What a treat it was turning into, having Max, his music, his attitude and his parties as a full-time neighbour. If it weren’t for the fact that he got on so well with Tierney and Zav, and was actually quite good with Peter, and indeed had moments when he could still make her laugh, Lainey knew she’d be buying him a ticket back to Bangkok.
‘Lainey, Lainey, where are you? I can’t find her.’
‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Lainey soothed, going to assist her father in from the garden. ‘She’s only gone to the shops.’
Peter Winlock’s watery blue eyes hunted the kitchen before coming to rest on Stacy first, then his daughter. ‘Who?’ he asked worriedly.
Lainey smiled gently. ‘Stacy’s here,’ she told him. ‘You remember Stacy, don’t you? She’s the one who drove into the back of your car the day she passed her driving test.’
Stacy’s eyes closed in mock dismay. ‘Hi, Peter,’ she said, getting up to give him a hug. ‘You’re looking a bit dapper today in your old panama.’
Peter chuckled delightedly. ‘The ladies always like this one,’ he said, tapping his hat. He peered more closely into Stacy’s eyes. ‘I remember you,’ he said, seeming thrilled. ‘You drove into the back of my car.’
Stacy couldn’t help but laugh. ‘And I’m never going to live it down, am I?’ she responded, without adding
even though it happened over fifteen years ago
.
‘Cup of tea, Dad?’ Lainey offered, going to reheat the kettle.
‘Oh yes, I like tea,’ he assured her, as though he rarely received such a generous offer. ‘Do you like tea?’ he asked Stacy.
Stacy would have answered, had Peter’s attention not already begun drifting to whatever else he was seeing in his tragically muddled mind.
‘Where is she, Lainey?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I can’t find her.’
‘It’s OK, Dad, she’s just gone to the shops,’ Lainey assured him. ‘She’ll be back soon.’ This was the best – the only – way, she’d discovered, to handle her father’s never-ending search for her mother. Let him think she’d be home soon, and within a few minutes he’d have forgotten he was even looking for her. Of course it would come back to him at some point, but that was OK, they’d go through the charade again and would probably keep going through it day after day, week after week, until he was too addled even to think it any more.
Alzheimer’s was so cruel, so random in its choice of victims, and showed no mercy for them either. It wasn’t only memory it destroyed, it was dignity too, and her father had always been such a dignified man, and powerful in his field. By the time he’d sold his publishing house to one of the multinationals some twelve years ago, the company had been one of the mostly highly regarded in London. Peter Winlock’s name was still spoken of with respect and affection, and because Lainey adored him and always had, it was no hardship for her to take care of him. She even cleaned him up after incontinent moments, bathed him and soothed away his tears as he cried with shame.
It had been Tom’s idea to buy this house – Bannerleigh Cross – from her parents. It was where she and her sisters had grown up, and there was barely a square inch of it that didn’t feel special to Lainey. The stories her father had told her of its history had brought it to life in a way that had made her young heart long to know more about the colourful and romantic characters who’d once filled the rooms with laughter, tears, music and strife. Aristocrats and actors; politicians, doctors, adventurers – the tales had turned out to be as tall as the manor’s elegant chimneys, but as a child she had never been able to get enough of them. Even now a part of her still believed in them, and on dark nights, if Tom was away and she was missing him, or her mother, she could almost feel the house and its ghostly occupants breathing its quiet energy back into her.
It was just over five years ago that they’d taken ownership of the place. By then her mother had been diagnosed with the cancer that had finally claimed her, and it had become clear that Peter couldn’t cope on his own. The house was too big, and he was already absent-minded enough to be causing concern. By taking it over, Tom had reasoned, her parents would be able to stay in their beloved home for the rest of their lives, albeit in the smaller part of it that Tom and Lainey commissioned to be built on. If they did end up having to go into care at a later date, they’d have more than enough capital to make sure it was of the highest quality. Lainey and Tom would also have the rural idyll they’d both long dreamed of owning, and the children would be far better off growing up in the country, they’d felt, than they would in town.
It was this kind of generosity that told Lainey, without words, how much her husband loved her, and if the gesture could have been any greater she was at a loss to know how. He even helped with her father, taking over when she was numbed by tiredness, and should Peter happen to stumble into Tom’s study while Tom was writing he was always given a far warmer welcome than any other unthinking intruder. The rest of the family didn’t dare to disturb Tom while he was at work, not even for minor emergencies such as broken arms or concussed heads. It was always Lainey who went hurtling off to school – or the hospital – to fetch the accident victim, and only later would Tom be told the story of what he’d missed.
It was amazing, she’d always thought, how easily he could turn the children’s mishaps into giant adventures and end up putting a smile back on their faces. They adored him, as he did them.
He hadn’t become particularly involved in the remodelling of Bannerleigh Cross; he’d simply left it to Lainey to make sure he had a place to work that was spacious and light with direct access to the garden, but not a part of the garden that was used by anyone who might disturb him. Even the gardener was encouraged to mow the lawn or strim the hedges on the days Tom wasn’t around. So Tom’s study was now where the old drawing room and library used to be, at the front of the dual-aspect manor with views across the sloping meadow that tipped into a bubbling stream at the edge of the three-acre estate. Since the lane leading from the village up to the house took a sweeping curve to the right when it became their beech-lined drive, the daily comings and goings took place out of his sight, mainly because Lainey had erected a sign directing everyone to the kitchen door, instead of the front.
The kitchen itself, which sprawled across most of the back of the house with several double French windows opening on to the patio, a hopeful-looking knot garden and the fields beyond, was still the true heart of the place, though it was twice its former size after absorbing the old back parlour, butler’s pantry and garden room into its embrace. (All original features such as cornicing, ceiling roses and fireplaces had been lovingly restored and replaced; even the old flagstones were back where they belonged.) These days this bustling centre of activity was far more than a kitchen with a glossy black Aga at one end and vast inglenook fireplace at the other; it was a place to eat, watch TV, do homework, catch up on emails, stare at nothing if you were Peter, and occasionally relax on huge sofas around a roaring log fire with friends, glasses of wine and opinions that needed to be shared if you were Tom and Lainey.
Lainey never forgot how lucky she was to be here. In spite of the difficulties she had experienced with her mother, she harboured a sense of belonging here in the way that grass belonged to fields and stars belonged to night skies. Her father had always understood that and so did Tom, though what her sisters, her mother’s favourites, thought, was never entirely clear, since they saw so little of them now.
‘You’re a good girl,’ Peter said, as Stacy sat him into his comfy armchair at the window end of the battered old dining table, ‘You drove your car into mine the other day, didn’t you?’
Stacy feigned a collapse. ‘And there was me hoping you wouldn’t notice,’ she groaned.
He patted her hand affectionately. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t tell Sandra,’ he assured her, using the very words he had at the time it had happened. Everyone had been nervous of Sandra’s fiery temper, with the exception of Peter, who’d always seemed more enchanted than fazed by her operatic tantrums.
‘Where’s Sherman, Dad?’ Lainey asked, referring to his faithful old golden Lab. As if she needed to ask. There he was, lying where he always lay when he brought Peter back from a walk, just outside the door waiting for permission to come in. It was Sandra who’d taught him to wait. Left to her he’d probably never have been allowed into the house at all. However, this was one of the few issues about which Peter had put his foot down. He loved his dog possibly as much as he loved his children, and as far as he was concerned Sherman had as much right to sit in front of the fire, or belly-flop on to the floor in the kitchen, as the rest of them. These days Sherman, who was getting on himself at thirteen, even slept on a rug at the foot of Peter’s bed, and should Peter wake up in the night and seem not to know where he was, or if he got into some kind of difficulty anywhere, Sherman would bark to raise the alarm. This was partly why Lainey and Tom had recently moved Peter back into the manor from the annexe, to make sure they always heard the dog. Now Peter’s private living space, with its own shower room, cosy sitting area, fireplace, TV and beloved antique-book collection, was on the first floor, securely sandwiched between Tom and Lainey’s master suite and the main family bathroom.
The children’s rooms were on the second floor. Max, in the two-bedroom annexe, had turned it into a tip by day and party central by night. He invariably found his way into the manor at mealtimes, or for booze when his supplies ran out, or just to get under everyone’s skin, with outstanding results.
‘There you are, old boy,’ Lainey was saying to Sherman as she ushered him in through the door. ‘You come and lie down with Peter now. I expect you’re both ready for a nap.’
Taking his biscuit to Peter’s chair, Sherman slumped down next to his master and started to chew in a languidly satisfied sort of way. Peter wasn’t watching him; his vague, rheumy eyes were gazing out of the window, though his hand automatically dropped towards the dog’s head.
‘You’re a little miracle, Sherman,’ Stacy declared, going to fill his drink bowl. And he was, because no one had ever trained him to bring Peter back from his walks, or to get him safely across a road, or to alert the family if Peter was distressed, he simply seemed to know what needed to be done and got on with it. ‘I wish the male human species was a bit more like you,’ she lamented, as Lainey answered the phone for the fourth time since Stacy had arrived. ‘Trusting, loving and endlessly faithful.’
Smiling, as Peter turned to look at her, she gave him a wink and drew up a chair to keep him company while Lainey chatted to Hugo, Tom’s publicist. Those calls usually went on for some time, since Tom was in high demand for various media or charitable events, even when he didn’t have a book coming out. Apart from being a full-on housewife and mother, it was Lainey’s job, for which she was very well paid, to organise Tom’s diary in a way that never took him away from the house when he wanted to write. Those dates were always carefully worked out between them to take into account his annual deadline, the research trips that needed to be made, and the occasional visits to the set of the latest TV adaptation. Being a writer herself, Stacy was as admiring of Tom’s success as she was, in some ways, indebted to it, since her regular column in one of the Sunday supplements was known to be loosely based on the hectic Hollingsworth family. Unfortunately the column had recently been axed due to a takeover at the paper, so, being freelance, she no longer had a regular source of income.
Though Stacy and Lainey had known each other since school, during their time at uni they’d drifted apart, until Lainey, in her capacity as junior publicist at Winlock’s, had rung Stacy, who was just starting out on a local paper, to offer her an interview with the new le Carré, as Tom was being billed back then. The piece Stacy had concocted had not only turned into her very first double-page spread, it had gained her the interest of one of the nationals who had later offered her a job.
Since that time they’d barely gone a day without speaking. They’d been bridesmaids at each other’s weddings; had often holidayed together with their husbands and later Lainey and Tom’s children – Max too, when Emma had felt inclined to let him come. Stacy had even been present at Zav’s birth, though only because the baby had come early and Tom hadn’t made it back from the States in time. Over the years they’d become closer to each other than they were to their respective sisters. In fact, Stacy often claimed that she’d never have survived the break-up of her marriage without Lainey’s unflinching support. During that time she’d spent far more time at Bannerleigh Cross than she had at her own home, the other side of the village, mainly because Derek had refused to move out. He’d even thought it was OK to carry on his affair under the same roof, and Pauline, the little tart with no heart, had been happy to oblige.
When he’d heard what was happening Tom had informed Derek, a senior correspondent with CNN, that a man who behaved with no respect for his wife deserved no respect from others, so he needn’t bother coming to Bannerleigh Cross again. Derek had moved out of the village soon after that, but then the house had to be sold so the proceeds could be divided, and thanks to a massive slump in the market he and Stacy had ended up with less than they’d paid for it. He’d also gone off with ten of the twenty thousand pounds Stacy had inherited from her gran, who had never been able to stand him, plus half the proceeds from the sale of her gran’s cottage. That, more than anything else, was why she detested him with such a passion now. He needn’t have taken his share of her inheritance, and he knew it.
These days she was renting the flat above her cousin’s gift and accessory shop in Stroud, while Derek and Pauline, a Texan model with more teeth than hair, and more front covers than brain cells, were living it up on New York’s Upper East Side.
At least her best friend was less than five miles from Stroud, and now Martin had appeared, the owner of a small but thriving nursery just off the A46, life was finally looking up again. She felt sure Lainey and Tom were going to love him when she got round to arranging a meeting. Certainly Lainey would, because Lainey generally loved everyone, and Tom probably would too, because as far as Stacy could make out there was nothing not to love.