The Family Affair

by Helen Crossfield

  “I put my marriage first and I therefore have absolutely no regrets,” Arthur said. “Louise had a good job and I got one too in the end so things worked out fine. I’m eternally grateful for that good fortune.”

  “Did you blame Richard for anything?” Beth asked, suddenly eager to hear if Arthur had secretly sided with her father.

  Arthur shifted uncomfortably in his tartan winged armchair and took a large sip of gin and tonic. As the ice cubes chinked against the heavy crystal, he waited until the alcohol hit the back of his throat before answering.

  “Over the years,” Arthur finally conceded. “I’ve come to accept that no-one is perfect. And that most people don’t deliberately set out to destroy other people’s lives. In the end Richard suffered just as much as your father.”

  “Yes,” Beth interjected. “But Dad died a pauper. He was the eldest son of the eldest son. He wasn’t even buried in the Earnshaw grave.”

  “Your father was extremely sensitive,” Arthur ventured slowly. “I don’t think he was up for the cut and thrust of the business world. That’s the main reason he didn’t succeed your grandfather. It wasn’t just about Richard.”

  “So,” Beth said angrily. “You’re saying Dad was the reason he lost everything?”

  “I’d say his character was a big factor in why things turned out the way they did,” Arthur replied wearily. “And without a doubt Alistair’s death played a huge part in all of it. There’s not much else I can say.”

  “And that’s the point I am trying to get to the bottom of,” Beth protested, finally getting to the bit she’d practised over and over again in the car.

  “What point?” Arthur asked defensively.

  “That Alistair’s death destroyed my father,” Beth continued boldly. “My brother died alone. I’m sure of it. And that’s what I am trying to understand. Everyone has always told me Richard was with him but I don’t think he was.”

  “What on earth are you suggesting?” Arthur retorted sounding slightly agitated as he got out of his chair to top up his drink.

  “I don’t know,” Beth continued. “I’m confused. Call it twin’s intuition, I just think Alistair was alone when he drowned. Dad couldn’t cope afterwards and lost everything as a result. And I guess I’m angry that the family never gave him any money to soften the blow.”

  “Things are not always that black and white Beth,” Arthur said abruptly, before lowering his voice at the sound of his wife padding down the corridor outside the sitting room. “I don’t want us to be having this conversation in front of Louise.”

  And at that precise moment the woman credited with saving Arthur from the curse that had befallen both his brothers breezed into the room.

  She was a lady of great beauty and poise. Only Louise Earnshaw (nee Rafferty) could wear a Liberty scarf around her head with such panache and get away with it in Pickering.

  Part Bloomsbury set and part Harrogate she had a beguiling personality which was both down-to earth and artistically eccentric, and Arthur revered her.

  “Hello Beth, lovely to see you again,” Louise said theatrically, as she wafted over to her cutting through the negative energy with a palpably electric life-force. “Lunch is ready if you both want to come through.”

  Damn, Beth thought as she looked up and marvelled at the scarf. That really would be the end of the discussion. There was no way on earth she would be able to get anything more out of Arthur now.

  As a highly respected psychotherapist, Louise had an annoying habit of not only being an extremely ‘glass half-full’ person. She also had a steadfast reluctance to talk about anything from the past. Unless, of course, it was part of her therapy sessions and someone was paying her.

  Her mere presence was all it took to disperse the awkwardness of the previous conversation, and she led them both purposefully into a deliciously light and airy dining room which was beautifully perfumed by a dramatic vase of fully opened tiger lilies.

  “If you come and sit here Beth you’ll have the best view of the garden,” Louise said, cheerily unfazed by the slightly glum look on her visitor’s face. “We’ve got a fabulous display of daffodils and tulips at the moment through that window.”

  “Yes,” Beth replied, forcing herself to smile and be polite. “I noticed them when I drove in. There are hundreds.”

  “We put them in last year as a little experiment,” Louise smiled, her bright red lipstick catching the reflection of the sun as she spoke. “The Telegraph was running a bulb promotion and we got overly excited and ordered rather too many. But I must say the result is utterly spectacular.”

  “Yes,” Beth agreed, wondering how on earth she could get Arthur on his own again. “The gardens remind me of Highlands. It caught me by surprise when I arrived here.”

  “Well they are similar but not exactly the same,” Arthur smiled nervously. “And Highlands was always a summer garden and not a spring garden, which this is.”

  “Right,” Louise shouted, as if to restore order. “Let’s start eating. I’ve done lime-cured salmon with freshly chopped dill, mini blinis and crème fraiche. I do hope that’s to your taste Beth?”

  “I’m sure it will be. It looks delicious,” Beth exclaimed, cheering up a bit as she studied the starter in front of her. She’d forgotten how good her Aunt Louise’s food was.

  “Well I thought it would be perfect,” Louise enthused. “Not too filling but it provides us with a bit of something naughty in terms of carbohydrates.”

  “It’s the sort of food I should put together when I’m in London,” Beth answered as she placed a crisp white linen napkin on her lap. “I tend to survive on ready-made meals, which I’m sure are full of everything I shouldn’t be eating.”

  “Well this kind of meal would take you no time at all to prepare as you can pretty much get all of it out of a packet,” Louise smiled over at her niece.

  As they ate, they spoke about London and Beth’s job and about why she had decided not to go Paris.

  But as soon as Beth mentioned wanting to take time out to reconnect with her father’s family, Louise changed the subject and talked about the wonderful work Arthur was doing on the Parish Council and how they both loved twitching.

  “What’s twitching?” Beth asked, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.

  “Bird watching of the feathered kind,” Arthur responded dryly.

  “Ah,” Beth laughed across at them both, not realising the joke was a ploy. “I see.”

  And this really was the highlight of the lunch after which Louise spoke at length about their upcoming Easter holiday in Umbria which may have been interesting if Beth had come to talk to them about Italy. But she had come to talk about Alistair and her father.

  “We’re going to be based in Assisi,” Louise bumbled on, looking lovingly at her husband. “And we will then just tour around. It really is our favourite bit of Italy isn’t it darling? We like it even more than we like Tuscany, which is praise indeed.”

  “Yes,” Arthur replied, touching his wife’s hands gently. “And the Umbrian wines are wonderful, especially the reds. We’ll fill the car with the stuff before we leave.”

  All the while Louise kept the three of them firmly in the present or the future, where she clearly felt they should all emotionally be.

  Nowhere in the conversation was there a suitable gap for Beth to feel comfortable about mentioning anything about the past and the murkiness that had followed her around all her life like a strangulating black cloak.

  How could she even attempt to ask difficult questions, Beth thought, as she finished off the last of her blinis, when everything Louise and Arthur wanted to talk about on the surface at least was so positive and contrived?

  And the main course was just as up tempo, with talk of future cruises and organic farming.

  “The chicken fillets we’re eating are from the local farm,” Arthur announced proudly, as Loui
se put the plates on the table. “And the butternut squash and fresh spring cabbage have all come from our garden. The squash was incredibly big this last year or so.”

  “I’m impressed,” Beth said willing herself to smile.

  Even the gloriously refreshing dessert of frozen blueberry yoghurt garnished with a fresh sprig of mint had an uplifting story to it, with Louise explaining how she’d learnt how to make it at a local farm.

  As Beth ate, she wondered whether Arthur and Louise’s life of wholesomeness and determined focus on all things positive was a mask for something darker. How could neither of them have mentioned her father over lunch?

  Maybe they had been involved in the family affair after all and in some bizarre twist had siphoned off some of the funds whilst maintaining a social veneer of being detached?

  What were the clues to their involvement? They certainly seemed to have acquired more than one piece of family furniture, Beth noticed, as her grandparents’ clock chimed loudly in the corner. And what was that peace symbol doing in the garden?

  As Louise served home-made rose-flavoured marshmallows and poured out strong Italian espressos, Beth studied her Uncle’s face.

  Whilst he was a man who liked to control things and had an obsession with keeping things pristine, he did not seem capable of destroying other people’s lives. Surely he had not been involved in Alistair’s death or her father’s rapid demise?

  Taking their coffees through to the lounge, the conversation focused away from holidays and food to the stupendous garden that framed each of the floor-to-ceiling lounge windows.

  *

  For the remainder of Beth’s stay, Arthur and Louise talked about the amount of enjoyment they both got from pruning their roses and the pride they had in their perfectly edged hedges – particularly the one shaped like a peacock.

  And then, just as they’d drained their cups of coffee, lunch was declared officially over when Arthur stood up and announced he really had to get down to some Parish Council business.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt the party,” he said “but there is rather a nasty piece of planning that’s gone in that requires a few of us in the village to put our heads together.”

  Not wanting to outstay her welcome, Beth had felt it best to leave, satisfied that however long she had with Arthur and Louise she would never get the answers she was looking for while they were both together in the same room.

  “It’s been a really wonderful lunch,” Beth lied, as Arthur hurriedly helped her into her coat. “Thanks so much for having me over.”

  “Our pleasure,” Arthur said, with no suggestion that he’d found the first part of the lunch difficult to deal with.

  As Beth turned to say goodbye to her Aunt she noticed that Louise had dropped her mask of perfect calm and had suddenly looked eager for her to go.

  Getting into her car, Beth smiled at them both through gritted teeth. Arthur had short-changed her with the truth and Louise had been a very determined accomplice, keeping them off all the difficult subjects in a very adept way.

  As Beth pulled out of the gravelled driveway and waved them both goodbye she put her foot down on the accelerator, eager to get away from their life of middle-class perfection and false veneer.

  She felt angrier than she had ever felt before. Intuitively she thought that they knew things that could have helped her.

  How odd, Beth thought, that out of everyone she had ever known in her life there was only one person who could probably understand her now, and that was a Frenchman who she had only just met.

  Maybe he would let her into his life and together they could bake pastries and furiously knead dough to heal and rid themselves of the ghosts of the past.

  Gripping the steering wheel tighter she put her foot down and drove in the direction of the little French patisserie which suddenly felt like home.

  CHAPTER 10: THE CONVERSATION

  Driving back to the patisserie for coffee and cake once more provided Beth with some time on her own to process what her uncle Arthur had said to her before lunch.

  Whilst his words about the family feud had been few, one thing was for sure and that was he seemed unwilling to blame Richard for anything. He had remained staunchly neutral.

  As Beth played back the conversation once again in her head, a large cloud formation high up in the sky parted with a sudden burst of sunlight making it difficult to see clearly ahead. She squinted hard to keep to the right side of the road.

  Perhaps Richard had tried valiantly hard to be the saviour and been savvy enough to know that her father would never have been able to keep the firm profitable and had simply wanted to do the decent thing by keeping the business in the family?

  And yet over the years there had been indications that not everything had been straightforward.

  Firstly, there was the secretive way her parents spoke to each other long into the night. And secondly, there was the refusal to speak about Richard and Highlands in the same breath after Alistair died.

  She knew for a fact that her mother abhorred the way that Richard had made money and never given any of it to Doug because she’d heard them speaking about it.

  But if her parents did have doubts about the accident she had never heard them share them as far as she could remember.

  As Beth drove she glanced over to her left and then to her right. She smiled as she caught sight of the dark brooding Yorkshire Moors, boggy from the winter rain but tipped today with celestial golden sunshine.

  The infinite expanse of sheer raw beauty which had provided solitary solace for her father in his lifetime, today called out to her with its majestic beauty, urging her to roam free and just be. If her father still lived on then these moors were the one place in the world she would find him.

  Nervously, she touched the strawberry coloured birthmark on her neck as she thought about her father‘s spirit rambling nearby. Maybe that sudden burst of sunshine had been him telling her to get out and let nature guide her to the truth?

  As she drove, Beth checked her wing mirror and then succumbed to the sudden yearning to stop. Getting out of the car she instinctively knew where she wanted to go.

  Pulling her cashmere scarf from last year’s collections more tightly around her neck, Beth navigated the rickety steps of an old wooden stile and started to walk down the same well-worn moorland path she had taken so many times with her parents as a child.

  As she forged forwards against the elements, she held out both arms and let the cold wind rush through her open fingers, and started to run towards the familiar large rock formation about a mile ahead.

  Memories of her parents with a picnic basket full of ham and mustard sandwiches, slices of custard tart and a large tartan flask of Yorkshire tea flashed in front of her. She stopped as she caught a glimpse of them walking side by side. Broken by death and yet somehow determined to go on living, if only for her.

  As she started walking again, she remembered how much she’d loved coming to these moors as a family and the intense feelings of freedom she’d experienced every time they’d stepped out onto the peaty canvass.

  The space allowed her to be anonymous and undisturbed by the pain of a world that had nearly destroyed them all and which she so desperately didn’t understand.

  Finding a suitable spot, her parents would lay out their picnic on an old woollen rug and they’d sit together eating and enjoying the silence of nature, punctuated only by bird song and the gentle rustling of insects as they moved busily in-between the bracken and the beautiful yellow gorse.

  After they’d eaten the sandwiches and cake and drunk a mug of tea each, Doug Earnshaw would take himself off for a long walk, returning only when it was time to go home.

  More often than not, Beth and her mother would have to go in search of him knowing full well they would find him fast asleep against his favourite rock, soaking up the soft late Yorkshire evening sunlight.

&n
bsp; And today as she got closer to where he used to find peace, Beth felt panic and some indignation when she realised that someone else was already sitting on his rock.

  Scrapping her hair back from her face as the wind whipped it into a frenzy, she tried to get a better look.

  In all her years of coming here she had never seen anyone apart from Doug Earnshaw sitting against the rock. Christ she thought as she got nearer. Could it really be Olivier in the near distance?

  Walking more quickly, she called out his name just to be sure of what she thought she’d seen. “Olivier is that you?” Beth cried out over the howling wind. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  Standing up to see who was shouting out his name, Olivier yelled back, the airstream mutating his words as he waved at her. “Hi Beth. Yes it’s me. What are you doing here?”

  “I think that is my question,” Beth replied breathlessly, as she arrived a few feet in front of him.

  “Why are you surprised?” Olivier asked as he shrugged his shoulders and pushed his long hair behind his ears. “It’s a public moor.”

  “Because you’re supposed to be in the patisserie serving cake and coffee, and I was just on my way there,” Beth smiled back. “If you’re here then who is serving afternoon tea to the inhabitants of Kepton?

  “There’s been a power cut,” Olivier replied matter-of-factly. “So I’ve had to close the shop for a couple of hours. They said it will probably come back on later this afternoon. This is a favourite spot of mine so I decided to make the most of it.”

  “I can’t believe that you know about this place,” Beth spluttered out. “It’s where I used to come as a child. In all the years I’ve been visiting here I‘ve hardly ever seen anyone on this part of the moor. It’s a bit too desolate for most people.”

  “Well it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m here then,” Olivier smiled bleakly. “You’re welcome to join me for a cup of coffee if you plan on staying for a bit as I was just about to have one.”

  “That’s more than miraculous,” Beth beamed, as she sat down next to him on a picnic rug which looked exactly like the one she used to sit on as a child. “That’s a very timely offer.”