Memories of the Storm (5 page)

'Gosh, look at the time,' Clio said. 'Frank's
hungry and so am I. I'll get some lunch. If you clear
the books away, I can lay the table.'

She carried the shopping into the kitchen but
when she glanced back through the archway she
saw that Hester continued to sit unmoving before
the albums. She stared straight ahead, as though at
some distant scene, and her hands were placed very
lightly around the great animal as if she were
warming them at a fire.

All through breakfast the next morning, Hester
was aware of Clio's tension. She looked slightly
different today. Her gold-brown hair was held back
with pretty combs, rather than twisted casually back
with a piece of silk, her lips were touched with a
slick of bright gloss and she wore caramel-coloured
suede trousers instead of jeans.

Catching Hester's rather quizzical appraisal she
said, 'He'll have to have Jonah's sheets,' as though
to indicate a proper degree of indifference to
Peter's visit, lest Hester was jumping to conclusions
about the combs and the suede trousers. 'After all,'
she added, 'it was only for one night. Peter wouldn't
care anyway.'

Hester made no comment. She wasn't interested
in Peter's praise or condemnation of the housekeeping
arrangements since it would never have
occurred to her that she or Clio might be judged
accordingly. She was trying to assess whether Clio
was merely excited at Peter's imminent arrival or
if her god-daughter imagined some kind of
emotional test might be involved in this visit.

'You look delightful,' she said – and Clio flushed
brightly.

'Do I?' she asked carelessly.

Hester smiled at her, touched as always by Clio's
unexpected moments of vulnerability.

'It always comes as a surprise that women look
much older when they dress up. Have you noticed
that?'

'No.' Clio was momentarily distracted from
thoughts of Peter by this odd idea. 'Do they?' She
frowned, trying to picture her friends in both casual
and smart modes of dress, but failed to manage a
comparison.

'Oh, yes.' Hester was adamant. 'They look more
elegant, of course, but older. Take a fifteen-yearold
girl out of her school uniform and, with
make-up and a sophisticated outfit, she can look
twenty-five. There is something rather poignant
about it, rather like a small child dressing up in her
mother's clothes. In the fifties, when clothes were so
much more formal, all young women looked like
their mothers; most unfortunate for them, poor
darlings. Oh dear! Those frightful permanent
waves, just like corrugated iron, and great gashes of
dark red lipstick that made them look as if they'd
been hit with a hatchet. So unflattering.'

Clio chuckled. 'And what did you wear in the
fifties, Hes?' She looked at the petite upright figure
sitting at the table: Hester wore jeans, a black
roll-neck jersey and an old suede waistcoat. Her soft
white hair was piled up into a wispy, untidy knot
and her small square face was as wrinkled and
brown as an autumn leaf. 'I bet you didn't dress like
your mother.'

'Well, I didn't,' agreed Hester. 'But then, you
have to remember, I had no role model. I went up
to Cambridge in the early fifties when I was in my
middle twenties, rather old by the other students'
standards, but I'd had an unconventional upbringing
and had no difficulty in adapting to
university life. Sartorially, I was probably what
you'd describe as café society. Of course, slacks had
become acceptable during the war and I had no
shocked mama to gasp and roll her eyes at me.' She
smiled reminiscently. 'The other students were very
sweet to me. To begin with I think they thought I
might be motherly – you know the kind of thing?
Listen to their woes and teach them how to cook
nourishing meals on a pittance. They soon realized
that I didn't do maternal.'

'I bet they did.' Clio was amused by the idea.
'Anyway, at least it can't have been too strange.
Almost like going home. Everyone must have remembered
your family.'

'Oh, not strange at all. I was very happy.'

'And did you have lots of boyfriends?' Clio could
easily imagine that the young Hester must have
been rather fun.

Hester's eyes glinted at her across the table.
'Lovers,' she corrected mischievously. 'I never did
things by halves.'

'I believe you.' Suddenly, with a little clutch of
apprehension and excitement, Clio remembered
Peter. 'And so you think I look older today?'

Hester studied her. 'A little. More sophisticated
and therefore older. I suppose this is how Peter
knows you best?'

Clio looked at her with sudden dismay. Hester's
innocent question unexpectedly encapsulated the
utter separateness of her life with Peter. Not
for them the ordinary intimacy of daily life: no
unadorned early morning face or scruffy weekend
clothes; no meetings with friends at the pub or
family get-togethers. Even after they'd made love,
and he'd showered and was buttoning himself back
into his city clothes, there was a formality about
Peter, as if he were also shrugging himself back into
that other, separate life, and pulling on a different
persona with his Thomas Pink shirt.

'I suppose it is,' she answered. 'It's a relationship
based on work. It's not that we don't relax and have
fun together, of course. We always have lots to talk
about . . .'

Her voice tailed off uncertainly but Hester
nodded understandingly.

'Talking about work can be a relaxation if it's
what really matters to you both. You must have a
very close bond.'

'Oh, we do,' cried Clio. 'It's just difficult to
explain it.'

Hester got up from the table. 'You don't have to
explain it. It's nobody's business but yours and
Peter's. I can't tell you how much I'm looking
forward to meeting him, though. It's so hard having
this kind of conversation when you don't know
the person involved. I'm going to feed the ducks.
St Francis can come and watch. He finds them
very amusing and they've long since ceased to be
nervous of him.'

'I'm not surprised. He's about as scary as Bagpuss.'

Hester pulled her shawl around her shoulders,
took up her stick and the daily ration of bread, and
left the kitchen with St Francis stalking at her heels.
Clio began to clear the table, still thinking about
Hester's comments. She felt uncharacteristically
nervous. Peter's response to her invitation coupled
with Hester's reaction to her appearance had
shadowed her confidence with doubt and made a
tiny crack in the fragile shield with which she
protected her relationship with Peter. Presently she
went into the little cloakroom next to the kitchen
and stared at herself in the glass over the basin. She
took out the combs and shook her hair free. Then,
taking the narrow silk scarf from around her neck,
she twisted her hair back and looked at herself
again. She tore off a piece of loo paper and blotted
her lips carefully, then flung the red-stained tissue
down the lavatory and flushed it away. Studying
herself she suspected that she did look younger:
younger and more vulnerable. Would Peter notice
any difference, she wondered.

Of course, it was just possible that he too might
be feeling nervous. This thought comforted her
and she was seized afresh by love for him.

The ducks fed, Hester wandered along the river
path. St Francis pottered in her wake, pouncing on
a leaf that trembled in the soft air as it drifted
silently to the ground, before pausing to sit and
wash his face with a velvet-padded paw. Hester
moved slowly between the trees, noting the
evidence of the river's passing. Twigs and stones
and trailing tresses of weed cast high upon the
muddy path showed where it had overflowed its
banks during the storm. In the lower branches of
the overhanging trees the detritus of the flood still
clung. Traces of the water's immense force were
everywhere, yet this morning the river chuckled
and murmured softly, running smooth and sinuous
in its winding bed, tame and sweet-tempered in the
sunlight.

Hester had ceased to think about Clio and was
wondering why she hadn't simply asked Jonah for
Lucy's address – or her telephone number. What,
after all, could be more natural than to speak to
her? The fifty-odd years that had passed since their
last contact must surely have done away with any
awkwardness or pain, yet it had seemed right to
allow Lucy the next move.

She'd been such a beautiful child: fearful on
her arrival at Bridge House, holding tight to her
father's hand lest he too be taken away from her
for ever. Hester, remembering her own desolation
when her father had died, had gone down on one
knee so as to be on the same level saying, 'Hello,
Lucy.' She could recall how the dark brown eyes
had regarded her so gravely but presently the child
had loosened her grip on Michael's hand and
shown Hester the grey plush rabbit she'd carried.
Patricia's boys – warned that Lucy had lost her
mother in a bombing raid – had been sweet with
her, taking her away to meet Nanny and to show
her where she would sleep.

'I can't tell you how grateful I am,' Michael had
said to Hester. 'I know she'll be safe with you . . .'
And then Eleanor had come in, graceful and poised
until her eyes fell upon Michael, and after a tiny,
telling pause she'd said, 'Well, isn't anyone going to
introduce us?'

Is that where it had all begun, this story that
she would tell to Jonah? Hester knew that each of
them – Eleanor, Michael, Edward – would have told
it differently, each from his or her own deeply
personal perspective, and she wondered if it were
possible to tell it fairly and without prejudice. It had
been a mystery as to why such a worldly woman
should have fallen in love first with Edward and
then – so disastrously – with Michael. Edward's
love for her was easier to understand. He'd been
so pleased with himself, so proud to have won
this beautiful woman – even though she'd admitted
to never opening a book if she could help it and
whose only reading was, apparently, the
Tatler
.
He'd been passionately in love, in thrall to
Eleanor's physical beauty, and, with all the
romanticism inherent in his nature, had mentally
endowed her with perfection of character too.

Their mother, privately dismayed, hoped
that Eleanor would quickly cease to flourish in the
rarefied atmosphere of Edward's love. It was clear
that she needed a tough, physical response to her
needs, and Edward's gentle diffidence and clever
mind would never be enough. How would a poet –
even a soldier-poet – satisfy such an unimaginative
woman as Eleanor? And Edward was determined
that one day he would be a published poet.

Sometime during his first year at Cambridge,
Edward had quoted Hester some lines from one of
John Clare's sonnets:

Poets love nature and themselves are love,
The scorn of fools and mock of idle pride.

'That's me,' he'd told her. 'And Mike too. Not that
I can call myself a poet. Not yet. But just you wait.'

Their mother had encouraged them. John Clare
was a link between Edward and his late father,
who had been working on a biography of the poet
when he died, and she strengthened the bond as
much as she could. It was she who wrote to him
at Cambridge, inspiring him to go on weekend
pilgrimages to Helpstone to see Clare's cottage,
and to seek out such places as Emmonsales Heath,
where Clare had wandered as a child, hoping to
find the end of the world, and the remains of the
old Roman quarry at Swordy Well. Edward had
infected Michael with his enthusiasm, dragging
him along on these excursions, and soon they'd
begun to incorporate Clare's language into their
speech: 'proggling' for poking, 'soodling' for idly
sauntering, 'blea' for exposed and 'haynish' for
awkward.

'Rather blea,' Edward might say on a winter's
afternoon up on Dunkery Beacon. 'Shall we soodle
on down to Porlock for tea?'

Hester had picked up this language with delight
and they had drawn her into their company, young
though she was. She loved the bird poems – read to
her by her father – and knew many of them by
heart, rejoicing in the wonder, even amazement,
that Clare showed over the tiny miracles of nature
and his intimate manner of writing that seemed to
involve her personally in his own delight.

Well, in my many walks I rarely found

A place less likely for a bird to form

Its nest . . .

. . . and you and I

Had surely passed it in our walk today

Had chance not led us by it . . .

. . . Stop, here's the bird – that woodman at
the gap

Hath frit it from the hedge – 'tis olive green –

Well, I declare, it is the pettichap!

Not bigger than the wren and seldom seen . . .

Edward had brought Michael home to meet them
all and soon he'd become as dear to their mother as
her own children and Blaise, their cousin. What
plans they'd made – oh, the glories to which they'd
aspired. Then the war had come – and Eleanor with
it.

A sudden scuffle of dead leaves beside the path
and a robin flew up in a scatter of leaf-mould to
preen himself in a holly tree where berries glowed
a rich, bright crimson. Hester watched him for a
moment, listening to the delicate sweetness of his
song, and then turned to retrace her path through
the wood.

There was no sign of Clio – perhaps she'd already
left to fetch Peter from the train – but Hester was
still thinking about the past and had temporarily
put them both from her mind. With the true
scholar's detachment she'd decided that if she were
to be able to tell Jonah the story accurately then she
needed to make notes; to try for some chronological
order and to see if there were any old snapshots
or letters that might bear out her memories.

She kicked off her boots in the scullery, passed
through the kitchen and went into the dining-room
which, since the recent building of the breakfastroom,
had become a study. A specially designed
table, built against one wall of the room, held a
computer, a printer and a filing tray. Clio's laptop
lived on a smaller desk that stood at right angles
underneath the window. Each desk had its own
padded swivel chair and Anglepoise lamp.

'It's only fair,' Hester had said to Clio, 'that if
you're going to be looking after me, you have the
space to work.'