Hidden Cottage (8 page)
Having collected the eggs from Sue at Cloverdale Farm and heard the latest on her twin daughters whom Daisy used to babysit and who were now doing their GCSEs, they retraced their steps towards the centre of the village. The green, with its semi-circle of attractively thatched cottages that led up to Medlar House and the church, was generally considered to be the jewel in Little Pelham’s crown, but Eliza thought Cloverdale Lane was the real gem. She loved the eclectic mix of stone-built cottages, the way they were squeezed in so closely they seemed almost ready to break free and tumble down the steep and narrow twisting road. She liked the tiny front gardens too, the way the owners all took such pride in them, filling the spaces with as much colour as they could. She was no flower expert, but as she and Daisy made their way down the hill, Eliza could recognize London pride, catmint, aubrietia, clematis, alliums and the frothy yellow flowers of lady’s mantle.
When they reached the junction with the main road, they waited for a chestnut mare ridden by a girl they didn’t know to clip-clop slowly by.
‘So what do you really think about Jensen’s girlfriend?’ Daisy asked as they turned right to go on to Parr’s, which was Little Pelham’s one and only shop – a post office and food store combined. ‘She wasn’t at all what I imagined. Not that I have any idea what kind of girls he’s ever been out with in the past. I mean, he’s always so secretive.’
With all the drama Daisy had caused last night they hadn’t had a real chance to discuss Jensen and Tattie in any detail. ‘I liked her,’ Eliza said simply. ‘And as for his secrecy, we’re all as bad as one another. Look what you were hiding from us.’
Daisy slowed her step. ‘You’re right, but come on, who’d have thought he’d get involved with someone who’s got a child? He’s not exactly the fatherly type, is he? I’d have had money on him running in the opposite direction the second he knew she came with that kind of baggage.’
‘People change,’ Eliza said. ‘Besides, we all have baggage.’
Daisy let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘You’re not wrong there and, as we both know, I have enough baggage to warrant my own baggage handler. So what’s your big secret, then? What are
you
hiding from us?’
Wrong-footed by the swerve of her question, Eliza said, ‘What makes you think I have a secret?’
‘You just said we’re all as bad as one another for hiding things, I assumed you were including yourself in that.’
Eliza hesitated. Could she tell Daisy? Why not? Hadn’t she wanted to bring Greg here this weekend to show him off to the family? She steeled herself. ‘Actually,’ she said nervously, ‘I’ve met someone. His name’s Greg and—’ She broke off and laughed, suddenly bashful at her own daring. ‘Oh God, I sound like someone from Alcoholics Anonymous!’
Daisy looked serious. ‘How long have you been keeping Greg under your hat, so to speak?’
‘Um . . . it’s been about four months now.’
Daisy’s expression intensified. ‘And don’t tell me, you’ve kept quiet about him because of Dad?’
‘No, not just because of Dad. More a matter of not wanting to jinx things before they’d had a chance to become really established.’
‘And things are established now?’
‘I . . . I think so.’
‘Well, good luck to you, Eliza. You got yourself fast-tracked to boring old adulthood at far too young an age; I reckon you deserve some fun. And if Greg is fun, you make the most of him. But what a family we are for keeping quiet about anything that’s important! What the hell’s wrong with us? And you know what, my going to Australia is only half the story.’
‘There’s something else?’
‘Oh yeah, there’s a lot of something else to come out yet. Hey, I haven’t seen this car round here before.’
They were now outside Parr’s where a green sports car was parked. Eliza looked at the number plate: OWEI. ‘Probably someone just passing through or maybe visiting,’ she said, pushing open the shop door and setting off the tinkling bell.
There was only one other customer inside the shop – almost certainly the owner of the car – and with a big grin on his face, Bob Parr was merrily cashing up a sizeable order. His wife, Wendy – aka, Windoline Wendy, owing to her fondness for lurid pink lipstick – was packing everything into a large cardboard box and she also was grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat, albeit with very pink lips.
While searching the chilled cabinet for the packet of pancetta that Mum had asked them to get for the carbonara she was making for lunch, Eliza covertly scrutinized the stranger. Tall. Slim. Dark-haired – short and well cut. Sunglasses artfully placed on the top of his head. Shirt: fitted and pale blue and tucked into jeans. Next to her, Daisy whispered, ‘Not bad-looking, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Ssh,’ Eliza whispered back.
‘He can’t hear us, not with Bob and Wendy gushing all over him.’
‘Hello, girls,’ Bob said, after he’d helpfully opened the door for the good-looking man and told him not to hesitate to get in touch if there was anything he needed. ‘You two home for the weekend, then?’
Before either of them had a chance to answer, Wendy said, ‘I bet you’re wondering who that man was, aren’t you?’
‘What man?’ asked Daisy, all wide-eyed and looking about the shop.
Bob laughed. ‘
That
man,’ he said, as from outside came the throaty rumble of a very powerful engine, which had them all turning to stare unsubtly out of the window.
When the car had gone, Eliza put their purchase on the counter to be rung up. ‘Go on then,’ Daisy said, ‘give us the lowdown so we can report back to Mum and Dad.’
‘His name’s Owen Fletcher,’ Wendy said excitedly, ‘and he’s bought The Hidden Cottage, just moved in.’
‘Really?’ Daisy said. ‘I didn’t know it had been on the market.’
‘Apparently he got in fast, before a for-sale board went up.’
‘That’s the internet for you,’ added Bob, struggling to get round his substantial wife behind the counter. ‘He saw it online and snapped it up PDQ.’
‘Is he going to live in it?’ asked Eliza, unable to contain her own curiosity now.
‘He certainly is,’ Wendy said. ‘Unlike that stuck-up couple from London who only used it at weekends and brought all their own food with them. They came in here once, just
once
mark you, and that was to buy a measly carton of milk. They had the brass-neck cheek to complain about the price of it as well.’
‘And they criticized our choice of pasta. “What no organic trofie pasta?”’ Bob said, imitating a woman’s haughty overbearing voice. ‘Good riddance to them, that’s what I say.’
For the last two years, nearly everyone in the village had had an opinion or a story to tell about The Couple From London; their mean-spiritedness and unsociable manner having gained them a less than flattering reputation very soon after becoming the new owners. Despite the minimal time they’d actually spent in Little Pelham, they had fallen out with an extraordinary number of people. They had accused Joe Coffin of deliberately over-charging them for some joinery work he’d done on the house; they had told Ricky Jones who had cut the grass for them that he didn’t know a thing about gardening; they’d reduced Karen Jackson to tears, claiming that while cleaning the house in their absence she had stolen a tea towel, and even the vicar, the Reverend Jane Beaumont, had come in for a tongue-lashing when she hadn’t taken seriously their complaint that the church bells were rung too loudly during bell-ringing practice. Working on the basis that The Hidden Cottage was on the edge of the village and almost a mile distant from St George’s, she had assumed they were joking.
Would the new owner of The Hidden Cottage make as many enemies? Eliza wondered as Daisy surprised her by saying, ‘It’s such a lovely day, let’s have an ice-cream.’
Bob pointed over to the freezer. ‘Plenty of choice, girls; take your pick.’
At Daisy’s suggestion, they didn’t go straight home but sat on the bench on the green with their Magnums and watched a group of children kicking a ball about. Her sister was right; it
was
a lovely day. Eliza supposed the reason Daisy wanted to sit here was that she was in no hurry to get home, where Dad would be due back shortly.
But as cross or disappointed as he was, Eliza knew he wouldn’t shout or rant at Daisy; he saw her as being too fragile for that. Which, of course, was another reason he was so protective of her.
Eliza wasn’t proud of it, but as a child she had harboured an unhealthy amount of ill-feeling towards Daisy. As an adult, however, she came to realize that Daisy’s horrendous behaviour when she’d been little had not been entirely her fault; she had merely reacted to the way their father treated her. Placed high upon a pedestal, she had learnt to wield the power she’d been given and had done so with tyrannical zeal and spite. One word from her perfect little rosebud mouth and their father would be in uproar with Eliza and Jensen, his ears closed to any claims that Daisy was lying or manipulating everyone. Even when Mum stepped in, as she so often had to, and defended Eliza and Jensen, he refused to listen or believe that Daisy could be anything other than perfect. In the end, it was easier to give in to their little sister, to let her have her way in whatever it was she wanted. But it was to do her no good in the long run; it could only ever lead her towards a crisis of some sort.
And that crisis happened, as these things frequently do, without any of them seeing the signs or realizing that poor Daisy was in serious trouble.
Eliza had been away at university and had arrived home at the end of term for Christmas, along with Jensen who hadn’t been home in ages, and they had both taken one look at Daisy and been openly shocked. It was Jensen who had asked their sister straight out how long she’d been anorexic. Not surprisingly, she had vehemently denied it, but once the awful word had been uttered aloud, it was suddenly blindingly obvious that Daisy was ill. No more could her loss of appetite, the baggy layered clothes, the sallow skin, the hours spent alone in her bedroom, be dismissed as a teenage phase or simply the pressure of exams, which was what Mum and Dad had assumed was the case.
Initially Daisy refused to see a doctor, promising that she would now start eating properly, that there was nothing to worry about, but Mum wouldn’t take no for an answer. She must have been frantic with guilt that she hadn’t spotted what Eliza and Jensen had seen, but as they soon discovered, seeing a person on a daily basis often blinded you to the gradual change in them; it took a fresh pair of eyes to see the situation for what it was.
Eventually Daisy gave in to Mum’s pleading and saw a doctor. Months of counselling followed, as did an excruciatingly slow gain in weight. At the same time, it all came out, that by starving herself Daisy had been taking control of her life as a way to free herself from the pressure of Dad’s overpowering love and his unrealistic expectations of her.
In the process of getting herself together, Daisy dropped out of school for a year and by the time she retook that year and went on to university she was out of sync with her old friends. It was a massive understatement to say that it had been a difficult time for Daisy and, four years on, they were still sensitive around her when it came to food. Seeing her eat an ice-cream and clearly enjoy it, as she was now while they sat in the warm sunshine on the green, would have been unthinkable back then.
It was equally unthinkable that Dad would give her his blessing with regard to her wish to go to Australia. Or that he would accept that this was obviously another attempt by Daisy to loosen the intense hold of his love for her.
Monday morning and Mia was alone.
Jeff had left for the airport not long after Putin had started up with his screeching out on the green and with no customers booked in, Mia had the day to herself. But feeling tired and edgy, she wasn’t sure it was a good thing not to be busy. Left to her own devices there was a danger she would brood on what had proved to be an exhausting weekend – a weekend of vigilant damage limitation and of constantly pacifying Jeff.
Right now her husband would be 35,000 feet up in the air, while she was down here crackling with guilt and self-reproach. Why hadn’t she known Daisy was so unhappy with her job? Why hadn’t she known that her daughter was planning to move to the other side of the world? Oh, it was all too reminiscent of when Daisy had made herself so ill.
The shame of Daisy’s anorexia still weighed heavily on Mia, that she had failed so absolutely as a mother, when all the time it had been the one thing she had tried so hard to get right. Another weight of regret and sadness for her was knowing that her relationship with her youngest daughter had always been overshadowed by Jeff’s love for Daisy.
While it would be fair to say that Jeff had had no interest in fatherhood when his son came into this world, things changed dramatically when Jensen was seriously ill in hospital. From then on Jeff accepted his role as father and threw himself into it wholeheartedly. Mia could still remember the look on his face when he set eyes on Jensen for the first time; there was a softening in his expression, a tenderness combined with a look of real alarm, but then lying in bed hooked up to an intravenous drip, Jensen had looked so very weak and vulnerable.
Prior to that day, Jensen had been poorly with a bad throat infection and the GP had prescribed a course of penicillin. But then one afternoon when Mia was sitting on the sofa reading to him, Jensen just didn’t look right to her; he seemed even more tired and lethargic and he had a strange puffiness around the eyes. Afraid he might be having a reaction to the antibiotics, she phoned the surgery and took him to see the doctor again. By the time Jensen was being examined, Mia could see that his hands had swollen, as had his ankles. When the doctor lifted his T-shirt, Mia winced at the sight of Jensen’s distended stomach: something was very wrong. Within the hour they were at the hospital and Jensen was being examined by yet another doctor.
Numerous tests were done – blood, urine and blood pressure – and then the doctor said that he wouldn’t be absolutely sure until they’d carried out a biopsy on Jensen’s kidneys, but it was looking very likely that he was suffering from something called nephrotic syndrome. ‘I’ve only ever seen one case of this before,’ the doctor explained. ‘What happens is that when there’s loss of large amounts of protein in the urine the protein content of the blood is lowered, causing oedema – that’s the swelling you can see. For now the priority is to completely flush out Jensen’s system and to get his blood pressure down. We’ll need to have him on an intravenous drip with fluids and hydrocortisone.’