It seemed strange for this fluttery girl that Diane had met only yesterday to refer to Gareth as ‘uncle’. ‘He’ll mend. And your mum?’
‘The same.’ Tamzin didn’t move from just inside the door. ‘The collapsed lung’s scary because she smokes way too much. But the doctors say there’s nothing to stop her recovering.’ She was quiet but not timid. Both smile and eyes were reminiscent of her father, except for her personal elements of trouble and need.
In the new reality that Diane had been tossed into last night, Tamzin was her niece by marriage. Gareth’s other niece and nephews were a part of Diane’s life, normal, boisterous, sometimes sullen, sometimes marvellous, teenagers or children. The offspring of his brothers. The cousins of her child. She was a part of their family and they were a part of hers, she knew their birthdays and whether they were taking exams this year. Tamzin was related to her in exactly the same degree as they were, as Ivan’s son, George – Gorgeous George as Bryony called him – who’d arrived at the house last week to show off that he was allowed to drive his mother’s car. A visit he’d cut short abruptly as he rediscovered how much he missed Bryony.
James was quiet – probably frozen with horror, seeing her in the daylight with her piggy cried-out eyes and a robe that had been a cheap buy ten years ago from a market stall. She’d never got around to making a replacement for the thin, shiny garment that had once been a pretty forest green but was muddy now with years of washing.
Pulling the dressing gown tightly closed as she belatedly remembered the nightdress beneath, once white but now ivory with age, she felt a flush of indignation. It was no sin not to have money! Gareth’s wages didn’t go far when he so often felt the need to help his brothers, family being family and blood being thicker than water. As their 1930s’ house had run into the major maintenance issues of a new roof and damp proofing over the years they’d had to extend and increase the mortgage periodically to cope. Money was always spoken for. Always.
Bryony had been a delicate child, plagued by asthma, bronchitis and tonsillitis. Her sickliness had been the reason they’d never had another baby and the reason that Diane had never quite got around to formal employment, even as Bryony grew up and, to an extent, out of her childhood maladies. Diane had made what money she could from her sewing, tailoring blouses and embroidering skirts for other people, wondering whether she ought to embark upon a midlife reinvention, perhaps to emerge at the end as a post- office counter-clerk with a salary, sick pay and a pension. But it was so difficult without a second vehicle. Lack of transport was a serious omission in Purtenon St. Paul, threaded as it was like a bead on the long string of Fenland lanes. To get a job she needed a car. To get a car she needed a job. ‘It’s time I dressed,’ she said, suddenly.
Tamzin moved immediately towards the door.
James put a reassuring arm across his daughter’s shoulders. ‘We only came to bring the car. No doubt we’ll come across each other at the hospital. They’re being moved to the Ackerman about three this afternoon.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. I had a phone call.’ Some admin person with a practised coojustto confirm for Mrs Jenner that the Ackerman Hospitalwereexpecting Mr Jenner, and his roomwasready and the ambulance arranged.
‘Call me if you need anything,’ said James, as he turned for the door.
‘Interesting, isn’t she?’ asked Tamzin, as they drove away in the Lexus.
James flicked her a glance. He had never quite got used to the ghost that his daughter had become over the past couple of years, often silent, always sad. Words like ‘interesting’ from her were as rare as a heap of food on her plate. ‘If you like a woman with a tongue like a hedge cutter.’
Tamzin giggled. ‘She has not! You’re just peed because she doesn’t follow your orders.’
James let that one go. ‘So why’s she interesting?’
‘Because she’s been kept secret, I suppose.’ Tamzin screwed up her face. ‘Why would Uncle Gareth do that? Why would he live in such a teeny, ordinary house? Why didn’t Diane know about the cottage? Or the money? Why didn’t she know about any of us? Maybe it’s us that Uncle Gareth kept secret, not her?’ As if the prospect was too much for her she leaned her temple against the door and closed her eyes, signalling that she no longer wanted to talk.
‘Both,’ James answered, anyway. ‘And the underlying reasons behind that will probably prove interesting, too.’
He lapsed into silence as the big vehicle eased along the lanes. Diane certainly was ‘interesting’. So resilient. Yet vulnerable, the way that she’d curved into his arms, her hair brushing his hand, her body quivering as she’d fought back her tears.
The way that they’d spoken to one another, for ten seconds, as if they’d known each other forever.
And although she’d cried, although she’d accepted his shoulder just for a few moments, he’d had the feeling that here, for once, was a woman who didn’t need his strength.
She could be strong. Sensible. Competent. Motivated. He thought that Diane Jenner could be anything she wanted to be.
‘She was embarrassed!’ Tamzin’s eyes flew open to examine the idea. ‘We caught her in her nightie and she didn’t like it. That’s why she sounded stressy and obviously wanted us to go. It was probably you, Dad, because you’re a man.’
James let his mind conjure up Diane’s robe doing less to cover her scantily clad breasts and more to gather them up nicely. That had been interesting, too. ‘Probably,’ he agreed mildly, quite happy to take the blame for Diane’s poor welcome.
He didn’t distress his fragile daughter by airing his opinion that any awareness of James’s masculinity that Diane might have experienced had been minor – compared to her vulnerability. Because, last night, she’d been caught without her armour.
After the Norths left, Diane showered and, to make up for being caught in ancient night clothes, changed into one of her favourite outfits, a white blouse criss-crossed irregularly by salmon-pink ribbon, and black jeans with a helix of the same salmon-pink chain stitch winding evenly up the left leg; clothes that made her feel less the ragged relation.
She picked up the car keys and felt a chink in her gloom. She was going to drive the car.
Although she’d passed her test at seventeen and, in fact, it had been through her snazzy British Racing Green Mini Cooper that she’d met Gareth just over twenty-five years ago, when he had stopped his scooter to help her change a flat, she now scarcely ever got into the driving seat. In fact, she’d driven this car precisely once.
If Diane wanted to leave the village when Gareth was at work she strode up the lane and across the bridge to catch one of the buses that trundled three times a week a torturous route between the hedges and into Peterborough or, in almost exactly the other direction, Holbeach. If she went out in the evening it was always to deliver a garment in the village or to accompany Gareth to visit his family, when, traditional man that he was, Gareth would drive.
Isolation was a feature of living in Purtenon St. Paul but Gareth had been intent on this rural idyll for them, as if living even on the edges of a town or city would automatically condemn his family to the grotty streets of his childhood. He wasn’t swayed by his brothers’ families surviving happily in modern housing on perfectly pleasant estates with schools, shops, cinemas and McDonalds within walking distance.
But, like any idyll, the rural existence had its drawbacks – Diane was driven bonkers by the seclusion. Bryony used to escape by going home after school with friends in Holbeach, Gareth fetching her at the end of the evening. Diane had no such convenient friends. In fact, living Gareth’s idyll, working from home, not being mobile … it was difficult to make friends at all.
It wasn’t even cheap to live in Purtenon St. Paul. The nearest supermarket was half-an-hour away by car and the village shop had everything from Christmas trees to carbolic – everything except bargains.
