Bridesmaids Revisited (28 page)

I made myself think about Ben and the children and how much I loved them. I wondered what he would have to say when I told him my grandfather owned Memory Lanes. I wondered and wondered and dozed and woke and then dozed again. And when I opened my eyes I saw, on looking at the clock on the bedside chest, that it was morning. To be precise it was seven-thirty. Leaping up with all the energy of someone who had slept for a week, I grabbed my handbag and case and headed downstairs. I took the stairs to the hall this time. Daylight had brought a return of courage. Should someone try to stop me walking out the front door, they would get a punch in the nose at the very least.

Rosemary came out from the sitting room as I reached the bottom, looking as though she hadn’t slept a wink and couldn’t have withstood my breathing in her direction.

“You’re leaving,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you?”

“Other than flattening my other two tires, nothing.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice, it sounded so hard.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ellie.” She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which made her look extra-vulnerable. And despite everything I found myself wanting to put my arms around her. “Too soft by half, that’s you, Mrs. H.!” I could hear Mrs. Malloy saying.

And, stiffening my spine, I walked through the front door and out onto the lane, where I turned towards the cottages at the top and suddenly found myself knocking on Tom’s door. He opened up within seconds and gave me a beaming smile that incongruously made his face look more pugnacious than ever. He invited me inside as I hurriedly told him that I was leaving by train because my car wasn’t working. And, after fetching the box—which he assured me, as if standing with his hand on a stack of Bibles, he had not peeked at—he offered to drive me to the station.

“On a mission for the ladies, one connected with this Memory Lanes business?” Tom asked as we drove along in the van from which he delivered his fish.

“Well, I guess you could say that,” I answered, and he said he was proud as Punch to help out in any way he could, even if it meant putting his life at stake. I told him that this was unlikely to be necessary, but thanks very much. And in great good cheer he parked outside the station, which turned out to be in Rilling, accompanied me to the ticket office, offered to pay my fare, and then waited with me on the platform until my train arrived some five minutes later.

There were plenty of empty seats and I chose one with no one occupying either side of the dividing table. Having stowed my case in the overhead bin, I sat down next to the window just as the train started up again. And with my handbag at my side, I opened the box and unwrapped the diary from its sheets of tissue paper. But I couldn’t bring myself to open it at once. Instead I stared out at the buildings and houses flashing by until green fields replaced them, some with sheep grazing in them as if posing while Constable painted them. The children loved to look for animals in fields when Ben and I took them on outings. There were always squabbles between Abbey and Tam over who had spotted the first cow and whether in fact it was a cow. Which always ended up with my suggesting that we look for dragons instead.

I opened the brown leather-bound book with “Diary” embossed on the front and, after leafing through it, saw what Richard had meant when telling me Sophia had her own way of putting her thoughts down on paper. There was nothing written on any of the lined pages, apart from the date printed halfway down each page, providing limited space from day to day in which to pour out one’s heart in words. Sophia had poured hers out in drawings. Some in ink, but most of them in pencil. There were several of the Old Mill and of St. John’s churchyard and of cottages and houses—one of them I was sure I had seen when walking down Hawthorn Lane yesterday. It had a particularly beautiful tree in the garden. Sophia showed it casting a graceful shadow over the lawn.

But mostly they were drawings of people. Some full-length, in varying poses. Others were headshots. Many in profile, but a number full-face. I came across vividly recognizable likenesses of the bridesmaids. The fact that they were elderly now and had been girls when these were drawn didn’t matter. Not only had Sophia rendered them accurately, she had captured their expressions. Ones that were a part of their personal landscape. Others that I’d seen flit across their features or show in their eyes a moment and be gone the next—as in the case of sturdy Thora, when she had talked about her relationship with Michael, the man who had finally gone back to his wife.

More than that, Sophia seemed to have captured some inner essence of all three. It was amazing, the power of those drawings. I came across ones of a man and a woman—elderly, rather than middle-aged. I knew they had to be her parents. Far from being drawn with malice, there was a certain, possibly reluctant tenderness in their rendition. Reverend McNair was depicted down to his clerical collar and had an irascible look about him, as if he could have benefited from being put in the corner until he learned to behave as nice vicars should. Mrs. McNair was wearing the black hat I had found in the wardrobe. She appeared to be just as described to me—the sort of woman who bustles about, sorting out other people’s lives for them until they find themselves again. I came across the missing page that Richard had mentioned—in addition to the ones torn from the back of the diary. Then leafed through a few more drawings of the Old Mill and came to a woman wearing an apron and an unmistakable hangover. Who from a faint resemblance to Edna had to be her mother, Gladys.

But the vast majority—pages and pages—were of a young man who could be none other than Hawthorn Lane. He was every bit as handsome as I had imagined him. But there was none of the arrogance and surly resentment of the disadvantages dealt him that I had pictured. There were drawings of him with mischievous laughter brimming in his eyes. Others showed his face in repose, and if such a masculine face could be called beautiful, his was. A particularly evocative full-length drawing showed him leaning against that tree in the garden of the house I’d thought I recognized and there was sorrow mingled with a great yearning on his shadowed face. Something stirred in me. A remembrance of those early days with Ben, when I wanted time to stand still long enough for me to etch every beloved detail of him on my heart.

The train pulled up to a platform, a surge of people got on—one of them an earnest-looking young man who sat down beside me, opened up his laptop computer, and began clicking away at the keys. I closed the diary. I had been impressed by the drawings, curiously moved by the ones of Hawthorn Lane. But I was also deflated. Richard had been right. I had come across nothing to suggest why anyone would have been desperate to prevent Rosemary from giving it to my mother. Not one of those drawings cried out to be titled “Murderer!” There wasn’t a wicked-looking face or figure amongst the group. And the only thing that could be said to strike any incongruity was those printed dates showing through what I believed to be truly gifted miniature works of art. Sophia could have had a great future, instead of a tragically curtailed one.

The soft clicking of the computer keys, along with the murmur of voices coming to me from nearby seats, formed a musical rhythm that entered my head. To lull me, within minutes of the ticket inspector’s stopping at my seat, into a doze. When I roused, it was to a stampede of movement in the aisle. We had arrived at Kings Cross. I staggered up, put the diary back in the box with the photograph, took down my case, put the box inside, picked up my handbag, and got off the train to join the herd heading for the barrier. I felt hemmed in and for the first time wondered if I had been followed. But I determinedly shook off the feeling. No one other than myself and five or six strangers had got on the train at Rilling. And I didn’t have that prickling down my spine that I’d felt when leaving the photography studio.

I joined the taxi queue outside. It was fairly short. Not one of those that coil around as though belonging on a board of Snakes and Ladders. Less than five minutes later I was giving my driver directions to Sir Clifford Heath’s office building. Tom had given me the address, not seeming surprised that the bridesmaids hadn’t done so, saying that he should remember it after all the letters he’d written in conjunction with the other villagers.

The taxi plowed through the heart of London, then wove its way amidst a maze of side streets with pricey-looking restaurants, understatedly elegant boutiques, and rows of Georgian houses, to draw up before what appeared to be a converted carriage house. I looked and to my surprise saw that the address was correct. I had been expecting a multi-storied, glass-and-steel building. Could Tom have made a mistake and sent me to Sir Clifford’s private residence? I wondered as I paid the driver and got out. But a brass plate beside the door indicated that this was indeed Heath Enterprises.

Ringing the bell, I waited with a fast-beating heart. Why hadn’t I planned out word for word what I was going to say to this stranger who was my grandfather and didn’t know it? I rather expected an impeccably clad butler with a suitably disdainful expression and a permanently raised eyebrow to open the door. It was that sort of place. But instead I was ushered inside by a woman of uncertain age who might have been the housekeeper—of the sort that ruled the roost at Cragstone Castle, except that she wore a pleasant expression.

“My name is Ellie Haskell,” I informed her. “I’m here to see Sir Clifford Heath.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but it’s a matter of urgency.”

“In what regard?” We were standing in a graciously furnished hall, a far cry from other office vestibules I’d seen. There was a rose-and-blue-patterned silk rug that put Gwen’s precious antique to shame, on the cherry-wood floor. Pictures—mainly landscapes that looked as though they had been purchased at auction for sums of money that would have left even the well-to-do spluttering. And a graceful staircase curving its way up to the first floor.

“It’s in connection with his desire to purchase the Old Rectory in the village of Knells,” I told her.

“He’s in a meeting. One that’s likely to last all morning. Possibly into the afternoon. And it’s more than I would dare to interrupt him,” she responded in a still affable voice. “If Ms. Chambers, his personal assistant, were here, you could see her. I do know that he has been awaiting word on the matter to which you refer. The meeting presently taking place is with Sir Clifford’s team of architects in regard to the Knells project. I really don’t know what to tell you.” She stood looking perplexed, as if wondering where to find the silver soup ladle that should have been on the top shelf of the butler’s pantry.

“I’d like to wait.”

“If you’re sure you won’t mind sitting for what could be hours, that would perhaps be best. He’s really not a difficult man, but he has his rules. I’m the guard dog. Suitably named Mrs. Rover.” She smiled and led me past the staircase, which she told me was for Sir Clifford’s and Ms. Chambers’s use, down the hall into an addition to the building that made up, she told me, the main office space.

“Sir Clifford’s architects designed it so that the exterior of the house would retain its Georgian facade.” She continued past several glass doors with names and job titles on them and around a corner. We now went up a plain white staircase to a gallery that had been converted into a waiting room with a Chippendale table on which reposed a telephone and other desktop accoutrements. The rest of the considerable space was furnished with comfortable-looking leather sofas and chairs, several glass-enclosed bookcases placed between the row of doors, and a number of side tables on which were set vases of flowers, or magazines and books.

“The powder room is in there.” Mrs. Rover pointed to the door closest to us. “There’s a brass plate on it, just as there is on the others, so you can’t mistake it. Now you relax and I’ll be back shortly with a cup of coffee for you.”

As soon had she disappeared down the stairs, I undid my case and took out the box. What was to stop me from walking in on Sir Clifford and handing it to him? Nothing, apart from the fact that he might well refuse to take it and order me out the door before I could get out two words of explanation as to why I had come.

I looked over at that Chippendale table that served as a desk. A moment later I was sitting behind it with the box close to hand, pulling a pad of paper towards me and picking up the pen that reposed in the crystal tray. Unlike Sophia, I didn’t mind writing. I sat organizing my thoughts before getting started. I had completed two pages by the time Mrs. Rover returned with coffee and a plate of biscuits that had almost certainly come from Fortnum & Mason. She didn’t reprimand me for making free with the desk and told me, before going back downstairs, that Ms. Chambers had telephoned to say that she would be in within the next couple of hours. That bit of news didn’t thrill me. But I didn’t let it stop me from filling up another three pages. I had just finished signing my name when I looked up to see her standing over me.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Mrs. Haskell?” Even with the steam coming out of her nostrils she remained the epitome of elegant good looks. Today she was wearing an exquisitely simple black dress with a single row of pearls at her throat to match her earrings, except that they were circled in diamonds.

“I’m writing to Sir Clifford.” My smile was genuine. Now I knew why she had looked at me with such dislike the other afternoon. Amelia Chambers knew, had perhaps known for years, probably having been told by her mother, about Sir Clifford’s relationship with Sophia. And Amelia had seen something in me, perhaps just a passing expression, that had convinced her I was Sir Clifford’s granddaughter. And she had been afraid that if he should ever see me, he might realize it also. And now here I was, just a closed door away from him.

“Very well, he’s in a meeting, as Mrs. Rover informed you, but if you give your letter to me I’ll take it into him and perhaps he will agree to step out here and see you for a few moments.”

“I’ll wait to give it to him myself.”