by Emlyn Rees
Despite the fire roaring in the fireplace behind Christopher, the room – which had always been the cosiest and most friendly in the large house – gave Rachel no comfort today. In the corner, a shiny grand piano was laden with framed photographs of her family. Four low, comfortable sofas, upholstered in cream leather were dotted around the room. Thick drapes hung at each of the two large picture windows, which looked out over the lawns to the misty paddock beyond. And everywhere, in every vase, huge floral tributes from family and friends filled the air with the scent of lilies and roses.
‘Anton,’ she explained, noticing that her eldest son was going bald on top, as he bent over the tray. He’d inherited her natural red hair, although while hers was still a thick auburn mane, thanks to her monthly visits to her trusted colourist at the Knightsbridge salon, Christopher’s hair had always been a weaker ginger version, which he’d kept in the same combed-over style since he’d been a chorister.
Her son, Rachel mused, as she opened another of the thick cream envelopes on the pile beside her, was not ageing particularly well. In her opinion he’d looked his best when he was seven. It didn’t help that as an adult, he’d developed the pinched, poker face of his profession as a barrister. Now in his mid-forties, he still had a resemblance to his father, but had none of Tony’s ruggedness, none of the scars, none of the charisma in his features that had made Tony so handsome.
‘You got rid of him rather fast,’ Christopher said, walking over and handing her a cup and saucer. ‘Are you sure this isn’t too much? I’d be happy to take phone calls for you, if only you’d let me?’
Rachel pretended not to hear him, reading another of the condolence cards. She accepted the coffee from him, without looking at him. ‘From the Richards. Couldn’t they have done better than a Hallmark card? I mean, these verses. Ugh! They make me want to die myself, they’re so bad.’ She threw the card down.
‘At least they sent a card and flowers. If they hadn’t you’d have –’
‘I know, I know. I would have struck them off, despite thirty years of friendship.’
‘I don’t know what you want from everyone, Mother.’
‘I don’t want anything. I don’t want anyone to mention it.’
‘But –’
‘Try and understand, Christopher. This is just the way it is. If they say something, it’s wrong, if they don’t say something, it’s wrong. I’m being what your father would call difficult.’
Christopher was silent and Rachel felt a pang of guilt. The fire crackling in the grate seemed extraordinarily loud.
‘I haven’t seen Lucy today,’ she said, eventually, referring to Christopher’s wife.
Christopher cleared his throat. ‘She’s a bit upset, you know, with the baby not sleeping.’
Rachel took a sip of coffee and placed the cup down gently on the saucer. She’d been wrenched out of another Xanax-induced sleep by Thomas’s screams last night. ‘It’s time Lucy got that child into a routine,’ Rachel said. ‘I told her as much.’
‘I know,’ Christopher said, his icy tone not hiding his disapproval.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m saying what needs to be said. She’s creating a rod for her own back.’
‘It’s not that easy, Mother.’
‘He’s only a baby, for God’s sake. He doesn’t have to have his every whim attended to. The sooner you get it under control, the easier he’ll be and the happier you’ll be.’
Christopher appeared to be biting his tongue and Rachel had to swallow her irritation. She could imagine him venting his frustration with Lucy upstairs, pacing back and forth and ranting about his mother. But Rachel didn’t care. If only Christopher would have the balls to stand up to her, then everything would be OK. But he never had, and probably never would.
‘Tell me you disagree and I won’t mention it again.’
Christopher wouldn’t look her in the eye.
‘Exactly. Children need a firm hand,’ Rachel said, the irony of her words not lost on either of them, as she picked up the pile of envelopes beside her and began to flick through them once more.
Left alone, Rachel sighed and took her glasses off again. She rubbed her fingertips over her eyebrows and under her eyes, which felt puffy. Even so, she knew she didn’t look as bad as she felt. Most people, when they met her assumed that she was in her mid-fifties, never suspecting that she was a decade older.
‘I know, I know,’ she said aloud, talking to Tony. ‘I’m being bad-tempered, but you’ve no idea how much there is to organise.’
Rachel shook her head and smiled, imagining the look Tony would have given her. It was almost as if she could sense his presence. As if this was all a joke and he was real and alive.
‘This is all so bloody stressful and it’s your fault!’
‘Mum! Who are you talking to?’
Rachel was startled to see her youngest son was watching her from the doorway.
‘Nick,’ she said, standing up. ‘I didn’t hear you arrive.’
She went to greet him, reaching up to hold both his shoulders. He was tanned, his skiing trip cut short by his father’s death. His fair hair had lightened in the sun. He was approaching forty, yet he still held on to the playboy good looks which matched his frivolous lifestyle. Rachel was about to ask him whether he had a companion in tow, but when she kissed his cheek, a sob escaped him and she drew back to see his handsome face crumple with grief.
Rachel inwardly groaned and held him, his weight heavy on her. She wasn’t used to seeing men in tears. Tony had never wept – except with joy. He’d coped with everything life had thrown at him with courage and steely determination. Why couldn’t his children be more like him and pull themselves together? And if Nick was like this, she dreaded to think how Claire would be when she arrived from Palma for the funeral. Every time Rachel had called in the past week, Claire had sounded as if she’d completely gone to pieces.
Eventually, Rachel managed to wriggle out from underneath her son and, taking his hand, she led him gently to the sofa by the fire. Benson, who had stirred when Nick had entered the room, circled his patch on the rug again and flopped down. He raised an unimpressed eyebrow at Nick and snorted.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nick said, as Rachel plucked a tissue from the silver holder on the mantelpiece and offered it to her son. ‘It’s just that I didn’t say goodbye to him. I didn’t see him one last time. He never knew –’
Why didn’t this move her? Why didn’t she feel anything but a vague sense of disconnection? She almost wanted to laugh and tell her son that this was all another hoax of Tony’s.
‘I can’t believe it either.’
‘But how will we . . . how will we live without him?’
‘We’ll get through this,’ she reassured him, but she knew she sounded phoney even to herself. So instead, she asked Nick about the details of the skiing trip. But Nick’s mind, which was usually so capricious, wouldn’t be deviated today. Tony’s departure had clearly sent him into a panic.
‘But what about you? What about Ararat? Who’s going to run it?’
‘I don’t see why things have to change too much,’ Rachel said, bristling slightly. It seemed to have escaped Nick’s notice that Ararat Holdings was a joint venture. That his parents had set up and continued to run the successful property company together. Forcing herself not to take offence, she moved away from him. ‘There’s no need to worry.’
‘But wouldn’t it be better if we sold it?’
So that you can get your hands on all the money, Rachel thought bitterly, noting the ‘we’ in Nick’s question. ‘No. I couldn’t sell Ararat. That certainly wasn’t in your father’s and my plans.’
Rachel didn’t want to have this conversation about business. Not now and certainly not with Nick. Ararat Holdings was hers and Tony’s. It had nothing to do with Nick, or Christopher for that matter. She and Tony had made a decision long ago to educate them and let them go their own way.
Christopher, probably in rea
ction to seeing his elder sister Anna self-destruct, had followed a straight and narrow path into law. Nick, meanwhile, had changed his career like his cars and Rachel had lost count of the times Tony had bailed him out.
Now it occurred to Rachel that, with his father gone and her saying that she wouldn’t sell it, Nick thought that Rachel would involve him in Ararat. She loved Nick, but he was hardly the most reliable of her children and Ararat was too precious and too successful for her to let him make mistakes. No, Ararat’s future would be decided by her and its current financial director and her grandson-in-law, Sam Delamere.
But she couldn’t tell Nick any of this. Because Nick had always been so jealous of Claire and her husband Sam. He’d never been able to accept that Claire was Tony’s little princess and that Tony had always treated Sam like his favourite son.
It was Tony who had taken Sam on as his protégé and had trained him up from the beginning, letting him manage a few villas, until he’d taken on the boutique hotels and had helped Tony expand the property portfolio. It was also Tony who had engineered it so that Sam would meet Claire. He’d encouraged their relationship right from the start and it had been a dream come true when they’d married the year before last.
Now Rachel thought about it, the most logical thing to do would be to ask Sam to run the company, now that Tony had gone. It was true that it was too much for her, and since Sam was virtually running Ararat’s operations single-handedly from its central office on the Spanish island of Mallorca, it seemed the most natural thing that he should take over Tony’s position. Yes, she thought, Sam was the only member of her family whose judgement she truly trusted. He was her rock and the sooner he got here the better.
‘But don’t you think –’ Nick persisted.
‘Nick, darling, do we have to discuss business now?’ she stopped him. ‘It’s been a busy morning and I’m rather tired . . .’
She needed to reserve her strength for comforting Claire, not justifying herself to her son. Claire was the one who would need her the most.
‘Of course. I’m being so selfish. Poor Mummy. You must feel so dreadful.’
Upstairs in her bedroom, Rachel kicked off her shoes and padded across the thick pile carpet to her walk-in cupboard. As she opened the door, the light came on automatically, illuminating rows of designer suits and shoes, and shelves stacked with the casual clothes she wore in the country.
She walked inside and started rifling through the rails, trying to select an outfit she could wear for the funeral. She knew she should dash up to London to get something special, but her thrifty nature had kicked in along with a sudden weariness at the thought of all the effort she was going to have to make over the next week. She knew that all eyes would be on her, but she also knew that Tony would be the first to tell her not to buy a new outfit on his behalf. Especially as he wouldn’t be there to see it himself.
She pulled out a couple of suits and threw them on to the chair. Then she stopped, rubbed her face. She might as well admit to herself the reason that she was back in her cupboard. Steeling herself, she knelt down and pulled out the hatbox she’d deliberately unearthed nearly a week ago.
Maybe it was because in fifty years she’d never felt out of her depth, but her first reaction on Tony’s death had been to turn to her brother Bill. As if on autopilot, she’d come to Somerset, walked into the house, gone upstairs and found the hatbox straight away. Inside had been a folder containing the papers she’d paid for from a private detective, and had had constantly updated since, with the details of Bill’s whereabouts.
It was the only secret that she’d ever kept from Tony. A secret she’d kept hidden in her closet for all this time. She’d felt giddy as she’d spread the papers out over the bed she’d shared with her husband. It had felt worse than if she’d been on the bed with a new lover.
For so long, Rachel had imagined that the day she’d contact her brother, the past would be magically erased. She’d acted on such a moment of impulse when she’d telephoned him that she’d honestly thought that Bill would answer the phone. She’d assumed that somehow he would have sensed this was her true hour of need and would have been waiting to come to the rescue.
What she hadn’t expected was to speak to her niece, Laurel – or Laurie, as she liked to be known. She’d seen her name on the piece of paper the detective had given her, but she’d never imagined that she was a real person. Yet the sound of Laurie’s voice, her suspicion and her obvious confusion, had jolted Rachel into reality. This wasn’t a fantasy world where Bill would come running and forgive her. This was a messy, complicated situation and all at once she’d become aware of how much time had passed.
Rachel had appealed to Laurie, but she’d been able to tell, as the call had ended, that she’d made a fool of herself. For someone who had built a successful business by shrewdly playing the market and being an expert at negotiation, Rachel now felt as if she’d made a terribly bad move. She’d shown her hand and had opened herself up for rejection. What if Laurie hadn’t mentioned her call to Bill? What if he didn’t come to the funeral?
She knew that the likelihood was that her call would have stirred Bill’s wrath, not his compassion. What if, on top of Tony’s death, she now had proof that she’d lost Bill for ever, too. Because for so long she’d lived with a shred of hope. And what if that hope was gone? She shuddered at the thought. It was too much to even begin to contemplate.
Instead, she turned her attention to the papers in the box – the newspaper cuttings from the aftermath of the flood, fifty years old now and faded. They still managed to shock her – the images of the houses she’d known so well swept away by the sheer force of water, cars crushed, buried in mud and left upside down in the street. And worse, the tree way above the harbour bridge, where they’d found her mother’s body after the waters had dropped, caught in the branches as if she’d been doing a cartwheel.
There were pictures, too, of the bedraggled survivors in the makeshift camp they’d set up after the flood. Even with the poor quality of the newspaper pictures, it was still possible to see the haunted look on the faces of the homeless and bereaved. She remembered it all as if it were yesterday.
She turned her attention to the stack of unopened letters addressed to Bill, dating back just as far, that were bound with plastic bands and marked RETURN TO SENDER. Behind them was the only surviving photograph of Bill and her with their parents. It had been sent to Rachel by a family friend after the flood, but was now sepia with age, a relic from a different era. It had been taken in the 1940s, sometime during the war – her father in his uniform, her mother smiling, holding on to her hat, her hair pinned up under it in a fashionable hairnet. Rachel had just been a kid, in brown sandals and a simple cotton dress. She stood next to Bill, holding his hand, and in the photograph, he was smiling down at her. They looked like the perfect family unit.
She’d felt so confused over the past few days, but one thought had remained constant: if anything good was to come out of Tony’s death, then it had to be to reach some kind of reconciliation with her brother. With Tony gone, Bill was her only link to her past and there was so much that she hadn’t resolved. So much that she still needed to understand.
Rachel closed her eyes for a second, feeling slightly dizzy. Everything about the future and the past seemed so fluid, as if everything she’d taken for granted could change at a moment’s notice. Up until last week, she was with Tony, for ever. Fact.
Now she was starting to question every other fact about her life. The fact that for so long she’d only looked forward. The fact that she hadn’t ever discussed her past or come to terms with what had happened in the Stepmouth flood. The fact that she’d promised Tony long ago never to mention Bill, as if by banning his name Rachel would stop thinking about him. But now, for the first time, she could admit the biggest fact of all – she hadn’t stopped thinking about Bill, or needing him, or wanting his forgiveness and understanding. But now she was at his mercy. Until he called her ba
ck, or gave her some sign, she would just have to wait.
By the next morning, Rachel had slumped into a blank depression. The baby had kept her awake again, but she wouldn’t have slept anyway. She dressed early and retreated to the office, slowly turning back and forth in Tony’s large chair, her fingers clasped in front of her, as she stared at the aerial photograph which was mounted on the wall. It was of Sa Costa, the old finca in Mallorca that she and Tony had restored together. It was their family home, but today, rather than filling her with happy memories and the desire to go there immediately, she felt as if she’d somehow betrayed the life she’d built with Tony.
He filled her every thought. It was as if she could picture him right before her, telling her off for making such a rash decision to telephone her brother without once thinking of the consequences. In her mind, she tried to explain to him how she felt, but he bamboozled her with the force of his own feelings. They’d so rarely had a truly cross word between them, but now she could only picture him angry and stubborn. It brought back memories of the few times they’d argued, and this, in itself, made her feel ashamed and guilty.
It was almost lunchtime, when Brenda, the housekeeper, knocked at the door and interrupted her thoughts. Brenda was short with curly grey hair. For as long as Rachel could remember, she’d always worn a housecoat and today was no exception. She peered round the door, her unmade-up face comfortingly familiar.
‘Call for you, Rachel,’ she said. She’d never lost her Scottish lilt in all the years she’d been living in Somerset. ‘Didn’t you hear the phone?’
‘Where is everyone?’ Rachel asked.
‘Christopher, Lucy and the baby are out, and I made Nick take poor old Benson for a walk. You need a cuppa?’
Rachel smiled wearily, years of happy communication between the two women meaning that Brenda instinctively understood her. She nodded, before picking up the phone.
‘Yes?’
‘Rachel? It’s Laurie. Laurie Vale. We spoke the other day.’
