Someone Special (54 page)

‘And you don’t want me with you?’

‘I do, believe me I do. But first I couldn’t let you walk into … into whatever awaits me, and second, if I leave the trailer and Phillips and the jukels, what do you think will be left when I come back? Folk have their work cut
out keeping body and soul together for themselves, they don’t have time for other people’s responsibilities.’ She stood up, yawned, patted her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Oh, I’m so tired, I’ve been going over it all in my head for nights and nights, trying to think what best to do, but in the end I decided. My train leaves in less than an hour, so if you’ve done cross-questioning me I’ll be on my way.’

She was smiling now, her cheeks faintly pink, her eyes shining. She’s quite looking forward to it, Nell realised with some surprise. She’s considering it a challenge – and a meeting of old friends. How very strange, when you think how she’s dreaded even a mention of Pengarth over the years, yet all the time, underneath, she wanted … what? Matthew? Mr Geraint? Pengarth itself, the cottage, the castle? I don’t suppose she knows herself, Nell concluded, standing up as well. But at last she’s got the courage to look her past in the face, at last she’s going to find out.

‘I’ve done my questioning for now,’ Nell said. She moved forward impulsively and kissed her mother’s cheek, clutched her hand. ‘I wish I could go with you, but I’ll stay here. You will write?’

‘I promise.’ Hester patted Nell’s cheek, then gently disengaged her fingers. ‘Take good care of yourself.’

Nell stood on the trailer’s top step and watched her mother out of sight, saw her stepping neatly and swiftly across the ice and mud until she reached the road and disappeared around a corner. Only then did she return to the fireside, feeling strangely alone, strangely flat.

My mother’s going to have an adventure, and all I’m going to have is another cup of tea, she told herself, tilting the pot. Oh well, I’d best write to Ted and explain. Fortunately his act isn’t on for another six weeks. Surely things will have returned to normal by then?

*

Hester walked up the once-familiar road, under the trees leaning over the tall, grey stone wall. She walked slowly, remembering.

Here she had come as a bride, bowling along in the pony-cart, flushed and excited at the thought of seeing her new home, marvelling at the size of the estate behind the wall which seemed to go for miles, glancing at Matthew’s profile every now and then, thinking him wonderfully handsome, wonderfully kind.

She had come this way when she was expecting Nell, too. Proud, walking with her back very straight and her stomach as stuck out as she could make it. She was proud because this baby was her very own creation, never mind the part Matthew had played. The child would be her contribution to their married life, the only mark she had managed to make despite all her hopes.

Hester had longed for her own little home, but the lodge was so dark and so full of Coburn possessions that at first she hadn’t been able to buy so much as a tea-tray to make her mark on the place. What was more, orphans don’t have photographs of their ancestors but the Coburns must have taken pictures of every event in their family from the time photography was invented. She remembered the dismay with which she had greeted the main bedroom with its walls almost papered with photographs of ancient Coburns in lace collars and tall hats – but the balance would be redressed when she had her own little baby. Dreamily, she imagined the photographs they would have taken, of herself in a big picture hat and a muslin dress, her hair flowing freely over her shoulders, the baby sitting on her knee smiling up into her face while Matthew stood behind them, a fond but proprietorial hand on her shoulder. Then pictures of the baby grown to be a toddler, swinging on a swing in the orchard, and perhaps another baby, all lace and curls …

She didn’t remember much about Nell’s birth save that
the doctor told Matthew his young wife was a marvellous girl, brave as a lion.

‘Plenty of grunts and effort but not even one small scream,’ he said as he emerged from the bedroom and handed the proud father his red-faced little daughter. ‘Go and give her a kiss, man – that’s a wife to be proud of!’ She even remembered the kiss, the feel of Matthew’s soft lips on her forehead, the awed reverence as he looked at her and then at the child.

She had not deserved all the praise of course, because she had longed to scream her head off, particularly at the moment of birth when she honestly thought she was splitting in two. But she knew better than to scream and make a fuss: this was her baby, the child she had longed for, what a greeting it would have been for little Helen if the first sound she heard were her mother’s shrieks of pain!

Then there had been the day she had taken Helen – odd how easily the name she had not used for a dozen years came into her mind when she thought of the past – into Rhyl for a check-up at the hospital. They said she was wonderfully fit and so was Hester, and she had got on the bus in the rain, and got off it in the rain, and walked the mile and a half back from the village with the baby under her coat, beneath this very wall. Matt had picked her up and, later, they had made love again and it had been all right, very much all right, and she had been the happiest, luckiest girl in the whole of Flintshire, in the whole of Wales … the whole world!

So when, precisely, had the serpent entered her Eden? Where had it gone wrong? Then the road curved, following the curve of the wall, and the lodge was before her.

It looked smaller. Odd, that. And a great deal grimmer. Dirtier, too. Matthew had whitewashed it when Nell had started school and though Mr Geraint had grumbled and complained, it had looked much nicer, or she and
Matthew thought so anyway. But now it was grey with green streaks again and the little windows were dull and cracked, the curtains falling down behind the glass.

It’s empty, Hester thought, and for the first time, doubt and dismay clouded her mind. He’s gone; perhaps they’ve both gone, and I’ve come here on a fool’s errand. But she was here, so it was no use turning back without making certain. Resolutely, she walked between the wrought-iron gates and up to the lodge. She knocked timorously on the front door.

No one answered. After a few moments she abandoned the front door and went around to the little yard at the back. Her linen line, green with age and neglect, still swung too low, she had to duck to avoid it. The pole that Matthew had made her was there too, propped up against the coal house, but it had split at the fork and was now a travesty of its former self. No one has hung washing out here for some time, Hester told herself, and found that she was shivering.

What had she done when she left Matthew twelve years ago? He had threatened her and she had been a silly little girl, afraid, confused, but oh God, what had she done? She approached the back door and, without really thinking, put her hand on the latch. It swung open easily, on well-oiled hinges, and there was the kitchen. Just the same only not so clean and spruce. I did keep things nicely, considering I’d never known a real home, Hester thought, surprised at how she remembered working in this room. Scrubbing the quarry-tiled floor, doing the washing in the low stone sink, cooking on the big central table, making bread, setting it to prove, putting the balls of dough into the old-fashioned oven and then, when the sweet scent told her the time was right, bringing the golden-brown loaves out to cool on a tray in the yard outside.

She looked slowly round the room, remembering. Before they had left, the kitchen had begun to feel like
home, like her own place at last. She’d bought a fat yellow jug for the dresser and kept it filled with flowers when there were flowers to pick. The jug was still there, but empty now. And there were her books … yes, a cookery book by Mrs Beeton, some old novels, a play, half a set of Dickens which Mr Geraint had brought her back from market …

A chill struck her and she looked around, thinking the back door must have blown ajar, but it hadn’t, it was just memories again. It had been Mr Geraint who had killed the little, struggling plant of love and trust which she and Matthew had been growing. Mr Geraint with his casual lust which hadn’t included the slightest interest in her mind or personality – and me too young and silly to realise, too in awe of a man so much my senior. Too eager, she remembered sadly, for the physical pleasures I had known in his arms to question the rightness of it.

Once he had got her up at the castle, she had been too busy to work on her relationship with Matthew. Too tired when she reached home after a hard day’s work to do more than the minimum here. She had been content to let the delicate plant shrivel, she had taken Matthew for granted. Fool that she had been, she had lived for the touch of Mr Geraint’s hand on hers, for the glance which said
Come up to my room
, for the promise, always unfulfilled, that some day, at some time, something wonderful would happen between them. Then the climax, the crunch. Mr Geraint claiming Helen; Matthew accusing her of adultery; the pair of them chasing her away from everything she knew and held dear. If I’d been older, wiser, Hester mourned now, gazing around at the pleasant, untidy kitchen, I’d have been able to handle it. I’d have told Matt to pull himself together, told Mr Geraint to do his worst, because when it came to the crunch how could he have taken Nell? Matt wouldn’t have let him, if I’d said ‘your dear Mr Geraint is a liar, he did seduce me
when I was only a child but all the rest is wishful thinking,’ Matthew would have believed me, would have scorned Mr Geraint, kept me close to him, defended me.

The only thing wrong with that little scenario, Hester reminded herself now, standing in the kitchen and looking round her, was that it was basically untrue, a downright wicked lie. Because although Mr Geraint had seduced her, she’d been unfaithful to Matthew without any particular qualms for five years, ever since Nell’s second birthday. And she had known as soon as she’d seen that family portrait in the Long Gallery that Mr Geraint had a point: Nell was remarkably like his ancestress.

Still. Nell was a big girl now, she would be twenty in a couple of months. Unbelievable, that I’m the mother of a young woman of twenty, Hester told herself now, looking instinctively in the little round mirror beside the back door to check that she hadn’t gone grey overnight. She had not. A lively, dark-haired woman looked back at her, a woman in her mid-thirties who carried her years lightly, whose skin was as clear as a young girl’s and whose figure, Hester knew without looking, had benefited from being kept in trim by wrestling with Phillips, doing the hard physical work necessary to show off the abilities of a very large python.

However, it was no use being complacent, not if Matthew had left. She went through into the bedroom, feeling like a spy in a friend’s camp but determined to find out for sure who lived in the lodge now and, if necessary, where Matthew had gone. The bedroom was almost the same, almost but not quite. Hester stared around her at the chest of drawers, the washstand, the bit of curtaining which, in the old days, had hidden her small supply of dresses and skirts. What was different? Something was, there was something … she saw it suddenly. The curling pictures of long-dead Coburn relatives had been removed. There was only one photograph left and she knew what it
would be before she crossed the room to look hard at the faded sepia print.

It was the only photograph they had ever had taken and it showed her, Matthew and Helen on the baby’s third birthday. Nell sat on her mother’s knee, small and serious, grasping a rag doll the photographer had given her. Hester was looking straight at the camera, smiling and proud, and Matthew stood behind them, in his stiff best suit, with one hand on her shoulder and his gaze, like hers, fixed on the camera lens. A small, embarrassed smile hovered round his mouth and for the first time it struck Hester that Matthew reminded her of someone. Who? He wasn’t at all like Ugly Jack; her heart squeezed painfully as she remembered that scarred, broken-nosed, much-loved face. No, Matt was nothing like Jack; she looked critically at the photograph of the man who had been only a couple of years older than she was now when it was taken, and saw that he was very handsome. He had a broad forehead, a straight, shortish nose, very dark silky hair that overhung his tanned brow and dark eyes which met hers, even in the photograph, straight on.

Gently, Hester touched the photograph with her fingers. I’m sorry for what I did to you, the touch said. I’ve come back to make what reparation I can, and at least I now know two things for sure. One is that you still live here, in this rather grim little cottage, and the other is that you haven’t married because no woman, no matter how careless, would let the place get into the state I’ve seen today.

Having done what she set out to do Hester returned to the kitchen. She glanced at the unlit range, then at the table, then at the clock. Matthew would no doubt be having his midday meal at the castle. There could be no harm in lighting the range, making herself a pot of tea …

There was food in the pantry, but not very much. She
found tea, a twist of sugar, some flour and lard. A further search produced a tin of stewing steak, some dried-up carrots, a few whiskery potatoes and an enormous leathery swede. A quick visit to the vegetable garden at the back yielded several heavy heads of dark green spring cabbage which she harvested triumphantly. There was a heel of bacon fat in the meat-safe; that stewed with the cabbage would be the makings of a meal.

Having lit the fire and made sure it was going well, Hester crossed the yard and climbed into the apple loft. A few wrinkled, rosy-cheeked fruit still nestled in their straw beds, so she put them in the pockets of her black coat. The kettle was boiling so she made tea and had to drink it black since Matthew either didn’t bother with milk or had taken the day’s supply to the castle with him, but it put new life into her, refreshed her after her long journey.

When the tea was drunk she went into the bedroom and pulled back the curtain and there was her faded blue cotton dress, her checked skirt, and the item she was searching for, the big, white, all-enveloping wraparound apron she had always worn for cooking. She took it down and put it on, trying not to let her lip tremble as she did so. It smelt freshly laundered; she guessed that every now and then Matthew must take her clothes out and put them through the wash. He had always been handy; she could imagine him washing her things in the low stone sink, whistling softly between his teeth as he did so, thinking about her. Perhaps even missing her. Then hanging them on the dreadful green linen line, watching for rain, hurrying to bring them in, ironing them with the nice new iron she’d bought just before she left, replacing them behind the curtain in their bedroom …