Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  ‘What did Mr Brannigan do?’ said Olive, who was young enough to actually ask the question that was gleaming in Ruth’s eyes.

  ‘Nothing, pet,’ Philip said. ‘Off you go now. See if the chickens are shut in,’ he added officiously.

  ‘Chickens?’ said Jane. Ruth’s eyebrows went up and Emily shook a bemused head.

  ‘And ducks,’ she said, resigned. When the children had gone she continued, ‘It’s really not the sort of thing the children should hear. I must be more careful. I mean, their own grandmother.’

  ‘Helen,’ Jane said drily, ‘is hardly everyone’s picture of a granny, though, is she?’

  ‘Well, of course not. And naturally she’s positively forbidden the children to address her as Grandmama, even in their letters. Isn’t it pathetic? She’s “Helen” to them, and the playboy of the western world is Mr Brannigan. Well, they could hardly call him Grandpa, could they?’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Jane. Mike Brannigan, Helen’s husband, had been a business associate of Joe Hardacre before his death. Not all of Joe’s businesses had been of the sort one would choose to brag about; before the First War he had invested heavily in the German armaments kings, Krupps, and after the armistice too, military dealings, with little regard to political consequences, had always formed part of his enterprise. Like his investments, Joe’s associates were not always the most savoury. Mike Brannigan was typical, a tough Irish-American, whose past was subject to much speculation but almost certainly involved gun-running to Ireland in 1916 and, more recently, liberal dealings with all parties concerned in the Near East. He was rumoured to have taken part in the Easter Rising, less out of Irish patriotism than a belligerent delight in a good scrap. Whether or not the rumours were true, Mike looked the part, and in the late twenties, when the newly-widowed Helen Hardacre, having failed to wrest some of the Hardacre fortune back from Harry, returned to New York in search of a new protector, Mike Brannigan, a toughly handsome thirty-year-old, was not short of appeal.

  In spite of a deliberate rich gilding of elegance, Helen Hardacre was, at the core, a woman very like Brannigan himself in character. They had sprung from similar sources, and fought their way up with similar gusto. Twenty years his senior, and far more experienced, Helen was able to convey to the brashly youthful Irishman an aura of sophistication and style he found irresistible, and he was already well involved with her before he realized he was entranced by fool’s gold. She was no more lady than he was gentleman, but by then he was physically enamoured with her, a condition she did nothing to ease until her finger was once more sporting a band of gold. For Helen, at Joe Hardacre’s death, was stony-broke, and indeed down to her last, borrowed mink, when Mike Brannigan, still convinced he was marrying wealth, led her down the aisle of St Patrick’s. On their wedding night she satisfied his every desire. The following morning she taped her last bank statement to the bathroom mirror. It was a gesture of such black humour that, where she had expected to find him furious, she found him convulsed with enchanted laughter. Their marriage had, at times, a richness that surprised them both.

  The marriage surprised Helen’s British family even more, partly because she neglected to tell any of them about it for years. In time, with her sharp and ruthless business wit backed up by Mike’s brawn, she had managed to reconstruct a respectable semblance of Joe’s old enterprise. Then with the advent of the Second War, while the Hardacres struggled in beleaguered Britain, the Brannigans built a fortune in armaments and the black market in America. Thus was Helen able, in 1946, to make an entrance of which she no doubt had dreamed for years. Arriving on the newly refurbished Queen Mary, she travelled up to London, her youthful consort on her arm, a monumental collection of matched luggage in tow, and booked in at the Savoy for a month. From there she issued invitations (Harry called them Royal Summonses) to the entire remaining Hardacre family, the greater part of which, out of a mixture of good manners and curiosity, came. There, in Helen and Mike Brannigan’s sumptuous suite, they were treated to an evening of glitter and luxury such as none of them had seen since before the war. And which, quite frankly, in the new straitened circumstances of the country and their own fortunes, none of them was ever likely to see again. Champagne flowed, imported foods, some imported personally by the Brannigans to avoid rationing strictures, filled laden, white-clothed tables. Amidst her utility-dressed, post-war shabby in-laws, Helen glided, cool and delicious in oyster silk, sparkling with diamonds. The best of New York’s cosmetics’ masters graced her remarkably youthful features. Mike Brannigan, his muscular body still uneasy in its dinner-suit, was as handsome and devotedly attendant as a royal favourite. Emily, who had prided herself on being the family’s one true sophisticate, was so put out by her mother’s performance as to retire to the cloakroom at one point in tears. Harry maintained quietly to Jane that he’d like to check out Helen’s loft for unusually aged portraits, but conceded gamely that his sister-in-law had definitely won this match. Only Madelene was unimpressed. ‘Of course she is beautiful,’ she said later, calmly. ‘She is rich. A poor woman who grows ugly in time is unfortunate. A rich woman who allows the same to happen is a fool.’

  Perhaps fortunately for family serenity, Helen withdrew once more to New York after making her point to the Yorkshire clan she always felt had looked down on her. Based there, with fingers of her complex and doubtful business empire reaching throughout the world, Helen grew richer and more stylish as time went by. Maud and Albert Chandler, whose company she occasionally kept, when operations on the coast required her personal attentions, maintained loyally that she was indeed still quite extraordinarily youthful for her age, though reading between the lines the family were able to discern hints of cracks in the armour. Helen did no doubt look ten years younger, even now, than she was, but she was still approaching seventy, relentlessly, and Mike Brannigan was in his prime.

  ‘Do you know, Aunt Jane,’ Emily mused, ‘I actually feel sorry for her. She really is quite pathetic.’

  ‘Like a crocodile, she’s pathetic,’ said Philip.

  But Emily went on, ‘No, truly. How long can it go on? Imagine having to keep your husband tied to your apron strings all the time, lest he run off with some platinum floozy. I imagine she has him practically manacled to her wrist for this Hollywood trip. She’s going for Janet’s new film’s première. You can just picture the scene!’

  ‘Oh, can’t I just,’ said Ruth, who had just returned from the garden with her empty chicken-feed bowl. ‘She’s too lucky for words. Imagine. Janet Chandler! And Don Madison! Oh, I can’t believe she’s really my cousin, and she really knows Don Madison. I bet she even gets to kiss him in the film.’ Ruth sighed, sinking dreamily into a chair by the long table. ‘Oh, why didn’t we move to California to open a pub, instead of dumb old Yorkshire?’

  ‘I very much suspect,’ Jane said, ‘that it is the purse strings to which the gentleman is tied and, if that is the case, no doubt he will be content to remain just where he is. Anyhow, it’s her life, and she’s entitled to live it as she pleases. As for the rest of us, we simply must get on with making the best of our own.’ She added, with a wink to Ruth, ‘Tell me my girl, when was the last time you wielded a paint-brush?’

  Chapter Five

  For once, Madelene was not late. In fact, so eager or, more correctly, so anxious was she regarding this luncheon that she had arrived at the sea front hotel in Scarborough a full half-hour early. The past four months, since Sam’s departure from Ampleforth, had not constituted the most lengthy separation she had endured from her younger twin son, nor by any means the most worrisome; the war had provided both. But it was without a doubt the most frustrating and also the most hurtful. Here she was, living but a few miles away from him, communicating by wretchedly awkward telephone, when always within an easy familiar drive of a reunion, and unable to bridge that tiny geographical gap because of the emotional gap that had suddenly loomed between them. Madelene needed only a handful of words to bring her at once to the side of h
er son; she was not a spiteful woman; but they were words he persistently refused to speak. Until now. The invitation had come, in a brief telephone conversation on Wednesday when he had, at last, suggested they meet. She at once offered Hardacres as the logical venue, since it was Sam’s childhood home, and as quickly realized, hearing the distancing of his voice, she had made a mistake. She left the choice to him, and he had designated this particular hotel, anonymous, neutral, devoid of association. Madelene restlessly paced its unfamiliar foyer, regarding its plush Victorian draperies with distaste. It had, in the last half-hour, come to represent the divisions between herself and young Sam, and she detested it. For the tenth time she settled in a chair by the window, looking out at the bleak winterscape imbued with the eternal sadness of summer resorts in winter; empty streets, tea-rooms and guest-houses dreaming silently in lace-curtained solitudes, empty beaches pawed by a restless, angry sea. Scarborough at least retained a fashionable dignity, unlike her more pedestrian sister down the coast, where Sam had chosen to live, and Madelene was not disinclined to enjoy a day’s shopping here, or afternoon tea with lady friends. Sam knew that; knew she had her favourite hotels and tea-rooms for such meetings, and had deliberately chosen none of them. He was, even now, rejecting her, and the family, at every turn.

  ‘Mother?’

  Madelene whirled about, startled, blinking in the dim light after the brightness of the snow outside. He was outlined against the interior light of the building and his face was in shadow. For a chilling moment Madelene felt that, had he not spoken, she would not have recognized her own son. With no logic but the force of familiarity, she had somehow expected to see him in the black habit he had worn at Ampleforth. Instead, he was dressed in a casual mix of sports clothes, a tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, a worn-looking pullover and limp-collared white shirt decorated incongruously with the brilliant red and yellow stripes of an MCC tie. His hair had grown, naturally, in four months and had evidently not yet been graced by a barber’s guiding hand. He was smiling broadly, and Madelene saw for the first time a startling resemblance to his great-grandfather who had smiled like that, and who also had never, in all his years as a country gentleman, learned how to dress.

  ‘You look … horrible,’ Madelene said, extending her neck slightly and turning her cheek for the habitual kiss.

  Sam gave it more heartily than usual and grinned again. ‘Thanks so much for the tact. I know. The combined talents of every second-hand shop in the East Riding. The alternative was army surplus and it was all a bit deja vu.’

  ‘The tie is the worst. Take it off.’

  ‘Mother,’ Sam said firmly, ‘the tie is really mine. From before, even. Besides, if I take it off they won’t serve me lunch.’

  ‘So?’ Madelene said warily. ‘You expect lunch, too, after four months of not even saying hello.’ She was half-teasing, and half-not.

  Sam smiled again and shook his head. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you to lunch. You don’t think I’d ask you all this distance for nothing.’

  Madelene was taken aback and sorry for what she had said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied at once. ‘I was only teasing. Of course I will take you to luncheon.’

  ‘No.’

  She looked up, startled. His face was set firmly, and his voice had taken on that new, steady tone she had come to associate with his phone calls from Bridlington, which he always insisted on paying for, coin by coin.

  ‘You can’t pay for this,’ Madelene said briskly, looking about the lavish surrounds.

  ‘I’m not a monk any longer, remember, Mother. I can’t expect to live on charity now.’

  ‘Charity!’ Madelene exclaimed, growing furious. ‘Your mother taking you to lunch is not charity. Nor, for that matter, is your uncle’s hospitality at Hardacres, or, or mine at home, or Philip Barton’s at Kilham, or Aunt Jane’s, or … or anyone else’s that you’ve turned down in the last four months as if you never wanted to see any of us again.’

  Madelene was quite red in the face from her sudden outburst of pent-up resentment and Sam, waiting until she had come to a spluttering halt, smiled once again and said, ‘Sherry, Mother? Or a glass of wine?’

  Twice more, during lunch, Madelene tried to persuade Sam to allow her to pay, but he was adamant. He had saved for weeks and weeks from his tiny wage, skipped meals and given up cigarettes so that he might arrange this meeting on his own terms; the terms on which he intended to base his future life.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ Madelene demanded for the fourth, frustrated time.

  ‘I told you. Fry fish, until I find something better.’

  ‘You cannot fry fish for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Why not?’ Sam returned. ‘Other people do.’

  But his smile was hollow. Granted, in the first few weeks of his new employment the euphoria of actually earning his own living, paying his own way, triumphantly handing Mrs Hewitt the rent money each week (in advance) had been a kind of fulfilment in itself. Naturally enough, that childish glee wore thin as day followed day, and boredom set in, saturated with the pervasive reek of hot cooking oil. He felt he could smell the stuff on himself permanently, even after a bath and a shave and a change of clothing; it went with him everywhere, a new incense. He said again, ‘I’ll find something.’

  ‘What?’ Madelene pursued, and Sam, confidence faltering, let his gaze slide from hers, defeated, to the white cloth of the table. Like so many whose coming of age was greeted by the coming of war, he had trained for little but defending his country. A good public school education and a single year reading law at Cambridge was all he had to offer the world, plus a not inconsiderable background of theology and philosophy from Ampleforth which, whatever its merits, lacked the worldly ring of practicality.

  When he found no answer Madelene shrugged Gallically and said, ‘It is a punishment.’

  ‘A punishment?’ Sam said, not sure he was hearing right.

  ‘Upon me. For failing to support you strongly enough in the faith. Now you have lost your faith and Our Lady is punishing me.’

  Sam leaned back in his chair and laughed so heartily and delightedly that his eyes watered.

  ‘You laugh? I am distraught; you have abandoned the Church, and you laugh?’

  ‘Oh Mother, sometimes you are so Catholic you are almost a heathen. Our Lady doesn’t punish people. Anyhow, you supported me wonderfully, always,’ he said, with such warmth and sincerity that Madelene forgave him his laughter. ‘And I have not lost my faith. I have lost my vocation. That is utterly different. Or more precisely, I think I have found I never had one to start with.’

  ‘Of course you had a vocation,’ Madelene replied, indignant. ‘You spent three years there. Three years. And Terry is still there, thank God, at least Terry still remembers you had vocations.’

  ‘No,’ Sam said, his voice once again newly firm. ‘No, Mother. Terry had a vocation. That is why Terry is still there. I didn’t. And that is why I’m here.’

  ‘But if Terry …’

  ‘I’m not Terry, Mother.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But you are so alike. You are twins. Always you’ve done everything together. So why now this?’

  ‘Just because something has always been done, it is not necessarily right,’ said Sam.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Madelene said shortly, staring morosely at her half-finished trifle. ‘I don’t understand you at all. You’ve changed. You were never like this with Terry.’

  ‘Blast Terry,’ Sam said suddenly, startling himself with his own vehemence. Madelene looked up, appalled, but he held his course. ‘I am not Terry, Mother. I’m me, Sam. I’m different. If you don’t like me this way I’m sorry, but I’m going to stay this way. I’m going my own way. I love Terry and I love the Church, but I’ve my own life to live. I’ve followed Terry every day of my life. Until now. I followed him into the world, as you well know. You didn’t even know I was there until after he was born. Then, su
rprise, here comes Sam, number two, second-in-line, runner-up. Damn it, Mother, I followed him through school, into the army, out of the army, and into the monastery, and I never argued once. And now for the first time ever I’m taking one little step without him …’

  ‘And look where it’s got you,’ Madelene said. ‘A fish and chip shop in Brid. An achievement, I suppose?’

  Sam was silent. He signalled the waiter and paid the bill, adding the precisely correct amount for a tip which he really could not afford. He rose from his chair and took his mother’s arm gently. Out on the wind- and snow-swept sea front street he walked her carefully to her little red car. As he opened the door for her, he said, ‘God would rather an honest man frying fish than a liar hiding behind holy vows. I have no vocation. I can’t camp on His doorstep for nothing.’

  He bent to kiss her, and saw in her slight flinch that she still did not understand.

  ‘May I drive you somewhere?’ she said stiffly.

  He shook his head. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I didn’t expect a yes or anything so gracious.’

  ‘I love you.’

  Madelene sighed, seated in the little car, looking up at the tall, handsome, black-haired man who was her son. ‘Children,’ she said. ‘They think that will cure everything.’

  ‘Won’t it?’ Sam said, with a small smile.

  ‘Change that ridiculous tie.’ She slammed the door, started the engine and roared away from the kerb, tyres spinning on slush.

  ‘Drive carefully,’ Sam called uselessly, from habit, as she tore off into the snow.

  Within the week, on an equally cold day, Sam met the answer to Madelene’s questions. Like most rare strokes of fortune, it was travelling incognito, and he did not recognize it at the time.

  It was a stormy day in late February. Sam had risen sharply for six o’clock weekday Mass at the Catholic church on Victoria Drive, as he did every day. Indeed, had Madelene Hardacre been able to observe the assiduous devotion with which he still maintained the religious life, she would have been less concerned about his loss of faith. And she would have been wrong as well, for Sam’s daily attendance at Mass was less a virtue than a comfortable habit without which he felt lost. In an everyday sense, his life had not changed as much as one might suppose. He still began each morning in church, rising as early as he had ever done. He still ate frugally, and he still retired at an early hour to his bed in Mrs Hewitt’s guest-house, whose guests’ sitting-room maintained a starchy formality that produced in its inhabitants a fair imitation of the Grand Silence of Ampleforth. And as for the carnal life, he had not even considered it. He was less a bachelor than a widower in that respect, too stunned yet by the separation from the monastery to realize he was, in matters of love, once again a free man.