The Healing Stream (2 page)

‘Thomas Sedgley.’ He introduced himself, holding out his hand to Richard. ‘You must be Mrs Pilbeam’s son. I’m glad you were able to get here.’ Then, with what Tessa saw as extra warmth in the smile, he turned on her. ‘Hello, my dear. I see you managed all the arrangements very well. So many people there to say goodbye to a dear friend.’

‘Do you have a car with you or can I give you a lift to the house?’ Richard asked.

‘If you would be so kind. My office is only just along the road, so I walked.’

‘To the house?’ The invitation had cut through Tessa’s armour of reserve. ‘You mean people will be coming back to Gran’s – for tea or something? I hadn’t thought . . .’

‘No, my dear, my visit is something different.’ Thomas laid a restraining hand on her arm as he told Richard. ‘As I arranged with you, I have the papers with me.’

‘Then we’ll all drive back together. I’m glad we can go over the will today; I want to catch the mid-morning ferry tomorrow. I can’t be away any longer.’

Ignoring what he’d said, Tessa told him, ‘You follow behind then; I’ve got Gran’s car.’ And with that she left them and, with her head consciously high, crossed the road to Middle Lane where she had parked. She had never been gladder of her ability to handle the car.

‘God knows how she walks in those ridiculous shoes, let alone drives in them,’ Richard muttered more to himself than to Thomas Sedgley.

‘A remarkable young lady. She and your mother were very close, I believe.’

‘You don’t know whether she had been made aware of the arrangements Mother wished for her? I haven’t had an opportunity yet to talk to her myself.’ Then, with a sudden and unexpected smile, ‘She’s got it in for me right enough. Can’t you just feel the way she bristles?’

‘Not on account of the future arrangements, I fear, for until I give her the letter that Mrs Pilbeam left in my keeping some years ago I am sure she is in ignorance of any such idea.’

‘I wish Mother had told her. Face-to-face it might have been easier for her. Most of Mother’s visits to the farm were during term time while the child was away at school and, since then, she always came on her own while Tessa holidayed with old school friends. I dare say you know the girl much better than I do. Despite being nineteen years old, and despite the way she has dealt with the arrangements for today, she strikes me as being unworldly – like a child dressed in grown-up clothes. Damn it, girls a year or more younger than she is were in uniform and serving their country not so long ago.’

‘Her life has been sheltered, Mr Pilbeam. It used to worry your mother that having spent so many years in boarding school on the mainland the child had no friends of her own age on the island. I understand she has friends from her school days but no one for day-to-day companionship. I have a granddaughter a few years her junior, living here on the Isle of Wight. She and her friends have their heads filled with adolescent rubbish, film stars, tap dancing, and beastly noisy records for their gramophones, unimaginable nonsense. I know it worried Amelia that Tessa missed out on all that sort of fun once she came home from school.’

Richard opened the passenger door for the solicitor, who apparently had been on closer terms with his mother than he had realized. Just at that moment Tessa drove past them without a glance.

Putting on his half-moon glasses Thomas took the parchment will from its envelope and spread it on the table before him, cleared his throat and started to read.

‘This is the last will and testament . . .’

A sum of two hundred pounds was to go to Violet Dinsdale, a local woman who had worked in the house daily as long as Amelia had lived there. Everything was to be disposed of, debts settled and an amount of four pounds for each month until Tessa reached the age of twenty-one to be paid to Richard, who was Amelia’s executor. The residual estate was to be equally divided between Richard and Tessa.

Taking Tessa by surprise, she was suddenly filled with a feeling of hope, of promise. Life was suddenly there for her to grasp. Things would be new and different. She could see no real shape but, despite that, she could make her own decisions, choose her own path. And all because Gran was making it possible. With the rush of excitement came another emotion: guilt that she could look to the future with hope when darling Gran was gone. But of all people
she
would be the one to understand, for she had had such joy in living. The thought of having the extra four pounds Richard would send her a month as well as what she earned working at the hotel made her imagine herself wealthy. She knew nothing of legal affairs but it seemed unnecessarily complicated that her four pounds should be paid to her uncle instead of straight to her, but that must be because he was the executor. Gran might have imagined that if she had it a year at a time she would go on a spending spree – spending sprees had always been such fun for the two of them together. Pulling her thoughts back into line she saw that Mr Sedgley was passing her an envelope with her name on it written in handwriting she knew so well.

‘Gran wrote it for me?’ Eagerly she took it, feeling the elderly lady’s presence very close. As she tore open the envelope she didn’t even notice that the two men were both watching for her reaction.

‘My darling Tessa,’ she read, ‘I hope this letter will never be given to you. I hope I will be there to celebrate your twenty-first birthday. But we none of us know when the call will come and if I get mine and leave you before then, I am handing care of you to Richard and Naomi. Oh dear, I can just picture your face when you read this but if it’s on the cards that I come to the end of the track while you’re underage at least I shall hit the buffers in peace knowing that you will be in good and loving hands. You hardly know them, and that’s been my fault: I ought to have seen to it that we visited the farm together, but when we had a chance to have a jaunt somehow we always found such “fun things” to do. So read this – no, don’t frown, just trust me, dear Tessa – and make yourself accept with a smile. That way, life is so much easier. Richard and Naomi have a home full of love; it will be impossible for you not to be happy living with them in Devon. Although we are all so far apart I honestly love them deeply, as I am sure you will too once your ruffled feathers are smoothed down. It’s what I truly want for you. Make yourself smile and accept even if you are angry and fearful – and that way, even though your life will be very different from the one we have here, you will find happiness and give happiness to them, too, just as you always have to me.

‘I’m pretty fit, but I have to face the fact that whilst you are fourteen’ – and glancing back to the start of the letter Tessa saw it had been written five years previously – ‘I have just had my eightieth birthday, so it’s time I put my house in order. Richard and Naomi are aware that I am writing this to you and are happy with the arrangement.

‘It’s a strange feeling to know that should you ever be given this to read it will mean that I’ve gone from the world. But Tessa, you mustn’t grieve. Rejoice for the gift of life, rejoice for all the fun and love we have shared through the years, and be sure that even if I’m done with living I shall always be there for you, wanting to know you are happy. Take life by the horns, love with all the faith and strength that’s in you, for that’s the way to have a full life. Always your loving Gran.’

Tessa felt trapped. Emotion was tearing her in all directions: fear, anger, grief such as she’d never believed possible, those were uppermost, crushing the hope and excitement for the freedom she’d briefly believed would be hers.

‘Did you know about this?’ She tried to sound strong, self-assured so that Richard would see that she was mature enough to live by herself. But where? The house was to be sold . . . the furniture would go to the auction rooms . . . the car would go . . . there would be nothing left of the things that had been home to Gran and her. If she were that fourteen-year-old her grandmother had written the letter for, then she could have cried and no one would have been surprised. But she was grown up. Gran had known how she would feel if the time ever came that she was given the letter. Tessa was resolved not to fail her grandmother, but equally to let it be firmly understood that nineteen was a far cry from fourteen.

‘I was just a child when Gran wrote this; she wouldn’t expect you and Aunt Naomi to be tied to things that were said all those years ago.’

‘We talked about it in May when Mother was at the farm and you were holidaying with a friend in the Lake District. It was almost as though she had a premonition.’ Richard spoke gently, his manner making it even harder for Tessa to hang on to her composure. ‘Naomi has your room ready for you. You must have heard me telling Mr Sedgley that I mean us to be on the mid-morning ferry tomorrow.’

‘
Us?
I can’t do that!’ Tessa could feel her face twitching despite the effort she was making to hold back her tears. But her voice refused to be controlled; she heard it break, rise to a high pitch far different from what she had intended. ‘I’m not a piece of baggage to be parcelled up and put in your case. I’m
me.
I live
here
. I have a job; Mr and Mrs Briggs at the hotel have been kind and let me have time to do the things I had to this last week, but tomorrow I shall go back to work. I
will
! Even if you make me live with you, I can’t come yet. I have a job. I can’t just walk away as if it’s not important.’ She shouted defiantly but her final thread of composure was lost; she was sobbing uncontrollably. In her misery she didn’t care that her face was contorted and her mascara leaving black streaks on her cheeks.

‘Listen, Tessa.’ Richard reached across the table where they were sitting and took both her hands in his. ‘Mother knew how upset you would be – Naomi and I both expected you to feel as you do. If you hate living in the country—’

‘I won’t come. I told you – I’m
not coming
.
I’ll ask Mr Briggs if they’ll put me up at the hotel until I find somewhere of my own. I could work extra hours to make up for it,’ she managed between hiccoughing sobs.

‘Your work there is finished. I found the number of the hotel from Directory Enquiries and talked with him last night. I explained the situation and he completely understood. I suggested sending him a cheque for four weeks’ salary or however long notice was expected, but he wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘You had no right to interfere! Do you think that’s the sort of thing Gran would have wanted? You’re not my gaoler, even if you think you are.’

Richard was at a loss. Even allowing for grief and fright, surely hysterical behaviour like this wasn’t normal. He thought of the peaceful, busy routine at the farm; he imagined Naomi shouldering his work as well as her own. If only she could have been here perhaps she would have been able to take away some of Tessa’s fear – because surely it was fear and pent-up grief that was behind her outburst. He looked helplessly at Thomas Sedgley.

‘Now then, my dear’ – the elderly man took the cue – ‘you take this and wipe away your tears.’ He passed her a snow-white folded handkerchief and sent up a silent thank you when, without a word, she took it and started to mop up. ‘Now, I know I’m an outsider but I was very fond of your grandmother and she used to talk freely to me. I knew what was in the letter because she told me; and she told me, too, that it worried her that you wouldn’t want to go to live at this farm. I remember her words: “Even if Saint Peter lets me through the pearly gates, how can I be happy if I know Tessa is fighting what I’ve arranged for her? Make her understand, Tom, make her see that I want to know she’s there with the others. The three of them are all the family I have left and I shall rest easy if I know they are caring for each other”. I’ve thought of those words many a time over the years. She was a very special lady; we were all blessed to have had her.’

What a sorry sight Tessa was as she gave her face a final rub and returned his handkerchief, by this time smudged with mascara, eyeshadow and lipstick, generously diluted with tears.

‘Rejoice,’ she said with a hiccough, ‘that’s what she wants me to do. Can’t fail her, can I?’ For a second or two she was silent, but when she spoke again her voice was quiet. It was as if all the fight in her had been washed away with her tears. ‘I’ve got to do as she says. Just can’t picture what it’s going to be like. Sorry I made a scene. Didn’t mean to start crying – I started and couldn’t stop. It’s all so different. I ought to have realized. Just pictured living here, working at the hotel, everything the same except I’d be on my own. Was silly of me.’

‘If that were possible, my dear, then Amelia – your grandmother – would have no peace in her soul.’

Tessa nodded. Already the future was beginning to have a structure. She would pack all her things in her school trunk before she went to bed. And she’d take the photograph album, and that picture of Gran and her that the street photographer had taken by the pier in Bournemouth when they went for the day during the July sales. The house wouldn’t be theirs any longer; someone else would cut the roses next summer, but no one and nothing could take away memories. Chagleigh Farm was only a few miles from the coast; she’d find a job in a seaside hotel. Before she knew it she’d be twenty-one.

The greatest advantage of youth is its ability to hear the beckoning call of Life.

Her hysterical outburst had left her drained of emotion. How else could she have dragged her trunk from the roof space adjoining her bedroom and packed, clearing drawers and wardrobe? Habit made her fold each item carefully, training from years at boarding school. In normal circumstances packing a case always held excitement. But on that evening it held nothing: no anticipation, no aching misery. She felt as lifeless as a robot as she stripped her room. With drawers, wardrobe and bookshelf empty, furniture that had been part of her life as long as she could remember meant nothing. She felt no pain; she felt no hope.

In the same numb state, next morning she helped Richard carry her trunk out to the car. They were both making a conscious effort to be polite. He hoped that it might make a base to build on and was prepared to put the previous day’s scene out of his mind. She didn’t ask herself why it was she behaved with forced friendliness – perhaps she subconsciously knew that if she asked the question the answer would have melted the ice that protected her. She was doing it for her grandmother; deep in her heart she knew that was the truth, but her hurt was too new to probe.