The Winter Children (11 page)

Olivia looks out at the garden, and at the carefully tended shrubs beyond the walls, where the lawns stretch away. ‘Why don’t they just leave him here? He’s done a brilliant job. He obviously wants to stay and carry on looking after it.’

Dan shrugs. ‘He’s getting on. He won’t be able to work, and then who’ll look after him?’

‘So what are they going to do with him? Chuck him out?’

‘I can’t remember what Cheska said now. They’ve moved him on a bit. He was in our cottage originally. He’s been shunted on to a place further away from the
house.’

Olivia is struck with guilt. They’ve displaced him. He’s been turfed out and they’ve taken his home. Maybe he hates them. Does that mean there’s a strange, malevolent and
resentful old man wandering about, wishing them harm? But then, he did warn her about the laburnum. So he must be quite safe, surely.

‘I’m not sure what to make of him,’ she says, frowning.

‘Why not ask Cheska when she comes over? She ought to know what’s going on. It’s her house, after all.’

In her study in Geneva, Francesca is on the telephone, her eyes fixed on their garden outside.

‘Of course, Mr Howard. That’s perfectly fine. You’ve seen the plans. You know what we want. You’re at liberty to visit whenever you wish.’ She uses the voice she
employs when trying to get things done for her charity work: smooth, controlled, with quiet authority. She suspects she’s going to be using it quite a bit with this man. He is already
irritating the life out of her.

Mr Howard says cheerfully, ‘That’s very good to know, Mrs Huxtable. I will take full advantage of that, if you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.’

‘You do know that you have a very important piece of history in your possession, don’t you? I’m afraid we are obliged to make sure you look after it.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, a touch of ice in her voice. ‘I quite understand the value of our house. And I realise that all this interference is something I cannot change. Unfortunately. I’m afraid I must go now. Goodbye, Mr Howard.’ She clicks the call off and sighs with annoyance. As if the renovation of a
huge house isn’t enough to have on her plate, she has to put up with all these complications as well. She is unaccustomed to people standing in her way; usually, they do all they can to
ensure she is completely satisfied. Take the architect, for example – he couldn’t do enough to make her happy. His enormous bill sits on her desk, proof of the care and attention he
has lavished on her.

‘Mum . . .’ Olympia has slipped into the study, wheedling as usual. Now that her daughter is almost fourteen, she is constantly asking for things. Her requests seem to breed like the
Hydra: fulfil one, and three more grow in its place. Her boarding school has widened her social circle to include the children of the rich jet set, and now she wants to keep up with them: their
clothes, their gadgets, their holidays.

Francesca turns to smile at her. ‘What is it, darling?’

‘Can you ask Daddy for an extension on my credit card?’

‘Ask him yourself.’ She sighs with annoyance. ‘You haven’t maxed it out again, have you? It’s barely halfway through the month.’

Olympia looks sulky. ‘I can’t help it. Things cost money. What am I supposed to do about it?’

Francesca looks over at her daughter. Adolescence has been kind so far: Olympia has clear skin and bright eyes; her hair is long and fashionably tousled. Her clothes are the most expensive money
can buy and she is more attached to her phone than ever, now a crystal-studded model. She barely acknowledges her mother except when she wants something, which, at least, is often.

What was I like at her age?

She remembers her waitressing job in the local cafe to earn enough money to buy the few clothes she could afford. She remembers long hours in charity shops looking for second-hand bargains and
loading up with used books to read in her tiny bedroom away from the noise and chaos of her family. She hated the way she looked, and went around hiding behind dyed-black hair grown long, and
shrinking inside baggy clothes and heavy lace-up boots. She never had one tenth of the comfort and money that Olympia takes for granted. And yet . . . she was driven where her daughter is languid
and bored. She was interested in the world, where Olympia is only excited by the doings of her tiny, privileged circle and its constant acquisition. Olympia’s school reported that her results
were not as good as they’d hoped: the only lesson she really applies herself to is skiing. Thousands of dollars in fees, and she can ski.

Did I do something wrong? I thought if I gave them everything I never had, they’d be happy. But it only seems to make them discontented.

‘So?’ demands Olympia.

‘I told you. Ask your father.’

‘When will I get to see him? He’s never here!’ shouts Olympia, cross. ‘Why can’t you do it? It’s typical. You don’t care how much I suffer.’
Bursting into noisy tears, she runs out.

This is normal
, Francesca tells herself. But it stabs her nonetheless. The sheer ingratitude of it. The silly selfishness.
But she’s still a child.

A fear has begun to haunt her, that she’s made a vital mistake along the way with her children that means they will grow up to be like this permanently: ungrateful and selfish. They will
never understand her, nor she them. She loves them but more and more she longs for them as they used to be, as very young children, before they became so grasping. She is struck by a strong
desire to go back and undo her mistakes, to be firmer and less indulgent.
It’s too late now.

She sighs and turns back to the file of correspondence on the desk in front of her. It’s thick with documents. Walt’s declaration that he had bought Renniston Hall turned out to be a
little premature. It was only the beginning of months of long and tortuous negotiations, but once they were out of the way, the real trouble started. Architects were commissioned to redesign the
house to provide the layout necessary for modern living: bathrooms for every bedroom, dressing rooms, state-of-the-art kitchen, home cinema and all the rest of it. Elizabethan houses were not
created with such things in mind, and the struggle with the conservation officers began. It wasn’t just them – the two men from the council she’d grown to loathe – but also
the officer from Preserving England, who seems to have just as much say as anyone else, despite the fact that the house no longer belongs to the society.

Tom Howard is charming enough, and good-looking in his way, but he has an implacable will and a veneration for the past that borders on the obsessive. It would be different, Francesca feels, if so much of what he says weren’t theoretical. No one exists who actually saw how the house was
originally lived in or how it was run or why certain things were built. No one knows how much has been knocked down and reconstructed, or altered or changed. It’s only conjecture. And yet,
Tom Howard seems to think he has a direct route to the past via his imagination. He’s knowledgeable, certainly, with a limitless bank of information on historic architecture. But it
irritates Francesca that he seems to see no value in the present, or a place for the house to evolve into somewhere fit for a twenty-first-century family.

Sometimes she thinks she could happily wring his neck.

And, as she expected, the burden of the project landed in her lap. Once Walt ticked off the plans, he handed the whole thing over to her, and was waiting only to be told when the house was ready to move in to.

And that will be years away at the rate we’re going.

But that suits her purpose now. In fact, she is doing nothing to hurry along the work. Not now that Dan and Olivia and the twins are there. She smiles to herself.

In two days I’ll be with them. Dan can’t keep them away from me any longer.

On the plane, Francesca is impatient. She spends the short flight to London sipping sparkling mineral water and scanning Olivia’s Facebook page for news. She’s been visiting it
almost obsessively for two years, and finds the lack of activity frustrating. There has been the occasional picture of the babies, but after a brief flurry when they arrived in Argentina, and some photos to mark birthdays, there has been almost nothing. Olivia does post, but she tends to concentrate on plants and
flowers, putting up photographs of things she has seen with a little comment about how beautiful they are, or why they are flourishing.

If I have to look at another bloody mimosa flower . . .
Francesca can’t get excited about plants, but luckily she has discovered that she can access the Facebook page of
Olivia’s sister, and that she has been much better at putting up pictures of the children. There are plenty of images of her own offspring to wade through, but they have provided Francesca
with a fuller picture of the lives of the twins in Argentina. She clicks there now, to look back at the library of photographs. She feels quite familiar with the house, a white-painted villa with a
wooden veranda, and with the lush green lawns, the well-stocked flower beds and shrubs, and the climbing frame with swings dangling from it. The twins’ boy cousins are older, skinny-limbed
and brown, scampering up and down the climbing frame, diving into the pool, or playing cricket. The twins are often somewhere in the frame, waddling with toddler slowness behind, or clutching fat
hands around the rope of the swing. While the bigger boys are like slender starfish, all legs and arms, in the water, the twins bob inside float suits and armbands, floppy hats shading their
faces, white suncream smeared over their plump arms. Olivia is there too, holding them on the swing and pushing carefully, or in the pool, eyes crinkled against the sun, hair dark with water and
drawn back into a ponytail.

She looks tired, though. Even the tan can’t disguise it.
Francesca is glad to see that motherhood is taking its toll on Olivia. That is, after all, only fair. Olivia is still plump
from her pregnancy, her face full. Even that doesn’t hide the new furrows and lines that have appeared on her forehead and the groove that leads from her nostrils to the edges of her
mouth.

Dan doesn’t look a bit different.
She gazes hungrily at the two images that have captured Dan. In one, he has Stanley on his shoulders and the photograph is taken from below so that
the little boy is outlined against the vivid blue sky, bending past Dan’s head to examine curiously the camera being pointed at him. Dan is looking up and laughing, his hands wrapped tightly
round Stanley’s ankles. His eyes are navy against the turquoise of the sky, his skin tanned to a light coffee colour, his hair a little more silvered than she remembers. He looks happy and
full of love for the little boy on his shoulders. Stanley is a podgy, golden-brown baby with soft brown curls and inquisitive blue eyes, his mouth open half in smile and half in exclamation.

He’s so beautiful.
She stares at the picture, even though she’s seen it hundreds of time before and the image is so familiar she could practically draw it.
Our son.

The words roll around her mind, delicious and wicked.
I shouldn’t. Not my son
. Olivia’s son. Dan’s son. And yet . . .

Precious little thing. Isn’t he adorable? He looks like Fred when he was just a baby. I’m sure that hair will darken by the time he’s ten, just like Fred’s
did.

Something in her longs to hold the child in the picture, to reach out and clasp him to her and savour the soft warmth of his body, the smell of his hair, and the beating of his heart next to hers. She wants to feel his existence close to her own and
revel in the fact that he is here because of her.

She pulls up a picture of Beattie. Dan is in this one, but so is Olivia and so the emotional effect is more muted. Olivia is holding the little girl, who is squinting in the bright sunshine and
pointing at whoever is taking the photograph. Her hair is darker than it was at birth, a golden caramel with hints of the dark brown to come. Straight and cut just above her shoulders in a long
bob.
Like mine.
She can’t make out the colour of the little girl’s eyes, but she suspects they are the same green as her own and feels certain that this is the child whose looks
could betray the secret. Of course this little girl will be like her, it’s inevitable. She thinks of Olympia, who takes after Walt’s side of the family with her fairness. The difference
in their looks has never bothered her, except at odd moments when she’s wondered how on earth she produced within her someone who looks so utterly unlike her. Now, the irony . . . that
Olivia has done the same.

Beattie is the daughter I was meant to have.

The thought floats through her mind and she gasps, horrified at herself. She dismisses it at once.
Of course that’s not true.
The implication that Olympia is not the right result
is not one she can tolerate. But still, she gazes, fascinated, at the little girl as she sits on Olivia’s hip and has the same feeling she does when she meets a friend of hers in Geneva who
adopted children. It’s a creeping sense that, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is something not quite genuine about the relationship between the mother and the adopted child. Of course, there is love, compassion, kindness . . . but the true, profound bond of the parent to its offspring? Can that really grow between genetic strangers? She knows it’s wrong to think that it can’t. If she had to argue
the case, she would declare that mothering a child is more than sharing its genes. But deep down, a little voice is telling her that Beattie would love her more than she loves Olivia if she only
knew the truth.

She closes the Facebook page and switches off her phone. They are coming in to land. The whole thing is getting closer to her now. She’s only hours away.

What are you trying to do?
she asks herself. Nervousness – or fear – bubbles in her stomach.
What’s your plan?

There is no real plan, just a slow movement towards whatever is meant to be. She has crazy fantasies sometimes, ones she knows would be intolerable in real life. She conjures them at night in
the darkness when she can’t sleep and is possessed by a kind of wicked excitement. A strange and enticing future beckons, one that means certain key people have to be disposed of. In fantasy,
she can casually wipe them out, but in real life that would be impossible. Not to be considered. Very, very wrong.