The Winter Folly (26 page)

The silence in the room became freighted with something awful: horror and grief combined. Alexandra’s limbs were numb, her skin cold. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ she
said through stiff lips.

Nicky looked contrite. ‘I’m sorry. I guessed you didn’t know when we talked about the past and I didn’t want to hurt you.’ Anger seemed to reinvigorate him.
‘But if it’s true, my guess is that your father drove her to it! He’s nothing less than a monster.’

‘Don’t say that!’ she cried. ‘Can’t you see he was all I had for all those years after my mother died?’ She fell back on the pillows and turned her face to
the wall, struggling to understand what he had said. It made a macabre and awful sense. There had been no grave to visit, no love around her mother’s memory, no shared stories of her.
Alexandra could only remember anger and coldness, and a sense of everyone being punished for whatever had happened. Life had shut down, and never been the same again.

The folly. That awful, broken tower. She shivered. Pictures began to form in her mind, terrible images of her mother falling from its jagged top and lying broken on the ground at the bottom.
It can’t be true.
But somehow she knew that it was, and all these years she had been the only one not to know the truth.

‘Are you all right?’ Nicky whispered. He inspected her carefully as if looking for signs of grief but her eyes were dry.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice blank. It was too much to take in all at once.

‘Can I get you something?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m sorry to tell you something so awful but I thought you should know if it would help you cope with what that man has done to you. Can’t you see you’re better off
without him?’

She nodded but stayed silent, staring at the wall and the pattern of the paper, trying and trying to understand.

Alexandra stayed in bed all day, staring dumbly at the wall as she attempted to make sense of what Nicky had told her. In a few short hours, she’d lost her father and
everything she had believed about her mother had changed. She struggled to absorb it and was unable to find the energy for anything else, even when Nicky came and sat with her and tried to distract
her.

By evening, a strange calm and sense of determination descended on her. She got out of bed and went downstairs to the dining room where Nicky was having supper.

‘Darling!’ He got up and rushed over to her, concern on his face. ‘Are you recovered? Should you be down here? You’ve had a nervous shock.’

‘I’m quite well,’ she said. ‘Really.’

He eyed her with anxiety. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘I don’t want you to be,’ Alexandra said urgently. ‘I don’t want anything to change for us. I can’t alter the past. I did my crying over losing my mother a
long time ago, and I can’t bring her back. My father has made it plain how he feels about me. I’ve lost enough of my life to him and I don’t want to lose any more.’ She went
over to him and clutched his arm. ‘I mean it, Nicky. You’re my world now. You’re all that’s real and true. I don’t want to think about the terrible things that
happened – just about how we can be happy.’

He looked at her with uncertainty mixed with relief. ‘I’m glad to hear that. I really am. But . . . are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Perfectly,’ she said fervently. ‘I want us to be happy. The past is the past. The future is what I want to think about now.’

‘Good,’ said Nicky. He smiled. ‘I’m very glad, darling.’

She sat down at her place and reached for her napkin, outwardly as calm and serene as if the last two days had never happened.

Alexandra heard the noise of the van long before she saw it. She’d been reading in the drawing room – at least, she’d been staring at a page for an hour while
her mind took her to the dark places she couldn’t help visiting ever since Nicky had told her the truth about her mother. She’d wanted to shut it all away but instead visions of the
tower were haunting her, floating into her head when she least expected it, or coming to her dreams and filling her with cold terror. She was on the point of getting up to leave the chilly drawing
room and find Nicky when she heard the roar of an engine. She got up and went to the window at the front and saw the van bowling down the hill towards the house. Was it a tradesman or a worker come
to deliver or fix something?

As the van came to a halt in front of the house, she heard the shouts from inside and then people spilled out onto the gravel, a gaggle of young men and women. Just then Nicky came past, drawn
by the noise.

‘Who are they?’ she asked, frowning, puzzled by the sudden invasion.

‘Don’t you recognise them?’ Nicky’s face had lit up with happy excitement. ‘It’s Sandy and the gang from the club! He’s got at least half a dozen of
them – Patsy, Alfie, David . . . Look!’

As Nicky opened the front door and hurried out to them, Alexandra stared again through the window. Now he had said that, she did recognise one or two faces from smoky, drink-soaked evenings in
the Notting Hill club, where they went to spend their evenings talking and dancing when they weren’t closeted away in the mews house. And there was Sandy himself, the de facto leader, his
hair thinning prematurely and his cheeks flushed, coming over to give Nicky a hug and a slap on the shoulder. Patsy, the sex kitten in her pencil skirt and tight jumper, followed, wrapping her arms
around Nicky’s neck with a shriek of delight. Alexandra had never felt at ease around Patsy, with her hedonistic eagerness to take anything she was offered, whether to swallow, smoke or
snort, and then be as wild as possible. She’d always looked at Nicky through half-closed smoky eyelids in a way that made Alexandra’s heart sink.

‘I wasn’t expecting you!’ Nicky was saying with a laugh as they all milled round him.

‘I said we’d drop by some time, didn’t I?’ demanded Sandy. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. ‘And today’s your lucky day, mate. Me and the kids are going
to make the place
sing.
We brought the record player. Are you in the mood for a party?’

Nicky turned to look for Alex, and she waved to him from the window, smiling. She could tell he wanted her approval. Perhaps it was good for them to have visitors. The house had been too gloomy
recently, the atmosphere of bereavement lying heavy on it – Nicky’s and her own.

They all crowded into the hall and she was suddenly surrounded by life and noise. It was startling but not unpleasant. She felt even more sure that they needed this injection of vivacity.

‘Hello, Sandy,’ she said as he came up to kiss her.

‘Hi, Alex, said Sandy in his soft drawling voice. He’d added an American intonation to his Scottish accent for sophistication, and the effect was rather odd. ‘How’s
tricks, baby?’

‘Very good, thank you.’

Nicky was beaming. ‘Isn’t it great to see everyone? Let’s get the party started! Patsy says she can make us whisky sours!’

‘That sounds fun,’ Alexandra said with a smile. She could see that Nicky was excited. He obviously needed to live a little.

Perhaps I do too. Perhaps we’ve been alone, just the two of us, for a little too long.

They were young, she reminded herself. Parties and drinking would help her to forget all those dark troubles, and concentrate on youth and love and everything she and Nicky had at their disposal
to enjoy themselves.

Nicky led the way into the library, animated and excited to be with his London crowd again, and she followed.

Present day

The summer would be a hot one if it continued like this. They woke to bright blue mornings that deepened to blazing warmth and then melted slowly into long, soft evenings rich
with scents from the garden. Outside the kitchen, the lavender border buzzed with bees and sent its sweet fragrance into the air. By the fruit canes, white cabbage butterflies fluttered crazily
about as if intoxicated by the treasure of dropping berries. The bricks of the walled garden baked in the heat and radiated an earthy warmth, and everywhere lush greenery crept and crawled and
grew.

Delilah could see summer in her own reflection: her skin had tanned despite her efforts to shield herself from the sun, and there was a pinky-gold glow to her face along with the freckles across
her nose. These days her hair was longer, and she pulled it back into a loose ponytail which, with her summer dresses and sandshoes, made her look younger.

A new kind of quiet had descended on the house. She hadn’t seen Ben for a few days as he was busy designing an irrigation system that would run at first off the mains but later from a
reservoir of stored rain water – like a giant water butt, he described it – and he spent hours in the workshop with lengths of rubber hose and widgets and hundreds of scraps of paper
with scribbled drawings on them. Erryl grumbled that he was having to handle the garden almost singlehanded with Ben so occupied, but it was John who climbed on the mower and rode up and down the
lawns and along the borders of the parkland, keeping everything neat. Sheep, cows and horses kept everything else in check, razoring down the grass in the surrounding fields and paddocks. John
became a familiar sight, in his shabby cargo shorts and hiking boots, naked from the waist up, his skin burnished by the sun and an old straw hat on his head, as he steered the ride-on mower up and
down. Mungo would lie nearby in the shade of a tree, too hot to do anything but let his tongue loll out and watch his master playing his odd game of driving back and forth on the grass. On the
compost heap, the collection of grass clippings grew into a mountain, dry and straw-like on top but with a scent of fermenting vegetation and fertile decay within.

Delilah preferred to be outside now, surrounded by all the life and light and vigour of the garden, and she took her laptop out to the summer house, away from the chilly depths of the house
where the silence hung ever more heavily. She was beginning to dread being there, especially alone. The house seemed to hunger for life inside it so badly that it felt as though it wanted to drain
hers out of her and absorb it into its walls.

She sat in the summer house, looking out at the lushness of the garden in full bloom. Perhaps it was a good thing there was the gymkhana next weekend. If John could see what pleasure this place
could bring people, and that peace and quiet would always return in the end, perhaps he would be more positive about her idea for clothes exhibitions and doing teas for people visiting the
garden.

Not that she had dared tell him about those plans. Ever since Susie’s visit, he’d become distant again, brushing away her attempts to apologise and acting as though she wasn’t
even there most of the time. Even telling him about the gymkhana had failed to get his attention. He’d just said grimly that as she’d gone ahead without consulting him, there was not
much he could do about it, and it had added to the icy atmosphere between them.

Susie’s thank you email had ended with:
Tell me you haven’t burnt those wonderful clothes! I will never forgive you if you have!

Delilah was torn. On the one hand, she didn’t see how she would be able to consign all those beautiful things, the only real tangible link John had left with his mother, to the flames
– not only because of their intrinsic value but because if he ever regretted his decision, there would be no undoing it. But she also didn’t want to be drawn into a conspiracy of
disobedience with Susie. Those things belonged to John and she had no right to go against his wishes.

She put her laptop to sleep and went out to find Erryl who was mending a bit of fallen stone wall, and asked him when he usually lit a garden fire.

‘Bonfire season is the autumn with all the leaves to get rid of,’ Erryl said, stretching his back and shoulders as he straightened up. ‘There don’t tend to be many in the
summer unless there’s a party. Mr Stirling used to have an annual summer get-together for his birthday and it was a proper knees-up. We’d have a fire then.’

‘Did he?’
Of course
, she thought,
his birthday’s in August. Perfect for an outdoor party.

‘Oh, yes. People would bring tents and pitch them in the big field and there’d be a bonfire set up there. But the day would start down here at the house and end with a big barbecue,
before they went up to the field for the bonfire – dancing, music . . . right into the night it went.’

‘It sounds fun. When was this?’

‘During Mr Stirling’s first marriage.’ Erryl looked at her askance, evidently embarrassed. ‘Sorry, ma’am. That’s how it was, though.’

‘Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I’m interested! Did they end when Vanna left?’

‘No, they went on for a few more years. But gradually they got smaller. Then Mr Stirling stopped bothering.’

Delilah thought for a moment and then said, ‘But Janey said you’d only been here a few years. How do you know?’

Erryl laughed shyly. ‘Ah – Janey’s only been here a few years. I’ve been here longer. I was in the lodge as a bachelor for twenty years if you must know, since the old
lord was living in the big house.’

‘Then . . .’ A thought occurred to her, bringing a tremor of excitement with it. She said eagerly, ‘Did you know Alex – I mean, John’s mother?’

‘No, no. She was before my time. But I could sense that she was gone, if you know what I mean.’ He shook his head. ‘It was all terrible, raw, even though she’d been gone
years. The old lord used to drink a lot, if you’ll excuse me saying, and I knew exactly why he did it: he was drowning his sorrows. I’ve seen it before. There’s those that drink
because they can’t stop, and those that drink to forget. He was one of the forgetters.’

‘So you don’t know what happened to Lady Northmoor? How she died?’

Erryl shook his head again. ‘Whatever it was, it was a bad business. That much I do know. I never knew a place or a man so sad.’

Erryl had solved the problem of the clothes, for now at least. There was no way to burn them. With no bonfires until the autumn, how could she? She wasn’t exactly going
against John’s wishes, but still, she knew she ought to put the trunk somewhere safe. She didn’t want John to stumble on it somehow, become enraged and do something rash. But where?