A Gathering Storm (3 page)

Three months earlier

Lucy’s journey to St Florian was one her father, Tom, should have made when he was alive. But he chose not to, and so she was making it for him.

Her quest began one afternoon in mid-January when she visited her stepmother, Helena, in Suffolk. Helena had asked her down from London because she’d been clearing out Tom’s possessions and wanted to give her some things.

As Lucy drove her hired car through the stark East Anglian countryside she studied her feelings. It was odd, really, that her long resentment of Helena hadn’t eased since her father’s death in a car crash the previous June. If anything, it had intensified. She felt sorry for her stepmother, certainly. Anyone seeing Helena’s worn expression, her unconscious habit of wringing her hands, would know that she’d loved Tom very much and grieved for him. But Lucy couldn’t forgive Helena for taking her father away. She’d hated, too, the fact that Helena, the second wife, the latecomer in Tom Cardwell’s life, had assumed the central role in the formalities following his death. As Tom’s legal spouse, it was Helena, not Lucy or Lucy’s mother Gabriella, who was called to the hospital after the car wreck was found, Helena who took charge of the funeral arrangements, Helena who, in the absence of any will, had presided over the division of Tom’s estate, although she’d made no difficulty about Lucy receiving her legal entitlement.

In addition to her own muddled feelings, Lucy had been moved by her mother’s intense anguish. By dying, it was for Gabriella Cardwell as though Tom had abandoned her all over again, and she found no comfort in the fact that this time the Other Woman had lost him, too. The two widows were quite unable to meet and share their grief; Lucy gauged that each saw only too clearly in the other what they themselves lacked in relation to Tom, and she was fed up with being the bridge between them.

When Lucy left the car in the quiet lane outside Walnut Tree Cottage, she saw Helena waiting for her at the front door, a willowy figure in a twinset of pigeon grey. ‘You’re awfully late,’ Helena called, her light voice quivery. ‘I was getting worried.’

‘Sorry, Helena,’ Lucy said, feeling guilty. ‘I didn’t start off till one, then it took ages to get through London.’

‘That’s all right,’ Helena said. ‘It’s just, ever since your father . . . I can’t help being anxious.’ Her cheek, when Lucy kissed her, felt dry, and Lucy saw that her matt-brown hair was now tinged with grey, like a coating of ash.

The white carnations Lucy had bought when she’d stopped for petrol were bruised and parched. She passed them across with a muttered apology.

‘How thoughtful of you, dear. And I’m so glad you’ve come.’

‘I should have visited before.’

‘You’re so busy, I know. You’ve been away, haven’t you?’ Helena tidied Lucy’s coat into a cupboard and led her into the sterile white kitchen. ‘Did you say Romania on the phone?’

‘Bulgaria,’ Lucy replied, watching as Helena arranged the horrible blooms in a cream china vase. ‘We were filming a costume drama. I was there for three weeks, on and off.’

In the hall, Helena set the vase on a shelf between two faceless dancing figurines. ‘Now, we should start in here, I think.’ She pushed open the door to the dining room and her voice trailed to a halt. Lucy saw why. Four ugly cardboard boxes were lined up on the table, spoiling the neat lines of Helena’s life.

‘They’re all bits and bobs of your father’s,’ Helena said, going over. ‘One of the charity shops took his clothes.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lucy said quickly. She couldn’t bear to think of strangers’ bodies filling out her father’s suits and shoes.

Helena glanced at her. ‘As you know, all his financial affairs are sorted out. There are these and a few things in his study – the books, of course.’

One box was too full to shut properly. On top of a pile of rugby programmes lay a photograph in a silver frame. Helena picked it up and said, ‘This was in the bottom drawer of his desk. Wasn’t she your grandmother?’

Lucy took it with a tender jolt of recognition. It was of Granny on the beach when she was young – the picture her father had used on the Order of Service at her funeral. It had stood on a bookshelf at home all through Lucy’s childhood. But here, it seemed, her father had kept it hidden away, as though he couldn’t bear to look at it. Why was that?

‘Anyway,’ Helena said, ‘I’d be much obliged if you’d take all this.’

‘I’d love to,’ Lucy said. She didn’t add that it was hardly Helena’s to give her.

As if reading her mind, Helena fixed Lucy with her steady grey eyes and said in her pale voice, ‘There never was any question but that you should have it.’

‘No, of course not,’ Lucy said. She was still staring at the photograph. Her grandmother had been so lovely and Lucy’s professional interest was piqued by the knowing sideways look she gave the camera. She’d have been an easy subject for a photographer; it really was true that there were people the camera loved.

‘Quite a charmer, wasn’t she?’ Helena remarked, as though she disapproved. ‘Oh, I know it can’t be easy for you, Lucy, this situation. I do hope that you and I . . . that we’ll continue to be friends.’

‘Of course we will.’ It would have been cruel to say otherwise, but Lucy sincerely wondered whether friendship would be possible. Not only was Helena nearly thirty years older than herself, but what on earth did they have in common?

‘Your father was very dear to me. He seemed so lost and unhappy when I got to know him. He needed me.’

Why? Lucy wanted to ask, but was too proud. A picture came into her mind of her mother’s wild weeping after Lucy’s father had departed, the blotchy face, the hair frizzier than ever. Helena, apart from the hand-wringing, was always composed, self-controlled. Why had her father come to need this calm, colourless woman?

Key to it all somewhere was why Tom had changed so much after Lucy’s grandmother’s death, when he’d started to explore the boxes of papers and mementos that she’d left behind. Was it the ordinary processes of grief, or had he found something amongst her possessions that bothered him? Even now, Lucy didn’t quite understand. Her father had been an intensely private man with a strong sense of pride and tradition, and rarely talked about feelings. He had always been warm and loving, though, and Lucy couldn’t make sense of why he’d cut his ties and set out to remake his life.

After Helena helped her move the boxes out to the car, they drank tea from fragile mugs in the beige sitting room before Helena said, ‘Shall we go and look upstairs?’

At the top of the cottage was an airy loftspace that Tom had converted into a study soon after they’d bought the house six or seven years before. As Helena turned on lights and fiddled with the sticking window blind, Lucy surveyed the room. It was the only place in the house where she still sensed her father’s presence. His faded navy sweatshirt hung on the back of the door, presumably missed in the charity-shop sweep. There he was, too, in the ordered rows of books, the old mahogany desk in front of the window that looked out onto darkening wintry fields.

Her attention was caught by a photograph that had fallen under the desk. She picked it up. It was of her father’s school’s first fifteen rugby team, his eighteen-year-old face sweet and eager in the front row. She studied it for signs of the more sombre, introverted man he would eventually become, but saw none. She placed it on the desk next to the computer, by yet another cardboard box.

‘Oh, yes,’ Helena said, ‘you should take that one, too. It’s mostly stuff of your grandmother’s.’

Lucy pulled up the flaps and looked inside. A yellow ring-bound file lay on the top, and when she opened it she saw notes in her father’s small neat handwriting – lists of dates, diagrams with arrows, and a reference to a book about the D-Day landings. Military history then, that was all. Disappointed, she took the file out. Underneath was a big square tin, once used for cake or biscuits, with a picture of a garden on it. She lifted the lid and smelt the scent of roses. The tin contained a jumble of mementos. She closed it again. She wouldn’t look at it in front of Helena.

‘What should I do with the books?’ Helena was at the shelves, straightening a row of old school stories with decorated spines. She looked out of place up here. Tom’s study had been his private world. Here he’d spent many hours reading in the big armchair, or at the desk writing, or surfing websites of second-hand booksellers.

‘I’d only want them because they’d been Dad’s,’ she said, ‘and I just haven’t room in my flat.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘No. Can’t you try that shop in the high street?’

‘That would probably be best.’ Helena was looking round the room now, wondering what else should be given its marching orders. Her eyes came to rest on the computer. ‘There’s something else I need to give you, Lucy. Your father was doing some research into family history. It might interest you. I tried to print the document off this morning, but the wretched thing wouldn’t work.’

‘I’ll have a go, if you like,’ Lucy offered, curious. She sat down and switched on the computer.

‘I guessed his password straight away,’ Helena said. ‘It’s “wasps”. ‘ Tom’s favourite rugby team.

Lucy typed it in, smiling, and watched as a series of icons appeared on a black and yellow desktop. Helena pointed her to a file labelled
Cardwell
. A page of text yawned open. Lucy stared at the heading. It was a man’s name.

‘Who’s Rafe Ashton?’ she asked.

‘You haven’t heard of him?’ Helena replied, frowning.

‘No.’

‘Your father said he was his uncle. You must have heard of him.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Lucy insisted. Great-Uncle Rafe? The name meant nothing.

‘I gather he was your Grandfather Gerald’s younger brother.’

‘I’d no idea he had one. Why wasn’t he Rafe Cardwell then?’

‘He must have been a half-brother. Anyway, he went missing in the war or something. It’s all a bit confusing.’

‘I’ll take it away and have a look.’ Lucy was annoyed that Helena appeared to know more about the family than she did. The printer clattered into life and several typed pages slipped softly into the tray. She tucked them into the cardboard box and, with the box in her arms, gazed around her father’s room for what was perhaps the last time.

‘I ought to go,’ she told Helena. ‘I’m due at a friend’s house in London at eight.’

‘Of course,’ Helena replied, but she looked disappointed.

Once on the road again, Lucy quickly forgot about Helena. Her mind was already on the mystery of Great-Uncle Rafe.

Lucy lived in a tiny apartment that her father had helped her buy, not far from the canal at Little Venice in North London. She loved to walk the towpath and watch the barges come and go, sorry that she’d missed the days when they’d been pulled by horses. Nowadays, they mostly carried tourists. The previous year, a series of photographs she’d taken of the area had sold well in an exhibition at a Camden gallery.

So far as work was concerned, Lucy felt at a bit of a crossroads. Photography was her hobby, but she might let it become more. She liked the small TV production company where she worked, but wanted more responsibility. Her boss, Delilah, had been encouraging. ‘We’re always being asked for short documentaries,’ she said. ‘Serious themes, women’s lives, that sort of thing. Bring me some ideas.’ Lucy had tried one or two on her, but nothing that had worked yet.

At twenty-seven, Lucy still hadn’t found anyone she’d want to share her life with; being fiercely independent, she wondered if she ever would. Will, whom she had met through work, was the latest in a not very long line of boyfriends.

In the weeks after meeting Helena, when she could bear to, Lucy would lift one of her father’s boxes onto the breakfast-table in her flat and take out its treasures one by one. Over his personal things – a carved wooden box containing cufflinks and tie-pins; his favourite LPs with their folk band covers – she didn’t linger, putting them out of painful sight and mind in a cupboard in her bedroom, but the photograph of her grandmother had taken a hold on her. She stood it on the desk and found herself glancing at it as she worked. It was strange, realizing that the elderly invalid she’d known had once been this beautiful young girl.

Lucy had been dearly fond of her father’s mother, but childhood visits to the musty London mansion flat could be something of an ordeal. There was an air of shabby grandeur about the place, an expectance of best behaviour. Angelina Cardwell liked Lucy to dress nicely, which Lucy sometimes fought against, causing ructions between her parents. Her mother Gabriella held that people should be allowed to wear what they liked, while her father argued that best clothes were a form of respect, and that Granny Cardwell liked to see little girls in pretty dresses and proper leather shoes, not jeans and trainers. Since Gabriella refused to accompany Tom and Lucy on these visits, Tom usually won. As she grew into her teens, Lucy came to enjoy the challenge of meeting Granny’s high standards whilst satisfying her own colourful sense of style. Granny didn’t mind clothes being fashionable, indeed she rather approved.

The three of them would sit together on the over-stuffed chairs and drink tea served by Granny’s Polish daily woman, and chat about what Lucy had been doing at school and whether Granny, who suffered badly from nerves and arthritis, was well enough to join some friends on a cruise. As far as Lucy remembered, she never was.

One Sunday afternoon, in a pensive mood, Lucy investigated the box she’d taken from her father’s study. Angelina’s cake-tin contained a lock of Tom’s baby hair folded in tissue; a birthday card he’d made her, drawn in a childish hand; a pair of knitted mittens. She fitted a finger inside one. Had her father really once had hands tiny enough for these?

There were a few letters and postcards he had sent his parents from school, or from holidays. And lots more photographs: only one or two of Tom as a toddler, but several of him as a schoolboy, then a teenager. Here was a photograph of her parents’ wedding, a picture of herself aged three in her mother’s arms, with the large green teddy she’d famously won at a fairground. All these her grandmother had collected together in this box of memories and it made Lucy feel both sad and happy at the same time to look at them.