A Perfect Family. PENNY JORDAN
Not that he had ever envisaged Jenny as becoming a successful businesswoman all those years ago when they had first known one another. She had been such a shy, diffident girl, so different in every way from his wife.
He had first seen Tiggy perched on the counter of an exclusive and fashionable London wine bar, surrounded by a crowd of admirers whom she was inciting to vie with one another for the chance to take her out.
David had still been playing with the group then and they had just been featured in one of the countless trendy magazines that had mushroomed into existence during that era. Someone recognised him—one of the other models who had been in the wine bar with Tiggy—and she had attached herself to him.
He could still remember the sharp frisson of excitement and challenge he had felt when he glanced across the narrow room and saw Tiggy looking back at him, knowing that she was deliberately ignoring all the other men who were clamouring for her attention.
Impossible then and now, of course, to ever imagine Jenny posing negligently on a bar top wearing one of the shortest skirts ever made, revealing acres of long, coltish leg, her pouting mouth painted in the palest of frosted pink lipsticks, her face deadpan pale, her eyes enormous in their thick rim of black lashes and even blacker kohl.
Jenny never pouted, and had she worn kohl eye make-up her father would have made her wash it off. Her legs were sturdily and sensibly constructed to carry her over the fields of her father’s farm, not delicately thin and fawn-like. Where Jenny was healthily robust, Tiggy had been fragile, delicate and vulnerable. Where Jenny had stoically contained and controlled her emotions, Tiggy had gone from tears to laughter and back again in the space of a heartbeat. Where Jenny had been familiar, safe and dull, Tiggy had been deliciously different and dangerous.
And nothing had changed, he reassured himself. He had seen the expression, the envy, in other men’s eyes when they looked at Tiggy and compared her with their own dully comfortable middle-aged wives.
Tiggy was the kind of woman who flirted by instinct, who appealed to everything that was male in a man. She certainly had done to him. He had been completely bewitched by her. Bemused. Besotted.
They had gone on from the wine bar to a nightclub, a whole crowd of them, Tiggy giggling as she openly bought a small handful of ‘uppers’ and insisted that he take one of them.
It hadn’t been any particularly big deal—everyone took drugs in the sixties; it was part of the London scene—only unfortunately the senior members of the chambers where he was in pupillage hadn’t seen it that way.
There had been his late arrivals and early departures and the days when he had never made it into chambers at all, waking up late in the afternoon in Tiggy’s small flat and her even smaller bed to while away what was left of the day in her arms. This behaviour had ultimately cost him his career.
He had to make a choice, the head of chambers had told him sternly when David had been summoned to his room to account for himself. The Bar or Tiggy and the life he was leading with her.
There had been no choice to make, really. He already knew what was expected of him, what his grandfather would expect of him.
He had been given twenty-four hours to think it over and he had gone back to Tiggy’s flat to tell her what had happened and to collect his things. Only when he had arrived there he had found Tiggy in a flood of tears—and pregnant with his child.
The sight of her vulnerable face and childlike body, her copious tears, had swept aside all his carefully prepared speeches. He loved her. He couldn’t live without her. She was having his baby. His grandfather would understand. He would have to understand.
They were married three days later at Caxton Hall.
As he kissed his new bride, David had told her sternly that henceforward there were to be no more drugs, no more partying all night and sleeping all day. They had their baby to think about.
Docilely Tiggy had agreed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him passionately whilst she told him how much she loved him.
It was a pity that he wasn’t still going to be a barrister, she told him. He would have looked so deliciously stern and forbidding in his court robes, but she would be just as happy married to a famous pop star and she had no doubts he was going to be famous.
David hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his career as a pop star had ended almost as soon as it began.
Three weeks later when the bank announced that he had overspent his allowance and that they couldn’t allow him to withdraw any more money from his account, he had told Tiggy that they were going to visit his family in Cheshire.
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