Cleo remembered that Brad – Hunnicliffe, that was it – had been over here on some sort of exchange. Teaching science or something at Lavenstock College. When Daphne, working in the Bursar’s office, had heard that he and his wife were seeking accommodation, it had seemed to her that Phoebe’s house, which was standing empty after her death, though still furnished, could be of some use to someone, rather than standing idle … not to mention bringing in some cash.
‘You might just as well stay in the house until we get another tenant – or for as long as you like as far as I’m concerned, Cleo,’ George said now.
Cleo could hardly speak, unable to believe that her luck could change so dramatically. Phoebe’s lovely little house! Not lovely in the sense that most people would regard as such, but lovely to her because it had been dear and familiar all her life, just as Phoebe had been.
Phoebe had been George’s aunt. She had married just before the war. Hardly had the wedding bells ceased to ring, however, than war had been declared and Jack, her young husband, had been called up into the Navy, where he’d gone down with his ship almost as soon as he’d finished training. Poor Phoebe. She and her Jack had had so little time together, but at least he’d never known that she’d lost the baby she was expecting. After that, she’d just gone back to work, never remarried, and lived alone, until she was eighty-four, in the house she’d come to as a bride. In many ways she’d had a sad life, but a busy, and in the end, Cleo thought, a contented one. When she died, she left the house and contents to George. He’d had some idea of tarting it up, like some of the neighbouring houses, before selling it, but Phoebe, quiet, determined, austere little Phoebe, had been very
special to him, and to all the family, and he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to get rid of all her furniture and belongings. However, as Daphne pointed out, it wasn’t very sensible to leave the place unlived in, and so he’d agreed to rent it to the Hunnicliffes as temporary furnished accommodation.
It was the end one of a row of pint-sized artisan-type dwellings, as the house agents referred to them, meaning two up and one down, with a kitchen tacked on and bathroom made from the tiny second bedroom. Now wedged in between blocks of council flats on the one hand and fairly swanky properties on the other … but nothing was perfect, Cleo told herself. It was here, in Lavenstock, not far from either the library or a bus route. You could walk into the town centre easily if you were so minded. Everything she needed, really. But …
‘You’ll have to pay me rent,’ George said sternly, and Cleo nodded happily, seeing this face-saving gesture for what it was, knowing he wouldn’t overcharge. ‘So I hope this cleaning job pays well. Otherwise you’ll have to get a proper one, won’t you?’
‘That’s blackmail!’
‘I know.’ He grinned.
He was a good egg, really. Her mum, too. They must have been cooking this thing up for some time.
Filled with a new energy, she couldn’t wait, and walked on air up to her new abode, stopping only to get in a few essential supplies at Sainsbury’s. Brandishing the keys like a trophy, she unlocked the front door.
She felt a little choked as she stepped in, and stood blinking for a moment. She’d never been inside the place since Phoebe had died, and the sight of all her familiar things brought her vividly back to mind: the embroidered cushions, her footstool, the crocheted duchess set on the sideboard. There also Cleo saw evidence of the quiet continuance of her modest life in the collection of knick-knacks, valueless to anyone else, but which had meant so much to Phoebe, as well as the clock presented to her father on his retirement and, in pride of place, her wedding photograph.
Going into her aunt’s house had always seemed like entering
a time warp, and seemed even more so, now that she was no longer here, part of it. Phoebe had lived in this little house for well over sixty years, and practically everything in it was exactly as it was when she and Jack had set up home when they were first married. She’d never seen the need for much modernisation.
The front room was all geometric shapes, fashionable at the time, the fireplace a perfect semicircle of fawn and eau-de-nil Art Deco tiling, without a mantelpiece, set against what Phoebe had called ‘a nice biscuit-coloured wallpaper’. The square dining suite was in limed oak. A matching step-sided china cabinet stood in one alcove, in the other a square-columned standard lamp, complete with its original parchment shade painted with flying ducks. Three more flew diagonally across one wall.
But people went in for this sort of thing nowadays, paid a lot of money for it, and the Honeybuns had probably been charmed, seen the whole thing as a genuine period piece, which is just what it was. Cleo looked at the only picture in the room, placed high on the wall, a curious depiction of Spaniards apparently about to do the tango, made from coloured silver paper mounted on black velvet, occupying the wall over the sideboard. The mirror over the fireplace had peach-coloured glass insets either side. Good Lord, she might well be living in an Aladdin’s cave! Every time she sat down on the fawn uncut moquette three-piece suite with its curved-to-the-floor padded arms, she’d be terrified of spilling her coffee on it.
Talking of which … she went to make herself a coffee, as a sort of rite of ownership, to carry around while she inspected the entire place and thought how she might adjust it, without disrespect to Phoebe, to her own more chaotic living requirements.
The kettle boiled, and as she reached for a mug, she noticed with shocked disapproval that Angel Honeybun had been using Phoebe’s good, Greek key-patterned tea service for every day. Her aunt must be turning in her grave. Not that it was Crown Derby, but Phoebe had treasured it. Cleo was furious when she saw a small chip on one of the cups – though she told herself you had to be prepared for worse than that when you rented a furnished house to anyone. There and then, she returned the cups and saucers prissily to the china cabinet in the front room
where they’d always lived, and as she did so, she noticed something else. The Clarice Cliff candlestick was missing.
She stared at the place where it had stood for as long as she could remember. Perhaps Angel had broken it, perhaps George had taken it home for safe keeping. But Daphne wouldn’t have given it house room, she’d been united in loathing it with Phoebe, who’d said often enough she’d have thrown it out years ago, had it not been given to her as a wedding present in 1939. Cleo could understand anybody who went in for Greek key-patterned china hating it; she was hardly enamoured herself. The chunky, two-branched pottery candlestick was OK if you admired angular, geometric affairs, decorated splashily in orangey-red, dark blue and bilious shades of green, outlined in black. But Cleo knew that anything with the Clarice Cliff name attached to it fetched high prices these days. Why was a mystery to her, but Daphne said they did. She’d seen something almost identical to this candlestick on the
Antiques Road Show.
She poked around a bit more, went upstairs, where drawers and wardrobe were empty. The large cupboard built into the fireplace alcove was locked and her keys downstairs, but it could wait, she certainly wouldn’t need more space. She went back to the kitchen to finish making her coffee, stood on a stool to take a better look in the top cupboards and there, behind a tall jug, was the candlestick. Slightly offended to find even such an object so relegated, she picked it up to return it to its rightful place, wondering if Phoebe’s spirit wasn’t hanging around there somewhere, already insinuating itself into her in an effort to make her great-niece as fussy as she herself had always been about that sort of thing, like people get, living alone. But as Cleo reached to put the candlestick back into the cabinet, she hesitated. Something was telling her – just what it was she didn’t know, she was no expert on those things – that all was not quite right about it. The shape? The design? It looked just the same. Had it, perhaps, like the china cup, acquired a chip? She turned it over.
The ‘Rudyard’ pattern, a number, and the designer’s name and mark. She’d have to show it to her mother to know whether there was anything wrong there, but what if there were? If it turned out to be a copy? Wasn’t there some subtle difference between the legality of copying something, and making a deliberate fake? Why should anyone worry, anyway, if you couldn’t
tell either from the real thing? Apart, of course, from the differences in price. She looked at the candlestick before putting it back. That was it, she thought, the colours looked just too
new.
Well, well, who would’ve thought it? Not such an angel, after all, little Mrs Honeybun. Had she broken the original, and been scared to own up?
Or what?
Cleo wondered briefly if anything else had been substituted, but Phoebe had never been one for amassing possessions, valuable or otherwise. She’d left the house and contents, family photographs and Jack’s gold watch to George, and all the money she had in the bank – a surprising amount, but she’d worked all her life and always been thrifty – to a children’s charity. She’d willed her engagement ring and a cameo that had belonged to her mother to Daphne, a turquoise ring and all the books she had to Cleo, and a string of cultured pearls to Jenna. And that was it, as far as Cleo knew.
Dorrie normally did her own cooking, but tonight Mrs Totty, as a gesture of goodwill or in deference to Sam’s needs, had left a substantial and savoury casserole for supper. When they’d finished – though Dorrie had eaten no more than a spoonful, leaving Sam to demolish the rest – he decided to broach the subject of the school’s offer for the house once more. He’d brought in a bottle of wine, she’d had two glasses and he thought she might be prepared to talk about it. But she wasn’t.
‘I don’t even want to think about it, Sam, I don’t need the money, I’ve more than enough to live on and I’m quite happy here, so why should I let them bully me into selling my home? Just because the school’s suddenly decided they need to build a big new science block?’ Seated in the depths of the big armchair, she managed to look small and defenceless, but stubborn, and more owlish than ever, taking refuge behind the huge specs which hid her eyes.
‘So it’s a new science block, is it? That’s why they need to resite the entrance? Not simply to spare the school from the horrid sight of the estate?’
‘You’ve been listening to Eileen, and she’s prejudiced!’ Dorrie’s lips twitched, though, and she added slyly, ‘Though naturally, new buildings would effectively do that, wouldn’t they?’
Nobody could seriously believe that was the prime reason, snobbery didn’t extend so far, even for institutions with a far more exalted reputation than Lavenstock College, Sam told himself. Or could they? For years, Lavenstock had teetered a little nervously between being a minor public school with a good reputation and being a rather better one; then the installation of the present Headmaster had brought academic successes and achievements which sent it soaring up the scholastic league tables. Improved science facilities were likely to be even more of an inducement to well-off people to send their sons to the school,
though the extent of both the wealth and the snobbery of such parents was almost certainly exaggerated.
The evening was chilly and Sam had made up a fire in the morning room. Resin hissed and boiled from the big log set on its glowing embers and Dorrie poked at it, sending sparks flying up the chimney. Several flew the other way, on to the hearthrug, and one began to smoulder. Casually, she stamped it out, but not before it had made yet another scorch mark to join the dozens of others already there, leaving behind a smell of singed wool. ‘It’s not convenient, they say, to have the new buildings over on this side, so far away from the others, right across the other side of the playing fields from the main school. It would also mean laying new services and everything – by which I suppose they mean drains and electricity. It’s easier to put in a new drive, this side. Well, they’ve already got the other three houses around me. Why don’t they pull them down and leave mine alone?’
‘Could it be because this one is bang in the middle? Which effectively stymies any chance of a new entrance?’
‘Maybe it could,’ said Dorrie, with another guileless smile. She reached out and twisted the knob on the old-fashioned radio by her chair until she found a concert on Radio 3. ‘All right?’ she asked, as the first notes of the Dvorak cello concerto flooded into the room, offering him the choice of a Murraymint to suck, or a piece of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. Sam said yes to the music and declined the sweets, seeing both actions as signalling Dorrie’s wish not to continue the conversation, but as he stretched his legs to the fire and let the tide of music sweep over him, and Dorrie snuggled into the warmth of her comfortable, sagging old chair like a sleepy tabby, he thought yet again about what Mrs Totty had said. Could it really be that Dorrie had always hated this house? She’d lived here all her life, alone in it for at least twenty years since her father, his grandfather, had died. Loyalty, or perhaps subservience, to that terrible old man had kept her living here while he was still alive, but she’d had no reason to stay afterwards. It couldn’t simply be that garden which was keeping her, he told himself. But he was afraid that it might be. She had always formed odd, unaccountable attachments to places, as well as people.
But if the school had offered a good price, which seemed likely, she could surely find a suitable, small house, where she
could make another garden? Would leaving this be so terrible? How long could she stand out? The school’s plans, he felt, were unlikely to be given up quite so easily.
He said gently, when the concerto had finished and she’d switched off, ‘Ignoring this business won’t just make it go away, you know.’
She looked away and began fussing with the evening paper. ‘I’ve told you what I think.’
‘Come on, Dorrie,’ he said more firmly, ‘wouldn’t it be better to have it resolved, one way or the other? Let me have a look at the correspondence for a start, and see if I can’t suggest something.’
Her face assumed a hunted, secretive look. He felt as though he was hurting a child. Then she said suddenly, uncaring, ‘Oh, go on, have a look if you want, it won’t make any difference.’
‘What have you done with the letters?’
‘I don’t know, they’re somewhere around.’ She gestured vaguely towards the ancient, battered desk in the corner. ‘In one of those drawers, I think.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes for sleep. ‘Three or four, I think there are. Unless I’ve thrown one or two away. I might have.’
‘Dorrie!’
‘Well, they made me so
angry.
’
It took him twenty minutes, rummaging through seed catalogues, some of his own old letters, recipes torn from newspapers, sweet wrappers, communications from the bank, before he came up with three or four letters with the Lavenstock College heading. He sorted them into date order, then read the first one through, until he came to the large, almost illegible signature at the bottom. He stared at it, mesmerised, then propped his elbow on the desk, his hand supporting his head. It felt incredibly heavy. Eventually, he looked up to see Dorrie gazing at him, blinking through her round glasses.
‘Wetherby,’ he said when he could speak, ‘Charles Wetherby’s still Bursar here? I was told he’d moved on.’
‘You must have been mistaken.’
But Sam knew he wasn’t. Charles Wetherby was the reason he’d joined the Antarctic expedition, the reason he’d sworn never to return to Lavenstock as long as the man was there. Two months later, he’d heard that he was leaving. Nothing would
have induced Sam to come back had he known he was still here.
He sat still, while a sense of hopelessness invaded him. That man, still here, when, if justice had been done and decency had its way, he should have been wiped from the face of the earth. His time in the frozen miles of Antarctica had purged Sam, healed the scars – or so he had thought. He was a young man in any case slow to anger, an easy-going fellow who believed in live and let live. But when he did lose his temper, it was monumentally. Now, it overtook his hopelessness, seethed up inside him like boiling sugar, until an even more terrible thought forced a certain calmness on him.
He shuffled the letters together. ‘Dorrie,’ he began, ‘Dorrie, do you know —’ But then he stopped. Dorrie wouldn’t, of course, know. She’d never had anything to do with the school, or the people there, or wanted to. Look how she’d chucked those letters into a drawer, almost without reading them.
‘What’s wrong, Sam?’
He roused himself, took a grip on his mind, and made himself say ‘Oh, nothing, Dorrie, dear. Just a rather nasty goose walked over my grave.’
Hannah Wetherby sat in the darkened school hall, with only the stage lights switched on, wondering at the inanity that had caused Roger Barmforth, deputy head of English, director
manqué
, to choose
The Beggar’s Opera
for the end-of-term production – or to be more accurate, wondering why she’d ever allowed herself to be roped in to help with the costumes. Making her own clothes was one thing, this was something else.
Roger Barmforth was an amiable idiot and nothing he did should have surprised her, but the choice of this bawdy entertainment for a school production, with its endless possibilities for innuendo and sniggers, was asking for trouble, when even the author’s name, John Gay, caused the adolescent cast to fall about. Nor had it been the world’s best idea to invite the sixth-form girls from the Princess Mary High School to participate. Though it had to be said that Rosie Deventer made a splendid Polly Peachum, hardly needing to act at all – and it was better than encouraging some of the boys to dress up, certainly better
than Douthwaite with his blond baby face in the part. There was no need for false boobs where Rosie was concerned.
Right choice or wrong, things had advanced too far to go back now. Hannah leaned back and closed her eyes. Subconsciously, she fingered the gauzy scarf around her throat, very aware of the letter in her pocket and the warm rush of feeling whenever she thought of it, though it had hardly been what she would have expected, or hoped for.
‘Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her. I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter!’
sang Polly Peachum’s father, to accompanying cat-calls from the wings and a compliant flounce, a rolling of eyes and various other body parts from Polly on the stage.
Hannah had never expected to see Sam Leadbetter again, had fully expected they’d be gone from Lavenstock before his stint in the Antarctic was finished. She felt quite dizzy at the thought of seeing him again, and overwhelmed by what it would inevitably mean. Had all the anguish of these last years been for nothing?
What would Sam think of her, now? Once she’d glowed with health, love had lent her warmth and vitality but now she felt herself a spent thing, who’d lost too much weight and was too pale. She often had a bruised look under her eyes, which she’d once thought echoed those other bruises … in her heart … Immediately the thought was formed, she’d scorned herself for such sentimental twaddle, but it was too late: she’d already thought it. And it was in any case exactly what she felt.
But it was an uncomfortable analogy which she skittered away from. She looked sometimes at the album containing her wedding photograph, like probing a sore tooth, and couldn’t believe what she’d once been: slight, even then, with big brown eyes and soft brown hair falling to her shoulders, but glowing and vibrant in a cream silk frock and her grandmother’s lace veil, standing on the steps of Our Lady’s Roman Catholic church – glowing with what she’d then thought was love. Adoring love for Charles, the tall, good-looking man beside her. Looking at the photo with hindsight, she could see that even then he was complacent, though she had never noticed it through the haze of her infatuation.
They had met when he was standing as the prospective candidate
for the Surrey constituency where she lived, and where she’d drifted in as a helper. She was eighteen, messing around after leaving school with nothing to fill in her time, not knowing what she wanted to do – a condition, had she but known it then, that was fatally endemic to her character. Here she was, still messing around at forty, still being roped in to lend a hand whenever there was no one else to do it, not knowing what she wanted to do with her life – except that, quite passionately, she wanted to live it without Charles, wrong though her religion said that was.
Her mother had never wanted her to marry him, and within two years would have been able to say, ‘I told you so,’ had she not been dead by then of a secondary cancer.
After Charles left school, his father had found him a job in a City bank, but though he had undoubted abilities, he had never felt he received the acclaim from it he thought he undoubtedly deserved, and eventually decided a life at Westminster would suit him better. He had convinced the selection committee of his solid worth (or perhaps dazzled some of the women as much as he’d dazzled Hannah) and achieved considerable publicity during the subsequent campaign, when his suave manner and photogenic good looks had made him apparently very popular. The seat he was contesting was thought to be a safe one, but the people of the constituency he was meant to represent had thought otherwise, and presumably seen through him. He had lost by a large margin.
Some people could cope with disappointment, but Charles was not one who fell into this category, never having been allowed to know what disappointment meant by either of his parents, who had spoiled him outrageously all his life. After failing in his bid for Westminster, he had stayed with the bank for some years then found an administrative job in industry, which was a mistake of the first order. He had lasted barely eighteen months among people who were quick to spot a supercilious phoney.
God knows what would have happened had the post of school Bursar not conveniently become vacant at that particular moment. The then Headmaster of Lavenstock had shortly been due to retire, and was happy enough to push the appointment of a man who seemed to have the required financial and administrative
acumen, without going too deeply into his background, other than to note with satisfaction that he was an Old Boy of his own school.
The post of Bursar, and the authority it conferred, had persuaded Charles that he had finally found a niche that suited him, and he filled the post with admirable efficiency. But he had never seen the advantage of showing circumspection, and was less and less able to curb his arrogance, even in public. He made few friends, of the sort he thought worthy of his upbringing, certainly none among his colleagues at the school. None of this went unnoticed; he was tolerated because of his undoubted abilities, but he could not be unaware that he was not popular.