Song of the Skylark

by Erica James

  But even as she told herself this, rattling the pushchair along the rough surface of the road where the pavement ran out, she feared Lorna might not view things in quite the same way. Lorna could be sharp when she chose to be. Tess had once overheard her giving her gardener a thorough dressing-down over the way he’d pruned the wisteria. On the other hand, she could be incredibly generous, and had given Tess some gorgeous presents over the years, which if she were really honest had made her feel just the teensiest bit uncomfortable because Tess had never been able to afford anything so extravagant in return. Most of the presents she gave people were home-made – scarves she’d knitted or crocheted; pots of jam, marmalade and chutney; traybakes of cookies and muffins; patchwork cushion covers and her latest creative project: hot-water bottle covers. All of which looked a little shabby when compared to the beautifully wrapped gifts Lorna treated her to. ‘Think nothing of it,’ Lorna had said when Tess had hinted at the disparity between the gifts they exchanged.

  Orchard House, a beautiful stone-built Georgian property with a garden of almost two acres, was one of the largest and most attractive houses in Great Magnus. Normally Tess would go round to the back door, but today she rang the bell at the front. To calm her nerves – how stupid that she should be this nervous! – she bent down to Freddie and stroked his cheek and was instantly rewarded with one of his endearingly sweet smiles. Surely her adorable grandson would soften Lorna’s heart and make things right between them again? Who could stay cross on the receiving end of such an angelic smile?

  Hearing the door being opened behind her, she stood up and tried to ignore the guilty truth of what she was doing – shamefully using her grandson as a shield to hide behind in the hope of brokering peace, or at best negotiating a truce.

  Lorna’s kitchen was as familiar to her as her own. It was never other than showroom smart, everything tidily put away or artfully placed, as though styled ready for a glossy magazine photo shoot. Tess knew better than anyone that it didn’t happen by chance; those colour-coordinated hand and tea towels didn’t arrange themselves, nor did those shiny vintage copper pans lined up along the shelf above the Aga polish themselves. Nor were they ever used. It was an idyll of restrained domestic splendour, in which previously Tess had loved to spend time.

  Now as she sat at the waxed farmhouse table overlooking the garden – a view framed by spectacularly expensive Jane Churchill curtains – she sensed that its very perfection again highlighted the disparity in their friendship. Life at Keeper’s Nook, with all its haphazard clutter, was very much the poor relation. No matter how hard she tried, Tess could never achieve order of this magnitude.

  With Freddie on her lap and watching Lorna adding milk to their mugs of coffee, she noticed with a stab of catty satisfaction a cobweb draped across the bunch of dried hydrangea flowers hanging from the hook driven into the beam above her friend’s head.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any fruit juice for Freddie,’ Lorna said, turning round. ‘Is water all right?’

  ‘That’ll be lovely, won’t it, Freddie?’ Tess said, giving him an affectionate squeeze. His answer was to wriggle out of her arms and slide down from her lap to go and investigate the tiered wicker vegetable baskets labelled Oignons, Pommes De Terre and Carottes. Feeling exposed and vulnerable without the warmth of his small body acting as a human shield, Tess gave a forced laugh. ‘He’s always enjoyed playing with those baskets, hasn’t he?’ she said, watching him rootling around in a basket of pre-washed, marble-sized new potatoes. ‘Remember when we found him trying to eat a raw onion?’

  A brittle smile appeared on Lorna’s face. ‘He’s grown since I last saw him.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Tess enthusiastically, ‘he’s shooting up like the proverbial weed. He’ll be at full-time school before we know it.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have him,’ Lorna said, passing Tess’s coffee to her.

  She took the mug and the implied slight – now that Lizzie has split with Simon, heaven only knows when I will become a grandmother. Not that Tess would admit it, but the thought of Lizzie ever being responsible enough to have a child of her own did stretch the bounds of belief. For that matter, Simon was hardly the sort to be champing at the bit to be a father; it was one of the many things that he and Lizzie had been in agreement with. But then Luke and Ingrid had thought the same, and look how they’d changed their minds.

  In many ways Lizzie and Simon had been an unlikely match, but once they’d come together, it had been one of those relationships that just seemed right. It was their shared sense of humour that had been at the heart of their love, Tess had always believed. They’d met here at Orchard House at a Boxing Day party Lorna and Keith had thrown six months after moving in. It was during those six months that Tess and Lorna had become firm friends.

  A plate of Duchy stem ginger biscuits was placed now on the table, along with a china Peter Rabbit mug of water. Lorna had bought the mug especially for Freddie’s visits with Tess – garish primary-coloured plastic rubbish wasn’t welcome here.

  With her bulging waistline a snug fit against the waistband of her trousers, Tess knew she shouldn’t succumb to what was on the plate, but she needed something to do and eating one of the future King of England’s finest biscuits would have to suffice. Predictably Lorna abstained – her slim body, the result of good genes, she claimed, but which Tess knew was the result of hours spent at the gym – was as enviable as her smooth complexion and hair that was treated to weekly visits to the hairdresser. Tess’s own hair was lucky to see the inside of a salon every three months, and even then she coloured it herself with, it had to be said, varying degrees of success. Well, we can’t all be as perfect as Lorna, a snippy voice whispered in her ear.

  Shocked at how nastily she was behaving, if only inside her head, she took a sip of her coffee. ‘Mmm … lovely, just what I needed; it’s been a busy day. What have you been up to?’

  Lorna shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, the usual, this and that.’

  Snatching at something to say, Tess said, ‘Did you know the vicar’s organising a food bank?’

  ‘Here in the village?’

  ‘Not for the village, obviously, but for wherever it’s needed. We were talking about it in the community shop. Suzy was joking that everybody will be hunting through their cupboards to offload anything that’s past its sell-by date. I said I’d have nothing left in my cupboards if I was to do that.’ Tess gave a strained laugh.

  Without comment, Lorna raised her mug to her lips, but stopped before actually drinking from it. ‘Freddie,’ she said, ‘don’t put that in your mouth, please.’

  Tess glanced over to where her grandson was sitting on the floor, sinking his teeth into a carrot. ‘He won’t come to any harm with it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t,’ Lorna said coolly, ‘but I want those carrots for tonight’s supper.’

  Determined not to rise to Lorna’s pettiness, Tess picked up the plate of ginger biscuits. ‘Freddie, how about one of these nice biccies?’

  His face lit up, and with the carrot pushed back into the Carotte basket, he came and helped himself from the plate.

  Biting into the biscuit, he dropped crumbs on the oak floor as he went back to the baskets of vegetables, and the silence between Tess and Lorna continued. Such was her desperation for something to say, Tess asked after Simon.

  ‘Busy with work,’ Lorna answered. ‘I heard Lizzie’s back at home with you.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Tess said brightly, ‘she’s covering for me at Woodside, while I look after Freddie for Luke and Ingrid. Freddie’s nursery flooded and had to close, so it’s been all hands to the pump, so to speak.’

  Lorna’s gaze intensified as she looked at Tess above her mug of coffee. ‘I also heard the reason why Lizzie’s back here.’

  ‘Yes, it’s hit her badly being made redundant; she loved her job at the radio station.’

&
nbsp; ‘Is that what she told you, that she was made redundant? I heard that she was sacked after she was found having sex with her boss on his desk. The married boss with whom she’d been having an affair.’

  Tess’s jaw dropped.

  ‘You must be so very proud of your daughter,’ Lorna added. Her words dripped with pure spite.

  ‘I don’t know where you heard such a vile thing,’ Tess murmured, struggling to keep her hands from slapping the smug look off Lorna’s face, ‘but I can assure you it’s quite untrue. Lizzie would never do anything like that.’

  ‘Simon told us,’ Lorna said matter-of-factly. ‘He heard it from one of Lizzie’s ex-colleagues at Starlight Radio.’

  ‘And naturally Simon has no axe to grind,’ Tess said tersely, ‘so he’d be totally unbiased in anything he told you about Lizzie.’

  ‘Are you accusing my son of lying?’

  ‘Better than accusing my daughter of – of—’ Tess floundered.

  ‘Of being a slut?’ said Lorna. ‘Is that the word you’re looking for?’

  Tess banged her mug down on the table, not caring that she’d splashed coffee onto its waxed surface. ‘No! No, it is not.’ She rose quickly to her feet. ‘Freddie darling, it’s time we were going. We’re clearly not wanted here. I really don’t know why I thought we would be.’

  ‘I couldn’t have said it better myself,’ Lorna said, also on her feet.

  In her haste to escape, Tess almost broke into a run with the pushchair. How could Lorna have said such a disgracefully vile thing? Was she really so petty that she had to come up with something so sordid?

  But even as Tess tried frantically to believe that it was a malicious lie that Lorna had invented for her own purposes, the nagging voice of her subconscious said it was true. Hadn’t she and Tom said all along that there was more to Lizzie losing her job than she’d let on? And hadn’t Luke said it would be better to leave well alone, that pleading a case of unfair dismissal might be counterproductive? Which of course meant Luke had known what Lizzie had done and had helped cover for her. Oh, how could Lizzie have done it! How could the girl do such a stupid, stupid thing!

  ‘Nana go faster!’ Freddie sang out merrily, leaning forward in the pushchair. ‘Faster, Nana!’

  ‘I am, Freddie,’ she panted breathlessly, ‘I am.’

  Her mind anywhere but on where she was going, Tess didn’t see the rut in the road and the next thing, like a cannonball fired from a cannon, Freddie flew out of the pushchair straight onto the tarmac verge. Horror-struck, Tess realised that in her fury to get away from Orchard House, she had forgotten to strap Freddie in.

  They arrived back at Keeper’s Nook with poor Freddie’s face horribly grazed and his T-shirt smeared with blood and dirt. ‘How could I have been so careless?’ Tess sobbed to Tom when he heard her calling to him for help. ‘I’ll never forgive myself. What if a car had been passing?’

  ‘There wasn’t,’ he said firmly, disentangling a bemused Freddie from her iron-like hold. ‘And Freddie’s just fine, aren’t you, old chap?’

  Freddie drew his eyebrows together and wobbled his head. Then he suddenly grinned. ‘Lizzie!’ he said, catching sight of Lizzie coming round the side of house. ‘Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie!’ he chanted happily, clapping his hands.

  ‘There,’ said Tom, ‘nothing wrong with him at all. Nothing that a wash, a change of clothes and a plaster or two won’t sort out.’

  Once a month Tom met up with a group of men from the village for a drink at The Bell. Of the two pubs in Great Magnus, this was his preferred choice as it served proper beer and wasn’t ashamed to sell packets of pork scratchings at the bar. Despite it being a pleasantly warm evening, they were seated in the panelled snug where they always sat. Keith was the only one missing from the gathering. Nobody knew why, although based on what Tess had told Tom of her visit to Orchard House this afternoon, Lorna had probably put her foot down and insisted he stay at home – there was to be no fraternising with the enemy.

  Privately Tom had always been suspicious of Lorna’s slightly superior air over Tess, as though Tess should somehow be grateful for the attention paid to her. He’d bet any money you liked that, at school, Lorna was the one who had called the shots; the one everybody else was expected to gravitate towards. In fairness, though, a lot of friendships were like that – unbalanced, with one side dictating the terms to the other.

  Only half listening to the banter around the table, Tom took a long, satisfying sip of his beer and let his thoughts stray to his daughter. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t shocked by Lizzie’s admission that what Lorna had told Tess was true, but he knew there was nothing to be done and that he and Tess had to do what Lizzie was doing: put it behind them. But in the history of mad moments committed by Lizzie, she had perhaps outdone herself this time.

  The challenge ahead, Tom thought, was how he was going to be able to look Curt in the eye when they finally met. It was a bridge he would have to cross when the time came. But by God, the man had better be worth the trouble he’d caused. And was continuing to cause.

  Chapter Ten

  When Luke had come off the phone last night after speaking to his mother and hearing that Freddie had taken a tumble out of his pushchair but there was nothing to worry about, he was perfectly all right, Ingrid’s first thought was to drive straight over and fetch Freddie home.

  Had she done that, Luke would most certainly have accused her of overreacting. So rather than go down that particular route, which would have led to her being accused of being overly protective and Luke dragging up yet another tale about the scrapes he and Lizzie had got into as children and how they’d survived perfectly well, she had gone to bed and quietly seethed, snapping out the light and pretending to be asleep when Luke had joined her.

  Seriously though, was it an overreaction to be so concerned about her son? Wasn’t it the job of a loving parent to care? Or, more specifically, the job of a loving mother? It was beyond her that Luke could have such a cavalier attitude towards their son. But that, she supposed, was because he was a man and had the ability to switch off his emotions when he needed to. Plus he had much the same DNA as his sister, so, when push came to shove, he was always going to have a more relaxed mindset.

  Not for a second did Ingrid believe the ridiculous story Tess had told Luke about her forgetting to strap Freddie into his pushchair. Tess might be a bit of a scatterbrain at times, but when it came to Freddie she never forgot things, she was as reliable as day follows night; it was why Ingrid had entrusted her precious son to her mother-in-law.

  No: the real story, and nothing would convince her otherwise, was that Lizzie had been left in charge of Freddie, and surprise, surprise, he’d come to harm in her care. And how typical that the family should cover for that useless girl!

  To stop herself from dwelling on Freddie and the daily battle of guarding him, Ingrid switched her thoughts to the battlefield which she could take command of far more effectively than the one which existed at home.

  In front of her on her desk were the notes she’d made regarding a negligence case against a GP who had failed to refer a patient for cancer investigations. In this instance the patient had been a five-year-old girl whose mother, a young single woman in her mid-twenties, had repeatedly told the GP she was convinced her child had something seriously wrong with her. She had been labelled a neurotic mother and told not to bother the doctor who was a very busy man. As a result, the child was now dead.

  Don’t ever tell me a loving mother doesn’t know best, Ingrid thought grimly as she gritted her teeth and got down to work.

  Chapter Eleven

  Given the heavy tension in the house, and knowing she was at the centre of it, if not the source, Lizzie opted not to ask her parents to give her a lift to Woodside, but to dig out her old bicycle from the garage and cycle to work. After pumping up the tyres and squirting some oil onto the
chain, and her father insisting she wore a safety helmet, she was finally on her way. Enjoying the sun-warmed breeze on her bare arms and legs, she was suddenly filled with the kind of devil-may-care exhilaration that had caused her parents so much consternation over the years.

  It was her lack of coordination that had always been the problem, the left hand blindly and wilfully oblivious to what the right was getting up to. When she was thirteen she’d flown head first into a ditch, resulting in a dislocated shoulder and five stitches to the side of her head. The tumble had led to her parents laying down the law that, unless she was wearing a cycle helmet, she was going nowhere.

  Whizzing along now, she loosened the strap of her helmet that was cutting into her chin and sped on. Passing the community shop on her right, she spotted Lorna’s charcoal-grey juggernaut of a four-by-four coming towards her. Knowing that she was public enemy number one for Lorna and as good as had a bullseye target stamped on her chest and back, Lizzie kept her gaze firmly on the road to avoid the danger of their eyes meeting. As a precautionary measure she swerved closer to the kerb, just in case the red mist came down for Lorna and she succumbed to an overpowering need to satisfy a mother’s urge for revenge.

  The car passed smoothly by without incident, and with her legs pumping faster than ever, Lizzie pressed on until the outskirts of the village with its verges of cow parsley and willowherb were behind her and she was on the open road with the sun-bleached wheat fields either side of her. The beauty of the day was quite at odds with the ugly anger now simmering inside her after seeing Lorna.

  Lizzie would never have thought Simon’s mother could behave so vindictively. Her rudeness to Mum yesterday was beyond belief, and it made Lizzie glad there was now no danger of the woman ever becoming her mother-in-law. But what did Lorna hope to achieve by being so nasty to poor Mum? For heaven’s sake, anyone would think Lizzie had murdered Simon the way his mother was carrying on! Mind you, she had to admit she was tempted to do just that after him stirring things up. She wondered who had spilled the not-so-pleasant beans to him. Odds on it had filtered through from Cal at Starlight, whose girlfriend worked at the same IT technical support company that Simon did.