Chapter 41
Present
Of course there was no problem with the deeds. Rae hadn’t expected there to be, Pappy had sewn up every part of his granddaughters’ inheritances as tightly as if he was expecting someone to pull them apart.
She’d met with the solicitor two hours ago.
Now she felt stuck. The offer on the table was miles beyond what she could have hoped for, certainly enough to pay off the outstanding loans on the hotel and take care of any upgrades needed.
But still, it felt as if something was holding her back. Blythe? She wasn’t sure.
Suddenly, she craved Pappy’s advice. She needed him to tell her this was the right thing to do – or it wasn’t. To show her, if there was some other option that would put things right. Of course, she couldn’t ask Pappy, but she could go and sit at his grave and maybe that would settle her mind.
The sun was sinking slowly on the horizon opposite, but there was no closing time on the island cemetery. She could park outside and slip through the old-fashioned turnstile gate.
As she picked up speed heading out of the village, she spotted Blythe’s familiar old Land Rover coming towards her.
Rae slowed down as it approached, thinking perhaps Blythe was headed for the hotel, maybe she was ready to call a truce?
But instead, the Land Rover picked up speed.
Her sister glanced at her as she passed, but she didn’t wave.
Her expression was set in such a determined frown, it was with a sense of relief that Rae knew she wouldn’t have to spend time with her this evening.
At this hour, the cemetery was empty of visitors, no sounds here other than the creaking branches of yew trees swaying in the quiet graveyard.
Marcus’s grave was in a newer section of the cemetery, opened only a year before he died.
She took a left turn, hardly glancing at his grave.
The path towards where her grandparents and her parents lay was narrow, shoots of daisies and buttercups forcing their way through, but only just.
Her grandfather had chosen this headstone with great care and love for his wife Gisela, when she had passed years before him.
He had purchased a large plot at the time.
Rae knelt across the marble plinth as she always did and began to pull any stray weeds.
At the headstone, she had planted a basket of simple summer flowers.
Every colour she could get her hands on flooded across the surface of the planter and trailed down along the sides where she’d trimmed them back only a week before.
She looked at the headstone, even now, years after he’d died, it felt like a wrench to her stomach to see his name engraved there.
When he died, her safe port had been stolen from her in an increasingly stormy sea.
Pappy had chosen a headstone of mottled grey marble with a black font when her grandmother died.That first day, when she’d come here and seen the stone engraved with his name, it had taken her by surprise. It was quite beautiful, straightforward, sturdy – just like Pappy.
‘Oh, Pappy.’ It was all she could manage tonight. These days when she came here it was just to spend time, but in the beginning, she’d cried rivers here at all hours of the day and night.
‘What should I do…’ she let the words hang on the cool evening air.
The darkening sky overhead brought with it a lowering of the temperatures and she shivered, pulled her jacket closer around her shoulders.
She would sit for a while, ‘for as long as it takes,’ she told him, as she rubbed the cool marble of the headstone gently.
‘Until I know what to do for the very best.’
She must have been there well over an hour when she heard the whimpering sound.
At first, she hardly noticed it, the silence was so rich here, her thoughts so tangled that it skirted about the edges of her consciousness.
But then the flight of crows back across the village from their day time watching points, brought her senses back to the present moment.
It sounded like a puppy. Or two puppies.
They were crying, hungry perhaps. She looked around the graveyard and that’s when she spotted a cardboard box, resting up against the tap that people used for watering flowers during the summer months.
Rae walked across to it. And she was right, the sound of soft crying and pawing nails, was coming from inside.
Above it, the tap had dripped down and made the cover a soft, sodding sponge.
She lifted it open carefully, just in case it wasn’t a puppy, it could be anything, she realised as she raised the cover gently.
A nest of rats? Did rats live in nests? She really wasn’t sure.
She dropped the cover again, a tint of fear at what might be inside.
Her car was a good distance away if she wanted to race back to it.
She looked around, spotted a discarded half a pair of shears poking from the top of a bin.
She pulled it out and used it to lever up the cover of the box, peered in to see three tiny puppies squirming about. White and black and brown, it was hard to know what breed they might be, if they were any breed at all. She picked them up, one by one.
She’d never been able to have a dog in the hotel, another thing she’d sacrificed, because she’d yearned for one for years, especially when Marcus ruled out the hope of any babies for them.
That had made her virtual estrangement from Siggy even harder to bear.
No good thinking of that now. She waited for a beat, the pain always lessened if she pushed it hard from her mind.
As to a pet, she knew that if she brought one to the hotel, he was capable of doing anything to it, just because he could, it would be another way of hurting her; she couldn’t do that to a defenceless animal.
These poor little things, so small and soft.
So pathetic and vulnerable. There was no way she was leaving them here, although she had no idea what she could do with them at this hour of the night.
They’d need to be fed and kept warm. Instinctively, she pulled them into her.
They were shivering, their eyes closed. They had no idea what sort of world they’d been abandoned to, she held them close to her face.
They weren’t exactly fragrant, but somehow, they made Rae’s heart crack open with an unexpected rush of warmth.
She looked across at her grandparents’ grave, the dying sun just now moving down the headstone, across the surface and then, for a little while it lingered on the frame.
And that’s when she noticed it.
A triskelion: it was carved into the stone, more visible now with the sun gleaming across the light gold paint. She knew what it meant, and she knew too that Pappy would have put it there for a reason.
It was her answer.
The triskelion, or the spiral, in Irish mythology symbolised new beginnings. It was a sign of hope.
‘Oh, Pappy.’ She knew exactly what his answer was; this was a time for new beginnings and maybe she already had the first of those in her arms. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’ She nuzzled the puppies closer to her face again and now, she hardly noticed the pong, because the tears that were racing down her face were such a mixture of happiness and relief.
‘Thank you, Pappy,’ she said, blowing him a kiss and then she headed towards her car in the last rays of dusky light.