Wickham Hall, Part 2 Page 5

  ‘He’s my boss and I want him to think well of me. He’s really grown on me. At first he didn’t seem to take anything seriously and he was irresponsible, I mean, the way he acted when we were trying to organize a press conference about him taking over from his father . . . ridiculous. And he was hideously late to his own sister’s wedding . . .’ I shook my head at the memory, although I couldn’t help but smile. ‘But today I saw a more sensitive side of him, which I liked.’

  I set down my glass and gazed at Esme. ‘If he comes to Weaver’s Cottage and sees the way I live, he’ll think differently about me.’

  ‘Well, maybe if he’s as sensitive as you say he is, he won’t.’ She shrugged simply. ‘Besides, I hope you realize you fancy the posh pants off him.’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s my boss, and—’

  ‘Are you kidding me? There was enough electricity sparking between you two on Sunday in Joop to light the Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘That was embarrassment, not electricity, Es. Big difference.’ I stood up and collected her empty glass. ‘Come on, the potatoes will be cooked.’

  We tucked into our pan-fried salmon when I dropped the bombshell.

  ‘I think I found a picture of my father today.’

  ‘What?’ Esme spluttered, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth.

  I darted back to the kitchen where I’d left my handbag and returned with the photograph from Steve’s studio.

  ‘One of these Morris dancers?’ Her jaw dropped.

  I tutted and pointed at the blonde girl behind them. ‘Look at her. It’s Mum and she’s holding hands with a man.’

  Esme squinted and moved the picture backwards and forwards to focus. ‘Are you sure it’s your dad?’

  ‘Admittedly it is only his hand and a bit of his arm. But that’s definitely Mum and this picture was taken in 1984, so yes.’ Esme looked dubious but I tapped the picture confidently. ‘Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. And now I want to know who he is.’

  My heart thumped as I stared at the photograph. My head had been full of Mum’s story ever since she’d revealed that she’d fallen in love with someone at the Wickham Hall Summer Festival. In all my twenty-nine years I’d never been particularly curious about my father. I’d just accepted that he wasn’t around and that was that. But now I’d had this tiny glimpse of him, I’d never been more curious about anything in my life.

  I remember the first time I asked Mum why I didn’t have a daddy. She had wrapped her arms around me, pulled me onto her knee and told me how a fairy had knocked at her door and asked her to look after a very special baby. The baby being me, of course. I’d adored the story, boasted to all my slightly less gullible friends about it and it wasn’t until I was eleven and along with my classmates watched the excruciating ‘Birds and Bees’ video at school that I noticed the flaws in her tale.

  But I’d never asked her again. Not outright, anyway. It made her too anxious. And if anything remotely related to fathers ever came up, Mum’s stock response was that she loved me twice as much to make up for not having two parents.

  ‘Can’t you ask her?’ Esme asked. She turned back to her dinner, swooping a tiny potato through mayonnaise and popping it in her mouth.

  I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’

  I filled Esme in on the online reading and research I’d been doing. Although Mum hadn’t begun seeing a counsellor yet she was making progress in terms of tackling some of the stuff she’d been accumulating. To date she’d managed to part with my cot, my baby toys and a box of old nylon bedspreads that had given us electric shocks every time we’d touched them. But I still felt as though I hadn’t got to the heart of it yet.

  ‘All sorts of things can trigger hoarding as a coping mechanism: a traumatic event, bereavement, anxiety, stress . . .’ I said, spearing a pile of rocket with my fork. ‘Mum says that she felt like she had everything that summer of 1984 and she let it slip away. And she was only seventeen, poor thing.’

  Esme pulled a sympathetic face. ‘Wasn’t your granddad there?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly when he died.’ I frowned. ‘But I know he never met me. So I’m guessing she was completely on her own.’

  ‘Finding herself single and alone and about to have a baby would be traumatic enough to trigger the hoarding behaviour, I guess,’ Esme mused, topping up our glasses.

  I nodded. ‘She said something else, too, about her father not being proud of her. It’s as if she is ashamed of something. And that’s the key to it.’ I gazed at Esme and rested my cutlery against my plate. ‘That’s when she clammed up on Saturday. But what I don’t understand is why she feels to blame. I mean, she’s not the first teenage girl to get pregnant, is she? And it was the eighties not the twenties. Besides it takes two . . . Oh God.’ I clapped a hand over my mouth as a thought hit me.

  ‘What is it? Holly, you’ve gone white,’ Esme pointed out.

  ‘You don’t think he was married, do you?’ I whispered. ‘That could be it. What if she fell in love with someone she couldn’t have? Perhaps he had children of his own. That would explain why Granddad wouldn’t have been proud of her. And that might be why she’s too ashamed of the affair to talk about it.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  We both fell silent then. I was mulling over my theory and Esme appeared to be concentrating on her salmon.

  ‘I’ve had another thought as well,’ I added in a low voice. ‘Mum has always said that Granddad left her his savings. That’s why she’s only ever had to work part-time. But maybe the man is still around and pays her an allowance and Mum can’t tell me because she’s sworn to secrecy.’

  Esme wrinkled her nose and twisted her corkscrew curls around her finger. ‘Isn’t a savings fund a bit more . . . likely?’

  I thought about that. She was right, I was getting carried away. ‘OK, but I bet he’s local. Mum has never wanted to move away from Wickham. What if she wanted to stay in the village to be near him?’

  ‘You think she had an affair with someone in Wickham?’ gasped Esme. ‘Blimey, that would be playing a risky game, wouldn’t it? She would bump into him all the time; Wickham’s only small.’

  I swallowed. It would also mean that I would bump into him all the time. Perhaps I had? I let out a groan. Perhaps it was actually someone I knew . . .

  Esme frowned. ‘I don’t buy it. If she says she met him at the Summer Festival, then that means it wasn’t someone local, or she would have met him previously. Perhaps it was just a visitor.’

  ‘I’d like to think Mum wouldn’t simply fall in love with someone who turned up to Wickham Hall with a day ticket and fifty pence for an ice cream,’ I scoffed, pushing my plate away.

  ‘So,’ Esme tapped her lip and narrowed her eyes, ‘we are looking for someone who perhaps worked there, or at least someone who was there for longer than a day.’

  ‘There are tons of staff at Wickham Hall, especially during the festival,’ I suggested. ‘And then of course there are all the exhibitors. They arrive three or four days before the start of the event. There would have been plenty of time to get to know one of them.’

  ‘Or – it could be Lord Fortescue!’ Esme leaned back in her chair.

  I gaped at her. ‘Esme! I hardly think—’

  ‘He’s married.’ She raised one eyebrow suggestively.

  ‘Yes, but he’s too old for Mum and he adores Lady Fortescue, and that was his first year at Wickham Hall.’ I shook my head. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Ha!’ She stabbed the air triumphantly. ‘There you go. That’s why she hadn’t met him before; he’d only just moved to Wickham.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Besides, he’s lovely.’ I stared at Esme defiantly. ‘Far too nice to be unfaithful.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure,’ she said knowingly. ‘He might be a very nice man but I know what the aristocracy is like. I’ve seen Downton Abbey.’

  ‘This is crazy. Stop right now.’ I snatched up the photograph from the table and gave her a warning look.
>
  ‘Keep your hair on.’ Esme chuckled, scraping the last of the salmon off her plate. ‘Well, what about the celebrity then? Who did the celebrity appearance in 1984?’

  Every year Wickham Hall had somebody famous on the festival programme to pull in the crowds. This year it was a TV gardener. In 1984 it had been the local BBC weather man.

  ‘Someone from the BBC,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Esme grinned, pushing herself up straight, ‘that’s it. He’ll be the one. I always thought you’d make a good newsreader. It must be in the genes.’

  She pretended to tap a pile of invisible papers on the edge of the table. ‘News just in,’ she said in a plummy accent, ‘a rather attractive man was spotted in Joop, wearing nothing but—’

  I tried to laugh with her but all of a sudden I found I couldn’t. It wasn’t funny at all. This was my father we were talking about. I’d always accepted that my family was just Mum and me; the identity of my father hadn’t bothered me too much before now. But now it felt very important and I was hurt that my best friend couldn’t see that.

  I stood up and swigged the rest of my wine, which was quite difficult given the lump in my throat.

  ‘Holster? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going home,’ I said, ignoring the prickling sensation at the back of my eyes. ‘I wish I’d never shown you the picture. You’re not taking this seriously. I’m glad you find my life so amusing, but from where I’m sitting, it’s anything but.’

  ‘Holly? I didn’t mean anything by it!’

  I left Esme’s jaw flapping and walked out of the flat, my heart racing. She was completely barking up the wrong tree. Mum probably just fell in love with a nice boy her own age and got a little carried away behind the bushes. All this talk and speculation was unhelpful and . . . unsettling. There’d be a very simple explanation, I was sure of it, and I wouldn’t stop digging until I’d found it.

  Chapter 6

  It was mid-July, the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and the air was so still that not a blade of grass moved nor a willow branch rustled and I was out and about in the gardens. On days like today there was nowhere I would rather be than lost in the grounds of Wickham Hall. I wasn’t lost, of course, not physically anyway. I’d just gone a bit starry-eyed with happiness at the sheer fabulousness of my job. I was so lucky to be outside in the sunshine, wandering around, checking up on the events happening that day, all in the name of work. I opened my diary as I rounded the eastern façade of the hall and ticked off my first completed task.

  I’d just performed my daily circuit of the festival site and had been thrilled to see that most of the marquees were up, including the big demonstration theatre and the indoor arena. The geography of the festival was beginning to take shape. I’d also been quite distracted by the sight of tanned shirtless men in shorts spreading tarmac for the temporary road that would loop around the showground. Muscles on muscles, some of them. Maybe Mum had had her head turned by one of the construction team all those years ago . . .?

  I snapped myself straight out of that thought. It wouldn’t do to go down that road this morning; I had too much on my plate and needed to keep focused.

  The courtyard was busy already and I had to dodge the tourists as I crossed it. The sunshine had brought visitors to Wickham Hall by the coach load, the café was doing a roaring trade in ice cream and Jenny’s special raspberryade, and Andy had been boasting that sales of his Victorian-style parasols would take the gift shop profits to new heights.

  Andy was on my to-do list today. Negotiating with him was always my least favourite task. I decided to get it over with straight away and made a beeline for the gift shop.

  The little shop was still relatively quiet – most visitors tended to save their shopping until the end of the day – and Andy was constructing a teddy-bears’-picnic-themed window display.

  ‘Morning, Andy,’ I said breezily. He threw me an icy smile and continued setting up a miniature picnic rug complete with three teddy bears in the window. ‘What a lovely display! We’ve got a large party of small children in today, they’ll love it.’

  ‘I can’t bear having loads of kids in here fiddling with things,’ he muttered.

  I was used to his less than welcoming charm where I was concerned and ploughed on regardless.

  ‘We’ve had some signed books delivered from Suzanna Merryweather’s publisher. They’ve asked if we’ll sell them in the shop. Can I get them dropped off here?’

  Suzanna Merryweather was the presenter of the TV show Green Fingers. She was also our celebrity guest for the festival and would be doing gardening talks in our demo theatre. I wasn’t a gardener myself but Mum loved her and even Nikki, who was a bit sniffy about TV gardeners, was keen to meet her.

  ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘We’re up to our eyeballs in summer stock. Books take up too much space and no one will buy them anyway.’

  I held my breath and waited for a diplomatic response to occur to me. But before it did, Edith appeared from the stock room. She was wearing a knitted twinset and thick tights despite the July heat but she still looked as cool as a cucumber with her powdered nose and immaculate bun.

  ‘Did I hear you say Suzanna Merryweather?’ she chirped. ‘I’ll have a book. I love that programme.’

  I looked at Andy and resisted sticking my tongue out. Seriously, what was his problem? I’d done nothing other than be chosen over him for this job. And I went out of my way to compliment his shop at every opportunity.

  ‘All right, well, I’ll send over one for Edith and the rest can be arranged on a table in the demo theatre.’

  ‘Rest of what?’ asked Jim, poking his head in through the shop door.

  When I explained, Jim’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. ‘I’ll definitely buy one, and I’m going to ask for her autograph when I see her.’

  ‘Two down, twenty-eight copies to go,’ I said brightly. ‘Not too bad. Let’s hope we find plenty more fans like you to buy the rest.’

  ‘Send the books over then,’ grumbled Andy. ‘Or I’ll never hear the last of it.’

  ‘Holly, just thought I’d let you know, I’m about to start,’ said Jim with a wink.

  ‘Thank you, Andy,’ I said, inclining my head graciously, and I followed Jim out of the shop before he changed his mind. Phew, another task ticked off the list.

  Jim was looking extra dapper today. He had a Wickham Hall polo shirt on, a clean, non-baggy pair of trousers and, I reckoned, he had even applied a good splash of aftershave.

  ‘Are you ready for this, then, Jim?’ I asked, looping my arm through his as we made our way to the picnic area.

  ‘I’ll be all right once I’ve got going,’ he said, ‘although I’m not used to addressing a crowd.’

  ‘You’ll be brilliant,’ I said, squeezing his arm.

  Today was Wickham Hall’s first ever nature trail, led by the aptly named Jim Badger, naturally. And twelve parents with their preschool children had gathered in readiness.

  I stood to one side as Jim introduced himself, gave everyone a sticky badge with their name on and then did that slidy-finger trick that old men do when they pretend they’ve cut their finger off.

  The kids loved him and the mums were giggling too. Jim handed all the children a map and coloured pencils and geed them up ready to go exploring. I took a few pictures on my phone as the little ones crowded round him.

  ‘Right, follow me to the woods; we’re going to see how many animals and insects we can find.’

  Before they moved off a little girl with brown pigtails and a stripy dress put her hand up.

  ‘Yes, Phoebe?’ said Jim, bending down to read her name.

  ‘If you got all the ants in all the world, would they fit under one chicken?’ she asked.

  Jim and I exchanged glances and I grinned, wondering how he’d answer this and possibly a lot more where this came from.

  The mums giggled, especially the one with brown hair standing b
ehind Phoebe.

  Jim bent down and pretended to steal the little girl’s nose. ‘Let’s hope not, Phoebe, because I think it would be very uncomfortable for the poor chicken.’

  And then he began dancing on the spot and smacking the back of his shorts as though he was being attacked by invisible ants. The children loved him. Just as I knew they would. Ever since he’d shown me the moorhen and her chicks I’d been trying to give him the chance to be a granddad, even if only for a few hours. He was in his element and I was pleased as punch for him. I ticked ‘check up on nature trail’ off my list and headed towards the café.

  I bought a pot of tea and a strawberry tart and chose a table outside, tucked into a shady corner. In theory my out-of-office jobs were done and I could go back inside, but as Ben had taken over the room with his easel this morning, I decided to work on the festival show guide in the courtyard instead.

  I poured a cup of tea, spread out the paperwork and then sliced the strawberry tart into quarters. I blinked at it: I’d bought Esme’s favourite cake without realizing, a sure sign that I was missing her already.

  It was well over a week since Esme and I had had our falling-out. Technically I supposed we hadn’t rowed, I’d been the one to blame, overreacting about the whole ‘who’s the daddy’ thing.

  We rarely rowed and it had left both of us shaken but we had smoothed things out by the following weekend.

  I’d apologized and she’d admitted that she’d got carried away with her Lord Fortescue theory, forgetting for a moment what the implications were for Mum and me. In the end we’d agreed that it was far more likely that Mum had simply had a fling with someone she’d rather not keep in touch with. I was glad we’d made up when we did because she and Bryony had made a snap decision to close Joop for a couple of weeks, regardless of the profit implications, and had flown off to Dubai to join Esme’s dad. I was super pleased for them. Not least because the shop was normally open seven days a week and they were in dire need of a break. But also they could discuss as a family what to do with Joop in the light of Bryony’s arthritis.