Glittering Fortunes (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

O
LIVIA
WOKE
TO
the sound of church bells. At first the faraway peal was part of a strange and troubling dream. In it she was at sea, floating on her back, the sun bathing her face, when a distant alarm rang out from the beach.
You have to go back in now
, a voice insisted.
Go back in or it’ll be too late.
She tried to swim, only to find her legs were useless, dead as driftwood, and with every thrash she sank deeper. Air was running out, salt filling her lungs. Churning waves tossed her on their surface. Panic devoured her. She became aware of somebody else in the water with her, an arm locked around her waist, and she fought to go alone but he held her back. Words against her hair were both threatening and kind. She couldn’t work out who was speaking; they came from everybody all at once: Addy, Charlie, Cato, her father...

Don’t struggle
,
I’ve got you
,
I’ve got you
...

She drifted into consciousness and blearily checked the time. Eight o’clock. Her cabin was bright and the sheets were hot. A dog-shaped imprint was at the foot of the bed, the dent of a body that had kept her company for most of the night. Olivia stretched and yawned, dangling her legs out of bed, her feet not quite touching the floor as she wound her ankles and twitched her toes. She peeled back the porthole curtain to reveal a gently tipping line of green.

Breakfast aromas soaked through the door, left ajar by her bedfellow when he had been summoned for his walk. She could hear Decca in the kitchen, the pop of the toaster and the scrape of a knife, and the muffled hum of a radio programme.

In the bathroom she took a short, sharp, freezing cold shower, and brushed her teeth. She dressed in jeans and padded through to the galley.

‘How did you sleep?’ Decca asked, stirring sugar into coffee and holding it out. She was in a sweeping robe with gold stitching, her hair in a Mrs Pepperpot bun.

Olivia took the mug, inhaling the nutty aroma. ‘Deeply.’ She smiled sleepily. ‘The journey took it out of me; I was out like a light.’

‘That’s good. Barney didn’t wake you? The cough gets so much worse at night; the hours just go on and on... Toast?’

‘Please. How is he?’

‘Better. I’ve made him go outside for breakfast.’

‘Is Charlie with him?’

‘No, he was up before either of us. He’ll have taken the dogs out, there are some brilliant routes round here. Bess’ll be having a field day.’

Olivia unscrewed the jam. ‘When’s Cato coming over?’

‘Tonight.’ Decca nodded firmly. ‘Barney will spend the day getting his strength up, and he’ll speak to them tonight.’

‘Charlie’s been through a lot. I know it isn’t any of my business, but—’

‘Oh, I’d say it was. Or that Charlie would like it to be.’

Olivia’s toast all of a sudden became terribly interesting.

‘You don’t get to my age without developing an instinct for these things.’ Decca gestured outside. ‘Go on, then, aren’t you going to join him?’

‘He’s back?’

Decca raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘Not Charlie.’ She smiled. ‘His uncle.’

* * *

O
UTSIDE
,
THE
SUN
was warming up nicely. Yesterday’s rain had infused the air with a ripe, lush scent that reminded Olivia of wet woody walks back at Lustell Cove; those bright green ferns that burst by the path, fronds pricked with quivering beads and the reassuring squelch of mud beneath her boots. In the daylight she saw that
Hedge Betty
was part of a floating street, houseboats lined up on the water, merrily enjoying each other’s companionship; some detached like Barnaby and Decca’s, others connected by ropes and walkways. The river was spinach-dark, lapping against the flanks and slopping in the spaces between, its verges overgrown and wild. Thick vegetation offered privacy from the road and a trail threaded up to the town.

It was with apprehension that Olivia made her way to the front of the boat. Barnaby was seated, a gentleman in his sixties with his back to her, his head tipped to catch the rays. She didn’t know what to expect, how far the illness had ravaged him.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, without turning round. There was a blanket over his knees. He had a gentle, unpolished voice, mellow with East Anglian burr.

She touched his shoulder. ‘Barnaby? I’m Olivia. Charlie’s friend.’

He reached to clasp her hand, his grip warm, and she stepped round so he could see her properly. ‘Come,’ he urged, ‘sit down. Sit with me.’

As it happened, the signs of Barnaby’s illness—the hollows at his brow and cheekbones, the bluish bruises beneath his eyes—were easily ignored when on the receiving end of such a peculiarly penetrating gaze. Like his nephews, Barnaby’s regard was soot-black, severe, as if compelled to disclose a matter of the gravest urgency, which, in this case, she supposed he was.

‘You’re kind to come with him.’ Where Barnaby’s stare differed from Charlie’s was in its inclusiveness, its willingness to connect.

‘Susanna invited me,’ she clarified. ‘For her son. You met her yesterday?’

Barnaby coughed savagely. ‘I knew Cato would sooner or later attract the limelight.’ He caught his breath. ‘And that sort of woman with it. Charles is different. He’s his mother’s son. Has he talked about me? Have either of them?’

She searched for something to give him.

‘He remembers you. Charlie remembers you coming to the house.’

‘It was another lifetime.’

‘And he remembers when you went away.’

He faced her. His eyes were alight. ‘What I wouldn’t give to go back and change things... But then there’s the question:
what
would you change? What would you do differently? I’ve turned this over for more than twenty years and I still don’t know the answer. I was who I was back then; so was Beatrice, so was Richmond. Denying what happened is the same as denying ourselves.’

She watched his fingers dance on the fringe of the blanket.

‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ Olivia said at last. He took a long time answering and she wasn’t sure he’d heard, before: ‘The words don’t exist. I’ve tried to find them and I can’t, even now. Some things defy language. We hadn’t been in touch since ‘92. To know she died without our ever having spoken again...’ Gruffly he cleared his throat. ‘There’s nothing to say, nothing to make it better. I was angry when I left. We fought. I told Bea to stand up for herself and to stand up to him. She told me I didn’t understand; I wasn’t the one...
dealing
with it.’ A beat. ‘So stupid to argue, when all I should have told her was that I loved her. That was all that mattered, all that ever mattered; the rest was a waste of breath. When it’s over, is there anything else?’

A dragonfly landed on the table between them, gauzy wings trembling.

‘It’s silly,’ Barnaby meditated, ‘but I look for her

everywhere—-in fellows like him, in whinchats singing at the window, in the sighing sea, on days when the wind whistles through the boat and I think I can hear her, clear as a bell, right there next to me.’ The dragonfly sailed off. ‘There’s a great trauma to never having a body to bury. It’s a gap between what everyone tells you must have happened—what
has
happened—and what you accept to be true. Gone, just like that, and never coming back. How can I believe it? How can I, when the last time I saw her was on the lawn at Usherwood, holding her boys, protecting them and loving them? She isn’t at the bottom of the ocean, cold and lonely...she’s there. She’s at home.’

‘Did you go to the funeral?’

‘I thought about it. Decca told me I should. Richmond’s clan was out in force, and admittedly I was a coward. I couldn’t face it. They knew how he felt about me and I couldn’t stand Beatrice’s memory being tarnished by a hurtful and avoidable squabble. I held my own farewell; I said my own things. That’s the only good to come of being lost—no one had ownership of her, in the end—not then and never again. Really, it’s what she always wanted. She’s nowhere. She’s everywhere.’

They sat in silence.

‘My dad died,’ Olivia offered. ‘I was six, so I didn’t really get it. Just that he was there one day and then he wasn’t. There are things I wish I could have asked him. I wish I knew the sound of his voice. I wish I had known him as an adult. I wish my mum hadn’t had to do it by herself. He’s at sea—he was a sailor, so it was right. We took a boat and poured him back in, that was how Mum described it, as if we’d only been borrowing him and he had really belonged there all along.’ She brought to mind that glittering spring day. ‘The powder felt so loose between my fingers, so light. It didn’t make sense that that was
him
. My dad. The hand I’d held. The cheek I’d kissed. The shoulders I’d climbed on when he was trying to read his book, and I knew if I kept on he’d tickle me till I cried laughing.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t remember anything else. But that was enough. That was life right there: hard to hold on to, running down till it’s gone. It isn’t silly to look out for her. When the sun shines on the ocean, whichever ocean, wherever, I smile back. It’s as if we’re smiling at each other.’

It was Barnaby’s turn to smile. ‘Charles is lucky to have a friend like you.’

‘He needs friends. People he can trust.’

‘That he will.’ Barnaby was grave. ‘That he will.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
HEY
ARRIVED
IN
Blakeney mid-morning, having arranged to rendezvous with Cato and Susanna on the sea front in order to, in Cato’s words, ‘deposit the cargo’. Barnaby and Decca had elected to stay behind.

In spite of Susanna’s attempts to remain incognito—or perhaps because of them—she was instantly recognisable as she emerged from Cato’s four-by-four, a scarf wrapped round her head and a pair of enormous dark glasses obscuring her face. Thorn clambered out of the back. When he spotted Olivia he came dashing over.

‘We went pony trapping!’

She crouched to his level. ‘You did?’

‘The
Pony Trap Inn
,’ corrected Susanna, bringing up the rear, as ever sapping joy from proceedings with vampiric precision. ‘It was hideous.’

‘Can I see ponies today?’

‘You might,’ said Olivia. ‘Shall we look for crabs first?’ All along the harbour children were crouched with buckets, weed-entangled nets dragging through the water and dripping brine when they were brought up and emptied. Shells scraped in plastic tubs as the crustaceans slipped and skated over each other. The sun beat down.

‘I’m relieved
you
can think of something to do with him.’ Susanna removed her shades and scoped her surroundings for prying eyes (a touch hopefully, Olivia thought). ‘I’m shattered. Who knew looking after children could be so tiring?’

Cato joined them. He wore a coral neckerchief tied above a Breton T-shirt. On anyone else it would have looked ludicrous, but Cato managed to carry it off. Several people glanced their way, passers-by slowing to confirm their suspicions, a procession of nervous smiles and star-struck teenagers, all of which he seemed oblivious to.

‘Greetings from the arsehole of England!’ he announced.

Charlie put the dogs in the shade. ‘Morning to you, too.’

Cato scowled.

‘Miraculously I’ve located a hotel with adequate spa facilities, if their website is anything to go by,’ Susanna chirruped. ‘I’ll be staying overnight. Cato, darling, you’re sure you won’t come? There can’t be a great deal to do around here.’

He leered at Olivia. ‘I’m sure I’ll think of something.’

Gingerly Susanna patted Thorn’s head. Thorn flung his arms round her neck and kissed her, and before she could stop it a short, delighted laugh flew out of her throat. Briskly she composed herself. ‘Be a good boy now.’

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Cato murmured devilishly.

Susanna tottered off across the car park.

‘He’s still alive, then,’ Cato tossed in his brother’s direction, ‘the runaway pensioner? Didn’t choke on his big reveal in the night?’

‘Don’t joke.’

‘You can’t imagine this is about anything remotely important?’ Cato scoffed. In his voice Olivia detected the slightest ripple of genuine query. ‘He just wants to clear his conscience before he carks it.’

‘About what?’

Cato curled his lip. ‘Pissing off Daddy Lomax? Wrecking Mummy’s final years? Never sending Christmas cards? How should I know? I don’t care.’

‘You never do.’

‘Come on.’ Olivia took Thorn’s hand. She had spotted a shack selling nets and steered him away: the poor child had enough sniping adults to deal with without two more. They perused the shelves and paid for what they needed, including a stick of rock for Thorn’s friend Tudor (seriously, where did these people come from?) and a knobbly beaded periwinkle for him, which he had become taken with after Olivia showed him how to put his ear to the lip of the shell and listen for the ocean.

By the time they came back, Cato had gone.

‘Look what we found!’ Thorn held the shell up. ‘Can you hear it?’

Charlie listened. ‘Is it really in there?’ he asked, shaking it as if he expected the water to come rushing out one end. Olivia smiled.

Thorn bounced up and down excitedly. ‘It is! It is!’

They arranged to meet in an hour. Olivia and Thorn found a space on the harbour and began setting up their tackle, and she spotted Charlie’s figure out on the salt marshes, the low, foraging shapes of Sigmund and Comet trotting behind. The Blakeney wetlands were golden and green beneath a vast, bright blue sky, across which an armada of gossamer clouds sailed to a vanishing point. Bursts of purple sea lavender flecked the wild grasses and a colourfully painted rowboat was lodged in the mud. Silver tributaries threaded through the fens. A tern screeched overhead.

Thorn was hanging off her arm.

‘Are we ready?’ He scuffed the brink of the wall with his shoe.

Olivia crouched, showing him how to tie his ropes and attach the bait, and filling up their bucket so the crabs didn’t dry out. Gradually they lowered the line into the water. She had demonstrated this to Addy, one long-ago summer when they had been out on the water. It was a miracle she had been able to explain so much of it, given she’d spent the entire time staring at his mouth and wondering how to kiss it.

‘Be patient,’ she told Thorn when he begged to draw it out and peek, his fat legs knocking impatiently against the sea wall. ‘Perseverance is half the battle.’

Her phone beeped. She dug it out of her pocket.

‘Who is it?’ Thorn waggled the line.

She subdued his hand in her palm. ‘Keep still.’

Thought I’d come rescue you. Where you staying? A x

She read the message, and read it again. A knot of anxiety tightened in her belly. Addy was here? The mobile cheeped a second time.

Text me your address xxx

Olivia folded it back into her jeans. She pretended to focus on the task but could only replay Beth’s accusation:
All you care about is Addy
...

Until just now, she hadn’t been thinking about Addy at all. It was the first time in years she could honestly say that. Now, instead of filling her with pleasure, his promised arrival nagged at her as insistently as Thorn’s grip on the crabbing net.

She didn’t understand where she stood with him.

Was Beth right, or did he return her feelings? She’d done what he’d asked; she’d introduced him to Cato. She owed him nothing more. Surely, then, if he were getting in touch, it was for the right reasons?

She elected not to reply. Coming to Norfolk was about getting away and clearing her head for a few days. Seeing Addy would put her right back at square one.

‘It’s boring waiting,’ complained Thorn.

Olivia looked out on the marshes, searched for Charlie’s figure but couldn’t find it. Next to her, a toddler with no pants on dropped an ice cream cone and burst into tears. ‘Sure is,’ she agreed, ‘but sometimes the longer you wait, the sweeter it is.’

‘Do the crabs taste sweet?’

‘They taste like the sea, and lemons.’

‘Is that because they eat lemons?’

‘No, silly, that’s what they get cooked in. If you like.’

‘Are we cooking them?’

‘We can, if we catch any.’

‘Is it ready?’ He jiggled the line. ‘Can we bring it up?’

‘OK, but lift it out very, very slowly.’ Olivia helped him guide the net to the surface. Three deep-pink shields groped in the mesh, claws tweezering.

‘See!’ She put her arm round him. ‘I knew you’d be a natural.’

* * *

A
FTER
LUNCH
THEY
headed into Cley. It was a sweltering walk, the road shivering with heat, and Olivia distracted him by picking out flowers from the hedgerows and telling him their names. She piggybacked him part of the way, the bucket of crabs dangling from his tightly clenched fist and having to be consulted every few seconds as if its contents might have leapt free and side-shimmied back to the water.

Thorn wrapped his arms tight around her shoulders. The contact stung. When they stopped she checked her back and saw it was sunburned.

Olivia found a deli and picked out parsley, white wine, lemon and flour-caked bloomers with crusts thick as handbag straps. She bought Thorn an ice-lolly and they had just emerged when a familiar mud-splashed Land Rover screeched to a halt on the opposite side of the road, mounting the kerb in the process.

A messy dark head appeared through the window.

‘Where have you been? Bloody hell, I thought something had happened!’

She held Thorn’s arm to cross. When they got to the car he volunteered the lolly and crabs to Charlie as if this answered the question.

‘We waited past the hour,’ she said affably, ‘and we have to get home or our spoils might escape.’ Her grin withered in the heat of his glare. ‘Sorry.’

‘I thought I’d lost you.’

‘You didn’t.’

His gaze was blazing. ‘You’re burned.’

‘I know. It’s fine.’

Charlie crunched the gears and reversed into a parking space. When he emerged it was with two damp dogs and a bottle of cream. Olivia applied it to her shoulders but couldn’t reach the back, and Charlie turned her round so he could do it. He felt massive behind her. His fingers were coarse on her skin, not slender like an artist’s, or long like a pianist’s, or adept in rolling reefers like Addy’s, but rough and solid and dexterous, fingers for
doing
things. She was acutely aware of his proximity, her senses heightened. She could detect that musky, earthy, Usherwood scent, and feel his breath on her neck. The lotion was cool, smelling of coconut and holidays on Greek islands. His hands were firm on her skin; thumb to thumb they covered her back, the tips snaking down to her waist and she couldn’t tell if he was doing this on purpose, making her feel like this, taking his time and knowing she was imagining what it would be like to stand stripped in front of Charlie Lomax, what would happen if his grip were to move round her body, beneath her arms and down her stomach...

Sigmund was sniffing for the final piece of Thorn’s cherry ice. The boy lifted it from reach, giggling, and eager at the game Sigmund filched it from his hand, hunkering down to guzzle it, remnants of pink dripping on to the boiling tarmac. Thorn stared after it, bewildered, the naked stick in his hand.

The moment was broken. Olivia straightened, embarrassed.

On the high street they passed a cluster of tearooms, charming stone cottages with welcome boards outside advertising scones and raspberries and clotted cream. Tourists milled in floppy hats and shorts, pints of amber warming in the sun or the cool crack of ice in a glass of cola. A handsome windmill reminded Olivia of one she had stayed in at Hindringham, a thimble-neat tower with a boat-style cap, a fissured white petticoat and fantail sails that faced into the wind. She and her friends had spent the week sunbathing and drinking cheap wine, lying outside with their books and listening to old tunes on the woolly radio Beth had remembered to bring.

‘What are they looking at?’

Thorn pointed to a bunch of sixteen-year-olds loitering excitedly at the entrance to a pottery shop. They were holding their phones to the window and kept rushing off to giggle with each other at the results.

‘I bet I can guess,’ said Charlie wryly.

Sure enough, as they approached, Cato’s unmistakeable silhouette came into view. He was leaning against the shop counter, deep in conversation with a pretty blonde with Bambi eyes. With the tinkle of the shop bell he turned.

‘Here comes the cavalry.’ Cato winked at the girl. ‘The kid’s not mine.’

‘No,’ agreed Charlie, ‘he’s his girlfriend’s.’

The assistant looked disappointed at the interruption, but naïve enough not to mind if Cato was attached or not. ‘Can I help you?’ she squeaked.

Olivia browsed the shelves. The ceramics were pleasingly sturdy to hold, a stout and squat assortment of mugs and egg cups, jugs and vases, with roughened clay bottoms engraved by their artist’s initials.

‘I’ve come to collect my brother.’

‘You’re brothers?’ the girl enthused.

‘Wouldn’t know it, would you?’ Cato removed his Marc Jacobs sunglasses and began polishing them. ‘Someone had to draw the short straw, I dare say.’

Her eyes fell on a large grey-green plate, paint swirled and churning, flecked with white, like the surface of a roiling sea. Olivia lifted it, held tight to the edges and peered in, as if she were looking through a window. All at once it was as if she had dived straight in. She thought of the conversation she’d had with Barnaby that morning, how she had told him about her dad and the day they had given him back to the ocean. Nothing could have captured so accurately the glitter on the water, the lifting, invigorating spray, the warmth of sunshine, as this did.

She missed Lustell Cove. She missed her mum. She missed Beth.

‘Why are you sad?’ Thorn asked, his hand sticky on her T-shirt.

‘I’m not.’ She put it back. ‘It makes me think of something, that’s all.’

‘What?’

She nudged him. ‘You ask too many questions.’

The shop girl spoke. ‘Sorry,’ she wheedled, ‘but do you mind not touching?’

All three of them were staring at her. Charlie was frowning.

‘I do,’ said Cato shamelessly, returning his attentions to the assistant’s sheer white shirt, whose top two buttons were undone. ‘Especially if I take you to dinner, I shall want to touch you so much I shan’t be able to enjoy my food.’ He indulged in a long, syrupy pause. ‘And I like to eat
whatever
is put in front of me.’

The girl blushed. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

‘I meant the ceramics...’ she demurred feebly.

‘Let’s go,’ said Charlie. ‘Barnaby and Decca are waiting.’

Cato groaned. He lifted the girl’s hand and kissed it, like a prince in a fairy tale. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Muffet, but duty compels me to pass up your tuffet.’

‘What’s a tuffet?’ asked Thorn.

‘Ask your mother,’ said Olivia.

Outside, Cato spent at least twenty minutes signing autographs. She sat on a shallow wall, looking out to the broads. She felt a blaze at her back, as if someone’s eyes were trained there. It could have been the sunburn.