A Fall from Grace - Maggie Ford (have you read this book TXT) 📗

love for each other. She was an utter fool! In one unthinking, selfish move she had terminated their affair.

Gazing at the closed door, unable to bring herself to return upstairs, to face him, she on one side of his mother’s bed, he on the other, never again to be as they had been to each other, would be unbearable.

A little while later James came to get her. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ he asked. ‘You rushed from the room so quickly I was worried for you.’

‘I didn’t want to cry in front of Mabel and Anthony,’ she lied. ‘He has enough to worry about without me breaking out in a flood of tears.’

‘That was so kind and thoughtful of you, my dear,’ he said tenderly.

‘No, it’s just that I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, the only one crying.’

‘It was still a tender thought, my dear. Anyway it’s time we left. Mabel needs to rest and sleep. And Anthony needs some privacy. Mabel’s sister and her husband are coming later and I think he may need some time to himself first.’

She nodded, now wanting only to be away. Leaving James to say their goodbyes she tried not to feel troubled while at the same time feeling relieved that Anthony hadn’t come down to see them off; having to face him after what had transpired between them would have destroyed her.

His mother died just a week later. It had happened so quickly. They had not been there when it happened. They were notified not by Anthony but one of his mother’s staff arriving to hand them a note from him, the wording almost cold in its content: ‘Mother passed away early hours this morning in her sleep. Anthony.’

But James saw nothing wrong in his terseness. His eyes filled with tears as he put the short note to one side after reading it aloud to Madeleine and murmured, ‘He must be utterly devastated. Such a wonderful woman – a kind and truly wonderful woman – all alone she brought up her son after my brother died, ever soldiering on. Why her? She didn’t deserve…’

His voice faltering, he drew himself up, his rounded, somewhat ageing features firming. ‘We must go to him straight away. He may have need of us there. I shall telephone my office and tell them.’

He thought for a moment while she watched him, then he said slowly, ‘I shall have to set about the funeral arrangements.’

‘Anthony will probably do that,’ Madeleine said, but he cut her short.

‘He will need all the help I can give him, a young man having just lost his mother, his father gone, he is alone in the world. He’ll need my help.’

As if he were a child rather than a grown man, she thought. But she said nothing, thinking only of him with sadness in her heart, for herself as well as for him; her emptiness telling her she had lost him. How could they go on as they had, while he grieved so? No, it was over and that was grief enough for her, quietly consuming her. And all the time James was regarding her in the belief that her sadness was purely for his nephew’s sense of bereavement as he put what he imagined was a comforting arm about her shoulder and laid a light kiss on her brow. If only he knew…

The following week beside his mother’s grave, while the vicar’s dull voice intoned the prayers for the departed, Anthony hardly looked in Madeleine’s direction. When he did it was as if across a gulf, his eyes pleading – for what, she couldn’t fathom. Aching love for her or the desolate loss of his mother? She ought to have been weeping for her sister-in-law. Instead she wept for what seemed for her the end of their wonderful times together. How would he want that, his mother so recently dead? It would probably feel to him like blasphemy. No, it was ended.

Eventually he would find comfort in some other young woman, fall in love, marry, and she would have lost him forever, destined to live the rest of her life with James, this old man she had married and maybe it served her right for having thought to use someone like him for her own ends. And even that had backfired on her. She was no nearer to tracing her child than at the beginning. She had been a fool!

She tried time and time again to catch Anthony’s eye even as everyone came away from the grave, a sad little group, a few friends, she with James to his car, Anthony to his with his mother’s sister and brother-in-law, they all returning to his home to the food laid out for them and to reminisce in respectful tones over memories of the one no longer there.

Anthony was deliberately avoiding her she knew that now without a doubt. At the funeral supper he didn’t come near her except once to speak to his uncle, then, with her standing beside James, he didn’t even cast a single glance in her direction when she uttered a word of two of sympathy.

He didn’t look well himself, his face very slightly flushed. It may have been from standing by his mother’s grave in a somewhat chilly wind for May, or perhaps from grief, or was it the beginnings of ’flu?

Madeleine’s heart almost stopped at the thought. Known to be highly infectious, it could leap from one victim to a dozen others in a single breath. What if he had caught it, sitting so close beside his ailing mother? Dear God, what would she do if it were to take him? She felt the blood suddenly drain from her cheeks at the thought, leaving them feeling cold, and she drew in an involuntary, tremulous breath.

The sound made both him and James glance at her, James asking, ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ she compelled to answer that she was fine. It was then that