‘Your husband,’ Cicely replied firmly. ‘You can’t let this defeat you, Audrey. You can’t give your life to your children because one day they’ll be married with children of their own and where will that leave you?’
‘A grandmother,’ she stated simply.
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘I barely have a relationship with him any more. How can I love someone so insensitive and cruel? He has robbed me of my children.’
‘It’s not like that,’ said Cicely in her brother’s defence. ‘It’s hard for you to understand because you weren’t brought up here. But we English really do believe boarding school to be the highest form of education in the world. It’s built into the culture so one doesn’t even question it. I missed my parents the first day, of course, just like Leonora. But after that I adored it and rarely thought of them at all. Cecil was at Eton and I doubt he suffered a moment of homesickness. He’s thinking of his daughters and believes, I’m sure, that he’s giving them the best start in life.’
‘He can’t love them like I do.’ Audrey looked across at Cicely’s profile and knew that she was sensitive enough to see the situation from both sides.
‘Cecil is very English,’ she said after a pause. ‘He’s upright and correct like Papa. He wasn’t brought up to show his emotions. But that doesn’t mean he is incapable of love. I’ll bet you he loves his daughters just as much as you. He’s willing to sacrifice his joy for their future. Don’t you see? He’s an Englishman and always will be.’
‘And Louis? Is he an Englishman too?’
Cicely’s mouth twitched as she stared out at the road ahead. ‘He’s in a cultural limbo,’ she replied and chuckled.
‘So if he had children . . .’
‘He’ll never have children,’ she interrupted tightly. ‘Darling Louis will never settle down and start a family. He’s a creature of nature like the trees and the wind. Tempestuous, impulsive, irrational. One doesn’t know what he’s going to do next and one never has. If Cecil is too cold then Louis is too hot, but that is like comparing . . .’ she floundered trying to think up an adequate analogy. ‘I don’t know, a horse and a donkey.’
‘How can you even think to categorize Louis like that?’ Audrey gasped in astonishment. ‘He’s ten times more talented than Cecil,’ she blurted in a passionate voice. Now it was Cicely’s turn to gasp. Audrey checked herself and added swiftly, ‘Cecil can’t play a note and besides he’s much more elegant than a horse. He’s more like a Great Dane.’ It was an inadequate attempt to redress the balance in her husband’s favour but Cicely wasn’t a fool. She continued to stare out at the road ahead.
‘I don’t know where Louis got that gift from, but it’s not a place on earth,’ she said, hoping Audrey’s fervour to be on behalf of her dead sister. Then she stretched her hand across the gearbox and touched Audrey’s. ‘Don’t hold this against Cecil, Audrey. He’s giving the twins a future. Your future is with him, don’t forget that.’
Audrey stared bleakly out in front of her and pictured Cecil’s face growing old. Suddenly life seemed a painfully long time with little respite. She thought of her daughters going to bed in that creaky house and her stomach twisted inside her.
Why was it that everyone she loved was taken from her? First Isla, then Louis and now her daughters. She felt alone and adrift and powerless to change the course of her own destiny.
Chapter 18
Leonora lay in the darkness with Saggy Rabbit listening to the coughing and rustling of the seven other children who shared her dormitory. The sounds were a comfort for they reminded her that, as solitary as she felt, she wasn’t alone. She had had supper at one of the long tables in the grand hall which resembled a scene from a medieval banquet, except there were no pigs roasting on spits in the fireplace, just a large display of dried flowers that sat collecting dust. She had placed herself next to Caroline Stainton-Hughes who announced that she’d like to be known by her nickname, which was Cazzie. Then she had turned to Leonora and told her that she had to have a nickname too. So everyone had called her Leo, like Alicia did, and they had eaten macaroni cheese and thick slices of white bread with butter in an attempt to fill the emptiness inside. One of the matrons called Sally had brought some of Miss Reid’s dogs around to comfort the new girls and she had sat on the floor with Cazzie and a couple of the other children who were particularly homesick stroking them and drying their tears on their fur. But then it had been time to shower and prepare for bed. She had hung her wash bag up on the peg next to dozens of others and had suffered a sudden twisting of the gut when the name tape on her bath cap, so lovingly sewn on by her mother, had flashed at her as she expanded the elastic to put it on. Now she lay in a ball in her bed. In spite of the heavy blanket she felt cold. The mattress was hard and the springs squeaked each time she moved. She heard the head matron’s footsteps followed by the light tap-tapping of her black Labrador as he followed her down the narrow corridors. She stopped at each room to shine her torch onto the beds to check that each child was where she should be then continued, the rubber soles of her comfortable shoes squelching on the wooden floorboards.