Chapter 31 In the Basket
In the Basket
There were several small oil paintings, some tied together face to face with string, and a large sketchbook. Evie opened the sketchbook and ran her torch over a watercolour of cliffs and sea.
‘Yes, these are what I was looking for.’
When everything was out, she commanded Rhys to help her carry it all down to her room, while I was instructed to stay and check anywhere else we hadn’t yet looked, in case there was a second cache.
I searched diligently, but all I found were cobwebs and a wicker laundry basket with plaster flower decorations, which I rather liked, even though, being precariously balanced on top of a flimsy bamboo table, it had fallen on me.
Rhys, returning in time to help me up off the dusty floor, remarked that it was just as well that Evie hadn’t seen me lying down on the job.
‘I’ve already looked everywhere now,’ I said indignantly. ‘And I’m filthy.’
‘Me too. It’s certainly time this place was cleared out.’
‘Did Evie say if we could go down and see Arwen’s paintings?’ I asked hopefully.
‘No, she ushered me out of the room and said she’d show them to everyone downstairs at teatime.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said resignedly. ‘But I’m dying to see them. It’s so exciting having a talented great-grandmother. Still, I could do with a shower and to wash the cobwebs out of my hair.’
Rhys agreed. Then, as we turned back along the dusty path marked with our footprints to the door, his torch illuminated a cardboard box, less dusty than anything else nearby, the word ‘Annie’ boldly written in black felt tip on the top. He stopped dead.
‘I’d entirely forgotten that was up here,’ he said.
I realized that whatever the box contained had belonged to his wife. It seemed that even up here, she was haunting me!
Rhys ran a hand through his already dishevelled and cobwebbed black curls. He stood, looking sombrely down at the box. ‘Such a small box to contain a life, although there’s her work as well, of course.’
‘Yes, she was a brilliant sculptor. That’s her true legacy,’ I said gently.
He sighed. ‘We’d been divorced for ages by the time she died, but everything she owned came to Cariad, which wasn’t a lot, other than clothes, a bit of jewellery and the contents of her studio.
After the funeral, her boyfriend dumped everything in boxes on the landing outside his flat and texted me to collect them. ’
‘Nice!’ I commented.
‘Turned out he’d already moved another woman in. It was Verity who’d given him my number and, to give her her due, she seemed more upset than I’ve ever seen her, but then, she and Annie had been best friends since school.’
That made me feel slightly warmer towards Verity: I expect losing her best friend had been a huge shock.
‘I was in the States when Finn Flint texted me to collect Annie’s stuff, but Nerys picked everything up and sorted it out.
This box is full of things she thought Cariad might like to have one day, to remind her of her mother.
There were also two sculptures in her studio and a lot of maquettes, plus some drawings.
Those are on permanent loan to a gallery in South Wales.
Cariad can decide what she wants to do with them when she’s older. ’
He bent and hefted the box into his arms.
‘I think it’s more than time to clear out the past, so I’ll put this box in the family sitting room and perhaps Nerys will go through it with Cariad later. There are a few ornaments and odds and ends that she might like to keep, as well as the jewellery, but nothing very expensive, Nerys said.’
‘I don’t think Cariad is very interested in things like jewellery at the moment anyway, but she might like to wear some of it later,’ I suggested.
‘We’ll see, but I’m glad I spotted it. It really is time to close the door on the past and move on.’
He rested the box on top of a chest of drawers and then looked searchingly at me.
‘And you must have realized by now that you are the person I want to move on with, Ginny – to spend the rest of my life with – and we’ve already wasted too much time. I should have known from the moment we met that it would never work out with Annie and that you and I belonged together.’
He came closer, looking down at me, his amber eyes dark as honey in the dim light.
‘Don’t you think now that we might have a future together, Ginny?’ he asked softly. ‘It can’t be just me feeling like this, can it?’
‘I … don’t know. It’s too soon …’ I stammered, backing away and fetching up against the laundry basket. ‘And … I think Annie would always come between us. Can you ever get rid of the past? Won’t she always haunt you? She was so beautiful and talented.’
‘I don’t see why she should, Ginny.’ He came closer, reaching out for me, but I fended him off.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Rhys, there’s something you don’t know, something I’ve been putting off telling you, and it concerns Annie.’
‘About Annie?’ he echoed, surprised. ‘I can’t imagine what that could be, because you never met, did you?
But it’s obviously a day for discoveries and revelations, so if you’ve got something you’re burning to get off your chest, why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable than this dusty attic to have it out? ’
He brushed the dust off the box of Annie’s belongings with the sleeve of his already filthy jumper and then picked it up again.
‘Come on, we’ll go to my room, where we can at least sit down and have a coffee while we talk.’
And without waiting for a reply, he headed for the steep stairs down.
*
Rhys’s room was actually a whole apartment, complete with a small hall and kitchen, and he explained it had been made for Nerys’s step-grandmother, Rose, who had been wheelchair-bound for the last years of her life and had a nurse-companion.
‘That’s when the lift was put in, too.’
He’d dropped the box in the small hall, to take down later, and led the way into a large sitting room, which also obviously served as library and study, for he had a big desk in the window that overlooked the back of the house, like mine.
‘You can be quite self-contained here,’ he said over his shoulder as he went into the kitchen, leaving the door open so I could see him putting on the kettle and taking down mugs from a shelf.
‘But I always leave the door to the hall open, because I don’t want Cariad ever to feel I’m shutting her out, even when I’m working. ’
‘I should think all the family feel like shutting themselves away sometimes when you have guests, especially the large groups,’ I said, looking around at the rich old carpets on the dark-stained wooden floor, a few quirky ornaments and a lot of books.
Normally I’d have made a beeline for the books on the shelves, but I was too nervous about the coming scene to do that right then.
He came back in with two mugs and put them down on the coffee table in front of a small sofa.
‘Come and sit down,’ he invited and, when I did, sat down next to me and turned his amber eyes on me, one eyebrow quirking upwards.
‘OK, so what is this mysterious revelation about Annie that you don’t want to tell me?’
‘It’s that – I was there,’ I said with a rush. ‘It happened not far from my cottage and I was driving home. I came on it mere seconds after it had happened. In fact,’ I added with a shudder, ‘I heard the crash.’
I swallowed and carried on, not looking at him, which somehow made it easier. ‘It was dark and in a narrow lane. I went round a bend and there the car was, smashed up against a tree.’
I stopped and shivered as the memories came rushing back to me.
‘It was on the wrong side of the road and … the horn must have jammed because it was blaring. I stopped, of course, and so did someone coming the other way, so our headlights lit the whole scene up like a nightmare.’
His hands took mine in a warm, strong, comforting grasp. ‘It must have been a horrible shock,’ he said gently.
‘It was. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since,’ I confessed, then carried on, determined to tell him everything.
‘I got out and ran to the car. There was just one person in it, a woman, and I could tell at once she was in a bad way. I stayed with her. I could hear the man from the other car calling for an ambulance.’
I could feel myself shaking again. ‘There wasn’t anything I could do and she didn’t seem to be in any pain.
I’d recognized her by then, even though I’d only seen photographs of her before – but she was so beautiful.
She looked like an angel … I tried to keep her talking because somehow I thought that might help to keep her alive till help came, but it didn’t. ’
‘I don’t see that you could have done anything more, and it must have been a comfort to her to know you were there,’ he reassured me.
‘I hope so. I felt so helpless.’
‘You know, I wasn’t told any of the details of the accident, because we’d been divorced for years by then. It was her boyfriend, Finn Flint, they contacted, through her phone.’
‘I only realized that you’d been divorced for ages once I’d got here and Cariad told me. Until then, I was afraid you might realize I was the Virginia Spain in the police reports.’
‘No, I didn’t see those at all.’
‘Then …’ I said slowly, ‘I don’t suppose you know the last words Annie ever spoke, either?’
I looked at him for the first time since I’d started speaking and he shook his head. ‘They might have told Flint, but if so, he didn’t pass them on to me.’
‘Then he ought to have, because her last thoughts were of you and of Cariad – except I didn’t know Cariad was her daughter’s name till I got here. But once I did, those few, disjointed words suddenly made sense.’
‘What exactly did she say?’
‘There was something at first about hares running in circles. I took it to mean she’d swerved to avoid a rabbit, but now I wonder if her mind was wandering, and it was the hare triskelion she was thinking about – or perhaps the one led to the other.’
‘Probably. She must have swerved for some reason.’