An Accidental Shroud

by Marjorie Eccles

  At that moment, Cassie came in. 'Turn that thing off, we're going to eat in the garden. I got a Chicken Chasseur at Marks and Spencer this afternoon – and a bottle of wine. You'd better come quick before she finishes it off. She's well away already.'

  'Chicken Chasseur, eh? In the money, are we?'

  Cassie grinned and tapped the side of her nose. 'Money? Don't be naive.'

  You had to admire her.

  No longer the baby sister he'd allowed to tag along after him, looked after with a fierce possessiveness, taught to swim, tucked up in bed, foraged for meals for when Naomi couldn't be bothered. Cassie was now a strong-minded young woman in her own right, stronger in some things, it amused him to admit, than he was, and equally unprincipled. Ruthless, in fact. Sometimes, she could frighten other people.

  But not Joss. They were a pair. He smiled, stretched and stubbed out his cigarette before going out into the garden to join them, totally unprepared for the catastrophe waiting for him there. Together, they could do anything.

  PART 2

  October

  6

  Nigel Fontenoy, watching the Midland landscape flash past the carriage window, found himself in an increasingly bad temper. His return journey from London was being made intolerable by some yuppie using his mobile telephone as if he'd purchased a monopoly on personal space along with his first-class ticket. Nigel knew he ought to have protested but he was sure to be met by the sort of superciliousness he didn't feel he could cope with today – or any other day, truth to tell. He always avoided straight confrontations, preferring more devious methods of revenge.

  Instead, like the other cowardly occupants of the carriage, he simply cast withering glances at the uncaring telephone user then turned to stare through the window as though the show-off conversations in the background had nothing to do with him, watching the grey skies and the trees bending to the wind and the autumn leaves flying.

  Already October, and he only had until mid-November to make up his mind. He tried to concentrate on the terms which had been put forward at the meeting with Jermyn's. But his thoughts squirrelled around in his mind, refusing to be put into any sort of order. So much, of course, depended on his father, and he needed to be quite clear in his own mind what was entailed before presenting the idea to him. He was only too clear, he feared, as to what George's reactions would be. He was unlikely to agree to the proposition, at least in the first instance. It would be up to Nigel to put it to him in a favourable light. Ever since Jermyn's director, Alec Macaudle, had been to see the shop in September, Nigel had been trying to prepare the ground, but George seemed to have an uncanny knack of turning aside from the subject whenever it was raised. Occasionally, Nigel had received a distinct impression that George knew exactly what was going on, without having been told. It was possible. He was a wily old bird. On the other hand, how could he have found out, when Nigel had been at such pains to hide it from him? He couldn't surely have deduced it from that one visit Macaudle had made to the shop in September? George had hung around on that occasion, but Nigel had made sure of there being no opportunity to introduce them – and he'd had all subsequent correspondence addressed to him personally and had kept it securely locked up at all times.

  George, however, was going to have to face the truth sooner or later. Provincial jewellers like Fontenoy's, however well-respected their name, were in the junior league nowadays . .. their outlets were narrow, competition was fierce. It wasn't as if they were London-based, working in the largest antique jewellery centre in the world. The only answer was to merge, to allow himself to be bought out by one of them: Jermyn's, to be precise. The shop would still be run by him, still be known as Cedar House Antiques, the only difference being that he would be relieved of the constant worry.

  Meantime, though, he still had certain assets; the thought of one in particular went a very long way towards lightening the gloom. Yet he frowned, remembering the appointment that evening. It had been a long day, and he was tired, but he would need all his wits about him, all his powers of persuasion. He sat up straighter as they went through a tunnel and the reflection of a girl's face in the window from the next bank of seats sprang out – sweet, young, soft. Smiling. He returned the smile, knowing she could see his reflection, too. A good-looking man, well dressed, obviously prosperous, a mature man who knew how to charm women. The girl stopped smiling, stood up abruptly and left the compartment.

  He shrugged. Forget it. In any case, he'd finished with all that now. He was becoming more circumspect as he grew older.

  The appearance of the battered old railway buildings at the top of the embankment, just before the train plunged into the next tunnel, signalled it was time to collect his belongings and get ready for disembarking. Perhaps it was that young girl, or maybe a sudden memory of that unspeakable encounter last month, but at that moment the thought of Naomi slid again into his mind. Naomi at eighteen. A peculiar sort of excitement coursed through him. She might have changed with the years, but not so much that she wouldn't, considering her present circumstances, allow herself to be persuaded at last to see reason.

  The weather had taken a turn for the worse as he came out of the station and headed for the car park. Rain was lashing down, it was distinctly chilly and a strong wind had got up. The biggest storm that Lavenstock had experienced for half a century, however, didn't begin in earnest until about ten, although it raged until dawn.

  7

  During the night, the Stockwell overflowed its banks, buildings were damaged, trees uprooted. At least one major accident was caused by a branch falling across a car windscreen, causing the driver to swerve and several vehicles to pile up behind him. An unlucky woman visitor, sleeping on a camp bed in a conservatory, was killed when a chimney-stack fell through the roof. On the outskirts of Lavenstock, an ancient tumbledown house, already dangerously shaky on its foundations, collapsed. The town had known nothing like it in living memory.

  Old George Fontenoy, uneasy in his bed, was subliminally aware of the chaos outside, of the screech of the wind in the chimney and the rattling window-frames and the rain drumming on the roof, of bangs and crashes on the periphery of his drug-induced sleep. At some point the noise reached a crescendo that penetrated his subconscious and he awoke in panic and terror, his heart beating arrhythmically. Drenched in sweat, he lay listening to the cacophony outside, willing the sleeping pills to lull him back into oblivion. He didn't succeed for some time but later, much later, he did sleep.

  Scarcely a soul in Lavenstock slept well that night.

  Lindsay Hammond, home again for the weekend, lay rigid in her bed, trying to think of anything other than the gale ... the new garden layout, for instance, which Christine had been trying to interest her in before bed. But thunder and lightning terrified her, and she couldn't concentrate her mind on Christine's ideas. She could only see the photos they'd been looking at, pictures of the original garden taken before the house was pulled down, showing a landscape of Victorian extremes: of threateningly spiky yuccas and downy grey Dusty Millers, poison-green spotted aucubas and feathery ferns, fleshy hellebores, deadly laburnum pods and gigantic, dangerous clumps of Japanese knotweed.

  The wind was tearing through the wood, the branches soughing and creaking, and she imagined the creatures deep in the interior, the birds being blown from their nests, the little brown muntjak deer, trembling and terrified. But the house was new and kept in good repair, Jake had built well and strong. Nothing rattled, shook or fell off. She was glad she wasn't Cassie, alone with that grungy mother of hers in the horrid little house that looked as though it only needed a huff and a puff to blow it down.

  She finally dropped off into an uneasy sleep, haunted by fantasies of the wind lifting Cassie's house up, whole, blowing it across the sky like some witch's hovel in one of her old fairy books. But even that wouldn't scare Cassie. She wasn't afraid of anything.

  It was some time later that she awoke again as light flashed across her closed curtains. The house
had been struck by lightning, she thought in panic, then realized it was only the headlights of a car.

  Cassie Andreas certainly wasn't frightened by the storm but she found it hard to calm down and get to sleep. Storms excited her – and she was far too hyped-up, wide awake, listening to the creaking and groaning of the loose section of guttering outside her bedroom window and the intermittent banging of the side gate, which had lost its fastening. She thought about getting up again and making herself some hot chocolate, but she'd only just got warm and at the thought of leaving her duvet-wrapped snugness she stayed put.

  The storm reminded her of the meltemi. When she'd been staying with her Greek grandmother, she could pretend to be afraid and creep into her bed and snuggle up to her vast, pillowy softness. But this was England, she was no longer a child, there was no grandmother here, and nobody could imagine snuggling up to Naomi for comfort.

  She was glad she'd allowed her mother to come here. She could have persuaded her not to, you could talk Naomi into anything, and Cassie had early discovered she could manipulate anyone, if she chose. She was sorry to have left the sun behind, but here she and Joss had rich friends – Lindsay and, of course, Matthew. Money was of paramount importance to Cassie, her life so far having been singularly lacking in it. Also, in Greece she'd always felt herself to be some sort of hybrid, neither Greek nor English. She'd hated that, sensing that there must be something better than either the dull, peasant life of her Greek relatives or the feckless, hand-to-mouth, come-day go-day existence of her mother.

  'We'll see about staying here, it all depends,' her mother had said when they arrived.

  Yes, we'll see, thought Cassie, now, with a secret smile. We shall see.

  The gate banged loudly again, several times in quick, erratic succession. She wondered if the roof might blow off, which in this house seemed entirely possible. The broken-down fence would certainly be laid low. Perhaps Joss might now be shamed into doing something about it, he was competent enough, though whenever he was asked to do anything like that he always managed to find urgent business elsewhere. If it had to be fixed, she would have to do it herself, as usual. She was the only one who ever did things around here. She wished, passionately, that she'd been the son, and Joss the daughter. She often thought of herself as a boy.

  Cassie wondered how Joss had been able to go on working for Jake Wilding for so long. She didn't think Jake was the sort to tolerate slacking and incompetence.

  'No problem,' Joss had said, with his slow smile, when she'd asked him once. 'I'm the blue-eyed boy as far as Jake's concerned.'

  Cassie, however, had known men like Jake in the village at home. 'All smiles to your face and a dagger in the back when you're not looking,' she'd said darkly, though the real reason she didn't like Jake was because she knew he instinctively distrusted her. She smiled, amused by the idea, and not at all upset.

  But then a little worm of fear began to burrow beneath Cassie's hard little shell. She tried to ignore it, but a web had been woven, meshing them all together into a tight knot, from which none of them might find it easy to extricate themselves.

  Joss, unable to wind down either, was smoking in bed, his thoughts jumping back to that September evening when Cassie had called him into the garden to eat.

  It came to him in a series of images, sharp and clear: the scruffy old table with the wonky leg which stood under the three arthritic old apple trees. Its grey weathered graininess and the stains of countless bird-droppings. The empty plates on the table, cleared of the illicit Chicken Chasseur. And the wine bottle, Naomi's glass. Cassie, lying on her stomach in the grass, her chin propped up on her hand, her eyes black and shining, exhilarated by the Wagnerian Sturm und Drang issuing from her radio. The end of a sweltering day and the dusk giving the garden an illusion of tranquillity. The scent of apples and, barely visible in the dusk, some woody Michaelmas daisies, bleached of colour by neglected old age and the half-light, reflecting the white blur of Naomi's face as she leaned over to pick up her glass.

  He'd seen that she was worried about something, or as worried as Naomi ever could be, and that in itself gave significance to the moment. It couldn't have been the bills which were piling up, for she simply tossed them aside, nor the repairs the house needed – she knew all about these things, and that retribution was only a step away, but let them slide off her consciousness like water off a duck's back. He knew this was something a good deal more fundamental.

  A few minutes before, Cassie had been clearing windfalls to make a space to lie on the grass, examining the apples for worms or wasps and putting the best to one side, suggesting, without much hope, that they could be made into a pie. Apple pies, unknown in Greece, were just another part of the British way of life that Cassie had embraced with such fervour.

  She hadn't wanted to come here originally, but it was obvious that she was now in her element. She loved the English countryside, its green lushness; grey English cities, strawberries and cream, ready-sliced bread for toast, and even the soft English rain. This year, there had actually been sun. She was well on the way to becoming a born-again Anglophile.

  Now, at the mention of apple pies, Naomi was rolling her eyes as if she'd never heard of such a thing. 'What ideas you do get! You pick them up and make one if you want one so much.'

  'All right, I will!'

  Naomi laughed and Joss had been furious with her. He lounged back in one of the old-fashioned deck chairs they'd found in the outhouse and put his feet up on the table, to annoy her. She didn't even notice.

  Cassie glared at Naomi, too, and turned the Valkyries off mid-ride, with a snap that nearly broke the switch. She was strong willed and quick to anger, and she could have no idea how to set about making apple pies, but he knew she'd find out. She had a tenacity he envied. If she was determined to do something, she'd do it, come hell or high water. He and Cassie, separated by eight years, had come from the same mould, but her anger was quick and violent, whereas his was a slow burn.

  As if what he'd been thinking about inside the house had transmitted itself to her, Naomi, her tongue loosened with alcohol, had unexpectedly broached the subject of his working for Jake Wilding. 'I wish you two weren't so involved with the Wildings, with Jake and Matthew.' She watched Cassie under her eyelids.

  'Why? Does it matter?' Joss had asked, lazily, trying not to let her know that she had the whole of his attention. She had Cassie's too, he could tell from her sudden tense stillness. Naomi took a deep breath and then in a rush, she told him it mattered very much, because she had once not only known Jake Wilding, she had been married to him.

  'Right,' he said, draining his wine.

  There was silence. 'You knew,' she said. 'Who told you?'

  'I've known since I was fifteen.' He watched for her reaction as he told her about opening that letter from England.

  'Joss!' She wasn't shocked, hardly surprised; amused, in fact, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth. 'Opening my letters! That was never one of your most endearing traits. You were bound to find out something disagreeable sooner or later.'

  He'd allowed the silence to lengthen, and felt rage tightening his skull. She'd known. She, his mother, had known all along what he was doing and had never tried to stop him. Both he and Cassie had opened their mother's mail since they could first read, just as they'd helped themselves to money from her purse, or from odd amounts left lying around, by her or anyone else. They'd become adept at steaming envelopes open and sealing them up again un-noticeably, enough to fool Naomi, at any rate, though it usually wasn't worth the effort they put into it. Mothers were supposed to stop you doing things like that – yet she'd known and never even tried to show him that it was an activity that was to say the least socially undesirable. She'd let him carry on doing it, simply because she was too lazy, or too uncaring, to stop it. She'd probably known about the pilferings from her purse, too. Sometimes he felt like killing his mother.

  'Is it so "disagreeable" that I'm Jake Wilding's so
n, then?' he'd asked, when he could speak. He tried to read her face, moon-pale in the dusk, but he was too far away to see her expression. 'He talked about me in the letter – the boy, he called me. Didn't he even know my name?' He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice and he heard her catch her breath.

  By this time, Naomi had drunk most of the wine. She poured the dregs into her glass. A train came out of the tunnel and thundered past. The tree branches bent and several more apples fell to join the others on the grass. The fence above the embankment swayed, the glasses and bottle rattled on the table. 'I hate this house,' she said.

  'Never mind the house, it serves its purpose. What about my question?'

  Ignoring him, she went on in a dreamy voice, 'My grandfather was a stationmaster, that was how he came to live here. Later, my father bought the house, and my mother kept it, even after she remarried.'

  'Will you answer me? I want to know.'

  'What you both should know,' she said, 'is that the boy Jake referred to in that letter was Matthew. Matthew is my son.'

  Whether you believed Naomi or not was largely a function of how young, or how credulous you were. As a child, he'd believed her stories implicitly, until he'd learned scepticism. But that hot September night, after the first initial shock, he'd had no difficulty whatsoever in believing what she said as, word by shattering word, she proceeded to demolish all his previously conceived ideas.

  When she'd finished and he was at last able to breathe again, he'd met Cassie's eyes. The tension that was always there between them sparked like two bare wires meeting. They had understood each other perfectly.