The Woman from Paris(11)

“I think you should go and talk it over with Grandma,” Tom suggested, smirking at the thought of the pair of them pecking away at poor Phaedra’s remains after they had torn her to pieces.

“So Margaret agrees with me at least.” Roberta smiled.

“She didn’t want to talk about it, actually,” David corrected. “But I imagine she’ll agree with you. Not that any of our opinions matter when it comes to the will. Dad had every right to change it. We can’t undo it, and Mum won’t want us to. In spite of being tired and emotional, Roberta, she wants to honor Dad’s request, and so do Tom and I.”

“Sure, whatever,” said Tom, flicking ash into the fire. “But it is all rather odd, don’t you think?”

David sank into the armchair and swirled the ice about in his tumbler, making a light tinkling sound. “She’s thirty-one, which means she was born in 1981. I was born two years later, so Dad slept with her mother a year before he married Mum.”

“That’s cutting it pretty fine,” said Joshua. “Considering he dated Mum for about a year before he proposed.”

“Perhaps it was a one-night stand,” said Roberta.

“Shhh, keep your voice down,” Joshua cautioned, thinking of his mother upstairs in her bedroom.

“Phaedra said Dad was her mother’s ‘great love,’ so it must have been more than a one-night stand,” Tom recalled softly.

“But she was not your father’s ‘great love,’” Rosamunde was quick to add. “I imagine it was a hasty fling for George that left the poor girl heartbroken. Happens all the time, though in this case he left a bun in the oven, which was very careless.”

“Why didn’t she tell him he had got her pregnant?” Roberta asked. “I mean, if she was so in love with him, might she not have thought he would do the decent thing and marry her? Nowadays people have no sense of duty, but in those days—we’re talking the 1980s—wasn’t it a terrible blot on one’s reputation to be pregnant outside marriage?”

“Depends what sort of family she came from,” said Rosamunde. “In most respectable families, it wouldn’t be considered proper even today.”

“Which leads me to suspect that she never told him,” said David. “If she had, he would have looked after her. I’m not sure he would have married her, but Dad was a good man; he wouldn’t have run off, leaving her to bring up his child alone. No, I believe she never told him.”

Roberta narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “It all seems very fishy to me. She turns up the day of his funeral and declares herself his illegitimate daughter. It’s a little too tidy.”

Tom blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Not really. Mother brings daughter up on her own, tells daughter who her real father is, daughter goes looking for him, which is natural. Father feels guilty he wasn’t around when she was growing up so includes her in his will. Nothing fishy about that.”

“It’s just a feeling,” Roberta persisted. “You’re all much too trusting.”

“Look, Dad isn’t around to answer our questions,” said David. “The only person who knows the answers, and most likely not all of them, is Phaedra. I suggest we ask her when we next see her.”

“You’re not thinking of seeing her again, are you?” Roberta looked horrified.

“Why not? Don’t you want to know some answers?” David replied.

“God, you’re going to invite her back, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps,” David replied.

“With your mother’s permission,” Rosamunde interrupted.

Roberta turned to her husband for support. “Josh, aren’t you going to say something?”

“I think you should calm down, darling, and wait until we know what’s in the will,” he suggested. “She might have been given so little it’s not worth making a fuss.”

“Or she might have been given a great deal, in which case it is,” said Roberta firmly.





3


Antoinette lay on her big brass bed and allowed her weary gaze to meander around the room. Her bedroom was her sanctuary—the only place in the house where she was safe from her mother-in-law. It was large and light, with a high ceiling bordered in a bold fleur-de-lis cornice. Portraits of her sons as little boys hung on the pale-yellow-striped wallpaper, with paintings of dogs and eighteenth-century landscapes. Primrose-yellow curtains dropped from thick wooden poles where latticed windows looked out over the lawn and ancient woodland beyond. A wardrobe dominated one wall, a chest of drawers another, while a delicate dressing table stood in front of the window where Antoinette often sat before the Queen Anne mirror to brush her hair and apply her makeup. There had been little room for change when she had moved into the house just over twenty years ago, for the Framptons had traditionally been avid collectors of art and antiques from all over the world, and George liked it as it was. But she had decorated her bedroom exactly the way she wanted it.