Chapter Forty-Five
It was mid-afternoon when Ruan finally arrived to collect Tammy from her mother’s. She’d messaged him to say that she wanted to spend more time at the house which he took to be a positive sign.
Kathleen had kept the letter and the proposal note but insisted he not delete the photographs of them “in case anything should happen to the originals”. After leaving, he’d picked up a sandwich and gone for a walk in the hills to pass the time and to think.
How could he have known that his inheritance would come with so much more than bricks and mortar?
The house itself did matter, of course. Its financial value wasn’t to be dismissed in a place where homes were scarce and precious.
Even so, he’d never dreamed how precious Rosewarne would be to one family in particular or what secrets it held – or that it would lead him on a literal and emotional journey that would challenge him in every way.
Kathleen had told him to make amends with Tammy if he could and he was now certain that he at least had to try. First of all, he needed to hear how Tammy had got on. Had she found the answers to her own questions?
He collected her outside the house and watched her mother wave her off from the door.
They drove in silence until they were clear of the outskirts of the village before he finally asked her, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am … thanks. Can you please take us back to the flat and we can both talk about it?’
‘So, Davey isn’t my dad,’ Tammy told him over a glass of wine. ‘He and Mum never even got on that well, according to her. She says Walter was seeking some kind of twisted revenge by accusing my mother of cheating.’
‘Why?’
She ran her fingers up and down the stem of the glass before answering. ‘He’d wanted my mum to … have an “arrangement” with him.’
‘Jesus …’ Ruan revised his opinion of Walter downwards again. Earlier today he’d thought he could feel some sympathy for the man, but this latest revelation had left his tolerance in tatters. ‘He didn’t actually try anything …?’ He found it impossible to voice his darkest fears.
‘No – thank goodness – and Mum told him where to go. Fortunately, he left her alone after that. He must have been desperate to try it.’
‘Or possibly losing his grip on reality completely. Kathleen gave me some more insight into his childhood. It was awful. His mother shut herself off and his father was vile to him. Kathleen said he didn’t know how to let himself feel and when the love of his life came along, he just couldn’t open up.
He was either too afraid to let his emotions take flight or he didn’t know how.
Kathleen said he seemed incapable of loving her, although she now thinks differently. ’
‘Would it have changed her mind to have read it before she left?’
‘No. She says not. She was pregnant …’
Tammy gasped. ‘With Walter’s child?’
Ruan nodded.
‘Oh my God. And did he know?’
‘She never told him because she didn’t want him to bring up the little boy. She says she’s still sure she made the right decision because she felt she could never have relied on him to give her and the baby a happy life – the one she went on to make with her new husband and children in Scotland.’
‘So Walter never knew his son at all?’
‘No. Kathleen feels guilty about it but has no real regrets about her decision. It’s hard to feel too sorry for my great-uncle, though, when he made so many lives a misery.
He was a very damaged soul and when she left, he sought revenge on the world.
He took out his pain on other people: by making them suffer. Like your dad.’
‘I wish I could feel sorry for him,’ Tammy said. ‘Maybe I will in time, though I’m not sure I have that capacity.’
‘I can understand that he lived out his days in misery and only at the very last, when it was too late, did he try to do something decent. He decided to do it through me, though I’d like to think that eventually he’d have changed his will and left at least part of Rosewarne to you.’
Tammy shook her head. ‘I wish I could believe that too, but I don’t.’
‘No, but it isn’t too late for me to do what he ought to have. What he might have. I want you to share Rosewarne with me. I’ll convert it back into two houses if you like and you can have the half that was yours.’
He heard the half-stifled gasp. He felt her shock deep in his heart and he guessed the answer before she spoke.
‘I – That’s very generous. Too generous, and, Ruan, this isn’t about Rosewarne. It’s not about money or even a home. It’s about me. It sounds mad, but I feel – paralysed.’
There was such a heartfelt anguish in her voice – such desolation. How could Ruan press his case? What she needed now was time, and he could only hope – but was he living in false hope?
‘I understand, even though I want you to have what’s yours,’ Ruan said. ‘So what do you want to do now?’
‘To go home,’ she said. ‘Only that.’
‘OK,’ Ruan said. ‘Home.’
Even as he agreed, Ruan wasn’t sure he knew where home was any longer.