“Is something wrong?”
“Everything.” Virginia pulled out a chair and sat, her arms folded and her expression mutinous. “That was Edmund, and he’s going to New York today. Now. And he’s going to be away all week, and he promised me…he promised, Edie…that he’d drive Henry to school tomorrow. I told him that it was the one thing I wouldn’t do. I’ve hated the whole idea of Templehall from the very beginning, and the only reason I finally relented was because Edmund promised that he would take Henry tomorrow.”
Edie knew a nasty temper when she saw one. She said reasonably, “Well, I suppose if you’re an important businessman these things are bound to happen.”
“Only to Edmund. Other men manage their lives without being so bloody selfish.”
“You don’t want to take Henry yourself?”
“No, I do not. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. It’s inhuman of Edmund to expect it of me.”
Edie, wringing out her dishcloth, considered the problem.
“Could you not ask Lady Balmerino to take him with Hamish?”
Virginia did not let on that Edmund had already made this sensible suggestion and got an earful for his pains.
“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “I suppose I could,” she admitted sulkily.
“Isobel’s very understanding. And she’s been through it herself.”
“No, she hasn’t.” It was obvious to Edie that she could say nothing right. “Hamish was never like Henry. You could send Hamish to the moon, and all he’d worry about would be when he was going to get his next meal.”
“That’s true enough. But if I were you, I’d have a word with Isobel. It’s no good working yourself up into a state if there’s nothing to be done. What —”
“I know, Edie. What can’t be cured must be endured.”
“That’s true enough,” said Edie placidly, and went to get the kettle and fill it with water. A cup of tea seemed to be in order. There was nothing, in times of stress, like a good hot cup of tea.
They were drinking the tea when Henry returned, his carrier bag bulging with goodies.
“Mummy, look what I got!” He emptied the contents out on to the kitchen table. “Look, Edie. Mars Bars, and Smarties, and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and some jellybabies, and Jaffa Cakes, and chocolate digestives, and treacle toffees, and Rolos; and Mrs Ishak gave me a lollipop for going away. I didn’t have to pay for the lollipop, so can I eat it now?”
Edie surveyed his loot. “I hope you’re not going to eat that lot all at once, otherwise you won’t have a tooth left in your head.”
“No.” He was already unwrapping the lollipop. “It’s got to last a long time.”
By now Virginia’s fury had simmered down. She put her arm around Henry and said, in consciously cheerful tones, “Daddy phoned.”
He licked. “What about?”
“He has to go to America. Today. He’s flying from London this afternoon. So he won’t be able to take you to school tomorrow. But I thought I’d…”
Henry stopped licking. His pleasure flowed from his face, and he turned enormous, apprehensive eyes upon his mother.
She hesitated, and then started up again. “…I thought I’d ring Isobel and ask if she’d take you with Hamish…”
She got no further. His reaction to the news was even worse than she had dreaded. A wail of dismay and floods of instant tears…
“I don’t want Isobel to take me…”
“Henry…”
He jerked himself out of her embrace and flung his lollipop on to the floor. “I’m not going to go with Isobel and Hamish. I want my mother or my father to take me. How would you like it, if you were me and…”
“Henry…”
“…you had to go away with people who weren’t your own mother and father? I think you are being very unkind to me…”
“I’ll take you.”
“And Hamish will be horrid and not talk because he’s a senior. It’s not fair!”
Furiously weeping, he turned and fled for the door.
“Henry, I’ll take you…”
But he was gone, his footsteps stamping up the stairs to the sanctuary of his bedroom. Virginia, gritting her teeth, closed her eyes and wished that she could close her ears as well. It came. The deadly slam of his bedroom door. Then silence.
She opened her eyes and met Edie’s across the table. Edie gave a long sigh. She said, “Oh, dearie dear.”
“So much for that bright idea.”
“Poor wee soul. He’s upset.”
Virginia leaned her elbow on the table and ran a hand through her hair. All at once the situation had become more than she felt able to cope with.
She said, “This is the very last thing I wanted to happen.” She knew, and Edie knew, that Henry’s tantrums, though rare, left him vulnerable and touchy for hours. “I wanted this to be a good day and not miserable. Our last day together. And now Henry’s going to spend it bursting into tears and blaming me for everything. As if things weren’t bad enough. Damn Edmund. What am I going to do, Edie?”
“How would it be,” said Edie, “if I just came back this afternoon and took Henry off your hands? He’s never so bad with me. Have you finished packing yet? Well, I could finish his packing and do any wee bits that need to be done, and he can just be around the place and have time to collect himself. A quiet day, that’s what he needs.”
“Oh, Edie.” Virginia was filled with grateful love. “Would you do that?”
“No trouble. Mind, I’ll have to go home and see to Lottie, give her her dinner, but I’ll be here again by two.”
“Can’t Lottie see to her own dinner?”
“Well, she can, but she makes such a hash of it, burns the pans, and leaves my kitchen in a midden, I’m better to do it myself.”
Virginia was repentant. “Oh, Edie. You do so much. I’m sorry I shouted at you.”
“Good thing I was here for you to shout at.” She heaved herself on to her swollen legs. “Now, I must get on, or we won’t get the baby bathed at this rate. Up you go and have a word with Henry. Tell him he can spend the afternoon with me, and what I’d really like would be one of his bonny pictures.”
Virginia found Henry, as she knew she would, under his duvet with Moo.
She said, “I’m sorry, Henry.”
Racked with huge sobs, he did not reply. She sat on his bed. “It was a silly thing to suggest. Daddy suggested it to me, and I thought it was silly then. I had no right even to mention it to you. Of course you won’t go with Isobel. You’ll come with me. I’ll take you in the car.”
She waited. After a bit, Henry rolled on to his back. His face was swollen and tear-stained, but he seemed to have stopped crying.
He said, “I don’t mind so much about Hamish, but I want you.”
“I’ll be there. Perhaps we’ll take Hamish with us. It would be kind. Save Isobel a journey.”
He sniffed. “All right.”
“Edie’s coming back after lunch. She said she’d like to spend the afternoon with you. She wants you to draw her a picture.”
“Have you packed my felt pens?”
“Not yet.”
He put out his arms, and she gathered him up and held him close, rocking him gently, pressing kisses on to the top of his head. After a bit, he emerged from beneath his duvet, and they found a handkerchief and he blew his nose.
It was not until then that she remembered Edmund’s message. “Daddy wanted you to ring him up. He’s at the office. You know the number.”
Henry went to her bedroom to do this, but Virginia had left it too late and Edmund had already gone.
The playroom was peaceful and warm. Sun poured through the wide windows, and the breeze sent the wisteria branches tapping at the panes. Henry sat at the big table in the middle of the room, and drew. Edie was on the window-seat, stitching the last of the name-tapes on to his new socks. In the mornings, for work, Edie wore her oldest clothes and a pinafore, but this afternoon she ha
d turned up looking quite smart, and had put on her new lilac cardigan. Henry felt flattered, because he knew that she was keeping it for best. As soon as she arrived, she had set up the ironing board, and ironed the morning’s load of washing, fresh from the line. This was now stacked, crisp and folded, on the other end of the table, and gave off a pleasant smell.
Henry laid down his felt pen and searched in his pen-box, making scrabbling sounds. He said, “Bother.”
“What is it, pet?”
“I want a biro. I’ve drawn people with balloons coming out of their mouths, and I want to write what they’re saying.”
“Look in Edie’s bag. There’s a pen in there.”
Her bag was on the chair by the fireside. It was large, made of leather, and bulged with important things: her comb, her fat housekeeping purse, her old age pension book, her post office savings book, her railcard, her bus pass. She didn’t have a car, so she had to go everywhere by bus. Because of this she had a timetable, a little booklet, “Relkirkshire Bus Company”. Henry, rootling for the pen, came upon this. It occurred to him, out of the blue, that it might be a sensible and useful thing to own. Edie probably had another at home.
He looked up at Edie. She was intent on her sewing, her white head bowed. He removed the booklet from her bag and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. He found the biro, closed her bag, and went back to his work.
Presently, Edie asked, “What would you like for your tea?”
He said, “Macaroni cheese.”
Dermot Honeycombe’s antique shop stood at the far end of the village street, beyond the main gates of Croy, and at the foot of a gentle slope that leaned between the road and the river. Once it had been the village smithy, and the cottage where Dermot lived, the blacksmith’s house. Dermot’s cottage was painfully picturesque. It had tubs of begonias at the door, latticed windows, and a thickly thatched roof. But the shop was much as it had always been, with walls of dark stone and blackened beams. Outside was a yard of cobbles where once the patient farm horses had stood, waiting to be shod, and here Dermot had set up his shop sign, an aged wooden cart, painted blue, with DERMOT HONEYCOMBE ANTIQUES emblazoned tastefully on its side. It was an eye-catching gimmick, and brought in much casual trade. It was also useful for tying dogs to. Virginia clipped the leads on to the spaniels’ collars, and knotted the ends around one of the cartwheels. The dogs sat, looking reproachful.
“I shan’t be long,” she told them. They thumped their stumpy tails, and their eyes made her feel like a murderer, but she left them and went across the cobbles and in through the door of the old smithy. Here Dermot sat, in his paper-piled birdcage of an office. He was on the telephone but spied her through the glass, raised a hand, and then reached out to turn on a switch.
Within the shop, four dangling bulbs sprang to light, doing a little to alleviate the gloom, but not very much. The place bulged with every sort of junk. Chairs were piled on tables, on the tops of chests of drawers. Huge wardrobes towered. There were milk churns, jelly-pans, stacks of unmatched china, brass fenders, corner cupboards, curtain rails, cushions, bundles of velvet, threadbare rugs. The smell was damp and musty and Virginia knew a small frisson of anticipation. Visits to Dermot’s were always something of a lottery because you never knew — and neither did Dermot — what you might, by chance, turn up.
She moved forward, edging her way between the tottering stacks of furniture, with the wary caution of a pot-holer. Already, she felt marginally more cheerful. Browsing was a comforting therapy, and Virginia allowed herself the self-indulgence of putting Edmund, the morning’s traumas, and tomorrow, all out of her mind.
A present for Katy. Her eye wandered. She priced a chest of drawers, a wide-lapped chair. Searched for the silver mark on a battered spoon, poked through a box of old keys and brass doorknobs, turned the pages of a dignified old wreck of a book. Found a lustre cream jug, and wiped the dust from it, searching for chips or cracks. There were none.
She was joined by Dermot, finished with his telephone call.
“Hello, my dear.”
“Dermot. Hello.”
“Looking for something in particular?”
“A present for Katy Steynton.” She held up the lustre jug. “This is sweet.”
“It’s a pet, isn’t it? The Garden of Eden. I love that dark gentian blue.” He was a rotund, smooth-faced man of mature years, but strangely ageless. His cheeks were pink, and his fluffy pale hair airy as dandelion down. He wore a faded green corduroy jacket, much adorned with drooping poachers’ pockets, and had a red-spotted kerchief tied in a jaunty knot around his neck. “You’re the second person I’ve had in today looking for something for Katy.”
“Who else has been here?”
“Pandora Blair. Popped in this morning. Lovely to see her again. Couldn’t believe it when she walked through the door. Just like old times. And after all these years!”
“We had lunch at Croy yesterday.” Virginia thought about yesterday, and knew that it had been a good day, the sort they would all remember when they were old and there was nothing much left to do but reminisce. It was the time when Pandora came home from Majorca, and Lucilla was there and some young Australian. Can’t remember his name. And we played croquet. And Edmund and Pandora sat in the swing-seat, and Pandora went to sleep, and we all teased Edmund for being such a boring companion. “That’s the first time I’d met Pandora.”
“Of course. Amazing. How the years fly by.”
“What did she buy for Katy? I mustn’t get the same.”
“A lamp. Chinese porcelain, and I’d made the shade for it myself. White silk, lined in palest pink. Then we had a cup of coffee and caught up on all the news. She was ever so sad when I told her about Terence.”
“I’m sure.” Virginia was afraid that Dermot’s eyes were about to swim with tears, and went on hurriedly, “Dermot, I think I’ll have this jug. Katy can use it either for cream or flowers, yet it’s pretty enough on its own.”
“Don’t think you could find anything nicer. But stay for a bit. Have a snoop around…”
“I’d love to, but I’m taking the dogs for a walk. I’ll pick the jug up on my way home, and write you a cheque for it then.”
“Righty-ho.” He took the jug from her and led the devious way back towards the door. “Are you going to Vi’s picnic on Thursday?”
“Yes. Alexa will be there too. She’s bringing a friend up for the dance.”
“Oh, lovely. Haven’t seen Alexa for months. I’m going to see if I can get someone to mind the shop for me that day. If I can’t, I’ll shut it up. Wouldn’t miss Vi’s picnic for anything.”
“I hope it’s a good day.”
They emerged and stepped out into the sunshine. The dogs, spying them, wheeked blissfully and leapt to their feet, tangling the leads. “How’s Edmund?” asked Dermot.
“On his way to New York.”
“I don’t believe it! What a thing! I wouldn’t have his job for all the tea in China.”
“Don’t waste your sympathy. He loves it.”
She rescued the dogs, waved goodbye to Dermot, walked on, leaving the last straggling cottages of Strathcroy behind her. Another half-mile and she had come to the bridge that spanned the river at the west end of the village. The bridge was ancient, steeply hump-backed, and once used by cattle-drovers. On the far side, a winding, tree-shaded lane followed the convolutions of the river, and led the way back to Balnaid.
On the crest of the bridge she paused to loosen the dogs and let them run free. They shot off at once, noses enticed by the smell of rabbits, to plunge into a thicket of bracken and brambles. Every now and then, as though to prove they were not wasting their time, they made hunting calls, or bounced high out of the tall bracken, with ears flying like furry wings.
Virginia let them go. They were Edmund’s gun dogs, patiently trained, intelligent and obedient. A single whistle and they would return to her. The old bridge was a pleasant spot to loiter. The stone wall felt warm in the
sunshine, and she leaned her arms on this and gazed downwards at the flowing peat-brown water. Sometimes she and Henry played Pooh-sticks from this bridge, flinging sticks upstream and then racing back to watch for the first, the winning stick, to appear. Sometimes the sticks never did appear, having been caught up in some unseen obstruction.
Like Edmund.
Alone, with only the river for company, she felt strong enough to think about Edmund, by now probably winging his way over the Atlantic towards New York, drawn, as though by a magnet, away from his wife and his son, just at a time when he was most needed at home. The magnet was his work, and right now Virginia felt as jealous and resentful and lonely as if he were gone to keep an assignation with a mistress.
Which was strange because she had never been jealous of other women, never tortured herself with imaginings of infidelity during the long periods when Edmund was away from her, in far-flung cities on the other side of the world. Once, teasing, she had told him that she didn’t care what he did, provided she wasn’t expected to watch. All that mattered was that he always came home. But today, she had slammed down the telephone receiver and never said goodbye, and then forgotten, until too late, to give Henry his father’s message. Experiencing a twinge of guilt, she gathered her hurt feelings about her. It’s his own fault. Let him brood. Perhaps another time he’ll —
“Out for a walk, are you?”
The voice came from nowhere. Virginia thought, oh, God, let a few seconds pass, and then slowly turned. Lottie stood only a few feet away. She had come up the slope of the bridge from the village, the way that Virginia had, soft-footed, unheard. Had she seen Virginia in the street, watching from Edie’s window, reached for her horrible beret, her green cardigan, and followed? Had she been waiting while Virginia was with Dermot, ducking out of sight and then dogging Virginia’s footsteps, always just out of earshot? The very idea was spooky. What did she want? Why could she not leave people alone? And why, beyond Virginia’s irritation, did there lurk, like a ghost, a sense of presentiment, a foreboding of fear?
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