Precious Time (52 page)

‘Not much,’ he’d said. He found women with long hair attractive; he had never looked twice at a woman with short hair.

As he looked at Damson now, he saw that she appeared weaker today. He held out the letter to her. She hesitated, then said, ‘You open it for me, darling.’ It was almost as if she had been expecting it.

‘You don’t seem surprised. Does he write to you often?’

She put the comb down on the table beside her. ‘No, but I was expecting this one. The pieces are all coming together, just as they should. Just at the right time.’

He slit open the envelope. There was just one sheet of paper. The writing was uneven, the lines badly spaced, and there were crossings out in several places.

Damson sank back into her chair. ‘Read it to me. Please.’

‘Are you sure?’

She sighed heavily. ‘Yes. And read it nicely.’

He caught a hint of a smile as she said this. ‘Nicely does it, then,’

he said.

Dear Damson,

Just lately I have been forced into thinking a lot about the past and I’m ashamed to say it’s been a painful process and made all the worse by knowing that I put you and Caspar through a hell of time.

I know you will probably regard this letter with cynicism, and I can hardly blame you for that, but please, I would very much like to see you again. Caspar too. I have written to him in the hope that the pair of you might be prepared to forgive a stupid, selfish old man who should have known better. It would mean everything to me if you would get in touch.

Regards,

your father

Caspar lowered the letter and looked at his sister. Her eyes were shut, her head tilted back against the chair. He was used to seeing her fall asleep without warning, but he had never seen her so still. He cleared his throat. ‘Damson?’

She didn’t answer.

He bent down to her. ‘Damson?’ He was frightened. He reached out to her. At his touch, her eyelids opened and relief, like none he had ever known, washed over him. He swallowed his fear.

She took the letter from him and stared at it, tears filling her eyes.

‘I said the pieces were coming together, didn’t I?’

‘I’d rather they didn’t if it meant you could be well again.’

‘It’s the way forward, Caspar. If the future is going to mean anything for you, you must do as he asks.’

‘What about you?’

She held the letter to her chest. ‘This is enough for my future. He’ll understand.’

Understanding only one horrible truth in all of this, that a future without Damson would be worse than any hell his father could imagine, Caspar left her sleeping peacefully. He went downstairs, and sat in the garden where yesterday he and Damson had chatted. It was another warm, sunny day, and as if he were locked in a time loop, he could hear the same people arguing the toss about the best way to deal with the slugs - jars of homemade beer was held up as the ideal solution. ‘Take a bloody great spade to them!’ he yelled at the brick wall. ‘Smash their stupid brainless bodies in!’

The voices went quiet.

‘For once I’m in agreement with you.’

Caspar turned his head sharply and saw that Roland Hall had crept up on him.

‘Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’ Though Damson had told him repeatedly that Hall was a good, sincere man, that he had never tried to turn their friendship into anything more, or to inveigle money out of her, Caspar still didn’t trust him. But, then, other than Damson, whom had he ever trusted?

Hall sat down. ‘I want to talk to you about Damson,’ he said. ‘It’s been your sister’s intention to move into the local hospice when she felt she couldn’t cope with the pain any more. I think that time is drawing near.’

Caspar wanted to take a spade to Hall and smash him to

smithereens. To see the man’s infuriating face pulped. ‘You want to be rid of her now, do you?’ he muttered savagely. ‘She’s become a nuisance, is that it? Frightened that the smell of death will scare the punters off?’

Hall’s expression was impassive. ‘It’s what she wanted, Caspar.’

Exasperated, he dragged a hand over his face. ‘Tell me, Hall, what the hell did you do before you took up scamming deluded fools who are more concerned about the finer feelings of slugs than themselves?

You’re so bloody inscrutable. What were you - an MI5 interrogator?’

‘Actually,

I was a monk.’

Caspar laughed nastily. ‘A monk? Oh, that’s a good one. But, don’t tell me, the celibate life proved too much of a challenge for you?’

‘I had no problem with the vow of chastity. It was the other monks I found difficult to live with. There was no escaping them and their inbuilt prejudice of right and wrong.’

‘So what’s different about this place?’

Hall sat back, steepled his hands together in front of him, the tips of his fingers just meeting. ‘I’m not saying it’s perfect here community life can never be that. Put a group of people together and it’s human nature for them to disagree over something or other. Here at Rosewood Manor, in our search to build a caring and sustainable lifestyle, we value autonomy and independent thinking. We try to support one another and support ourselves in any way we can, for instance, by growing and selling organic food.’ He canted his head towards the brick wall. ‘But even that provides a breeding ground for dispute. It means we have to try harder, to be more self-aware. And while we’re striving to achieve all that, no one at Rosewood Manor is forced to be what they’re not. So long as one isn’t harming another person, one can be oneself here, without fear of being judged. It’s why your sister has enjoyed being with us.’

Caspar took this as a criticism of his sister, which he couldn’t countenance. ‘Damson has never been frightened of anyone, or anything.’

Hall looked at him hard. ‘That really isn’t true, Caspar, and it’s time you realised it. Damson was terrified of herself and what she was capable of inflicting on her mind and body. She came to us crippled by fear and regret. She’d had two abortions by the age of twenty-two and she never forgave herself. It’s haunted her for most of her life.’

Caspar’s jaw dropped. ‘No! That can’t be true. I don’t believe you.

She would have told me.’

‘She never wanted you to know. She told me you idolised her and saw her as perfect. She hated knowing that she wasn’t, hated knowing that she had let you down.’

‘But she didn’t!’ cried Caspar. ‘She hasn’t let me down. She could never do that. Not ever.’

Hall’s voice was steady. ‘Are you sure about that? What about her coming here? Didn’t that annoy you? Didn’t you berate her for hitching up with a bunch of sad losers whose only interest in her was to relieve her of her worldly goods?’

Caspar had the grace to turn away. He tried to take in what Hall had told him. He was mortified that he had added to Damson’s problems. And, worse, that he was perhaps the source of some of them.

‘When you’re thinking more clearly,’ Hall said, ‘you’ll understand that Damson has spent most of her life searching for something to make her happy, something to take away the guilt. She’s told me about the series of unsuitable men who used and abused her, and who, in her own words, she used as a means to inflict yet more punishment on herself.’

‘Stop! I don’t want to hear any more. Just be quiet, will you?’

Caspar pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. It was too much to take in. Unable to speak, he got to his feet and left Hall . sitting on the bench alone. He went back inside the house. He needed to be with Damson. Needed to apologise to her.

She was sitting in the window where he had left her no more than half an hour ago. The sun was shining through the glass and its rays lightened her hair - the same colour as his own. He remembered how she used to dye it during the school holidays, much to Val’s and their father’s horror. One summer, having already dyed it jet black, she had another go at it and it turned a vivid orange. She didn’t care: she just laughed and tied it up on top of her head with a green silk scarf and said, ‘How’s that for a carrot head?’ Nothing bothered her. ‘It’s just another experience to add to the rest,’ she said.

But some things had bothered her and she had not shared them with him.

Why hadn’t she? The truth bit into him. Because she had been selfless in her love and support for him and, like a spoiled child, he had greedily accepted her unconditional love. By putting her on a pedestal, he had imposed restrictions on what she could do with her own life. He was allowed to change and make untold mistakes, but she wasn’t. She was his sister, but he had treated her as a mother.

And everyone knows a mother must be constant in a world of chaos and upheaval.

He crossed the room silently. There was so much he had to say to her. More than anything, he wanted Damson to know that she would always be perfect in his eyes, no matter what.

But when he knelt beside her, took their father’s letter that was still on her lap and laid it on the table, he saw that he was too late.

Damson was dead.

He held her in his arms and wept. Wept as he had never wept before. ‘Oh, Damson,’ he groaned, ‘I’m so sorry for what I did to you. I didn’t realise.’

Jonah had spent the afternoon on tenterhooks. His GCSE history class was sitting its last paper. Once the exam was under way he had slipped in at the back of the sports hall and had scanned through the questions, reassuring himself that there weren’t any horrible surprises in store for his pupils. Or him. But it had been fine. He had covered all the ground in his lessons. He went back to his classroom to share the joys of the 1832 Reform Act with 7B, confident that so long as his students kept their cool they would do well.

When it was all over and the papers had been gathered in, he was waiting outside the sports hall to see how they had survived. He was greeted with a mixture of relief, anxiety and cautious optimism. And an element of cockiness from an unexpected quarter. ‘Did you get the eight main points to the treaty of Versailles?’ he asked the group.

Jase grinned at him. ‘No sweat, man. It was a breeze.

Jonah smiled. ‘Atta boy. You off home, now?’

‘Nah. Thought I’d stick around and polish up the candelabras.

‘Course I’m off home. Were you offering a lift?’

‘I wouldn’t inflict that on you again, Jase. I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for damaging your image.’

‘A word of advice, Sir, you wanna get yourself fitted with a flash set of new wheels or you’ll never pull a decent woman.’

‘I was wondering where I was going wrong.’

Driving home, Jonah wondered how Clara might have responded to Jase’s worldly wisdom. From what he had learned of her lifestyle before she’d upped sticks in favour of taking to the road in a camper van, she had owned a smart car herself. And, like shoes, he had always believed that a car gave away a lot about its owner. He could easily imagine Clara dressed in a power suit sitting behind the wheel of a sports car, mobile phone ringing, headlamps flashing.

In contrast, his rusting Ford Escort, which would pass its next MOT by the skin of its teeth, shouted from the rooftops that his attitude to life had a more casual slant. Sure, he could splash out on a better car if he wanted, he certainly had the money, but so long as his existing one provided him with a safe, reliable drive, he didn’t much care what it looked like.

And, anyway, he had managed to pull himself a decent woman.

He was seeing Clara that evening.

His father would babysit Ned, and instead of taking Clara to a restaurant, Jonah had offered to make dinner at his cottage. ‘Having already sampled your cooking and enjoyed it, I’ll take the risk,’ she had said. What surprised him most about the evening ahead was not that Clara had agreed to see him, but that his father was so keen for them to enjoy themselves. Jonah had anticipated a somewhat less than enthusiastic response to his poaching Clara away from Mermaid House for the evening, but it seemed that the opposite was true. ‘No, no, don’t you worry about me, Jonah, you go ahead and have a little fun. It’s high time you did. Ned and I will have a grand old time of it.’

Jonah was always suspicious when things came to him too easily.

Everything he had really wanted in life he had had to fight for.

It was only yesterday that he had behaved like a pompous idiot with Clara over Val’s diaries - oh, he’d gone the full nine yards - but it felt like days ago. She had apologised over and over again for what she had done, and each time she said she was sorry he felt a bigger heel. He had tried hard to make her understand why he had been so angry.

‘It was reading them and having everything brought back so vividly,’ he had said, still with his arms around her. ‘It was a shock reliving it, I guess.’

She had looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘I’m sorry, Jonah.

Truly I am. It wasn’t a gratuitous act on my part, I was genuinely interested in you all. I wanted to understand why your father behaved as he did and why you had such a bad relationship with him. I admit it was wrong of me to do it so sneakily, but it just sort of happened. I wish I could apologise more. I feel awful. I should never have said that bit about you and Emily.’

‘It’s okay, forget it. Though I ought to ‘fess up the reason I became so angry and Jo Regular turned into Stormin’ Norman. I didn’t want you to think I was a spineless wimp.’

‘I’d already decided that anyone who enjoyed teaching at a school like Dick High was anything but a wimp.’ She’d kissed him, then added, ‘I’ve been lucky, Jonah. I’ve had what must seem to you a very boring middle-of-the-road but happy upbringing, and it’s made me the way I am. Just as your upbringing has made you wary and guarded, not to say perceptive, it’s also, I suspect, made you determined to fight for what you want. So don’t go selling yourself short.’

‘In that case, dare I ask you to have dinner with me?’

‘Just the two of us?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Only if your father doesn’t want to babysit.’

They had walked back to Mermaid House, hand in hand, and as though to underscore what he had already told her, he said, ‘I’m not devaluing what Val wrote, but I can think of any number of kids at Dick High who have suffered far worse than any member of my family has. Some of those kids survive levels of violence, abuse, degradation and neglect that make my childhood look like something out of The Waltons. I don’t want your sympathy.’