An Accidental Shroud

by Marjorie Eccles

  Sitting on the ground in the shade of one of the trees, leaning against its rough bark, she ate her lunch, consisting of a handful of fresh dates, a carob bar and a glass of wine, while reluctantly bringing her mind to the problem of what she must do. She was in an impossible situation and knowing that she'd brought it on herself made it no better. She didn't waste time in self-recrimination ... she was too used to bringing trouble to her own door by now to blame herself when it happened.

  All the same, it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't come back to England, or at least to this part of it. Why had she, when she could have gone anywhere? In retrospect, it was easy to see that it was bound to cause complications. But she'd always been fond of the place, and when her mother had died and left her the house at a time when she was homeless and nearly penniless it had seemed crass stupidity to refuse to return and live in it. After all, they were all civilized people. She couldn't see that it would matter to Jake now. And she'd wanted to see Matthew. She had a right to see him. He was, let's face it, she thought, her own flesh and blood, her son – conveniently forgetting that she'd never sent him so much as a birthday card in eighteen years.

  She should have approached Jake before this. But she hadn't, and now ... What was she going to do about Matthew and Cassie? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Who could have imagined that happening?

  How serious was it, with Cassie and Matthew? How did you find out if your daughter was sleeping with her boyfriend? Well, just ask! That was easy, it was what she'd always done before, anyway, though she'd been too stunned when Cassie had produced Matthew last night to probe too deeply. Suddenly, out of the blue, 'This is Matthew, Matthew Wilding.' Besides, they'd had that owl-eyed girl, Lindsay, with them.

  But supposing she asked and got the answer yes; how could she then tell Cassie that her boyfriend was also her half-brother?

  She was going to have to do something – instantly – to prevent catastrophe – if it wasn't already too late. Panic almost overcame the sense of enormous ennui engendered by the thought of having to act. She was very good at putting things off, even better at doing nothing at all. The lotus-eating life she'd led since leaving Jake had suited her temperament down to the ground, a temperament she certainly hadn't passed on. She couldn't imagine how she'd come to have three children so energetic and decisive.

  Despite his dark hair, Matthew was so like Jake, with the immediately recognizable family nose, that she had known and recognized him as her son instantly, almost before Cassie had introduced him last night, and she'd been shocked at the uprush of emotion. She was very sorry indeed, at that moment, that she'd ever left him and vowed she must do something to compensate.

  The thought of facing Jake after all this time didn't alarm her – Naomi was alarmed by very little – but for a moment, as she thought of the consequences which might possibly follow, her resolution did falter. But it would surely be all right if she did what she had to immediately, without thinking too long about it. She was a creature of impulse. That was how the decision to leave Jake had come about: she'd suddenly become fed up with being a wife, and for Naomi there was nothing so dead as something which no longer caught her interest.

  She'd always hated being tied down and had lived in a joyously free and what some might have called unprincipled way until she'd met Jake again and decided to marry him. Handsome Jake, who had only needed to smile and she was done for. It had been possible to make herself believe she could become the nice, obedient, responsible wife he wanted. And it had worked for a while, until she began to feel stifled with too many possessions, too much money. Jake had adored her, and the baby, when he came, was absolutely delicious. But then he'd begun teething and he'd had whooping cough and was fretful and tetchy after it, and wasn't quite so delicious any longer. The novelty of her new lifestyle had quickly begun to wear off, coincidentally with two other things happening. First, Ty Andreas had come into her life, via the Greek restaurant where he worked as a waiter. Then her mother's new husband had written to order Naomi from then on to take responsibility for her elder child, the one she'd never told Jake about. He said it was high time her mother had the opportunity to enjoy a life of her own, she shouldn't be saddled with someone else's six-year-old, it wasn't right at her age. It had been time to pick up the child and move on.

  Naomi hadn't initially intended her decampment to be permanent. One day she would come back to Jake and Matthew, of course she would; but somehow the years, mostly in Greece but also on the island of Corfu, Italy, America, Spain, had stretched out. And even after Ty had been killed in a taverna brawl and she'd left the others (or they'd left her) she hadn't been able to summon up the energy to return. By then, she and Jake were divorced, anyway.

  Since then, there had always been problems with money, but that was something which had never been important to her and she'd grown used to managing on hardly anything. She never seriously considered taking up her work again where she'd left off, although she'd had talent – oh yes, outstanding talent, it had been said more than once. You needed more than that to succeed, however – hard work and stickability, for instance – concepts which bored Naomi. In the end, the money had run out completely and even her Micawberish view of life began to waver. Nothing – or, as was more usual in Naomi's case – nobody, had turned up to save her this time. Until her mother had left her the house.

  'It's good. It's good to be here and not always going somewhere else,' said Cassie, child of too many disruptive moves, after they had settled in. 'We should stay here.'

  'Well, we'll see. It all depends.'

  It was a very small house, though it had three bedrooms if you counted the attic. But the unexpected legacy had given them shelter for the last months, if no income, and the house, occupied for years by various tenants, was in a terrible condition. Unspeakable things must be happening under the roof slates, because the ceilings were sagging; some of the floors were rotten, paint was peeling everywhere and the front fence was falling down. Naomi's housekeeping was sluttish, and she could easily shut her eyes to the state of the house, but she was still practically on her beam ends, so much so that she'd put the house on the market. She hadn't even had a nibble. The sign still stood, planted drunkenly in the front plot, bindweed climbing up its post and threatening to obliterate its message.

  Oh, she'd been mad, mad to come back! And not least because Nigel might well hear of her return. She was putty in the hands of any persuasive man, and Nigel was nothing if not persuasive. And, she had no need to remind herself, very nasty when roused.

  But what could he do? Automatically, she touched the wood of the tree trunk. All her life she'd been irredeemably superstitious, believing implicitly in luck, good or bad. It was astonishing that she still had the one thing he had coveted, intact, that it had survived all that had happened to her, that she hadn't lost or misplaced it somewhere along the way. Most of everything else she'd ever possessed was scattered somewhere around the globe, marking her progress like an animal's spoor.

  And anyway, he probably had no need of it now, after all these years. But she knew Nigel and his persistence and was tempted briefly, just for a second. Why not give in and be done with it? It was of no conceivable use to her; she would, in fact, feel much more comfortable without it.

  Then her resolution hardened again, she felt vindictive. Nigel thought that money could buy everything. Giving in to him would be the last – the very last – thing she would do.

  A little, cold wind had sprung up, and she shivered. A fifteen-coach express, en route from Birmingham, the second city, to London, the first, pounded past. The house shook, then creaked and groaned itself quiet. The fence leaned over a little more. It would soon be winter again. Naomi wondered how much longer they could survive here.

  5

  Jake recognized the handwriting on the envelope as soon as he saw it. It gave him a nasty, unpleasant jolt, though at the back of his mind he'd been expecting something like this. He thrust it into his pocket to read in private
, but when he arrived at his main offices in the town, a golden-windowed tower block, the latest prestigious development next to the new shopping precinct, he was still reluctant to read it. He let it stay there all day in his pocket, burning a hole, until he was alone and unlikely to be disturbed, until everyone but the cleaners had gone home, the word processors and the fax machines were silent and the only sound was the distant drone of vacuum cleaners.

  Naomi's beautiful cursive handwriting stared at him, dark and bold, and so large that the little she had to say took several pages. What the message amounted to was that she was living less than seven miles from him, with her son and her daughter, Cassie. He stared at the letter. Well, yes. He had known who Cassie Andreas must be the moment he heard her name – Andreas had been the name of that Greek waiter Naomi had run off with. But he'd done nothing about it, convinced that the problem would go away of its own accord, that Naomi would disappear as suddenly as she'd arrived, just as she'd always done. How naive could you get?

  The letter went on to say that Naomi had recently met Matthew but hadn't (thank God) yet told him who she was. He would have to know, however, because – Jake must have noticed this – he and Cassie were obviously becoming attached to each other, and not as brother and sister, either. Naomi was prepared to tell them the facts, if Jake was not.

  They ought to know – although she was in any case leaving Lavenstock just as soon as she could sell her house, and would take Cassie with her. Of course, she couldn't speak for her son, Joss, but he'd surely go with them, too. He'd always been a rolling stone and was long overdue for a move.

  Joss. Joss Graham.

  Jake threw the letter on to the desk as if it had suddenly become contagious, pushed his chair back, poured himself a glass of Glen Morangie from the private supply he kept for entertaining, and went to stare out of the windows, which were not golden at all inside, but dull. The anti-glare glass meant an absence of sunlight, which had come to depress Jake, though he'd been responsible for it, for the whole development, in fact. He was already contemplating other premises.

  There was a PS to the letter. Nigel was not to know that Naomi was in Lavenstock.

  What the hell was she up to? A spot of not-so-subtle blackmail? As soon as I can sell my house. He immediately rejected the idea. Naomi, whatever her other faults, was the least mercenary person he'd ever known. Jake drained his glass and chewed his lip, and went back to reread the letter, not the bit about Cassie and Matthew, which didn't worry him in the least. Matthew couldn't possibly be attracted to that wretched girl, he thought dismissively, projecting his own feelings about her on to his son without too much consideration of the matter. But what about Joss?

  Graham as a surname wasn't unusual, and Jake had never remotely connected him with Naomi, nor with Cassie; why should he? Presumably Matthew (and Lindsay, for that matter) knew the two were brother and sister, but there was no reason why they should have connected them with him as anything other than Joss's employer. And Cassie had been the only one to visit the house, never Joss: Jake had made his views on how things stood in that direction plain enough, after all.

  He began to calculate Joss's age. Born, he noted sardonically, before he, Jake, had married Naomi. Not, however, before he had first met her. Naomi-like, she'd disappeared for several years after their first meeting, and then returned to Lavenstock. It was only then that they had rediscovered each other and married. But even so, what he suspected, that she was belatedly trying to foist parental responsibility for Joss on to him, was improbable, but certainly not, he feared, impossible.

  As he thought about Joss, his anger mounted, knowing himself deceived. Oh, that one was Naomi's son, all right! Naomi meant trouble, always had. Trouble span round her like a centrifugal force, drawing in other people from the periphery. She had surely put Joss up to getting a job with Wilding's, to becoming friendly with Matthew. With the very obvious objective of getting into his good books before she dropped this bombshell.

  The question was – aside from whether or not Joss was his son – what the devil was he going to do about it?

  The blood pounded in his head.

  He jumped when he heard the telephone ring. Few people knew his personal hotline number, which came straight through to him. Thinking it was Christine, he picked it up, an apology for his late arrival home on his lips. The apology died when he found he was talking to his old friend, Tom Callaghan.

  Callaghan didn't waste words. 'I thought I should let you know that Naomi's back.'

  'Well, thanks, but I've just been reading a letter from her, informing me of the fact.'

  'This is bad news, isn't it?'

  'Whenever has Naomi been anything else?'

  'Does Nigel know?'

  'I shouldn't think so. She particularly asked me not to tell him.'

  There was a thoughtful pause at the other end of the line. 'I think he should know,' Callaghan said. 'If only for his own protection.'

  Jake remembered then, something he ought not to have forgotten about Tom, and felt a moment of empathy with his friend, sensing the other's unremitting pain. And he knew that what Tom was really saying was something quite different.

  Joss lounged in the chair, smoking, listening to the new CD he'd bought, with the volume turned up, all the windows open to the hot night, thinking, amongst other things, of Jake Wilding.

  He'd been working for Jake for seven months now, an unprecedented time for Joss to stay with anything. His previous record had been six months when, with another man, he'd run a small waterfront restaurant in Honolulu. Mostly, it had been odd jobs whenever he found them around the world: a spell on a North Sea gas rig, a short time felling timber with the Forestry Commission in Scotland, three months as a short order cook in New York, and so on and so forth. In between, there had been countless other jobs, and rather a lot of activities best forgotten.

  He had no more been to university and taken a degree in microbiology than pigs could fly. He'd lied his way round it to Jake when he wanted the job with Wilding's and Jake, taken with his open, frank and easy manner, had accepted what he wanted to hear.

  Joss told lies as easily as he breathed. He'd been conditioned to it by the way he'd been brought up; lies had been a necessity by which he'd survived. He'd been fending for himself ever since he was fifteen. Snatched at six years old from his grandmother, whom he'd greatly loved, and swept unceremoniously off to Greece by a strange woman they said was his mother, treated with as much careless affection as a puppy and with much less discipline, he'd been allowed to go pretty much his own way, scraping up what education he could and learning, en passant, the laws of survival. Naomi had been a feckless mother, carelessly loving when she was reminded of her children by their presence and she was feeling well-disposed, forgetful of them when she was not. He was fifteen when he found the letter from England.

  He'd picked it up when it arrived, and opened it before Naomi had had the chance to see it.

  He'd always been curious about who his father was, until that day when he'd seen what was written, and read the flamboyant signature. Jake, was all the signature said, but the letter had been written on headed business paper: Jake Wilding was a property developer and builder. And he was writing to ask Naomi for a divorce. It had already cost him a great deal of time and money to trace her, he wrote, but he was prepared to be generous if she would agree. She owed that to the boy.

  Joss had read the letter with mounting excitement. He had a father, at last, his name was Jake Wilding, he lived in England. He had money. Joss had no feelings for this unknown father, but he had determined there and then to go to this place, Lavenstock, and seek him out, get what he could from him.

  At fifteen, he was well able to pass for eighteen. He'd signed on with a merchant ship in Piraeus and would never have bothered to see his mother again if it hadn't been for Cassie. His only regret had been having to leave her behind. He loved his little sister as much as he was capable of loving anyone, and he wouldn't have left he
r if he hadn't known that her father's relatives, a fiercely possessive peasant family, would take care of her. She spent most of her time with them as it was. They adored her, tried to dress her like a little doll, which she hated, and spoiled her outrageously, which she tolerated. They would have liked to have adopted her legally but Naomi, out of some suddenly discovered maternal instinct, had stubbornly refused. She had let Cassie take the Andreas surname, but that was as far as she'd go.

  Joss grinned now, to think that he had ever worried about Cassie, of all people.

  His intention had been to make his way straight to England, but it hadn't been as easy as that. For a while, it was all he could do to survive. Later, when he'd learned the trick of it, other things had intervened and offered so much excitement that his original purpose had been driven to the back of his mind. His new life provided him with change and stimulus and the spice of danger and excitement he craved, the chance to prove he could live on his wits. From then on, he'd turned up on his mother's doorstep from time to time, when whatever he was doing brought him in her direction. The years passed, and he'd almost forgotten his original motive for leaving home when he heard about Naomi's legacy and her intention to move back to Lavenstock. The name had conjured up old memories, new possibilities, and he had arrived at the little house by the railway one night without warning and taken possession of the attic.

  He'd then got himself a job at Wilding's. Naomi, though admitting that she had once known Jake, had said nothing to Joss about having been married to him, nor about him being Joss's father. And Joss didn't tell her what he knew. He concentrated on making a good impression on Jake before presenting him with a ready-made son. It was a pity there was now another son, Matthew, but Joss accepted this philosophically – lucky there was only one, and not several. It never occurred to him to ask who Matthew's mother was ...