Wickham Hall, Part 2 (6 page)

Plus I'd felt it myself; he had whirled through this office like a typhoon, but I had to admit I hadn't had a single dull moment since he'd arrived on the scene. And, I realized, I was enjoying his company.

I expected Ben to adopt his default setting of confident nonchalance and shrug off the compliment but he looked quite taken aback. And I was pretty sure he coloured a bit under his tan. Ben had a serious side and all of a sudden I liked him a lot more for showing it.

He shot me a sideways glance and rubbed his neck. ‘Thanks, Holly. No one has ever said that before.'

‘Lord Fortescue is good with people too. Perhaps not as exuberant as you,' I twinkled my eyes at him, ‘but he has a certain aura about him. It must be in the genes.'

‘Maybe you're right,' said Ben thoughtfully. ‘We all must inherit something from our fathers, mustn't we?'

I thought of the photograph I had in my handbag, which I believed had my father on it, and a shiver ran down my spine.

‘I suppose so,' I murmured and wondered what I might have inherited from mine.

At seven o'clock on the dot, I knocked on Esme's door and she opened it dressed in a pale yellow playsuit that set off her golden brown skin beautifully.

‘So, what's the emergency?' she said, ushering me inside.

‘Food first.' I held up my bags. ‘And wine.'

I quite enjoyed cooking; I found it relaxing. Not at Weaver's Cottage. That was anything but relaxing. I like to lay all my ingredients out, do all my preparation before I begin cooking. There simply wasn't room amongst all the kitchen clutter at home to do it properly.

Esme uncorked the wine while I washed the tiny new potatoes that Nikki had given me along with the salad leaves and set a griddle pan out ready to cook a couple of salmon fillets.

‘I thought about going for a run to sort out all the mush in my head,' I said, accepting a glass of rosé from her, ‘but this is far better.'

‘No contest.' Esme pulled a face. ‘Cheers.'

We took our glasses out onto her tiny balcony while the potatoes cooked and sat down in the evening sun.

Esme's flat was one of ten in a two-storey building on the edge of Henley. Built in the 1950s it had as much space as a modern two-bedroomed house, a communal garden and this, the pretty balcony that she'd decorated with bunting and fairground-style lights.

I stretched out my legs and exhaled. Esme waited patiently.

‘I met that old lecturer of yours today – Steve. He wants to come round to our cottage and look through all Mum's old newspapers. Apparently, they're almost impossible to get hold of. “A treasure trove of culture” he called them.'

‘Did he? The old smoothie.' She chuckled.

‘Part of me thinks that maybe I should arrange it. He did seem quite excited. And it might give Mum a boost, especially now she's admitted she's got a problem.'

‘Do it! Definitely.' She rolled her eyes at my doubtful expression. ‘Look, Hols, if the newspapers really are of value to him, he's not going to mind the state of your house, is he?'

‘The thing is,' I worried at a piece of loose skin on my lip, ‘Ben wants to come too.'

‘
Ben
now, is it?' she smirked.

I ignored that remark. ‘We've been getting on really well this week and I don't want to spoil anything.'

Esme gave the patio table a triumphant tap. ‘You really like him, don't you? I knew it.'

‘He's my boss and I want him to think well of me. He's really grown on me. At first he didn't seem to take anything seriously and he was irresponsible, I mean, the way he acted when we were trying to organize a press conference about him taking over from his father . . . ridiculous. And he was hideously late to his own sister's wedding . . .' I shook my head at the memory, although I couldn't help but smile. ‘But today I saw a more sensitive side of him, which I liked.'

I set down my glass and gazed at Esme. ‘If he comes to Weaver's Cottage and sees the way I live, he'll think differently about me.'

‘Well, maybe if he's as sensitive as you say he is, he won't.' She shrugged simply. ‘Besides, I hope you realize you fancy the posh pants off him.'

I shook my head. ‘He's my boss, and—'

‘Are you kidding me? There was enough electricity sparking between you two on Sunday in Joop to light the Eiffel Tower.'

‘That was embarrassment, not electricity, Es. Big difference.' I stood up and collected her empty glass. ‘Come on, the potatoes will be cooked.'

We tucked into our pan-fried salmon when I dropped the bombshell.

‘I think I found a picture of my father today.'

‘What?' Esme spluttered, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth.

I darted back to the kitchen where I'd left my handbag and returned with the photograph from Steve's studio.

‘One of these Morris dancers?' Her jaw dropped.

I tutted and pointed at the blonde girl behind them. ‘Look at her. It's Mum and she's holding hands with a man.'

Esme squinted and moved the picture backwards and forwards to focus. ‘Are you sure it's your dad?'

‘Admittedly it is only his hand and a bit of his arm. But that's definitely Mum and this picture was taken in 1984, so yes.' Esme looked dubious but I tapped the picture confidently. ‘Don't ask me how I know, I just do. And now I want to know who he is.'

My heart thumped as I stared at the photograph. My head had been full of Mum's story ever since she'd revealed that she'd fallen in love with someone at the Wickham Hall Summer Festival. In all my twenty-nine years I'd never been particularly curious about my father. I'd just accepted that he wasn't around and that was that. But now I'd had this tiny glimpse of him, I'd never been more curious about anything in my life.

I remember the first time I asked Mum why I didn't have a daddy. She had wrapped her arms around me, pulled me onto her knee and told me how a fairy had knocked at her door and asked her to look after a very special baby. The baby being me, of course. I'd adored the story, boasted to all my slightly less gullible friends about it and it wasn't until I was eleven and along with my classmates watched the excruciating ‘Birds and Bees' video at school that I noticed the flaws in her tale.

But I'd never asked her again. Not outright, anyway. It made her too anxious. And if anything remotely related to fathers ever came up, Mum's stock response was that she loved me twice as much to make up for not having two parents.

‘Can't you ask her?' Esme asked. She turned back to her dinner, swooping a tiny potato through mayonnaise and popping it in her mouth.

I shook my head. ‘Not yet.'

I filled Esme in on the online reading and research I'd been doing. Although Mum hadn't begun seeing a counsellor yet she was making progress in terms of tackling some of the stuff she'd been accumulating. To date she'd managed to part with my cot, my baby toys and a box of old nylon bedspreads that had given us electric shocks every time we'd touched them. But I still felt as though I hadn't got to the heart of it yet.

‘All sorts of things can trigger hoarding as a coping mechanism: a traumatic event, bereavement, anxiety,
stress . . .' I said, spearing a pile of rocket with my fork. ‘Mum says that she felt like she had everything that summer of 1984 and she let it slip away. And she was only seventeen, poor thing.'

Esme pulled a sympathetic face. ‘Wasn't your granddad there?'

‘I don't know exactly when he died.' I frowned. ‘But I know he never met me. So I'm guessing she was completely on her own.'

‘Finding herself single and alone and about to have a baby would be traumatic enough to trigger the hoarding behaviour, I guess,' Esme mused, topping up our glasses.

I nodded. ‘She said something else, too, about her father not being proud of her. It's as if she is ashamed of something. And that's the key to it.' I gazed at Esme and rested my cutlery against my plate. ‘That's when she clammed up on Saturday. But what I don't understand is why she feels to blame. I mean, she's not the first teenage girl to get pregnant, is she? And it was the eighties not the twenties. Besides it takes two . . . Oh God.' I clapped a hand over my mouth as a thought hit me.

‘What is it? Holly, you've gone white,' Esme pointed out.

‘You don't think he was married, do you?' I whispered. ‘That could be it. What if she fell in love with someone she couldn't have? Perhaps he had children of his own. That would explain why Granddad wouldn't have been proud of her. And that might be why she's too ashamed of the affair to talk about it.'

‘Possibly.'

We both fell silent then. I was mulling over my theory and Esme appeared to be concentrating on her salmon.

‘I've had another thought as well,' I added in a low voice. ‘Mum has always said that Granddad left her his savings.
That's why she's only ever had to work part-time. But maybe the man is still around and pays her an allowance and Mum can't tell me because she's sworn to secrecy.'

Esme wrinkled her nose and twisted her corkscrew curls around her finger. ‘Isn't a savings fund a bit more . . . likely?'

I thought about that. She was right, I was getting carried away. ‘OK, but I bet he's local. Mum has never wanted to move away from Wickham. What if she wanted to stay in the village to be near him?'

‘You think she had an affair with someone in Wickham?' gasped Esme. ‘Blimey, that would be playing a risky game, wouldn't it? She would bump into him all the time; Wickham's only small.'

I swallowed. It would also mean that I would bump into him all the time. Perhaps I had? I let out a groan. Perhaps it was actually someone I knew . . .

Esme frowned. ‘I don't buy it. If she says she met him at the Summer Festival, then that means it wasn't someone local, or she would have met him previously. Perhaps it was just a visitor.'

‘I'd like to think Mum wouldn't simply fall in love with someone who turned up to Wickham Hall with a day ticket and fifty pence for an ice cream,' I scoffed, pushing my plate away.

‘So,' Esme tapped her lip and narrowed her eyes, ‘we are looking for someone who perhaps worked there, or at least someone who was there for longer than a day.'

‘There are tons of staff at Wickham Hall, especially during the festival,' I suggested. ‘And then of course there are all the exhibitors. They arrive three or four days before the start of the event. There would have been plenty of time to get to know one of them.'

‘Or – it could be Lord Fortescue!' Esme leaned back in her chair.

I gaped at her. ‘Esme! I hardly think—'

‘
He's
married.' She raised one eyebrow suggestively.

‘Yes, but he's too old for Mum
and
he adores Lady Fortescue, and that was his first year at Wickham Hall.' I shook my head. ‘Definitely not.'

‘Ha!' She stabbed the air triumphantly. ‘There you go. That's why she hadn't met him before; he'd only just moved to Wickham.'

‘That's ridiculous. Besides, he's lovely.' I stared at Esme defiantly. ‘Far too nice to be unfaithful.'

‘Don't you be so sure,' she said knowingly. ‘He might be a very nice man but I know what the aristocracy is like. I've seen
Downton Abbey
.'

‘This is crazy. Stop right now.' I snatched up the photograph from the table and gave her a warning look.

‘Keep your hair on.' Esme chuckled, scraping the last of the salmon off her plate. ‘Well, what about the celebrity then? Who did the celebrity appearance in 1984?'

Every year Wickham Hall had somebody famous on the festival programme to pull in the crowds. This year it was a TV gardener. In 1984 it had been the local BBC weather man.

‘Someone from the BBC,' I said. ‘I can't remember his name.'

‘Ah well,' Esme grinned, pushing herself up straight, ‘that's it. He'll be the one. I always thought you'd make a good newsreader. It must be in the genes.'

She pretended to tap a pile of invisible papers on the edge of the table. ‘News just in,' she said in a plummy accent, ‘a rather attractive man was spotted in Joop, wearing nothing but—'

I tried to laugh with her but all of a sudden I found I couldn't. It wasn't funny at all. This was my father we were talking about. I'd always accepted that my family was just Mum and me; the identity of my father hadn't bothered me too much before now. But now it felt very important and I was hurt that my best friend couldn't see that.

I stood up and swigged the rest of my wine, which was quite difficult given the lump in my throat.

‘Holster? What are you doing?'

‘I'm going home,' I said, ignoring the prickling sensation at the back of my eyes. ‘I wish I'd never shown you the picture. You're not taking this seriously. I'm glad you find my life so amusing, but from where I'm sitting, it's anything but.'

‘Holly? I didn't mean anything by it!'

I left Esme's jaw flapping and walked out of the flat, my heart racing. She was completely barking up the wrong tree. Mum probably just fell in love with a nice boy her own age and got a little carried away behind the bushes. All this talk and speculation was unhelpful and . . . unsettling. There'd be a very simple explanation, I was sure of it, and I wouldn't stop digging until I'd found it.

It was mid-July, the sky was as blue as a robin's egg, and the air was so still that not a blade of grass moved nor a willow branch rustled and I was out and about in the gardens. On days like today there was nowhere I would rather be than lost in the grounds of Wickham Hall. I wasn't lost, of course, not physically anyway. I'd just gone a bit starry-eyed with happiness at the sheer fabulousness of my job. I was so lucky to be outside in the sunshine, wandering around, checking up on the events happening that day, all in the name of work. I opened my diary as I rounded the eastern façade of the hall and ticked off my first completed task.