Someone Special (15 page)

Hester turned her attention to Mr Geraint’s desk. It was covered with pages and pages of cream manuscript paper and the paper was covered with writing. Rather nice writing, done with a broad-nibbed pen so that the downstrokes were thicker than the upstrokes, which gave the writing the look, almost, of a Chinese painting. It was, however, awfully untidy. Hester’s fingers itched to set it straight, but instead she glanced at the shelves to her left, and thought she had seldom seen so many books, or such large ones. Musty, dusty books, not the sort you longed to open and read but the sort you gazed at with awe in museums and libraries, scared even to open them for fear
they might either fall to pieces or prove to be Latin or Greek or some other foreign tongue.

Not all the books were big or old. There was a small, very fat little book bound in red leather lying next to her, on the cushioned windowseat. Hester picked it up and opened it. More of the beautiful writing met her eyes and without even thinking twice she began to read.

14 August 1925: Got home before dinner and walked into an atmosphere; Beth not at her happiest last night; actually accused me of being unfaithful; said she’d heard I’d picked up some little piece while I was visiting the O’Maras. Told her she was a fool, no cause to be jealous etc etc., but suggested I’d never even think of other women if she could bring herself to be a bit easier before me, for example instead of coming to bed in the most voluminous white cotton nightgown I’ve ever had the misfortune to get entangled with if she came in her own beautiful, creamy skin. Slapped my face, but laughed, too. Quarrel – if you can call it that – ended happily in bed. I gave it three stars, she said more like ten. I asked if she’d missed me and and she proved she had. Must warn her not to listen to gossip, though. She’s a fine woman
.

Hester put the book down. Her palms were sweating and her heart hammered in her breast as though she had suddenly found herself in Bluebeard’s tower room, waiting for him to return and murder her. The red leather book was a diary and she had read it. The implications, even the date, passed her by for the moment at least; the nuns would be horrified that their teaching had not penetrated her thick skull: no one, ever, read another person’s diary … Mr Geraint had trusted her, had left her alone in his room with the diary actually unlocked on the windowseat. It had never crossed his mind that she would read someone else’s personal day-book.

Impatient footsteps mounting the stone stairs brought
Hester flying away from the windowseat, her hand to her mouth. He would catch her, guess what she had been reading, dismiss her, dismiss Matthew, throw them out of the lodge. She realised suddenly what this place meant to her and to her husband. It was security, a home of their own, food on the table and a fire in winter. It was the difference between a good life and the sort of life she had seen people living in the Liverpool slums. She knew which she preferred.

Mr Geraint came into the room and began speaking at once, as though the last thing on his mind was diaries and the sort of person who would read another’s secrets.

‘That’s that,’ he said grimly. ‘She’ll be out of here by lunchtime, Matthew’s driving her down to the station. I’ve arranged with him that you’ll move in here just until Mrs Cledwen gets back and he’s arranging for a girl from the village to do the rough work.’

‘Oh dear,’ Hester quavered. ‘What about Helen … I don’t think …’

‘It’s all arranged,’ Mr Geraint said impatiently. ‘You’d better start getting luncheon now; can you serve it at one o’clock?’

‘Ye-es, I suppose, though I don’t …’

‘I’ll come down today, you may serve mine in the study,’ he said, breaking through Hester’s wild ramblings, for on the spur of the moment she could not think of a good reason for saying she had to go home, she could not remain here. ‘But tomorrow, well, tomorrow can wait. No, leave the child here; she’s easy to amuse and it will keep her out of the way while you’re cooking.’

‘All right,’ Hester said, too confused to object. She went to the door. ‘One o’clock; I’ll try to get a meal for one o’clock. Bye-bye, Nell; be a good girl.’

Mr Geraint sat down and pulled the half-written page towards him. He read, one hand reaching out for the pen without taking his eyes off the sheet of paper. On the
floor, Helen selected another crayon and began covering the red scribbles with blue.

Hester made her way down the stone stairs, across the courtyard and back to the kitchen, still in a daze. Matthew had said she would move into the castle while Mrs Cled was away? Could it be true? If so, whatever was Matthew thinking of? She would have to have baby Helen with her, she would not dream of letting the baby stay with Matthew at the lodge, good though he was with her. And would she sleep in the housekeeper’s room, in that cold, musty, damp little place, in that unwelcoming single bed? And would she have to put up with all this upheaval, all this unhappiness, because she had been silly enough to read a page of Mr Geraint’s diary and therefore dared not object to his plans for her? But it wasn’t just that; it was their dependence on him, Matthew’s love of his home and his job. They could not risk losing their place here.

With a heavy heart Hester began to peel potatoes and onions and to prepare a meal. Come back soon, Mrs Cled, she beseeched, onion-tears mingling with real ones. Come back soon and let us all go back to normal again!

4

NELL KNEW VERY
well that a ghost lived in the Long Gallery, so she usually ran very fast past the door, unless she was carrying something, in which case she tiptoed, but she felt happier running. Today, with the rain sluicing down the window panes as though it intended to bring about a second Flood, she just walked fast. And she didn’t close her eyes either, but looked challengingly around her, daring the ghost to put in an appearance, almost wanting to see it so that she could tell Dan just what she thought of ghosts in general and the Pengarth ghost in particular.

Dan had been at the castle for just over a year, and he was Nell’s greatest friend, the person who mattered most to her after mummy, daddy and Mr Geraint. He had the advantage of being closest to her in age, too, though he was three years her senior. It was unfortunate that mummy didn’t seem to care for him much.

Or perhaps it was Mrs Clifton she didn’t like. Mrs Clifton had been married to a younger brother of Mr Geraint’s, who had been killed in a motor accident, leaving her and her little son in straitened circumstances. Mrs Clifton was a poor relation, or that was what mummy had said, softly, to daddy after Dan and his mother had been living at the castle for six months or so.

‘I don’t want to wait on
her
the way I have to wait on the old man and his friends,’ her mother had complained to Matthew as the three of them sat in the lodge kitchen that evening, Hester having served and cleared up dinner at the castle. ‘I know she’s awfully pretty and very charming, but she’s only a poor relation. It’s true I could do with someone to give me a hand, but can you see that
one raising a beautifully manicured finger? I can’t.’

Matthew chuckled. ‘I know what you mean, but the old man did say she’d pull her weight if he had her an’ the boy to live. If you ask me though, Hes, she’s settin’ her cap at him. I wish her luck; a wife’ud be cheaper than a poor relation and a deal more useful, too.’

‘How can she marry him? She’s his sister-in-law; I thought you couldn’t marry your brother’s wife.’ Hester clattered plates, then turned and addressed her husband triumphantly. ‘I may be unworldly, but I do know the bible; the nuns saw to that! And has it ever struck you how similar Dan is to the old man? In looks, I mean. Were the brothers alike?’

Matthew was taking his chauffeur’s boots off, using a yellow duster so that he didn’t leave fingermarks. Nell loved those boots, she thought they were beautiful, or tophole as the boys at school would have said. They were made of beautiful leather, and sometimes Matthew let her polish them, using beeswax and spit and a great deal of rubbing. Well, Nell called it rubbing but Matthew called it elbow-grease. He usually wore the leather boots with his best breeches and Nell thought – and said – that he looked like a king when he was driving the Lagonda, but Matthew complained that though comfortable on, they were hell to remove. So now he was sitting on the edge of the ladder-backed chair which always stood by the kitchen door, going puce in the face and breathing heavily whilst trying to heave the first boot off.

At his wife’s words, however, he stopped tugging for a moment to consider her questions, frowning thoughtfully.

‘Mr Geraint and Mr Paul were different to look at; chalk and cheese you might say. But in their ways – well, they were both headstrong, self-willed, living life at a gallop, whereas I live it at a trot, like Mr Samuel did. Mr Sam’s the youngest brother; got a nice little place over in Kent. As for marriage ’tween brother and sister-in-law,
that’s legal all right, it’s just coveting while they’re both alive that you can’t do. But if they were to marry, well, do you ‘member Mrs Cledwen? She did all the cooking, his laundry, the marketing; you’d find yourself on easy street if he took young Rosie Clifton to wife, love.’

‘But Mrs Cled wasn’t married to the old man. Matthew, you’ve never said and I never asked again, but was Mrs Cled his you-know-what? Come on, it’s five years since she went, you can tell me now, can’t you?’

Nell, practising her writing at the kitchen table, kept her head bent and her hand moving, but she was all ears. What did Mummy mean? What on earth was
his you-know-what
and who was Mrs Cled? The name stirred the faintest of faint recollections, but nothing more.

‘I don’t suppose it’s any of my business. It were a long time ago, but I always reckoned she was,’ Matthew said, starting to tug at his boot once more. ‘I could ha’ been wrong, mind. I can’t think why else she stayed, an’ worked so hard, because I don’t reckon he paid her much.’

‘And you think marriage would bring with it certain obligations,’ Hester said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if it would? Young Mrs Clifton’s a lazy cat, but I suppose he could insist. Oh, and then I could spend more time here, I might even get to work in my garden again. Why, before Mrs Cled left I was only up at the castle for two or three hours each morning; it was a different life. Nell hardly knows her own home!’

Matthew shot a warning look at his wife but Nell continued copying – and listening – and after a short pause Hester continued, though she lowered her tone a trifle.

‘No, but it’s true. The child spends more time up at the castle than she does here. Even in schooltime she has to go there after her classes and hang about until I’ve finished his dinner and done all the washing up and clearing away. It’s no life for a child, Matt!’

Nell, sensing danger, longed to put her oar in, to glance up from the book and say that she adored the castle, couldn’t be happier, found her life totally satisfying, but you didn’t do that when you were seven years and three months old, you kept quiet, listened and said a lot of secret prayers, after the real ones were finished, to influence God and persuade Him to do His best for you.

Matthew got the first boot off and used his boot-removing duster to mop his brow; Hester didn’t notice so he didn’t get told off, to Nell’s relief. She hated it when her mother was sharp and her father apologetic; it wasn’t fair, she thought confusedly, when this happened. A man as lovely, as kind, as her father shouldn’t have to sound humble and sorry when he’d done nothing wrong.

‘She’s better off than most,’ Matthew said now. ‘Think on, love; the improvements the old man’s made over the past few years mean at least the main rooms are dry and the furniture isn’t going mouldy or rotting away any more. There’s kids in the village ’ud give their eye-teeth for a chance to play in a great old barn of a place like Pengarth. And we gets to eat pretty well an’ all.’

Hester had sighed and come over to where Matthew sat. She had bent over and kissed the top of his head, and then knelt in front of him.

‘You’re right and I know it,’ she said, taking the boot duster from him and rolling it carefully round her hands. ‘When I think of the way I was brought up … oh Matt, you’re right, we don’t do badly. There’s kids in town who don’t eat every day, let alone eat meat. I shouldn’t grumble, only I did like having my home to myself. Now I’m going to get this old boot off your foot in one pull, so hang on to the chair!’

There had followed one of those times when families come closest, Nell remembered, slowing her pace to an amble as the Long Gallery fell behind her. Mummy had
heaved on the boot, Daddy had clung to the chair, and then the boot had come off, Daddy had tipped forward as Mummy fell backwards and they had all ended up on the floor in a laughing, kissing heap.

But it hadn’t solved the problem of Mrs Clifton and Dan, because though Nell was bright enough to realise that daddy thought Mr Geraint might marry Mrs Clifton, she was sure that nothing of the sort would happen. Mr Geraint was kind to Mrs Clifton and patient enough with Dan, but Nell couldn’t imagine the old man marrying anyone, let alone a fluffy little giggler like Dan’s mother. And Hester really didn’t like poor Mrs Clifton and was sharp with Dan as a result. As though Dan could help who his mother was! Mum even seemed to blame him for looking a bit like Mr Geraint, which now that Hester had mentioned it, Nell could actually see for herself. Was that why mum sometimes snapped at Dan? But it didn’t seem to make sense to Nell.

Not that Dan minded. Probably he didn’t even notice, and he was really fond of Matthew, trailing round after him in a fashion very similar, Nell supposed, to the way she trailed round after Dan. And for the time being, at any rate, life went on as usual. Mrs Clifton behaved like a guest, Dan behaved like a guest’s son, and Hester did all the work.

Nell reached the head of the stairs and stood on the top step, looking down into the hall. The banister was a long, glorious swoop of dark, highly polished wood, but if mum or Mr Geraint came into the hall and caught her halfway down there would be trouble. She’d been told and told … Hester was afraid she’d lose her balance and fall off and kill herself on the hall tiles, Mr Geraint, much more practically, was afraid she’d catch a foot in the barley-sugar twists which held the banister in position, break a leg and ruin his staircase. Or that was what he said; Nell thought he knew very well she was safe
as houses really, but agreed with her mother for the sake of peace.