‘And you did, I suppose?’ Geraldine’s knuckles, as she gripped the back of her chair, shone white.
‘Analyse Francis and your relationship? Yes, I did. You were cousins who were more like brother and sister. Only your mutual family home – which you loved passionately and which he saw as a liability – was destined to be his only. The only way it could ever be yours – and be passed on to a child of yours – was if the two of you married. And so you used sex to get what you wanted and Francis, who knew with what passion you’d care for Cedar Court, enabling him not to have to, happily went along with it. When I ran off with Francis, I behaved badly – as did he – but I didn’t ruin one of the world’s great love stories, and perhaps if you could face that truth honestly, the two of us could be friends again.’
There was a silence.
Primmie and Artemis exchanged glances, mutually terrified that the shit was now truly going to hit the fan.
Geraldine’s hands squeezed the back of the chair even more tightly. At last she said, her voice raw, ‘I’d like to know what you think, Primmie. Are you in general agreement with Kiki?’
Compassionately, Primmie’s eyes held hers. ‘Yes, Geraldine. I am. I think that when you were a child you fantasized about Cedar Court being your actual home, not just the family home that your mother had been born in. We all have childhood fantasies of one kind or another and, because they’re usually impossible to bring to fruition, we outgrow them. You saw a way of making yours come true – and as you and Francis were so close, it was easy for you to slip from being cousins who were best friends into being lovers who would marry. If it hadn’t been for Cedar Court, I don’t think either of you would ever have thought of marrying each other.’
‘And you, Artemis?’ Geraldine’s voice was as brittle as glass. ‘What do you think?’
Artemis looked towards Primmie for help, realized that, as Geraldine had asked her specifically, any such help would be inappropriate and said reluctantly, ‘I’m not a very good person to ask, Geraldine, because I don’t know much about men. If I’d known more, years ago, I would have known that Rupert wasn’t marrying the real me – the me who’s pretty crap at just about everything but running a home – and that when he found out I wasn’t the successful, soignée model he had me down as being our marriage was bound to keep running into trouble.’
‘I’m not asking about Rupert and you, Artemis. I’m asking about Francis and me.’
‘And that’s what I’m coming to, Geraldine. Just as we were never perfectly matched and able to give to each other what the other lacked, so I never thought that you and Francis were perfectly matched. You were strong and he … wasn’t. I liked him, though,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I always liked him. It’s just that I always thought it must be a bit tedious for you, always getting him out of scrapes.’
For one terrible, tense moment, Geraldine simply stared at her and it was then that Primmie realized that Geraldine was ill – probably desperately ill. Instead of her face looking merely finely chiselled, it looked gaunt, and she was more than racehorse thin. Looking at her, Primmie doubted if she weighed much more than eight stone.
Slowly Geraldine’s grip on the back of her chair eased. Unsteadily she sat back down. ‘OK,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘Now I know what you all think. And you’re probably right. Francis was weak. That’s no revelation to me at all. And maybe I would have been marrying him for Cedar Court – which, ironically, I’m no longer obsessed by. But running off with your friend’s husband-to-be on their wedding morning is still the lowest, shittiest, most despicable act possible. Especially when you then don’t even marry him, but simply stay with him while you have a use for him and drop him like a hot brick when his usefulness comes to an end.’
Kiki opened her mouth to make an indignant reply.
Beneath the table, Primmie kicked her hard.
Given what had happened to Francis after his break-up from Kiki – or what was believed to have happened to him – she knew it would be fatal for them to start talking about it. It was subject matter for another day. For now, all that mattered was that some kind of rapprochement between Geraldine and Kiki was at last in sight.
Anxious for it to continue, and judging that the best way of helping it to do so was to shelve the subject by giving everyone something to do, she said, ‘We’ll have coffee in the sitting room. Kiki, would you take in the tray I’ve set? Geraldine, could you reach the box of cubed brown sugar on the top shelf of the cupboard next to the Aga? I always have to stand on a chair to get to it.’
As they moved their chairs backwards, away from the table, the subject of Francis was temporarily dropped. Breathing a sigh of relief, Primmie followed Artemis into the sitting room.
‘Nice work,’ Artemis said to her. ‘Will Kiki have a bruise on her leg in the morning?’
‘Very probably.’
They looked at each other, Destiny’s unspoken name lying heavily between them.
Artemis stepped towards the television and picked up the silver-framed photograph that sat on top of it.
‘It was taken about ten years ago,’ Primmie said, watching her as she looked at it, ‘when the children were still at school.’
Artemis put the photograph back down without saying anything.
‘Destiny’s photograph is in the bedroom.’
Primmie’s throat was so tight, it hurt. ‘By my bed.’
‘Rupert would never let me do that.’ Artemis’s eyes were again bright with tears. ‘He said it wasn’t healthy having a photograph always present that would constantly remind us of what we had lost. I used to speak of Destiny to Orlando and Sholto, but Rupert used to get so angry at my doing so that I stopped. And when I longed to share my grief with you, he said that doing so would only prolong it.’
‘He was wrong.’ Primmie’s voice was quiet and steady and full of infinite pain.
‘I know.’
Simultaneously they stepped towards each other, holding each other close, sharing their long-carried grief at last.
From the doorway Kiki, the coffee tray in her hands, said, ‘What on earth is going on here?’ She stepped into the room, Geraldine behind her. ‘Who was Destiny? A friend?’
No one spoke.
Geraldine cleared her throat. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that we need the bottle of Bell’s.’
Kiki put the tray down on Primmie’s glass-topped coffee table. ‘I’m always happy to see a bottle of whisky,’ she said pragmatically. ‘But I’d like to know why you three suddenly need one. Who was this Destiny person? Someone’s granny?’
Geraldine took the bottle of Bell’s and four glasses out of the sideboard cupboard and put them on the table, next to the tray.
‘No,’ she said, as Primmie and Artemis still didn’t speak. ‘Destiny was Artemis’s adopted daughter. She died in a drowning accident when she was five years old.’
Kiki blanched at her crassness. ‘Oh, gosh, Artemis. Forgive me. Primmie told me you’d lost a child and I just didn’t put two and two together. I’m so sorry, Tem.’ She looked from Artemis to Primmie. ‘And were you Destiny’s godmother, Primmie?’
Geraldine shot Primmie a swift glance and began pouring generous amounts of whisky into each glass.
‘No.’ Primmie took tight hold of Artemis’s hand. ‘No, Kiki. It wasn’t quite like that.’
Geraldine handed Kiki one of the glasses.
‘Artemis was Destiny’s adoptive mother and I was her natural mother.’
Kiki’s jaw dropped. Gobsmacked, she looked from Artemis to Primmie and back again. ‘I don’t understand … are you saying that you had a baby, Primmie, and Artemis adopted it?’
Primmie nodded.
‘But why? I still don’t understand.’
‘It was before I was married. I couldn’t provide Destiny with all the things Artemis could provide her with and, as Artemis and Rupert couldn’t have children of their own, and as I couldn’t have borne to have had her adopted by strangers, it seemed the
obvious solution to both our problems.’
Kiki took a drink of her whisky to help her assimilate the unbelievable information that Primmie had had an illegitimate baby. If it had been anyone else, she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, but Primmie?
‘When was all this going on, Prim? After I’d moved off to America, obviously.’
Primmie moved towards the table, took a glass of whisky from it and took a deep swallow. ‘No,’ she said, still nursing the glass. ‘No. I was pregnant with Destiny when we were all three being fitted for our bridesmaid’s dresses for Geraldine’s wedding.’
Kiki stared at her, totally perplexed. ‘But you couldn’t have been, Primmie. That was just after I got back from my tour of Australia, and you were dating Simon. I remember that clearly because …’ She was about to say ‘because we had lunch together and he said he was going to marry you and I bullied him out of it’, but thought better of it.
Primmie didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else.
‘So I don’t see how …’ she began, and then stopped.
The silence was profound.
In dawning horror, Kiki looked from Primmie to Artemis to Geraldine, and back to Primmie again. ‘No,’ she said, her voice strangled. ‘No. It isn’t possible. You would have told me if you were having Simon’s baby, Primmie. You would have told me. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Primmie said again, her voice full of remembered hurt. ‘But only after I’d told Simon. And I never got the opportunity to tell him. We were going to make our secret engagement public when you came back from Australia and when he’d been able to tell you of our plans face to face. Then he fell ill and went away to recuperate – though I’m not sure now that he really was ill at all. I think he wanted to be on his own in order to come to a decision to end our relationship. It was while he was away that I discovered I was carrying Destiny and we didn’t see each other again until the morning of what should have been Geraldine’s wedding day.’ She lifted her shoulders in an eloquent shrug. ‘And when he said he no longer wanted to marry me, I decided not to tell him about the baby. If I had, he would have changed his mind, and I didn’t want him marrying me out of a sense of honour or duty.’
‘Oh God!’ Kiki looked as if she was about to pass out. ‘Oh Christ! Oh hell!’ She drained her glass in a swallow. ‘You’re telling me you had Simon’s baby and he never knew?’
Primmie nodded.
Kiki looked round her, as if for support. As she did so, Rags trotted into the room and sat by her side.
Dazedly Kiki looked back towards Primmie. ‘I can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of it. I had a half-sister – a half-sister who was your daughter – and you never told me?’
‘How could I? If I’d told you, then Simon would have had to know as well – and Simon knowing, when he didn’t want to marry me, was a complication I simply couldn’t face.’
‘But Simon did want to marry you!’ the words were blurted out before she could stop them.
Still standing near the door, Geraldine folded her arms.
Primmie bit her lip.
Artemis, who had never shared Geraldine’s suspicions as to just why Simon Lane had broken off his relationship with Primmie, merely looked bewildered.
Kiki looked like a woman on the brink of an abyss.
‘Come on, Kiki,’ Geraldine said, pitilessly. ‘How do you know that at the time your father ended his engagement to Primmie, he was still in love with her and still wanted to marry her?’
‘Because … because …’ She put her hand down to Rags and knotted her fingers in his fur. ‘Because we had lunch together when I came back from Australia and he told me then. I was … appalled. I couldn’t even begin to imagine having Primmie as my stepmother. The thought seemed … indecent and I … and I …’
She couldn’t go on.
‘And you begged him not to do it?’ Geraldine finished for her.
‘I … Yes. Oh God, Primmie. I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry. If I’d known about the baby … If I’d been a bit older … If I’d had more sense …’
Her words tailed off into a silence no one attempted to break.
At last, in a haze of misery, she said, ‘It could all have been so different, couldn’t it? And it’s all down to me that it wasn’t, isn’t it? Her face was ashen, her flame-red hair only emphasizing its pallor.
Primmie dragged in a deep breath, feeling like a vertigo sufferer who, seeing the world tilt crazily, can only wait for the dizziness to pass.
She’d suspected that Kiki might have had a hand in Simon’s decision to end their love affair, but she’d never been certain of it; had never wanted to be certain of it. Now it confronted her in a way there was no avoiding.
She closed her eyes, the past of thirty years ago as close and as real as yesterday. If Kiki hadn’t so cruelly sunk all her dreams for her then there would never have been any question of her giving Destiny up for adoption. She and Simon would have married and, with Destiny, would have lived at Petts Wood. Destiny would never have been taken to Spain by Rupert; would never have drowned. Destiny would be with her here, now.
She opened her eyes. And she would never have had the life she had lived with Ted. There would have been no love-filled little house in Rotherhithe. No Millie, Joanne, Josh and Lucy. What had happened had happened. Kiki wasn’t to blame. If Simon had truly loved her – as Ted had truly loved her – then no amount of Kiki’s pleadings would have made him change his mind about marrying her.
She looked across at Kiki, Kiki who no longer seemed at least fifteen years younger than her actual age, but who, perhaps for the first time in her life, was visibly sick with anguished regret and guilt.
‘Nothing is all down to you, Kiki,’ she said quietly. ‘What you did caused me a lot of pain, but the aftermath of that pain wasn’t your fault – Simon didn’t have to take notice of what you said and I had a choice as to whether to keep Destiny or have Artemis and Rupert adopt her. There are no hard feelings, Kiki. Truly. What matters now is the present, not the past. And the present is the four of us being together again, just like we used to be.’
Kiki bit her lip and then, without a word, spun round, heading out of the room.
‘Kiki!’ Primmie slammed her glass of whisky down on to the coffee table. ‘Kiki, come back!’ She ran across the room after her. ‘Don’t leave, Kiki! There’s absolutely no need for you to leave!’
Out in the hallway, at the foot of the stairs, Kiki paused. ‘I’m not leaving, Primmie,’ she said, turning to look at her, one hand on the newel post. ‘I’m going to your bedroom. I want to see Destiny’s photograph. I want to see if my little half-sister looked anything at all like me.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The next morning Kiki did something she had never, by choice, done before. She got up early. With Rags at her heels, she let herself quietly out of the house and set off down the track. In the meadow Black-Hearted Alice was tearing grass and thistles out of the ground, and the air was so still she could hear the sound of her jaws chewing relentlessly. There was no sign of Maybelline, who presumably didn’t come out to graze until after she had been milked. Marvelling at the way Primmie had turned herself from a Londoner into a woman who could quite equably milk cows and goats she opened Ruthven’s double gates.
It was a glorious morning, full of the promise of Indian-summer heat, and she paused, taking off her trainers, tying the laces together in order to hang them round her neck. Then, closing the gates behind her, she set off across the dew-wet grass, towards the headland and the sea.
There wasn’t another soul in sight. With Rags repeatedly streaking off in front of her and then pounding back to circle her and race off again, it was as if she had the whole of Cornwall to herself. The two low-lying arms of the cove were a muted, misty green, the sea a shimmering, glittering silver.
With Rags’s white plume of a tail leading the way she slipped and slithered down the shallow incline to the ribbon of sand, grateful for the em
ptiness and the tranquillity, aware she had a lot to think about.
That her father had died having had a child he had known nothing about seemed, to her, surreal. How on earth had Primmie managed to keep such a secret? She picked up some small flat stones from the shoreline and began spinning them out to sea. Rags, thinking it a game, plunged into the waves after them. She watched him frolicking in the shallows, reliving the moment in Primmie’s bedroom when she had looked down at the face of her little half-sister. Nothing in her life had prepared her for such a mind-blowing, absolutely indescribable experience.
The photograph had been taken at a birthday party, for Destiny had been holding a balloon in one hand, printed with the words ‘YOU ARE 4’, and her dress was a ruffled and flounced pink party dress. Her eyes were shining and she was laughing with glee. Somehow, she had expected that Destiny’s hair would be red, like hers. It wasn’t. It was fair, like her father’s; like Primmie’s. And, like Primmie’s, it was curly. Destiny had her short, kitten-shaped face, though. And her stubborn chin.
She sat down on the sand, hugging her knees, grieving for the half-sister she had never known, overcome by all she had missed out on.
She had hardly cried since childhood – and very rarely then – but tears rolled mercilessly down her cheeks and on to her clasped hands.
Rags, seaweed in his mouth, padded up to her, shaking water from his fur. For once she ignored him. Dropping seaweed from his mouth he flopped down beside her, and not for a long time – not until his coat had dried in the early morning sunshine – did either of them move.
When she returned to Ruthven, it was to find both Matt and Hugo in the kitchen, drinking mugs of coffee.
Primmie was grilling bacon.
Geraldine, wearing a narrow turquoise dress, her silk-black hair hanging long and heavy down her back, was seated at the kitchen table, chatting to Matt and making notes in a small notebook as they talked.
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