The Hidden Legacy: A Dark and Shocking Psychological Drama

by GJ Minett

  Whatever you decide, Primrose Cottage is yours. I hope you’ll accept it and learn to love it as much as I have. It’s been a daily reminder to me that not everything I’ve touched in this life has turned to sand. And whether you choose to read on or leave the second envelope unopened, I pray that when you reach my age, you’ll look back on life with fewer regrets than those I’ve had to carry around with me for far too long.

  Love those closest to you and hold on to them for dear life.

  Yours with affection,

  Eudora

  February 2008: Ellen

  Ellen’s response, on reaching the end of the letter, was to go straight back to the beginning. The second time she read slowly, searching for any significant detail that might have escaped her. Kate was content to wait, reaching for the wine bottle and refilling both glasses. She watched as Ellen took a couple of sips and put the glass back on the table without once taking her eyes from the sheets in front of her. She could have been drinking bleach for all she knew.

  Kate sat down next to her, turning sideways on and lifting her feet onto the sofa. She hugged her knees and chewed on another slice of pizza as she nestled into the corner, studying Ellen’s face for some hint as to how she was taking this. There was nothing to be gleaned from her expression, nothing to suggest she was reading anything more significant than a TV magazine, but that was Ellen. Kate knew her well enough to be sure there was plenty going on underneath. She couldn’t possibly be unaffected by all this.

  Eventually Ellen looked up from the letter and gave a deep sigh, tucking behind her ear a strand of hair that had fallen across her face.

  ‘You OK?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Fine . . . just a bit . . . I dunno . . . weird, I suppose.’ She fanned herself with the sheets, staring vacantly into the middle distance.

  ‘You OK about Barbara?’

  Ellen gave a rueful smile. ‘Yeah . . . sure. It’s not like it’s some big surprise, is it?’

  ‘No, but even so . . .’

  ‘You were there, Kate. You know what she was like. At least she was consistent. She never made any bones about the fact that she was keeping things from me.’ She arched her back, easing the stiffness from her joints. ‘Wish I could say the same about Sam,’ she added.

  ‘Sam?’ Kate sounded surprised. ‘Am I missing something?’

  Ellen speared a couple of slices of carrot and put the fork to one side. ‘Here,’ she said, skimming back through the letter. ‘She said those . . . plural. Where is it?’ She ran her finger down the lines of text until she found the sentence she was after. ‘There are those very close to you who don’t think you should. See? Not someone or your mother. Those.’

  Kate looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Bit tenuous, isn’t it? You sure you’re not reading too much into it?’

  Ellen shook her head emphatically. ‘That’s no throwaway comment. Remember what Reverend Williams said . . . about how Eudora took ages over this? If she said those, that’s what she meant.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So who else could it be? I mean, assuming we can rule out Megan and Harry, if it’s someone close to me, it’s got to be Sam and Mary, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Cheers, El,’ said Kate, raising her glass in mock tribute to their friendship.

  ‘Yeah, well, you don’t count. If I can’t trust you, I might as well just pack it all in.’

  ‘And you don’t trust Sam?’

  ‘Of course I do. Well . . . I did. But he’s been really off lately – ever since I first mentioned Eudora’s name. And now it turns out he’s been ringing me all day.’

  ‘Since when?’

  Ellen explained about the missed calls she’d discovered earlier in the car. If he was so desperate to get hold of her, it could only mean one thing – somehow, although God only knew how, he’d managed to find out what she was up to and was determined to reel her back in. The more she thought about it, the more she felt hounded by him – that wasn’t too strong a word.

  ‘Have you rung him?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘Why? I know what he’s going to say. I don’t want to hear any more evasions and half-truths, Kate. And anyway I don’t trust myself just yet. I’m fed up with being . . . manipulated like that. He can sit and stew for a bit. It’ll do him good.’

  Kate flicked at a piece of fluff from the cushion that had attached itself to her tights. She watched Ellen work her way through the momentary flash of temper, managing it just as she’d always done, right from their time at school through to the darkest days of her relationship with Jack. Ellen was a slow burner who had never felt comfortable with public shows of anger, preferring instead to store up resentment until it sizzled at the edges. All she ever needed was a few moments to compose herself, open the valve and let the pressure subside.

  After a while, Ellen put her plate on the table alongside her wine glass and leant back so that her head was against Kate’s legs. She folded the letter carefully, reinforcing the creases, and slipped it back into the envelope. Then she picked up the larger one and studied it closely. This one was much, much thicker and, unlike the letter she’d just read, it was sealed with several strips of Sellotape. As if she hadn’t even trusted Reverend Williams to keep his word, Eudora had signed her name across the flap.

  Ellen twisted slightly so that she could look up into Kate’s face.

  ‘What would you do?’ she asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘If you were me – would you read it?’

  Kate picked up another slice of pizza and took a bite out of it.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I’d do,’ she said. ‘I’m not you. I can lift the lid and have a good look inside and just walk away if I don’t like what I see. It’s not going to hurt anyone but me.’

  ‘Whereas I’ve got Megan and Harry to think about.’

  ‘Whereas you’ve got Megan and Harry.’

  ‘And once you know something, you can’t unknow it, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And ignorance is bliss.’

  ‘So they say.’

  Ellen nodded. ‘You know I’m going to read it, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Never doubted it for a minute,’ said Kate.

  August 2007: Ellen 2

  I feel I have to start with my husband, Josef. Someone ought to speak on his behalf and I’m sure he deserves a more eloquent testimony than mine. Unfortunately I am all he has, poor soul.

  You need to understand that Josef was a good man. A kind man. A gentle man in all senses of the word. He was never less than considerate to me, and to Julie he was a devoted, loving father for those few years God saw fit to grant him that role. One moment of madness should not be seen as typical of him. The Josef I knew was a man of moderation who never acted impulsively. Violence was simply not in his nature.

  I first met him in the spring of 1941. In those days I was working as a seamstress, making alterations to beautiful dresses I could never imagine wearing myself, until the war started and we were put to the monotonous task of making uniforms. I was the elder of two daughters in what my father described as a middle-class family. If my mother had any thoughts on that or any other matter, I never discovered what they were. There was room in that household for one opinion only.

  I was a considerable disappointment to him in two specific respects, neither of which seemed entirely fair to me. My greatest sin, it seems, lay in having been born the wrong gender altogether. My mother was expected to produce a son who might look after the family business some day. Instead she gave birth to two daughters, giving him an excuse to withdraw almost completely from family life, emerging from his self-imposed exile only when he felt there was a need to reassert his authority and make life as difficult and unpleasant as possible for my younger sister and me.

  My other major failing, as far as he was concerned, was that I was still living at home. Throughout my teenage years, his one consolation had been that before long I would su
rely be whisked away by an unsuspecting suitor, and become someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, with so many young men being called away to fight for their country, potential husbands were thinner on the ground than they might otherwise have been. To add to this, the crippling shyness which had blighted my adolescence showed no signs of releasing its hold as I moved into adulthood, leaving me ill-equipped to fight my own corner in such a competitive environment.

  My prospects of finding a suitable partner might have been better, were it not for the restrictions placed on my social life. My father had his own ideas about how respectable young ladies were expected to behave. They did not go out in the evenings during the week, for instance. Tarts did. Trollops did. Decent girls did not. I was allowed out on a Saturday night to go to the cinema with Jane, a work colleague who was already married with a baby girl even though she was three years younger than I was. She was deemed acceptable, partly because she was living with her parents while her husband was away on active service but principally, I suspect, because there was always the hope that if I spent enough time in her company, some of her magic might rub off onto me.

  If the cinema was considered acceptable, public houses most certainly were not. As for dance halls, they were generally regarded as suspect, although for some reason he seemed to view the Saturday night dance at Cheltenham Town Hall with a less critical eye. Perhaps he felt that anything taking place in such august surroundings must have an element of respectability about it. Whatever the reason, Jane and I started going there whenever a big band was in town, and it was at one such evening that I first met Josef Kasprowicz.

  He was twenty-eight years old and had come over from Lodz in Poland as a fighter pilot. I was three years his junior but the gulf in experience made the real difference between us so much greater than that. You’d be hard pressed to imagine just how young and naive I was, even allowing for the fact that those were far more innocent times. It’s no exaggeration to say I probably knew less then about the ways of the world than the most sheltered teenager does now.

  Suffice to say, I was dazzled by him. I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever met. He was polite, considerate and I was immediately drawn to him, not least because of the slightly exotic air conferred upon him by his lack of facility with the language.

  From the outset, he presented my father with something of a dilemma. In almost every respect, Josef was the answer to his prayers. Here at long last was someone who was not only prepared but even anxious to take me off his hands. Even better than that, he was a hero, a decorated fighter pilot, one of our brave and gallant boys. Unfortunately his prospects as a future son-in-law were marred by the fact that he wasn’t actually one of our boys . . . not really. Josef was a Pole, wasn’t he? A Polack. My father, as he was to prove so graphically in the coming years, had little interest in me as a person but the thought that the Nash bloodline might in any way be tainted was anathema to him. No grandson of his was going to be fathered by someone who could barely speak the King’s English.

  Josef finally proposed shortly after the end of the war. I don’t know to this day exactly what was said behind the closed door of my father’s study or what reasons he gave for denying Josef his blessing. All I do know is that when Josef left our house that evening, he asked me to go with him and I did. Without even thinking. It took me no more than five minutes to throw clothes and a few essentials into a case while my mother stood by the door, telling me I was making a dreadful mistake. Then I was gone and I never saw them again . . . not once. Josef and I were married in June the following year.

  The first few years of marriage were hard. Once he was back in civvy street, Josef tried to find work as a draughtsman, the career for which he’d qualified in Poland before the war. Employment possibilities however were scarce and he soon discovered that any currency his medals and citations might have earned him counted for very little in the reality of post-war Britain. Now he was just another returning serviceman looking for work and a Johnny Foreigner to boot. He managed eventually to find a job on a dairy farm near Andoversford, gruelling work which entailed not only anti-social hours but also a nine-mile cycle ride each way. As ever he saw nothing in this to complain about, volunteering for any extra hours on offer. Sometimes I didn’t see him between the hours of six in the morning and nine at night.

  We were renting a flat in Hewlett Road and money was tight enough for me to have to do a couple of afternoons a week in the local newsagents but we were happy enough, inasmuch as I ever really thought about it. That, I suppose, is the point. I hadn’t ever given it any thought at all. In that first year, everything was new, exciting. I had escaped the tyranny of Havelock Road and that was all that mattered. But once the initial onslaught was over and we began to settle into some sort of rhythm, we gradually became aware of just how different we were.

  It was nothing too dramatic to begin with. I loved the cinema and would happily have gone every weekend if our finances had stretched that far. Josef came with me at first, holding my hand in the dark and doing his best to be enthralled by what was happening on the screen. He was restless though, happier doing something than being passively entertained. Before long we decided it was pointless paying good money for him to sit there and be bored. Instead I started going with Jane or, more often than not, on my own.

  For his part, Josef loved going for long walks across the hills on a Sunday afternoon, seven-mile hikes in all kinds of weather. The idea of sharing this with him was appealing enough but the reality was very different. The honest truth is that the great outdoors did nothing for me. Ten minutes into the walk I would already be pining for the flat. I would have been so much happier curled up in a blanket, reading one of the classics. The library in town was like a second home to me and these hours spent trekking across the countryside began to feel like a waste of valuable reading time.

  Even socially we were struggling to find the right balance. Josef’s friends from his days at RAF Duxford were very important to him. It was a part of his life I’d never been in a position to share but at least I could appreciate the importance of the bond forged by their wartime experiences. I wanted to support him whenever they all got together for reunions but somehow always ended up feeling like an outsider, even among the wives. My inadequate social skills were probably at the root of it but, for whatever reason, I never felt totally accepted by them and sensed after the first few attempts that, far from supporting Josef, I was making it difficult for him to relax and be himself.

  I don’t recall discussing these problems with him – not once. He was probably trying to protect my feelings. For my part, I was acutely aware I’d made this particular bed, as my father would have been pleased to put it, and over a period of time these differences simply became part of the daily routine. We made room for them by gradually drifting further and further apart. If anyone had asked me at any stage whether or not I loved Josef, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes – of course I do. He’s my husband. But it would have been no more than a reflex. I never dared to ask myself the question.

  What we lacked was a shared interest, the focal point Julie would eventually provide. Perhaps that’s why we agreed we’d start a family the moment our finances would stretch to it. Maybe we both hoped that bringing an extra factor into the equation would distract us from focusing too closely on what was missing. For my part, I know I was more than ready. I was almost thirty when Josef and I got married, thirty-three by the time we agreed the time was right. My body clock was not so much ticking as screaming.

  So when Josef finally landed a job in the drawing office of a local architect, it felt like a new beginning in more ways than one. With our finances on a sounder footing, there was no reason why we shouldn’t start a family. For me, this was more than just the logical next step in our relationship. I’d come to view it as a chance for me to redeem myself. I’d been a failure as a daughter and was now failing as a wife, but if I could make a success of raising a family, there was hope
for me yet. I could hardly wait to get started.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t that simple. Now we were no longer obliged to take precautions, I naively assumed it wouldn’t be long before I would be expecting. I’d imagined so often the moment when I would know for sure, rehearsed the way I would break the news to Josef, almost tasted the surge of joy which would miraculously sweep away the awkwardness between us. We’d never been as comfortable in our intimacy as we might have been but I could see this all changing overnight, now that we had a common goal to pursue.

  But three months slipped by, then six, then nine, each one bringing its own little disappointment. Josef was so solicitous the first few times. I suspect he knew how important this was to me and understood that each month that passed was like a little death. From time to time I would find on my pillow a posy of wild flowers he’d picked on the way home from work. Alternatively he might suggest a small consolation prize – forget the money, we’ll go out for a meal. But not even someone as considerate as he could hope to keep this up indefinitely. And after eighteen months, it gradually ceased to be a topic of conversation between us.

  It was my fault. I knew I was to blame. I was doing something wrong. I never felt comfortable talking about such matters so it’s an indication of how desperate I was that I went to see Jane, who by now had five children of her own and clearly knew how to carry out her responsibilities in a proper and adult manner. Her immediate response was to laugh until she saw how close I was to tears. Then she sat me down, put her arm around me and did her best to reassure me. There was nothing wrong with me or with how I was conducting myself. I was too anxious, that was all. I needed to relax, stop fretting so much. I couldn’t hurry these things – they had a timing all of their own. You’ll be fine, you’ll see. And as it turned out she was right . . . although not in the way I’d imagined.