The Four of Us (54 page)

Leaning towards him, she said gently, ‘You're hallucinating, Rupert. Please stop trying to talk. The effort is too much for you. If you want me to stay here at the hospital, I will. Sholto is here and Orlando is—'

He interrupted her by making another hideous guttural sound in his throat. ‘Sweet Christ, Artemis,' he said on a gasp, when he at last managed to speak. ‘Just for once, listen to me, will you? Really listen.'

The little jagged green lines running continually across the screen of the nearest monitor increased in unevenness. Artemis glanced at it fearfully, wondering if she should ask the nurse if she should leave.

‘I was never going to tell you … I couldn't see the point.' He sucked in another deep breath, making a whistling sound as he did so. ‘It was your fault, Artemis. Destiny should have been in a home for children with special needs and you wouldn't even consider it. You wanted to saddle our home with a child who needed far more attention than our way of life could tolerate. It was unfair to you. Unfair to me. Unfair to her. And so I resolved an untenable situation the only way I knew how. When you were in hospital, unable to leave it, I put Destiny into a long-term care home – and told you that she'd drowned in Spain.'

He broke off, his eyes closed, the lines on the monitor dancing wildly.

‘Right. That's enough,' the nurse said abruptly. ‘Please leave the room, Mrs Gower. Please leave immediately.'

Artemis did no such thing.

She gripped Rupert's hand tight, desperate for him to open his eyes, to remain conscious. ‘Where did you leave her?' she demanded frantically. ‘If you're telling me the truth, where did you leave her?'

In her anxiety to be near enough to hear even a whisper in reply, she half slid and half fell off the chair on to one knee beside him. ‘Rupert! Please God! What home did you put her in? Where is she now?
Where is our daughter?'

There wasn't a reply, or even the merest hope of her remaining to hear any reply he might make.

An entire team of doctors and nurses surged into the room, most of them concerned only with Rupert, two others heaving her to her feet and frogmarching her back into the waiting-room.

‘What on earth …' Hugo began, hurrying forwards to extricate her from their grasp.

‘What's happened?' Serena shrieked. ‘Is Rupert dead?'

‘She's alive,' Artemis said incoherently to Sholto as Hugo put a steadying arm round her. ‘Destiny is alive. Your father's just told me. She's alive and he's always known she was alive.'

It was the moment she should have collapsed into tears, but for the first time in her life she was beyond tears, she was beyond anything but the most profound, mind-numbing shock.

‘And Dad?' Sholto hadn't the least interest in whether an adopted sister he had never known was alive or not. ‘Why has everyone gone rushing in to him? Has he taken a turn for the worse? He hasn't died, has he?'

Numbly Artemis shook her head. ‘She's alive,' she said again, this time to Hugo. ‘My little girl is
alive!'

Hugo, who hadn't a clue what she was talking about, but was aware from the fevered activity going on in the intensive care room that cataclysmic bad news was probably imminent, said, ‘Let's go out into the corridor, darling. You can talk to me there. Explain to me there.'

As she leaned against him so heavily he was almost totally supporting her, he led her out of the waiting room and into the relative privacy of the corridor. ‘What daughter, darling?' he asked as she started to tremble violently. ‘The little girl you told me about who drowned when she was only five years old? How can she still be alive?'

Artemis's trembling increased. She was juddering now, shaking from head to toe. ‘He did it. Rupert did it,' she said through chattering teeth. ‘She was a slow learner … and he hated it. He was ashamed of it. He wanted us to put her in a home. But she didn't
need
to be in a home, Hugo. She was loving and happy and quite clever at some things … things like drawing and painting. And he … Rupert … he took her to Spain … to our villa in Spain … and he telephoned me with the news that she'd died … drowned … and she hadn't. She hadn't!'

The horror of what she was telling him almost took his breath away. ‘You mean he
lied
to you? But how could he lie about a thing like that and get away with it? You have her death certificate, don't you? And you know where she is buried?'

At the blank incomprehension he met with, he knew just how easy it would have been for Rupert to have pulled the wool completely over Artemis's eyes. Without her having to say anything, he knew that Artemis had never given a thought to a death certificate; that she'd believed Destiny had been cremated.

‘He put her in a home. He put our five-year-old little girl into a home
and left her there!'
As Artemis thought of how bewildered, how frightened Destiny must have been, how she must have cried and cried for her, she thought she was going to faint. ‘How could he do such a thing, Hugo? How could anyone be so cruel, so wicked …?'

‘Dad's dead.' A door whisked shut behind Sholto as he stood staring at his mother in Hugo's protective arms. ‘I think I should stay with Serena, don't you?' he said tightly, his face drawn and white. ‘She probably needs me to be with her far more than you do.'

As he turned abruptly away from her, Artemis made no attempt to run after him, or to call him back. She could only think of one thing, and it wasn't Sholto's grief.

‘He didn't tell me where he left her!' Her eyes met Hugo's, appalled. ‘How can I find her, Hugo, if I don't know where he left her?'

He tightened his arm round her and began walking her down the corridor towards the stairs and the exit.

‘We'll find her,' he said confidently. ‘The first thing to do is to contact whatever organization you have in Britain that is the equivalent of America's Missing Persons Bureau.'

Artemis stopped walking, swinging round to face him. ‘No,' she said, as a new realization hit her with all the force of a tidal wave. ‘The first thing I have to do is to tell Primmie!'

It was seven o'clock when they turned in through Ruthven's opened gates. Behind cosily drawn curtains all the downstairs lights were on, so that in the otherwise bleak emptiness of the headland the house looked as glowingly welcome as a house on a Christmas card.

‘How am I going to tell her? How can I possibly prepare her for such earth-shattering news?' she said as Hugo drove into the yard and Rags came bounding out of the house to greet them.

Hugo, who was still rallying from the shock of learning that Destiny had been Primmie's love child, said gravely, ‘You can't prepare her, Artemis, darling. You couldn't prepare anyone for news such as this. Just tell her straight out, as simply and directly as possible.'

They entered the house by the side door, walking through the porch and into the kitchen. Primmie, Kiki, Geraldine, Brett and Matt were all seated at the gingham-clothed table. Primmie was ladling soup into bowls from a large, steaming soup tureen, Matt was cutting thick slices from a loaf still warm from the oven and Brett was pouring generous amounts of red wine into glasses.

‘You're just in time,' Primmie said, rising to greet them and still smiling at something Brett had just said. ‘The soup is carrot and parsnip, but I've some pâté in the fridge, if you'd prefer it.'

‘No. The soup is fine, Primmie.' Artemis stood in the welcoming warmth of the kitchen, aware that Rags was again settling himself down by the Aga. Through lips that were dry, she said, ‘I think you should sit down, Primmie darling. I have some news. Monumental news.'

It certainly wasn't the way she would have prepared her for the news that Rupert had died, and Primmie stared at her in bewilderment.

‘Good news? Bad news?' she asked, nervously aware that though Artemis's eyes were shining with fevered excitement, her face was a shell-shocked white.

‘I want you to listen to me very carefully, Primmie, because when Rupert told me this, I didn't at first believe it. I couldn't. It's both too terrible and too wonderful.'

Brett put the wine bottle down and, pushing his chair away from the table a little, placed his ankle on his knee. Kiki lit a cigarette. Geraldine took a drink of her wine, a slight frown puckering her forehead. Matt merely looked towards Primmie, concerned.

Slowly Primmie sat down. ‘OK,' she said, her nervousness growing. ‘Go on.'

Artemis licked her lips and then said, very quietly and steadily, ‘Destiny didn't drown twenty-five years ago, Primmie. When I said to you that as a toddler she was a little slow, it wasn't the whole truth. Destiny had learning difficulties. They weren't severe, but Rupert was embarrassed by them. He didn't want people assuming he'd fathered a child who wasn't academically bright. When I was in hospital after my car accident in 1978, he took advantage of the situation by putting Destiny in a long-term care home, phoning me, from Spain, and telling me that she had drowned.' She licked her lips again. ‘He told me all this just minutes before he died. It must be the truth. It
has
to be the truth.'

For a long, long moment time stood still.

No one moved.

It seemed to Artemis that no one even breathed.

Then Primmie said devoutly, ‘Oh God.' Slowly and unsteadily she rose to her feet. With tears blinding her eyes, she stepped towards Artemis. ‘I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe I'm living through this.' Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘If Destiny is alive, then we can find her, Artemis. We can find her and have her in our lives again.'

With sudden burning overwhelming hope, they fell into each other's arms.

Brett, aware something momentous had happened, but not certain what, said in an undertone to Kiki, ‘Who is this Destiny person? Is she Artemis's daughter? Her sister?'

Kiki ran a hand through her spiky red hair. ‘No,' she said, for once looking her age. ‘She was Primmie's illegitimate child. Artemis adopted her. When she was five years old, on holiday in Spain with her father, she drowned. Or he said that she had drowned.'

‘Jeez.' As Primmie and Artemis continued to cling to each other, sharing the most profoundly emotional moment of their lives, he said, ‘Pretty traumatic, discovering your dead child isn't dead at all. No wonder they've both gone to pieces.'

‘And me,' Kiki said, looking dazed. ‘Inside, I'm all in pieces, too.' She reached out for his hand. ‘I never knew her, but Destiny was my half-sister. The only sister, of any sort, I've ever had.'

As Brett took on board what this meant where Primmie and Kiki's father's relationship had been concerned and stared at her, round eyed, Matt said to Hugo, ‘The first thing we're going to have to ascertain is whether Artemis's husband put Destiny in a care home
before
going to Spain, or afterwards.'

‘If it was before, finding her should be relatively simple.' Hugo opened a cupboard where he knew he would find a bottle of Bell's. ‘How old will she be now? Twenty-nine? Thirty?'

‘Thirty,' Geraldine said, as Hugo put the bottle of whisky on the table, adding quietly, so that Artemis and Primmie shouldn't hear, ‘And if Rupert put her in a care home in Spain, then finding her won't be simple at all, Hugo.'

She kept quiet about her worst fear, which was that Rupert Gower had offloaded his adopted daughter in Spain under a different name to her birth name. It wouldn't have been hard for him to do so. Rupert had always had money – money that had quite obviously paid for Destiny's care for years and years. And money would have enabled him to do anything he'd felt was necessary to prevent his action ever being discovered.

As to whether Rupert had continued paying for residential care once Destiny had reached adulthood, that depended on just how severe her learning difficulties were. Artemis had always insisted that they were slight. Rupert had judged them to be severe enough to be an embarrassing social handicap. Where the truth lay was impossible to know. If, however, Rupert had still been paying residential fees, then details of the payments would, presumably, be amongst his personal effects – and as Artemis was his widow, there would be no problem about her having access to them.

The same thoughts were obviously going through Hugo's mind, for as Artemis and Primmie finally drew apart, he said, ‘As your husband's next of kin, you're going to have to go back to Gloucestershire in the morning, Artemis. However much you don't want to, there are arrangements it's down to you to make. And you need to go through all Rupert's personal papers before anyone else does so, just in case there should be information about Destiny in them, payments to an adult care home, that kind of thing.'

Artemis gazed at him blankly. ‘But Destiny wouldn't need to be in a home now, Hugo. She's thirty. She's a woman. And she never needed special care. Truly she didn't.'

Matt and Geraldine exchanged glances, both of them aware that it was a catch-22 situation, for if Artemis was right, Destiny would be far harder to find.

Primmie said quietly, ‘I'm going to take Rags for a walk. I need to be on my own for a little while.'

‘But it's pitch black out there, Primmie.' The concern in Matt's amber-brown eyes deepened. ‘If you need to be on your own, be on your own in the house. We can all go home. Geraldine can stay with Artemis.'

‘No.' She shook her head. ‘No, I don't want you to all go home. I just want to walk, and think, and to have Rags with me.'

She walked out of the kitchen into the porch and at the sound of her shrugging herself into Amelia's old Barbour, Rags roused himself and trotted after her.

Seconds later the outside door closed after them both.

‘OK,' Hugo said, pulling a chair out for Artemis at the table. ‘Let's get moving. With luck, there will be information amongst Rupert's papers that will lead us to Destiny pretty quickly. If there isn't, we're going to have to explore other search avenues. Ideas please.'