How familiar. Somewhere, a warning bell went off but it rang so deep within his subconscious mind that all he could hear of it was a very faint echo that faded almost as soon as he tried to grasp it.

"Garth, do you really think someone might have stolen my keys?"

Claudia mumbled against his mouth.

"Well, it's a distinct possibility, isn't it?" he returned.

"I'll get a safety chain and bolt to fit on the door before I go back to barracks," he promised her as he bent to pick her up and carry her through into the bedroom.

He had changed the bedding that reeked of the whisky he must have spilled on it and taken it down to their local launderette to wash.

Guessing the question that Claudia was going to ask him as she saw the fresh bed linen he bent over and slowly started to kiss her.

Now that she was carrying their child, their lovemaking was different--quieter, gentler, less intensely passionate perhaps, but to him somehow deeper and richer, as though their mutual awareness of the life they had created bonded them at a new, more mature, less carefree level.

"I'm getting to be almost afraid to do this in case I hurt you," Garth whispered to her as he slowly started to penetrate her.

/! know, but the doctor said it was all right," Claudia reassured him.

Her own sex drive had diminished with her pregnancy, her breasts felt sore and tender, and her constant nausea left her feeling almost permanently tired. But as though in compensation, her desire to be close to Garth, to be held by him, to feel close to him both physically and emotionally, had increased. She loved the feeling of protection and safety it gave her to be held close to his body, to be wrapped in his arms, to know that he was there for both of them, her and their baby.

"I was so afraid about your going away this time," she told him in a whisper while he moved carefully inside her. Tou won't still have to go, will you? "

"I doubt it. Now that I know this tour has been cancelled, I intend to bring my leaving date forward to what it was originally supposed to be. Mmm.-you feel good. I'm not hurting you, am I?"

Claudia shook her head, closing her eyes and letting her thoughts drift, accelerate, as her body quickened to the rhythm of Garth's. Their lovemaking was tender and leisurely, Garth's orgasm not as fiercely intense as she was accustomed to on their first time in bed after they had been apart.

"How long have you got at home?" she asked him a little later as shelay beside him, her body curled towards his."Only forty-eight hours," Garth replied."Mmm..." Garth reached out and placed his hand over her belly."You know, I sometimes can't quite believe it," he told her huskily."No, sometimes I can't, either," Claudia agreed."You... you aren't sorry, are you?" she questioned him.

"You are pleased?"

"Of course I'm pleased," Garth answered gruffly, reaching out for her and rocking her in his arms as he held her tight.

"Of course I'm pleased."

Kicking open the kitchen door, Estelle put down her supermarket carriers of food and went to switch on the answering machine.

Blade was sulking with her. She gave a small shrug--so, let him sulk.

She was familiar enough with his moods to know that ultimately he would get in touch with her.

She was halfway back to the kitchen when she heard the familiar male voice on the tape. For a moment, she tensed and then very deliberately closed the door between herself and the answering machine, leaving her father's voice to speak into the silence of the empty room.

Her father! Rather the man who had fathered her. Well, he could keep his pretence of wanting to get in touch with her, of wanting to see her. What use did she have for him now?

Three months--that was the length of time he had stayed around for her after her birth, three months before he had had enough of being a father to her. He hadn't wanted her then and she certainly didn't want him now.

It filled her with angry contempt to see the way people like Tara carried on about their parents, their precious mummies and daddies.

Saw agely, she mimicked an upper-class accent under her breath as she mouthed the words. And what made her even more contemptuous was to see the way that Garth so obviously adored his daughter.

In her opinion, parents were a necessary evil that one had to put up with until one could break free of them. Not that she had had too many problems in that direction. Her mother had a hedonistic, selfish approach to life, which meant that being a hands-on mother had never been a role that held any appeal for her.

Estelle could remember how appalled Lorraine had been when Blade's school threatened to expel him.

"But that means we shall have to have both of them here with us," she had protested to Ethian.

They had been in their bedroom at the time and Estelle--six years old--had been listening outside the bedroom door.

"He hasn't been expelled yet," Ethian had calmed her, 'and even if he is, well, I expect we'll be able to find another school to take him. "

"I'd like to send Estelle away to school," Estelle heard her mother telling him.

"But, of course, if I do, her father will no doubt insist on paying her fees direct and cutting my maintenance."

"Does he know that you've moved her to a state school?" Estelle's new stepfather asked Lorraine.

"No, of course not. He doesn't have the least idea just how expensive she is to keep. I can hardly bear to think of the money he must waste on that wretched house he's bought for Sophie, never mind the money he's undoubtedly settled on their son. Why on earth couldn't he have done something like that for Estelle?"

"She's a girl," Ethian answered dispassionately.

"She hardly warrants that kind of investment."

So now she knew the reason her father had wanted nothing to do with her. He had gone away when she was a baby because she was only a girl.

Thoughtfully, she had made her way back to her own bedroom. She was used to listening to her mother's complaints about her father's financial meanness towards them.

Her mother liked wearing pretty clothes and going to all the best parties; she liked summers in Tuscany and winters in Barbados. And Estelle had learned while very young that her mother deeply resented whatever or whoever prevented her from doing what she enjoyed.

There was nothing Lorraine enjoyed more than accompanying her husband to the large number of corporate 'dos' his work required him to attend.

A pretty, vain, completely self-centred woman, she divided the rest of her time between shopping and visiting beauticians and hairdressers.

Estelle knew perfectly well that if she were to dial the number of the apartment in the exclusive block that her mother had persuaded Ethian to buy the previous year, she would be unlikely to get a response from anything other than the an n swering machine and that even if she did leave her a message, her mother would probably not bother to ring back.

"You're an adult now, a woman," she had told Estelle on the day of her eighteenth birthday.

"And I really do think, darling, that it's time for you to look around for somewhere of your own to live."

Estelle had known immediately what her mother had meant. They were both women and her mother had no intention of sharing anything she considered to be hers with another woman, not even her.

"You'll have your father's allowance and I'll speak to Ethian. I'm sure he'll want to do something to help you," her mother had assured her.

Estelle had been living in her cramped little flat for less than six months when Ethian had stopped paying the allowance he had promised to make her. She still had the money she received from her father, of course, but she wasn't able to live on that, and the pittance she earned working in an exclusive Bond Street shop didn't even pay for the clothes she bought there at cost.

It had been one of the girls she worked with who had suggested that she might know of a way Estelle could improve her finances. It wouldn't be so different from what her mother did anyway.

Yes, her mother might be married to Ethian, but it had never been any secret to Estelle that Lorraine used his sexual hunger for her to get from him what she wanted in terms of clothes, money, holidays.

The only difference between them was that she, Estelle, didn't have to restrict herself to one man.

"Has Estelle rung back yet?" Sophie Frensham asked her husband John.

Estelle's father shook his head.

"I'll leave it a couple of days and then try again." Correctly interpreting the look on his face, Sophie pushed aside the fruit she had been preparing to make jam with and, wiping her hands, walked across the kitchen and put her arms lovingly around him.

The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was huge and old-fashioned.

When John had inherited the place from his father ten years ago, he had promised her that just as soon as he could afford it, she could start work on modern ising the whole place, but while John might be wealthy in terms of land and assets, he was unfortunately cash poor.

Farming was no way for a sane man to try to make a living, he was fond of saying, but despite that, Sophie knew how proud he was of the fact that Ian, their son, was determined to follow in his father's footsteps.

She had known John since childhood. Her grandfather had been Lord Lieutenant of the County, and while John's family were not tenants of her grandfather, John, like all the other local children, had been invited up to the hall for the biannual parties her grandparents gave for their tenants and neighbours.

Although they were of a similar age, as teenagers they had gone their separate ways to follow their separate interests. She had worked abroad for a while, learning and then teaching French, while John, like many of his peers, had turned his back on tradition and the role in life expected of him, and instead of making his life here at the farm he would one day inherit, he had gone instead to London, which had then been a Mecca for young people. London in the seventies--she had heard about it, read about it, but still found it difficult to envisage John, the John she knew and loved, being a part of that reportedly wild and exuberant scene.

Her parents had been a little concerned when she had first announced that she wanted to marry him.

"He's a divorced man with a child," her mother had pointed out quietly, but Sophie had refused to be swayed, and her faith in him had been more than justified, more than repaid.

At the end of the month, their daughter Rebecca would be celebrating her twenty-first birthday.

Sophie's brother, who had inherited from their grandfather, had offered the ballroom at the hall for the event, and she knew how much it would mean to John to have his elder daughter Estelle there.

Privately, she had her doubts about the kind of life Estelle was living--Sophie had a woman's instinct about her stepdaughter, which warned her that her beloved John could be very shocked and hurt by the way his daughter lived her life--but she loved him too much to want to voice such thoughts to him. She didn't want to disillusion him and she just hoped that Estelle herself wouldn't do so, either!

"She's my daughter, my first child, yet she's a stranger to me," he gruffly told her now.

"And that's my fault. I should have tried harder, done more. I was so damn glad to get out of that marriage that I never even gave a thought to ensuring that I had proper access to Estelle."

"Things were different in those days," Sophie tried to comfort him.

"Everyone believed then that a child was better off left with its mother, and you did try," she reminded him, remembering all the useless attempts they had made to persuade his ex-wife to allow Estelle to come to them during school holidays. She had never refused point-blank, but what she had done was quite simply make it impossible for them to have her other than for the odd short visit.

And then there was the matter of the very generous allowance that John had paid his elder daughter right up until her twenty-first birthday, a far more generous allowance than either of his children from his second marriage had ever received.

While Ian, their son, had been at agricultural college, he had had to work in his spare time to help finance his education, as had Rebecca.

New agricultural policies, coupled with the crippling effects of things like BSE, the usually fatal cattle disease, had dramatically changed the way John farmed their land, and every bit of money they managed to accumulate had to be put back into the farm. But Sophie had reminded herself every time she felt herself starting to resent the financial strain that John's elder child made on their resources of just how very much more fortunate her children were in that they had the loving presence of their father in their lives on a day-today basis.

John had admitted to her that he had never taken very much interest in Estelle as a baby.

"The whole thing, Lorraine's pregnancy and Estelle's birth, was a total mistake, something that just wasn't meant to happen. Lorraine swore right through the first few months that she intended to have her pregnancy terminated. But I... I couldn't let her do that," he had confessed grimly.

"We fought like cat and dog over it. We should never really have married. The whole thing was a disaster right from the start. God alone knows what I thought I was doing, and then, of course, when Lorraine realised that I was serious about our moving back down here to the farm, that was it. There was no way she was going to leave London.

"In fact..." He stopped. What was the point in going over it all again? Sophie had, after all, heard the story of his destructive and thankfully brief marriage often enough.

Silently, Sophie watched him. She could guess what he was thinking, how much he hoped that Estelle would get in touch with them and how much he wanted her to be there with them when they celebrated Rebecca's coming of age, to be a part of them.

Sophie wasn't quite sure what had alerted her to the truth about Estelle--a certain sixth sense perhaps, an awareness, a horrible dark knowing that she had tried desperately to avoid until its darkness had been innocently confirmed by a friend who mentioned that she had bumped into Estelle in London and that she had been accompanying a man known to them both.

The man in question was nearly thirty years Estelle's senior, very wealthy and very, very married. Sophie's friend had assumed that their being together was completely innocent and the result of his having been introduced to Estelle over the previous Christmas when Estelle had totally unexpectedly turned up on her father's doorstep, but Sophie had known otherwise. She could never tell John because she knew how guilty he already felt about her.

"I should have sued for custody," he had said forcefully one summer when Estelle had been eleven.

She had just spent a week with them, disdaining the activities and company of their own children, shutting herself away in her room for most of her visit and running up a huge phone bill.

"She ought to have been running around outside with the others... and not..." He had paused, shaking his head.

"She's not like a child.

She's more of a miniature adult. I feel so guilty, Sophie," he had said often, 'so helpless. I ought to have done more, tried harder."

Would it have made any difference if he had, if Estelle had been brought up surrounded by love and security as their own children had?

If she had been subjected to the loving, caring discipline they had exercised with Ian and Rebecca, if she had known as they had known, that she was loved and wanted?

As he saw the sympathetic look on her face, John knew that there was nothing that Sophie could say to change how he felt. His guilt went too deep.

Watching Sophie measuring out the sugar to put with the fruit in preparation to boil up the jam, John silently thanked whatever beneficent presence in his life had arranged for Sophie to love him.

She was totally different from his first wife, so totally different in every possible way.

He had met Lorraine during the early seventies while he was living in London. Originally from a small working-class town in the north of England, she had been in London for just under two years when she and John had first met at a party thrown by a friend of a friend John had met at college.

His family, especially his father, had been filled with disapproval when John had announced that instead of following family tradition by going to a local college, he intended instead to study at the London School of Economics.

"That's not a university. It's a breeding ground for drop-outs and lefties," his father had growled furiously, but John hadn't been prepared to change his mind. At eighteen, nearly nineteen, what he thought of as the narrowness of his parents' lives, the constraint and dullness of the life he himself would be expected to live, had filled him with a fierce determination to escape, to live, and it had been in this reckless mood that he had met Lorraine.

Eighteen months his senior, she had just broken up with her previous boyfriend, a forty- year-old recording studio executive who had, he later discovered, balked at her efforts to get him to the altar.

Lorraine might have been part of the London 'scene' and everything that it encompassed, but she still was a hard-headed, shrewd northerner--sex before marriage was all very well just as long as it ultimately led to marriage.

Lorraine had seen her grandmother, her mother and her aunts live gruellingly hard lives that had worn them out by the time they were in their forties. She could see her friends from school starting the same inevitable progression, getting themselves a lad, falling pregnant by him, getting married quickly and shamefacedly, renting a small terraced house if they were lucky enough to have a lad who could afford such luxury, or moving in with his or their own mam and dad if he couldn't, their lives virtually over before they had begun, at least in Lorraine's eyes.

That wasn't going to happen to her. So very deliberately, she had packed her bags and taken herself off to London, getting herself a job in a shop to start with, in one of the multitude of new boutiques that were springing up all over the capital.

It was an age of crumbling barriers, of a new interaction between the classes. Northern accents were something to be worn proudly, but even so, Lorraine quietly and secretly learned to smooth out the rawness of hers. She quickly came to realise, too, that her passport to the kind of money and comfortable life she wanted would have to be a man.

And she had openly told John when their marriage was in its final throes that initially he had seemed the ideal candidate.

Well-connected, and so she had mistakenly thought then, comfortably wealthy, and even more importantly, not as yet tarnished by the cynicism that had begun to dull the glow of London's gilded youth.