The One I Was (12 page)

‘Tax?’ Smithy asked. Cathal looked from her to my mother.

Mum nodded. ‘I think I’m getting somewhere then I realize I haven’t included this or that. The accountant is very helpful, but I find it all hard.’

‘Am I impertinent to ask whether I might help with those figures?’ Cathal asked Mum. ‘I’m not unfamiliar with this process.’

‘Of course,’ she said, looking less distracted. ‘You’ve been through this yourself.’

‘What figures?’ Andrew asked.

‘When someone dies you have to tidy up the money matters,’ Mum said. ‘Your grandmother left everything in good order. But it was sudden.’ She pushed her half-empty bowl away. Cathal was watching her.

‘I have been an executor several times,’ he said. His dark-blue eyes made it clear he knew what Mum was feeling.

Mum looked at Cathal as though seeing something in him she hadn’t noticed before. ‘Perhaps you could just check I’ve done everything.’

‘There comes a point,’ he said, eyes crinkling, ‘when this stuff fills your head with sand.’

‘That’s it exactly,’ Mum said. ‘Sand.’

‘You were always very good at maths, Clarissa,’ Smithy said.

‘It’s not so much the calculations,’ she answered. ‘It’s putting all the information together.’ She looked very young today, with her blond hair tied back into a ponytail and no make-up on her face. Almost like a little girl, looking for a grown-up to help with homework. I wriggled on my chair, finding the observation an uncomfortable one.

‘Come on,’ Cathal pushed his bowl back. ‘Let’s see whether we can’t knock these devilish numbers into shape.’

Smithy watched them walk towards the stairs and shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’s more sensible than he seems.’

*

Next morning when Andrew and I came down to breakfast we found Cathal standing at the stove, stirring a saucepan of porridge.

‘We worked very late on those figures.’ There were grey rings under his eyes. ‘Your mother said I could stay overnight.’

I wondered if he’d slept in one of the bedrooms on the top floor, and hoped he hadn’t woken Smithy, who also slept up there.

‘Great view,’ he said, nodding towards the garden, hung with a light mist that the sun was already piercing. ‘They did the cook a favour when they moved the kitchen up here. In my childhood home there were about three sets of stairs between the dining room and the kitchen.’

Must have been a large house. ‘Where do you live now?’

He gave the porridge an extra stir. ‘I’m a wanderer. I find myself a berth here and there.’

Smithy came in, letting out a quiet gasp when she saw Cathal at the stove. ‘What are you doing here so early?’ A flush covered her neck.

‘Making breakfast.’

‘That’s my job.’ She walked towards him, holding out her hand for the wooden spoon.

He smiled at her. ‘I like to finish what I start.’

Smithy snorted. ‘I bet you do.’

He ignored her outstretched hand, serving his porridge. He sat down, his back to Smithy. ‘Better eat up. The working man must keep to his task.’ His eyes twinkled at me. But he still didn’t look like a working man. His shirt was too smart, even though the collar was frayed, and the corduroy trousers he was wearing now it was cooler looked as though they might once have been worn with a jacket and tie. But Cathal was one of those people who looked properly turned out even when they should have seemed scruffy.

Smithy grabbed his bowl as soon as he’d finished, carrying it off to the sink.

‘Ah, Clarissa.’ He was looking towards the kitchen door. Mum had pulled back her hair into a ponytail. She looked purposeful. Smithy and Mum exchanged a quick look. It was enough to tell me that Mum knew Smithy did not want Cathal here in the kitchen so early in the morning.

‘I’m going to ring round some schools today,’ Mum said. ‘Then we can go and visit some of them.’

‘Couldn’t I just go to the comprehensive in town?’ I longed to be with normal kids who lived with both parents, doing normal stuff.

Smithy was looking at me in that way that sometimes suggested she could read minds. ‘There’s more to education than having fun, Rose.’ But there was a gentleness to her tone which wasn’t always there.

‘I could teach them here,’ Cathal said.

‘Teach? You?’ Smithy said. ‘What could you teach?’

Mum cleared her throat. ‘Cathal used to be a teacher.’

‘Did he now?’

‘I must get on with the garden.’ Cathal stood up. ‘And let out Kronos.’

‘Kronos?’ Andrew asked.

‘That’s what I thought we might call the peacock. He is a bit of a god, is he not?’ As he passed Mum he winked at her. She turned a bit pink and looked away.

Andrew waited until she’d left the room. ‘I don’t want him teaching me.’ He said it quietly, but there was no mistaking the tone in his voice.

‘He’s not the type to stick to something regular like teaching.’ Smithy blasted tap water into the sink. Andrew and I cleared the breakfast things. Outside the wheelbarrow bounced its way to the garden to the accompaniment of Cathal’s whistling.

‘Where does this man come from, anyway?’ Smithy cut carrots into thin batons, like little spears. She always liked to prepare the vegetables early in the day, leaving them in bowls of cold water. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘His family are Irish.’

‘Ah.’

‘Oh, Smithy.’ Mum picked up the tops and tails of the carrots Smithy’d cut and put them into the compost bin. ‘They were propertied people in the South. Cathal grew up in a large house.’

‘Did he now?’ Smithy nodded to herself.

‘We have mutual friends.’

Smithy looked at her as though she was about to ask who they were.

‘Well, people we both vaguely know.’

‘Vaguely know,’ Smithy repeated. She pulled out the plug. ‘We should start on the upstairs.’

They were clearing out the unused bedrooms on the top floor. Smithy picked up the strange navy turban she wore round her hair whenever she carried out dusty work. I trailed behind them as they went upstairs. Sometimes they found interesting things in those bedrooms, old toys and books. They opened the door of a room next to Smithy’s own.

‘Either we cover all this furniture with dustsheets or take it down to the basement.’ Smithy ran a finger over the tallboy. ‘It’s too good to leave here gathering dust.’

‘Perhaps it would be best to sell it. Especially if …’ Mum glanced at me.

‘You don’t know that it will be necessary yet, Clarissa.’

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s necessary?’

Mum sat down on the bed. ‘Come and sit here, darling.’ She put an arm round me. ‘We have to pay tax on this house now that Granny’s dead.’

‘Death duties,’ Smithy said. ‘The chancellor wants his cut.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘We owe the government money, darling. Granny left me some money as well as the house, there may be enough to settle the bill. But if there’s not …’

‘You’d have to sell Fairfleet.’ I stood up, shaking off Mum’s arm. ‘No. Not this as well. First Dad, then Granny, now we’re losing Fairfleet.’

I ran downstairs, the sob rising in my throat.

‘What is it?’ Andrew shot out of the kitchen. ‘What’s happened?’ I shook my head.

Cathal brought in an armful of courgettes and aubergines. He looked at me and then glanced upstairs, towards Mum, who was coming down after me. ‘Perhaps we need to talk more about my idea,’ he said.

‘Your idea?’ Andrew said.

‘We should talk, yes.’ Mum looked suddenly exhausted. ‘Cathal had a plan for turning Fairfleet into a tutorial college.’

‘Revision courses for O and A levels,’ he said. ‘Residential courses.’

Mum’s attention was on me. ‘Come back upstairs,’ she said. ‘Help us clear out the rooms. We can talk about this later.’

*

Smithy was on her hands and knees when I came back in, sweeping underneath a bed. ‘You can check the drawers in that tallboy are empty,’ she said. ‘God knows, all this furniture must be worth a fortune. Those boys didn’t know they were born.’

‘The German boys?’ I asked.

‘The Jews.’ Smithy looked as though there was more she might have said.

‘Granny wanted them to have the best,’ Mum said.

Smithy made a sound like a sniff.

I pulled a drawer open. It moved smoothly, almost soundlessly. Granny had once told me this was how you could tell furniture was well made. The inside of the drawer smelled of cedar.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ I said. Cathal was sitting in the kitchen. My socked feet made no sound as I came in and he didn't look up. His features were knotted into deep concentration, his brow puckered.

‘Hello,’ I said. He looked up and his smile was like the sun coming out.

16

October lit Fairfleet’s grounds with a honey tint. I smelled the tang of bonfires each time I went outside to help Cathal with the leaves. His rake moved in long, graceful sweeps and he hummed some folk song that might have been Irish to himself, hardly seeming to notice me. For someone who could pay people such dazzling attention he was surprisingly good at retreating into his own private world. I didn’t mind because occasionally he’d nod at me, acknowledging my feeble efforts with the leaves.

Kronos had shed most of his tail feathers now and looked smaller and less important. Perhaps he needed a friend. I wanted to save his feathers, smuggle them upstairs where they wouldn’t bother Smithy, but Kronos seemed to have shed them where I couldn’t find them.

‘We’re getting stupider and stupider,’ Andrew said, when the leaves were neatly piled and I came back inside. ‘It’ll be half term soon and we’re still not at school. We’ll have to do menial labour when we grow up.’

‘Like Cathal.’ We were standing at our favourite spot by the kitchen window, looking out at him as he cut back the last of the summer growth in the flowerbeds. Smithy was in the kitchen, too, tidying up the cutlery drawer.

‘Some people think teaspoons can go in any old place,’ she’d said at breakfast, with a glance out of the window at Cathal.

‘He seems to have made it work well for him, not having a proper job.’ Andrew’s lip curled. ‘Living in a comfortable house.’

‘Cathal doesn’t live here.’

‘He stays most nights.’

‘That’s because he’s helping Mum with the taxes and they go through Granny’s paperwork at night. Mum’s an executioner.’

‘What?’

‘Executor,’ Smithy said. ‘Person who deals with the dead person’s affairs.’

‘It’s taking so long.’

‘I think he likes being here,’ Andrew said. ‘I think he’s trying to string it out. Wiggle his way into Mum’s affections.’

Behind us cutlery clattered onto the floor.

‘My fingers are all thumbs,’ Smithy said. Mum came in wearing an apron. Another one of her ‘doing’ days, more and more of them as the season progressed. She must be taking the tablets regularly.

‘I think he’s odd,’ Andrew said. He cast a defiant look at Mum, daring her to dispute this.

Smithy banged the cutlery drawer shut. ‘There. Let’s hope the knives and forks and spoons stay in their right places now.’ She looked at Mum as though indicating that what applied to cutlery should also apply to people.

Mum rolled her eyes. ‘I’m going upstairs to clear out Granny’s clothes. Want to help, Rose?’

I went up with her. Seeing Granny’s old dresses and furs made my chest feel tight. We packed them into plastic bags according to whether they were to go to charity shops or downstairs to the basement. One of the dresses hanging up in dry-cleaning plastic in Granny’s wardrobe was Mum’s own wedding dress.

‘Goodness knows how this got in here.’ Mum took it out. ‘I’ll hang it in my own wardrobe.’

‘It’s too pretty to put away.’ I ran a hand down the plastic-covered whiteness.

‘Do you think so?’ Mum sounded pleased. ‘Let’s take the plastic off.’ The dress had long sleeves, with fabric-covered buttons running down them. The skirt fell from its fitted bodice in a neat ripple of silk.

‘I prefer your dress to Diana’s.’ At the time of the Royal Wedding, just after we’d come to Fairfleet, I had longed for a dress like Diana’s: a puff of silk. Remembering this made me feel disloyal to my mother.

‘Perhaps if I put it on it will …’ she said.

‘Will what?’

But Mum shook her head. Perhaps she believed that if she wore the dress again it would act as a kind of lucky charm, bringing Dad back to her. Perhaps he didn’t really love the tennis-player as much as Mum. And Mum couldn’t possibly really be interested in anyone else apart from Dad. I struggled to push some thoughts about Cathal to the back of my mind.

‘I was so happy when I wore this.’ Her eyes had a faraway expression now. ‘I didn’t really want to change into my going-away outfit. I felt this dress was casting a spell over me.’ She stroked it again. ‘A bit like Cinderella in that Walt Disney film, wearing the wedding gown her fairy godmothers magic up for her. The dress that changes colour while she dances.’

I remembered the scene. ‘But it was a ball-gown, the one the fairy godmother makes when she turns the pumpkin into the coach.’

She looked sad at having misremembered and I wished I hadn’t corrected her.

Later on I remembered the scene in another Disney film,
Sleeping Beauty
, where the fairies change a wedding dress from pink to blue and back to pink again. I meant to ask my mother whether that was the scene she’d been thinking of, but I forgot.

*

Next morning when we came down for breakfast it was to find Cathal sitting beside Mum at the table. Both wore dressing gowns. Cathal must have borrowed an old one from the airing cupboard. He removed his hand from Mum’s exposed knee.

‘Hi kids.’ He gave us that quick smile of his. ‘I was wondering about building a tree house in one of those oaks out on the lawn. What do you think, Andrew?’

I saw longing fight against distrust in my brother’s face. He too had seen that hand on Mum’s knee. ‘OK,’ he said gruffly, turning to the box of cornflakes on the table. After breakfast Cathal drove him in Granny’s old shooting brake to the timber merchant. They returned with resin-scented planks, which Cathal and Andrew unloaded and carried onto the back lawn. Andrew’s features were lit with the thrill of carrying out a man’s task. The two of them spent the afternoon measuring and sawing. I took tea out to them. It had started to drizzle very gently, but the air was still mild.