A Rage to Live (6 page)

‘Next you’ll be telling me you’re only doing your duty,’ she told him, scorn in her voice.

‘Next I’ll be telling you nothing. I’ll be cuffing you and bundling you off to the courthouse. Now how do you like them apples, Mrs Vine?’

Cressida watched and listened to this confrontation from the sheriff’s car. She was not surprised when she saw the man who had bought her her first drink at the country club, the man whom she had labelled Mr Stud, take his place at Carol’s side. Anger flared up in Cressida. It seemed to her an affront that he would be in her family house. How Byron would have despised such a man! It was that thought that prompted her to defy the sheriff and leave the car. She slammed its door closed. The sound attracted the attention of the three people on the verandah. ‘Sorry, Sheriff. Though I would like to make
your job here easier and stay out of this, I find I can’t. This is
my
house and I have waited long enough to claim it.’ Having said that, Cressida walked up the stairs with a poise and purpose that was absolute.

She addressed her step-mother. ‘You’ve cheated fate for more than twenty years, Carol. Bend to it now, if not happily, at least graciously, for your own sake, not mine. The alternatives are not merely to be physically removed from this compound, but to be slammed into prison as well. And have no doubt, if that happens, I will do everything I can to see that you are kept there for a very long time.’

Cressida’s words were astonishingly hard and direct. The menace behind them was what galvanised Carol to act. But before she could there was a roar of motors, the hissing sound of air brakes being released, and Carol watched the vans roll into motion and away from the house.

‘It’s over,’ she conceded, ‘but don’t ever think you’ve won. It’s just another one of your hollow victories, Cressida.’

‘No one knows that better than I do, Carol. I have the memories of more than twenty years of being robbed by you of a family life and my home to remind me.’

Ed Cornwell saw no need to take over. Cressida Vine had confirmed to her step-mother all the woman had ever wanted: victory over Byron’s daughter, an admission that Carol had in some way if not destroyed her step-daughter, at the very least given her years of pain. The change in her expression, now smug with satisfaction, told him Carol Vine would leave Hollihocks peaceably.

He watched her gather up a jacket, handbag, and a large travelling jewellery box from just inside the front door. ‘You need not follow us, Sheriff Cornwell, we are only walking around to the garage to get the car. My car, I might add.’ Without another glance at Cressida, she walked past her and down the stairs.

‘You telling me my job, now, Carol?’ he asked, and took her elbow as he walked with her down the stairs.

‘Do you intend to escort me off this property?’ she asked, unbelieving that that might be the case. There was arrogance in her manner now.

‘No. I intend for my deputy and I to do that.’

She wrenched her elbow from his grasp. ‘That’s hardly necessary. What do you think? That I’ll vandalise this place I love so much? That I might set it on fire? How very dramatic of you, and how very stupid. I won’t have the sheriffs office running me off this property like some common thief.’

Ed Cornwell ignored her words. He instructed Harvey, ‘You get in the car, Harv, and drive it around to the garages. Mrs Vine and her friend here and I will meet you there.’ The deputy walked off and the
sheriff turned to Carol Vine and said, ‘Now you calm down and don’t take that attitude with me. We go back a long time, you and Byron and me, and you know that I know how mean you can get when you don’t get what you want. I’m taking no chances of your losing control of yourself, and doing something you’ll be sorry for later. You may
say
it’s over. I’m making
sure
it is. Don’t make a fuss. I’ve got the law on my side. But I’m not enforcing the law here. I’m escorting you off this place because Byron would be appalled at what you have done, bringing us all to this. No more. It’s over, Carol. And I’m making sure of that.’

It was the sheriff who drove Carol’s Mercedes to the lane running up to the Hollihocks compound, Carol at his side, Mr Stud sitting silent and ineffectual in the back seat, Harvey driving the sheriff’s car behind. There he stopped and opened the back door of the car for Mr Stud who got out and sat down in the driver’s seat. Ed Cornwell went around to the passenger side of the car and reached in and took Carol’s hand in his. Tears were staining her cheeks. ‘Remember what you told Byron’s daughter back there on the porch, and mean it. It’s over. You begin again, Carol.’

‘I wish Byron hadn’t died,’ was all she could say, then motioned to her unsavoury friend to drive on.

Ed pulled a large, fat cigar from his breast pocket, rolled it between his fingers and watched the car disappear down the lane. He neatly bit the end off his cigar and spat it out. He placed the cigar in his mouth and sucked on it, removed it, gazed at it and then down the empty road, replaced it in his mouth and lit it. After several puffs he turned to Harvey.

‘Well, that went real easy.’

A much relieved-looking Harvey said, ‘You do have a knack with people, Sheriff.

‘Yeah, easy,’ Ed repeated.

‘That Miss Vine. She owns it all now?’

‘Yup.’

‘I’ll bet she’ll be making some changes around here.’

‘Yeah, Harv, something tells me you got that right. Let’s go. Best we get back and let those vans know all’s clear.’

Alone and home. Cressida hugged herself and took a deep breath. What a glorious feeling. She looked out across the compound, the gardens, the drive, the moors and lanes leading to the outbuildings. She walked the length of the vast raised area that circled the house until she found the view she was looking for. The beach and the bay, in the distance the rooftops of Kane’s beach house. She dragged a small round wooden table over to the spot that gave her her best view and sat down on the edge of it.

Her mind flashed back to the hours in his arms, the flagrant, unrestrained sex that slipped over the edge into hedonism, that doctrine that pleasure is the chief good. They had been well matched this time, two hedonists, not one and a victim. This time round Cressida could not pretend that love was what had bound them together in their hours of sublime sexual lust so much as her undiminished love for him, and their mutual hunger for sexual ecstasy. Cressida knew it was perverse, that his past behaviour should contradict her belief in his new protestations of love for her. It didn’t. She believed him, as she had done all those years ago, but this time with a difference: she understood that in those moments of intense sexual heat, he probably told most of his sexual partners he loved them. No pain this time. She had learned through the years how to put the brakes on love, until her lovers’ actions could speak louder than their words. And Kane Chandler, this time round, would be no exception to her rules. His deceit had, after all, been their inspiration.

She thought of him lying there in a deep sleep. How very handsome he was still. Success and fame and fortune had not spoiled him, merely added to his life. Only one thing surprised her about him: that she still loved him. He had been gone from her life for so many years that it had never even entered Cressida’s mind that her love for him could be resurrected.

The returning to New Cobham was for her future, not for a sentimental reawakening. Kane Chandler had not, at least in her conscious mind, counted any longer in her past, and had most certainly never been envisaged in her future. Cressida shivered then shrugged. It was as if someone had walked over her grave.

Chapter 6

Cressida shielded her eyes with her hands. She could just make out three children walking down on the beach towards the Vine boathouse. There was joy in the way they played and teased each other, running and skipping in bursts of energy. Though she could not hear their laughter, she could imagine it. A woman, tall and slender with blonde, blonde hair that shimmered like silver in the sunlight, joined them.

Two boys, a young girl and a woman on Amiable Bay’s beach. Cressida was blinded by memories. She was able to recapture the intensity of her own childhood, seeing something she had treasured across a gap of more than thirty years. Blinding recognition of a happy childhood filled with love and good times. Until that fateful day when her whole world was turned upside down. She had been nine years old.

As a child Cressida had adored her mother Rosemary. Her two elder brothers had been her best friends, bright and funny, capricious like their mother, adoring of their father, protective of their tomboy sister Cressida. The family had been close-knit and Hollihocks their very special world. As children they had always been made aware of what a privileged life they had been born into. Puritan stock coming down from both sides of the family had bred in them the belief that privilege must never be taken for granted. Life was quite simple: one had to earn one’s place in it, no matter what one was born to. The Vine children, like their mother and father, were born and bred to be winners. They were keen competitors, but they were something else too. The Vines seemed to their more sedate neighbours to be experience seekers. People often said of them: ‘Oh, the Vines, they inspire one with their rage to live.’ In any other family on the Cape that rage would have been frowned upon. But the Vines, for all their intensity, and wealth, and power, never flaunted what they were, what they had. Nor did they impose themselves on anyone else.

Byron, who could be the most sociable of people, was equally one of America’s most respected men of letters. He held a seat of philosophy at Harvard where he had taught, had been a visiting
professor at Cambridge in England and at the Sorbonne in France, but the heart of his life had always been Hollihocks and his family. It was in the library there that he had done most of his important work.

The Vine brood had been kept blissfully unaware of their family’s wealth and status in the community, in New England high society. Just as they had not the vaguest idea that the Vines owned almost every piece of vacant land and private coastline in New Cobham. The result of another dictum that had been for generations pretty well enforced: ‘The Vines never sell their land.’ Nor did they live off their capital. Not penny pinching but careful, was the financial rule of thumb enforced.

The only thing the children had been vaguely aware of was that Byron was something special, and that was only gleaned from the many world dignitaries who kept arriving to visit him at Hollihocks. They learned at a young age that their mother was the frivolous element in their lives and loved her silly, fun-loving ways. Her impulses almost always took them by surprise. Rosemary had been able to keep her family on the edge, never quite knowing what to expect from her. She had seemed to them to be brighter, more beautiful, younger and more carefree, and far more exciting than any of their friends’ mothers. Byron often referred to his wife, as ‘My weakness, my extravagance, my wife’. He adored her.

Rosemary was one of those women who, in the eyes of husband and children, could do no wrong. She had them dazzled, charmed, as she had most people. But the reality was that she was a brilliant actress and a frightful hypocrite, a woman who lived with double standards. Rosemary was splendidly clever at manipulating people for her own pleasure. She was a self-centred woman who demanded constant attention. A woman who thrived on impulse living. Though she adored her husband (theirs had been a love match which never waned throughout their years together), she took advantage of the sixties’ sexual revolution and its declaration of free love, and used her husband’s existentialist beliefs, the philosophical doctrines he taught and wrote about, to legitimise her affairs. Byron and Rosemary had a tacit understanding: lovers were permissible as long as they were discreet and did not challenge the marriage or interfere with the children’s well-being.

So Cressida and her brothers ran free and sometimes wild, but never destructively so, and had an idyllic childhood. It was only many years after the accident, when Cressida and Byron had come to terms with the shattering of their lives by the death of Rosemary and the boys, that they were able to see events clearly. Byron’s words to his daughter
were: ‘Your momma, our Rosemary, she was always our blind spot.’ They never loved her less for their insight.

Down on the beach one of the boys swept the girl off her feet and pretended to throw her in the water. Cressida smiled. It had been years since she had thought about her brothers. For a very long time now it had seemed that they and her mother had existed in someone else’s life. She had always felt sad about what time could do to the dead, and it was especially tragic when those poor forgotten souls had once been loved ones. She was thankful that for the moment time had not yet done that to Byron. He was still a great part of her life, no longer active but thankfully very much still there.

Cressida remembered she had never tired of going everywhere with Rosemary. It had always been more fun than being anywhere else. Trips to Josephine Smith’s were her favourite. She would sit quietly and fantasise about the parties and journeys and fancy dinners and dances Rosemary would attend with Byron, wearing the clothes she would be jumping in and out of in the salon. Then lunch at the New Cobham Inn where Mr Edridge would fawn over them and enchant her mother with his attentions and be especially nice to Cressida with extra helpings of peach cobbler. And how glorious it had been when they rode on the beach together. Cressida was very nearly as daring a cross-country rider as her mother. Or when they swam far out into the ocean in races that sometimes Rosemary would let her daughter win. Or when they sailed. Rosemary was, if not the best, then very nearly the best of all the local sailors in New Cobham. There were the silver trophies in the library at Hollihocks to prove it. That was what made the accident so unbelievable. That fateful day now flashed before Cressida’s eyes. She relived it, something she had never expected to do again.

It was only a few days before they were due to go back to school, a very hot and sultry morning. A storm was brewing somewhere far out over the ocean. They could feel it coming even though it wasn’t visible.

It had been a strange summer, more people than usual coming and going. That had been fun but almost too much so. Ever since her return Rosemary, although as vivacious as ever, seemed somehow hyperactive, on edge, not so much with the family as by herself. And many of her friends were uncomfortable with her, no matter how much of an effort was made to hide it. All that covering up was making for an uncomfortable atmosphere that the family had never had to deal with before.

Cressida was watching her mother, thinking about what she had
done and wondering why she had done it. They were all sitting round a table set on the lawn having breakfast, with Rosemary looking as pretty as ever. She appeared, as she always did, not to have a care in the world. She was wearing wide white cotton trousers that hugged her hips and a long-sleeved white cotton shirt open at the neck. She was barefoot, and on her head was a white hat, the sort a captain might wear on his boat. It had a blue visor and a band of blue around it, an anchor etched in gold thread in the front.

‘You look far away, kitten, come back to us,’ suggested her mother.

‘Are you mooning about something, Cressy?’ asked Byron.

‘No.’

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Rosemary.

Cressida’s face flushed. She could not possibly tell the family she was trying to understand why Rosemary had deserted them and run away in January with their neighbour, Mr Redfern, to live in Paris. Why she had upset their lives and vanished, ignored them as if they had never existed, and just when they were coming to terms with having lost her forever, had returned to them as if nothing at all had happened.

Life seemed so right with her mother again, so why was she so worried? They had after all survived the hiccup in their lives – all except Mrs Redfern who had left New Cobham with her five children.

As many times as her brothers Hal and Tim had explained it to Cressida, she still could not understand why Rosemary had done it. Only yesterday she had told Hal, ‘If Momma loves us like you say, I still don’t understand why she ran away with Mr Redfern.’ The look of disgust on Hal’s face prompted her to say, ‘It was sex, wasn’t it, Hal?’

He hesitated. She did understand, there was no point in lying. ‘Yeah, Cressy, it was sex. You see, you do understand. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Does she still love us, Hal?’

‘Sure she does, Cress, maybe more than ever.’

Her brothers and Byron understood, and maybe Rosemary just wanted Mr Redfern the way she wanted Kane, and couldn’t help herself any more than Cressida could. That squidgy feeling, and being all warm and weak-kneed, was pretty powerful stuff. She knew she could never give up that feeling, or Kane. Her father and Hal and Tim understood that and seemed to have been able to put what Rosemary did out of their minds. But then Hal was fourteen and Tim sixteen, that was why they got it quicker than she did. She felt suddenly better about Rosemary’s vanishing act. She could understand it. Sex was a forgivable weakness even if desertion wasn’t. At last she too was able to put it out of her mind. Only one question lingered. Would her mother, the
magnificent Rosemary, again vanish from her life as she had that winter, and maybe the next time not return?

‘You guessed it, Poppa. Our Cressy has a secret, a love secret.’ That was Hal, teasing.

‘Is that so, Cressy, can’t you let us in on it?’ he asked not unkindly, and reached over and squeezed her hand.

‘She’s got a crush on Kane Chandler.’

Cressida didn’t bother to deny it. The family was aware of her longstanding hero worship of their friend and neighbour. She looked over to Hal and there was something in the way he looked at her and frowned that told her he had said it to cover up what was really troubling her. She and Hal and Tim often understood about each other’s feelings without having to say a word. She smiled at him with her eyes, grateful for his support.

‘Come here, baby,’ demanded Rosemary. Cressida went to her mother’s side. Rosemary ran her fingers through Cressida’s hair. ‘Were you mooning about Kane?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly, Momma, only thinking about going over there this afternoon. We’re going crabbing.’

Rosemary gazed for a long time into Cressida’s eyes. Then she tapped the table with the palms of her hands. ‘Let’s sail to Provincetown. How about it, boys? A lobster lunch in P Town. Cressy, you run and tell Kane we’ll take him with us.’

That was Rosemary. In a matter of seconds she turned a dull breakfast into an exciting event. The boys were thrilled. They had other plans but would cancel them anytime to sail with their mother. Cressida was already running down the lawn towards the cliffs and the steps down to the beach on her way to tell Kane when Byron rose from his chair. ‘Come back, Cressida,’ he called. Then turning back to his family, said, ‘Not so fast, gang.’

By that time Cressida was back at his side. He placed an arm around her. ‘Have you checked the barometer, Rosemary? Looked out into the bay? It seems pretty choppy to me.’

‘Since when has choppy water ever stopped you from sailing? Hal, run in and check the barometer, make your dad happy, although he knows as well as I do that it will be going up and down all day, it’s that kind of weather. It won’t matter to me, Byron, what it says. I’m taking the
Sea Hawk
to P Town, and anyone who wants to come can.’

‘Come along, Dad,’ invited Tim.

‘No!’ Rosemary called out, too sharply and too loud not to draw the children’s attention. There was something embarrassing about the way she said it. It was more as if she was giving an order to Byron, something the children had never heard her do before. For a few
seconds a strange hardness came over Rosemary that silenced everyone at the table. The mother they knew and loved slipped out of character. It was strangely shocking. No one moved. Then she rose from her chair and went to stand by Byron’s side, to bend down and kiss him on the lips, to caress his face and kiss him once more. She ran her hand down his arm and took his hand in hers.

‘Just the children and me. I want to have them all to myself. Please don’t mind. I’ll make it up to you later when we come home.’

Rosemary at her best, her most charming and seductive. Rosemary who could still wrap her husband around her little finger whenever she chose to. ‘The storm will break in a few hours,’ he advised her.

‘By that time we’ll be in Provincetown, moored and eating lobster.’

‘Promise me if you’re not, you’ll pull in somewhere until it blows back out to sea?’

Rosemary laughed and kissed him once more. The children were delighted. Hal said, ‘Then if Poppa can’t come, neither can Kane. He’s not one of your children, Momma.’

‘That’s true, Hal. Well, Cressy, it’s either crabbing with Kane or sailing with us. You make up your mind.’

‘You won’t be angry if I choose Kane?’ asked a troubled Cressida. ‘But I did promise him first I’d go with him.’

‘Have I ever been angry with you for keeping a promise? Come here, child.’

Rosemary squeezed her daughter’s hand. Then she ran her hands through Cressida’s hair and told her, ‘You’d better comb your hair and clean your fingernails. Kane likes his ladies looking well-groomed and glamorous and sexy, not like tomboys. If you hope to catch him one day you’ll have to pay more attention to being pretty. Go change into those new jeans I bought you in town the other day.’ It was a cruel tease for a nine year old who knew she could not compete with the beautiful girls she had seen with Kane. She fought back tears of frustration that she was not the beauty she wanted to be for him.