by Fay Keenan
‘Come on sweetheart, get your shoes on, and find a jumper.’
‘Can I wear my Hello Kitty shoes?’ Ellie asked, holding up a pair of silver sparkling slip-ons that were completely inappropriate for the wintry weather conditions.
‘Not today.’ Popping a jumper on over her distracted daughter’s head, she fished out a pair of red wellies and helped Ellie into them. ‘Go and have a wee, then we’ll get going.’
As she went to leave Ellie’s room, Anna took a brief glance around it. It was still early days, but the cottage was finally starting to look like it had an owner. She’d made a start on painting Ellie’s room first, a soft rose pink that hopefully should last a few years before whatever consumer-driven fad took over her daughter next, and she’d hung some cream waffle blackout curtains at the small window. The floor was still bare as Jack Carter had had all of the boards in the cottage varnished a year or two previously, but Anna had decided Ellie needed a carpet to ward off the chilly winter mornings. While she had a moment, Anna thought she might as well measure the room and get the carpet ordered. Grabbing the tape measure from the windowsill, she went to the corner of the room and knelt down beside the built in cupboard.
It was then that she saw it.
Right in the corner of Ellie’s room, inside the cupboard and tucked between the skirting and the first wooden board, almost out of sight in the crack, was the corner of a piece of paper. Anna figured it was probably an old newspaper – after all, there had been several occupants of this cottage over the years, but she never could resist an ancient news story, so she gently pulled on the corner.
It was immediately obvious that this was no newspaper, but it did, nonetheless, provide very interesting reading. Tape measure forgotten, Anna sat on the floor of her daughter’s room, a sense of shock and then comprehension gradually taking over her.
After she’d read it, she folded it neatly and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans.
Descending the stairs, she saw Ellie was now playing with her toy house and village.
‘Are you ready to go?’ she said.
‘Can I take Bunny with me?’ Ellie held up her rather worse for wear comforter by one of its ripped ears.
‘Yes, of course,’ Anna murmured. Forgetting the park for the moment, Anna locked her front door. There was one person she knew would be able to shed some light on the piece of paper she’d just found, and it wasn’t Charlotte.
12
‘Now I’m not one for gossip,’ Pat, Anna’s next-door neighbour, said, pouring a cup of tea and then settling in at the kitchen table, ‘but the whole village knew about Matthew and his wife Tara splitting up almost before Matthew himself did. She was so brazen about it all.’
‘What happened?’ Anna asked. She sipped her mug of tea, and waited for Pat to illuminate her. Ellie was playing contentedly with a jigsaw puzzle that Pat had unearthed for her from a basket of toys she kept for when her grandchildren visited.
‘Well, Matthew was working all hours on the business. Ten years ago it was at serious risk of going under, and he had fifty employees all depending on him to pull it through. Jack was still at the helm but he was leaving more and more of the legwork to Matthew. Matthew was away from home a lot, and when he was here he was chained to his desk in the office. Some nights he barely made it home before the birds started up again. Tara and Meredith were lucky if they saw him in daylight. It got so bad that Meredith knew her grandfather better than her own dad, and Matthew was at breaking point. Jack tried his best to help, but he wasn’t in the best of health and his wife Cecily, Matthew and Jonathan’s mother, was in the late stages of cancer so he had enough on his plate.’
‘Sounds terrible,’ Anna shuddered. ‘Poor Matthew, and Jack. How did they get through it?’
‘Matthew put his head down and carried on working. He’s never been one for confiding things, or sharing responsibility. When Jack handed him the keys to the firm, he opened the door and made the place his own. For well over ten years he’s driven it forward, and no one was going to get in the way.’
‘So what did Tara do?’ Anna asked. ‘She can’t have been very happy.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ Pat sighed. ‘She was bored out of her mind, by all accounts. She was already stuck at home with a four-year-old, didn’t have a job and was starting to look around for other entertainments. There were rumours their marriage was starting to fall apart, even as the business was beginning to pick up. Jonathan had finished university about a year previously and was lounging about the place, spending time with Meredith when Matthew was busy slaving away to keep a roof over their heads. Things happened.’
‘Tara and Jonathan?’ Anna gasped, although the note she’d found had been pretty self-explanatory. ‘How could he do that to his own brother? Matthew must have been devastated.’
‘More angry than anything,’ Pat refilled their cups from the teapot on the table. ‘He’d sacrificed his own ambitions to run the family business – he’d really wanted to practise law, studied it at university and completed an internship, but when Jack asked him to take over the business he couldn’t refuse. Left the offer of a plum job at a top firm just like that and came home. Cider’s in his blood, he’s a fourth-generation brewer.’
‘Couldn’t Jonathan have done it?’
Pat snorted. ‘You’ve as much chance of getting angels to come down from the sky as you would getting Jonathan to have any hand in the cider business.’ She took a biscuit from the plate in front of her. ‘Oh, he was more than happy to spend the profits, when there were any, but he didn’t give a fig about how they were made. He’s a businessman all right, got the brains to do really well, but he didn’t want the family business. Jack, ever the indulgent father, let him make his own way. Unfortunately, Jonathan’s focus wasn’t on his career when he came home. He and Tara started carrying on, and…well, you know the rest.’
‘Are they still together?’
Pat shook her head. ‘No. They split up, apparently, quite soon after they left. I don’t really know the details. So it was all for nothing, really.’
‘What did Matthew do? How did he manage after Tara left him?’
‘Bottled it up, ploughed all of his energy into the business, tried to do the best he could with Meredith, but she missed her mother terribly. Now she wants a woman around – and Matthew’s worried about having to have “the talk” with her, although, frankly, he’s left that a bit late and she’s probably better informed than him in certain regards.’ Pat sipped her tea. ‘Not that she’s given her dad any cause for concern as yet,’ she added hastily. ‘But you know how they are at that age. Curious. Reckless.’
Anna’s heart turned over at the thought of Matthew dealing with both daughter and business without help, although she knew Pat, in addition to cleaning for the Carters, had obviously been of some emotional support, too. She told her so.
‘Well, I do what I can, but I’m getting on a bit, now,’ Pat said. ‘He needs someone in his life.’
Hating herself for asking, but compelled to anyway, Anna did. ‘Has there been anyone?’
Pat’s eyes twinkled. ‘One or two women have cast their nets in his direction over the years. After all, with Carter’s Cider the way it is now, he’d be a good catch. But no one’s turned his head in the way Tara did. Until recently.’ She gave Anna a brief, knowing look.
Anna looked away, embarrassed. ‘It was just dinner. And besides, I’ve got a long way to go myself before I can think about anyone in that way. After James…’ She swallowed hard.
‘There there, love, don’t go down that road,’ Pat said sympathetically. ‘Enjoy things for what they are. Matthew’s a good man. Having been burned once himself, he’s not minded to jump feet first into the fire again. Give yourselves time.’
Anna felt the lump in her throat, both for Matthew and herself, and took a gulp of her tea to try to dislodge it. She nodded at Pat. ‘I can forget, sometimes, for a moment, that James isn’t here. The moment I wa
ke up, before I’m fully awake, and as I drift off to sleep. But then my brain kicks in and I realise I’m on my own bringing Ellie up, and it’s very unlikely she’ll ever remember what a kind, wonderful man her father was. I don’t think it’ll ever go away.’
Pat smiled sadly. ‘It won’t,’ she said. ‘But it’ll gradually get easier to bear.’
‘What happened to Jonathan?’ Anna asked.
‘Oh he checks in with his dad from time to time. Jack’s always trying to convince him to come home, but he’s understandably reluctant. Jack hasn’t got a clue what really happened between them, so he misses his younger son dreadfully.’
‘Why hasn’t Matthew told him?’ Anna was shocked.
Pat sighed. ‘If there’s one thing Matthew’s good at, it’s sticking his head in the sand. Take Meredith for example. She’s nearly fifteen but he still thinks she’s a little girl. He’s still angry, but he won’t drag his father into what he sees as his own personal business. Deep down, he couldn’t bear to ruin Jack and Jonathan’s relationship, and he still mourns the loss of the brother he loved so much. It was only Matthew’s insistence that Jack be kept in the dark that denied Tara that last act of revenge.’
‘But surely the village gossip would have worked its way back to Jack eventually?’ Anna had already realised from listening in to customers’ conversations in the tea shop that it was virtually impossible to keep anything quiet.
‘Only a couple of us really knew what had happened, and we weren’t minded to fill Jack in, either. It’s no less humiliating for Matthew, of course, but at least he spared Jack some of the pain of having to choose between his boys.’
‘But surely Jonathan should have known better?’ Anna said. ‘How could he have done that to Matthew?’
‘I’m not excusing Jonathan,’ Pat said, ‘but Matthew was never right for Tara. We all knew it. He was blinded by her. You only have to look at Meredith to get an idea of how beautiful she was. Matthew wasn’t ever the type to fall head over heels, but Tara enchanted him from the start. When she turned that charm on Jonathan, who was far less responsible and far more susceptible, that was that.’
‘So what happened to her?’
‘The last I heard, she’d moved back to America with the latest in rather a long line of lovers. ’ Pat sniffed.
‘Is that where she was from, then?’
Pat nodded. ‘She looked like the typical all-American girl when Matthew brought her home, but I always thought she was harder than that underneath. She’d have to have been, to have walked out on Meredith.’
Anna felt a lurch of sympathy for Matthew’s daughter. She knew all too well the pain that losing a parent could cause, having seen Ellie in the early days after James. ‘And Jonathan?’ She asked, to take her mind away from such things.
‘He’s spent the past few years sporadically trying to reconcile with his brother, but Matthew won’t have it. Matthew can’t do anything about Jonathan’s share in the business, and he’s still on the board of directors in name, but he’s kept Jonathan at arm’s length. Perhaps one day they’ll be reconciled, but, as the Americans say, they’ve got an awful lot to work through first.’
‘That explains why Matthew was so snappy with me when he had to come over the day I moved in,’ Anna said. ‘It must be hell for him, knowing his wife and brother were at it on his own doorstep.’
‘And to add insult to injury, Jack was out of the country for three months during the time the cottage was on the market, so Matthew was the point of contact for interested buyers. He even had to take a few around himself when the estate agent double-booked.’
Anna looked aghast. ‘One of them was me.’ She remembered how short he’d also been with her that day; how, when he’d left her to look around upstairs, she’d had to swallow back tears, knowing he was waiting impatiently downstairs for her to make a decision. She couldn’t read him that day, but now it all made sense.
‘It probably wasn’t his finest hour,’ Pat agreed. ‘But now that you’ve got the cottage, perhaps he can let things go a bit.’
‘Poor Matthew,’ Anna murmured. ‘No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it last night.’
‘Give him time, love,’ Pat replied. ‘It’s early days, like you say.’
‘Well, thank you for trusting me with it,’ Anna said. ‘And don’t worry, I won’t say a thing.’
‘I know you won’t,’ Pat replied. ‘He’s a good man, and he deserves some happiness. I hope you might be the one to give it to him.’
Anna smiled. ‘Early days, Pat, remember?’
13
Anna soon got into the rhythm of village life. She and Lizzie had worked out the shift rota at The Little Orchard Tea Shop so that Anna could work around Ellie’s nursery provision, but downtime was limited. Meredith and a few of her friends started popping into The Little Orchard Tea Shop a couple of times a week after school and wolfed down their cake with such enthusiasm that Anna found herself increasing the numbers she was baking to compensate.
One drizzly Thursday afternoon in early February, when her netball practice had finished, Meredith, on her own for once, was sitting on one of the tea shop sofas, about to embark on a slice of treacle tart. She was still in her sports kit, and her hair was tied in a messy plait that reached down her back. Looking at her, Anna couldn’t stop the Mallory Towers comparisons from running through her head, although she doubted modern public school life was anything like Enid Blyton’s portrayal of it. As if to dispel Anna’s imaginings further, Meredith reached into the pocket of her hoody and pulled out her mobile phone. Texting furiously, she then put it away again.
‘Tart all right?’ Anna asked, noticing the empty plate.
‘Great,’ Meredith replied. ‘Any chance of another slice?’ She held her plate up for Anna to take.
‘I thought teenage girls survived on fresh air and bottled water, these days!’ Anna quipped, taking the plate.
‘Oh, please.’ Meredith looked down at her own, enviably slim, thighs.
‘No danger of you getting an eating disorder then!’ Anna said.
‘I’m blessed with a good constitution,’ Meredith said piously. ‘I get it from my dad. There’s no way he could chug the amount of chips he does and still look halfway decent without some great genetics going on, don’t you think?’
‘No comment,’ Anna said lightly, knowing she was being led.
‘Anyway, no point in obsessing about weight – there’re plenty of other things to worry about.’
‘Such as?’ Anna was intrigued. She could just about remember being a teenager, but she did wonder whether the things she remembered worrying about were the same as the twenty- first century breed.
‘Oh, you know,’ Meredith went vague. ‘Stuff.’
Anna smiled to herself and went to cut Meredith another piece of treacle tart. On her return, a giggle from the sofa got Anna’s attention. Meredith was staring at her phone, thumbs furiously working once more.
‘Something funny?’ Anna asked.
‘Oh, just Flynn,’ Meredith grinned. ‘He makes me laugh.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Lush,’ Meredith replied. ‘And funny.’
Anna smiled. ‘And more specifically?’
‘Well, Dad doesn’t like him, obviously, but then he’s always been a bit funny about stuff like that. I only have to mention a boy’s name in passing and he threatens to pack me off to a nunnery.’ Meredith rolled her eyes. ‘I mean, it’s not even as if I’ve been out on a proper date with anyone, yet!’
‘He just wants to keep you safe,’ Anna replied. ‘My dad wasn’t exactly that fond of my husband James at first, so I wouldn’t worry too much!’
‘I just wish he wouldn’t be so moody about me seeing boys,’ Meredith grumbled. ‘I mean, he doesn’t have to worry about any of that kind of stuff – I do know the facts of life and I’m not likely to do anything dodgy. It’s not as if we don’t get all of that shoved down our throats at school enough.’
/> ‘I know, Merry, but in the heat of the moment, things can happen.’ Anna forced herself to suppress some of her fruitier teenage memories. She’d spent enough afternoons with boyfriends in the long grass off the Strawberry Line to know what teenage hormones were like.
‘Flynn’s not like that,’ Meredith said. She sighed. ‘He’s sensitive. And musical. And he can drive… well, he’s taking lessons.’
‘So he’s not in your year, then?’
Meredith laughed. ‘No, he’s older. In the Sixth Form. Taking A-Levels.’
Anna nodded. So far, so harmless.
‘He wants us to go out sometime,’ Meredith said. ‘To the cinema.’
‘What does your dad say?’
‘I haven’t told him yet.’ Meredith looked speculatively at Anna. ‘I was wondering if maybe you could… like… put in a good word with Dad.’
Anna’s brow furrowed. ‘Don’t you think it’d be better coming from you?’
Meredith sighed. ‘Every time I try and talk to Dad about it, he shuts me down straight away. There’s no way he’ll listen to me. When he found out I’d snogged Joel at the wassail last year, he went apeshit and tried to sack him on the spot.’
Anna smiled inwardly. Joel was eighteen and a packer at Carter’s Cider with dubious personal hygiene and an equally dubious reputation with the teenage girls of Little Somerby. In that particular instance, she could sympathise with Matthew.
‘He’s just trying to protect you,’ Anna said reasonably. ‘He probably feels like he has to be mum and dad to you, and believe me, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to do by yourself.’
‘He can’t protect me from the whole world,’ Meredith said, jumping as her phone beeped again.
‘It’ll take time for him to get used to the fact you’re growing up,’ Anna replied, but she’d lost her audience. Meredith was furiously texting again. ‘Do you want another drink?’ Anna asked, having cleared two tables and bid farewell to another group of customers by the time Meredith finally put her phone back down.
