Sky Garden

by Jenny Schwartz

  His answering smile was wry.

  She rose and walked beside Chloe’s chair out to the hall where Richard stooped and kissed Chloe’s cheek before he and Nick walked out, back through the warren she and he had entered by. She and Chloe entered an elevator set discreetly off to one side of the warren, just out of view of the public rooms.

  “Thank you,” Chloe said as the elevator silently ascended. It was comfortably large, the impression of space enhanced with mirrors on the sides and gentle lighting. “They don’t get enough time together.”

  It was a very private confidence, even if it only confirmed what Lanie had guessed. She didn’t respond.

  The elevator doors opened and Chloe exited.

  Where the Great Hall and dining room had been designed to over-awe, this first floor was about luxurious private comfort. The ceilings remained impressively high, but the room they entered was on a human scale—although still larger than many London flats.

  The color scheme was light shades of sand, gentle blues and soft, fading green.

  “I call it the Lake Room.” Chloe stopped her chair by a large window and waved a hand.

  Through the window, a body of water too large to be a mere pond, reflected the blue of the sky. A small folly, painted white and green, had been built on its edge, just off-set so it didn’t obscure the view from the house. Rushes along the far edge provided shelter and nesting grounds for water birds. Closer to the house, the lawn ran down to it.

  The lake was a jewel in the incredible parkland.

  “It is beautiful.” Lanie sank into a comfortable armchair opposite Chloe. She tore her gaze from the view and studied the room.

  A keyboard piano, adjusted to Chloe’s wheelchair height, occupied one corner; a television another. Books were neatly arranged on low bookcases all around the room, and paintings—that Lanie guessed were all originals—filled much of the high walls. It was cozy, lived in and a neat example of how Waterhill fit its inhabitants, and not vice versa.

  Chloe pushed back a curtain. “There they go.” An estate wagon sped down the driveway. She let the curtain fall. “You’ll think me presumptuous, and I am, but I can’t afford the time of letting things develop naturally.” She looked at Lanie. “I know who you are.”

  Chapter 9

  When a well-mannered woman began a conversation by pre-emptively apologizing for her presumption, Lanie braced. When Chloe added that she knew who Lanie was, the delicious meal she’d just eaten curdled in Lanie’s stomach. This was where Chloe would make it delicately clear that a woman such as Lanie was not for Nick.

  Surviving a serial killer had marked Lanie with the worst kind of notoriety, and evidently Richard, unlike his son, had researched Lanie’s background after meeting her. Then he’d told Chloe.

  Yet their welcome had appeared genuine. Expression and tone had matched their words.

  “No. I don’t know who you are,” Chloe amended. “But I know what you’ve survived. You’re strong, and I’ve seen your compassion. I need you to listen. There are things you need to know.”

  Not a rejection. Far from it. The rigid muscles of Lanie’s back released. She’d been an idiot, too suspicious and seeing problems everywhere. Richard cared for his wife. There were no circumstances in which he’d leave her to handle the dirty work of warning away an unsuitable partner for Nick. If he hadn’t wanted Lanie here, he’d have told her.

  Chloe stretched out a hand; only for an instant. She was too weak to extend the gesture. “My dear, you and I know the effect of a major trauma. It changes lives, and not ours alone. Those around us are affected.” Her gaze turned back to the window, to where Richard and Nick had driven away. Her face was pale and pinched so that its delicate make-up was revealed as a mask.

  She wanted to talk about private matters, things that Lanie had no right to hear. As curious as she was about the estrangement between Nick and his father, she and Nick weren’t together; not yet, maybe not ever. She thought of what Nick didn’t know of her past, and nearly shuddered. Privacy ought to be respected.

  But how did you tell a woman as gently imperious and yet fragile as Chloe that she should shut up. “Is this where you show me Nick’s baby photos?” Lanie asked with bright, unhopeful cheer.

  “I can’t. Nick, as a baby…no.”

  Lanie’s stomach clenched. That sounded bad.

  Chloe clutched the arms of her wheelchair. “You deserve an explanation of the situation, one that Nick evidently hasn’t given you, if you can talk to me of baby photos.”

  “No.” Good grief, what tragedy had she trampled on? Lanie abandoned all hope of playing things cool and easing the conversation onto general matters. “Chloe, no. I’m not Nick’s girlfriend, and even then, whatever he wants to share with me is his story to tell.”

  “All of our stories intersect. We own bits of each other. No one’s story is his alone. And Nick…he needs to learn to open up. He’s too much like Richard, as much as he’d hate to hear that.”

  “We have reasons to hold ourselves private.”

  “Not from everyone. Just listen, Lanie.”

  As if she could do anything else. Chloe was too urgent to resist. Good manners and compassion meant Lanie couldn’t walk away, and she thought Nick would forgive her. Agitating Chloe would be the unforgivable sin here at Waterhill.

  Chloe started easily enough, but not where Lanie had thought she would. Initially, at least, this was not Nick’s story.

  “Richard and I married young. We were part of the same social circle. We met at parties and friends’ houses, and our families knew one another. When we said we were in love, no one said we were too young. I think our parents were glad we’d each found someone so suitable.” Her mouth twisted in rueful, gentle mockery. “We lived a charmed life, and we didn’t know it. Frankly, I was spoiled. I had only to want something, and it was mine.”

  She released the arms of her wheelchair and locked her hands together. Her thin fingers twisted, the smooth skin translucent over blue veins, tendons and bone. The rings on her fingers were too loose. “When I was twenty one, I had a car accident. I was travelling through France, speeding with a girlfriend. She was driving, and she walked away with a few scratches. I was badly injured. When they told me I was paralyzed, I screamed. I screamed till they sedated me, and when I woke, I screamed some more. I couldn’t believe that life could be so cruel, so unfair.”

  Life was incredibly unfair. Lanie knew it, but then, her scars didn’t show on the outside. Her limitations weren’t obvious. Chloe had suffered a complete narrowing of her possibilities. “I’m sorry.”

  Chloe shook her head, dismissing the sympathy. She looked out the window, where the estate wagon had vanished. “Richard was only twenty three, fresh out of university and learning from his father how to manage the estate and the Tawes’ business interests. His father was a distant man. He never recovered from Richard’s mother divorcing him for an American actor. She never returned to England. When I had my accident, Richard had no one to turn to, no emotional support. He was an only child, as Nick is.”

  Lanie heard the excuses Chloe was making for her husband, and she did the math. Nick was thirty two, likely conceived after Richard’s marriage to Chloe. Yet Chloe was his stepmother, not his mother. Her heart squeezed for the additional betrayal Chloe had suffered.

  “It was a difficult time. I was difficult.”

  “Chloe.” Self-blame wasn’t healthy. Worse, Lanie shouldn’t be hearing this private story. Bad enough to hear about Nick, but this…

  “No.” The older woman cut her off. “I’m not being hard on myself. When I look back at how badly I behaved and for how long, I am ashamed. It wasn’t depression or suicidal thoughts. I wanted to punish the world for my suffering, and Richard was the person closest to me. That he didn’t walk away from me completely is to his credit. Richard loves forever, and Nick is like him.”

  Chloe paused, obviously composing herself. The muscles of her throat worked as she swallowed her
emotions.

  Lanie gave her what privacy she could, looking out the window at the beauty of Waterhill. Birds soared on the wind, free and wild in the blue sky with its white, puffy clouds. As little as she wanted Chloe’s confidences, it was impossible now to stop them.

  Chloe was at the point where the catharsis of telling the complete story was more important to her than the energy she’d expend in sharing it. Her voice had hoarsened when she spoke again. “At the time, I didn’t know that Richard met Nick’s mother, Joann. She worked at a garden center, but her passion was environmental causes. Richard’s always been interested in them, too. They met at a protest meeting in Southampton. They had an affair.”

  Stark words that covered so much.

  “When Joann became pregnant, she told Richard. He won’t discuss what he felt then, but I can imagine.” Her breathing shuddered. “The doctors had told us that I’d never have children, and here, this woman—Joann—was giving him a son. He told her, he couldn’t leave me. That he loved me. Richard says that she understood, and he thinks that some part of her was relieved. She was apparently very independent. She made him promise that he wouldn’t contact Nick.”

  “Why on Earth?”

  “Apparently, Joann was a radical. She didn’t want her son to be a lazy inheritor of privilege.”

  “That’s pretty drastic, though.” Lanie marveled at different attitudes. Could any woman truly turn her back on all that Waterhill could mean for her son?

  Chloe answered that question. “You’ve met Nick. He’s the product of a strong-minded, independent woman. He came to us when he was fourteen, when Joann died of an aneurysm. One moment she was there, active and involved in everything. The next, Nick was alone. Joann’s parents were very quiet, elderly people; completely unable to cope with a teenage boy. And Richard…Joann acknowledged him in her will as Nick’s father—he was unnamed on Nick’s birth certificate—and left Nick to his care.”

  “But did Nick know that Richard…”

  Chloe shook her head. “Poor Richard. He had to explain things to Nick, who was ragingly unhappy, grieving Joann. And Richard had to explain things to me. He was so stern. He was rigid with pain. He said that he was bringing Nick home to Waterhill and he asked that I not hate Nick. As if I’d be angry with Nick!”

  “You were furious with Richard.”

  “No!”

  Lanie blinked. “What?”

  “I was furious with myself. I couldn’t believe Richard had given up his son for me. I was so bitterly ashamed.”

  “You were ashamed?”

  “Oh, yes. Me. The day Richard brought Nick to Waterhill, I waited, sick with nerves, in the Great Hall. I watched the front door open. The sunlight silhouetted them. Nick all gangly resentment and wariness, and Richard tall and strong and powerless to help. And then they moved inside and I saw Richard’s eyes. Tortured love.” Chloe’s expression and voice appealed achingly to Lanie for understanding. “It was never that Richard loved Nick less than me. He’d known that Nick needed him less than I did. Nick had Joann and his inherited Tawes strength. I was a clingy, desperately reliant creature who endlessly claimed Richard’s attention.

  “I grew up that day. Belatedly. I had been selfish and spoiled and cost a boy his dad, and Richard his son. But that gulf between them has never healed. Neither can forget those fourteen years apart. Nick knows that Richard chose me over him.”

  Lanie slumped back against her chair, trying to make sense of the story. One thing felt instinctively wrong. “Nick would never blame you. I can see his love for you.”

  “For me, yes. But he can’t forgive Richard.”

  Fathers and sons, a tangled relationship at the best of times. Her dad and Selwyn butted heads. Her dad disapproved of her brother’s career choice and never hesitated to say so. Her brother seemed to respond to the paternal disapproval with yet more recklessness. And that was a father and son who loved, trusted and relied on one another.

  For Nick to only learn of his father’s existence when he was fourteen and grieving his mum’s sudden death…devastating. More than that, if the family hadn’t gotten professional counselling, those first patterns of shock and resistance would have locked in as the new normal.

  “Did Nick have counselling?” she ventured.

  Chloe winced. “I wanted him to. Richard offered it. Nick…I don’t know if it was teenage boy rebellion, pride or something else, but he refused.”

  “And Richard?”

  “Richard? Oh, you mean, did Richard have counselling? No.” A pause, perhaps filled with regret. “Like father like son.” And in a strong voice. “They need to find each other.”

  Lanie stayed silent. That Chloe passionately believed that Richard and Nick needed one another was obvious, but for Lanie, the situation was less clear. Every family was dysfunctional in its own way; change the status quo and the stresses could worsen.

  Besides, it was Nick and Richard’s decision.

  However, she had a new light on Nick’s ambivalent relationship with Waterhill. His love for it was mixed up with his mum’s scorn for inherited privilege, and his own complicated attitude towards Richard and the world he represented. Nick couldn’t move forward till he stopped punishing his dad, and himself, by withholding himself.

  Which begged the question, could Nick make an emotional commitment?

  Lanie looked at Chloe’s profile as the older woman stared out the window, looking towards where Nick and Richard would return.

  Yes, Nick could love, but he’d be wary of it.

  Nick and Richard walked in. Lanie thought of how her dad and brother walked together, heads inclined, discussing the world and its madness, or recipes, and easy with each other. She saw what worried Chloe: these two were wary antagonists. They were both tense, keeping a stranger’s distance between them. Whatever magic their shared interest in the experimental crop at Valley Farm had wrought, it had dissipated.

  In one aspect, though, Lanie envied them. They’d had the freedom of the outside and exercise, while she’d been trapped with her own, none too happy thoughts.

  After her fraught story, Chloe had lapsed into silence, only rousing at the sight of the estate wagon driving towards the house. Then she’d begun talking about the craft studios in the converted stable block and Waterhill’s gardens. Distracting talk that aimed at hiding her worries from Richard.

  Lanie doubted she succeeded.

  Richard was astute. After an assessing stare, he crossed the room to stand by Chloe. He put a hand on her shoulder and she fleetingly covered it with hers. The love between them was obvious, along with his protectiveness.

  “Ready for a tour of the house, Lanie?” Nick paced to the other window, every line of his body shouting disciplined impatience.

  “Chloe’s been telling me about the rose garden. I wouldn’t mind seeing the garden while the sun’s out.” And if it had been raining? Well, she’d have found a different excuse. She and Nick needed to get out of the house. It would be a close contest whether his impatience or her emotional discomfort burst out first.

  “The new hybrid roses are blooming,” Chloe said. “We’ll have afternoon tea when you return.”

  Nick’s stern expression relaxed as his gaze snagged on Lanie’s response.

  She knew what he saw: her mouth dropping open. More food?

  “We’ll go see the garden.” He closed the sitting room door behind them. “Chloe still feeds me like I’m a sixteen-year-old boy with hollow legs.”

  “That’s sweet. But this walk had better be a five mile hike or I’ll need to undo my belt.”

  He glanced at her slim waist.

  Just a glance, and she had to fight down a blush, because then his gaze slowly travelled up her figure, lazy and approving. Some of the day’s tension vanished. This was the lazy flirtation she’d anticipated on a day in the country.

  “The rose garden is an anachronism, like so much at Waterhill. The design is stolen from an eighteenth century French chateau,” Nick
said as they went down the stairs. The graceful staircase was dark with age and glowed with the patina of well-polished oak. He led the way along a passage hung with Old Masters and family portraits. There was no mistaking the family “look”. Nick had it, in the strong bones of his face and the square jaw.

  She’d have liked to study them—another day. Nick radiated a controlled urgency, a need to escape the house, and she was driven by a similar desire, if from a different cause.

  “The house might be Tudor, but the outbuildings and gardens have been remodeled several times, most recently after the Second World War when the high price of labor made restoring them impractical. The rose garden is rather good.”

  He shouldered open a heavy side door and the garden burst upon them.

  A wide stone path would allow easy access for Chloe’s wheelchair, and enabled them to walk side by side through the geometrically laid out garden.

  “I hope you didn’t mind being left with Chloe. She seemed intent on having your company.”

  “I didn’t. She’s lovely. Very…caring.”

  He stopped walking. “You talked about more than gardens,” he said flatly.

  “I couldn’t avoid it. She wanted to tell me about you and Richard.”

  He stared back at Waterhill, at the tall gray stone building rising up with implacable endurance. “That I was his bastard, legally acknowledged.”

  “That you didn’t know each other for fourteen years, and now, she worries that you still don’t know each other.”

  He looked at her then, shaken out of whatever resentment he’d retreated into. “Dad and I are fine.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said blandly, and swallowed a giggle at his shocked frown. He was smart enough to know that he and his dad’s relationship was not fine. Sometimes agreeing with an excuse was the most effective means of highlighting its hollowness. And his shock did look funny given his usual cool composure. “You’re both old enough to decide on the relationships you want and how much work you put into them.”