by K. L. Slater
‘Perfect!’ Karen beamed, pushing over a pen and some papers. ‘Now, if you can just fill in this application form, I’ll print off the job description and person spec. They’re paying above minimum wage, so I expect this vacancy will prove popular when it goes online in the morning. Must be your lucky day, walking in just as we got it through!’
Holly had managed to complete the application form without too much bother and left soon after, assuring Karen she’d be emailing the references and ID documents.
‘I’ll call you later with the time of your interview and details of where to go,’ Karen had replied. ‘Here’s my card.’
On the bus home, Holly had fretted about whether her paperwork would stand up to scrutiny. The last thing she wanted was anyone raking up trouble for her.
If Geraldine found out where she was, she’d have to up sticks and leave again. Holly would face her when the time was right and not before, otherwise she would have no chance of triumphing.
On the spur of the moment, she’d got off the bus a few stops earlier and walked to the street where she’d lived with Aunt Susan.
She’d already decided she wouldn’t just brazenly walk up to the house and knock on the door. She didn’t want to risk finding Keith home alone or Aunt Susan telling her they’d washed their hands of her.
She’d never received reply to the note she’d sent to her aunt and she’d taken that to mean she wanted nothing more to do with her niece. But now she realised that the chances were, Patricia had never even posted it. The last thing they’d have wanted, with hindsight, was her to keep in touch with relatives who might realise what was happening and convince her to leave Medlock Hall.
No. It was best if she just kept watch, visited a few times. She might get lucky and bump into her aunt. It was bound to happen if she kept coming here.
She had turned the corner and froze.
The terraced houses had now completely gone and in their place stood a sprawling block of offices.
As she had stood there aghast, a woman emerged from the offices.
‘Excuse me!’ Holly had crossed the narrow road. ‘Can you tell me when these offices were built? I’ve just returned to the area and I remember there used to be houses here.’
‘That’s right, we’ve been here… let’s see… about seven years now. Our business was one of the first to move in here.’
Holly had thanked her and watched as the woman went on her way.
In that moment and despite her aunt’s faults, she had felt so completely and utterly alone.
* * *
Once she had finished her juice, Holly walked into the living room and looked around at Cora’s drab, dated furnishing.
It was a decent-sized room and it would be improved no end by getting rid of the heavy lace nets that swamped the window and swapping the gloomy fabrics for bright modern prints.
If Cora would give her a free hand to make improvements, Holly knew she could work wonders in here, but she didn’t intend to broach the subject.
Cora Barrett was a woman most definitely set in her ways, and she had very rigid ideas of how things should be. Holly felt sure that in Cora’s eyes, the room looked perfect.
She glanced up at the Artexed ceiling and the tarnished brass candle chandelier above her head. Living here was like being beamed back to the fifties.
However, the house itself was impressive and Baker Crescent was considered one of the better roads in the area. In the future, with younger owners, Holly had no doubt the accommodation would be transformed. One day, the dusty old museum she stood in now would be just a vague memory.
She sighed and took hold of her thoughts again. Old patterns of depressive thinking weren’t going to help her put the whole awful mess behind her, of that she felt certain.
She peeked through the window, but thankfully there was no sign of Cora returning from the shops yet.
Without even really considering what she should do next, Holly padded upstairs and stood outside the front bedroom, Cora’s room.
The plain, glossed white door was closed, so she gave it a firm push. As it began to open, it caught on the carpet underneath, so she kept pushing.
The room smelled a little fusty, as if it hadn’t actually been used for some time.
It was over-filled with heavy walnut furniture that crowded it out and gave the otherwise sizeable space a claustrophobic feel.
The dusty burgundy velvet curtains were half closed, and Holly snapped on the light to save her squinting unnecessarily into the gloom.
She walked over to the chest of drawers that stood by the window. The top was a sea of framed photographs, many of them featuring a gloriously young and vibrant Cora with various people, but mostly with Harold, whom Holly recognised from their wedding photograph on the mantelpiece downstairs.
She picked one of the photos up and studied it. Cora stood clutching the hand of a young girl with ribbons in her hair on Blackpool seafront. Cora was smiling but the child looked surly.
The photograph was black and white, but Holly could imagine the dull grey colour of the foaming sea behind them and the dirty beige sand on which a group of hapless donkeys stood, waiting forlornly for their next riders.
She replaced the photograph and didn’t bother inspecting the others. She felt fed up enough as it was without studying those long-ago scenes. It was nice to see Cora looking happy in most of them, but when Holly compared that glowing girl with the wrinkled woman she had become, she felt even worse about her own future.
How was it possible that years could flit by so quickly, robbing people of their happiest times?
She felt the keen passing of her own life, the division between the girl she had been before and the woman she had turned into.
Effectively she was betraying Cora’s trust by sneaking in here. That wasn’t the person she wanted to be.
She asked herself the question: would she want someone snooping through her room and rifling through her personal items? Most definitely not, came the uninvited reply.
Yet something in her demanded she take the opportunity to look around. That way, she had less chance of being fooled as she had been before. She might get a measure of who the real Cora was.
In the past, she had fallen far too easily into believing that people were who they said they were. It was a mistake that had cost her dearly; that might have already ruined her future and robbed her of the love of her life.
And she couldn’t quite believe that the old lady really had nobody in her life. No children of her own and therefore no grandchildren; not even any elderly friends to go and play bingo with, or whatever it was that old people liked to do these days.
It was quite sad, yet she couldn’t help thinking that Cora and Harold had obviously kept themselves purposely isolated all these years, and now Harold was long gone and Cora found herself alone.
Maybe she wasn’t quite the frail old lady she liked to pretend to be… People could surprise you.
Holly inched open the drawers one by one. After nearly asphyxiating herself with the smell of mothballs, she came across a large, tattered brown envelope in the last but one drawer from the bottom.
She slid it out and peeked inside. More photographs and a few papers. She was about to replace it when something caught her eye at the top of one of the letters.
Her heart lurched when she read the lines beneath.
It seemed that she’d been right. Cora had a secret of her own.
Chapter Thirteen
Cora
As Cora moved slowly up and down the supermarket aisles wondering what Holly might like for tea, she felt she had turned a corner in what had become a mundane, uneventful existence.
Holly had left the house earlier to go into town and find herself a job, apparently. Although Cora had assured her there was no rush to pay rent or anything of that sort, at least for a few weeks, Holly had been insistent. It was rather a shame, just when they were getting to know each other; and Cora thought of her very much as a visitor, rather
than a temporary lodger.
She selected a two-pint carton of semi-skimmed milk and laid it in the rickety trolley with a wonky wheel that she was having trouble pushing in a straight line.
Still, who’d have thought things could turn around so completely in a single afternoon, and so out of the blue like that?
Cora had been standing at the end of a short queue in the post office, waiting to purchase a book of stamps. That had been her sole reason for leaving the house that day, as she only sorted out the bank business twice a week. She’d needed to post a couple of cheques for bills and realised she’d run out of stamps.
She didn’t like all this online banking business, nor the thought of direct debit payments that gave the energy companies cash before she’d even received the full quarter’s service.
What was the world coming to? What had happened to paying the correct amount for a service actually received and used? Harold had always refused to give out his bank details to companies.
‘Blighters can take what they like once I grant them access to my funds,’ he would roar upon receiving a letter informing him he could save money by paying in regular monthly instalments.
My funds. He’d always referred to it as his money, and she’d had to ask for every penny she needed.
She’d never in a million years have been able to take a person like Holly in if Harold had still been around. Even completely bed-bound – as he was for the best part of a year before he died – he’d have caused a big fuss if Cora had brought someone in need back home, even if it was to stay with them just temporarily.
He’d even forbidden Cora from giving loose change to that poor homeless chap and his dog who sat on the corner of the high street in all weathers, for goodness’ sake. Harold had always maintained that ‘homelessness is a lifestyle choice’. What utter nonsense.
Sadly, against her better judgement, Cora had allowed him to get away with his dictatorial manner for all of their married life, and it was only really once he’d gone that her anger had surfaced. She had finally realised the impact his bigoted attitudes had had on her own life. Nobody had ever wanted to befriend them; people preferred to stay away.
It had to be said that when Harold died, there had been a welcome new sense of freedom that Cora had never experienced before.
Harold had cleverly always insisted he only imposed certain measures and precautions to keep her safe.
‘You’re too gullible to be out on your own, love,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll come with you, make sure nobody tries anything on.’
As a young, newly married woman, Cora had initially been flattered, but of course it soon dawned on her that her husband was controlling her for his own selfish reasons. He wanted to ensure she was there just for him; he didn’t want to share her with anyone else: friends, acquaintances, even children. Harold had never wanted children.
As usual, a wave of sadness came with the realisation of so many lost opportunities.
The mood gripped her until she reached for the rich butter biscuits that Harold would certainly have forbidden her to buy because of the extortionate cost. She placed two packets carefully in the trolley and allowed herself a smug grin.
Sometimes she was too hard on herself, she knew that. It wasn’t at all easy, in those days, to escape a difficult marriage. With no job and no friends, Cora had felt paralysed to do anything about her circumstances. It had simply been easier to put up and shut up.
She knew a lot of women hid their true feelings for one reason or another.
Take Holly. She seemed a nice enough young woman, but Cora wasn’t fooled by the happy-go-lucky character she seemed fond of displaying on the surface. You didn’t live as many years as Cora had without garnering a sense of people, and she was absolutely certain that there was more to her young visitor than met the eye.
She’d thought as much that day when she’d abandoned the post office queue and gone to speak to the sobbing undernourished waif who seemed utterly inconsolable that she wasn’t able to get her twenty pounds from the counter.
Even though some customers had shown their disapproval, and others their pity, Cora had sensed there was a determined young woman underneath the frail exterior who was in need of neither.
She would be loath to admit it to anyone else, but as she had been trying to comfort Holly, the thought had occurred to her that without Harold around to dictate her actions, she might view this wretched young person as a sort of personal project.
She could offer assistance and help guide her to a more fulfilling life, while bagging herself a companion in the process.
After all, wasn’t that what ladies used to do in times gone by? They’d advertise and pay for a female companion so they didn’t have to put up with the achingly long hours of loneliness that Cora herself had suffered with no prospect of respite.
The Victorians got a lot of things right, and they set great stock by order and routine, just like Cora herself.
It had occurred to her that day that this could be a match made in heaven. It was all a matter of striking the right balance to break through the generation gap.
She had begun by regaling Holly with interesting stories about her life. Holly had seemed genuinely interested and this had encouraged Cora to continue.
She’d asked her visitor a couple of pointed questions about her own past, and it hadn’t escaped her notice that each time, Holly had cleverly – or so she thought – refrained from answering by luring Cora back into her own reminiscing.
But she was in no rush. She could wait.
When Holly was prepared to open up a bit and trust her with her personal history, then Cora would tell her the truth.
That was, the truth about what Harold was really like.
Not the other truth.
She didn’t intend telling anyone about that until she’d made up her mind exactly what to do.
Chapter Fourteen
Holly
‘This is Pat’s son, the nice young man I told you about who lives next door.’ Cora beamed as she looked alternately between Holly and the tall, serious-looking man called David – not really that young at all – who now stood in front of her.
He had dark brown hair desperately in need of a cut. He was pale, as if he might never have had a tan at all, and wore wire-rimmed spectacles that did him no favours unless he was actively trying to look like a geek. On top of all that, he was fidgety.
‘Hello, I’m Holly.’ She extended her hand. ‘Cora’s told me a lot about you.’
David pressed his palm to his thigh for a moment or two before grasping Holly’s hand. His fingers felt unpleasantly hot.
‘David Lewis.’ He introduced himself abruptly.
It seemed as if he were forcing himself to stand there when his feet were perilously close to running out of the house, away from her enquiring eyes.
When he finally released her hand, Holly fought the urge to wipe it on her jeans.
‘It was so nice to see your mother yesterday, David,’ Cora remarked. ‘She said you’d spotted Holly out in the yard and wondered who on earth she could be.’
‘I wasn’t… I mean, I just happened to look down from my window and…’
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t think you’d been spying on me,’ Holly quipped.
Both she and Cora laughed, but David’s face remained impassive, a deep, mortified bloom creeping into his cheeks.
Holly was instantly reminded of Evan’s cheeks. They’d flush just the same if practically anyone at all, apart from Holly, spoke to him. She felt a little squeeze in her heart.
‘It’s so nice of you to come around and say hello, David,’ she said, speaking a little more softly. ‘I don’t know anyone around here yet, so I do appreciate it.’
David shifted on the spot, his cheeks continuing to glow. His eyes darted to her face, but he looked away again before she could offer him a reassuring smile.
After a beat of silence, he cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Barrett, if you have any jobs you’d
like doing while I’m here, it would be a pleasure to help you in any way I can.’
He spoke in a rapid, formal manner, as if he were reading the words from an invisible prompt.
Cora clutched at her chest, her mouth forming a perfect O. ‘David, what a gentleman you are. Isn’t he, Holly?’
‘Yes,’ Holly agreed. ‘He certainly is.’
She watched as David found a sudden fascination with a fleck on his sleeve.
‘Actually, if you don’t mind, David,’ Cora said, ‘I could do with a chair bringing downstairs. It’s the one in the corner of Holly’s room. It really would be quite heavy for us girls to try and shift on our own.’
Holly grinned. She’d already got used to Cora’s everyday sexism. ‘I’ll make us all a drink, then.’
As she walked towards the kitchen, she became aware that David had followed her into the small hallway. He faltered at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Is it all right… I mean, to go into your room?’ His voice sounded scratchy in his throat and Holly watched as his fingers twisted against themselves.
‘It’s fine, David. I’m in the back bedroom, the one on the left,’ she said easily. ‘Cora insisted I take the room overlooking the garden. Now I feel like I’ve pinched her bed!’
‘Nonsense,’ Cora called from the other side of the door. ‘Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve slept in both rooms, depending how the mood takes me. I’m quite happy with the front bedroom for now.’
‘You just can’t tell some people, can you?’ Holly whispered, gently nudging David and grinning.
His arm jerked away from her as if she’d given him an electric shock.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to…’
But before she could finish her sentence, David had bounded up the stairs.
Chapter Fifteen
David
Upstairs, I stand frozen in the doorway of the back bedroom like an idiot.