The Patron of Lost Causes

by Mark Daydy

“I didn’t know you were in a group with Ellie?”

  “Mum, we were at junior school together.”

  “Of course…”

  Victoria and Ellie had spent three years together at school in Camley – not that it ever brought Lucy and Jane into contact at the school gates. Lucy had an admin job in Chichester in those days and relied on Libby to take Victoria to school and bring her home.

  “Are you going through with your plan?” Victoria asked.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You think so? You seemed really up for it when we spoke.”

  “As I recall, you were pushing me, but yes, I’m going in a minute.”

  “Good. Don’t forget to take some selfies.”

  “Yes, about that…”

  “It’s okay, I know you don’t like sharing online. We’ll have a glass of wine and a laugh over them next time I’m over.”

  “Right, well, I’ll say bye-bye and get to it then. I’ll report back when I get home.”

  “Okay then. Bye, Mum, I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Of course, her daughter didn’t get it. Not fully. That was Lucy’s fault. All that endless recounting of her happy early years had long become a way of counteracting the late teen years, of which Victoria had heard nothing.

  So, unremarkably, a routine chat a few days earlier had brought up good memories. Pre-seventeen memories. But talking to her daughter over coffee, Lucy experienced a sudden realization of how disconnected she had become from those far-off days, as if they had been placed behind a screen. So maybe Victoria hadn’t needed to push much after all.

  She checked her watch. It was another two hours before dinner. So, as planned, she left the hotel on foot. It was only a short walk to the past.

  *

  Shelby Avenue was a non-descript street. The kind that told you nothing. In fact, the kind that suggested there wasn’t anything to tell in the first place and that nothing had happened since it was built in 1932.

  The semi-detached houses were all similar, set back from the road with a short drive and a strip of grass. The fences between were generally covered by mature shrubs or well-maintained privet hedges. Little had changed since her teenage years. Little ever changed in Sussex. It was a county that exuded permanence.

  A pizza delivery bike came crawling along and pulled up opposite. The familiar sight of the rider taking hot food to someone’s door.

  Lucy headed down the street – nearing the house the Robertsons lived in all those years ago. She paused where Mr Robertson’s little red Ford once sat on the drive. Now, the grass was gone and a Range Rover, a Mercedes, and a sporty BMW took up the entire block-paved front.

  A little farther on, Lucy crossed the street and came to a halt outside the Pendletons’ place. Here, Steven Pendleton once kissed her and suggested they might like to get married. Then he invited her to try on his Batman outfit. Him being five and her six at the time did not diminish the strength of the memory.

  Finally, outside number 23, she stopped with greater purpose. There was her mum at the lounge window… and behind her a small girl on a rocking horse. Her dad, Eric, appeared at the door – a tall-ish man in a business suit that matched his job as an accountant, or as Mum used to put it, a wealth consultant.

  “Can I help?”

  The image of her father dissolved into a man in jogging attire. The new people who had taken over. She had never met them personally, and now didn’t wish to.

  “Sorry, wrong number,” said Lucy.

  She walked on a little way, aware of him leaving the house and pounding away in the opposite direction. A moment later, she took out her phone and pretended to talk to someone as she walked back on the opposite side to take in number 23 from neutral territory.

  Her mum had died aged forty-seven – the same age as Lucy now. Her dad would have been fifty-four at the time.

  Relationships are risky. Her parents’ marriage failed. It was only her dad’s good grace that kept them together. But it hurt Lucy to know they had separate bedrooms seven years before her mum fell ill.

  Her dad stayed on in the house for another quarter of a century, living there quite alone until his passing. She wondered about that for a moment. Then she heeded her daughter’s suggestion. It seemed the most ridiculous thing, but she turned around, raised her phone, and snapped herself in front of her old house.

  So many memories…

  The first time she took a boy up to her room. Sixteen. Homework. Supposedly. Not that much of their planned snogging could take place. Her mum constantly interrupted with tea, lemonade, biscuits, magazines…

  That was when Lucy first began to fully understand the extent of her parents’ difficulty with people displaying passion. She certainly couldn’t remember them ever displaying any themselves. She recalled playing at a friend’s house when she was six or seven. The friend’s dad came home from work and kissed his wife right there in the lounge where Lucy and her friend were playing. Just like that! Lucy was shocked. Her head swirled. How did they know it was okay to kiss? They never spoke a word!

  She thought of her mum again. A Howard girl. She’d had emotions, of course, but she tended to save them for arguments – or, more accurately, for the end of an argument, where she would storm out of the room and slam the door shut as an exclamation. Lucy had long hated people slamming doors. It always triggered anxiety.

  She wondered. What was it with relationships? Why were they so hard to get right? She had let three men into her life. All of them lost causes – lost causes she’d believed she could turn around, rescue from the brink, restore to the light, possibly because she was a Howard, and helping the less fortunate was a valued family trait. She recalled Jane introducing her to Greg, saying he needed a bit of help, and would Lucy like to get involved?

  Bad memories.

  Lucy sighed. Coming here had been a mistake. She should have gone home to Barnet straight after the party.

  She turned back in the direction of the hotel and started walking swiftly along the streets of her youth. It brought back more memories. Hurrying, late for school…

  She slowed. The past didn’t own her. She just wanted to revisit happy times. Why was that so difficult?

  She reached the main road. Up ahead… the White Horse pub. She recalled being allowed inside at seventeen, mainly because back then nobody ever asked for proof of age, and possibly because the landlord knew her parents.

  Yes, the White Horse, which, along with the Prince Regent, served this large-ish village as well as the many smaller communities in the area.

  She couldn’t help but glance across the street as she passed on the opposite side. Maybe they had redecorated it, reshaped it, smashed the old interior into rubble and rebuilt it leaving just the exterior façade. She wouldn’t be going in to check. She’d only see it as it had been that evening, when she set foot inside and beheld tall, handsome Greg alongside sixteen-year-old Jane waving to her from the bar.

  *

  Later, back at the hotel, Lucy mulled over her choices while she enjoyed the in-house grilled halibut and mashed potato, which helped dissipate the effects of Eleanor’s terrible cucumber sandwiches and weak, watery coffee.

  She wouldn’t be visiting her old junior school on the other side of the village in the morning. The charm of the idea had simply worn off. And as for visiting her old high school in Camley…?

  While it was easy to skip over the bad bits from far away, here on the little-changed streets of West Sussex, she was far too aware of what she was avoiding. Like the time she was in sixth form and Greg came by on a motorbike – obviously stolen, although at the time she had gullibly believed he’d borrowed it from a friend.

  No, this had to stop. Sussex had to be returned to the past, to memory, and she would have to stop telling Victoria how lovely certain bits had been. From now on, she needed to act like a grown-up. She would tell her daughter everything or nothing. And nothing seemed the better option, because frankly Vic
toria had lived through enough bad stuff herself, with a drunk, gambling father hardly ever there for the first ten years of her life, and then permanently gone when he crashed his car.

  One advantage of not going to take selfies outside her old haunts in the morning would be having a little time to spare before she headed home. Something wasn’t quite right with Libby and she didn’t want to leave Eleanor or Jane to deal with it. Not that they would have even noticed.

  Later, around half-ten, she got ready for bed. Beyond the hotel window lurked a dark Sussex sky. She once dreamed of such nights, with someone who loved her, who made her laugh, who would hold her close.

  She checked her phone. No messages and nothing out of the ordinary on Facebook. She checked the selfie she had taken earlier. A middle-aged Lucy Holt looked completely out of place outside teenage Lucy Holt’s home.

  She slid under the covers and closed her eyes. Sussex offered nothing. In the morning, she would check on Libby and then go straight home to Barnet.

  5. The Silver Chalice

  On a lovely early September morning, Lucy paid the taxi driver and then paused with her wheelie bag at Libby’s front gate in Camley. It was a moment to take in a view that had captured the spirit of sunny days going back at least the twenty-five years Libby had lived there, and very likely many years more. The clematis that climbed either side of the high gloss royal blue front door was in bloom, its cheery yellow flowers basking in sunshine. Quite simply, the old stone cottage was quintessentially picturesque. It was also ideally located for anyone responding to a summons from Eleanor, a few hundred yards across the town.

  The front door opened.

  “You really didn’t need to come,” said Libby. “You’ll miss your train.”

  Lucy smiled. “Don’t worry about the train. It’s an hourly service. As long as I avoid the Friday afternoon rush hour in London…”

  Inside, Libby unnecessarily recounted the latest UK weather report while she prepared a pot of tea and a small plate of chocolate fingers. Lucy was aware that the country could expect a few days of warmer weather, but she hadn’t come to talk about meteorological conditions. However, Libby was already in full swing, extolling the joys of sunny days and switching to memories of baking-hot trips to Bognor and Brighton and sweltering expeditions to the horse racing at Goodwood. It was a while before they made it into the lounge with the tea and biscuits.

  “I was worried about your little problem,” Lucy explained as they took their seats. “You were very vague yesterday, but I sensed something was troubling you more than you were letting on.”

  “You mean Selsey?”

  “Yes. What’s going on?”

  Libby pondered for a moment before answering.

  “It’s not like I won’t see her. It’s not that far.”

  Lucy still didn’t get it.

  “What was the plan? You mentioned a granny apartment.”

  “As I explained, my friend Gail Middleton recently moved there and thought I might like to join her. It would mean me paying for her garage to be turned into a living area with a separate bedroom and en-suite bathroom. We had a couple of quotes to do the conversion work and it comes in at around thirty thousand. Obviously, I’d have a stake in the freehold based on a valuation.”

  “So, what’s changed?”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “Right… so why did you get quotes for the work?”

  “Because I thought I did have the money. That silver cup I mentioned – it’s an Elizabethan communion chalice. We think it dates back to 1580.”

  “Wow. That’s old.”

  “Yes, Eddie obtained it years ago. The thing is… the man at Taylor’s Antiques in the High Street believes it only dates back to the early twentieth century. Pre-First World War, probably.”

  “You mean it’s a fake?”

  “He used the term ‘copy’.”

  “I see.”

  “He said an original would be worth around twenty thousand.”

  “Again, wow.”

  “He offered me five hundred for it.”

  “Five hundred? I hope you told him no.”

  “It’s alright, I’m just working up the courage to try another dealer. It was quite a blow hearing what he had to say.”

  “Just make sure you don’t sell it to him.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. It’s worth a lot to me sentimentally. Obviously, that would change for twenty thousand. Eddie would have wanted me to be happy. He wouldn’t have wanted me to part with it for five hundred though. He would have had something to say about that.”

  “I’m glad, but… I mean, it’s none of my business, but couldn’t you sell your house and buy a house near your friend?”

  Libby looked around her, at the walls, the door, the ceiling.

  “No, that wouldn’t be possible.”

  “Oh… any particular reason?”

  “I don’t own it.”

  “You don’t? Oh, I always thought…”

  “It’s a rented property.”

  “Okay. I suppose I’d always assumed… still, no matter. There’s nothing wrong with renting. I rent. So did Dad.”

  “Except, you can only move if you find another place to rent.”

  “And there aren’t any?”

  “On the contrary, there are quite a few. It’s just that I’m seventy and I wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting my peace of mind to a new landlord. You read all kinds of rotten stories in the newspapers, don’t you. Mine does every little job and even sends a gardener round twice a month at no extra cost.”

  “I don’t suppose your friend could contribute to the cost of converting the garage?”

  “She lives on a small pension. She owns the house, but really has little else. I couldn’t possibly ask her to pay even part of it.”

  A glaring solution reared up in Lucy’s mind.

  “Have you thought of asking Eleanor for a loan?”

  “Eleanor? I couldn’t ask Eleanor for money. Goodness, the world would freeze over. Chasms would open and consume southern England. At least that’s how bad it would feel should I ask. No, Eleanor and I never discuss money. Absolutely not. It’s out of the question. Besides, Eleanor wouldn’t believe my financial situation. She thinks I have the house, a portfolio of shares, and a considerable sum in the bank.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No.”

  Good grief.

  “So why does Eleanor think that?”

  “Because I’ve always given her that impression. Believe me, having Eleanor’s pity would be unbearable.”

  “The pity is that you and your sister don’t have a more honest relationship.”

  “I’m desperate, Lucy. I’m so disappointed I can’t go and live with Gail. I’d do anything to change it.”

  “Right…”

  “I have two thousand in the bank for a rainy day and there are other bits and pieces I could sell. Raising thirty thousand with the chalice was going to be tough, but without it…”

  “Fair enough,” said Lucy, trying to fathom how successful businessman Uncle Eddie had left Libby with next to nothing.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Libby, gathering her emotions but failing to fully hold them in. “You know what it’s like to have life-changing plans… to reach a moment of exciting transformation…”

  “Yes, of course.” Lucy experienced a sudden urge to change the subject. She opted for Libby’s son. “I meant to ask – how’s Keith getting on?”

  “Oh, he’s well. He moved to a new school last year – on the outskirts of Sydney. He loves being part of the senior management team, shaping the way the school runs.”

  “Australia sounds wonderful. His partner’s a teacher too, isn’t she?”

  “Kimmy? Yes. They met at his first school over there. That’s fifteen years ago. How time flies.”

  “You went over to see them not so long ago, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, that would be nine years ago.”

  �
��Nine?”

  “We do the video thing on the phone a couple of times a month. It’s not the same as being there though.”

  Libby became lost in thought for a moment before pointing to one of the photos on the wall by the fireplace.

  “Do you remember him like that?”

  It was young Keith astride Ned the rocking horse.

  “Funny you should say that. I was looking at photos with Jane and me sitting on Ned. Separately, I mean. I expect you passed old Ned on a long time ago.”

  “I meant to, but I never got around to it.”

  “You mean he’s still here?”

  “Would you like to say hello?”

  Lucy felt a pang. A bubbling up of feelings that echoed from happy days long ago. She could already sense his white painted body and horsehair mane and tail.

  “Come on,” said Libby.

  A moment later, they were in the garage pulling the dust cover off.

  Lucy gasped. “Oh Ned…”

  She felt a kind of joy that was all too rare in the world. At least, in her world. Warmth radiated throughout her body, her being, her soul.

  “He’s as lovely as I recall,” she said, studying him… her oldest friend… forever in full gallop.

  “He probably needs a good scrub with detergent,” said Libby.

  “He looks fine – although not quite as big as I remember.”

  “Well, you’ve grown. For the record, he’s still four feet high from the floor to the tips of his ears.”

  “To think Mum had him when she was young.”

  “We all did,” said Libby. “After Sylvia, he was passed to Eleanor, and then to me. Then, when your mum had you, she took him back for you. Eventually, he ended up back here for Keith.”

  “I’m glad you kept him.”

  “Ah well, there wasn’t anyone to pass him along to after Keith. It’s only recently I’ve thought of selling him. No room at Selsey, you see. That’s why I know his dimensions. I was going to write an advert.”

  “We were crime-fighters,” said Lucy, stroking Ned’s mane. “We used to chase after the bad guys.”

  “That sounds fun.”