Creature Comforts

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Yes, until drink and drugs got the better of her. Lisa, your mother, was very young when she came to live with Debo after your grandmother died and, unfortunately, she fell in with Fliss’s crowd and under her influence.’

  ‘That makes it a bit clearer,’ I said. ‘I can see now why Debo would be upset … and Fliss’s circle must have seemed very glamorous and irresistible to an impressionable young girl, so I understand better how she came to such a tragic end. Poor Lisa!’

  I sighed. ‘This must have raked up some unhappy memories for Debo. Baz always promised he’d leave her the Lodge and the land round it where she’s extended the kennels, and instead this son of Fliss Gambol has scooped the lot!’

  ‘She does have the Lodge for life, though, and Baz may have thought if he left her any money she’d spend it on even more dogs,’ Daisy said astutely. ‘Or if he gave her the Lodge outright, she’d mortgage it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I admitted, because Debo did tend to pour every penny that came her way (except for what Judy could snatch away for housekeeping) on her Debo’s Desperate Dogs Refuge. ‘Anyway, I’ll have to see when I get home. With Baz’s son having all the land, she won’t be able to keep as many dogs.’

  ‘I can’t see her being happy about that,’ Daisy said. ‘And I don’t think she’ll want to take any of the money your father left you, either, however desperate things are.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said, sitting up straighter. ‘You know, I believe meeting Kieran was a wrong turn. I confused what I wanted with what I was supposed to be doing.’

  Daisy smiled. ‘I think it all comes down to following your heart. But sometimes you also need to use your head.’

  ‘Both seem to be telling me to go back to Halfhidden and set up my mail-order company there. I want to go home at last, and not go away ever again,’ I finished.

  Daisy regarded me thoughtfully. ‘Hmm … that might still be the shock talking and the cold feet about the wedding. But time will tell.’

  ‘It will – and there’s something else I’m going to do when I get home, that I should have done years ago: I’m going to meet the past head-on,’ I said with new resolution.

  ‘You mean, the accident?’

  ‘Yes, I want to fill in the blank bits and try to understand why I was driving that night. I mean, I remember clearly that I was working in the pub with Lulu and Cam and that I left to walk home early, because my old dog, Patch, was ill. And then in the car park I passed the red Range Rover and Harry invited me to the party at Sweetwell. I told him I couldn’t, though that bit’s fuzzy … and then I remember absolutely nothing until I came out of the induced coma in hospital weeks later.’

  ‘But you’ve been told what happened?’

  ‘Yes, mainly by Lulu and Cameron, because by the time I’d convalesced with you and got home again, no one ever mentioned it to me – it was like the elephant in the room. Even Judy and Debo didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Well, they did think at one point they’d lost you, so it isn’t surprising that they wanted to put the whole tragedy behind them.’

  ‘Perhaps, but because I can’t remember what happened, it’s always made it very hard for me to accept what I did and move on. So now I’m going to talk to those most involved, especially Cara and Simon. I haven’t seen Simon since then and Cara’s always avoided me, or cut me dead. Lulu says it’s because she blamed me for the scar on her face that ended her hope of being a model,’ I added. ‘Lulu and I were amazed when she married Sir Lionel Cripchet after she left Oxford University, because he is more than twice her age and horrible! But his estate, Grimside, is only the other side of the hill from Halfhidden, so at least it means she lives nearby.’

  ‘I can see where you’re coming from and the need for closure,’ Daisy said, ‘but sometimes it really is better to let things lie. Cara’s anger is probably based on guilt because she was sober enough to realise that you shouldn’t be driving, yet she let Harry persuade you.’

  ‘If I really was driving,’ I said, looking up at her. ‘Because the thing is, Daisy, in that flashback I had, I wasn’t. I was in the back seat, with Cara.’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, leaning across and squeezing my hand, ‘that might not have been a genuine flashback, because don’t forget that the first two people on the scene after the crash said you were in the driver’s seat, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, though I don’t trust Simon’s father, Dan Clew, in the least … but Tom Tamblyn said so too, so I suppose you’re right,’ I sighed. ‘Tom has always been my friend.’

  A message popped into my phone and I looked at it for a long moment. ‘Kieran. His mother must have got hold of him and – well, he’s not pleased with me, let’s put it like that. She’s on her way to spring Douglas from the clink, but Kieran says his father will lose his driving licence and probably be prosecuted, so it will make his life very difficult.’

  ‘That’s not your fault, is it? I expect Kieran will see sense once he’s had time to think of it from your viewpoint.’

  ‘He’ll have to, because I’m not shouldering the blame for things I didn’t do, when I still have to come to terms with the things I did,’ I said.

  Before I went to bed I rang Lulu.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s all gone horribly wrong,’ she said when I’d told her my news, ‘but I’m really glad you’re coming home because we all need you! And if you’re back tomorrow, you can be at my Halfhidden Regeneration Scheme meeting on Tuesday, can’t you? It’s in the Village Hut.’

  ‘Regeneration?’ I echoed and she said mysteriously that she’d taken some of my ideas about involving the whole village and run with them.

  ‘Cam has to teach an evening watercolour class in Ormskirk, so he’ll probably get there only for the very end of the meeting, though he knows all about it. He’s been helping me draw up maps and stuff. So I’ll really need your support,’ she added, refusing to be drawn on the details.

  ‘Are you upset about Kieran?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes – no, I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I did fall in love with him and … somehow, I seem to have just as suddenly fallen out of love again. Or perhaps I fell in love with a Kieran who didn’t really exist.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ she said sadly. ‘I never want to fall in love again. My friend Solange says that that woman Guy’s living with keeps coming into the café and crying into her coffee, and it’s rumoured they’re having huge rows.’

  Lulu’s ex, Guy, was still occupying the house in the Dordogne from which she’d finally fled. He’d assumed she’d left because she’d found out about his affair, but she’d had no idea till afterwards, when her friend in the village told her the woman had moved in. Still, at least it meant that he left her alone.

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ I said.

  ‘No, Guy was always a mistake – a controlling, bullying mistake, and I’m glad I got away.’

  ‘With Cam,’ I said slightly pointedly, for I knew their old friendship had taken a slightly different turn on their journey home from France.

  ‘Cam has been a huge comfort to me, but we don’t want to rush into anything and spoil the friendship we have … I mean, it’s always been the three of us, hasn’t it? And we all need space to get our lives back on track.’

  ‘True,’ I agreed. ‘Time will tell – about many things!’

  Chapter 3: Moving Pictures

  ‘No we don’t need her,’ snapped Cara from the back seat of the Range Rover. She was tall, ice-princess-fair, beautiful, nineteen, and hated Harry showing interest in any other girl. She hadn’t deigned even to acknowledge my callow, adolescent presence when I’d been out in the beer garden earlier collecting empty glasses, though Harry and Simon had said hello …

  I woke with a start and sat bolt upright, heart thumping, for my hazy dream, as familiar as an old friend, seemed to have come more sharply into focus, revealing words and details I’d previously forgotten … if they were memories and not, as Daisy had implied about
the previous day’s flashback, something conjured up by my subconscious.

  Cara Ferris was the only witness with clear recollections of all that had happened and I was going to do my best to get them out of her, one way or another …

  I lay back for a few minutes, listening to the faint sounds of Daisy, who was a very early riser, clashing about in the basement kitchen. It was strangely soothing. My inner body clock was totally messed up after the long flight back and I wasn’t sure quite what time it thought it was now, except that all at once I was ravenously hungry.

  There were no further messages from Kieran on my phone, but he would by now be well on his way home. I’d sent him a brief reply last night, saying that once he’d thought about things calmly, he must see that I couldn’t have acted any differently and that the crash had not only come as a great shock, but brought back memories of my previous one.

  Then I’d added that I was heading home to Halfhidden, and left it at that. His move next – and I think he owed me a major apology for his last text.

  Before our arguments reached their recent crescendo, he’d had the habit of leaving a loving ‘Good morning, darling!’ message on my phone for me to wake up to every day. He had one of those fancy watches that told you the time wherever you were, though he was quite lazy, so I suspected he’d found some kind of app that worked the time difference out and sent the message for him … only now he appeared to have turned it off, along with the charm.

  After all these years, it left a Kieran-sized hole in my morning.

  I rang home after breakfast and got Judy, as I’d expected. Debo would be out in the kennels with Sandy, the kennelmaid, but on weekday mornings Judy could usually be found in the kitchen, baking bread and cakes that never seemed to have any effect on either Debo’s figure or mine, only on her own expanding girth. Judy didn’t care, though: she’d given up her struggle against weight gain, along with her career on the stage, when she’d moved in to help her best friend with my childcare, the housekeeping and their shared passion for rescuing dogs.

  When I told her I’d be home some time that afternoon, she expressed mild surprise.

  ‘I thought you were going to go and stay with Kieran’s parents in Oxford first?’

  ‘There’s been a slight change of plan … or even a big change of plan. I’ll tell you both about it when I get back. Did my boxes arrive? There should be three of them. One’s got fabrics and some sample dresses I had made up in it.’

  ‘Yes, all safe and sound and in your studio,’ she told me.

  Debo and Judy had created the studio-den out of the old conservatory at the side of the house as a welcome-home surprise for me when I’d returned from Daisy’s after my convalescence. She’d told them how interested I’d become in textiles, so they’d installed an old sofa, a small handloom, an easel and a scrubbed pine table, on which sat an antique black Singer sewing machine inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I’d cried when I saw it, but in a good way …

  ‘Debo will be pleased to hear you’re coming home today and now I know, I’ll bake your favourite coffee walnut cake.’

  ‘All your cakes are my favourite,’ I said, for while Judy’s loaves tended to be dark, dense affairs that took a fair bit of chewing, her cakes and scones were so light they practically floated off the plate.

  ‘If you tell me what time your train gets in I’ll come and meet it,’ she offered.

  ‘I’ll ring you just before I get there,’ I promised.

  As the train ate up the miles between London and Lancashire, my heart lightened. My decisions, too, seemed just as valid now they were exposed to the daylight, especially since there had been no further word from Kieran.

  By now he should be back in the UK, although unless his mother picked him up from the airport, he’d have to go to Oxford on the train, because presumably his father was grounded.

  I sighed, looking out of the dirty window at a watercolour-grey sky. I sort of missed Kieran, though perhaps I just missed the familiarity of having him in my life. But if he really loved me, I supposed he would follow me north – by which time I hoped to have laid Harry’s ghost to rest and made a new beginning.

  I really wasn’t looking forward to the first of those interviews with the others involved in the accident, but my inner voice, now I had tuned in again, assured me that it was the right thing to do. So I took out the spiral-bound notebook I’d bought at the station and began to jot down a list of the people involved in the accident that I needed to talk to.

  At the head, of course, were Cara and Simon, the two most important witnesses, though Cara definitely wouldn’t want to speak to me and I had no idea where Simon was working. The last I’d heard, he was under-gardener at some big National Trust property in the south.

  The next two witnesses in order of importance were Dan Clew, Simon’s father, the Sweetwell gardener who had pulled me out of the wreckage of the car, and Tom Tamblyn, who’d arrived just in time to see him do it. I dreaded trying to talk to the horrible Dan. He’d accosted me soon after I’d come home from my convalescence with Daisy and almost shattered my fragile and hard-won equilibrium by telling me no one wanted me back in Halfhidden and to leave Simon, alone. However, now, I was no longer a fragile sixteen-year-old but a confident woman of the world in her mid-thirties, so I would give it a go even though he probably wouldn’t tell me anything anyway, or if he did, it would be unreliable. But I’d believe Tom, if only I could get him to open up about what he saw. He was my friend Cam’s uncle and, along with his father, Jonas, keeper of the Lady Spring in the Sweetwell woods.

  Apart from them, there were just Lulu, Cam, Debo and Judy, who might add a bit of peripheral detail. I decided I’d get those interviews done first and out of the way, before I got to the trickier and more important ones.

  Judy was waiting patiently at Ormskirk station for me in her battered estate car, sitting on the open tailgate along with two old friends: a one-eyed, white bull terrier called Vic, and Ginger, a drooling rotty-boxer cross, who were the current house dogs. Also, staring mournfully out was a large, shaggy mountain of black fur.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ I said, holding back the two dogs from jumping out, and already slightly covered in dog drool and hair from their enthusiastic welcome. Judy, smallish and plumply pear-shaped, was clad in tartan trousers of a shrieking orange shade that was unlikely ever to have been worn by any Scottish clan, and which echoed the hennaed colour of her madly curling hair. When I kissed her, she smelled of roses as usual, though since she lived in the permanent doggy fug of the cottage, I could never work out how she managed it.

  ‘That’s Babybelle,’ she said. ‘There’s a Newfoundland in there somewhere, under the hair and blubber. She lay on her last owner’s small child and nearly suffocated it, so they were all for having her put down, till someone contacted Debo.’

  ‘She’s so vast I don’t suppose she even noticed the child was there and she seems friendly enough,’ I said, stroking her. She heaved herself up into a sitting slump and licked my hand.

  ‘Oh, she’s daft as a brush and wouldn’t hurt a fly on purpose. But I think she must have been fed a diet of junk food, because she was even fatter and in really poor condition. She’s already lost a stone.’

  ‘She looks very sad,’ I said, stroking her head. Her eyes were like lumps of dark, moist amber.

  ‘They’re supposed to be faithful, one-person dogs, so she’s probably missing her owners, even if they were useless – but she certainly seems to like you.’

  She pushed the dogs back and closed the hatch door. Then she added, as she turned the car out of the short-stay car park and headed towards home, ‘Perhaps you could be in charge of Babybelle once you’ve settled in? She needs encouraging to take exercise.’

  ‘I could take her out a bit,’ I agreed cautiously, because since my dog Patch died I’d avoided getting too attached to any of the dogs, mostly because I was away so much.

  I looked round, and saw a flat, black, furry face and two s
ad amber-brown eyes staring through the mesh of the dog guard at me. She whined. At least, I hoped it was Babybelle and she wasn’t lying on the other two dogs.

  We drove through the sizeable village of Middlemoss and turned into the high-hedged lane that would lead eventually to the Screaming Skull Hotel and the turn up the valley to Halfhidden.

  ‘How is everything?’ I asked. ‘Debo sounded very upset about Baz’s will and this new heir suddenly appearing on the scene.’

  ‘She certainly is, but I’ll tell you all about it when we get home, because Debo said we needed a council of war.’

  ‘Has this man actually arrived?’

  ‘Well, he’s been up a couple of times, but he hasn’t moved in yet, since he has to relocate his business from Devon first. Garden antiques, apparently.’

  ‘So, you’ve met him?’

  ‘I have, but Debo was away working when he was around. A magazine flew her to the Maldives for a shoot – it’s all right for some! – and then she had a cameo role in a film. Anyway, we’ll save that for later, or I’ll be repeating myself.And then you can tell us both what’s brought you home early, because I can see something’s up.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed, and she began to update me on the local gossip, though of course I’d heard some of it as Lulu and Cam had been emailing me all the time now they were back living in the village.

  ‘I was going to give a talk in the Village Hut tomorrow, on knitting with dog hair,’ Judy said, dawdling behind a slow tractor, ‘but Lulu’s plans seemed more urgent so she’s talking tomorrow and I’ll give mine later. You know about Lulu’s meeting?’

  ‘Yes, but she was very mysterious and wouldn’t go into details. The Halfhidden Regeneration Scheme sounds very grand.’

  ‘We’re all agog to know what she’s up to.’

  ‘I gather it’s part of her plans for expanding the Haunted Weekend breaks into week-long Haunted Holidays.’

  ‘Then it’ll be interesting to find out how that will regenerate the whole of Halfhidden, won’t it?’ Judy said. ‘Did you know that old Jonas has moved to live with his daughter, Lottie, behind the shop and Cameron has gone to take his place at the cottage by the Spring?’