At the door, he just stood for a moment, then squared his shoulders. ‘Okay, let’s do this. Yvonne said she’d leave the door open, so . . .’ He walked forward.
Inside, it took a while for Lulu’s eyes to adjust after the bright sunlight. The place was huge. She followed Nick from room to room, exclaiming with false enthusiasm over the admittedly very pleasant rooms, big and square and furnished with real antiques. But there was an odd feeling to the place. Maybe it was because she knew what had happened here, but there was an expectant quality to it, as if the house were waiting, not for its next holiday let guests, but for the family to return and find it just as they’d left it.
Duncan and Maggie and Isla.
And Nick.
It was as if the chintzy chairs and sofa grouped about the fireplace in the ‘drawing room’ were positioned ready for them all, ready to resume a conversation broken off twenty-two years ago. They were the same chairs, she was sure. The same vintage creamy carpet with a pattern of vines twining over it. The same brass matchbox holder with an embossed sunflower just waiting for a Clyde to pick it up again and light the fire.
‘Dear Auntie seems to have kept the place up, at least,’ said Nick as they climbed the stairs, Nick with both cases, as ever the perfect gent. ‘An agency organises the bookings and the cleaners and what have you, but Yvonne oversees the whole thing. I give her a cut of the profits. Yvonne doesn’t really do altruism.’
At the top of the stairs, he stopped and turned.
This must be where his mother fell.
She touched his arm. ‘Where are we sleeping?’
‘I asked them to make up one of the guest rooms.’
Of course he did. He wouldn’t want to use his parents’ room or his own childhood one. Which was fine by her. As she followed him along a wide, rather gloomy corridor, she kept looking over her shoulder to check there was no one – nothing – behind them. She wanted to grab Nick’s arm and pull him away, back down the stairs, back into the car. She didn’t want to be here. This was where Nick’s whole family had just disappeared.
‘This is lovely,’ she said brightly as they entered a large, sunny bedroom overlooking the back of the house.
There was a four-poster bed. Gleaming antique furniture. A surprisingly modern en suite complete with walk-in shower. She had a pee, and then she and Nick went back downstairs to the big old-fashioned kitchen, where someone had stocked the fridge with milk, cheese, butter, tomatoes and juice. And there was a loaf of crusty bread on the worktop.
‘This would be your aunt?’
‘Mm.’
‘It’s going to be . . . interesting . . . to meet her and your uncle.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Lulu didn’t have long to wait. They had eaten a sketchy lunch and were wandering about the garden, by tacit agreement getting out of the house itself as soon as possible, when a tall woman Lulu guessed was in her sixties appeared round the side of the greenhouse and lifted a hand stiffly. She was elegantly dressed in a navy trouser suit, with a slash of colour at her neck in the form of a cerise silk scarf, jauntily tied.
‘Yvonne,’ said Nick grimly as they approached one another.
Yvonne nodded at him. There was no attempt at a hug or even much of a smile, just a questioning look at Lulu. The stocky man who appeared behind her, in contrast, was beaming nervously.
‘Lu, this is my Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Michael,’ said Nick tonelessly. ‘My wife, Lulu.’
‘Pleased to meet you!’ burbled Michael, offering his hand. ‘Well, well, this is a turn-up for the books, eh?’
Lulu took his hand briefly, her own automatic smile fading fast.
She wanted to scream at them. She wanted to throw it in their faces, what they’d done to sixteen-year-old Nick. He’d lost the whole of his immediate family. Any decent aunt and uncle would have taken him in, but no, they’d abandoned him too, virtually. Okay, so they had made sure he was secure financially, and found a good school for him, and ‘allowed’ him to visit them for a week at Christmas and in the summer. That had been the word, heartbreakingly, that Nick had used.
Allowed.
They’d allowed him two weeks of family a year.
The rest of the holidays he’d spent at his boarding school with strangers.
You horrible, horrible people! Lulu wanted to snarl at them, but contented herself with a slight lift of her upper lip which she hoped conveyed the sentiment.
‘Much traffic on the way up?’ said Michael.
‘We’ve brought you some more food,’ said Yvonne, indicating the bag she was carrying.
‘Thanks,’ said Nick coldly, ‘but we’ll be doing a shop tomorrow. And we’ll probably eat out tonight. We don’t need anything more.’
Not from you was the unspoken message.
‘Well, we’ve bought it now,’ said Yvonne, as if this were Nick’s fault. ‘I’ll leave it in the kitchen, and you can do what you like with it.’ And she moved past them, off along the path towards the house.
No.
No, Lulu couldn’t let this go.
As Michael started on about the farm and the changes Nick was going to see – something about one of the sheds being replaced and the problems they’d had getting planning permission – Lulu hurried after Yvonne.
She caught up with her in the huge, high hall and just blurted it out:
‘Why didn’t you take Nick to live with you?’
For a long moment, Yvonne said nothing, her face blank as she looked at Lulu, almost as if she were looking through her. ‘I don’t do children,’ was all she said, eventually.
Rapid footsteps sounded on the tiles behind her, and Nick said, ‘Lulu! I turned round and you’d gone! Why did you just take off like that?’
He spoke too loudly, his tone harsh, and as she turned to him with a reassuring smile – she was humouring, for now, his need to keep track of her every movement – she was conscious of Yvonne flinching. And she wanted to round on her again, to tell her she’d done this. She’d contributed, at least, to making Nick the way he was, making him panic and talk too loudly and offend her sense of what was reasonable behaviour.