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‘Of course not. But perhaps confused. And so you’d better come back with me and be properly looked after,’ said Thomasina. Incredibly there was a note of affection in her voice. She held Maud’s arm very firmly, and took her outside, pushing the door closed with her foot as she did so. Maud tried to resist but Thomasina’s hands were too strong. As they went back across the park Thomasina talked soothingly–something about soon being home and how no one needed to know about this absurd flight through the darkness.

Maud, by this time sobbing with despair, scarcely heard her, but when Thomasina said, ‘Where on earth were you going anyway?’ she replied, ‘I was escaping from you. And Simon. I was running away because of what he did to me.’

‘Then you’re definitely a little mad,’ said Thomasina lightly. ‘Half the girls in the county would like my cousin to make love to them. He’s greatly admired. In fact he’s considered quite a matrimonial catch. I was even thinking we might arrange for the two of you to be married. Wouldn’t you like that? Simon would, I know. Oh do stop crying, Maud, and don’t shudder like that. It would be a wonderful marriage; your father would be delighted. But we’ll talk about it properly in the morning.’

As they went inside Quire House, Thomasina said, ‘Don’t try shouting to the servants, will you? We don’t want them knowing you’re a little disturbed. In a small place like this people do love to gossip, and gossip is never particularly kind anywhere. Within twenty-four hours the whole of Amberwood would be convinced you were a raving lunatic.’

Maud thought: that’s quite true, but the real truth is that she’s afraid of people knowing what she and Simon did to me. She glanced at Thomasina; in the dim light of the passageway off the main hall, Thomasina’s eyes were wild, and she was frowning, as if she was making plans in her head. Her grip loosened slightly and Maud wondered if she dared attempt to get away. She could run back along the hall and out through the garden door again. But when she tried to remember if Thomasina had locked or bolted the door when they came in, she could not. And even if she ran as fast as she could, Thomasina would stride across the park again, as she had done earlier, and catch her.

She thought Thomasina would take her back to the big bedroom overlooking the park, but when they reached the first floor, Thomasina hesitated.

‘The real worry now, Maud, is that for the moment I don’t think I can trust you not to run away again. And I don’t want you to do that, my dear. So not this room, I don’t think. It’s too near the main part of the house and there’s no lock on the door. So I’m afraid–yes, I really am afraid it will have to be the next floor.’ She glanced at the narrower stairs leading to the second
floor. ‘But you’ll be perfectly comfortable up there.’ Again the smile. ‘I wouldn’t let you be uncomfortable,’ said Thomasina. ‘I think too much of you.’

‘Do you?’ said Maud, staring at her.

‘My dear girl,’ said Thomasina, ‘don’t you know I’m absolutely devoted to you?’

Donna and Don Robards had been absolutely devoted to each other. They had been all in all to one another and had not needed anyone else. Donna and Don, a single entity against the world. It had always pleased Donna to think of them in that way, and it pleased her now, even with Don dead.

Within the family they had been Domina and Don. ‘So pretty,’ their half-Spanish mother had said when they were small. ‘The old names for lord and lady.’

Their father, with his permanent round of meetings and reports and too much to do, had liked the names as well. He said they were echoes of almost defunct academic terms for a fellow of Oxford or Cambridge. Not that Domina and Don would need university careers; there would always be more than sufficient money for them to live comfortably without having to work at all. Trust funds were being set up, investments made…Domina and Don, fortune’s darlings.

‘And Domina is so
good
with her little brother,’ their mother told everyone, delighted with the timing of her children’s birth, perhaps even slightly smug at having managed a three-year gap between them. It was exactly right: it was wide enough for Domina to look after Don while they were small, but narrow enough for
it to dwindle to nothing when they were grown up; to allow them to be friends.

To the nearly four-year-old Donna, Don’s arrival in her world had been the most wonderful thing she had ever known. He was perfect, this small brother. She spent hours staring into his cot or his pram, sometimes stroking his face. From the very start she had fought his battles and flown into a rage if anyone criticized him. ‘Sweet,’ said their mother indulgently. ‘Domina is so protective of Don.’

When Don reached his teens, people said he was spoilt and a bit selfish and lazy, but that often happened to the children of wealthy parents. Donna knew this to be untrue and mostly due to sheer jealousy. Don was not spoilt and he was not really selfish or lazy. You might perhaps say that different rules applied to him, and you might also add that you did not apply the rules for a carthorse to a thoroughbred.

The simile of a thoroughbred pleased her–Don was sleek and aristocrat-looking, he was exactly like a thoroughbred. His hair was fair and silken, and he was slender and supple. In the summer holidays he lay in the garden of their house, just wearing cotton shorts. Donna usually joined him, pretending to read, but secretly watching him, and seeing how his skin gleamed with health. Once or twice he had asked her to rub sun-tan lotion over his back–he could never reach it all himself and he liked his tan to be even. His skin felt satiny and warm under Donna’s hands, and the scent of the lotion and the sun’s warmth and the masculine scent of his body blurred together in her mind. She spent a long time rubbing the lotion into his back, and when it was done she waited for him to say he would turn on his back so she could rub the lotion on his front, but he did not.

Lack of money was not something Donna ever thought she would have to cope with, but when she was eighteen and Don was fifteen, their parents died and they had to cope with it very abruptly indeed.

Donna was never sure, afterwards, how they got through that
time. She had been grief-stricken, of course she had, but Don had been in pieces. He cried for hours over their parents’ death, flinging himself on his bed, not bothering to hide the sound of his sobbing. He pushed Donna away when she tried to put her arms round him, thinking this was the one time they should cling to one another.

But Don had not wanted Donna’s arms. Leave him alone, he’d said. His life was in tatters, and he would never get over this, not if he lived to be a hundred. He wanted to die in this bed, now, tonight; he knew he would never be happy again. Dramatic. Even melodramatic if you wanted to be truthful. He had always been like that and he always got over it, but it had torn Donna apart to hear his grief.

And then within days–
days
!–of the double funeral, they had been dealt a second blow. Their father, it seemed, had been teetering towards bankruptcy, and his business–outwardly so prosperous–had been on the verge of collapse for months.

Donna listened to the solicitors who came to the house to talk to them, and had at first simply stared in blank incomprehension. No money? But that was utter nonsense; of course there was money, there was a great deal of money. Their father had been extremely wealthy–everyone knew that, said Donna. They had this house, cars, ritzy holidays. Her mother bought expensive clothes and jewellery–it was a joke within the family that even mundane things like tights or face flannels went on the Harvey Nichols account. Donna and her brother had both been to costly boarding schools; Don, only fifteen, was still at his school, of course. There were trust funds, investments, fat share portfolios, many of them intended to safeguard her and Don’s future. It could not be right that there was no money.

But apparently it was right. As well as there being no money, there were a number of debts and business obligations to be met. There were salaries due to the people in her father’s company which had to be paid, said the solicitors solemnly. This house would have to be sold, and the cars and most of the furniture
would probably have to go as well–there were some quite valuable pieces and one or two good paintings. There would have to be a proper valuation, of course; they would see to that as soon as possible. Unfortunately the house was heavily mortgaged and the bank would probably call in the debt fairly soon, but something might be salvaged.

Well no, Donna and Don would not be thrown homeless into the world–of course they would not, said the solicitors, shocked at such an idea. A little money would have to be squeezed from somewhere, and a suitable place found for them to live. Unless there was anyone in the family who might take them in? Ah, there was not. No relatives? Oh dear, that was a pity. Well yes, they did appreciate that Donna was eighteen, and therefore an adult…Oh yes, she would almost certainly be regarded as Don’s legal guardian. And a modest house, or perhaps a little flat would somehow be managed for the two of them.

Donna did not want these stupid smug men squeezing out money to buy a modest house or a flat for them to live in, and she did not want them computing income and selling things or knowing all the details of her father’s financial ineptitude. But she did not let them see this, and somehow she managed to control the cold furious rage that welled up inside her. She asked if her mother had been aware of the situation, and the solicitors hemmed and hawed and avoided her eye, and said, Well, possibly she might have, but they were not here to judge.

It was instantly obvious to Donna that her mother had known all along. She had known all about the mounting debts and the tangled finances, and Donna, realizing this, hated her mother very fiercely indeed for continuing to expect expensive holidays and first-class travel and lavish entertaining. She hated her father as well, for continuing to provide all those things, and for not giving so much as a hint to Donna or Don. When Donna thought about her father’s deceit and her mother’s selfish extravagances she knew she would never forgive either of them, and she was very glad they were dead.

She had politely told the solicitors that she and her brother would be perfectly all right. No, they did not need anyone’s help, thank you so much. They would manage. They did not want anyone finding somewhere for them to live; they would find their own place. Donna had already left school and would look after Don, who must, of course, finish his education. Two more years that would be.

To herself she thought that even though they were financially out in the cold, at least she and Don still had each other.

There had been the tag-end of a single-premium insurance policy to cover the rest of Don’s school fees, and even if Donna had been agreeable to cashing this in for living on, the terms of the policy would not have allowed it. So Don, protesting angrily, had to go back to school.

There was just enough money for the renting and furnishing of a tiny flat for the two of them to live together. Just about enough. The unfairness of it all was a permanent ache in Donna’s throat, but once having found the flat she had taken a job, because it was necessary to have money. She had, in fact, taken several jobs, mostly of the Mayfair receptionist/dinner-parties-in-your-home kind, drifting from one to another, hating almost all of them. But her school French was quite good, and she was fluent in Spanish learnt from her mother, which was occasionally useful.

One or two former friends of her mother helped out with introductions and recommendations. ‘Dear Domina, so brave and really quite clever, she’d be so useful to your little business…Well no, no actual
qualifications
, but we knew the family–such a tragedy it was, so do employ her if you can.’

It was humiliating to have to depend on people’s charity in this way, but Donna put up with it because of Don and because it was necessary to have money. And if nothing else, the jobs filled in the time until Don left school and they could be together, properly and for always. Then something better would turn up. Donna and Don, golden girl and boy.

The flat felt horridly poky after their lovely house, but Donna made it as attractive as she could for when Don came home for the school holidays. She emulsioned walls and painted skirting boards and searched junk shops for nice old pieces of furniture. She furnished Don’s bedroom lovingly, putting the very best furniture in this room–a beautiful little Victorian bureau for him to store his things, and a cherrywood table to stand by the window.

She placed the bed so its head would catch the early sun, imagining Don lying in it, warm and safe and cherished, his hair on the pillow looking like spilled honey in the morning sunshine…

Exactly as it had looked in the bed at Charity Cottage on that summer’s afternoon…

Renting Charity Cottage for a month each summer had been a quirk of Donna’s mother. Rustic and rural, she had said delightedly when she first discovered the place, somewhere where they could live simply and plainly. She said this every year. ‘And usually,’ observed Don, ‘she says it just before she starts ordering food supplies from Harrods.’

‘And just after buying new outfits from Harvey Nichols,’ added Donna.

But they quite liked going to Charity Cottage, partly because it was so different from the places they normally went, and because they liked exploring the surrounding countryside. Donna had passed her driving test that summer, which meant she and Don might take the car and go off on their own sometimes. Their mother had a different project each year. So far there had been water-colour painting, a study of old churches and horse riding. One disastrous year it had been tracking down local witchcraft customs.

This year’s project was local buildings; she was going to scour the area for really interesting landmarks, and compile a proper, scholarly notebook about their histories. She would illustrate her notebook, of course–she had already asked in Harrods
about the right kind of camera, because if you were going to do something you wanted to do it as well as possible.

‘Four hundred pounds for a camera and goodness knows how much else for new clothes,’ said their father, half-exasperated, half-indulgent. ‘Maria, you’ll ruin us.’ But he smiled as he said this, and Donna, looking back at this memory from the other side of that disastrous summer, thought no one could have told from his voice or his expression how very close to the truth his words must have been.

It had not seemed anything like ruin at the time, nor had it felt like the onset of tragedy. Charity Cottage, that last summer, was exactly as it always was: a bit shabby with its slightly battered furniture, and a bit basic with its old-fashioned kitchen and bathroom. Their parents always had the big bedroom at the front, overlooking the park round Quire House, and Donna and Don had a bedroom each at the back. They went for walks and drives, and cooked the evening meal on the old-fashioned cooker, after which their father usually retired to the bedroom to study reports sent by his assistant. So boring, said their mother gaily, they were supposed to be on holiday, for goodness’ sake.

But there was not, actually, a great deal to do at Charity Cottage. Donna and Don played music on the portable CD-player they had brought with them, and their father complained and said music was not what it had been in the sixties. Burt Bacharach and the Beatles and all the great musicals.
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Hair
–goodness, do you remember how shocked everyone was by
Hair
, Maria?

Don thought it was gross to even mention things like that, and Donna thought it embarrassing to have your parents singing ‘All You Need is Love’ all round the cottage, and trying to remember the sequence of the verses in ‘American Pie’.

But after the first week their father discovered all over again how much his children’s constant presence interrupted his study of the quarterly business review, and their mother discovered afresh how tedious it was to have to cook every night, and demanded to
be taken out to dinner at the local pub, or at the very least into the nearest big town to buy good-quality prepared food. One forgot how extremely tiresome it was to peel potatoes and cut up meat, she said, while as for washing-up after every meal…

The only thing that had really been different at that stage of the holiday, had been Maria’s project about historic landmarks, and a sudden out-of-the-blue question from her as to whether it might be possible to buy Quire House. It was a bit dilapidated, but it would scrub up very nicely and it would be splendid for summer entertaining and weekend parties, what did anyone think?

What Donna thought–what she later said to Don–was that their mother had spotted a new toy, and was visualizing herself playing lady of the manor. Donna did not much like Quire House which seemed to her a rather sad place, and which Don, who was going through a slightly effete stage, said was an ugly specimen of an ugly architectural period. But they walked dutifully round the house one afternoon, peering in through windows and disturbing jackdaws’ nests. Their father was forced into agreeing to try to track down the owner, although the owner would probably be some inaccessible property company and there would be preservation orders and listed-building prohibitions on every square inch of brick so you could not even change a light bulb without permission. That being so, he said, Maria was not to build up any hopes.