Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  The only discordant note was the life Simon Turner chose for himself. He had never had any interest in the business, nor was the extended family to his liking. His father put it down, probably correctly, to his age and facilitated his desire to travel instead of grow bulbs. He continued to hope, even as the years stretched and the postcards came less and less often, that one day Simon would come home.

  Fourteen years ago, said Jonathan, aged twenty-one, he returned to The Flower Mill with a newly framed diploma and a heart full of ideas for improving the business. But six weeks later, sitting on a straw bale to catch his breath, Robert Turner succumbed to a stroke. He was dead before the ambulance arrived.

  Their first thought was that when the shock and grief subsided, life in East Beckham would go on much as it had. They were fortunate that Jonathan had chosen to follow in Robert’s footsteps when his own son had not. The transfer of power would be as smooth as could be hoped for.

  The first indication they might have presumed too much came with the reading of Robert’s will. Naturally he provided, and generously, for his widow and stepson. But The Flower Mill was a family business, built up by Turners before him, and he left it to his own son – expressing the perhaps naive hope that the returned wanderer and the qualified plantsman might together forge a team strong enough to carry the Mill into the next millennium.

  It wasn’t what Jonathan had hoped for, but he was too honest a man to deny Simon’s entitlement and he readied himself to work with and if necessary under him.

  But Simon had no more interest in owning a bulb field than living on one. He returned to arrange for the sale of The Flower Mill. Not the house, which was Sarah’s, but the fields and the sheds and all the paraphernalia of a successful business.

  Sarah took up the story. ‘I begged him, pleaded with him. Not for my sake, I was secure and always would be. Not even for Jonathan: he could have had a good job in any nursery in the country. It was the village people I was concerned for. The Flower Mill was and still is the only employer. If Simon had sold it as a going concern it would have been something. But the best offer he was getting was from a leisure consortium that wanted to build a golf club. There’d have been a few jobs on the domestic side, they’d have needed a couple of groundsmen, but generations of experience growing bulbs would suddenly have been worth nothing. It would have been the death of East Beckham.’

  ‘We tried to buy him out,’ said Jonathan. Fourteen years later it was in his face and his voice that this was important, that he wanted Donovan to understand they’d tried to do things properly. ‘People in the village were going to put money in too, we’d have run it as a co-operative. But we couldn’t match what the leisure people were offering, and Simon hadn’t a sentimental bone in his body. He was never happy here, he didn’t reckon to owe the place or the people anything. He just wanted the most money he could get for it, and we couldn’t compete.’

  He fell silent, sombre and pensive. This time Sarah made no effort to continue the tale. Donovan supplied an ending. ‘So you killed him.’

  ‘No!’ insisted Jonathan, his head coming up with a jerk. ‘It was an accident. A tractor turned over on him. He wasn’t familiar with heavy machinery, he shouldn’t even have been driving it.’

  ‘Why was he?’

  Jonathan shrugged. ‘We don’t know,’ murmured Sarah.

  ‘OK,’ said Donovan ruthlessly, ‘so what makes you think he was driving it? Did you see him?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Damn it,’ snarled Jonathan, ‘it was on top of him in a ditch when we found him! It seemed a pretty safe guess that was what happened. Maybe he saw it as his last chance to play with his father’s toys – I don’t know. But he turned it over and it killed him.’

  For the moment Donovan was prepared to leave it at that. Now they were talking he didn’t want to break the flow. There’d be time to go into the details later. Besides, he really needed to sit down. He gestured at the spare chair. ‘Do you mind?’

  Jonathan shook his head. ‘Of course not.’

  Sarah said, ‘You’re really not up to this yet.’

  Donovan chuckled weakly. ‘Don’t worry about me. Just – let’s get this sorted out.’

  Turner — except his name wasn’t even Turner — gave an uneasy shrug. ‘I don’t know if we’ve time for all this.’

  Misunderstanding, Donovan raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Do you have more pressing business?’

  ‘I meant – ’ But he didn’t explain what he meant. ‘All right. Where were we?’

  ‘Simon had conveniently killed himself in a tractor he’d no reason to be driving,’ Donovan said, deadpan.

  It was hard to remember, this long after, who first put it into words. The same idea occurred to several people more or less simultaneously: they could see it in one another’s eyes. Finally somebody said it out loud.

  ‘They’d both been away, you see,’ Sarah said softly. ‘Jonathan in France, Simon all over the world. Outside East Beckham there was no one who’d recognize either of them. It was feasible, if we all agreed.’

  ‘To switch identities. To bury Simon Turner as Jonathan—’ Donovan realized he didn’t know her previous name.

  ‘Payne. Yes.’

  There wasn’t much time. They could leave it overnight, pretend it was morning before they found the tractor in the ditch with the body underneath, but that was about all. They couldn’t discuss it for a week and still expect to be believed. It had to be done quickly if it were to be done at all.

  ‘We sat round that table in the kitchen and talked till three in the morning,’ Jonathan remembered. ‘It was so difficult – it seemed terribly wrong, to take a man’s name in order to get your hands on his inheritance. I kept thinking how hurt Robert would be. But the fact was, Robert was gone; and so was Simon. We weren’t actually hurting anyone – unless you count a leisure conglomerate none of us knew or wanted to. We were protecting a community, a way of life, my stepfather thought the world of. We couldn’t bring Simon back by telling the truth. And we didn’t know who’d inherit, who’d have the last word on whether the Mill was sold.

  ‘Whereas if Simon was still alive, he could change his mind. Nothing had been signed. I had it in my power to look after all these people, my mother included. I could have refused. They couldn’t have gone ahead without me. But the more we talked about it, the more selfish that seemed.’

  ‘You can’t blame Jonathan for the decision we reached,’ Sarah interjected, stern in defence of her cub. ‘He was twenty-one years old – he was a boy. We put him in a position where he had to choose between our future and his honour. Since then, of course, we’ve all had our regrets. But Jonathan made the biggest sacrifice for the smallest gain.’

  ‘So you called for an ambulance and told the authorities your son was dead.’

  She nodded, her eyes tight shut. ‘You have no idea how difficult that was. Identifying the body, making the funeral arrangements. We had him cremated, it seemed safest. I thought I’d have to try and cry, to make it look right. It was no effort at all. I never knew him well, and the last time we spoke we were shouting at one another because what he wanted was going to destroy what I wanted. But he was Robert’s son, and he died in a ditch, and he wasn’t even getting the respect of burial under his own name. I was ashamed. Crying came naturally.’

  ‘Then you went home and called off the deal with the leisure company.’

  Jonathan nodded. ‘I thought that was where it would fall apart. Simon had met these people, shown them round. If they came back they’d know I wasn’t Simon Turner. I wrote to them in the first instance, told them the recent death of my stepbrother made it impossible to go ahead at this time, that my stepmother couldn’t be asked to cope with any more.

  ‘I expected they’d make a fight of it – come over and try to persuade me. They’d already spent money on a feasibility study, it was going to be wasted for what was not much more than a whim. And anyone who knew him, eve
n slightly, would know Simon wasn’t sentimental.

  ‘In the event that worked for us. The conglomerate realized it was an excuse, but they thought I was trying to push the price up. They played it cool and said they understood perfectly, I should contact them again when I was ready to proceed. They warned that, of course, by then they might have lined up another deal … Plainly they expected me to call them back inside twenty-four hours. But I didn’t, and apart from a rather cool follow-up a month later, which I also parried, they weren’t going to beg. They thought it was about money and they weren’t going to up their offer. The thing was laid to rest with much less trouble than I’d been anticipating.’

  ‘A bit like Simon,’ observed Donovan brutally.

  Indignation sparked in Jonathan Payne’s eye. ‘You reckon? Simon’s been dead for fourteen years. In that time he’s been back to haunt us twice.’

  If Donovan himself represented the second manifestation then the first was … ‘You’re talking about Rosemary.’

  Payne nodded, then looked away. He was sorry about what happened to Simon. He was ashamed of what happened to Rosemary.

  It had been eleven years since the wedding. They had met for the first time outside the church, parted the next day. In all that time Jonathan Payne might have addressed three remarks to his Aunt Rosemary. He just about noticed she was a lot younger than his mother, a bare five years older than himself. She noticed that he’d grown since last time she’d seen him, but since that was his Christening she was hardly surprised. Five years is still a lot at that age.

  Five years is a lot less between a man of twenty-six and a woman of thirty-one. A career woman with the world at her feet, she was beautiful and strong and confident, and she knocked him off his feet.

  He knew it was impossible, out of the question. But she didn’t, and of the two she was the stronger. And no one had let her in on the secret, and she never suspected the deception that had occurred and the massive consequences it would have for her. Paying her sister her once-a-decade visit, Rosemary found herself in the company of an intelligent, sensitive, good-looking young man, strong and hard-bodied from physical toil, whom she believed to be her sister’s stepson Simon Turner, aged twenty-eight, rightful owner of all she surveyed.

  It wasn’t greed: she had money of her own. But powerful people gravitate together: they see themselves in the mirror of one another and self-love is a great aphrodisiac. She wanted him. Her sister’s fury only added to the pleasure of the chase.

  ‘I tried to warn him,’ said Sarah, speaking into her lap. ‘I knew what she was like. I was fond of Rosemary, but her dearest friends would have to admit she was wilful. And – predatory.’ She looked up. ‘Isn’t that what they say these days? A sexual predator?’

  Not in Glencurran they didn’t, and not much in Castlemere. But Donovan knew what she meant. He’d known people like that too; had spent his heart on one. ‘She made the running?’

  ‘I could have stopped it,’ gritted Payne. ‘She didn’t rape me. A man with an ounce of character would have walked away.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘Not in time. It only happened once. The next day I told her it had been a mistake, it couldn’t happen again. I asked her to leave and she stormed off back to London. But it was already too late.’

  ‘When did you know?’

  ‘Thirteen months later,’ said Sarah, a bitter edge on her voice. ‘When a red sports car roared into the yard. I was in the kitchen: I looked to see who it was. Rosemary was the last person I was expecting. She took a small suitcase out of the boot and put it on the kitchen step. Then she lifted something off the passenger seat and put it on top of the suitcase. I couldn’t make out what it was. It almost looked like a carrycot.’

  It almost looked like a carrycot. Intrigued, Sarah went to the door and opened it, a greeting on her lips with a question right behind. But Rosemary was already stalking across the yard towards the packing sheds. Puzzled, Sarah looked down at the basket on the steps. It was a carrycot, and there was a baby inside.

  The man calling himself Simon Turner wasn’t in the shed: Jim Vickery directed the angry young woman to his office at the front of the house. Sarah too was looking for her son, to tell him what she’d found, and he was looking for her to ask what all the noise was about. They came together in the hall.

  Rosemary was so angry she was shaking, her face flushed, her eyes ablaze. Apart from a brief detour to her flat she’d come here direct from the London clinic where she’d had the DNA tests done. The ones that showed Elphie’s father and her mother shared almost as many genes as siblings do; that explained the baby’s strange appearance and erratic development; that proved that Simon Turner was in fact Jonathan Payne. She’d borne her nephew’s child.

  Looking back she felt so stupid. The signs were there, if she’d thought to look for them. Damn it, she’d even met him under his own name. But he was fifteen years old, she a sophisticated young woman – why should she have remembered him? When she looked at the wedding photos – she wasn’t a sentimental woman but she’d always thought she looked good that day and so she’d kept the ones Sarah sent her – it was as plain as day. The two boys didn’t even look alike. Simon was dark; Jonathan was fair, like his mother. Like her.

  Almost, that was what distressed her most. That she’d been duped. He hadn’t come on to her, she’d come on to him, his reluctance only making her the more determined. That was why, when her contraception failed, she was not inclined to tell him. She didn’t need his help, and in all honesty he could not be considered responsible for the child.

  Or, could not have been had all been well with Elizabeth. But it wasn’t. From the moment of her birth there were problems. When the baby failed to thrive as she should have the doctors raised the possibility of blood testing. Rosemary agreed because she hoped it would help her baby. In the event it didn’t – but it did explain her.

  The moment she saw Jonathan, standing astonished in the hallway, she went for him. She went for his face with her nails and for his heart with the rapier of her tongue. Sarah would have intervened but for the precious burden in her arms; and Jonathan himself was too taken aback to respond, even when the blood-red talons scythed at him. He finally recoiled, too late, with shock in his eyes and bloody tracks across his cheekbone.

  ‘You bastard!’ she spat, her fury stoked rather than dampened by the miles she’d driven. ‘You bastard! You animal.’

  He had his hand to his face, fingers trembling in the slick blood. ‘Rosemary—’

  She swiped at him again; this time he backed out of range, stumbling against the hall table. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me! Have you any idea what you’ve done? Have you? You’ve brought into being a child with no place in the world, a child with no future. Nine months I carried her. For nine months there were things I’d rather have been doing, but I carried her because I owed her that much. I made a mistake, and you can’t just walk away. I thought we could make it up to one another after she was born.’

  She stabbed the taloned hand towards the cot. ‘See that? That’s your daughter. And that, more or less, is how she’s going to be for the rest of her life. Bigger, but not a lot brighter. She may not walk. She may not talk. She may be in nappies all the years of her pointless existence. And you did that to her, and nothing you do now can ever make it right.’

  Springing tears mixed with his blood on Jonathan Payne’s cheek. ‘I don’t understand …’

  Rosemary thrust her face into his. ‘She’s not right! Do you understand that? She’s defective – retarded – mentally and physically handicapped. What’s the latest euphemism? – she’ll have learning difficulties. Jesus, will she have learning difficulties! Like, which hole in your face does your dinner go in? Somebody’s going to be spoon-feeding her when she’s twenty-five years old.’

  She took a step back. ‘But it isn’t going to be me. This is your doing, Jonathan, not mine. You knew it was wrong, that it was dangerous, and you said nothing
! You let me believe you were Simon Turner – that you were fair game! You let this happen rather than come clean with me.

  ‘I don’t know what you did to him. I presume he’s dead, and that’s what was worth concealing at any cost. Well, I hope you still feel that way in ten years’ time. I hope you can look at your daughter and still think her suffering was not too great a price to pay.’

  And with that she left. Stunned, frozen in the hallway, they heard the car roar and spit gravel, and then she was gone. And the bundle that was Elizabeth, that was going to be Elphie, was still lying in Sarah’s arms, squinting up at her.

  The child never saw her mother again, except in a photograph. Perhaps it was intuition that drew her to the pretty woman in the sprigged dress, perhaps an incautious word in front of a child supposedly too slow to understand pointed her in the right direction. Sarah never saw Rosemary again. There were no letters, no cards, not so much as a telephone call.

  Jonathan saw her once more. Dr Chapel had found a specialist who seemed to offer Elphie the hope of enhanced development but wanted to speak to her mother first. Jonathan went to London.

  He found Rosemary packing her bags. She noted with satisfaction the small scar remaining under his eye before returning to her task. She was going to a new job in Boston, she said. She had hoped never to see him again.

  He explained the purpose of his visit.

  Rosemary shrugged. ‘Tell him you couldn’t find me. Tell him I’m dead. I did my share, Jonathan: everything since then has been your problem. Deal with it.’

  Downstairs a taxi honked, and she picked up her bags and left. He neither saw nor heard from her again. The specialist lost interest in the case and Elphie grew as best she could in the love of her family and the solitude of the fen. In the end, she didn’t make too bad a job of it.