The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘Well she was your grandmother.’

  ‘I know. But it still seems bizarre.’

  ‘What about probate and all that? Inheritance tax. Won’t you have to pay a fortune? Have they done a proper inventory?’

  ‘They’ve done one. That’s what Mr McDowall said, anyway. And to be honest, at first glance, it looks like a hoard, a load of junk. I mean, it’s just lived in. And a lot of the stuff in the main house is pretty scruffy. Brown furniture and you know how little that fetches.’

  ‘There’s brown furniture and then there’s...’

  ‘Brown furniture. I know. And there are a few good pieces of old oak. A big carved press, a couple of chests. A fabulous table. And a bed. But the kitchen was probably last done in the 1970s. It’s like…’ she hesitates. She has taken some photographs on her phone, but even they don’t give a proper impression. ‘Dad, imagine a weekly sale at some small-town auction house. You know, the ones where they say it’s a sale of household goods and the whole place is full of trays and boxes of miscellaneous junk and damaged furniture and foxed pictures. Some of it is going to be really good, but you wouldn’t know from a casual glance. That’s what it’s like. The main room in the house is OK. I think my grandmother spent most of her time there when she wasn’t in her bedroom. But the main room’s comfortable enough and the kitchen’s functional.’

  ‘Where did you sleep?’

  She hesitates again. ‘In my mum’s old room.’ She thinks it’s probably better not to mention, at this stage, that she also slept on a sofa bed in a cottage with a comparative stranger and his dog. Her father, a hippy at heart, has a blind spot where his daughter is concerned. He worries about her all the time.

  He’s silent for a moment. ‘I never saw it properly, you know. Or only from a distance. Jess never took me to the house. Said her mother wouldn’t approve. I stayed on after the gig. Camped out in the van. Couldn’t leave her but we met elsewhere. In one of the villages, in a quiet corner of the pub. Or down on the beach.’

  Daisy has heard this story many times, and seen the old photographs, but it still seems impossibly romantic to her: her tall, skinny father with his long dark hair and his beloved fiddle, performing at a folk festival on the island, falling for her red-headed mother, Jessica May, in the middle of the music and song, camping in the old van that was to become their home, her home too for a large part of her early childhood, although her mother had made plenty of modifications to it.

  ‘But you met Viola, surely?’

  ‘I met Viola once. It was a folk festival and it wasn’t her kind of thing at all. But she agreed to come to a supper in the hotel at Scoull, afterwards. They’d laid on this big buffet – everyone brought something – and somebody had persuaded her to come. She sat there like the lady of the manor. Like the Queen Mother without the sense of humour. She seemed quite old to me, but she can’t have been more than sixty. Your mother was a late baby. Viola must have been forty or so when she had her.’

  ‘And unmarried? Wouldn’t that have been a big scandal?’

  ‘I suppose it must have been. There was certainly no sign of a father. No father named on your mum’s birth certificate either.’

  ‘Didn’t she ask?’

  ‘Of course she asked. But she told me she had never got a satisfactory answer. Your mother always said she thought it must have been a visitor. Nobody from the island. Otherwise, word would have got about. It’s that kind of place. They keep secrets from outsiders, but they talk among themselves.’

  ‘It must have bothered her. Mum, I mean. It would bother me.’

  ‘I’m not sure that it did, all that much. It meant that she could fantasise about some glamorous stranger! You never know, there might be some clues in the house still.’

  ‘I suppose there might. I don’t think Viola threw very much away. It’ll take months to go through all the old paperwork. I wish I’d met her.’

  ‘You might have been disappointed. I don’t think you’d have got much out of her. She was a formidable woman. You didn’t cross Viola. Not unless you were very brave. Or so your mother told me.’

  ‘What did you think about her? Did she talk to you? When you met her?’

  ‘She shook hands with me and patronised me like hell. Jess thought it was hilarious. I didn’t. But she didn’t know there was anything going on between us. I think we managed to hide it well. Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine that anyone would fall for me, let alone that it might be her beloved daughter.’

  ‘But she did love her?’

  ‘Yes. I think she genuinely loved her. But it was a repressive kind of love. It must have been, or your mum wouldn’t have done what she did. Wouldn’t have run away. What was Jess’s room like?’

  ‘Like Mum, I suppose. Colourful. Nice. You can come and see it some time. It’s full of her things, still. But quite clean so Viola must have looked after it all these years since Mum left. I slept there and it was OK. It’s the only bedroom in the house that seems genuinely comfortable.’

  She can see that he’s upset. Even after all these years, the thought of Jessica can both move and sadden him. His eyes glisten. ‘Ach, it’ll be sold soon enough. Why don’t you just get rid of it, contents and all, Daisy?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that, yet.’

  He looks aghast. ‘What on earth do you mean? I thought you were just going over there to have a poke about and then let the place go. Take the money and run.’

  ‘Is that what you want me to do?’

  He looks aghast in a different way. ‘No, no. Don’t misunderstand me, Daisy. I don’t want any money! I just think it’s such a huge undertaking. Wouldn’t it be better to sell everything? There’s all kinds of things you could do with the money.’ He looks confused, sheepish again.

  She hugs him. ‘I know, Dad. I know. I don’t for a minute think you’re after my money, although you’d be very welcome to it. God knows you’ve earned it. It’s just – I can’t explain it. I like the island.’

  ‘It’s a lovely place, right enough.’

  ‘I feel comfortable there. You can see the sea from the windows. There’s a walled garden. I’ve hardly seen the half of it. I need time. Time to get to know it or for it to get to know me.’

  ‘But do you have time? What about probate, taxes, things like that?’ Money has never been his strong suit.

  ‘It’s paid, Dad. There was enough money in the estate to pay everything. Quite a bit of money, really, since Viola hardly spent anything at all and inherited quite a lot. There were farms and land that were sold off years ago. All that’s left now is the house and gardens and a few acres of not very productive land. But you’re right. It was a fairly large sum, but there won’t be much left to do anything at all with the house.’

  ‘How was it valued?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest. I think somebody from the firm of solicitors went in with some… expert.’

  She stops quite suddenly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just wondering about experts. Local experts. Who they were. It’s nothing. I’ll ask Mr McDowall. He must have made the arrangements.’

  ‘But surely, if there are valuable antiques…’

  ‘It would be very hard to be certain. It’s not a museum. I doubt if there’d be any dispute if somebody with the right credentials just went in and did a reasonable valuation without really going into too much detail. The tower is quite gloomy. You can hardly see what’s in there. It took me a few days to pluck up the courage to go in myself, and even then I had help.’

  She thinks of Cal, leaping confidently up and down those spiral stairs. As though he had been in there before. The local antiques and art expert. With credentials. Exactly the kind of person a city solicitor, perhaps knowing his mother and father and their classy shop, not far from his office, might call upon to do some kind of valuati
on of the contents of Auchenblae.

  She feels slightly sick.

  ‘What is in the old tower then?’

  ‘The main room in there is one big junk room. You know, these small island lairds weren’t exactly rolling in it. And even though Viola’s family were pretty well off, I think for most of her forebears Auchenblae was just their summer house.’

  ‘Some holiday home!’

  ‘I know. Mr McDowall told me it wasn’t until her parents that the family actually lived there properly, and I get the feeling they didn’t do much to it. But maybe it’s not all junk. There’s an amazing carved bed. And pictures. It would be worth taking a good look at the pictures. There’s a very beautiful portrait of a young woman. It looks like an Elizabethan portrait but the name on it is Lilias, and the laird at the time had a daughter called Lilias. We – I – looked her up.’

  ‘You’re getting sucked into all this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Would that be such a bad thing? I’m in a rut, Dad. You have a more exciting time of it than me these days. My thirties are marching on. There’s no man in my life and I’m fed up to the back teeth of fairs and boot sales. I need a change.’

  The fairs are no picnic. Bad enough setting up, hauling a dozen or more boxes of objects into some draughty hall and then building a decent display, but the breaking down at the end is arguably worse, with everyone trying to park as close as possible to the venue and falling over each other to get away. Somebody will always mind a stall for you while you go to the loo or fetch a coffee, and Daisy has friends who can sometimes be persuaded to help. Her father volunteers as often as he can. But too often, she does it all by herself and by the end of the day she’s exhausted.

  ‘You need a shop.’

  ‘I can’t afford to rent a shop.’

  ‘You could easily afford it if you sold Auchenblae.’

  ‘I could buy a shop if I sold Auchenblae. I could buy a shop and a house of my own.’

  ‘Exactly. And wouldn’t that be better than camping out in a crumbling mansion? Wouldn’t that be the sensible option? Why do anything different?’

  ‘Because I’m my mother’s daughter,’ she says, before she can stop herself.

  He sighs. ‘There’s no arguing with that. I just worry about you.’

  She’s not even sure that she wants a shop. It’s the kind of thing that sounds wonderful in prospect, but she’s worked with the general public before, and they can be a sore trial, day in and day out. Especially when you’re on your own.

  ‘Listen. The house isn’t going anywhere. Nor the contents. What I’m thinking is that I’ll spend the summer on Garve. I’ll have a good look at what I’ve got. Get proper broadband and carry on with the online business. Explore. Research things. Sell things from the house, but on my terms. It just seems wrong to let it go, to abandon it without documenting it all in some way. I don’t think I could bear to just invite some auction house in and have them clear it all out.’

  She has been thinking about this for the whole drive from the island. Working out the possibilities. Now she realises that she can’t bear to let Cal take what he wants either. Has he earmarked things? Did he do the inventory? Did he find the picture of Lilias on that first visit? Hide it? People do hide things. She’s done it herself, burying desirable objects in the bottom of boxes of rubbish on viewing days so that a casual browser might not find them.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be easier, though? It’s one hell of a job for you. And you said yourself, it’s mostly junk.’

  ‘It would be easier. But think of what I might be missing?’

  ‘You wouldn’t miss things. They’d value things for you. Sort them out for you. Sell them.’

  ‘I don’t just mean that. It’s something to do with my history. My heritage. We lost Mum when I was too young to have asked her anything.’

  ‘But the family were just incomers to that place.’

  ‘Yes. They were. In a way. But they were Neilsons and they lived there for a hundred years. Maybe there was some connection with the island already. The names are so similar. Neilson and McNeill. I just don’t know. Maybe there are family papers, letters, photographs. The kind of thing I’ve never had. Or only on your side. Never on Mum’s. I’m curious. And I won’t know until I’ve looked at what’s really there.’

  He shakes his head but she can see that he’s half resigned to her plans already.

  ‘I suppose so. I suppose it would do no harm.’

  ‘There’s this portrait. It was in the tower. Stacked in a pile of pictures on the floor. Not hung on the wall or anything.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Lilias McNeill. It’s absolutely stunning.’

  ‘Worth a bob or two then.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure it is. But it made me think. Who was she? Who painted it? Why? There’s an inscription on it. It says, “A time will come”. Un temps viendra. I began to think, maybe this is my time. Maybe I need to spend some time there. Give a bit of time to the house. It feels so neglected. I could go. Just for the summer.’

  ‘You’ve got too much imagination for your own good, Daisy,’ he says. ‘But I suppose that makes you your mother’s daughter as well.’

  ‘Well, I’m being practical too. There’s enough cash for me to live there for a few months, do some online selling. It needs a massive declutter and since I’m in this business, I might as well do it myself. Otherwise I’m just handing it over to somebody who might know even less than I do about it!’

  ‘That’s true. And you can always keep your options open.’

  ‘I can. And when you’ve finished touring, you can come and see for yourself.’

  ‘Aye. I will. I’ll do that. Maybe visit a few old haunts.’

  ‘We could see if the Clootie Tree’s still there.’

  ‘Didn’t you go?’

  ‘No. I didn’t. I thought about it. I thought about going to see where Viola’s buried as well, down at Keill, but I didn’t do that either. Maybe next week.’

  ‘Do you remember the tree?’

  ‘All too well. The road past the house doesn’t go anywhere else.’

  ‘I wonder if people still tie their wishes onto it.’

  She catches herself thinking that maybe she could walk up there with Cal and Hector. And then she thinks about the inventory and her suspicions. Of course she could be imagining it. It might have been somebody else entirely who valued the contents of Auchenblae. She’ll have to phone Mr McDowall tomorrow and ask him. But perhaps she shouldn’t be going anywhere with Cal and Hector. Perhaps she shouldn’t trust Cal at all.

  SEVENTEEN

  It’s a relief to stop thinking about Auchenblae for a while. On Saturday morning she and her father go to the antique fair as planned. They stuff as many boxes and cartons as possible into Daisy’s car, most of it from the small storage unit they hired a few years ago. This involves getting up so early – a bleeding ungodly hour, says her father – that Rob can hardly keep his eyes open and Daisy drives while he leans back in the passenger seat and tries to doze. They would have packed everything the night before, but it never seems wise to leave it in the car overnight, in the city.

  ‘This place wouldn’t hold a fraction of the things from Auchenblae,’ she remarks as they lock up the unit. ‘If I wanted to keep some of it. And I’d have to clear the house before I sold it. Or let somebody else do it.’

  ‘So you’re still thinking of selling it, are you?’ Rob yawns widely.

  She had woken up in the middle of the previous night and couldn’t get back to sleep with the worry of it all. But then everything seems so much worse at three or four in the morning. She switches constantly between excitement and panic.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Half an hour later, they manage to find a parking space not too far from the entrance to the suburban hall where this monthly fair is held, and th
en lug and trundle everything into the foyer.

  ‘If I don’t get a coffee soon, I’m going to kill somebody,’ Rob remarks, mildly.

  The organisers are late, an accident on the motorway causing a mega traffic jam, and the exhibitors have to wait among the assorted trolleys and boxes until the keyholder arrives. The stallholders are an eclectic mix of young hopefuls, middle-aged and some elderly dealers who are either winding down to full retirement or desperately trying to supplement their pensions. They will cheerfully tell her that they have ‘done quite well’, when they’ve only made the price of the stall, but they’re a kindly bunch on the whole. She and her father have nicknames for some of them: Mr Desperate, Mrs Grumpy, the Hippy Sisters, Green Welly Man. She sometimes wonders what they call her.

  The sale is held in a familiar draughty hall that smells of frying bacon from the pop-up cafeteria tucked into a small kitchen at the far end. The smell is appetising at first, but by the end of the afternoon, it always becomes sickening. She’s made up a picnic: sandwiches and fruit and a flask of black coffee that her father falls on as though it is nectar. Around lunchtime Rob will invariably wander off and come back with trays of chips and more coffee in paper cups, because they will have drunk the whole flask before mid-day but never seem to get round to buying a spare flask. Fairs invariably make Daisy hungry. She once managed to secure a stall at a mixed crafts and collectables fair opposite a couple selling home-made chocolates. They were very liberal with free samples for their fellow stall-holders and by the end of the day Daisy felt faintly sick.

  She has a feeling that as soon as Rob is off on his trip, any of his healthy eating will be abandoned with a fair amount of enthusiasm. She has to remind herself that it isn’t her job to police his behaviour, just as it isn’t really his job to police hers any more. Not that he ever did. She must decide for herself what she wants to do. The inheritance, and everything that comes with it, is hers and hers alone. He doesn’t want her money and won’t accept it, even though she’d be happy to give him some of it. Until now, they’ve been sporadically comfortable, with periods of borderline hardship. Daisy has grown up with it and doesn’t mind it. She knows that money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness, but it certainly makes the occasional misery a whole lot easier to bear.