Eloise (13 page)

Two people stood in the slate-flagged hall, a fire burning even though it was a warm day. One of them was the boy. The dazzlingly beautiful adolescent I had seen on my way back up from the beach, and again in the churchyard.

The other was Juliana. She stepped forward, surprised but obviously delighted by my arrival. She hugged and kissed me and then waved towards the boy.

‘Cathy, I want you to meet Arthur. My great-grandson.’

Chris came in a taxi. He’d phoned, and told me to wait at the door. He didn’t see, didn’t
want
to see, Juliana or Arthur. He bundled me into my Beetle, took the driving seat, said he didn’t want to hear even a word until later, and got us home in time to eat fish and chips with Eve and Tom. We were all quiet, Chris and I burdened with more knowledge than we wanted. The children, too, were muted, obviously sensing something they weren’t part of. After supper, they went next door to play pool with our neighbour’s children.

Chris and I faced each other across the kitchen table.

‘Do you want to talk first, or shall I?’

That was Chris, supremely rational as always. I looked at him. I was so floored by what I had learned at Roseland Farm that I didn’t know how to begin. I shook my head.

‘You start,’ I said. ‘And by the way, I know you tried to drug me so I’d be out of the way when you went off to have your talk with Ted.’

Chris flushed and had the grace to look ashamed.

‘Yes, I’m sorry, Cath. I just knew I had to talk to him straight, man to man. And that couldn’t happen if you were there. And besides, you really did need to rest.’

‘No, I didn’t. Don’t pretend you tried to give me sleeping pills because it was for my own good. If you wanted to speak to Ted alone, why on earth didn’t you just tell me?’

He looked down and muttered, ‘I thought you’d refuse to let me. You’re so obsessed with Eloise, I thought you’d insist on being there.’

‘Jesus, Chris. That’s a pathetic excuse. You drugged me because I was an inconvenient barrier to something you needed to say to Ted. I can’t forgive that. If you ever try to do that again, I’ll divorce you. I really will. I can’t believe that you, of all people, my husband for God’s sake, would exploit your medical knowledge to gag your wife so she wouldn’t interfere in a fucking conversation with a mutual friend.’

Chris was obviously embarrassed, but defiant.

‘Look, Cathy, the conversation I had with Ted today was important. And I couldn’t have had it if you’d been there.’

‘Oh, right. Fine. Then next time just get me sectioned if I’m interfering in your precious life. Or maybe you can silence me for good. After all, you’ve got access to all the right drugs. You could slip me an overdose, and no one would ever know. “Just Chris’s mad wife, on the old pills again, taken too many. It’s been on the cards for ages, ever since her breakdown”.’

Once again, Chris was furious with me.

‘Grow up, will you? You aren’t well. You
do
need medication, and you’re far more vulnerable than you want to believe. I’m looking after you, for Christ’s sake. You’re my wife, and my absolute responsibility. You did need to rest this afternoon and I’m sorry that I used that opportunity to talk to Ted when I thought you were asleep. It seemed like a useful thing to do. He said things … well, he said things about him and Eloise that he would never have talked about if you’d been there. Because you and Ellie were so close.’

‘What did he say?’ Eagerness to know won over my anger.

Chris leaned back into his chair, took a mouthful of wine from his glass, and said:

‘Cathy, he’s not a nice man. Not the man I thought he was. At all.’

I looked at him. I know this, I thought. This is what it’s all about; this is why Eloise is so desperate to reach me.

Don’t trust a word he says.
Her words rang in my head.

Surely she meant Ted?

But Chris had drugged me. So which one of them was treacherous?

Chris looked down at the table.

‘First of all, Cath, I think he married Eloise for her money.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous,’ I said, despite knowing that it was something Juliana had believed when he and Eloise first got together. ‘Of course he didn’t.’

‘Why do you find it so hard to believe?’ Chris asked. ‘Think about it, Cath. A dirt poor artist marries a Cornish heiress and we all think it’s a love match?’

‘But we did think it was a love match, didn’t we? You remember the way he looked at her? And she was very beaut iful. Why wouldn’t he love her?’

‘He said their marriage was dreadful. He implied she was unfaithful.’

‘Eloise? No! She wasn’t like that and, anyway, I would have known.’

‘Would you, Cathy? I don’t think she told you everything.’

That was certainly true. I stood up.

‘Let’s go for a walk. Just down to the beach. I need to clear my head.’

We walked slowly down the lane, between the little whitewashed cottages and the ancient stone walls with their wild flowers bursting from every crack and crevice. We’d once seen a dormouse here, tiny and bold as it perched on a rock, the sweetest sight I’d ever seen. And at night there were badgers and foxes scurrying furtively around the hedgerows, burrowing and searching for food. During the day though, the most constant presence was the sea, glimpsed blue and golden over every gate, every stile, its waves murmuring softly, beckoning you down to the cove.

‘Did Ted tell you anything about Arthur?’ I asked.

Chris shook his head. ‘No. Who’s Arthur?’

‘Eloise’s grandson,’ I replied.

Chris stopped. He turned to look at me, his face mildly amused, full of disbelief.

‘You’re being ridiculous. Her grandson? For God’s sake, she was only in her forties when she died. What on earth are you talking about?’

We sat down at one of the picnic benches at the café on the beach. The café was closed, the beach deserted. I reached forward and took Chris’s hands over the table.

‘Listen to me, Chris. This is important, really important.
Eloise has been trying to tell me this story for so long but it was Juliana who actually fleshed it out for me today. It’s a long story, but what she told me is that Eloise had a baby when she was only thirteen.’

‘What?’ Chris interrupted. ‘That’s absurd. Surely we’d have known about something as … as huge as that.’

‘Please be quiet, Chris, and hear me out. Hardly anyone else knew. It was all kept very hush-hush, for obvious reasons. Let me tell you now … ’

From the time Eloise was small, a lonely only child, she was educated at a private school in Truro, quite a way west from her home. She was a weekly boarder, coming back to Roseland Hall every Friday afternoon. At that point, her parents still lived in the huge family mansion; but they had no male heir. There was money, but not enough to maintain the immaculate house and parkland indefinitely and Charles refused to countenance opening the estate to the public.

‘Ridiculous idea,’ he snorted whenever Juliana suggested that could be the way forward. ‘We’re not exhibits in a zoo. I don’t want the hoi polloi and their muddy boots all over the Long Gallery, or trampling through my shrubberies. My father would have had a fit.’

Charles was as snobbish as Juliana was pragmatic. She knew he would never agree, but she did tell him that the most practical
option was to hand over the big house and estate to the National Trust. They would still have a considerable fortune, enough to ensure they and Eloise and any children she might have would never have to worry about money. They could live in the pretty old farmhouse in the grounds, which was more than adequate to house their small family in plenty of style, and they would no longer have to endure the suffocating responsibilities of running an enormous stately home that ate money.

But Charles hated the idea of giving up the house that was his heritage. He would have hung onto Roseland indefinitely, however much money it haemorrhaged, feeling that it was the emblem of his dignity, his worth as a man. In fact, he was less worried about money than the fact that he had no son to inherit the estate. He felt ashamed about that, obsessed with the fear that his Cornish peers regarded him as inadequate and emasculated.

It was while Juliana was trying to cope with her husband’s emotional crisis that her loving maternal eye became diverted from her only child. But Eloise, encouraged by her mother since she was young to keep a diary, recorded the events of the traumatic summer she turned thirteen. And then, years later after her father died, she allowed her mother to read it. And when she married Ted, she left the diary with her mother, making Juliana promise to keep it secret, and above
all to ensure that her new husband would never find it.

Now, after Arthur’s miraculous appearance in her life, Juliana had at last decided to share Eloise’s record of that momentous summer with me. And because she knew so much of what her daughter had gone through at such a vulnerable age, her knowledge, combined with Eloise’s abandoned, love-ridden rambling notes, took me straight back into a world in which I had never known my friend; my dear, lovely girl whose life was now so cloudy, so lost to me.

In her neat, childish hand, Eloise wrote of how lonely she felt. She was shy at her boarding school and found it difficult to fit in with the other girls, burying herself in the roles she won so easily in the dramatic society. Back home every weekend, she was mostly on her own. Isolated, footsteps echoing round the vast empty rooms of the mansion which had once been so vibrant, so full of glamorous social gatherings, dances, musical evenings, dinner parties resplendent with the finest silver and most precious porcelain, she withdrew. She spent her weekends in her bedroom, reluctantly joining her parents for meals during which her father was silent, his eyes dull, eating little but drinking glass after glass of wine. And after dinner, when he went alone to his study, Eloise would watch from the stairs as the butler, Eric, brought him a decanter of whisky. Charles would not emerge from his lair, no matter how long she stayed up.
Twice, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and walked down to the study, standing nervously for long minutes before she hesitantly opened the door. Both times, she saw her father stretched out on the sofa beside the dying fire, unconscious and snoring, the whisky decanter empty on the walnut table by his side.

The long summer holidays started on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. Both her parents were far too engrossed in their marital problems to pay much attention to their lonely little daughter. And so, as she wrote so wistfully in her diary, she whiled away her days wandering around the lovely parkland, daydreaming and occasionally settling into the little gazebo to read her favourite books,
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
.

And she fell more and more into the company of the estate manager’s son, Jack.

Like Eloise, Jack was an only child, just a couple of years older than she. Although he went to the village school, and often had friends round to play football in his parents’ large garden, he was a wistful boy, dreamy, with huge blue eyes and a thatch of golden hair. A Cornish child, brought up on the beach, who could surf and swim like a fish. Eloise had always been in awe of Jack. He could do anything; he made campfires with kindling and cooked sausages for his friends
as dusk fell. He knew his way around the strange and mysterious places on Bodmin Moor, telling hair-raising stories to his mates about the ghosts and boggarts that haunted the misty wild stretches around Jamaica Inn. He claimed he had seen apparitions, grey and terrifying, howling in terrible pain among the ancient stone circles that dotted the moor, souls tormented by unresolved passions, by desperate injustices they could not put right.

No wonder Eloise fell in love with him, this beautiful Cornish boy, blond as the hay and brown as a nut, with his fearless tales of those murdered innocents now doomed to roam the blasted heaths of Bodmin until they found release.

All that summer, she wrote, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Shy and tongue-tied when she was among his friends, she longed to be alone with him. When she was, she told him about her favourite books. He hadn’t read them, but watched her with grave attention as she talked about Jane Eyre and her mysterious intimations of the madwoman in the attic, the final flight from her beloved Mr Rochester, and the supernatural voice she heard across the wilderness of the Yorkshire Moors, summoning her back to her blinded lover’s side.

And she told him about Cathy and Heathcliff, their dark, doomed love affair at Wuthering Heights, and how their passion outlived Cathy’s death.

And he watched her, lying next to her in the fragrant grass, his head propped up on his hands.

Eloise’s thirteenth birthday fell on the thirteenth of July. Her mother, distracted as usual by her husband’s moods, asked Ellie how she wanted to celebrate.

‘Do you want a party, dear? We could ask some of your school friends. And have some lovely party games, perhaps with a magician or something?’

Eloise shuddered. She had hardly any friends, certainly didn’t want them to come home and watch her father drink. And party games? How horrible was that? It all seemed deeply unattractive. So she demurred. Said she really didn’t want a fuss. Would be happy just to celebrate at home with her parents, a birthday cake and maybe a ride on her beloved pony, Daisy.