He turned towards her. “Your mum doesn’t want me here.”
“Do you blame her?”
He shook his head.
“Things have changed,” Arabella said.
“I just hoped she might still love me.”
“Only thinking about yourself.” His daughter’s face was twisted with pain.
“I’m so sorry, Arabella. I haven’t been well.”
“There you go again: me, me, me.” Arabella clenched and unclenched her fists and took a step towards her father. For a moment Kitto thought she might hit him.
“We don’t need you, Dad. We’re doing OK. Mum’s getting better. She doesn’t cry so much any more. She’s beginning to eat again and two days ago she actually laughed. I’d forgotten what that was like.”
“It’s one of the sweetest sounds,” Kitto agreed and carried on down the stairs towards the Great Hall, where there was another group of visitors listening intently to his mother. Unable to face Clarissa, he veered left and opened the door to the servants’ staircase.
“Where are you going?” Arabella called.
“I’ll stay in the pub tonight. Look after your mother. Whatever you think of me, please remember that I do love her, and you and your brothers. Maybe one day you’ll forgive me; some people grow older but forget to grow up.”
“You can say that again.”
Arabella watched the door close behind him. Turning around, she saw Jane standing at the top of the Great Staircase. Her mother looked as pale as the white plaster ceiling.
“I don’t think I can quite face another group, darling.”
“Go and lie down. I’ll take the next lot straight to Aunty Blaze. Can I bring you anything?”
Jane shook her head and, holding on to the wall for support, made her way along the passage to her bedroom. She didn’t bother to undress, but lay down on her bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
* * *
It was, without question, the worst day of Toby’s life. Dressed in stiff tweeds, his fake moustache aggravating an outbreak of acne on his upper lip and cheeks, he had performed, over and over again, the part of the stuffy, charmless preacher husband while Celia took the opportunity to use the role of Pocahontas to flaunt her curvaceous body in a sensual dance in front of groups of strangers—for the obvious delight of Roberto Syson, who stayed through three performances. Many hours later, Celia left, pretending to be tired but clearly bound for a secret assignation. Watching her go was like reliving the car crash in slow motion: the lorry coming closer and closer, the screech of tyres, the tearing sound of metal on metal, the vicious bite of the seatbelt against his shoulder and torso, the screams of his grandparents, followed by utter darkness.
He lay with the lights turned off in his bedroom. The curtains were drawn, but the early-evening sun spilled through the tears in the fabric and cast mocking beams across the floor. A piece of wallpaper had come unstuck and quivered in the breeze. The tap in his basin dripped. Outside, the rooks cawed to each other, a mournful song of broken promises and hearts. Toby knew he had lost Celia and that life without her made no sense at all. He would have to lie there until he died.
The door burst open and his sister stood there, clouds of auburn hair framed by the light on the landing.
“Guess what? Dad came home. And I told him to go away,” she said triumphantly.
Toby squinted at her, unable to react; the news couldn’t penetrate his obsession.
“Mum’s in bed asleep, so Aunty Blaze tried to make us dinner, but it’s so dissssssgussssssting that she’s offered to buy us all something at the pub. So you’ve got to get up now, because the Princess and Gran are waiting.”
“The Princess?” Toby sat up. That was his private name for Celia; perhaps she was downstairs rather than in Roberto Syson’s arms.
“Princess Amelia is still here. Her uppity chauffeur said it was against EU rules to drive more than seven hours in one day so he couldn’t take her back to Kent tonight. She tried to fire him on the spot, but of course she can’t drive her own car so she has to spend the night here until she can go home tomorrow.”
Toby sank back into his pillow. The wrong Princess.
“Get up!” Arabella pulled at her brother’s sheet. “I’ll tell you a secret. Dad’s at the pub.” She looked at Toby, who hadn’t moved a muscle. “And the special tonight is chicken korma.”
27
An Afternoon
FRIDAY 31ST JULY 2009
He met her at the station. This time there were no misunderstandings; both of them knew why she had come and what would happen. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding hers. She shimmied over to his side so that their shoulders touched and their bodies collided at every bump and turn. Three times he stopped just to take her face in his hands and look into her eyes.
Parking the Land Rover by the barn, he took a blanket and basket out of the back and, without speaking, they walked hand in hand up the hill to the high meadow. The late July air was warm and scented. Some of the fields had already been harvested, ploughed and tilled. The hedgerows were tangled with wild flowers. Wolfe laid out the blanket on the ground and took Blaze in his arms, stroking her face and her neck with his lips. Wordlessly, he unbuttoned her shirt. She wriggled her hips slightly to help him free her jeans and underwear. He unclipped her bra and her breath caught in her throat as he kissed her breasts, her stomach and then her inner thighs. She rose to her knees and pulled his T-shirt over his head while he removed his jeans. Pressing their naked bodies together, they made love urgently, rolling off the blanket and into the grass.
Afterwards, they crawled back onto the rug and lay naked, side by side, warmed by the sun, their fingers and legs entwined. Raising himself on to one elbow, Wolfe kissed her face tenderly—her eyelids, her cheeks, her scar, her mouth, her throat—without taking his eyes off hers.
“I love you,” he said, again and again.
“I love you too,” she replied, knowing she had never uttered four words so sincerely. Happiness ripped through her. Rolling on to their sides, they looked into each other’s eyes. They made love again.
“I’m not letting you out of the valley this time,” Wolfe said when they were done. “Tell me you’re staying?”
Blaze hesitated. “There are still things to sort out.”
He sat up quickly and looked at her. “What does that mean?”
Blaze squirmed under his gaze. She’d wanted this for so long and yet, now it was happening, she was seized by panic. “I’m not ready,” she said, unable to articulate her true feelings: the fear of being vulnerable and of caring too much.
He shook his head in astonishment. “Not ready? How many more miscommunications, periods of silences, weeks apart do we need? This is ridiculous.” The last syllables caught in his throat.
Blaze sat up. “It came out wrong,” she stammered, trying to correct herself.
But Wolfe had heard enough. “Love is about actions not words. If I didn’t know about Trelawney, I’d assume there was someone else.”
“Of course there’s no one else,” she retorted. She reached out to take his hand, but he turned away from her. She half rose to her knees and tried to keep her voice level. “We’ve only just opened the house and it’s beginning to take off. Visitor numbers are picking up; there’s a lot more to do. And then there’s my mother.”
He sat up and searched for his T-shirt. “What is it with you?” he asked, his voice uneven. “The moment we get close, you pull away.”
“You froze me out for months,” Blaze exclaimed, irritated that he was putting all the blame on her.
“I thought, when you finally agreed to come here today, you had made a decision.” He stood and started putting on his jeans. “I can’t be with someone who puts their family’s past before their own future.” His voice was flinty.
“I have to settle my ghosts; I have to save Trelawney.” This, they both knew, was only partially true.
He was quiet for a moment or two. “I really care for you, but I can’t wait indefinitely,” he said, low and determined. “And I can’t cope with your vacillations; it’s too painful.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Blaze replied miserably.
“It’s simple—you don’t love me enough.” He turned his back to her.
“You are so wrong.” Blaze got to her feet, naked, and walked towards him, catching his arm with her hand.
He shook her off. “I didn’t know it was possible to love another human being as much. I want to lay my whole self down before you, to protect you, to adore you, to love away your past hurts. There’s literally nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Joshua, please don’t,” Blaze said. “I love you. You must know that.”
He shrugged his shoulders and walked off down the hill.
“If you really loved me, you’d give me more time,” she called after him.
He stopped and looked back at her. “Another false horizon?” He laughed dismissively. “You prefer to be miserable in familiar territories than risk happiness in an unknown world. You care about your insecurities more than people. I fell in love with a brave woman, not a coward.”
Blaze remained silent; stung by his words, unable to think of any reply, she watched him walk away. The sun was still hot but she shivered violently. She found her scattered clothes and pulled them on. Below, she heard a car ignition and saw his Land Rover driving off up the lane. Clutching her shoes, she ran across two fields, grazing her feet on the sharp-edged golden stubble. She reached the farmhouse and sat down at the kitchen table to wait. Five minutes later, there was the sound of a car approaching. Her spirits soared: he had come back. She darted outside, but instead of Wolfe she saw a middle-aged woman.
“You must be Blaze. I’m Molly. Joshua asked me to take you to the station.” The woman had a kindly face. “Are you ready to go?” She was holding Blaze’s bag, left earlier in the Land Rover.
Blaze nodded miserably and followed Molly outside. Later, she couldn’t remember if she’d spoken a word on the way to Haddenham.
Blaze went back to Trelawney and moved out of the Mistresses’ Wing into her old childhood bedroom and waited for him to call. For the first week, Jane, without asking what had happened, looked after her like a mother tending to a sick child. She made Blaze soup and boiled egg and soldiers, never commenting when the food lay uneaten or sentences remained unfinished. Blaze resigned from her job in Bristol and threw herself into manual labour. She worked harder than anyone; there wasn’t a task she didn’t volunteer for, a chore that was beneath her. In the mornings she swam in the estuary until the water turned her extremities numb. At dusk she ran up the hill to the burial ground—all in a desperate, failed attempt to banish him from her mind.
28
Pools and Butterflies
MONDAY 17TH AUGUST 2009
Kitto and Toby walked through Plymouth to Tinside Lido. Built in 1935, it was one of the few landmarks that the Germans hadn’t bombed during the war. Only open for the summer months, the lido was, on this baking-hot Monday, surprisingly quiet. The blue striped pool glistened in the late-afternoon sunshine and gulls wheeled and shrieked overhead. A few hundred feet offshore, as if pinned against an azure sky, were the white sails of a small flotilla. On the horizon there was a huge tanker, bright red and blue, bound possibly for America.
“We might even get to swim,” Kitto said, looking at the pensioners lined up along the sides of the lido in their deckchairs, sipping tea from Thermos flasks and taking sandwiches out of cling-film wrappers. Toby, who hadn’t wanted to come, glanced around nervously. His greatest fear and most ardent wish was to run into Celia. At school she’d been surrounded by a gang of protective girls. At 4 p.m. each day, Roberto Syson met her at the gates on his 800cc motorbike.
Toby had brought his swimming trunks, but hoped Kitto would not make him swim. He’d spent most of the last weeks in his room, curtains closed, and had no wish to bare his white body.
“We used to come here as children, with Nanny,” Kitto remembered.
Toby was amazed. “You grew up by a lake, a river and an estuary.”
“Nanny said it was dangerous and muddy!”
Toby surveyed the municipal pool. “Dad, why are we here?”
“I wanted to spend time with you. Make up for all those missed opportunities.”
“It’s a bit late!”
Kitto’s shoulders sank. “I’d like to try.” Toby decided swimming was easier than talking and ran to the changing rooms. Minutes later he emerged and dived straight into the deep end. It was unheated and the water’s iciness knocked the breath out of him. He shot to the surface, gasping for air and respite, his arms flailing, and made for the side. Kitto sat on the edge laughing.
“Isn’t it incredible? The cold makes every cell in your body feel alive.”
Toby couldn’t speak but in that moment, all of his senses on fire, he knew for the first time since Celia’s departure that he could survive without her and the constant thrum of misery would abate. Kicking away from the white-tiled side of the pool, he forced himself back through the water and swam two quick widths. Rapidly his body adjusted to the temperature and he could feel blood coursing from his heart through his veins. Soon the feeling returned to his hands and feet. Lifting his face out of the water, he laughed, intoxicated with the sheer joy of being alive. He pretended to be a seal, lacing his body up and under the surface, plunging down to the depths and propelling himself with a great whoosh to emerge in front of his father. Kitto took off his trousers and, stripped down to his boxer shorts, jumped in beside Toby and the two ducked and wrestled. At first the onlookers were annoyed, but soon got caught up in their exuberance, remembering their own parents and childhood.
Later, his skin puckered and blueish in tone, Toby shivered himself dry in the last embers of sunshine. He refused Kitto’s offer of a towel or jumper; he wanted to revel in the goosebumps, to make up for the hours lost that summer wrapped in melancholic inertia.
They walked through Hoe Park and up to Sutton Harbour.
“There’s nothing good to say about this place,” Kitto said, looking at the concrete office blocks, cheap fast-food takeaways, the clusters of bored young people by the bus stops, tired mothers leading crotchety children and old men disappearing into basement betting shops.
“Have you seen Ayesha?” Toby asked. He could never mention his half-sister in front of his mother.
“She wants to go to Cambridge to study History of Art.”
“I thought she wanted to read biophysics?”
“Your Great-Uncle Tony has converted her to aesthetics.”
Toby let out a low whistle. “Lucky her.” Then his shoulders slumped. “I seem to be the only one in the family with no calling, no idea what I want to do.”
“You’ll find your way.” Kitto looked fondly at his younger son. “Perhaps you have to learn to care a little bit less about things and learn to put yourself before others?”
Toby smiled at his father gratefully; since losing Celia, his self-esteem had collapsed.
“I’ll walk you to the bus stop,” Kitto said.
“Why don’t you just come home?”
“I have to wait for your mother to ask.”
“You grew up there,” Toby said crossly, wondering why his father was living in a small bedsit in Plymouth.
“People make houses and I realise that my home is wherever Jane is.”
Toby didn’t say anything. He thought grown-ups could be pretty stupid.
Sitting in the bus on his way back to Trelawney, Toby wondered if his brother would ask them to stay on when he inherited in December. The thought of leaving the castle was too painful to contemplat
e. Toby had read enough literature, watched enough television, had enough friends, to know that his family life was eccentric and dysfunctional, yet it was his world. He could not imagine opening his curtains without looking down on to the wildly overgrown garden below or beyond it to the glinting estuary. Or going to sleep without the music of creaking pipes, scuttling mice or the wind chasing around the battlements. The best day of his life so far had been the announcement five years earlier that there was not enough money for him or Arabella to return to boarding school. The two of them had unpacked their trunks, hardly daring to look at each other or scream their delight out loud in case the decision was reversed.
The view softened as the suburbs gave way to rolling green fields and occasional glimpses of the sea, snatches of dark blue against distant hills like purplish bruises in the dusky light. Bad weather was coming in from the west and Toby could see the scratch marks of rain on the horizon. The bus dropped him at the turning to Trelawney and, getting out, he slung his swimming bag over his shoulder and took a shortcut alongside the river. He stopped for a moment to look at the icy water careering over large, moss-covered boulders and, out of the corner of one eye, glimpsed the blue flash of a kingfisher. Crossing a small stone bridge, he climbed up the old cart track, cobble-bottomed and steep-sided, made hundreds of years earlier by farmers taking their produce to market. Trees grew out of the banks, their roots entwined amongst great granite slabs. The tops of the branches had grown into each other, transforming the track into a cool, dappled tunnel. At the top of the hill, Toby emerged into a field and turned left. The air smelt of newly cut grass and silage and he felt the early-autumn chill settling over the fields.
Rounding the next corner, he looked down at Trelawney and his heart swelled. Most of the buildings were dark, but he could see light spilling out of the dining room and Great Hall windows. He could just make out a diminutive figure—his mother, perhaps—carrying an armful of cut branches in through the front hall. Damn his brother for inheriting. Toby knew that Ambrose would never love Trelawney as he did. For his elder brother it was merely a birthright.
House of Trelawney Page 32
