Down the Garden Path (4 page)

It was the lettering I studied now. Did it slope backwards because written left-handed by a normally right-handed person? The paper was a pale mauve and still faintly Devon violet-scented. Fergy considered “smelly paper” horribly common, something my mother could never be—so was this another ruse to mislead, or was there some hidden meaning? Dad would not have minded if I kept the letter but I wanted it to stay in Mum’s drawer.

When I was putting it back I remembered something else. Reaching under a pile of petticoats I pulled out the little hot water bottle which had kept me snug and warm in my basket. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding it in my hands, I felt comforted again; not only because of its associations but because there was something jolly about it. A small stone flask, not more than six inches long, shaped like a monk—a tubby, smiling-faced monk, one eye closed in a wink.

“You’d help me if you could,” I said, patting his bald pate, and we huddled together on the floor until the shadows took over the room and Fergy called me down to tea.

Often, until I went away to boarding school, I would go up and talk to my friend the monk, and I never quite forgot him even after I found a more substantial friend—one who argued more, was given at times to daunting criticism of my behaviour, but who was almost as good a listener. Harry.

Harry Harkness lived with his widowed mother, Vera, at the other end of Vicarage Lane. And if that makes him sound like a knock-kneed bookkeeper and her a grey-haired old lady complete with rocking chair, nothing could be further from the truth. Vera was a chestnut-haired vamp, who had buried two husbands and divorced a third. Harry, son of number two, was a gorgeous chestnut-haired vampire. Ten years older than I, he had an evil reputation for sucking the breath and guts out of everything female within a twenty-mile radius.

We met when I was twelve, home for the holidays. My dog, Slobber, ran off one afternoon while taking me for a walk. Slobber was doing the drawing room scene that summer. On this occasion he entered the Harknesses’ drawing room through their French windows with me in hot and muddy pursuit. Vera wasn’t present, but Harry was entertaining a lady who, from the various items of her clothing scattered around the sofa, suffered from the heat.

A squeal and a flurry of cushions blotted out my horrified mumbled apology. The lady fled the room and, moments later, the house. I never saw her again. Harry told me afterwards that she’d moved to the Outer Hebrides. He may have been joking. That was part of his charm for me—I never quite knew when he was being serious or what he was thinking. He was also a superb host. Minutes later Vera came in and, while she chatted to me, Harry rustled up a splendid tea of sausages, bread and butter, and rock buns. Having sat in a tin and been forgotten those buns certainly lived up to their name, but dunked in mugs of steaming tea they were really quite good.

That afternoon stands out as one of the happiest days of my childhood after Mum’s death. I found myself telling Vera and Harry about her and about my birth mother. (Increasingly, the latter was becoming a fantasy figure to me, endowed with beauty, brilliance, and charm of international proportions. In this I was spurred on by my schoolfellows who now thought my foundling history at once deliciously romantic and pathetic.)

My special friendship with the Harknesses, mother and son, had begun. Harry, of course, was more than a friend. He was my hero, the stuff of which schoolgirl dreams are made. And as time went on, hiding my monumental crush from him, under a mask of a tomboyish younger sister, took more and more doing.

At last I decided that perhaps what was needed was to put some distance between Harry’s concept of me as a pal and my emergence as a woman. So one year I didn’t come home for the Christmas holidays. Instead I spent them with a friend at her family’s home in Bournemouth. The Jeffersons were wonderful people and made a great fuss over my birthday (celebrated as four days prior to my arrival at the vicarage), but guilt at leaving Fergy to fill Dad’s stocking and her own, and missing out on stirring the Christmas puddings for luck, almost made the sacrifice unbearable. The days until Easter seemed unending, and when I did at last get back to Kings Ransome it was to discover Harry was away on business for the agricultural firm he represented.

Hadn’t Fergy always warned that not stirring the puddings would fetch forth seven years of bad luck? She was so often right in her ominous predictions. Indeed, the new month began with nine straight days of rain, a sure sign that evil forces were in ascendance. Still, I repeatedly told myself as the summer term dragged on that people made their own good or bad fortune. If I wanted to find my mother one day soon, I would have to go and look for her. If I wanted Harry now, I would have to go and get him.

I took a good look in the mirror (something I was inclined to avoid because my reflection reminded me that, unlike most people I knew, I looked like no one but myself), and assessed my looks. Yes, I supposed I was pretty in an Old Masters kind of way. I would have preferred lush black hair and slumberous dark eyes, but my figure was coming along nicely, especially the upper portion, as a result of applying a herbal cream purchased at an exorbitant price via my friend Rosie Jefferson’s brother. And Harry had not seen me for almost a year.

On a trip up to London to view the Houses of Parliament, I feigned illness and asked to be allowed to sit in the ladies’ cloakroom until I recovered. Knowing Miss Whale’s delicate sensibilities I was confident that visions of my being disgustingly sick would keep her at bay long enough for me to whip outside and down one of the side streets to the boutiques. Success. In one I found exactly what I wanted, a splashy black dress with a gravitating neckline and only inches of skirt. How smug I was as I sat on the train going back to school in my blue-and-gold-striped blazer and my demure straw hat, the dress concealed in my satchel. And how foolishly I forgot another of Fergy’s warnings: “God doesn’t sleep. He only pretends.”

I was to be punished for my deviousness. My great plan to get Harry in a compromising situation from which the only decent outlet would be immediate marriage ended in catastrophe. I should have scented trouble ahead when things went too well—at first. Dad was glad I wanted to visit Vera and Harry. He liked them, and although he wouldn’t have liked the black dress, it was concealed under my raincoat. As I had known she would be, Vera was out at bingo that night, but Harry’s pleasure at seeing me eroded the instant the raincoat came off and he inhaled the first wave of the perfume I had sloshed over my body from the toes up. Could this be the man I had idolized for years, callously propelling me out the door, calling me a child—of all disgusting names? And, to add insult to injury, he said he was too fond—
fond
—of me to do anything that would hurt me.

I would never forgive him. I didn’t plan to live long enough to forgive him! Back in our damp, chilly, black-and-white-tiled bathroom I tried to drown myself, but being the immature child I was, I couldn’t even do that right. The pungent scent of my Floral Passion bubble bath kept bringing me back.

Something had to be made of the rest of my miserable existence, but for weeks I could not think of anything worthwhile, except making the lives of those around me as rotten as my own. The trouble with Dad was that he was so disgustingly understanding. After telling me that he was ready to listen and talk about whatever was troubling me, he left me alone. When I came to dinner one evening with my hair a brilliant purple and my cheeks streaked with black blush, he merely smiled at me through the spectacles drooping down his nose and asked if I had had a pleasant day. Curled up in bed that night with my grey flannel rabbit with the pink velvet ears, I had one of my “talks” with Mum. The next day I went out and worked in her rockery, and three hours later came in and asked Dad if, instead of going back to school in September, I could go to a secretarial college in London.

Life in the city would make me forget. Theatres, museums, the zoo, art galleries—I haunted them all on weekends. They were a great deal more cheerful than my bedsitter near Oxford Circus. Besides, if my despised former teachers were right and the most important part of a girl’s anatomy was her head, I had better start using mine.

Early in my London sojourn, I did go along to an organization named FIND, which assisted adoptees in locating their birth mothers. But although they were eager to help me they were unable to discover any more than I already knew—that there appeared to be no record of my birth prior to my adoption, meaning it was unlikely I had been born in a hospital or nursing home. All right, so I had been born at home; but then how had my mother dealt with the doctor or, more likely, the midwife? That question continued to plague me, just as Harry’s failure to write or telephone pleading for forgiveness plagued me. And then something happened. I began to enjoy myself. Mainly because of Angus Hunt.

Mr. Hunt wasn’t a dashing young man about town, and he didn’t fall madly in love with me. He was a middle-aged, large (tall
and
fat), shaggy lion of a man, and he offered me a job in his art gallery. Or what I at first believed to be his gallery. He didn’t, I found, own The Heritage. But he
was
The Heritage. Strange, our paths crossing as they did; and stranger still that they should divide and recross later.

* * * *

Still, I shall always wonder if the worst day of Mr. Hunt’s life was the one when I went to view Umberto Bosky’s showing. I remember it was my birthday and I stood in a crush of hundreds craning with gasps of wonderment at the sole exhibit, a ten-foot canvas with a six-inch spider-legged crescent, just sufficiently off centre to announce that Bosky spurned the ruler.

“The sheer power! Do you know from which of his periods it comes?” boomed a six-foot woman in a deerstalker hat, standing on my foot.

“His midlife-crisis period,” I said as, scowling, I turned to press my way through the surge of damp overcoats. Out of the morass of heaving humanity a hand gripped my elbow. And that was it—my meeting with Mr. Hunt. His lack of outdoor wear told me that he was a member of The Heritage staff, and I told him what I thought of stuffing the place with Bosky bunk. Mr. Hunt disagreed. Repellent as he personally found such art, it brought people in at a trot and, at £2.50 a head, crowds like these helped buy the real treasures. He offered to show me one, a suspected Rubens he was hoping to authenticate. Half an hour later he offered me a job as his girl Friday.

Typical Angus Hunt. His warmth, his spontaneity, his enthusiasms were as vast as his size. “Ach, lassie, don’t think about art. Feel it.” On the rare occasions when one of his brilliant impulses turned sour, he would hunch his massive shoulders under the rumpled linen jacket, shake his untidy mane of grey hair, and say, “Worth the gamble. Always worth the gamble.”

I had been working for Mr. Hunt for about eighteen months when I received an up-beat “how are you doing” letter from Harry. My immediate reaction, after my hands stopped shaking, was to use it to line my budgie’s cage. That word “child” still rang hatefully in my ears, but was there some small hope that one day the man might be brought to realize what he had tossed away like a wilted cabbage leaf? In my chatty up-beat reply, I filled two pages on what fun it was to work for Angus Hunt, his passion for fruitcake, baked and sent to him every fortnight by two “maiden aunts” in his native Scotland, his intriguing collection of pocket watches, and his occasional jocular hints at a secret vice.

The right approach. It worked, didn’t it? On a gimlet-grey evening as I sat on the window seat trying to cheer myself by painting my nails red with white polka dots, I spied a motorbike pulling up to the curb. Footsteps creaked up the stairs to my third-floor room. Frantically blowing on wet polish, and attempting to pick the newspaper up from the couch with my elbows, I vacillated between ecstasy and rage. It would be spineless to forgive him immediately, but then Dad prized charity—loving charity—above all other virtues. I wanted Dad to be proud of me, didn’t I? But ...

I opened the door and Harry stood there, hand lifted ready to knock. His eyes as brilliantly blue as ever. Gorgeous. He was still the most gorgeous man I had ever seen and when he said, “Hello, Tess,” with that faint blend of amusement and appreciation in his voice—exactly as though we were meeting accidentally at the bus stop after not seeing each other since the day before yesterday—I hated him. The idiot
did
love me. I knew he did and yet he had stayed away! Perhaps now, with the wisdom of maturity, I could appreciate that Harry had displayed a certain gallantry in not succumbing to the lure of the black dress. But the man could add, couldn’t he? I hadn’t been sixteen for quite a few years.

He was handing me flowers, and I hid my face in them. The door was closing and we were standing like actors in a bad play on the hearth rug. Ah, now he was speaking his lines. Telling me that he had wanted to give me time to grow up, to be sure of my feelings. He was taking something out of his coat pocket, a small velvet box, handing it to me with what would have been a pretty fair display of reticence if I hadn’t known him so well, if I hadn’t been able to read confidence in the tilt of his chin and the way his hands moved.

Not so fast, Harry darling. I told him that, having aged considerably since we had last met, my eyesight was failing. Excusing myself, I went over to my bureau, picked up a magnifying glass, came slowly back to the rug, opened up the box, and through the lens examined what was inside. A pearl and cinnamon diamond ring. How had Harry known I had always loved that ring when I gazed at it through the window of the village antique shop?

“It’s lovely,” I whispered, looking up at him, but he was staring at the magnifying glass.

I tried to make words come out of my throat, to tell him that I had only been teasing. But he wouldn’t have believed me.

“I’m sorry I disturbed your busy evening,” he drawled. Looking pointedly at my smudged nails, he turned about and left.

For three hours I sat in a corner, a sodden lump, biting my wretched nails and alternately plotting how I could get even. Years of emotional reconstruction down the drain. London wiped out. And, come to think of it—this with a ferocious sniff—apart from Angus Hunt and The Heritage I loathed London. I was a country girl, and as Angus would say, “What I wouldna’ gi’ reet noo for green stillness and dreaming church spires.” And Dad ... and grumpy, bullying Fergy, and the new puppy ...