Chapter 10 Creeping Nemesis
Creeping Nemesis
I followed Rhys out to the hall, now feeling as if things seemed to have taken on the quality of a strange dream, where objects presented themselves suddenly and clearly and then swam away again.
Rhys, who had stopped and turned to face me as soon as the door had closed behind us, did not look in a much better state.
He ran a hand through his already dishevelled black hair. ‘It’s amazing that you should be here, Ginny! I’ve often thought about you – I could hardly help it, what with you being one of Cariad’s favourite authors! But I never thought I’d see you again.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was a surprise to me to find you here. Evie booked me in and, although I suppose you may be on the website, I didn’t have time to look at that. I was too busy packing up my cottage.’
‘I hope if you had known, it wouldn’t have put you off,’ he said, looking at me uncertainly from his deep-set amber eyes.
‘Ginny, I feel I owe you an apology for never getting in touch with you after our first meeting … but perhaps we had better postpone it, because at the moment I feel as if my body and brain are in two different time zones, neither of them the current one.’
He smiled at me ruefully, but I didn’t return it.
‘There’s nothing to explain. I’d pretty much forgotten you until we bumped into each other earlier,’ I lied. ‘Shall we go up? I’m really beyond coherent conversation too.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘Of course,’ before heading for the stairs.
‘Which room has Nerys put you in?’
‘The Marc Chagall room.’
‘In the lonely west wing, with the other guests, but we go the other way,’ he said, turning left as we reached the landing.
‘This is the family side, and I have a sort of mini flat at the end of it, where I can retire if the Muse takes me, while still being near Cariad.’
He stopped. ‘And here we are. This was once the nursery and until recently my old nanny, who looked after Cariad, had the room off it. But she’s retired to St Melangell now.’
It was a large room, and Cariad was tucked up in bed reading a book – one of mine in my Hedgehoppers series.
She looked up as we entered and said accusingly, ‘You’ve been ages.’
‘About three-quarters of an hour at the most,’ Rhys said. ‘Ginny’s tired from her journey, so she’s just looked in to say goodnight on her way to bed.’
‘But I wanted to show her all my books,’ Cariad complained.
‘You seem to have quite a library, but perhaps I could see them another day, in the light and when I’m not so exhausted,’ I suggested.
‘I’m reading this one of yours again,’ she said, holding it up. ‘I’m never sure if the Hedgehoppers are elves or something like that. They can’t be fairies, because they haven’t got wings.’
‘You can have this fascinating literary discussion tomorrow,’ her father said firmly.
‘I suppose so,’ she conceded, then closed the book and snuggled down in bed. ‘Goodnight then, Ginny. I’m glad you’ve come.’
I thought I heard Rhys murmur, ‘So am I!’ but I wasn’t sure.
I smiled at her and said goodnight, then headed for my own room, closing the door thankfully behind me when I got there.
It had been quite a day.
*
I had just got into bed when, with resignation but no surprise, I saw the door open and Evie slip in.
Considering she is the wrong side of seventy and had just driven up from London, she looked and sounded a lot more lively than I felt.
She perched on the end of my bed and regarded me with her bright, dark blue, birdlike eyes.
‘Well, Ginny, here we are in the bosom of the family. Of course, they don’t know we are part of it yet. That joy is yet to come.’
‘I don’t think a very distant connection makes you part of a family!’
‘Perhaps not, but at least it will give some leverage to my enquiries about Arwen and Cosmo Caradoc.’
She settled herself more comfortably. ‘This house is much cosier than I expected. Nerys told me they’ve invested heavily in a heat pump and solar panels here and at the pottery up the lane. Shame the bathrooms don’t quite stretch to one each. I have to share mine with that Komodo woman.’
‘Which room have you got?’
‘Gwen John.’
‘Very suitable,’ I commented, and she grinned.
‘But listen, Ma, I’m just too tired to talk tonight.’
She ignored this. ‘Of course, having read the literature they sent, I am entirely resigned to a lot of seasonal nonsense, before I can really get down to my research. And did you notice Nerys mentioned that Cosmo died not long after the end of the war? Presumably soon after Arwen’s stay here, unless his death happened while she was here, of course, and that was why she was free to go to Cornwall? ’
‘That would be a simple explanation to the mystery,’ I agreed sleepily. ‘In which case, you will only need to find out a little more about her visit here, won’t you?’
‘Oh, I have a feeling there is a lot more still to discover. I’m only just getting into Cosmo’s work, for a start. I saw what I could in London, but I haven’t yet researched him online, which is why I must have missed that he ceased to work after 1919.’
I had been slowly drifting off to sleep, but her next words jarred me awake again.
‘Didn’t you tell me it was Rhys Tarn’s wife, the artist Annie Ashwin, who was killed in that car accident near you just before lockdown? Quite a coincidence.’
I’d forgotten I’d told her that, but she never forgets anything; it is all squirrelled away inside her twisty little brain.
‘Yes, it was, but he doesn’t know that I was at the scene and I’d much rather it stayed that way. There’s no point in raking it all up again. Really, I just want to leave it all behind. If I’d known he would be here I’d never have come.’
‘He’s on the website, Ginny.’
‘I’ve been too busy packing up the cottage to look at it.’
‘I wouldn’t get in a tizz about it. If we don’t tell him, there isn’t any way he could know you were involved, is there?’
‘I don’t think so. Even if the police report contained my name, it was as Virginia Spain, so it probably wouldn’t have registered that it was me. We did meet very briefly once, years ago, because we have the same publishers,’ I explained, hoping I sounded casual but not sure I’d managed it.
‘Oh?’ She regarded me again with her bird-bright eyes. ‘I had an idea you might have, from the way he was looking at you earlier, before dinner. And he must have remembered you, with his little girl being such a fan of your books. It’s odd how unexpectedly things connect up.’
‘I was thinking much the same earlier. The Fates have an odd sense of humour,’ I agreed.
‘They certainly must have, to catapult such an odd collection of people together – what with the Terrible Twins, with their eyes already on that poor young man, Toby, and Kate Komodo trying to become the literary heavyweight. I think we will need a sense of humour.’
‘Toby seems very nice, and I like Nerys and Timon,’ I said. ‘Oddly, I got the feeling neither Nerys nor Cariad likes Verity much, although she seems very sweet.’
‘Dripping with it like a honeycomb,’ Evie said sardonically. ‘I rather like Noel. I think his bookshop will be well worth a visit, and he may know something about the history of the artists who have lived here.’
‘Are you getting straight down to work tomorrow?’
‘In a way. I need to know as much about the family as possible, so I’ll be joining in with the house tour in the morning, and wild horses wouldn’t stop me taking part in the Winter Solstice ceremony.’
‘In the guise of Mother Nature, I assume?’
‘As myself,’ she said, and finally got up to go. ‘Goodnight, darling. And tomorrow we must do something about your hair, because it looks as if rats chewed off the ends.’
When the door closed I thought of getting out of bed and locking it, in case she had an afterthought and came back, but before I could do it I had dropped fathoms deep into sleep and strange dreams of Noel’s Winter Solstice figures pursuing me into the darkness …
*
I always wake really early, and next morning I lay in bed for some time, thinking of the previous day and all the strange experiences and surprises it had brought.
I had literally been pitchforked into a strange new world and would be living in close proximity to a diverse selection of people.
Presumably everyone was hoping for what Nerys had described: an opportunity to recharge their creative batteries; a peaceful stay in the country.
But with Evie in their midst, about to root in the family history like a truffle hound, and likely to assume the role of the catalyst who causes a series of unexpected changes, things might not work out quite the way they expected, but more like the Chaos Theory in action.
But then, there might be nothing much more to find out about Arwen and her connection with the painter Cosmo Caradoc after all.
Then, of course, there was Rhys, a complication I hadn’t expected. I hoped I’d made it plain that I’d almost forgotten I’d ever met him so that he wouldn’t try and talk to me about our previous encounter. There wasn’t anything he could say about it that I would want to hear.
I’d tried to put any thought of our first meeting behind me long ago. I mean, it was such a something-and-nothing thing really, even though it had hurt at the time.
I had let my agent persuade me to go to my publisher’s annual November party.
I’d had a big and unexpected success with my first Mrs Snowboots book the previous Christmas, and my second was about to be published.
The party was held in the foyer and courtyard of a museum, which was interesting – it felt very strange and mysterious to be there when it was closed – but big parties where I knew no one really weren’t my thing and this was the only one I ever went to.
Of course, no one took much notice of me, for which I was deeply grateful. The lion of the evening was Rhys Tarn, whose first literary novel, The Labyrinthine Heart, had been mega the previous year and had won a couple of hugely prestigious prizes.
Our agents were friends, and when they moved our way she introduced us and Rhys and I fell into conversation.
We were both very young, he only a couple of years older than I was, and both of us still surprised by our success.
Left alone in our corner for a few minutes in one of those quiet eddies that sometimes happen in crowds, we just sort of clicked.
It was an instant attraction, a feeling as if we’d known each other for ever …
or it was for me. I’d never felt that way about anyone other than Will before then, and we had long since split up for the first time.
Rhys and I seemed to have such a lot in common.
We had both got unexpected success young – he was an established and award-winning poet, too, before his first novel was accepted – we both hated large parties, we loved the country and he sympathized with my wish to live there and said he spent as much time as he could at his family home, which was near the sea.
The talk was just so natural and I could have sworn our attraction was mutual, especially when, as he spotted his editor moving purposefully in our direction with the MD in tow, he asked me quickly for my phone number and said he’d ring me because he’d love to see me again.
I scribbled it down hastily before he was swept off and swallowed up by more important people than a mere children’s author.
After that, I’d kept my phone with me constantly for days, until finally it dawned on me that he was not going to ring.
Perhaps he never meant to, but had asked for the phone number of any reasonably attractive woman he met and our mutual attraction – that moment when our eyes had first met with a kind of astonished surprise – had only been on my side?
It was only then that I thought to google his marital status and found that he had been married to the artist Annie Ashwin since 2009.
The name rang a bell and I dug out a Sunday supplement feature on New Young Creatives from April 2009.
I’ve always been a great one for cutting interesting stuff out and putting it in my sketchbooks.
And there was Rhys, among a group of others, tall, dark and craggy like a young Heathcliff – and there, too, was Annie Ashwin, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a cloud of dark auburn hair, large eyes and a short upper lip, dreamily gazing at him. They must have married soon after …
I felt ashamed then, realizing that, if anything, he’d only been looking for an affair and then decided not to bother, and I certainly wouldn’t have given him my number if I’d known he was married!
No, as I said, it was all something and nothing, a non-event, and I should be grateful in retrospect that he hadn’t contacted me and I’d really fallen for him before I knew he was married.
I didn’t need any apology or explanation; there was nothing to discuss. I only wanted to forget the whole thing.
And nor, I suddenly remembered with relief, was I related to him, even remotely, because Nerys had said that he was Timon’s nephew, not hers.
I got up and put on jeans and a warm, brightly striped jumper. Then, remembering what Evie had said about my hair, I braided it, which made the roughly chopped ends less noticeable, and went down to breakfast.
I was suddenly totally ravenous.