by Rebecca Tope
Gussie had pointed out another lost village site, entitled Upper Ditchford, as well as expounding on the Knee Brook, which was the river that had powered the Blockley silk mills.
‘The Cotswolds vary so much, don’t they,’ said Thea. ‘I was in Cold Aston last year, and this is quite different, even though it’s just a few miles away.’
Gussie mumbled agreement before alerting Thea to their arrival at her son’s house. ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Stop here, before they see us.’
Thea did as instructed, wondering what the mystery was about. Her first interpretation was that Gussie was afraid that Thea might get invited in for a sherry if the family noticed her.
‘Too complicated to explain,’ the woman muttered. ‘Listen – I’m sure to see you again. Thanks for the lift. If I’d spotted the flat tyre earlier I’d have walked, of course. It’s only three or four miles. Don’t get too agitated about Gladys, will you. She’s got a lot more sense than she lets on. She isn’t going to come to any harm. Just try to be patient with the way she asks the same thing over and over.’
‘Thanks,’ laughed Thea. ‘That was getting to me a bit.’
Gussie gave her a last searching look. ‘Word of advice,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t underestimate her. There’s a difference between forgetting what time of day it is and being stupid. Gladys Gardner definitely isn’t stupid, and it would be wise to remember that.’
‘Right,’ said Thea, trying not to feel like a schoolgirl. ‘Have a good lunch. It was nice to meet you.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The drive back into Blockley, along an unfamiliar road, took her over a handsome-looking river, and past a property entitled Hangman’s Hall Farm, which set her musing cheerfully as to what the history of it might be. There were clumps of brown drooping snowdrops just visible through the new grass, no longer acting as harbingers of spring, but instead harking back to a winter that had been grim at times. Most of the expected flowers were late, the daffodils only just blooming and the leaf buds on the hedgerows very far from opening. But the past few days had brought great changes, which Thea had chosen to regard as signs of optimism for this particular assignment. The Montgomerys were paying her well, and despite the understating of Granny’s condition, it did seem likely that she would manage to befriend the old lady and the people around her.
* * *
She made herself a light lunch, thinking that she and Jessica might venture out that evening for a meal at The Crown. Sooner than expected, she saw Granny and Giles pass the front window on their way back to the cottage, walking slowly. Quickly she went to the front door and threw it open. Calling to their backs, she said, ‘Hello! Had a good time?’
Both turned to look at her without speaking. Granny’s face was transformed from the bright-eyed animation of the morning. Everything drooped, and her eyes looked watery and unfocused. Giles’s lips were clamped tight in what appeared to be exasperation.
‘We overdid it rather,’ he said. ‘Poor old Glad’s very tired now. She’s going to have a nap.’
‘Oh. Do you want me to…? I mean, can I do anything?’ Thea was suddenly terrified that her charge was going to expire on her, and she’d have to summon Yvette home to arrange her mother’s funeral. Except she was incommunicado in India, so that wasn’t an option, whatever happened.
‘No, no,’ boomed Giles’s deep voice. ‘She’ll be fine. It was all my fault. One tends to forget – well, you know.’ He seemed to be trying to say more with his eyes, and a quick tilt of his head towards the exhausted Granny.
She is ninety-two, Thea wanted to say. What do you expect?
She let Giles take the old woman into her part of the house, and close the door behind them. He’d probably done it before, and from the look Granny had given her, she had yet again completely forgotten who Thea was and why she was there.
She could see The Crown from where she stood, noting a lot of people emerging and getting into cars. Voices floated along the street to her, families buzzing with the afterglow of a good Mother’s Day lunch. Disaffected sons-in-law mollified by a bottle of Beaujolais, grandchildren glad to be liberated from the demands of manners and unfamiliar food. Thea thought again of the Gussie woman and wondered what her family consisted of, and how they felt about each other. It was odd, she realised now, that the son hadn’t been summoned to collect his mother when her car failed her. Niggling questions occurred to her, and she hoped she’d have a chance to hear answers to them, over the coming days.
She and Hepzie went back into the house and remained indoors, listening out for sounds from the cottage. Giles left after a little while and all was silence after that. Inevitably, renewed worries about Jessica floated up, and there seemed no way of dodging them. The afternoon progressed steadily, however, with a mixture of reading, preparing the second bed in the spare room and browsing the Internet on her laptop for information on the lost Ditchford villages. The last proved almost entirely fruitless, which surprised her, until she tried some lateral thinking and used the words abandoned and deserted instead. There still wasn’t very much about the Ditchfords, but it seemed the closer settlement of Upton, mentioned by the Gussie person, had received plenty of attention from academics. She couldn’t find the energy to read any of the learned papers listed, or the comparisons with other similar villages. Instead she closed down the computer and started to think about phoning her mother to grovel over her neglect. It was not an enticing prospect, so she deferred it while she boiled the kettle and buttered a Cream Cracker and worried a little bit about Jessica.
The knock on the front door startled her. It was only just after five, so it couldn’t be Jessica. And yet it was. ‘Goodness, you’re early! What happened?’ she greeted her unsmiling daughter.
Jessica pushed Hepzie away as the spaniel scrabbled ecstatically at her knees, and said, ‘What do you mean? It’s the exact time I told you I’d be here.’
‘You said six.’
‘It is six.’
‘But—’ Thea frowned at her watch, and then at the handsome pendulum clock hanging in the hall.
Jessica snorted. ‘You forgot to put them forward, didn’t you? Have you been an hour behind everybody else all day?’
Thea felt a wholly disproportionate agitation at this small failure. The day she had just lived through acquired a completely new aura, stained with embarrassment and self-reproach. ‘I’ve never done that before,’ she said.
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it. Can I come in?’
Thea waved her in, still reassessing the past ten hours or so. It came to her that she had felt some sense of being at odds with everyone around her. They were having lunch too early – even Granny had apparently got the wits to reset her clocks, leaving the house so early that morning. And now it was six o’clock and somehow she wasn’t ready for it to be that time. She felt cheated of something. And she felt incompetent, unfit for the world, and that was the most scary part.
‘Happy Mother’s Day, by the way,’ said Jessica. ‘I got you one of those chocolate orange things.’
It was a moment of embarrassment. Thea’s refusal to permit any excessive gush inhibited them both. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Between them lay Jessica’s trouble, which somehow felt too big to talk about without due preparation, a gradual approach, to a scene where there might be tears or raised voices or ill-considered announcements.
‘I’ll show you the room,’ said Thea. ‘And make some tea. I thought we could go out for a meal – if we can find a table. Mother’s Day is such a nuisance in that respect.’
‘They mainly go out for lunch, I think,’ said Jess. ‘Did you have anywhere in mind?’
‘Just The Crown, a little way up the street.’
‘I saw it. You mentioned it in your directions.’
‘So I did. It looks popular, at least. There was quite a little crowd there earlier on.’
Jessica sighed, and hefted the large bag that hung from her shoulder. ‘Let’s see the room, then,’
she said.
Thea led the way upstairs and along a corridor to a medium-sized bedroom. ‘It’s very nice,’ she said feebly. ‘Good view over the back,’ she added.
The window gave a long view to a hill rising to the west, beyond a row of houses on a road parallel to the High Street. ‘The whole town’s in a bowl – hills rise up on all sides,’ she elaborated.
‘Very pretty,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m sure I’m going to love it.’ Her tone suggested quite otherwise, and Thea wondered whether her daughter was with her mainly from a sense of duty. After the ordeals of other house-sitting assignments, the whole family probably considered that she needed to be looked after every time she took on a new job. Her sister Jocelyn had asked her directly, a few weeks ago, why she went on doing it.
‘For the money,’ Thea had replied, not entirely honestly. The truth was she relished the constant changes of scene, the new people and the little snatches of history she collected during her brief sojourns in the various Cotswold villages. No two were alike, and she was already actively seeking further commissions, placing advertisements in magazines and creating a website for herself. One interesting woman had contacted her, wanting somebody to oversee her animals in Temple Guiting for a fortnight in early June.
‘It was a centre of silk production,’ Thea informed the girl, still intent on instructing her about Blockley, and resolving that she must take the visit at face value. Trying to read ulterior motives into people’s actions was seldom a sensible line to take. She went on, ‘There are huge old silk mills down at the very bottom of the hill, where there’s a little river. I went for a look the last time I came here, when I met the Montgomerys. They’ve all been converted into apartments now, but you can see just what they must have been like. We can walk down there one day.’
‘Fascinating,’ muttered Jessica. ‘Silk mills.’
Thea felt a dreadful urge to slap her. The reversions to adolescent mulishness happened very seldom now, but there were still moments when the twenty-one-year-old could slip back to fifteen – or even five at times. Thea supposed this was universal between mothers and daughters – perhaps between parents and children in general. The echoes and ghosts of those earlier years never quite disappeared.
Jessica was a good four inches taller than her mother, with her father’s broad shoulders and long limbs. The look of Carl that sometimes flashed out was both sweet and sharp. His manner of tilting his head when thinking, the way he turned his left hand in towards his body to indicate impatience – to find them preserved in Jess had been a surprise. While he lived, Thea had never noticed that his daughter shared so many of his ways. It was a joy, mostly, despite the jolt it never ceased to give her. Another piece of the past forever captured. This, more than anything, was what bound families together. It was the same with her siblings. Damien was forever the older brother, sarcastic, protective, superior; Jocelyn the whining baby sister, struggling to keep up, quick to defend herself.
But she was losing patience rapidly. Until Jessica explained the reason for her loss of confidence, or whatever it was that might be going on, they couldn’t hope to have a relaxed time together. And it seemed wise to combine it with a change of scene. It would, after all, be a shame if the atmosphere of the house were to be ruined by the emotions of an upsetting story. Besides, she was hungry and there was very little food in the store cupboard or fridge.
‘So it’s nearly half past six,’ she said, with a little frown. ‘I’d better give Hepzie her supper. Then we’ll go out for a meal. OK?’
‘You’re allowed out, are you? Do you have to do any jobs first?’
Thea had forgotten Granny completely. She couldn’t remember hearing anything from the cottage since Giles had left.
‘There’s an old lady next door. It’s the Granny cottage, and she’s the granny. She’s ninety-two, and forgets things. She doesn’t recognise me, but she fell in love with Hepzie the moment she saw her.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Do you have to feed her, or put her to bed, or take her to the lavatory?’
‘None of the above. I just have to try to keep her from wandering away and getting lost. There’s a buzzer that goes off if she opens her front door. It went off this morning at half past seven.’
‘How weird.’
‘It is a bit. She’s been out today, with a surrogate son called Giles. She looked terribly tired when he brought her home and she’s been silent ever since.’
‘You should check that she’s still alive then,’ said Jessica in a voice that was too normal for the words she spoke.
‘I don’t want to wake her if she’s asleep. On the other hand, if she sleeps all evening, she’ll be awake all night.’
‘Does she wander off in the night as well?’
‘I don’t know.’ Thea’s voice rose. There were too many things she didn’t know, she was starting to realise. Then she forced herself to concentrate on the question. ‘Well, yes, I think she does. She was out incredibly early this morning. The buzzer woke me up. I think she’d been moving around for a while before that. There were sounds that I only half heard, before I woke up properly. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Sort of.’ Jessica frowned, and flicked the short hair behind one ear.
Thea detected a fading interest, which was irritating. She wanted to finish her story, to update her daughter on the ways of the house, to fill the space that would otherwise be occupied by Jessica’s own story, which Thea did not feel quite ready for. ‘You must know how it is in a strange place,’ she continued, slightly more loudly. ‘Your mind just accepts that there’ll be a lot of strange noises and smells and so forth, so you don’t react to them. If I had to wake up properly every time I heard something unusual, I wouldn’t get any proper sleep. So I tuned it all out. But thinking about it later, there were a few thuds and rattles going on, which could have been her getting up before dawn, I suppose.’
‘And what about you, eh?’ Jessica gripped the spaniel round her soft throat and gave her a playful shake. ‘Not a very good guard dog, are you?’
‘She’s useless,’ Thea agreed. ‘I always hear things way before she does.’ Hepzibah beamed at her tormentor and wagged the feathery tail.
Jessica stayed with the subject of Granny. ‘Can you get in without disturbing her? Did they give you a key?’
‘I can go through the connecting door. There’s a key on a hook above it – they keep it locked, which I know is another weird thing. They said I might frighten her if I appear all of a sudden, so best not to use it.’
‘Mum, this is quite a peculiar set-up. That poor old lady is being kept prisoner.’
Thea recalled the cage-like fence around Granny’s little garden area and couldn’t help but agree. ‘I suppose they’ve got their reasons,’ she shrugged. ‘The old girl certainly is terribly forgetful. I think they just want to cover themselves, having somebody here, in case she wanders off and gets run over or something. Mrs Gardner’s pretty robust physically. I don’t think I need check her now.’
‘Did you bring your laptop?’ The sudden switch of subject was typical. Thea nodded. ‘Good. Let’s google The Crown before we take the plunge. It might be horrendously expensive. I saw another pub on the way in. Great Western, it was called.’
Thea’s admiration for her daughter’s powers of observation had always been high. It was one reason why she knew she would make a good police officer. Thea herself had not even noticed there was another pub in Blockley.
‘Go on, then,’ she invited. ‘While you’re doing that, I’ll go and have a listen, just to see if Granny’s awake.’
It was with considerable relief that she heard the muttering of the television when she put her ear to the connecting door into the cottage. She even caught a brief cackle of laughter that she was sure came from the old woman herself. When she went into the living room, where Jessica was reading the computer screen, she reported her findings.
Jessica interrupted her.
‘Hey! This is wonderful!’ she laughed. ‘Somebody’s posted a review of the restaurant at The Crown. It’s incredibly rude. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued for libel, the things it says.’
‘Bad food?’
‘Terrible. Inedible, it says. Greasy. Desserts brought straight from Iceland. The shop, not the country.’
‘Oh dear! Does that mean we have to go somewhere else?’
‘Of course not. We have to check it out. If they’ve seen this, they’ll have smartened their act up, anyway. Though it’s not cheap.’
‘Never mind. We’ll have a blowout tonight, and spend the rest of the week surviving on Marmite sandwiches.’
‘We will not. This is my holiday. I want proper feeding, twice a day, thank you very much.’
Outside it was still broad daylight, thanks to the time change. Jessica walked slowly, inspecting the delights of Blockley. She paused at the house next to theirs. ‘Curtains closed?’ she noted. ‘Do you know who lives here?’
‘A man called Julian. Granny’s best friend, apparently. She’s been worrying about him. He was missing for most of yesterday, but his lights were on last night, so I assume he’s back.’
‘But you haven’t seen him today?’
Thea shook her head. ‘I still haven’t seen him at all. But I’ve been out most of the time, so I wouldn’t have done anyway. Giles Stevenson says he’s a bit of a recluse and sometimes doesn’t answer the door, even if he’s in.’
Jessica tutted disapprovingly at this.
‘Granny talks about him a lot. He’s got a grandson, and is a retired archaeologist and some other things. He’s got a vintage Rolls Royce that lives the other side of Blockley.’ Thea beamed proudly at all the information she’d gleaned in such a short time.
Jessica was peering through the gap in the curtains. ‘Still closed at this time of day – that’s odd,’ she noted. ‘It’s nowhere near dark yet. Why didn’t he open them this morning?’