Guilt in the Cotswolds (4 page)

Again Thea thought of Pandora, and what a fitting image that was, when she was herself opening lids on who-knew-what ancient troubles.

‘I’m sure Mr Wilshire knows what he’s doing,’ she said firmly. ‘I certainly can’t see any reason to criticise him, and I have it from a quite independent source that his mother is perfectly happy in the care home. She has been very much involved in the decision to move. Nobody forced her into it.’

Norah Cookham narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that what you think? Then let me tell you otherwise. I went to visit her yesterday, and I can promise you, she has
no idea
what’s going on here. And if she did, it would make her very angry indeed.’

After a few more words of little consequence, Thea made her excuses and went back to her work. The bedroom was as she’d left it, and she sighed at her newly reluctant approach to the task she had agreed to
undertake. If Norah Cookham was right, then she was party to something very unpleasant. But the emotions of the family were really not her concern. She might try to contact Richard Wilshire and explain that she needed firm assurances that she was not doing anything that would distress his mother, having heard what Mrs Cookham had to say. And there was also the fresh information conveyed by Millie to be factored in. Some of it was at odds with what Richard had told her.

She looked around the room, trying to decide what to do. There were four large drawers to be emptied after the wardrobe, with endless decisions as to how to arrange the contents. If Millie and her friend wanted them for a drama department, then wouldn’t that be as good a fate as any other? Had Richard Wilshire categorically refused to allow her to have them? Was there some misunderstanding, whereby she had never actually asked him? Had he impetuously asked for Thea’s help, only to realise that there really wasn’t so much of a rush, and he should have listened more closely to his daughter? Would he turn up at lunchtime to tell her he was sorry, but she was not actually needed after all? And if he did that, would she still get paid?

The uncertainty had a slowing effect, but she decided to carry on as she had begun, although spending more time on each item she found. She piled the clothes from the wardrobe onto the single bed, in no special order. There was nothing that deserved to be thrown out. Every garment was in good condition, clean and
undamaged. When she moved to the chest of drawers, she found silk undergarments, thick knitted socks and big men’s hankies and blouses neatly folded and separated from each other with tissue paper. Carefully, she wrote everything down on her list.

Inevitably, she drifted into reveries about Mrs Wilshire’s life. Why would she keep all these things? They dated back to the 1940s, in many instances, when she would have been only a young woman – the age her granddaughter was now. Would she have worn the clothes then, and if so, how had they survived so well? Wasn’t the normal thing for clothes to become worn out, torn and stained and finally used as rags? If they didn’t suit you, or were the wrong size, you gave them to someone else or sent them to a jumble sale. These blouses in particular were perfect. Socks and hankies might never date, but almost everything else did. There was a suggestion of a sort of shrine in this room, Thea realised. Everything put away so carefully, protected from damage and never used. Perhaps they had never belonged to Rita Wilshire at all, but been rescued or bequeathed – kept because another woman had once owned them. Another woman who had gone away or died, leaving her lovely things high and dry.

It was almost time for lunch, and Hepzie was getting restless. Another little walk might be a good idea. ‘We can just do a quick circuit past the church,’ Thea said.

This meant turning the other way from the earlier walk. The church was very close by, on a high point in a landscape of tremendous undulation. Just past the church gate, the ground fell away in a dramatic sweep down to the ancient pub on the main street. The way the hostelry squatted humbly directly below the grand serenity of the house of God was impossible to ignore. The church was in full light, nothing near it casting a shadow. But the pub gave the impression that it seldom saw any sunshine at all. The ground rose again behind it and large evergreen trees hemmed it in on either side. The facade was plain and dingy, although Thea surmised that this would not remain the case for long. The only place in Chedworth that offered any sustenance to visitors could not be permitted to present a bad image.

She walked with her dog along a short stretch of the village street, passing a row of solid stone houses, many with attic windows projecting from their roofs, and no pavement for pedestrians. Since traffic was rare and slow, this caused very little worry on Thea’s part. She had Hepzie on a lead, but as soon as they turned back up the little street that linked Mrs Wilshire’s house to the main thoroughfare, she untied the dog and let her run free. They had performed a slow and crooked circle, more of a triangle in reality, and were back again within fifteen minutes. In that time, they had encountered not a single person. This was typical, and not at all surprising. There was, indeed, nowhere for people to go in the middle of a Friday. Somewhere towards Lower Chedworth, there was a primary school, sounds of playground games filtering across the valley. A dog barked in the distance and a plane flew overhead. Otherwise, the place was exceedingly quiet.

A quick snack comprising a sandwich made from the bread and ham she had brought from her Witney home, and then she went back upstairs for a look inside the third bedroom. This turned out to be the one Richard must have occupied before leaving home. Despite his assurances that there was nothing left in the house that he wanted for himself, there were possessions here that he had at least neglected to throw away. A guitar hung on the wall, for one thing. An odd home-made instrument, complete with strings, but with no hollow echo chamber, painted in swirly reds and purples. It
must have been a short-lived interest – and besides, it would be unlikely to yield a good sound. There were two old transistor radios and a box containing obsolete wires and plugs. All rubbish, Thea assumed. She would have to start a pile for things likely to be destined for the tip.

The last and smallest upstairs room was the most cluttered. It contained old suitcases, a filing cabinet, a broken office chair and a lot of cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling. Stuff that was too big or heavy to go up into the attic, Thea supposed, with a sinking heart. This was turning into a mammoth job, which would take more than a week to fulfil adequately. Professional house clearance people would presumably just bundle the boxes into a skip without checking their contents, along with the suitcases. From the little Richard Wilshire had said, Thea was expected to at least open them all, check for value or interest and then write down what there was. When she set about doing this, she found a few bundles of envelopes obviously containing letters, along with diaries and notebooks, sketchpads and postcards.

It no longer felt like a treasure hunt. When first explained to her, some weeks earlier, it had sounded like something that would be fun. With an interest in history, she had anticipated plenty of fascinating material to browse through. Now, the sheer weight of it all made her feel tired, along with the unease as to the consequences of all this disturbance. A nagging sense of
guilt followed her every move. She should have phoned Richard for reassurance, but she kept hoping that his daughter would have found him and said enough to bring him back, without her needing to summon him. She was being more slow and careful than at first, conscious that she might have to put everything back as she’d found it.

At first she had assumed that a handful of old letters and photos would be delightful to examine. Now, with such a quantity of personal paperwork in front of her, she felt mostly sad. There was so much of it, inevitably containing a wealth of detail about the lives of Rita Wilshire and her family. Just one family out of millions, creating this great mass of recorded fact and feeling, which nobody was ever going to care about. Three suitcases and five full boxes was far and away too much for one person to leave behind. There were countless packets of old letters in their original envelopes that had been held together with rubber bands that had now perished, so that the bundles fell apart as soon as she tried to lift them out. They mainly seemed to date back to the 1950s and 60s, many of them typed. Nothing special – just the normal accumulation that anyone could produce, if they were not given to throwing anything away.

When she opened a drawer of the filing cabinet she found dozens of cardboard folders containing newspaper cuttings, recipes, knitting patterns, old theatre programmes, and huge numbers of leaflets
and booklets garnered from visits to stately homes, museums, castles, exhibitions and other places of interest. It would appear that for one substantial period of her life, Mrs Wilshire had been an avid traveller, not just in Britain, but France, Italy and Germany too. Everywhere she went, she had gathered up colourful souvenir leaflets and kept them on file in perpetuity. A biographer would be in heaven, tracing her progress around Europe. But there was no biographer, and nobody else could possibly want to know all the places she had been.

Even more dispiriting was the discovery of a lifetime’s worth of diaries. No fewer than twelve five-year diaries, all the same size, most of them secured with a tiny lock, piled in three layers inside the drawer. Sixty years, with a daily record of the weather, people met, films and TV programmes viewed, interspersed with momentous births, marriages and deaths. None of the locks was actually in operation, so it was simple to open them and read their contents. She spent half an hour flitting from 1957 to 1977, then on to 1994 and finally 2010. The writing was legible, and nearly every line in every book had been used. Four lines to a day. A page to a date, so the years came one below the last, and you could easily see what had happened on, say April 10th in 1957, 58, 59, 60 and 61. And very little of note had happened, it seemed. Again, only a dedicated biographer would ever take the trouble to go through it all.

But could you actually dump diaries in a skip? This
was a woman’s
life
, recorded meticulously. While she was still living, it would be essential to have her permission before discarding them. Similarly the hundreds of photos Thea found in one of the boxes, dating back to the monochrome 1950s and beyond. This was a more familiar dilemma to Thea. Just about everybody had a stack of old albums predating the digital age, and almost never looked at them. It was a relief, in most people’s minds, that such albums would soon disappear entirely, leaving far less space-hungry methods of storage for one’s pictures. It hardly seemed worth making a list of all this. She wrote ‘Diaries, letters and photos’ and left it at that.

Time swept by and she had little to show for it. Richard Wilshire would have to get more involved than he apparently wished to, because she, Thea, was not going to make irrevocable decisions for him. When the door knocker sounded at half past three, she and Hepzie exchanged looks of relief from the work that had at some point mutated from fascination into tedium.

Millie Wilshire stood there again, this time without a companion. She looked dazed and uncertain.

‘Hello?’ said Thea.

‘He’s not here, is he? My dad, I mean.’

‘No. Why? Are you still looking for him? It sounds as if you really have lost him.’ It was inappropriately facetious, she realised a second later.

‘Yes, I have. He’s not answering his phone, and nobody’s seen him all day. In fact, I can’t imagine where
he’s been since yesterday afternoon. What time did you get here? What time did he leave? Did he say where he was going?’

‘Um …’ said Thea, selecting the question she thought most relevant. ‘It must have been nearly seven o’clock. He said he had a visit to make. Something like that.’

‘What does that mean? Where did he go? This
never
happens. He’s completely predictable these days, and he
always
answers his phone, or calls right back. He
lives
for the phone. People call him all the time for work.’ She fought down her anxiety enough to say more calmly, ‘I thought perhaps you’d called him with a question and he’d popped in because he’s in the area. He’s supposed to be at Yanworth, then Stow, then Chipping Campden. In that order. He had appointments.’

‘I haven’t seen him or spoken on the phone to him. I did think of it after you’d gone this morning, but I decided not to.’ It was impossible to know how concerned to be, but if the man’s daughter was worried, it would seem that there was something wrong. ‘Do you always stay in such close touch?’ she asked.

‘It’s only because we live under the same roof. You do need to know where the other person is. Apart from anything else, there are the dogs. We don’t bother each other much, in the usual run of things. But he has been a bit funny lately, and now he’s vanished, it’s like …’ she tailed off. ‘It scares me that I can’t find him,’ she finished.

‘But you fight a lot? You didn’t agree about your
grandmother going into the home.’ A faint hypothesis was developing in Thea’s mind, in which the man was deliberately avoiding the accusing girl, his own guilty feelings already more than enough without her input. ‘Could he have gone to visit her, perhaps?’

Millie blinked in confusion. ‘No, of course not. He has to
work
. He goes to the home at weekends – or early evening, sometimes.’

‘You know all these farms he visits, do you?’ It seemed highly unlikely that she would. ‘And where did Judith go?’

‘Can I come in if you’re going to ask all these questions?’

‘Sorry. I’m just trying to understand. And you asked me quite a lot, as well. Come on in.’ They went into the front room together, where Millie stood looking intently around herself. Thea was unsure whether she was checking for missing objects or hoping to find her father hiding in a corner.

‘I know which farms he has to visit. He’s got a great big map up on the wall in the flat. I used to go with him sometimes when I was little. I like farms. I’ve got a thing about pigs. Not that you see so many these days. We don’t really talk much any more. Our lives are quite separate. Just lately, we’ve hardly spoken to each other except about meals and that sort of thing.’

‘Because of your gran?’

‘Partly. That’s been a real mess. Her friends have been vile about it. People who never lifted a finger to help
now tell him he’s a monster for doing what he’s done.’

‘But he says she
wanted
to leave. It was her own choice. And I thought you felt much the same as the friends.’

‘It’s not really true that it was her choice. She just couldn’t see any way of avoiding it. Dad stopped fixing up the house like he used to. It was a
campaign
– that was the word he used himself. A campaign to get her to see her situation the same way he saw it. It upset me every time he talked about it, thinking how miserable she must be about it. He said she’d fall downstairs, or set the place on fire, and then what would people say. She
has
been very wobbly on her legs. But she could have brought the bed downstairs and used the outside loo. I still think it’s horrible.’

‘Did she care what people said about her?’

Millie nodded. ‘She did, rather. At least, she liked to keep up an independent image.’

‘But you don’t visit her?’

Millie flinched. ‘I’ve been ever so busy. I took her out for lunch one weekend, not so long ago. While she was still living here, that was. And then it all seemed to happen really fast, and Dad got all quiet and withdrawn because of the guilt he was feeling.’

‘But wouldn’t her friends see that at her age a home is really the best place for her?’

‘Some, maybe. Not others. There’s a woman who lives opposite. Norah. She has this sniffy way of showing Gran what she thinks.’

‘I met her today. Just after you were here. She said
they’d been friends for thirty years, and she visited her in the home yesterday.’

‘Yeah – I guessed she’d be watching. She always is. I’m surprised she visited, though – nothing better to do, probably. She and Gran email each other mostly. Even when they lived so close, they did it. Gran loves email. Norah and Dad fell out a while ago. She’s been pretty unpleasant to him since then. I don’t think Gran would count her as a friend, exactly. She keeps trying to set her against Dad, which is really stupid.’

‘Has she got a husband?’

‘Not any more.’

Thea was reminded of a house-sit she did in Blockley before she met Drew. There was an old lady with bothersome neighbours there, too. That was also where she’d met the celebrity rapper who had given the most bizarre comments on events going on around him. ‘Where’s Judith?’ she asked again.

Millie frowned. ‘She had to get back to London for something. She stayed the night with me at the flat last night and she and I had lunch today up at Kilkenny. Nice pub, that, by the way. Then the car came for her and she was off.’

‘Car?’

‘Right. Courtesy of the BBC. They all have their own drivers, like royalty. It’s another world.’

‘I suppose it is. She
is
awfully famous,’ said Thea, thinking that if she recognised the actress, then almost everybody would.

‘She’s nice, though. It hasn’t spoilt her. At least …’

‘I suppose it must have an effect on a person.’

‘It’s mostly the being recognised all the time. People think they know her, and that’s exhausting. There’s never any peace.’

‘Must be complicated for you as well.’