by Anne Baker
Helen had told Rex almost as soon as they met that she had been recently widowed, but it had taken him a long time to see her dark moods. He’d recognised early on that she was looking for support in things unrelated to gardening – her daughter Chloe, for instance.
At that time, Chloe had been an awkward and lost-looking twelve-year-old; he could see she wasn’t happy. They’d both seemed vulnerable and in need of help.
It was only after he’d seen Chloe come hurtling out into the garden a few times, red-eyed and rebellious, that he realised she was more troubled than her mother. Rex was afraid they were having the sort of rows he’d had with his family when he’d been growing up, but he couldn’t imagine a problem that might cause them.
Rex felt sorry for Chloe, and knew that having a mother who suffered spells of depression must make it harder for her.
‘Is she still grieving for her father?’ he’d asked Helen. ‘Is that what is troubling her?’
‘It’s what’s troubling both of us, I suppose.’ Helen was staring past him into space. ‘We haven’t told you just how bad the accident was.’
He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. ‘A climbing accident, you said?’ he prompted.
‘Yes.’ She looked at him then. ‘John’s hobby was rock-climbing. He was in North Wales with a group of climbers, practising before attempting one of the peaks in Switzerland. He took me and Chloe with him for a few days’ holiday. The idea was that we would go walking, but climbing fascinated Chloe. John took her along and gave her a first lesson or two. The other climbers made a big fuss of her and said she was a natural and had real ability. I was always scared for him, but he had no fear and neither had Chloe.
‘Then one morning, the climbers were planning to do a much harder climb. John wanted to take Chloe but I stopped him. Climbing scares me and I was afraid for her. I settled down outside with a book and Chloe was watching them through binoculars. I knew she’d gone but it never occurred to me that she’d get a lift over to the rock face and try to climb behind them.
‘It came on to rain, and that distracted her and made the rock slippy, and when she reached a more difficult spot she became scared and started calling for help. She’d climbed surprisingly high without help or supervision. Her father and one of his friends came reeling down to help her. She was panicking by this time, so John unfastened his own safety harness to put it on her. She was thrashing about and . . . Well, he slipped and fell . . .’
‘Oh God, Helen, to his death?’
She flinched. ‘Even worse, I think. He broke his back. His injuries were so bad he could never recover. He lingered . . .’
Rex shuddered. After that he understood Helen’s black moods and the clouded horror he saw in the girl’s wide eyes.
CHAPTER TWO
REX FINISHED CUTTING THE grass and was getting ready to go home; he was lifting the lawnmower back into his van when he saw Chloe running towards him. She’d changed into a smart red dress with matching red shoes. He’d never seen her wear high heels before.
His heart began to race. ‘Another new dress?’ he asked.
‘No, you’ve seen it before.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘I’ve cut six inches off the hem to bring it up to date. I had to, it’s no good having only one dress at a fashionable length. Mum said I was to give you a piece of her birthday cake to take home. She says it won’t keep because of all the fresh cream I put on.’
‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’
She giggled. ‘A bit like a children’s party, isn’t it, when you get a piece of birthday cake to take home?’
He smiled, ‘I’m not too grown up for that. I’ll enjoy it for my supper.’
She looked radiant. He noticed with pleasure that she was taking more interest in her appearance; she’d had her hair cut differently and tonight she was wearing a touch of lipstick. It made her look grown up.
‘I put it in a Pyrex dish, it’s too soft and squidgy to put in a bag.’
He could see it through the glass lid. ‘That’s a very generous piece. Can you spare all that?’
‘Yes, Mum says cake like this will make me fat.’
He laughed, ‘You don’t need to worry about that yet. I’ll bring the dish back next time I come.’
Helen came out and waved to him as he drove away. He felt excited. In six more weeks, Chloe would be seventeen, and now she was wearing make-up; clearly she was beginning to think of the opposite sex.
He could feel himself tingling as he decided he’d waited long enough. She was old enough to be told what was on his mind. He was nervous about doing it because he was afraid she might not feel that way about him. In all honesty, he’d seen no sign that she did. He’d like to start by inviting her to come out for a restaurant meal with him. On her own.
The difficulty was, he didn’t want to upset Helen by excluding her. He’d need to talk to her about it first, and just thinking about that made his toes curl with embarrassment. He’d have to tell her outright that he was in love with her daughter. And in view of Chloe’s youth and the difference in their ages, would she approve of that?
These days he saw much more of Helen than he did of Chloe. He’d have to wait for the right opportunity to say something like that, but if he looked out for one, sooner or later it would come.
‘Rex is nice, isn’t he?’ Chloe said to her mother as they drove off.
‘Very nice,’ she agreed. ‘A good friend to us both.’
They went first to pick up Gran and Marigold, as Joan and Walter had invited them all to have dinner at their house to celebrate Helen’s birthday. Chloe had been looking forward to it.
She was pleased to see her mother smiling and happy. She’d be on top of the world if Mum’s spells of black depression were really behind her. It had taken them a very long time to get this far.
Chloe, too, had had her nightmares and her black moods. Her father’s absence was a terrible ache and moving up to Liverpool and starting another new school two terms after everybody else had been hard. Mum had brought with her all the furniture and belongings that reminded them of Dad, and had placed photographs of him on show about their new home. She had a way of speaking about him frequently, as though he were still with them.
Auntie Joan and Uncle Walter had been very kind to both of them when they’d first come north. When Chloe’s twelfth birthday came round, Mum and Joan had taken her into town. She’d wanted a record player for her own room and they’d let her choose the one she wanted.
Then Uncle Walter had taken them all to the Adelphi Hotel for a special lunch and she’d had ice-cream cake. Before going back to his factory, he’d taken her to a record shop and bought her some of the latest records by Cliff Richard and Adam Faith. By the following year they’d had Beatlemania at school, as had half of England, and Chloe had played their records all the time. She still did, they were her favourites, and every birthday after that Uncle Walter gave her their latest album. ‘Love Me Do’ was her all-time favourite song.
Every month or so, Auntie Joan and Mum met for lunch in town, and they got together for family celebrations. Aunt Goldie had told Chloe that Joan had made her fortune by marrying Walter Bristow, and she should look out for a rich man too.
Walter Bristow was coming up to retirement age but he was still running the company he’d set up many years earlier. He’d trained as a vet and had very modern ideas about feeding animals. He thought many of the diseases suffered by pets were caused by giving them the wrong diet. He produced foods for dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs, each designed to provide a balanced diet to keep the animal in good health. He believed that a dried crunch of ingredients was the easiest way for pet owners to buy and store it.
Her mother drew up in front of Uncle Walter’s big house in Freshfield and Auntie Joan came to the door to let them in. She was one of those people who was always bubbling with good humour.
‘Hello, Chloe.’ She threw her arms round her and pulled her i
n. ‘Happy birthday, Helen.’
Chloe considered Auntie Joan to be one of those women who was still genuinely pretty at fifty. Marigold said disparagingly that it was all done with make-up and that she dyed her hair palest blonde when really it should be grey.
Uncle Walter met them in the hall. He was a big man with a head of thick white hair, pink cheeks and a cherubic face. He gathered Chloe up as usual in one of his big bear hugs, but tonight he wasn’t his smiling self.
‘Sorry, Helen,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘We’ve no birthday present for you. I took Joan to the theatre last night and while we were out, thieves broke in and took it.’
‘Mum’s present?’ Chloe wanted to laugh.
‘It was a book, Helen. Joan had it wrapped up ready for you.’
‘It was that new novel by Rosamund Rogerson,’ Joan said. ‘I’ll buy another copy next time I go into town.’
‘You shouldn’t be telling Mum what it was,’ Chloe giggled.
‘Oh dear! I’m not myself today,’ Auntie Joan said. ‘They took the family silver too.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes, we think they broke in to get that.’
‘You had such a lot, and it was valuable, wasn’t it?’
‘Walter’s father left it to him. He was interested in antique silver and collected it all his life.’
‘And now it’s gone,’ Walter sighed sadly.
‘Did they take anything else?’ Helen asked.
‘Some money, but the police think they were targeting the silver.’
‘Don’t the rich suffer?’ Marigold said sourly. ‘It’s a comfort to know thieves are unlikely to target us.’
‘The best we can say,’ Joan added, ‘is that it was insured, so we’ll get something back.’
‘Doesn’t the sideboard look bare without it?’ Walter sighed. ‘I’d like to buy more, but good-quality silver isn’t easy to find. And I’m afraid I don’t have my father’s knowledge. He was never happier than when he was visiting antique shops or grand houses when they were selling off good silver.’
‘It’s been a hard day,’ Joan said. ‘The police were here for ages. But it’s not the end of the world, and we aren’t going to let it spoil your birthday dinner. Come on, Walter, what about the drinks? Gran, you’ll have sherry, will you?’
Rex went home to his comfortless bachelor flat and grilled a pork chop for his supper. Afterwards he made himself a pot of tea, ate Chloe’s cake and gave himself up to daydreaming about her.
Helen had confided how difficult Chloe had been when they’d first come to Liverpool, and that she was missing her father and also her friends in London. Rex was no stranger to bereavement and knew it could change everything for family members. He’d been bereaved twice, and both times it had been traumatic. His mother had died while he was still a child. Then only a few months before the Redwoods arrived, he’d lost Sylvia, his wife of two years. They’d been visiting her parents, who kept a hotel on Lake Windermere. Almost every time they went there, they’d gone rowing on the lake, but this time they’d been run down by a speedboat. Neither of them could swim and he’d been unable to help her. She’d drowned together with their unborn child.
After Sylvia’s sudden death, he was floundering so badly he thought he’d never recover. Nothing had been further from his mind than that he should fall in love with Chloe. He didn’t know how it had come about. Over the last year or so, he’d come to accept that Sylvia was lost to him for ever and that if he wanted a wife he must find somebody new. He had in mind a well-balanced woman like Sylvia, grown up and with a mind of her own.
But it was the contract he’d signed with Helen, the garden, and the support and companionship he’d found in her and Chloe that had eventually turned his life round. He’d wanted to do the same for them.
He’d watched Chloe grow up, and it had been like tending a rare plant that had eventually produced one magnificent flower. She was still more girl than woman, but already Rex knew he wanted no other. He loved her and always would.
In those early days when he’d been working in their garden, he’d occasionally seen her come rushing out, angry and rebellious. He pretended not to notice her agitation and tear-stained face and asked her to help with whatever he was doing. A gardening job pulling up weeds seemed to help calm her.
At other times he’d see her come out to cut a lettuce or a cabbage for the table, or even late on a winter’s afternoon with a saucepan to cut sprouts for their supper. It seemed she was interested in growing vegetables, perhaps because her mother preferred flowers.
‘I’d like to have a vegetable patch of my own,’ Chloe had said one day. He’d started her on radishes and sugar peas, which Helen called mangetout, so she’d have something to eat quickly. The sugar peas produced a bumper crop and Chloe had been able to brag that she’d planted them and weeded them and put in the sticks to help them grow up off the ground. They’d proved to be a huge success and she’d planted them every year since.
He saw Chloe as another teenager as unhappy as he’d been. Helen was focused on her own loss and didn’t seem to see Chloe’s needs. He’d grown to love Chloe without even realising it was happening.
He thought she’d desperately needed a confidant. While they’d bedded out seedlings of lettuce and cabbage, she’d told him of her agony on joining a school where friendships and loyalties had been formed in the months before she’d got there. She’d explained her difficulties with classwork when the curriculum had changed.
‘I’m left out of everything. I never quite know what I’m meant to be doing. It confuses me, makes me look a fool.’
‘That’s the last thing you are, Chloe.’
‘I want to do the right thing, I want to join in and be one of them, but somehow I can’t.’
‘Just keep on trying. The teenage years can be troubled.’
‘Were yours? Were you unhappy when you were my age?’
‘Yes, I was, but for a different reason.’
‘You didn’t lose your dad or get moved from one end of the country to the other?’ The intense gaze of her lavender-coloured eyes had challenged him.
‘No, I lost my mother.’
‘Gosh, that’s worse. How old were you then?’
‘Ten.’
‘That’s awful.’
It was not Rex’s way to talk about his own difficulties. He’d let it be known generally that Horace Kenwright, the owner of Kenwright’s Garden Centre, was his father, but that wasn’t strictly true. Rex was the eldest son of Laura Kenwright, née Harrington, born before she met and married Horace.
Rex remembered the time when he and his mother had been everything to each other. She’d taken him in her arms to say, ‘I’m going to get married. Horace Kenwright will be my husband and your father and we both need him.’
But Rex had resented their new home and the way Horace became the centre of their life. He’d been five when his mother married and he’d started school a week later. He’d had to share his mother’s attention and felt pushed out. Over the years that followed, he was aware that Horace found fault with everything he did and carped at his mother. He knew she was unhappy and never allowed to forget her misdemeanour. Horace had adopted him legally and given him his name, but he’d given him precious little else and certainly no love.
Before long, Rex had a half-brother called Simon and felt his mother had even less time for him, though he knew she loved him and did her best to stand between him and his stepfather. When Laura died giving birth to her third child, Gerald, Rex took it very hard.
In later years, he came to understand that in exchange for marrying his mother and adopting him, Harrington money had been forthcoming to set up the garden business and thus support them.
Rex had had an unhappy childhood. He felt Horace very much favoured his half-brothers; they could do no wrong. While his mother was alive, she’d protected him and been very supportive, but once she’d gone, Rex became the butt of his father’s ill humour.
Horace praised Simon and Gerald and sent them to private schools, whilst telling Rex he was an incompetent fool who could not compete with them.
For a time, his Harrington relatives kept in touch with birthday and Christmas gifts, but he rarely saw them. Eventually, there was only his grandfather left, and he was an invalid living in a nursing home.
As a child, Rex had spent his free time making himself useful in the family business, befriending his father’s employees and learning from them. He felt he’d grown up without a place in the family, and when the time came for him to leave school, his father had refused to take him into the business.
He’d found himself a job working for the council in their parks and gardens department, and as soon as he could, he’d left home. He was twenty-one when he received a letter from the Harringtons’ solicitor telling him that his grandfather had died and that he was the main beneficiary in his will. That changed Rex’s life; he knew now what he wanted to do. He enrolled at a horticultural college.
There he met Sylvia, and for a time his star was rising. He decided it would do him no good to resent the Kenwrights, and tried not to feel alienated. His stepfather was still running the business; he’d taken both Simon and Gerald into it, and it was thriving as never before.
He couldn’t say all that to thirteen-year-old Chloe. It was too painful to him and he doubted she’d understand, but he told her enough of it to develop a rapport with her.
Helen noticed that Chloe was to be found increasingly often in the garden, chatting to Rex. The vegetable patch grew larger. Chloe wanted fruit bushes, and together they chose and planted blackcurrants and gooseberries and strawberries. Helen too was keen on fruit. Rex took them both to the garden centre at the right time and they bought apple trees and a Victoria plum, a greengage and a damson tree.
In recent years they’d all enjoyed the fresh fruit and Helen had said, ‘You’re very good for Chloe. She’s lost her father, but you’re a great father figure for her.’
That made him catch his breath. It wasn’t how he saw himself. He hoped Chloe didn’t see him in that light, but he doubted she saw him as a prospective husband. The age difference was too great.