Gifted and Talented

by Holden, Wendy

  Distracted as she was, Sara could recognise a change. Diana’s expression was not the conciliatory one of old, the one that could be lied to or shouted down. It was clear that something apocalyptic had happened. Something from which there was no coming back. No one had yet spoken, but Sara could tell that this scenario was terminal.

  With an almost romantic longing, now, she recalled the comforts of home. Perhaps, after all, she could survive life without a famous academic for a husband. If she could survive so many nights in social housing, in a non-super-king-sized double bed in a bedroom without an en suite, then she could survive anything. She had learnt that much about herself.

  Sara looked at Diana, who was trying to summon the words to start. She raised her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Save your breath. We’re going, Milo and I. We’re leaving. You’ll never see us again. Just let me go and pack our things.’

  Diana stood in the security light and watched Sara totter off towards the Lodge. She closed her eyes and let the great sense of calm flood through her. Then, slowly, she walked towards the college.

  The foyer of Branston was full of people, students mostly, all in a state of high excitement. Diana did not stop to gather the details. She pressed on into the corridors that led to Richard’s office. Policemen were milling about outside. She pushed through, hardly aware of them. There he was, leaning over his desk, looking grey, exhausted and utterly defeated.

  Then he looked up and saw her and the joy that shot across his face went straight to her heart. He was over beside her in seconds. ‘I’m so pleased you’re here,’ he whispered. His strong hand closed over hers, holding it tight. His breath was warm in her ear. ‘Stay with me, won’t you? For ever? I need you, Diana. You’ve no idea how much.’

  Isabel was running up the grass verge of the road, in the darkness, under the trees. They dripped on her with a concentrated remorselessness. It felt horribly personal, as if the very heavens were victimising her.

  She had been wrong. Pathetically, stupidly, despicably, inexcusably wrong. Jasper had never loved her. He had lied. He had taken her money. He had ruined her life. But much worse than that, he had killed Amber. Isabel had no doubt now that he had supplied whatever she had taken.

  The thin soles of her shoes pounded down on the glistening black tarmac. She had made all the wrong choices. Olly, for example. The sight of him here, tonight, had made her want to throw herself in his arms. Dear, sensible, warm, loving, funny, caring, clever Olly. But he had been there with that other woman, the one with the camera. Isabel had missed the boat.

  And then there was her work. Professor Green: ‘You’ll be lucky to scrape a third.’

  Despair overwhelmed her. She did not deserve to live. The urge to lie down in the road and be crushed by the next passing car was violent and powerful. But what would dying achieve? One dead person was enough.

  She was in trouble – lots of it. For running away from Branston and leaving Amber’s body. For rushing off to St Alwine’s, bribing the porters and then hailing a cab she could not afford to take her to the debauched party of a notorious student society. Would she have to go to jail now?

  She could no longer think straight, and she could run straight still less. She was heading for Branston but wanted more than anything to run to her mother, the one person who always had, who always could, make everything all right again. But she had been avoiding Mum’s calls.

  Isabel was limping and lurching now, sick with pain and self-disgust. Mum had been so proud of her, so loving and supportive. She had been repaid by constant demands for money and the idea that an adoptive mother was inferior compared to a family who could trace themselves back a thousand years.

  Isabel was sobbing now. Despicable ingrate as she was, how could Mum want her after this? Let alone love her? She wasn’t even her child in the first place. When she found out, Mum would regret the day she ever saw her. Perhaps she should just run away . . .

  As, much later, an exhausted Isabel reeled up to Branston’s entrance, the red digits of the clock blurred and wiggled across her sight. She felt about to die as she stumbled into a foyer so bright she could almost hear it.

  Someone within leapt to their feet, but as they rose, Isabel fell. The floor had come up to meet her and Isabel’s fingers were splayed on the carpet. It was warm and dry and she wanted to melt into the red behind her eyes.

  ‘Isabel!’

  Isabel opened her eyes. She rolled over and stared up. Within a halo of blazing strip lights, a face was looking down at her.

  Isabel gasped. And yet there was, in this face, none of the censure she feared or felt she deserved. All Isabel could read there was concern.

  ‘Mum?’

  The face nodded. Was it a dream? Isabel asked herself. But no, her fingers were pressed into the gritty pile of the carpet. It was real, if unbelievable.

  ‘What are you . . . doing here?’

  Her mother was kneeling beside her now, hugging her hard. ‘You weren’t answering my calls. And, when you did, you sounded, well, not like you. I had a feeling.’

  Isabel’s heart squeezed with guilt. A feeling. A maternal feeling. A sixth sense that could only be love. She struggled to sit up, but fell back again.

  ‘I just knew something wasn’t right,’ her mother went on in her soft Scottish voice. ‘I got here earlier this evening. Got to Branston in the end, you see!’

  It was a brave attempt at a joke, but her mouth quivered with the effort to smile and there was no laughter in her eyes. She surveyed the wreck of her daughter with an expression of wild distraction. ‘Look at you!’ She shook her head. ‘Isabel! You’re so thin . . .’

  The love and fear in her voice sent new strength into Isabel. She rose up, clung and sobbed into the blessedly familiar shoulder. ‘Oh, Mum. I’m so glad you’re here.’

  The arms round her tightened. Isabel closed her eyes and felt her mother’s face against her head, her mother’s voice crooning comfortingly into her hair: ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’ sobbed Isabel. ‘And it won’t be ever again.’ Mum didn’t know the half of it.

  ‘Rubbish,’ her mother replied robustly. ‘You’re a heroine, you know. You saved someone’s life.’ She paused, and Isabel felt the body holding hers straining with the effort of holding back volcanic emotion. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ came her mother’s ragged whisper. ‘So proud that you’re my daughter.’

  The scales had fallen from her eyes in a manner more dramatic than even Olly could have hoped for. And he had further hopes of Isabel, even though things were at an early and delicate stage between them. Partly still in shock at the ease with which De Borchy had deceived her, Isabel was understandably cautious about starting another relationship. And, when she wasn’t being cautious, she was locked in the library trying to make up lost academic ground.

  Olly was giving her time. He could afford to. He was busy himself, happily occupied now the Post was going full throttle. Press Baron’s Son In Drugs Shame. What a great first-day front-page it had been. That Jasper De Borchy had been the missing link in the university drugs ring had been a discovery beyond Alastair’s wildest dreams.

  And then there were Olly’s landlords. The Stringer household was on the up. Hero had not only started going to school again but had taken a weekend job at the dogs’ home where Coco the ever-escaping poodle was supposed to be incarcerated. She could be seen about town on Saturdays, taking Coco for walks. Scrubbed of make-up, hair shining, she was unrecognisable from her former incarnation. And she seemed to bear him no grudge about his outburst – on the contrary, she seemed almost grateful.

  Dotty’s clients were building slowly up again – although thankfully the Lintles had not returned. David’s career too was gradually righting itself. Hero had also, by way of apology, revamped her father’s online presence; it now looked b
etter than any rival lecturer’s.

  Olly supposed it was good news that Amber Piggott was making progress in hospital. And Isabel was definitely thrilled about the relationship between the Master of Branston and her friend, Diana, the college gardener. She had, apparently, moved into the Lodge and it looked like a florist’s inside, these days, according to David, who, with Dotty, had been invited to the dinners the Master kept giving for his students and staff. Also according to David, Richard Black had a permanent smile on his face.

  Press Baron’s Son In Drugs Shame. Diana put the newspaper with its enormous – really, really enormous – headline back on Richard’s desk. Dramatic times, she thought. The paper dated from some months ago – the week before last Christmas, in fact – but it brought it all back.

  Feeling a wave of sudden nausea – she was sicker this time round than when pregnant with Rosie – she sat down. Beneath the Post on the desk were many other papers containing stories relating to Branston. They were awaiting insertion in the cuttings book, the maintenance of which was the responsibility of Flora. But she and the Bursar were still on honeymoon.

  Diana moved a few papers. Exposed were the bills for the post-alumni dinner clean-up operation in college. It had taken weeks for the wreckage to be entirely removed from the Incinerator, and college claret had proved impossible to remove from concrete floors. Elsewhere, a black smoky patch recalled the fact that there was a corner of Branston College that would forever be Sara Oopvard.

  Sara’s departure was only one, Diana thought, of the many unexpected ways the alumni dinner had been a blessing – to the college as well as herself. Among the students it had attained a notorious, even legendary status and Diana sensed the hope bright among them that something even worse would happen next time.

  As a result, Flora – when she came back – had an enormous number of volunteers to help work through the updated alumni list. Those potential donors to whom news about the dinner had got out seemed to be newly interested in their alma mater as a result. Money was flowing in.

  Some of this had been invested in a new website. There were sections on the college staff – as Head Gardener and soon-to-be wife of the Master, Diana had been put at the top, just underneath Richard himself. The designer had put in a special section on the Gesamtkunstwerk and there was another – admittedly small – on celebrity alumnae: ‘Famous Picklers’. As a result, applications were firmly on the up, including one from David Stringer’s own daughter who was, according to Richard, especially promising and wanted to be a lawyer.

  Diana stood and walked to the window. Glossy grass rippled in the breeze. Little green buds were appearing on all the trees. There was laburnum along the lawns and lilacs in white and purple – lilac and laburnum that she had freed from ivies, from rubble, from shadow.

  There was so much to look forward to. Gradually, over the next few weeks, the sun would get hotter and the leaves grow bigger. The days would start to smell warm, filled with perfume and butterflies. Her delphiniums would explode in slow motion, that blue row of rockets she had looked forward to seeing for so long. And she had other plans for the garden too, but those might have to wait for a while. She pressed her belly and smiled.

  The only cloud in her happy blue sky had been leaving the Campion Estate to move into the Master’s Lodge. But then a job as Sally’s deputy in the housekeeping department had come up and Debs had not needed Diana’s urging to apply – successfully, as it turned out.

  So there was no need to lose touch with her old neighbours; besides, Shanna-Mae and Rosie were joined at the hip and both wildly looking forward to the baby, who Shanna-Mae hoped was a girl and Rosie hoped was a boy. Both had eagerly volunteered for babysitting. And both would be bridesmaids at the wedding, registry office though it was. Neither she nor Richard wanted a fuss. Nor a wedding in the egg-shaped chapel, however newly committed to Branston Richard now was.

  Who could have imagined it would all turn out so well? She opened the window, breathing in the fresh air. It was the most beautiful spring she could remember; certainly the loveliest there must ever have been at Branston. The bulbs she had planted the previous autumn had transformed what had been scarred, scabbed and unloved grass into a dancing fairyland of pale yellow and soft blue flowers: narcissi, bluebells, primroses and daffodils. A path wound through it.

  Diana closed her eyes. Voices floated over to her and she opened them again to see Isabel walking along the path between the primroses with Olly. He had his arm round her and they were laughing.