Rose Cottage (22 page)

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Then I’m sorry. I was hoping, and I let it run away with me. I can see it wouldn’t be right for you.’

I said quickly, ‘It isn’t that. It just hasn’t come up. I – I never thought about it. I had no idea he felt that way.’

‘Then for mercy’s sake don’t let him know I told you.’

‘Of course I won’t!’

Another brief pause, then she suddenly reached up and kissed me. ‘Well, if it’s not to be, it’s not to be. But believe me, I’m as happy for you tonight, child, as I am for myself. Good night, and I hope she comes soon.’

I scrambled eggs for my supper, and ate Prissy’s two remaining peaches. It was a meal that took me back a few years, eaten as it was on the bare table top, and with the ‘cooking’ plates and cutlery which were all I had kept out for my own use. After I had washed up I did a leisurely tour of the cottage, ostensibly to check that everything had gone that should have gone, but in reality to do something – anything – to occupy me and keep my mind from turning over and over in the same treadmill of speculation.

If we were right. If she should come. If we were wrong, and no one came. If she did not come tonight, then when? How long to wait and wonder? If we were right …

And so on. By the time I knew that I had totally failed to fix my mind on anything else except the possibility of my mother’s return I was back in the kitchen, where only the table and chairs and the Unseen Guest, along with the fireside tools and the cracket, remained to offer any kind of welcome.

Welcome? It looked, in the failing light, inexpressibly dreary. But it suggested something to do.

Flowers. That was it. Flowers, the loveliest ornament of all, guaranteed to charm any place to life. There was no vase to be had, of course, but a couple of Mr Blaney’s milk bottles would do very well. Flowers and a bright, freshly lighted fire. No better welcome anywhere.

I found the bottles and rinsed them, leaving them ready in the back kitchen. Then I went out.

It was nearing nine o’clock, and dusk was drawing down. Behind the trees the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of day had dropped, and the evening was very still. The stream sounded loud. I walked down to the gate and stood leaning on the top bar, enjoying the scent of the roses, and straining to listen for any sound from the lane or the road beyond.

There is nothing that wakes memory so quickly and vividly as scent. If my solitary supper eaten off the bare table top had taken me back a decade or so, the fragrance of the roses took me back still further. Some of the bushes, I knew, had been in the old rosery at the Hall, which Sir Giles – the present baronet’s father – had had cleared and replaced with the modern varieties that to his gardener were very much second best. My grandfather had brought a good many of the old bushes here to his own garden. Fashions had changed, in plants as in other things, and some of the roses were rare now, but not his favourite, the tough, ubiquitous old cottage rose that (if Davey and I were right) Lilias
and her husband had dug up and taken to the cemetery for him.

If we were right. Back it came, the wearisome round of preoccupation. Would she come? Could we be wrong? And if we were right, then how, dear God, how to meet the situation? How cope with it?

Action again indicated. I went to gather the flowers, the still flourishing survivors of a season of neglect. There were lupins and irises, and some columbines soon to go wild, and, loveliest of all, the double white lilac that hung in scented clouds over the toolshed roof.

I was just about to make my way back to the cottage when I heard the sound I had been waiting for. A car turning in from the road and coming slowly down the lane. The toolshed was behind the cottage, so from where I stood under the lilac tree I couldn’t see the lane or the gate. Nor could I see lights, though by now it was almost dark. I wondered briefly if it might be Davey, come down for some reason, but he would have used headlights, and this was a much quieter vehicle than the van. Clutching the flowers to me, I stood still, waiting.

The wheels stopped at the gate. The car door opened, and shut gently. Then came the click of the gate latch, and the squeak of hinges. Footsteps, almost inaudible on the weeds, but recognisably a man’s, trod up the path. Then a tap at the cottage door.

I was just about to move to answer it, when I heard the door open, and after a moment, the sound of someone moving about in the kitchen.

The back window of the cottage, which faced towards
the toolshed, showed a crack of light; the kitchen door must be half open. My heart thumping, I moved forward and peered in through the window.

There was nothing to see but that crack of light, and the movement of shadow across it as the visitor crossed the room. A man’s voice called, ‘Is there anyone there? Kathy?’

I pushed open the back door and went quickly through into the kitchen.

The visitor was a tall man, a total stranger to me, and he was standing by the fireplace, apparently examining the framing and stitchery of the Unseen Guest. As I entered he turned quickly, self-possessed and smiling.

‘Well, hullo there! I guess you must be Kathy?’

I stared at him. Dark eyes, dark hair with a dusting of grey. Fifty years old, maybe; tall and thin, with skin tanned brown. American, by the voice and the clothes; light drill trousers, a casual, expensive-looking jacket, and a scarf knotted at the neck. He could have passed as a gipsy for Miss Linsey’s ‘vision’ at the graveyard, but more certainly he was my mother’s respectable gentleman from Iowa.

I cleared my throat, but found myself unable to speak. I stood there, clutching the flowers to me, staring at him.

He spread both hands in a placatory kind of gesture. He might have been saying, ‘Look, I’m not armed.’ He spoke again, with a calming sort of social ease, obviously attempting to bring a bizarre situation under control.

‘I hope you’ll forgive me for walking in like this, Miss
Kathy, and I’m sorry if I gave you a start, but I’m real happy to meet you. I don’t have to ask if you’re Kathy, do I? Yes, I think I’d have known you. I’d have known you anywhere.’

I found my voice. It came out none too steadily, and with no attempt at all at bridging the situation.

‘Is she here with you?’

His brows went up, but he answered readily in that pleasant drawl. ‘She certainly is. She’s right there in the car. But—’ this as I started towards the door – ‘no, please! If you’ll wait just a moment? I guess she’s just as nervous as you are, so she asked me to come in first and see if you were home, and kind of break it to you. But it looks like I don’t have to? You were expecting this? You know already?’

‘Not know. Guess. You’re Larry, of course?’

‘I am. Larry van Holden. I sure am happy to meet you, Miss Kathy.’

He put out a hand and, rather bemusedly, I took it. I was wondering how much, in the end, she had told him about me. ‘Make it Kathy. You’re my stepfather, after all.’ I turned back from the door and put the flowers down on the table. ‘All right, then. It’s not just an easy meeting, is it? Perhaps you’re right, it might be better to clear one or two things up before my – before we meet. I found it out only yesterday, that my mother was still alive, I mean, and that she’d married you and was living in America. It was when Davey Pascoe – she’ll have mentioned the Pascoes? Yes? – well, when we were clearing Aunt Betsy’s room to pack things up for the removers, we found some letters, letters from my
mother, hidden away. We worked things out from that, and from what we’d heard in the village, so we knew you’d been here. It was you who took the things from the safe in that wall, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’ He hesitated. ‘I must tell you, we hadn’t planned to visit here at all. It was my idea to come over to England, to look up traces of my mother’s folks from north of here, near Hexham. The trip was a kind of holiday, and Lilias was two ways about it, a bit homesick, you can imagine, and wanting news of you and her mother, but being scared to come anywhere near the place in case she wasn’t welcome. Then we saw something in a local paper, that the Hall here was to be made over, and this cottage fixed up as a rental, so Lilias began to wonder if her mother had moved away, or had maybe even died, and we hadn’t heard a thing. So we came over – it had to be after dark so that no one would see her – and you know what we found. The cottage was empty, no sign of anyone, and poor Lilias – well, I don’t have to tell you how she was feeling. So we went up to the village and she sent me to ask at the Pascoes’ house, but there was no one there, so I went to the vicarage, and from what the girl there told me I took it that your grandmother had died, and your Aunt Betsy had gone back to her folks in Scotland.’

‘I knew about that. She said the same to me. “The old lady died and the sister went back to Scotland.”’

‘That’s it. So we came back here. Lilias knew where the keys were, of course. No one had said anything about you being expected here. Lilias figured that your aunt hadn’t known about the safe-cupboard, so she
wanted to get the things from it, but we had no way of getting at it right then.’

It was like coming alive again to feel that twinge of amusement. ‘Because the tools had all gone from the toolshed?’

‘That’s right. Why is it funny?’

‘No reason. I’m sorry. Go on. You came back on Monday night?’

‘That’s right, we did, and we did our bit of safe-breaking. I’ve got the goods here.’ He dug into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a yellowed envelope which bulged with papers. He laid this on the table between us, and added to it, item by item, an assortment of small objects. I recognised Granddad’s old turnip watch, the battered little box that held his medals and Gran’s rings and the ‘Mizpah’ brooch that had been his engagement gift to her.

I had been listening to his story with only half my mind; the other half was outside there, in the car at the cottage gate. The objects on the table, for so many days past an obsession with me, seemed quite irrelevant to what was happening now. I picked the envelope up, turned it over without seeing it, then put it down and opened the box. Two medals, a twist of paper holding five gold sovereigns, a thick old-fashioned wedding ring, a pretty, cheap-looking bracelet, a brooch of seed-pearls and peridots …

His voice said, gently amused, over my bent head: ‘They’re all there. I don’t know why I’ve been hanging on to them; we meant to leave them with your grandmother, but what with all that was going on there, I
quite forgot. They’ve been in the glove compartment of the car.’

I was hardly listening. I had picked up the bracelet. ‘But this?’ I said. ‘This was sent back to Gran after the bus crash. It was on the – it was one of the things that identified Lilias. Her initials, see?’

‘Yeah, I know. It certainly gave Lil a shock to see it. She’d never heard about the accident, you realise that?’ He took the bracelet from me and laid it back in the box. ‘This made it sure it was Cora and Jackie, their friends, who’d been killed. She’d given Cora the bracelet as a keepsake when they left. And they weren’t the sort, any of them, to keep in touch, so they never knew.’

‘The travelling folk? I suppose not. But my mother did try. She wrote to us several times.’

He was putting the other objects carefully back into the box. ‘She did, poor girl. So that’s how you knew who’d been here, and how you found out about Lilias? You knew my name, even.’ He laughed. ‘You sure had me wondering just now if your grandmother had found the news too much for her. She promised to leave it to us to tell you, but I’d begun to figure that maybe she couldn’t wait and had gotten herself to a telephone after all.’

‘What?
What did you say?
’ The meaning of the quiet words, drifting past in that slow, even drawl, got through to me at last, and brought me up with a jerk. ‘Gran? What are you talking about? How would Gran know about this? I’ve never been in touch. What do you mean, Gran promised to leave it to you?’

‘Just that. We’ve just got back from Scotland. That’s where we’ve been since the weekend.’

‘Scotland?’ I said blankly. ‘You mean you’ve been to Strathbeg?’

‘That’s right. When we left here on Monday night, thinking that Mrs Welland was dead, and that your Aunt Betsy hadn’t troubled to let Lilias know, your mother was so mad that she just had to go straight up to Scotland to have it out, as we thought, with your Aunt Betsy, and find out what had happened to you.’

‘I see …’ I took a long breath. ‘Yes, I do see.’

I looked at him, at Lilias’s rich, respectable gentleman, and, for the second time, found myself smiling. She’d have been upset enough, my poor mother, to face a dozen Aunt Betsys, and with Larry beside her she’d have found it easy. ‘It’s a pity she didn’t do it long ago!’

‘It surely is. Poor Lil. All the way north in the car she was saying all the things she’d been wanting to say, and going over all the years … Well, she’ll tell you herself, and it doesn’t matter now, thank God, because when we got there, there was your grandmother, alive and well and not believing her eyes and ears.’ He showed a hand. ‘You can imagine.’

‘I’m not sure that I can.’