Family Holiday

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1937 and now available for the first time in eBook. Summer brings the holiday with Guy and the children - just like every other year. But it also brings that chance meeting with Blake Randall, the young officer Clare had loved so deeply and yet so fleetingly all those years ago in a wartime hospital. He has not become boring like Guy, the kindly but unexciting doctor she married. Blake has retained the spark of youth; the spark Clare still feels within herself...

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 176

Sample

It was during breakfast on a wet, grey morning in April, which had more of the chill of winter than the warmth of spring about it, that Mrs. Tardy broached the subject of the family holiday.

‘It’s time we fixed up something,’ she said. ‘You know what it was like last year. If you don’t book rooms in time, you get bad ones.’

She made her little speech brightly, with the cheerfulness of one who is not certain that her suggestions will be well received. But there remained the necessity to show an optimism whenever she, herself, felt the reverse. Upon that optimism, Clare Tardy had built the foundation of the family happiness. One severe crack in it and the whole edifice might fall to the ground. In other words, she considered it of vital importance that she should hold the family together. For although nobody said anything, she had a faint but growing belief that they had begun to pull in opposite directions.

There was, of course, a tendency for members of modern families to lead their own lives. Clare Tardy was not blind to that fact, neither was she old-fashioned, nor anxious to impede progress. She was too intelligent. But she did dislike disintegrated families, just as she hated hotels, except for short holidays, or a flat — which in her estimation lacked the atmosphere of a real home. She liked a house and a family in the house. She believed devoutly in the joys of family life.

She had determined from the time her children were born that they should know those joys, because she had never known them. Her own mother had died when she was a child. Her father, who was in the Indian Army, remained abroad, and most of her childhood was spent at school or staying with elderly aunts.

When she was of age, the Great War came, and her father was killed on active service. Once again Clare had to face an existence without any permanent background. Being of an affectionate and sociable disposition, she had loathed it.

‘My own children shall know what it is to have a proper background — a nice big house and good parents,’ she had said from the day that she married. And she had tried to carry out her word.

But things never seemed to work out according to plan. And Clare’s marriage had by no means been exactly what she had hoped for.

Here, at the breakfast-table, sat the family; puppets, just as she might have placed them on a stage in her imagination. But unfortunately she could not perpetually pull the strings. These puppets were much too human.

Guy, her husband, was a doctor with a small but steady practice; Jack, her eldest son, was twenty and up at Oxford. They had gone to many sacrifices to send him up, but there he was, thank God, studying Law and doing quite well. Joan, aged eighteen, had just left her finishing school in Lausanne. And Margaret, affectionately known as ‘Mogs’, aged fourteen, was still at a boarding-school in Hastings.

Here they all sat, in the big, solid dining-room of a big, solid house in South Kensington, outside which was a brass plate with the inscription: Dr. G. B. Tardy, M.D.

The house was much too big for them, of course, and they could not afford as large a staff as was necessary to run it efficiently. But they always seemed crowded in the holidays, and when the children brought friends to stay with them. It was easier, of course, when Jack was at the ’Varsity and Mogs at school, and there were only three of them left.

Guy had done quite well. He was popular amongst his patients. But with his family he was almost shamefully negative. He never bothered about any of them. Clare felt that he never bothered much about her, either. To him, they must all be like pieces of furniture in the house, which he had grown accustomed to seeing and which had their proper uses. But none of them seemed to have any bearing upon his particular private life. He worked, ate, slept and played his Sunday golf. They saw little of him except at the morning and evening meals.

More often than not he came into his food after they had all finished. Such were the exigencies of his calling. He was frequently out in the evenings, too. And when at home, he either went to sleep or listened to one of his immense collection of Bach records.

Bach was Guy Tardy’s religion. Clare was fond of light music but had never shared in his passion for the classics. Those endless Masses and Fugues appeared to her noble and beautiful, but she could see no reason why anybody should wish to sit down and listen to them for hours, and feel those hours to be the high spots of living.

She regretted, somewhat, Guy’s tendency to be old-fashioned and insular in his views. He hated speed. He had a car only because it was necessary to his work. A solid British car which he never drove over thirty-five miles an hour, even on the open road.

He was always kind, affectionate, and ready with nice presents at Christmas and on birthdays, but otherwise entirely vague.

Clare had, for a number of years, been virtually head of the household, the one to whom the family went when they wanted something bought, or something done. She liked that. It gave her a feeling of warmth and ownership. Without being over-possessive, she expected some attention and gratitude from her children, and while they were at school she had received both. In fact, it was while they were very young, despite the fact that Guy had then only a small practice in Earls Court, and they sometimes had a frantic struggle to keep up appearances, that Clare had known real happiness.

Very soon after her marriage she had ceased to demand much from Guy as a husband. She had been a pretty girl with an ardent and impulsive nature. She had always woven romances around doctors and been proud and pleased to marry Guy Tardy who, in the third year of the war, when they married, was a medical officer attached to a Red Cross Unit in Camberley.

He had never been handsome, but fresh, auburn-headed and quite attractive in his uniform. His vague, rather dreamy manner had drawn Clare to him. She was his antithesis. So much more spirited. And at that time, his devotion to music had been part of his attraction for her. She liked to think she was marrying a man with an artistic sense. Their honeymoon had been a fair success. Afterwards, Clare devoted herself to forwarding his medical career.

At the end of the war, he bought a practice in Earls Court. All too soon there had come an end to the romance which Clare’s nature craved. With the birth of Jack, the immersion of Guy in his work and her endless duties as wife and mother, the lover in Clare was soon put to sleep. That had been Guy’s fault more than hers. He had never had a strong sensual side and he was much too busy and too tired during the first years of marriage to delve into psychological problems about his wife.

If at first Clare had resented the loss of that more exciting quality in marriage which a normal woman craves, she had soon settled down to the lack of it and concentrated on the family.

But now the family were growing up. They were becoming independent. It frightened her. She was no longer the one to whom they looked solely and absolutely for their physical and mental needs.

Almost daily she was feeling the little tugs — Jack and Joan and even Mogs, still a schoolgirl, pulling away, away from her. Thinking for themselves, acting for themselves.

It was not that Clare was exacting. She had always deplored the type of women who wound themselves round their children, sucking their youth like vampires, forcing gratitude or respect from them — or at least demanding the outward semblance of what could never really be extracted by force. But she did love her three children devotedly and she felt a kind of desperate urgency to keep them with her a little longer. For once they were gone she would have only Guy. Guy, who was just a figure-head, wanting to be well-fed and looked after but requiring none of the spiritual intensity of affection which she had it within her to lavish.

She had had so many little blows of late. Jack, for instance, when he last came down from Oxford for vacation, spent most of his time away with the friend who had shared rooms with him. And she had so looked forward to his coming home. She adored her son. He was handsome and gay. At the same time, he had inherited some of his father’s quiet persistence in work, which was of enormous value. He was to go into the office of his uncle, Arthur Tardy, who was a solicitor in the City.

More than anything in the world, Clare liked to have Jack with her, and he was devoted to her. While he was still at school he had been proud of her because she had kept her youthful figure, dressed well and could still be called a very pretty woman. It was always ‘Mum’ who got him out of his little scrapes. She had helped him only last term when he had exceeded his allowance and run into debt at Oxford. Yes … they had always been close friends.

Yet these last twelve months Jack had not appeared to need her quite so much. Unpacking his trunk for him at Easter, she had come across the photograph of an unknown girl, which had fallen out of one of his pockets. That had terrified her. To think that Jack had a mysterious girlfriend and had said nothing to her.

She was too tactful to question Jack, but she had entertained a dozen fears since that moment. Who was the girl? Perhaps she wasn’t very nice. Perhaps Jack didn’t care to introduce her to the family. It would be so awful if her attractive, handsome boy got himself involved with some undesirable female. And it was grievous to Clare Tardy to feel that she had been left out of his confidence. It made her wonder, too, if there were a lot of other things she did not know.

Then there was Joan. A beautiful girl, Joan. Looking at her seated at the breakfast-table, Mrs. Tardy felt proud of the fact that she had produced such a daughter. Joan had her mother’s dark eyes and slim, graceful build, and Guy’s reddish-brown head. Tawny, naturally wavy hair, always beautifully done.

She was a reserved girl, with a stubborn side to her nature. Guy had that same stubbornness. It was best left alone. When Joan was reprimanded, she shut up like a clam.

While still at school, Clare had not found it so hard to cope with Joan. There was a sweet, pliable side to her and she loved her mother. There was, then, the artificial stimulus of excitement over school holidays, that joy of being home again which Margaret was still experiencing. But after Christmas, when Joan left Lausanne, made away with all her ugly school clothes, started to have her hair ‘set’, to put colour on her lips, to ‘grow up’, in fact, Clare had felt uncomfortable about her. The girl seemed so aloof. She had never been as communicative as Jack or Mogs, and Clare found it hard to discover where she went or what she was doing. When questioned, sometimes Joan would give a full account of her activities, but usually she was non-committal and even annoyed by the most innocent questions, as though she resented any inquiries into her private and personal life.

Clare, who had herself always been a frank, impulsive person, failed dismally to understand that side of Joan.

There remained Mogs, the humorist of the family. Overgrown and in the fat ‘puppy stage’, with curly hair which was a frank and flaming red, and sincere blue eyes. Not really pretty, but full of vitality and charm. Clare had never had trouble with Mogs and had congratulated herself that she never would have any — until last term when Mogs developed a ‘crush’ as she herself termed it, for her music-mistress at St. Brede’s.

That ‘crush’ had a psychological effect upon the fourteen-year-old girl which was devastating and had appalled her mother. All through these holidays, Mogs had been different. She had lost her sense of humour.

How Clare loathed the name of Miss Walters! How willingly she could have administered a dose of Guy’s prussic acid to that woman. For consciously or unconsciously, she had taken Mogs away from her. The Christmas holidays had been so different. Jack and Joan might have other things to do, other people to go out with, but Mogs was usually the devoted daughter who had to include ‘Mum’ in everything. Now Clare missed that devotion and was ridiculously jealous of Miss Walters and the influence which she appeared to have over the child.

If Clare maintained that there was to be no revolution in Central Europe, Mogs immediately said:

‘Oh, but Mum, Miss Walters says there is going to be one.’

When Clare said:

‘I don’t like the way you are doing your hair, darling. I wish you’d brush it back from your forehead,’ the answer came:

‘But Miss Walters likes it done this way!’

And so on, until Clare wanted to scream.

It was not as though Miss Walters, estimable teacher of music though she might be, had anything in particular to recommend her. Clare had once talked to her at St. Brede’s about her girl’s musical tastes and had thought the woman rather second-rate. But she seemed to exercise a peculiar magnetism over Mogs who said she was ‘simply too marvellous’ and that a lot of the other girls ‘simply adored her’.

It was a schoolgirl-stage, through which Clare had once passed. Looking back, she could remember at her Convent, a nun of peculiarly unattractive mien who had inspired her to exaggerated admiration. It was a form of hysteria to which schoolgirls are given, generation after generation. And with girls of Mogs’ age, it was, of course, a kind of sublimated sex. Unhealthy in a way, yet natural. In another year or two, all that emotionalism would be directed towards some young man.

Somehow, Clare felt that she would not mind when her beloved Mogs worshipped a young man. But she did most strenuously dislike the adoration and exaltation of Miss Walters.

However, with the tact and good sense which were inherent in her, Clare made no outward fuss or objection. She even allowed Mogs to talk unceasingly of her adored one.

But it did annoy her when she found her own photograph, which always hung over Mogs’ bed, replaced by a most unattractive, out-of-focus snapshot of the music mistress (taken at St. Brede’s with Mogs’ own Brownie and framed at Woolworth’s). Clare’s own likeness had been relegated to the dressing-table. But Miss Walters must be guardian of the bed! Really, it was laughable! But Clare was jealous and admitted it to herself.

This morning, when Clare broached the subject of the family holiday, she did so with a trepidation which she had never before experienced. She was not at all sure that the holiday would be as big a success as those of former years. But she was determined that they should, as usual, go away together. That holiday was the thing Clare most looked forward to in the year. Those three weeks when, with Guy and the three children, she abandoned the cares of housekeeping and they had fun together somewhere by the sea.

In Clare’s mind were stored away countless precious memories of holidays, right from the time the children were babies, until now. She liked it when they all took a look at the fat albums full of snapshots, which they liked to laugh at, now. To Clare, those snapshots, often badly taken, had their amusing side, but they were sacred, too. Pictures of her loved ones in all stages.

Brightly and hopefully, this morning, Clare talked about the forthcoming summer, looking round the table with that wide smile which had always been her chief charm:

‘It may be early to talk about it, but we must make plans and book the rooms. Don’t you agree, Guy?’ she said.

Dr. Tardy dropped his newspaper and rose to his feet. He was a slight man of medium height. He wore the striped trousers and black coat which he considered appropriate to his calling. He did not approve of the young physicians who went their rounds wearing ordinary lounge-suits or ‘tweeds’. He was a stickler for ‘good form’. He took off the horn-rims which he used for reading.

‘Well, my dear, I suppose so. I haven’t actually given a thought to our holiday.’

That was typical of him, thought Clare. For when did Guy ever make plans or lay schemes apart from his work? He always left things to her. Sometimes she wondered what would happen to him and the children if she died. Guy was a dutiful parent, saving and making what provision he could for the future, denying himself — and her! — in order to save for a rainy day. But he was not the sort of man who worried about the lesser problems or attended much to the lighter side of life. She had never known him come in and say:

‘Let’s do t. . .