The Call of Destiny (The Return of Arthur Book 1) (20 page)

 This time, when Igraine answered the
phone there was a voice at the other end, and a name attached to it. She

begged Arthur to come and see her that very
day.

There was an uncomfortable
silence in the sitting room as mother and son stood looking at each other. ‘You
cannot imagine how many times I have dreamed of this moment.’

‘Me too,’ confessed Arthur.

She lifted her shoulders
awkwardly. ‘Shall we . . . ?’ She sat in the corner of the sofa, Arthur
opposite her in an armchair.

‘Let me look at you.’ She
studied the son she was seeing for the first time. ‘You won’t be angry with me
if I say something personal?’

He smiled. ‘I’ll try not to be.’

‘You are quite the handsomest
young man I ever saw.’ ‘You don’t think you might be just a little prejudiced?’

‘Not in the least.’ Igraine
searched for the right words. ‘I wish I could express to you how happy I am. I
had given up hope of ever seeing you.’

‘Well, here I am,’ he said flatly.

‘Yes, here you are,’ she said.
She wanted to take him in her arms, yet looking at her son across the coffee
table, the distance between them seemed as unbridgeable as the gulf of years.

‘Why did you have me adopted?’

She had expected the question,
but not so directly and not so soon. ‘You don’t believe in wasting time.’

‘We could talk about the
weather if you prefer.’ ‘So angry?’

‘Angry is not the right word. Puzzled,
certainly. Hurt, perhaps.’

‘No. You are angry. How could
you be anything else?’ She stood at the bay window looking out at the lush
lawns, the well-tended flower beds, the rose garden, the gazebo, the ornamental
lake and the woods and fields beyond; everything perfectly laid out, everything
in its proper place. Unlike her life. Hers had been a privileged existence, she
had everything a woman could reasonably ask of life, everything but peace of
mind. Since she gave her son away, hardly a single day had passed without her
conscience troubling her. She hoped he might forgive her, even perhaps in time
learn to love her. More than anything, she wanted an end to lies.

‘When I look at you now,
Arthur,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how to answer your question, I don’t know how
I could ever have given you away. All I can say is that you were a baby then. I
didn’t know you, I hadn’t learned to love you. It was wrong of me, I should
never have done what I did. But do please try to understand. I know you must
feel desperately hurt and rejected, but you see it wasn’t you I gave away. It
was someone else, someone I didn’t know.’

‘It was your son,’ he said bitterly.

Igraine bowed her head. What
could she say? ‘When Godfrey died, I was lonely, Arthur, so very lonely. He
deserted me when I needed him most. Oh yes, you can look shocked, but that is
exactly what he did. He left me to face the world alone, with three young children
and another one on the way.’

‘Why do you think he . . . ?’

‘Who knows,’ she said
wretchedly, ‘who knows why anyone takes their own life? He was faced with
financial ruin.’

‘Was that the only reason?’

‘I knew he had problems, but
he would never discuss them. He was brought up in an old-fashioned school, you
see. His father died leaving a lot of debts, and after that it was all
downhill. Godfrey became introverted and morose, not a all the sociable,
charming man I married. We had no fun, no social life, nothing. I didn’t mind
so much for myself, but there were the girls to consider. We hardly had the
money to pay the school fees. Things were difficult, very difficult.’ She
paused, observing her son’s sombre expression, wondering what he was thinking.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘We gave this New Year’s Eve
party,’ she continued. ‘It was Godfrey’s idea, though how he was going to pay
for it I never understood. I should have talked him out of it, but . . . ’ She
shrugged. ‘I thought it might cheer everybody up. I even persuaded myself he
must be doing better. Perhaps he thought of it as his final fling. Who knows?
Anyway, he chose that very night to tell me he was bankrupt. It was a nasty
shock, I can tell you. He had given me no real warning. I knew things were bad,
but not that bad. If only he had taken me into his confidence before, I might
have been able to help him. We had a row. I – well, I threatened to leave him.’

‘Did you?’

She shook her head. ‘I
couldn’t. He told me something else that night. He said he had stolen money
from his club – he was the treasurer of Greys, you know – well, borrowed it was
what he said, but I knew what he meant. I never discovered exactly how much,
but apparently it was a great deal.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? I wanted to
help him but I didn’t know how to. Anyway, Godfrey didn’t want to be helped –
not by me, at any rate. It was New Year’s Eve, and my world had collapsed. It
was the worst night of my life.’

‘Was that when he left home?’

She shook her head. ‘That was
much later. No, New Year’s Eve was the night I met a man who looked like
Godfrey’s twin.’ On a tripod table by the armchair stood two silver-framed
photographs, one of Godfrey, one of Uther. ‘See for yourself.’

Arthur studied them. ‘Incredible. Which is
which?’

She pointed at one. ‘This is Uther.’ ‘How could
you tell them apart?’

Her face flushed scarlet. ‘It
was fate, Uther turning up out of the blue like that. If it hadn’t been for
him, I don’t know what we would have done. He was simply wonderful, kind and
thoughtful and generous. He adored Godfrey, of course, everyone did, and he
respected him enormously, thought him such a gentleman. It was Uther who
settled the business of the missing money – how exactly, I don’t know. I only know
he saved Godfrey from disgrace, and then he helped him out financially. Not
just once, either. Finally, when he realised Godfrey was never going to make it
on his own, he gave him a job in his property company. For a time our lives
were transformed.’

‘For a time?’

‘Godfrey was a proud man. I
don’t think he was ever comfortable working for a friend. It wasn’t long before
things started to go wrong.’

‘In what way?’

She hesitated, as if she had
said more than she intended to. ‘There was Uther . . . successful, confident,
rich. Poor Godfrey. I think he felt inadequate.’ Arthur’s face showed his
discomfort. It hurt to hear her talking about his father in that disparaging
way.

‘You make him sound such a failure.’

‘I’m afraid he was, at least
financially. Though if money had been the only problem, we would have managed,
somehow or other.’

‘What other problems were there?’

Igraine shifted uncomfortably
on the sofa. She had said too much, and now was being pushed where she did not
want to go. ‘He – imagined things.’

‘What sort of things?’

Lord, why these questions?
Why, after all these years, did he have to know everything, and so quickly?
Arthur was young. How could he possibly understand what she had endured? ‘It
doesn’t matter. It’s not important.’

It was her evasiveness that
gave him the clue. He saw it in her eyes. ‘He was jealous of you and Uther.
That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

‘Dear me, what a suggestion.’
She tried to laugh it off but the laughter sounded forced. ‘Mind you, men do
get jealous sometimes. Yes, I suppose he might have been jealous of us.’ She
looked away, avoiding her son’s keen look.

‘Might have been?’

‘Supposing he was, what then?’
There was an edge of impatience and irritation in her voice.

He studied the photographs
again. The two men were so alike that at first sight they might well have been
twins, and yet, on closer examination, they were really very different. There
is a glint in this one’s eye, and a toughness about the mouth and jawline that
clearly says, this is a confident man, a man who knows what he wants and means
to get it. This other one is a gentle man, lacking the inner strength to endure
the worst the world flings at him. The eyes of the first challenge you, the
eyes of the second stir compassion. He picked up the photograph of Godfrey
Whittaker, Marquess of Truro. Thinking of all the misfortunes he had suffered,
he pitied him with all his heart. How he wished he had known him.

He glanced at his mother,
unaware that in his eyes there was a look of reproach, gone in an instant, but
not before her watchful eye had caught it. She burst into tears, but they were
more tears of temper than of sorrow. ‘How can you be so distant?’ she
complained. ‘You haven’t kissed me. You haven’t even called me mother. I am
your mother, after all, whatever happened in the past. You have no right to
cross-examine me, no right at all.’

‘I believe I have. And you
have the right to answer, or not to answer, as you choose.’ It was a cold
reaction to her heated outburst.

‘Whatever you may think, I never gave Godfrey
any cause to be jealous of me,’ she said, lifting her head defiantly. ‘He may
have imagined the worst. But what was I supposed to do?’

‘Is that why he shot himself?’

Igraine jumped up and paced
the room, wringing her hands. ‘How can you say such a wicked thing! It’s cruel!
Cruel!’

‘Sit down, mother.’ The words
rang out like a command. It may have been the tone of authority in his voice,
or because he had called her mother for the first time, but she obeyed
instantly. ‘Forgive all these questions,’ he went on gently, ‘but I want to try
and understand my father’s state of mind, and why he committed suicide.’

His father? For a moment
Igraine was confused. Of course! Arthur assumed that Godfrey was his father! In
all the trauma of the meeting, she had overlooked that crucial fact.

‘From what you tell me,’ he
went on, ‘his financial problems were solved. So he had only one reason to be
depressed that I can think of; he thought he had lost his wife to another man.
What other explanation could there be?’

She slumped back on the sofa.
So he did blame her. Suddenly she was weeping, this time not tears of anger but
tears of remorse. When she spoke again, Arthur had to lean forward to catch the
words. ‘Godfrey and I were devoted, but we were never . . . oh, he loved me in
his way but he was not a passionate man. And then suddenly, there was Uther. I
never meant it to happen, it just did. Those two men . . . you can’t believe
how much alike they looked. Even more alike than the photographs.

‘In a way it was like falling
in love with Godfrey all over again, except that . . . how can I put it? Uther
pulsated with life and energy. He
needed
me to love him, he needed me so
much to love him; and so I did, you see. What else could I do? It was as though
I had been waiting for him all my life. I never believed in fate before, but
oh, I am certain it was fate. How could it have been anything else? I couldn’t
help myself. I
did
love him. I loved him passionately.’

For a while the great drawing room was so quiet
that through the open windows they could hear the breeze sifting through the
avenue of beech trees. Arthur broke the silence. ‘So my father must have known,
or at least he must have guessed that you and Uther – that you were lovers.’
The word burned like acid in his mouth.

Igraine hesitated. For a
moment she was on the point of telling him the truth. But then her courage
failed her. ‘Not while Godfrey was alive,’ she muttered. ‘I was never
unfaithful to him.’ Pray God she would be forgiven for the lie, pray God Arthur
would believe it.

‘I am not here to judge you, mother.’

She reached out her hand and
touched his cheek. ‘Oh Arthur, I am sorry. So sorry. If only I had the time all
over again. It was a terrible thing we did to you, a terrible thing we did to
ourselves. I would give anything to be able to make it up to you. But I can
never do that, can I?’

‘What’s done is done. We all
have to live with it. At least explain to me why you had me adopted.’ She tried
to take his hand in hers but he eased it away. ‘Why, mother?’

She shook her head helplessly.
‘Not just like that, not after all these years. It didn’t make sense then, and
when you ask me to make sense of it now, I can’t. There are no easy
explanations and too many questions to answer. I need time, time to think, time
to remember, time to get used to having my son back.’

‘I only want to know why you
had me adopted. Surely that can’t be so difficult to explain? Everything else
can wait.’

A long silence. Then Igraine
said in a low voice, ‘It was not my doing.’

He was standing over her. ‘Whose then?’

Her mouth opened and closed
but the words would not come. ‘It was Uther,’ she said finally, her voice
trembling. ‘He made me do it.’

‘Made you? How could he do
that? You could have said no, couldn’t you? Why didn’t you? All those months
you carried me. Didn’t you feel anything for the child growing inside you?

Didn’t you feel anything when I was born?’
Arthur’s voice broke, the tears leaped from his eyes as they used to when he
was a boy. ‘Tell me, mother, what
did
you feel? Did you feel anything at
all for me?’

‘How can you ask? Of course
I did.’

‘Then how could he
make
you give me
away? Why didn’t you insist on keeping me? Why couldn’t you just love me?’

‘Stop! Stop! You’re breaking
my heart!’ Covering her face with her hands, Igraine began to sob.

‘You didn’t love me, did you,
mother? That’s the truth of it.’

She took a few moments to
regain control of herself. Hands twisting in her lap, she pleaded with her son.
‘Don’t say that, Arthur. Please don’t say that. Say I was weak, I admit I was
weak. Say I was afraid of losing the man I loved. I was. But don’t say I didn’t
love you. I agreed to have you adopted, and yes, it was a wicked thing to do.
But I’ve suffered for it, Arthur. I’ve paid a dreadful price for it every moment
of every day of my life.’