Echoes in the Cotswolds Read online

  ‘Who told you Lucy was in hospital?’ Thea asked him, since no one else seemed inclined to speak first.

  ‘That Hunter bloke from the committee,’ said Kevin Sinclair impatiently. ‘Just seen him in the bread shop.’

  ‘Do you live in Northleach, then? Are you on the committee as well?’ Already Thea felt better for having slipped into her familiar questioning role. Somehow or other she was going to get at least the outline of the story. She heard herself say the Committee as if capitalised. Almost as if it was some kind of soviet apparatus for surveillance of all that went on in the town.

  ‘We live in Stroud, actually,’ said Tessa. ‘But we know people here.’

  It was a Wednesday, Thea remembered. Normal people should be at work. Even those in their sixties like these two generally had gainful occupations these days. Unless, of course, they were patently idle and affluent like Faith and Livia.

  ‘Have you got a business or something? I mean – most people would be at work,’ she said boldly.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Tessa, jutting her beaky nose forward and giving Thea a challenging look. ‘Wouldn’t that go for you too, then?’

  ‘I am working,’ Thea flashed back. ‘I’m working for Lucy, as it happens.’

  ‘She’s the house-sitter,’ said Bobby in a weak-sounding voice. ‘And, to put it as nicely as I can, I’ve had about enough of all this. I never signed up for a houseful of friends and relations arguing about what happens now. I’ve got children to think about.’

  ‘Nobody’s arguing,’ said Kevin Sinclair. ‘We just hoped for a bit of information. If this lady’s the house-sitter, she’ll be the one we want. She can fill us in on what the excitement’s about. Can’t she?’

  Again, Thea found herself attaching labels. The man was tall and well-covered, with broad shoulders and a fleshy neck. His hands looked muscular, the nails short and not especially clean. A builder, she hazarded, or something along those lines. Perhaps he had done Lucy’s barn conversion, before their marriage collapsed. Lucy’s replacement was just the sort of woman who might take up with a builder, Thea thought, while knowing her judgement to be outrageous.

  ‘I understand you have a son?’ she prevaricated. ‘If you’re divorced, then he must be her next of kin.’ She knew as she spoke that she’d got it wrong, but she enjoyed the sense of provoking the man into correcting her. He did just as she’d hoped.

  ‘He isn’t anything of the sort. He’s not her son. They’re nothing to each other.’

  ‘Oh. I just thought she might have given his contact details to the hospital – but they called Bobby this morning, not him.’

  ‘Why did they call anyone? Did something happen? Why’s everyone just standing around like this if there’s some trouble?’

  ‘Maybe you should both come over the road and we can talk about it there,’ said Thea, with a questioning look at Bobby. Wasn’t she overstepping a mark, usurping the American woman’s role? ‘If that’s okay,’ she added.

  ‘It’s more than okay,’ said Bobby. ‘It would be doing me a huge favour. Look – this is the ward, and the phone number.’ She opened a drawer and took out a sheet of paper that Thea supposed had been provided by Lucy. It struck her that she had been given no such information. Bobby thrust it at her. ‘Call them and say you’re the contact person now, not me. Lord, it’s practically eleven o’clock already. Buster must be starving.’ Only then did everyone notice that the child had been complaining more and more loudly ever since the last two people had entered the room.

  ‘Sorry, baby,’ Bobby crooned. ‘What an awful mother.’

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Millie, getting up from the rug. ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’

  ‘Don’t start that,’ said Bobby, and instigated a wholesale exodus that successfully saw Thea, Hepzibah, Sinclair and Tessa all on the pavement in under a minute.

  She saw no alternative but to let them into Lucy’s house and offer them a drink. It felt completely wrong, and completely inevitable. They all sat down in the living room, Tessa unable to resist a thorough inspection. ‘Never been in here before,’ she said.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Kevin. ‘Best not tell her we were here. She won’t take it kindly.’ Then he looked hard at Thea. ‘You’ll visit her, then?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Thea impatiently. She felt there was a lot to be explained before she took any impulsive action. ‘You didn’t answer my question about your son. Where is he?’

  ‘No idea. I don’t keep track of him. Neither does Lucy. He’s a grown man, lives his own degenerate life.’

  ‘Degenerate!’ Thea repeated the word incredulously. It sounded old-fashioned and horribly condemnatory. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-something. I lose track.’

  ‘He’s twenty-eight,’ said Tessa. ‘His name’s Ollie.’

  Thea was burning to hear the story, to fill in the gaping holes left by this all-too-brief account. Lucy had never said anything about her married life, with or without a stepson. Frustratingly, it was no use expecting any of these people to come to the rescue now, she realised. Although perhaps it was worth one last try. ‘So why did you come rushing over here when you heard she was in hospital? It’s all been planned for months – it’s funny you only just heard about it today, when she’s had a collapse. You’re the nearest thing she’s got to family – shouldn’t you go and see what’s happened?’

  ‘Collapse?’ the man repeated. ‘Is that what happened. Why can’t you just tell me?’

  ‘Because I hardly know any more than that myself. The hospital phoned Bobby and said the operation didn’t go ahead because Lucy was unconscious or in a coma or something. We were all trying to guess what exactly happened when you showed up. Why don’t you just go there and find out for yourself? Rather you than me, anyway.’

  ‘Nice try, love,’ said Kevin, holding up his hands. ‘But if you knew Lucy, you’d know better than suggest such a thing. Even if she’s at death’s door, she’d not want me near her.’

  Thea just nodded and shrugged, unable to think of anything more to say. There was nothing so murky and rancorous as the aftermath of a messy divorce. And nothing so mysterious, either. The real reason for the split was seldom disclosed to outsiders. ‘Okay,’ she muttered. Then another thought struck her: ‘I wonder how she got to the hospital this morning?’

  ‘Oh – Hunter took her,’ said Kevin carelessly. ‘He wasn’t long back when I saw him. Said he could hardly say no when she asked him outright, and he’d managed to combine it with a bit of business. Great man for business, is old Hunter.’

  ‘But Lucy doesn’t like him,’ Thea blurted without thinking.

  ‘Lucy doesn’t really like anybody,’ said Tessa confidentially, hugging Kevin’s arm as she sat beside him on the sofa. ‘But she’ll make use of them when it suits her. Right, Kev?’

  ‘Right,’ said Lucy’s former husband. He drained his coffee and gently disengaged his arm. ‘Best be off. Things to do. First on the list is phone that hospital and find out what’s what.’

  Thea watched the couple as they got ready to leave and tried to assemble her thoughts. There were still several areas of bafflement. Too much information had been flung at her, making a far from coherent picture. Apart from Bobby, all the new people she’d met that morning had been of roughly the same age. They would have been at their most active, sexually, financially, socially, in the 1990s, she supposed.

  ‘So will you go and see Lucy or not?’ Kevin urged. ‘Because as much as I’d like to, I’d only open old wounds and set the old girl back. That’s if she’s compos mentis. If I phone them, they’ll just fob me off with some bland bit of nonsense. Sounds as if somebody ought to be going there in person.’ He looked at the spaniel. ‘You can leave that with Mrs Thing over there.’

  ‘Latimer,’ Thea remembered with an effort. ‘But I’ve no intention of going – haven’t I said that enough times?’

  ‘Stalemate, then,’ said Kevin.

  Tessa laughed and neatly
sidestepped the argument. ‘Latimer’s a nice name,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think? Sort of solid.’

  ‘It is nice,’ Thea agreed, rather glad to introduce something light and irrelevant. ‘So is Livia. I always think three syllables work best in a name. Like my daughter – she’s Jessica.’

  Kevin just stared as if they’d both lost their wits, but Tessa kept it going. ‘Imagine if she was Livia Latimer. Wouldn’t that be nice!’

  Thea knew, deep down, that she was merely trying to postpone a final decision about what to do next. She was hoping, probably, that Bobby would emerge from her front door waving her phone and reporting a change in Lucy’s condition – whether for better or worse, it could well excuse Thea from having to go to Oxford. Apart from anything else, she very much disliked Oxford. It had disagreeable associations.

  ‘So you do at least accept that I can’t go anywhere right away,’ she told Kevin. ‘I’ll have to speak to my husband. And he’ll say it’s not my job to take orders from anybody but Lucy herself.’

  ‘Oh?’ Scepticism beamed brightly from his eyes. ‘Where’s he, then?’

  ‘At home. Miles away. He might be needing me.’

  ‘What if Lucy dies?’ said Tessa, with relish. ‘Who’d get her house?’

  ‘Not us,’ said Kevin. ‘And not Ollie. Most likely she’ll leave it to this lady here. She seems the sort of person that could happen to.’

  Thea winced at the accidental accuracy of this remark. The house she lived in with Drew and his children had in fact been an inheritance from a grateful customer. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. All three of them had moved to the front door. As Thea opened it two people were passing on the pavement, giving them curious glances.

  ‘Bit of a comedown, all the same,’ said Kevin. ‘After that great barn.’

  ‘Did you do the conversion?’ asked Thea, following her earlier hunch.

  ‘Who – me?’ He guffawed. ‘Do I look like a builder?’

  Tessa joined in the laughter. ‘You do, Kev. I’ve always said so.’ She turned to Thea. ‘He’s mostly a feed merchant,’ she explained. ‘Animal feed. And he drives his own lorry – huge great thing. Deals in hay and straw. Lends a hand with other stuff sometimes – transporting sheep, when it’s busy. There’s never enough people for that these days.’

  ‘Poor sheep,’ said Thea, thinking of the lorries she had seen crammed with woolly bodies, often on three levels. The creatures always seemed so hopeless, too sunk in despair even to feel frightened.

  Both women had let Lucy slip yet again from the front of their minds. But Kevin was more tenacious. ‘Well, say hello to my ex-wife if you ever get to see her,’ he said heavily. ‘We should be getting on.’ He eyed the cottage again. ‘Pokey little place. Not like hers over the road. Can’t think what Luce was doing, moving over here.’

  Thea and her spaniel went back into the house. Then she stood with her phone in her hand, wondering what in the world she was supposed to do next.

  Chapter Seven

  Drew would be conducting Penelope Allen’s funeral, by Thea’s calculations. He had another burial that afternoon, for a person whose name escaped her. She had said she would try to be back on Saturday, but would let him know if that changed. The painful contrast between her expected boredom, doing nothing but guard a house against unlikely marauders, and his hectic schedule gave her frequent surges of guilt and frustration. She ought never to have accepted such a nebulous commission.Lucy had not provided any convincing reasons for her anxiety, and now everything was thrown into total confusion by her bizarre collapse in the private wing of the John Radcliffe.

  She should at least tell Drew what had happened and prepare him for a range of possible developments. But she must time it carefully, or the call would interrupt a delicate stage of one of his funerals. Probably, she told herself, he was so focused on his work that he wouldn’t notice whether his wife was at home or not.

  The most striking factor in the whole scenario was the absence of any sense of urgency. Kevin Sinclair had pressed her to go and see Lucy, but it had not seemed to emanate from any undue concern for his ex-wife’s welfare. A person in a coma could wait, of course. Lucy wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t need anything that Thea could provide, was in a safe place and whatever happened next was beyond anyone’s control. She definitely did not want to go and sit by the bedside for uneventful hours at a time. She had no expectation that the medical people would tell her anything meaningful, given that she was no relation, and barely even a friend. Lucy’s life was looking very sparsely peopled – something that should have been apparent already from the mere fact of needing a paid house-sitter to do something any friend would cheerfully undertake. The whole business hardly involved Thea at all, in fact. Except that if somebody did break into the house, or rubbish the garden, or pour petrol through the letter box, Thea would feel she had betrayed a trust. She certainly couldn’t just walk away as if the whole thing was out of her hands. That would be morally untenable, and she wasn’t sure she could cope with any more guilt. Which meant she was trapped there until Lucy either recovered or died, and she would simply have to put up with it.

  There was one person on Lucy’s brief list of Northleach acquaintances she had yet to meet: the man called Hunter, who was on the committee. The man who had told Kevin about Lucy’s operation that very morning. She supposed she would never encounter him now. Lunch was looming – a modest snack that she had brought with her from home – and then she would have to start making some decisions. The lack of any real information about Lucy was tantalising, and felt unnecessary. Modern regulations about revealing personal information meant that such situations were all too common. Unless Lucy had left precise written instructions that a certain Thea Slocombe was authorised to receive details of her condition, treatment and prognosis, she would have to remain in ignorance.

  Except that Bobby Latimer, who was, at least to some extent so authorised, had handed the baton to Thea. Pretend you’re me, she had said, and there was every chance that such a ruse would work, despite Thea’s instant assumption that it would not. Surely hospitals had not yet reached the point of demanding passwords or actual physical thumbprints before they would let a person in or disclose any information. It probably wouldn’t be long, Thea thought crossly. Meanwhile, she decided to at least try a phone call.

  The hospital switchboard was slow to respond, but then put her through to the relevant ward without delay. ‘Oh hello, I’m enquiring about Lucy Sinclair, who’s on your ward. You called me earlier today to say she’s in a coma.’ Too late Thea remembered Bobby’s American accent. If she was speaking to the same person who phoned that morning, that could give the game away.

  ‘Oh. Can you give me your name, please?’

  ‘Latimer.’ What was Bobby short for? Lucy had told her and she’d forgotten. Roberta, Robina, or some weird made-up American name? And did she call herself Mrs, Ms or Miss?

  Luckily it didn’t matter. ‘Oh yes. Well, she’s slightly better now. It was never really a coma, you know. I don’t know who would have told you that. She lost consciousness for a little while, which meant the surgery had to be postponed – cancelled, actually – but she’s not in any danger.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that. Is it possible to visit her?’

  ‘Best leave it till tomorrow, dear,’ said the nurse, or whatever she was. ‘Give her time to get over it. She’s very incoherent just now. You wouldn’t get any sense out of her.’

  ‘All right. That’s a great relief. Thank you very much.’

  Which was some sort of progress, she supposed, but it was of very little help in the decision as to what to do next. Lucy could be home again by Friday, the way hospitals discharged people these days. She would have lost her place in the schedule for operations, and until they worked out what had caused her collapse, they wouldn’t dare try again.

  Perhaps, then, it would make sense to go and visit the next day, if nothing changed in the meantime. Until then she could
loiter here in Northleach, staying until about three o’clock, switching lights on and off, turning the radio on, and generally making it look as if the house was being comprehensively lived in. At that point she could make the decision whether or not to stay. On the face of it, she knew she ought to – the house was just as empty and vulnerable whether Lucy had surgery or not. But somehow that was not how it felt. Everything was standing on shifting sands, the whole exercise undermined by Lucy’s strange descent into a brief semi-coma.

  She ate her sausage roll and apple and looked to the dog for stimulation. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Maybe we could take a turn around the town square for half an hour.’ Hepzie wagged in wholesale agreement.

  Taking care to lock the front door and checking to ensure her car was where she’d left it, Thea and spaniel headed eastwards. There was a feeble attempt at sunshine, and the air felt mild and springlike. Loud laughter was coming from the door of The Wheatsheaf over the road. As a pub it struck Thea as being at the more pretentious end of the spectrum, with an eye to American tourists rather than unreconstructed locals. It offered lavish accommodation and equally lavish cuisine. In short, it was typical Cotswolds – and most visitors would look no further. They might well ignore the more modest Sherborne Arms, despite it being right in the town square, leaving it for less affluent locals. For the moment, Thea was not tempted by either of them.

  The laughter was prolonged; most likely the result of a coachload of tourists enjoying a pre-booked lunch before exploring the famous church. Far too big for the little town, St Peter and St Paul’s had been financed by plutocratic wool merchants, who had enjoyed enormous prosperity over the centuries. Six or seven centuries, in fact, if Thea remembered rightly. Northleach had been a sort of ‘hub’ for the wool industry in the Middle Ages, with an important road running right through it. There had been numerous inns and taverns and handsome houses. Snippets from a guidebook came back to her as she strolled along. A handful of buildings could trace themselves back to 1260-something, while plenty more could provide plentiful detail of their erection in the 1500s. Cotswold stone was nothing if not long-lasting. No wonder, she acknowledged to herself, that people from younger countries liked to come for a look.