But her trust in Ralph had gone, and she didn’t know if she would ever be able to get it back. He had risked everything he had because he was a fool, and she felt sure Peasebrook had only been spared because it was a step too far. It made her blood run cold to think of what might have happened. Her respect for him had gone too. He was weak. And no matter how he tried to excuse it, or explain it, he just wasn’t the man she thought he was. In no way did she blame herself for what had happened. She was a good wife, and she wasn’t insecure enough to start looking for imperfections or ways in which she didn’t measure up. She bloody well did. It was Ralph who didn’t.
She didn’t share what had happened with many people. She hated gossip and speculation. She didn’t want Ralph being a public spectacle, for Alice’s sake as much as anything. Sarah was a very private person. It was a huge burden to shoulder all alone. Every now and then she longed for a friend to share the truth with, but she didn’t trust anyone. A few glasses of wine and your private business was public knowledge. She’d heard enough intimate secrets splurged at dinner parties to know that. So she kept quiet.
The first Christmas was awful. They had to tighten their belts. They didn’t send out invitations to their usual Christmas Eve party and Sarah ended up fabricating an excuse involving a tricky and unpleasant varicose vein procedure to stop people thinking they had been left off the guest list because the party had become a tradition locally. She found the pretence dispiriting and exhausting, and all the excitement of Christmas was tainted. Tainted by the stupid, awful, ridiculous debt. She still didn’t understand why Ralph had felt the need, because there’d always been sufficient, or so she thought, but when he tried to explain that gambling wasn’t driven by any logic, she got upset. And tried not to get angry.
But when there wasn’t enough money for Christmas presents, because every last penny was going into the development fund for Peasebrook, she felt resentful. All those bloody acres, she thought, and no cash in the kitty. She was determined that Alice should have what she wanted, and not have any sense of the crisis they were in, so she bought everything on her list to Father Christmas – more than she would usually – and everyone else was going to have books.
Books, after all, were her escape from the horror she had been through. At night she could curl up with Ruth Rendell or Nancy Mitford and the stress melted away and for a couple of hours she could be somewhere else. Reading gave her comfort.
She went into Nightingale Books. Until now, she had been working her way through the books in the library at Peasebrook, but she wanted to choose specific books for everyone in the family.
Julius Nightingale was behind the counter when she walked in, wearing a distinguished pair of half-moon glasses and peering at a catalogue. She gave him a smile.
‘Can I help?’
‘I’ve come to do my Christmas shopping. I’m just going to have a wander round.’
‘Shout if you need me.’
She saw a pile of Dick Francis novels on one of the tables and thought how in previous years she would have bought one for Ralph. Not this year though.
As she browsed, she found the horrors of the recent past fading away. She lost herself somewhere in amongst the shelves as she chose for her friends and family: a thick, weighty historical biography for her father, a sumptuously illustrated cookery book for her mother, the Narnia Chronicles for Alice, the latest escapist fiction for her younger sisters, jokey books for the downstairs loo for her brothers-in-law. Choosing the books was soothing her soul.
The pile was enormous. As she handed over her debit card, she hoped there’d be enough in the account to cover it. She thought she’d probably overdone Alice’s stocking. She was definitely overcompensating. Sarah busied herself looking at a rack of Penguin classics while he processed the payment, her heart hammering.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Julius. ‘It’s been declined. It happens a lot at Christmas,’ he added kindly.
Sarah felt her cheeks burn. She was mortified. She was going to cry, she realised with horror. Thank goodness she was the only person in the shop at that moment. And then it struck her that, throughout all the turmoil and the trauma and the chaos and the fear and the panic, she hadn’t cried once. Ralph had, great snivelling gulping sobs of self-pity, and it made her want to scream, because the whole situation could have been avoided if only he hadn’t been such a fool. He had brought it on them through his own stupidity. But Sarah wasn’t a shouter; she was a stiff-upper-lip-and-get-on-with-it sort of person who came up with solutions rather than wallowing.
Only now, suddenly, she felt as if she were six years old and the world had come crashing down around her because she’d smashed her piggy bank on the kitchen floor. She swallowed back the tears.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she stammered.
‘Take them anyway. You can pay me later,’ Julius said, and he grinned. ‘I know where you live, as the Mafia say.’
‘No, I can’t possibly,’ said Sarah, and this time she couldn’t stop the tears.
Julius was the perfect gentleman. He made her an industrial strength cup of tea and sat her down. And he was so understanding and so unjudgemental she found herself spilling out everything that had happened.
‘What a horrible time you’ve had,’ he sympathised.