Between Friends (83 page)

‘Come on, Annie, and you too, Edie. You both have cousins and second cousins and third cousins twice removed back in Great Merrydown. Don’t tell me none of them have a strong and reliable fourteen-year-old we can train up to our standards. I need one good experienced girl for the dining room. Smart, ambitious and hardworking. The rest we can manage somehow. I will do the cooking, the reception and the bookwork and …’

‘Give over, Meg! Three jobs
and
Tom to see to and then there’s the child …’

‘Will looks after Tom and Beth has Sally Flash and it will only be until we get firmly back on our feet. Now don’t scowl at me like that, Annie Hardcastle. You know I can do it. I can do anything I put my mind to.’

She was invincible in her confidence, in her love and in the renewal of the strong will to succeed which Martin had put back into her with his own enthusiasm for his work. He was proud of her, he said, and there was nothing she could not do if she cared to and if she would just slip her hand … yes … just there and arrange her shoulders … my word, the light was superb as it rested in pale golden shadows on her, yes, yes, he knew they were speaking of the hotel … but really, whilst they were about it did she not think that if they were to lie on the …

Their love, and the laughter which appeared to go hand in
hand
with it, the soft warmth of his approbation gave her something, some quality she found hard to describe but the vitality she now possessed reminded her of Megan Hughes of ten years ago. She knew she must work harder than she had ever done, and that her responsibilities were more than she had ever had but all she needed, she told herself, were some hardworking girls and perhaps an ex-soldier, if there was one who was not devastated by the war, to work in the bar and she could do it. If she had to work twenty-four hours a day herself, she would do it.

By the end of July she would re-open the ‘Hilltop Hotel’!

‘Well, my sister’s husband’s cousin has a couple of girls just left school. They’re dying to get into what they call “office work” whatever that might be. Lady typewriters, I believe they call them but if they were told they were to be taught hotel management, which sounds more impressive than scrubbing floors,’ Annie grinned, ‘then I reckon they might be persuaded. If the wages were right!’

‘Good, you write to them then … oh, and tell them they can use the typewriter in my office. That might fetch them!’

‘You haven’t got one.’

‘That’s easily remedied!’

The hardest part, of course, was dealing with Tom’s fear at the sudden upheaval in the monotonous pattern which had been his life for over eight months and his utter terror at the spectre of meeting ‘people’. He had become used to the two men who worked in the gardens and even the young lad who had been taken on to help
them
. He and Will planted and weeded the vegetable garden for though he had lost his peace of mind, his sure grip on the reality of life and the easy-going, smiling charm which had once been his, he had retained his gift for making things grow. Under Will’s guidance he put in the seeds, not always sure what they were, and watched them come up and it was then, as the tiny green seedlings showed above the dark earth that his instinctive skill seemed to come to life as they did and he would nurture them, love them even until they grew to be the fine vegetables and the fruit which would be placed before the guests, who would one day seat themselves in Meg’s refurbished dining-room. Whilst the prospect of this was in the future, whilst his garden and his life on what they called the ‘farm’ were filled with only Will and Beth, the gardeners, the dogs, he was perfectly certain that when the day came he would get through it quite unscathed.

They were guests, Meg explained to him as she held him in her arms one night, and he would have absolutely no need to even see them. They would keep to
their
part of the hotel and there was no way they could get through to
his
. To the apartment which he and Beth, Sally Flash and herself were to share. Yes, the dogs would be with him and Will would sleep in the attic room if Tom wanted him to. The gardens at the back of the house and the farm itself where his animals were housed, the cows and the goat, the pigs and the hens, would be out of bounds to anyone but himself and Will. Yes, of course Beth could go with them, until she went to school.

‘To school?’

‘Now you know she must go to school when she is five, Tom.’ Meg was infinitely patient with him but sometimes she worried about the intense wall of protection Tom tried to erect about Beth … his daughter. He still was not happy about the pony she was learning to ride and stood in a sweat of apprehension each time she was astride his back. Meg had bought a couple of sturdy mares, small and steady, believing that if she, and therefore Tom, could also learn to ride, going out on the quiet moor with Beth it might allay his fears but so far he had not been persuaded to get up on the mare’s back. He would stand for hours stroking the soft nose of the animal, looking into the liquid eyes, soothed as he had always been by the contact he had with a creature he knew would not harm him but it seemed it was not in him to actually ride the mare.

‘Why does she have to go to school, Meggie. Can’t she have a governess. That way she needn’t go out of the grounds. You know I don’t like …’

‘Tom, she needs to be with other children. It’s not good for her to be just with you and Will,’ and Tom, the Tom who had onced romped with Meg and Martin, agreed, but the Tom who now lived in his body swore to himself that when the time came he would do everything to prevent his beloved daughter from going out into … well … there were shells … and he had heard a whizz-bang the other day when he was in the meadow!

But as the day rapidly approached, as the constant and sudden appearance of strange men, the alarming banging of a workman’s hammer, of saws cutting sharply through wood rattled his fragile nerves, Will was forced to take Tom to the furthest fields on the farm. Each evening when they returned, Tom would be more
apprehensive
at the sight of some new adjunct added to his familiar home, or worse still, some part of it taken away! Windows appeared where there had been none and a door which had been there when he left that morning was bricked up and plastered over when he returned and what would happen next, his wounded mind begged to know?

Meg was in Ashbourne, once again attending the solicitors who were still attempting to untangle the legal complexities caused by Martin’s ‘death’, his will and his return to life which had made it null and void. She had spent an hour with them and her head was aching as she returned to her motor car and when the voice called her name her first reaction was annoyance for she had just been promising herself half an hour with Martin and the certainty that his clever and imaginative fingers would ease it away.

‘Meg, Megan, is it you?’ the voice asked.

Meg turned to stare at the woman who had called her name and though there was a certain familiarity about her eyes and the set of her mouth she could not for the life of her remember where she had known her.

The woman smiled and held out her hand.

‘Eveline O’Hara.’

‘Eveline …?’

‘You don’t remember me?’

‘Well, yes, I know your face but …’

‘The Adelphi Hotel. Miss O’Hara!’

Megan began to smile and through ten years of change and more change, of war and suffering, of happiness and grief, the memory of a young girl and this woman emerged – and she was Megan Hughes again, skivvy, kitchen-maid, chambermaid and finally assistant housekeeper.

‘Miss O’Hara … why, of course … really, I don’t know why I didn’t recognise you. You are …’

‘Older, Megan and … not quite so … strong.’

‘No … we have all … the war took its toll.’

‘Aye, it did …’ and a shutter came down on the face of Eveline O’Hara as it did on a hundred thousand female faces all over the country at the mention of the war.

‘Come and have a cup of tea, Miss O’Hara, and tell me all about yourself.’

‘It’s Mrs Coyle now, Megan, but call me Eveline, after all, I’m not that much older than you,’ and Meg could see she was right.
She
had always seemed to be middle-aged to the young Meg Hughes from her lowly position as kitchen-maid but now she realised she could be no more than thirty-five or six, though her hair was greying and her face was lined.

They sat in the small tea room for over an hour and at the end of it Meg Fraser had herself the ‘experienced girl’ she needed for her dining-room. Eveline Coyle was a widow now, her husband of two years gone with the very same ‘Liverpool Pals’ who had been mown down at Tom’s side. She hadn’t fancied going back to Liverpool where she had been so happy for such a short time with her Donny, she said sadly, so she was working in a local hotel as a glorified housekeeper-cum-receptionist-cum anything-else she was required to do but she wanted to settle somewhere, make a home for herself, put roots down, but there … that was enough about her. What had Megan been up to in the ten years since they had last met?

She drove home with Meg that evening, all her worldly possessions in the back of the Vauxhall, the recriminations of the hotel manager silenced by the month’s wages Meg had stuffed into his greedy hand; and she wept a little when Meg showed her the small, sunny sitting-room and bedroom with which she was to do exactly as she liked for they were to be her ‘home’.

‘You put your roots down here, Eveline,’ she said softly, ‘for I mean to be here for a long while!’

And now they were here. The Marringtons first, as seemed only right and proper for they had been her first guests when she had opened ‘Hilltops’ before the war, and tomorrow their dear friends, Sir Joseph Hartley and his wife – ‘made his brass in munitions, lass, and got a knighthood an’ all, though my Albert said he bought it an’ I say what’s to stop Albert havin’ one then? Lady Nelly, that’d be me,’ and her good-natured laugh could be heard in every part of the hotel that week!

They came in their droves that lovely autumn, the private suites and bedrooms never empty. The newly rich who could now afford this luxury which the elegant Mrs Fraser offered, and the thoroughbred wealth which had not been earned but handed down. The war had to some extent drawn the classes together, or at least given the well-bred the tolerance to accept the well-feathered, for they were so exceedingly rich! The local gentry came to dine when a table could be found for them, careless and haughty but adding that touch of privileged class to Mrs Fraser’s
dining-room
. They drank the excellent wines she served and ate the superb food she personally prepared – five years had not diminished her skills in the culinary arts, it seemed – and moved about her lovely, newly decorated, exquisitely furnished drawing-room and salon and the intimate and quite daring bar and grill room she had installed. They came in their motors, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and Lanchesters, which gleamed in the soft lights falling across them from the windows, and no-one was ill-mannered enough to mention the shell of the man who was her husband and who, one heard, was locked up in a distant wing of the hotel with a man to guard him!

‘When will you ever have time for me?’ Martin asked her ominously, his pride in her not apparently foreseeing the cutting back of the hours they had spent together, little enough to start with, his expression saying. August had passed into September and then October and still the travellers came, their appetite for a long weekend, or a mid-week break or a few days away from it all scarcely abating. ‘Does the bloody season never end?’

‘It appears not, my love. The war seems to have introduced into everyone the desire to get away and have a holiday.’

‘But it’s been nearly a year since the war ended. Are they never going to forget it?’

‘How can they? How can anyone?’ and the silence would fall about them and Meg would feel the sharp-edged tension come between them and neither could remove it, nor even speak about it for both were afraid it might wound them so mortally they might never recover.

Beth Fraser, four-and-a-half years old and full of energy and charm and the bright beauty of her mother, raced across the springy turf of the slope which ran above the gorge of the Dovedale Valley. Though it was October, guests from the hotel still wandered lazily about the gardens and their well-bred voices begged one another to look at the darling child and was she not a replica of her mother, the superb Mrs Fraser, they said, and do come here, little girl so that they might pat her riotous curls. The child stopped, politely waiting but in her eyes was the rebellious look which, if they had known him they might have recognised in those of her father. She stood and submitted to having her rose-petalled cheeks admired and the length of her curling lashes, and when her mother’s guests moved on, their interest turning to some
other
topic of curiosity which they were certain Mrs Fraser arranged just for their entertainment, Beth sighed in childish exasperation for really it was very hard to have a
good
game without one or other of them interrupting it!

‘Let’s go down the path, Sally,’ she begged her nursemaid. ‘We could throw sticks in the river for Sidney.’

‘Now you know Mummy doesn’t like you to go out of the garden, Beth …’

‘Oh just this once, Sally … please … we won’t go far …’

‘Well …’ Sally Flash turned as though to search out Mrs Fraser and beg her permission but the only people about were hotel visitors, and all, she assumed about to bear down on her charge, and could you blame them for she was an extremely engaging little girl, but still, it was a nuisance!