Cricket (25 page)

“I don’t think the guy is dying,” Shenal said. “Not from what Paul said, anyway. I think he’s going into surgery and wanted to see his own vicar rather than the chaplain at the hospital. Do you want milk in this?”

“Please.”

“So, I heard from someone yesterday who might be of interest to you,” Shenal said, clearly trying to divert attention from the fact that she was serving Henry coffee in Paul’s kitchen. He allowed her to get away with it—for now.

“Oh?” he said.

“Yeah. Hannah Beasdale.”

Henry cast his mind over all the people he’d met since moving to Cheddar and couldn’t put the name to a single face. “Nope. You’re going to have to help me out with that one.”

“She used to be Ryan’s sister-in-law.”

Henry’s jaw dropped. “You knew Sarah?” he asked, feeling an unwelcome wave of annoyance that Shenal had had this information all the time he’d known her and never seen fit to share it.

“I knew her sister,” she corrected. “I was at school with Hannah. I’m a lot younger than Ryan and Sarah, though, so they never paid me much attention.”

“What was she like?” Henry asked in hushed tones.

Shenal laughed. “If you want me to say she’s a dragon then… yeah, maybe. She was a bit of a bitch when we were at school, actually. She was pretty, so she was popular. Then there was little Hannah, who was weird, and me.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“
Me,
” Henry said.

Shenal waved it off. “I was the only non-white person in our whole year. I think there was a black guy a few years older than me, and by the time I left there were one or two Pakistani girls. But when I was there, I was very much the odd one out.

“Don’t,” she warned him. “Don’t go feeling sorry for me. Secondary school toughened me up. It was fucking horrible at the time, but I’m a better person for it now.”

“Okay,” Henry said. “Tell me more about Sarah.”

“Ugh. So, she must have been five years older than us? Hannah sort of hero-worshipped her, so I wasn’t ever allowed to mention how much of a bitch she was, but I never really liked her all that much.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she was slim, and blonde, and her parents had money. I think she mellowed out a bit once we left school. By that time she was almost permanently attached to Ryan, like she was bloody Princess Di and he was her prince. I remember, when they got married my mum said that it would never last.”

Henry raised an eyebrow in question.

“Oh, they were too young,” Shenal continued. “They were doing it in a rush… et cetera, et cetera. The wedding was really ostentatious.”

“Did you go?” Henry asked incredulously.

“To the reception, yeah,” Shenal said. “Hannah was a bridesmaid, so she invited me. It was so gaudy… yuck. I wore a sari because I knew it would piss her off.”

“Then what?”

Shenal shrugged. “I don’t know. They sort of faded away once they were married. Ryan started working on the farm with his dad, and they moved into one of those tiny little cottages in the village.”

“So she never lived at the farmhouse?”

“No. He only moved in there a few years ago, after his parents moved abroad. That was long after they got divorced.”

“He won’t tell me any of this himself,” Henry admitted.

“I suppose, as far as he’s concerned, it’s all ancient history,” Shenal said. “There was a bit of a ripple when they announced that they were splitting up, but like I said, no one was really surprised. I think Sarah liked the limelight—she was Queen Bee in school, then she got married really quickly, but after that her star started to fade, and she didn’t like it.”

“Where is she now?”

“Bristol, I think,” Shenal said, then gave him a wicked grin. “She works in a call center.”

“It’s very easy to dislike her,” Henry said.

“Well, Ryan used to worship the ground she walked on,” Shenal said, “until he didn’t anymore. She treated her friends very well. But if Sarah didn’t like you, then she treated you like shit.”

“Nice,” Henry muttered. “What about her sister? Is she still local?”

“I’ve sort of stayed in contact with Hannah over the years,” Shenal said. “She’s moved to London now. She’s a dancer. I meet up with her when I go to see my brother and my nieces.”

“Did anyone ever say anything to Ryan about being gay?” It was something Henry had worried about for a while. He didn’t mind being someone’s experiment, as long as he knew that’s exactly what it was so he could keep his own feelings out of the equation.

“No one would have dared,” Shenal said. “He’s always been that good-looking, you know,” she added slyly.

“What do you think?”

“About the two of you? I’m not particularly surprised,” she said. “To be honest, I thought Ryan would eventually end up getting married again really quickly or being a recluse for years. He’s not exactly reclusive, but he hasn’t dated at all since he got divorced.”

“Oh.”

“I would have never said, oh, Ryan Burgess must be gay, but seeing the two of you together makes a lot of sense, I suppose.”

Henry nodded. “Thanks.”

She shrugged it off. “It’s not a compliment. I’m just being honest.”

He smiled anyway. “So, what about you and Paul, then?”

That was the next big taboo. The two of them clearly weren’t out and proud, but she was sitting in Paul’s kitchen like it was her own.

“I told you. I came round for breakfast.” But she was blushing.

“Came round for breakfast, or was already here when it got to breakfast time?”

Shenal sighed heavily. “I came round for breakfast.”

“Ohh. He’s holding out on you like Ryan held out on me.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” she said. “Or maybe it is. We’re such good friends, and the whole bloody village knows the both of us. If we announced that we were seeing each other, there would be uproar.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Henry,” she sighed. “It’s a long list, darling.”

He had time and told her so, then shot down each of her complaints about religion and race and “what would our parents say,” and prejudice and their jobs and the likelihood of Paul being moved to another parish one day.

“Shenal, when I met Ryan, he was
straight
,” Henry said. “Or very deep in the closet, at any rate. If we can make it work, so can you.”

“Ryan coming out is probably less traumatic to this community than Paul dating a Hindi woman,” Shenal countered.

“So the four of us can be one big scandal together,” Henry said, offering his friend a small smile. “If you like him, Shenal, then you should go for it.”

She nodded and pushed her fingers through her hair, leaning back in her seat and sighing softly. “We’ll see,” she said noncommittally. “Are you going to see Nell later?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “I was planning to.”

“I’m going there next, if you want a ride.”

Even though he could and would drive either of Ryan’s cars, Henry didn’t as a matter of course. It was safer for all involved if he wasn’t in control of a vehicle.

“That would be great.”

H
E
WAS
going to Nell with a specific topic to pick her brains on. So far, their conversations had been about the family, the house, Henry’s own childhood and adolescence. He found himself completely absorbed in the stories Nell could tell him, amused and delighted by her anecdotes about the war and her own role in it.

The Richardsons and Stretton House went back—nearly all the way back, to the days when it was first built. Generations of people had lived in the old manor until Nell had left it. Henry knew his family was in those walls, in the gardens and the dirt and the trees.

It was strange to think that the house was originally built while the city he called home was still called “New Amsterdam,” way back in the early 1600s. The earliest sketches, blueprints, and paintings of the house showed it without the two wings, which were added at a later stage.

This—years of history—was part of a storage space set aside in the attic of the house, well preserved by a good roof and what he could see was an attempt at keeping these sacred things safe.

There wasn’t much of a filing system in the attic. In fact, much of it looked like it had been dumped there haphazardly for one reason or another. Still, Henry thought it important to go through and catalogue what he could, find what he wanted to go out on show when the house was eventually reopened. He had an idea of turning the east wing into something of a museum or an area for learning, at the very least. Certain documents, maps, some of those blueprints, letters, photographs, they couldn’t be handled due to how very, very old and delicate they were, so they’d need to be stored behind glass somewhere.

But those ideas were still in their infancy.

There was a tea crate that had caught his attention for some reason, and despite the fact that the attic was dark and dusty and he wanted a break, Henry stopped to prize the lid off. Near the top was a photograph of three children, two boys and a younger girl. He didn’t really need to turn it over to see the names “Bill, Bertie and Nell” to know that the little girl was his great-grandmother, but it pleased him to see it nonetheless. There were more photos in the box, some that were labeled, others not, all of people who had lived decades ago. He collected a stack and decided to take them to Nell.

After being shown into what he thought of as Nell’s conservatory and settled with a habitual cup of tea, Henry extracted the photograph and handed it over.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said as she laughed. “I wanted to know more about it.”

“This is a school picture,” she said, eyes bright.

“I guessed as much.”

She clucked at him. “You’re making me feel like an old woman, Henry.”

“That was never my intention, ma’am.” Turning on the charm certainly was, though.

“You,” she started, and said nothing more, reaching for her reading glasses—a pair of Coke-bottle thick lenses that helped counteract the cataracts on her eyes.

“I was ten when this was taken,” she said. “Must have been the summer of ’thirty-one.”

Henry knew this. He’d found another picture of Nell in the same dress that had the date printed neatly on the back, and was surprised at himself for being surprised that she knew this.

“Have you found me, yet?” she asked him, handing back the picture.

“I think so,” he said, pointing to a girl in the front row, her hair pushed back from her face, wide smile, hands folded neatly in her lap.

“Yes,” she said, delighted. “Bert had already left school by this point, but that’s Bill there, in the back row next to Rex Morningside. Ooh, all the girls liked Rex. He was such a cutie.”

Henry laughed and shuffled closer on the little couch, wanting to see as she pointed people out.

“That’s Nora Ayres and Bettie Harcomb and Margaret Chase. We used to go around together, back in the day. Nora married the butcher’s son and moved to Manchester, and Margaret ran away to Paris. Goodness only knows how she managed to afford that, but there you go.”

“Running away to Paris sounds very romantic,” Henry offered.

“I suppose it is.”

Nell chattered on happily, pointing out various classmates and filling him in on all the sordid details of their later lives.

“Mrs. Richardson, you are a gossip,” Henry said, teasing her.

She laughed. “Oh, barely any of them are still alive to be offended,” she said, but with a smile on her face. “And they would have stories to tell about me too, if anyone would have asked.”

“Now you’re making me want to ask.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Nell said. “You’d think badly of me.”

He moved on to a safer topic of conversation, wanting to know more about the house he’d inherited.

“You were born there?” he asked as the sun started to set in the gardens beyond her conservatory.

“Oh yes,” Nell said. “My mother had moved in when she married my father. This was when it was just on the cusp of respectability to have serving staff, before the first war made it an excess few could afford.”

“Was she local?”

“Almost. She came from the south coast somewhere, Devon, I believe. She was aristocratic, and my father wasn’t, but he was a colonel in the British army. He’d served in India for five years and came home to find a wife. Their marriage wasn’t arranged, not as far as I know, anyway. They were introduced by a friend of the family that knew mother’s family, and they got married before the turn of the century.”

“Did they ever go back to India?”

“No, gosh no. Father was quite a lot older than mother. About ten years, I think, but you can check that if you want to track down birth certificates, I’m sure they still exist somewhere. He was released from the army, and then they had Bert, and Bill, of course, and me.”

More than the story of Nell’s parents, Henry wanted to know about her own love story with the original Henry Richardson, but she didn’t seem to be very forthcoming with sharing it. It took a few more weeks of requesting, pleading, and dropping hints. She got a faraway look in her eye and started to talk.

Nell Herrington was eighteen years old.

She had been allowed out to a dance, held in the village hall, with three of her friends—Peg, Nora, and Bettie, all other village girls whom she’d been at school with. Nell remembered little things, like how, for some reason, the smell of lavender seemed to be particularly strong in the evenings, and how the heel of her shoe kept getting caught in the cobbles that still paved the main street through the village at that time.

It was a warm evening, so they didn’t bother with coats, but had been encouraged by their mothers to wear hats and gloves. Nell had a blue dress that tied with a red belt—something her father had disapproved of, so she rolled the belt up and hid it under her hat until she was outside, when she slipped it back through the loops on her dress.

Warnings of war were still only gentle rumbles. Belief perpetrated that the conflict in Japan would never reach European shores, that there was nothing to worry about. There wasn’t any reason for concern, not yet anyway, and the light spilled out of the village hall to show them the way.