LITMIR.BIZ

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was one problem where he suspected that Chrissie’s gentle touch would be much more beneficial than his own.

      ‘We’ve got a family gathering looming soon, haven’t we?’ he asked Didi. ‘I’ll see if Chrissie will have a tactful word with Paul, if you like.’

      ‘Would you?’ Didi smiled in relief. ‘I haven’t dared say anything to Paul, but I have heard a whisper that Annalise has been bunking off school to be with Pete. The band practises in an old barn out at—’

      ‘Laura and Rick’s farm, yes, I know,’ Guy said, nodding. ‘They used to use Frances’s garage, but she gave Mike an ultimatum and told him that there was no way she would continue to allow them to use it unless they agreed to keep the noise level down. Laura stepped into the breach and offered them the use of one of their barns.’

      ‘Well, as I said, it seems that Annalise has been sneaking off school to spend time with them there.’

      ‘Leave it with me. I’ll do what I can,’ Guy promised.

      DAVID TENSED as he watched Maddy’s car come up the drive towards Queensmead. He had been watching the house ever since his arrival in England some days earlier, sleeping at night in unlocked garden sheds and open hay barns. After several weeks at sea sharing cramped quarters with the rest of the crew, the solitariness of his present existence was a relief. He missed Father Ignatius, of course; the two of them had become very close in the time they had worked together. As well as missing him, though, David was also concerned about him. Despite the priest’s vigour and positive attitude towards life, David had sensed recently that the older man was not quite as stalwart as he had once been.

      Had he done the wrong thing in leaving him to come home? Had he made the selfish decision—again?

      In the car with Maddy were her three children, the second youngest, Emma, with her solemn eyes and determined expression reminding him so much of his own daughter Olivia’s at the same age. It was odd the things that memory retained without one’s being aware of it. If asked, he would have been forced to admit that he had paid scandalously little attention to either of his children as they grew up. Olivia had spent more time with Jon and Jenny than she had done at home, getting from Jenny the loving mothering she had never received from Tiggy, his frighteningly fragile and vulnerable ex-wife. Given the number of years he had been away, David had assumed Tiggy would have divorced him by now and this had indeed been confirmed when he overheard a comment about her having moved away and established a new life for herself with another man. David was shamed to realise that he felt more relief than grief at this discovery. His ex-wife’s loss was one thing; seeing Emma in the garden with her brothers Leo and Jason and being reminded of Olivia was quite another.

      But was it his nephew’s children David had really come to see, familiar to him now by name and expression as he watched them play and call out to one another? They tugged at his heartstrings in a way that reinforced how much he had changed.

      The eldest child, Leo, who was physically so very much a Crighton, seemed fascinated by him. David had ached to talk to the children and to hold them, but he had restrained himself. Seeing them, though, reinforced just how much he had lost. Man and child had not spoken with one another, but David sensed that both he and Leo felt the tug of the blood bond that existed between them. ‘Grampy Man,’ Leo had wailed in protest as David made a hasty exit from the garden when Maddy had come to the garden door.

      Was it, then, his own adult daughter and almost adult son who had brought him back home like a lodestar? Or had it been his need to see his father? He was an old man now, who spent most of his day in a chair apart from his twice daily walk around the garden with Maddy or Jenny, Jon’s wife, or sometimes with Max.

      Max!

      Max had surprised David. What had happened to the selfish, hedonistic young man who had looked up to him and on whose adulation David had often preened himself, whose envy of him had fed David’s own always vulnerable sense of self-esteem?

      Only two days ago he had watched as Max walked in the garden with his younger brother Joss, the two heads close together as they talked earnestly. At one point they had stopped walking and Max had put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort and very real affection. There had been no mistaking the closeness between them and no mistaking, either, the love and pride in Max’s eyes as he played with his own children.

      Seeing Max with his wife and children and witnessing the total transformation of his character had left David with a sharp sense of pain and regret.

      The day he walked out of the nursing home where he had been recuperating from his heart attack and out of his old life, he had done so because he could no longer tolerate the unbearable weight not just of his own guilt but of his father’s expectations.

      The onus of being the favourite son, the first-born twin, the good-looking husband and charming brother-in-law, the isolation of being the one all the others looked up to, had become so burdensome to him, so resented by him, that he had felt swamped by it.

      He had needed to break free; to step away from the image others had created for him and be himself. At least that was what he had told himself at the time; that and the fact that he had every right to put himself first, that his brush with death had released him from any and every obligation he owed to anyone else; that his heart attack was a warning to him to live his own life.

      A faint smile touched his mouth, creasing the lean planes of his face.

      He weighed a good deal less now than he had done when he had left home and his body possessed the taut, muscle-honed strength of a man used to hard physical work. His skin was tanned by the Jamaican sun and the sea air, and his streaked blond hair was only just beginning to show some grey. But it wasn’t just his body that looked different; the long hours spent in often painful reflection and the even longer hours in discussion and debate with his friend the priest had also left their visible mark on him. His eyes now looked out on the world with reflection, compassion and wisdom, and he was able to smile warmly, generously and even sometimes tenderly at the frailties of his fellow man.

      A stranger looking properly at him now would have found him something of an enigma. His physical appearance was that of a tough manual worker, but married to it was a depth of awareness and intelligence in his eyes that suggested a man of letters and deep reflection. But David no longer courted the approval of other people; he no longer needed either their admiration or their company. Solitude, physical, mental and emotional, had become his chosen friend rather than his feared foe.

      It had taken some months of working beside Father Ignatius before David had been able to start confiding in him.

      ‘I have no family, no friends,’ David had told him. ‘If I were to go back home, they would disown me and rightly so. I have committed an unforgivable crime.’

      ‘No crime is unforgivable in God’s eyes,’ the priest had replied firmly. ‘Not if one truly repents it.’

      ‘What is true repentance?’ David had asked him, adding sardonically, ‘I’ve never been the sackcloth-and-ashes type. Too much of a sybarite, I suppose, and too selfish.’

      ‘You say that and yet you are prepared to acknowledge that you have sinned. It takes a brave man to submit himself to the judgement of his peers and an even braver one to submit to his own judgement and God’s. If to admit the existence of one’s sins is the first step on the road to self-forgiveness, then to make true atonement for them is the second.’

      ‘True atonement! And how am I supposed to do that?’ David had asked savagely. ‘There is no way I could ever repay the money I stole or undo the damage I have done.’

      ‘There is always a way,’ Father Ignatius had insisted, ‘but sometimes we can make it hard for ourselves to find it.’

      Always a way! David shook his head as he remembered those words now. If he had imagined that his leaving, his absence, had created an emptiness in the lives of those he had left behind, he was discovering how vain that assumption had been. The jagged edges of the destruction he had caused had been repaired, and in the days he had

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