Wild Mountain Thyme

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  Besides, by then he was well into his second novel. So he thought about Jeannette for perhaps five minutes and then plunged thankfully back into the company of the infinitely more compelling characters who were now going about their business within the confines of his own head.

  * * *

  When Helga came downstairs again, he was back in the kitchen sitting on the window seat, with his back to the sun, and enjoying his beer. The door opened, and she appeared, carrying the child in her arms. He was larger than Oliver had imagined, dressed in red overalls with a bib and a white sweater. His hair was a sort of reddish gold, like new pennies, but Oliver couldn’t see his face, which was buried in Helga’s delectable neck.

  Helga smiled at Oliver over Thomas’s shoulder.

  “He’s shy. I have told him that there is a visitor, and he doesn’t want to look at you.” She bent her head to say to the little boy, “Look, you silly. He is a nice man. He has come to have lunch with us.”

  The child made a mooing, negative sound and buried his face still deeper. Helga laughed and brought him over to his high chair and inserted him into it, so that at last he had to let go of her. He and Oliver looked at each other. The child had blue eyes and seemed sturdy. Oliver didn’t know much about children. Nothing, in fact. He said, “Hi.”

  “Say hello, Thomas,” Helga prompted. She added, “He does not like to talk.”

  Thomas stared at the stranger. One-half of his face was red from being pressed into a pillow. He smelled of soap. Helga clipped a plastic bib around his neck, but he didn’t take his eyes off Oliver.

  Helga went to the stove to collect their meal. From the oven she took a shepherd’s pie, a dish of brussels sprouts. She put a little into a round dish, mashed it up with a fork and set it down on the tray of Thomas’s high chair. “Now, eat it up,” and she put his spoon into his hand.

  “Does he feed himself?” asked Oliver.

  “Of course. He’s two now, not a baby anymore. Are you, Thomas? Show the man how you can eat up your dinner.” Thomas responded by laying down his spoon. His blue eyes fixed, unwinking, on Oliver, and Oliver began to feel self-conscious.

  “Here,” he said. He set down his glass of beer, and reaching over, took up the spoon, filled it with squashed meat and potato, and steered it towards Thomas’s mouth. Thomas’s mouth opened, and it all disappeared. Thomas, munching, continued to stare. Oliver gave him back the spoon. Thomas finished his mouthful and then smiled. A good deal of the smile was shepherd’s pie, but there was, as well, the glimpse of an engaging double row of small pearly teeth.

  Helga, putting down Oliver’s plate in front of him, caught sight of the smile.

  “There now, he has made a friend.” She brought another plate and sat herself at the head of the table, so that she could help Thomas. “He’s a very friendly little boy.”

  “What does he do all day?”

  “He plays, and he sleeps, and in the afternoons he goes for a walk in his push chair. Usually Mrs. Archer takes him, but today I will take him.”

  “Does he look at books and things?”

  “Yes, he likes picture books, but sometimes he tears them.”

  “Does he have toys?”

  “He likes little cars and blocks. He doesn’t like teddies or rabbits or things like that. I don’t think he likes the feel of fur. You know what I mean?”

  Oliver began to eat the shepherd’s pie, which was very hot and delicious. He said, “Do you know a lot about babies?”

  “At home in Sweden I have younger brothers and sisters.”

  “Are you fond of Thomas?”

  “Yes, he is nice.” She made a face at the child. “You are nice, aren’t you, Thomas? And he doesn’t cry all the time like some children do.”

  “It must be rather … dull for him, being brought up by his grandparents.”

  “He is too little to know whether it is dull or not.”

  “But it’ll be dull when he’s older.”

  “A child on his own is always sad. But there are other children in the village. He will make friends.”

  “And you? Have you made friends?”

  “There is another au pair girl. We go to classes together.”

  “Haven’t you got a boyfriend?”

  She dimpled. “My boyfriend is at home in Sweden.”

  “He must miss you.”

  “We write to each other. And it is only for six months. At the end of six months, I shall go back to Sweden.”

  “What will happen to Thomas then?”

  “I expect Mrs. Archer will get another au pair girl. Would you like some more shepherd’s pie?”

  The meal progressed. For dessert there was fruit or yoghurt or cheese. Thomas ate yoghurt. Oliver peeled an orange. Helga, at the stove, made coffee.

  She said to Oliver, “Do you live in London?”

  “Yes, I’ve got a basement flat just off the Fulham Road.”

  “Is that where you are going now?”

  “Yes. I’ve been in Bristol for a week.”

  “On holiday?”

  “Who’d go to Bristol for a holiday in February? No, I have a play being put on at the Fortune Theatre there. I went down to do a small rewrite. The actors complained they couldn’t get their tongues round some of my lines.”

  “A writer?” She turned wide-eyed. “You write plays? And get them performed? You must be very good.”

  “I like to think so.” He filled his mouth with sections of orange. Their taste, and the bitter tang of the peel, reminded him of Spain. “But it’s what other people think that really matters. The critics, and the people who pay to come to the theatre.”

  “What is the play called?”

  “Bent Penny. And don’t ask me what it’s about, because I haven’t got time to tell you.”

  “My boyfriend writes. He writes articles on psychology for the university journal.”

  “I’m sure they’re fascinating.”

  “But it isn’t the same as writing plays.”

  “No. Not quite the same.”

  Thomas had finished his yoghurt. Helga wiped his face and took off his bib and lifted him out of his high chair. He came to stand by Oliver, balancing himself by placing his hands on Oliver’s knee. Through the worn denim, Oliver could feel their warmth, the grip of the little fingers. Thomas gazed up at Oliver and smiled again, a grin with dimples and that row of little teeth. He put up a hand to touch Oliver’s beard, and Oliver stooped so that he could reach it. Thomas laughed. Oliver picked him up and held him on his knee. He felt solid and warm.

  Helga seemed gratified by all these friendly advances. “Now he has made friends. If I got a book, you could show him the pictures while I put the plates in the dishwasher. Then I have to take him for a walk.”

  Oliver had already decided that it was time to leave, but he said, “All right” so Helga went to find a book, and he and Thomas were left alone.

  Thomas was fascinated by his beard. Oliver hoisted him up so that he stood on Oliver’s knee and their eyes were on a level. Thomas tugged his beard. Oliver yelped. Thomas laughed. He tried to tug it again, but Oliver caught his hand and held it in his own. “That hurts, you brute.” Thomas stared into his eyes. Oliver said softly, “Do you know who I am?” and Thomas laughed again, as though the question were a great joke.

  Helga came back with the book and laid it on the table, a large and brightly colored book with farm animals on the shiny cover. Oliver opened it at random and Thomas sat down again on his knee, leaning forward on the table, to peer at the pictures. As Helga went about her work putting plates away and scrubbing out the dish that had contained the shepherd’s pie, Oliver turned the pages, and said the names of the animals, and pointed to the farmhouse and the gate and the tree and the haystack. And they came to a picture of a dog, and Thomas barked. And then to a picture of a cow, and he made mooing sounds. It was all very companionable.

  Then Helga said it was time for Thomas to come upstairs and be dressed in his outdoor c
lothes, so she gathered him up and bore him away. Oliver sat and waited for them to come down again. He looked at the immaculate kitchen, and out into the immaculate garden, and he thought of Helga leaving and the next au pair girl coming, and the pattern repeating itself until Thomas was eight years old, and of an age to be sent to some well-established and probably useless prep school. He thought of his son, slotted, labeled, trapped on the conveyor belt of a conventional education, expected to make the right friends, play the accepted games, and never question the tyranny of meaningless tradition.

  Oliver had escaped. At seventeen he had cut and run, but only because he had had the twin weapons of his writing and his own single-minded, rebellious determination to go his own way.

  But how would Thomas fare?

  The question made him feel uncomfortable, and he rejected it as being hypothetical. It was none of Oliver’s business what school Thomas went to, and it didn’t matter anyway. He lit another cigarette, and idly opened Thomas’s picture book again, lifting the front cover. He saw on the white fly sheet, written in Mrs. Archer’s neat black-inked script,

  Thomas Archer

  For his Second Birthday

  From Granny.

  And all at once it did matter. A sort of rage rose within Oliver, so that if Jeannette’s mother had been standing nearby, he would have attacked her; with words that only he knew how to use; with his fists if necessary.

  He is not Thomas Archer, you sanctimonious bitch. He is Thomas Dobbs. He is my son.

  * * *

  When Helga came downstairs, carrying Thomas dressed in a sort of ski suit and a woolen hat with a bobble on it, Oliver was already waiting for her in the hall. He had put on his coat, and he said, “I have to go now. I have to get back to London.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It was very kind of you to give me lunch.”

  “I will tell Mrs. Archer that you were here.”

  He began to grin. “Yes. Do that.”

  “But … I don’t know your name. To tell her, I mean.”

  “Just say Oliver Dobbs.”

  “All right, Mr. Dobbs.” She hesitated, standing at the bottom of the stairs, and then said, “I have to get the pram and my coat from the cloakroom. Will you hold Thomas for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  He lifted the child out of her arms, hoisting him up against one shoulder.

  “I won’t be long, Thomas,” Helga assured him, and she turned and went down the passage beneath the staircase, and disappeared through a half-glassed door.

  A pretty, trusting, stupid little girl. He hoped they would not be too hard on her. You can be as long as you like, my darling. Carrying his son he went down the hall, let himself out through the yellow front door, went down the steps and got into his waiting car.

  Helga heard the car go down the street, but she did not realize it was Oliver’s. When she returned with the push chair, there was no sign of either the man or the child.

  “Mr. Dobbs?”

  He had left the front door open, and the house was invaded by the bitter cold of the afternoon.

  “Thomas?”

  But outside was only the empty pavement, the silent street.

  2

  FRIDAY

  The most exhausting thing in the world, Victoria Bradshaw decided, was not having enough to do. It was infinitely more exhausting than having far too much to do, and today was a classic example.

  February was a bad time for selling clothes. She supposed it was a bad time, really, for selling anything. Christmas was forgotten, and the January sales just a gruesome memory. The morning had started hopefully, with thin sunshine and a light icing of frost, but by early afternoon it had clouded over, and now it was so cold and wet that people with any sense at all were staying at home by fires or in centrally heated flats, doing crosswords or baking cakes or watching television. The weather gave them no encouragement to plan wardrobes for the spring.

  The clock edged around to five o’clock. Outside, the bleak afternoon was darkening swiftly into night. The curved shop window had SALLY SHARMAN written across it. From the inside of the shop this presented itself backwards, like writing seen in a mirror, and beyond these hieroglyphics Beauchamp Place was curtained in rain. Passersby, umbrellaed and gusted by wind, struggled with parcels. A stream of traffic waited for the Brompton Road lights to change. A figure, camouflaged by rainproof clothing, ran up the steps from the street and burst through the glass-paneled door like a person escaping, letting in a gust of cold air before the door was hastily slammed shut again.

  It was Sally, in her black raincoat and her huge red fox hat. She said, “God, what a day,” furled her umbrella, took off her gloves and began to unbutton her coat.

  “How did it go?” Victoria asked.

  Sally had spent the afternoon in the company of a young designer who had decided to go into the wholesale trade.

  “Not bad,” she said, draping her coat over the umbrella stand to drip. “Not bad at all. Lots of new ideas, good colors. Rather mature clothes. I was surprised. I thought his being so young, it would have been all jeans and workmen’s shirts, but not at all.”

  She pulled off her hat, shook it free of raindrops, and finally emerged as her usual, lanky, elegant self. Narrow trousers tucked into tall boots, and a string-like sweater that on anyone else would have looked like an old floor-cloth, but on Sally was sensational.

  She had started life as a model and had never lost her beanpole shape or the ugly, jutting, photogenic bones of her face. From being a model, she had gravitated to the editorial pages of a fashion magazine, and from there, using her accumulated know-how, her many connections, and a natural flair for business, had opened her own shop. She was nearly forty, divorced, hard-headed, but far more tenderhearted than she liked anybody to suspect. Victoria had worked for her for nearly two years and was very fond of her.

  Now, she yawned. “I really hate business lunches. I always feel hung over by the middle of the afternoon, and somehow that throws me for the rest of the day.”

  She reached into her immense handbag and took out cigarettes and an evening paper, which she tossed down onto the glass counter. “What’s been happening here?”

  “Practically nothing. I sold the beige overdress, and some female came in and dithered for half an hour over the paisley coat, and then she went out again and said she’d think it over. She was put off by the mink collar. She says she’s a wildlife supporter.”

  “Tell her we’ll take it off and put on plastic fur instead.” Sally went through the curtained doorway into the small office at the back of the shop, sat at her desk and began to open the mail.

  She said, “You know, Victoria, I’ve been thinking, this would be a terribly good time for you to take a couple of weeks off. Things’ll start livening up soon, and then I shan’t be able to let you go. Besides, you haven’t had a holiday since goodness knows when. The only thing is, February isn’t very exciting anywhere. Perhaps you could go and ski, or stay with your mother in Sotogrande. What’s Sotogrande like in February?”

  “Windy and wet, I should think.”

  Sally looked up. “You don’t want to take two weeks off in February,” she announced resignedly. “I can tell by your voice.” Victoria did not contradict her. Sally sighed. “If I had a mother who had a gorgeous house in Sotogrande, I’d stay with her every month of the year if I could. Besides, you look as though you need a holiday. All skinny and pale. It makes me feel guilty having you around, as though I worked you too hard.” She opened another envelope. “I thought we’d paid that electricity bill. I’m sure we paid it. It must be the computer’s fault. It must have gone mad. Computers do, you know.”

  To Victoria’s relief the question of her suddenly taking a holiday at the end of February was, for the moment, forgotten. She picked up the newspaper that Sally had tossed down, and for lack of anything better to do, leafed idly through it, her eye skimming the usual disasters, both great and small. There were floo
ds in Essex, a new conflagration threatened in Africa. A middle-aged earl was marrying his third wife, and in Bristol rehearsals were under way at the Fortune Theatre for Oliver Dobbs’ new play, Bent Penny.

  There was no reason why she should have noticed this little scrap of news. It was tucked in at the end of the last column on the entertainments page. There was no headline. No photograph. Just Oliver’s name, which leapt out at her, like a shout of recognition, from the small print.

  “.… it’s a final demand. What a nerve, sending a final demand. I know I wrote a cheque last month.” Victoria said nothing, and Sally looked at her. “Victoria…? What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing. Just this bit in the paper about a man I used to know.”

  “I hope he’s not being sent to jail.”

  “No, he writes plays. Have you ever heard of Oliver Dobbs?”

  “Yes, of course. He writes for television. I saw one of his short plays the other night. And he did the script for that marvelous documentary on Seville. What’s he been doing to get himself in the news?”

  “He’s got a new production coming off in Bristol.”

  “What’s he like?” Sally asked idly, half her mind still on the iniquities of the London Electricity Board.

  “Attractive.”

  This caught Sally’s attention. She was all in favor of attractive men. “Did he attract you?”

  “I was eighteen and impressionable.”

  “Weren’t we all, darling, in the dim days of our youth. Not that that applies to you. You’re still a blooming child, you fortunate creature.” Suddenly she lost interest in Oliver Dobbs, in the final demand, in the day, which had already gone on far too long. She leaned back and yawned. “To hell with it. Let’s shut up shop and go home. Thank the Lord for weekends. All at once the prospect of nothing to do for two days is total paradise. I shall spend this evening sitting in a hot bath and watching television.”