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Authors: Marian Babson

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BOOK: The Cat Next Door
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‘Not always,' Milly corrected. ‘Sometimes he stays around for several hours. He has a little nap and visits everyone.'
‘How kind of him! How condescending! Just what I bargained for when I bought him. A visiting cat! A two-timing little – '
A bell rang in the distance. There was an abrupt silence. Everyone froze, then Wilfred slowly deflated. Aunt Milly looked around blankly, the animation died out of her face, the vague sweet smile was back. She stretched a hand towards her book and, this time, picked it up, clasping it to her like a shield.
Christa's bracelet jangled as she reached for her wine glass and drained it. Henry looked at Margot.
The bell sounded again. It was a handbell, rung expertly as by a town crier, managing to give out a sound that was both plaintive and imperative. It was going to keep on ringing until someone answered.
‘You haven't seen Lynette yet, have you?' Henry asked.
‘No.' Margot shook her head. That was one of the absences she had not felt able to ask about. ‘How … how is she?'
The bell pealed again, signalling annoyance – and, perhaps, growing panic.
‘She's heard all the talking,' Christa said. ‘She's afraid she's missing something. She wants to know what's going on.'
‘Then why doesn't she come downstairs and find out?' What Margot considered a perfectly reasonable question was met with an awkward silence.
‘You haven't seen her yet.' Emmeline pushed back her chair. ‘You might as well get it over with now. We'll have no peace until you do.'
The others nodded agreement with varying degrees of uneasiness.
‘Come along – ' Emmeline stood in the doorway, waiting impatiently. ‘Come along. She's upstairs in her – '
There was a low growling sound deep in Uncle Wilfred's throat.
‘She's in the master bedroom,' Emmeline amended hastily. ‘Come along!' She turned and almost fled from the room.
Margot followed more slowly, uneasily aware of some sort of warning signal still flickering in Wilfred's eyes. Aunt Milly had opened her book and was reading avidly. Henry and Christabel were too intent on their
raspberry fool to look up and meet any other eyes. Nan had disappeared. The bell kept ringing.
‘Coming …' Emmeline called out. ‘All
right
, Lynette, we're coming. Don't be so impatient!' She hurried up the stairs and paused before the open door, waiting for Margot to catch up.
‘Who's there?' The thin voice crackled with sudden panic. ‘Who's out there?'
Emmeline closed her eyes briefly and her lips tightened before she forced them into a calming smile. She motioned to Margot to follow and advanced into the room.
‘Now, Lynette, I told you we were coming, you heard us climbing the stairs. Who else could it be?' If the sweet reasonableness of Emmeline's tone was a trifle strained, the child did not appear to realise it.
‘Oh, yes.' There was a fragile welcoming smile to greet them. ‘Hello, Cousin Margot. Did you have a good flight over?'
‘I've had worse.' Margot stooped to kiss the pale cheek, slightly puzzled. Lynette was sitting up in bed, looking perfectly healthy, with no trace of a fever or a cold. Why wasn't she dressed and downstairs with the rest of the family? ‘What about you? Aren't you feeling well?'
‘No. I'm not well.' Lynette turned her head away. ‘I feel very, very poorly.'
There was a tray on the bedside table. From the look of the empty plates, there was nothing wrong with Lynette's appetite, at any rate. Another table, on the far side of the king-sized bed, was piled with games and hobby equipment: beadwork, embroidery, petit-point, a painting set and drawing tablet, everything the bedridden invalid might desire. Behind the piled-up pillows propping her up, the shelves that formed the bedhead held books, a transistor radio, the TV remote control, a couple of fluffy animals, comfort toys not quite outgrown.
Everything well within reach without Lynette having to leave the bed.
Was there something wrong with her legs?
Emmeline was not meeting any questioning eyes. She busied herself with stacking the dishes on the tray into a neat little pile, then carried the tray across the room to set it down beside the door leading into the hall. At the other end of the room, another door stood ajar, opening into the en-suite bathroom.
‘Now then.' Emmeline briskly pulled a book and exercise notebook from the shelf immediately behind Lynette. ‘Have you finished your English assignment?'
‘Almost.' Lynette twitched defensively. ‘I was going to, but …' Her eyes closed and she leaned back against the pillows. ‘I was too tired.'
Tired, yes, tired
. Margot fought back a yawn.
Aren't we all?
Margot looked again at the hobby table and saw that the embroidery ring held a pattern with just a few flowers filled in, the tapestry in its frame was only two inches wide, a band of beadwork curled despondently on top of tubes of loose beads in a plastic bag, a threaded needle was jabbed into what was intended to be a petit-point cushion cover, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were in a tumbled heap beside a few fitted-together sections of a cuddly-pets domestic scene.
Everything started and nothing completed.
She noticed, too, a small cluster of sports books and political biographies flanking the school books and novels on the bookshelves. Uncle Wilfred was maintaining a foothold in the quarters that had belonged to him and Aunt Milly His attitude was now explained, although it looked as though there was scant chance of his reclaiming the master suite at any time in the immediate future.
‘Isn't Fenella here yet?' There was a querulous, faintly accusing note in her tone, as though it were someone's fault that Fenella hadn't arrived yet.
‘She'll be here soon. But you've got Margot right now. Why don't you have a nice visit with her, while I – '
‘Fenella is going to bring me a present from Tokyo.' Lynette eyed Margot speculatively. ‘Did you – ?'
‘Lynette!' Emmeline called her to order sharply. ‘Where are your manners?'
‘I'm tired, so tired …' Lynette retreated into invalidism. She gave Margot a wan smile. ‘Tomorrow,' she said. ‘Tomorrow you must tell me all about New York. Tonight I'm only strong enough just to say hello to everyone.' She lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes firmly.
‘Tomorrow …' Margot agreed, grateful for the reprieve and following Emmeline from the room. This was not the Lynette she had known. This Lynette was looking and sounding like a child but …
‘Isn't Lynette into her teens now?' she asked.
‘There has been a bit of regression, yes.' Emmeline answered the thought behind the question. ‘It's something we may have to deal with … eventually. If it doesn't right itself naturally. But not until this is … over.' Her voice wavered suddenly. She turned her back on Margot abruptly and marched down the hallway and into a room at the far end, the door of which closed behind her with a firm decisive click – not actually slammed, but making it quite clear that the conversation had ended.
A
bit
of regression! Margot did a swift calculation. Lynette must be fourteen now – and she was behaving like an eight-year-old. Ten, at the most. And hadn't Lynette been heading towards being the sporty type? Margot distinctly remembered watching her on a tennis court, playing an aggressive but good-humoured game with one of the cousins. And winning school prizes for swimming and running. Claudia had always boasted that she was rearing a future Olympics winner – in one field or another.
Claudia …
Her eyes blurred with sudden tears, Margot stumbled and caught at the banister just in time, leaning heavily on it as she descended the stairs. She reached the foot of the stairs before she realised it and stretched out a hand blindly for balance.
Only to feel it grasped firmly and reassuringly. Henry had been waiting there for her. She opened her eyes and smiled weakly at him.
‘Hooray Henry …' She greeted him by the old nickname.
‘Not any more,' he said ruefully, squeezing her hand and releasing it. ‘There's not much to hooray about these days.'
‘No …' She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and they strolled into the library. ‘There isn't, is there?'
‘You've seen Lynette?'
‘How long has she been like that?'
‘Ever since she …' He turned away and busied himself with the coffee pot and cups waiting on the long table. ‘Ever since … Cream and sugar?'
‘No sugar, thanks.' She sank into one of the button-back leather armchairs flanking the fire. The tray beside the coffee pot held a full complement of cups and saucers. She wondered how long it would be before the others appeared for their coffee. This was the first chance she had had to talk to anyone privately since she arrived late this afternoon. Might as well make the most of it.
‘Will she ever be able to walk again?'
‘What?' In the act of bending over to hand her coffee to her, Henry straightened up abruptly, snatching the cup away. ‘Who? What are you talking about?'
‘Lynette. Isn't she paralysed?'
‘Not a bit of it. Where did you get that idea?'
‘I've just seen her. Lying there in that king-sized bed, all her games and pastimes within easy reach. She looks so pale and frail. I just assumed …'
‘Assumptions are dangerous things. There's nothing physically wrong with Lynette. But the shock completely traumatised her.'
‘Then she can walk.'
‘Of course she can. She did, in the beginning. Except that she wouldn't go out into the garden.' Henry restored her cup of coffee to her and sank down in the opposite armchair. ‘Then she didn't want to come downstairs. Well, there was so much commotion going on for so long, you couldn't blame her for that. Everyone was just as glad to have her tucked up safely out of the way, to be frank. Only …'
‘Only …?'
‘Only … they've let it go on for too long. She's too well dug in now and she doesn't want to leave that room any more. It's a shame they moved her in there to begin with. It's too convenient with the bathroom en-suite, she doesn't even have to walk down the hallway to the family bathroom. It's been weeks now since she left that room at all.'
‘I thought Uncle Wilfred was looking a trifle strained when I went upstairs with Emmeline. I'm surprised he allowed her to take it over like that.'
‘At the time, it seemed the best thing to do. Her own room overlooked the … the salient part of the garden. The police were swarming out there, with electric lights set up around the taped-off area and all their equipment. We couldn't let her look out and see that. She'd seen enough.' He set down his coffee cup abruptly and looked around for something stronger. ‘What about a cognac or a liqueur?'
‘She found them, didn't she?' The twin sisters, Claudia and Chloe, Lynette's mother and aunt. Claudia, stretched out upon the ground; Chloe, stooping over her with the bloodied knife in her hand. ‘I … I just know what I read in the newspaper clippings you sent me. I thought someone else might write to me about it, but
they didn't. Oh, they wrote, but they never mentioned … what happened.'
‘No, they wouldn't.' Henry poured cognac into two balloon-shaped glasses and brought one to her. ‘We're all still trying to come to terms with it ourselves.'
‘Yes.' It must have been unbearable, still was. ‘But Milly and Wilfred seem to be coping fairly well, considering …'
‘Is that the way it looks to you?' Henry gave a sharp bark which could have been a cough or a bitter laugh.
‘Well, from what I've heard, they're coping a lot better than …' She found she did not want to utter the name. Someone else she hardly dared enquire about.
‘Kingsley?' Henry nodded. ‘He came as close to a breakdown as one could possibly get without going completely over the edge. Or perhaps he did. He was devastated, he adored Claudia.'
‘And she him.' Margot could attest to that. Despite fluttering every female heart in the neighbourhood – yes, hers included – the rising young politician had had eyes for no one but Claudia from the moment they first met. He could even tell her apart from Chloe – something even Aunt Milly was not always able to do in those days – and that, in turn, had helped to win her heart. A man who could not be fooled by their games was someone special indeed – someone to be held tight.
‘They were so utterly devoted to each other. It was a tragedy …' Henry paused and seemed to consider what he had just said. ‘A tragedy for all of us,' he amended. ‘I don't know how we got through it. In a way, Kingsley had it easy – he disappeared into The Priory for six weeks, even though the election was looming. And he got re-elected, when so many others weren't. No one dared mention the words “sympathy vote”, but that was what it was.'
‘Not necessarily,' Margot defended. ‘He was always one of the best politicians in his party.'
‘Good old Kingsley!' Henry gave the sharp mirthless bark again. ‘Always has the women on his side!'
‘That isn't fair – '
‘Fair? What's fair? And what does it matter, anyway? All that's important now is the trial.' He turned his head away. ‘The trial. God! It's so incredible! Chloe's trial.'
‘But why?' It was the question she had been asking herself since she first heard about Chloe. ‘Why?'
‘God knows.' Henry shrugged. ‘And, presumably, Chloe. But we can't ask the One – and the other isn't talking. Literally. She hasn't said a word all the way through.'
BOOK: The Cat Next Door
4.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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