There had been no need to ask about Edwina. Even then, Zoe had known that her mother’s mother had been killed when Marian was too young to remember her. But she had been sad, and hugged Tisha, and her great-grandmother had wiped away a tear and said: ‘Well, darling, the tragedy is that I was never cut out for motherhood...’
But a moment later her eye caught the sweep of brilliant red silk spilling from one of the trunks, and she had launched into a tale of some exiled Russian count met in Paris just after the war.
Zoe smiled at the memory. For all its bareness, the house seemed full of her; she had impressed her forceful, independent spirit upon every red Victorian brick, giving a damn for nothing and nobody, least of all the remnants of her family. Vain, selfish and egotistical, by the standards of everyday society, Letitia Mary Duncannon Elliott had not been an admirable woman, and yet she had fascinated Zoe; and beneath that carapace of cynicism, something in her had warmed to the child. Was it the recognition of kindred spirits, or a heavy measure of nonconformity passed down in the blood? Or was it simply a matter of lonely old age reaching out to a solitary and misunderstood child?
With a sudden flash of insight, Zoe realized that it was probably a combination of all three.
Certainly Zoe had enjoyed every minute of those few weeks, loved the air of ‘camping out’ within the house, the irregular meals and what her mother would have called ‘unsuitable’ food. One day when the grocer neglected to call, they had lived entirely on strawberries from the garden; another time, after a trip to Fortnum’s, it had been quails eggs for breakfast and pate de foie gras with toast for tea. And the trips to town, after lengthy preparations the day before, had been the most exciting occasions of her young life. The three old ladies and their gentleman friend had gossiped unashamedly before her, stuffing her full of cream cakes and giving her sips of wine to drink. Witty and world-weary, dry and brittle as autumn leaves, they were relics of a time between the wars; how she wished she had been older, or that they were still alive.
It had been a fabulous, fantasy time; the weather had been glorious that summer, the towered and turreted house sleeping in the sun like a fairy-tale castle, the garden an overgrown mass of peonies and roses and wild honeysuckle. In the orchard a Russian vine had spread like a canopy through the trees, strangling everything with its winding tendrils and pretty, lacy blossom. Despising gardeners and gardening, Tisha had said she preferred it like that.
A perfect place in a perfect summer, and for years it had been encapsulated in her mind as the idyll of childhood, with Tisha the benevolent white witch who made everything possible.
But the adult who looked at those great high rooms also saw rising damp in the kitchen quarters and dry rot in the attics; she shivered involuntarily, wondering what winter was like. The central heating looked prehistoric and the fireplaces were huge; Tisha would not have spent money on fuel. The winter following that idyllic summer had been harsh; Zoe recalled shivering every night in her boarding school dormitory, and did not wonder at Tisha’s sudden death. The certificate recently unearthed gave hypothermia as the cause.
Suddenly, needing the direct heat of the sun, Zoe hurried downstairs and out onto the terrace. Summoning a smile, she handed the keys back to the indolent young man.
‘You can lock up now, if you like. I’ve seen all I want to see inside. If you don’t mind, I’ll just have a wander through the garden.’
‘I’ll go, then.’
‘Yes, you may as well.’
He hesitated, gave her a smile. ‘I don’t suppose – you wouldn’t care for a drink down at the village pub?’
Zoe shook her head. ‘No, thanks all the same. Another day, I might have said yes – but right now I don’t think I’d be very good company.’
‘Sure?’ He met her steady gaze and sighed regretfully. ‘Oh, well, never mind. Some other time, perhaps?’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
She watched him lock and test the doors, saw him stroll back to his car and give Marian’s little Spitfire a look of envious admiration. With a final wave, he swung his modern saloon round on the gravel drive, and disappeared between the shrubberies.
Like everything else, the gravel was overgrown with weeds. In the orchard the vine had gone, while at some stage the old trees had been pruned back to some kind of life, although it was impossible to tell whether they would ever bear fruit. Zoe suspected not. Since Tisha’s day, the garden had obviously been cleared and tended, but more recent neglect had again allowed the vigorous growth of climbers and creepers to smother less hardy plants. There was a certain wild, ragged beauty about it, but the place had lost its magic. She paced a winding path through the shrubbery; as a child, this garden had seemed endless, the paths like tunnels which went on for miles.
Back at the terrace, Zoe sat down on the steps and glanced back at the house. Afraid that it too might seem suddenly diminished, she averted her eyes, wanting to preserve the memory as it had been. But the memory that was Tisha was crumbling in the light of recent knowledge; secrets had been revealed and personal traumas guessed at, clarifying motives which had been hidden for more than half a century.
That happy, smiling family group, photographed in the garden of a cottage in York, was no sham; but Edward’s face and the presence of Robert Duncannon presupposed tensions which were about to erupt into tragedy. How the truth had come out, it was impossible to say; but that it had come out, and blasted them all in the shock, was certain. Letty Duncannon’s correspondence bore that out. Tisha had stayed on at home for two more years, but Zoe gathered that it had been an uneasy truce, that her acceptance had been borne of necessity, as was so much else in her life. Never one to bemoan her situation, she had simply bided her time, like a half-wild cat awaiting its opportunities; and at the first opening of the door, she was gone.
The war provided her opportunity. With trained men off to the Front or needed for training others, women had been taken on at the barracks as clerks; from York she had transferred to the War Office in London, and there, presumably, she had met Captain Edwin Fearnley, a regular soldier some years her senior. Had she loved him? Zoe wondered, gazing at the garden his parents had once so carefully tended. Perhaps she had, in her way, for she had spoken of him in affectionate terms. Perhaps he represented the security she had lost; the security destroyed by Robert Duncannon. And what, Zoe wondered, was her opinion of him?
As ever, the more questions were answered, the more others arose. It was a frustrating exercise, particularly when undertaken alone. Together, she and Stephen had tossed ideas around, reasoning, speculating, sifting the evidence and looking for logical conclusions to every question. And it was exciting, because their minds complemented each other, hers quick and instinctive, but not always leaping in the right direction, and his slower, more methodical, following the line of reason. Between them, they usually reached solid and satisfactory conclusions.
She missed him. Missed his company and his affectionate teasing; and most of all in that moment she missed the passion they had shared. Her body, as much as her lonely spirit, ached for him. If that lengthy and beautiful letter from Istanbul had perfectly expressed his yearning, then Zoe could have echoed it here, in this garden, at the fall of evening.
Across the lawn’s soft grass, long shadows were creeping, indigo beneath the trees, dove-grey where they touched the rounded shape of a cherub in the dried-up lily-pond. The past was no longer perfect, and the present less so; she wanted Stephen, needed him now, not in three or four months’ time. She wanted him to be here, seeing all this, sharing her past, helping to exorcise the devils of memory which held her in thrall.
It was hard to leave, because the last time she had done so it had been to discover that her own world was crumbling; like Tisha, she had had to face some very unpleasant truths. Her parents had parted and it seemed they no longer wanted her. James Clifford was in London and managed to see her only once before Marian was taking her to a huge, horrible place full of strangers. It w
as like a prison. That had been her first impression, nor had it changed, despite the beautiful grounds, the tennis courts and hockey-pitches, the neat village beyond the walls. After the freedom of this house and Tisha’s own brand of magic, boarding school had represented endless years of punishment for some obscure crime she could never recall committing. And with Marian constantly moving house, the holidays were no remission. She saw little of her father, and Tisha was dead.
The drive back through summer twilight was not easy. Unfamiliar with these country lanes, Zoe had to force herself to concentrate on what she was doing, where she was going. When she finally arrived at her mother’s cottage, Marian came out straight away, as though she had been waiting by the door.
‘Thank heavens you’re back – I was convinced you’d had an accident, or worse. Picturing you locked up in that awful house with a madman, or something!’
‘Oh, Mummy, I’m sorry. I should have phoned, I didn’t think – ’
Anxiety turned to anger. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been chatting up that estate agent in some pub, Zoe?’
‘No – no, I haven’t.’ On the verge of tears, Zoe dissolved instead into weak laughter. ‘But oddly enough, he did offer...’
Inside, with the lamps lit and a bottle of chilled wine on the low table between them, Zoe explained, as best she could, why she was so late; but the wine loosened her tongue, and for once she was not so inclined to spare her mother’s feelings and keep things to herself. Ignoring Marian’s deepening frown and her occasional exclamations, Zoe let the whole day come pouring forth.
She talked about the girl, Tisha Elliott, and her relationship to Edward and Louisa and Robert Duncannon. She talked about Letitia, the old lady her mother had known, and about the house and the summer Zoe had spent there as a child. And about herself, the years at boarding school, the feeling she had then, that her parents no longer wanted her. The wine loosened something else, so that by the time she came to the end of the tale, which rested where it had begun that day, with a telephone call from Stephen, Zoe could no longer control the accumulation of grief. Huge tears poured down her face, running along her jaw and soaking the front of the thin blouse she wore. As Marian handed her a box of tissues, Zoe apologized again.
Marian seemed more confounded than upset, as though she were trying to sort out that mix of tragedies old and new, as though she could not find words to say or even a place to begin. Eventually she patted her daughter’s shoulder and swept the damp hair from her face; physical affection had never come easily to her, and it was almost as though she were afraid to embrace her grown-up child.
‘I’d no idea you were so unhappy,’ she said at last, wonderingly, and it seemed to Zoe that she spoke no less than the truth. ‘You were always so self-contained – no tears, no tantrums, quite the perfect little girl in those days.’
While Zoe sobbed afresh, recalling the tears she had shed in private, the secret world she had inhabited, Marian said: ‘I’d no idea I was such a poor mother. I liked school, you see, when I was a child. Everything was so ordered, so safe. There were rules and you obeyed them, and if you did well, people liked you. And I wanted to be liked, so I did well. But it wasn’t like that at home. Home!’ she repeated bitterly. ‘That great, empty mausoleum – you’ve no idea how I hated it, how unhappy I was in the holidays. No friends and nothing to do, and Letitia off gallivanting most days up to town...
‘I only sent you there in utter desperation that summer,’ Marian confessed. ‘I thought, well, the poor lamb will just have to put up with it for a few weeks – even that was better than the ghastliness of the separation. Rows, bickering, up to town to see solicitors – oh, it was awful. I had to spare you that.
‘But you enjoyed being with Letitia, didn’t you? I couldn’t understand it. And you were so difficult after that, Zoe, I’m afraid I blamed it all on her. I was convinced she’d turned you against me. We never did get on.’
‘I know,’ Zoe said bitterly, ‘that was obvious, even to a child.’
‘She resented me. Resented my existence. I dragged her back to Sussex, and she hated it. She couldn’t wait to get me off to school so she could resume her rounds of friends and men and parties. And in the meantime, she sold everything of any value in that house – things that should have belonged to me.’
Zoe had heard it all before; but now she was seeing it differently. Suddenly, she felt sorry for her mother. Tisha had managed to embitter her grandchild, and through Marian her selfish behaviour had somehow managed to colour Zoe’s existence. There was a degree of blindness in both women, a limitation of spirit somewhere that made it difficult to judge the effect of their behaviour on others. Wondering whether that was, in part, everyone’s problem, made Zoe anxious. She was aware of wanting children, Stephen’s children, and yet it frightened her to think that she might behave in the same blind, selfish fashion.
It frightened her more to think she may never have the chance.
Nothing was resolved. Nor did her mother seem to understand about Stephen. His profession seemed so entirely unsuitable, she could not imagine what had attracted Zoe. Knowing that her mother would never understand the special links forged by their common inheritance placed a clamp on Zoe’s need to talk about him. She said her farewells after lunch the next day, and took a train back to London.
Because much had been said about her father, she found him still very much on her mind. Marian’s claim that James Clifford was more interested in money than people was simply not true, but Marian would never believe that. It was not money as such that interested him, rather the excitement of making it; and with his wide-ranging business interests, his time and attention were immersed. When Marian said that he could not have looked after a little girl, even one at boarding school, Zoe knew she was right. It did not, however, ease her sense of regret, for she liked her father and there was a level of affection between them that she had never shared with her mother.
When he was not abroad, they met for dinner fairly regularly, perhaps once or twice a month; and occasionally he would drop in to see her at the flat on his way home from the office. He always enquired about his ex-wife, but James Clifford rarely talked about the past. The present and the future were what interested him, not the whys and wherefores of a failed relationship, even one that had produced a daughter as dear to him as Zoe.
He knew about Stephen, and was sorry not to have met him; he was also rather intrigued by the blood relationship.
‘Although I sincerely hope,’ he had said with a laugh when she explained the connection, ‘that these Elliotts you speak of are nothing like their late and unlamented relative!’
Letitia had earned his grudging respect, if not his liking, for nerve and sheer tenacity in clinging to a way of life that she had made entirely her own. The facts Zoe had unearthed about her origins amused him.
‘Well, she always claimed a connection with the Irish gentry,’ he said, ‘and it seems she was telling the truth. I have to confess I didn’t quite believe her at the time.’ But in the light of her illegitimacy, he said he was not surprised that the old lady had been so secretive about her family.
James Clifford was currently abroad again, but not even his sympathy could ease the problem of Stephen. Thoroughly miserable by the time she arrived home, Zoe sat and stared for a while at the ominously silent telephone, then went to invite her neighbour Polly down for a drink.
Their friendship was one that had grown over the years, born of the fact that they were the only single women in the building, and, as far as they were aware, the only two regularly at home during the day. But if it had begun in the realms of convenience, their relationship had become a true one, full of warmth and honesty. As a friend, Polly had proved to be more steadfast than others in more conservative professions. She was an actress whose rich, throaty voice was much in demand for radio plays and television voice-overs, but her vibrant personality masked a practical nature, and her concern was generally expressed in forthright terms.
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Faced with the problem of Tisha and the past, she said quite bluntly that nothing could change it, so worrying was a waste of time. ‘Look back if you must, Zoe, but only to check up on things. It strikes me that the template was a pretty poor one, and the best thing to do is break it.’
Which was virtually the conclusion Zoe had come to already, but it helped to hear it from someone else.
‘And as far as your beautiful man’s concerned,’ she went on, ‘why don’t you just write and tell him the truth about Philip?’
‘But I could be doing Philip a grave injustice. I mean, just because he wasn’t a great lover, doesn’t mean to say that he’s gay.’
‘Oh, come on, does it matter nowadays? All right, it obviously matters to him, and for his own sake, the quicker he gets himself sorted out, the better. As far as Stephen’s concerned, I think you should be honest. I’m sure Stephen’s mature enough to understand. Let’s face it, he lives and works in an all-male environment – he must have seen it all before.’
‘But how did Philip strike you?’
Polly threw up her hands in despair. ‘For goodness’ sake, why does everybody think, because I’m an actress, that I should be an expert on gay men? It doesn’t say a lot for my reputation, does it?’ She shook her head and laughed. ‘Anyway, you’ve asked me that question before – and as I said, he simply struck me as being not your type. Too uptight, somehow. I know you thought he had hidden depths,’ she reminded Zoe with a gurgling laugh, ‘but to me he was just plain boring.’
Zoe chewed her lip. ‘You’re sure?’
‘No, I’m not sure. How do I know what turns him on, or what his hang-ups are? You went out with him for three months, and even you don’t know! But I’ll tell you this,’ she added firmly, pouring herself another glass of wine, ‘that man is getting out of all proportion. He’s not important to you – Stephen is. So why don’t you write him a searingly passionate letter, telling him how much you love and adore him, and you can’t wait for him to get back to warm your lonely bed. That should cheer him up no end.’
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