‘It is a honey bee, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it might well be. A dutiful member of a hive.’ She laughed and threw her cigarette into the grate. ‘Not very much like the current generation of Wincantons at all.’ She contemplated Beatrice for a moment then said, ‘In fact, you suit the motto better than the rest of us. How strange.’ She reached out and took Beatrice’s hand. ‘I sense you’ll be a faithful friend to us, and to Angie in particular. You’re almost a part of the family, child. Now,’ she rumpled Beatrice’s hair and said, ‘you must be going back to your own family. Your mother’s missing you. Off you go!’
And Beatrice went, pondering the conversation. Although Oenone Wincanton had asked nothing specific of her, why did she feel that, with all those veiled hints, a pact had been asked of her? All that talk about faithfulness and duty. It was silly. Being Angie’s friend was no effort at all. She liked pleasing Angie and was grateful to the girl’s mother for her kindness. If Angie’s mother chose to put another cast on it, that was nothing to do with her.
The Rowans, April 2011
‘At the time,’ Beatrice Ashton said, ‘I forgot about this conversation, for I was racing up the stairs to pack. Suddenly, I badly wanted to see Mother and Father and Jinx again. For things to be normal and ordinary . . .’ She smiled and trailed to a halt, a soft expression on her face as she relived those events of so long ago. She was telling her story so vividly that Lucy was spellbound.
The girl glanced at her watch and was surprised to see that two hours had passed. The only interruption had been the arrival of Mrs P., a pleasant local woman in her sixties, who could be heard clattering about in the kitchen. Seeing that Mrs Ashton had a guest she’d promptly insisted on finding Lucy something for lunch.
Lucy said, ‘It’s extraordinary hearing stories about Granny when she was a girl. She told me some things – that she loved Carlyon – but the part of her childhood she talked about most was when she was younger. I suppose her mother and father were happier together then when they all lived in London. She had dancing lessons and amazing children’s parties with conjurers and magic lantern shows and fancy dress.’ She didn’t like to tell Beatrice that Granny Angelina had never mentioned sharing lessons with a shy little half-French girl.
‘Perhaps we all need a part of our childhood that we think of as golden, a time we imagine that we were completely happy,’ Beatrice murmured. ‘Well, mine was Carlyon.’
‘My mum used to take me to stay with some art college friends in Wales every summer,’ Lucy said, remembering. ‘I had a brilliant time with their children. You wouldn’t believe the things we got up to. It seemed like paradise compared to primary school in London.’
‘Where was your father while you were there?’
‘He ran his own business and never gave himself holidays.’
‘Any holiday we had,’ Beatrice said, ‘was staying with one side of the family or another. My father liked home and routine best.’
Chapter 7
Hugh Marlow came home but he was sadly weak. When, after several days in bed, he was able to get up, he was pale and exhausted and could hardly leave the house. The manager at the bank did his best to keep the job open. After all, Marlow was valued by ‘our classier customers’ and was ‘one of our heroes’. When he’d recovered a bit more, Beatrice’s father tried working half-days, but even this tired him and as a result her mother wore a permanently strained expression. The doctor visited once or twice, then there came several evenings when Beatrice lay awake to the sound of arguing in the drawing room beneath. One phrase her mother uttered frequently and with mounting exasperation was, ‘Write to him, Hugh, please, and just see what he says.’
In the end, it seemed that the terrible letter was written, for one Saturday the postman left one of the familiar thick white envelopes with a Gloucestershire postmark. It lay looking ominous all morning on the tray in the hall until Mr Marlow returned from work and opened it.
No one told Beatrice what it contained, but soon after that Hugh Marlow handed his notice in at the bank, and the monthly white envelopes became the most looked-for event in the household, opened by Beatrice’s father with a mixture of fury and relief. But there had to be economies, it was explained to her. Less good cuts of meat from the butcher, a fraying winter coat patched up to last another year. For a while Mrs Marlow took in pupils for French conversation, though this so disrupted her husband’s new routines that eventually it had to stop. Beatrice felt the household grow increasingly dismal, her mother and father wrapped up in one another more and more. Apart from schooling and meals and bedtime she began to come and go as she pleased.