But she had been honest when she’d told her mother that she thought Ellis seemed nice. There again, maybe she’d only said what she had because instinctively she wanted to please her mother and make her happy.
From the front of the car, Martha said, ‘I’m going to give Auntie Geraldine another call when we get home.’
‘Why?’
This was from Tom.
Switching her gaze from the passing hedgerows that were now giving way to suburban housing, Willow shifted position so she could see Tom’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. She wanted to try and read his expression.
‘Because I guarantee Geraldine will be able to shed some light on our mysterious Ellis Ashton,’ answered Martha. ‘He and Mum said that he was at Geraldine and Brian’s wedding, so why have we never heard of him before? And why have we never heard his name mentioned by either Mum or her oldest friend who both, it turns out, knew Ellis at university?’
‘There must be plenty of people they knew back then whose names have never cropped up in conversation with you and Willow,’ said Tom.
It sounded perfectly plausible to Willow. But not to Martha.
‘It seems to me that I’m the only one really looking out for Mum,’ she asserted. ‘And I stand by what I said earlier, that I strongly believe we’re not being told the whole story. Call it a sixth sense if you like, but I swear they both became very shifty when I pressed the point on how well they knew each other. Did you see the way Mum looked at Ellis when he started to answer my question? It instantly made him go quiet.’
Privately Willow thought anyone, even the most innocent of people, would look shifty if they had Martha cross-examining them. ‘I think we should give Ellis a chance to prove himself,’ she suggested. ‘What do you think, Tom?’ Willow knew she was putting him on the spot,but if anyone could rein in Martha it would be Tom.
‘Perhaps a quick word with Geraldine might be a good idea,’ he said diplomatically. ‘I can’t see that it would do any harm.’
So long as Mum didn’t hear about it, thought Willow.
‘What if he asks Mum to marry him? Have you thought what that would mean for us?’
Willow inwardly groaned. Would Martha ever be quiet? ‘That we’d have a stepfather?’ she offered with impulsive flippancy.
‘You’d be happy with that, would you? Happy too for him to have Anchor House if anything happened to Mum?’
‘Hey, let’s not get carried away, Martha,’ said Tom. ‘I can’t see Naomi rushing into marriage. She’s much too sensible for that.’
There was a huff of exhalation from the front passenger seat, which Willow interpreted as dissatisfaction at Tom’s reasonableness. And very likely the idea that Mum was much too sensible to consider marrying Ellis.
After a lengthy silence, and just as Willow was closing her eyes to sleep, Martha said, ‘I wish now that I’d acted sooner. If I’d suggested that Mum sell Anchor House to move nearer us immediately after Dad died, or during those months of the coronavirus, she would never have met Ellis again.’
Willow hadn’t ever believed that Martha could persuade their mother to fall in step with her plans to move from Anchor House, not yet at any rate. But now that Willow was in the position she was –nine weeks peaky– she could see the attraction, if she did decide to keep the baby, of having Mum closer to hand.
‘You never know,’ said Tom, ‘if your mother and Ellis do plan on making things more permanent, they might want to live somewhere new for them both so that Ellis isn’t living in your father’s shadow.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Willow. ‘And if that’s the case, maybe then we could encourage them to move nearer the pair of us. Somewhere in between us for instance.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Martha.
‘I’m just trying to see things with a fresh perspective,’ Willow said lightly, noticing that her hand had once again strayed unconsciously to rest against her stomach.
She noticed too at the very same moment that Tom was looking at her in the rear-view mirror. Immediately she lowered her hand to her lap in case he read anything into the gesture and guessed her secret. If he did, he would be sure to tell Martha and then heaven only knew what would happen.
Chapter Nineteen
Unable to sleep that night, her mind restless with replaying all the excruciatingly awkward moments experienced that day – yesterday, as it was now – with Tom and the girls, Naomi was downstairs waiting for the kettle to boil. It was gone three o’clock, another hour or so and the dawn chorus would start up.
She made herself a mug of tea and opening the cupboard where she kept the tin of chocolate biscuits, she took one out. Then another for good measure. She was in need of something comfortingly indulgent, and calories, as everyone knew, as she liked to joke, didn’t count when consumed in the night or in the garden. She sat in the old rocking chair to one side of the Aga – the chair which had belonged to her grandmother, then her mother, and now her. Who, she wondered, of her two daughters would have it when the time came? Would Martha feel the chair should be hers because she was the eldest, but would Willow actually want it for sentimental reasons as opposed to a sense of entitlement?
With sudden wistfulness, she thought of all those times she had nursed the girls as newborns in this chair, then gently rocked them off to sleep. Maybe because she was the second child, Willow had been the easiest of the two to feed and settle.She never woke up crochety or cried with angry, face-crunching intent. She was, as the visiting midwife once said, a dream of a baby. A dream of a baby who grew into a sunny-natured dreamer who was happy to drift along like a feather carried on the breeze.
While Colin had despaired of what he considered to be Willow’s airy-fairy-ness and lack of direction, Naomi had instead cherished what she regarded as their youngest daughter’s innate goodness. But she wondered now if that had been a mistake on her part. Had she shielded Willow too much from the real world, made her incapable of fighting for her place in it? There had been something slightly off-key about Willow yesterday. She had seemed tired and occasionally absent from the conversation around the table. More airy-fairy-ness, Colin would have said with a roll of his eyes.
In contrast to her sister’s sweet nature as a baby, Martha had emerged from the womb with her fists flailing, ready to take on the world. Yet as Martha grew older, and for all her toughness and outward confidence, Naomi glimpsed a softer and more vulnerable child doing her best not to lose face or ever show weakness. From such a young age, and with Colin championing her, Martha had set her sights so high. But had that also been a mistake? Had it put too much pressure on her?
