by Rebecca Tope
‘I hope you didn’t break his heart.’
‘So do I, but I have a nasty feeling I did. And it feels much worse that I can’t really remember him. I mean – he must be so hurt. Although obviously I try not to let it be too obvious.’
‘Did you keep a diary? Wouldn’t that jog your memory?’
‘I did, actually. But it just says things like “Fraser phoned again” and “Fraser here in eve” which doesn’t help much. I get the impression he was rather clingy and I had to be cruel to get rid of him. I met your father all at that same time, and wanted to be available for him. I get odd flashes of memory, but nowhere near a coherent picture.’
Thea wanted to ask Did you sleep with him? but couldn’t. Who in the world could ask their mother such a question? The answers that might come spilling out were too awful to contemplate. What if Damien, born ten months after her parents’ wedding, was somehow the offspring of this Fraser, for example? The contiguity sounded uncomfortably close. What if her mother had conferred one final sexual favour on the wretched rejected boy, a few weeks into her marriage? It struck Thea as all too dreadfully possible, as she rummaged for impressions of the promiscuous nineteen sixties. Didn’t they all sleep with everybody in those distant days?
‘And what does he want from you now? Some sort of atonement? Does he seem angry with you?’
‘Reproachful, a bit. It’s hard to explain, but I think there’s a natural human wish to relive the past. It gets stronger as you get older. It’s some kind of unfinished business for him and he thinks it should be for me as well. He wants to talk about his family and what happened after I stopped seeing him. There was another brother, quite a bit older, who took on the family business from their father. He’s been talking about that a lot lately.’
‘What was it? The business, I mean?’
Her mother laughed again. ‘You won’t believe it when I tell you. And I had no idea at the time. I’m convinced he never said a word about it.’
‘Come on, Mum. What was it?’
‘Undertakers. The Meadows family are undertakers.’
Chapter Three
But Drew’s an undertaker, she wanted to shout, as if this was a huge and unacceptable coincidence. Other people couldn’t be undertakers; that wasn’t fair. What if her mother had married Fraser, and he had gone into the family business instead of escaping to Australia? Maureen Johnstone would have been Maureen Meadows and her children would have grown up amongst coffins and pallbearers. The randomness of life, with its insistent alternative realities, was frightening.
But her mother did not know about Drew. Thea had never once mentioned his existence to her, although her daughter Jessica had met him. Jess would not have gossiped to her grandmother about him, she felt sure. She would not have known what to say, picking up on the ambivalence that Thea herself felt. For the first time, Thea understood that Jessica’s reaction to her love life was very much the same as Thea was now experiencing about her own mother. The generations repeated the pattern without even realising it. Their fathers were dead in both cases, and the painful resentful loyalty that a daughter inevitably maintained ensured that there could never be a fully acceptable replacement. Of such rigidity small tragedies were made, as well as large sacrifices. Because Drew’s young Stephanie and Timmy would be prone to exactly the same jealous adherence to the memory of their mother. The dead cast deep shadows, and there was no avoiding them.
‘So when do you think you might come?’ she asked.
‘We thought tomorrow. Late morning, probably. We can go out for lunch.’
‘Provided we don’t have to have a Sunday roast,’ Thea warned. She had eaten too many tasteless thin slices of unidentifiable meat covered in glutinous gravy to willingly risk it again. ‘I’ve yet to find a pub that makes a decent job of it.’
‘You never used to be so fussy. I blame Carl,’ said her mother lightly. It was true – Thea’s husband had been exacting in his gourmet standards. The meat had to be locally reared and killed, and the gravy made from its juices, with not a grain of Bisto. And he preferred it in chunks, not slices.
‘It’s not fussy,’ she objected. ‘It’s wanting them to serve something worth eating.’
‘We can have a salad in a garden somewhere, preferably by a river. I’m sure you can come up with the ideal spot.’
‘I’m sure I can,’ said Thea confidently. Then she had a thought. ‘But surely Fraser knows Winchcombe? He must visit his brother sometimes.’
‘He’s only been twice. Oliver is very reclusive, you see. He doesn’t encourage visitors.’
‘But he does know how to get here?’
‘Oh, yes. There’ll be no difficulty with that. He’s brilliant at that sort of thing.’
She came to the conclusion that she was more pleased than otherwise that her mother would be joining her, as the afternoon slowly waned. It was only three o’clock, and there were two hours at least before she needed to go and check Oliver’s birds. She picked up the notes he had left, and saw the lines: ‘Cleeve Common is worth a visit, for the views. Drive to Postlip Hall (left turn off the Cheltenham Road that runs past the church and out of town), park just off the road and walk up the track.’
The light outside was likely to be ideal for views, she judged. A thin layer of cloud would ensure there were no stark shadows, but a clear uniform visibility was almost guaranteed.
‘Come on, then,’ she told the spaniel. ‘Let’s start as we mean to go on. It might be raining for the rest of our time here.’
She turned left at the top of Vineyard Street and passed the church. The street was lined on both sides with an extraordinary collection of houses. No two were the same, as far as she could tell. She couldn’t recall another place, whether in the Cotswolds or anywhere else, that offered such a dazzling variety of styles, materials and sizes. It must be an architectural historian’s dream.
There was a left turn within a mile or so, and she glimpsed a sign including the words ‘Postlip Mills’ and she turned down it, assuming it was where Oliver meant. But there was nowhere to park, and it looked incongruously industrial. Notices directed deliveries and other official business matters, and the road dived rapidly downhill. ‘This isn’t right,’ she told Hepzie. ‘It’s some kind of factory, I think.’
Nervous of being stopped and interrogated, she hurriedly turned the car and went back to the main road. A second turning quickly came into view, with a sign announcing ‘Postlip Hall’.
‘Aha!’ she breathed, and turned left again.
Immediately she found a fingerpost pointing up a track to ‘Cleeve Common’. It was, apparently, half a mile distant. She and the dog could be up and back within forty-five minutes, quite easily.
They set off, the spaniel running free. The way was steep and stony, and Thea found herself considering the possibility that it had once been a significant road, bordered as it was with old stone walls. Somewhere there was a hall, invisible behind the trees on her right. Overhead, the branches met to form a green tunnel, and the path snaked enticingly upwards, renewing the sense of incipient magic that had begun with the gargoyle.
The half mile took ten minutes and left her breathless. A gate marked the sudden emergence onto the common. Hepzie had wriggled through its bars before Thea managed to open it. Ahead was an expanse of scrubby grass, and an abrupt hill boasting a scattering of vegetation that might have been gorse. There was a sign, headed ‘Cleeve Hill Common’, so badly stained with mildew that she could barely read the depressing list of regulations it contained.
She walked on, turning back every few yards in the hope of a good view of Winchcombe without having to go all the way to the top of the hill in front of her. There were trees in the way at first, but finally she got what she wanted, with the solid square-towered church clearly to be seen.
The town, evidently, was on reasonably level ground, with a considerable escarpment behind it, which after some difficulty she concluded had to be to the east, despite the fact that
Winchcombe lay on the very western edge of the Cotswolds. It was not in a bowl, like Blockley or Cranham; instead it had been arranged in the valley caused by the river that she had already realised must have been important, from the number of times the word ‘mill’ appeared on street names.
The church stood protectively above the jumbled houses, like a shepherd with his sheep, she fancied. The colours were muted greens and greys, and from such a distance it was easy to perceive houses and trees as much the same in terms of their harmonious place in the picture. The town was inconspicuous, unassuming. It made no brash claims, and in the overcast light there were no unnatural flashes of sunshine on glass or metal.
It gave her an overview that she was pleased to have. However important Winchcombe might have been in the past, it was now a tucked-away little town, with no major roads passing through, no claims to power. It was clean and tidy and timeless, and it sold antiques. The woods were full of birds, and the houses were all quite effortlessly individual.
‘We like Winchcombe,’ she told the dog, which had come to her side after nosing idly in some clumps of long grass.
Later, she took the dog to the bird hide and sat watching a selection of finches picking delicately at the sunflower hearts on their feeding station. She could recognise chaffinches, both male and female, quite easily, and waited in the hope of seeing the colourful goldfinch again. Instead there were a dozen or more blue tits, and something that could only be a greenfinch. A slender little brown bird flitted amongst the branches that was neither a wren nor a sparrow, and brought Thea to an agony of self-reproach at her ignorance. The birds were certainly very entertaining, as they followed a complex dance from tree to table and back again, the little tits so quick and acrobatic amongst the bigger species. According to Oliver’s poster there should also be bullfinches and siskins, and possibly even hawfinches and redpolls. She began to grasp how exciting it could be to lure the rarer species into your garden, with the right kind of food and a careful lack of disturbance. She noticed that there were at least three distinct sorts of tits, where she had initially bundled them all under the single heading of blue tit. Hepzie lay peacefully on the rough earth floor, as her mistress indulged her new interest.
It would be even better, she guessed, in the early morning. Birds were at their most lively at dawn – weren’t they? There had to be a great many more species out there in the trees; some preferring fat and others seeking seeds. Where were the robins and wrens; thrushes and sparrows? As she mentally listed all the birds she could recall, there was a flurry at the seed table and a flash of red. When she looked properly, there was a sharp-beaked visitor with a comical red skullcap. Anybody could see it was a woodpecker, but Thea was sure she had never seen one so close up before.
It was plainly very nervous, darting rapid glances at the busy blue tits, as well as swivelling to check its back. It was almost too frightened to snatch a sunflower heart, but it remained long enough for a comprehensive inspection. Its front was a soft-looking beige, with a splash of red near the tail. The red was more suited to something much more exotic – like a parrot. Far from the more muted orangey-red of the robin, it was pure scarlet and thus surprisingly exciting. Even without the red, its black and white back was dramatic. ‘Ah,’ she breathed happily. ‘What a beauty!’
As well as the finch poster, Oliver had left a large colourful Birds of Britain book on the table in the hide. When the woodpecker had gone, she looked it up, and readily identified the ‘greater spotted’ variety. The thrill persisted for many minutes; the glimpse of the wild creature had been an unearned privilege that made her feel honoured and awakened to a world she so often forgot. Then she flipped through a section depicting small brown birds, and concluded the answer to that mystery was a willow warbler. She wasn’t at all sure she had ever heard of a willow warbler before, and certainly had had no idea what it looked like.
And she should not forget this world of British wildlife, because Carl, her husband, had been an environmentalist, fully aware of the birds of Britain, as well as the badgers and foxes and otters. She had walked with him and seen larks and swallows galore in the open fields, and coots and cormorants in the Essex marshes where they had holidayed. But they had not spent time crouched in a woodland hide watching these little things in such numbers and taking time to admire the soft breast feathers of a woodpecker.
‘Well, old girl,’ she told her dog, ‘I think we might be due for a rather enjoyable stay at this rate.’
Hepzie wagged a slow plumy tail, and Thea felt something that had been in abeyance for very much too long. She could not recall a sense of anticipation in the whole of the previous year, other than for the most fleeting moments. She had enjoyed the big house in Cranham for a day or two, she reminded herself, and the lovely old buildings of Snowshill had raised her spirits, but she had lost her sense of wonder at the natural world, which had been there twenty years ago. Although, of course, she had permitted herself to anticipate each new encounter with Drew Slocombe. The sight of his boyish features and engagement with his witty banter had been the main pleasures in her life since the previous March. A mere six months since she first met him and all she had to show for it was a depressed foreboding that nothing happy would ever come of it.
And now she could rediscover her natural lightness of heart by watching wild birds. It was like tapping into a vein of gold she had forgotten existed; a beam of sunlight to remind her that it was in fact a wonderful world.
It was a shame, then, that her mother was due to arrive the next day, with her mysterious new man. No way would Thea bring them to the hide and share its secrets. She would come down early to fill the feeders and check the camera, and then spend the day being sociable and hospitable, and take them to Winchcombe Church and perhaps Sudeley Castle. No mention had been made of the proposed duration of the stay, but she hoped it would not be more than two or three days. The idea that they might intend to stay for the whole fortnight gave her a nasty jolt. Surely there was no danger of that. Her mother had a short attention span; she would soon get bored, especially if the weather took a downward turn. And the man, this Fraser Meadows – did he not have a life of his own? From what she had heard of him so far, she rather suspected that he had little to distract him other than his long-ago girlfriend, who could barely remember him.
She went back to the house, approaching it from the north-east, so that the whole wall was in deep shadow in the late afternoon. The door, which she had mentally labelled the back door, had a modest porch over it, and opened into a passageway that led through the middle of the house to another door, which she thought of as the front. But the house did not have an obvious facade with which to greet the world. It was much the same both sides, with a door and four windows like a child’s drawing. It sat awkwardly on the uneven ground, and the question of an approach drive and somewhere to leave the car had never been properly resolved. Oliver clearly cared little for such details, and had done nothing to address them. It gave a sense of a fairy-tale cottage in the woods, sheltered by large trees and difficult to find.
The large trees, however, cut out the sunlight and reduced the air temperature. Where this might have been desirable in a tropical climate, it was not such a good idea in England, with sunshine always at a premium.
She found the makings of a late-afternoon tea and sat in the dwindling patch of brightness on the bleak little patio, thinking about her mother. On reflection, it seemed obvious that there could be no plan to stay at Thistledown for the whole fortnight. Why, in that case, should Oliver go to the expense of employing a house-sitter? He had mentioned a conversation with his brother, in which an agreement had been made that there would be a visit – but clearly it was only to be brief. From long habit, Thea found herself analysing her own feelings on the subject, only to discover that she already felt proprietorial over the property and its birds. She did not want trampling feet and loud voices to frighten away that lovely woodpecker. She would risk boredom, and even another d
ive into depression, rather than take responsibility for amusing her mother. Over her various house-sitting commissions she had been joined by sisters, daughter and boyfriend, not always very happily. When she embarked on this way of life, she had envisaged peaceful interludes with her dog, perhaps making new friends in the different villages, but not sharing the places with relatives. Yet somehow an expectation had arisen that she would welcome them; an expectation that clearly persisted.
The awkwardness of the approaches to Thistledown, whether from front or rear, made it difficult for anyone to arrive without warning. And yet neither Thea nor her spaniel detected any advance sounds of footsteps before the visitor appeared. Hepzie looked up as the shadow fell across her, and emitted a low snarl that startled Thea.
‘Gosh! How did you get here?’ she said, squinting up at the figure standing between her and the sun. The dog’s animosity raised no great alarm in her breast – Hepzie had never been a very reliable judge of character.
‘I just walked up from Vineyard Street. I knew there’d be nowhere to park down here. You must be the house-sitter.’
‘Yes, I am. And you are …?’
‘Melissa. Oliver’s niece. I think my father is going out with your mother.’
Chapter Four
Put like that, it almost made them sisters, Thea supposed, with an instinctive recoil. She had enough sisters already, and she was already thinking unworthy female thoughts as she inspected this slender, tanned creature who could apparently tread so lightly as to make no sound.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is it you he’s staying with?’
‘What? Oh … no, that’s Mo. She’s my half-sister. She’s twenty years older than me.’ She spoke with a strange sort of emphasis, an iambic line that felt rehearsed but seldom spoken. A little laugh added to the artificiality. Thea was faintly alerted to uncomfortable family business.
