‘Same for us although it’s a few years more. It’s a life sentence when you think about it.’
‘A happy one, I hope?’ she said, looking at him and seeing a sudden wariness cross his face. ‘You two seem very content together.’
‘Do we? It’s not been as smooth as you might think. Losing Lucy was a big thing, you know, and there was a time shortly afterwards when we talked about separating.’
‘Did you?’ She was genuinely astonished.
‘It was the grief. It started to annoy me that she couldn’t get to grips with it. She was in tears for weeks, no let up at all and it was getting to be impossible. I tried to be patient but I couldn’t get through to her and it was a very difficult time. To me she was being selfish thinking only of herself and not me. She never asked once how I was coping with it. She just left me to get on with it. It didn’t seem to occur to her that I was almost out of my mind with grief.’
‘You’ve dealt with it in different ways,’ she told him. ‘When something as terrible as that happens you are on your own. You can help each other through it but I’ve seen a lot of relationships disintegrate after a trauma so you’ve done well to hold it together.’
‘Thanks.’ To her surprise he reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I can talk to you, Eleanor, and that’s a surprise because when I first met you I thought, this woman is going to be such hard work.’
‘Did you really?’ She felt the pressure of his hand, astonished that he had done this, and surely he held it a fraction longer than he ought, holding her gaze at that so that she felt quite hot and bothered as she caught sight of Henry heading back.
Alan had his back to him but there must have been something in her look that made him swiftly let go of her hand – although not before Henry had seen it.
She lay awake for what seemed hours that night thinking about it and the guilty look on Alan’s face as Henry took a seat beside them.
You only looked guilty if you had something to hide.
Chapter Ten
PAULA CARRIED A small photograph of Lucy around with her, tucked into a pocket in her purse. Every time she opened the purse, it was a comfort to know that Lucy was there. Alan did not know about it so far as she knew, because he was not in the habit of going into her purse.
Of course she did not need a photograph because Lucy’s face was deposited in her memory in a safe-box that she could open any time she wanted. More often than not, though, she thought of her daughter at a particular age, round about five years old when she had started school, her early promise of being a bright little girl fully realized.
There was a five-year gap between her children. It had not been their intention to have a gap as large as that but it was the way it happened and it worked well because when Matthew started school, she did not miss him as much as she might have as there was baby Lucy to care for. Lucy was premature but a good weight at just under six pounds and, from the beginning with her tiny hands and feet, she was destined to be just like Paula, challenged in height terms, with the same light-coloured hair which hairdressers always kindly described as fine when they clearly meant thin.
Lucy was the much-beloved baby girl but they tried not to spoil her and Matthew was the big brother who adored her. There were spats of course as they grew older and she made fun of his girlfriends, embarrassing him and laughing about it, but it was all good-natured stuff. But when he went off to university, it was Lucy who probably missed him the most. She was thirteen at the time, still a lot smaller than all her schoolfriends but a popular, bright girl as, a little later than most of them, she started the process of maturing into a young woman.
‘It’s not the same,’ she grumbled to her mother, ‘with no Matty around.’
She was the only person who called him that. She would have gone far, would have followed her brother to university if she had anything to do with it. Alan, deprived of that opportunity, also had been dead keen on his children doing that. Nobody was more delighted than Alan when Matthew got his place because it was something he had been denied and to get such a fantastic offer as a place at Oxford had meant Alan had gone round for weeks bragging about it.
And so had she. They told his granddad the news but there was never a proper acknowledgement from him, not even a congratulations card, which would not have hurt him.
Paula, try as she would, had never got on with Thomas Walker.
‘So you are the girlfriend?’ he said when Alan first introduced her to him. ‘There’s not much of you, is there?’
She could tell from his expression that he did not think much of her and that, coupled with the anxiety of the occasion, made her more tongue-tied than usual although Alan had immediately taken hold of her hand and given it an encouraging squeeze. Alan’s mother, frail even then, had welcomed her cautiously, but deliberately or not there had never been the opportunity to chat woman to woman as it were, so whatever her inner thoughts might be were never revealed.
It was his father’s wish that Alan went into the family business, which was concerned with building and supplying specialized equipment to the maritime industry. It was a medium-sized business, moderately successful and the plan was that eventually Alan would take it over. But that was not to Alan’s taste and the engineering industry was not something that fuelled his interest.
Alan’s father was a bully, his mother a cowed little woman who did as she was told, and with the financial rug well and truly pulled from under his feet and no other means of supporting himself other than landing himself in enormous debt, Alan made the difficult decision not to accept the place he was offered. It was not Oxford but a good red-brick university and the course in European history promised to be fascinating.
‘What the hell use is history?’ his father had said, laughing at him. ‘It’s what’s happening now that matters, not what people got up to God knows how many years ago. Anyway, I’ve not worked my socks off to get this business up and running to have my only son turn his nose up at it. You need to get a grip on reality, son. We can’t all be astronauts.’
It was all very well being stubborn and Paula understood because Thomas Walker, Alan’s dad, was an awkward individual who obviously had been as lukewarm about her as she was about him. Sometimes she wished Alan had swallowed his stupid pride and gone into the business, because from all accounts it was booming, his dad still nominally at the helm although there was a manager now who ran things. Thomas was known locally within the business community, admired for his tenacity, if not entirely liked, brusque and offensive to the ladies as he often was – it was something of a miracle that he had not been done for sexual harassment – and he had a finger in several business pies these days, still working a bit even in his late seventies. They heard on the grapevine that he had diversified and moved into property-developing a decade ago, and now owned a few houses which he let out to students. It was no secret and somehow or other Thomas made sure that they were drip-fed the information with I-told-you-so high on his agenda.
With his long-suffering mother long gone, Thomas was Alan’s only living relative, but even though the old man only lived over in Torquay, they rarely visited or spoke. Thomas’s annoyance at his son’s refusal to go into the business had festered and simmered and eventually reached boiling point, culminating in a huge row shortly after she and Alan got married. His ‘You can do a lot better than her’ had infuriated Alan. Paula, hating family rifts, had tried to smooth things over and for a while there had been an uneasy truce when the children were small and they had paid Granddad occasional visits. He paid them scant attention and her efforts were doomed to fail and the visits became less frequent and eventually, with no effort coming from him, they petered out. It was the last straw when there was no acknowledgement from Thomas when Lucy died or when Matthew married.
She could just about turn a blind eye to his grandfather not coming to his grandson’s wedding but not coming to Lucy’s funeral was non-negotiable and she would never forgive him that.
She would shed no tears when Thomas Walker popped off.
Alone in the hotel room, lying on the bed propped up by a mountain of pillows, Paula was feeling a little better as her headache eased. She simply could not have faced the palaver of dinner this evening with Eleanor still insisting on speaking Italian, which made for an uneasy situation with their waiter, who would have much preferred to conduct the conversation in his charmingly accented English.
There had been no communication from Matthew or Nicola, but since she and Alan had requested a news blackout then she could not blame them for the silence.
All in all, the holiday was going well. She had caught something of Eleanor’s enthusiasm for Italy and its people and the boat trips across and up the lake were introducing them to the many different little resorts dotted round the lake. There was not a lot of contact with the other people in the tour group but that was because the four of them were so obviously a little unit, and because Eleanor was a bit off-putting nobody had dared butt in. Amongst the group, though, Eleanor was definitely the one who stood out with her easy elegance and Paula had not failed to notice the looks other women cast her, reading their minds and knowing they were asking themselves how the hell she did it and, more to the point, what she had spent in order to achieve it.
So long as she pretty much agreed with Eleanor, it was all right. After all, the woman could not help it if she happened to be tall and slim with lustrous hair, something Paula yearned to have. Alan loved her as she was, and it was silly to be dissatisfied with yourself when there were others far worse off than you, but it was doubly annoying when you tried your very best to look your best and didn’t always manage it and yet somebody like Eleanor always got it right. She was the sort who would look enchanting wearing a paper bag.
She had not yet got round to telling Alan that she had been offered a promotion at work to shop manager. It had been on the cards in the card shop for some time, because she was by far the longest-serving member of the team and knew the ins and outs of the job, despairing sometimes of the way the junior staff treated customers and not afraid of speaking out when that happened.
The promotion would mean a pay rise, which would be welcome, but it also involved more responsibility and that was why she was hesitating about accepting it. She knew both Alan and Matthew would tell her to go for it but she had seen what additional responsibility and the related stress did to people and that was why she was considering it carefully before she accepted. She was not the ambitious sort, more than content to just do the job as well as she could, and she knew that with the promotion would come meetings with the other managers in the group and the constant worry that her shop was underperforming and slipping in the company sales charts.
Although she was flattered to have been asked, she was not going to do it. In fact, she wouldn’t even mention it to Alan, for what was the point? What he didn’t know he couldn’t worry about. Yes, the extra money would be nice but it wasn’t worth making herself ill.
Getting off the bed, she padded barefoot across to the window. There was nobody in the pool and the blue water shimmered and glinted, moving restlessly as the sun lowered in the sky. There were streaks of pink there, so yet another fine day was promised for tomorrow.
She wondered what was happening back home and hoped Alice had not lost the key and was remembering to move the post from behind the door. Alice was scatty and forgetful and for a moment, she wondered if she should give her a quick call to remind her.
Forget it.
She pushed the anxious thought from her mind.
She was hungry now, but she could not turn up for dinner late so she would have to stay hungry. Alan had offered to stay with her, forego his dinner but she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Don’t let her get to you,’ she had said, meaning Eleanor. ‘Whatever she says, it’s just water off a duck’s back.’
‘Don’t worry. I can handle her,’ he told her with a smile. ‘She’s a softie underneath.’
Now, why did she find that remark so disturbing?
Back home, Alice next door picked up the mail from Paula’s mat and took the letters through to the table in the kitchen. There were a few circulars, some junk mail but amongst them a serious-looking letter in a stiff white envelope, which she placed to one side with the other proper letters so that Paula would not throw them out by mistake.
She was not being nosey, not really, but she did notice that this newest letter was from a solicitor because the address was on the back.
She hoped it was not bad news.
Chapter Eleven
MATTHEW NORMALLY ATE lunch at his desk, a quick sandwich and a coffee from the machine in the corridor if he was lucky, but that day he had decided for some reason – call it fate if you will – to take an hour off as he had an appointment over in the South Hams area later in the afternoon; a potentially exciting commission from a client with big ideas and the money to make it work. It was just the sort of thing Matthew liked to get his teeth into. He liked to give the clients as much time as they needed, so he would not be clock-watching and would probably end up being late home and he had warned Nicola of that. It was her day to cook, but she was not the least interested in cooking so he was not building up his hopes too much and he suspected that an M&S ready meal would be awaiting him. He did not mind too much because he had not married his delectable wife for her cooking skills, rather because she was so delectable.
The honeymoon was over, very much so, but he had never expected marriage to be a bed of roses and he knew that they were well-matched. His beautiful wife was fiery and quick-tempered and he was just the opposite – freezer chilled – so there would never be a big explosion between them. He knew from the start that he would forever be the calming influence in their relationship. He had sussed out her faults from the beginning as she had probably done with him. He had known from the outset that she was a bit of a snob and spoilt, but she couldn’t help that, being the only child of parents with money, and of course they wanted the best for her and they had given her the best. She probably realized too that he was defensive about his own background, feeling sometimes that he had to make excuses for it, which was unforgivable.
However, reining Nicola in was proving hard work and now that the cottage had lost its charm for her, it was an uphill struggle trying to convince her that they could not yet afford the house she craved. It was beyond them in financial terms and even though they were saving something each month, he reckoned they needed to stay at the cottage for at least five years before they could consider moving onwards and upwards.
It was a cool day, but as he strolled down to the Hoe away from the bustle of the shopping streets, the light sea breeze made it seem even cooler and he was glad of his jacket. The seagulls swooped and screamed and the sea was choppy and unappealing, faintly green but mainly grey. Amongst the ships in the distance, a large navy ship was ploughing through the waves and he felt that pride in his home city – the ocean city – that he knew and loved. Perversely, because at eighteen he couldn’t wait to get away to Oxford, he had missed the place when he was away, missed the smell of the ocean, the screech of the gulls, so maybe if you were born close to the sea, it did seep somehow into your blood. He knew he had once warned his mother that he wouldn’t be around here forever, but now that he was married and Nicola had her job at the hotel, he doubted he would be tempted to move. Perhaps you needed to leave a place before you really appreciated it for what it was worth.
He was not greatly interested in history as his father was, but as he finally reached the Hoe he paused before the bronze statue of Sir Francis Drake standing there proudly on his plinth looking out to sea. The sea never changed. It would have been every bit as choppy in those distant days as it was now and he was reminded of just what an achievement that had been, that circumnavigation of the globe, something not easily undertaken now, let alone then, and there was always the story of the bowling match of course, which probably never happened but made for a good story an
yway. Call the man what you want, a pirate maybe, but if he had lived today he would still have been a man to be reckoned with, a man with a good head on his shoulders who managed to keep it there by staying on the right side of his Queen through such turbulent times. Apparently the first thing he asked when he returned home after his voyage was ‘Does the Queen still live?’ It was odd to think just how inaccessible people were in those days, away for months without any means of communication when nowadays you felt vulnerable if you left your mobile at home.
Sinking into a contemplative mood, Matthew stood there a while, his eyes scanning the murky grey horizon. He should come and stand here more often, but when you lived so close to a place you never got round to it. You couldn’t get away with living in Plymouth without knowing all there was to know about Francis Drake, although the man himself had spent a good deal of his childhood over in Kent. He remembered being taken on a school trip to the nearby Buckland Abbey where as a grown man Drake lived for a while, and standing there with his mates in the Great Hall on the very same floor that Drake stood on. There were monks buried beneath that floor as well, which had sent a shiver through the girls in his class, but aged ten he was more concerned with having a day off from school and messing about than listening and regrettably it had all gone in one ear and out the other.
His grandfather’s business was in marine engineering but like his father he had no particular interest in that either. That didn’t stop a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t seen the old man in years and that his granddad had never met Nicola. They had sent a wedding invitation but it was never answered.
It only took one person to hold out a hand for the other to grasp.
Perhaps it was up to him to do something. Maybe he should make an effort to build some bridges, for old Thomas Walker was not getting any younger but just now he had other things on his mind and the effort seemed too much. Family rifts were a pain and he couldn’t help thinking that if Lucy was around she wouldn’t have stood for it. He was surprised too that his mother seemed to have given up so easily, although he knew that she had half-expected the old man to turn up at Lucy’s funeral and at his wedding.
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