‘Margaret is saying, would Saturday be all right for going through the house, at least making a start?’
‘Sure, I’m here till Tuesday. Have you spoken to Caroline? She should probably be there too. There might even be some of her things in the house.’
‘I doubt it. Did you hear that, Tilly – yeah? Right, I’ll do that. Ok.’
‘What are we having for supper?’ Louise asked, hopefully raising a saucepan lid.
‘It’s just a tomato sauce, I’ll do some pasta.’
‘What was that about Caroline? Have you heard much from her since Mum got out of hospital?’
‘What do you think? She’s gone back into her hideaway, I suppose, that cottage.’
‘No, she’s in London.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I met her for a drink. Three or four weeks ago, me and Eric. She asked for you all, for Mum, and she said she was selling the cottage.’
‘Really?’
‘I guess taking taxis from Ullapool was getting a bit pricy. Or ridiculous.’
‘So she’s staying in London?’
Louise shrugged. ‘To be honest, she didn’t seem sure. She said she might put the flat on the market as well. She said a funny thing about the cottage – something about it not being the same one, and she should have known that would be no good.’
‘The same as what?’
‘I said, what do you mean, and she said she’d wanted another one, but it wasn’t for sale. She sort of shrugged and laughed and said, well, that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway.’
‘The same cottage.’ Esther thought about this. ‘I wonder if she meant – do you remember George?’
‘George who?’
‘He worked with Dad, and he was a great hill walker, went all over the Alps as well.’
‘What,’ Louise said, trying to be patient, ‘has that got to do with Caroline?’
‘He had a cottage near Ullapool, I’m sure it was there. And Caroline and Daniel stayed in it one summer. I’m trying to remember when that would have been.’
‘How strange,’ Louise said. ‘But that would fit. She seemed rather vague and distant, but not – I don’t know, I can’t quite explain. She seemed softer.’
‘Softer?’
Louise sat down at the table and laid her phone in front of her. ‘It’s been easer since Mum’s stroke, somehow. She even answers texts. Will I give her a call?’
‘If you like. Do you think she could come here on Saturday – it’s quite short notice.’
‘I told her that now the power of attorney was in place, the house was on the market and we’d be going through it soon. She offered to come – said just let her know.’
‘You had quite a conversation then.’
Louise had the phone at her ear, and Esther, moving to the other end of the kitchen to start getting dishes out, could not hear it ringing, but she gathered no one answered. Cheerfully, Louise gave her name and cut the call.
‘Left a message,’ she said.
‘Yes, I heard.’
Louise glanced round the tidy kitchen. ‘I meant to ask, but we’ve hardly seen each other since I got here this morning. Don’t you usually have B&Bs by now?’
‘I’ve cancelled them.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that for me – I wouldn’t mind giving you a hand.’
‘No, I’ve cancelled them all.’
Louise took this in. ‘Just for May or – ’
‘For good.’
‘You’ve wound up the business?’
‘Not quite. There’s all the accounts and the tax and stuff, but I’ve taken it off all the websites, and taken our own one down. At least, Ross did it for me.’
‘When did you decide this?’
‘I started thinking about it as soon as Mum went into the nursing home. What with visiting her there, and now the baby coming in August, I don’t want to be so tied. Anyway, I’ve had enough.’
‘And Tilly says she’s retiring next year?’
‘She’s had enough too.’
‘Right.’
Esther sat opposite Louise. ‘Don’t you get fed up with the same thing, year after year? You get to a point when you think, if I don’t please myself now, when on earth am I going to? But you probably don’t look at it like that, you’re a writer.’
Louise, for once, was silenced. She felt – what? Outflanked, perhaps.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s not high art, it’s just blah. . . . I churn it out, I don’t even think about it much now. That’s not quite true, I do try to make it fresh and at least amusing. The chick lit wave has been excellent news for me. It’s just, my heroines are getting older, and I’ve started persuading my publisher that hen-lit is the way to go. I’m not around young women any more, not the way I was when I was in employment full time. You always have to make things up, but I’ve been wondering lately if I’m making up the wrong things.’
Esther laughed. ‘I still think it’s funny, the way you write romance when you have no faith in it at all.’
‘Who says?’ But she grinned, accepting this.
‘How is Eric?’
‘Fine. Pretty good.’
Esther thought, she is going pink, almost blushing. Louise!
‘Getting older, it doesn’t really change how you feel, does it?’ she said, and got up to boil water for pasta.
Louise rested her elbows on the table, leaning her chin on cupped hands. ‘No, but maybe it changes what you think about what you feel.’
Esther looked at Louise’s mobile phone and her own, lying face up on the table, waiting for the beeps that would interrupt their conversation, draw them away to something else – a friend, publisher or agent, one of the children, perhaps the nursing home.
‘It’s different now, we’re much more connected to the world. It wasn’t until I started the B&Bs that I felt truly connected to anyone or anything beyond Jack and my family. Well, beyond the school playground, the PTA, the village . . . you know what I mean.’
‘It was good for you.’
‘Oh yes.’
As if to reinforce Esther’s point, Louise’s phone starting ringing. It was Caroline. Yes, she would come north, there was nothing to keep her just now. She would fly up on Friday. Louise arranged to meet her at Dyce airport.
‘What about Tilly,’ Louise asked. ‘Will I try her now?’
But Margaret said she couldn’t join them – she would see them on Saturday at the house.
‘She didn’t actually say what she’s doing tomorrow. She was very coy about it,’ said Louise.
‘Oh, it will be one of her internet dates.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, I forgot to say. She’s been meeting people for a while. In fact, I think the last one was a bit of a success. This must be the second date.’
Louise started to laugh. ‘My God, she’s come round after all. She was appalled when I suggested it.’ She looked at Esther. ‘What about you – haven’t you fancied trying it?’
Esther flushed. ‘That’s not funny. There was only ever Jack, you know that. Even when I was furious with him, even when I longed to leave, or kick him out, or whatever. And there were moments – weeks even. Ages ago. But – no, I couldn’t imagine it.’
‘Give it time.’
Esther shook her head. ‘It’s different for Margaret. She just wants to be married again. I feel I’ve done that, I would never want another marriage.’
Louise, for a moment, forgot she had had two marriages in the past. She thought of herself as single, always single. Like Caroline, who had never gone through with that marriage to – what was his name? Perhaps they could ask her why not. The old barriers seemed to be breaking down, the boundaries they had set shifting and dissolving.
‘Anything is possible,’ she said aloud. ‘Even now.’
There was a hiss from the saucepan, which must have had a wet patch on its base, as Esther put it on the hotplate.
‘I think s
he will find another man – now that she’s made up her mind.’ She sat down at the table again with Louise. ‘I meant what I said. I really don’t want to marry again. But since Mum went into hospital – in fact really since the poor old cat died – I’ve been so restless.’
‘The cat?’
‘Flossie, my tortoiseshell and white cat. I told you.’
‘Yes, but – ’
‘Anyway – apart from half a dozen hens, I don’t have any animals now. No children at home, no animals to look after.’
‘And no B&Bs?’ Louise smiled. ‘You’ll have to find somebody else to look after now.’
‘Right,’ Esther said. ‘Since apparently that’s all I ever do.’
‘Sorry, no, I really didn’t mean Mum – honestly.’
Esther had reddened. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘I finally managed to get something for myself – a career of sorts – a business. But what did I choose?’
‘It was successful, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh yes. But if you examine it from the outside, and I’ve been trying to do that – all it meant was I cooked and cleaned for a whole lot of other people, not just Jack and the kids. It kept me here, kept me tethered.’
Startled, Louise said, ‘I thought you liked it, I thought this was the kind of life you wanted? The house, the garden, chickens . . .’
Esther laughed. ‘Chickens! I’ve had a life very like Mum’s, even – if you include the chickens – like Granny’s. I don’t seem to have moved into the modern world the way you did, Caroline did, and she’s older than all of us. Even Margaret, though she often said she’d rather stay at home, has actually had a proper job for years, teaching. She could have been a head teacher if she’d had the – well, courage maybe, though I don’t like to imply anything by that. She said she just liked being with children and other jobs in education are about a lot more than that.’
‘She only went on teaching because Mike left,’ Louise said. ‘She resented him for that more than anything.’
Esther sat down at the table again, picking up her mobile phone and turning it over, upending it, balancing it on its edge.
‘I think she had a hard time, don’t you? Her mother, Uncle Gordon, and then being just left with us, as if she was a parcel. Not that Mum thought so. She loves her, I sometimes think . . . oh well.’
‘We’ve been over this, we agree,’ Louise said. ‘But sometimes she’s so passive you can’t help being impatient. If what she wanted so much was having a man, why hasn’t she done something about it all these years? Instead of waiting till she’s in her fifties?’ Louise shrugged. ‘Oh well, you know her better than I do, you’ve always been close.’
‘Yes, we have, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think she’s got her faults. Margaret and I sort of fell out only once, a stupid argument, when Jack was made Assistant Director. I said it was unusual for a head teacher to get that sort of job when they’d not been out of teaching, in management already, but he’d done so much to develop the new curriculum, he was the obvious choice. I was really proud of Jack, I could see everyone thought highly of him. But Margaret said, “Oh the curriculum – I could see all those changes far enough, the amount of paperwork they generate and all for what? I’m still teaching the way I always have, I can’t see it’s made any difference to me.” And I said – it was a mistake, the moment the words were out I regretted them – I said, surely it should have made a difference, didn’t she want to change the way she did things, improve all the time? You know Margaret, she didn’t shout back at me, as you might have done, or say something cutting, as Caroline might – even Jack, he wouldn’t tolerate criticism either. She just closed up like one of those shellfish when you touch them, snapped herself shut and said she’d better be going, she had so much preparation to do for the next day. Just when she’d got her coat on and I was trying to think of something to say that would defuse it, make everything ok again, she said, “If you’d ever had a job, Esther, you would understand.” Touché, right enough.’
‘That was a bit unfair.’
Esther ignored this, unstoppable now. ‘What was wrong with me? I followed Jack around, supported him. Once the kids were at school I tried writing wee stories but they weren’t very good – I’m no rival, you needn’t worry. I was no good at sewing, making things. I decorated, but even that Jack often had to do again. Hopeless. Then one day it came to me, when I was cleaning this place for the umpteenth time, sick of it, sick of myself, I thought, it’s big enough for a bloody hotel this house, what on earth made me think living in it all my life would be a good idea? And yet, I love Braeside, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
‘Then I remembered what Caroline had said when she gave it to us, I hadn’t taken it in then, I was so overwhelmed by what was happening, by the whole idea of living here. Make the house pay, she said to me, quite sternly. So there was another voice in my head suddenly, quite a cross voice, saying ‘get on with it’. I don’t know where that came from. I’d been watching something on TV about women starting their own businesses, maybe it was that. Or maybe it was Kirsty, she said to me when she was choosing her third year subjects, no offence Mum, but I don’t want to be like you. I want my own career. That’s when I thought, I’m just like my mother, and that was ok in her day, but I’m missing the boat, I have to do something. So I started to research running a guest house, then I went to a Start Your Own Business Day for women, in the Treetops Hotel, and that was the best thing of all. Not the workshops, not the stuff they gave you about cash flow and VAT. That was gobbledegook. No, it was the other women. So many of them were like me, kids growing up and feeling redundant and stupid. We all wanted to do something, to prove we could.’
‘And you did,’ Louise said, marvelling at this tirade, that she wouldn’t have interrupted even if it had been possible. ‘You made a huge success of it.’
‘Saved me. Saved my marriage,’ Esther said.
Another pause. Louise said, ‘Really?’ This had not seemed to be a joke.
‘Oh yes. I got confident, I wasn’t so dependent, and I didn’t care so much what he was doing all the time. I thought, if he left me, I’d be ok.’
‘Left? You and Jack had a really good marriage.’
‘I suppose we did. But there was a spell – when it sort of fell apart. Or I did.’
Louise said, ’I wish you’d said. I thought – once, when I was up and you were a bit distant – I wondered. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own dreary love life, I might have been more use to you.’
‘If you’d been living here, I’d have told you,’ Esther admitted. ‘I wanted to. I did talk to Margaret, but with Mike . . . oh you know. It was quite difficult. Anyway, it was hard enough keeping it from the kids. They knew of course. Not the details, but they knew their parents were unhappy. With each other.’
‘But you got through?’
‘Oh yes,’ Esther said, tired of talking about it. ‘We got through.’
ii
They had eaten Esther’s apple crumble and she was making coffee when Caroline noticed the photograph. Esther had forgotten it again, tucked behind the Indian Tree plate, or she might have put it away in a drawer.
Caroline had been sitting with her back to it, but when she put the pudding plates on the draining board and turned to the table, she checked.
‘That photograph – ’ she said.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ said Louise, reaching up and taking it down. ‘You and Daniel. Esther and I were trying to work out where it was taken.’
Caroline took it from Louise and stood gazing. She was pale anyway, but seemed paler. ‘You mean when,’ she said. ‘You must have wondered when it was taken.’
‘Well, yes.’
Esther had put the coffee things on a tray. ‘I thought we’d go through to the sitting room.’
Caroline brought the photograph with her. When they were sitting down, Esther pouring coffee, she said, ‘I’ve never seen this.’
‘How do you mean?
You’re in it.’
‘I know. I’ve been trying to think. Where did you find it?’
‘Among Mum’s photographs, in the box room at Harrowden Place.’
Caroline looked stunned. ‘I just can’t think how it got there.’ She realised the others were poised, waiting. ‘I’d better tell you.’
‘Is it Glasgow?’
‘Yes, after Daniel came home. He was living in a flat there with two students. One of them – was it Kenny or Joe? One of them was a photography student and one day he caught us just as we were coming out of the door. It must have been shortly before Daniel was killed, because I was never shown it. The only thing I can think is that one of the boys put it amongst his things and when I collected them I didn’t see it. I left some of that stuff with Janet when I went to London. Somewhere in her house there must be, unless she threw them out, and I can’t see she would, a box of letters she started writing to me when I left Aberdeen for my first job away from here. I stored them in a shoebox, and I gave it to Daniel because he wanted to read them all.’
‘How long – how long was he home before – before we knew about it?’ Esther asked.
‘He was in Glasgow a month before he even got in touch with me.’
‘Why – ’
Caroline leaned forward, the mug of coffee held tightly in both hands. ‘It’s difficult to explain now – and it’s so long ago. But he wasn’t the same, at first. He was damaged in some way that I didn’t really understand, though in my career, later, I saw people who were like him. He was very fragile. I was terrified he’d leave again, terrified. So when he said he didn’t want anyone else to know yet, I went along with him. I did try – ’ She stopped.
‘It must have been awful,’ Esther said. ‘And yet, were you happy, to have him back?’
‘Happy! It’s not so simple. I felt – ’ She stopped, her colour coming back, her face, they saw, glowing. ‘I felt complete again.’
More than we realised, Esther thought, and more intense, though I knew they were close. I wonder how much Mum knew – or guessed. This photo was in her box. She must have seen it.
‘So his death,’ Louise said, ‘was the worst possible thing that could happen. Even worse because of when it happened.’
The Treacle Well Page 33