‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Not nothing.’
‘Well.’
‘Yes?’
‘Swap you! My father for yours! No, I don’t mean that. But I mean, he’s quite something, isn’t he?’
Josh looked proudly across at his father and smiled. ‘Yeah, he’s a good guy,’ he agreed.
And then they moved forward into the main part of the barn, joining in and yet not joining in, because although they resumed the communal dancing that was currently so popular, in reality they both knew that they were really only dancing with each other.
‘I – er – don’t really think I had better have any more to drink, Alexander. Really.’
‘Oh, come on, Hope. This is New Year’s Eve, or whatever. The New Year coming in? The whole world is jumping around and all you want to do is sit with your crochet, or whatever it is you do.’
‘Needlepoint, actually.’
Alexander always did get that wrong. They were so different, crochet and needlepoint, so different. As different as Jack from Alexander, or Melinda from Rose, or Aunt Rosabel from Hope. She frowned, and put out a hand, too late, to cover her glass. She had to tell him.
‘Alexander.’ Hope put down her fork, and stared through the festive candles which Alexander had put about the kitchen table at his still handsome face. ‘I have to tell you something. I should have told you before.’
Alexander nodded. ‘Yes, darling?’
‘I have to tell you that … I have …’
‘More wine?’
‘No. Really. Alexander. I have to tell you that I have fallen in love with someone else.’
Alexander stared at her, and actually managed to make his eyes fill with tears. As she stared into them, Hope thought she would end her life. She could not remember, ever, seeing Alexander cry. She stared down at her plate, and her own eyes filled with tears, and a lump came into her throat.
It could not be worse, telling him this way, after all they had been to each other years before. The years of fun and happiness, wrecked by her. No, not just by her – by both of them. But, even so, she had to share the blame. She had to shoulder her part of the failure. She had failed him too.
She started to cry uncontrollably. ‘I’m so sorry, Alexei. I didn’t want to fall in love with someone else. But I was alone here, in the country, with only Aunt Rosabel and Verna and Letty, and you were always away, and it just happened. I’m so sorry.’
She sobbed helplessly into her hands, hearing her own voice and her own heartrending cries, and there was nothing she could do to help herself, such was her sorrow, such was her grief.
As he laid her down on their bed and spread out her long hair around her face, for all the world as if he was her nanny and not her husband, Alexander stared down at his wife. God. The whole business had been so avoidable, that was what was so crass. As he gazed down at her he realized with a surge of passion that he still cared about Hope very much, despite everything. But it was just so much her fault. Not giving him a son, not doing what he wanted so that he could inherit his father’s money, and now going and having an affair with that musician up the way. All this time she had been deceiving him with some old rocker, making love with him, perhaps in this very bed. All the time he was in London, working, thinking about their future, she had been deceiving him.
The foolish thing was that he would never have suspected a thing had Muffin Hatherleigh’s best friend from her Pony Club days not been Poppy Taylor-Batsford who had, it seemed, witnessed the two of them lunching together in a wine bar in Bradford-on-Avon. Apparently they had not been able to pick up their knives and forks without holding hands, so blatant had been their relationship.
And of course quite suddenly, after Muffin had passed on the gossip to him, suddenly it had all made such sense! Particularly when Alexander came home and found Hope looking better than she had ever done. Suddenly her going off for a so-called ‘rest’ to Worcestershire, everything, had made such sense. Why had he not questioned her deep desire to go to Worcestershire of all places? Hope who had never wanted to move to the country, and whose first choice for a break must always have been London or Paris, Rome or New York, for God’s sake? And who, most of all, had never before admitted to needing a rest.
But of course, he, Alexander, having been so hard at work in London, with so much on his mind, trying to make money for them all, had not once suspected Hope. Had it not been for Muffin, he would never have suspected her, not for one minute.
What he could not understand, and what he so resented, what made him burn up inside, was that Hope always seemed so innocent. Justifiable rage really seared him as he thought of himself in London, trying to keep them all, while all the time she was off with Jack Tomm! He stared down at her on the bed, and the thought of the two of them together, her and Jack, seemed to set fire to the alcohol he had consumed, jealousy now fuelled by righteous fury.
Well, as it happened, he was going to have to leave Hope for his new amoureuse Muffin Hatherleigh anyway, because, quite apart from anything else, Muffin was just too rich for Alexander to resist marrying.
Over the past months Alexander had come to realize that the truth had to be faced. He had at last found a woman, a rich widow, who could actually, miracle of miracles, afford him. The icing on the cake was that Muffin was absolutely besotted with him. He could go and live with her and he would not even have to sell his car.
Everything was finally and absolutely over between him and Hope now, finally and completely. All he needed to do was leave a carefully written note to her saying goodbye, and go.
Hope was trying, as Melinda would say, to get her head around what Aunt Rosabel was saying.
‘These gels have generally all had babies, you see, Hope. And someone has to bring them up, feed them, give them a home. So the women have now found this out, mostly to their cost – and the result? The result is that they have become hybrid creatures, unable to determine what determination they really have, or are, for that matter.’ She paused and looked across at Hope. ‘Do you get my meaning, my dear?’
Hope nodded. ‘Of course. Things are really different now, aren’t they? And with so many daughters you can imagine, Aunt Rosabel, I’m always thinking about these things. Is it right to marry and have babies and leave them to someone else, lots of other people, to bring up? Or is it better, if you want to work, not to have babies? I don’t know, really I don’t. It’s something that really puzzles me a lot. I mean, I don’t seem to have done very well myself, always betwixt and between, never doing anything really well, it often seems to me, so that I don’t really feel I can pronounce.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ Aunt Rosabel smiled and looked across at her great-nephew’s wife. ‘You have done excellently.’
Hope too would have liked to smile, but she found that all she could do was look rueful.
They were only a few weeks into the New Year. Outside the wind was not howling, it was screaming and tearing at the landscape, and if she stood up and gazed out of Hatcombe’s windows she could see the rain coming in broad sheets, moving down the fields and the lawns towards the house as if being sent by God to cover the house in one long length of white-grey silk. Not far behind it came the sound of thunder and yet more sheets, but this time of bright white-yellow explosions of lightning.
As she stood looking out, a thunderbolt came to Hope, but not one that had anything to do with the weather. She turned. ‘Excuse me while I fetch us some tea, Aunt Rosabel,’ she said in a low voice. Walking as fast as she could, but not so fast that Aunt Rosabel would notice anything untoward, she left the drawing room and made for the downstairs cloakroom where she was heartily and gratefully sick.
Somehow she had known it. All along, since the New Year, through all the preparations for leaving Hatcombe, finding Alexander’s letter, telling the girls that their father had left, arranging for them all to move into Jack’s cottage at the Mill House, she had known with a dreadful certainty that there w
as something wrong with her, and that it was not ‘flu, or measles, but something she had already experienced four times, and had been warned by Alistair Macleod she must never experience again.
Hope was pregnant.
Chapter Eleven
It seemed that no sooner had Hope’s new pregnancy been confirmed than Aunt Rosabel was dead. It astonished Hope that she finally minded the old lady’s dying as much as she did, and yet in another way it did not surprise her at all, for she had instinctively felt that Aunt Rosabel wanted to go before she was forced, one way or another, to leave Hatcombe. That being so, she had, in her own inimitable and elegant way, taken her leave once she knew that her own little world had finally come to a natural end. As Melinda put it, ‘It’s like that old actor guy said the other day, The car has come for her.’ Hope could only be glad that Mr Bell and his so-called nephew’s amiable plan to forcibly evict the old lady from her home had been unavoidably delayed.
Naturally, had they all still been living at Hatcombe the news of his great-aunt’s funeral would have brought Alexander hurrying back from London, but as it was, with Muffin Hatherleigh waiting for him in Belgravia, her town house already filled with his clothes, her Scottish castle already changed to suit his needs, her private helicopter traded in for one which her new so-handsome lover preferred, Alexander had already said goodbye to Hatcombe, and written his farewell to Hope.
I hope you will understand that it is you, and no-one but you, who is utterly responsible for my being unable to carry on being married to you? Had you taken my advice before Letty was born and made sure of the sex of our child we would not only have been able to have a happy family life, we would have been able to afford it too. As it is, all that is now in the past, and all there is left to do is gather what we each can from the ashes and get on with the next phase. God help us all. But I am sure you will manage very well with Jack, and I am sure I can manage extremely well too. There is nothing more to say, really. Goodbye, Hope. Alexei.
Despite a throbbing head, far worse than she had surely earned from the few glasses of wine she had drunk, Hope had stared pitifully at Alexander’s signature. It had been the final straw, somehow, his using Hope’s love name for him – the one she had only used at intimate moments.
It was so cutting, and yet so fitting, and now ‘Alexei’ was gone for ever, and with him Alexander, leaving Hope and her daughters to attend his great-aunt’s simple village funeral and give tea to as many of her old friends as were able to be present.
In fact, although thoroughly enthralled with Muffin, and perfectly happy to be her live-in lover and have her lavish anything she saw fit to lavish upon him, Alexander had remained in London rather than attend Aunt Rosabel’s funeral not so much because he could not bear to stay away from his wonderfully wealthy new love and his equally new flamboyant lifestyle, as because he was far more interested in taking himself off to see the Williamson family lawyer and make enquiries as to the exact nature of the chaos in which his great-aunt’s estate had been left.
‘That, alas, would appear to be that,’ the lawyer concluded at last, tapping the papers back into shape on the top of his polished partner’s desk. ‘Alas from your point of view, I mean.’
Alexander drummed his fingers on the over-new briefcase that Muffin had insisted on giving him, and, twisting his mouth into a sideways grimace, took a deep breath before speaking slowly and precisely, as if to a stupid person.
‘Why?’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘Why were her affairs allowed to get into this sort of mess, Mortenson?’
Mortenson stared at him, his expression filled with a most un-lawyer-like innocence while he practised a beautiful form of mental yoga which entailed thinking of flowers and night skies.
‘Why, Mortenson? When I relied on you, we all relied on you – my soon to be former wife, my daughters, myself – not to let this sort of thing happen? We counted on you, Mortenson. We absolutely counted on you.’
‘No-one can legislate for the failure of an old lady’s memory, Mr Merriott, and the fact is that all is not yet lost. We are actually, as you know, in the process of taking that devious couple of gentlemen who talked your great-aunt into selling them her house to court, and I know we will win. It seems they have a history of this sort of thing – diddling old people out of their estates and hiving off a great deal not for their so-called charity – orphans, indeed – but for themselves. On the other hand, as you no doubt realized before you came to see me, it will take some time to sort out the various claims on the estate. I have little doubt that it will be sorted out, and of course there is a court order on the house, so Bell has not been able to take possession. If I have anything to do with it, he will never be allowed to.’
‘I should think not! The balance of my great-aunt’s mind was most definitely affected, as I can prove. She made out cheques here there and everywhere, some for thousands. I have medical proof that she was not in sound mind. Not only that, but she thought that the sum those two criminals offered her was the current market price. She was, in other words, duped.’
Rich though Alexander knew he would be the moment Muffin said ‘I do’ in Kensington Register Office – following what he devoutly hoped would be a quickie divorce from Hope – nevertheless he was more than reluctant to give up his claims on Hatcombe.
It was pride more than anything, as even he recognized. Even he knew, logically, that now that he had Muffin and her millions, now that he had freed himself from all those daughters, he did not need Hatcombe at all; but since he felt he had been through so much for the wretched house Alexander had come to believe that, although he did not need the place, he nevertheless now deserved to live there.
He saw himself, but with Muffin not Hope, standing in front of Hatcombe’s graceful double doors, saw himself striding across its fields, or standing of an evening in the old rose garden listening to birdsong. Not to give up Hatcombe to anyone else had become a principle of his that he would not willingly relinquish, a cause célèbre for him alone. He had been through too much to want to see anyone else – say Jack Tomm – living there and enjoying it. Hatcombe was meant to be his. It suited him. He had always thought so.
‘Your great-aunt was duped,’ the lawyer agreed, ‘but I should tell you that when we have won this case – which I am sure that we will – you will find there are certain secret codicils to your great-aunt’s will, codicils which I have to warn you, Mr Merriott, do not, I must tell you in confidence, include you.’
Alexander stared at Mr Mortenson. He always had got on his nerves, but never more than now. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Hatcombe is not to be left to you.’
Alexander’s mouth opened and then shut slowly, and then opened once more to say, ‘To whom then did my great-aunt leave her house?’
There was a short pause and then Mortenson shook his head. ‘I cannot say, Mr Merriott. But it is perfectly clear that it was not your great-aunt’s intention that the house should be yours. That is all I can tell you. And let us face it, given that you and your wife are divorcing, it cannot have come as the shock it might well have been before.’
‘But when the will is read?’
‘No-one will be any the wiser, no-one outside this office that is to say. Future ownership of the house is covered in a secret codicil which was the wish of my client, your great-aunt. In the meantime, until we have sorted out the other little complication, it is to be rented.’
Alexander stared ahead of him. ‘I too have claims against the estate, Mr Mortenson. I poured money into that house, most of the profit on my own house—’
‘Understood, Mr Merriott, and it will be heard in full, I promise you. But first things first. We must first go after these gangsters who duped your relative while the balance of her mind was disturbed, as I am sure you appreciate.’
Alexander tapped his foot, his mouth tightened, and he swept his fingers through his thick dark hair. What a pill! He would have to wait now, and for some time, until everythin
g was settled, but no matter what the secret codicils he would buy Hatcombe back. In fact he would make quite sure that Muffin bought it back for him. She could well afford it.
‘Oh yes, and one more thing. What about estate duty?’
The lawyer rose. ‘I shouldn’t concern yourself with that,’ he said smoothly. ‘Not much point, really, is there, Mr Merriott? Not considering.’
Alexander stood up. As the lawyer joined him on his side of the desk to escort him to the lift, he had the strangest feeling that Mr Mortenson did not really like him very much, and never had. Alexander frowned.
It did not occur to Alexander very often that someone did not like him. The last time it had was when he had returned home to Hatcombe and seen how far Hope – his own wife of all people – how far she had gone to avoid kissing him on the mouth.
‘Goodbye, Mr Merriott.’
Mortenson turned back from the lift. Everyone in his office had succumbed to ’flu, his wife was away skiing with their sons, and he missed them very much. He had a pile of work that would take him into the small hours, but nevertheless Mr Mortenson’s heart sang with the knowledge that Alexander Merriott would not after all be inheriting Hatcombe, and if this not-so-very-old family lawyer had anything to do with it, he never would.
‘I thought as much.’ Hope stared at the young woman gynaecologist. ‘After four pregnancies you sort of know. And then of course when I did the test …’
Her voice tailed off.
‘I expect, given your medical history, and the unplanned nature of the pregnancy, that you might be thinking in terms of a termination?’
Hope nodded. ‘Yes,’ she agreed dully. ‘I am.’
‘Your notes – you know, any new pregnancy, it is quite clear, would cause a great deal of worry. To have another baby would be to take a considerable risk. Your womb, previous scars, not really advisable, really, in the circumstances—’
‘I know.’ Hope nodded again. ‘What a pill …’ she started, and then, ‘or lack of it!’
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