by Fiona Walker
Too uncomfortable to care, she rubbed her cramping leg muscle and hoped her mother would survive the fall out if the summer romance was coming to a close. But Lucy’s temporary diversion from the road less travelled was the least of her worries in the light of what she’d just heard about death threats and impending financial disaster at Farcombe.
Crawling out of her hiding place, she tugged at the bracelet of sticky tape only to find it tightening like a tourniquet.
She could hear urgent voices in the main hall. Francis had discovered her disappearance.
‘She’s still terribly ill and delirious at times. She’s a danger to herself.’
Now Legs thought about it, she did feel distinctly ill. She was incredibly dizzy and chilled to her bones.
Footsteps were running all over the house now, voices shouting her name.
She hastily crept back through the service door, holding onto the walls for support. It took all her energy to retrace her steps through to the back lobby and up the rear stairs. The search party hadn’t started looking beyond the green baize yet, but Legs was feeling so rough now that she no longer cared if she was found as long as they gave her an arm to lean on and promised to catch her if she fainted. She crawled the last flight of back stairs on her hands and knees.
Nobody was on the landing when she crossed it and returned to her room, peeling off the hunt coat and balldress with arms as weak as string before kicking them under the bed, which she clambered into just as Francis charged back into the room.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Here,’ she said faintly, mustering a smile. She was drenched in icy sweat again. She was acutely aware that she still had a small, leather-bound notebook and a large amount of her own hair taped to her wrist, which she kept firmly under the covers.
‘You went missing.’
‘Perhaps you’re getting what I’ve had? I hope you’re not delirious and a danger to yourself.’ She closed her eyes, grateful for the blanket of exhausted darkness that immediately enfolded her.
Chapter 34
After her gruelling excursion, she slept for a couple of hours. Waking to hear a tray clanking its way towards her along the landing, she managed to wrestle the electrical tape from her wrist and hide the notepad under her pillow before Francis appeared with more clear soup. She ate it hungrily, although she was secretly dying for some of Imee’s cake that she’d smelled earlier. But Francis was insistent that she must follow his prescription for recovery, and she could hardly reveal that she’d been on the loose that day after all, sniffing the baking and eavesdropping on calamitous family secrets.
‘I think I could manage something sweet,’ she suggested.
‘No need to get into bad habits,’ Francis teased, having already wolfed his way through the huge steak baguette he’d brought up to keep her company. ‘You’ve lost so much weight, after all. You look fantastic.’
He picked up her hand and examined her reddened wrist. ‘Darling what have you been doing to yourself?’
It did look pretty horrific, the tight tape having left deep creases which were stained with the leather’s oxblood dye. It must have run while she’d sweated her way back upstairs after her break for freedom.
‘It’s nothing – touch of psoriasis,’ she lied. ‘I must scratch it in my sleep. All that poetry has been giving me incredibly vivid dreams.’
Looking at his creased brow, she had an unpleasant feeling that he now had her on suicide watch as well as runaway watch, meaning that she wouldn’t get to examine the contents of the little book beneath her pillow, let alone plan a better escape.
‘I keep dreaming about letters arriving,’ she fished, scratching her wrist for effect.
‘Well that’s hardly surprising.’ He removed her hand and patted it. ‘It was your love letter that brought us back together.’
‘In my dream, they’re death threats.’
‘Death threats?’ He looked alarmed.
‘And the house starts falling down around me as I read them, floors collapsing, walls caving in, ceilings coming down, that sort of thing. I think Gordon Lapis is there too.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘What a disturbing reverie.’
‘I’m sure it’s my unconscious mind trying to connect something,’ she insisted, studying his face for a reaction. ‘What do you think?’
He gave her a curious look. ‘I think you’re right. Perhaps you have had too much poetry recently. Good job I’ve found something else for us to look through.’
He’d brought up a lot of old photographs with him that evening, eager to reminisce far beyond the past fortnight. Soon, they were spread all over the bed like a patchwork quilt of memories.
Every photograph that featured her, Francis and their families happy and smiling made Legs doubt the messy blond stranger she now saw captured in front of her eyes. Given his recent comments about her looking so good for losing weight, she kept wondering if Francis had always wanted her to be thinner. Perhaps she should have developed pneumonia on a regular basis?
She was certainly no oil painting as a child, with her National Health specs and puppy fat. Christ, her legs were awful. The first bikini shot Francis had taken of her was a shocker – she looked like Alan Carr in a string two-piece – but she comforted herself with the fact that she’d been twelve with no boobs yet to speak of, and she was poking her tongue out. On closer examination, she stuck her tongue out for every photograph from the age of eight to fifteen. The sight of Francis as a teenager still flipped her heart over. He’d never suffered the greasy-skinned, spotty, bum-fluff moustache trauma of other teenage boys she knew. He had looked like something from a boy band, all floppy-haired, blue-eyed, cupid-lipped coy intensity. She’d fancied him so much. Her fingers now lifted a shot of him sitting moodily on the shelf of rock outside Lookout that could be a publicity poster for The O.C. She was sure she had the same picture in her ottoman at home; Ros had taken it during her arty photographer stage.
‘God, I was guileless, wasn’t I?’ He noticed her looking at it. ‘That was about the time I got stopped by a scout and asked to go into a model agency, but I couldn’t think of anything worse.’
‘Being stopped by a scout and asked if he can help you cross the road?’ she suggested idly, thinking him rather vain to remind her of the incident when the evidence was laid out in front of them that she’d spent most of her teens looking like Ugly Betty’s even uglier little sister.
It still baffled her why he had chosen her above all the others, above Ros and Daisy and assorted pretty friends who’d holidayed with them and had all harboured crushes on him. At the time, she’d probably questioned his choice less because it had just felt so exciting and right and she had loved him; they’d got on like two sparks from the start, always joking and talking, the age gap between them irrelevant because her sense of humour was so grown up and his sense of fun was so childlike. Now she looked back at printed reminders of herself, the baby of the group, so goofy and gauche and immature compared to the flicky-haired sleekness of his closer peers, she wondered why he’d looked at her twice. He’d seemed so shy and complex to her at the time, but the photographs suggested a self-confidence and charisma she’d never registered back then.
She studied shots of Francis now with his arm around her on the harbour-front, then at the beach, in this house, in the wooded garden at Spywood and on the terrace at Spycove. There they were lined up with the Foukes family when Nigel had still been alive – Daisy’s brother Freddie was holding up two fingers like rabbit ears behind her head, and Daisy herself was looking furiously sulky. Daisy had been so upset when Francis fell for Legs and not her. Her crush on him had been just as fierce and phosphorous as her younger friend’s after all. The two had compared their love for Francis Protheroe like a secret pact before the ultimate betrayal happened. Daisy remained jumpy on the subject even today, as well as being very protective of Francis.
‘Why did you ever fancy me?’ she asked now, holding up the tongue-p
oking Alan Carr in a bikini shot as evidence.
‘You were my best friend,’ he said simply. ‘I woke up one day realising I wanted to sleep with my best friend more than anything else in the world.’
‘But I was such a goof.’
His hand closed over hers. ‘You’ve got more beautiful every day that I’ve known you, Legs.’
‘I couldn’t have got much worse,’ she scoffed, quickly removing her hand and casting the bikini shot aside, embarrassed that she’d fished for that compliment so shamelessly and now wanted to cast it back out to sea.
Seeing their travel photographs, she couldn’t help but be transported back, remembering those budget mini-breaks that she’d worked loathsome weekend jobs to fund, and which had matured their fledgling romance from kiddy summer holidays to seasoned globe-trotting, or so they’d believed as the world opened out to them like a giant multi-lingual playground.
There were many European snaps of Francis and Legs dressed in the sort of student street fashion they had thought super-cool at the time, posing artily alongside smiling Pacamac tourists as they climbed the Eiffel Tower, crossed the River Danube, pretended to push over the leaning tower of Pisa and just stared and stared up at the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. Given their inability to work the camera’s timer and the unreliability of asking fellow sightseers to frame a shot, many had heads and ears cut off.
Legs studied them again closely. Francis looked the same in all of them, she suddenly noticed. There was that same floppy hair, always cut the same way, handsome as a pop pin-up, his wildest fashion gestures being to pull the white shirt from his jeans waistband and add a waistcoat. She’d always thought he was so trendy. She, meanwhile, appeared to have travelled to many of the most romantic capitals of Europe dressed as a bag lady with a different hair colour and hat on each occasion.
‘Am I wearing a tam-o’-shanter?’ She peered closely at herself posing wistfully by Oscar Wilde’s grave. ‘Christ, I’ve got a ruffle-front shirt on, too.’
‘That was during your Walter Scott phase. You’d been studying “The Lady of the Lake” at school that term.’
‘As Oscar said, “You can never be overdressed or over-educated” – and here is proof.’ She hastily moved on. ‘Oh look, here’s Bali! I loved that beach. And you don’t look nearly so boffinish here.’ He was sitting on a rickety hired moped, his linen shirt unbuttoned. Around his throat he wore a leather bootlace threaded with turquoise and green beads that she’d bought him from a street market. Skin tanned the colour of coffee and hair bleached white in the sun, he was incredibly foxy.
‘What do you mean “nearly so boffinish”?’
‘Finnish – Nordic, you know; pale,’ clearing her throat, she quickly changed the subject. ‘Wow! Look at that sunset over Angkor Wat. Was it really that colour?’
The Big Trip photographs were the most evocative, making her heart lift as she remembered the heat and buzz of the dusty road trips and the shimmering beauty of island hopping, dancing at midnight on the beaches in the firelight, slicing through perfect turquoise sea in rickety long boats, snorkelling through caves to dive for shells, and making love again and again and again, insatiable in their little beach hut rooms on stilts. She’d never been as brown as that before or since, she realised. Her teeth looked pure white in the photographs, her hair as blonde as Francis’s. And by that point in her life she had learned to artfully tie a sarong on one hip to detract from her vast thighs.
‘You look amazing here, he lifted a shot of her sunbathing topless, laughing into the camera and coyly covering her chest with crossed arms.
‘It was the happiest I can remember being in my life,’ she said honestly.
They hadn’t taken many photographs of their little London flat. Heading off to work for the first time was hardly like heading off to school, with indulgent parents lining up youngsters in the doorway wearing their crisp school uniforms. Nor had they taken shots of their very pretentious dinner parties, where they had served ‘truffle galettes avec jus’ on Woolworths plates to guests crammed around a wobbly table that was such a tight fit in their flat’s kitchen that the guest at one end ate in constant peril of falling out of the window.
But there were captured moments from family Christmases and birthdays and holidays spanning their five cohabiting years, and also many of the festival as it grew from tiny, friendly jazz gathering to highbrow arts clique. Legs and Francis with a famous dissident poet; Legs and Francis with a strange Siberian sculptor who fashioned all his work from reindeer milk, horsehair and goat dung; Legs and Francis with lots of drunken jazz musicians.
There was the engagement party they’d held at the Book Inn, a raucous all-nighter with live music and Prosecco flowing endlessly, and such fun, culminating in a brave few skinny dipping off the harbour walls at high tide. They were lucky they hadn’t got hauled in by the coastguards.
‘Did you bring the ring back here with you?’ Francis asked.
‘Um, no, it’s in my bedside drawer,’ she lied, knowing it was still crammed in the car’s glove compartment where it had been since the day he’d handed it back to her.
She felt the prickling heat of trepidation on her skin. Surely he hadn’t intended that ring-giving gesture as some sort of new proposal? She had admittedly taken it without argument, but that was because he’d walked off leaving the ring box in her hands before she could do a thing about it. If he had been asking her to marry him again, then had his entreaties to ‘say the word’ in fact not been about telling him she loved him, as she’d thought, but simply to say ‘yes’?
She had to get her hands on that letter and see what she had written so that she could start minimising the damage. She was also eager to know what his father had meant by saying ‘once Francis and Allegra marry’ like it was a done deal, but she still didn’t want to give away the fact she’d been wandering around the house eavesdropping. Equally, the little leather notebook was still burning a hole beneath the pillow behind her but she couldn’t hope to sneak a peek with Francis around, and he was showing no sign of budging.
Looking through the photographs had unsettled her, making her irritable and nit-picky, and badly in need of the loving comfort of her family.
‘I can’t believe my mother hasn’t been to see me in a whole fortnight,’ she grumbled. ‘She’s only ten minutes’ walk away.’
‘She’s not exactly welcome here right now,’ he reminded her.
‘Surely Poppy could call a truce on hostilities just to enable her to visit the sick? I’ve been very ill.’ She succumbed to a fit of coughing to prove her point.
‘That’s why you’re better off without visitors.’ Francis stood up to fetch her next dose of antibiotics which were due. ‘I’ve kept Lucy totally up to date.’
‘How is she? Please tell me the Spywood love-in is coming to an end?’
He refilled her glass with a long-suffering sigh. ‘They’re still behaving like children.’
Legs eyed him with suspicion, Hector’s loving entreaties for Poppy to take him back still fresh in her ears, along with his spiel about his adulterous road less travelled. ‘I shouldn’t think Mum was very happy about him brawling in the pub, or waving a gun at his stepson. Naturism is less idyllic with a black eye and a twelve-bore.’
She chewed her lip, now increasingly worried about her mother. Whatever Francis said, she suspected that the summer of love in Spywood Cottage had developed an autumn chill which meant clothes would have to be put on before both parties faced a wintry dressings down at their respective homes. It might be the outcome Legs had wanted, yet she guessed it would be no less painful for soft-hearted Lucy after the greatest rebellion of her life. She had no idea how distraught her mother might be right now, nor did she trust Francis to impart all the facts during his telephone updates. It seemed unlikely he’d reported that her younger daughter had suffered pneumonia, coughed up blood, been delirious, unable eat for ten days and seemed to have lost all her possessions. Even in the throes of heartb
reak, Lucy would have battled her way into the hall via the sea tunnel to find Legs had she known that.
Another fear was gripping her, one which she knew had little logic yet she still couldn’t shake off. If Byrne had come to Farcombe to enact some sort of revenge on Hector, surely her mother was in danger while she was still living under the same roof as him. The sooner he returned to the hall the better, she felt; she’d slip him a set of new keys personally if necessary.
‘Can you take me to the cottage to see her tomorrow?’ she asked now.
Francis predictably flashed a patronising smile and shook his handsome head; ‘You’re still far too ill to leave the house. You need to rest more. You look shattered, poor darling.’
I’ll just go without him, Legs decided recklessly. But even as she thought it, cold grey slabs of concrete weariness were boxing in her head.
He was right, she realised as tiredness mugged her. She was wiped out again. All this reminiscing and worrying was making her feel enervated. She increasingly resented her body for succumbing to such weakness, making her usually ox-like constitution so frail. Ten days ago she’d been able to run up the cliff path without breaking a sweat. Now she dripped with exhaustion after the slightest effort and the thought of running was laughable, even running away.
When she awoke after a doze, she saw that Francis was sitting across the room in the window seat watching her, the florescent pink and lilac sunset behind him as bright as a tacky neon sign. She couldn’t read the expression on his face at all.
‘I found your dressing up clothes,’ he said quietly.
‘My what?’
‘Under the bed. Uncle Larry’s hunt coat and a silky negligee.’
She could feel a blush stealing its way through her pallor, ‘I got cold in bed,’ she lied.
He sucked his lower lip thoughtfully. It was obvious he didn’t believe her, but he was too well-mannered to say so. ‘You just have to say, darling. I’ll fetch you another blanket.’
