She picked up the disintegrating purse found in the lake and threw it onto the pile destined for the bin, then hesitated. The key might fit the house or the shed, a spare key might be useful. She put it with its purse in another box silently named, the ‘maybe’ pile.
There were letters which she put in a separate box. There was probably nothing of interest but that decision was not hers. She looked around her at the assorted piles, boxes and sacks of what had once been an orderly room and sighed. She wasn’t exactly helping, just making a mess. There was a letter written in large letters as though written in anger, it was irresistible and she picked it up and read:
‘I can’t cope with this. Please come and talk about it.’
It was signed Mimi. Sadly, she put it with the rest. Later, she asked Doris who Mimi was.
‘That’s that wife of his. Miriam she was christened, mind, but she didn’t like it so she called herself Mimi.’
‘You didn’t like her?’ Zena dared to ask, guessing the answer from Doris’s tone.
‘Had a foul temper she did, and goaded poor Roy, attacking him with fists and even a weapon sometimes, trying to make him hit her so she could blame him and get more sympathy when he threw her out.’
‘He told me the story about his sister-in-law Donna was untrue.’
‘I don’t know what happened, but Miriam left and he refused to help her. She could have gone to the courts but she didn’t, so I’ve always believed the fault was with her and not him.’
‘What happened to Donna?’
‘She left soon after and no one heard from her. There was one letter apparently, which said she was moving to Norfolk. No one saw her again.’
‘Now we’ll never know.’
Lottie was coming back with shopping on the raft. She knew it was silly to use the lake when it would have been easier by bus without the steep path to negotiate, but somehow it was a touch of the past that pleased her. Perhaps she was aware of the changes to come and felt a nostalgia for the happy times when the children were small and life offered nothing but a future holding continued contentment.
In those happy days, a promise of a picnic or a boat trip around and back again, or a visit to Sam’s farm for a ride on the gentle old horse, was enough to make Zena and Greg forget anything that ailed them. Life had been so simple and now, with the family likely to break up and the house sold, she was touched with a melancholy, despite the excitement of marriage to Sam and a new life as a farmer’s wife.
She stopped the raft in the middle of the lake and sat for a while in the silence and the peace of the tranquil lake, so close to a busy road yet hidden away like a magical world far from normal life. She thought about the confusions of Zena’s breakup with Jake and the embarrassment of Rose’s resentful outburst.
At least Rose’s error had made her face up to telling Zena, Greg and Mabs about the baby she had given birth to so shamefully and who was still frequently in her thoughts. She regretted not telling them sooner. As so often in the past, she sat on the gently moving raft and daydreamed about how life would have been for her if she had refused to part with him. But it had been impossible She had been sixteen, and completely obedient to her parents’ decisions, following the arrangements made for her without a murmur of argument, hiding her fears behind a frightened face.
Her arms still ached, needing that small baby to fill them, even after Zena and Greg. She wondered where he was, what sort of life he’d had. She had been told nothing except he had been given to a loving family. She had to believe that.
There had been so much upheaval since Ronald died, she mused. But Greg was happier for the loss of poor, bitterly angry Rose. She suffered from her abandonment which had been followed by living with the unkind, uncaring Conellys and it shocked her to imagine her own lost child suffering in the same way. She knew that wasn’t so; he had been legally adopted by a family who wanted him. Rose had suffered from the unkind people who had fostered her, reminding her constantly of her unfeeling mother discarding her like unwanted rubbish – a story that was unlikely to be true, invented by the Conellys to torment a helpless child.
Greg had been terribly hurt by Rose, but he had found happiness with someone new. Susie Crane would make him a good life partner; she wasn’t the type to let anything worry her. She would speak out and get things sorted; deal with what life offered and smile as she coped with its challenges.
But what of Zena? Lottie stared into the depth of the deepest part of the water, the sun shining and revealing small fish darting about and she could even see right into the depths, at the stones and waving fronds of weed on the bottom. Zena and Jake were no longer the happy couple planning to marry and she didn’t think Kevin was the one to make her daughter happy either.
As she stared through the still, clear water, lit by bright sun, she became aware of something unusual amid the stones. A long shape, maybe a discarded sack of garden rubbish, although it was unusual these days to find abandoned rubbish as the path from the village was overgrown and difficult to navigate, especially with what looked like a filled sack. Curious, she lay down on the raft and stared, but the movement of the raft caused ripples and the scene disappeared. Perhaps she would tell Sam in case it was something that would harm the wild life.
Later, Sam went to investigate with a hook intending to drag the bundle to the edge. He leaned over to help pull the object onto the raft and a length of clothing slipped out and wrapped itself around his arm and he recoiled with shock. Could it be a body? He pulled back to the shore and asked Greg to call the police, then he told Lottie and Zena to go inside and make tea. He refused to discuss what he might have found.
He and Greg went back for another look. They knew they should leave it until the police arrived but somehow they felt guilty at leaving it there. If it were a body, it had lain there for years, yet to walk away and leave now seemed wrong.
Foolishly in that cold water, Greg stripped off his outer clothes and went in. He struggled to push away some large stones that were holding it in place. Sam dived in with him, having stripped off jacket and trousers, and slowly they brought the rotting sack close enough to the shore to examine it. Several layers of material fell as they moved it and they went in twice more until everything was on the small beach. The contents appeared to be women’s clothes. They ran up to Llyn Hir, teeth chattering like castanets and Lottie ran a bath and found some clothes belonging to Greg that might fit Sam, scolding them for the idiots they were.
The two policemen complained at their not waiting for the professionals, and nervously went to look at the bundle of clothes. After examining it they agreed it seemed likely to have been discarded as unwanted. ‘Maybe thrown away by a widower, clearing his wife’s possessions,’ the constable suggested. ‘There’s nothing of value.’ Police divers went down but found nothing else on the lake bottom, apart from one shoe, which they added to the contents of the rotting sack.
The police promised to arrange for its removal, but Sam offered to deal with it, not wanting the path from the village to be opened by many people passing through, encouraging people to come and visit the place. He valued the privacy of the lake and felt protective of its varied and fascinating denizens.
The sack was rotten, as were most of the contents, but as they unfolded some of the garments they found, folded inside a dress, several pieces of jewellery. These were put on one side although obviously of little value, being rusted and broken.
By the following day the path from the village was no longer overgrown. Everyone wanted to visit the scene where a mysterious bundle had been found and what Sam had dreaded happened; the path was opened by people gaining access by pushing through the undergrowth, cutting back branches and tearing up plants as they made their way to the lake, which looked as serene and innocent as usual. Groups would pause on the bank to stare and chatter for a while. Wild rumours abounded, many convinced it had been a body. Some insisted it was a tramp, called Felix, who hadn’t been seen for years; another beli
eved it to be an airman – a victim of a war time crash– but soon the novelty faded, as newspapers reported the find as nothing but a sack filled with old, rotting clothes. Fewer and fewer people came and in a week, the path was left to recover.
Zena remembered the purse with the key which, she had learned, would open Roy Roberts’s door. She remembered the man’s distress when she had shown him the purse and was convinced the clothes had belonged to his wife and had been discarded after she had left.
She took the police to Roy’s empty house and showed them the tattered remnants of the purse and the key. They looked at the piled up contents of Roy’s cupboards and drawers, gave them a cursory examination then left, satisfied that the find had been the result of a widower’s way of disposing of his dead wife’s things, weighted down by stones and now with nothing to tell its story. Rumours began, although it was impossible from where, and they even reached Geraint, the paper boy – who declared Roy Roberts’s house and the lake to be a better places for ghosts than the house called SunnyBank.
When Zena next went to clean there, she met Geraint who lamented the fact that that his paper round didn’t include deliveries to Roy Roberts or Doris. ‘That’s a real haunted house, I’ll bet,’ he said cheerfully. Zena wanted to remind him, with disapproval, that Roy Roberts had died, that it wasn’t a joke, but she refrained. He would learn about the sad side of life soon enough.
Karen was there but Mr Penberthy was still away. Karen seemed worried but didn’t reveal the reason for his continuing absence. They worked together on the last of the once abandoned rooms and Zena was delighted to be invited to go with Karen to an auction house to bid for the last few items needed to complete the furnishing. Within weeks the large house was completely furnished and new curtains hung at every window.
A few weeks after Roy’s funeral, his son Jack came to see Zena, wanting to talk about his father. ‘If there’s anything you want to ask me about him, I’ll tell you as much as I know,’ she promised.
‘Was he violent?’
‘I would say no. You did know he had been a boxer when he was young? Kevin told me he was strong and had a punch that won him quite a few fights. But as well as learning to fight, he had learned to control his anger. He told Kevin he would never dare to hit anyone, with such a powerful punch, he was afraid he might hit harder than intended.’
‘I feel so bitter about my mother,’ Jack said. ‘She cheated me out of a life knowing my father.’
‘Your father wanted it that way. He wasn’t the villain but decided to take the blame. He knew that your mother would look after you better than he could.’
‘She told us he refused to help us. Why was he angry with us?’
‘Perhaps she didn’t tell you the truth,’ she said softly. ‘Doris told me he sent money regularly to all three of you, until you were eighteen.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I doubt we ever will. But he loved you, and wished his life had been different, that much I do know.’
Sam and Greg fished in the lake but returned the fish unharmed. The water looked so tranquil but Sam knew it would still have a tinge of horror after those few minutes when he thought the sack contained a body. Until seasons changed and brought fresh new life to the creatures living there, that thought had ruined his pleasure of the lake. By the time winter had passed, the path to the village would be over grown once again and the lake would settle back into it previous peaceful mood. He persuaded Lottie to continue using the raft, and Nelda’s girls still enjoyed trips on the boat. They didn’t know about those first dreadful moments when he touched the rotting sack and a dress wrapped itself around his wrist, a memory that still gave him bad dreams.
Since Ronald’s death, Zena and Greg had tried repeatedly to find Billy Dove, the man their father had mentioned and who had been known to Roy Roberts. ‘Why didn’t we ask Dad to tell us more about him when we had the chance?’ Zena moaned one morning as they were cycling down to the village.
‘That’s the thing about life, Sis, there’s always plenty of time, until it runs out without warning.’
‘That’s very philosophical for this time of the morning, Greg!’
‘There are so many secrets waiting for the right moment to be told and left until it’s too late. It’s making me think more seriously about everything. Rose’s hatred making her do all that damage believing our mother was also hers. Your Roy Roberts taking the blame for a vicious wife for the sake of his sons, who hated him because of his wife’s lies.’
‘The biggest secret is Mam’s first born. How d’you really feel about us having a half brother? I’ve pretended to be all right about it, but I’m frustrated not knowing who he is, where he is.’
‘Those questions are running through my head too but we’ll never have answers. Adoption is always private, not even the mother is told where he lives or the name he was given.’
‘He would be about thirty-four years old.’
‘I hope he has a good life.’
As they reached the end of the lane, a car sounded its horn and stopped. The driver’s window was lowered and Jake leaned out. ‘I’ve got a job!’ he shouted.
Greg waved and rode on but Zena dismounted and went over. ‘Well done. What are you doing?’
‘Selling!’ He smiled widely. ‘D’you know, Zena, love, when I came back home, I was full of regret for going to London and messing everything up between us, but it was an education. I learned so much, confidence in my own abilities mostly. Mainly that I’m a good salesman, I really am! I also learned a few lessons on life and living – and honesty. Will you meet me tonight so I can go all philosophical on you?’
‘Not you as well,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Greg has been talking about the “deep mysteries of life” and now you!’
Jake had found a job with a firm selling kitchenware and excelled at it. His experience in London had given him the confidence needed to persuade people to buy more than originally intended. The timing was perfect. With a final easing of goods for sale after years of austerity, wives were throwing away well-used and battered saucepans that until recently couldn’t be replaced. In kitchenware, new styles came on the market and although there were still some restrictions on availability, Jake, with his newly discovered confidence, which he translated as ‘downright cheek’, was a great success.
Refrigerators suitable for small kitchens were available at a price possible for the average housewife when bought by weekly payments and Jake took on the new luxury to add to what he was already offering. He explained all this to Zena over a meal in a local restaurant, and she marvelled at the way his life had changed.
‘Why did you leave London?’ she asked. ‘Surely there are better opportunities in a big city filled with people with lots of money, than around here, small towns and small wages?’
‘I enjoyed it, love, there’s no doubt about that, but after a while, the success lacked excitement. I felt anonymous, invisible, a stranger among strangers. A small fish in a large pool isn’t for me. I’m happier as a very small fish in a very small pool, if you see what I mean.’
‘But you were successful, and you had made friends.’
‘You’ll laugh at this, but forget all my stories about the exciting life I led. My neighbour, Vera, was almost eighty years old and apart from the office and Rose, she was my only friend.’ He looked at her, a serious expression clouding his eyes and reached over and held her hand. ‘I did her shopping for a few weeks when she had fallen and broken her leg. When she was able to get about again, her son arrived, having been told nothing about the accident until then.
‘She handed me a piece of paper on which she had written down everything I had spent, together with the full amount of what I’d spent, even though I’d told her I didn’t want it, that it was a gift not a loan. D’you know what she said?’
Zena shook her head, expecting another of his stories about giving to people who needed it, proof that although he had changed in many ways, his atti
tude to others remained the same.
‘She asked about you, then said I had no right to give money that was not mine to give. If we were saving to get married, half of the money was yours and I should respect that. She also said that my real gift to her, a treasured gift, was my time.’ He looked embarrassed as he added, ‘I didn’t tell her we were no longer planning to marry, see. I couldn’t accept that it was over between us. I still can’t.’
‘I don’t think a few words from an elderly, temporary neighbour is going to change the habits of a lifetime, Jake.’
‘But they have. You’ll see, if you’ll agree to try again. I’ll still want us to help where necessary but with time, not money and only as a couple, both of us, together making the decisions, not me.’ He smiled ruefully, ‘And, most critical of all, without publicity. I was obsessed with being everyone’s friend. I’ve been such a fool.’
Zena would soon have no reason to go to Roy Roberts’s house. The cupboards and drawers were emptied, their contents sorted into lots for the sons to look through. There was only the shed – a task she didn’t relish at all, imagining spiders watching her from the dark corners. It was no longer a pleasure to prop her cycle against the gate and walk in smiling as he stood to greet her.
She missed him. The loss of Roy and all that followed had tainted more than the waters of the lake. She concentrated on building up the office supplies business, with Jake surprising her by sending her several new, important customers. The shed remained a vision at the back of her mind, like SunnyBank had been for young Geraint the paper boy, she thought with a smile. She would have to deal with it, but found reasons to delay.
The End of a Journey Page 28