Echoes of the Past

by Maggie Ford

  “That’s another thing I don’t hold with,” she cut in, but Edwin ignored her.

  “I’ve put a proposition to him. He hasn’t said yes or no to it yet, and I wanted to ask how you felt about it anyway. I know he’ll never apply himself enough to reap what he’d always dreamed about so I suggested it was time he began knuckling down to something more substantial. What I suggested – and I need you to have your agreement in this – is that I take him into the business as a partner. After all, we are cousins. I’ve not spoken to the family yet but they’ll be right behind me on this. But I’ve told him that he’ll have to work and dedicate himself to it. He’d be silly to pass it up, a guaranteed regular income rather than this hit-and-miss lark of acting.”

  “Hold on, Edwin!” Helen stormed towards him. “You’ve promised him all this before—”

  “I’ve not promised anything yet.”

  “Not before consulting me?” she finished. “And I’m expected to fall over myself to agree. I hardly see you from weekend to weekend. I’m all on my own here most of the time, but he can come here and live!”

  “He’ll be company for you, Helen.”

  “It’s your company I want, not your damned cousin! I’m expected to be happy at being fobbed off with some substitute. I don’t want Hugh’s company. I want you.”

  Edwin lifted his arms in despair then reached into a nearby wooden box for a cigarette. He’d taken to smoking these days at home, mostly because it was always so fraught with Helen’s complaints about him not being there. At work he hardly even thought of cigarettes.

  “Don’t start all that again, Helen,” he said, searching for the table lighter, which didn’t happen to be there. Lamely he put the cigarette back in its box. “I can’t be in two places at once.”

  “I know that,” she railed. “But once in a while couldn’t we go out somewhere, just the two of us together – dinner or the theatre or even just to the local pictures?”

  Now he was out of patience. “Look, Helen, I’ve virtually invited Hugh to stay here, just for a short while, and I can’t go back on that. I’ll make sure he keeps out of your way if that’s how you feel about him, and get rid of him as soon as I can.”

  “As soon as you can!” she burst out. “Why not sooner? Why not now?”

  The library door was opened tentatively, interrupting them, admitting a cautious Angela, looking worried, followed close behind by her sister. Having started school last week for the first time, she had become a little awed and Sunday, as today was, had done nothing to ease her mind about Monday morning. She had evidently been looking for comfort. Now she faced the two adults with wide-eyed concern.

  “Why are you and Daddy shouting at each other, Mummy?”

  With a final glare at Edwin, Helen hurried over to her and swept her up in her arms. “We weren’t shouting, darling. We were just talking a bit too loudly.”

  Odd that Angela, who needed to concentrate on what was being said to her, could complain that something was too loud, for surely a raised voice would not be deemed as such.

  “You was shouting, Mummy!” came Georgina’s truculent voice. Just eight days off being three years old, she was finding her feet with a vengeance. “We could hear you right down in the kitchen.”

  She, like Angela, enjoyed being downstairs while meals were prepared. (“So long as they sit on a chair each up to the table to play and keep out of the way when there’s any hot stuff about, they’re fine with me,” Mrs Cotterell would say.)

  “Mrs Cott’rell said, ‘Whatever’s them two rowing about?’ so we came to see. Mummy, pick me up too. I want to be picked up.”

  “Daddy will pick you up, darling.”

  “I don’t want Daddy, I want you,” Gina began to rage. Her small fists were clenched, and one foot stamped rapidly on the wood block flooring. It was left to Helen to hand the compliant Angela to her father so as to hoist her other daughter into her arms, Gina immediately quieting with a satisfied smile.

  So dwindled out the argument and Hugh, attending Gina’s birthday party, stayed on after the other guests had left.

  * * *

  It was unnerving having Hugh around the house. Not that he was around all that often. Mostly he’d head for London beside Edwin in the car, or in the Jag he’d bought himself in the spring, only eight months after having been taken into the partnership, and often he’d stay on in town, sometimes until the next evening, sometimes for a couple of days or more. Helen guessed the reason for that. Hugh enjoyed his women – for the odd night or two, that was.

  Hugh’s womanising should have left her cold, but she constantly caught herself dwelling on it. She wasn’t jealous, she sternly told herself - but if she was really honest, that was what it boiled down to.

  When he was here, she could feel those vivid blue eyes following her every movement, and was acutely aware of being under what could only be described as suggestive scrutiny.

  “Haven’t you got something to do?” she’d snap at him, or hiss if Edwin was home. He was here far more than her husband. If Edwin was home more often she’d have felt less disconcerted having Hugh around.

  Hugh’s decree absolute had come through in June this year and for nearly three months he had moped about the house, staying out of everyone’s way. He’d hardly gone to the restaurant, though Edwin appeared content to let him hang fire for a while.

  “I can guess what he’s going through,” he told Helen. “It must be a rotten time for him, and I can manage. Though I wish your father was still in charge. I miss him, you know.”

  Her father had planned to carry on at Letts beyond his retirement, but January 1961 had done for his bronchitis. Confined to bed, his energy drained by a constant racking cough that made it a terrible job to breathe, Helen had feared for him. With the arrival of spring he had recovered slowly but by then he knew that his working days were numbered. Another bout in late April had convinced him that working beyond retirement was stupid. He did threaten to go in from time to time, missing the place dreadfully. But Edwin had been adamant. He had no wish to see his uncle’s oldest friend fall foul of an ageing body and be killed by overwork.

  Now her father sat at home, went along to the Pensioners’ Club and the Dinner Club, comfortable on his state pension and a substantial one from Letts, plus interest from his savings and his shares. But he was lonely and isolated from all he’d known over the past forty years.

  Helen visited him frequently and often brought him back to the house, not only because she wanted his life to be made as full as possible but also to keep at bay what was happening between her and Hugh. Perhaps Hugh wasn’t aware of what he was doing to her – or was he? She wouldn’t have put it past him. But the thoughts inside her were not healthy.

  For a while after his divorce, it hadn’t been so bad, with him moping around the house – though he was probably affected more by his ex-wife going on in the world of theatre without him than by his unrequited for love for her, or so it seemed to Helen. She had felt sorry for him; felt it safe to offer her sympathy and understanding without feeling threatened.

  But now that had all changed. Snapping out of the doldrums in a remarkably short time, Hugh had become his old self again.

  He’d been here over a year now. Today was Gina’s fourth birthday, and Helen was giving a small party for hers and Angel’s little friends, with no evening do to follow. Hugh had offered to help in the kitchen and she had let him, for why behave churlishly when he’d been so down these previous three months?

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  She pointed to the bread she’d cut. “You can butter those.”

  He made a good job of it. Outside, Mrs Cotterell, her daughter and the gardener, Arthur Brain, had taken over organising the fun and games, and the squeals of children seeped into the kitchen. There was only her and Hugh in the house. Edwin, as usual, had made his excuses not to be there though he had promised to be home early.

  “Maybe you should have gone to h
elp him today,” she said idly as she took some buttered slices from the pile Hugh had made. “Then the two of you could have left earlier and got here in time. Gina’s so disappointed.”

  “I don’t think she is.” Hugh’s voice was husky. “I know I’m not.”

  His tone made her look up sharply at him. But before she could reply, he laid down the butter knife, reaching out to take hold of her wrist as she made to pick up another slice from the pile.

  “It wouldn’t have given me this opportunity to say how I feel about you, Helen.”

  “Don’t be silly, Hugh!” she burst out, jerking her hand from his hold. But he reached for her again.

  “I know how you feel about me. I see it whenever you look at me.”

  “That’s not true!”

  Her words were cut off as she was pulled against him, his fingers, expertly entwined in her fair hair, gently easing her head back while he planted a kiss on her lips. In anger and surprise she fought against him, finally breaking from the hold to leap away from him.

  “That was uncalled for!” she hissed, afraid to raise her voice in case those in the garden heard her. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but if you think I feel like that for you…”

  He was smiling at her. “I know you feel like that for me, Helen. There’s a hunger inside you. You get nothing from Edwin. I know that by the way you look so unloved these days. Your eyes are empty. Until they look at me and then I see them fill with longing – a longing to be loved.”

  Now she was thoroughly angry. “You think too highly of yourself! As if I—” She broke off, at a loss, unable to express herself with her senses contradicting every word hardly had it reached her brain.

  She should have laughed it all off. A laugh would have deterred any further nonsense from him. Her mistake had been not to, and now he took her back into his arms and she returned his kiss as the need for the love that Edwin was failing to give her welled up inside her.

  A loud, overwrought weeping tore her from his hold. By the time Gina stumbled into the kitchen in floods of tears, closely followed by a concerned Muriel Cotterell, Helen was back to making ham sandwiches and Hugh was buttering away like fury.

  “Mummy!” An indignant Gina flung herself at her mother. “Make Katie give my trike back! Come outside and make her!”

  Apparently to Gina’s mind the birthday tricycle was sacrosanct, not to be purloined by anyone, not even her sister. That a friend should lay claim to it even for a moment or two was to her the worst thing in the world.

  “Mummy, she’ll break it! Come and get it back!”

  “All right, darling, I’m coming.” Taking the small hand, Helen let herself be practically dragged out to the garden to do her duty, at the same time throwing Hugh a warning glance.

  It took quite a while to sort out the problem, gentle words finally persuading the little friend to relinquish the trike, only for Gina to explode again as another little friend felt she could borrow her birthday doll.

  “You can’t play with both at the same time,” Helen admonished her daughter, aware that the second friend was about to burst into tears. In frustration she prevented Mrs Cotterell plucking the doll away from the pouting friend and starting off a new set of tantrums, at the same time appealing to six-year-old Angela, “Darling, tell Gina she has to learn to share.”

  “But she’s going to break it!” squealed Gina in panic, glaring through her tears at the second little friend.

  Angel came to the rescue. Picking up one of her old toys, a brightly coloured, soft-bodied stuffed clown, she thrust it into the child’s arms. The clown’s many colours immediately attracted the three-year-old, and the doll was easily retrieved. Going to her sister, now on the trike but still tight-lipped and tearful, Angel sat the doll on the handlebars while Gina reached to steady it, tears quickly drying, leaving Helen to fondly gaze at her older daughter.

  Harmony restored, she returned to the house but there was no sign of Hugh.

  * * *

  Helen glanced up to see Hugh standing just inside the doorway of the lounge, where she’d been engrossed in a novel by Daphne du Maurier, one of her favourite authors. Edwin in London, the children in bed, the radio playing quietly to itself with nothing on the television to interest her, she’d been immersed in the world of du Maurier’s Mary Anne, the Cockney courtesan who had shocked a nation.

  The lounge door being open, she hadn’t heard him come in but had sensed movement from the comer of her eye. He had a disconcerting habit of creeping up on people and, remembering the episode in the kitchen during Gina’s birthday party the previous Friday, her muscles instantly tensed.

  He had kept out of her way since then but with Edwin around over the weekend that was no surprise. On Monday Hugh had gone in with him and they had come home together each evening for the next four days. “God knows what’s got into him, being so eager to be there,” Edwin had remarked.

  Now, on this Friday evening, he had come back alone, leaving Edwin to carry on at Letts – perhaps even glad to see the back of his cousin, as he had so often remarked. Helen hadn’t even heard him come into the house and she wondered if he had used the back door. Still in his outdoor coat, he’d been regarding her. Anger flew up inside her.

  “Hugh! You gave me a start! What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to apologise,” he began, “for that business last Friday. It was unpardonable.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  It was all she could find to say. Keeping a tight hold on her book as a shield against his coming any nearer, she glared at him over the top of it.

  He was smiling affably. “Can you forgive me?”

  Somehow she nodded, accompanying the head movement with a shrug, hoping he wouldn’t come any nearer. She just wished he’d go; his presence was already causing that familiar discomfiting sensation pulsating inside her. But, having moved two or three steps further into the room, Hugh came to a standstill.

  “I’ve come to a decision,” he said. “I’ve decided it’s time I left. Truth is I seem to have overstayed my welcome, at least where you’re concerned. It’s time I moved on.”

  She remained staring at him, aware of a sudden and disturbing empty feeling.

  “I’m going to spend a few weeks in Cambridge.” His statement brought Helen back to earth.

  “What about the restaurant?” she asked sharply. “And Edwin?”

  “I’ve squared it with him. He’s willing to let me go, seeing it as a short holiday. I think he owes me that.”

  Short holiday! A few weeks! Edwin begrudged himself holidays, so why give his cousin time off? Hugh had skived off plenty of times as it was since coming into the business. Edwin was far too soft on him. But who was she to argue? She wished only to see the back of him and the temptation he brought with him. In fact, she told herself, she couldn’t be more relieved.

  * * *

  What he had told Helen had not been true. Hugh smiled to himself as he drove to Cambridge in his Jag. A few weeks could stretch into a few months or even longer, maybe forever.

  The real truth wasn’t that he needed to get away from Helen, who could turn him on every time he saw her, but that the chance had come up of a plum part in a new play – one he could not refuse.

  An old Oxford chum had written to him about it. In fact it was Rodney who was putting on the play.

  I want you for the lead part. It’s perfect for you. In fact I wrote it with you in mind, though I didn’t realise that at the time. I think it was because I remembered how good you were when we were in OUDS and it kept plugging away at me. So there it is. Say you’ll come up and we can have a chat about it. It’s a great script. It’ll be playing in Cambridge and there’s every chance of it eventually being transferred to the West End.

  Hugh had replied that he would be delighted to come up to Cambridge. Rodney, in the days of Oxford a promising playwright, now actually putting on a play and asking him to play the lead – it was like manna from heaven. Hugh saw his
future stretching bright and golden before him as he drove. He saw the play running for weeks, perhaps months, a total success, brought into some prominent West End theatre to reap great acclaim, brilliant reviews, excited critics, and packed houses. He was on his way at last.

  Fourteen

  “I want him out of here!”

  Helen hissed the words over the breakfast table, fearing that Hugh, still upstairs in his rooms, might hear her. But their vehemence had Edwin looking up sharply from the piece of toast he had just reached for, his expression one of injured surprise. “What’s he done to upset you, then?”

  “He hasn’t upset me.” She forced herself not to sound agitated, though after this weekend it was hard not to be.

  Hugh was living with them again, had been here six weeks since his return in late July after an absence of ten months. In that time there had been one letter from him, received after two months away and full of apologies to Edwin. He’d explained that he hadn’t intended his time away to be so long but that he’d unexpectedly landed an absolutely marvellous part in a play:

  “I was as surprised as you are,” he’d written quite unashamedly.

  But it was something I couldn’t pass up. I know you’ll understand. I hope this doesn’t affect our relationship, business-wise or cordial, and I’m certain you can carry on without me for a while.

  There had been a full page of drivel. Edwin had been furious and so had Helen. “He treats you like shit!” she’d said, feeling the need for crudeness, so beside herself was she at Hugh’s cavalier behaviour.

  For once Edwin had agreed though as the months passed and he acquired a good restaurant manager, Michel Marat, a young and energetic man – Helen’s father had retired permanently now owing to ill health – he often remarked on being better off without Hugh around.