Till We Meet Again (12 page)

He had only downed one scotch when he asked her if she knew where Father kept his will.

‘I haven’t even thought about that,’ she said, shocked by such haste.

‘Well, I suggest you think on it now,’ he said sarcastically. ‘He might have made some requests for his funeral in it.’

‘It’s not that at all,’ she said, seeing right through him. ‘You just want to know what he’s left you.’

He caught hold of her arm and twisted it right up her back until she shrieked with pain. ‘So what if I do? That’s more honest than you staying here pretending to be Florence Nightingale when all you really are is a lazy, fat parasite.’

The following day Martin left, dropping in to see Father’s solicitor on his way home. He rang Susan that evening and curtly told her to go ahead and arrange for the funeral at All Saints Church. As there had to be a post mortem because Father hadn’t been examined by the doctor for several months before his death, the funeral was delayed for some two weeks, and in that time Martin didn’t call her or come back once.

During that time Susan felt very strange – weak, weepy and completely disoriented. There had never been a time when she was alone in the house, or when she hadn’t had to cook for someone else. There were strong winds that autumn, and they howled right round the house making her nervous at being alone. She jumped at every little noise, she had to leave a light on at night, and although a couple of the neighbours invited her to stay with them for the nights, she felt unable to leave the house.

One day she would feel exhilarated that she was free now to go off with Liam, the next she was looking for obstacles to prevent her. She knew so little about men, so how could she know whether she could trust Liam? Then there was the house. She expected it had been left jointly to her and Martin, so it would have to be sold, but until that happened someone had to stay here and look after it. She didn’t want to have to see Martin again, she was terrified of him and she knew he’d be even nastier once there was no one else around to hear and see him.

What kind of job could she get? She wasn’t qualified to do anything except housework. She felt so low in herself that she even found herself agreeing with Martin’s opinion of her.

Martin came again for the funeral. It was scarcely over when he informed her of the contents of the will. He read it to her aloud, knowing full well how much it would upset her.

‘To my daughter Susan I leave the sum of two thousand pounds and my service revolver,’ he read first, looking up from the will and smirking at her.

‘To my beloved son Martin,’ he continued, his voice rising with malicious intent. ‘I bequeath the rest of my estate. The Rookery, the family home, with all its contents. My savings, and my stocks and shares. I hope this will in some little way compensate for any estrangement Martin might have felt from both myself and his mother over the years. We both loved him dearly and were so very proud of his achievements.’

Susan felt a tightening of her gut as she remembered both the wording of that will and Martin’s smug grin that accompanied the reading of it. She wouldn’t have minded if her father had left everything to a charity, just as long as she and her brother had been treated equally. But why was there no ‘beloved’ in front of her name? Not one word of thanks for caring for her mother for all those years. She had in fact been treated like a servant, paid off when her services were no longer required, with not one shred of thought for her future.

It was, she knew now, the beginning of the end, for Martin unleashed something within her that day which was to change her for ever.

Susan pressed her face into her pillow. Even after all this time, and even more painful events, the memory of that day still roused such intense anger inside her. How different might it have been if she had managed to keep in contact with Beth? She wouldn’t have let Martin take everything from her.

Just thinking of Beth made the tightness within her subside a little. Although it had been a monumental shock to meet up with her again, and distressing that Beth should see what she’d become, she couldn’t help but be glad she’d come back into her life.

A smile seemed to creep up from within her as she remembered how even as a child, Beth always knew how to handle every situation. She was the one with the ideas, and the push to make them happen.

Beth had even solved the problem of how to get over Susan’s embarrassment at buying her first bra. They were thirteen, and it was only when the weather grew hot that summer and Susan was wearing more flimsy clothes that her mother had noticed how big her breasts had grown. She kept on saying Susan must have a bra, and ordered her to go to the ladies’ underwear shop in town to be fitted.

Susan attempted to go in there twice, but each time she saw the formidable women in the shop, she got so frightened and embarrassed that she backed off at the last moment, which made her mother very angry because she didn’t have time to go with her. Then Beth arrived for the summer.

She noticed the new bosom immediately, but instead of making Susan feel more embarrassed, she was envious, for she was still flat-chested. Then Susan confided in her about her bra-buying problem.

‘You don’t have to put up with those old biddies prodding you around,’ Beth said confidently. ‘I’ll measure you. I’ve seen my sister do it. Then we buy one from Marks and Spencer. You can try it on in the toilets, and if it doesn’t fit right we take it back and change it again.’

Susan didn’t mind Beth measuring her one bit, even if she was shocked to find she was already a 36. It was Beth who selected a pretty lacy bra from Marks, without batting an eyelid, and oversaw the fitting of it in the public toilets. Fortunately it was right first time, but it was Beth’s praise once Susan had got her dress on back over it that made her feel wonderful.

‘Gosh, you look really grown up,’ she gasped. ‘You just looked chubby before, now you look like a pin-up girl. You’re so lucky.’

But then, with Beth beside her Susan got far bolder about all sorts of things that summer. Beth taught her to do handstands, to smoke a cigarette, and how to put on makeup and nail polish. She had a little bag of makeup her sister had given her, and though neither of them was old enough to wear it in public, Beth claimed they needed to practise for when they were. Out at the little camp they’d made in the woods the previous year, they’d pretend it was a beauty parlour, and take it in turns to beautify each other.

Susan could hear Julie snoring in the bunk above her. Usually it irritated her, but tonight it gave her the same comfort she’d felt when she and Beth used to lie side by side in a field reading.

She knew she was right in dismissing Beth as her solicitor. It wasn’t fair to burden her with a case she couldn’t win, nor did she want her trawling through the more shameful aspects of her past. But she was touched that Beth still cared enough to want to defend her. That was far more than she deserved.

Chapter seven

‘So you want me to take over?’ Steven Smythe looked at Beth questioningly. His deep blue eyes were almost popping out of his head with surprise. ‘Are you quite sure?’

Belt felt irritated. It was Monday morning and she had thought of little else but Susan and her defence all weekend. It had been difficult enough for her to call Steven into her office and explain her predicament, for Steven wasn’t one for being satisfied with just the bald facts. He’d already asked so many questions which she saw as irrelevant, and the fact that as usual he looked a mess didn’t help. He had spilt something on his tie, his shirt was badly ironed, and his fair hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb in weeks, let alone a pair of scissors. Could a lawyer who gave so little thought to his personal appearance handle something as serious as this?

‘I’ve said I’m sure, haven’t I?’ Beth retorted irritably, itching to tell him to smarten himself up. ‘I’ve already explained why. Susan’s afraid our childhood connection might cause problems.’

‘I understand that all right,’ he said equally sharply. ‘Why me though? Why not Brendan or Jack? They’ve had more experience in murder trials.’

Brendan and Jack were the two senior partners in the firm.

‘Because neither of them would allow me to help,’ she said, thinking the truth was more likely to influence him. ‘Look, I care about Susan, even if our friendship was a very long time ago. I don’t believe she could help what she did and I can’t let her go down for life without attempting to prevent it.’

‘What if I said I didn’t want you poking your nose in either?’ he said.

She was just about to snap at Steven again when she realized he was teasing. His blue eyes were twinkling with amusement. She thought then that perhaps this might work, maybe they did have something in common after all. ‘You won’t.’ She smiled. ‘You need my help, you haven’t handled a murder before.’

‘You should smile more often,’ he said, looking hard at her. ‘It makes you beautiful.’

‘Don’t start creeping,’ she retorted. ‘Now, I’d better fill you in with everything she’s told me so far.’

‘Well, that’s it,’ Beth said half an hour later. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’d say there’s almost enough already to present a case for diminished responsibility,’ he agreed. ‘That is, if she can be persuaded to drop pleading guilty to murder. But we need to know who the father of her baby was, and where she went for the eighteen months when she didn’t appear to have been in Bristol. Might she have been with him?’

Beth shrugged. ‘Go and ask her.’

‘I’ll go tomorrow afternoon, I’ve got someone in court in the morning. Shall I tell her you want to visit her too?’

Beth nodded. ‘Be very tactful about it though. Try and sound her out to see if she still wants me as a friend.’

Steven smiled. ‘Tact is my speciality, I have been told I’m so tactful I’m ineffectual.’

‘If you get more out of her than I did, then I’ll scotch that rumour,’ Beth said. ‘I appreciate you being so understanding, Steven, I half expected you to tell me to sod off.’

Steven gave her a long, cool look. ‘It’s good to find you’ve got a heart tucked away under those designer clothes. I’d begun to doubt it.’

He left her office, and Beth sat down at her desk to look at the case files of clients she was currently dealing with. But she found as she opened the first one that she couldn’t concentrate enough to take in what she was reading.

Leaning her elbows on her desk and supporting her head in her hands, she thought about Steven’s last remark to her. She didn’t mind that until today he’d thought her heartless. Even people who knew her far better than him had often offered that opinion about her. Perhaps it was only because of meeting up with Susan again, and all the emotions that had surfaced, that she herself knew it wasn’t actually true.

But what had started people seeing her that way? Was it her manner? Or did she do something which created an image that never left her? Did she inherit it from her father? He was after all the best example of real heartlessness she knew.

‘Probably,’ she murmured to herself as she picked up the hastily written notes about Susan she’d jotted down over the weekend to remind herself of everything she had to tell Steven today. She checked through them to make sure she had covered everything.

One of Steven’s irrelevant questions came back to her. ‘Why did you go to Stratford-upon-Avon for a holiday? I’d have thought Sussex by the sea was a better place to be in August.’

Her brief answer to that was that she went with her mother, Alice, to visit her Aunt Rose. But as she thought back on the real reason they were there, she suddenly felt very shaky and remembered that was the first time she was accused of being heartless.

Beth gripped the arms of her chair, seeing herself in her mind’s eye as a ten-year-old in a faded, outgrown pink dress, standing by her mother’s bed as she flung clothes into a suitcase.

‘You’re as heartless as your father!’ Alice sobbed. ‘You didn’t think of what this would do to me, all you care about is yourself.’

Through the bedroom window Beth could see plump, jolly Aunt Rose talking to Uncle Eddie as he leaned against the railings on the drive smoking a cigarette. Their car, a green Rover 90, was highly polished as always. It was Uncle Eddie’s pride and joy, and he’d come down in it at Beth’s request to take her and her mother away to safety in Stratford-upon-Avon.

‘I didn’t ring them for me,’ Beth insisted, beginning to cry, for her mother could barely see out of one eye it was so swollen and black, and each time she moved she winced with the pain in her ribs. ‘I did it so Daddy couldn’t hurt you again.’

A week earlier, school had broken up for the summer holidays. Beth had been out playing with a friend, and when she arrived home about four-thirty in the afternoon she had found her mother lying on the kitchen floor.

Beth knew immediately by the blood on Alice’s mouth that her father had hit her again. She also knew that this time her mother had to be far more seriously hurt because usually she went to great pains to hide these incidents from Beth.

She was frightened because of the blood. Robert, her fifteen-year-old brother, would have known what to do, but he wasn’t home, he was working on a farm some miles away for the whole summer. So she knew she’d have to deal with it herself.

‘Can you hear me, Mummy?’ she asked, kneeling down beside her mother.

To Beth’s relief Mother opened her eyes. ‘Just help me up, Beth,’ she said in a strange, croaky voice. ‘I must have fallen over.’

She took a long time to get up, and she was holding her side and wincing with the pain. Beth helped her into the sitting room, got her to lie down on the couch and then brought a basin of water and a cloth to bathe her face for her.

‘It’s probably not as bad as it looks,’ Mother said. ‘I only stayed on the floor because I felt dizzy.’

Beth was used to her mother telling fibs about the injuries she always seemed to be getting. Serena, her older sister, had explained to her once that Mummy didn’t want anyone to know Daddy did those things. Last time Serena came home from her college and saw their mother with another black eye, she’d got really cross with her and said she ought to leave him. Robert had joined in too and said he agreed, and that they could get a flat in Hastings.

Beth wasn’t old enough to understand the complexities of grown-up relationships, but she knew she would run away from anyone who hurt her. Her mother’s face was swelling up almost as Beth looked at it, and as she was alone in the house with her, with her father likely to come back very soon, she was afraid.

‘Shall we run away, Mummy?’ she whispered to her. ‘I could pack us some things.’

‘Don’t be silly, Beth,’ her mother said weakly, beginning to cry. ‘I can hardly walk, let alone run. Besides, where would I go with you to take care of?’

‘We could go to Aunt Rose’s,’ Beth said without any hesitation. Aunt Rose was her mother’s sister and in Beth’s opinion she was the kindest, jolliest person in the world. Rose and her husband Eddie didn’t have any children, and they had a caravan. Two or three times a year they went touring with it, and they always came to Copper Beeches to see Alice and her children en route. Dozens of times Beth had heard Rose suggest that she brought the children up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a holiday. But they had never been.

‘I couldn’t let Rose see me like this,’ her mother said, dabbing her bruised face with the wet cloth and wincing with the pain. ‘She’d blame your father.’

‘Well, it was him, wasn’t it?’ Beth said. ‘He’s mean and cruel. I hate him.’

‘You mustn’t say such things,’ her mother exclaimed in horror. ‘He’s your father.’

That made no sense to Beth. But she tucked a blanket round her mother and said she would make her a cup of tea.

After Beth had put the kettle on she went out into the stable yard and sat down on a bench to think about what she should do. Her father’s old rusting Humber wasn’t there, and that meant he’d probably gone into Hastings and wouldn’t come back until late that night.

Everything about her parents and her home life was a puzzle to Beth. Seen from the end of the gravel drive, with pasture land railed off on either side, Copper Beeches looked very splendid, especially in summer when the rows of beech trees almost met and formed an archway. The house had wide steps up to a large studded front door, and with its long arched windows, tall chimneys and the stable block to one side and a conservatory on the other, it looked like the home of very rich people.

But once you were half-way up the drive it soon became apparent that this wasn’t so. The stucco on the house was falling off, the window-frames were crumbling, and many panes of glass in the conservatory had fallen out years before. Weeds grew between the cobbles in the stable yard, and the roof was sagging. Her mother struggled to try to keep the lawn cut and the flower beds tidy, but as she so often said to her children, it was a house that had been built to be cared for by a team of servants, and it was as much as she could do to keep the inside clean and tidy.

None of Beth’s friends at school lived in such a big house, but they all had better clothes and toys than her. Their houses might be tiny in comparison, but they were mostly much nicer. Copper Beeches was dingy, it smelled of damp and mould, and everything, from the furniture and carpets to the bedding, was worn out.

In every other family she knew, fathers went to work, but not hers. He didn’t cut the grass or mend things, he just pottered about, tinkering with his car, or sat in the library reading. In the evenings he mostly went into nearby Battle to the pub. Beth was pretty certain too that no one else at her school had a father who hit their mother.

He was always saying, ‘I have a position to maintain,’ which sounded to Beth as if this was supposed to be a reason why he didn’t work, but it made no sense to her. She had once asked Robert to explain, but he just laughed and said, ‘His position is the joke of the village.’ That didn’t make any sense to her either.

Serena, however, had spoken more plainly when Beth asked her about it. She said, ‘It means our father is a terrible snob, and a parasite. A parasite is something which lives off something else. Like a flea. Father lives off rent he gets from tenants. He’s too lazy to do a hand’s turn himself.’

Beth wished either Robert or Serena was here now to consult. But Robert only popped home now and then while he had this farm job, and Serena was working in a restaurant for the summer, so she wouldn’t be home at all. Telephoning Aunt Rose seemed the most sensible thing to do.

So she went back into the house, made her mother some tea, and found some change and her aunt’s telephone number. Then, once she felt she could leave her mother for a while, she rode her bike down to the phone box in the village.

After Beth had blurted out how she’d found her mother, Aunt Rose had said she and her husband would get there as soon as they could. ‘Don’t tell Mummy you’ve rung me,’ she said warningly. ‘I don’t want to give her time to think up excuses, or your father an opportunity to prevent her leaving. Just go home and look after her till we get there.’

So that was exactly what Beth did. And now, two days later, Rose and Eddie were here, just as they’d promised, so Beth couldn’t understand for the life of her why her mother called her ‘heartless’. Surely if she’d done nothing, that would have been heartless?

Beth came out of her reverie, a little shocked that after all these years that incident still stung. It seemed to her that her mother should have praised her for being cool and level-headed. A more emotional child would have run screaming to a neighbour, and then everyone would have known what a brute Monty Powell was. But then, her mother wasn’t blessed with much common sense, that was evident in the way she stuck by her husband, however badly he treated her and his children.

Beth didn’t really believe that character was passed on genetically. She’d grown up with siblings who were considerably older than herself, so she’d learned from them rather than from her parents. Seeing her mother’s weakness from an early age had shown her that stoic acceptance only brought grief. Likewise, her father’s laziness had instilled the work ethic in her. They were perfect examples of how she didn’t want to be.

Beth sighed, flicking through the files on her desk, not really reading them. If only her mother had listened to Aunt Rose that summer and filed for divorce. But she wouldn’t, she was too worried at leaving Robert at home with his father, and perhaps too she believed that even a brutal, lazy snob of a father was better than no father at all.

It seemed strangely ironic to Beth that the same summer she realized how dysfunctional her own family was, she was introduced to the Wrights and decided they were the exact opposite. Indeed, she’d taken the images of their perfect, happy family with her right through to adulthood.

She could still picture the Wrights’ house, The Rookery, as clearly now as if she’d seen it just a few days ago, a mysterious-looking place, almost invisible from the road because of the thick bushes and trees surrounding it. It had tall chimneys and latticed windows, and the garden ran down to the river, lock and weir. She remembered now that Susan had said there were no rooks in the trees any more, as her father always shot them because he couldn’t stand the noise they made.