Eleven Pipers Piping (53 page)

“There was for a period, Caroline.”

“Yes, but we chose not to hold the past against each other. Being able to forgive made our marriage stronger in the end. Remember we talked about this in your marriage preparation course? I’m not sure I ever learned if you had a … an episode in your marriage.”

“We all have episodes.”

“You’re not going to spill, are you?”

“Not today, sorry.”

Caroline smiled wanly. “Never mind. Come and see how beautiful Thornford is in this light.”

Tom joined her at the window, still holding the book. He had once, in a despairing moment, stood on the top of St. Nicholas’s bell tower and surveyed the village in its spring raiment, a thatch-and-cob jewel set in a sea of luminescent green, but Thorn Court’s belvedere tower commanded the high view, and that view late on a winter afternoon, as the earth turned its farthest from the sun, was of beauty stripped bare, stark and vulnerable. Dying rays rimmed the horizon with a soft golden light, flaming the feathery maze of naked trees tracing the folds of the distant hills and blazing the low, thin clouds double bright. Above this amber middle band, the ice-blue sky darkened to indigo; below, the village slipped into bronzing, blackening shadows, a little world folded into a bowl.

“You missed this all the years you were gone.” Tom regarded her in profile.

“Terribly.” Caroline folded the blanket around her.

“I had a phone call a little earlier this afternoon.”

“Yes?”

“From Australia.”

“Not from my mother, I trust.”

“No.”

“Good, she’s supposed to be on a plane out of Sydney in a few hours.” Caroline flicked a glance at him. “It’s the middle of the night in Australia. It must have been an important call.”

“It was … well, it was important to someone.”

Caroline let a heartbeat pass. “And I have a feeling it has something to do with me.”

“The call was from a woman named Phyllis Lambert who lives in Melbourne, but she’s English-born. Fifty years ago she was in
nursing school at Leeds. She emigrated not long after graduation. It seems she was a very good friend of Judith Ingley’s, and they stayed in touch over the years.”

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Ingley,” Caroline said, then added when Tom failed to respond: “No, truly. She was a meddlesome woman, and very much had the wrong end of the stick about … well, I think you may well know now, don’t you. But I wouldn’t have wished her dead—not that way.” She twisted her head to study his face. “You must believe me.”

Tom saw the supplicating shine in her eyes. Sorrowfully, he said, “I’m sorry, Caroline, I’m not certain that I do.”

Her expression turned bleak. “Tell me what this woman—Phyllis—said.” She spoke without expression.

Tom thought back to the call, announced on Judith’s mobile by a few bars of “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” He recognised the number; it was the one he had phoned—twice—in Australia. The voice, too, was recognizable. It was the same as the outgoing message, only trembling in anxiety, and it didn’t wait for Tom to proffer the usual greeting.

“Judith, are you okay? I was woken by the priest you’re staying with. He thinks you’re my mother, which is so odd, I thought I’d call you first to see if he’s unhinged. Actually, I tried a couple of times yesterday to get hold of you. I found the information you wanted! Judith?”

It had been no easier relating the circumstances of Judith’s death to Phyllis Lambert, as she was named, than it had been to Alice Ingley. Indeed, the bonds of affection between the two women ran deeply, as Tom learned in a call so lengthy he thought the phone’s battery would die and cut them off before she was finished. They had written faithfully for years; then, when long-distance rates no longer crushed the pocketbook, they phoned with regularity, later adding a little email, though neither cared for its impersonality. She had been planning a summer visit to England. She hadn’t been back
in nearly fifty years. Her husband, dead two years, hated to fly—they’d emigrated to Australia by boat—and now that Judith had buried her poor husband, so sick, you know, with Parkinson’s, well …

She burst into sobs. “In fact,” she sputtered through tears, “that was our last conversation.”

“What was?” Tom had asked, bewildered.

“About Parkinson’s and such illnesses, the strain they can put on a marriage. Any road,” she’d continued, when she’d recovered her voice, “she asked me to look into something for her, as I nursed for many years all over the country. Ken—that’s my husband—was often transferred with the bank he worked for. She wanted to know if I could take a peek into something in the medical records here that pertained to someone living in your village. She was a bit mysterious about it, actually, and I was reluctant, as it meant me violating confidentiality, but Judith seemed to think it was to some good purpose, so …” He could hear her blowing her nose. “I’ll tell you, Vicar,” she added adenoidally, “I’m sure I can trust in your discretion and perhaps it will do some good after all.”

Tom’s thoughts returned to the present, prompted by Caroline’s reiterating the question, “What did Phyllis Lambert tell you?”

He tapped the book of poems absently against his chest. “You never knew your mother-in-law, did you?” he asked instead.

“No. As I think I said on a previous occasion, I met and married Will in Melbourne some time after she died, and soon after we were here in England.”

“What did Will say his mother had died of? He must have mentioned it.”

“Of course.” Caroline tightened the blanket around her. “He said she had died of an embolism, a sudden, horrible, freakish twist of fate.”

“Which you never questioned.”

“I had no reason to. We were young, in love, soon to return to
England, looking to the future. Who would I have asked anyway? His father he never knew. He had done a runner years earlier. Will had almost no other family—and I’m sure you understand why, now. We wed in front of a JP. My mother and a girl I went to school with stood up for me. Will brought a couple of mates from his old college team. I doubt they knew. Well, I know they didn’t, because years later I asked Will if they did. He had gone to some pains to keep his secret from me.”

“May I ask when Will’s birthday is?”

“He would turn forty-nine October twenty-seven, if …” Caroline’s brow knitted. “Why?”

“I just wanted to assure myself of something. It’s not important.” He paused, then asked, “When did you learn that Will wasn’t an adopted child, as he claimed to be?”

“Can’t you guess?” Caroline shivered, despite her warm wrap. “At your marriage preparation class, we did mention a brief period of separation, about ten years ago, remember? We weren’t forthcoming about the reason—we could
never
be forthcoming about the reason—but the point was we overcame it.

“You see, we had had Adam early in our marriage, but I wanted another child. I simply assumed we would have one, as there were no complications conceiving the first one. But years went by and nothing happened and I began to worry something was wrong. I suggested we be tested, then urged, then insisted. I became rather obsessed about it, I’m afraid. Hell to live with, though I didn’t much care at the time.” She flicked Tom a glance. “Finally, I had made an appointment for us at a private fertility clinic in Harley Street, and had Will believe we were meeting for a late lunch in Portland Place—he was at Sport England then. But as soon as he read the brass plate on the clinic door, he bolted. We sat on a bench in Regent’s Park and he told me he had been … snipped years earlier, after Adam was born—and he told me why. He told me the woman he claimed was his adoptive mother was, in truth, his birth mother.
I don’t know why I never twigged. I’ve seen a picture of her. The resemblance is quite marked.”

She paused. “I presume Mrs. Lambert told you Will’s mother died from nothing so out of the blue as an embolism?”

Tom nodded grimly.

“As you might imagine, my world was turned upside down. You know, don’t you, that anyone with a parent with Huntington’s disease has a fifty–fifty chance of having it himself? That there’s no cure? I didn’t know at that moment in Regent’s Park, but Will told me.

“Suddenly,” she continued bleakly, “I was faced with the prospect that not only might my husband be struck down by this cruel disease in the prime of his life, but my son might one day, too. I think I lost my mind for a time. Will told me this a few days before I was to attend a hospitality conference in Torquay. I went early, fled really, and stayed a week after the conference was over, taking long country walks, making a nostalgic visit here, trying to decide what to do. I had a ten-year-old boy at home in Toot Hinton, whom I loved, and despite the deceit and the awful shock, a husband that I still loved. There was nothing to do but carry on.”

“Stiff upper and so forth.”

“In effect.” Caroline smiled weakly.

“There are tests that determine—”

“Will refused to be tested. Ignorance allowed for hope, he said. Even inventing his own adoption was a way of distancing himself. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want the idea of a death foretold to colour his life. But it did, in its way. Thinking that his life might be shorter than most is why he lived so intensely. Why he worked so hard on building up this hotel, and threw himself into sport, into the cricket he loved so, and running, and being in the amateur dramatic society, and in the Thistle But Mostly Rose, and on the parish council. It’s what made him so …” Her voice broke. “So …”

“Wonderful?” Tom supplied. Caroline nodded mutely, her face crumpled with restrained tears. Tom let his eyes drift to a rook ascending,
a black thing losing itself in the darkening sky. He could think of instances in the recent past when Will had shown himself less than wonderful.

“We carried on,” Caroline continued, wiping at her eyes. “You do, don’t you? Look at you. You’ve carried on in the wake of your wife’s death. Life seems a meaningless succession of days and nights as you crawl your way out of something you didn’t think you could bear, doesn’t it? And then the pain lessens. Will accepted my pregnancy by another man. I think he was not unhappy that I had somehow evened the score—somehow matched his great hurt to me. He knew that this child would escape the disease’s shadow. The years went by—Ariel’s ten now—and after a time it doesn’t seem possible that anything could seriously alter your happy life. HD symptoms usually begin to show in your late thirties or early forties. Will was in his late forties. We thought we had been spared. And then, one day, suddenly, everything changes.”

“Suddenly?”

“Yes, although your mind refuses to believe it when it happens—at least mine did. One day more than a year ago Will cut himself shaving—”

“A common enough occurrence.”

“It was more than a nick, though. And he told me it was the way his hand trembled holding the razor that caused it. He had come back from the bathroom, ashen. When I questioned him, he replied, ‘It’s beginning.’ He looked … I can’t quite describe it—haunted, I suppose, stunned, frightened. I dismissed it, of course, as you do. Laughed it off. As you say, a man cutting himself shaving is a common enough occurrence. But then other signs started to appear—a tic in the eyelids, a hand tremor, episodes of clumsiness, and he was not a clumsy man. More frightening were the changes in mood. Will could be forceful, he could get angry—don’t we all at times?—but his was a clean anger, a squall that would pass swiftly. But now he would brood.

“Then there were these sort of mood lurches, a new irritability, and then came one or two episodes of rage, which he seemed helpless to control, and which afterwards filled him with such remorse. It was like he was watching himself undergo transformation, and so quickly. His mother’s decline had been swift.

“Of course, the worst of these was the incident with Victor and Molly’s boy. Will had lit into Adam over something at one point, but Adam is a man. But Harry’s death, and the thought that his outburst might have precipitated it, shook Will to the roots of his soul. Well, you know all this, of course. You gave him good counsel.”

“Caroline, if Victor and Molly had known that Will’s outbursts were involuntary, they might not have blamed him so—”

“I know, I do know that,” she interrupted him softly. “But Will didn’t want to be excused. He wanted to believe he was in control of himself. But more, he didn’t want to be pitied. He didn’t want anyone to
know
, as I said. And there were … there were practical considerations. We have yet—
I
have yet—to tell Adam that he may have … distorted genes. We maintained the fiction that Will was adopted. It’s what we had told him when he was a child. We—Will and I—decided to wait until he matured before telling him. Will’s mother told
him
when he was fourteen. It was too soon, he said, a terrible shock, much too much a burden for a teenager to bear. He would reproach his mother for giving birth to him at all, then watch over her like a hawk for signs. We both wanted Adam to grow up without those sort of worries.”

“But he’s grown now, Caroline.”

A shadow crossed her face. “While Will was healthy, there never seemed a good reason to tell Adam. There was always the fifty percent chance that Will
didn’t have
Huntington’s, and if he didn’t have it, he wasn’t a carrier, and the chain would be broken. We let ourselves live in a bubble.”

“But Will, you say, has been exhibiting signs for what—?”

“More than a year.”

“Adam’s in a relationship with a young woman, Caroline. They could have—”

“I do know that, Tom. I do worry about it, very much. It’s just that …” Her eyes wandered the room, now almost engulfed in shadow. “It’s that there have been other complications.”

“It’s money, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.

Caroline’s eyes found his. “Isn’t it always? Isn’t it most often money worries that tear away at a marriage?” She looked away. “You know we’re in a spot over money. When Daddy died, he left just enough for a down payment on this property. We borrowed from the bank, and Nick lent us part of his share of Daddy’s money. He was in the army then, and didn’t seem awfully concerned about how he would invest his inheritance. Perhaps we took advantage of him, I don’t know. But now he has his own business ambitions, of course, and he owes money to some dubious characters because I’m afraid he’s found Torquay’s gambling culture more alluring than is good for him—or good for anyone trying to launch a new home security firm. He’s been adamant that we accept an offer from Moorgate Properties to invest in the hotel.”