Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
That night, as Matt slept beside her, she lay in bed, listening to the house.
It was windy, and Trade Cottage was responding with a series of moans and reverberations, shaking whenever it was buffeted by a particularly strong gust. The soughing of the leylandii outside the window was like the crashing of distant surf, and the house felt like a ship under full sail, ploughing on through choppy waters.
Her reaction to Paul and Rosemary’s offer had been atavistic, she knew – as visceral as her disgust at the rats. Matt couldn’t quite get his head around it. As far as he was concerned, they’d made a slightly ridiculous suggestion, and she’d pooh-poohed it, and that was that.
He’d even said he felt sorry for Paul. ‘I didn’t realise he had so little time left. I should take him to the pub for a drink. It must be so frustrating for him, being stuck in that wheelchair all day.’
‘Well, don’t ask him until this is over,’ she’d said. ‘Or he’ll think you want a man-to-man chat about the price.’
For her, it wasn’t just Paul’s gall in trying to buy back a house he’d only just sold them that was so upsetting. It felt like a massive betrayal, after he and Rosemary had been so welcoming. And that, she realised, was something she was particularly vulnerable to, in a way Matt wasn’t.
When her mother first started drinking, blaming it on the stress of the divorce, Kate had tried to go and live with her father.
Discovering that he and his new partner didn’t actually want her while they focused on their own baby had undermined her self-confidence just when she needed it most. Good-looking, charming men like Paul or her father, she’d learnt, always withdrew their favour in the end.
And if Rosemary had been drawn to Tilly and Will in part because they’d filled a gap left by her own absent grandchildren, something similar might also have been true for her, she realised.
Perhaps she and Rosemary weren’t friends despite the age gap, but because of it.
Perhaps Rosemary had become the mother figure that, on some level, Kate had been looking for ever since she was twelve.
Which made her and Jamie siblings of a kind, she thought drowsily. Rosemary’s real child, returning to take his rightful place, not just in Trade Cottage, but in his mother’s affections.
Well, you can fuck right off, she found herself thinking. You’re not having any of it. Or her.