Elle slipped silently down the dimly lit stairs, her toes sinking into the deep plush pile of the cream carpet. It gave her a sense of luxury but not one of belonging. The polished banister felt cold and the hallway clung to the wintry chill that had seeped into the house on their return home from the funeral an hour earlier.
Through the stained-glass window of the front door the streetlights picked out the silhouettes of denuded trees shivering in the breeze, but it was the thin slither of light coming from beneath the study door that drew her attention. As she opened the door she could still feel the dampness of Charlie’s tears cooling on her neck and it fuelled her lingering anger.
Rick looked up from his computer and his face softened in sympathy. ‘You look worn out,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you open a bottle of wine to have with our supper? I’m just catching up on some emails. I won’t be long.’
‘We should never have taken Charlie to the funeral. He’s been sobbing his heart out.’
‘You can’t mollycoddle him, Elle,’ Rick said. He pushed his chair back from the desk but didn’t stand up. ‘He has to understand about life and death sooner or later. Of course he’s upset – his granddad’s just died. But we’re all upset. We can show him how we pull together as a family. It’ll be good for him in the long run, you’ll see.’
Elle was tempted to explain in graphic detail how distraught Charlie had been but Rick had already seen the look of horror on the little boy’s face as he watched his granddad’s coffin being lowered into the ground. His reaction now would be the same as then; he would tell him to man up, shaming his son for getting upset. Experience had taught her that she would be doing more harm than good by arguing so with some reluctance she swallowed her anger and changed the subject. ‘I’ll have to make a start on clearing Dad’s house since it has to be emptied by the end of the month.’
‘If that’s a dig about me ending the lease then it’s not my fault your dad left no estate. I don’t expect you to understand the figures, but even you can work out it would be a waste of money renting the house for longer.’
‘I wasn’t disagreeing; I was just saying there isn’t much time. I was going to suggest I spend the weekend there rather than travelling to and fro all the time.’
Elle’s parents had lived in a small terraced house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, which was a forty-mile round-trip from their house in Southport. Between Charlie’s school runs and her other daily chores, it left only a few snatched hours here and there during the working week. It made perfect sense to stay over, but as she watched Rick picking through the papers on his desk she knew he was about to dismiss the idea. ‘I was only planning to stay over on Saturday night and you’re out that evening anyway,’ she added.
‘I don’t like the thought of you being in a half-empty house on your own overnight, that’s all. I’m working in the day, but I suppose I could always forgo my night out with Chris and join you later,’ he said, as if he was seriously considering the possibility. ‘But he’s so miserable at the moment and I’d hate to let him down. Angie really has done him over. How he managed to hold his tongue with her at the service today is beyond me.’
She didn’t rise to the bait. Rick and Chris were architects and worked for the same engineering firm and Chris just so happened to be a nephew of one of the owners. Rick had once been eager to nurture the friendship between their respective wives but since Chris and Angie had separated three months ago, he had made it clear whose side they should take. So far Elle had evaded the issue by suggesting there was still a chance of reconciliation. She was in no mood to be drawn into an argument that might lead to her forfeiting a friendship, not today. ‘So go out with him. I’ll be perfectly fine with Charlie to keep me company and it is only one night, Rick,’ she said, steering her husband back to the matter at hand.
‘But I’d be coming home to an empty house. I might as well stay out all night in that case,’ he said sullenly. ‘We haven’t had a single night apart since Charlie was born.’
Elle was well aware of the fact and it was a statistic she was far from proud of. It would be to her eternal regret that she hadn’t spent the last days of her father’s life at his bedside. It might have made all the difference. He had been taken to hospital with pneumonia but had discharged himself. Like an errant schoolgirl rather than a thirty-five-year-old woman, she had been told in no uncertain terms by her husband not to nursemaid Harry but to leave him to his own foolishness. He had died alone.
‘If I don’t clear the house in time then we’ll end up paying extra rent,’ she warned.
‘But you don’t even have to do the clearing out at all. There’s a clearance company I know who should be able to give me a good deal and I can ask them to go through everything. Let’s face it, Elle, there’s not much there worth salvaging and I don’t want you cluttering up this house with your parents’ junk.’ Rick continued shuffling paperwork distractedly as he spoke but then something caught his eye. He hurriedly dropped the stack of pages back down onto the desk but he wasn’t quick enough.
‘Is that Dad’s watch?’ Elle asked in utter disbelief. She had been standing at the door, preferring the bite of cold air at her neck than stepping into the oppressive warmth of the study but the sight of what was clearly her dad’s watch drew her in.
Rick sighed and snatched up the papers to reveal the old-fashioned pocket watch her dad had worn religiously during her formative years. It had reappeared a month or so ago when Harry’s health had started to deteriorate and he had given her explicit instructions that he wanted to be buried with it. The last time she had seen it was in his coffin and now she knew why Rick had insisted on his own private farewell to her father at the funeral parlour.
‘It’s of no use to him now,’ Rick said, picking up the watch by the chain and letting the dial sway from side to side.
‘But you said it wasn’t particularly valuable, so why not let him have his dying wish, for God’s sake?’ The steel in her voice was alien to Elle but the anger she had put to one side had bubbled back to the surface without warning, leaving no time to draw on the self-restraint she had learned over the years.
‘Don’t you think Charlie deserves some kind of heirloom?’ Rick countered, completely unabashed. ‘Your dad left barely enough to cover the funeral costs. The watch is only plated but the chain’s solid gold. It has some value.’
‘Yes, sentimental value to my dad.’
Rick ignored her. ‘And have you seen this?’ he asked. There was a small brass key dangling from the other end of the chain and he caught it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Any idea what it belongs to?’
Elle was momentarily distracted from her anger by this tiny relic from her childhood, one she had barely acknowledged. The key had been an intrinsic part of the watch and so she had never once thought of it as an object in its own right. ‘I’ve no idea. All I know is the watch was given to him on his twenty-first birthday and it was so important to him that he didn’t want to be separated from it, even in death,’ she answered pointedly.
‘How important, do you think? What if your dad’s left some hidden treasure after all? Surely he must have picked up the odd piece on his travels when he was in the navy?’ Rick mused. ‘It’s hard to believe that he has nothing to show for seventy-three years except a pitiful insurance policy. Keep an eye out for anything this might fit while you go through his stuff.’
‘I’ll go over on Saturday morning with Charlie and stay until Sunday,’ Elle said, eager to take advantage of Rick’s curiosity. ‘You’ll hardly notice we’re gone.’
Rick seemed not to hear her. ‘I’d better get on. I’ve missed enough today as it is and I’ll be working on Sunday too if I can’t catch up.’
Elle took the absence of objection as his agreement. Normally she would have retreated after such a rare victory, but something kept her in the room. ‘You shouldn’t have taken it, Rick,’ she said, the tears welling in her eyes as she picked up