How seductive it is, thinks Dossie, to imagine sharing with someone; to open one’s heart, to ask for advice. Where does that come from, that need to be known, to be understood, to be loved?
She remembers her last disastrous love affair and snorts derisively. It’s always been a weakness with her since Mike died: the longing to fall in love again.
‘You have the worst instincts with men I’ve ever known,’ a friend once said to her. ‘You’re so gullible. Why do you infallibly pick bastards?’
‘They’re always the best looking,’ she joked, but the remark hurt her, probably because it’s all true. She is gullible, she is optimistic and they are good-looking. Life seems rather pointless unless you’re sharing it with someone you love.
Dossie looks around the kitchen. Is she imagining that by selling her home and sharing the proceeds with Adam he might become closer to her? Or would he just take the money and run? But, anyway, he’s right. She can’t really afford to stay here, to manage the upkeep of this house, so at least with his contacts he might get a good price for it.
Suddenly she is weighted with depression, with loneliness. Her usual mantra, ‘Get a grip. Get a life. Get a dog’, doesn’t work for her at the moment. Battling with misery and tears, she drags out her phone and texts Hugo.
Could you Ned and Prune manage lunch here to meet Adam at the weekend? x
To her huge relief, he answers promptly.
Prune is working this weekend but otherwise that’s great. Saturday or Sunday?
Dossie thinks about it and decides on Saturday. Adam will be down on Friday evening and she doesn’t know when he means to leave on Sunday. She replies to Hugo and at once she feels more cheerful. Later she’ll FaceTime Jakey and see how they all are. Meanwhile she’ll get on with some work.
Hugo puts his phone down, writes the lunch date on the wall calendar and goes back to the kitchen table. It is covered with photographs. He’s been promising Ned that he’ll sort them out, put them into an album, but as usual he has become distracted by them. He picks up one and then another. Here he is, best man at Jamie’s wedding. Jamie, handsome in his uniform, smiling into the camera with Hugo beside him. ‘He’s my wing man,’ Jamie always says when he introduces Hugo to his mates. And here they are again at school, Jamie playing bass guitar with Hugo on the keyboard in the background. They’d both played the piano, both played in the school orchestra. Hugo picks up another photograph and stares at Emilia, laughing out at him with Jamie beside her. He experiences a similar shock to the reaction he had earlier at the Relish café: how alike they are, Emilia and her daughter, Lucy. He looks closely at the photograph and puts it down again. He still can’t quite see how Jamie’s marriage broke apart: they were so much in love.
Hugo bends to stroke Brioc, who presses against his leg. Then Hugo turns away from the table, remembering Emilia. She was so vivid, so alive. Her father was a musician, a flautist with one of the symphony orchestras, her mother was an actress. Emilia’s life was unsettled, bohemian, but she loved it, loved her artistic, unpredictable parents. Perhaps Jamie was right and it was this that had been the root of the trouble, after all. Perhaps those early years on a married patch with the rules and regs of military life, the separation, had contributed to Emilia’s sudden decision to leave Jamie. That it should have been for a man more than ten years her senior was an extra blow to his cousin’s pride. She’d met Nigel at her mother’s London flat; an amusing, handsome, Hugh Grant-type of actor, who was having great success in a TV sitcom.
‘The humiliation’s bad enough,’ Jamie said, ‘without seeing the bastard grinning out at me from the television every time I turn it on.’
Later, Nigel made a couple of films and then faded out of the public eye. Emilia had faded out of Jamie’s sight with him. There was no reason to remain in touch. Hugo looks at the photograph again – at the happy smiles, the hopefulness in their faces – and seems to feel the past all around him. Hugo picks up another photograph: he and Jamie amongst a group of choristers in blue cassocks and white frilled ruffs, holding candles, the Christmas tree behind them. Stanford in C, John Ireland’s ‘Greater love hath no man’: was it the sense of duty, of dedication, of professionalism instilled by the music that bound them together as boys and still holds them close? The Christmas Celebration, an event always held in the last week of the Michaelmas term, certainly contributed to his love of performance, his sense of theatre, that delicate balance between the religious and secular. He grew up determined to find a way to work in an artistic environment with like-minded people. Despite his musical ability, his love for the piano, he knew that he hadn’t the temperament to be a public performer and so, encouraged by the school motto, ‘Esto quod es’ – ‘Be who you are’ – he decided to join the new intake of interns at the BBC. Jamie chose service to his country and joined the RAF, becoming a Hercules captain, a ‘Truckie’ pilot, flying on operations in the Gulf, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Very different worlds.
And now here are photographs of Jack as a boy, as a young naval officer, of Ned and Margaret, holding glasses of champagne, laughing together, after Jack’s Passing Out Parade at Dartmouth. Hugo gazes at these pictures of his beloved aunt, of his cousin, so happy, so alive. It’s still almost impossible to believe that Jack, so vital, so full of humour and determination, should have died. Hugo remembers what fun they shared, though he had such admiration for his older cousin. Even Jamie was in awe of Jack; both of them devastated by his death.
On a sudden impulse Hugo gathers the photographs together and bundles them back into the big envelope. He doesn’t want Ned to come in from his bridge group and see them. There’s too much bereavement and sadness, too many failures and disappointments. He glances at his watch: just time to take the dogs for a walk before Ned comes home wanting supper. The exercise will raise his spirits, put him back on an even keel. Who was it, he wonders, who said that life has to be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards? Just at the moment he can’t understand anything. And if he’s feeling like this, how about poor Dossie, battling with loneliness, and Jamie, struggling with this terrible threat to his career?
Hugo groans, shoves the envelope to the back of a shelf in the dresser, and calls to the dogs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ADAM DRIVES INTO the empty, open-fronted barn, sits for a minute, still listening to the end of an interview on Radio 4, and then switches off the engine. He’s not surprised that Dossie’s car isn’t here. He left London earlier than he planned but, knowing that she’s taking a supply of food to a holiday complex in St Ives, he decided not to text her. He’s quite pleased to be here on his own: to give himself some time to adjust to the rural silence, to look at the gracious, pretty house with its freight of memories.
He stands in the warm May sunshine, hands in his jeans pockets, and stares around him. He can see signs of neglect in the garden that Mo loved so much; the window frames need touching up. His thoughts dart back to the time when Pa’s mother lived here: an indomitable, tough old lady with a will of iron. He and Dossie stayed with her during exeats and half terms, and once for the whole of an Easter holiday whilst Mo and Pa were between continents, moving from South Africa to Western Australia. Dossie, in her teens, seemed to take everything in her stride. She was allowed to have her friends from Truro School to tea or to spend the day. His school friend, Christopher, lived too far away to come to St Endellion. It seemed so unfair that Dossie was allowed to go to Truro School whilst he was sent upcountry to prep school.
Adam wanders round the outside of the house, aware of birdsong, of the scent of lilac, of the patchwork of fields all about him. There should be a dog somewhere around; there have always been dogs. Mo should be on her knees, weeding a border, and Pa shouting from somewhere, asking where the garden string has got to, or the secateurs, or that coffee was ready. Yet, somehow – and he’s not proud of this – it’s a relief that they’re not here to question him, ask how the job’s going or if he’s got a new girlfriend.<
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It was always like that: a sense of expectation, never to be fulfilled. He remembers overhearing a couple of B and B-ers talking; old friends of Mo and Pa.
‘A miracle that they had a son at last,’ he said to his wife. ‘After all those miscarriages, Pa was off his head with joy.’
‘Especially when that last miscarriage was a boy,’ she replied. ‘D’you remember? They were distraught. They wanted one so badly. My goodness, he’ll have a lot to live up to, poor boy.’
Adam balls up his fists and crosses his arms, staring up at the back of the house, remembering the succession of disappointments over the years, in his indifferent school reports, in his lack of physical prowess; in his failure to get to a top university: Pa’s raised eyebrows when Adam told him he was joining the agency in London. He’d hoped his only son would be an engineer, join the army.
‘Mike set it up,’ Adam said quickly, defensively. Mike could do no wrong in Pa’s eyes. ‘I’m going to be training with one of his friends.’
‘I suppose if that’s what you really want,’ Pa answered.
On an impulse, Adam walks back to the front of the house, down the drive and out into the lane. He strides quickly, hardly noticing the white hawthorn blossom in the hedges, the red campion in the ditches. He strides across the road and into the churchyard, around the west end of the little collegiate church to where Mo and Pa are buried beside Granny and Grandpa. He stands looking down at the graves. There are wild flowers in containers – Dossie, he thinks – and the grass is newly cut.
He is filled with emotion: grief, anger, love, despair.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says silently, bitterly, to them. ‘Sorry that I could never be the son you wanted. Maybe that other son, the one that came before me, might have been more the sort of son you wanted. You’ll never know how much I tried but it was never good enough. And the really terrible thing is that all I feel now is a sense of relief because I haven’t got to keep pretending that I don’t mind that I wasn’t what you hoped I’d be. That I was useless at school, that my marriage fell apart, that I didn’t give you any grandchildren, that I always seemed to get it wrong. And the fact that I feel relief makes me feel a complete shit, too.’
He turns away from the graves to stare beyond the churchyard, across the further wall, to the distant shine and shimmer of the sea. In the surrounding fields tall, feathery grasses and bright yellow buttercups ripple in the south-westerly breeze. The sun is warm on his shoulders and, as he breathes in the scent of hawthorn and new-mown grass, he allows some of his tension to flow out from him. As his fists unclench and his arms fall to his sides, just for a moment he feels so free; free from the bitterness of being sent away from home when he was barely eight years old to a cold, bleak boarding school, a small lonely boy who found it so difficult to join in, and was punished for it. For this moment it seems that all the pain, all his anger, is being carried away on that clean, salt-scented wind.
Although he knows that it is an illusion, he wants to weep, but instead he turns back, passing under the great yew, out through the gate and into the lane – and then pauses in surprise. Because there is Dossie, at the end of the lane, waiting for him.
‘Hi,’ she says, as he crosses the road. ‘I thought you might be here,’ and she puts out her arms and hugs him. After a second, he responds, and it is as if, for the first time for many, many years, he really has come home.
Dossie holds him tightly before letting him go. She is surprised by that sudden, instinctive response. Adam isn’t given to demonstrations of affection, he finds it difficult to show his emotions, and as they turn for home she is confused by her own reactions. For so long now it seems that they have been on opposite sides. She knows it was because she agreed to support it, to help them with it, that Mo and Pa were able to continue with their B and B-ers once they were too old to manage alone. Adam thought it was time they retired, sold The Court and downsized. They argued bitterly about it. At the time, she and Adam were both in difficult relationships and now Dossie regrets the angry words they exchanged. She longs to reconnect with him; to make their relationship work.
‘This is the bit I hate most,’ she says to him, unlocking the door. ‘Coming into a silent, empty house. There always used to be something going on and dogs rushing out to meet me.’
Adam doesn’t dismiss what she says with a shrug or a half-smile, as she fears he might, but stands still as if he, too, is listening to the silence.
‘You should leave a radio on,’ he says. ‘That way there would always be music or someone talking when you come in. It wouldn’t feel so bleak.’
She stares at him, seeing bleakness in his own face, and she hurries ahead of him into the kitchen so that he doesn’t see that she is near to tears, touched by the fact that he’s taken her seriously and not made light of her feelings.
‘That’s a good idea,’ she says, pushing the kettle on to the Aga. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Mo always had Radio 3 going. Or I could get a dog, of course. What d’you think?’
She waits: this is the test question. This is the moment when he will talk about her selling The Court, about not being able to manage it on her own, but Adam says neither of these things. He stands with his hands in his pockets, staring at the dogs’ beds.
‘What breed would you get?’ he asks at last. ‘Which was your favourite of all the dogs?’
She’s taken off guard and fiddles about with mugs and coffee – Adam never drinks tea – whilst she thinks about it.
‘It’s difficult,’ she answers at last. ‘I loved old Jonno, of course, and his inability to keep away from water. And Jess. Gosh, I don’t know. What about you? Which was your favourite?’
‘Molly,’ he answers at once. ‘I loved Molly. I was gutted when she died.’
In that moment Dossie has a mental picture of Adam as a small boy of eight or nine, sitting cross-legged where the dogs’ beds are, their grandmother’s beautiful field spaniel lying across his bare knees, his blond head bent over her and his hands gently caressing her smooth brown coat. For the second time in a few minutes Dossie wants to cry. She turns to look at him and is shocked by the same bleak look on his face. She guesses that he is remembering those exeats from school; the half-term holidays they spent here at The Court.
‘Were you very unhappy at school?’ she asks involuntarily.
‘Yes,’ he answers immediately, not moving, still with that grim expression. ‘I hated it. I hated it so much I thought I might die of it.’
She can think of nothing to say that does not sound trite.
‘I suppose,’ she says, at last, ‘if you are abroad and moving around all the time with your work, it’s difficult to give your children a proper home life and a decent, uninterrupted education.’
‘In which case,’ he answers swiftly, ‘don’t have children. I shall never have children. I’d be too afraid I might get it wrong for them.’
Dossie is taken aback by his response, at the pain that emanates from his tense figure.
‘I had no idea it was so bad for you,’ she says gently.
‘Why would you?’ he asks, almost indifferently, as though he wouldn’t expect any attention to be paid to his suffering.
‘Were you bullied?’ she asks tentatively.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I was bullied because I was so homesick. I had my head forced down the loo, I was mocked because I called my parents Mo and Pa, and I was caned for not joining in.’
She takes a breath but, before she can speak, Adam rushes on as if he needs to say it all; to say the words at last.
‘I didn’t bring friends home but Mo and Pa never asked why or seemed to wonder about it. I hated school because I wasn’t very bright and because I was useless at Games.’ He shrugs. ‘And nobody seemed to care much about that either.’
She is silent, not knowing what to say or how to help him.
He looks at her at last and then half smiles. ‘Sorry, Doss. Forget it. Long time ago.’
‘Clear
ly not,’ she answers. ‘I had no idea it was that bad, Adam. I should have noticed.’
He shakes his head dismissively. ‘You were already in your middle teens, thinking about boys and pop stars when I came back to England to school. A few years later you were married to Mike.’
‘That’s not the point. You’re my little brother. I should have picked up on it. You were always …’ She hesitates, not wanting to sound as if she is criticizing him. ‘You were a funny little boy. Kind of distant. Even in the holidays when Mo and Pa came home and were living here you seemed not to want to be a part of it.’
He looks at her, as if puzzled by her lack of understanding. ‘Can you begin to imagine what it was like, Doss? After twelve weeks of a prison-like existence, coming back to a houseful of B and B-ers? No time just to be with Mo and Pa. Always someone else around. Pa telling me to turn the telly off, go outside, to remember that breakfast was between eight and ten. Can you imagine what it was really like for someone like me? To be asked by well-meaning people a dozen times a day whether I enjoyed school and which subject I liked best?’
Dossie tries to remember those latter years of Adam’s school life. She was doing her Cordon Bleu course, living with friends in London.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says inadequately.
Adam shrugs. ‘Well, let’s face it, it hasn’t been a walk in the park for you either, has it?’
‘Well, you know what they say?’ She tries to sound upbeat. ‘Life’s shit and then you die.’
His face lightens. ‘I’m not arguing with that.’
The kettle boils and she makes tea for her and coffee for Adam; strong, no milk, no sugar. Just like Ned has it.
‘I hope you won’t mind,’ she begins hesitantly, thinking it’s time to change the subject, ‘but I’ve invited a couple of friends to lunch tomorrow. They started out as clients but have kind of morphed into chums. I think you’ll like them. They live down on the coast near Polzeath. Ned and Hugo.’
Homecomings Page 5
