“Have you nothing to say for yourselves?”
Johnny cast him a brief rebel glance. “She’s no business here. It’s our house. We don’t like strangers poking round. We’re not a freak show.”
For a moment Daniel breathed steadily, silenced by his own compassion. Then he sat on the edge of the table. “Nobody thinks you are. All these people getting under your feet are just trying to deal with the situation as best they can. Brodie is trying to help too. But even if she wasn’t, she’s my friend. I expect you to treat my friends with courtesy.”
“She wasn’t very courteous to me,” grumbled Johnny.
“No,” agreed Daniel, “she wasn’t. Which is why I had a word with her before I came up here to have a word with you. While I’m staying here you’re bound to bump into one another, and I don’t want any repeat of that nonsense. You don’t have to like one another. You do have to be polite.”
There was a mutinous pause. Then Johnny said, “We will if she is.”
Daniel nodded, satisfied. “That seems reasonable. OK. What do you want to learn today?”
Daniel had always known what he wanted to do. His first day in the classroom as a trainee teacher had been like coming home. It wasn’t just his grasp of his subject—that’s the easy part—more that he was good at teaching. Children liked him and responded to his enthusiasm. Mathematics is a hard subject to imbue with any glamour, but Daniel Hood—who had a certain homely charm but no glamour of his own -managed to share his own sense of wonder at the worlds it opened up. He took his students beyond the tedious remembering of formulae—which were, as he pointed out honestly, purely for passing exams: anyone using maths professionally has a slide-rule, a calculator and a stack of textbooks within reach—and out into a universe whose infinite possibilities could only be explored this way. He made them understand that maths wasn’t a form of torture but a tool he was forging for them.
When the panic attacks that followed one long weekend -one infinitely long weekend—of mental and physical abuse meant he had to give up teaching, it was like a bereavement. He had no idea what else to do with his life. Salvation came in the form of a tearful thirteen-year-old who couldn’t do long division to save her soul. Six months of maths with Mr Hood had given her the hope that one day she would master it: when he left she was distraught. She found out where he lived, and sat softly crying on his doorstep until he agreed to tutor her.
If their sessions together rescued her education, they saved his sanity. This he could do. If it wasn’t teaching as he knew it, there were compensations. One of them was the freedom to tailor lessons to the pupils’ interests and rate of progress. They had to acquire the knowledge in the way that a traveller has to reach his destination, but there was nothing to stop them taking the scenic route rather than the motorway.
To say they hadn’t known him very long, the Daws girls were quickly getting Daniel’s measure. Distress forgotten, Em eyed him slyly from under her bog-cotton fringe and said, “You could tell us about astro—astron…”
“Astronomy,” Daniel supplied automatically. Then he laughed. “Yeah, right. Em, that’s the oldest trick in the book! Get the teacher to talk about what interests him and he won’t notice that you’re reading Pop Secrets under the desk. Credit me with some intelligence!”
“No, really!” said Johnny, apparently sincere. “It’s science, isn’t it?—and that’s education. And it’s interesting. Mum—” She stopped dead, white-faced.
Em finished the sentence, diffidently. “Mummy didn’t know a lot about science. We got it mostly out of books.”
Daniel nodded slowly while his heart bled for them. But he recognised progress when he saw it. This was the first time they’d spoken to him of Serena. It was a huge, brave step. If he was careful now he could begin to help them; if he wasn’t careful enough he could send them back into the bunker. “Everyone gets it mostly out of books. It’s where most knowledge is kept. The clever part is knowing that, and taking the trouble to find it. I think your mother was a pretty good teacher.”
Again that quick trade of glances. The sisters seemed able to convey whole sentences in a meeting of eyes. “She was,” agreed Johnny quietly. “We learnt a lot. Anything she didn’t know she found out. We went to libraries and museums and art galleries. We went to the places where history was made. We studied the Battle of Hastings sitting on the battlefield.”
“It was a hot day,” remembered Em. “An ant bit my bum.” Johnny elbowed her in the ribs. “Well, it did,” the younger girl muttered indignantly.
“That’s a brilliant way to study,” said Daniel. “I wish I could have done that with my classes. It’s not practical with big numbers, but it’ll have given you a feel for history—and geography, and science and the rest—that most kids never get.
“OK. Astronomy. Name me a star.”
He wasn’t catching them that easily. “The sun,” said Johnny smugly.
“Good. Another.” Blank silence. “Then name me a planet. Other,” he said, forestalling Johnny by an instant, “than the Earth.”
They thought. “Venus,” said Em. “Mars,” said Johnny. “Jupiter.”
“Erm…”
They were away. In the course of the next two hours they covered the components of the Solar System, including the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud; the natures of the planets and their companion satellites; and how the size and distance of these remote bodies were established within fairly accurate limits from ancient times using only basic mathematics. They touched on the Greek myths, Galileo and the Inquisition, and Tycho Brahe’s golden nose.
For the first time in nine days the monstrous shadows of what happened in the studio were banished from the girls’ eyes. When Peris stuck her head through the school-room door to say lunch was ready she was astonished by their engagement. If Daniel achieved nothing more at Sparrow Hill she reckoned he’d already earned every penny they would pay him.
Unwilling to wait for Philip Poole, Brodie returned to her office to go through her trophies from Sparrow Hill.
There must have been fifty numbers in Serena’s address book but none for Constance Ward. She kept a Christmas card list but her sister didn’t feature on it. There was even a rough copy of her will, left in her desk after the formal draft was lodged with her solicitor, but Constance was not a beneficiary. Neither, Brodie noted, was Nicky Speers, or any of the handsome young men who preceded him. She left her estate divided between her husband and two daughters, for all the world as if they were a perfectly normal, happy family. Nothing in her papers hinted at what was happening or what was to come.
Brodie eyed the book with disfavour. Working her way through those fifty numbers was the hard way. She’d get unanswered phones, engaged tones and answering machines.
She’d get the wives, husbands, parents, siblings and small children of the people she was looking for. They’d take messages which they had no intentions of passing on. She’d be waiting for two days before it became obvious she’d have to call again. Even when she got talking to the right person, most of them—perhaps all of them—would have nothing to tell her.
She found herself looking at the photograph again. A lot of girls think ponies are the centre of the universe until they discover boys. But for some that first love endures and colours everything they do thereafter. They live on toast and Marmite so their horse can live in comfort. It puts them in hospital, and their prime concern is getting out in time for the Pony Club camp. They spend more on horse-shoes every eight weeks than they do on their own shoes every year. In spite of all this they think they’re lucky. They think their life is infinitely preferable to those of their friends who have new cars and foreign holidays and smart clothes.
So it was possible that Constance Ward had continued riding though her sister had not. If so there were a number of organisations to which she might belong. A trawl of websites would provide her with contact numbers; conceivably the first she called would have the information she needed. With luc
k it would be quicker than working her way through Serena’s address book.
The names, addresses and phone-numbers of people on membership lists is generally restricted, and people manning office phones will say they are unable to give it out. Brodie would never have made a career out of information if she hadn’t found ways round this. Usually she thought up a little white lie, but this time the truth served better than anything she could concoct. Two little girls were going into care if she couldn’t find their aunt. She told it straight and simple, with pauses in all the right places, and she’d have made stones weep. One after another these affected, helpful people called up their databases and scanned them for the name of Constance Ward.
And one after another they drew a blank. She was offered a Mrs Constance Ward, but if Constance had married her name would have changed. Which was part of the problem. The woman could be a member of every equestrian organisation in the country, but if she was now Constance Walking-Strangely there was no way either Brodie or the people she was talking to would know.
The last possibility exhausted, she put the phone down and glared at the address book. But she never thought she had a choice. She made herself a cup of tea, then she opened it at the letter A and began dialling.
Chapter Nine
After lunch the girls disappeared upstairs. Daniel had set some homework and they gave him to understand that they intended to start immediately Daniel didn’t believe a word of it; and indeed, five minutes later the strains of pop music were crashing through the house.
Peris caught his eye and they traded a grin. “It’s only a lie,” said Daniel tolerantly, “if there’s the remotest chance of misleading someone. Otherwise it’s a fairy-story.”
“And that’s all right?”
“Certainly. The person hearing it without challenging its obvious shortcomings becomes a co-conspirator. Without the willing suspension of disbelief there could be no art.”
Peris’s face grew still. “Speaking of art—”
Daniel knew what she was going to say “Safe for now. But before you leave this house you might want to dispose of them. I wouldn’t like the girls to be sorting through a storage container in a few years’ time and find themselves staring at the pictures that destroyed their family”
“They’ll want to keep some of their mother’s work.”
“I’m sure they will. But not all the work she did should be preserved for posterity.”
Peris agreed. She found herself agreeing with a lot that Daniel said. “No one can say those girls have had much luck. But I think they were lucky that Hugo found you.”
“I hope so,” Daniel said fervently. “I want to get this right, to help them. But it isn’t always obvious what’s for the best. You will tell me if you think I’m getting it wrong?”
“I doubt if there is a right and wrong,” said Peris honestly. “I think there’s just having your heart in the right place and doing your best. We can’t change what happened. We can’t protect them from it. We can only smooth the way a little. And remember that children are always tougher than we think. They have to be: growing up is an endurance test. Hell, just getting born involves being shoved through a mangle, having your oxygen cut off and being slapped till you cry! After that, any thing’s an improvement.”
Daniel laughed out loud. Here was another of these strong, positive women who filled him with admiration. Confident and successful women like Brodie Farrell and Peris Daws seemed to him to know the secret of life, to get more out of it than anyone else. Where confident, successful men harnessed conflict, these women forged alliances. They drew their power up through roots deep in the earth itself, their strength was the strength of the planet, and they saw things clearly.
To Daniel the world seemed complex: a jigsaw without edges, poetry without rhymes, music without bars. He struggled to make sense of it, and often worried that this was because he was stupid. More than once Brodie had explained in words of one syllable that only clever people even try to understand. Most get along by refusing to lift their gaze above where the next meal, the next car, the next fortnight in Miami is coming from. Daniel tied himself in knots trying to comprehend things that didn’t require his comprehension, that would continue their waltz to the music of time whether or not he knew the steps.
If he’d tried to explain any of this to Peris Daws she’d have sent for the men in white coats. Because he didn’t, what she saw was not a bundle of uncertainties and contradictions but an intelligent, thoughtful, gentle man whose arrival in her family circle was the only positive thing to have happened in over a week. Difficult as the situation was. Peris could have been struggling with her nieces’ moods alone. She understood why their behaviour was so erratic, but that didn’t make them any easier to handle.
She sighed. “My problem is, I understand the theory of child-raising but haven’t had the practice. My mother would have walked in here, boxed their ears, given them a hug and had them eating out of her hand before she’d got her coat off. But then she had six of her own to learn on. As the last, I never got any hands-on experience.”
“You don’t have children, then?”
She looked at him from under lowered eyebrows. “I can see you’re short-sighted: are you colour-blind as well? Hugo and I have been together for twelve years; we’ve been married for two of them. Even now it’s not easy. We moved down the road from Pretoria to Jo’burg because there’s a difference between Afrikaans cities and English ones, but we still raise eyebrows, and hackles. We have the right to take what we want and pay the price for ourselves, but not to impose the consequences on babies.”
Daniel had no right to argue with her. People had despised him for what he’d done, and for what they thought he’d done, but never for how he looked. “You could end up with children after all, unless Constance wants to keep the girls with her. How will you feel if she does?”
She cast him a hunted look. “Truly and honestly? Relieved. It’s bad enough Hugo’s colleagues treating me like his servant, I don’t need it from his nieces as well. Which doesn’t mean I won’t do my best for them. I will, and there’s no need for him or them ever to know how I feel. But if they do stay in England, it would be a lie to say I’ll be upset.”
She seemed to think Daniel would disapprove. She was wrong. “Then I hope things work out for you. You’re here for them now when they need you most. It isn’t selfish to hope that you won’t have to give as much as you’re prepared to.”
The suspicion of a tear glistened in the corner of Peris’s eye. Then in one fluid movement she leaned over the table and kissed him squarely on top of his yellow head.
Daniel stared at her in astonishment. She gave a deep throaty chuckle. “You’re a nice man, Daniel Hood. How about we leave the girls here and adopt you instead?”
Less than halfway through Serena’s address book Brodie’s dialling finger succumbed to repetitive stress injury. Twenty identical calls to twenty mildly concerned but wholly unhelpful strangers left her itching for a change.
She had other work to get on with, but nothing this urgent. She couldn’t tell Hugo Daws that his nieces would have to go into care because her finger got sore and she went off to comb antique shops for a Meissen shepherdess for a dentist’s wife who already had the shepherd.
She thought of Philip Poole. If he and Blossom were back by now, there was an outside chance that he could tell her something useful about Constance Ward. At least the drive would give her finger time out.
She didn’t phone ahead to check that he was about and could see her. She generally preferred to turn up unheralded. She had some wasted journeys, but she got more out of people when they met face to face. If Poole was in the office when she called he’d take the phone and say no, sorry, he’d no idea where Constance Ward lived. But if she perched on a straw-bale and chatted to him while he did whatever farmers do—dusted the cows, vacuumed the sheep, polished the tractors—he would find himself feeding the conversation with snippets of memory or ru
mour, and one of them might prove more valuable than he had any reason to expect.
If not, the phone and the address book would be waiting when she returned.
Poole was tuberculin-testing the cattle. But he didn’t send her away: he had his foreman take over and steered her into the pleasanter environs of the kitchen garden.
Once this walled half-acre would have fed the family and half a dozen farm labourers. But things change. Even farmers’ children like spaghetti hoops sometimes, and may be more impressed by television advertising than the pedigree of a home-grown carrot. Today the garden was mostly in flowers, with the tail-end of a soft fruit crop against the wall.
If Poole didn’t understand why Brodie was back he didn’t complain. “I’d have told you if I knew where Connie was.”
“I know,” nodded Brodie. “But Nicky said you knew the Ward sisters as girls—that you rode together. It occurred to me that she might still ride and other local riders may have seen her about. Would it be a huge nuisance to ring some people and ask?”
He thought for a moment. “I'll call the hunt secretary, get him to make enquiries. The dealers get around too—if she’s stopped hunting but still rides they’re probably our best bet. Come inside for a coffee while I make a few calls.”
It was that or go back to her own phone. Her finger spasmed in revolt. “Lovely.”
As they sipped the coffee Brodie said, “You still hunt then, Mr Poole.”
“Philip, please,” he protested. “To everyone round here Mr Poole is still my father, and he’s been dead for eight years. Hunt?” His lips twitched. “Yes and no. Yes, I go out with The Three Downs Foxhounds. Is there any hunting involved?—almost none. You’ve seen Blossom—well, she’s the Three Downs’ idea of a quality hunter. At fifteen years old she’s considered a bit young and flighty. She has been known to gallop, and even jump, which is considered outrageous thrusting by the Three Downs. If we’re not careful we find ourselves ahead of not only the Master but also the hounds.
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