A Friend of the Family (9 page)

She felt weak and old and tired and longed quite desperately for the man who had lived with her and loved her for more than fifty years. They had sat in this very room, he reading aloud to her while she played patience, his voice mingling with the rustle and fall of logs and the flick, flick, flick of the cards. They had taught Percy some of the words, laughing together, delighted when he showed such aptitude. Hermione's tears fell on to her cards and she strove to overcome her weakness lest Thea should come upon her unannounced. She caught her breath suddenly as the niggly little pain in her abdomen gave a sharper twinge than usual. Perhaps, after all, she should get the doctor to give her a check-over. But not just yet. She didn't want to know anything unpleasant until this business with Thea was sorted out. She'd written to Tim, giving him an outline of the situation and asking him to come down as soon as he arrived in the country.
He was much more likely to be able to help Thea than she, more or less tied to a chair, and they'd always been such friends. How she loved these two children. She thought of Thea, fighting her battle with courage and love. And Tim, so like Edward to look at, so eager and always ready to lend an arm to the weak. If only he would come. Hermione sighed and wiped away her tears with her handkerchief. She must not weaken now. Tim would be home in a few weeks to help her. She began to deal the cards with trembling hands. Thea should be here at any moment and must find nothing amiss. The wind screamed louder and somewhere a door banged loudly. The parrot shifted uneasily in his cage and Hermione paused, holding the cards, listening. At that moment, the pain struck again with such force that she half rose with a cry, clutching with one hand at her stomach and the other at the table that rocked for a moment and then fell as she did, the tiny cards scattering like leaves. And Edward was there, coming towards her, young and strong, arms outstretched, and she cried out his name, ‘Edward', as she died.

Tim fell to his knees beside her, gathering her up, and looked up to see Thea standing beside him, her eyes wide with shock.

‘Get the doctor, quickly!' he cried. ‘Ask Mrs Gilchrist. Quick!'

Thea fled away and Tim continued to crouch, holding the frail old body close, touching the tears which were still drying on the withered cheeks and, at last, gently closing the eyes which, for that brief second, had blazed at him with hope and love and joy.

 

Nine

 

FOR THEA THE ARRIVAL
of Percy was the turning point. It was as if the presence of the parrot, talking now in G.A.'s voice, now in Uncle Edward's, gave her new courage and strength to cope not only with George but with Hermione's death. She would never forget that terrible scene. She and Tim had arrived together at Broadhayes and she had followed him into the library expecting G.A. to be overjoyed by the surprise of seeing her beloved grandson unexpectedly. Instead, that cry of ‘Edward' and the terrible sight of the overturned card table before Tim had gathered his grandmother up in his arms and told Thea to get the doctor. By the time he arrived she was dead. He had questioned them closely and a sobbing Mrs Gilchrist had told him that Hermione had complained a few times of little pains in the abdomen but that she had refused to seek advice. The doctor knew Hermione far too well to expect that Mrs Gilchrist would have been able to bully her into any course of action she didn't wish to take and comforted her by saying that he suspected it would have done no good even if she had.

‘Sounds like an aortic aneurysm,' he told them. ‘The lining of the main blood vessel weakens, bit like a balloon, and one day it bursts. If I'm right, she's been living on a time bomb. We couldn't have operated, she was too old. It would have meant a graft. It's a major operation and I doubt she would have survived it. Just as well she didn't know she had it, at least she wasn't worrying about it. I'm afraid there'll have to be a post-mortem to make sure I'm right.'

If Tim had not been there Thea would have been lost indeed, and
his presence continued to be comforting during the following days. However, close though they had been throughout their young lives, even Tim could not take G.A.'s place. Thea was quite unable to take him into her confidence and she felt as if she had lost not only the person who had taken over the role—as far as that is ever possible—of her mother but also a confidante and ally. Tim and Mrs Gilchrist were at one in insisting that she should take Percy home with her. Hearing him talk in G.A.'s voice was alternately harrowing and comforting, but he seemed contented enough to be with her and she spent as much time with him as possible. He and the puppy, Jessie, would stare at each other for ages. Jessie would bow down on her front paws, stern in the air, and give a short high yelp, inviting him to play. After a while he learned to velp back at her whereupon she would sit down at once, ears cocked, gazing at him in amazement. Maggie Tabb, the Cornish girl who came in to help Thea with the spring-cleaning, was enchanted by the odd couple and begged for some of Thea's drawings of them to take home to her small boy, Wayne. The next morning she told Thea that he'd demanded a story to go with the drawings and Thea settled down and wrote a charming tale which delighted Wayne and prompted Maggie to say that she should put it in a book.

After she had gone, Thea sat at the kitchen table thinking very hard. Why shouldn't she write some stories about Percy and illustrate them? After all, she'd always enjoyed writing children's stories. Why not ones about Percy? It would be fun to do and it would help her through these days of waiting and wondering. George had been almost his old self since G.A.'s death. He had comforted and consoled her in her grief but there was still a barrier and she knew that without G.A. to support her it would be much harder to go on without some sort of confrontation. Some instinct warned her against this, told her to hold on a little longer. Hermione's death, however, had brought home to her a realisation of the waste of time and life this muddle was creating and she felt unwilling to let it drag on much longer. Nevertheless, Thea had always trusted her instincts and it occurred to her
that if she had something of her own to be thinking about and planning for, maybe she could manage. She decided against telling George about her new idea. It would be her thing, her project, and if anything came of it she would enjoy surprising him. It would be worth waiting for, worth working for.

George, meanwhile, was praying that his appointment to HMS
Warrior
at Northwood, which was the headquarters of the Commanderin-Chief and Fleet Headquarters, was going to be the answer to his problems. He was delighted to be leaving the somewhat pedestrian planning job at Whitehall and looked forward to being back in the more operational, day-to-day life where there was a proper Mess and he could live in. Most officers, having done their obligatory month of living in, couldn't wait to move out and start claiming lodging allowance but George could see many advantages to living in. The most obvious was that Felicity would not be able to turn up on the doorstep. He would hardly need to go outside the base all week and with luck he would be able to avoid her completely. True, Thea wouldn't be able to come to stay but, what with Percy and the puppy, Thea's visits these days were very few and far between. George didn't realise that this was mainly because Thea instinctively preferred to fight the battle on her own territory and Percy and Jessie had given her the excuse to do just that. He missed her midweek visits but latterly he had been so terrified that Felicity might turn up whilst Thea was there that he had been a bundle of nerves, quite unable to enjoy her company. It was almost a relief when she said that she couldn't come. For George, the appointment was the chance he had been looking for, the turning point, and he decided to keep his head down and wait to see what happened.

Tim, on the other hand, had no intention of being so patient. Waiting to see what might turn up was not the way he worked. Tim was like Rabbit. He never let things come to him but always went and fetched them. Hermione's letter had shown that she was very worried about Thea and George and that she expected him to do something about it. She had left him Broadhayes and all that she had;
sorting out Thea was the least he could do to repay her. Apart from that, he was extraordinarily fond of Thea, looking upon her as a younger sister and feeling a sense of responsibility for her. Unfortunately, Hermione's letter had not been too clear for she was intending to tell him the details when he arrived back from America. However, what was clear was that this Felicity Mainwaring was the fly in the ointment and needed to be dealt with, and Tim already had an idea how this might be achieved.

When the funeral was over he went back to London to visit David Porteous, the artist he had met in America with his daughter Miranda, in the hopes of furthering this plan. To Thea he said not a word. He wanted to see the situation for himself, to meet George and to determine just how the land lay. Tim wanted to settle at Broadhayes, run his computer business from home and marry Miranda. However, he felt honour-bound to deal with Thea's problem before he could enter fully into his inheritance and he had no intention of wasting time.

For Felicity, life had narrowed into one thought: to win George back. So obsessional had she become that she couldn't see that her behaviour was much more likely to make George hate her than love her. She lived for her trips to London, planning them in advance, deciding what to wear and inventing series of conversations which she and George would have when she arrived. Back at home she spent hours walking from room to room, staring out of windows, willing the time to pass until the next meeting. She managed to block out the fact that George dreaded the sight of her, convinced that time would bring him to his senses and they would be together again. If only he would touch her. She was sure that once she broke down the physical barrier he would respond to her as he had done in the past. She steadfastly ignored the truth that a man with a twenty-five-year-old wife would be unlikely to prefer a forty-five-year-old mistress. She stuck rigidly to her diets, made regular visits to the hairdresser and clung to the belief that an experienced older woman must be more exciting than an inexperienced young one. In the early spring, she sensed a slight relaxing in George's attitude and began to hope anew. Since he
hadn't mentioned his new appointment to her, she had no idea that his move to Northwood was offering him a way out and, naturally, he didn't tell her. So she waited, feeding herself on tiny scraps of comfort, encouraging hope out of words and gestures that she magnified and distorted so as to build up nourishment out of a meagre allowance of the last remains of George's affection for her. So Felicity had survived the winter. Now it seemed that George was beginning to respond and Felicity prepared to redouble her efforts which would bring her the results for which she had schemed and planned for so long.

 

IT WAS FOLLY WHO
found Thea the agent through whom she hoped to sell her work. Her illustrated stories of Percy the Parrot were coming on apace and Thea had found great satisfaction and comfort in having something positive to be working at and thinking about. She had let Polly into the secret and Polly had been rendered speechless as she looked at the sketches and read the stories.

‘They're delightful,' she said at last. ‘Absolutely charming. Honestly, Thea, I wouldn't have believed it. These drawings are so professional. We must get someone to look at them. I'm sure they'll be an absolute hit.'

‘D'you really think so?'

‘I certainly do. Paul may know someone.'

‘Paul? Surely it's not his sort of thing at all?'

‘No, no. But he's written lots of papers and a book and heaven knows what, and they all have to be published. He can probably tell us where to start. He may be a boring old turd but he does have occasional uses.'

‘He isn't at all boring. When I met him at PI ugh's christening I thought he was very nice. You can't fool us any more now that we've met him.'

‘Well, naturally he was on his best behaviour in front of Harriet and Michael. Me being godmother to Flugh and so on. You saw his social side. Tremendous effort for him, poor old duck. He had to go to
bed for a week afterwards to recover. He starts getting withdrawal symptoms if he can't pore over a microscope at least once an hour.'

‘You're hopeless. I thought he was very nice.'

Polly made a face as if execrating Thea's taste and returned to the stories. ‘Leave it to me,' she said. ‘Honestly. These are terrific.'

A few weeks later she telephoned. ‘Thea? Listen. I've found you an agent. I've had a quick chat and described your stuff and he wants to talk to you.'

Thea clutched the receiver. ‘Gosh,' she said at last. ‘Oh, Polly.'

‘I know. Exciting, isn't it? I've got his telephone number here somewhere. Hang on a minute.' Thea could hear paper being shuffled. ‘Jesus!'

Polly's voice changed and Thea held her breath in suspense for a moment.

‘What is it?'

‘My dear.' Polly's voice was awestruck. ‘There's a mother blackbird sitting on the fence stuffing the largest worm you ever saw down the throat of one of its young. It's quite incredible.'

‘Polly!'

‘Yes. Sorry. Quite distracting. Got a pen? Here it is.' She read the name and number twice. ‘OK? Get on to him at once. He's expecting a call. Let me know how it goes. ‘Bye.'

It had gone better than Thea had dared to hope and she had sent off some work for the agent, Marcus Willby, to see. He was very impressed and started to approach publishers. Thea waited to hear the result; hoping for a miracle, her heart jumped whenever the telephone rang or the postman called. However, when the telephone rang a few weeks after George had gone to Northwood, it was not Marcus but Felicity.

‘Hello, Thea,' she said. ‘Long time no see. How's everything?'

‘Fine.' Thea pulled herself together quickly. ‘We're fine.'

‘Good. Just thought I'd see how you were. I must pop over some time. I've been so busy. Still. I expect you're glad not to be having to trek up and down to London any more. That awful flat. And that bed!
I've never slept in anything so uncomfortable. Anyway. Glad you're OK. When I've got a moment we'll get together. I'll telephone. See you.'

The line went dead and after a moment Thea replaced the receiver. Felicity's words seemed to go on ringing in her brain. ‘And that bed! . . . I've never slept in anything so uncomfortable . . . And that bed! . . . ' So it was true. What she had held out against, never really allowed herself to believe, was true. She sat on at the table, quite still, until she realised that she was deadly cold. Rising stiffly, she crossed to the Rayburn and pushed the kettle on to the hotplate. She folded her arms across her breast as though shielding herself from a blow and looked at Percy.

‘I always trusted him, you see,' she said. ‘Somehow I just couldn't believe he would. I trusted him.'

Percy listened to her consideringly and then spoke in Hermione's voice. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them.'

Thea's face crumpled and she covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh, G.A.,' she whispered. ‘How could you die when I needed you?' And she burst into tears.