Winter Solstice (17 page)

Nicola laid down her handbag on the seat of a chair that stood against the wall. She began to unbutton her jacket.

“Back for good?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to see.” Carrie moved forward and gave her sister a kiss, which Nicola, perfunctorily, returned.

“But when did you get home?” She shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it down on top of her bag.

“About a week ago. But I’ve been fairly occupied, so I didn’t ring Ma till this morning.”

“Well, I never did.” She gave Dodie a cold look.

“I suppose Mother’s been telling you about all the drama. Getting you on her side.” Dodie and Nicola were clearly, at this moment, on the worst of terms. Carrie decided that Lucy must have been having a hellish time between the pair’ of them.

Dodie looked hurt.

“Nicola, that’s not fair,” she protested.

“No, but I bet it’s true.” Nicola settled herself with a thump in the middle of the sofa.

“Anyway, it’s too late now. I’ve booked my flight. I’m going on the eighteenth of December. For two weeks.”

A pregnant silence followed this defiant announcement. Dodie turned her head away and stared at the flickering electric coals. Disapproval emanated from every bone in her body. Nicola caught Carrie’s eye and made a face, as if the two of them were in alliance against their mother. Carrie did not return her glance, because, at that moment, she didn’t like either of them very much.

But it was no good getting caught up in the ongoing row. She said, as evenly as she could, “There seems to be a problem with Lucy.”

“She was asked to Florida, but she refuses to come with me.”

“I do see her point.”

“Oh, you would.”

“Ma suggested that I look after her for Christmas.”

“You?” Nicola made the word insulting. And then she thought for an instant, and said it again, and this time it didn’t sound insulting at all, but quite different. A brilliant notion that had not previously occurred to her.

“You.”

“But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“No house. No home.”

“Ranfurly Road?”

“Still let.”

Dodie now chose to chip in to the conversation.

“I thought Carrie might have taken Lucy to stay with your father. In Cornwall. But apparently that’s out of the question as well.”

“Why?” Nicola demanded.

Carrie told her.

“A dearth of space.”

“And bloody Miles and his bloody wife won’t have her, the selfish sods. Excuses, excuses on all sides.” She chewed her thumbnail.

“Anyway, I’m going. I’m going to Florida with Randall, and nobody’s going to stop me. I haven’t had a holiday forever, and I’m going.”

Carrie, sympathetic in a way, but thinking of Lucy, tried reasoning.

“But, Nicola …”

She got no further. Nicola rounded on her.

“It’s all very well for you.” Carrie wondered how many thousands of times in her life she had heard that familiar wail. It’s all very well for you.

“You’ve never had a family, you don’t know what it’s like being tied, day in, day out, to a child. Term time, and holidays. Keeping Lucy amused, dealing with problems at school. All on your own. As far as I can see, your life has been one long holiday. Nothing but skiing, and having a good time. Mountains and young people and gliihwein parties. And never coming back from Austria. It’s years since we set eyes on you. Not a care in the world.”

Carrie, with some difficulty, kept her voice even.

“Nicola, you clearly haven’t the faintest idea what I’ve been doing. My job was public relations officer for a prestigious travel firm, and each morning nine people had to report in to my office. I had a secretary, and an apartment of my own, and in high season, I very often worked seven days a week. So let’s hear a little less about irresponsibility.”

“It’s not the same.” Mulish, Nicola stuck to her grudge.

“Not the same as bringing up a child.”

Carrie gave up.

“Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Nicola ignored her.

“It’s up to you, Mother. You’ll have to forget about Bournemouth for the moment….”

Dodie, not unnaturally, became incensed.

“I shall do no such thing.”

“You can scarcely leave Lucy here on her own….”

“And why should I be the one to make the sacrifice … Carrie suddenly knew that she could listen to this pointless sniping no longer. The two of them were entrenched, and all the argument in the world was not going to come to any sensible conclusion.

“Do stop” she told them sharply.

Rather surprisingly, they did. After a bit, Nicola said, “So, have you got any bright suggestions, Carrie?”

“I don’t know. I only know that we’re talking about your daughter, not about a dog that has to go into a kennel. If you don’t mind, I’d like to go and have a chat with her, since she couldn’t talk less sense than either her mother or her grandmother.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Where’s her room?”

“Next to the kitchen.” Nicola gave a jerk of her head. “At the back …”

Carrie went to the door. As she opened it, her mother spoke again.

“See if you can persuade her to be a good girl and simply … go.”

Carrie did not reply. She went from the room and closed the door gently behind her.

Farnham Court had been built at a time when middle-class families were still expected to employ resident servants. Therefore each apartment had been designed with a small and undistinguished room for a housemaid or a hard-worked cook-general. Lucy Wesley, when she came to live with her grandmother after her parents’ divorce, had been given this room, and did not really care that it was both cramped and sunless because it was her own.

The window, veiled in folds of white voile, looked out onto the well in the centre of the building, at the bottom of which was a paved courtyard with a few tubs containing shrubs and bulbs which the hall porter was meant to keep trim and watered, so there was virtually no view. But the walls were yellow, which imparted the illusion of sunlight, and Lucy had her bed, piled with teddies, and a large table with drawers for doing her homework, and lots of shelves for her huge collection of books. Her computer sat on the table, and there were lamps and a small television set, and a sheepskin rug on the blue carpet. When her school friends came to visit, they were always loud with envy and admiration, mostly because the space belonged to Lucy only, and she didn’t have to share it with some tiresome younger sister and a clutter of sibling’s possessions.

It was a very tidy room because Lucy was an extremely tidy person. On the shelves, her books stood in straight and regimented lines; her bed was smooth, her clothes folded. At school, her desk was the same, with pencils sharpened and exercise books squared and neatly stacked. Once a week, Mrs. Burgess, who came to clean for her grandmother, went through Lucy’s room with hoover and duster and left it smelling strongly of lavender polish. But from time to time, driven by a sort of housewifely compulsion, Lucy cleaned it again herself, polishing the mirror of her dressing-table and the silver frame that held the photograph of her father.

She missed him dreadfully, not simply as a person, but because, like a piece of furniture that had lost a leg, with his going all sense of family had collapsed, fallen sideways, crooked and useless; and Lucy knew mat it was unmendable and would never be the same again. She had been seven years old at the time of her parents’ divorce. A bad age (though could there possibly be such a thing as a good age?). Still a small child, but old enough to know exactly what was happening. Which was that the fabric of existence had come apart, and that she and her mother were left to put together the detritus of all that remained. They had moved in with Gran, and Lucy had thought for a bit that this was a temporary arrangement, but slowly accepted the fact that it was for good. For some reason, despite disagreements and occasional rows, it seemed to suit both women, and as nobody ever bothered to ask Lucy’s opinion, she kept it to herself.

From time to time, she saw her father, but his new wife, who was called Marilyn, was wary of involvement, and clearly had no interest in children or stepdaughters, or anything except her absorbing job; otherwise, surely, she would have had babies of her own by now. She and Miles did not even have a proper house with a garden, but a flat, and it was the sort of flat that, if you couldn’t be bothered to cook dinner, you telephoned and a snacky sort of meal was delivered at the door, on a trolley.

Marilyn was certainly not the sort of person one could confide in, and Lucy felt she could no longer confide in her father, because of divided loyalties on both their parts. Sometimes she felt that she would burst if she didn’t find someone adult to talk to. Her headmistress, Miss Maxwell-Brown, was exactly that sort of a person, and had, every now and then in the course of a private interview, intimated quite clearly that if Lucy had something to say, then Miss Maxwell-Brown was more than happy to listen. But Lucy’s reserve, and that same tiresome loyalty, got in the way. And she was terrified of anybody being sorry for her, as though she were some sort of orphan. So, “No, I’m all right,” she had insisted.

“Really, everything’s all right.” And, reluctantly, Miss Maxwell-Brown would let her go.

Now, at a quarter to twelve on a Friday morning, she had finished her homework (it had taken since after breakfast) and was writing in her diary. The diary was fat as a little Bible, leather-bound, and with its own tiny lock and key. It had smooth thick paper that was a pleasure to write upon, and had been a present from Cornwall. Happy Christmas, Lucy, was written upon the flyleaf, from Grandfather, Serena, Amy, and Ben.

They never forgot Christmas and birthdays, which was good of them, because Lucy had been a baby when that particular marriage broke up, and she had no memory of Jeffrey Sutton, and of course had never met Serena, or Amy or Ben. Sometimes, when life felt really bleak, she lay in bed and wove fantasies about them, about being asked to go and stay and-even less likely-being allowed by Mummy and Gran to make the trip. She planned it all in her mind. A taxi to Paddington and then the train, and being met somewhere with a palm tree and a blue sea, being taken to a house in a wonderful garden, close to a beach, perhaps, and where the sea winds would blow in through the open window of her bedroom. And having Ben and Amy would be like having brothers and sisters of her own.

Lucy had kept up the diary ever since the day she had received it. It wasn’t so much a diary as a notebook, because there were no dates, just lovely clean pages, which meant that you wrote the date yourself, and then the day’s doings underneath. Sometimes, there was little to record, but other days, if she had been to the cinema or to a concert with the rest of her class, there was quite a lot to remember, and she could use up two or three pages. She got a lot of satisfaction writing, with her best pen, on the thick creamy paper. She had a passion for notebooks, paper, pens, the smell of ink, all the tools of writing. Stationery shops were her most favourite, and she seldom emerged from one without a little box of coloured paper-clips, a packet of postcards, or a new red-ink Biro.

She wrote:

Mummy has gone to the travel agent this morning. She went right after breakfast. She and Gran are scarcely speaking to each other because of Christmas and Bournemouth and Florida. I wish they would understand how I would hate Florida. You can’t swim all day in a pool, and I don’t like Randall that much, or ice-cream, or watching videos.

The diary was better than having nobody to confide in, but a person would be better. She laid down her pen and gazed out at the grey morning beyond the floaty, white voile curtains. She thought about Carrie, Mummy’s younger sister, and a splendid aunt. Carrie would be perfect, because she talked to you as though you were a grownup, and yet was always prepared to do exciting and innovative things. Before she disappeared to Austria and never came home again, Carrie had been Lucy’s saviour, the giver of special treats, like going to see La Fille Mal Gardee at the Opera House, or outings to Kew on the first warm spring days. Carrie made even the National History Museum fun and interesting; and once they had gone down the river together in a boat, all the way to Tower Bridge, and had lunch on board. All of London, seen from the water, had become a foreign city, unfamiliar, with towers and spires washed in sunlight.

She picked up her pen again.

I wouldn’t have minded spending Christmas with Dad and Marilyn, but they‘re going away to ski. Marilyn says it’s a long-standing engagement. I’m sure Daddy would have put it off but of course she wouldn‘t let him. I don’t know what has to be so special about Christmas anyway, and why everybody makes such a fuss. Anyway, this afternoon I’m going to the pictures with Emma Forbes and then back to tea with her.

While Lucy sat in her bedroom, doing homework and now writing in her diary, beyond the closed door, Gran was living her own tidy life. Every now and then during the course of the morning, Lucy had heard the telephone ring, and Gran’s low voice, chatting away. And, about an hour ago, someone had rung the bell and come to visit, and as Lucy finished her French, she was aware of the soft murmur of conversation from behind the drawing-room doors at the end of the passage. She had no idea who it could be, and did not particularly care. Some boring friend of Gran’s. But now, she heard the whine of the ascending lift, and then the rattle of a latchkey in the front door, and knew that her mother had returned, back from the travel agent.

The awful thing was that, despite Lucy’s insistence that she wasn’t going to go to Florida, she couldn’t be too sure that, in desperation, Mummy might not have booked two flights, and Lucy, willy-nilly, would be dragged along with her. After all, at fourteen, there wasn’t much one could do, except sulk for two weeks and loathe every moment of it, and hopefully spoil it all for everybody. She was perfectly capable of all this, and her mother knew that she was perfectly capable, but still, there remained the daunting possibility. She raised her head, like an alert dog, to listen. But the footsteps passed her door and went down the passage, towards the sitting-room. The door opened and shut. Voices again. She closed her eyes and wished that she could close her ears as well.