CHAPTER FOUR
Beth had made herself useful whilst Dulcie and Otto had been fetching Walter from the hospital. She had cleaned the kitchen, the downstairs loo, and the upstairs bathroom, and had put all her clothes away.
Eyeing the view from what was usually her bedroom but was now to be Walter’s for the duration of his stay, she consoled herself with the knowledge that at least she could see up the mountain from the room she had been allocated. She couldn’t see as far as Maisie and Adam’s place, but it was a comfort knowing that her youngest child was just over the horizon.
During this time her phone had rung twice. The first call had been from Nikki, whose opening gambit had been a hissed, ‘What the hell, Mum?’ Apparently she’d heard the news, first from Dulcie who had sent her a message, then from Maisie who had tried to phone her when she had been in class and then sent her a message.
It seemed that Nikki wasn’t pleased for two reasons. One, that Beth had kept it a secret (‘You’re as bad as Maisie. Scratch that, you’re worse.’) and two, because Maisie had phoned her during a lesson observation. Beth hadn’t helped matters by telling Nikki that if she was so concerned about receiving calls, she should have turned her phone off.
The comment hadn’t gone down well. Nikki had used her ‘teacher voice’ and had told Beth that she would see her later. It had sounded like a threat.
Maisie had accused Beth of being unable to cut the apron strings, and that she needed to let Maisie have a life of her own. Trust Maisie to make it all about her. Maisie clearly still had some growing up to do. The only person who was pleased that she had moved to Picklewick was her grandson. Sammy had sent her a message with one word in it – ‘Wicked’. She briefly wondered what he was doing using his phone during school (she knew it was strictly against the school’s policies), but she let it go. She needed all the support she could get, even if it was from an eleven-year-old.
Peg, Walter’s gentle Border collie, also seemed pleased to see her and, after Dulcie and Otto had left for the hospital, the dog had followed her from room to room, as though Beth was a rather peculiar sheep that needed rounding up. Beth didn’t mind. She appreciated the company, and it was one more ‘person’ on her side.
After she had done the chores, she made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table to await Walter’s arrival.
Beth heard him before she saw him. As usual, he was grumbling, but she supposed this time he had good reason. She had never broken a bone in her life (but then, she hadn’t been prone to going up ladders), but she could imagine how inconvenient it must be. Painful, too. She shuddered at the thought of the metal pin they’d inserted into Walter’s leg, and wondered whether he would beep when he went through airport security, and if so, would the hospital issue him with some kind of letter to explain.
Beth sat up straighter when the kitchen door banged open, and Walter limped in, flanked by Dulcie. She had her hands outstretched, as though expecting to catch him if he toppled over.
Walter didn’t say a word when he saw her, but his lips tightened and Beth guessed he was as unhappy to see her as she was to see him. Living in the same house as him was going to be a challenge, she thought, consoling herself with the hope that his stay at the farmhouse would only be for a few days. As soon as they could see that he could cope on his own, Dulcie and Otto would surely send him home.
Moving slowly, Walter headed for one of the kitchen chairs and lowered himself into it with much grunting and face pulling. His leg was sticking out, and Beth hoped no one would trip over it.
Peg, the traitorous creature, had been waiting patiently by the door, and was now nosing her master, asking to be fussed. So much for Beth thinking that Peg was on her side. Maybe she could get a dog of her own…?
Nah, it would need walking come rain or shine, and although Beth would be happy to take a dog for a walk when it was fine, she wouldn’t be too keen on having to take it out when it was hammering down. And then there was the hair everywhere, and the dog poo that would need picking up. On second thoughts, maybe she would get a cat. Cats were far less trouble – maximum gain for minimum effort.
Whilst all this was going through her mind, she was studying Walter. He didn’t look well. ‘Drawn’ was the best way to describe him. His cheeks were gaunt and his eyes had sunk, and the skin on his face was almost as grey as his hair.
Beth found herself feeling sorry for him. The fall and the subsequent operation had taken its toll.
‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ Dulcie said. ‘Here, give me your coat.’
Beth watched her daughter fussing around him and wondered whether she should play nice and offer to help. ‘I’ll make it,’ she said, getting to her feet.
Otto had disappeared upstairs with Walter’s bag, but he wasn’t up there long and when he came back down Beth asked him if he also wanted a cup of tea.
‘Not for me thanks. I’m going to the cottage to pack a few things for Dad. Anything in particular you want me to bring, Dad?’
Walter reeled off a list of things he couldn’t live without, and Otto headed off, leaving Beth, Dulcie and Walter to make small talk.
Walter shot the opening volley. ‘I can’t believe you just turned up here out of the blue.’
Beth narrowed her eyes as she poured boiling water into the teapot. So that’s how he was going to play it. ‘I can’t believe you were up a ladder at your age,’ she retorted.
‘Anyone hungry?’ Dulcie asked.
‘No,’ Beth said.
‘Yes.’ That was from Walter. ‘The food in that hospital was dire.’
Dulcie said, ‘If you want something quick, I could heat up some soup or make you an omelette.’
‘I don’t want to put you out,’ Walter said.
Beth returned fire. ‘You should have thought of that before you went up a ladder. And in slippers, too.’
‘It was an accident,’ he shot back. ‘Unlike what you did. You could hardly call moving house and not telling anyone an accident.’
‘What I do is none of your business.’ Beth’s voice was sharp. How dare he lecture her on what she should or shouldn’t do.
‘Ditto.’
‘Ooh, get you and your fancy words. Been looking up the crossword answers, have you?’
‘Don’t be so childish.’
‘It’s better than being oldish.’
‘Oldish?’
‘Yeah, too old to go up a ladder, and too stupid to realise it.’
‘Mum!’ Dulcie was aghast.
‘It’s true. Anyway, he started it.’ Beth glared at Walter.
Walter glared back.
Beth had gained a lot of experience in outglaring teenage daughters, and she smirked when Walter looked away first. When she noticed that Dulcie was glaring at her, Beth quickly rearranged her features.
‘I’m not standing for this, Mum. Walter needs rest; not you goading him. If you can’t behave yourself, you’ll have to go.’
Beth gasped. ‘Where?’ Surely Dulcie wouldn’t throw her own mother out.
‘Maisie’s static has three bedrooms. You can stay there until your new house is repaired.’
‘No!’ Beth cried. Maisie would never agree. And even if she did, a static caravan would be too cramped for three.
Dulcie was still glaring. ‘Promise me you’ll behave yourself?’ She had her hands on her hips and looked as though she meant it.
Beth forced out a reluctant, ‘Yes’
‘Good.’ Dulcie turned her attention back to Walter, and Beth felt a small degree of satisfaction that Dulcie was going to berate him too.
But she didn’t. When Dulcie said, ‘What’s it to be Walter, soup or omelette?’ Beth ground her teeth together to hold her irritation in check.
The next couple of weeks were going to be very long indeed.
Bloody hell, this was going to be worse than he anticipated, and he wasn’t referring to his broken leg, either. Walter was referring to Beth. Why, oh why, did she have to rock up at the exact same time he was incapacitated? And it looked like she’d already sharpened her knives and wasn’t averse to stabbing him with them. Talk about kicking a man when he was down.
He held the moral high ground though: climbing a ladder to see to his guttering himself because he didn’t want to bother Otto, might have been misguided but it had been done with the best of intentions. He couldn’t say the same for the stunt that Beth had pulled. Deceitful and underhand, that’s what she was. Although he did concede that she had a stroke of bad luck with her ceiling coming down. If she had been able to move into her house in the village today, her actions wouldn’t have had such annoying consequences.
Poor Dulcie. Walter felt very sorry for her. Not only did she have him and his broken leg to contend with (which he was deeply sorry about) but she now had her mother to put up with. The woman was a menace.
Abruptly, he felt exhausted. All he wanted was to crawl into his own bed in his cottage and sleep for a week, but his cottage was out of the question. To his chagrin, he was acutely aware that he needed help (the nurse had been right) and the only way he would get it was to stay with Otto and Dulcie for a while. Otto, the poor boy, had too much on his plate with the restaurant to be able to give him a great deal of assistance, but Dulcie worked from home, so she’d be able to keep an eye on him. Walter hoped he wouldn’t put her out too much.
‘I think I’ll go for a lie down,’ he said as soon as Otto returned with his things, but as he tried to get up, he didn’t know how. He feared putting any weight on his plastered leg, and he couldn’t lever himself up using just the one.
Shuffling awkwardly to the edge of the chair, he reached for his crutches and promptly knocked them over. Dismayed and humiliated, he could feel his face flushing, and if he hadn’t been so damned cross about the whole thing, he had a horrible suspicion that he might have burst into tears.
Quietly Otto bent to retrieve the crutches, holding them in one hand whilst he offered the other to Walter, who took it gratefully. But even with his son’s help, Walter found it a struggle to get to his feet, and he was even more irate and embarrassed by the time he was upright.
Gritting his teeth and looking straight ahead, he limped out of the kitchen. Ungainly and awkward, he realised that using the crutches was going to take some practice. They hurt his arms, and even the short journey from the kitchen to the foot of the stairs left him with aching wrists and hands.
Panting with the effort, Walter gazed upwards in dismay. The thirteen steps might as well be a thousand. The thought of trying to heave his old carcass up them made him want to weep.
‘I can’t do it,’ he muttered, leaning against the wall to try to take some of the weight off his good leg.
‘No problem, Dad; if you can’t get to the bed, we’ll bring the bed to you.’
‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’
‘You’re not a nuisance.’ Otto put an arm around his shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, son.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’
‘I’m causing you nothing but trouble. It’s not the first time you’ve had to bail me out.’
‘Stop that right now. I’m not going to put up with you feeling sorry for yourself. Accidents happen.’
‘I should never have gone up that ladder.’
‘Too right you shouldn’t, but what’s done is done. Look on the bright side – it could have been a lot worse.’
Walter had been trying not to think about that.
Otto continued, ‘Anyway, it’ll only be for a few weeks. You’ll be back on your feet in no time – excuse the pun. Let’s get you into the living room, then I’ll bring the bed down.’
Walter allowed himself to be guided into the lounge, where he sank gratefully onto the sofa with a grunt. Otto handed him the TV’s remote control and gave his shoulder a squeeze before returning to the kitchen. Walter couldn’t hear what was being said, but he could guess. Otto and Dulcie would be kind, he had no doubt. But he couldn’t say the same for Beth. And even if she didn’t say it aloud, she would be thinking it.
For the umpteenth time, Walter lamented that Beth was witnessing his frailty. He was a proud man (stubbornly so, Otto reckoned) and he hated her seeing him so helpless. It made him feel rather vulnerable, and the last person he wanted to show any weakness to was Beth Fairfax. Knowing her, she would take advantage and go for the jugular.
As he sat there, listening to the sound of Otto manoeuvring a bed across the landing, Walter wondered why he and Dulcie’s mother didn’t get on.
Ah, that was easy – she was annoying. But he didn’t look too closely at why he found her annoying because it didn’t matter. What mattered was that, aside from the next couple of weeks, he was going to see an awful lot more of her now that she would be living in Picklewick. He wouldn’t simply be able to stroll up the lane and pop in to have a cuppa with Dulcie, because she might be there. And whenever Dulcie and Otto invited him for lunch or supper, in the interests of fairness they would have to invite her too.
For Walter, with Beth on the scene, life wouldn’t be the same again.
What a palaver, Beth grumbled to herself, as she carefully crept down the steep stairs the following morning. It was incredibly early, but she had woken up to go to the loo and hadn’t been able to go back to sleep. Typical.
She could have done with a couple hours more, because she’d been awake half the night. And that was Walter’s fault. Twice she’d heard Otto go downstairs, presumably to check that the old man hadn’t fallen out of bed. Or, worse, fallen over when he went to the bathroom.
The fuss if that had happened, didn’t bear thinking about. Yesterday had been bad enough.
As Beth tiptoed through the dining room and into the kitchen (she didn’t want to risk waking Walter), she pursed her lips as she remembered how Dulcie had fluffed pillows and smoothed the duvet before Otto had sent everyone out of the room so he could help his father change into his pyjamas to have a nap.
What was wrong with falling asleep in the chair like a normal pensioner, Beth wanted to know. She often napped in a chair, but she didn’t feel the need to change into her nightie to do so.
Pouring boiling water into a mug, she mashed the tea bag against the side, then added milk, wincing at the rattle of the glass milk bottles as she closed the fridge door.
When she sat down at the kitchen table, she took a sip and grimaced. Ergh! Goat’s milk! She had forgotten that was what Dulcie and Otto drank now, although they must have bought normal milk because she’d had a couple of proper cups of tea yesterday. No doubt the cow’s milk would have been bought especially for Walter.
Beth, slightly ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts, tried not to feel bitter. If Dulcie had known she was coming, she was sure that Dulcie would also have stocked up on normal milk for her.
Recognising that some of her negative feelings regarding Walter stemmed from him living so close to the farm whilst she lived so far away, Beth resolved to try harder to be nicer to him. With her now living in the village (or she would be as soon as the repairs were done on her house) she had no reason to feel as resentful.
The remainder of her negative feelings were due to him simply being annoying. She had never met such an irritating man. If she said the sun would come up tomorrow, he’d argue that it wouldn’t.
She wondered how he was feeling this morning. Like a right idiot probably. What seventy-something bloke in his right mind would venture up a ladder whilst wearing slippers? He had been an accident waiting to happen.
Beth drank her tea and debated whether to poke her head around the door and ask if he’d like a cup. Then she decided against it, in case he needed the loo. She didn’t mind making him a cuppa or fetching him something from the kitchen, but she drew the line at helping him to the bathroom, even if she didn’t have to accompany him inside. And Walter seemed to need to go an awful lot. No sooner had he been helped into bed, he’d decided he needed the toilet, so Otto had to help him out of it and help him to get to the loo, then help him get back into bed. For Walter, a simple trip to the toilet involved an awful lot of helping, and right now Beth didn’t feel up to it.
She suspected she never would.
However, in the interest of being nice (or nicer, at least) Beth vowed to help where she felt able.
Before too long, she heard someone stirring upstairs and shortly afterwards Dulcie appeared, bleary-eyed and yawning.
‘I’m not going to ask if you had a good night,’ Beth said, ‘because I know you didn’t. How many times did Walter get Otto out of bed?’
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Beth could have kicked herself. So much for her vow to be nicer. But how could she be nice when her daughter looked exhausted?
Dulcie didn’t reply; instead she asked, ‘Do you want another cup of tea?’
Beth leapt to her feet, or as close to leaping as she got at her age. ‘I’ll make it. You sit down. Can I get you some breakfast?’
Dulcie shuddered. ‘No thanks. Too early for me. I’ll have something in a bit. Is Walter awake?’
‘No idea.’
‘I don’t think I’ll disturb him. We’ll let him sleep, shall we? He needs his rest.’
What about me?Beth thought. Don’t I need my rest too? She’d had a traumatic couple of days, what with the stress of moving and the subsequent disappointment. But when her inner voice told her to stop being so selfish, she had to admit it was justified. She was being selfish. Jealous, too, because Dulcie never showed her such concern.
It made her feel rather sad.
She didn’t expect thanks for anything she’d done for her kids, but a bit of consideration now and again wouldn’t go amiss.
Telling herself that things would pick up when she was living in her own house, Beth tried to look on the bright side: she could now see her girls whenever she wanted (within reason, of course), and she hoped to soon make friends in the village.
She could also be involved in the farm, because living in Picklewick meant that she would no longer feel left out. The fact that Walter would also be involved was a cross she would simply have to grin and bear.
‘I can manage.’ Walter sounded as cross as he felt, despite it being patently obvious that he wasn’t able to manage the stairs without help.
Otto regarded him patiently, and Walter felt a stab of remorse. He ought not to be so grumpy, but he couldn’t stop himself. He’d had a dreadful night’s sleep, partly because his leg was giving him grief, partly because he hadn’t been able to settle in a strange bed, and also because he kept fretting that he would need the loo and wouldn’t get there in time.
It had taken him ages to heave himself out of bed and walk out the back to the downstairs bathroom, and that was with Otto’s help. So he’d lain there worrying, until he’d worried himself into needing to go. Getting up once in the night was normal: three times was a damned nuisance. And it hadn’t helped that Otto had kept coming downstairs to check on him.
Between one thing and another, Walter had only managed an hour’s sleep here and an hour there.
He used his good leg and his arms to haul his backside onto the next step. Then he sat there for a couple of seconds, panting.
‘Are you sure you won’t have a shower?’ Otto asked. ‘We can wrap your cast in cling film and pop a bag over it.’
‘I can’t stand for long enough, can I?’
‘I’m sure we can find something for you to sit on. A plastic garden chair perhaps?’
‘It won’t fit.’
‘Something else then…’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to have a think.’
‘Don’t take too long – I want a bath today, not next week,’ Walter snapped. He knew he’d gone too far when Otto’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. Hastily, Walter attempted some damage control. None of this was Otto’s fault, and it wasn’t fair to take it out on him, especially since Otto was doing his best.
‘I’ll have a strip wash in the downstairs bathroom,’ he said with a resigned sigh.
‘Good idea.’
Walter eased himself down the stair he had hauled himself up just a moment ago, and struggled to his feet. His anger wasn’t aimed at Otto; it was aimed at himself. What on earth had made him think he could climb a ladder at his age? Just look at where his idiocy had got him. Not only was he unable to have a bath or sleep in his own bed, he had to put up with Beth Fairfax to boot. She had a front row seat, and was currently sitting in the kitchen, smirking at his discomfort as he made his slow, awkward way to the loo, Otto hovering behind him, just in case.
Damn and blast her! The only way things could get any worse, was if Beth was the one who was accompanying him.