Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Kath nodded. They saw Ken, red-faced and beaming his enjoyment, beckoning from the doorway.

  ‘There’s your dad. He’ll be famished. He wants us to go in with him to have dinner.’

  ‘You go. I’ll be in when I’ve made sure of everyone else.’

  Harriet kissed her mother’s cheek, and watched her walk away, taller than usual on dressed-up high heels.

  Not my Dad, she thought. And she also knew that even though they didn’t speak of Simon it didn’t mean that he was forgotten. Harriet thought of him every day, and wished for him.

  She left the shelter of the grotto, and went in search of the last of her guests who might need accompanying in to dinner. Harriet was the last to go in herself, on the arm of Anthony Fell. She had grown to like him, as well as to admire what he did.

  They surveyed the crowded tables. Anthony said smoothly, ‘This is a very nice piece of PR. It won’t do the planning application any harm.’

  ‘It’s not just PR. I wanted people to come to Birdwood, to feel that it hasn’t just been taken up by some stranger. I’d like to do other things here, village things, when the house is restored. The place was willed to Everden, in the beginning.’

  ‘Very commendable,’ Anthony said. Harriet sensed that he was making mild fun of her, but she let it pass. She didn’t know, yet, how she would establish the links without adopting the lady of the manor role for herself. Jane’s sharp remark had struck home. But she determined that she would do it, somehow.

  Across the table Miss Bowlly was dispatching a large plate of duck with great enthusiasm. She had removed her wellingtons and her knitted hat for the occasion, but otherwise she seemed to be dressed much as usual. She leaned forward, and winked at Harriet.

  ‘Nice to see everyone mucking in,’ she remarked.

  It was not quite the elegant phrase Harriet might have hoped to have applied to her elegant party, but it conveyed some of the spirit she intended. She beamed back at Miss Bowlly. ‘It is, isn’t it? Long may it last.’

  There was only one short speech after the dinner. Harriet delivered it herself, standing informally at her table. She welcomed the guests to Birdwood, and thanked them for coming. She hoped there would be many more such evenings to come, celebrations for Everden and the new community together. She asked them to raise their glasses and drink a toast to that association. They drank, and there was loud applause.

  ‘Well done,’ Anthony murmured in her ear when she sat down again. She didn’t try to convince him that she meant what she said.

  After dinner the dancing began.

  With her speech over, Harriet took a third glass of champagne. She was beginning to float on a sea of well-being. When she danced with the vicar the faces around her seemed to belong to friends. She saw Kath dancing with the farmer whose land adjoined Miss Bowlly’s, and Ken with Miss Bowlly herself. Anthony Fell was dancing with the striped-shirt woman from the village hall meeting, the woman herself barely recognisable in peacock-blue taffeta tiers.

  The tempo of the music grew quicker. The vicar relinquished Harriet, and she found herself with one of the dinner-jacketed outskirter men. As they whirled over the floor, in and out of the pillars, in a throng of young dancers, Harriet found herself sentimentally hoping that if Caz and Fran of the spray-paint vows were not here themselves, then at least their parents were, or their older siblings. It seemed symbolically important that they should have penetrated past the unboarded windows tonight.

  Harriet passed from partner to partner. The party was alive, moving without her direction. Some of the pensioner ladies were already leaving, thanking her and beaming with their own daring in having come at all; the younger contingent was settling in for a much longer night. The dancing continued, but some of the couples were separating out to sit in the plaster groves. The pairings would fuel village gossip for months.

  Harriet remembered that once, at a party of Jane’s, she had felt that her life was separated into two compartments, and the occupants of one compartment could not be allowed to stray into the other. But tonight she knew that all the parts of her life worth reckoning with were here, under one decaying roof, at Birdwood.

  Then Harriet saw Jane herself. She watched her dancing with David Howkins. In that instant by recognising something in the way they touched one another, with familiarity and yet a kind of constraint, or perhaps by making the kind of connection eased by champagne, Harriet knew that they had been lovers.

  It was like a bright, unwelcome light flicking on in a darkened room.

  Harriet had been dancing with Charlie Thimbell but she faltered, and then stood still. She was winded by recognition of her own obtuseness, and by a shaft of jealousy.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Charlie asked her.

  ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ Disconnected images began to form a picture in her mind. The jealousy startled her, but she was also shamed to know that she had been too blind and too busy to see what was happening to her friends. She understood just as plainly as the love affair had existed that it was over now. ‘I can be very stupid,’ she added, more to herself than to Charlie.

  ‘You always seem as sharp as a razor to me,’ Charlie said, with the comfortable air of having forgotten everything that he did not find palatable to remember. ‘You seem to have everything very tidily sewn up.’

  ‘Not everything. Not quite everything.’

  Charlie wasn’t listening. He had taken her hand to lead her out of the dance, and now he lifted each of her hands in turn and kissed them. ‘Listen, we’ve got to go. I wish we didn’t, but there you are. It’s a wonderful party.’

  They found Jenny sitting on one of the benches. Her latest baby was only a very few weeks old. She looked plumper than she had done. She lifted her head to smile at Harriet.

  ‘I’m dragging him away again.’

  ‘And I wanted to see the fireworks.’ But Charlie was only pretending to be aggrieved.

  ‘There will be plenty of other times.’ Harriet was thinking again of other evenings, of the small accretions of experience shared that built up into friendship. ‘There will. There must be.’

  Charlie and Jenny didn’t notice her ferocity. She went with them, across the hall to the double doors, and kissed them both.

  ‘Good-night. Good-night.’

  She let them go, to drive home to their children. Their babysitter had charge of Imogen, too, for this one night. As Harriet retraced her steps she was thinking of sleeping heads on pillows, as she had seen Linda’s. A sense of the intricate responsibilities of parenthood admonished rather than attracted her. Although she had imagined that she would have children of her own some day, some unspecified day, it came to Harriet on this surprising evening that perhaps she had long ago chosen and already moved too far down a different path. She felt a lightening, as of relief. She thought of the work she had to do, of the Birdwood development and of other threads moving outwards from that beginning, drawing her with them. An awareness of happiness that had nothing to do with champagne carried her in search of Jane.

  She found her sitting at one of the cleared supper tables. She had been talking to one of the youngest Everden couples, but they melted away when Harriet sat down. Jane met her head-on.

  ‘I’m sorry about the lady-of-the-manor dig. Charlie ticked me off for it.’

  Harriet waved her hand, taking in the dimming room all the way across to the great open hearth where the burned logs were collapsing into the hollow red heart of the fire. It was after eleven o’clock. At midnight, the fireworks display would mark the beginning of the end of the party.

  ‘It wasn’t quite unjustified, was it? I’ll try not to turn into the lady. Will that do?’

  Jane sat back in her chair and laughed at her. ‘We’ll have to see.’

  They were both aware of the shifting sands of their friendship, and of their wish to secure it again. They sat for a few moments, facing each other across the white tablecloth with their champagne glasses between them. They talked about t
he party, and about the Everden stalwarts who passed by them, and the new village that Harriet hoped to see built across the fields.

  ‘Good luck,’ Jane said at last, tipping her glass and emptying it.

  Harriet took a breath. ‘You never told me about you and David Howkins.’

  After a glance, Jane said, ‘You never asked.’

  She couldn’t gauge if it was meant as a rebuke, but Harriet accepted it meekly. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It all finished quite a long time ago.’

  ‘Were you hurt?’

  There was a pause. ‘No,’ Jane lied to her. And then, with a renewal of the act of generosity that Harriet could just begin to guess at now, she offered, ‘It’s you he’s interested in. Did you know that?’

  Harriet answered simply, ‘Yes. I think I did.’

  Briskly Jane gathered up her evening bag and her empty glass. ‘Well, then,’ she said, without bitterness. ‘I’m going to have another drink, and find somebody to dance with. A night without Imogen doesn’t happen all that often. Not that I’m complaining, you understand.’

  She winked at Harriet, a lewd wink, and went away into the room where the dancing was still in full swing. Harriet sat on, alone at the table. The white cloth made a blank page for her thoughts.

  She had made the party, it was her own creation. All these people were here, the guests and the waiters and the cooks, because she had brought them together. Their enjoyment was her achievement, and in watching the faces Harriet felt the fragile bubble of her Everden dream grow stronger. Harriet was proud of her evening, but now that it was reaching its climax the success of it did not surprise her. She knew what she could do, she expected success from herself. But it also came to her as she sat there that she should arrange her own life with the same decisiveness.

  A long time ago, at the very beginning, when she had met David in Jane’s kitchen full of teachers, she had believed that she had no time for the absorbing conspiracies of love. And now, as she sat painfully remembering her marriage, and Robin and Caspar, her own failures and smallness of heart as well as her partners’, she was sure that she had made a true reckoning. Other things drew her, taking out her energies and allegiances. Love as a pursuit was too exacting, and the responsibilities daunted her.

  Harriet felt no particular sadness. Rather a kind of elation, at a truth finally recognised and categorised. But there was, she decided, another kind of truth to be reckoned with. She could recall, from the days when she was trying to start Peacocks, how grim her denial of everything unconnected with her business had been, and how rigid her determination to succeed. She thought she must have been very unlikeable, in those days. But I did succeed, she told herself. The severed limb of Peacocks still hurt her, but she knew how to contain the hurt. I’m mistress of myself. Or I should be.

  The choice of phrase made her smile, intensifying her private-joke expression as she sat with her chin in her hands.

  Harriet felt suddenly happy, possessed by a happiness that managed to shake off guilt, that was nothing to do with champagne or the elation of the party. She didn’t want to go in pursuit of love, as if it were some threatening Grail, as she had tried to do with poor Caspar Jensen. But that was no reason, she understood, why she should not enter into all the other human conspiracies – of sex, of friendship, or simple enjoyment, as she had discovered in one dimension with Linda. There was time. The initiative was her own, as in everything else she did. The truth was so simple, and so obvious, that it almost took her breath away.

  David Howkins had offered her something long ago, and she had anxiously rejected it. She had hidden in the bathroom. The memory made Harriet laugh out loud. A passing couple looked curiously at her.

  Tonight it had made her jealous just to see him dancing with Jane, just to think of what was plainly over.

  And if you want something, Harriet told herself, then you can go and get it. She surveyed her room, from the ceiling mouldings to the oak floorboards, acknowledging a partial truth. But she was not so elated as to allow herself total conviction.

  She took a deep breath, and then went to look for David.

  She found him almost at once. He was standing on the first-floor landing, leaning on the mahogany rail and looking down on to the heads in the hallway. Harriet knew that he had been waiting for her.

  She gathered up the hem of her green velvet skirt and went slowly up the wide stairs to meet him. When she reached his side he moved along, making room for her. She leant on the rail beside him, feeling the warmth in the wood where his arms had been.

  They bent forward, shoulder to shoulder, watching the scene below them. There were small groups of people gathering together, talking and laughing. Coats and wraps were being brought out, and helped on. The doors stood open, and there were more people filtering out into the darkness. It was almost midnight, time for the fireworks.

  Harriet said, ‘Perhaps I should go out with them. Give some directions.’ Then she turned to David. She examined his face, wondering that she had ever thought he looked like a boxer. She was microscopically conscious of the texture of his skin, the way his mouth moved. She smiled at him, a lazy smile. ‘Or perhaps I shouldn’t.’

  ‘There’s no need. It’s their party.’ David was smiling too.

  Harriet knew that he was right. She had presented them with Birdwood for the evening, and it was theirs to enjoy. They didn’t need her, and she wanted something else. She wanted it very much.

  David stood upright. They faced each other, and he put one arm around her waist. Then he leant forward and touched the tip of his tongue to her mouth. Harriet lifted her arm and curled it around his neck, drawing his face to hers. Their mouths met and opened.

  Downstairs, all of Everden streamed out to watch the fireworks.

  When David lifted his head again it was to demand, ‘Where?’

  Harriet might have said, impossible, but this evening she would not. Instead she took David’s hand, thinking quickly. In the room with the faded and spotted mirror where she had changed into her green dress there was a pile of sheets left by the decorators.

  ‘This way.’

  They slipped along the gallery, hand in hand, bumping into each other and laughing like conspirators. Harriet pushed open the door. The sheets lay in a heap on the floor, but there were also coats left by the waiters, a shopping basket and a crash-helmet.

  ‘No,’ Harriet said. But David gathered up the sheets and took her hand again. He led the way now, along the gallery and up the much narrower, dark and crooked stairs that took them to the servants’ floor above.

  The only light came filtering up from below. Harriet could hear his breathing as he pushed open the nearest door. It was almost completely dark, but Harriet knew that it was one of the maids’ rooms, fitted awkwardly under the eaves, with a little slit of iron grate, seemingly hardly wide enough to burn a single coal.

  She saw the faint blur of grey as he unfolded the sheets and then, looking upwards as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she saw the different navy-blue darkness of the jagged sky through the hole in the roof.

  David took hold of her, drawing her against him. Their mouths explored each other; Harriet turned her face, feeling the heat of her own skin reflected back from his. His hands went around her, smoothed over her bare back, then undid the long zip in the green velvet bodice. The dress fell away and left her shoulders bare.

  David put his mouth to the exposed skin, and Harriet’s head fell back. They knelt down, very slowly, facing each other on the spread sheet. The truant laughter had died, now. There was only the echo of their breathing.

  They lay down, stretching along the length of each other.

  From outside there came a rip, and a great crackle.

  Looking upwards, Harriet saw an instant’s flicker of fire, and then a great shower of scarlet sparks falling towards the earth.

  From a long way off, she heard a chorus of voices saying, ‘Ahhhh …’

&n
bsp; David put his fingers to her mouth, to suppress the renewed laughter.

  Harriet said, ‘Yes.’

  All My Sins Remembered

  BY ROSIE THOMAS

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Michael Joseph

  Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1991

  Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © MAR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560578

  Version: 2014-02-26

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen