Her mother drew up in front of Uncle Walter’s big house in Freshfield and Auntie Joan came to the door to let them in. She was one of those people who was always bubbling with good humour.
‘Hello, Chloe.’ She threw her arms round her and pulled her in. ‘Happy birthday, Helen.’
Chloe considered Auntie Joan to be one of those women who was still genuinely pretty at fifty. Marigold said disparagingly that it was all done with make-up and that she dyed her hair palest blonde when really it should be grey.
Uncle Walter met them in the hall. He was a big man with a head of thick white hair, pink cheeks and a cherubic face. He gathered Chloe up as usual in one of his big bear hugs, but tonight he wasn’t his smiling self.
‘Sorry, Helen,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘We’ve no birthday present for you. I took Joan to the theatre last night and while we were out, thieves broke in and took it.’
‘Mum’s present?’ Chloe wanted to laugh.
‘It was a book, Helen. Joan had it wrapped up ready for you.’
‘It was that new novel by Rosamund Rogerson,’ Joan said. ‘I’ll buy another copy next time I go into town.’
‘You shouldn’t be telling Mum what it was,’ Chloe giggled.
‘Oh dear! I’m not myself today,’ Auntie Joan said. ‘They took the family silver too.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes, we think they broke in to get that.’
‘You had such a lot, and it was valuable, wasn’t it?’
‘Walter’s father left it to him. He was interested in antique silver and collected it all his life.’
‘And now it’s gone,’ Walter sighed sadly.
‘Did they take anything else?’ Helen asked.
‘Some money, but the police think they were targeting the silver.’
‘Don’t the rich suffer?’ Marigold said sourly. ‘It’s a comfort to know thieves are unlikely to target us.’
‘The best we can say,’ Joan added, ‘is that it was insured, so we’ll get something back.’
‘Doesn’t the sideboard look bare without it?’ Walter sighed. ‘I’d like to buy more, but good-quality silver isn’t easy to find. And I’m afraid I don’t have my father’s knowledge. He was never happier than when he was visiting antique shops or grand houses when they were selling off good silver.’
‘It’s been a hard day,’ Joan said. ‘The police were here for ages. But it’s not the end of the world, and we aren’t going to let it spoil your birthday dinner. Come on, Walter, what about the drinks? Gran, you’ll have sherry, will you?’
Rex went home to his comfortless bachelor flat and grilled a pork chop for his supper. Afterwards he made himself a pot of tea, ate Chloe’s cake and gave himself up to daydreaming about her.
Helen had confided how difficult Chloe had been when they’d first come to Liverpool, and that she was missing her father and also her friends in London. Rex was no stranger to bereavement and knew it could change everything for family members. He’d been bereaved twice, and both times it had been traumatic. His mother had died while he was still a child. Then only a few months before the Redwoods arrived, he’d lost Sylvia, his wife of two years. They’d been visiting her parents, who kept a hotel on Lake Windermere. Almost every time they went there, they’d gone rowing on the lake, but this time they’d been run down by a speedboat. Neither of them could swim and he’d been unable to help her. She’d drowned together with their unborn child.
After Sylvia’s sudden death, he was floundering so badly he thought he’d never recover. Nothing had been further from his mind than that he should fall in love with Chloe. He didn’t know how it had come about. Over the last year or so, he’d come to accept that Sylvia was lost to him for ever and that if he wanted a wife he must find somebody new. He had in mind a well-balanced woman like Sylvia, grown up and with a mind of her own.
But it was the contract he’d signed with Helen, the garden, and the support and companionship he’d found in her and Chloe that had eventually turned his life round. He’d wanted to do the same for them.
He’d watched Chloe grow up, and it had been like tending a rare plant that had eventually produced one magnificent flower. She was still more girl than woman, but already Rex knew he wanted no other. He loved her and always would.
In those early days when he’d been working in their garden, he’d occasionally seen her come rushing out, angry and rebellious. He pretended not to notice her agitation and tear-stained face and asked her to help with whatever he was doing. A gardening job pulling up weeds seemed to help calm her.
At other times he’d see her come out to cut a lettuce or a cabbage for the table, or even late on a winter’s afternoon with a saucepan to cut sprouts for their supper. It seemed she was interested in growing vegetables, perhaps because her mother preferred flowers.
‘I’d like to have a vegetable patch of my own,’ Chloe had said one day. He’d started her on radishes and sugar peas, which Helen called mangetout, so she’d have something to eat quickly. The sugar peas produced a bumper crop and Chloe had been able to brag that she’d planted them and weeded them and put in the sticks to help them grow up off the ground. They’d proved to be a huge success and she’d planted them every year since.
He saw Chloe as another teenager as unhappy as he’d been. Helen was focused on her own loss and didn’t seem to see Chloe’s needs. He’d grown to love Chloe without even realising it was happening.
He thought she’d desperately needed a confidant. While they’d bedded out seedlings of lettuce and cabbage, she’d told him of her agony on joining a school where friendships and loyalties had been formed in the months before she’d got there. She’d explained her difficulties with classwork when the curriculum had changed.
‘I’m left out of everything. I never quite know what I’m meant to be doing. It confuses me, makes me look a fool.’
‘That’s the last thing you are, Chloe.’
‘I want to do the right thing, I want to join in and be one of them, but somehow I can’t.’
‘Just keep on trying. The teenage years can be troubled.’
‘Were yours? Were you unhappy when you were my age?’
‘Yes, I was, but for a different reason.’
‘You didn’t lose your dad or get moved from one end of the country to the other?’ The intense gaze of her lavender-coloured eyes had challenged him.
‘No, I lost my mother.’
‘Gosh, that’s worse. How old were you then?’
‘Ten.’
‘That’s awful.’
It was not Rex’s way to talk about his own difficulties. He’d let it be known generally that Horace Kenwright, the owner of Kenwright’s Garden Centre, was his father, but that wasn’t strictly true. Rex was the eldest son of Laura Kenwright, née Harrington, born before she met and married Horace.
Rex remembered the time when he and his mother had been everything to each other. She’d taken him in her arms to say, ‘I’m going to get married. Horace Kenwright will be my husband and your father and we both need him.’
But Rex had resented their new home and the way Horace became the centre of their life. He’d been five when his mother married and he’d started school a week later. He’d had to share his mother’s attention and felt pushed out. Over the years that followed, he was aware that Horace found fault with everything he did and carped at his mother. He knew she was unhappy and never allowed to forget her misdemeanour. Horace had adopted him legally and given him his name, but he’d given him precious little else and certainly no love.
Before long, Rex had a half-brother called Simon and felt his mother had even less time for him, though he knew she loved him and did her best to stand between him and his stepfather. When Laura died giving birth to her third child, Gerald, Rex took it very hard.
In later years, he came to understand that in exchange for marrying his mother and adopting him, Harrington money had been forthcoming to set up the garden business and thus support them.
Rex had had an unhappy childhood. He felt Horace very much favoured his half-brothers; they could do no wrong. While his mother was alive, she’d protected him and been very supportive, but once she’d gone, Rex became the butt of his father’s ill humour.
Horace praised Simon and Gerald and sent them to private schools, whilst telling Rex he was an incompetent fool who could not compete with them.
For a time, his Harrington relatives kept in touch with birthday and Christmas gifts, but he rarely saw them. Eventually, there was only his grandfather left, and he was an invalid living in a nursing home.
As a child, Rex had spent his free time making himself useful in the family business, befriending his father’s employees and learning from them. He felt he’d grown up without a place in the family, and when the time came for him to leave school, his father had refused to take him into the business.
He’d found himself a job working for the council in their parks and gardens department, and as soon as he could, he’d left home. He was twenty-one when he received a letter from the Harringtons’ solicitor telling him that his grandfather had died and that he was the main beneficiary in his will. That changed Rex’s life; he knew now what he wanted to do. He enrolled at a horticultural college.
There he met Sylvia, and for a time his star was rising. He decided it would do him no good to resent the Kenwrights, and tried not to feel alienated. His stepfather was still running the business; he’d taken both Simon and Gerald into it, and it was thriving as never before.
He couldn’t say all that to thirteen-year-old Chloe. It was too painful to him and he doubted she’d understand, but he told her enough of it to develop a rapport with her.
Helen noticed that Chloe was to be found increasingly often in the garden, chatting to Rex. The vegetable patch grew larger. Chloe wanted fruit bushes, and together they chose and planted blackcurrants and gooseberries and strawberries. Helen too was keen on fruit. Rex took them both to the garden centre at the right time and they bought apple trees and a Victoria plum, a greengage and a damson tree.
In recent years they’d all enjoyed the fresh fruit and Helen had said, ‘You’re very good for Chloe. She’s lost her father, but you’re a great father figure for her.’
That made him catch his breath. It wasn’t how he saw himself. He hoped Chloe didn’t see him in that light, but he doubted she saw him as a prospective husband. The age difference was too great.
One afternoon, Rex was emptying the pond in the lower part of the garden. This had been a rather boggy area, but with a little drainage in the surrounding land he’d achieved a natural pond. Helen had wanted water lilies in it, and though he had a few flowers floating on the water now, the water had grown muddy again.
Today he’d brought some frogspawn, as the tadpoles would eat the algae that was discolouring the water. Emptying and cleaning out the pond was the sort of job Chloe loved. He’d told her he was going to do it. She’d come rushing home from school to shed her shoes and socks on the bank, and still wearing the rest of her school uniform, waded in to join him. He saw immediately that she was upset.
‘I hate school,’ she told him angrily. ‘I loathe all the girls there and they don’t like me.’
‘Has something happened?’ he asked cautiously.
‘They hid my gym bag from me and I got into trouble for that, and then I came bottom of the form in a biology test.’
‘I’m sorry to hear you have problems at school.’
Chloe sniffed and started pulling out pond weeds. ‘I’d rather leave school and help you all day,’ she told him. She was sliding about in the mud.
‘That’s nice to know, Chloe, but you’ll have a problem with your mum too if you wallow in all this mud. Shouldn’t you go and change?’
She burst into tears at that, so he led her up the bank and sat down on the grass beside her. ‘It’s not just that, is it?’
‘It’s everything,’ she wept. ‘I’m a wicked person, that’s why everybody hates me.’
‘I don’t hate you, and I don’t think you’re at all wicked. What makes you say that?’
She lifted her hand from her face and he saw her eyes were great pools of misery. ‘You don’t know how bad I am.’
‘Go on then, tell me.’
‘I killed my father.’
‘What? That’s not what your mother says.’
‘She’s told you about it?’
‘Yes. Chloe, she blames herself for your father’s death.’
‘She blames me, it was my fault. I was big-headed and thought I could climb too.’ She started to tell him how she’d slipped away from her mother when she wasn’t watching, had gone after her father and caused the accident.
‘An accident is an accident. It doesn’t mean anyone has to take the blame.’
‘If I’d stayed with Mum, it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Yes, you made a mistake, but your father wanted to take you with him, and your mum stopped him doing that. She was afraid for you because they were going to do a harder climb. Had she let you go with the climbers, your father would have made sure you were safe, and it would never have happened.’
Chloe sat beside him sniffing but saying nothing.
‘And what about your dad? He fastened you into his safety harness and that saved your life. Your mum says that if only he’d stayed in his harness and just hung on to you, nobody would have fallen. You all made mistakes. But your dad wouldn’t want you and your mum to be unhappy, would he?’
‘We can’t help it. We want him back. It’s no good saying we must forget what happened; we can’t.’
‘You’ll never forget it, Chloe, it’s changed your life. What you must try to do is to put it behind you and move on.’
‘I don’t know whether we can.’
‘I want you to try. Promise me you will?’
He’d treated her as the lost girl she was and he thought she’d responded.
For Chloe, the feeling of personal guilt would not go away, though she’d tried to do what Rex had suggested. She couldn’t get away from the fact that if only she’d stayed with Mum that day, Dad would still be with them. She’d never climbed since, never been near Capel Curig and never wanted to.
She’d grown up feeling lost and mixed up and as though she’d never recovered from her father’s death. She knew she disappointed her mother because she’d never shone in the classroom after that.