‘OK,’ I said.
He turned away, and that was my cue to leave the subject alone and never go near it again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ONE DAY FOLLOWED another.
About three weeks after I’d come to Avalon, I was eating my lunch in the garden when I heard a clattering on the gravel of the drive. Over the top of the wall I saw the top half of a white horse and a girl in a sweatshirt waving at me. I picked up my empty mug and plate and walked over to the gate. The girl dismounted on the other side and walked the last few steps, holding on to the reins so that the horse had no choice but to follow. We faced one another over the gate.
‘Hi,’ she said. She was about my age, with ruddy cheeks and strings of brown hair hanging down on either side of her face beneath a shabby riding hat.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Is Genny in?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, she isn’t.’
‘Oh!’ The girl frowned. ‘But she knew I was coming today. We planned it ages ago and I’ve come a long way.’
She looked at me as though waiting for me to give her a reason why Genevieve had missed her.
‘Perhaps she forgot?’ I suggested tentatively.
‘Well, obviously. Where is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Out riding?’
Behind the girl, the horse delicately extended one front leg like a ballerina, leaned down, and rubbed its cheek against its knee. The flies were bothering it. It had darker grey freckles on its face.
‘No, I don’t think she’s riding,’ I said.
The girl looked at me with exasperation.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but, really, I don’t know where she is.’
‘Who are you exactly?’
I realized that she had probably seen me sitting by the stream at the bottom of the garden as if I owned the place.
‘I’m the housekeeper.’
‘Genny didn’t say anything to me about getting a housekeeper.’
I shrugged helplessly. The horse shook its head and blew air out of its nostrils. It made a whinnying sound. The girl turned to it and calmed it with her hand.
‘When are you expecting her back?’ she asked. ‘Is it worth me waiting?’
‘I don’t know when she’ll be back.’
The girl frowned again.
I grasped for something to say that would make me credible.
‘Do you know Mrs Churchill? Virginia?’
The girl pushed the horse backwards away from the gate.
‘Of course I know her.’
‘Perhaps you’d better speak to her.’
She grabbed the front of the saddle with one hand, found the stirrup with her left foot and hopped effortlessly on to the horse’s back.
‘I will,’ she said, and she made the horse turn and start cantering down the drive, sending gravel skittering this way and that.
I exhaled as she went, and turned back into the house.
She wasn’t the only visitor. The farrier turned up just a few days later wondering why Genevieve hadn’t brought the horses down into the loose boxes for their regular appointment. He had also come a good distance and I went through a similar conversation with him. There was a flurry of enquiries from the organizers of various major equine shows and events, which I politely deflected. I even answered a telephone call from the manager of a horse and donkey sanctuary in Taunton asking if Genevieve would be available to turn on their Christmas lights. I said I didn’t know.
‘She’s such a lovely person, she’s always helped us out before,’ the woman said.
‘I’m sure she’d love to do it, but …’
‘We thought she could arrive on horseback to turn on the lights. Don’t you think that’d make a good photograph?’
‘I’m sure it would,’ I said. ‘Only the situation here is difficult.’
‘Can I pencil her in? Then she can either confirm or not when she’s ready.’
I didn’t tell Alexander about any of these things. I didn’t see the point. I knew he would pretend they meant nothing, but they would remind him of Genevieve and how she had stepped out of her life, and his, and I didn’t want anything to cause Alexander any more pain than he’d already been through.
September was drawing to a close. The days grew shorter, and I bought myself some warmer clothes one Saturday when Alexander took me into Castle Cary to show me where he worked. I used to be drawn to the fashion items; now, I picked up practical sweatshirts, fleeces and jeans. Alexander bought me a waterproof coat and a good pair of boots.
‘You’re turning me into a Wurzel,’ I complained.
‘I like Wurzels,’ he said, and I smiled and said: ‘If you’re happy, I’m happy.’
Alexander smiled at me then and I saw something new in his eyes. He moved his face towards me as if he were going to kiss me, but Jamie was looking up at us with curiosity, and nothing happened. We did not touch physically, but something had changed between us; the connection was stronger. I was sure of it.
I worked hard. While Jamie was at school I cleaned the house thoroughly, one room at a time, not just the floors and surfaces but inside the cupboards, the skirting boards, the windows. Gradually, Avalon became less dark and gloomy. I cleared out the spiders, vacuumed up the dust and worked away at the stains. I carried out minor repairs and organized a handyman to deal with more substantial problems. Lights whose bulbs had needed replacing now illuminated the darker corners of the house, radiators gave out warmth and draughts were blocked. I paid with my own money for a builder to come and fix the holes in the roof so that the squirrels could no longer find their way in.
I found a photograph beneath the plastic cutlery tray in the kitchen drawer. It was a picture of Genevieve, with her hair long, like mine, standing beside the statue at the entrance to Eleonora House. Genevieve was mimicking the pose of the statue, one hand at her breast, the other reaching out and turned towards the gateway to the drive, inviting visitors in. Her face was downcast, like the statue’s, and the resemblance between them was striking. It was an old photograph, watermarked and dirty. I thought it was creepy. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t see the shadow of whoever had taken the picture. Surely it should have fallen across the grass, in front of Genevieve. And why had she posed like that, knowing the tragic story behind the statue? Was it a joke, or was she trying to underline her blood heritage by showing how alike she and her unlucky ancestor were? Either way, I didn’t like it.
I didn’t know what to do with the photograph. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, but I didn’t want to have to find somewhere safe to put it. In the end, I slipped it back beneath the cleaned tray, where I had found it.
In all my cleaning, I never went again into Alexander and Genevieve’s room. If I went past and the door was open, I would pull it shut. The empty space inside the room scared me. I knew, rationally, that all I’d seen that day was my own reflection – that was all it could have been. But what I remembered seeing was not me but someone else altogether, and the more I thought about it, the more the fear in the eyes of the face in the mirror seemed to haunt me.
I did not mention any of this to May during our daily phone calls. The last thing I needed was May telling the rest of the family I’d had a supernatural experience, that I was obviously having trouble coping with my situation and that my mental health was deteriorating. No, I didn’t want them to start down that route – it had been difficult enough persuading them that I didn’t need specialized ‘help’ after the baby – so I said nothing about the image in the mirror, nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AUTUMN WAS SETTLING in, and so was I. There hadn’t been a frost yet, but the morning air was cold and mists hung low over the valley. As the colours of Somerset mellowed into pale greens and browns, I felt calmer and less anxious. When I spoke to May on the telephone, I must have sounded more like my old self, because our conversations were more normal. I still had nightmares about losing the baby,
but they weren’t as regular as they had been. Looking after Jamie and Alexander took up so much of my time and energy that I dwelled less on the past. I did my best to shut out the thoughts and memories I didn’t want in my head and, by keeping busy, I generally succeeded.
I was becoming used to the countryside. I had begun to appreciate the seasonal changes that you don’t see in a city, or at least not to the same extent. The light and temperature used to change with the seasons in Manchester, but in Somerset everything was slightly different every day. The hedgerows were full of berries, the bird droppings around the house were purple with blackberries, and my boots crunched hazelnut shells already broken by squirrels and littered along the pavements.
By now, the people of Burrington Stoke knew I was Jamie’s nanny and that I lived at Avalon. They always asked if there was any news of Genevieve, and they told me things about her.
Midge Taylor in the Spar said her sister used to be in the same branch of the Pony Club as Genevieve and that Genevieve had run her parents ragged as a teenager.
‘It was Mrs Churchill’s own fault, my sister said,’ said Midge. ‘She kept such an eagle eye on Genevieve that, the minute her back was turned, Gen would be up to no good! She used to climb out of her bedroom window and ride into the village to get to the Young Farmers’ parties, tie the horse up outside and ride it back again when the party finished! All the boys had a thing for her, and all the girls wanted to be like her. She was so much fun!’
‘Why wasn’t she allowed to go to the parties?’ I asked.
Midge shook her head. ‘Boys,’ she mouthed.
Joyce Hope, the teaching assistant at school, told me that Genevieve had contrived to get herself expelled from two of the best and most expensive boarding schools in Britain because she couldn’t stand the regimentation.
‘Heaven knows how she managed to get into university,’ said Joyce. ‘I think the Churchills paid for some private cramming, or else they must have pulled some strings, because that girl was far happier outside with her horses than she was inside with her books.’
I smiled at the stories of Genevieve’s courage and daring. They made me more curious about her. Alexander never told me anything much, so I had to put together what bits and pieces of information I could gather. When I was on my own, at Avalon, I tried to imagine how Genevieve must have felt. She was living in the same house as I was, drawing the same curtains, cooking in the same pans. I tried to make myself feel like Genevieve, in order to understand what she had come to dislike about her life so much that she had walked out of it. She lived in a house that was big and unruly but which must have suited her lifestyle. She had a beautiful, healthy son and was married to Alexander, and even if things weren’t perfect between them, surely they couldn’t have been that bad. She was a champion rider, who had access to the best horses and could exercise them in some of the loveliest countryside in England. Why would anyone in her right mind walk away from all that?
There were only two people who could answer that question. Genevieve wasn’t there; and Alexander refused to talk about his marriage although he sometimes, inadvertently, told me some small detail about his life with Genevieve.
He showed me how to recognize a sloe berry and made me bite into one, and I was horrified by the way it dried my mouth, thinking I was poisoned. He laughed and said: ‘Gen used to love collecting those!’
‘What for?’ I asked, tapping my parched tongue against the inside of my cheek.
‘Sloe gin. She made it every autumn so it was ready in time for Christmas.’
‘Sloe what?’
‘You just need berries and sugar and gin. It makes a liqueur that’s better than anything you can buy in the shops. It was one of her little rituals.’
The next day, when I was alone in Avalon, I took down the recipe books from the shelf beside the Rayburn. Alongside a very tattered Mrs Beeton and two Jamie Olivers that looked as if they’d hardly been used, I found a homemade book. Inside were hand-written recipes for soups, pies and pastries and, sure enough, glued to the back cover was a piece of lined paper with instructions for making sloe gin.
On the way home from school that afternoon, Jamie and I duly picked a bagful of the tight little black berries with their silvery bloom. He solemnly pricked the fruit and poked it through the necks of well-washed empty squash bottles while I measured out the sugar and the gin. It felt right to be doing something that Genevieve always did, carrying on the tradition.
Another day Jamie asked if we could go to the conker tree.
‘I don’t know where the conker tree is,’ I told him, and he said he would show me. It was at the back of the village hall, a huge, old horse-chestnut with leaves that were browning and curling, and branches ripe with seed-pods. We collected conkers, dozens of them, from the grass beneath the tree. I watched Jamie, who was always happy when he had a task to undertake, and I felt a little sad for Genevieve that she was not here to see her son.
Later Alexander sat for hours at the kitchen table, skewering holes through the middles of the biggest conkers and threading string through. Jamie sat opposite him, with his head in his arms, watching his father and swinging his legs. When one conker had been successfully attached to its string, Jamie would select the next from the pile and slide it across the table. Neither of them said a word but they were so alike in their concentration on the task in hand. Jamie could not have had a more attentive father.
I had dropped Jamie off at school one day and was walking back to Avalon when I met a tall, thin, gypsy of a man with deep-set eyes and yellowy dreadlocks. Even though it was a warm day, he wore a long coat and worn old boots. He was leaning against the garden wall of one of the village houses, smoking a roll-up. Behind him, scraggy chickens scratched in the soil of their pen and washing flapped on a line stretched across the garden. He raised a hand in greeting when he saw me.
‘Hi,’ I said tentatively. I thought he might be just passing through. People who looked like him sometimes did, on their way to Glastonbury.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Jamie’s uncle, Damian.’
I recognized him at once. This was Claudia’s brother. I could see some likeness between the two of them; although he was so thin and she was the opposite, they had the same slightly hooded eyes and an identical jowliness about the chin.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘And you’re the infamous nanny.’
His voice betrayed his origins. He tried to disguise the public-school consonants behind a lazy West Country burr, but it didn’t work. He said the word ‘nanny’ with a slight sneer, as if being hired help was something to be ashamed of. For all his hippy pretensions, he was still, at heart, an upper-class snob.
I smiled in a businesslike way.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said.
I was determined not to let him have the satisfaction of scaring me.
‘I expected you to be less conventional, Damian. Everyone’s watching me,’ I said.
He laughed.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘And fair play to you for standing up to Virginia.’
‘I don’t stand up to her,’ I said. ‘I just keep out of her way.’
He laughed again, a slightly nervy, high-pitched laugh.
‘Do you mind if I walk with you for a while?’ he asked.
The pavement wasn’t wide enough to accommodate us both, and the road was busy with school traffic, so I went in front, with Damian following behind. I found his presence unnerving. I hoped he wasn’t looking me up and down, sizing me up.
‘Are you staying in Burrington Stoke?’ I asked when the pavement widened at the new quarry junction and he came alongside me.
He shook his head.
‘I’d rather cut off my right hand than stay here. I just came back to see if it was true about Genevieve being missing.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said.
‘How perfectly karmic,’ Damian said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A life for a life, Genevieve for my mother.’
I thought maybe Damian really was slightly unhinged.
‘Nobody’s suggesting she’s dead,’ I said quickly.
‘I think she is. Don’t you?’
He was making me uncomfortable.
‘How did you find out she was gone?’ I asked.
‘The old bill found me. They tracked me down. Fair play to them.’
He looked around him at the neat, mown grass verge beside the quarry entrance and exit. The grass was pale with stone-dust.
‘We could sit here for a while,’ Damian suggested. ‘Have a smoke and a chinwag.’
‘I ought to get back to Avalon,’ I said. I delved for an excuse. ‘I’m expecting a delivery.’
‘OK.’
He looked over to the gatehouse. The guard had spotted him. He was speaking into his phone.
‘I’m not exactly Mr Popular round here,’ Damian said, grinning. ‘In fact, they don’t like me at all.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a white van heading down the track inside the quarry. The gatehouse guard had put down his phone and put on his cap.
The last thing I needed was to be caught up in a scuffle between Damian and the quarrymen. I imagined what Virginia would have to say about that.
‘Why don’t you come back for coffee at Avalon?’ I suggested.
‘I don’t know …’
‘We’ll just sit outside, in the garden.’
The long red and white pole that formed the barrier across the quarry exit was slowly rising. Any moment now and the gates would swing open and the van would come through.
‘Go on then,’ said Damian. ‘If you insist.’
He was a good few years older than me, but still, of the two of us, I felt like the adult. I could feel how uncomfortable he was in the world. It was sad that his life had been derailed by his parents’ divorce when he was so young, and I was sorry for him but, at the same time, he gave me the creeps.
The Secrets Between Us Page 10
