ‘Grief!’ Astra exclaimed; it was relatively unheard of for any of their mothers to want very much to do with their daughters, much less ask to come and stay for a while.

      ‘My sentiments exactly!’

      ‘What does Thomson say?’

      ‘He says to invite her—and he’ll invite his mother to come at the same time. I think he’s thinking that they’ll both be such ghastly company for each other that neither of them will stay long.’

      Astra remembered Thomson’s sour-looking mother at his wedding—she had no trouble at all remembering Yancie’s mother, her aunt Ursula. She, like her two sisters—Astra’s mother and Fennia’s mother—was completely flighty, man and money mad.

      But, as irrepressible as ever, Yancie was laughing again as she stated, ‘I think I might just do that.’ And Astra burst out laughing too.

      She was not laughing a little while later when she put down the phone. Memories were surfacing, memories which she had thought no longer haunted her, but all too plainly, and painfully, still did.

      Her parents had divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, according to her aunts, had not particularly wanted a child but had conceived her as a ploy to get wealthy Carleton Northcott to marry her.

      Astra’s aunt Ursula and aunt Portia had seen nothing at all wrong in revealing to Astra when she had been in her early teens that their sister Imogen had declined Carleton Northcott’s offer of a handsome maintenance settlement for her and the child. Instead, obviously knowing something of the integrity of the man—for all it seemed he’d balked at having to actually marry her—Imogen Jolliffe, as she was then, had horrified him by telling him it was marriage—or an abortion.

      So Imogen had got what she wanted. It hadn’t been enough for her. Whether the marriage would have worked had she kept to her marriage promises was difficult to tell, but her baby had been barely six months old when Mrs Carleton Northcott started playing in pastures new.

      Astra remembered little of those early years. What she did remember was that, for all her father no longer lived with them, she saw more of him than she saw of her mother.

      In her early years Astra grew used to being banished to her room on the occasions when her mother brought ‘a friend’ home. As it happened, Astra, a quiet, reserved child, was quite happy not to have to stay and be talked at by the succession of men who filed through the house.

      Had she stayed at home, however, she might—while shying away from it—have formed the opinion over her growing years that her mother’s promiscuity was normal behaviour. Though her father had been ready to put a stop to any chance of that.

      She was just coming up to her seventh birthday and had spent a very pleasant weekend with him when, according to her aunt Delia, her mother’s elder half-sister, her father had been disturbed by Astra’s innocent chatter about the story book she’d been reading in her bedroom while her mother had talked to ‘Uncle’ William in her bedroom.

      Instead of returning Astra to her home at the end of her weekend stay with him, it was to her aunt Delia’s house that he took her. ‘Stay here with Aunt Delia, poppet; I just want to go and have a private word with Mummy,’ he explained, having had a discussion with her aunt while Astra went to chatter to Mollie, Aunt Delia’s mongrel dog.

      Astra loved her aunt Delia; everything was so calm around her, and with one arm around Mollie Astra waved her father off with the other. She had no inkling then of the almighty row that had taken place between her parents. Which, pieced together many years later, started with her father saying he had merely called to inform her mother personally that Astra wasn’t coming back, and that he was taking her to live with him.

      Apparently, for all it was plain that Imogen Northcott had little interest in her child, she cared not at all to have her ex-husband laying down the law. ‘No, you are not!’ Imogen told him bluntly, and in the ensuing ‘Yes I am, no, you’re not’ argument his ex-wife informed him she had made arrangements—without consulting him—for Astra to go to boarding-school.

      Carleton Northcott might have argued, but immediately saw that, while he still followed his business interests and much though he had grown to love his daughter, he would not be able to be a full-time father to her. Since his main objective was to get her from under her mother’s roof—perhaps boarding-school might be the answer.

      ‘She’s only seven.’ He wasn’t ready to give in easily. ‘She’ll be lonely—I’m not having her…’

      ‘She won’t be lonely. Her two cousins are going with her.’

      Cold dislike had been in the air as Carleton

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