Secrets and shadows, p.13
Secrets and Shadows, page 13
Isobel thought that it was Louisa’s occasional ability to be ruthless – which sometimes made people think of her as spoilt – that had also given her the determination to fight – and survive – cancer. How complicated life was. She said seriously: ‘Poor Adam . . . but isn’t gratitude one of the hardest emotions to handle?’
‘Umm – you’re right. Funny you should say that, because Marnie said much the same thing to me this afternoon,’ said Louisa. ‘But go on about Lorna. I didn’t mean to sidetrack you with my problems. What happened next?’
‘Oh well, Lorna got home, full of expectations of marriage and children and life at Glendrochatt, only to be told by Giles that he was going to marry me – the much younger sister she’d always resented and bossed around. To make matters worse, she was not only still in love with Giles himself, but completely obsessed with this house and estate, and had set her heart on being mistress of Glendrochatt. Don’t think I don’t realise how dreadful it must have been for her, but when Lorna has a grudge, even a small one – and this one was mega – she’s never been able to let it go and move on to other things. It grows into a complete obsession. Anyway, after our wedding she married a glamorous South African eye surgeon and we all hoped everything was all right. She had a luxurious lifestyle and masses of money but it didn’t work out. He was unfaithful and the babies she said she longed for didn’t happen. Because John had been married before and had children by his first marriage, and because Lorna had taken herself to endless doctors, we assumed she couldn’t have any. Certainly that’s what she told my mother. How wrong we were! Anyway, that summer after they split up, she came back from South Africa intent on paying off old scores with me and getting Giles back . . . and she very nearly did.’
Louisa could imagine Lorna’s temptation. Giles was extremely attractive and though her own fondness for Isobel would certainly have stopped her from flinging any lures over him herself, sisterly affection had obviously not been a sufficient deterrent to Lorna.
‘Did you realise at the time that they were having an affair?’ she asked.
‘They only had one night together – and it was partly my fault.’ Isobel sighed. ‘I refused to go on a Suzuki music weekend with Giles and Amy – and Giles took Lorna in my place. But I couldn’t throw stones because I was on the edge of an affair myself with Daniel Hoffman – the artist who painted the two backdrops for the theatre. He was spending the summer with us, mostly working in the theatre, but Giles also commissioned him to paint my portrait – very dangerous, that was. Exciting heart to hearts between the artist and the model during sittings.’ Isobel pulled a mocking face and laughed, but Louisa could see the recollection was painful.
‘Is the portrait good? Do you like it?’
‘Everyone likes it, even me. It’s wonderful – quite apart from me it’s a sensational picture. It’s hanging in the drawing room – do go and have a look sometime. Giles used to have ambivalent feelings about it because he says Daniel captured a look on my face that he thought was only ever directed at him. I wouldn’t know about that – but I still feel very badly about Daniel because he fell for me in a big way and out of rage at what I could see was brewing between Giles and Lorna, I encouraged him. He got badly hurt. He was a fascinating character, great fun and quite unlike anyone I’d ever met before. The children adored him and he was specially brilliant with Ed – which of course particularly endeared him to me. He was several years younger than me so I suppose I was flattered to start with and it was just the morale boost I needed at a tricky time in my marriage. That’s how it began anyway, but then I started to fall for him too and the whole thing nearly got out of hand. If it hadn’t been for the drama with Ed I don’t know how it might have ended. That brought Giles and me to our senses with a bang. So you see,’ said Isobel with painful honesty, ‘I’m not really in a position to take the moral high ground with Giles about his one-night stand with Lorna.’
‘Perhaps not in theory . . . but that never seems to help much with how one feels,’ said Louisa. ‘I always thought you and Giles had such a cast-iron marriage.’
‘I thought so too at one time, but now I don’t think there is such a thing. Nothing in any relationship is ever quite what it appears to the outside world, is it? We’ve made a pretty good job of welding our marriage together again, and I’d thought it was stronger than ever till Rory was dropped into it. Now I’m so afraid, I feel as if an arctic wind was blowing round me.’
‘Afraid of how Giles will react?’
‘Afraid of what it’ll do to us both . . . but mostly afraid of myself. Terrified of what may happen and whether I can cope. Look how I over-reacted to Bunty, and she’s a total stranger and it doesn’t really matter what she thinks.’
‘How long is Rory here for? Won’t it all blow over when he goes back to Lorna? Surely she can’t expect him to stay with you indefinitely.’
Isobel groaned. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she expects or even wants – but I’m not going to let the poor little boy be used as an emotional football and kicked to and fro across the Atlantic to score points for opposing sides. He’s not just Lorna’s responsibility now – he’s Giles’s too – a little cuckoo in our nest. And that,’ said Isobel, ‘makes it very complicated.’
At that moment they heard footsteps in the hall, the dogs rushed excitedly to the door of the nursery and Giles came in.
‘Good heavens, what on earth are you two doing sitting in the dark? You look like a pair of owls!’ he said. Isobel and Louisa blinked in the unexpected glare as he switched on the lights. ‘Hi there, Louisa. Hope you’ve had a productive day with the writing muse. Hello, my Iz. I’m afraid I’m a bit late, but we got carried away and started on something new. Still we had a wonderful practice.’ As Giles bent to kiss his wife, Louisa watched him touch her cheek with his finger in a small gesture of private intimacy. He gave Isobel a questioning look.
‘You look exhausted, darling . . . you all right?’ he asked.
‘Oh, wonderful, terrific,’ Isobel’s sarcasm was biting. She had been longing for Giles to come home, but at the sight of him the horrible, unwanted feelings of resentment seemed to rise in her gorge like bile. ‘I’ve just been filling Louisa in about our little family dilemmas,’ she said nastily.
‘Oh well, tell the whole world, why don’t you?’ Giles was instantly furious. ‘Louisa can alert our friends and relations to the latest Grant drama and you can announce it to the writing group tomorrow . . . since you made them so interested in the first place.’
Louisa sensed the tension between husband and wife simmering below the surface and felt caught in the cross-fire of matrimonial sniping that might easily ignite into a full-blown fusillade. Perhaps dynamite was not so enviable after all, she thought wryly. Aloud she said: ‘Look, I think I’d better leave you to discuss this in private.’
‘Oh, God! I’m sorry, Louisa.’ Giles was instantly apologetic. ‘That was unfair to you both. I was well out of order.’
Isobel gave herself a little shake as if to dislodge some foreign body. ‘Me too. Sorry, sorry, sorry.’
‘It’s getting late. Bedtime for me anyway I think,’ said Louisa lightly. She kissed her host and hostess a swift goodnight, for once thankful to escape their usually congenial company.
When she had gone, Isobel looked at Giles in horror.
‘What is this doing to us? I didn’t mean to react like that. I could kill Lorna. I feel as if she’s infected me with a horrible virus and my immune system can’t cope with it.’
‘I know. But we will cope with it. We have to,’ he said. ‘Come to bed, darling. We have better ways of communicating than this.’
In the small hours of the morning Isobel woke with a terrific start to bloodcurdling yells. She and Giles had talked long into the night and then made love with a passion that would have been the envy of many long-married couples. She leaped out of bed and ran barefooted down the passage. The landing light was on and the door of the little room that had been Edward’s before he was promoted to a larger one upstairs on the top floor was ajar, propped open by a book. Rory was sitting up in bed screaming hysterically. Isobel gathered him in her arms, murmuring all the old words of comfort that she had used to Amy and Edward when they were little. ‘It’s all right, darling. I’m here. It’s only a dream. Wake up. I’m here.’
‘The Hat! The Hat!’ screamed Rory, incoherent with terror. ‘Get him off! Take it away, take it away!’
‘I will, darling. It’s all gone now. No more Hat.’ Isobel hadn’t the faintest idea what, or who, the Hat was, but after years of practice, particularly with Amy, she knew about exorcising nightmares. Rory wound his arms so tightly round her neck she was nearly strangled, but his screams subsided to sobs, and the sobs gradually became intermittent, though with each one she could feel his bony little body shuddering. She rocked him and murmured to him until he was completely quiet and he leaned against her exhausted, thumb in mouth.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s a good boy. Would a drink of hot Ribena make you feel all better?’
He nodded, looking up at her through dark lashes from greeny-brown eyes that were so uncannily like Giles’s – so unlike her sister Lorna’s big blue ones. He took his thumb out of his mouth for a moment. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, before jamming it back in again.
‘I won’t be a minute. I’ll just go and boil the kettle and come right back and we’ll have a hot drink together. I’ll sit on your bed and talk and we’ll have a picnic. Where’s Rabbit?’
Rory burrowed down the bed and came up with the battered one-eared rabbit that was the most treasured possession he had brought with him from the States, though he’d come with a trousseau of immaculate new clothes to cater for every possible variation of weather or social occasion. ‘I think you’ll find he’s got everything he could possibly need,’ Lorna had said on the telephone, but Isobel thought he’d come without any of the things a child really needed – except perhaps Rabbit.
‘You pop to the loo,’ she said now, ‘and by the time you’ve done that I’ll be back.’
‘You won’t be long?’
‘I won’t be long.’
When she came back with two mugs, she sat on the edge of his bed and told him about the games Edward used to play; about the bag of plastic dinosaurs he had always insisted on taking with him wherever he went and how he and Amy had loved to play in the old wooden castle that had been made years before for Giles when he was a little boy too. When Rory had finished his drink she tucked him in tight and watched his eyelids beginning to droop as if they had become too heavy to hold open any longer. She went on talking softly until she judged he was really asleep before she got cautiously off the bed. She stood for a moment looking down at this small replica of her husband with his perfectly proportioned body, grace of movement and wonderful looks – so different from her own son. Two tears trickled slowly down her cheeks and her throat felt tight. He had called out for his grandmother in his sleep, but it occurred to her suddenly that not once, even at the height of his nightmare, had Rory called out for his mother.
She turned out the bedside light and slipped quietly out of the room.
Chapter Nine
The following morning, Christopher woke early and decided to go for a walk before breakfast.
No one else was about as he let himself out of the door into the courtyard. He thought how cleverly the old farm buildings had been converted by the Grants to provide the facilities for their flourishing arts centre – an example of good manners in architecture. He went round the side of the accommodation wing and came out at the edge of the park. The air was full of birdsong, and if, in the morning light, the rhododendron bush below his bedroom window had lost its magic, moonlit luminosity, it still looked beautiful: the heavy white flower clusters just touched inside with yellow as though some medieval monastic artist – a master of restraint – had dipped his finest brush in ochre paint and drawn barely perceptible lines down the centre of each petal. Across the valley below, transparent wisps of mist were draped along the river, giving the landscape the look of a Chinese picture painted on silk, with the tops of trees rising above the early haze and the far hills rolling into the distance. What a place to live, thought Christopher – lucky, lucky Grants.
He forked left up a mossy path into the wood above the drive. Some of the pointed buds on the branches of the ancient beeches were still only beginning to unfurl and show hints of the brilliant green to come, and those new leaves that were already fully out were crumpled and covered with fine silver down. The path soon petered out but after a steep scramble, which was testing for his leg, he reached a clearing and stopped to sit on the remains of a fallen tree trunk in the early sunshine. Below him, he could see the tip of the flagpole on the tower but the flag, with the Grant coat-of-arms on it, was hanging limp, with no breath of wind to lift it.
He thought what fun it must be to run a joint venture from home as Giles and Isobel did – how satisfying. No doubt there were tensions and difficulties for a married couple in working so closely together, but it seemed to him infinitely more desirable than the frenetic rush in which he and Nicola had led their lives and most of their friends still did. Many couples hardly seemed to have time to enjoy each other’s company any more – even go on holiday together, if their careers clashed – but he didn’t think the Grants’ rural lifestyle was one that Nicola would appreciate. The buzz of the City, the pressure of cutthroat competition, was the breath of life to her and it wasn’t only the resulting prosperity that acted on her like a powerful aphrodisiac – though money was very important – but everything it represented: not just purchasing power but influence; excitement; control; recognition. She had been fond of telling him that it was the thrill of the chase as much as the capture of the quarry that was significant to her in the pursuit of wealth, though Christopher suspected that she wasn’t exactly lacking in blood lust either. And not so long ago, I was every bit as ambitious for the same things myself, he thought. It’s not her fault that I’ve altered. I can’t blame her because I’ve had a change of heart and mind and she hasn’t – and some of the anger against her that had been festering inside him started to drain away.
It was his mother who had suggested he should come on this particular writing course. She had seen an article on ‘Life Enhancing Vacations in Beautiful Places’ in the glossy supplement of her Sunday paper and Glendrochatt had been one of the four venues suggested. There had been a walking week in Andalusia combined with bird watching; a painting holiday in Greece tutored by a well-known artist; a music and meditation course in Wales offering such enticements as spiritual detoxification and energy realignment . . . and the creative writing week in Scotland. ‘Make use of your leisure to renew your creative vision,’ the writer of the article had urged piously. ‘Come home refreshed in body and spirit, with a new skill and a new perspective on life.’
‘That’s what you should do,’ his mother had said with conviction. ‘Go on a writing course. Remember all those essay prizes at school? Remember the excitement when you started to get a few poems accepted when you were up at Oxford? The writing bug has never really gone away, has it? We always thought you’d go into journalism before you got so smitten with the City. Now you’ve been given an opportunity to re-evaluate your whole existence and the time and chance to pursue a completely new direction.’
He’d raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Oh, is that what this is all about? A great new chance for me?’ he’d asked mockingly.
‘Yes,’ she’d answered. ‘At least, that’s exactly what it could be – if you choose to let it.’
‘I see. Someone else’s appalling bad luck turned into my good luck? Seems a bit unfair on them, to put it mildly.’
‘Better than wasting a chance! Better than wallowing! You can’t alter what’s happened so you must make your own luck now,’ she’d said fiercely. He could see she was on the edge of tears, and it was so unlike her to be critical – she who had been his staunch supporter through everything – that he’d felt ashamed. He thought with a pang that she’d got to look much older recently.
‘I’m sorry.’ He put his arm round her thin, stooped shoulders and gave her a hug. Then he said teasingly. ‘Poor old Mum! Casting your pearls of advice before swine as always! But I expect you’re right – you usually are. Give me the article then. I won’t promise to go, but I’ll promise to read it.’
She had handed him the paper. ‘Go on a quest, darling,’ she said. ‘You may not find what you expect . . . but you never know what else you may discover.’ She had added lightly, ‘It might even prove to be a treasure hunt!’ And she picked up the earthy wooden trug, which had somehow made its way into the drawing room – something that drove his meticulous father crazy – gathered up her ancient leather gloves and clippers, called up the dogs and headed off to her beloved garden before he could start raising objections to the idea. He had looked after her fondly and thought she bore a strong resemblance to a modern-day version of the White Queen in Through the Looking-glass – pearls, spectacles and dog-whistles tangled round her neck; hairpins cascading out of the knot of white hair, which was balanced as precariously on top of her head as a pile of ivory spillikins; the zip of her old skirt skewed round, off centre.
