Chapter 15 Winter Solstice #2
‘I don’t think she knew what she wanted by that stage, except not a baby. She’d always been upfront about not wanting children, although at the start of our marriage I’d hoped she would change her mind.’
‘But the baby might be this other man’s?’ I ventured.
‘Yes, but he was in a band and touring the US at the time, and when she contacted him he just told her to get rid of it: he’d never wanted kids, especially one that might not even be his.’
‘That’s horrible!’ I exclaimed. ‘And the poor baby! I mean, it wasn’t the baby’s fault.’
‘That’s what I thought. But when she’d calmed down a bit, and I’d had a chance to think about it, I managed to persuade her to give our marriage another go and come back to Triskelion with me to have the baby.
I’d moved back here by this point. I thought, once the baby arrived and she’d seen it, she’d feel very differently about it.
But it didn’t work out that way and she couldn’t wait to get back to London again after the birth. ’
‘And the baby was Cariad?’
‘Yes. The one good thing to come out of the whole sorry affair is my little girl – and she is mine, whether I’m really her father or not.’
‘Of course you are,’ I said positively. ‘She doesn’t look in the least like you, but last night I was struck straight away by how much she resembles you in expression.’
‘Really? Nerys said when she was born that she looked just like me,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t see it and she’s struck out on a path of her own in the looks department ever since.’
‘Cariad did tell me this afternoon that you and Annie had been divorced for years and she hadn’t seen much of her mother.’
‘No, I tried to keep some connection between them, for Cariad’s sake.
I’d take Cariad up to London from time to time to see her, but the only time I let her take Cariad alone for the day, they went back to her flat and Cariad saw her boyfriend taking drugs.
Luckily she was too young to understand what was going on.
After that, there was no contact before Annie died. ’
‘It’s a very sad story,’ I said. ‘Annie was both beautiful and a very talented sculptor, and her life was cut so short.’
I wondered whether I should tell Rhys of my personal involvement in Annie’s final moments, when the Fates had again pulled the web together in the strangest pattern. Somehow then didn’t seem the right moment.
And while I might now understand why he had never rung me after our first meeting, part of me still thought he ought to have done, to explain what had happened, however unreasonable that might be.
‘I’m glad I told you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t really said all that to anyone else, not even Nerys and Timon. Now I hope you and I can start all over again and put this behind us.’
‘Of course. I mean, there’s no reason why we can’t be friends,’ I said firmly.
‘Good,’ he said, his voice warm. ‘You know, there’s something about you that really made me want to tell you the whole truth and not wrap it up at all.’
‘Evie says people confide in me, although I can’t see why anyone should. But if you’ve been bottling it all up, it’s probably better to tell it to a stranger.’
‘I wouldn’t call you a stranger,’ he said and then added to my surprise: ‘I don’t suppose you’re an early morning person like me – that is, when I haven’t got jet lag?’
‘Yes, I like to work early in the morning, and in summer I often take a walk before breakfast, too.’
‘Then, to show you’ve really forgiven me, meet me in the garden hall at seven tomorrow and we’ll walk up to the wood to get the mistletoe for the house.’
‘Well, I … OK,’ I said, unable on the spur of the moment to think of a way of refusing, then gave a great shuddering shiver, realising how cold I’d got, standing there.
‘You’re getting chilled to the bone!’ he said contritely. ‘Come on – let’s get down before all the hot wassail and cake have gone!’
*
When we were almost back at the village, Rhys said, suddenly, ‘After my divorce came through, I remembered our agents were friends and asked mine to find out what you were doing these days. She told me you’d got back with an old boyfriend and were living in the country.’
‘I did get back with Will. I’d broken up with him quite a while before I met you and then, later, he came looking for me and we thought we’d give it another go.
It sort of worked, because I’d got to like living alone, and he’d set up a computer games business with a friend in Battersea, so he spent the weekdays there and the weekends at my cottage.
Or at least, I thought it suited us both … ’ I added bitterly.
‘What happened?’
‘He’d told me he was living in his friend Simon’s spare room during the week – the one he created the computer games with – but when I urgently tried to contact him just before lockdown, Simon’s fiancée told me he’d been living with another woman for months and months.
Apparently, he’d been intending to tell me that weekend that he’d moved in with her permanently. ’
‘I’m sorry, that must have been horrible,’ he said sympathetically.
‘It was, although I’d realized it was never going to be the same as when we’d got together the first time, on our first day at art college, years before.
We were even less well suited second time round.
We’d become such opposites. I loved living a quiet life in the country, while he liked the bright lights of London, parties and lots of people. ’
‘Like me and Annie, only in our case I was the country lover. Opposites do attract and when you fall in love you don’t think of how things will work out in the future.’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? The past is the past. Nemesis, in the form of my mother, has brought us together, but I don’t expect we’ll ever meet again after I leave Triskelion.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said softly as the sound of revelry from the green grew louder. The wassail must have gone round a couple of times already.
‘But I’m glad your mother made you come here, even if Nerys doesn’t seem that keen on Evie digging into the family history.
But then, Evie does have a track record of unearthing information that makes for uncomfortable truths about the attribution of artworks.
Nerys might be afraid she will try and do that with some of Cosmo Caradoc’s. ’
‘I really don’t think so,’ I assured him. From something she’d said about the depiction of light in Lewis Madoc’s later works reminding her of the two small seascapes of Arwen’s she had seen in Charlotte’s house, I thought she might be on a different track entirely!
‘Well, it seemed a bit unlikely to me, but Nerys is very protective about her great-grandfather’s reputation.’
‘As far as I know, Evie’s only interest in coming to Triskelion is to fill in the details of the brief time Arwen Madoc spent here, once we’d discovered Caradoc had become her guardian and insisted she make her home here.
The only mystery was how, in that case, a mere few weeks after coming here, she’d left and gone to friends in Cornwall.
But then Nerys told us that he had died around the time she must have left, so that probably solves that one. ’
‘Nerys doesn’t talk about Caradoc much, but I know he died in some kind of accident,’ Rhys said. ‘If that’s all Evie wants to know, I’m sure Nerys will tell her.’
‘We know so little about Arwen’s short life – she died at nineteen – that any details will be welcome for the joint biography of her and her friend, the woodcut artist Milly Vane,’ I said.
‘You can tell me more about Arwen Madoc when we meet in the morning,’ he suggested. ‘I’d never heard of her till you came here, so I’m interested.’
We’d joined the throng by now and I could see Bronwen and her helpers dispensing wassail from large bowls, on a trestle table on the green.
‘You go and bag yourself some wassail before it all vanishes. I must go and change. See you in a bit,’ he said, and headed off towards the door to the village hall.