The Bowness Bequest Read online

  Christopher looked startled. Simmy concluded that it wasn’t only her who often mislaid a vehicle. The blurred boundary between Windermere and Bowness meant it was quite usual to leave one’s car in the former, where the streets were emptier, and walk down into the latter. ‘Around here somewhere,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Well, I must get moving,’ said Moxon, doing his hand-rubbing routine again. ‘I’ll be in touch with you. Both of you,’ he added. Something in his eyes made Simmy wince self-consciously. A kind of superior knowingness, tinged with amusement and something a bit more acidic. She brushed it away as irrelevant and nodded a brief farewell.

  ‘Let’s go and look for your car, then,’ she said to Christopher. Already she had worked out that if she offered to take him in hers, he would then be stranded in Troutbeck for the night, and that way complications lay. Far too many complications to be countenanced, in fact.

  They found his long silver-coloured estate quite quickly. ‘I need plenty of space for the job,’ he explained. ‘I’m always having to cart boxes of junk to and fro. I’m lucky they don’t make me use a van.’

  ‘I must come and see you in action sometime,’ she said idly. ‘I’ve never been to an auction. My mum rather fancies it as well. She wants some new china.’

  ‘You’d be welcome,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘And I must admit, I’ve almost never been to Troutbeck. Are you sure you want me invading you? What about supper?’

  ‘I can do something quick for both of us, if you like. Sausage, egg and chips. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ he sighed. ‘Just like old times.’

  It wouldn’t be at all like old times, but she went along with the fantasy. It was dawning on her that this man was considerably changed from the boy she had known more than twenty years earlier. Their last joint holiday had been when they were sixteen, and there had been a disconcertingly sudden escalation in their feelings for each other. It all came rushing back to her, as she led the way up the steep road to her home. George had been twelve and three-quarters, intolerably sullen and withdrawn, except for the moments when he turned nasty, asking deliberately embarrassing questions of everyone around him, about their deepest feelings and beliefs. Eddie had been fourteen, anxious about his place in both the family and the wider world. He had developed mild asthma and was pale and thin. The weather had been fairly vile for most of the fortnight, too. Simmy had let it all pass her by, barely aware of anything but the alarming physical urges that her body was experiencing, entirely beyond her control. She remembered Angie saying, on the drive home, ‘That’s the last time we do that. We’ve grown too far apart for it to work any longer.’ Somewhere Simmy had detected a subtext, but she made no effort to examine it. She was too distraught at the notion that she might never see Christopher again.

  The cottage was chilly, and she hurried round turning up the heating and closing the curtains. The sausages she had in mind were a near-forgotten pack at the back of the fridge. Sitting Christopher down at the kitchen table, she admitted that the use-by date had passed. ‘But only by two days,’ she added.

  ‘No problem. I’ve got a cast-iron stomach.’

  ‘I guess you would have, after all that travelling.’

  ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Simmy – you said on Monday that you’d always liked my dad. Was that true? How much have you seen of him since you came to live here?’

  ‘Gosh! That was a bit sudden. To tell you the truth I haven’t seen him at all since then. The last time must have been when I came here to visit, three years ago or thereabouts. My parents and yours were having a pub lunch together in Ambleside and I went along. And I did go to see Fran once or twice when she was ill, but Kit was out each time.’

  ‘And did you like him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I certainly didn’t dislike him. He’s always been perfectly nice to me, in a distant sort of way.’ She couldn’t say all she was thinking – that Kit had obviously felt his intellectual differences from the Straws. Russell would quote poetry, or discuss plays and films that Kit knew nothing about. Angie reminisced about her wild youth in London, with protest marches a regular activity. She had been to Greenham Common, and waved CND placards. Kit Henderson neither understood nor approved of such antics.

  ‘The two families were not natural allies, were they, when you think about it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Of course they weren’t. It was just the accident of the maternity ward that brought us together And my mum’s insistence on never letting anybody go. She’d have their addresses off them within minutes, and write to them for the rest of their lives. You would not believe the number of letters she’s kept. Loads from your mother, obviously. I think every moment of your childhood must be there, all written down for posterity.’

  She flinched. The notion of posterity was a painful one in the Straw family. Simmy was a childless only child. The line stopped with her. ‘My mum really did like Frances,’ she said. ‘Your mother had a special knack of making friends that mine really doesn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I sounded cross. I just don’t like the way myths get created and then turned into facts carved in stone. The truth is much more messy and slippery than we let ourselves realise.’

  She was moving around the kitchen, collecting plates and pans and cooking oil for the makeshift supper. Christopher turned on his chair to follow her back and forth, not letting his eyes leave her face. It felt as if he wanted something from her that was not exactly sympathy or reassurance, but attention and serious consideration of what he was saying. ‘She told me your sisters are adopted,’ Simmy said without warning. ‘I had no idea until yesterday.’

  ‘You mean, Angie told you? Why? I mean – how did it arise?’

  ‘With me wondering why one of them didn’t get the flower book instead of me.’

  ‘Because there’s no chance in the world that they’d appreciate it. Either of them. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with them being adopted. They’re nice enough girls, but nobody would ever call them artistic. You’re the obvious person to have it. And I suspect there was another reason, which is much more embarrassing.’

  They were sliding from one topic to another, adding to the already worrying image of an amorphous thing called Truth, slipping through their fingers like jelly. Now it was more like being on a fairground ride, where you were directed at random down tunnels and chutes that took you to somewhere unknown. The sausages engaged her for a minute or two, before she remembered she had also promised chips. There was a bag of frozen ones that were supposed to spend twenty minutes in the oven. ‘I’ve got this all out of sync,’ she muttered. ‘You’re distracting me.’

  ‘I came here to talk to you, not eat. Leave the chips and just fry some bread or something.’

  She put down the spatula she’d been holding, and looked at him. ‘The trouble is, I’m starving hungry, even if you’re not. Make yourself coffee or tea, and let me concentrate for a bit.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any beer or wine?’

  ‘Sadly not. I thought I’d hold off from solitary drinking until I’m over forty. Not long now.’ It was oddly soothing to know that he knew exactly how old she was. She had always felt that about him, ever since she could remember.

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ he begged. ‘And neither of us seems to have a lot to show for it. I haven’t even got any parents now.’

  ‘I’ve got a shop, and you’ve got a brilliant job.’

  ‘Yeah, right. And we’ve both got our health, I suppose.’

  ‘You never wanted children – is that right?’ Her own lost child had been the first thing to spring to mind at Christopher’s harsh words about their lack of worldly success. ‘So it’s no point complaining about that now.’

  ‘I didn’t want them when Sophie wanted them. That was quite some years ago now. I’m a different person.’

  ‘So you do want them?’

&nbs
p; ‘Do you?’

  It stopped her heart, in mid beat. She could feel it suspended in shock, taking her breath with it. The words were like bullets, fired at her point-blank.

  ‘I wish I had the one that died,’ she shot back. ‘I wish that about twenty times a day.’

  ‘Oh God.’ He looked at her, stricken. ‘I forgot.’

  The hot frying pan was right there, to hand. She could have picked it up and thrown it at him. She could have dashed boiling oil into his face. Who could have blamed her if she had? But she did no such thing. ‘Well, you won’t forget again, will you?’ she said.

  ‘No. And you won’t forget that my father was murdered. We gather these tragedies as we go through life, carrying them on our backs until the weight of them kills us.’

  She actually laughed at that. The pompous words hinted at self-pity as well as a retreat from the intensity of the moment. ‘Come off it,’ she said. ‘So what was that thing that’s so embarrassing? Let’s get back to that.’

  He put his face in his hands, shoulders slumped. ‘Do we have to do that now? I’m not sure I’ve got the strength. I didn’t sleep for a moment last night, and it’s catching up with me. I’ve got to drive back to Keswick somehow. And then down here again tomorrow, I shouldn’t wonder. That police chap seems to keep coming up with more and more questions. And somebody’s got to turn everything off in the bungalow and stop any more burglars getting in.’

  ‘You think it was a burglar?’

  ‘I hope it was,’ he said, his voice muffled by his hands.

  ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ murmured Simmy. ‘I think I got it right this time. Anyway, eat something, and then if you’re too knackered to drive home, I suppose you can stay in my spare bed.’

  He looked up and smiled wanly. ‘I think I’ll do just that,’ he said.

  Chapter Eight

  Simmy slept very badly, acutely aware of Christopher in the next room. It had been six months or more since she had entertained an overnight visitor, and the habit of living alone had become deeply engrained. She had recently heard a woman on the radio saying ‘I like a man in my life, but not in my house’ and the truth of it had made her laugh aloud. At the same time, she had worried that this was awful news for men, who generally seemed to want very much to share their home with a woman.

  When she did drop off, there were dreams involving seaside and blood and two men fighting over something that looked like a burnt sausage.

  They had made no plans for breakfast, but she assumed they would both be impatient to get to work. When she emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed and wondering whether Christopher liked porridge, there was no sound from his room. Should she wake him with a cup of tea, she asked herself. Then a sudden panicky thought hit her: what if he had died as well, during the night? These things went in threes, didn’t they? Frances, Kit and then their son – was it so impossible? The irrational terror sent her straight to the closed door, which she knocked on loudly.

  ‘What?’ came an equally loud response.

  ‘Sorry. I just wondered whether you’d like some porridge.’

  ‘Good God, Simmy. I thought the house was on fire. Are you always so loud in the morning?’

  ‘I’ve got to get to work. So have you, apparently. Can I come in?’

  ‘It’s your house.’

  That was no kind of an answer, but she opened the door anyway. Christopher was standing by the window in boxer shorts and a T-shirt. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t often have visitors.’

  ‘And I don’t often stay in anyone’s house. We need your mum to explain the rules to us.’

  ‘I think I should offer you a shower, make you tea in bed and then cook eggs, bacon and black pudding for you.’

  ‘Is that what Angie does for her B&B people?’

  ‘More or less. More, actually. Cereal, toast, morning paper and real milk. She’s very conscientious.’

  Christopher glanced down at his phone. ‘I haven’t got time for anything. Harry’s going to want to go over the schedule for the next few months, this morning. I’ll be late whatever happens.’

  ‘Your father’s just been murdered. I’m sure he’ll make allowances.’

  He gave her a complicated look – defeat, pain, followed by a clenched-jaw resolve. ‘I want to go to work. You hear people say that, don’t you – especially men. It always sounds as if they’re trying to avoid the ghastly truth. That’s most likely how it is with me, as well. I want life to go on as it was before. I enjoy going to work. I don’t want Harry to find someone else to do my job.’

  ‘What sort of a man would do that?’

  ‘A man whose business is too fragile for interruptions or mistakes. It all has to run like clockwork, and he needs me to see that it does. You have no idea how much there is to do behind the scenes.’

  ‘I’d really like to find out sometime.’

  He stopped obsessing and smiled. ‘Simmy – you really are an amazingly soothing influence. Did anyone ever tell you that?’

  ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘Surely you do. When Hannah and George used to fight so savagely, you were always trying to make peace between them.’

  ‘Only because I was so scared. I wasn’t used to anything like that.’

  ‘They’re still just as bad, you know. Neither of them will ever miss a chance to upset the other. It must be something chemical.’

  ‘I still can’t get over the girls being adopted. How come I never realised? My mother assumed you’d told me all about it.’

  ‘I didn’t want to talk about it. It seemed so strange. There was our teacher explaining about how babies get made, and my parents just seemed to go out and collect a pair of girls with no biology involved at all. They gave us about two days’ warning. George was beside himself with rage.’

  ‘Which must be why he hated Hannah so much, then.’

  ‘Partly, yes. And she was awfully provoking. But he didn’t lose anything by their arrival. I never understood it.’

  ‘He lost his place as the youngest. Suddenly he was the middle one of five.’

  ‘True. But most people really hate being the youngest. I asked him once, when we were in our twenties. He said he couldn’t explain it himself. It was just a sort of compulsion that became a habit.’

  ‘And she was every bit as bad, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Worse, if anything. Listen – I really must go. Can we carry this on this evening, do you think? I could take you for a meal somewhere as a thank-you-for-having-me sort of thing, if you like.’

  Only then did Simmy realise that she had missed her usual Wednesday evening visit to her parents. This was now Thursday, and she would be a lot less welcome. On Thursdays beds were changed and freshened for the weekend guests, which outnumbered midweek ones by a considerable margin. Stocks of food were replenished and grill pans cleared of residual grease. Angie had never forbidden Simmy from dropping in, but the quality of her conversation was definitely poor on a Thursday.

  ‘Okay, then,’ she said. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Meet me in Bowness, then. Seven-thirty at the Chinese. How does that sound?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  She forced a quick mug of coffee onto him before he drove off into the murky morning. Simmy watched him go from the front door of her cottage, thinking she had no phone number or address for him. The flowers he had commissioned for his mother’s funeral had been paid for in cash – well over a hundred pounds for a handsome spray from all the siblings. Kit had used a different florist, somewhat to Christopher’s embarrassment. ‘Typical,’ Angie had said, as the mourners filed past the pile of tributes at the crematorium. ‘That man has a perverse streak.’

  Simmy had been at her mother’s side, taking half a day off from the shop and leaving Bonnie in charge. She had only dimly admitted to herself that she’d been motivated by curiosity as to how the Hendersons had turned out since their teenage years, even less that she badly wanted to see Christoph
er again. She had been to very few funerals in her life thus far, all of them obliterated by the dreadful business of burying her own baby daughter. Angie had been insistent, from a maternal wisdom that Simmy had been slow to notice. ‘You know – there’s a lot that happens at a funeral. It brings back all kinds of stuff from the past, strengthens bonds between those still living. Makes you see how precious time is. I really like funerals,’ Angie finished. ‘They’re much better than weddings.’

  And it had been a good experience on the whole. Angie’s audible comments about the flowers had been awkward, since Lynn and Eddie had both been standing close by, doing their best to pretend they hadn’t heard. There had been another instance, in the crematorium, concerning the vicar and his obvious ignorance of Frances Henderson’s character. When he said, ‘A devoted mother and grandmother to her large family, and loving wife to Christopher,’ Angie had snorted. ‘Platitudes,’ she muttered. ‘And he can’t even get the names right.’

  At the assembly afterwards, in a local hall, eating minimal refreshments, Simmy had relived moments from those seaside years, helped by brief conversations with some of the siblings. ‘George looks well,’ she’d said. ‘I heard he’d been having some problems.’

  ‘His liver’s been playing up. Scared him into giving up the booze,’ Christopher had told her. ‘They think he’ll get away with it, if he can keep dry. He’ll be okay. He’s not short of willpower.’

  ‘He’s only thirty-five,’ she mused.

  ‘I know. Three boys in less than four years. My poor mother!’

  Rerunning this conversation now, Simmy found additional resonance to it in the light of her discovery about the two sisters who came after the trio of boys. Frances must have been superhuman to manage so many children all so close in age. And how had it never occurred to Simmy to wonder how come Hannah was only ten months younger than George? She knew when all the birthdays were, if she thought about it. She’d seen the two impossibly close siblings battle fiercely throughout their early years and not once looked more closely at the reasons for it.