Happily Ever After

Chapter 19

19

GARDENCOURT – PORTRAIT OF A LADY, HENRY JAMES

‘Do you fancy a bottle of wine tonight?’ Hugo asked that evening over dinner. ‘I’ve had a delivery that I’d like your opinion on.’

This had become our shorthand for a fashion show, when he’d had a new arrival. Hugo would try it on first, then I’d have a go, and we’d check the label for authenticity, browse the internet to see if anyone famous had worn it recently, and then finish a bottle of wine whilst Hugo slipped into something more comfortable and I quietly despaired of my life choices.

But things were different now. I actually had some life choices, courtesy of Jay, which I needed to think about, and I wanted to take Oswald’s diaries to my bed and spend an evening combing through the more salacious entries. I wasn’t actually going to use any knowledge I obtained, but if I produced the diaries later with a knowing smile and a wink, Lady Tanith would know that I knew and she may let me hang around the house a bit longer.

Just a couple of days with the diaries, that was all I wanted. Time to skim read. It would probably be all that my nerves and imagination could take but it would mean I was in a position of – no, not power, because that would imply an evil twist that just wasn’t me. I wasn’t going to use the diaries for blackmail or anything like that. After all, who was there to blackmail? Oswald and Caroline were already dead, Hugo and Jasper knew their mother had been… important to Oswald. Any revelations about that relationship that the diaries contained would surely be worth no more than a nod and a shrug? So reading the diaries would be for me. For personal satisfaction, so I would know what all this hunting around the library had been all about. Perhaps I could get to know Oswald a little better too; his enormous visage had been quite a confidante during these weeks amid the dusty tedium; it would be nice to get behind the austere stare a little.

‘Can we do it tomorrow?’ I rolled my eyes at Lady Tanith, who was sitting at the dining table with us, unusually for her. She’d clearly finished whatever she had to do earlier and was choosing to cramp our style instead. ‘I’d rather like an early night tonight, Hugo.’

‘I believe my son is requesting your company,’ Lady Tanith said stiffly. ‘And you are a guest in this house.’

‘I know what Hugo is requesting, Lady Tanith,’ I said, my voice heavy with double-meaning.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hugo added, very quickly. I hoped he hadn’t thought I was about to dob him in. ‘Tomorrow is fine, honestly, Mother.’ He began collecting plates, noisily, trying to end the conversation.

Lady Tanith raised her eyebrows at me. She was still trying to force Hugo and me together and seemed increasingly annoyed at our lack of evident intentions for one another. Although, even if we had had any intentions, I liked to think we’d have been classy enough to keep them from his mother.

‘It’s a date,’ I said, which made him smile and Lady Tanith settle back into her chair with a disgruntled air.

‘Hmph,’ she snorted. Just for one second I was tempted to tell her that it was only a date in the calendar sense but I didn’t, and Hugo, sensing the worst was over, stopped clattering crockery.

‘In fact.’ I stood up. ‘I think I’ll go to bed now. Goodnight.’

Hugo returned my goodnight, with a slightly crestfallen expression on his face. He was obviously looking forward to unveiling his new purchase and my postponing the event was leaving him at a loose end, but it just reiterated my decision. I could not marry Hugo. And I particularly couldn’t marry him knowing that Lady Tanith would only endure me as the mother of the future heirs to Templewood. The position of power she would have over me would be unbearable, and the thought of raising children as supercilious towards me as she was, made me shudder. Although I did grin at the idea of popping babies out in very quick succession and then insisting that Lady Tanith babysit them all. That would sort out her attitude.

Then I sighed. As if I’d leave any child of mine in the care of House Grim. Besides, Lady Tanith would hire nannies to ‘help out’, and then Hugo would fall in love with one of them; I’d read those books too.

As I went up to my room, preceded by The Master, who was now forcing his way into my bed most nights, where he was a great stand in for a hot water bottle so I’d stopped scooping him back out and closing the door on his whiskery face, I thought again about Jay’s offer and my alternatives.

Should I swallow anything that was left of my pride and ask Mum and Dad for the airfare to Canada and join them? They would be only too delighted if I took back everything I’d ever said about hashtag NomadicExistence, hashtag Vanlife, hashtag TooOldForThisShit. They would hand over the travelling empire to me in a few years, I could get my bus driving licence and I could carry on making TV shows about resentful locals, lack of amenities and the trials and tribulations of parking a single-decker bus in public car parks. I’d have money, as long as the TV companies stayed interested, and the whole freedom of the road movement seemed to be growing in popularity again, as early-retirers sold the bungalow and bought a camper van. Yes. I could be a cult figure, and a rich one at that.

Or, I could try to make a go of landscape gardening. I had the feeling that Jay would make an incredible teacher – a frisson crept down my spine at the thought of his fingers and that near kiss – and that I would actually enjoy learning about plants and planting conditions and how to design a garden.

Was sticking to my principles really worth starting again?

Another thought of Jay, with his direct gaze, his messy hair and those long brown legs in shorts. Of course my principles were worth it.

I got into my pyjamas, then I propped my pillows up, sorted the volumes into date order, and began reading. I started with the earliest, 1968, and read all about Caroline’s gradual slide into frailty, which seemed to be linked to arthritis and maybe some other conditions that Oswald was too delicate to mention. He also tried out some phrases he was thinking of using in his next novel – I could have told him not to bother, he seemed to be the king of the mixed metaphor and obvious description – and talked about the management of the estate in general. It was, in short, not exactly riveting stuff. There wasn’t as much of ‘Oswald’ as I’d hoped for. I wanted emotions, dreams for the future. I wanted high drama, character development and, in short, story . I hadn’t considered that the diaries of a real person, as opposed to, say, Bridget Jones , might just be a catalogue of daily events and a record of milk yields.

I read about the decisions Oswald made: redesigning the gardens, letting out more farmland, finding someone to provide help for Caroline, but nothing of the guilt he must have felt about having to do so.

The first mention of Tanith came halfway through the year. Some old friends had a ward, which I had thought a thing that only existed in fiction – they were guardians for the daughter of a cousin. She had lost both parents; her mother had died very suddenly when the girl was five, and then her father had remarried and moved to South America with his new wife. The girl, Tanith, had been left in the care of Oswald’s friend and he was now looking for a position for her.

I put the book down for a moment, my eyes burning. So Tanith had lost her mother when she was little more than a toddler? Then her father hadn’t wanted to take her with him when he moved continents? She was the product of such cold-heartedness that it made a tear plop onto the diary page. How could her father have left his little girl behind? Her mother had only just died, she must have been bereft and scared and lonely. I had a sudden urge to seek out Lady Tanith and hug her, but I managed to suppress it without too much difficulty. Tanith had had a lifetime of ignoring emotion and I doubted that she’d welcome any outbursts from me.

Was this why she really wanted the diaries? Because she knew that Oswald would have laid her past bare and revealed her to be, at heart, just a terrified abandoned child, and didn’t want her own children to see what she’d been through? I guessed that being shown to have had a less-than-perfectly upper-class upbringing might let people into secrets that Tanith would rather keep buried. It was why she kept her sons close. Fear of loss must have ruled her life – no wonder losing Oswald had hit her so badly.

Oh God. Poor, poor Tanith. She daren’t have her past exposed, because she would worry that her boys might not understand. That little girl, alone and friendless and brought up by distant cousins… I wiped the back of my wrist over my eyes. Of course. It all made sense now. Those cousins had contacted Oswald, asking if he had anything for the now adult girl. Nothing too menial, a light role which would help her learn to run a household. Oswald considered her to be suitable. But he never ruminated on the possibility of giving up the estate, taking Caroline away somewhere they could be together more. He didn’t consider spending more time with his wife, or agonise on paper as to what would happen to the estate when his son Richard – who sounded a bit ineffectual and more concerned with his city friends than learning how to manage Templewood – inherited.

I wanted emotion from Oswald, outpourings of grief and anxiety! There was no narrative arc, other than that provided by the passing of the year, no character growth that I could see either. Literature had, once again, misled me. He never mused about the background of the companion he was thinking of taking on for his wife. Not one word was written about how fragile she must be, how friendless and lonely, or how much good she might bring to the household. Oswald, in short, had all the empathy of a house brick. It did not bode well for his novels.

But as I read on, the story of Templewood, Caroline and Oswald and their son still managed to absorb me, even without the personal touches I wanted. I got to the end of 1968 and laid the book down with the feeling of anticipation that I’d got used to from reading books which ended on a cliffhanger, preparing me for the excitement to come in the next-in-series. 1969. That was when Lady Tanith had come to Templewood Hall. Perhaps this was where dear Oswald switched up a gear and discovered he had Hidden Passions?

I wriggled myself more comfortably on the pillows and opened the next volume.

* * *

The birds were starting their feeble twittering complaints at the first glimmers of dawn when I put the last volume down. My eyes itched, but I hadn’t been able to stop reading. And now I needed to talk to someone.

Not Hugo, obviously. I couldn’t talk to Lady Tanith, because… because I just couldn’t, and anyway…

So I got out of bed, put on the thickest clothes I had and, leaving the cat to resettle in the warm bit of bed I’d left, I went out into the first early brightness. The sky was grey, the night gradually dragging the day over the sky as it retreated, and everything wore long shadows of the retiring darkness, and drizzle. I padded my way out of the back door, around the house and down the path.

Jay would be up. He was a gardener. Whatever time of day – and night, too, come to that – I went outside, there he would be, snipping and mowing and generally gardening. Dawn was probably his natural time, he’d be skipping about somewhere, snipping roses or tying back some trailing growth in a top beaded with condensation, and shorts.

I kept an eye open, but couldn’t see him anywhere, so decided to start at Ground Zero and went to his cottage. Jay, it turned out, wasn’t skipping anywhere and was, in fact, irritable and newly awoken when I banged at his door, rang the bell and pressed the buzzer that he’d had installed to bypass his need to wear his hearing aids at night.

‘What? Andi? What…? It’s about ten past midnight, isn’t it? Why aren’t you asleep? Never mind, I’ve not got my aids in, hold on, I’ll come down.’

The upstairs window banged shut and I jiggled on the step for a few moments until Jay, in a T-shirt with Homer Simpson looking very past his best on, and boxer shorts, opened the door.

‘I thought you’d be up,’ I said, apologetically, sliding into the hall.

Jay didn’t answer. He led the way through to the kitchen, which was warm and brighter than the rest of the house, fumbled on the table, and found his hearing aids. ‘All right,’ he said, as though he were trying to lose the last dregs of dreams. ‘All right. I’m here. What’s the panic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said as soon as he turned round. ‘I thought – gardening, up at dawn, digging and… and… everything…’ I trailed off, at his grin.

‘In spring, maybe. In summer, yep, up early to get the watering done. But it’s autumn. Most things are shutting down. I’m keeping the autumn colour beds going but now I don’t need to cut the grass every five minutes or weed absolutely everywhere, I get a lie-in. Until a very strange woman turns up on my doorstep while the sparrows are still in bed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, still hopping from foot to foot, powered by the rocket fuel of discovery. ‘But I needed to talk to someone.’

‘And you thought of me? I’m flattered.’ Jay ran a hand through his hair, which didn’t help the middle-of-the-night look. ‘Right. Let me put the kettle on.’

While he did so, I took out the diaries that I’d carried over, clamped once more to my bosom and laid them on the table. Jay turned around from filling the kettle and plonking it onto the Aga plate, saw them and raised his eyebrows.

‘ That exciting, eh?’ He looked at the diaries and then at me. ‘I do hope that you aren’t so filled with lust as a result of those that you’ve come over to have your wicked way with me. It’s early, I might need a bit of a run up.’

‘Sorry, no,’ I said, and then wondered why I’d apologised. ‘I read them all last night and I have to offload.’

Jay whistled. ‘All right. All right. Sit down, stop dancing. Would you like some toast?’

‘ Toast ?’ Obediently I pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘For you this is clearly earth-shattering. For me, it’s dawn, I was asleep, I need toast. I’m making some anyway and need to know whether to make extra.’

His pragmatism in the face of my evident incredulity was both calming and incredibly annoying. ‘Yes. No! Look, this is important!’

‘Better make it wholemeal then. Right, you talk, I’ll toast. Go.’

I took a deep breath. Where to start?

‘You know that Lady Tanith came to be a companion to Caroline, Oswald’s wife?’

‘I’d gathered that, yes.’

‘And Lady Tanith became his muse, they fell in love but Oswald was too honourable to leave Caroline, so they had an affair under her nose. When she died, he took some time out, went to Switzerland and died there. That’s the story, right?’

The kettle whistled and Jay poured water into mugs. I waited until he turned back around to see my face. He’d got his hearing aids in, but I didn’t want to have to repeat any of this.

‘Right.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you saying that’s not what happened?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Not according to Oswald.’

‘Maybe he edited things? Didn’t want to be seen in a bad light? Seducing the young companion while his wife was quietly dying upstairs?’

I shook my head impatiently. ‘He didn’t need to worry. These diaries were hidden, weren’t they? If he’d wanted them to be squeaky clean, maybe for publication, he would have either written a fake set, put them somewhere easy to find, or he’d have self-edited and not hidden them at all. These were his own, private recollections and records – trust me, there is a lot about the running of the estate in here. Maybe he’d been going to edit them or destroy them when he got back from Switzerland, only he didn’t come back.’

I took the mug of tea. Over in the corner, two slices of toast popped, and I had to wait for those to be buttered before I carried on.

‘I’m imagining all kinds of nefarious dealings.’ Jay handed me a slice, warm and dripping with melted butter. ‘Carry on.’

‘That’s just it. There weren’t any nefarious dealings. Oswald really did not like Lady Tanith at all. He took her in as a favour to a friend because her mother was dead and her father had left her and this friend had brought her up and needed somewhere for her to go. To be honest, he really ought to have wondered a little bit more about what a background like that might do to a person.’

‘Oh dear,’ Jay said, biting his toast.

‘He calls her things like “that annoying child” and “my bleating shadow”. Apparently Lady Tanith inserted herself into his life; she was everywhere. Oswald was trying to write – she’d be there, in the library, talking, trying to give him ideas or lines he could use.’

Jay pulled a face. ‘That sounds… irritating.’

‘According to Oswald it was more than irritating. I actually started to feel really sorry for him. He even took to hiding in the icehouse to try to get away from her, but she followed him there too. By 1972 the poor man was desperate.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yes. She was obviously damaged. I mean, everyone she’d ever loved had dumped her, she was desperate for something to love and she fixated on poor Oswald. Round about May he got absolutely scathing about her. He was clearly being fairly polite to her face but letting it all out in his diary. There are pages of stuff about how she wouldn’t leave him alone, how she trailed behind him, how he was going to have to leave Caroline – to whom he was, incidentally, absolutely devoted – and go down to London just to get a break from Lady Tanith.’

Jay licked his fingers and got up to put more bread in the toaster. ‘Why didn’t he just tell her to push off? Explain that he needed space to write? Lock the library door?’

‘Apparently the door didn’t lock, not until late 1972, when he got one put on. But Lady Tanith would take a chair and sit outside, talking through the door. And Caroline liked her; Lady Tanith made her life easier and gave her someone to talk to – when she wasn’t pestering Oswald, obviously. To be honest, I’m not sure Lady Tanith would have gone, even if he’d given her her marching orders. She was too much in love with Oswald. It just wasn’t returned. At all,’ I added, in case there was any doubt.

‘So – so all that stuff about her being his muse? About them being devoted to each other? That’s all in Tanith’s head ?’ Jay leaned against the Aga as though he needed its support in his shock. ‘She made it all up?’

‘Fifty years, Jay. I’m not sure she even knows what was true and what she just invented. She didn’t do it deliberately I don’t think. She just didn’t know what love was meant to look like.’

‘Bugger me.’ He scraped his hair back with both hands. ‘Fifty years. Fifty years of that bloody memorial service every month. For a man who didn’t even like her.’

I made a ‘there you go’ face.

‘So, she’s got a shrine in the attic, she lays flowers at that stone, she’s been staring at that portrait, for fifty years ! It was pretty weird when we thought they’d been lovers, now it’s not just weird it’s – well, treatment territory, I’d have said.’

‘I think it’s grief,’ I said, taking another slice of toast.

‘Grief? No. I know about grief, Andi.’ Jay rubbed, probably unconsciously, at the tattoo on his wrist. ‘Grief is carrying someone with you, in your soul. It’s wanting to live your life for them too, because they didn’t get the chance. It’s hearing their voice in the rain, wishing they could have met… Look, what Lady Tanith has, that’s not grief. That’s self-indulgence.’

I looked at him over my crust. ‘You don’t have a monopoly,’ I said softly.

‘Sorry? You’re eating and…’ Jay waved a hand at my face. ‘That bit wasn’t clear.’

‘You can’t speak for everyone’s grief. The way you feel about your sister, that’s your grief. Lady Tanith has her own grief. OK, yes, it’s over the top and utterly bonkers from our perspective, especially knowing now that she’s grieving for someone who really disliked her, but she’s still entitled to it, Jay.’

This was as close as I could come to explaining what I felt about Lady Tanith. The pity I had come to feel, more and more, as I’d read those diaries. Oswald, who had been too – I wanted to say soft, but he’d been kind, really – too kind to sit Lady Tanith down and tell her that she could never be anything to him. Or perhaps – the thought had come at about two in the morning – perhaps he had been afraid to say anything? Perhaps he’d half thought that Lady Tanith might lose any reason she had and do something awful to Caroline just to have him free for her? And he’d needed Lady Tanith, whatever he thought of her. He’d loved his wife, but he couldn’t care for her, couldn’t be with her all the time. He’d had his writing.

And he’d been bloody stupid.

But Lady Tanith had rewritten history. Perhaps she’d always believed it. Maybe she’d taken Oswald’s attempts to shake her off as being his artistic temperament. His inability to declare love for her, as loyalty to his wife.

After all, she hadn’t had the best start in life. But pity only took you so far, before you wanted to shake her really hard and tell her how much she had interfered with Oswald’s life. He may even have written twice as many dreadful novels and even more execrable poetry, if she hadn’t been over his shoulder all the time, ‘helping’. So maybe it wasn’t medicating she needed, so much as a medal.

Jay took a deep breath which sounded more like a gasp. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. You’re right. Everyone loses someone in their own way and everyone deals with it in their own way. I can’t speak for the entire world of loss.’ He came over and flopped beside me on a chair at the table. ‘Thank you,’ he said, softly.

‘What for? Telling you you aren’t the only person ever to lose a loved one?’

‘For stopping me from being so self-absorbed. Grief starts out dark and tortured and it ends up – well, like Lady Tanith.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor woman. All those years telling herself that he loved her.’

‘But it does rather beg the question,’ I said, pointing at the diaries on the table. ‘What do I do with those? Lady Tanith isn’t going to be happy until she gets them, but I can’t let her see them… or can I?’

He pulled a ferocious face. ‘Argh. That’s a tough one.’

‘It might be good for her. To see life as it really was, not as she’s constructed it to be. I mean, she must have known, surely, men don’t run away and hide when they see you coming if you’re their muse and the love of their life. Even Lady Tanith must know that, deep down.’

‘Or’ – Jay pushed my cup of tea towards me – ‘or it might send her over the edge and she kills everyone who might know and then takes to the woods, gibbering and bloodstained.’

I gave him a hard stare. ‘Or she might just be really upset.’

‘As I said, gibbering and bloodstained. Anyway. Ethical dilemma; this is much more your territory than mine.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, you’ve got all that “go and live with my sister, or please my parents by taking on their world” stuff, haven’t you?’ He dropped his face into his mug. ‘Or coming in with me.’

He wasn’t looking at me. Carefully not looking at me. As though he were afraid of what I might say next.

‘That’s not ethics. That’s just practicality,’ I said, trying for cheery upbeatness. ‘But I’m assuming that learning how to landscape gardens won’t involve Peppa Pig or passing an HGV driving test.’

A quick, hopeful sidelong glance came from the direction of his mug. ‘Nope. Or at least, not that I’ve noticed so far, as long as you can come to terms with a ride-on mower. Gardening can also be somewhat pig-adjacent.’

‘Well then.’

Jay smiled, a slow thoughtful smile. ‘Great. But what about these diaries? What are you going to do? Could you redact them? Tear out the pages where Oswald is at his most vicious about her? Pretend, I dunno, that there’s a particularly selective breed of worm that only eats some paper?’

I gave a deep sigh that let out a lot of the tension I’d been holding. ‘I really don’t know. I should just give them to her, of course. She’s an adult, responsible for managing her own expectations and responses. I should just hand them over, not say that I’ve read them, and let her discover what Oswald really thought, in her own time.’

‘But?’ Jay crossed his legs and his shoulder made contact with mine. It was nice.

‘Well, bloodstains, gibbering and all that. And, I feel sorry for her. I don’t know if I could bear being the person who blew her world apart. She wants to read them, to edit them for publication, even though no reader is ever going to comb through that lot to find Oswald’s motivations for his novels. She’s not going to publish them without going through them first, so I can’t even tell myself that she won’t ever see what he said.’

‘So, pretend you never found them.’

I focused on the hairy brown knee beside me. ‘She knows they’re there in the library somewhere. I can pretend to keep looking, of course, but I’ve got no idea how long I can keep it up before she fires me and brings in someone else.’ I pulled a face. ‘Someone a lot quicker on the uptake than me, who finds the hiding place. If it’s empty, Lady Tanith will draw a whole lot of conclusions that I’d rather she didn’t – like I found them and ran off with them, and if I put them back, then I’m just kicking this further down the road to make it not my responsibility.’ I sighed again. ‘I’m buggered, whatever I decide.’

Jay whistled again. ‘And now it’s my problem too, thanks for that.’

I stiffened. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think…’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s good, in a very weird and protracted kind of way. Shows you trust me.’

‘Does it?’

‘Well, you obviously realise that I’m not going to run straight to Lady Tanith or Hugo and tell them that you found the diaries, am I? That’s trust.’ Jay looked at me sideways again. ‘You really haven’t trusted many people in life, have you?’

‘There’s never been a need,’ I said briskly. ‘So, advice. What do I do ?’

‘We could run away?’ Jay suggested, half-hopefully.

‘Lady Tanith would have a case against us for breaking the terms of our employment, and don’t tell me she wouldn’t use it. Besides – besides, I don’t want to leave Hugo in the lurch. He’s all right.’ Then I thought of Hugo, in full-length satin and velvet, swinging an evening bag with no one to turn to. ‘He’s got his demons too, but he’s been nothing but kind to me. I can’t dump him and go and hide.’

‘So tell him what you’ve found. Lady Tanith is his mother, maybe this is more his responsibility than it is ours?’

I stood up, noisily pushing the chair back. ‘I’ve thought of that as well. But the boys were brought up on the story of their mother’s doomed love for Oswald. Is it fair to expose them to the fact that she has never really known what love is? With all the implications that might have for the way she’s treated them?’

‘It might explain an awful lot about life for them, though,’ Jay put in. He stood up too. ‘What’s not fair, is that this has fallen on you.’

Jay reached out. I felt my skin cool at the thought of his approaching touch, and then prickle with heat, but he reached past me and picked up his plate of toast.

‘I’m going to give it a couple of days,’ I said, not sure whether I felt disappointed or not that he hadn’t touched me. ‘Nobody knows that we found anything in there. I’ve got a bit of leeway to weigh up the pros and cons and maybe introduce the topic to Hugo.’

‘You and Hugo…’ Jay put the plate down again. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

‘No. I thought, right at the beginning… but no, Jay.’

‘What about me? Was I in the frame at the beginning?’ He was quite close to me now, Homer Simpson’s bug eyes giving me something to focus on.

‘I thought you were going to attack me with a pair of shears,’ I admitted. ‘But I do admit to a momentary Lady Chatterley consideration.’

Jay’s expression brightened. ‘Well, that’s hopeful, at least. I did get a look in at being a lusty young stud.’ Another small step, so close that I could see the light of the increasing dawn reflecting in his hair. ‘But I promise to take things very, very slowly. All right?’

‘I think that would be good, yes.’ My voice came out very small, very quiet. He smelled of clean linen, of rumpled sheets and sleep, with a musky top note that was probably just shower gel or shampoo but to me smelled alluringly male. When I looked above Homer, Jay’s head was on one side, and his eyes were asking me a question that I wanted to answer with my entire body. ‘All right?’ he whispered, a hand tangling into my hair to draw my face closer.

‘Mmmm.’ I stood on tiptoe to reach his mouth and we kissed, a toast-crumb and tea-flavoured kiss that somehow managed to conjure images of potential nights of tangled sheets and heat rather than burned bread and stewed leaves.

After a while, which could have been moments or could have been decades, Jay stepped back, although his fingers still grazed the skin of my cheek. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘Well.’

‘Mmmm?’ I said again, lost now in a potential fantasy which leaned a lot more towards the raunchier side of my reading habits than Jane Austen would have cared for.

‘I’d better get dressed and walk you back to the house.’

‘Oh.’ Disappointment and thwarted lust crashed together into my heart. I’d hoped – had I? – for more. But Jay wasn’t a ‘take advantage of the moment’ sort of guy, I realised.

‘You don’t want to be caught sneaking in with that lot, do you?’

‘No.’ He was quite right, damn him. Whilst my literary-powered brain had been imagining moments of passion on the kitchen table, practicality had to win out. Jay had been right all along, life really couldn’t be like the books. Us having wild sex here and now would mean getting back to the house to the likelihood of being met by either Lady Tanith, Hugo or Mrs Compton, and any one of them would query why I was carrying a load of books. And I couldn’t leave them with Jay, in case I decided that telling Hugo was the only thing to do. I would need to show him absolute evidence of his mother’s self-deception.

Jay gave me a wicked smile. He clearly knew what I’d been thinking. ‘Right. Give me five minutes.’ He set off for the hallway. ‘Actually, better give me ten. Not sure I can get my trousers on yet.’

I laughed and let him go. Now that someone else knew about Lady Tanith and Oswald, I felt better. Lighter. I understood how Hugo felt, telling me about the dresses after keeping the secret to himself for years – sometimes you just needed someone else to know.

I walked around Jay’s kitchen, tidying our plates and mugs into the deep butler’s sink and wiping the table free of crumbs. Living in a small space in the bus for so long had taught me that if everything wasn’t put away immediately, after twenty minutes you were wading through knee-level mess and trying to find somewhere to sit that didn’t have cutlery on it. Then I looked at the walls, where botanical prints decorated the plain plaster, and stacks of gardening books and magazines were piled roughly but tidily in a corner.

There was one photograph. Unframed, tucked under a magnet on the fridge and slightly curled at the edges. A much younger Jay, hair tied back, and wearing a University of Durham sweatshirt, arm around a smiling girl whose head was pushed right up against his so they could both fit into the photograph. She looked frail but happy, short curls bouncing around her thin face and a look of mischief in her eyes.

I took the photo off the fridge and looked at it properly. Yes, I could see the sibling resemblance. Jay and Flora both had the same dark hair and eyes, the same high cheekbones and similar smiles. If he was at university when this was taken, it must have been fairly close to her death.

‘That’s the last picture.’ Jay had come into the kitchen behind me, unheard. ‘Flora wanted us to do a selfie. She’d come up to Durham to visit me.’ Gently he took the picture from my hands and then stared down at it. ‘We were both pretty rubbish at taking selfies,’ he said quietly. ‘This was the only one that had both our faces in.’

I thought of that photograph on the table in the attic. Oswald looking uncomfortable, with Lady Tanith squeezed in next to him, smiling happily. Who had taken it, Caroline? Richard? How had Oswald been persuaded to stand still next to Lady Tanith for long enough? Not that it mattered. She clearly treasured that picture, her and her beloved. The denial that Lady Tanith must live under was almost a solid weight. How could I ever blow her world apart with the evidence? But somehow, somehow she was going to have to find out, and then she’d know that I knew and… But love took so many forms. Did I have a right to impose my belief in the way it looked onto Tanith, who had presumably loved Oswald in her own way, even though that love hadn’t been returned? Her feelings had still been valid.

I tried to imagine Tanith faced by utter reality and failed. Nothing was like books. This was people’s lives.

‘She’d have liked you.’ Jay gently hooked the photograph back under the magnet. ‘Flora. You would have made her laugh.’

‘Why don’t you frame it? Put it on the wall?’ I watched the picture’s edges curl back into place, shadowing Flora’s happy smile under a twist of paper.

‘It seems – too final, somehow, you know?’ With one last glance at those happy faces, Jay turned away. ‘Yes, right, I don’t have the only way to grieve, I know that. But ten years… it’s still not long enough.’

‘So you can understand Lady Tanith? A bit?’ I waited for him to swirl his waxed coat over his shoulders.

‘Understand? Nope, not if I live to be two hundred. But sympathise with? I guess I can maybe do that.’ Jay opened the front door. ‘But only because it’s probably my best idea for keeping safe if she finally loses it and ties us all up in the basement.’ He ushered me through into the chill of the early morning. ‘If she utters one “mwahahahahaha”, I’m heading for the hills as fast as my sturdy gardener’s legs can carry me.’