‘Don’t talk such rot, Daphne,’ Skye said, regaining her senses quickly. ‘We are not being bombed, and it’s merely a fire that’s got out of hand on the moors. The firemen will deal with it. I daresay it was some foolish people playing with matches, as you children are always warned not to do.’
But she knew exactly what it was, or thought she did. Just as, years ago, she had known exactly what it was when her pottery had burned to the ground, and who had been responsible. There was no similarity between those two events, except for the gut feeling that the irate clayers had got their revenge on the hated Theo Tremayne at last by setting fire to his expensive car.
By the time she and Celia had calmed all the children down and spent an hour assuring the snivelling Mary that they weren’t all about to be burned in their beds, Nick had driven to the site, and come home to confirm what she suspected.
‘It was Theo’s car all right,’ he said grimly. ‘The bastards had poured petrol all over it, though God knows where they got it from. The car went up like a bomb and as it spread it set the moors alight. The authorities are questioning folk in the area, but they won’t find out who did it. The clayers are like clams when it comes to betraying one of their own.’
Although dumbstruck by what he was saying, Skye kept her eyes averted, afraid that he would see that she applauded this trait, no matter what the circumstances. And she shouldn’t be approving of anything that resulted in an act of vandalism.
‘We can thank God the night is so overcast,’ Nick went on savagely. ‘The German bombers won’t be able to operate tonight, otherwise they might well have turned their attention westwards with such a beacon to guide them.’
Skye realised the truth of his words. But if he hadn’t stubbornly refused to collect Theo’s car, this would never have happened at all. She couldn’t forget that, either.
‘Someone had better let Theo know,’ she said, full of a resentment she couldn’t explain.
‘My reaction to that is to let him rot until he sobers up,’ Nick retorted, still bursting with uncontrollable anger at the irresponsibility of the clayworkers, and utter contempt for his wife’s cousin.
Skye looked at him coldly, wondering how such a tender and loving husband could sometimes revert into such a monster.
‘I shall go and tell him myself,’ she declared.
‘Mom, you shouldn’t go out this late at night,’ Celia put in. Skye rounded on her at once.
‘Why on earth not? What the hell is wrong with all of you? Do you think I’m a child, or too senile to drive into Truro after dark?’ she whipped out, immediately wishing she hadn’t said the dreaded word.
But it was too late now, and she was damn well going to let Theo know what had happened. She had to be the one.
She realised the evacuee children were studying her silently now. Butch stood uneasily, while the other two, Tommy and Daphne, seemed oddly drawn together for once, with Mary burying her head in Celia’s shoulder.
‘Will you be all right, missis?’ Butch said at last. ‘I could come wiv you, if you like.’
‘That’s very sweet of you, Butch,’ she said, touched by his red-faced concern, ‘but this is something I have to do myself. It’s family, you see,’ she added, shutting them and Nick out completely.
* * *
By the time she reached Killigrew House and approached the front door, she could hear the raucous sound of singing. Theo knew some ripe old songs, and she could only thank God that the house was well away from any others.
Betsy opened the door no more than a fraction, red-eyed and clearly alarmed to find Skye standing there. Late night callers traditionally meant bad news in a community that rarely left their homes after dark except by invitation, and Skye quickly reassured her.
‘There’s no family trouble, Betsy, but I have to speak to Theo,’ she said abruptly.
Betsy gave a shuddering laugh. ‘Whatever ’tis, you’ll get no sense out of him, Skye. But you’d better come in and see the state he’s in, if you can stand it. ’Tis good of you to bother, and more than he deserves.’
The house smelled of vomit and disinfectant, and Skye had a job not to retch. She could only guess what kind of life Betsy had always had with her cousin in the past, with his philanderings and his evil temper. She followed the screeching sounds as Betsy led her to the parlour.
Theo was still bellowing out songs, of a sort. He was sprawled out on a sofa, a spilled glass of cider on the floor beside him. His face was puce, his shirt buttons stretched to breaking point as his beer gut protruded disgustingly through them. He was a disgrace to humanity, let alone his family, thought Skye.
But she tried not to let Betsy see just how much she despised him, knowing that the wife must still have some feelings for her husband, and truly amazed at her loyalty to him through all the years.
‘Shall I leave you to him?’ Betsy said.
‘I think you had better stay and hear what I have to say, Betsy. He’s not going to be too pleased,’ Skye said, with the understatement of all time.
At her voice, Theo glared at her with narrowed eyes.
‘What’s this, then? Come to gloat, have ’ee, cuz? Like seeing your poor old feller in a poorly state, do ’ee?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you, Theo, about your car.’
It took a few seconds for him to comprehend. Then:
‘The bastards had best leave it alone,’ he roared. ‘If they’ve scratched one bit o’ paint on it, I’ll whip the hides off ’em—’
Skye spoke brutally, without emotion. ‘They poured petrol on it – which I’m sure is against the law, considering the regulations,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘and then they set fire to it and set the moors ablaze.’
It was a revelation to watch his face, and see the varying, flickering emotions that passed over it. There was bellowing fury; blasphemies of the most profound invention; a kind of comic disbelief; a pathetic howling of tears; and then he became a shadow of the old, powerful Theo as he finally slid from the sofa into a shivering heap on the floor.
‘My Lord, I could have been a bit more subtle,’ Skye said uneasily to Betsy.
She shrugged. ‘Don’t see why you should, Skye. Theo were always blunt in the way he spoke to other folk, weren’t he?’
‘But his car was his pride and joy—’
‘Oh ah. We all knew he thought more of it than he did of me,’ Betsy said matter-of-factly. ‘Look at him now, the dozy old fool. Such a fuss to make over a bit of burnt metal!’
Skye caught her breath at such a provocative statement as Betsy tipped the toe of her slipper beneath Theo’s arm to make him move. He didn’t react at all.
‘He’s passed out again,’ Skye said with relief. ‘Otherwise he’d have been roaring at you for saying such things about his car.’
She paused, realising that Betsy was staring down at Theo strangely now. She knelt down beside him and pushed the great bulk of him over so that he sprawled on his back, completely inert. His face was grey and sweating, and his breathing was so shallow as to be almost non-existent.
Betsy’s face was almost as ashen as her husband’s when she looked back at Skye. ‘I think we should send for the doctor,’ she said quickly.
* * *
The official cause of death was a massive heart attack, but however incongruous it seemed, Skye thought privately that he died of a broken heart at the loss of his precious car.
‘It was the most spooky thing imaginable to see the way Betsy sat there, stroking his face so tenderly, and crooning to him as if he was a baby, while we waited for the doctor to arrive,’ she told Nick later, still choked and shocked at the swiftness of it all.
‘My poor darling, it must have been horrible for you both,’ he said gently, for once not condemning anyone at all.
‘And I was the one to trigger it,’ she said, starting to weep in his arms. ‘If I hadn’t rushed in and told him about the car so brutally—’
‘Hush, my love, you know very wel
l it wasn’t just that. He was a prime case for a heart attack. The doctor said it was a miracle it hadn’t happened long ago.’
‘I wanted to stay with Betsy, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted to be alone with him until Sebby and Justin could be contacted. After the miserable life he led her, and all those other women…’
Nick held her close. ‘But now he belongs to her alone, doesn’t he? None of them can touch him now. He’s totally hers, perhaps for the first time in her life. That’s why she’ll want to guard this last time with him so fiercely.’
She leaned into him. ‘It’s a long time since I had the feeling that you could be so perceptive, so Cornish,’ she whispered illogically, since that was exactly what he was.
‘It was always there, sweetheart. We never lose it, but sometimes we have a hard time saying what we feel.’
It comforted her to hear him say it now. She and Theo had been at daggers drawn for years, but now he was gone, she felt his loss more deeply than she could explain. She supposed it was because it was another one of the old Tremaynes gone, another link in the family chain broken.
But she hoped Betsy wouldn’t have to keep up this silent vigil with him for too long before her boys came home. It wasn’t healthy to sit over the dead, even though Skye knew it happened in many parts of the world and was thought perfectly natural. The body – the framework – was still there, and so was the soul, depending on your beliefs, but it still seemed creepy to Skye to watch over it, and talk to it, as if it could still comprehend. But maybe Betsy needed to do this, in order to make her own peace with her husband.
Skye shuddered, wishing time could move on, and they didn’t have to go through the inevitable days of mourning and weeping… and as the thought slid into her head, she felt a huge shock at her own feelings. She realised she didn’t want to mourn Theo, even though she knew she must. He had been a thorn in her flesh for so long, but he had chosen the way he lived his life, and to hell with the rest of them. And he was probably lording it over St Peter right this minute – if, indeed, his soul had winged its way upwards and not down.
She took a deep breath at the thought, and forced herself not to be too gloomy. Seb and Justin would soon be home on leave, and Wenna was coming back for a few days too. They still had a funeral to get through. The little evacuees were scared enough at knowing there was a death in the family, and had already clamoured not to have to go to it…
* * *
‘Of course you won’t have to go,’ Celia told them. ‘It’s for people in the family to pay their respects and say goodbye, and he wasn’t your uncle, was he?’
‘Our Ma brings home lots of uncles,’ Tommy Lunn said importantly. ‘Sometimes we only see ’em once, and sometimes they stay all night too!’
‘Is that so?’ Celia murmured, guessing at the kind of men these uncles were, and not thinking too much of Mrs Lunn.
She was tempted to offer to stay at home with the children instead of attending the funeral, but that wouldn’t be right, and the family needed everyone’s support. Where there used to be so many of them, their numbers were dwindling, and unconsciously she echoed her mother’s thought. The old order was changing, to use a boring euphemism.
Besides, Seb would need her. She didn’t know why she thought of him particularly, but she knew he would take his father’s death very hard. The two men had been so antagonistic towards one another, and yet she knew that love was there all the time. Some people just had a hard time showing it.
And right at that moment, Celia vowed that if she ever had children she would lavish all the love and care in the world on them, and never stop telling them she loved them.
* * *
It was a corker of a funeral, as an exuberant Betsy never stopped telling anyone who would listen. Theo would have heartily approved of the numbers of folk who turned out, bosses and clayworkers as well as family, all swelling the congregation in the little church and filling the churchyard where he was laid to rest next to his father’s grave.
Back at Killigrew House for the bun-fight, which Betsy determinedly called it in Theo’s own style, she flitted around as if she was the hostess at a society wedding.
‘Is she all right?’ Celia asked Seb uneasily.
Tall and dark in his infantryman’s uniform, and clearly suffering with tight-lipped grief, he nodded.
‘She’ll do,’ he said. ‘This is her house now, and this is her way of stepping into Father’s shoes.’
‘Don’t you think that’s odd, after the way they’ve been all these years?’ Celia couldn’t help asking. ‘I’m sorry, Seb, I don’t mean to be crass—’
‘You couldn’t be crass if you tried,’ he said, with a small attempt to be jocular. ‘No, Mother’s being the way she might always have been, if Father hadn’t squashed her spirit years ago. He couldn’t do it with Justin and me, and now it’s her turn to be herself.’
He said it without any malice, which surprised Celia, but she was encouraged to ask more.
‘I wonder what she’ll do now. This house is far too big for her now with you and Justin away for the duration.’
She glanced across to where Justin was chatting to Wenna, just as if this was an ordinary family gathering, and realised at once how far away from them all the two of them had grown. Justin, the budding doctor, and Wenna, the nightclub star…
‘She’s already decided,’ Seb said abruptly. ‘She’s going to offer the house for use as a servicemen’s convalescent home. It won’t be a hospital, and they’ll have to be walking wounded, but I reckon she’ll be needing helpers on a non-nursing basis, so if you’re looking for a job in the area attending to a lot of helpless men, now’s your chance.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Celia, too stunned at the thought of Betsy having decided on her future so quickly to consider anything else.
Chapter Three
Oliver Pengelly brooded over the fact that he hadn’t been born a couple of years earlier. His cousins Seb and Justin had joined up, and the sight of them in their uniforms at their father’s funeral had fired his blood anew. And the offices of the Informer newspaper were already depleted by several of the young men going off to war.
The very phrase had a dramatic and romantic ring to it, thought Olly. Not that he was stupid enough to underestimate what war meant. When you were in the newspaper business, you could hardly not know. But if only he had been born earlier there would have been no fuss about his wanting to join up at the earliest opportunity. It would simply have been accepted as the patriotic thing to do. As it was…
He gazed out of the office window on a late afternoon in July and scowled as he saw his sister approaching from the far side of the street, presumably at the end of her own working day on the trams, and knew he was in for a telling-off about not visiting home more often.
But New World wasn’t home to him any more. He constantly argued with his stepfather, and he was far happier staying with David and Lily in Truro, where the Kingsley infants were his adoring slaves. He certainly didn’t care for the influx of up-country brats his mother had taken in, either. He’d met them once, and once was enough.
Uncharitable was definitely becoming his middle name, he thought uneasily, but he couldn’t help the way he felt, and he thought his mother was too damn soft-hearted for her own good.
He put that down to a peculiar kind of guilt, and he’d been rash enough to say as much to David Kingsley recently. And when he’d explained what he meant, big as he was, he’d got a cuffing around his ears for his trouble.
‘Well, I reckon she sometimes still feels guilty for not being a proper Cornishwoman, and for being from “over there”,’ he’d said belligerently. ‘And I know that years ago a distant American relative tried to make contact with her old grandmother and caused her to have a stroke. My mother still feels guilty on that account. Both Americans, see?’ he added, knowing he wasn’t making sense, his ego still smarting over his cuffing.
‘You young oaf,’ David snapped, never mincing
his words when he felt it was needed. ‘You don’t know the half of it. The man was related to the Killigrews, and only distantly related to the Tremayne family. I hope you’ve got enough sense not to say such things in front of your mother, anyway. She has nothing to feel guilty about!’
Olly’s frown got darker. ‘Well, she’s American, isn’t she? And you know what Mother’s like. If anyone censures them, she takes a share in the guilt. Look how she fretted over the abdication crisis, as if she and the Simpson woman were practically blood relations!’
David looked at him thoughtfully. The boy was getting too hard for his years, and maybe it had been a mistake to bring him into the business so soon. But he knew as well as anyone that when Oliver Pengelly wanted something badly enough, Oliver Pengelly got it.
They both turned in some relief as Celia swept in, bringing the warmth of the July day with her.
‘Mom wants to see you, Olly,’ she said flatly, once David had discreetly left them. ‘What the hell are you playing at by staying away so long?’
‘I thought she had enough kids around her now without bothering about me,’ he said, defensive at once. ‘I don’t see Wenna rushing home every five minutes, anyway.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Wenna’s three hundred miles away. She still telephones every week, though, and she came home for the funeral, didn’t she?’
‘Oh ah, and she and Justin were acting the townies all right, weren’t they? Wenna was always a proper little angel, phoning home every five minutes, and you’re playing Miss Goody Two Shoes with the vaccies now, I suppose—’
‘The vaccies?’ Celia snapped. ‘What kind of rubbish talk is that, for God’s sake?’
Olly glared. He was too old for this, and he didn’t need an older sister telling him what to do. He had always felt the underdog with her, and he felt it acutely now.
‘Look, I’m doing a good job here, and I’ll get over to see the parents when I can, all right? There’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed, and somebody needs to report it.’
A Brighter Tomorrow Page 4