Chapter 38
‘I meant what I said, Jane, about coming to stay with us,’ said Frank as he brought her and Elizabeth a mulled wine. The two ladies had moved into the bar as the lounge was too warm and they were both wilting, though the others had stayed, like the hothouse flowers they were.
‘I know you did, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I promise I will think it over.’
‘What’s left for you to do in the house before it’s sold?’ asked Elizabeth, when Frank had gone back to the galley.
‘Hardly anything. My local community have been wonderful, helping me pack up everything. What I was going to take to Michael’s will now go to the charity shop.
There are Clifford’s books, of course. I shall rent a small storage unit because there are some things I do want to keep: photos, his papers, a writing desk he bought me, in case I ever do settle down again.
I’ve sold all the big pieces of furniture; the new owners have bought quite a lot of it because it was chosen for the house but almost looks as if the Rectory was built around it.
It wouldn’t have fitted in the new flat in Lancaster which is poky…
or bijou as Michael and Alison describe it. ’
‘What’s your daughter-in-law like?’
‘Like Michael – oily, disingenuous. They’re very well suited.’ She made yet another small growl of annoyance at herself. ‘I can’t believe I was suckered into agreeing to such a… a stupid move. Whatever possessed me?’
‘As you say, you were at a low ebb and ripe for being manipulated,’ said Elizabeth to that. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. Some people are just too good at coercion.’
Elizabeth knew that situation only too well, being in a place and wondering how you got there, and however desperate you were to get out of what felt like a ‘trap’, in the end it was easier and less painful to stay in it.
So much easier to encourage someone else to break free than do it oneself. She envied Jane her courage.
‘You’re right. Michael is very good at manipulation.
My husband was a savvy and emotionally intelligent man, but his son was his Achilles heel.
It always sat heavy in Clifford’s heart that he hadn’t had the chance to influence him for the better when he was young and forming, but he was of his flesh and Clifford loved him unconditionally.
I knew what Michael was like, I should have been prepared for his game plan, and yet I still managed to let myself be railroaded. ’
‘Some people can just sense vulnerability, Jane, and they home in on it with primal intuition. Have you handed him any money for the flat refurb yet?’
‘No, not so far. But he keeps pressing because he says he’s already paid some of the workmen.
They were very expensive, apparently. I’ve asked to look over the bills but he just laughs and says, “Don’t you trust me?
” He said that his father made him swear to look after me if anything should happen to him, though I’m not sure how true that is.
I’ve no doubt they’d have made sure I was fed and watered adequately, like a Wagyu beef cow.
Or at least a much lower grade version, they wouldn’t want me out-living them. ’ She dropped a little mirthless laugh.
‘Yes, and they’ll milk you of money until they get their hands on the motherlode.’
Jane pulled a sad face. ‘I confess after Clifford died, I really didn’t want to last much longer, so did it matter who got our money?
But finding my glimmers along the path of my grief began to lift me: in the kindness of strangers who helped me box up the house, sitting in my garden in the midsummer listening to the birdsong, watching the swans who choose our riverbank to nest in, the moonflowers that finally decided to grow after years of me trying to cultivate them.
’ She gave her lip a chew. ‘Michael and Alison will be furious when I tell them I’m not going to live there. ’
‘But what can they do about it?’
Jane thought about that for a moment before answering.
‘Nothing, I suppose, except make a lot of noise. Michael doesn’t like things not going his way.
But… I haven’t actually written my new will yet so he would be very foolish to murder me, wouldn’t he?
’ There was a twinkle in her eye as she said it.
‘Thanks to the fortifying powers of such an excellent Christmas dinner, I have formulated a little plan that involves some manipulation of my own.’ Then she took a sip from her mulled wine and shuddered with delight.
‘Another glimmer, Jane?’
‘More of an explosion. Now, Elizabeth, please tell me about this bookshop.’
Elizabeth shook her head disapprovingly and huffed.
‘Vincent shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just an idea I had about opening up a bookshop that’s run to sell but also to give some support to people who need it in the community. I’ll never open it, of course.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’d want to do it as a full-time project and I have a job. Even if I do hate it.’
‘Then leave and do what you want to. As someone who spent a lot of years on the wrong track, let me tell you life is infinitely sweeter when you switch to the right one.’
‘It’s complicated, Jane.’ She didn’t want to load onto the old lady’s shoulders what a tangled mess she was in, a fly wrapped up in a web. She couldn’t pick and choose which elements of her life to keep and which to reject. It was all or nothing, in or out.
Jane tilted her head at her drinking companion. For just the briefest of moments she saw her younger self sitting in front of her in Elizabeth’s form. She recognised her: lonely, unfulfilled, starved of kindness.
‘The older you get the more you realise that we are our own saboteurs, creating obstacles in our way, and why? Because we are too afraid of the spectre of change.’
Elizabeth wondered if Jane could see into her head. Her next words intimated that she could.
‘Know your worth, don’t let anyone feed you crumbs when you deserve cake.
And don’t settle for a life without love, Elizabeth.
You might think you can, but you shouldn’t.
’ Jane leaned forward, tapped her on her knee and held her eyes with her own honey-brown ones which were bird-bright and full of wisdom.
‘Now, I want to invest in your bookshop.’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘Jane, that is sweet of you, but you can’t possibly say you’ll invest in the pipe dream of someone you only met a couple of days ago. I might be such an ace manipulator that I cast your stepson in the shade.’
Jane laughed at that. She knew people and she would have bet her considerable savings on that not being the case.
‘I don’t want my husband nor myself to have worked so hard for all those years just to see our savings squandered on Michael’s idiotic schemes. He’s too idle to make any of them a success.’
There she is, the Jane I know. Where have you been hiding, old girl? She heard Clifford in her head. And she could see him in her mind’s eye, an amused and approving smile pulling at one corner of his lip.
‘I absolutely refuse to waste another penny,’ she went on. ‘He’s had his fair share and what is left, I want to be used for something worthwhile. I didn’t know what to do with it until this afternoon, but I do now.’
‘You are worthwhile, Jane,’ said Elizabeth, reaching for Jane’s hand and giving it a soft, warm squeeze. ‘Blow all that money on yourself.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, I won’t be forgetting myself in the equation.
There’s plenty to go round,’ said Jane. A mutiny was rising within her.
It would be mad, wild to change her course so dramatically.
But also jolly exciting. An adventure, as Clifford would have said.
And no, it wasn’t the alcohol that had possessed her, but something much more potent and life-affirming.
She actually felt as sober as a judge, more clear-thinking than she had been since last February.
‘I’m going to write that will as soon as I get home. And then I’m going to book a very long holiday. Now, tell me about your business plan, Elizabeth. I want all the details.’
So Elizabeth did.
‘You are very funny, Roo,’ said Grace, meeting her outside the loo as Grace was coming out of it and Roo was about to go in. ‘I loved your poem.’
‘Aw, thank you,’ said Roo, genuinely touched because she didn’t think that Grace seemed like the sort of person who would have said so if she didn’t mean it.
‘I really enjoyed performing it. It’s made me feel that maybe I…
I should go back to the drawing board. I wouldn’t like to get old and have all these dreams still inside me, untried. ’
Her words rang a loud bell inside Grace. And she found herself nodding.
‘Of course, I might crash and burn.’ Roo winced.
‘Or you might fly,’ said Grace.
Roo smiled. A little encouragement went a long way with her. She hadn’t had much of it in her life.
‘I don’t want to settle for second-best. I feel as if I’m just looking at what I want through a window at the moment, wishing it were mine. I’m just existing at present and that’s no good, is it?’
Is that what Billy would have thought if he’d done what I wanted him to do?
Grace asked herself, though she knew the answer.
He’d needed to live his life for him, not for her.
And it was right that he had. He’d once told her he was in the place he should be, doing what he was born to do and she hadn’t wanted to hear it.
At his funeral, his commanding officer had said that Corporal Billy O’Carroll was a soldier deeper than his bones and she’d been too angry to be proud.
But would she have really wanted him to live a little life like Roo was presently doing – unhappy, unfulfilled?
Why was it that this flash conversation with someone she barely knew could make her see what she never had before?
‘You absolutely must, Roo,’ said Grace. And she surprised them both by hugging the young woman. It was the hug of approval she never delivered to her boy.