The Legacy (49 page)

For days, Meredith was consumed with thoughts and daydreams about the Dinsdales. She had so rarely encountered other children—only visiting cousins, or the children of other guests who stayed only fleetingly so she never really got to know them. She knew she was supposed to despise the tinkers, and she knew all the things her mother had told her about them, and she still longed more than anything to please her mother and to make her happy, but the idea of having friends was irresistible. A week later, she was playing in the barred shadow of the tall iron gates when she saw Flag and Maria walking along the lane toward the village. They would not see her unless she called out and for a second she was paralysed, torn between longing to speak to them again and knowing that she shouldn’t—least of all from the gate, which was visible from the house if anybody happened to be at one of the east-facing windows. In desperation she came up with a compromise of sorts and burst loudly into song—the first thing that came to mind, a song she had heard Estelle singing as she pegged the laundry out to dry.

“I’d like to see the Kaiser, with a lily in his hand!”
she bellowed, tunelessly, hopping from one bar of shadow to the next. Flag and Maria turned and, seeing her, came over to the gates.

“Hello again,” Maria greeted her. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Meredith replied, her heart yammering behind her ribs. “What are you doing?”

“Going on to the village to buy bread and Bovril for tea. Do you want to come too? If we can get a broken loaf, there’ll be a ha’penny left to buy sweets,” Maria smiled.

“Not necessarily,” Flag qualified. “If there’s enough left over we’re to buy butter, remember?”

“Oh, but there’s never enough for butter as well!” Maria dismissed her brother.

“You have to go to the shops yourselves?” Meredith asked, puzzled.

“Of course, silly! Who else would go?” Maria laughed.

“Suppose
you’ve
got servants to run around buying
your
tea, haven’t you?” Flag asked, a touch derisively.

Meredith bit her lip, an awkward blush heating her face. She hardly ever went into the village. A handful of times she had accompanied Mrs. Priddy or Estelle on some errand, but only when her father was away, and her mother laid low and guaranteed not to hear of it.

“Do you want to come, then?”

“I’m not allowed,” Meredith said unhappily. Her cheeks burned even more, and Flag tilted his head at her, a mischievous glint coming into his eye.

“Seems to be a fair bit you’re not allowed to do,” he remarked.

“Hush! It’s not
her
fault!” Maria admonished him.

“Come on—I dare you. Or maybe you’re just scared?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

Meredith glared at him defiantly. “I am not! Only . . .” She hesitated. She
was
scared, it was true. Scared of being found out, scared of her mother’s lightning-fast temper. But it would be so easy to slip away and back again without being noticed. Only the worst luck would mean she was discovered in this outrageous behavior.

“Cowardy, cowardy custard!” Flag sang softly.

“Don’t listen to
him
,” Maria advised her. “Boys are
stupid
.” But Meredith was listening, and she did want to impress this black-eyed boy, and she did want to be friends with his sister, and she did want to be as free as they were, to come and go, and to buy sweets in the village and bread for tea. The gates of Storton Manor seemed to rear up above her head, ever higher and starker. Jangling with nerves, she reached for the latch, pulled open a narrow gap and slipped out into the lane.

Flag strode on ahead, leaving Maria and Meredith to walk side by side, picking wild flowers from the hedgerows and firing questions to and fro—what was it like living in a caravan, what was it like living in a mansion, how many servants were there and what were their names and why didn’t Meredith go to school, and what was school like and what did they do there? In the village they stopped at the door to the farrier’s shed to watch as he pressed a hot iron shoe onto the foot of a farm horse, whose hooves were the size of dinner plates. Clouds of acrid smoke billowed past them, but the horse did not blink an eye.

“Doesn’t it hurt him?” Meredith asked.

“ ’Course not. No more than it hurts you to have your hair cut,” Flag shrugged.

“Get on with ye, casting shadows o’er the work,” said the farrier, who was old and grizzled and stern of eye, so they carried on toward the grocer’s. They bought a broken loaf and a jar of Bovril, and even though there was only enough left for two small sugar mice, the lady behind the counter smiled at Meredith and gave them a third.

“Not often we see you in the village, Miss Meredith,” the lady said, and Meredith caught her breath. How did the woman know who she was? And would she tell Mrs. Priddy? Her face went pale and panicked tears came hotly into her eyes. “Now, now. Don’t look so aghast! Your secret’s safe with me,” the woman said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Carter!” Maria called brightly, and they went outside to devour their sweets.

“Why aren’t you allowed to go into the village? No harm could come to you,” Flag asked as they stopped by the pond to watch the ducks circling idly. They sat down on the grass and Meredith nibbled at her sugar mouse, determined to make it last. She so rarely had sweets.

“Mama says it’s not seemly,” Meredith replied.

“What’s seemly?” Maria asked, licking her fingers with relish. Meredith shrugged.

“It means she’s too good to go mixing with the hoi polloi. The likes of us,” Flag said, sounding amused. The girls thought about this for a while, in meditative silence.

“So . . . what would happen if your ma found out you was along here with us, then?” Maria asked at length.

“I would be . . . told off,” Meredith said uncertainly. In fact, she had no real idea. She had been told off for even watching the Dinsdales. Now she had sneaked out of the gardens and come into the village with them, and talked to them lots, and been seen in the grocer’s by a woman who knew her name, and it had all been wonderful. Painfully, she swallowed the last of her sugar mouse, which had lost all its sweetness. “I should go back,” she said nervously, scrambling to her feet. As if sensing the change in mood, the Dinsdales got up without argument and they began to walk back along the lane.

At the gates, Meredith slithered back through the gap as quickly as she could and pulled the gate closed, not daring to look up at the house in case somebody was watching. Her blood was racing and only once the gate was shut did she feel a little safer. She held on to the bars for support while she got her breath back.

“You’re an odd one and no mistake,” Flag said, with a bemused smile.

“Come and have some tea with us tomorrow,” Maria invited her. “Ma said you can—I asked her already.”

“Thank you. But . . . I don’t know,” Meredith said. She was feeling exhausted by her adventure and could hardly think of anything except getting away from the gates without being seen talking to them. The Dinsdales wandered off and Meredith put her face to the bars to watch them go, pressing the cold metal into her skin. Flag pulled a leggy stem of goose grass from the hedge and stuck it to the back of Maria’s blouse, and the blonde girl twisted and craned her neck, trying to reach it. As they passed out of sight Meredith turned and saw her mother standing in the upstairs hall window, watching her. Behind the glass, her face was ghastly pale and her eyes far too wide. She looked like a specter, frozen for ever in torment.

Meredith’s heart seemed to stop, and at once she thought desperately about running away to the furthest part of the garden. But that would only make matters worse, she realized in a moment of cold clarity. She suddenly needed to pee and thought for a hideous second that she would wet herself. On trembling legs she made her slow progress into the house, up the stairs and along the corridor to where her mother was waiting.

“How dare you?” Caroline whispered. Meredith looked at her feet. Her silence seemed to enrage her mother further.
“How dare you!”
she shouted, so loudly and harshly that Meredith jumped, and began to cry. “Answer me—where have you been with them? What were you doing?” Mrs. Priddy appeared from a room down the hall and hurried along to stand behind Meredith protectively.

“My lady? Is something the matter?” the housekeeper asked, diffidently.

Caroline ignored her. She bent forward, seized Meredith’s shoulders and shook her roughly.

“
Answer me!
How
dare
you disobey me, girl!” she spat, her gaunt face made brutal by rage. Meredith sobbed harder, tears of pure fear running down her cheeks. Straightening up, Caroline took a short breath that flared her nostrils whitely. She measured her daughter briefly, then slapped her sharply across the face.

“My lady! That’s enough!” Mrs. Priddy gasped. Meredith fell into shocked silence, her eyes fixed on the front of her mother’s skirts and not daring to move from there. Caroline grasped her arm again and towed her viciously to her room, pushing her inside so abruptly that Meredith stumbled.

“You will stay in there and not come out until you have learnt your lesson,” Caroline said coldly. Meredith wiped her nose and felt her face throbbing where her mother had hit her. “You’re a wicked child. No mother could ever love you,” Caroline said; and the last thing Meredith saw before the door closed was Mrs. Priddy’s stunned expression.

For a week, Meredith was kept locked in her room. The staff were given orders that she was to have nothing but bread and water, but once Caroline had retired, Estelle and Mrs. Priddy took her biscuits and scones and ham sandwiches. They brushed her hair for her, told her funny stories, and put arnica cream on her lip where the slap had made it swell, but Meredith remained silent and closed off, so that they exchanged worried looks above her head.
No mother could ever love her
. Meredith dwelt on this statement for a long time and refused to believe it. She would
make
her mother love her, she resolved. She would prove that she was not wicked, she would strive to be good and obedient and decorous in all things, and would win her mother’s heart that way. And she would shun the tinkers. Because of them, her mother could not love her.
They are not welcome here.
She lay listlessly on her bed and felt her old anger at the Dinsdales, her old resentment, well up into a stifling pall that cast a dark shadow over her heart.

Epilogue

S
pring is finally looking like it might win. We’re through the muddy daffodils stage, past the week where soft tree blossoms were stripped by wind and rain and left to rot at the roadside in pink and brown drifts. Now there are tiny cracks in the earth of my sparse lawn, and fledgling sparrows line up along the fence, wide yellow mouths and fluffy feathers. I might get a cat, if it weren’t for these absurd little birds, sitting shoulder to shoulder like beads on a string. I check their progress daily. The last tenant here parked his motorbikes on the lawn, and piled up the debris of his DIY, so there isn’t much grass, but it will grow now, I think. The sun finally has some warmth. I sit out in it, tilt my face to it like a daisy, and I can feel the summer coming at last.

It was a relief, in the end, to have all my decisions made for me. Made by Dinny. What could I tell Clifford and Mary? That Henry was alive but damaged, and although I had seen him many times over Christmas and not told them, I now had no idea where he was? And why would I even try to stay at the manor, with all of them gone? Beth, Dinny, Harry. Henry. But I didn’t go far. That was a decision I had already made, I think. There was no question of me going back to London—it would have been like walking backwards. And on the edge of Barrow Storton was this cottage to rent. Not pretty, not quaint, but fine. A 1950s two-up, two-down at the end of a short row of identical cottages. Two bedrooms, so Beth and Eddie can come and stay, and a great view from my bedroom at the front. It’s on the opposite side of the village to the manor. I can see right across the valley, with the village at its bottom, and one corner of the manor is visible through distant trees. Less and less of it now that the trees are swelling into leaf. Then the downs roll away, bounding up to the barrow on the horizon.

It makes me very serene, living here. I feel like I belong. I have no sense of there being anything else I should be doing, or working toward, or changing. I am not even waiting, not really. I make a special point of not waiting. I teach in Devizes, I walk a lot. I call in on George Hathaway for cups of tea and biscuits. Sometimes I miss the people I used to see in London—not specific people as such, but having so many faces around me. The illusion of company. But here I tend to notice the faces I do see all the more. People aren’t part of a crowd like they were. I’ve made friends with my neighbors, Susan and Paul, and sometimes babysit for them for free because their little girls wear patched trousers far too short for them and don’t go to ballet or judo or have riding lessons. There’s no trampoline in their back yard. Susan’s expression moved from suspicion to incredulous joy when I offered. The girls are good-natured and they do as they’re told, most of the time. I take them on nature walks up on the downs or along the riverbank; we make cornflake cakes and hot chocolate while Susan and Paul go to the pub, the cinema, the shops, their bed.

Honey knows I’m here, and so does Mo. I went back to see Haydee and told them where I was and they’ve both been to visit since. I polished the tarnish from the silver bell on Flag’s teething ring, brought it to a high shine and tucked it into Haydee’s cot. She grabbed it with one fat hand, crammed it immediately into her mouth.
It was your great-grandpa’s
, I whispered to her. I wrote down my address, told Honey to keep it in case anybody asked for it. She gave me a straight look, solemn, then arched one eyebrow. But she didn’t say anything. She’s back at school now and Mo comes around with Haydee in her pram. She walks from West Hatch, says the fresh air and movement is the only thing that makes the baby sleep. I revive her with tea at this, the furthest point of her journey. Mo walks with a waddle, her back aches, and when she gets to me she is usually hot, pulling at her T-shirt to unstick it from her breasts. But she loves Haydee. As I make tea she twitches the blanket over the child and can’t keep herself from smiling.

I have the photo of Caroline with her baby in a frame on the window sill. I never did get around to giving it to Mum. I am still proud to have uncovered the child’s identity, to have found the source of the rift between my family and Dinny’s. Mum was astonished when I told her the story. I can’t prove it all, definitively; but I know it to be true. I’ve decided to like the fact that I can’t find out completely; that I can’t fill in all the blanks—why Caroline hid her earlier marriage, why she hid her child. Where Flag was before he appeared at the manor and then fell into the Dinsdale’s loving arms. Some things are lost in the past—surely that’s why the past is so mysterious, why it fascinates us. Nothing much will be lost any more—too much is recorded, noted, stored in a file on a computer somewhere. It would be easy, not to be fascinated these days. It’s harder to keep a secret, but they can be kept. Harry is living proof that they can be kept. I find I don’t mind secrets half so much when they are mine to keep, when I am not excluded.

The manor house was sold at auction for a figure that gave me a sinking feeling inside, just for half an hour, imagining where I could have gone and what I could have done with such wealth. Clifford came to the auction but I hid from him, at the back of the conference room in a Marlborough hotel, as the figures bounced to and fro, got bigger and bigger. I could sense his anguish just by looking at the back of his head, rigid on stiff shoulders. I felt sorry for him. I think perhaps he’d hoped nobody else would come, nobody else would want to buy it; that he could snap it up for the price of a semi in Hertfordshire and tell everyone for ever that it was his birthright. But plenty of people did come, and a developer bought it. It’s being converted into luxury flats, just like Maxwell suggested, because this is considered commutable now—from Pewsey to London and back every day. I can’t imagine how it will look inside when it’s done. What will my little back bedroom be? A kitchen with black granite counters? A fully tiled wet room? I can’t imagine it, and I’m half tempted to go and see the show flat when it’s ready. Only half tempted though. I don’t think I will. I don’t want my memories of it muddied.

I think about Caroline and Meredith a lot. I think about what Dinny said—that people who bully and hate, people who are cold and aggressive are not happy people. They behave that way because they are unhappy. It is hard to find sympathy for Meredith when I have such memories of her, but now that she is dead I can manage it, when I try. Hers was a life of disappointment—her one bid to free herself from a loveless home over so soon after it began. It might have been harder still to feel sympathy for Caroline when I never really knew her, when she chose to abandon one child and then raised another without love. It would be easy to conclude that she just could not love. Wasn’t able to. That she was too cold to be truly human, that she was born flawed. But then I found the last letter she wrote before she died; and I know better.

It lay undiscovered for weeks in the writing case, after I left the manor. Because she never sent it, of course, never even tore it from the writing pad. It was there, all along, beneath the cover, the line guide still in place underneath it. Her spidery writing tumbles across the page as if unravelling; 1983 is the date. No day or month specified, so perhaps that was the best she could do. She was over a hundred by then, and weakening. She knew that she was dying. Perhaps that was why she wrote this letter. Perhaps that was why she forgot, for a while, that she could never send it, that it would be read by nobody until me, more than a quarter of a century later.

My Dearest Corin,

It has been so long since I lost you that I cannot count the years. I am old now—old enough to be waiting to die myself. But then, I have been waiting to die ever since we were parted, my love. It is strange that the long years I have spent here in England seem, sometimes, to have passed by in a blur. I cannot recall what I can have possibly done to fill so much time—I really do not remember. But I do remember every second I spent with you, my love. Every precious second that I was your wife, and we were together. Oh, why did you die? Why did you ride out that day? I have been over it so many times. I see you mounting up, and I try to change the memory. I convince myself that I ran after you, told you not to go, not to leave me. Then you would not have fallen, and you would not have died, and I would not have had to spend these long dark years without you. Sometimes I so convince myself that I did run after you, that I did stop you, that when I realize you are gone it comes almost as a shock. It hurts me dreadfully, but I do it over and over again.

I did a terrible thing, Corin. An unforgivable thing. I ran away from it but I could not undo it, and it has followed me through all the years since. My only consolation has been that I never forgave myself, and that surely this life I have endured has been punishment enough? But no, there could never be punishment enough for what I did. I pray that you do not know of it, for if you did, you would not love me any more and I simply could not bear that. I pray that there is no God, and no heaven or hell, so that you cannot have been looking down, cannot have seen what crimes I committed. And I can never join you in heaven, if that is where you are. Surely, my soul belongs in hell when I die. But how could you not go to heaven, my love? You were an angel already, even on earth. Being with you was the one time in my whole life that I was happy, that I was glad to be alive, and everything since then has been ashes and dust to me. How long you have lain under that empty prairie? It is eons since I saw you. The whole world could have been born and died again in the vast age since we touched.

I wish I could see you one more time, before I die. Part of me believes that there would be some justice in this—that if the world was a fair place, I would be allowed just a second of your embrace, to make up for losing you. No matter what I did in the madness of grief, no matter how I compounded my mistake or how much worse I have made it—have made myself—ever since. I would gladly give myself up to an eternity of torment just to see you one more time. But it cannot be. I will die, and be forgot, just as you died. But I never forgot you, my Corin, my husband. Whatever else I did, I never forgot you, and I loved you always.

Caroline.

I read and re-read this letter in the weeks after I found it. Until I knew it by rote, and each word broke my heart a little. Such a vast depth of regret and sorrow that it could cloud a sunny day. When I feel it take hold of me, when I feel I have absorbed too much of it, I remember Beth. Her crime will not follow her any more. She will not compound it, or let the regret tear at her for ever. The chain has been broken, and I helped to break it. I remember that, and I let it cheer me, fill me up with hope. I will never know what Caroline did. Why she took her baby and ran to England, why she then abandoned him. One thing I do notice, though, from my many readings of this letter: she does not mention her son. If the child was hers, and Corin his father, why doesn’t she mention him? Why doesn’t she tell her Corin about his son? Try to explain why she abandoned him? This may well be the crime she hopes he never saw, but surely that must have come before her flight from America? And this abandonment seems inexplicable, really unbelievable, when matched to the love she professes for the child’s father. I remember the dark young girl at the summer party—the girl whom Caroline called Magpie. Her hair, as black as Dinny’s. I will never know for sure, but this omission from the letter hints at a crime indeed, and makes me doubt the claim of kinship I made to Dinny.

Beth came to stay a couple of weeks ago. She wishes, I think, that I’d settled in a different village, but she’s getting used to the idea. She doesn’t shy away from this place any more.

“Doesn’t it bother you, seeing the house over there?” she asked. Expressions fly across her face these days. They rise and jostle like balloons. Something tethered her features before and now it’s gone. And I may well settle somewhere else, sometime; soon, or eventually. I’m not waiting, but I need to be where he can find me. Just until the next time he does. And he’s got reasons to come back here, after all. More to pull him here than just me, and my desire for him. A mother, a sister, a niece. I think Honey would tell me, if he’d been back.

My happiness at seeing Beth improve bubbles up whenever I set eyes on her. No miracle cure, of course, but she’s better. She can split the blame for what happened with Dinny now; she no longer has to think that she and she alone dealt fate to Henry Calcott. The truth of it, the right and wrong, is more diffuse now. She didn’t take a life, she just changed one. There’s even a fragment of leeway, just a hint of gray as to whether the change was for the better or worse. So no miracle cure, but she talks to me about it now—she’ll talk about what happened, and because she’s turned around and looked at it, it’s not dogging her steps like it used to. I can see the improvement and so can Eddie, although he hasn’t asked me about it. I don’t think he cares what’s changed, he’s just pleased that it has.

It takes a while to see somebody differently when for years you’ve seen them in a particular way, or not seen them at all. I still saw Harry, when Dinny told me to see Henry. And I still saw Dinny as I had always seen him, always loved him. I tell myself that he needs time to see me differently, to see me as I am now and not see a child, or a nuisance, or Beth’s little sister, or whatever else it is he sees. Perhaps the time is not now; but it will come, I believe. There was a legal wrangle over the plot of land where the Dinsdales are allowed to camp. The developer didn’t want a load of travelers parking up in the communal gardens of his new flats. In the end that piece of ground, along with the rest of the woods and pasture, was sold to the farmer whose land adjoins it, and he has known the Dinsdales for years. So it’s still there, waiting for them. Waiting for him. A beautiful place to camp in the summer, green and sheltered, and unmolested now.