by Rachel Hore
‘But the school is at the heart of Fernley,’ Kate pointed out. ‘What will be left apart from the church? I suppose it will be the post office after this. And the pubs.’
The others nodded, but it was despair that Kate saw in their faces, not anger. She couldn’t believe their acquiescence. It was the life of their community they were talking about, after all.
‘We mustn’t go down without a fight,’ she told them. ‘There must be something we can do.’
‘Let’s go away and think about it for a bit, shall we?’ said Miss Smithson. ‘I’d better go back and teach your children!’ Her mouth smiled but not her eyes. ‘I expect the governors will get a letter out to all the parents straight away.’
‘Would the authority give us a breakdown of the figures, do you think?’ said Kate. ‘At least then we could get an idea of what we’re up against. And perhaps the governors could ask whoever it is from the department to come to a meeting and give us a few facts.’
‘Yes, yes, all that,’ said Miss Smithson. She looked at Kate as if she had thought of something, because she smiled suddenly. ‘What was it you did in London?’ she asked.
On the walk back to Paradise Cottage in the sunshine, the shocks of the last two days suddenly hit Kate. Joyce, watching for her out of the window, caught sight of her daughter-in-law’s tear-streaked face and hurried to open the door.
‘Where have you been? What’s happened? Are the children all right?’
‘The children are fine, just fine. Well, I hope they will be.’ Kate started to tell her about the school, but this merely unplugged a deeper misery and soon she was sobbing uncontrollably.
Joyce helped her onto a chair and sat down at the table next to her, putting her arms around her. This was such a motherly gesture, one she’d always missed, that Kate buried her head in her mother-in-law’s shoulder and cried harder than ever. Bobby came and jabbed his nose into each lap in turn, but Joyce pushed him away.
‘Oh, Kate, dear. This can’t just be about the school. What’s the matter? I know everything seems very difficult for you at the moment and I know I don’t always help. But is there something wrong between you and Simon? Of course it’s none of my business, but I can’t sit here and pretend that that wasn’t a miserable weekend.’
Kate sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know if it’s me who should be telling you . . .’ She stopped. Simon’s mother would surely feel her first loyalty was to her son, no matter what he had done.
But already Kate had gone too far. Joyce sat upright in her chair. Her eyes did not leave Kate’s face, so Kate told her the cold facts of Simon’s affair.
When she’d finished, they sat there in silence, then Joyce said, ‘I don’t know what to say. I wouldn’t have believed it of him.’ After a moment, her bewildered expression was replaced by one of fear. She said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ Kate began to cry again. ‘And I don’t know how serious he is about her. I don’t know what he wants to do. I do still love him. I can’t just tell him to go. And there are the children to think of. Anyway, this is his home more than mine – you’re his mother. It’s me that would have to go. I’d have to find somewhere . . .’ She finished, ‘I couldn’t go without the children.’
There was silence again. Then Joyce said carefully, ‘I know he is my son and I will always be there for him, but Daisy and Sam are my grandchildren and I’m fond of you, too. What he’s doing is very wrong. I can try and talk to him, but I don’t know whether it’s going to be any use. He won’t listen to me, he never has done . . .’ She trailed to a halt, the enormity of the problem coming home. After a moment she decided. ‘You must stay here,’ she said. ‘If it comes to it, Simon will have to find somewhere else. It’s not right that the children lose their home. But maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe he’ll see sense. Oh, don’t give up on him, Kate, don’t. We had difficult times in our marriage, everybody does, but you can get through.’
‘Yes, but your husband has to be there to do that,’ Kate snapped. ‘I feel like a widow most of the time anyway – sorry, Joyce, that was tactless of me. Oh, I wish we could turn back time. We should never have left London. I suppose we’ve led such separate lives we’ve got used to being without each other.’
‘It’s so different now, isn’t it? My parents were apart for most of the war, but my mother never looked at another man, though we missed Dad so much. She used to say he wasn’t the same after he came back, but she didn’t complain. So many men never came back – she knew she was one of the lucky ones.’
‘It’s hardly like the war though, is it?’ Kate instantly regretted her sharpness. ‘I mean, we see each other every week. I’m sorry, Joyce, I didn’t mean to be rude, but we can’t make these comparisons. Things are just much more complex than they were sixty years ago.’
‘That’s just what Hazel was saying last night. We didn’t use to go into a shop and have to choose between thirty different jams. Or have to decide between a dozen different Directory Enquiries firms when the old one used to work perfectly well . . .’
Kate sighed impatiently. Joyce had such a grasshopper mind these days. Her mother-in-law took the hint. ‘I’ll make us both some coffee,’ she said and started bustling about, fumbling the cups and spilling the grains. She stopped, the decaff jar in her hand and turned round. ‘You know, if you and Simon want to go off on a little break, maybe next weekend, I’m very happy to look after the children.’
‘Thank you, but I don’t know whether he would. He’s very strange at the moment. And I’m not sure I could face a whole weekend, just the two of us. He’s got to want to come back. I can’t make him . . . I don’t even know whether I want him back.’ And with that she burst into tears again.
‘What are you going to do?’ Debbie asked.
They were sitting at the wooden table in Debbie’s sunny cottage kitchen the next morning, drinking tea. Kate added two sugars to hers and Debbie pushed a packet of chocolate biscuits towards her. Down on the floor, little Holly upended a box of her big sister’s doll’s-house accessories on the quarry tiles and plumped herself down happily to sort through the little figures and furniture, gabbling to herself. Jonny had just drifted into the kitchen, his olive skin and dark hair and eyes reminding Kate just how like brother and sister he and Debbie looked. She had often noticed how married couples grew to look like one another. Did she, Kate, share Simon’s facial expressions, his turns of speech, his gestures? She’d never thought to consider such a bond between them before and now it was with a pang. Would that bond, too, dissolve? She watched Jonny run his fingers back through his wavy hair in the same way Debbie always did, as they discussed the news about the school, but then, perhaps sensing dark whirling currents of female emotion, he helped himself to a handful of biscuits and vanished upstairs to his desk.
‘I just don’t know what I’ll do,’ Kate said now. Why does everyone expect me to be doing something? she thought angrily. It’s Simon who’s been doing things. ‘It’s like I told Liz on the phone last night, one minute I feel so angry I’m shaking, the next I cry till I’m as weak as a baby. Last night was awful. I lay awake just going over and over the last few months, trying to see where it all went wrong. I hate him for what he’s done but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love him.’ Kate looked up, dark circles making her eyes appear huge in her face. ‘Suppose he doesn’t want me any more? Suppose he goes off with her? What will I do?’
Debbie put down her cup and made to say something. Then she appeared to change her mind.
‘Kate, it may not come to that. It’s early days yet. But if that is what happens, you will survive. Honestly. You have friends here – I’m here for you – and it sounds as though Joyce is ready to help. It’s a most awful crisis but people do get through it.’
‘I don’t even want to see him at the moment but I’ll have to at the weekend. He’ll want to see the children. And I guess we need to talk.’
‘Yes, yo
u do.’
‘I know we haven’t seen enough of one another over the last year, but many couples manage that, don’t they?’
‘Well yes, but every marriage is different, I suppose is the answer. I mean, look at Jim and Janet next door. Jim’s away a lot with his work but Janet told me once that they made this agreement when she was pregnant with their first, that he would work hard to earn the money and she would devote herself to the children. They talked it all over in great detail, how Janet would feel, whether Jim would see enough of the kids and so on. But Jim had an awful upbringing – his mum left when he was seven – and he said he couldn’t bear to think of anyone but Janet looking after his children.’
‘Jim’s a salesman, isn’t he?’ Kate asked.
‘Yes, his firm have a lot of foreign contracts. Janet says they both get fed up sometimes, but what is life-saving is to go away together by themselves several weekends a year . . . I’m sorry, I’m blathering on here. Their situation really is completely different.’
‘No, it’s just all too late for me – for us – isn’t it? I didn’t see it coming.’
‘Kate, isn’t it more complicated than that? You not seeing one another enough might not be the only reason for him . . . doing this. There might have been other things in your marriage – or from before you met. And you have to think very long and hard about whether it’s just a slip-up on his part and whether you can get back what you had.’
‘I know, I know. And the children. I can’t think what this will do to Sam and Daisy, they love their daddy so much. And my mum and dad will be horrified. They don’t need any more trouble . . .’ And Kate dissolved into tears once again.
At lunchtime, Kate was forcing down a sandwich when Dan rang again.
‘Hi, Kate, I’ve been out all morning. I’m on my mobile. I might have missed your call?’
‘No, Dan, sorry, I forgot,’ said Kate. Joyce was semaphoring in the background, so she said, ‘Hold on,’ and put her hand over the receiver.
‘If you want to get out to see the old lady, dear, I can collect the children. Hazel’s got her grandsons visiting – we can go round there, I expect.’
‘Thanks. I suppose I ought to see Agnes.’ She spoke into the phone. ‘Yes, I’ll come, Dan, if you don’t mind picking me up. Yes, half two will be fine.’
After lunch, Kate looked so exhausted and tearful Joyce sent her to bed for an hour. She awoke soon after two, and by the time she had washed her face, slicked on some lip gloss and brushed her hair, Dan’s van had pulled up outside.
‘Here,’ said Joyce. She thrust a bouquet of large yellow roses from the garden into Kate’s hand. ‘For Miss Melton, hoping they’ll cheer her up.’
Kate buried her nose in the gorgeous blooms. ‘Mmm, I’m sure they will. They certainly do me.’
And, indeed, as she opened the front door and waved to Dan, she felt her spirits lift just a little. It would be good to go somewhere different with somebody new and have to think about someone else’s troubles. No, that didn’t sound quite right, thought Kate, but what woman would not feel cheered by going down the garden path to meet Dan leaning easily against his car smiling?
Which thought only made her want Simon.
Chapter 18
‘Lovely garden your mother-in-law has. Her cottage is picture perfect.’
There was something very comfortable about sitting next to Dan in the untidy old van, windows open and Classic FM floating out.
‘Yes,’ Kate replied. ‘I always say it’s like the Seven Dwarves’ house, or the Three Bears’ cottage. She’s collected all those bird-tables and nesting boxes from around the country. It’s what she used to do with her husband, you see, take holidays where you could visit gardens. Like the garden at Seddington House – that must have been magnificent in its heyday.’
‘Miss Melton’s grandfather had it laid out at the end of the nineteenth century. There was a full-time gardener once and an assistant, and now there’s just me. Oh, and a local firm comes in with a tractor mower once a week.’
‘What else do you do – apart from helping Miss Melton, I mean. If I’m not being nosy.’
‘Of course you’re not.’ They had stopped at a junction, and Dan glanced at Kate as they waited for a break in the traffic. ‘I have what they call a mixed portfolio. I paint – that’s what I like doing most. And I run a gallery in Halesworth with a friend. We show local artists, mainly. That’s where I was this morning, framing pictures.’
‘Oh?’ said Kate, with interest. ‘Do you ever show your own work there?’
‘Sometimes. I’ve got some drawings up at the moment, in fact.’
‘I’ll have to come in and see them,’ said Kate.
‘That would be great.’
‘It’s special seeing work by people you know, don’t you think?’
‘It can be dangerous sometimes. What happens if you don’t like it? Does that change your opinion of the person who created it?’
‘By their works shall ye know them. Yes, there is that risk.’ Kate chuckled. ‘But I’ll take it.’
‘And then there’s my motorbikes,’ he added.
‘Your motorbikes?’
‘Yes, I buy old ones and restore them and sell them. And I do a bit of stunt riding.’ Dan grinned. ‘When the police aren’t looking!’
‘It sounds safer to have the van. Do you camp in it?’
‘It’s done a lot of travelling, good old soul, been round Europe.’ He patted the dashboard affectionately. ‘Now it’s mostly useful for carting stuff about.’
‘Hope you’re not meaning me,’ Kate teased him.
‘Yup, stuff like you,’ he agreed and laughed.
When they got to the hospital, they found a space easily in the car park.
‘I’ll come in and say hello and give her this from Marie.’ From behind the seat, Dan lifted out a leather shopping bag, which appeared to have clothes in it. ‘Then I’ll drive down to the town. Pick you up here about four?’
Kate thanked him and Dan looked at her as if wondering whether to say something else.
‘Just a word of warning,’ he said finally. ‘Well, perhaps “warning” is too strong a word. That nephew of hers is about.’
‘Max? I bumped into him at the weekend.’ She explained about Bobby’s drama.
‘Yeah, he’s not a bad bloke. Trouble is, he rubs Miss Melton up the wrong way. Treats her like an old person, if you know what I mean.’ He was choosing his words with care. ‘My view would be he’s too aware that he’s her closest relative. He’s hardly been to see her at all until she had this accident. Now he’s around half the time asking me and Marie questions about this and that . . . Miss Melton’s solicitor said he could have the keys to the house.’ He stopped. ‘I’d better shut up. I get over-protective about her and, after all, it could just be real anxiety for her on his part.’
Kate nodded. After Max’s help with Bobby she felt she owed him the benefit of the doubt, too. It didn’t sound as if it had been his fault that he hadn’t got to know his great-aunt earlier. The family row, whatever it was, had not been of Max’s making.
They asked directions to the ward. Kate was relieved to see that it was bright and airy, with a dozen beds. Agnes was, fortunately, alone. She was sitting in a wheelchair next to her bed, staring into space, a stale cup of tea untouched on the tray table in front of her. Someone had left an old copy of Woman’s Weekly next to it. That wasn’t touched either. Huddled up in a blanket, despite the warm weather, her face looked shrivelled, vacant. Kate was struck again by how she now often looked every one of her ninety-odd years. A butterfly of unease fluttered in her mind.
It took a moment for Agnes to recognize them, but when she did, the vitality rushed back.
‘You found me then,’ she quavered as Dan placed the bag on the bed and pulled up a chair for Kate. ‘Don’t know why they’ve put me in here with all these poor old things.’
Kate kept her eyes on Agnes and hoped the other occupants of the war
d hadn’t heard this.
‘It’s good to have people to talk to,’ Dan said. ‘And it’s a nice bright room, this. I won’t stay now. I have to get a few bits and pieces to deal with that rotten window in the library. I’ll fetch Kate in an hour, Miss M., and come back later in the week.’ He winked at Kate and strolled off down the ward, his rangy figure attracting admiring looks from the two young nurses on duty.
‘Good boy, that one,’ croaked Agnes, then cleared her throat and spoke more strongly. ‘I wish he’d make a success of something. Did you know he gave up a career in London?’
‘Really?’ said Kate, surprised. ‘I don’t know much about him, but he certainly doesn’t strike me as an urban animal. Have you known him long?’
‘Only since he came home looking for work a few years ago. Summers knows the family. She engaged him to clear the front garden while he was studying and then we kept finding other things for him to do. I think he only comes out of kindness now, you know. He always seems very busy . . . whatever it is he does. Kate, it’s lovely to see you. And what wonderful roses. Ask Nurse to bring you a vase, and a proper cup of tea, too. I was asleep when they brought this. It’s disgusting.’
Kate went over to the nurses’ station to cajole one of them into carrying out Agnes’s orders, then sat down at the bedside. Agnes pulled Dan’s bag over and started rummaging around amongst the clothes. Kate took the chance to look round at the ‘poor old things’. The cubicle curtain was drawn between Agnes and the bed on her left, but in the bed on the other side, a nearly bald lady lay asleep. Opposite was a huge woman crippled by a stroke. She sagged against the pillows, her eyes unable to focus, her mouth hanging open. Her equally large husband, a man in his seventies, was sitting by her side, coaxing her to drink from a child’s beaker. He caught Kate’s eye and twinkled at her. ‘I come every day to see my Maureen,’ he confided. ‘She looked after this ol’ bugger –’ he jabbed at his chest to indicate himself as the old bugger ‘– every day for fifty years. Never a cross word. Now I look after her.’