The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (28 page)

‘Would you like some tea?’ As soon as she said it Lucy wanted to clout herself for stupidity, but she couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. ‘How did you know where I was?’

Gemma gazed at her and it was frost.

‘Mother asked around Father’s acquaintances. We heard from Constable Keane that he’d seen you. You have to come back to Newcastle,’ she said, obviously well-rehearsed. ‘Father has lost his mind, Guy is dying and we have no money. Mother made me come here to ask you to help us.’

Lucy had a wild desire to laugh.

‘Why should I do that?’ she said.

‘Because of how badly you behaved. You owe your family and Mother would consider forgiving you for what you did – for how you broke up the family and ruined my wedding day.’

‘Why can’t you work?’

‘I have two small children.’

‘I’m sure that Mother could look after them.’

‘She is too busy looking after Guy and Father and the thing is—’ Gemma faltered, ‘we are pretending Father is well because the business must not go down. It’s all we have. I knew you would have succeeded, that you could run it for us.’

‘Actually it takes a lot longer than you think to become a solicitor. I had no money so I’m not one.’

Gemma glanced about the office.

‘Then how did you get this?’

‘Because I have a law degree and know more than most secretaries and Mr Bainbridge is the only solicitor here so I help him.’

‘Father needs help. He can go to the office some days and the rest of the time you could run the place. He would still be seen as the solicitor and as himself – so many people believe in him, you see.’

There was silence and Lucy felt like a cock crowing, but that didn’t feel good.

‘My husband is dying,’ her sister said. ‘The cancer eats at his stomach.’

There was a horrid and wonderful part of Lucy which wanted to shout with glee, and yet she couldn’t.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘He’s in a lot of pain. He has to have morphine constantly. The doctor thinks he will live for just a few more weeks and then I will be widowed with two children, a father who cannot work and a mother who is grief-stricken.’

Lucy wanted to say that no matter how fast Guy was dying
she hoped he burned in hell, the evil bastard. She had told herself that nobody was evil, that people were a product of their upbringing and that everyone could be excused or understood for whatever they did, but she could not forget and could not forgive what Guy had done to her. Whatever his powerless background, and she didn’t know whether it was right, he should not have treated her as he had done. Even if his mother had done something awful to him so that he had learned to hate women, to set one sister against another.

‘Has your marriage been good?’ she said.

Gemma frowned.

‘He is the best of men,’ she said. She stood so tall that Lucy was in no doubt that if she had been there for long enough she would have hit the ceiling with the top of her stupid head. ‘You must help us. There is nobody else or I would not have come.’

‘So you don’t like me, you don’t want me, but you want me to make money and save the family,’ Lucy said.

‘I have little choice. I have two children, an old man, an old woman and a dying husband. What kind of a woman are you?’

‘I thought you knew. Graceless and lying and not your friend.’

Gemma stood and didn’t say anything.

‘I knew how it would be. Mother made me come. I didn’t want to. You were always so difficult, you thought you were so clever.’

‘I am,’ Lucy said.

It was a comment she remembered afterwards, mentally
beating herself over the head for it. ‘I don’t have to come back to Newcastle. I can send you money.’

‘It’s not just money we need.’

‘Really?’ Lucy stared at her as she might a stranger.

‘We need you to come home,’ Gemma said.

She turned and walked out. Lucy was thrilled. She had finally bettered her family, she had avenged herself – she was glad, she didn’t care. She looked around her office at the fire, at the sweetly red-and-orange flame in the grate, and she knew that her office here was what she had always wanted, was what she had really strived for. She could not claim that the loss had been so huge.

*

Lucy half thought that Gemma would come again to the office, but she didn’t. Lucy tried hard to put from her mind the way her sister had come to her, knowing how much Gemma despised her – it must have been unbearably difficult – but she could not live with it.

Her family would not go from her mind. Night after night she dreamed of them loving and hating her, she dreamed of violence and blood and screaming and shouting and all the things that families were. She dreamed of comfort and laughter and her warm childhood.

She waited. She told herself that it didn’t matter, she didn’t care, that it was over, they had put her out. She made herself think of what it had been like when they did not want her any more, and for a day or two she held herself from them. Yet she thought of them so much that it was like a new grief.

She went to Edgar and he listened to her halting explanation.
She so obviously didn’t say what she meant and he frowned.

‘I can’t spare you,’ he said.

‘They’re my family.’

‘Your brother-in-law must have family and they must have means, surely.’

‘Apparently not.’

Edgar hesitated and then he looked at her and said, ‘I don’t want to be without you, you have become so valuable to me. I was going to say to you that I would take you on properly so that in time you would be a solicitor. You have a great deal of ability and I must say a woman’s touch is welcome here. You’ve boosted our client list. Mr Clarence respects you a great deal and so do I.’

Lucy felt excited, exhilarated that he should even think of her.

‘So consider carefully. I’m sure your family is important to you, but so is this.’

Lucy thought her problem was solved. She went out of Edgar’s office, worked hard all that day and discovered in the early evening as she walked back to the tower house that she was unhappy with her decision.

She stopped just before she reached it and realized how much this place had come to mean to her. Miss Slater was playing a hymn on the old piano they had insisted on bringing with them. The sitting-room windows would be open to the sunshine and she recognized the lovely Charles Wesley hymn, ‘Love Divine All Loves Excelling’, which people tended to play at weddings. The piano sounded tinny and yet she thought the whole thing was so beautiful. The idea
that she had to leave here and go back to Newcastle and give up the life she had made for herself was the last thing she wanted to do.

She had wanted her parents and Gemma to be wrong, she had wanted them to miss her, she had wanted to be asked back. But not in these circumstances.

When she reached the house, stepping over Frederick in the shade of the front garden, she found that Joe was not there, only the two Misses Slaters.

It was late when Joe came home from work that evening. She put a plate of food in front of him, but it was only afterwards when they were sitting drinking tea together at the table and she could hear the two Misses Slaters talking softly in the sitting room that she told him about her day. Joe sat back and regarded her attentively as he always did.

‘And Edgar thinks I shouldn’t go,’ she finished.

‘Do they have any source of income at all?’ he said.

‘I don’t know what happened to Guy’s business. He seemed so prosperous. But Edgar is going to offer me to be an articled clerk and after that a possible partnership. If I go to Newcastle he may not.’

Joe drank some more of his tea and then said, ‘Can you stay in Durham and let your family eat grass from the back garden, while the brother-in-law you hate dies in a nasty way and your father gets worse?’

Lucy got up and walked about for five minutes or so until she could try to say something reasonable.

‘I don’t hate Guy,’ she said.

‘You loathe him,’ Joe said softly.

‘I don’t want to go back there,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘I just said.’

‘No, you didn’t. You’ve never explained what you were doing here and every time I’ve tried to talk to you about it you’ve sort of curled away.’ He looked patiently at her. ‘That day in Gateshead you hated being there because your parents’ house was across the river. You never say anything about them or about why you left.’

‘It’s none of anybody else’s business,’ she said.

‘No, of course it isn’t, but you’re making it my business,’ Joe said. ‘Do you hate him because he took your sister from you?’

She stared at him.

‘Would that be a reason to hate anybody?’

‘It might if you had been very close and were no longer.’

‘If that had been all.’ She hadn’t realized she was gritting her teeth. She wanted to tell Joe what had happened, but she couldn’t get the words out. Somehow she could not trust him because he was a man and he would fail to understand so she just kept still until he broke the silence.

‘Why don’t you go and then if things get too bad you can come back here?’

‘Edgar says he won’t keep my job for me.’

‘Doesn’t it ever occur to you that Edgar likes you, that he wants you there for more than because he thinks you’ll make a good solicitor?’

She looked up, her threatening tears forgotten.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘Why is that silly?’ Joe was giving her such a straight look that she blushed.

‘Because I’m not—’ She couldn’t go on. ‘I don’t want to go back there,’ she managed, and then she cried.

Joe got up and went to her and put an arm around her, which made her cry more.

‘You don’t have to stay, just see how you can help. Then you can come back. It’s only Newcastle, it isn’t the far ends of the earth. Edgar’s not going to give your job away. He’d have to employ another solicitor for the work you do. Give him a chance and give your family a chance, eh? With a bit of luck Guy will die tomorrow and he’ll have left your sister a fortune – and you can come back to Durham.’

She thumped him and Joe moved away.

*

Lucy didn’t want to tell Edgar that she was going back to Newcastle, but it had to be done. She stood in his office while Edgar wandered around like a farmer at a country fair.

He heard her story and then he stopped his meandering and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear you say it.’

Edgar put his hands deep into his pockets and then took them back out.

‘I understand that you feel you must go, but you must also understand that I need somebody to fill your role. I can’t keep it open for you if you aren’t here, and you won’t become a solicitor without it.’

Lucy was shaking.

‘They’re all the family I have.’

He shot her a quick look, almost affectionate, and she remembered what Joe had said.

‘Are they? What about Emily and me? What about the
Misses Slaters and Joe Hardy and your other …’ Edgar smiled here, indulging her, ‘… adopted family, the Formbys?’

She wanted to cry then because he was making her face almost impossible choices.

Lucy left his office, but when she tried to get out of the front door she was so blinded by tears that she couldn’t find the doorknob. Silently she called Edgar names, but it was only because she would have burst into tears if she didn’t.

*

She hated telling the Misses Slaters that she was leaving; they looked so distressed.

‘You have lots to do,’ Lucy said lamely, as though that had any significance here.

‘We do, now that the typewriting classes are going so well, like a proper business. And we have at least learned the elements of cooking through you, dear Lucy, and the concerts are a joy – but we don’t want you to leave. You are the nearest to a daughter that we will ever have and we will miss you so much.’

‘You have Mr Hardy and Mrs Formby and Tilda and Clay and—’

*

Lucy went to the Formby house to say goodbye, but she also went to the shop and hugged Tilda before she left. Over and over each of them said the same things and she wished she were the kind of person who could let her family shoulder the burdens which were none of her doing. But in the end she was not.

Gemma answered the door. Lucy had thought when she came home that they might embrace, but all Gemma did was hold open the door. Lucy had an impression of herself as a budgerigar, going willingly into its cage because it couldn’t think what else might save it. She almost heard the clanging of the cage door behind her.

Inside she could smell medication – the stink of hygiene, bleach and pills together – and, the desperate longing which women had to help men survive. It was like a hospital. She felt sorry for the house.

She did not know where to go. She had thought that Gemma and Guy had a house of their own, but it seemed that this was not so. Gemma moved in front of her and led the way into the kitchen. There her mother was busy as Lucy remembered her, at the table, kneading bread which she had always done when things were difficult. She didn’t look up. Neither did her father who sat over the fire.

Gemma said awkwardly, ‘Lucy’s here, Mother.’

‘Aye, I can see.’

Lucy wished that she had been courageous and could have challenged her mother, but she didn’t even want to. Her
father seemed unaware of her presence. She turned away in time to see two very small children behind her in the hall. Gemma had evidently left them to answer the door.

‘This is your nephew, Lionel, and your niece, Phyllis. They’re twins.’

Oh God, Lucy thought, what dreadful names. She had not met many small children and dismissed them as boring. They seemed so tiny and needy. She found out that night that they didn’t seem to sleep, that they cried all the time. She was astonished at how much attention they had to have.

Gemma sent her up to see Guy then. She remembered it as her parents’ bedroom. The bed was all she saw, Guy a shrivelled thing beneath the covers. His breathing was shallow and each breath seemed hard.

‘He wasn’t like this until the last few days,’ Gemma said. ‘He was fine earlier.’ But her tone was uncertain.