by Karen Powell
‘Because?’
‘Because it’s still Angus. I thought it would change, but it hasn’t, it won’t.’
How terrible that there was still hope in his eyes, a tiny flicker of it.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I do understand, Venetia.’ James nodded, gave a smile that was more like a grimace. ‘I loved him too, of course.’
EPILOGUE 1956
Was that all a family amounted to? A jumble of furniture heaped up on the Great Lawn like abandoned props on a stage, the curtainless windows of her sitting-room an empty backdrop? Perhaps Alexander was right, that day last summer when they walked along the ridge. If so, then this was the beginning of the inevitable, the dwindling down of the white-smocked broods in the old portraits in the hallway; of Teddy and Thomasina, with their solemn faces and stately bearing; Sir Laurie as a boy and then again as a young man, with his wife Penny seated beside him. All the way down to the three of them: Angus, Alexander, herself. James too, of course, pictured alone, seated at the farmhouse kitchen table. We are a dying breed, Alexander had said.
Against her wishes, he’d given up any idea of finishing his studies.
‘I need to go away from here, mother. The army’s as good a bet as any.’
‘One day when everything . . . ’ She ran out of words.
‘I don’t know.’ Alexander shrugged. ‘I can’t imagine wanting to live here again. Not without her.’
The farm would carry on as usual; Thomas would remain at Gatekeeper’s Cottage as long as he wanted. Venetia had no difficulty persuading Alexander of that, though she was surprised when Thomas, sombre yet clear-eyed, came to tell her of his intention to look after his father without any extra help.
She did not know where Alexander would settle once the army had done with him. Abroad somewhere was the most he could say. Germany for now. Venetia felt quite sure he would never return to Richmond Hall.
Lennie’s grave was already hazed with green as if it were somehow more fertile that the rest of the churchyard. Venetia had cut early blooms from the garden, but the flowers that had seemed so pretty in her hands looked wrong when she stood at the foot of the mounded earth. Instead, she laid a handful of the blooms on the flat oblong of Danny Masters’ grave, beside the small bouquet that his mother brought to him every Sunday. The remainder were for Angus. Venetia crossed the grass to his grave, leaving Lennie untroubled.
On the driveway, sycamore leaves bright and new above her, Venetia heard the rumble of a van approaching. She’d spent the winter making over a semi-derelict cottage on the edge of the estate, but most of the furniture from her rooms at Richmond Hall was to be taken to auction. The cottage was tiny, just one bedroom and two small rooms downstairs, and she had seen little point salvaging much for herself. She would live a smaller kind of life now: an almost-reversal of a journey she’d taken as a young girl and newly married. She had tried to hold onto all that she and Angus had built for themselves and failed. In the end there was only herself. But it was something to be alive, with spring bursting from the buds and a new garden in need of attention. Civilisations could rise and fall all they wanted, but no one could stop her going on if she chose. It was up to the rest of the world what it did with itself.
A housing company had shown interest in the Hall. Alexander had written of it in his last letter from barracks. Soon, developers would come to scrape the house from the landscape, making way for other lives. The river would flow on though, long after the earth had closed in around the bones of the past, and the land would become what it always had been: a palimpsest waiting for a new story to be told, which was always the old story, of love and loss and joy and grief.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Powell was born in Rochester, Kent. She left school at 16 but returned to education as a mature student to study English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in York with her husband and daughter.