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came down specially to tell you,’ she heard Tara saying softly. ‘I wish I could stay longer, Ma, but I can’t. I’ve got a client meeting in the morning and then I’ve got to break the news to Dad that it isn’t just a few weeks’ holiday that I want.’ Tara reached out and hugged her mother tightly.

      ‘Please tell me that you’ll be happy for me,’ she begged in a hoarse little pain-filled whisper.

      ‘I’ll be happy for you,’ Claudia repeated dutifully, and as she said it she gave up a silent prayer that it would be true and that she would be able to be happy for her daughter instead of …

      ‘I’d better let you get to that meeting,’ Tara told her mother gruffly as she hugged her a second time even more fiercely than the first. ‘I promise we’ll both come and see you before we go, and once we’re over there I’ll want you to come and stay. I want to show you off to Ryland’s family so that they can see how lucky I am to have such a special, wonderful mother. You are special and wonderful and I do love you very, very much … and I think I’m just so lucky to have you for my mother, to have you and Dad as my parents.’

      The subject of Claudia’s talk to the members of the Townswomen’s Guild had originally been spurred by her awareness that many of her closest friends had recently had to readapt to a married life where their children had flown the nest and, so far as nature was concerned, they themselves were in many ways now redundant.

      ‘It’s a matter of what you actually do with your time,’ one friend had commented woefully to Claudia, adding self-critically, ‘I never thought I’d ever be the kind of mother who couldn’t wait for her own children to produce their children so that she could be a grandmother but …’

      ‘We aren’t old in the same way that our mothers and their mothers before them were old at our age,’ another friend had told her. ‘After all, in terms of life expectancy, fifty is nothing these days, but it’s what you do with those years … how you fill them … the fact that you feel a need to fill them when, for virtually the whole of your adult life, what you’ve been struggling to do is to make time, not fill it.’

      But after the bombshell Tara had dropped on her, Claudia knew that she couldn’t follow through with her original plans without being in danger of betraying her own emotions. So instead, and to their bemusement, she rather suspected, she gave the women an abbreviated talk on the problems that could face new, first-time fathers.

      After the meeting, several people wanted to talk to her, to congratulate her in the main on the article that had appeared in the local paper and that Tara had read out to her earlier. Just listening to them brought back such a sharp mental image of Tara lying on her bed that she could hardly bear to have them speak.

      It was a relief to escape and finally be on her own; it was even a relief to know that she was going to be alone once she got home. At least, it was a relief to know that Tara wouldn’t be there, that she could finally relax her guard a little and allow herself to show some real emotion.

      The intensity of her own sense of foreboding and doom, her own fear and despair had shaken her. Why had she not guessed … realised … prepared herself for something like this? Why had she allowed herself to become so complacent, to think …

      ‘Claudia.’ She stopped, forcing herself to smile as one of her closest friends approached her. ‘I saw Tara driving through town earlier. You are lucky to have a daughter and to have such a close relationship with her,’ she commented enviously, before adding, ‘Not that you don’t deserve it. You and Tara are both lucky,’ she amended firmly. ‘My boys …’ She paused. ‘Do you know, if you weren’t so … so you … there are times when I could almost hate you. You’ve got everything right.’

      ‘Not everything,’ Claudia felt bound to point out to her quietly, reminding her when she gave her a surprised look, ‘Garth and I are no longer married, Chris.’

      ‘You’re divorced. Yes, I know, but even your divorce has been a model of what a divorce should be. Neither of you has ever been heard to utter a word of criticism against the other. Despite the trauma you were going through at the time, I can remember how determined both you and Garth were that Tara shouldn’t suffer. It was all done so … so quietly and discreetly, with Garth moving out of Ivy House and buying himself that new place on the other side of town.

      ‘But it isn’t just the way the two of you handled your divorce. It’s everything even before then. While the rest of us were all complaining about having to manage our careers and bring up our children, you and Garth moved here from London. You gave up your job as a probation officer to be at home with Tara when she was a baby. Then when you and Garth divorced, you set up your own business and worked from home until you were well enough established to branch out and take on office premises.

      ‘I know how hard you work—what long hours—and you’ve always managed to find time for your friends and your charity work. So far as I know, neither you nor Garth has ever missed even one of Tara’s school events. You’re a wonderful cook—’

      ‘I’m an adequate cook,’ Claudia interrupted her dryly.

      Chris overrode her, insisting, ‘You’re a wonderful cook, and you still look stunning and sexy, as my darling husband frequently reminds me.’ She continued firmly, ‘I doubt that there’s a single one of your friends whose husband, whose partner, hasn’t compared her to you at some stage or another and found her wanting.’

      ‘I sincerely hope not,’ Claudia declared truthfully.

      ‘Well, it’s true,’ Chris persisted. ‘But more than that, what I envy you most of all for, Claudia, is that you are just such a nice person. You’re generous, warm, witty … and honest … so totally honest in everything you do. Claudia, what is it?’ she demanded uncertainly as she saw the sudden quick tears fill her friend’s eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you … I was just—’

      ‘It’s all right,’ Claudia assured her hastily. ‘I’m just … I’m just a little bit tired. I … Too many late nights,’ she fibbed, ‘which is why I’ve promised myself an early one tonight.’

      ‘Yes, I’d better go, as well,’ Chris agreed, taking her hint. ‘I’ll see you on Thursday … it’s our week for lunch,’ she reminded Claudia.

      ‘I’ll be there,’ Claudia agreed.

      It was still light as Claudia turned off the road and in through the arched gateway in the brick wall that surrounded her home.

      She and Garth had first seen Ivy House on a cold snowy day when the branches of the tree had been bare and the ivy clothing the house itself and the brick wall around it frosted white against the mellow backdrop of the Cotswold stone.

      The house had originally been built in the eighteenth century as a dower home attached to the estate of the then Sir Vernon Cupshaw. The main house had fallen into disrepair after the Great War, when all three sons of the family had been killed, and the estate had eventually been broken up. Claudia and Garth had bought the house and learned of its history from the last surviving spinster aunt of the original family. Claudia could still remember how the old lady had looked from her to the small bundle that was Tara, whom she had been holding, as she told them, ‘This house needs love and I can see that you have it. It also needs children … just as our family needed children.’ Claudia hadn’t been able to tell her what she already knew, which was that Tara would be an only child.

      They had had to do a great deal of work to turn the house into the comfortable home it now was and, after the breakdown of their marriage, one of the hardest things Claudia had had to prepare herself for was the prospect of losing Ivy House, but Garth had insisted that she was to keep it.

      ‘It’s Tara’s home,’ he had reminded her quietly when she had pointed out to him with fierce, bitter passion that she didn’t want his charity … that she didn’t, in fact, want anything of him. But even then … even then that had not been entirely true and they had both known it. But

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