Chapter 5
Ollie wakes late the next morning. He is still on the sofa, but at some point he must have turned off the TV and found a blanket. His memory of the night is vague and he feels groggy, as if he had been drinking. He showers and has cereal and coffee for breakfast to wake himself up. It is raining again, a blustery autumn day smelling of wet leaves, and he heads back into Stanton Bay.
Cathy opens the door almost before he has rung the bell, and invites him in. Ham and homemade quiche and salad are laid out on the table and a jug of sparkling elderflower.
“I’m sorry about yesterday, did you find something to do?”
“I walked over the headland, and came back through the churchyard. It was good on the hills, great views. I should have brought the dog down with me. I found the family graves.”
She looks up at him, her knife and fork still, but she doesn’t say anything, and turns back to her food.
“Was Bobby your brother?”
“Yes he was, but he died before I was born. Mother never talked of him, I was told that he had died in his cot. Less than a year old. I don’t think anyone knew why. He would have been about ten years older than me. Alice and I used to visit his grave and we put flowers there for him. I still do. But it was our secret, we could never mention his name to Mother.
“It was a difficult time for Mother. Mary, my grandmother, never understood why my mother married William. Mary and William didn’t get on. They were polite to each other, but there was no respect. It must have been difficult living together, even in a big house, and in the end Mary moved away. I remember visiting her in Abbotsbury, the other side of Weymouth, we would drive over. But she never came to the Manor. She died while I was still quite small. While she was with us my parents put on a show of stability, but after she left they drifted apart, as if they were living separate lives. Mother didn’t forgive Father for the changes the war made to him, for not being the man she married. But he was immune to her and she couldn’t get to him. She took it out on Alice. Mother resented her for not being Bobby I think. Bobby was her first child, the only son, and Alice couldn’t replace him. It was easier for me, I was younger, the sore had started to heal, and by then she had Father to worry about. But during the war Mother saw Alice, this girl, and grieving for her son I suppose she couldn’t love her.
“Alice was clever, loud, aggressive. She was sent off to boarding school when she was 11, but it didn’t work out, we heard that she was disruptive. After two years she was sent home. We both went to local schools after that, but Alice didn’t settle and found it hard to make friends. I was young, and memory is a strange thing. Some of this I knew at the time, some I realised later, and I confuse the order of events. About this time Alice lost weight, and became withdrawn, less outgoing, less confident. I think she was sent to see a doctor, and I found tablets she was taking, but it wasn’t talked about. She battled with Mother, Father always supporting her, taking her side. Increasingly he was in his own world, but as she got older Alice found a path into it that was closed to the rest of us.
“I remember one incident very clearly. I was about 9 years old. Cook was in charge in the kitchen and we generally kept to the playroom. The kitchen was old fashioned, with a big range cooker and a big wooden table in the middle with benches along each side. Copper pans hung from hooks in the ceiling. Every day we did our homework at the kitchen table together after tea; Nanny would usually supervise, but that day she wasn’t there. I don’t remember why, perhaps it was her day off. We were sitting at the kitchen table, Alice had finished her homework and was playing with a wooden doll that Father had given to her. It wasn’t very special, but it had yellow hair and a pink dress and Alice was very fond of it. Mother came in to check what we were doing. She was always criticising, and I would keep quiet and keep my head down. She wanted to know why Alice wasn’t doing her homework. ‘I’ve finished it. There wasn’t much’. ‘Let me see.’ ‘It’s all done, I’ve put it away in my satchel.’ ‘Show me, I don’t believe you.’ Alice stood up to fetch her satchel, and Mother grabbed her by the arm. ‘What’s this?’ There was a mark on Alice’s sleeve. It looked like blood. Alice stiffened, and tried to back away, but Mother held her tight. Alice was always sensitive about her arms, as a child she had been splashed with boiling water, and her shoulder still had the marks of twisted skin. ’Nothing.’ Mother pulled up the sleeve and was looking closely at her arm, gripping it. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at. ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Nothing. I fell and cut my arm, but it’s OK.’ ‘I don’t believe you, you are a nasty little girl.’ ‘Ow, let go, you’re hurting me.’ Mother was pinching Alice’s arm, hard in the fleshy part just above her elbow. ‘Let me go.’
“Suddenly Mother let go of Alice and grabbed the doll. Before Alice could react she walked two steps across to the range, opened the front where you put the coal, and threw in the doll. ‘You are much too old to be playing with dolls like this. You’re 14 years old. Dolls are for babies. Your father pampers you, treating you as his little girl. If you were a boy you’d have learned how to behave by now.’ Alice had shrieked and ran over to the range, but Mother was standing still and upright in front of it, and it was much too late. Alice was still a lot shorter, but she flung herself at Mother, throwing her arms at her in a wild attempt to push her out of the way. Mother just stood there, red cheeked, lips drawn tight, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead. And Alice turned and ran crying from the room. Mother looked at me; she was breathing heavily. ‘What are you looking at?’ and I turned back to my books, and kept looking down at the table.”
Cathy pauses, and turns to her uneaten lunch. Ollie is thinking back to what happened at the Manor the night before. The hate, the anger. Should he say something? But he isn’t sure now what he saw, what he had heard. Was Alice showing him a bruise on her arm? Was it her who was crying in the night? They ate in silence for a few minutes.
“After this Alice avoided Mother as much as she could, and spent more and more time on her own. We were at different schools, she was at the big school and caught the bus in the morning from the village. Some afternoons I didn’t see her at all. She would go to her room, or seek out Father in his study. Father was still working for the Forestry Commission, but not full time. He was based in Weymouth but only went there once or twice a week. Otherwise he was visiting sites or, increasingly, working from home. He interacted less with the commercial world, stopped socialising, as if he had had enough of everything outside his small space. I guess there wasn’t much money coming in and Mother had a couple of the stables converted into holiday lets. Cook had to do breakfasts and make picnics for the visitors. Nanny had gone a few years before, and the daily help came less.
“It was only a few years later that he died. A heart attack. It was soon after Alice’s 18th birthday, and there had been a big party for her at the Manor. I remember that we each had a new dress; it was summer, one of those rare nights when it stays properly warm. We had a marquee, flowers, musicians and everyone looked lovely. Alice was allowed to drink champagne, I had a sip when they weren’t watching. Father was happy, and young, and even Mother seemed to enjoy herself. Father made a short speech to wish Alice a happy birthday, and he gave her a double string of pearls as a birthday present, beautiful in a black box lined with velvet. They had belonged to his mother, and Alice was thrilled, I remember her hugging him and hugging him. I stayed up late and fell asleep on the lawn. They told me that they had carried me up to bed, I didn’t remember.
“And a few days later he was dead. He was in his study, sitting at his desk, and it was Alice who found him. I was upstairs and heard this howl, a horrid twisted noise. We all came running down, she was standing, white-faced, just making this awful sound, she couldn’t speak. Cook had to take her to the kitchen to calm her down. She cried for days, she couldn’t be comforted. She didn’t sleep, and she would wander round the house at night. I followed her once, she slipped into the study and hid there. A couple of times she was found there in the morning, asleep in his chair. Mother called the doctor out and he gave her something to help her sleep, but for ages she hardly spoke. She stopped going out and lost weight again. Today you’d call it anorexia, but then she was just being difficult and self-centred.
“Harry lived a few miles away, and had been a family friend for a few years. He was a local estate agent, and had tried to persuade Father to sell off some of the outbuildings, convert them into more cottages. He had been coming round every few months I guess with some excuse, even before Father died. He was tall and dark, well you have seen his portrait. Much younger than Mother, about 40. He was able to understand us in a way that she couldn’t. Although it was Mother he was coming round for he was always kind to Alice and me. After Father died he was here round more, and it was Harry who managed to bring Alice back from wherever she had taken herself. He made a point of finding her, talking to her, sometimes bringing her cakes and sweets to eat. He persuaded her to come out into the garden, to walk up to the Tower again.”
Cathy stops talking, stands up, and clears away the lunch things. She looks at the fireplace. the fire is made up but not lit, and she sits, shivers and draws her cardigan closer. “It gets cold early these days. Would you light the fire for me?”
Ollie finds the matches in the basket with the kindling and touches one to the paper in the grate. She watches him, crossing her arms as if she is folding herself up.
“Once the kindling catches it’ll be fine, you can leave it. I’ll make some tea in a minute.”
She pauses again, and Ollie goes across to the sofa, watching the flames starting to leap up, the wood starting to crackle.
“It must have been tough; did she have friends she could talk to? What happened to her?”
She turns and looks straight at him, and for the first time he sees something that might be fear in her eyes. “I am probably getting the timing wrong, there must have been weeks or months over which this all took place, but in my mind the party, the funeral, and Mother announcing that she and Harry were going to marry all happened together, one inevitably following the other, as if planned that way.”
She looks away and slowly stands up.
“Alice was still recovering from Father’s death. When Harry and Mother told us they were getting married she was betrayed all over again. And it was worse, Father had loved her to the end, he had died but he never lied to her, never let her down. Harry had been a friend, perhaps she had a crush on him. She couldn’t believe that he loved Mother, who was older, he couldn’t want her, no one could love her. He must have been after her money. When Father died she was inconsolable. Now she was eaten up with anger.”
It is quiet for several minutes, both looking into the fire.
“A date was set for the wedding. It would have raised eyebrows, but Harry moved into the Manor. He didn’t like the house; I think he saw too much family history in it, too much of William. He wanted to sell it off for redevelopment. Mother wouldn’t sell it, but after Alice went they did buy a flat in London and spent more time there. I went away to boarding school, and then university, spending the holidays here, or sometimes in London. The cook became a sort of housekeeper, she moved in and looked after the place, managing the people who rented the cottages and doing some occasional B&B in the main house. Eventually they moved away completely, but I had met Michael, your grandfather, by then. Michael and I married at the Manor in 1970 and Philip was born the next year. Victoria and Harry came down for the wedding but she died shortly afterwards, and Harry never came back after that. I have lost touch with him.
“But Michael and I loved it here, and we were happy. Michael would never have agreed to sell. Perhaps I should have kept it for you, but you can’t hold on to things for ever, particularly places. Houses have too many memories. And it cost too much to look after the place. Cook was still here, we did some B&B and there was still a bit of income from the lettings, but not really enough to make it work. And I am getting too old. But I didn’t ask you down here to talk about me, I need to finish Alice’s story. There’s not much more to tell, but I am tired now. If you can stay another day I’ll finish the story tomorrow.”
“That’s fine. I am going to Bristol to see some friends for a couple of days, and Mum isn’t expecting me back until the weekend.
Cathy gets to her feet, slowly and holding onto the arm of the chair as she does. She is looking older, tired. And then she straightens up, pats her hair and smiles. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine really. I’ll be pleased when this is over. I think I should like to come up to the Manor and see what they have done with the place. I’ll come up tomorrow. Could you give me a lift there? I don’t drive very much now. Pick me up at about 10.00.”