Till We Meet Again (18 page)

‘Just a minute.’ Beth interrupted her. ‘All he left you was his gun?’

‘Well, there was two thousand pounds too,’ Susan admitted. ‘But that was hardly compensation for giving up my life for him and Mother, was it? He left everything else to Martin, who never did a hand’s turn to help any of us.’

‘But the house, that must have been worth a fortune,’ Beth gasped, seeing in her mind’s eye the lovely old house of mellow red brick, the beautiful garden and the river flowing by it.

‘I hadn’t ever considered that, but Martin was all too quick to see it. He didn’t give a toss about making me homeless.’ Susan sighed. ‘He said I could stay on till he’d sold it, but that Christmas he didn’t even send me a card. He always was a self-centred, cruel bastard. I don’t think he has ever had any feelings for anyone but himself.’

Susan’s words brought back a sharp memory for Beth. It was during their second or maybe third holiday together, and they were sitting down by the lock behind Suzie’s house, their feet dangling over the edge as they waited for boats to come into the lock. Suzie had mentioned almost in passing that her older brother had come home the previous evening, and she seemed a bit scared of him.

Beth knew he was the same age as Serena, therefore she’d always assumed he treated his little sister the way Serena treated her – little presents, making a fuss of her, and asking her about her schoolwork.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Suzie was biting her lip and she looked a bit pale.

‘I hate him coming home,’ she admitted in a small voice, turning her head as if to check he wasn’t in the garden watching her. ‘He’s always nasty to me. He says cruel things.’

‘Like what?’ Beth relied on both Robert and Serena for the comfort and affection she never got from her parents, so she found it hard to imagine anyone’s brother or sister could be nasty.

‘That I’m fat and stupid,’ Suzie said, and a tear trickled down her plump cheek.

‘You aren’t fat or stupid,’ Beth said stoutly. ‘You’re sweet and pretty. He’s the stupid one if he can’t see that.’

Beth couldn’t remember anything more, perhaps a boat came into the lock and distracted them. She didn’t think Suzie ever said anything about her brother again either. But obviously Martin had always been a nasty piece of work. Yet another thing she’d failed to pick up on about her friend.

‘Why didn’t you contest the will?’ Beth asked, her indignation rising. ‘The courts are very understanding when someone has spent their life being a carer, then doesn’t get left enough to support themselves.’

Susan smiled placidly. ‘Maybe I would have if Liam hadn’t come back,’ she said. ‘I had been working myself up into a frenzy of rage. But then, lo and behold, at the beginning of December Liam came knocking on the door, just as he said he would. By then I’d begun to doubt him too, so I’m sure you can imagine how thrilled I was. Suddenly the house and Martin didn’t matter a bit.’

Beth noted that Susan’s voice took on a husky, sensual quality as she spoke of Liam. This was the adult woman she didn’t know, so very different from her childhood friend.

It struck Beth then that she was at a real disadvantage. Susan’s character had changed and been remoulded by circumstance, events and the influence of others, and the image she had of it in her head was hopelessly out of date.

She thought it incongruous that a shy, middle-class, somewhat frumpy woman would fall for a man who looked and lived like a gypsy. She wouldn’t have expected her old friend to have a baby outside of marriage, or to get involved with the long-haired leader of a commune. And as for killing anyone…

Steven was equally baffled, but he didn’t have his opinions clouded in the way Beth did. His first view was that Susan was as soft as butter, and a willing victim of her parents, her brother and Reuben. But if that was so, how did she leap out of that docile stance to become an avenger of her child’s death?

The answer to this had to be something they hadn’t tapped into yet. Beth guessed she and Steven would just have to keep digging until they unearthed it.

‘Liam must have been very shocked that both your parents had died?’ Beth asked, wanting to be convinced that this man was not another fortune-seeker like Reuben later on.

‘He was astounded,’ Susan agreed, and smiled as if the memory of that still pleased her. ‘Oh, Beth, he was so lovely, I’d never had anyone concerned about me before. He felt bad that I’d handled two funerals without any help, he was furious that Martin was being so evil. But what really made me feel none of that mattered any more was just his presence. He understood how I felt, he wanted to make things better for me.’

Beth wanted to believe that. But she knew that Susan had ended up in Bristol without him. It was a bit like reading the last page of a novel first. ‘And so there was nothing any longer to prevent you having a love affair?’ she said, raising an eyebrow.

Susan giggled. ‘No, nothing and no one,’ she said. ‘I was very wicked. I opened a bottle of Father’s best wine, and we slept in Mother and Father’s bed that night. It was so lovely.’

‘You deserved something good to happen after all you’d been through,’ Beth said. She had a picture in her mind of Susan in a winceyette nightdress under her parents’ rose-pink satin eiderdown. Gypsy Liam didn’t fit well into that picture at all. ‘Was he your first lover?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Susan grinned, a little shamefaced. ‘I never met anyone stuck at home. I’d given up hope that I ever would. So I had to grab it, didn’t I? To hell with the consequences.’

‘Did you even stop to think about contraception?’ Beth asked.

As she said that, she remembered how she and Suzie had discussed what they’d do if they got pregnant. They were only fourteen at the time, and neither of them had even kissed a boy, so it was purely hypothetical. Suzie had claimed she would kill herself!

‘I don’t remember.’ Susan giggled. ‘But even if I had, I wouldn’t have known what to say to Liam about it. Besides, at my age it hardly mattered anyway.’

It would have mattered very much to Beth. But then she had every reason to be suspicious of men.

‘So you just leapt into it then?’ she prompted.

‘Yes. Without a second thought. It’s odd how you can remember every detail about some things, but nothing about others,’ Susan said pensively. ‘There was a full moon that night and it was frosty. As I was drawing the bedroom curtains, Liam came up behind me and we looked out at the garden together. The moon was shining down on the river, it was like there was a silver bridge across the darkness of it, and the frost on the grass was glistening.’

‘It sounds very romantic,’ Beth said awkwardly.

Susan barely heard what she said. She wasn’t listening, she was remembering. Liam had slipped his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. ‘There’s magic in the air tonight,’ he whispered. ‘Everything is just right for us, so don’t be scared.’

He slid his hands up under her sweater as they stood there and unfastened her bra. As his hands cupped round her breasts she gasped with pleasure. She entered into a brand-new world that night, one she had never imagined in her wildest dreams. The thrill of his bare chest against hers, the soft wetness of his mouth, the hardness of his body pressing into her soft flesh. There, in her parents’ big soft bed, the same one she’d been conceived in thirty-four years before, she discovered what rapture really meant. All her inhibitions left her as he explored her with his fingers and his lips, she heard herself begging for more, and she didn’t care if she was behaving like a slut.

‘A thirty-four-year-old virgin,’ Susan said with a giggle. ‘I thought I was too old to fall in love. But it was like being a young girl all over again, Beth. I never guessed it would be like that. I thought I’d be scared, that it would turn out to be smutty and I’d feel bad. I didn’t, though, it was wonderful, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

‘And after that night?’ Beth was unnerved by the rapturous glow on Susan’s face.

‘He stayed with me from that night, right through Christmas and on till half-way through January, and we never seemed to sleep.’

‘What were your plans?’ Beth asked. She knew now why Susan hadn’t felt able to tell Steven all this. ‘Did your brother know you had a man there?’

‘I didn’t know or care if Martin knew,’ Susan laughed, showing those small, even teeth Beth had so often envied her for as a child. Surprisingly, they were still as white now as they had been then. ‘I felt so strong, so happy, he hardly even crossed my mind. I didn’t have any plans. I was living right in the present, the past and the future weren’t important any more.’

‘But you said Liam only stayed until mid-January. How did you manage when he went away?’

‘It was tough to be alone again, but he had to work,’ Susan said carefully, as if this was something she’d told herself a hundred times before. ‘You see, he looked after gardens all over the place, some he’d been doing for years. He couldn’t let his customers down just because of me. Sometimes he was gone as long as four weeks, but mostly it was only one or two. I tried hard not to get upset by it.’

‘So how long did this go on for?’ Beth asked. If Annabel was born in April of 1986, she had to have been conceived the previous July, around eight months after Susan’s parents died.

‘Right up till Martin finally sold the house in August,’ Susan said. ‘The fun we had that summer! We used to go skinny-dipping in the river at night, we’d get drunk and dance out on the lawn, we often made love out there too. I’ve never had so much fun. He made me feel so sexy and naughty. That’s what I meant about the glimpse of the woman I’d always wanted to be.’

Beth began to feel irrationally irritated. She didn’t want to hear above love-making on dewy grass, or dips in the river. She wanted to know whether Liam was on the make, how Susan came to live in Bristol alone, and all the relevant details. ‘Oh, come on, Sue,’ she said impatiently. ‘You must have been in the early stages of pregnancy by August. You weren’t children, for goodness’ sake tell me what happened to Liam.’

A cloud passed over Susan’s face. ‘Martin turned up unexpectedly one day. Liam wasn’t there at the time, but Martin had found out about us, and he was furious with me. He said I was a half-witted slut and asked how I dared have some gypsy living in his house. He said I’d got to get out.’

‘Are you saying Liam skipped off before you left there then?’

‘No, he didn’t.’ Susan riled up in indignation. ‘We were in love, everything was wonderful between us. He was only working away for a few days. When he returned I told him what Martin had said, and we talked about what we should do. He wanted me to find a place in Stratford, but I knew it was hard to find flats or houses to rent. I also thought I’d be happier making a new start somewhere else, where no one knew me. I didn’t want people gossiping about me.’

Beth nodded. ‘But why Bristol?’

‘We used to go there sometimes when I was little,’ Susan explained. ‘We stayed with some relation of Mother’s in Clifton. It had always seemed a wonderful, exciting place to me, what with the zoo up on the Downs, the parks, the big shops and the docks. It wasn’t too far for Liam to travel to his customers, and we thought he’d soon find new ones there too.’

‘So Liam came with you then?’

‘Well, no.’ Susan faltered momentarily. ‘You see, I didn’t realize I was pregnant then, and as he had a big job he had to finish, I said I’d come here to find a place for us.’

Beth wondered how a woman who had hardly been out of her home town before could possibly trek off alone to a big city. And if Liam was so caring, why did he let her?

‘Right! You came to Bristol and found the house in Ambra Vale. Now, what about Liam?’ she asked bluntly.

‘I couldn’t contact him when he was working, he always phoned me. I found the house, got back to the house in Luddington to pack, but he still didn’t phone. I was getting panicky then, but I figured if the worst came to the worst and he hadn’t phoned by the time I had to leave, I would leave the Bristol address with the neighbours and they’d pass it on to him. But I never saw him again.’

‘So the last contact you had with him was before you went off to Bristol?’ Beth felt she had to get that straight.

Susan nodded glumly. ‘I should have left my address with other people too, left a letter for him at The Bell in Shottery where he used to drink. I reckon Martin told the neighbours not to tell him where I was.’

Given what Susan had already said about Martin, Beth thought it was quite likely he did put his oar in, but it didn’t say much for Liam’s love for her that he was so easily deterred. She thought the most likely explanation was that he was already feeling trapped before the Luddington house was sold. Maybe he even encouraged her to go to Bristol so that he would never run into her again by accident.

But she wasn’t going to air that view. It was kinder to let Susan think he really couldn’t find her.

‘It must have been awful for you,’ she said instead. ‘Especially when you discovered you were pregnant too.’

‘Oddly enough, finding I was pregnant helped me get over him,’ Susan said pensively. ‘I know he did really love me, but he was a free spirit, he’d lived like a gypsy for most of his life. Even if he had managed to find me, I don’t think he would have fitted into an ordinary sort of life.’

‘I’m glad you can be so generous towards him,’ Beth said with a touch of sarcasm. ‘I don’t think I’d have been if I’d had to bring his daughter up alone.’

‘If it wasn’t for him coming along when he did, I would never have known love,’ Susan said, almost as a reprimand. ‘You must know what I mean, Beth? Falling in love, making love, that’s what turns you into a real woman, isn’t it?’

Beth felt inexplicably angry as she drove back to the office later. She couldn’t understand why Susan was so accepting of Liam’s desertion. All that twaddle about how falling in love made her into a real woman was just so much hogwash. She was pathetic! She’d let her brother take that beautiful house without so much as a protest. She should have taken legal action against Dr Wetherall when Annabel died, but instead she lay down and waited for some hippie guru to fleece her!