‘Oh, I think someone’s already whispered sweet nothings to Jo, don’t you?’
The rogue!
But he’d turned her way again, serious now, frowning.
‘That’s if you are Jo! I’m sorry, we didn’t meet—not properly. You know I’m Charles, and you are?’
His aunt? Charles wondered, though why that thought upset him he didn’t want to consider.
No, Dottie had said ‘my Jo’, but it was impossible she could be Dottie’s daughter. Dottie must be touching ninety, and if Jo was much over thirty he’d eat his hat.
Maybe a cousin...
But the statuesque beauty was talking.
‘I’m Jo Wainwright, local GP in Port Anooka. I took over the practice a couple of years ago, but I have a locum there at present.’
‘Then why are you here? Is D—my grandmother ill?’
Somehow saying Dottie seemed far too informal—inappropriate really.
Jo was shaking her head, the red in her hair glinting in the lamplight.
‘Dottie is probably the fittest eighty-five-year-old it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. She’s also the stubbornest—’ She broke off to smile at the old woman. ‘And she’s not entirely steady on her feet, while as for the stair lift—you’d swear she was taking off for Mars, the speed she roars up the stairs on it.’
‘Fiddle-faddle!’
Charles ignored the interruption.
‘So?’
But again it was Dottie who answered.
‘Oh, she thinks I’m not safe to be out here on my own, and she knows darned well I won’t move to one of those nasty places where old people rot away and die, so now she spends all her spare time here, eating me out of house and home, and leaving spies here during the week to report back to her.’
As the words were warmed by fondness, and Dottie was clinging to Jo’s hand as she spoke, Charles knew it was only bluster, and understood there was a special bond between the pair.
‘Dottie’s right,’ Jo told him. ‘I don’t like her being out here on her own, but I’ve grown to love the place almost as much as she does, so staying out here when I can is no hardship.’
She paused, looking a little rueful as she added, ‘Mind you, I didn’t know about the roof. I keep asking Dottie what needs maintenance and although we’ve done a bit, there’s been a long dry spell so the roof didn’t get a mention.’
She had such an animated face the words seemed to come alive as she spoke them, but he could hardly keep staring at her, any more than he could ask her what her husband thought of this arrangement.
So he watched as she spoke quietly to Dottie, helping her to her feet.
‘I usually take Dottie her supper in bed. Would you excuse us?’
For the first time, he actually took in the long Chinese robe the older woman was wearing. Had she been settled in bed when he’d arrived and thrown them both into confusion?
‘Can I be of assistance?’ he offered, and was rewarded with a ferocious scowl from the woman he’d come so far to meet.
‘You’ve caused quite enough drama for one day, thank you very much. You’d best be getting back to the village and we can discuss your visit in the morning.’
‘The tide, Dottie,’ Jo said gently. ‘He won’t be able to get back to the village now. He’ll have to stay the night.’
‘Then put him in the front room,’ Dottie said, with such malicious glee Charles knew it was either haunted or, more prosaically, lay beneath the worst of the roof damage.
Left on his own, Charles prowled around the room, aware through all his senses that his mother had once walked here, sat here, maybe helped decorate the ragged imitation tree that stood forlornly in one corner. The need to know more about her had brought him all this way.
He tried to imagine her living in this house, but his thoughts turned to Jo, and it was she he pictured in his mind, maybe on a ladder, laughing as she tried to fix a star to the pathetic tree.
He closed his eyes, replacing Jo’s image with one of his mother that he had only formed from pictures, and the stories his father would tell. Would Dottie tell him more stories, the ones he’d come so far to hear? Stories of his mother as a child, her likes and dislikes, anything at all to turn her into a living person instead of a picture by his bed.
It had been close to Christmas back then, too, some annual event having brought his father to the tiny seaside town, and he knew it was a degree of silly sentimentality to have come now, to find out what he could before he married and settled down, taking some of the burden of official duties from his father.
Had his mother prowled the room as he now prowled, arguing with herself—or her parents—about leaving with the lying vagabond?
He knew that had to be his father, because neither of them had ever loved another. And a vagabond he might have been, only even then, Charles was sure, he’d have been called a backpacker. Travel had been something his father had been determined to do, the only time he’d ever argued with his parents. But although it had disturbed his relationship with them, he’d known he had to see something of the world, to mix with ordinary people, the kind of people he would one day rule.
He himself had done much the same, he realised, when he’d insisted on studying medicine in Edinburgh, with men and women from all layers of society. Eton had been all very well for an education, but he knew how his fellow students had thought and how that layer of society worked. He’d needed to know everyday people.
Even back home for holidays, he’d worked in bars and cafés in the summer, and been a ski instructor in the winter.
But getting back to his father...
A lying vagabond?
Jo returned before he had time to consider the word Dottie had used, bringing light into the gloomy room with her smile.
‘Been looking for memories of your mother?’ she said. ‘I’ve done the same, but sadly never found a thing.’
She paused, then added, ‘Though I don’t pry to the extent of going through drawers. I wouldn’t take advantage of Dottie that way, but I do shake out the books I borrow to read, just in case there’s a photo been left to mark a page.’
Charles looked at the wall of books at the back of the room and shook his head. It would take for ever...
‘Has she not spoken of her to you?’ he asked.
Jo shook her head.
‘Not a word, and apparently there’s enough solidarity in the village that no one else ever talks about her. I know there has to be a reason because although Dottie’s a bit eccentric—well, pretty eccentric—she’s not irrational.’
She sighed, shook her head, and bent over to pick up a glass bauble from a box of decorations that stood by the tree, hanging it on a low branch before turning back to Charles.
‘Dottie and I usually have grilled cheese on toast for supper, but if you haven’t had dinner and would like something more substantial, there are lamb cutlets and plenty of salad things.’
Charles shook his head.
‘Grilled cheese on toast sounds fantastic. Takes me back to student days when it was one of the few things I could cook—cheese on toast, beans on toast, eggs on toast!’
That won another smile, which was so open and honest and full of good humour that it caught at something in his chest—just