Rowan sighed again, and laced her fingers through Ed’s. “I’m not sure I’ve thought this through properly or not . . . but I’m . . . uneasy . . . about all of this. Aren’t you? Am I imagining things?”
Ed responded by continuing to look her directly in the eye. He might be slightly tiddly, but he’d learned over the years that two could play at Rowan’s silent-treatment game. Eventually the other person always cracked.
“I don’t know,” she continued, thinking aloud. “When she told me about Adam first . . . I mean, alarm bells went off straight away. About that course first of all – there’s something about it that isn’t right, isn’t there?”
Ed released his hand and pulled himself back across the table for another swig of coffee. “It’s all legit,” he shrugged. “I looked into it all myself – I’m not so stupid that I’d go and pay for a course that doesn’t exist – and it’s Darvill’s – what a coincidence!”
Rowan smiled. “No. You’re not stupid, love,” she said softly. “But you are indulgent. Always have been when it comes to Bee.” He made to protest but Rowan raised a hand to silence him, all the while smiling indulgently herself. “And I know that there’s a reason for that too. But we’ve also always known that sometimes indulging Bee hasn’t worked out for the best, now has it?”
It was Ed’s turn to smile. “Hey, we wouldn’t have moved down here if it wasn’t for that, now would we? Every cloud and all that!”
“And I love that we moved here, Ed. You know that.”
“And so do I,” he said. “I’ve never been happier. It changed my life so much for the better.”
Rowan smiled back. It was true that Ed had become a different man in the countryside. She had been afraid that he would wilt and wither once away from his home and his foundations, but instead he had flourished.
“I just think that maybe Bee is rushing into something and I’m concerned,” she said. “It’s only been a couple of months since she met Adam, but she’s already talking about him moving into Pilton Gardens once Sasha moves out.”
Ed frowned.
“I didn’t say that to you because I thought you’d get mad, but it’s true. She told me that the weekend after she met him.” Rowan paused for the message to sink in. “That’s how fast this is moving, Ed. And I’m worried that something will go horribly wrong. You know that Bee’s like a freight train once she sets her mind to something and in the past we’ve always been able to avert disaster at the last minute but, this time, I don’t know why, but I just feel like the crash is inevitable. And I’m worried for her. I know that we haven’t always seen eye to eye – I mean, to this day I have no idea what Bee truly thinks of me deep inside. But she’s my family, and I know that she’s your world. I just don’t want her getting hurt, that’s all.”
Ed took a deep draught from the cup of coffee, his own brow furrowed at the thoughts that suddenly sprang to his mind. “What should we do?” he asked. “Should we stop her? Forbid her from doing the course? Withdraw funding? What do you think?”
Rowan shook her head. “No, no. None of the above, Ed,” she said impatiently. “I just think that maybe you should have a talk with her – on her own. Maybe I’ll take Adam into the village or something in the morning – to the market – and you and she can go for a walk – show her the plans for the self-catering apartments or something. But maybe just try and get something out of her that doesn’t solely revolve around the fact that Adam lives and breathes, and how wonderful he is and how his students think he’s amazing and how Darvill’s college is the best thing since sliced bread . . . Maybe just . . . I don’t know . . . introduce a note of caution perhaps? Pull her back to the kerb a little bit? She’ll take it from you – she’d just think I was interfering, but you’re her dad. And you’re paying for it after all . . .” Rowan’s voice trailed off as she saw Ed’s worried face. “Look, don’t panic. I’m sorry – I’m scaremongering, aren’t I? I don’t mean to. I mean, she might not even get on this course if it’s as tough as she makes out, and that will mean that problem might be solved. I don’t want to belittle her talent but it’s not like she has the slightest experience in fashion design, has she? And if she doesn’t get on the course, then it might sort everything out. I don’t think Adam will seem so glossy when she has to get a job and with him out of the way then she might, I dunno, go travelling maybe? See a bit of the world? Make some new friends, meet some new boys – have some adventures. Maybe she’ll grow up a little bit. She’s only twenty-five, after all. She has her whole life ahead of her.”
Ed was silent, but he nodded in agreement across the table. “Twenty-five,” he said after a moment, sighing heavily. “Where did the time go?”
Rowan laughed lightly. “Hark at you! You’ve gone all maudlin now. I should have left you drinking the wine until you nodded off, like you normally do!”
Ed smiled sheepishly in response and reached out to take her hand again. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” he said. “As always, my love, you have it figured out, don’t you? Making sense of my life for me yet again.” He raised Rowan’s hand to his lips and kissed it tenderly. “What would I have done without you?” he said, quietly, and she squeezed his fingers. They sat like that, in silence, in the growing darkness, as the valley lit itself below, the lights of occasional farmhouses coming on, one by one.
While from just inside the darkness of the kitchen door, the chill of the evening creeping in around her bare feet, Bee burned with rage at everything that she had just heard her stepmother say. That bloody woman, she fumed as she grabbed the handbag she had come back downstairs to retrieve, stopping for a moment to eavesdrop as she heard her name mentioned through the still of the evening. I was right all along. How dare she!
Bee stomped back up the stairs, not caring if her footsteps were heard from outside yet hoping that Adam wouldn’t appear at the door of his room. It wasn’t that she didn’t long to see him, to collapse into the arms of the only person that she felt truly loved her. But she felt too distraught to talk to him now. She needed to calm herself, to be alone. To be rational and calm before she spoke to him. Because if she spoke to him now – if she saw his perfect face filled with concern, and blurted everything out to him – then she felt sure that there was a chance she would leave that house right there and then and never return. A real chance that she would say something to her father that she would always regret.
No. She would leave all right. And never darken the door of Judith’s Acre for the rest of her and Adam’s life. But she would do so with her head held high, with her father’s love for her intact, and with her stepmother’s regret at meddling in her life assured forever.
Chapter 48
September 2020
Jenny
I do not like thee, Adam Wilson.
No. Absolutely. Not a jot. Not one little bit.
I want you to leave. Leave us alone, me and the girls. I’ve got quite used to it just being the four of us actually. Me, Bee, ‘Poor Matilda’ as they all call her and Sasha, always The Bride. I’ve got to know them all quite well, actually. Through watching, always watching.
I know that Poor Matilda is far from poor. That she’s been squirrelling money away in secret for most of her life, ever since her first summer job as a kid in fact. Because she wants to go travelling. Not just travelling – she wants to go far, far away. Hence the degree in Chinese.
She wants to get as far as she possibly can. As far as she can get from her vile mother. She hasn’t saved enough just yet, but she’s working away every hour that she can in that awful greasy spoon that she hates so. Coming home, stinking of dirty chip fat and onion rings and lord knows what else – all the time working. And when she’s not, she’s studying her absolute hardest at her degree. She’s actually clever, you see, despite what we all used to think. All those years being the victim of her mother’s vileness have taught her to keep quiet and keep watch. And she has learned well from this. Matilda might still have that unfortunate colouring that
she’s always had, along with those scars from her childhood eczema, she might act like she’s a simpleton but she is far, far from it. She is wise, she is shrewd, she is quiet. She verges on sneaky, but that I can forgive seeing as how she has spent her whole life hiding firstly her most treasured possessions from that grabbing mother of hers and subsequently her own hard-earned cash. Her escape fund. And she has succeeded.
Matilda has brains. Brains to burn. She is astute and resourceful. And all of this wrapped up in the most physically forgettable, verging on unpleasant package that you’ll ever find, with her terrible, cheap clothes, her allergies, her limp hair, her vast hips.
She’ll do very, very well for herself, that child.
Add experience to what she has already and she will be unbeatable. She will have the art of surprise at her fingertips; she will attack quickly and coldly, when her enemies least expect it.
I suspect that she will one day be CEO of a very large company or hold high political office.
And that will show her mother, won’t it?
I know that Sasha exists solely as an extension of that awful lorry-driver boy, that her only aim in life, her only goal, the only horizon that she can see is her wedding day to him. And she will make a very good wife for him, I’m sure. Just like her own mother, Ed’s sister Betty, with her ruthless efficiency, her single-minded ambition. So long as that ambition relates solely to her personal wants. And Sasha wants. Good God, does she Want, with a capital ‘W’!
She wants the perfect dress, the nipped-in waist, an up-do that will refuse to budge all day long. She wants her favourite pop songs in church – she wants the biggest church she can find, in fact, and no one will stop her having it. She wants the most tender beef and salmon on the menu, the immaculately choreographed first dance. She wants the bridesmaids to be that little bit less perfect than herself – that’s why she’s putting Bee in crimson and Matilda in something sleeveless, poor thing – so that they don’t show her up. She wants the perfect honeymoon, the perfect house, perfect teeth, perfect skin – the perfect man. Well, we all can’t have everything, can we?
Yet with the same dogged determination to have everything her own way for her wedding, she will apply herself on return from that perfect honeymoon to making sure that Aaron does exactly as she wants. And then she will make sure that the babies begin arriving in perfect order – she’ll give up work, devote herself solely to the home.
And for what? I thought that would work too but I got pretty bored pretty fast, didn’t I?
In an odd way, I admire them both – Matilda and Sasha. They are both determined young women who will, I think, go far for themselves, who know exactly what it is they want and are working hard toward achieving it.
Which is exactly what I didn’t do when I was alive.
And exactly what my daughter seems unable to do now.
She thinks that she wants this course at Darvill’s – how I thrilled and chilled when I heard the name of that place! – the source of my greatest happiness it was, although I didn’t realise it then.
But I don’t think she does want it.
And more worryingly, she thinks she wants this Adam Wilson character.
But I’ve been watching him as closely as I’ve been watching the rest.
And I do not like him, not one little bit.
I see how he checks out his own reflection every time he passes something that will show it to him. I see him preening and primping in front of the mirror, using the palm of his hand to tease back his hair into that odd flick he’s so fond of.
I see him smoothing down his stomach and sucking in his gut when he thinks no one is looking. I see him checking his fingernails – his manicured fingernails – when he’s alone.
I see the way he rolls up his nose at our house – it’s a proper house-share house now, instead of the family showhouse that I worked so hard to make it. Everything is mismatched, three disparate tastes all thrown in together, washing draped over radiators, bridal magazines, textbooks, dirty coffee cups.
And Adam doesn’t like it that way, making those faces of disgust when Bee has left the room and then melting into that fake smile of his when he sees her again.
I hate it when he does that. The face he makes is bad enough but what I hate the most is the face that she makes in return. It makes me look away to see it – the expression of sheer trust and devotion, the glow of happiness and expectation, the want and the desire to be with no one else.
I hate it because in it, in that beautiful woman’s face that she now has, I can see as clear as day her baby face. And because I know what she was like then, I know that it is the very same expression with which she used to look at me.
And I cannot bear for anyone else to have that gift bestowed upon them. Particularly when they don’t deserve it.
I don’t know what Adam Wilson’s game is, what exactly he wants from my daughter. I do know that he is always here. That he looks through all her little sketches and drawings – that he has even seen mine in that sketchbook Bee found in the attic – those stupid things I used to pretend to design for Princess Diana all those years ago.
I know that she tells him her thoughts and her dreams, her private desires, her hopes, her regrets, her loves, her hates – she gives herself entirely to him, and he takes, takes and takes some more. And what worries me is where he is keeping what he takes, and what he plans to do with it.
Because he doesn’t reciprocate – not really. Bee thinks that they are equal partners, but only because she wants that so desperately. Yet what she really needs is to be cared for, to be looked after.
And that’s what I want for her too and if I cannot be the person to do it, then please don’t let her fall for him because he’s not capable.
He just wants to see himself reflected in her worship; he wants some silly, vulnerable girl to adore him and make him feel good about himself. He just wants the total adoration that he receives in return for the few crumbs that he throws for my wonderful, foolish girl to peck at.
And I know this because I did the same. And I paid a heavy, heavy price for it.
If there is a God – which I seriously doubt, as I am still here in this limbo – then please let Him or Her not allow Bee to make the same mistake as I did: to fall for a narcissist and have it ruin her entire life, to fill her with so much regret that she will never be able to move on from it.
No. I do not like thee, Adam Wilson, and whatever your game is.
And it seems that my daughter’s stepmother doesn’t either, if Bee’s vociferous complaints and rages following her last visit to that place that they moved away to are anything to go by.
Which is odd. As I always saw her as an arty type too, just like Wilson.
And interesting, because I thought that she didn’t care for my child – that she stole Bee from me only as part of the package that ensured her Ed.
But if she hasn’t welcomed Wilson into her home, if she disapproves, as it seems she does, then something has happened that I never thought possible. That there is now something else, apart from my husband, that we have in common. That if there is trouble ahead – as I fear there may be – I may have an unlikely ally.
Chapter 49
September 2020
Rowan
When she thought about it afterwards, Rowan could have sworn that someone – it was a woman’s voice – shouted at her to “Wake up!” She had thought it must be one of the children at first, Clemency perhaps – the voice was of someone a little older than the others. She then reasoned that it must be Claudia herself. It had to be someone, urging her to rise out of her slumber.
But no. The dawn breaking silently through the gap in the curtains of the house in Cambridge illuminated the room sufficiently for Rowan to see that she was completely alone. For an instant, she was sure that she heard breathing, but soon realised it was her own. Her heart pounded.
For as soon as she woke, she was instantly filled with a sensation of dread. Somethin
g, somewhere, was terribly wrong. She was sure of it.
When Claudia rose at six, she found Rowan in the kitchen, her gaze directed over the pocket-handkerchief-sized garden of the house – all that remained from the once long and lovingly planted oasis which every year was claimed, piece by piece, by the river.
Claudia coughed as she entered the room and Rowan, holding a cup of tea which sent wisps of steam up into the air, turned to look over her shoulder, forcing a weak smile. In the harsh sunlight of the morning which streamed into the kitchen, Rowan was struck suddenly by how old she looked without a comb run through hair, or a face washed, never mind the absence of her armour: her make-up which she applied carefully several times a day with little deviation from the dramatic 1950s’ style that she had always worn. Rowan knew she herself must look just as worn but she was still taken aback for a moment at the sight of the crow’s feet around Claudia’s penetrating green eyes, at the paleness of her skin.
There was a silence between the women while Claudia switched on the kettle, yawned and stretched and then reached into a cupboard for an old-fashioned tin. “More tea?” she asked Rowan casually.
Rowan shook her head.
“What has you up so early anyway?” Claudia finally enquired. “You were exhausted last night when you got here – I thought you’d have a lie-in this morning?”
Rowan turned from the window and slid onto a chair at the dining table behind her. “Oh, I think it was around five when I woke,” she said dismissively.
Claudia’s eyes widened. “Five!” she exclaimed. “Hell’s Bells – that’s the middle of the night round here! We don’t even get up that early on Christmas morning! What on earth had you up at five?”
Rowan shrugged again. “Oh, nothing,” she muttered quietly, thinking hard how to change the subject, but suddenly weighed down with her own negativity and the niggling sensation that she just could not shake the feeling that something, somewhere, in her life, was horribly wrong.
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