Best Kept Secret Read online

  Jessica adored Winston, second only to Sebastian, despite her new brother declaring somewhat haughtily, ‘I’m far too grown up to have a teddy bear. After all, I’ll be going to school in a few weeks’ time.’

  Jessica wanted to go to St Bede’s with him, but Harry explained that boys and girls didn’t go to the same school.

  ‘Why not?’ Jessica demanded.

  ‘Why not indeed,’ said Emma.

  When the first day of term finally dawned, Emma stared at her young man, wondering where the years had gone. He was dressed in a red blazer, red cap and grey flannel shorts. Even his shoes shone. Well, it was the first day of term. Jessica stood on the doorstep and waved goodbye as the car disappeared down the drive and out of the front gates. She then sat down on the top step and waited for Sebastian to return.

  Sebastian had requested that his mother didn’t join him and his father on the journey to school. When Harry asked why, he replied, ‘I don’t want the other boys to see Mama kissing me.’

  Harry would have reasoned with him, if he hadn’t recalled his first day at St Bede’s. He and his mother had taken the tram from Still House Lane, and he’d asked if they could get off a stop early and walk the last hundred yards so the other boys wouldn’t realize they didn’t own a car. And when they were fifty yards from the school gates, although he allowed her to kiss him, he quickly said goodbye and left her standing there. As he approached St Bede’s for the first time, he saw his future classmates being dropped off from hansom cabs and motor cars – one even arrived in a Rolls-Royce driven by a liveried chauffeur.

  Harry had also found his first night away from home difficult, but, unlike Jessica, it was because he’d never slept in a room with other children.

  But the alphabet had been kind to him, because he ended up sleeping in a dormitory with Barrington on one side and Deakins on the other. He wasn’t as lucky when it came to his dormitory prefect. Alex Fisher slippered him every other night of his first week, for no other reason than Harry was the son of a dock labourer, and therefore not worthy of being educated at the same school as Fisher, the son of an estate agent. Harry sometimes wondered what had happened to Fisher after he left St Bede’s. He knew that he and Giles had crossed paths during the war when they’d served in the same regiment at Tobruk, and he assumed Fisher must still live in Bristol, because he’d recently avoided talking to him at a St Bede’s Old Boys’ reunion.

  At least Sebastian would be arriving in a motor car, and as a day bug he wouldn’t suffer the Fisher problem, because he would be returning to Barrington Hall every evening. Even so, Harry suspected that his son wasn’t going to find St Bede’s any easier than he had, even if it would be for completely different reasons.

  When Harry drew up outside the school gates, Sebastian jumped out even before he’d had time to pull on the brakes. Harry watched as his son ran through the gates and disappeared into a melee of red blazers in which he was indistinguishable from a hundred other boys. He never once looked back. Harry accepted that the old order changeth, yielding place to new.

  He drove slowly back to Barrington Hall and began to think about the next chapter of his latest book. Was it time for William Warwick to be promoted?

  As he approached the house, he spotted Jessica sitting on the top step. He smiled as he brought the car to a halt. But when he climbed out, the first thing she said was, ‘Where’s Seb?’

  Each day, while Sebastian was away at school, Jessica retreated into her own world. While she waited for him to return home she would pass the time by reading to Winston about other animals, Pooh Bear, Mr Toad, a white rabbit, a marmalade cat called Orlando, and a crocodile that had swallowed a clock.

  Once Winston had fallen asleep, she would tuck him up in bed, return to her easel and paint. On and on. In fact, what Emma had once considered the nursery had been converted by Jessica into an art studio. Once she had covered every piece of paper she could lay her hands on, including Harry’s old manuscripts (he had to keep his new ones locked up), with pencil, crayon or paint, she turned her attention to redecorating the nursery walls.

  Harry didn’t want to curb her enthusiasm, far from it, but he did remind Emma that Barrington Hall wasn’t their home, and perhaps they ought to consult Giles before she escaped from the nursery and discovered how many other pristine walls there were in the house.

  But Giles was so smitten with the new arrival at Barrington Hall that he declared he wouldn’t mind if she repainted the whole house inside and out.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t encourage her,’ begged Emma. ‘Sebastian has already asked her to repaint his room.’

  ‘And when are you going to tell her the truth?’ Giles asked as they sat down for dinner.

  ‘We can’t see that there’s any need to tell her yet,’ said Harry. ‘After all, Jessica’s only six, and she’s hardly settled in.’

  ‘Well, don’t leave it too long,’ Giles warned him, ‘because she already looks upon you and Emma as her parents, Seb as her brother, and calls me Uncle Giles, while the truth is she’s my half-sister, and Seb’s aunt.’

  Harry laughed. ‘I think it will be some time before she can be expected to grasp that.’

  ‘I hope she never has to,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t forget, all she knows is that her real parents are dead. Why should that change, while only the three of us know the whole truth?’

  ‘Don’t underestimate Sebastian. He’s already halfway there.’

  7

  HARRY AND EMMA were surprised when they were invited to join the headmaster for tea at the end of Sebastian’s first term, and quickly discovered it was not a social occasion.

  ‘Your son’s a bit of a loner,’ declared Dr Hedley, once the maid had poured them a cup of tea and left the room. ‘In fact he’s more likely to befriend a boy from overseas than one who’s lived in Bristol all his life.’

  ‘Why would that be?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Boys from far-flung shores have never heard of Mr and Mrs Harry Clifton, or his famous uncle Giles,’ explained the headmaster. ‘But, as is so often the case, something positive has come out of it because we’ve become aware that Sebastian has a natural gift for languages that in normal circumstances might have been missed. In fact, he is the only boy in the school who can converse with Lu Yang in his native tongue.’

  Harry laughed, but Emma noticed that the headmaster wasn’t smiling.

  ‘However,’ Dr Hedley continued, ‘there may be a problem when it comes to Sebastian sitting his entrance exam for Bristol Grammar School.’

  ‘But he came top in English, French and Latin,’ said Emma proudly.

  ‘And he scored one hundred per cent in maths,’ Harry reminded the headmaster.

  ‘True, and all very commendable, but unfortunately, at the same time, he languishes near the bottom of his class in history, geography and natural sciences, all of which are compulsory subjects. Should he fail to reach the pass mark in two or more of these, he will automatically be rejected by BGS, which I know would be a great disappointment for both of you, as well as his uncle.’

  ‘Great disappointment would be an understatement,’ said Harry.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Dr Hedley.

  ‘Do they ever make exceptions to the rules?’ asked Emma.

  ‘I can only recall one case in my tenure,’ said the headmaster, ‘and that was for a boy who had scored a century every Saturday during the summer term.’

  Harry laughed, having sat on the grass and watched Giles score every one of them. ‘So we’ll just have to make sure he realizes the consequences of dropping below the pass mark in two of the compulsory subjects.’

  ‘It’s not that he isn’t bright enough,’ said the headmaster, ‘but if a subject doesn’t appeal to him, he quickly becomes bored. The irony is, with his talent for languages, I predict he’ll sail into Oxford. But we still have to make sure he paddles into BGS.’

  After a little coaxing from his father, and some considerable bribery from his grandmother, S