‘The Cousins are rat-shit. Amen.’ Kate had never been bothered by them and was not bothered now; they had never played any part in her life, a non-situation which, as far as she was concerned, could continue until they all dropped dead. Ah, but how far was she concerned? And how far had a certain letter, not at the moment understood, altered the balance of all their relationships … ? But she had forgotten the letter, she had forgotten The Cousins, she had even forgotten the demon lover. She was asleep.
Daniel was not asleep. He slept very little: perhaps three or even four hours a night if he was lucky. His legs pained him, but they’d been doing that for nearly two-thirds of his life; he could live with it, he knew how to arrange them to their best advantage. What really worried him now was the knowledge that his right leg, the one they’d eventually been able to reconstruct with such success, was weakening. He didn’t want to go back to hospital; hospitals had scared him from the very beginning when he had lain there feeling trapped while groups of men and women had discussed his legs which, due to anaesthetics, could well have belonged to someone else. Since then he had returned five times for further surgery, and had once or twice descended into such deeps of despair that he had seriously considered the cold, practical advice of his grandmother: for different reasons they neither of them had any obligation to cling to life if it became intolerable.
He felt that things would have been very different if he could have stayed at university and taken his degree; then his life would have had a clear-cut purpose, keeping him in touch with the world and with people; moreover the purpose would have been an end in itself, validating his disability. Daniel Ackland, lawyer, could have heaved or wheeled himself about some city, secure in the knowledge that he was of use. Daniel Ackland, part-time researcher, was too aware of his uselessness even to consider a city life with its many mind-saving interests; and so he lived in a delightful cottage in the middle of beautiful woodland where his only links with the world were books, radio not television (by choice), his work, and the loyalty and love of his sister. Without Kate he might well have foundered, and they both knew it.
In a way he had genuinely loved his grandmother, Lydia; her spiky and eccentric ways made sense to him, even as a boy, and he had often found echoes of her in his study of the Law, with which, though she despised it, she shared an outstanding lack of sentimentality. So it was in many ways fitting that the discovery of an old letter, written to her and then lost, was about to release him from the bondage of uselessness.
It was the kind of situation which even she might have found amusing; he had only ever seen her smile at the wry contradictions of life.
Kate’s visits to her brother at Woodman’s always felt like weekends, but they could never occupy any part of Saturday or Sunday, when Hill Manor was always filled with guests and fully booked for every meal. Only with the arrival of lackadaisical Monday, or sometimes Sunday evening now that she’d trained her assistant, Maureen, could she escape from her commitments. She knew that in many ways she now was the Manor; people who wanted to book asked for her by name and expected her to be everywhere at all times. Alex, in his kitchen, was the most vital component but, a shy man, he preferred to remain unseen; it was Kate’s efficiency and poise, and in particular her charm, which oiled the mechanism and kept it in smooth running order. So almost every week, and because Alex gave her very special licence, she was able to spend Sunday night, the whole of Monday and part of Tuesday with Daniel.
This particular visit was almost over; would have been entirely over if Daniel had not said at breakfast on Tuesday morning, ‘You know that woman who used to clean the place for Grandmother … ?’
‘Mrs Tyson, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. She still lives in the village.’
For Kate this was a minor turning point. An hour ago in her bath she had decided that the whole business of their grandmother’s death, and the ambiguous letter which had preceded it, were matters best left alone. Her review of their relationship with The Cousins had only strengthened this decision. The past had been turbulent, often bitter, and was best left to moulder away in other people’s memories, since neither she nor Daniel had any personal memory of it at all. The letter had intrigued them, but if damp had not attacked the wainscotting just to the left of the kitchen door they would never have known of its existence, never have been drawn towards the peculiar but irrelevant questions it raised. They had their own lives to lead.
But, she now supposed, there was something more profound lying beneath the calm surface of such reasoning, because her heart jumped at her brother’s piece of information and she knew that nothing on God’s earth could make her drive away until she’d heard what Mrs Tyson might have to say.
‘How would we … I mean, she’ll think it a bit odd, us suddenly asking questions about things that happened years ago.’
‘Why?’ He held up the now dry but still stained sheet of creamy writing-paper. ‘Why shouldn’t we be curious? She’ll remember that shelf.’
Meg Tyson had not changed at all in the five years since they’d last seen her. She was one of those women, aged perhaps fifty, in whom one could clearly see the girl she had been at fifteen: a tip-tilted nose, a firm mouth not much given to smiling, fairish hair, hardly showing a streak of grey, pulled back into a bun. Kate would have betted that she still put it in pigtails at night.
They joined her for a cup of tea in her small kitchen where an ancient but immaculate washing-machine grumbled and gushed in the corner. On the other side of the room an old man sat on a window-seat, filling in football-pools with much reference to various tattered sports pages.
‘Takes them serious, don’t you, Dad?’ There was no answer. Mrs Tyson touched her ear by way of explanation. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear that a number of things had dropped down the back of the shelf. ‘Tried sticking Sellotape along it, I did, but the damp soon put paid to that.’
When it came to somebody whose christian name began with R who lived in Salisbury, who had stayed a weekend with Lydia Ackland shortly before her death, Mrs Tyson was flummoxed, with good reason: ‘I used to go up Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, you see. There was that much to do here come weekends.’ So any guest arriving on a Friday and leaving on Sunday evening, or even early on Monday, moved in and out of Woodman’s with her never having seen them. ‘I remember helping Sally make up the spare bed a while before Mrs Ackland’s death, but just when …’ She shook her neat head.
Kate said, ‘We thought we might talk to Sally too, but we don’t know where to find her.’
‘Ah! Well that’s something I can tell you. Never misses a Christmas, bless her.’ She went to a drawer in the dresser. ‘Such pretty cards, I can always put a finger on them. There we are, Mrs Ferris she is now.’
She had hitherto shown a commendable lack of curiosity about the contents of the lost-and-found letter, but now, as she put the Christmas card on the table, Kate noticed her taking a good look at it. She and Daniel had decided that they’d be wise to keep its contents to themselves, so she placed Sally’s card on top of it and pushed them both over to her brother; he made a note of the address and telephone number, returned the card with a smile, folded the letter and put it in his pocket.
Kate said, ‘It’s just curiosity on our part.’
‘And why not? I can tell you I was pretty curious myself. There was something … I don’t know, something not quite right about any of that.’
Daniel said, ‘You mean her death.’
‘Bless you, yes. It wasn’t … like her to fall, now was it?’
At this, the old man on the window-seat, whose hearing can’t have been bad at all, looked up and said, ‘Fall! That’s a good’un!’
‘Now