Chapter 53
FIFTY-THREE
After the coroner’s officer had gone back outside, she stayed in the kitchen, trying to get her head round all this. How had things become so crazy? Dead pheasants were one thing, but suggestions of murder? And how could a house – any house – be worth all this?
Yet she knew in her bones she would fight for Trade Cottage, fight to her dying breath. The more Jamie and his cronies threw at her, the more resolute she would become.
She’d never really fought for anything before.
In London, she’d slipped through life avoiding confrontation.
She’d been the one who kept quiet when drunken youths kicked off on the Tube, or who apologised when someone trod on her heel on the escalators.
But Trade Cottage had brought out another side to her. Here, I make my stand.
It occurred to her that, if Oliver Wray’s reconstruction and interview had been hard for her, it must have been doubly traumatic for Rosemary. Kate had a sudden image of her, sitting all alone in that barren modern house, and her heart went out to her.
She jumped up. It wasn’t Rosemary’s fault that Jamie was being so horrible. And, on top of the shock of her husband’s death, there was that diagnosis – Rosemary would be devasted about that. Kate couldn’t not go to her, whatever lawyers or Jamie might say.
She went to the gate in the hedge. Once inside The Old Tennis Court’s garden, she stopped, looking up at the house. In the window, she could see Paul’s telescope and, next to it, his motorised wheelchair, empty now.
As she hesitated, she saw Rosemary walking towards the big plate-glass pane. Seeing Kate, she also stopped.
Tentatively, Kate waved up at her. For a long moment, Rosemary didn’t respond. Then she raised her arm and waved back.
‘I suppose he’s only doing his job,’ Rosemary said with a sigh. ‘But it’s not as if any of it’s going to bring Paul back.’
Instinctively, Kate reached out and squeezed Rosemary’s hand. ‘It must be so hard.’
They were drinking tea in The Old Tennis Court’s kitchen. Below them, in Trade Cottage’s garden, mechanical diggers toiled away, making trenches for the drainage field.
‘I had no idea he was going to do it,’ Rosemary said bleakly. ‘Absolutely none. It’s funny, isn’t it? You think you know someone – what they’re like, what they’re thinking – but, really, you never do. Even when you’ve been married to them almost sixty years.’
Kate tried to think of any crumbs of comfort. ‘Perhaps he was thinking of you. You know – not wanting to become a burden.’
‘Perhaps.’ Rosemary was silent a moment.
‘Though, actually, I don’t think it was that.
If anything, Paul rather took me looking after him for granted – he was quite old-fashioned in some ways.
But Oliver can’t find any evidence of depression or anxiety – nothing on the computer to suggest he’d been building up to it, for example.
And, of course, it probably is harder to pull a shotgun trigger with MND, let alone two at once.
But he’d had that little .410 since he was a boy.
If anyone knew how to handle it, he did. ’
‘At the funeral,’ Kate said carefully, ‘Jamie said something about how Paul had been worried about your health. And now . . .’ She hesitated. ‘We’ve been told you’ve been diagnosed with dementia.’
‘Ah. Yes, I have.’ Rosemary pursed her lips. ‘So I suppose my future is that I shall gradually turn into a shuffling, vacant husk. Like something out of those awful zombie movies Hamish and Flora like to watch. Will I be aware of it, do you suppose? Or does one forget what one used to be?’
She considered for a moment. ‘It’s probably kinder if you do just forget, isn’t it?
But, somehow, I don’t think one does. I think you’re probably always aware everything’s slipping away from you.
Such a shame. I have some lovely memories of the children growing up at Trade Cottage, for example.
Playing in the woods, helping with lambing .
. . It will be sad not to be able to remember all that. ’
‘And, Rosemary . . . About this solar-farm business . . .’ Kate began.
‘Oh, that.’ Rosemary’s eyes went to the fields. ‘Well, I don’t want to look at solar panels either – of course I don’t. But family has to come first.’
‘Does it?’ Kate ventured. ‘What about . . . friendship?’
‘Friendship?’ For a moment, Kate thought Jamie had been right, and Rosemary was going to deny that was what the two of them had, and she braced herself for the inevitable hurt that would cause her.
But the other woman only said bleakly, ‘I’ve had friends in the village before.
Some of them for decades. But then the grandchildren come along and they get busy.
You see less and less of them, and eventually they move away to be near where their children live, and by then you hardly notice they’ve gone.
And so it goes on – everyone else, preoccupied with family, and you treading water.
No one ever talks about that, do they? The .
. . grief of not having your grandchildren around you.
Having all this energy, and nothing to put it into except making jam no one will eat and working the till in a charity shop where the only customers are other old people.
Don’t you see? Jamie and his family are all I’ve got now.
If he doesn’t move into Trade Cottage, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.
Let alone how I’ll cope with what’s coming my way. ’
‘But he isn’t all you’ve got,’ Kate insisted. ‘You’ve got me – us – Tilly and Will, who adore you—’
Rosemary shook her head. ‘Even so. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for a dribbling, incontinent zombie.’
‘It would be a privilege,’ Kate said gently. ‘And anyway, all that could be years away. Did the doctor—’
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Jamie’s voice said incredulously.
She looked up. He was about ten feet away, his face a mask of fury, striding towards them as if he meant to lay hands on her and physically pull her away from his mother.
She jumped up. He had his father’s height, and if he did get violent there’d be nothing she could do, but she didn’t want him towering over her when he did it.
‘You were told to stay away from here,’ he snarled.
‘It’s not up to you,’ she retorted. ‘It isn’t your house.’
‘Nor yours.’ He looked at Rosemary. ‘What’s she been saying to you?’
Rosemary said meekly, ‘Kate just popped in to see if I was all right. The coroner’s officer has been suggesting all sorts of nonsense—’
Jamie’s face darkened. ‘He shouldn’t be talking to you without me here, either. I’ll have a word with our lawyer.’ He gestured to Kate. ‘Now hop it, before I call the police.’