Daughter of Riches

by Janet Tanner

  She wandered on without completing the sentence and Brenda stared after her anxiously. Catherine was usually so ready to chat!

  Catherine walked straight through the hotel and out of the back door, left open because it led now to the small swimming pool that had been installed in what had once been the kitchen garden. There was no one in the pool; the water looked very cold and very blue in the October sunshine. Catherine walked across the lawn heading for the end of the garden. It was planted now with flowers and shrubs, but the apple tree was still there – the tree Nicky and Paul used to shin up, and which Charles had often threatened to cut down because it drained all the goodness out of the soil. She looked up, remembering how they had picked the last remaining apples to take with them when the Gennans had turned them out of their home and feeling that the events of that year had somehow marked the end of her childhood. Until then everything has seemed to be bathed in sunshine like the endless Jersey summers and what problems they had were solved as easily as a kiss had taken the sting out of a grazed knee. Catherine went to the tree, throwing her arms around its gnarled trunk and pressing her face into the cool rough bark. But still the tears would not come, only the bittersweet rush of memories and the pain of her own guilt.

  The snap of a dry twig invaded her thoughts and Catherine looked up accusingly to see a young man, casually dressed, on the lawn behind her. So lost in memories was she that she forgot for a moment that hotel guests now had access to the garden, so startled that she demanded angrily: ‘ Who are you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I …’ He broke off, looking at her. ‘It’s Catherine, isn’t it? I’m Jeff McCauley. I was a friend of Nicky’s. I’ve come over for the funeral.’

  Jeff McCauley – who had been in hospital with Nicky. Sophia had written to ask him to visit in the hope of pulling Nicky out of his depression but he had not come. Catherine felt a rush of animosity, as if he was personally responsible for Nicky’s death.

  ‘It’s a bit late now isn’t it?’ she said bitterly.

  Jeff McCauley looked shocked. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I suppose it is. Look, I’m really sorry about what has happened. I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll leave you in peace.’

  He turned to go but suddenly she did not want him to. He was a link with Nicky, someone who had known her brother in the years she had managed to miss. ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ she apologised. ‘Please don’t go. Tell me about Nicky – when he was in the army. Talk about him – please!’

  ‘Well, there’s not a lot to tell,’ he said a little awkwardly. ‘I didn’t know him in the army, just in hospital. I knew it had hit him pretty hard, being paralysed. I guess it’s one of the things we were all afraid of, and I was one of the lucky ones. But all the same I never thought that Nicky would … he had such guts. It just goes to show you can never tell …’ He broke off but she was silent, waiting, and after a moment he went on: ‘I had a spinal injury too but mine wasn’t permanent, thank God. When I was in my chair Nicky and I used to have races, round and round the grounds.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Oh he did usually. His arms were so strong. He said it came from all the rowing he used to do and the swimming. Christ, I can’t believe he’s gone.’

  ‘No,’ Catherine said. ‘Neither can I.’ The bursting sensation was there in her head again but this time the pressure was hot and hard behind her eyes.

  ‘He was a good bloke, a really good bloke,’ Jeff went on. ‘And he thought the world of you, well, all of you really, but he never stopped talking about his little sister …’

  Catherine barely heard him. I’m going to cry, she thought. All this time the tears refused to come and now in front of a stranger I am going to cry.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she tried to say, intending to run and hide somewhere but all that came out was a sob and she clapped her hands over her face, turning away as the tears escaped from her eyes and her nose in an unstoppable torrent. The pain inside her creased her like a stomach cramp and she doubled up against it whilst he stood helplessly by.

  At last the great tearing sobs began to quieten though her shoulders still shook and her hands still covered her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  She shook her head wordlessly, still not looking at him, then after a moment she fumbled unsuccessfully for a handkerchief. Jeff took out his own, clean and unused, and passed it to her. She took it without speaking, blowing her nose, sobbing some more, then blowing it again.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’ She turned, looking at him with red and swollen eyes. ‘I don’t normally burst into tears in front of someone I don’t know.’

  ‘This is pretty exceptional.’

  ‘More than you know. That’s the first time I’ve cried since it happened.’

  ‘Has it helped? Do you feel a bit better?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She blew her nose again. ‘But perhaps I will.’

  ‘I hope so. Look, I’m staying at La Maison Blanche, but I don’t want to intrude …’

  ‘You’re not,’ she said and she meant it. It was like a breath of fresh air to talk to someone who had known Nicky well, yet was not family, who cared, but not with the same overwhelming emotional involvement, and his vitality seemed to compensate a little for the terrible emptiness that Nicky’s passing had left inside her.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Unless you really want to. At least, not yet.’

  Miraculously he seemed to comprehend her need.

  ‘I’m not in any hurry,’ he said.

  He told her that he came from Yorkshire and like Nicky he had been wounded in the last ditch fighting before the fall of France. Since the war he had done all kinds of jobs because he seemed unable to settle to anything and now he was in London, servicing office machinery.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll stick it,’ he said. ‘I’m an open-air man really but I still have problems with my back and at least it’s a living. What about you? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m still at school but I shall be leaving soon and I hope to go to college and train to be a teacher.’

  ‘Clever, eh?’

  She flushed. ‘ No, not really. But I like children and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.’

  ‘I wish I was clever. I was never much good at school. Always in trouble.’

  She smiled. Being clever is really not so very important, she wanted to say, but she was afraid it might sound patronising. And then the conversation was back, inevitably, to Nicky.

  ‘I wish I’d come to see him when Sophia wrote to me,’ Jeff said. ‘I feel dreadful about it but I was so tied up with my own problems. Maybe if I’d come to see him, I could have helped. After all, I’ve been there. I’d have understood. I’ll never forgive myself for not making the effort.’

  ‘It’s no use thinking like that,’ Catherine said forgetting that she had hated him a moment ago for the self-same reason. ‘I’ve been blaming myself too, terribly, for something I said. But I expect the ones who are left behind always feel like that when someone dies. That if you’d done or said something different then perhaps they would still be alive. I doubt if it’s true. No person is to blame.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘I’m sure I am, though I didn’t realise it until just now. And I’ve been so angry. Angry with myself for what I said, angry with Paul and Viv, angry with God for letting it happen, even angry with Nicky.’

  ‘And now you’re not angry any more.’

  ‘Not at the moment. At the moment I feel kind of released. Maybe I’ll be angry again tomorrow.’

  ‘At the funeral.’

  She nodded. ‘Jeff – thanks for being here. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ He looked awkward suddenly. ‘I didn’t do anything. Look, Catherine, if you come over to England to teacher training college, you will look me up, won’t you? I’d
like to see you again, only …’

  He broke off. She knew exactly what he meant. They could be friends, very good friends, but this was not the time nor the place to pursue it.

  ‘I’d like that, Jeff,’ she said. ‘And thanks again.’

  He smiled briefly, nodded, and left her there. Catherine cried a little more but now the tears were softer and healing. Then she went home.

  Viv did not know whether or not she should go to the funeral. She wanted to go and yet she didn’t want to. She was afraid of seeing the rest of Nicky’s family, afraid of what people would say and, most of all, afraid of her own emotions.

  In the end she decided she tould not stay away but neither could she go with Paul.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked curtly when she told him this, because suddenly he felt secondary to Nicky again, and was ashamed of it. ‘Why shouldn’t you come with …’ he broke off. He had been going to say ‘with me’. Instead he substituted ‘the family’.

  ‘I don’t think they would want me.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘It’s not rubbish. They’ve never liked me. Now they will hate me.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true. I don’t hate you.’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘That’s different, isn’t it? No, I can’t come with the family mourners, Paul. I don’t have the right. And the last thing I want is to cause an atmosphere and make it all worse than it is already bound to be.’

  ‘If you feel like that I don’t suppose there is much I can do about it.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Paul experienced stirrings of the old familiar panic.

  ‘If you are going to marry me sometime or other the family is going to have to get used to seeing us together.’

  ‘Perhaps but this is not the time.’

  ‘You are still going to marry me, I presume?’

  He had first asked her two weeks ago, just before he had written to Nicky. The letter had been by way of breaking the news gradually. He had asked her and she had said yes, seemed actually to want to marry him, but now this had happened and she was behaving oddly again so that all his old doubts were resurfacing – had she only accepted because he was the best prospect she had? She didn’t appear to be very happy in the theatre – she had been ‘resting’, waiting, without much enthusiasm, for the pantomime season – and it certainly was not keeping her in the manner to which she was accustomed. Her father, though he was apparently picking himself up from his crashing fall on the stock market, was not able to support her and on a limited income Viv the extravagant, who had never had to give a second thought to budgeting or economising, was a hopeless manager. Paul did not like to think about it but it was after he had told her of the planned expansion of the family business that she had begun to sit up and take him seriously. Though he hardly liked to admit it even to himself he had held off mentioning marriage until after he had told her of the plans he had made for his own future – when he left the RAF he would go back to Jersey and involve himself in the chain of luxury hotels that Bernard planned.

  ‘I think old Bernard might have something there,’ he had said to Viv. ‘Holidaymakers are going to begin flocking to Jersey now that transport is so much cheaper and easier and we might as well think big and make the most of it.’

  ‘What would you do?’ Viv had asked.

  ‘Help run the show, of course. I own a quarter share of everything there is, remember, and at the moment Nicky and Bernard are running everything between them. I’m not sure how able Nicky is these days and Bernard doesn’t have the know how to aim the hotels at the really top class bracket. I mean, look where he was brought up, for God’s sake. I’m amazed he even knows which knife and fork to use. But if I went in with them I could organise the best of everything.’ He had given her a sly glance. ‘ With your help, of course.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘There’s nothing you don’t know about socialising and society, Viv. You’d be an asset in every way.’

  ‘Are you offering me a job?’

  ‘I suppose I am. Unless of course …’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless you would consider marrying me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, I would consider marrying you.’

  ‘Good lord!’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight years old, Paul, and I doubt I’ll get a better offer now. I like the idea of overseeing interior decor for a chain of hotels, if that’s the job you’re offering me, and besides … I quite fancy you. There’s only one thing bothering me – will I still fancy you when you are in civvy street or is it the uniform that sets me all a-tingle?’

  He had laughed, not quite sure how much of what she said she meant and how much was a joke, but too delighted by her acceptance to worry over much. It was only later that he had begun to wonder. He didn’t know what to make of Viv, he’d never known, that was part of her attraction. The only damn thing he was certain of was that he loved her so much it hurt. He wanted to show her off to the world as his but he had the awful sick feeling in his stomach that she never would be as completely his as she had been Nicky’s.

  And in any case what good had it done Nicky in the end? When the chips had been down, when Nicky had ceased to be her golden hero, she had left him. Viv had no time for tarnished dreams. When the time came she would treat him just as ruthlessly.

  The knowledge sickened him but it made no difference. She was an obsession with him; somehow he had to prove to himself that she would stay with him where she had not stayed with Nicky. And he had to begin proving it now. By having her by his side at Nicky’s funeral. Only she wouldn’t play ball.

  The night before Nicky’s funeral Paul went out drinking. He had discovered during the war that temporary oblivion came out of a bottle, that it was possible to relax stressed nerves and forget the loss of a friend and fear for one’s own future when enough alcohol was running in one’s bloodstream, and that night he set out to put the solution to the test on his peacetime problems. Not only did he drink, he also played a few hands of poker and pontoon with some old friends. Paul started off with just a few pounds and won handsomely. And he found that what problems the whisky bottle could not obliterate, the exhilaration of winning a card game did.

  It was the first time in his life that he had taken such measures to ease his nagging feeling of insecurity. It certainly was not to be the last.

  Chapter twenty-six

  Jersey, 1991

  Juliet had been awake a good deal of the night. She was too hyped up to sleep, she supposed, her body roused, her senses swimming, confused and yearning, her conscience nagging her that she had betrayed – still was betraying – Sean. Then, as the responses Dan had awakened in her began to cool down, all the other events of the evening were waiting in the wings to pop into her mind like jumping beans and with them the unstoppable questions.

  Viv’s reaction to the mention of Louis’s name was one of the unforgettable moments, Juliet thought – drunk as Viv had been there had been no mistaking the shocking strength of feeling that lay behind her outburst. She had hated Louis – still hated him almost twenty years after his death – with a passion that verged on obsession. Might Viv have had something to do with Louis’s death? Paul had owed Louis a great deal of money, might possibly have been ruined if he had had to settle his debts, and Louis’s death had saved him from that. Was one of them capable of killing him? Juliet shuddered. At least her grandmother had claimed the shooting was an accident. If Paul or Viv had been responsible it would have been cold-blooded murder.

  But then there had been others who had hated him – this Raife Pearson, with whom he had quarrelled on the night he died, for one. Dan had said it was impossible for Raife to have killed Louis and Juliet herself had pooh-poohed the idea that he might have hired someone else to do the job for him. It sounded so ridiculously far-fetched. But if it were true, what a wonderful
relief it would be! And the coincidence was enormous, a quarrel on the very night he died. If only I could find a link! Juliet thought. If only, after all this time, I could clear not only my grandmother’s name, but that of the whole family.

  Towards dawn she dozed, dreaming muddled but strangely vivid dreams, and when she woke full sunlight was streaming into her room. The clock beside her bed said almost nine o’clock; worried, Juliet leaped out of bed and dressed – she’d shower later.

  Deborah was the only one in the breakfast room – David had already left for the office and Sophia, as usual, was having a light breakfast on a tray in her room. As Juliet came in she looked up from the morning papers, smiling, and Juliet thought again what a beautiful woman she was. With no make-up to distract and with her hair pulled back in a loose bunch and tied with a chiffon scarf, the perfect bone structure of her face was more evident than ever and beneath her silk wrap the lines of her body were revealed as equally perfect.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘ Sit down and have some coffee.’

  ‘Oh yes please! I only just woke up and I do feel pretty grim!’

  ‘You were late home last night,’ Deborah said, pouring the coffee and passing it to Juliet. ‘Did you have a good time with Paul and Viv?’

  ‘Lovely.’ Juliet put a little milk into her coffee and hoped Deborah and Paul would not compare notes about what time she had left. Viv, she thought, had probably been too sozzled to know what time it had been. ‘They’re fun, aren’t they?’ she added.

  ‘Mm. Well, Paul is. I’m not so sure I’d call Viv fun actually, although I understand she was quite a girl in her day.’

  ‘She’s quite a girl now! It’s hard to believe she is as old as Grandma.’

  ‘Older, I think. But of course in spite of all that has happened to her, Sophia is ageless.’

  ‘You are very fond of Grandma, aren’t you?’ Juliet said, buttering a piece of toast.

  ‘I adore her,’ Deborah said simply. ‘If there was one person in the whole world I wish I could be like it would be Sophia.’