Final Witness. Simon Tolkien

had happened in her bedroom when Thomas found Greta trying on her clothes, but there was no point in asking her son. He’d found it difficult enough to tell her about the dresses.

      ‘Let’s not talk about Greta or your father, Tom. I know things aren’t easy at the moment with what’s happened to Barton, but you shouldn’t try to make them worse. You’re not the only one who misses Barton. Jane loved him and so did I. What we both need is a change of scenery. London’ll be good for us.’

      There was a note of appeal in his mother’s voice that Thomas could not resist. He loved his mother and could not bear to make her anxious or distressed. That would lead to one of the terrible migraines that hurt her so badly. The long afternoons when his mother lay on her bed with her face covered by a flannel sighing with the pain were the worst days of his childhood. Afterward she would be weak for days, sitting in the rocking chair by the kitchen door in her dressing gown, drinking the cups of peppermint tea that Aunt Jane made for her in a special teapot.

      ‘Yes, Mum. I’m being silly. I’d love to go with you. I’ll go and get packed.’

      ‘Jane’s washed your shirts. They’re in the laundry room. And you’ll need to take your blazer for the theatre.’

      ‘The theatre? What are we going to see?’

      ‘Macbeth. At the Globe. I’ve got tickets for Thursday night. Just you and me.’

      ‘Macbeth! Oh, Mummy, I love you! It’s the one I’ve always wanted to see.’

      Thomas ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and hurried to his room to get ready.

      Anne smiled. What a strange boy he was! It was the first time in two weeks that she’d heard real happiness in his voice, and what was it that had caused this change? A tale of ghosts and bloody murder, treachery and treason.

      They drove with the top of the Aston Martin down. It was a beautiful car that Anne had had since she was in her twenties. The garage in Flyte that had looked after her father’s Rolls-Royce did the same for the bright red sports car he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. Driving it made her feel young again. The world that flew by in a blur of fields and hedgerows seemed full of possibility. She was a fool to have shut herself and Thomas up in the house for so long.

      Thomas also felt exhilarated. He loved to watch his mother drive. Her beautiful hands laced themselves around the spokes of the steering wheel, which was small, like in a racing car, as she sat back in her tan leather seat and allowed the wind to blow her brown hair over her shoulders. She was wearing a white summer dress with an open neck, and Thomas could see her favourite gold locket glinting in the sun where it lay heart-shaped on her breastbone. His father had given it to his mother on their wedding day, with a picture of them both shut inside.

      On her finger Anne wore a blue, square-cut sapphire ring. The stone had been brought back from India by Thomas’s great-grandfather just before the First World War. There was a family rumour passed down through the generations that old Sir Stephen Sackville had stolen it from its native owner, who had then cursed him and his descendants, but no one believed the story. The jewel seemed so pure and magical and the portrait of Sir Stephen hanging in the drawing room at the House of the Four Winds was of a kindly old man, saddened by the early death of his daughter, Anne’s mother, in a riding accident. She had only been forty when she died, the same age that Thomas’s mother was now, and Thomas had often come into his mother’s bedroom to find her sitting at her dressing table gazing up at the portrait of her mother hanging on the wall above the fireplace.

      ‘I’m wearing the ring for you,’ said Anne, sensing her son’s attention to the sapphire. ‘I know it’s your favourite.’

      ‘Grandmother’s wearing it in the portrait, isn’t she?’ asked Thomas, who loved family history. ‘I was looking at it yesterday.’

      ‘Yes, she always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out. The sapphire’s so very beautiful. Wearing it makes me feel close to her. It’s silly, I know.’

      ‘No, it’s not.’

      ‘You’re right. It’s not.’ Anne smiled at the certainty in her son’s voice.

      ‘I do so wonder what she was like, Tom,’ she went on after a pause. ‘My father used to say that she was a daredevil. Always getting into scrapes and running up huge debts that old Sir Stephen had to pay off. But everyone forgave her because she was so pretty and full of life. Then suddenly she was dead. Killed by a horse, of all things.’

      ‘How old were you, Mum?’

      ‘When it happened? Five. I’d just turned five.’

      ‘It must’ve been awful. Really awful.’ Thomas suddenly wished that he’d not brought up the subject of his grandmother.

      ‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ said Anne. ‘I mean, yes, it must have completely traumatized me, which is why I can’t remember anything about it except one image, which may have nothing to do with her death except that I feel sure it does. It’s seeing my father sitting on the front stairs. I can’t remember if he was crying or not but I know that he never sat anywhere except on a chair and there he was sitting on the stairs.’

      ‘The front stairs?’

      ‘Yes. And for many years I couldn’t remember anything about my mother at all. I would look at the old photograph albums, but they didn’t mean anything, and curiously it was that painting you like that gave me the strongest sense of her. It used to hang in the hall, and I’d gaze at it for hours until one day a memory came back to me.

      ‘I was in a park on a swing. It must’ve been like a children’s playground, and I’ve never been able to work out where it is, although I can see a grove of big green Christmas trees nearby. Anyway, there’s someone pushing the swing, and I go up, up, up in the air so high that my little patent leather black shoes are right above my head.’