by Imogen Clark
‘Is it that one?’ Melissa breathed, hardly daring to hope. ‘The end one?’
She caught Ray’s expression, at once both frustrated and slightly irritated.
‘No. It’s number 5,’ he said, and she saw now that the car was parked more outside number 5 than number 1.
Just for a second, Melissa felt her spirits sink. The end house would have been so perfect. But then she caught herself. What was she thinking? Number 5 was still amazing. And a mid-terrace was much warmer than one with three walls exposed to the biting north wind. She hoped that no part of her momentary disappointment had shown on her face. She couldn’t bear for Ray to think that she was in any way ungrateful.
She counted up the front doors so that there could be no further mistakes: 1, 3 and there was number 5. It looked like a child’s drawing of a house with a neat front door and big bay window on the ground floor and two symmetrical windows above. The rough pebble-dash render was painted a rich burgundy and the window surrounds were a warm buttery cream. It was lovely.
‘Oh!’ said Melissa, opening the car door and jumping up and down on the spot. ‘This one? The red one? Oh Ray, it’s gorgeous. I can’t believe it. You bought a house! You bought us a house!’
‘Shall we go in then?’ asked Ray. He was beaming, pride at having pulled this off without her even suspecting what he was up to just radiating off him.
Melissa unfastened the now wide-awake Leah from her car seat and lifted her out, hugging her tightly into her chest as if she too were part of the prize that she had just won, which, in a way, she was.
Ray pushed open the little iron gate and walked backwards up the path towards the front door, all the time smiling and waving the key at Melissa. When he reached the door he slotted the key into the lock, swung the door open and turned back to face her.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that I have to carry my bride over the threshold.’
‘You can’t do that, you idiot,’ objected Melissa. ‘I’ve got hold of Leah. It’s not safe.’ But she knew he would and hoped that the whole street was watching.
‘Then I shall carry my bride AND my daughter,’ he replied, sweeping the pair of them up, his arm under Melissa’s legs. He tottered a little under the weight and then took the few steps until they were inside, where he let them down again.
Then he took Melissa’s face in his hands and kissed her.
‘Happy wedding, darling,’ he said, planting a second kiss on the crown of Leah’s head. ‘Now, let me show you round our new home. And then,’ he grimaced, ‘I’m going to have to set off to the Big Smoke.’
Melissa’s bubble burst. ‘But we only got married yester—’ she began, but then she remembered the deal they’d struck and so she bit back her tears and nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
‘You are so perfect, Melissa Allen,’ said Ray, taking hold of her hand and spinning her shiny new ring round on her finger. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such an amazing wife as you.’
Despite her disappointment, Melissa felt her heart turn over. She felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have Ray all to herself and she mustn’t complain. After all, it was his job that had let him buy this house and drive this car. Without it they’d be stuck. She couldn’t possibly get a job that earned anywhere near as much as he obviously did. So, she was just going to have to get used to the fact that he had to leave her sometimes. For the time being, at least. She took him in her arms and nodded her head into his broad chest.
‘It’s okay,’ she replied. ‘I get it. But when will we get my stuff from the caravan and move in properly, like?’
‘As soon as I’m back,’ he promised. ‘And maybe you could make a start without me, shift some of the smaller things?’
Melissa nodded and smiled bravely, trying not to let her dismay show. It would be so much more fun to move the things together, but at least this way she could decide what went where. And maybe now that Ray was married and had a family he might not have to look after so many clients. He could tell them at work that he had less time available than before. She’d suggest it next time he was home. Until then, she needed to make the most of having him here. And this was their honeymoon, after all.
‘So,’ she said with her best come-to-bed eyes fluttering, ‘are you going to show me the bedroom?’
29
GRACE – THEN
Clio’s first few weeks of life flew by in a whirl of health visitors and doctors’ appointments. She was slow to grow, feeding only fitfully and still crying a lot, and there was talk of her having to be readmitted to hospital if she didn’t manage to put on some weight. Grace reluctantly gave up breastfeeding and, on stout advice from Mrs Finn, put Clio on the bottle which, she had to admit, improved things no end. Gradually, a balance was restored in the house and Grace began to feel that having two children instead of one was actually going to prove manageable.
Christmas was only six weeks away and she wanted to get on top of all the preparations early. Neither she nor Charles had large families. Their parents were dead, and whilst Grace had her sister Charlotte to buy for, Charles was an only child. But there were the staff to think about as well as the vicar and his wife and all the tenants, the master of the hunt and the huntsmen, the lady who kept the post office in the village . . . The names just went on and on.
Grace sat herself down at Charles’s desk in the office and set to making a list. She liked a list, the way it made her force some sense of order into her brain. She was sure that her ability to think clearly was still all over the place after the birth of Clio. Maybe it had never recovered after Hector had arrived, she thought with a smile to herself. But a nice neat list which she could tick off as she went along – this Grace liked.
She hadn’t got very far when the telephone rang. Usually the housekeeper would answer it but Grace was just sitting there, next to an extension and perfectly capable of answering her own telephone.
She picked it up. ‘Hello. Grace Montgomery Smith speaking.’
‘Ah, hello,’ said an elderly voice on the other end. ‘This is Honeyborne here. From the bank. Is Mr Montgomery Smith available?’
Grace didn’t recognise the name. The bank manager that she dealt with for the estate was called Wolfe, which she always thought was an unfortunate name for a banker. ‘I’m afraid he’s at work at the moment,’ she said. ‘Can I help?’
‘I’m sure you can, my dear,’ said Mr Honeyborne, and Grace cringed. She was not and never had been anybody’s ‘dear’.
‘We’re just wondering,’ the man continued, ‘what you would like us to do with the deeds to the house. We can either keep them here in our safe or I can have them sent round to you. Either is fine.’
Grace was puzzled. The Hall had been in her family for hundreds of years, and any paperwork was held in a safe at the office of the firm of solicitors that had been looking after the estate since her great-grandfather’s time. Did he mean one of the workers’ cottages? But why would the title deeds be anywhere else?
‘I’m not sure I quite follow . . .’ she began.
‘The deeds,’ Mr Honeyborne repeated, as if he were talking to an elderly relation or someone dim-witted. ‘To the house in Whitley Bay.’
Now Grace really was confused. She didn’t have a house in Whitley Bay. ‘I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Mr Honeyborne spluttered at the other end of the phone. ‘Well, perhaps I’d better talk to your husband, dear. Could you ask him to ring me when he gets home?’
His meaning was clear. Grace was used to it. People always assumed that Hartsford Hall and its estate belonged to Charles, that she had merely married well. In fact, it was entirely the other way round. Still, there was no point setting this bumbling bank manager straight. He was probably muddled about this house too. Why would Charles have a house in Whitley Bay that she knew nothing about? It made no sense.
‘I’ll ask him to ring,’ she said. ‘Does he have your number
?’
Grace brought the subject up over dinner that night. Hector was bathed and in bed and Clio was at least quiet and with Mrs Finn. Even though the house had three dining rooms of various capacities, when there were just the two of them Grace preferred to eat at the little table in the corner of the kitchen where Mrs Finn generally fed Hector during the day. It had thrown their cook when Grace had first suggested the idea. No member of the family had ever elected to eat in the kitchen before. There had been some serious chuntering about inappropriate breaking with protocol, but once it was clear that Grace was just looking to make life less formal, a compromise had been reached.
Now the two of them sat opposite each other at the scrubbed pine table with only a small lamp lit, which cast shadows over the walls of the kitchen and made the space feel intimate and cosy. Supper was a simple pasta dish with a green salad and some freshly baked bread. Grace served them both, then handed a plate to Charles who took it gratefully.
‘I’m ready for this,’ he said, tearing off a hunk of bread with his hands and ignoring the bread knife that lay on the board. ‘Busy day today. We had Sharonov in for the first time. He’s conducting down in London before he comes back to work with us, but he wanted to get a feel for things first. Worked us bloody hard, I can tell you.’
Charles reached for the bottle of Merlot that sat between them and started to pour himself a generous glass. Grace stuck to water. Even though she was no longer feeding Clio herself, she needed to keep a clear head to cope with the children.
‘The bank rang today,’ said Grace lightly. ‘Well, not our bank. A bank. A Mr Honeyborne. Wanted to know what you propose to do with the deeds to the house in Whitley Bay.’
As she spoke, her eyes never left her husband. The light was intentionally dim over in this corner, but she thought she saw the colour drain from his face like sand through an egg timer. His pouring hand wobbled slightly, causing the wine to flow off-centre and splash against the side of the glass. He put the bottle down carefully without raising his eyes to her, and then slowly lifted his glass to his lips and took in the wine’s bouquet. Satisfied, he took a drink, letting the wine circulate around his mouth, and then put his glass down.
Finally, he spoke.
‘Oh yes. I meant to talk to you about that,’ he said, his tone carefully calculated, it seemed to Grace, to sit somewhere between casual and interested. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said I didn’t know anything about a house in Whitley Bay, at which point he suggested that he spoke to you instead.’
Charles raised his eyebrows and nodded as if this was all making perfect sense to him, but offered no explanation. Grace, remembering her conversation with the patronising bank manager, began to grow irritated.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Do we own a house that I know nothing about, and if so, why?’
She eyed Charles closely, feeling unsure of her ground. She had never considered her husband to be a secret-keeper. She shared everything with him and until now, she had thought that this was a reciprocal arrangement; but what if she had been wrong? Well, she had kept the occasional secret from Charles – his birthday presents, for instance, that weekend away to Paris that she had arranged when they were first married, the pool table in the den that she had bought him on a whim. But a house?
‘I’m so sorry, Grace,’ Charles said, and Grace felt her throat constrict. What did he have to be sorry about? What was going on here?
‘I should have told you,’ he continued, ‘but first I was away and then what with little Clio surprising us like she did it just slipped my mind. I never intended for you to find out like this.’
‘Find out what?’ Grace asked, both exasperated by his prevaricating and now more than a little unnerved. ‘What haven’t you told me, Charles? Why have you bought a house?’ Then a terrible thought occurred to her. She was dismissing it even as it streaked across her mind, but it escaped from her mouth before she could stop it. ‘You’re not going to leave me, are you?’
But even as she heard the words uttered, she knew it couldn’t be true. Charles adored her. She knew this with all her heart and it wasn’t something you could fake. His love for her was real and deep and not an imitation, or something that might pass for love if you avoided examining it too closely.
‘Of course not,’ said Charles, frowning deeply, concern written all over his face. ‘How could you possibly think that?’
He stood up and came to her side of the table, wrapping his arms around her from behind and squeezing her tightly. Relieved that her gut instincts appeared to be correct, her panic subsided a little, but she didn’t respond to his touch. It would be too easy to just accept his hug and his excuses without getting to the nub of the issue. He had bought a house, for goodness’ sake, without discussion and for no apparent reason. That was unacceptable whichever way she looked at it. She needed to know what was going on. She shrugged him off, so he let her go and sat back down in the seat opposite her.
‘So?’ she asked, eyebrows raised and arms folded. ‘Why have you bought a house in Whitley Bay?’
Even though the light was dim, she could still see his face clearly. He fixed her with his tawny eyes and inhaled deeply before he spoke. Grace waited.
‘I have told you a lie,’ he said dramatically.
This kind of statement was Charles all over, and normally the way he embellished the everyday with unnecessary flourishes made Grace laugh. But now she held her breath. Had her total faith in him been misplaced?
‘Well, more of an omission than a lie,’ he continued, his eyes cast down at the table between them, and Grace focused everything she had on his face so that she didn’t miss any clues. ‘I let you think that I am an only child. And that is true, kind of. My parents only had me. But my mother had another child before she married my father.’
Grace’s brain was working hard to keep up. ‘So you have, what? A sister? A brother . . . ?’
‘A half-brother,’ said Charles. He still did not meet her gaze.
‘Well, that’s not so terrible,’ said Grace, her tone more gentle. Was that it, the hidden secret? She could cope with that. The odd extra family member was neither here nor there.
She reached across the table to take his hand in hers. ‘Why did you never tell me?’
Charles swallowed. ‘I was ashamed,’ he said.
Finally, he looked up at her. Her big, bluff husband now seemed more like a child in fear of reprimand. Grace squeezed his hand gently, careful not to risk damage to any part of his fiddler’s fingers.
‘I know I married way above my station,’ he carried on. ‘People tell me all the time. It’s unbelievable that I’m here in this incredible house with the cars and the estate and all that, when I barely had a brass farthing to my name before I met you. I wake up every day and pinch myself, I really do.’
‘Well, that’s just silly,’ said Grace, shaking her head. ‘I’m lucky that I inherited all this . . .’ She waved her arms around vaguely. ‘But that’s all it is – luck. I’ve never done anything to earn it. It just got handed to me on a plate. You mustn’t think badly of yourself just because your family background is different to mine.’
Charles pulled a face, twisting his mouth into a wry smile, and Grace felt herself relax a little more. This was more like her Charles.
‘You haven’t heard the worst of it yet,’ he said, raising his eyebrows at her. ‘My family were nothing like yours. Let’s see how you feel when you’ve heard the whole thing, shall we?’
30
GRACE – THEN
So, Charles had a secret about his family, thought Grace. How intriguing. She realised that she was holding her breath as she waited for him to tell her what it was. How bad can it be, she wondered, and what would it matter anyway? Maybe his family was a little more colourful than he had let on. That was hardly something to be ashamed of. There were a couple of characters in her own family tree that history had attempted to bury. Her father had once told her that the 7th ba
ron had been tried for murder, but he’d had such a twinkle in his eye as he’d told her that Grace had never quite believed him. But whatever it was that Charles was about to tell her would make no difference to how she felt about him, she knew that for certain.
She watched as her husband picked up his fork, pushed the pasta round his plate and then put it back down again.
‘I need to tell you about Ray,’ he said finally.
Grace smiled in what she hoped was an encouraging way, and waited.
‘He’s my half-brother, like I said,’ repeated Charles. ‘The one I never mentioned to you.’
He stretched his mouth into a grimace but Grace was no longer interested in all the build-up. She just wanted the story.
‘Ray is a few years older than me,’ Charles went on. ‘We barely saw each other growing up. When his mother and my father split up, he went to live with his mother and that was that. I knew that I had a half-brother because Dad used to talk about him from time to time, but I never saw much of him. Dad reckoned that Ray’s mother kept him away from us as a way of punishing Dad. I don’t know. Anyway, he came to stay a couple of times in the holidays when I was little, but by the time I was ten he’d stopped coming. After that he played no part in my life and I just forgot about him. So you see, it wasn’t a total lie to not tell you about him, Gracie. I just never thought about it.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Grace. ‘I’m not cross. I can see how you might not have mentioned him. What I don’t understand is why we appear to have bought a house in Whitley Bay.’
Charles nodded. ‘I was just coming to that,’ he said. ‘So, Ray got caught up in a bit of bother.’ He ran his hand through his thick hair, which fell back into place obediently as soon as he stopped touching it.
‘What sort of bother?’ asked Grace, narrowing her eyes.
‘The sort that gets you sent to prison,’ Charles replied solemnly.
Grace started. She couldn’t help herself. She had never known anyone who had even been arrested, let alone gone to prison. The idea was horrifying, but also tantalisingly intoxicating, a peep into a world that she had only ever seen on the television.