‘Where do you live?’ she said.
He jerked his head to the right. ‘Over there.’
‘Far?’
‘Far enough.’
‘I live in the gamekeeper’s cottage.’
‘So you said.’
‘Did Kit let you on the property?’ April said. ‘I’d feel bad going against his wishes.’
‘We had an understanding.’
April wasn’t sure that answered the question.
‘He emigrated to Canada, you know,’ said April. ‘To be with a woman.’
Astonishingly, he smiled. ‘That so?’ A slow, amused shake of his head. ‘Well, well.’
April spoke without thinking.
‘Do you want to come round some time? To the cottage? I can’t offer you much except a cup of tea.’
He stared at her, no smile now, but no hostility or wariness, either. His eyes were the black-brown of coffee. The sun, low now in the sky, was caught in the corners, whorls of tawny sparkling light. His face — was it handsome? Hard to tell. It was like looking at a stone on the bottom of a stream. You could see it clearly, knew exactly what it was, but no matter how long you stared, its image resisted a complete capture.
‘I don’t like walls,’ he said. ‘I’d like it better if you came to me.’
And he started to walk away, dog at his heels.
‘But I don’t know where you live!’ April had called.
His last words came to her on the air.
‘You’ll find me.’
CHAPTER 13
late March
April drove to Sunny’s in a car Edward had found for her. It was an old Volvo wagon, shaped like an air-raid bunker, and with room in the back to fit — April had calculated this while idling in the lane waiting for a farmer to drive his flock around her — four ewes and a medium-sized border collie.
Edward had overcome April’s objections by insisting that the car was not a gift but a temporary loan. It belonged to Irene’s youngest nephew, who was currently in Australia, working in a coalmine. According to Edward, the nephew was meant to have become an accountant like his father, but instead had chosen to leave school at sixteen and travel across Europe, adventuring and finding work as an itinerant labourer, sleeping when he had to in the back of the Volvo. Irene, Edward said, considered her nephew to be a black sheep, made even blacker now by the ironore of Pilbara, and April was welcome to have his car until such time as he saw sense and slunk back home. Which would be no time soon, was Edward’s prediction. The waves of familial disapproval, even as they spoke, were no doubt bouncing harmlessly off the dazzling red surface of the outback.
Sunny had issued April and Edward a standing invitation to come to tea every Sunday. April’s initial instinct had been to refuse, but a combination of her own waxing curiosity about the house’s past and Sunny’s inability to hear the word ‘No’ meant she had already spent two Sunday afternoons at Sunny’s house and was five minutes away from spending a third. The hardest thing, thought April, was refusing the food, which was consistently, delectably tempting. Edward usually ate her share as well as his, but not before he did his best to sway her.
Edward’s Alvis was already parked outside. He’d left Sunny’s front door ajar, so April pushed it open. Crouched in the alcove that held coats and boots was Fatso. He greeted her with a chirrup and a sinuously raised back, so April bent down to stroke him. The fur behind his ears was as soft as down and the top of his cinnamon-coloured head toasty warm, as if he’d been sleeping in front of a heater. Fatso closed his eyes and purred, butting his head against her hand. April had only intended a quick pat but she kept on, indulging in the rare feeling of another living being enjoying her touch.
Sunny and Edward were talking in the kitchen.
‘It’s a perfectly natural reaction to a trauma, I would have thought,’ said Sunny. ‘One either fights or flees, doesn’t one? Depending on one’s personality? My father was a fleer. Hid away, shut up tight as an oyster. Besides, must I point out that you’re a fine one to talk? When did you last make an attempt to meet someone? Surely, there are plenty of clubs. There were even in my day.’
‘I’m far too old for that scene now,’ said Edward. ‘And before you say “Pish”, it’s perfectly true. I could ride into a club naked on the back of a juggling bear, and the young things would blank me. I could self-immolate on the dance floor, and they might, if I were very lucky, light a Gauloise off me.’
‘That is a transparently feeble excuse. What about places for men your age? You can’t tell me those don’t exist. And what about the internet? According to Dilly, it’s not all serial killers and people who like to dress up as giant teddy bears. She says there are some very respectable matchmaking websites these days, though I refused to let her tell me how she knew.’
‘Has it occurred to you that I might be happy on my own?’ said Edward.
‘Nonsense!’ said Sunny. ‘Under that indolent exterior, you’re as red-blooded as the next male. There is no possibility that you could be at all happy hunkering down alone in an oyster shell for the rest of your life.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Edward. ‘I quite fancy having pearls for eyes.’
‘Foolishness,’ said Sunny. ‘But I suppose it’s fruitless to persuade you otherwise. You’re remarkably intransigent, you know. I despair of it quite often.’
April heard a cupboard door squeak open.
‘I should warn you,’ Sunny said, ‘that the walrus did eat my father in the end. And answer—’ the cupboard door slammed ‘—there was none.’
Fatso had tired of being stroked. He signalled this to April by sinking his teeth into the fleshy apple of her palm.
‘Ouch!’ April rubbed her hand with her other thumb. ‘You fickle sod!’
Sunny popped her head around the kitchen doorway.
‘Why are you lurking out there?’ she said to April. ‘Hang your coat and come in!’
On top of Ben Nevis today were small sandwiches and a large cake, dense with yellow marzipan and dried fruit.
‘Simnel cake,’ Sunny announced. ‘I haven’t made one for years, so I thought I’d better practise. It’s Mothering Sunday soon, and I intend to wallow in self-pity by celebrating it on my own.’
‘Did you know that these marzipan balls on top represent the eleven disciples?’ said Edward. ‘Eleven because Judas is excluded.’ He picked one off his piece of cake and ate it. ‘Judas, as his actions did rather prove, is ball-less.’
‘I’d planned to sugar some violets,’ Sunny said. ‘But the only decent flowers I could find smelled as if Fatso had peed on them. My self-pity falls short of outright masochism.’
‘Have you actually invited your children to your birthday?’ April said.
‘Of course not,’ said Sunny, irritably. ‘I don’t want them coming only because they feel guilty.’
‘Did they celebrate your eightieth?’
‘They did not,’ Sunny said. ‘But they did, at least, have a good reason that time. On my eightieth birthday, I buried my husband.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’
‘So was I, by God.’ Sunny brought a sandwich halfway to her mouth, before discarding it again on her plate. ‘He swore he would last, the swine. He promised to sing me happy birthday.’
She glanced at the wedding photo on the sideboard. ‘As it happens, I’ve never celebrated any significant birthday. I turned twenty-one during the war, and everyone was too busy dying then, too. On the morning of my thirtieth, I went into labour with son number three, Xandy. My fortieth was just after Kennedy’s assassination, so Perry was caught up in a bunch of diplomatic hoo-ha. Deborah, my middle daughter, crashed her car the evening before my fiftieth, so we spent the day in a hospital waiting room. What happened on my sixtieth? Oh, yes. Perry and I went to Spain on our own, and thanks to an off paella on our first night we spent my birthday jostling for the lavatory. And two days before my seventieth, my second son, Henry, fell ill with something dire while work
ing in Java, and we were still waiting to hear whether he was alive or dead.’
‘And?’ April had to ask.
‘Oh, he was fine, of course. Knowing Henry, he probably didn’t even notice he was in hospital.’
‘What was he doing there? Holidaying?’
‘Zooologising. Studying some kind of giant rat.’
‘How giant?’ Edward said. ‘No, on second thoughts, don’t tell me. I’m intimidated enough by those balls of fluff that gather under the bed.’
‘So you can see,’ Sunny said, ignoring him, ‘that this is my last chance for a proper party.’
‘Well, we’ll certainly be there.’ Edward looked across the table. ‘Won’t we, Ms Turner?’
April was saved a reply by the phone.
Sunny tsk’d impatiently. ‘That will be Freya,’ she said, rising. ‘She invariably calls at times of maximum inconvenience.’
‘The cake is very good,’ said Edward to April, when Sunny was busy in conversation.
In a strange way, April appreciated that Edward made such little effort to disguise his tactics. It meant little effort in return on her part to disregard them.
‘I’m sure it is,’ she said.
‘The sandwiches,’ Edward pressed on, ‘are egg and cress. Which also are delicious but have the unfortunate effect of propelling me straight back to childhood, a place I was ready to leave many years before that was possible.’
Sunny had the phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear, her hands now engaged in refilling the kettle and setting it on the bright red Aga.
‘How are you finding working with Oran?’
Edward at least knows when not to pursue a subject, April thought. Though this new topic was only marginally better. Any talk of Oran led inevitably to the house, and April wished to keep the house’s intrusion on her thoughts to the barest minimum.
‘We get along fine.’
‘I must admit that during even a short conversation with him, I feel rather like I’m hurtling through a series of fun-fair rides. My head tends to spin.’
‘We don’t talk all that much. Mainly he sings.’
‘And he sings so very well, doesn’t he? When I first heard him, I was, unfairly perhaps, astonished.’
April shrugged. ‘Yes, he has a good voice.’
‘He was raised by his grandfather, you know. George Rose. He was the sexton of the Kingsfield church, and the local odd-job man. I’ve gathered from Sunny that there was nothing to which George couldn’t turn his hand. He taught Oran everything.’
This subject, April realised with dismay, was one that would not be relinquished so readily. She could not tell what Edward intended by pursuing it, but assumed he had some kind of agenda. He always did. Still, as always, she needn’t play the game. She needn’t ask the question she very much wanted to, which was: what had happened to Oran’s parents?
‘Oran’s mother was George’s only daughter. Marianne.’
It seemed Edward intended to tell her anyway.
‘George and his wife adopted her as a baby because they couldn’t have children of their own.’
In the background, April heard Sunny say the word ‘turnips’, declaratively, as if she’d just proved a point. April’s own wish at that point was for Sunny to end her call, come back to the table, and make Edward stop talking.
‘Sunny told me that Marianne was a blonde beauty with striking tawny eyes,’ said Edward. ‘Stunning, apparently, but a complete narcissist. Perhaps George and his wife lavished her with too much attention? Perhaps it was simply her nature, who knows? She had a string of lovers for years until, in her early thirties, she met another narcissist, Aidan Feares, a charming red-haired Irishman. They were sexually obsessed with each other from the minute they met, and never meant to have Oran. He got in the way, cramped their style, as they say. George’s wife had died by then and he was on his own. When Oran was only two months old, they dropped him on George’s doorstep and never came back.’
‘Well, not all people are cut out to be parents,’ said April.
Edward was undeterred. ‘Oran’s a good man. Eccentric, yes, and not entirely reliable, but a good man nonetheless.’
April hid her immediate reaction, which was one of pained incredulity. Surely that could not be his agenda?
‘I will work with Oran,’ she said to Edward, taking care to make every word clear. ‘Apart from that, I have no interest in him.’
‘Of course not,’ said Edward, blandly. ‘I quite understand.’
If Edward is indeed scheming, thought April, he’s out of luck. What she’d said was true. It was not Oran who occupied her mind too often for comfort. It was not Oran who had prompted April to pick up The Popular Encyclopaedia of Gardening and turn to the calendar at the back, which listed all the garden tasks month by month. The list for March seemed very long, and the month was already nearly over. Under the heading ‘Fruit Garden’, April had read Plant strawberries, but do not let them fruit this season … Remove big buds from blackcurrants and spray with lime-sulphur … In mild weather, when the sap is running freely, fruit trees may be grafted.
April had wondered how you would know when the sap was running freely. Did you see it go, like Wee Willie Winkie, or the Gingerbread Man? Would you have to run after it? Hunt it down?
You’ll find me, he’d said. But even if she did decide to look (which she would not), where on earth should she start?
Sunny said a terse goodbye. Footsteps clipped back across the flagstone floor. She sank into her chair.
‘Freya is WOOFing,’ she said.
‘Really?’ said Edward. ‘Is it hormonal?’
‘W-O-O-F. Workers on organic farms. She’s spreading slurry.’
‘Freya is your youngest?’ said April.
Sunny’s nod was reluctant. ‘Perry always called her our Shetland pony. Short, stroppy and inclined to bite. Our relationship has become only marginally less stormy over the years.’
‘Slurry in Sligo,’ said Edward. ‘I must say, I can’t quite picture a daughter of yours farming.’
Sunny’s eyes flashed. ‘I’ll have you know that I was extremely active on the Blythes’ farm! I milked cows regularly. I even ploughed fields with the tractor!’
She tutted, indignation rising. ‘It still makes me livid to think of what happened to them. So unfair. So unnecessary.’
Sunny pointed a finger at Edward. ‘You believe I should have more compassion for Lewis Potts.’
‘Well, I—’
‘He drove that family to ruin,’ said Sunny. ‘Because he refused to accept that anything he was associated with could fail.’
‘The farm failed?’ said April.
‘No, his business failed. He sacrificed the Blythes because he, Lewis Potts, needed the money to pay his debts. He could have sold Empyrean, but he sold the farm that had been tenanted by Blythes for generations, and he evicted them from the only home they’d ever known!’
Edward frowned. ‘Actually, that’s not true. I’ve seen the sale and purchase agreement for the farm — it’s in the files — and I am certain it makes provision for the Blythes to stay and run the farm for the new owner.’
‘But how could they?’ said Sunny. ‘They had no help! Ellis and Martha Blythe lost both their sons, Lily’s brothers, to the war, and decent farm labour during that time was almost impossible to come by. They were struggling enough to meet Mr Potts’s demands. A new owner would have made their lives impossible.’
‘So it was their choice, then, to leave,’ said Edward. ‘No one evicted them.’
‘If Lewis Potts had not sold the farm,’ insisted Sunny, ‘the Blythes would not have had to choose. He forced it on them!’
‘Yet you said they were struggling.’
‘Oh!’ Sunny did a little shimmy of outrage. ‘I do so detest when you become all lawyer-ish!’
‘Then I’ll refrain from pointing out the obvious — that your loathing for Lewis Potts may, on occasion, blinker you.’
; Being lawyer-ish brought the steel to the fore in Edward, April observed. Instead of lounging, he sat upright. His voice was strong and clear. Even the bones of his face seemed to harden — no more expression of mildly bored amusement, that ‘slappable smirk’ so well described by Oran. Edward the lawyer, thought April, was a formidable opponent.
Sunny, however, would sooner cut off an arm than capitulate.
‘They had to go all the way to Wales to find work—’
‘Why?’ Edward said. ‘You just said decent farm labour was in high demand.’
‘Ellis had standards. He could not abide shoddy practices or lax attitudes to animal welfare.’
‘I find it hard to believe that Wales housed Britain’s only ethical farmer, but I won’t quibble. Ellis Blythe certainly chose Wales for a reason, whatever that reason might have been.’
‘The move killed him.’ Sunny, April noted, had opted for drama over logic. ‘Being forced to slave all God’s hours for a farm worker’s pittance drove Ellis Blythe to an early grave. Martha became ill from the grief. Lily, beautiful, loving Lily, stayed at home for years to care for her ailing mother, and died a lonely spinster, with no family of her own around her.’
‘And that is all very tragic, I grant you,’ said Edward, ‘but the evidence you’ve presented still suggests it’s very likely that Ellis Blythe’s reason for leaving Kingsfield had nothing to do with Lewis Potts, and that the sale of the farm merely provided a catalyst for him to act on a decision he’d already made.’
‘Ellis Blythe trusted Lewis Potts,’ said Sunny. ‘He believed Lewis Potts was on his side. He trusted him right up to the day he was betrayed. And no amount of your pettifogging chicanery can belie that.’
CHAPTER 14
April, 1936
Farmer Blythe picked James up by the collar of his jacket, carried him to the end of the lane and set him down behind the fence with no more effort than if James had been a bundle of cow parsley. James made no protest — Farmer Blythe would only grin in his easy way — but he had a renewed wish that the growth spurt his mother had hinted at would hurry up and happen. He was only two months off thirteen but no bigger than he’d been at twelve. Lily was now a whole head taller, and, more frustratingly, so was Rowan. Only Sunny was still shorter, though she acted as if she were the size of a champion bull. Farmer Blythe had carried her in his other hand, but while James had hung quietly, resigned, from the man’s huge fist, Sunny had struggled and yelled and kicked out at her abductor. Farmer Blythe had only held her farther out, and grinned.
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