Swimming Pool Sunday (18 page)

‘Imagine,’ said Janice Sharp. ‘Half a million pounds!’

‘That’s a lot of money,’ said Mrs Quint soberly. ‘Let’s hope the Delaneys are insured.’

Mary began to feel slightly defensive.

‘Well, Katie’s been very badly hurt!’ she exclaimed.
‘She may need special care for years. She deserves the money.’

‘Oh, I’m not saying …’ began Mrs Quint. She was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. Sylvia stood up.

‘Do excuse me,’ she said, bestowing a gracious smile around the room, ‘and help yourselves to more coffee.’

There was animated chatter while she was gone. Mrs Quint tried to introduce a subject of more general interest into the conversation, but no-one appeared interested in the plight of her garden, nor willing to divulge their holiday plans.

‘I just think’, Mrs Prendergast was saying as the door opened, ‘that if people are actually charging you to use their pool, then they jolly well have a responsibility …’

Suddenly she was interrupted by Sylvia speaking from outside the room. Her voice was deliberately raised in a mixture of delight and malice, and she was saying, ‘Have you got time for a quick cup of coffee, Ursula?’

A couple of the ladies gasped. Mrs Prendergast’s head shot round. There, in the doorway, stood Ursula Delaney, with a benign expression on her face and a cake, sprinkled with almonds, balanced on her upturned hands.

‘Hello, everyone,’ she said simply. ‘I can’t stay, I’m afraid, but I wanted to contribute a little something.’

‘Not to worry, Ursula,’ said Sylvia, giving an amused little grin round the room. ‘I’d say it’s enough that you’ve come at all. You know most people here, don’t you?’ she added.

‘I think so,’ said Ursula, smiling vaguely around. She walked over to the table and deposited her cake. As she looked up again, there was an embarrassed shuffling. Nobody spoke.

‘Dear me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Please don’t stop the
conversation just because of me. What were you talking about?’

There was a dreadful little silence. Mary Tracey felt her cheeks growing hotter and hotter. Then Mrs Quint cleared her throat.

‘I was talking’, she said firmly, ‘about the dreadful state of my garden.’ She looked severely at Mrs Prendergast. ‘Wasn’t I?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Prendergast hastily. ‘Yes, you were. And … and so was I,’ she added. ‘Mine’s in a terrible state, too.’

‘So is mine,’ chimed in several voices. Ursula looked around, a puzzled expression on her face.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what bad luck! Our garden seems to be doing quite well.’ She gazed out of the window with a thoughtful expression on her face. ‘We do have very good mulch,’ she said eventually. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer.’

She looked around with raised questioning eyebrows. But no-one seemed to have a reply.

Two weeks later a letter arrived for Hugh from his insurance company. He opened it at breakfast, read it, then silently put it back into the envelope.

‘What?’ said Meredith, whose eyes had homed in sharply on the logo on the front of the envelope. ‘What did they say?’

Ever since the announcement that Hugh and Ursula were going to be sued, Meredith had found herself waking every morning with an urgent fighting energy which she longed to put to good use. But Alexis had informed her candidly that there was little she could do in such early days, and he’d added again that the case was likely to last a very long time – maybe years.

Years of this tension? Meredith couldn’t stand the thought, and she knew she wasn’t the only one who was feeling the strain. While she’d been striding around the house with an impotent adrenalin; unable to work; unable to relax, Hugh had retreated silently into himself. His face was subdued and haggard; he’d admitted he wasn’t sleeping well.

‘What did they say?’ Meredith repeated, trying not to sound impatient.

Hugh looked up. He glanced at Ursula, who was peacefully eating a boiled egg and reading the
Daily Mail
, then attempted to smile optimistically at Meredith, but his eyes had a blank devastated look.

‘They think it’s most unlikely that they would be able to meet any claim for damages arising from a non-domestic use of the pool. They say …’ he gazed down
at the letter, ‘they say that if we’d informed them that we were using it for a public function, they could have arranged additional cover. But we didn’t.’ Hugh put down the letter and looked bleakly at Meredith. ‘Basically, they say they’re not going to pay.’

‘Bastards!’ exclaimed Meredith. ‘They’re just using any excuse to weasel out of it!’

‘Maybe,’ said Hugh. He rubbed his face miserably. ‘But maybe they’re right. Maybe I should have given them a call; arranged extra insurance. It just never occurred to me …’ He broke off.

‘Let me see the letter,’ demanded Meredith. She grabbed the sheet from Hugh’s plate and scanned it. ‘It doesn’t say they definitely won’t pay,’ she said, after a few minutes. ‘It just says probably.’

‘I know,’ said Hugh, ‘but frankly, I don’t hold out much hope that they’ll change their minds.’

Meredith looked at the letter again.

‘I guess you’re right,’ she said. She leaned backwards in her chair and looked distantly out of the window. She couldn’t quite bear to meet Hugh’s gaze; to feel the unspoken implications of this letter flickering fearfully from his eyes to hers – bypassing Ursula, as did so many of their tacit communications. What if Hugh and Ursula somehow lost the case? she found herself thinking. What if they had to pay out huge damages? Hundreds of thousands of pounds? What would they do?

A bubbling fury rose up in Meredith and abruptly she pushed her chair back.

‘I’m going out,’ she said, and left the room before either Hugh or Ursula could comment.

She stalked out of the drive of Devenish House, and without really knowing what her intention was, strode briskly and deliberately towards Larch Tree Cottage, at the other end of the village. A vision of Hugh’s defeated eyes burned in her brain, making her stride more and more quickly, and she reached her destination panting
slightly and wondering what she was about to do, exactly. But as she neared Larch Tree Cottage, she saw Louise coming out of the front door, and all hesitation disappeared.

‘I just thought you might like to know’, she said in a harsh abrasive voice, ignoring Louise’s gasp of surprise, ‘that it looks like our insurers are pulling out. So if you do win your God-awful case, Hugh and Ursula will have to pay you out of their own pocket and they’ll probably be ruined. Just so you know.’ She stopped halfway down the path, and looked at Louise for a reaction.

‘I’m afraid,’ began Louise in a shaky, but rather formal voice, ‘I really don’t think …’

‘No, you don’t, do you?’ broke in Meredith angrily. ‘You don’t think at all. If you did, you wouldn’t be bringing this fucking case to court. You wouldn’t be ruining the lives of two perfectly innocent people!’

‘I’m not …’

‘Do you know what this is going to do to them?’

‘Well, do you know what this accident has done to us?’ interrupted Louise, with sudden indignation. ‘Do you know what we’ve been going through? My God, you haven’t even visited Katie in hospital! None of you! You haven’t seen what state she’s in! So don’t start talking about ruining lives. You’ve no idea what this is like for us!’ Louise’s eyes blazed, blue and angry, at Meredith.

‘The reason we haven’t been to the hospital is because you’re suing us!’ Meredith’s voice rose, furious, through the air. ‘Did that ever occur to you? We’ve been advised not to go near you. If you’d only drop the stupid case, we could help! We want to help!’

A smooth voice interrupted her.

‘If you want to help, you can leave the premises of my client at once.’

Both women’s heads whipped round. It was Cassian,
coming out of the front door. Meredith scowled at him.

‘Yes,’ said Louise, emboldened by his arrival. ‘Just leave me alone, Meredith.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Meredith scornfully, ‘I’ll go, then. But just for the record, I do have some idea what you’re going through, you know …’

‘Will you please stop harassing my client,’ interrupted Cassian impatiently. Meredith ignored him and looked directly at Louise.

‘In case you’d forgotten, my husband went into a coma a few years ago, like your daughter. The difference is, he died.’ She broke off suddenly and Louise flushed faintly.

‘I can tell you now,’ Cassian said, ‘this outburst isn’t helping your case at all.’ He took out a notebook and began to write in it.

‘And the other difference is,’ said Meredith curtly, ‘I just accepted it. I didn’t look around for someone to blame, or try to make money out of it.’

‘I must request …’ began Cassian again.

‘Oh, fuck off, you little toad,’ interrupted Meredith. Louise broke in, without looking at Cassian.

‘Well, OK, so your husband died,’ she said, in a jerky voice, ‘but maybe what’s happened to Katie is worse; she could be brain damaged for life!’

‘Louise,’ snapped Cassian, ‘this conversation has got to stop. Go and get in the car.’ Louise glanced at him hesitantly, then obeyed.

‘Right,’ said Cassian. He brought out a mobile phone. ‘Now,’ he said to Meredith. ‘I can call the police – or you can go now.’

Without answering, Meredith began to walk back down the path. She stopped as she passed the car and tried to catch Louise’s eye, but Louise frowned and looked away. Meredith shrugged, and carried on walking back to Devenish House.

*

Hugh had spent the rest of breakfast patiently explaining to Ursula the meaning of the letter from the insurers, trying to make the situation quite clear, without frightening her. When he’d finished, she looked at him with a face only mildly wrinkled with anxiety, and said, ‘Oh dear.’

And Hugh had stared back at her, feeling an uncharacteristic frustration rising through him. Is that all you can say? he wanted to shout. Don’t you see what this means for us? But instead of shouting, he clenched his fists under the table and gazed out of the window, and tried to calm his pounding, angry, terrified heart.

Ursula, meanwhile, sat in silence, consumed by difficult and rather perplexing thoughts. She leaned back in her chair and screwed up her face, and when Hugh got up to leave the table, she nodded absently at him as though he were a stranger on a train. She sat for another ten minutes or so after he had gone, then abruptly came to a conclusion. Leaving the dishes for Mrs Viney, who came in twice a week to clean the house, Ursula quickly went upstairs to the pretty satinwood dressing-table which she used as a desk. She sat down, took out a piece of rough paper and, with a missionary zeal, began to compose a letter.

The next day, when everybody had gone out, Ursula left Devenish House clutching a large basket and a pale mauve envelope. She walked briskly through the village, deserted at that hour of the morning, until she reached Larch Tree Cottage.

She was well aware that she was repeating the path which Meredith had taken just the day before; that Alexis would be furious if he discovered what she was doing; that she shouldn’t be there at all, but a firm belief in what she was doing kept her step from faltering. Her mission, she thought, was very different from poor Meredith’s outburst.

Ursula had been astonished when Meredith confessed to her confrontation with Louise. Yelling in the street! What were they all coming to? It just showed, she thought, that nobody was quite themselves at the moment. Indeed, this was one of the very points she had put in her letter to Louise.

Ursula had great hopes of her letter. She had toiled over it for almost three hours the previous day, then had written it out neatly before hurrying into Linningford to buy a selection of toys. Now she looked at the envelope, addressed to Mrs Barnaby Kember, and felt her heart give a flutter of hope. Alexis might insist, she thought, that they should avoid contact with the Kembers, but what harm could an honest letter do? Surely Louise would melt when she read Ursula’s heartfelt appeal – from one mother to another? Surely she would drop this silly case?

She had intended simply to leave the basket in the porch and then go, but outside the cottage, playing on the grassy verge in a rather desultory way, was Amelia. She looked up as Ursula approached.

‘Hello, Mrs Delaney,’ she said.

‘Hello, Amelia,’ said Ursula, in surprise. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

‘I’ve got an earache,’ said Amelia, ‘so I’m at home.’

‘And is Mummy at home, looking after you?’ said Ursula, looking, with sudden alarm, towards the cottage. She certainly didn’t want to bump into Louise.

‘No, she isn’t at home,’ said Amelia. Ursula relaxed slightly. ‘She’s at the hospital,’ added Amelia grumpily, giving the verge a little kick. ‘She’s
always
at the hospital.’

‘Well, dear, I expect she’s worried about Katie,’ said Ursula mildly.

‘I had an earache,’ continued Amelia doggedly, ‘and I told her, and all she said was, “Oh, buck up, Amelia.” And then it hurt so much I cried in the night, and she
took me to the doctor, and all he said was “How’s Katie?” And now’, she added, with stony emphasis, ‘I’m ill too, but I’m being looked after by Mary, and Mummy’s gone to see Katie, like she always does.’

Ursula gazed at Amelia in a sudden discomfiture. Poor child. Of course she must be feeling rather left out.

‘I hate Katie,’ said Amelia, and darted a quick defiant glance at Ursula. Ursula essayed a hesitant smile.

‘I’m sure you don’t really,’ she said. Amelia stared rigidly at Ursula for a few seconds, then flushed and looked away.

‘But look,’ said Ursula hurriedly. ‘Look what I’ve brought you.’ She put a hand into the basket and pulled out the first toy that her hand touched. It was a Barbie doll, dressed in a pink leotard and encased in a shiny wrapper. Amelia stared at it.

‘For me?’ she said suspiciously. ‘You brought this for me?’

‘Yes,’ said Ursula, hoping she sounded convincing. ‘Some of these toys are for Katie, and … some of them are for you.’ Amelia turned the doll round in her hands for a silent minute. Then, suddenly, she gave a sob.

‘I don’t want it,’ she wailed. ‘I want Katie to have it.’