A Hidden Life

by Adele Geras

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  A Hidden Life

  Adèle Geras

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Orion

  This ebook edition published in 2013 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2007 by Adèle Geras

  The moral right of Adèle Geras to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78206 614 9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Adèle Geras is the author of many acclaimed stories for children as well as four adult novels: Facing the Light, Hester’s Story, Made in Heaven and A Hidden Life. She lives in Cambridge.

  www.adelegeras.com

  Also by Adèle Geras and available from Quercus

  Facing the Light

  Hester’s Story

  Made in Heaven

  For Sophie and Dan

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Caroline Wood for telling me how a movie production company works; to Edward Russell-Walling for help with choosing wine; to Jane Gregory and Emma Dunford; and especially this time to my editor Jane Wood for handing me the last piece of the jigsaw.

  Thanks, too, to Dina Rabinovitch and Sally Prue for reading the novel so carefully and enthusiastically.

  As always, I’m grateful to my family for their help and support.

  ‘Are you quite certain that this is what you want to do, Mrs Barrington?’

  Constance lay in bed with her eyes closed. Could she muster the energy to answer this young man she hardly knew? She was very close to death. There was no point in deceiving herself and, besides, she was completely calm at the prospect of leaving this world. What irked her was the fact that she would no longer be in control and that was why she’d summoned Andrew Reynolds to her bedside on a day when she knew there was no danger of her son and his wife visiting her.

  How the world had shrunk lately! She hadn’t left this bedroom for months and was now too weak even to enjoy the distant view of the Channel. She’d loved sitting on her little balcony on summer mornings, looking out over the sloping lawn that ran down to the bank of spotted laurels near the gate. I won’t see the garden in spring ever again, she thought. And the house could do with some redecoration. This room, especially. The cream velvet curtains had almost had their day, the William Morris Willow wallpaper, which had once been pretty but which she had tired of about two years ago, had definitely faded … but what did it matter? Everything could be left for someone else to deal with. What would become of her silver hand mirror? The crystal perfume bottles on the dressing table? They would go with the rest of the glass, she supposed, to Phyllida. Her daughter-in-law was the kind of person who’d know what to do with items like that; how to distribute them where they’d be appreciated. I don’t really care about any of it, Constance thought. Not about the bits and bobs of my life.

  ‘I’ll sign the new will,’ she told him. ‘And you must promise to take it to Matthew’s office as soon as possible after I’m gone.’

  ‘He won’t be very … happy with what you’ve decided, you know.’

  What business is that of yours? Constance wanted to ask. She’d paid quite enough to buy this man’s silence till she was safely out of the way. Let Matt continue to think the will he’d drawn up was valid. He’d realize his mistake soon enough. They all would. She tried to smile, but the effort was too much for her.

  ‘I think I have to warn you,’ Mr Reynolds went on, ‘that this document is bound to create certain … well, ill-feeling.’

  I don’t care, Constance thought. How can I convey the depth of my not-caring to this foolish young man who knows nothing? Everyone deserves exactly what they’re getting, and they’ll soon find out that I don’t forget anything – and I don’t forgive either.

  Constance believed in the afterlife. She always had, and now that she was getting closer and closer to discovering whether she was right to do so, she comforted herself with the notion that she might very well be there, watching from on high as Andrew Reynolds told Matthew that no, the will he’d drawn up for his mother was not the most recent. Not by any means. The heaven of her imagination hadn’t changed very much since she was a child, and she saw herself on a cloud, hovering somewhere near the ceiling, listening as her son read this interesting new will out to the rest of the family. She’d worked out every detail of her funeral years ago – they’d all gather for the reading of the will straight after the burial. That was how it was supposed to be. She summoned up what remained of her energy to speak once again. What had he called it? Ill-feeling. According to him, she was going to create ill-feeling.

  ‘I know,’ she breathed at last. ‘That is my intention.’

  1

  Lou Barrington had stopped loving her grandmother when she was eight years old. There had been times lately when she’d hoped that something could be done to improve the chilly relationship they’d fallen into, but now Constance was dead and buried and it was too late. Lou had done her best, but she’d waited years for some indication of a softening, of a change of heart from her grandmother and none had come.

  Milthorpe House, Lou reflected as she made her way across the hall, had changed. In her opinion, it had lost its heart and its warmth after her grandfather died, and now there wasn’t even Miss Hardy, the housekeeper, to remind her of her childhood. She’d been in charge of everything up until a few years ago, but since her death Dad had arranged agency staff to look after both the house and his mother. Miss Hardy had been pleasant enough, not in the least like Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, but you knew that anything you said in front of her would be instantly relayed to Constance. The two of them were very close, so you had to be wary in her presence.

  Lou had been told to wait in the library. The room was dark on this cloudy day and she switched on the lights as she went in. Vanessa and Justin, her brother and sister, were in the library already. Why hadn’t they noticed how gloomy it was and turned on a light? Burgundy brocade curtains hung at the tall windows. On either side of the fireplace stood the vases which she’d loved when she was a small girl. In those days, they towered over her head. She’d thought they were beautiful, admiring their narrow necks, rounded middles and the mess of dragons, flowers and assorted Chinoiserie painted all over them. Looking at them now, they struck her as verging on the hideous: too large, and impractical in every way. Justin turned to greet her with a smile.

  ‘Oh, hello, Lou,’ he said. ‘I was just saying to Nessa that C
onstance hardly ever came in here, did she?’ Justin was running his hands over the backs of the books without really looking at them. Lou loved the window seat in this room. Its cushions hadn’t been re-covered since she was about ten. Sitting there as a child on rainy days, looking over the flowerbeds and then at the apple tree with a bench built round it near the back gate, and beyond that at the slopes of the South Downs, had made her feel as though she’d strayed into the opening pages of Jane Eyre. There was always a small slice of sky between the curve of the hill and the frame of the window, and clouds drifted across this luminous space, making pictures that she found entrancing.

  ‘No,’ Lou answered. ‘She wasn’t much of a reader, really.’

  Nessa came over and peered at one of the shelves, her dark hair falling forward over her brow. She looked more ethereal than usual in grey jersey, with a filmy scarlet scarf round her neck. She was not exactly pretty but she was slim, and always beautifully dressed and elegant; she made Lou feel large and a little clumsy. Now she said, ‘Where are Grandad’s books? They used to be down here, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, next to the collected Dickens,’ Lou answered. ‘Aren’t they there?’

  ‘She must have given them away. Not that anyone read any of them, did they? Not now and not when he wrote them, poor old Grandad!’ Nessa smiled. ‘I think you were the only person who ever opened them since the day they were published. Putting him next to Dickens was wishful thinking on Constance’s part.’

  ‘I’ve got them all at home,’ Lou said. What she didn’t say was that she treasured them. John Barrington had left his own copies to her in his will and now, even though she hadn’t yet read them properly, they reminded her of the hours and hours her grandfather had spent with her, talking about the sorts of things no one else seemed to be interested in: countries far away and times long gone and astonishing people. Stories and more stories. She remembered him reading parts of his first novel, Blind Moon, aloud to her when she was quite young. All she could bring to mind now was that it told the story of a young boy called Peter having adventures in a Japanese prison camp. There were other children shut up there with him and the book was about the hero and his gang and the narrow shaves they had with the guards. Most of all, she recalled the atmosphere of what Grandad had read to her: heat and darkness and the image of the moon, which frightened Peter because it seemed to be like the glowing, pale eye of a blind person looking down at them out of a black night sky.

  Grandad had still been handsome even though he was old, and one of Lou’s favourite pastimes had been looking with him at the albums full of images of someone tall and strong and young. She said, ‘I expect Constance has binned the ones that used to be here.’

  Justin laughed. ‘She reckoned books were dust-collectors. That’s what she told me. I’m surprised she kept the library as a library at all. She could have turned it into something else. I would have.’

  Lou was shocked at this remark, but then she often found herself taken aback by some of the things Justin and Vanessa came out with. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising, considering that they weren’t related to her, not really. They were the children of her father’s first wife, Ellie, by her first husband, who’d died very soon after Justin was born. Dad was Ellie’s second husband, and all her life Lou had been taught to think of Justin and Vanessa – to behave towards them – as though they were her elder sister and brother, and as far as she was concerned, most of the time, that was what they were. They even shared her surname, because Dad had adopted them as soon as he married their mother. But Ellie had taken one look at Haywards Heath and the life she’d be living there and had immediately done two things. She’d had an affair with someone who lived in London and then run away with him, leaving Dad holding the babies, who hadn’t been babies but children. He’d married Phyllida, Lou’s mother, a few months after Ellie’s departure and once she was old enough to know about such things, Lou had sometimes wondered whether help with the shouldering of the childcare burden was part of the attraction.

  But no, she knew that wasn’t fair to either of her parents. Mum wasn’t glamorous like Ellie but she was kind and good-humoured, and even if no one would have called her beautiful, her face was one you were quite happy to look at and if she smiled at you, you couldn’t help smiling in return. Lou was born a year after Mum and Dad married, when Nessa was ten and Justin six. Now here they were, the three of them, killing time, waiting to be summoned for the reading of Constance’s will.

  ‘You can come through now.’ Matthew, Lou’s father, put his head round the door, looking flustered. They followed him across the hall to the drawing room, and Lou looked down at the beautiful Turkish carpet with its pattern of blue and red birds on a fawn background, flying with rectangular wings in and out of glorious, imaginary trees covered in strangely-shaped leaves. There it lay on the parquet floor, looking just as it always had, welcoming every visitor to Milthorpe House.

  How typical of Constance to have stage-managed this event, Lou thought as she looked around. Mum was being attentive to Dad as usual. She hadn’t been too fond of Constance but would never have shown her true feelings. Lou felt most sorry for her father. He’d been completely devoted to his mother and it was clear he’d been crying, which wasn’t like him at all. Poor Dad … Lou had been surprised at how sad she, too, had felt at the graveside. It struck her, all at once, that this really was the very end of someone; of everything they’d been. However hard she tried, she couldn’t believe in a life anywhere else. Imagine there’s no heaven … Lou had never thought there was one, even as a child. The tears that came to her eyes unbidden weren’t about any residue of love for her grandmother, but to do with her regret that they hadn’t been closer in life; hadn’t managed to get over the jealousy, or resentment, or whatever it was Constance felt that had come between them.

  The weather (grey, windy, with occasional gusts of horizontal drizzle) had seemed appropriate to the way everyone was feeling. Some of Constance’s elderly friends were in black hats with veils. Gareth, Nessa’s husband, looked uncomfortable in his dark suit, his round, cheerful face not suited to this setting. Dad had seemed in some strange way absent during the service and burial; preoccupied, as though his mind were on something else. Even though his hair had been grey for some years, he still looked young: tall and thin and with very blue eyes, now slightly red-rimmed, behind his glasses. This must be such a sad day for him. What had he been thinking of while his mother was being lowered into her grave?

  Lou sat down in one of the armchairs and felt ashamed as she acknowledged that she was feeling calmer now; even beginning to enjoy herself a little. There was a kind of closure about all this, a putting-away of a person’s life, so to speak, and perhaps it was time for her to stop fretting about the bad relationship she’d had with Constance. If you looked at it in a positive frame of mind, the funeral meant a day off work, and a day and night away from childcare. Poppy was staying with Lou’s friend Margie, who, poor thing, was in for something of a culture shock, not to mention probable sleep deprivation. You couldn’t imagine a one-year-old, you had to experience her, Lou had told her, and Margie announced gamely that she was ready for anything. Lou smiled to herself. The only question was, would she be ready for a repeat performance? Most likely not, but you could always hope … Lou would have died for her baby. She adored her beyond all reason and more than anyone else in the world, but how blissful it was to take a break from her for a few hours, even though she missed her.

  It was good to be back here, too. Milthorpe House looked from the outside like one of the smaller hotels you saw as you drove here from Brighton, which was just a few miles away along the coast road. Someone had thought of adding turrets to the roof in several places. The front was cream stucco and there were balconies on those rooms that faced the sea. This was some way off, but still visible because the house was quite high up, built on a gentle slope that became the South Downs once you’d left Barrington land. It wasn’t really Barrington, Lo
u reminded herself. Constance had brought the money and the property to the marriage. Her father’s family had owned Milthorpe for three generations. John Barrington was a provincial solicitor and Constance was rich and very beautiful and, true to form, she’d never let him forget how lucky he was; how much further up in the world he’d travelled simply by falling in love with her. Lou felt tears coming to her eyes. She still missed her grandfather, who’d loved her, and she’d never stopped loving him even though he’d been dead for more than two years.

  ‘Louise, darling … how lovely! Years since I’ve seen you! You’ve grown up surprisingly pretty!’

  What was one meant to say to that? Ellie was well known for speaking before she thought, and even though her tone was quite friendly what Lou heard was for someone who was such a plain child! She stood up and kissed Ellie on both cheeks.

  ‘And you look fantastic!’

  That was true. It always had been true about Ellie. She had a flamboyant, exotic style that had seemed quite out of place in Haywards Heath, where Dad and Mum still lived. She was wearing a black velvet cloak over a short black satin dress, which caught the light and shone – rather inappropriately, Lou thought, for a sombre occasion. Her matching hat was wide-brimmed and covered in black feathers. It would have been ridiculous on anyone else, but Ellie, with her wide red mouth and dark eyes, looked terrific. One of Constance’s memorable pronouncements was made about her first daughter-in-law: She’s a flamingo who wandered into an aviary full of nothing more exciting than sparrows and thrushes.

  Dear old Gran! Always ready with a neat belittling remark. And guess who the thrushes and sparrows were! The rest of the family, of course. Lou was the only person who’d ever called Constance Gran and she did it because she knew how much it irritated the old woman. The war between us, she thought, had been going on for so long. Am I sorry it’s over? I suppose not, not really. But while Constance was alive, Lou had never shrunk from a fight, and she’d never changed her views, even though her father was obviously deeply unhappy that his darling daughter didn’t get on with his mother.