The Love Letter

by Fiona Walker

  He stared at the spilling roll of cash she’d pressed into his hand. ‘Italian lire?’

  ‘No! Not that! Hang on …’ She felt deeper in the pockets, scrabbling past the bassoon reeds and the lighter which clicked open as she fumbled. The next moment there was a hissing whoosh and her pocket combusted, mothballs igniting like little tinder petrol bombs. ‘Agh!’

  Byrne had lightning reactions. Before she could even take in what was going on, he’d dragged off the tailcoat, thrown it to the ground and was stamping on it.

  As soon as the little blaze was out, he took her hand very gently in his to examine it. Apart from a red thumb and a broken nail, it was unharmed. The coat, meanwhile, was a smouldering wreck, its pocket totally burned out.

  Legs looked down at it, suddenly wanting to cry. ‘I found Hector’s betting system. He wrote it all down in a little book, but I’ve just torched it, so now you have no reason to believe me when I say he had nothing to do with race fixing. He had money on your father to win on a horse called Thelonious Monk.’

  ‘I know,’ he said tersely.

  Before she could question this, he held his fingers up to his lips again. Jenni Murray was interviewing a breast-is-best advocate at close range now as the little car bounced over the woodland track potholes just beyond the brash. They listened as she shared an anecdote about maternity bra clips.

  ‘It’s just my mother coming back,’ Legs whispered to Byrne.

  ‘Is Hector with her?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ She eyed him nervously, wondering what he might do to Hector if he was there. Was that why he was here out in the woods, about to spring his revenge? Was there a booby trap already set? She sucked her burned thumb, which was starting to throb quite badly now.

  ‘How did you get his notebook?’ Byrne was craning to catch a sight of the car.

  ‘It was taped under his desk.’

  His eyebrows shot up, but he kept his gaze trained on the track. ‘Did you drive here?’

  ‘My keys are locked inside my car. It’s a long story. Nobody followed me, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I don’t drive a red car any more,’ she added brightly, eager to reassure him that she wasn’t bad karma.

  ‘I know that,’ he replied drily, finally turning to look at her.

  ‘How do you … Oh. My. God.’

  He lifted his finger to his mouth as the penny dropped in Legs’ head amid a gold rush of gratitude and repressed squealing. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ she whispered in amazement. ‘You gave me a car! That was so kind!’

  ‘All the better to drive away from me in quickly.’ He glanced over his shoulder as the car engine on the track fell silent, his voice dropping to an urgent undertone. ‘Now you must go.’

  ‘How can I go without thanking you properly, and helping you with all this? You gave me a car! I can’t believe I thought it was Francis.’

  ‘Shh!’ He held up his hand, listening to angry voices drifting through the woods.

  But it was just the car radio which Lucy had left on, no doubt listening to the last few minutes of the breast-is-best debate, which now featured a furious male interviewee ranting that it was a public decency offence. Moments later, Jenni was plugging the scone-baking feature on tomorrow’s show and the radio was switched off.

  Now they could hear nothing except the breeze in the tree-tops, the distant waves raking the shingle and the gulls crying out greedily and mournfully.

  ‘Why do you want to get rid of me so badly?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘You’re hurt.’ He turned to her, voice barely more than a hiss of breath. ‘Go and see your mother. You need to soak that hand.’

  ‘Come with me.’ She couldn’t bear the idea of him disappearing, leaving so many unanswered questions, ‘Hector’s obviously not with her.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Just come for a cup of tea,’ suddenly the thought of her first cup of tea in a fortnight almost made her weep with joy, but she didn’t want to let him slip away. ‘You’ll like Mum.’

  ‘I do like her.’

  She stared at him in amazement. He kept doing that to her, taking facts she told him and revealing that he already knew them. Well two could play at that game, she decided, as anger and fear coursed through her. She’d show him just how insightful Julie Ocean was and just how brave she could be when fighting to protect her loved ones.

  ‘So you’ve befriended her to get closer to Hector, have you?’ she challenged. ‘I might have guessed. You did the same to me that first night, after all, wheedling all that information out of me to further your cause. And now you’re here spying on him, desperate not to have me blow your cover. What are you planning to do? Leap out from behind a tree and cudgel him?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said witheringly. ‘He’s got a gun.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Legs gasped, clutching her chest in horror. ‘Has it come to that?’

  He gave her a dubious look, uncertain if she was teasing him or not. ‘He’s been out since dawn bagging pheasants for a big dinner Poppy’s hosting in a couple of days. Peace offering, I think.’

  Realising her mistake, she breathed out with relief. ‘It won’t be very well hung.’

  ‘How unlike Hector,’ he muttered sarcastically. ‘Poppy called me last night to tell me about the party and let slip that she intends to come here today and demand that your mother relinquishes Hector before aperitifs. Apparently they’ve recently exchanged letters; it’s all very Jane Austen. That’s why I’m hanging around here. I thought it best to be close by in case it’s more Pride and Prejudice than Sense and Sensibility. Poppy gets very overwrought away from the house.’ There was genuine concern in his voice.

  ‘In that case, what are we waiting for?’ She stooped down and gathered basset hound Fink in her arms, buckling under the weight. He was as heavy as a sack of wet sand and already enthusiastically washing her face.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Kidnapping your dog.’ She stumbled off as fast as her weary legs would carry her, grateful that she had planned for just this eventuality.

  Chapter 36

  When Legs burst into Spywood Cottage carrying a tail-wagging basset hound, her mother was sitting naked at the table writing a letter on blue paper, a glass of white wine at her side despite the morning hour. Tears were streaming down her face.

  ‘Legs! Darling!’ She looked up in shock. ‘I heard you were still bed-ridden. You look terrible.’

  ‘I’m much better, thanks.’ She averted her eyes from her mother’s full frontal.

  ‘What on earth are you doing with Fink?’ Lucy made a hopeless attempt at false cheer, mopping her cheeks with the tablecloth, then squealed and held the cloth to her chin to preserve modesty as she spotted Byrne racing in after her daughter. ‘Goodness! What drama here at Spywood. Hi, Jago. Is everything OK?’

  ‘I could ask you the same.’ He immediately took in the tear-streaked cheeks, the wine and the letter, which she was now sweeping beneath today’s unread Guardian.

  ‘You two do know each other?’ Legs gasped, dropping Fink on a sofa and collapsing onto it with him for a moment, her lungs scorching again and the room spinning.

  ‘We met on the beach when I was painting,’ Lucy sniffed shakily. ‘Glass of wine?’

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ Legs took a few bolstering hot breaths ready to cross the room, but Jago held up his hand, already heading into the recessed kitchen to put on the kettle.

  He seemed remarkably au fait with the cottage layout, Legs realised distractedly, but she was more concerned that her mother’s nakedness, entirely visible from the back, was now inches from Byrne as he searched for teabags. Lucy was looking tearful again. ‘It’s j-just lovely to see you, darling. I’ve left so many unreturned messages on your mobile; I thought you’d stopped t-talking to me.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said croakily. ‘My phone’s been locked in the car all week.’

  ‘And I’ve been feeling too shame-faced to question it,’ Lu
cy gasped. ‘I was desperate to come and see you, but I was told I wasn’t wanted.’

  Without warning, a wave of empathy coursed through Legs with such force it swept her off the sofa like flotsam, and she launched herself across the room to give her mother a mammoth hug, wrapping her in the tablecloth as she went, complete with the Guardian, writing paper, spilled white wine and a small vase of wild musk mallows.

  It was the best of all hugs – tight-armed, tearful, laughing, loving, all wrapped up in a length of old William Morris-print cotton that had seen the family through a plethora of meals and crises. Legs wanted to stay there for ever despite the white wine dripping into her crotch and the musk mallows on her head.

  When Byrne placed tea mugs on the bare scrubbed boards of the table beside them, mother and daughter broke apart, palms cupping each other’s cheeks. Legs’ eyes slid gratefully towards him, but he’d already melted out of range as her mother kept her face locked forwards, eyes brimming with emotion.

  ‘I hoped I might finally get to see you at the big house this morning, but I was rather ambushed.’

  ‘You’ve been to the hall?’ Legs asked, trying not to cough.

  ‘I knew Poppy intended to come and talk to me today and I was so worried about it I didn’t sleep a wink last night,’ she admitted shakily. ‘So I thought I’d go myself and save her the fright of trying to get out of the front door.’

  ‘Was it awful?’

  ‘It was strangely civilised. I think she was so relieved not to have to leave the house that she welcomed me like an old friend, even though I was there to apologise for having an affair with her husband. And you know how gushing she is with everyone, even if she hates one’s guts. She’s terribly lonely. We had coffee on the terrace and compared notes on Hector. He really is a very difficult man. Poppy says he absolutely has it in for poor Jago.’

  Again Legs tried to look for Byrne to catch his eye, but her mother still had her in a loving headlock.

  ‘It’s strange to learn so much about oneself from one’s most headstrong child,’ Lucy smiled sadly at Legs, pulling her closer so their noses touched. ‘I thought you were utterly mad leaving Francis, when I had adored his older doppelganger all those years. Now I can see how wrong I was in imagining he would be an easy man to love.’

  Legs eyes’ crossed as she tried to fix her mother with a meaningful look. ‘Actually I have escap—’

  And you’re together again!’ Lucy finally let go of Legs’ cheeks so she could clutch her daughter’s hands in hers and kiss them jubilantly, making her burnt thumb throb. ‘You are so brave. So brave and true. You and Francis have that spark of magic that endures and forgives errors of judgement. Like Poppy and Hector.’ She sat back down with a troubled sigh.

  Coughing hoarsely, Legs looked around for Byrne, but he’d vanished, leaving a large bowl of iced water on the scrubbed oak beside her. Fighting not to wail in frustration that he’d deserted her, she plunged her reddened thumb into the water where it practically sizzled before dropping its needles of pain away like a diffused magnet.

  ‘You look so terribly pale.’ Her mother was regarding her closely across the table, still wrapped in the William Morris cloth like a sarong. ‘I wish I’d been allowed to see you.’

  ‘Did Francis really say I didn’t want you to come?’ Eyes still scanning the room, she noticed that the front door was still open and realised Byrne must have slipped out again.

  ‘He said no visitors,’ Lucy sighed. ‘I tried to get more out of him, but you know what the mobile reception is like here. At least I knew you’d be getting the best possible care. Francis seems over the moon you came back to him.’

  ‘Francis isn’t the reason I came back,’ Legs laid claim to her tea, too drained and bereft to waste time going into detail. She hugged the warm mug in her free hand and breathed in its steam, wanting to spin out the pleasure, knowing Byrne had made it. He’d given her a car and made her a mug of tea. Both took on equal importance right now, her mismatched tokens of a mismatched love.

  Then she heard a guttural snort and spotted Fink working his way forensically around the kitchen recess vacuuming up crumbs and she suddenly found herself beaming from ear to ear. If he’d left the dog, he had to be planning to return.

  ‘I do love bassets,’ Lucy followed her gaze. ‘They remind me of your father. Fink and Jago stop to talk to me on the beach most days; I gather he’s camping nearby. He came in here and fixed the trip switch once – you know how antediluvian that board is with its awful fuse wires; only your father ever understood it because he grew up with one just like it. Jago turns out to be exactly the same. Hector is utterly impractical with such things.’ Her face crumpled once more.

  ‘Is it over between you two?’

  She shrugged sadly, big bluebell eyes draped in shadowy lashes. ‘Hector is terribly difficult to live with, you know. In concentration, he’s far more contrary than I ever imagined, and so boorish. What starts out as a lively conversation inevitably becomes a lecture. He’s just so hyper critical, and he is such a baby.’

  ‘Sounds like Francis,’ Legs sighed before succumbing to another coughing fit.

  ‘He calls me “domestic” as an insult,’ Lucy ranted on, ‘but I like being domestic. “The practical aesthete”, Dorian has always called me. I trained as a picture restorer after all. Art is a practical process. It requires hard work. God, I miss your father.’

  ‘He misses you.’

  Lucy said nothing, doubt etched on her face. She looked unspeakably tired, her sleepless night having ravaged her hollow cheeks and drawn the darkest of rings beneath her eyes. Legs reached her free hand across to take her mother’s.

  ‘So it’s really, really over?’ She tried to disguise the hope in her voice.

  ‘Almost,’ she offered uncertainly through the waves of high emotion. ‘We’re mature creatures; we don’t “dump” each other like your generation – it’s more of an osmosis. Nobody gave us a date for summer’s lease running short, although we knew it would end; certainly if you and Francis reunited.’

  ‘Was that always the plan?’

  She shook her head guiltily, squeezing Legs’ hand tightly in hers. ‘I only wish we were so noble. That was simply the excuse.’

  Legs returned the pressure.

  ‘But you are back together!’ Lucy laughed tearfully. ‘Francis says you’ve even taken your engagement ring back.’

  Legs’ eyes widened. ‘The phone signal must have been remarkably good when he called to tell you that.’

  ‘He came to the cottage in person not long after you left for London. Francis said you had his mother’s ring and that you two were still very much in love. Hector told him you’d have to return to Farcombe to prove it, and now you have.’

  She shook her head violently, coughs racking her chest again, ‘That’s not right. I simply didn’t know what to do with it for the best. When a man gives you a ring it’s like taking a part of his heart, isn’t it?’

  If she expected her mother to pick up on the unhappiness in her cough-ridden voice, she was mistaken, as Lucy’s thoughts went straight to Dorian, lifting her hand to study her own trio of rings, engagement wedding and eternity. ‘Your father will be so pleased! He just adores Francis. Having him as a son-in-law will make up for all this upset.’

  There was a low, welcoming woof from the sofa, and Legs looked round to see Byrne standing in the doorway. If he’d heard any of the preceding conversation, his face gave nothing away. Crossing the room, he put the tailcoat on the table, no longer smouldering but smelling strongly of charred mothballs, wool and paper.

  ‘I found the notebook.’ He placed it carefully alongside the coat like forensic evidence, the red leather cover blistered around charred pages.

  Still numb from her mother’s proclamation, praying that Byrne hadn’t heard it, Legs managed a nervous smile. Coughs ripped through her again.

  ‘You are the very best of research assistants.’ He didn’t look very pleased about it, ta
king her hand which she’d been waving around for emphasis while talking to her mother and putting it back in the water.

  Across the table, Lucy stood up with a great scraping of chair and scattering of more mallow as she tugged the tablecloth around her. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just pop upstairs and get dressed.’ She picked up her writing paper and pen. ‘Maybe I’ll have a little lie down first. I have something important to think over.’ She tripped her way up, trailing a vase, two candlesticks and a rapidly unfolding G2.

  Leg continued staring fixedly at Byrne, one hand in a bowl of water once again.

  He stared back, waiting until Lucy had closed the bedroom door audibly upstairs. Then he held up the notebook. ‘Hector laid a huge bet on my father to win the day he fell.’

  ‘So I was right! He can’t have been responsible for his accident?’

  ‘Oh, Hector was still to blame,’ he said bleakly. ‘Why d’you think he put so much money on the horse?’

  She looked at him questioningly.

  ‘He had an insider tip.’ He remained unblinking. ‘It was my father who told him to back it in the first place.’

  Legs hand flew to her mouth in surprise, splashing drops everywhere.

  ‘Hector loved the races so much, he bought a couple of point-to-pointers on a neighbour’s advice to keep with a local jockey who’d started training. That was Dad. It was over twenty years ago. The neighbour was Goblin Granny. They all partied together regularly.’

  ‘So Hector knew Poppy before the accident?’

  ‘The first spark of attraction dates back to those early days.’ He reached out and took her hand, making her heart rev excitedly, but he was just steering it back to soak in its water bath again, his face set with anger. ‘Hector plays a long game. Look at your mother.’