Читать книгу A Sleep and A Forgetting - Gregory Hall - Страница 8

She examined the room yet again, checking to see whether she had, despite her scrupulous preparations, missed anything vital. The brass-framed bed, with its new gleaming white duvet faced the two narrow rear windows. In the alcove between the chimney breast and the back wall, she had placed a small Edwardian mahogany writing table, recently rescued from a roadside skip and carefully restored. On the other side was a narrow wardrobe, the door of which had a pleasant marquetry pattern. By the bed was a small bookshelf with a lamp and a digital clock-radio. On the far side, near the door, was a chest of drawers, also in mahogany.

The spare room had always been just that. Spare in use and spare in furnishing. The only person to sleep in it – indeed, the only person who had ever been invited to the house – had been Flora, and she had stayed only a handful of times, the occasions on which Bill had been persuaded to do a weekend’s child-care. The last time had been about six months before. They had eaten out, gone to the theatre, the cinema, and in between they had slummed about the house, feeling gloriously lazy, and no shadow had come between them.

She had tried to say no when Bill called to ask her if Charlotte could stay the weekend. He had to go to a conference in Brighton, which he couldn’t get out of as he was reading a paper. Charlotte’s best friend Alice was away on a family visit to her grandmother. So, in the circumstances, there wasn’t any alternative. Catriona had felt bullied into agreeing, angry with herself at her weakness in submitting to the bullying, and guilty at her uncharitable attitude.

In two hours, Charlotte would arrive. Bill was dropping her off with her stuff on his way. The idea of her niece staying in her house, even if it was only for the weekend, the thought of a child’s unpredictable personality disrupting the carefully assembled structure of her life, was making her feel nervous, almost to the point of being physically sick.

At nearly thirteen years old, Charlotte was not quite what you could any longer call a child, exactly. She had her mother’s blonde colouring and willowy figure, but her intellectual development had from her earliest years been overseen by her father. From the beginning, he taught her to think mathematically. Even as a toddler, she had been encouraged to count the things which made up her world. ‘How many ducks on the village pond today, Charlotte?’ ‘Fifteen, Daddy.’ A pause and a wrinkling of his brow while he checked. ‘I make it fourteen.’ A delighted chuckle. ‘There’s one gone under the water, Daddy.’

He taught her figures to remember and disgorge as a kind of party game. She could recite the metric equivalents of imperial weights and measures, and vice versa. He taught her the times tables, then mental arithmetic. At the age of four, she was a computer adept. Not surprisingly, she was already a star at her school, Stag End Comprehensive in Cirencester, where the formidable Linda Rice, a trustee of the Prince’s Trust and the government’s favourite educationist – after a stint in which she had turned round the ailing Waterbury School in Oxfordshire – had recently become Head.

How could this prodigious child of the future and her spinster aunt, lover of old books and dead poets, ever hope to reach any common understanding? Even when her niece was small, Catriona had never found it easy to communicate with her.

‘Auntie Cat, are you a witch?’ she had asked at six.

Bill had chuckled. Flora had been shocked and tried to hush her daughter into silence.

Catriona had been amused. ‘Why do you think I’m a witch?’

‘Because you always wear black.’

This was not invariably the case, but often enough to prove that the child had good powers of observation. She had thought of replying in the words of Masha in The Seagull that she was in mourning for her life, which was as good a reason as any, but it would have been unfair to load that on her niece. Instead she had said simply, ‘Because I’m a black Cat,’ thinking that for one who never made jokes it was quite a good one. But instead, Charlotte had stared at her with eyes round with suspicion and fear.

The bell rang. Catriona, engaged in the last-minute preparations of their meal, hurriedly wiped her hands on a paper towel and ran out of the kitchen to open the front door. Charlotte stood on the step. She wore blue jeans and a white top tightly stretched over the buds of her breasts.

‘Hello! Come in!’

She stretched out her arms to give the girl a hug, but there was no mistaking that the thin shoulders remained stiff and unresponsive.

Bill followed from the car, carrying a bulging nylon sports hold-all.

Charlotte pulled out of the embrace and stood in the hall, staring up and around at the pictures and framed prints, tapping her fingers to some kind of internal rhythm on the newel post, her white-trainer-shod foot idly kicking the bottom step of the stairs.

‘I’ll show you your room!’

Led by Catriona, the three of them trooped upstairs. Bill dumped the bag on the bed, then went over to one of the windows and stared out, his tall, heavy body partially blocking out the evening sunlight.

‘Hey, Charly, you can see Ally Pally from here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Alexandra Palace. It’s a famous London landmark. Where television started. That should make it appeal. Come and look!’

She clumped to his side. ‘What a sad-looking dump.’

‘Nothing looks interesting to you at the moment, does it?’ her father responded with asperity.

The girl swung back abruptly into the room, glancing around without enthusiasm. ‘Is there a power point?’ she demanded of her aunt.

Catriona did her best to maintain her initial note of bright enthusiasm. ‘Yes, of course! There are doubles on each side of the bed and another here by the fireplace.’

Her niece nodded curtly, then proceeded to unzip the holdall and lug out of it the black rugby-football shape of a portable CD-player. She banged the machine down on the writing table. Catriona tried not to wince as the hard plastic grated on the polished surface.

Charlotte rummaged further in the bag and removed a stack of CDs in shiny plastic cases, the covers of which featured young blonde-haired women, who looked similar and may indeed have been the same person, for all Catriona knew.

These were slammed down by the CD-player with the previous disregard for the french-polishing.

Bill was looking at his watch. ‘I ought to be going. You know what the bloody traffic’s like at this time.’

At the open front door, he bent to give his daughter a peck on the cheek. ‘See you Sunday. Don’t give Catriona any hassle.’ He raised a hand in farewell to his sister-in-law who had hung back by the stairs. ‘Bye, and thanks.’

The girl and the woman, left alone, stared at one another.

‘I expect you’d like to unpack?’

Charlotte consulted the lime-green fashion watch she wore. ‘There’s this programme starting. Where’s the telly?’

‘I don’t have one, I’m afraid.’

The girl’s heavy brows contracted and her face twisted in a look of fury. ‘You haven’t got a telly? I knew you were weird, but not that weird. Why didn’t you say? We could have brought mine.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it.’ It was true. Television didn’t figure in her life. She had a sudden vision of Charlotte’s bedroom in Owlbury, crammed with electronics. She should have thought of it. But would she then have done anything about it? Probably not. ‘You’ll be deprived only for the weekend. And there’s so much else that we can do in London,’ she added, with more than a touch of irritation. She might have had a blank over the wretched television, but she had picked up a copy of Time Out and marked some of the places they might visit together.

‘Such as what? We came here on a trip in the Juniors and it was really boring. Traipsing around museums and going on about history all the time.’

‘I’m sure we can find something to interest you.’ She said this with more conviction than she felt.

‘Oh yeah?’

Catriona decided it was time to assert some kind of authority in her own house. ‘We’ll discuss that later. Supper will be ready in a quarter of an hour. I suggest you go up, sort out your things and wash your hands.’

The girl turned and ran up the stairs. The bedroom door slammed, and after a moment the pounding beat of rock music played at high volume filled the house.

Catriona thought of saying something, thought better of it, sighed and returned to the kitchen. She had the impression that children of her niece’s age lived on hamburgers and chips or similar, but she had no intention of cooking such stuff. Instead, relying on the belief that a growing child would be hungry enough to eat whatever was put before it, she had decided to make the kind of thing she would have eaten if she’d been alone: in this case a bean casserole with rice and green salad.

The food, which smelt delicious, was simmering ready on the hob. She laid the pine table for two, set in the middle a cut-glass vase in which she placed a few stems of early blooming roses from the garden, then called up the stairs.

‘Supper-time, Charlotte!’

Charlotte flopped down on the indicated chair and stared at the table.

‘This is posh.’ She indicated the flowers. ‘These from your boyfriend?’

Catriona smiled, with an effort. ‘No. Only from the garden.’

The girl regarded the plate set before her with an expression of outrage. ‘Yeuch! Christ, you’re a veggie. I might have known. I can’t eat this slop. Isn’t there anything else?’

‘No. I thought you might like it.’

‘Well I don’t. Haven’t you got any real food? I was really fancying a pizza. Haven’t you got one in the freezer?’ Interpreting the look on her aunt’s face, before Catriona could reply, she continued, ‘Yeah, right, of course, you don’t have a freezer. OK, what about a sandwich? You do have some bread and cheese?’

Suppressing her anger, Catriona – whilst Charlotte stood by, offering more sneering criticism: ‘Have you only got that kind of bread? And no cheddar?’ – made her a couple of sandwiches.

The girl ate ravenously and slurped from her glass of orange juice – this was one thing which appeared to be acceptable – whilst opposite her Catriona picked at the cooling mess of beans. She had almost no appetite, but she forced herself to eat. It would be a sign of humiliating weakness for her to reject the meal as well.

As she mechanically forked a few grains of rice into her mouth, she was aware that Charlotte was, in between noisily chewing savagely torn-off mouthfuls of her sandwich, watching her both attentively and speculatively, as if she were waiting for the right moment to ask her something.

Finally, she asked it.

‘Cat, what do you do about sex?’

Her aunt stopped eating, her mouth suddenly dry. As naturally and unhurriedly as she could, she put down her fork and took a sip from the glass of mineral water at her elbow. She thought she had prepared herself for the sex question. But it had arrived in an unexpected and particularly unwelcome form. Charlotte was not asking for information about changes in her body, or whether you could get pregnant from kissing a boy, or other such uncontroversial matters. This charmless, ill-mannered child was asking, in a tone of hardly disguised contempt, about Catriona’s own sex-life.

She temporised, searching for an appropriate, safe, non-committal formula. God, this was what being a parent was like, forever at the inquisitive whim of a junior member of the Gestapo.

‘How do you mean, do about it?’

The girl tossed her dark, greasy hair impatiently. ‘What do you think I mean? You’re not married are you? So, have you got someone regular you have sex with?’

Catriona decided the best tactic was to answer the question exactly in the terms it was put. ‘No, I don’t have anyone I regularly have sex with.’

Charlotte pursed her lips. ‘Then do you have a different man when you feel like it? And how often is that? Every day, every week?’ She paused, her lip curled in a sneer. ‘Every month? Every year?’

To her annoyance, Catriona could not prevent herself from blushing, with both anger and embarrassment. It was clear that this little bitch’s prurient interest would hardly be impressed or satisfied with anything less than a record of constant promiscuity. For a moment she considered lying, then, realising that it could rebound upon her if, as likely, it were retold by Charlotte to all and sundry, she resisted. She started to say, ‘Look, I don’t think you quite understand how adults relate together, I mean …’

Charlotte’s eyes flashed with irritation. ‘I don’t want to know about your stupid relationships. I asked you how often you had sex, got that? How many men? How frequently?’ Again, she paused; again, the sarcastic look appeared. ‘Or perhaps you don’t get it at all? Perhaps no one fancies you. I know Bill doesn’t. So do you have to make do with just playing with yourself? Is that how it is? Sad old auntie Cat wanking herself off in her single bed?’

Suddenly, she’d had enough. She snapped, reverting, in her temper, to playground abuse. ‘Shut your mouth, you nasty little cow! Mind your own bloody business!’

She got up from the table, collected up her plate and scraped the unfinished food into the pedal bin. She yanked open the dishwasher door with unnecessary force, making the dirty crocks inside rattle together, and jammed the plate into one of the racks.

When she turned back into the room, Charlotte had gone, and the music, louder than ever, was booming down the staircase.

‘Charlotte?’ She tapped again lightly on the door.

A muffled voice from within said, ‘Go away!’

‘I think we should talk. I’m making some breakfast. Sausages.’

‘Not stinking veggie sausages?’

‘No, real, one-hundred-per-cent fat, gristle, cereal, monosodium-glutamate and maybe-even-a-little-bit-of-meat sausages.’

‘All right. I’ll be down in ten minutes.’

She looked much younger that morning in her pyjamas – Mickey Mouse patterned, which were totally genuine, she explained, as they’d been bought on a family trip to Disneyland Paris.

‘Mum loathed it, but Bill was like a kid himself. I’ve never seen him like that. Most of the time he’s so uptight about his work and that, but he went on everything. Course, the old dad was still there underneath, ’cos when we were doing Space Mountain, which is a really, really scary ride, he was like, “We’re getting I calculate more than one g here”, while everybody else was screaming their heads off.’

She demolished the plateful of sausages, fried egg and baked beans and tomatoes while she talked.

Catriona had risen early and slipped out to the Asian supermarket at the end of the street. There she had stocked up with the sort of food that Charlotte would eat.

‘That was a great breakfast.’ She paused. ‘I was out of order last night. Sorry.’

‘No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m supposed to be the grown-up. I shouldn’t have said those things. I shouldn’t have got so angry.’

‘I shouldn’t have gone on about, you know.’

‘It isn’t, for me, the sort of thing I can talk about very easily, particularly not to someone I don’t know very well. There are private things which I like to keep private.’

‘Yeah, particularly from some snotty-nosed kid.’

Catriona smiled. ‘That’s not how I think of you. At your age, you’re coping with a lot of growing up at once. It’s painful. And then there’s everything that happened lately on top of that.’

‘But I was still rotten to say those things. Perhaps I’m not a nice person. Perhaps it was because of me that Mum went away. Perhaps I was so awful she couldn’t stand being around me.’

Catriona was on her feet in an instant, rushing to her niece’s side of the table. Crouching down she enveloped the child in a hug, drawing the blonde head against her bosom. ‘No, Charlotte, you mustn’t ever say that. I’m absolutely sure it had nothing at all to do with you. Your mother loved you more than life itself. She would have done anything for you!’

‘Anything but stick around! Anything but want to be with me! She must have hated me underneath, whatever she said, otherwise she would never have left. Now you hate me too. You must do after all those things I said. I didn’t mean to be so nasty.’ She struggled to raise a tearful face. ‘Those things I said, I don’t want you to think I’m a bad girl. We talk about things at school, that’s all. About … our bodies and how they make us feel and what it might be like to …’

‘I know, I know, I understand. Of course, it’s absolutely natural and normal to be curious. I was more upset than I would have been because of how I was feeling about your mother. Both of us are under a lot of pressure. It comes screaming out of us.’

‘She used to get mad at me.’

‘Everyone gets angry sometimes.’

‘Not just angry. Once she said I’d ruined her life. That she hated me.’

There were tears glinting in her eyes as she spoke.

Catriona was astonished. She’d always regarded Flora as the perfect mother, the mother she could never have been: endlessly patient, calm, unfazed by mess or stinks, practical and, more than anything, loving.

‘I’m sure she never meant it Charly. Everyone says things they don’t mean from time to time.’

‘She meant it. I could see it in her eyes. I thought she was going to hurt me. I could see that she thought she was going to hurt me. Then she sort of pulled back.’

‘Why was she so angry, Charly?’

‘It was about the uniform.’

‘What uniform?’

‘Her uniform. From when she was with British Airways. It was about a year ago. We’d been doing some stuff at school about careers. I mentioned that my mum had been an air stewardess and that made the boys start sniggering and going Phwoarr! Though I could see that they were actually a bit impressed. She was out when I got home, so I went into her bedroom and took the uniform out of her wardrobe. Just to look at it. I’d seen it hanging there in a plastic cover. I couldn’t resist putting it on – first the skirt, then the blouse, jacket and hat. They fitted me quite well, because I’m tall for my age. I was prancing about in front of the mirror, feeling quite glam, and thinking of all the exotic places Mum had been to, when she came in. I hadn’t heard the front door, so I was quite surprised. I wasn’t expecting she’d mind, because I used to try on her things all the time. But when she saw me in the uniform she went absolutely ballistic. She practically tore it off me. Like I said, I really thought she was going to hit me. More than that. I thought she was going to murder me.’

The recollection of the incident had made the child go quite pale.

‘That was when she said I’d ruined her life, that she hated me. I could see that she meant it.’

‘Perhaps at the time she did. Having children is a huge event in people’s lives. It changes everything. Perhaps Flora had ambitions that none of us knew anything about. Ambitions for a career in the airline. It wouldn’t have been easy to combine that with being married with a family. When she saw you wearing the uniform, it brought it back to her.’

‘Like I was a sort of symbol of what she had lost?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, I think I can understand it a bit more. So you think she loves me as well?’

‘I’m sure she does.’

‘Have you got the life you want, Cat?’

The question took her unawares. Suddenly it was as if their roles were reversed. The tall, slim, willowy girl-woman was staring at her with her penetrating blue eyes, displaying a calm wisdom beyond her years.

‘I’m not sure anyone gets exactly what they want or expect. But I think I have as much as most people. A job I like. My own house.’ She smiled in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. ‘A wonderful sister and a beautiful, charming, intelligent niece, both of whom I love dearly.’

‘You’re not married, though. And you don’t have children of your own.’

‘I’m only thirty-eight! Not due for the scrap-heap yet.’

‘But you’ve decided not to get married, haven’t you? If you were really wanting to have kids, you’d be working on it now. We did stuff about eggs and that in human biology. But you’ve not even got a boyfriend, have you?’

Catriona started to feel uneasy again. ‘I think I’ve said, Charlotte, that I don’t want to be quizzed on my personal relationships.’

‘Yeah, right, sorry. But I’m not asking in a crude way now. I’m just asking why you don’t want children of your own?’

‘For a start, I’m not in a position to! As you’ve pointed out, I don’t have a man, never mind a husband. Secondly, I don’t think I’d make a very good mother.’

‘I think you would.’

‘It’s generous of you to say that, but I don’t think so. I’m much too selfish. I have my work, and my house. I don’t need anything else.’

‘Your house is amazing. It’s like you’ve thought about every bit of it. The right picture here, the piece of sculpture there. I used to think Mum was house-proud, but with her it was a matter of keeping everything clean and tidy. You’ve put so much of yourself into your house, haven’t you? Maybe that’s why there isn’t much left over.’

‘So what did you like best?’

‘The sloth bears, definitely. They were so cute with their big claws and friendly faces. I would love to have brought one home.’

‘It would fit well in your room, wouldn’t it? And we could let it out in the garden for a run.’

‘And we could feed it on vegetable scraps. We could throw them out from a bucket at meal-times, just as they did today!’

The child’s eyes were bright as she involved herself in the fantasy. The sulky, withdrawn, early teenager had for the moment disappeared, and someone far more unaffected and likeable had taken her place. The zoo, suggested enthusiastically by Charlotte, had been a great success. Catriona, who didn’t care for animals, but was nevertheless uncomfortable with the morality of keeping them in captivity, had been uneasy about the visit. To her surprise, she had relaxed enough to enjoy herself, laughing like a child at the antics of the monkeys, who certainly did not behave as if they were incurably depressed. Only the elephants, trudging around their bare concrete pen, seemed melancholy and out of place. Had they, though, ever seen the savannah of Africa? And if not, did their genes still cry freedom as they stared out over the safety ditch that separated them from their grinning, yelling, waving human admirers?

They walked back over Regent’s Park. The Spring sunlight cast long shadows over the grass. In the rose garden, the unopened flower buds on the bare bushes were yellowed, shrivelled and battered by the recent rain, like Brussels sprouts at the end of winter.

They were enjoying what seemed like a companionable silence when Charlotte said, ‘When Mum comes back, you won’t tell her about this afternoon, will you?’

‘Why ever not?’

‘She wouldn’t approve of our going to the zoo. She hates zoos. She says they’re degrading both to animals and people. There was a dreadful stink when I was in the Infants’. The school trip was to the Cotswold Wild-Life Park. Mum wouldn’t let me go and I cried all night, because my friends were going to laugh at me. I thought you might have known, but when I suggested it and you said OK, you obviously didn’t. But perhaps I ought to have said something. Only I did so want to see London Zoo.’

Catriona paused before replying. She hadn’t known about Flora’s aversion, though perhaps she ought to have, as it was certainly consistent with her sister’s general philosophy. Would it have made any difference if she had known? Charlotte, torn between the loyalty of the child to her parent, and her own stirrings of curiosity and independence, was clearly concerned at the subterfuge she regarded herself as having perpetrated.

Eventually, Catriona said, ‘You might have mentioned it before, but you have mentioned it now, and that’s brave of you to own up. And maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, because you’ve had the opportunity to make your own mind up about the subject. Your mother will respect the fact that, at your age, you need to do that. So how do you feel about zoos now?’

‘I think Mum’s right in some ways. It isn’t natural, is it? to be so cooped up, not for the larger animals anyway. But some of the species might have gone extinct by now if they weren’t kept going by zoos, and then nobody would have a chance to appreciate what they were like, which would be a shame. I’m glad I’ve seen those special white leopards.’

‘It’s complicated, isn’t it? I think you should discuss it with your mother when she comes back.’

Even as she said it, she thought how false it sounded. As if Charlotte and her mother would immediately fall into a discussion about the morality of keeping wild animals if Flora did come back! What was the point of pretending like this? Sooner or later, Charlotte would have to be told that it was unlikely that her mother would ever return. She was not a stupid child, far from it, so she must at some level know this. Then again, perhaps it was hope that was supporting her. Truth would merely kick away the crutch on which she leaned, and what good would that be?

‘There wouldn’t be any point in that. Mum will never change her mind in the least bit. Once she has an idea, that’s it. Zoos are just one thing. There’s vegetarianism, recycling, conserving energy, having to use eco-products. She won’t hear a word against any of them. That’s why I got upset with you over the food. I had huge battles with Mum over what I liked to eat and I couldn’t stand having to go through it again with you.’ She grinned. ‘Luckily you gave in quicker.’

Catriona smiled in return. ‘Strong opinions weakly held, that’s me.’

‘Besides, you’re a veggie, but I bet you don’t go in for the rest of the stuff that Mum does. The meetings, the protest marches, the posters.’

‘No, I don’t have any interest in activism. I hadn’t realised that Flora did.’

‘Yeah, course. Green Party, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, CND, Animal Rights, you name it, she was into it. Out every evening at meetings some weeks she was.’ She paused, a bitter twist to her mouth and a surprisingly adult look of world-weariness on her face. ‘Sometimes I used to say to her that she was more keen on saving the planet than caring for her own daughter.’

‘And what did she reply?’

‘She got really mad. I told you how scary she can be. She said she had as much right to her own life as I did, and that I had everything anyone could possibly want. And besides, there were important issues in the world that needed people strong enough to fight for them. Well, she’s certainly strong, is my Mum. And a fighter. She even got arrested once. Did you know that?’

‘No, she never told me.’

‘No, I bet. It was a demo about GM crops which got ugly when they started trashing the field. Mum wouldn’t talk about it afterwards, but a boy at school said that his uncle, who’s a policeman, said that she was dead lucky not to get done for assault. She went for a copper with a spade, and it was only because he dodged quickly and wasn’t hurt, and she was a woman – and a good-looking one, not a battle-axe in a boiler-suit – so that he thought his mates would laugh at him, that she was let off with a caution.’

‘So she must have had friends, acquaintances in these various organisations?’

The girl shot her a swift and suspicious look. ‘What do you mean, friends?’

‘What do you think I mean? People with whom she shared common interests, people she liked, people she rated.’

Her niece was shaking her head. ‘Mum may be a bit loopy, but she isn’t so stupid as to think that the Stroud veggie and sandals community contains a single person within it with any more chance of saving the world than a crippled hamster. As for … well, she had a bit more taste there.’

‘More taste where?’

But Charlotte was, irritatingly, pretending she couldn’t hear. ‘Look, there’s a van over there. I could murder an ice-cream.’

The last night, Charlotte called in to say goodnight. The child’s body, which in daytime activity seemed so powerfully present and alive, seemed small and shrunken under the covering of the single sheet in the big bed.

‘Mum used to read me stories when I was little. About rabbits and hares and badgers and moles and water rats, living cosy little lives in burrows and hollow trees. And I’d imagine that my bed was a burrow, and I’d snuggle down, and I woke up to find it was morning before I ever realised I’d been asleep. I felt so warm and safe. Now I lie awake, and I know that there aren’t any burrows to hide in. The Wild Wood isn’t a place you can avoid. It’s everywhere.’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘That means that everywhere you go, there are things waiting to attack you. You can’t trust anybody, can you? Not even people you thought would never let you down?’

‘You’ve had a bad experience lately, one of the worst it’s possible for anyone to have. You feel let down, abandoned, betrayed. But there is still hope and trust to be found in the world. You have to believe that.’

‘Is there? Where do I start to find it? Can I trust you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you be someone I could always rely on, no matter what? Would you promise it? Would you promise as long as you live never to let me down?’

She hesitated before replying. ‘That kind of promise is very difficult to keep. A lifetime is, I hope, a long time. Circumstances might intervene. I might be too sick, or too old one day to help you.’

‘But if it were in your power?’

‘If it were in my power.’

‘Will you promise me then? That as long as you live, if it’s in your power, you’ll never let me down, that you’ll always be there for me?’ The child’s small hand grasped hers and she gave it an answering squeeze.

‘I promise.’ The words seemed to echo in the darkness of the room.

She remembered the night when she, hardly more than a child herself, had sworn never to have children, never to be a mother. And unlike so many solemn oaths uttered by children in the dead of night, Catriona had kept hers. Now here it was, broken in spirit.

The child sat up suddenly, threw her slim arms around her aunt’s neck, and pressed her full warm lips upon hers.

‘Sealed with a kiss. Thank you, dearest Cat.’ She sank back against the pillow, as if exhausted by the effort the forging of the new bond between them had cost. Drowsily, she continued, ‘I wish I’d made Mum promise, instead of just assuming. If I’d made her promise to send for me if she ever went away, then she would have had to. Instead of which she’s too busy to think of me. Too busy fucking Frank.’

It was as if a cold finger had touched her spine. ‘Who’s Frank, Charlotte?’ she asked as casually as she could.

‘Frank Churchill. He teaches some art classes at our school. His daughter is there, too, a couple of years ahead of me. That must be how Mum met him. A real poser. Everyone knows he has it off with just about every attractive woman he bumps into. And he’s a big-head about his sculpture. About how he’s received a new commission, which he’s working on in his studio. Sounds posh till you know it’s a poxy rat-hole. Actually, he spends most of his time drinking with a load of other layabouts in the Fleece in Stroud.’

‘And you think that he and your mother are …’

When the girl replied, her voice had become husky, as if she were going to cry. ‘Yeah, course. Don’t you know? Didn’t Mum ever tell you? Frank is definitely her boyfriend. She’s gone off with him, it’s obvious.’

‘But why do you think that? Did she tell you? Your mother never ever mentioned this Frank to me. What’s more, she never even hinted that she had a … that she was seeing someone.’

‘I found out by accident. One afternoon, our class was in Stroud doing a project on industrial archaeology. It was her day off, so I was surprised to see her. She seemed very much in a hurry, so she never saw me. She went into the old woollen mill off the High Street, the one that’s been turned into arty-farty workshops. She was using a key to unlock the door. That’s the same place that God’s gift to women Churchill has his studio in. When I asked her casually where she’d been that afternoon, she said she’d been shopping in Ciren. Why else would she be going into his studio, with her own key? And if that wasn’t the reason, why lie to me about it? So I wasn’t surprised at first when she skipped. I thought that after a bit, she’d want me to join her. But time’s gone on and she obviously doesn’t. I really miss her, Cat. If she loved me she’d miss me. If she loved me, she’d come back for me.’