The roar of a motorbike sounded in the lane, growing louder as Dave Bryant drove up to the cottage, dying away again as he parked the machine at the side of the house. He came in through the back door a couple of minutes later, carrying his crash helmet under his arm.
‘Hello, Mum, Dad.’ He grinned at Jill. He was a sturdy lad of twenty, nothing special in the way of looks, a frank, intelligent face and a generally likeable air, the kind of lad an employer would probably engage on sight.
He was apprenticed to a Cannonbridge firm of builders on a day-release scheme, working three days a week for the firm and spending the other two days at the local technical college. He was an industrious lad and a good student, he had taken more than one prize.
‘Sit down, everyone!’ Mrs Bryant commanded. She patted her frizzed hair into place and began to dish up. They all ate with keen appetite, there was never any trouble with finicky eaters at Mollie’s table.
‘This is a very good rhubarb tart,’ Dave said with keen appreciation towards the end of the meal. He and Jill never regarded their mother with criticism, they took her as she was, not having known her in her willow-slim, com-gold days.
‘I’ll bake you a couple of tarts for the party on Friday if you like,’ Mrs Bryant offered expansively. The party was an end-of-term social at Dave’s college and she’d already promised half a dozen goodies.
‘Oh yes, please,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘That’d be great.’
‘Are you inviting Clive to the party?’ Jill asked her brother.
‘I did ask him,’ Dave said without much interest, ‘but I don’t think he’ll come. He said he’d let me know.’
‘You should try to persuade him,’ Mrs Bryant said as she stood up to fetch a massive fruit cake from the larder. ‘He never goes anywhere, he sticks in those digs all the time, making his models – it can’t be healthy for a lad of his age.’
Clive Egan was twenty-one years old, the only surviving child of Mrs Bryant’s cousin. His parents were dead and he lived in lodgings in Stanbourne with a Mrs Turnbull, an elderly widow. He was employed as a general building worker by the Cannonbridge firm where Dave Bryant was apprenticed.
‘It would do Clive good to go to the party,’ Mrs Bryant said with a jerk of her head. ‘It’s not much of a life, living in digs.’ She poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Mrs Turnbull’s a good sort but the lad needs more life at his age.’
Ken took a huge slice of cake and bit into it. It was undeniably excellent, full of plump raisins and glacé cherries. His mood softened. ‘Go on, Dave,’ he said. ‘You ask Clive again. You’ll find he’ll go to the party with a bit of persuading.’
Five miles away, in the village of Stanbourne, Clive Egan and his landlady were about to begin supper. Clive had been working in Stanbourne for the past ten days, assisting with a central heating installation in one of the large houses. He was a tall, heavily built young man with broad shoulders and strongly muscled arms. His fair hair was clipped close to his head, his eyes were a deep clear gold with a restless darting gaze.
‘I expect you’ve nearly finished on that heating job,’ Mrs Turnbull said as they sat down to cold bacon-and-egg pie and salad. She was a perky little woman with quick neat movements and sharp brown eyes; her thin grey hair was dragged back into a scanty bun.
‘Another couple of days should do it,’ Clive said. ‘Then I’ll be working over at Longmead, a roof repair and guttering job.’
She glanced up. ‘Oh – if you’re going to be over Longmead way, perhaps you wouldn’t mind calling in at Mayfield Farm for me, ordering a turkey from Mrs Slater.’ Her oldest sister and her husband were celebrating their golden wedding early in August and Mrs Turnbull had promised a turkey for the family reunion dinner.
‘Yes, sure,’ Clive said. ‘That won’t be any trouble.’ He helped himself to potato salad. ‘I can walk up to the farm in my dinner-hour.’
‘I shall want a good big bird.’ She inclined her head, considering. ‘Be sure to explain to Mrs Slater about the dinner, tell her it must be a top-quality bird, I don’t mind paying. And ask her if they still deliver or if I’ll have to arrange to have it fetched.’
Supper had already been eaten at Parkwood, the Lloyds’ elegant late-Georgian house on the edge of Longmead village. Rather a meagre supper; it hadn’t taken the Lloyds long to despatch it.
Rachel didn’t feel called on to provide much in the way of an evening meal during the week in term-time. Henry could eat as much as he wanted in school at midday and in the course of her own driving hither and yon about the neighbourhood in execution of her many duties she was usually given a sustaining succession of cups of tea and coffee, home-baked cakes and cookies, slices of pies and quiches.
Not that Henry was disposed to be critical of his supper. He had little appetite nowadays, had grown steadily thinner over the last few years and scarcely noticed any more what was set before him.
When the supper things had been cleared away Rachel fetched her embroidery basket and settled down in an easy chair in the sitting room with the radio tuned in to a concert of classical music. There was no television set at Parkwood. ‘I’ve never felt the need of one,’ Rachel said when anyone commented. Her parents would have been horrified at the idea of introducing such a time-waster into the household and she had never seen good reason to depart from their attitudes and strictures. Parkwood had belonged to her parents and she had lived there with them before she married Henry fourteen years ago.
In his bachelor days Henry had been accustomed to television. He had lived with his widowed sister in a snug little house in Cannonbridge and they had watched many an entertaining or instructive programme together in the placid evenings.
They had led an agreeable, uneventful life that flowed steadily on and seemed as if it would continue in the same tranquil way forever. Henry was at that time deputy head of a Cannonbridge primary school with good hopes of a headship somewhere before long.
And then one February evening his sister, engaged in a little dressmaking, providing herself with a pretty new blouse for the spring, went upstairs to fit the blouse in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. Some alteration in the way the garment hung upon her caused her to frown, some difficulty in getting a good fit over one breast, but she pushed the little anxiety to the back of her mind, went downstairs again with resolute cheerfulness and altered a dart in the bodice. Eighteen months later she was dead.
The snug little house had belonged to her and on her death it passed to her son, a professional man, married with a young family, living in Scotland. ‘We don’t relish the thought of uprooting you,’ he told Henry at the funeral, ‘putting you to inconvenience, but—’
The snug little house must be sold and Henry must provide himself with somewhere else to live.
In the course of his many visits to the hospital during the last six months of his sister’s life, Henry had become acquainted with Rachel, who was an active member of the Friends of Cannonbridge Infirmary.
She befriended Henry and was very good to him in those bleak and difficult days. She was energetic, formidably competent