The Dream House (47 page)

‘What would have happened to a stillborn baby? It would have died unbaptized. Weren’t there rules about that?’ Kate asked Mike suddenly, remembering there were sometimes complications about who could be buried in consecrated ground.

‘Strictly speaking, there was no duty to bury them in the churchyard,’ mused Mike. ‘But it was usually left to the local clergyman, who would often be sympathetic to the bereaved family. If the mother had died, too, as in Evangeline’s case, then mother and baby would be buried together. Sometimes I’ve heard of a dead newborn being slipped into the grave of an unconnected person being coincidentally buried at the time. The clergyman concerned might or might not have made a note of that in the records.’ However, that clue, too, bore no fruit.

‘I think what must have happened,’ said Mike, closing the heavy leather volume of burial records, ‘was as Agnes believed. Her baby was secretly given away for adoption to some local, unidentified couple. It might well be that he never had a birth certificate, let alone adoption papers. Children were still considered relatively less important in that period, and all too often, uncomfortable questions would not be asked. The matter might have been brushed under the carpet.’

‘But what would have happened when the child grew up and applied for a passport, or when the Welfare State came into effect and everybody was given National Insurance numbers?’

‘Today, yes, everything is regimented, but then, especially in the muddle after the war, when so many documents had been destroyed or gone missing, or people were displaced, I suppose officials just had to make strategic decisions. As for a passport, remember that foreign holidays are relatively new. Many people never needed to apply for one.’

Max had been listening intently to Kate’s report. Now he said, ‘What about asking round the village yourself? Is there any famous old character who’s a repository of local history?’

‘I went to see a neighbour of Dan’s who was born in Seddington in 1928. He’s lived in the village all his life – don’t you think that’s amazing, these days? Anyway, he chattered on about everything as though it was yesterday. His parents ran a local greengrocery, which closed down when they retired in the early nineteen fifties. He remembers where Mrs Duncan, the Melton cook, lived with her sister, but they’re long dead and neither of them had children, so that link’s no good. And he said a Doctor Lymington used to come when his mother “took bad”. The Lymingtons moved away, though. He doesn’t know where. And the doctor would be dead now anyway. The only other point of interest is that he didn’t remember Miss Selcott, though he delivered groceries for Diana’s family and remembers them all right, but not a lodger. So Miss Selcott definitely can’t have stayed on at the rectory. And that’s it. I’ve run out of leads now, unless Mike comes up with something.’

‘Sounds to me as though you’ve been as thorough as you can,’ said Max. ‘You’ve done your duty by Agnes, Kate. More than.’

Although Kate was aware that Max’s legacy depended on them
not
tracing Agnes’s heir, she said stubbornly, hoping he’d understand, ‘I want to go further. I must find out what happened.’

‘Why? And what good would it do? Suppose the person doesn’t want to be found, anyway? Or doesn’t even suspect that they were adopted? You might cause them terrible distress.’

Kate remembered the vivid nature of her dream, the young Agnes’s pain – anguish she still felt deeply, seventy years later. Some wounds, like the loss of a child, never heal. Then Kate thought of her parents, still living a half life after nineteen years.

‘Well I wouldn’t want to force the knowledge on them, if they didn’t want it,’ she said carefully now. ‘But there’s the letter from Agnes – they might want to see that – and the money . . . I’m sorry, Max, I’m so stupid and tactless.’

‘I’m not thinking of the money,’ Max said coldly. ‘Or rather, I’m
trying
not to think of the money. Since I honestly don’t believe you’re going to find Aunt Agnes’s son, frankly I’m not very worried that I’ll lose my part of the inheritance. I just think you sound a bit obsessed, that’s all. Agnes is gone, Kate. You can’t make yourself responsible for her unfinished business. You’ve done all you can reasonably do, why don’t you leave it?’

‘It’s partly that I feel there is some wrong to be righted, Max. If you had read the diaries . . . Why don’t you? I’ll give them to you.’ Suddenly, she felt it was time. Dan had brought the diaries back to Paradise Cottage before his holiday and left them with Joyce as Kate had been out. ‘It’s such a terribly sad story.’

‘I would like to read them. Thank you,’ he said. ‘I want to learn about my grandfather, too, though I wish I could read what happened from his point of view.’

‘And about your grandmother, Max,’ Kate said softly. ‘You’ll need to understand what their love did to Agnes and her father. It ruined their lives. Love conquers all, indeed, but at what cost?’

They were silent for a moment, then Kate said, ‘You’ve never told me much about your parents.’

‘They’re both dead now,’ he said. ‘My mother, Elizabeth, five years ago, my father two years before that. He was a professor of natural sciences at Cambridge and a bit older than my mother. When he was in his late sixties he developed Alzheimer’s. He died in a nursing home eight years later.’

‘That must have been awful.’

‘He had been a brilliant man and it was shocking to see his decline. And we had always been a tight little unit. My mother was Raven and Vanessa’s only child, and they had little contact with Vanessa’s side of the family as well as Raven’s. She had a lonely childhood, I would imagine.’

The train was slowing as it drew into Diss station. Max said, as he got up to help Kate with her coat, ‘I’ll come and pick up the diaries soon. Then when I’ve read them, perhaps you’d have dinner with me?’

His face behind his spectacles looked so earnest, so hopeful, Kate nearly laughed. Instead she kissed his cheek and replied solemnly, ‘Of course. Give me a ring and we’ll fix it.’

When she arrived home, a meeting of Joyce’s book club was going on in the living room.

‘You can come in and join us,’ Joyce said in a stage whisper as she came into the hall to greet her.

‘Thanks, but I’m exhausted,’ sighed Kate. ‘I’ll have a bath and an early night.’

Joyce’s face disappeared and Kate wearily trudged up the stairs. Talking to Max on the train had helped her forget that she’d just left her children to strange new experiences in a big city. She stopped at the half-open door of their bedroom and pushed it wide. The knowledge that Sam and Daisy weren’t there, tucked up safe in their beds, couldn’t stop the cloud of desolation descending and she took in the drawn-back curtains, the neatly made beds, the unnatural tidiness of the room. The rows of sightless eyes of the soft toys on Sam’s bed glinted at her malevolently in the darkness. Don’t be silly, she told herself, shutting the door. They’re probably having the time of their life with their dad. She hurried into her own room, switched on all the lights and tuned the radio to Classic FM.

As she pottered about tidying up, her eye fell on her locket on the bedside table. She picked it up and a thought struck her. Apart from the diaries, it was the only real clue she had to Agnes’s past. This was obviously the half that Harry had been sent after they were forced to part. How had it ended up in that little shop in Norwich?

Kate mused over her plans for the weekend. The following morning, she intended to visit Seddington House to sort through some more papers. Later she would have supper with Debbie and Jonny. But, as it turned out, she would do neither of these things. The next day, while she was eating her breakfast, the telephone rang. Joyce answered it, and after a second, passed her the handset with an anxious look on her face.

‘Your father,’ she said.

Now she had negotiated the traffic past Ipswich and it was a straight run across to the M25, Kate at last allowed her thoughts to wander. The reason for her father’s phone call had still hardly sunk in, and it had been a relief to concentrate instead on the endless twists, turns and roundabouts that had constituted the route so far.

‘It’s your mother, Kate.’ Her father’s voice had been quavery. An old man’s voice. ‘I’m at the hospital. It’s happened again. The doctors don’t know if she’ll pull through this time.’ And then, the simple cry of need, ‘Please come.’

She had been in the car and on the road in fifteen minutes flat, leaving Joyce with a flurry of instructions.

Now, as she peered through the drizzle and swung into the outside lane to overtake a long straining line of trucks, she tried to remember her father’s broken sentences. Barbara had been hoarding her anti-depressants, it seemed. When Kate had been down to see them a few weeks ago, she had been struck by her mother’s low mood, but had connected it to the news that she had brought them – that she and Simon were separating.

Yet it was her father who had seemed to take it more to heart. Kate had been surprised.

‘I can’t help feeling that this is partly our fault,’ he said to her sadly when she sat with him after breakfast in the morning, whilst Barbara was getting dressed upstairs. ‘We’ve been so caught up in ourselves, in . . . what happened.’ He looked around, then, at the many faces of Nicola, smiling happily at them across the room. ‘We haven’t made enough time for you all.’

Kate had been left fighting for words. In the end, she said carefully, ‘I’m still not sure what was at the root of Simon’s drifting away. I think it’s not the first time he’s been unfaithful to me, but I can’t see that that’s remotely connected with anything you or Mum have done. In the end, he was not prepared to put me and the children first. Oh, it’s all a great muddle at the moment, it doesn’t make proper sense . . .’ She drifted off and, feeling the tears prickle, leaned forward to pet Benjy who, himself bereft, had come to press himself in uncharacteristic friendliness against her leg.

Had it taken the breakdown of her marriage to start this sea-change in her relationship with her parents, or were other elements in play? Her father, now seventy, seemed suddenly less certain. As chinks appeared in his bluff exterior she could see how fragile it was, this brave face he presented to the world. This time, when she left, she hugged him and gently kissed her mother, and it wasn’t an effort of will.

It was lunchtime before she reached the hospital, eventually found a parking space and followed instructions to the intensive care unit. A nurse took her into a room where her father sat gazing at his hands next to a bed in which a slight figure lay unconscious, an oxygen mask over her face, a drip feeding into one hand, her vital signs spelled out on several instruments on the further side of the bed.

‘Kate!’ Her father was suddenly animated, eager. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. Then they stood together looking down at Barbara.

After a moment, Kate pulled up another chair and sat down by her father, once more taking his hand.

‘What happened?’ she said.

He sighed heavily. ‘The doctor had been giving her something for the depression since the last time.’ That was six months ago, Kate calculated. ‘I counted out the pills for her every day. But sometimes she must have hidden them. Then, yesterday evening, when I was round at the Scotts’ playing bridge, she must have taken them all. I found her when I got back. She was on the bed, but she’d been sick. That might be what saved her, the doctor says.

‘Anyway, I called an ambulance and they brought her up here. When I rang you, they weren’t sure if they were in time, but they say she’s a bit stronger; she could be coming up for air soon.’

‘Poor Mum. I – I hadn’t realized she was that bad again.’

‘She was going downhill over the summer. Kept saying she was very tired and there wasn’t any point in anything. And . . . she felt with me, that we’re somehow to blame for your marriage going wrong.’

‘But you’re not, Dad.’

‘Yes, we are.’ He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘We’ve been old fools. We’ve not helped you enough.’

It was several hours before Barbara started to surface. She opened her eyes and there was such a look of anguish in them, Kate was glad when she closed them again. A quarter of an hour later, her eyelids flew open once more. This time she moved her head, as though irritated by the mask over her mouth. Later still, she gently squeezed her husband’s hand as he whispered her name and crooned words of comfort. Kate was intensely moved to see him lay his head on the pillow next to Barbara’s and kiss her cheek and stroke her hair. After all these years, he was still devoted to her.

Kate pulled her chair up to the bed. ‘Mum?’ she whispered. ‘It’s me.’ She watched in dismay as tears zigzagged their way across her mother’s cheeks and she made little moaning sounds through her mask.

Major Carter’s sister Maggie arrived late afternoon, summoned by phone soon after Kate arrived at the hospital. She arranged a large bouquet of scented lilies in a vase she had brought with her and ordered Kate to take Desmond home.

‘He’s been up all night and I bet he’s hardly eaten.’ It was true that Kate’s father had barely touched the sandwiches Kate had bought him. He had just sat there in the café endlessly stirring his tea, looking around him in bewilderment. Kate was alarmed to see him so vulnerable, so alone.

‘I’ll stay here and make sure she’s comfortable, Des, you mustn’t worry,’ his sister told him. ‘I’ll call if there’s anything, I promise.’

They got home at eight for Kate to find there was little food in the house. ‘I’d been going to go shopping today,’ her father said tiredly as he sank onto the sofa.

‘Well, never mind, there are eggs and some bits and pieces. I’ll make an omelette.’ Kate poured her father a couple of fingers of malt whisky and went off to cobble together a meal for them both, which she coaxed him to eat.

‘Why don’t you sit down while I clear up,’ she said afterwards, ‘then I’ll bring you some coffee.’ But when she came through into the living room, he wasn’t there. She heard him moving about upstairs and went up after him.