A Gathering Storm(4)

‘I should have visited before.’

‘You’re so busy, I know. You’ve been away, haven’t you?’ Helena tidied Lucy’s coat into a cupboard and led her into the sterile white kitchen. ‘Did you say Romania on the phone?’

‘Bulgaria,’ Lucy replied, watching as Helena arranged the horrible blooms in a cream china vase. ‘We were filming a costume drama. I was there for three weeks, on and off.’

In the hall, Helena set the vase on a shelf between two faceless dancing figurines. ‘Now, we should start in here, I think.’ She pushed open the door to the dining room and her voice trailed to a halt. Lucy saw why. Four ugly cardboard boxes were lined up on the table, spoiling the neat lines of Helena’s life.

‘They’re all bits and bobs of your father’s,’ Helena said, going over. ‘One of the charity shops took his clothes.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lucy said quickly. She couldn’t bear to think of strangers’ bodies filling out her father’s suits and shoes.

Helena glanced at her. ‘As you know, all his financial affairs are sorted out. There are these and a few things in his study – the books, of course.’

One box was too full to shut properly. On top of a pile of rugby programmes lay a photograph in a silver frame. Helena picked it up and said, ‘This was in the bottom drawer of his desk. Wasn’t she your grandmother?’

Lucy took it with a tender jolt of recognition. It was of Granny on the beach when she was young – the picture her father had used on the Order of Service at her funeral. It had stood on a bookshelf at home all through Lucy’s childhood. But here, it seemed, her father had kept it hidden away, as though he couldn’t bear to look at it. Why was that?

‘Anyway,’ Helena said, ‘I’d be much obliged if you’d take all this.’

‘I’d love to,’ Lucy said. She didn’t add that it was hardly Helena’s to give her.

As if reading her mind, Helena fixed Lucy with her steady grey eyes and said in her pale voice, ‘There never was any question but that you should have it.’

‘No, of course not,’ Lucy said. She was still staring at the photograph. Her grandmother had been so lovely and Lucy’s professional interest was piqued by the knowing sideways look she gave the camera. She’d have been an easy subject for a photographer; it really was true that there were people the camera loved.

‘Quite a charmer, wasn’t she?’ Helena remarked, as though she disapproved. ‘Oh, I know it can’t be easy for you, Lucy, this situation. I do hope that you and I . . . that we’ll continue to be friends.’

‘Of course we will.’ It would have been cruel to say otherwise, but Lucy sincerely wondered whether friendship would be possible. Not only was Helena nearly thirty years older than herself, but what on earth did they have in common?

‘Your father was very dear to me. He seemed so lost and unhappy when I got to know him. He needed me.’

Why? Lucy wanted to ask, but was too proud. A picture came into her mind of her mother’s wild weeping after Lucy’s father had departed, the blotchy face, the hair frizzier than ever. Helena, apart from the hand-wringing, was always composed, self-controlled. Why had her father come to need this calm, colourless woman?

Key to it all somewhere was why Tom had changed so much after Lucy’s grandmother’s death, when he’d started to explore the boxes of papers and mementos that she’d left behind. Was it the ordinary processes of grief, or had he found something amongst her possessions that bothered him? Even now, Lucy didn’t quite understand. Her father had been an intensely private man with a strong sense of pride and tradition, and rarely talked about feelings. He had always been warm and loving, though, and Lucy couldn’t make sense of why he’d cut his ties and set out to remake his life.

After Helena helped her move the boxes out to the car, they drank tea from fragile mugs in the beige sitting room before Helena said, ‘Shall we go and look upstairs?’

At the top of the cottage was an airy loftspace that Tom had converted into a study soon after they’d bought the house six or seven years before. As Helena turned on lights and fiddled with the sticking window blind, Lucy surveyed the room. It was the only place in the house where she still sensed her father’s presence. His faded navy sweatshirt hung on the back of the door, presumably missed in the charity-shop sweep. There he was, too, in the ordered rows of books, the old mahogany desk in front of the window that looked out onto darkening wintry fields.

Her attention was caught by a photograph that had fallen under the desk. She picked it up. It was of her father’s school’s first fifteen rugby team, his eighteen-year-old face sweet and eager in the front row. She studied it for signs of the more sombre, introverted man he would eventually become, but saw none. She placed it on the desk next to the computer, by yet another cardboard box.