Inherit the Skies (7 page)

A waiter, who had seen Alicia rise, hovered attention.

‘Thank you, I am not lunching,' Alicia informed him. ‘Would you kindly find my coat for me?'

As she moved away between the tables, where more than one diner watched with covert curiosity as she passed, Sarah felt the tiredness increase, an ache behind her eyes throbbing up into her temples.

So – the lunch had been the unmitigated disaster Kirsty had predicted it would be. She had gambled on Alicia's hatred for Leo being stronger even than the hatred she felt for her, Sarah. She had gambled – and lost.

Or had she? Alicia had originally turned down her request for a meeting and later changed her mind. Perhaps pride had made her react violently – pride and shock that her precious Guy could behave so treacherously. Maybe when she had had time to talk to him and time to think she would realise that now, for the first time ever, she and the woman she hated so much must become allies for the sake of the company.

Dear God, how did I ever manage to instil such hatred? Sarah wondered. I never meant to. I never meant to hurt anyone. And yet she knew that was exactly what she had done, always.

Thoughtfully she lifted her glass, draining the remains of the gin and tonic, and as she stared into its crystal depths it seemed suddenly that her whole life was reflected there with its triumphs and heartbreaks, its turbulent loves and its bitter hatreds.

And what a life! What would I change if I could? she wondered and the answer came back to her: not a great deal. I have lived for seventy-three years and each one of them fully. And even if I wanted to –
could
I have changed it?

Certainly not the beginning – and it was from that beginning that every thread flowed. In the beginning she had been just a child, a pawn in the hand of fate, and afterwards it was probably much too late …

Sarah sipped her drink and let memory take her back in time to a past so real, so vivid, it might have been happening
now.

You are a child of the universes no less than the trees
and the stars. You have a right to be here.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons – they are
vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with
others you may become vain and bitter for always
there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself
.

Desiderata

‘Billy Stickland, will you come on please!' Sarah begged. ‘Pick your feet up and stop kicking every stone you see. We'll never get home at this rate.'

She tugged impatiently at the hand of the small boy who was lagging along beside her, trying to hurry him, but he only pulled back and dug in his toes more determinedly.

‘Aw, Sarah, it's hot – and me boots are pinchin'. Why can't we go down by the stream?'

‘Yes, Sarah, you promised we could fish for tadpoles …' The girl, Phyllis, was a year older than her brother and even more inclined to show signs of rebellion. Sarah might be bigger than they were but Phyllis resented having to do as Sarah told her. It wasn't even as if they were related; Sarah just happened to live next-door-but-one to them in the row of cottages at Starvault and when their mother had been growing fat and clumsy with yet another baby Sarah had been asked to take Billy the mile and a half to the village school and back each day. ‘He'd never do what you told him to,' Phyllis had been informed by her mother when she protested about the arrangement and although she knew in her heart that it was true, Phyllis did her best to salve her wounded pride by ensuring that Billy did nothing Sarah told him to either.

‘You said yesterday we could fish for tadpoles,' Phyllis persisted. ‘I brought a jam jar with me to school and our Billy's been looking forward to it all day.'

‘I didn't promise,' Sarah said. ‘ I only said we might, but now we can't.' She gave Billy's hand another tug in an effort to make him keep pace with her.

‘Stop it, Sarah, you're hurting me arm!' Billy whimpered and Phyllis took up his cause.

‘You're mean and bossy, Sarah. I shall tell our mum you hurt our Billy.'

‘You can tell your mum what you like. I don't care. Only come on, will you?' Sarah said, fighting back tears of sheer desperation. ‘If you don't I shall leave you here, both of you.'

‘Then you
will
be in trouble.'

‘I don't care, I tell you. I've got to get home.' But she did care. She knew and they knew she would never leave them – not when they had been entrusted to her care. Not Sarah. She might be only nine years old, skinny as a bean pole in a blue cotton pinafore, but her sense of responsibility was well developed. However anxious she was to get home she would make sure she took Phyllis and Billy with her if she had to drag them every inch of the way.

‘Why do you keep making us run?' Phyllis asked complainingly. ‘Why are you in such a hurry today?'

For a moment Sarah did not answer. Most of her breath had been used up struggling with the unwilling Billy and she felt hot, flustered and close to tears. But Phyllis was a friend –
almost
– and she was so very worried.…

‘It's our mum,' she confided. ‘She's ever so bad, Phyll. I started to tell you this morning but you kept going on about your six-times-table.'

‘Yes, 'cos we had to know it by today. Miss Keevil said she'd give us three strokes if we didn't get it right and … Well, what's wrong with your mum anyway?'

‘I don't know,' Sarah said, and felt more like crying than ever. ‘That's just it, Phyll. I don't know what's the matter with her and I don't think
she
knows either. She's got this really bad pain in her tummy and …'

‘P'raps she's going to have a baby,' Phyllis suggested. ‘My mum had a pain in her tummy just before we had our Frank.'

‘Don't be silly,' Sarah said scathingly. ‘I haven't got a dad, have I?'

‘No, but I don't see …'

‘Babies don't get delivered to houses where there's no dad,' Sarah said. ‘ I don't know why but they just don't. And anyway, this is different. She keeps being sick. I heard her moaning and retching all night. And this morning she was too bad to get up at all. She just lay there.'

‘Ooh!' At last Sarah had impressed Phyllis. Her eyes went round with horror. Children like her and Billy and little Frank were often sick, but mothers …when mothers were sick the world seemed to have fallen off balance. Phyllis experienced a small stab of guilt and she took her young brother's other hand. ‘Come
on
, can't you, our Billy? Why are you so slow?'

Billy scowled and kicked defiantly at a small piece of gravel but he knew better than to argue. When the two girls put up a united front it was worse than useless.

For a few moments the three of them hurried along in silence while the sun beat down from a clear blue sky onto their bare heads and arms. Sometimes, on afternoons such as this, they would take off their socks and boots and wade through the lush green grass that grew along the edge of the lane, sometimes they would stop to pick handfuls of golden celandines and purple cock-robins, snow white feathery heads of cow parsley and scarlet silk poppies, fine and delicate as butterflies' wings, sometimes they would take a stick and poke into the ditch that lay between hedge and verge to see what treasures might be uncovered in its overgrown depths. It was so good to be free after a whole day of sitting on hard forms in the sunless schoolroom, constantly nagged at by Miss Keevil's piercing voice and threatened by the cane she kept propped up in the corner, and they loved to make the most of that freedom.

Not so today. Sarah's anxiety had at last transmitted itself to the other two children and even Billy stopped whining and marched along between them, his pinching boots forgotten as a strange sense of urgency flowed like an electric current from the girls' hands into his own.

From the village school the lane wound steeply upwards for the first half mile, then followed the curve of the hill until it dipped away to where Starvault Cottages nestled in the lee. From the last bend before the lane began its descent they were plainly visible, looking like dolls' houses in the narrow valley below – three stone-built dwellings set at right angles to the lane with tiny patches of flower garden and a cinder path separating them from the long strips of vegetable garden which sloped up the hillside. The houses were identical except that Sarah's – closest to the lane – had a little wooden porch and a honeysuckle creeping around the door, while the small patch of garden outside Phyllis's house was surrounded by a low wall which dripped great cushions of clematis and snow-on-the-mountain.

Often as they rounded that last bend one or other of the children would cry: ‘There's our house!' or ‘See – there's our mum in the garden. Wave!
Wave
!' for the first sight of home at the end of a long day seemed to them every bit as welcome as an oasis to a traveller who has been lost in the desert. But today there was no pleasurable sensation of homecoming, only a creeping foreboding which seemed all the more oppressive because of the brightness of the sunshine, and in the cottages and gardens nothing stirred.

Billy was beginning to drag again and Sarah felt the tears of frustration threatening once more. Just why she was so anxious she was not sure, but the fact that this black dread which had been closing in around her all day was nebulous only served to make it more frightening. Perhaps if there had been someone she could talk to it would not have been so bad – a bigger girl at school, maybe, or the teacher. But the bigger girls, about to go out into the world and earn their living, tended to think themselves above talking to a nine-year-old, drawing into a huddle and turning their backs if they saw her approaching, and Miss Keevil was a daunting figure. No child ever dared to speak to Miss Keevil unless they were first spoken to and even then there was always the danger of attracting three strokes from that ever-ready cane of hers if they were careless with their choice of words. And at home there was no-one. No-one but Mum. They only had each other.…

Unable to bear the delay a moment longer Sarah let go of Billy's hand.

‘You'll be all right now, won't you? Look – we're almost home.'

‘Yes, we'll be all right, Sarah,' Phyllis said. ‘You go on.'

‘Sure?'

‘Yes, sure. Come out later and play five-stones or hopscotch.'

‘I will.' But there was no comfort in the illusion of normality.

She began to run down the hill towards the cottages. The ribbon bow tying up her curls came loose; she pulled it out and thrust it in the pocket of her pinafore without stopping, and her booted legs almost ran away with her on the last steep slope. The impetus kept her going as she turned into the cinder track and down the short path that led across the square of flower garden to her front door.

Often on afternoons such as this the door would be open to let the fresh air and sunshine in and the heat of the fire – kept burning whatever the weather for cooking and boiling a kettle – out. Today however the door was closed. Sarah's foreboding deepened. She lifted the latch and went in.

The door opened directly into the small living-room with its low ceiling and flagstoned floor. It was empty. Worse, the fire had gone out and nothing appeared to have been done since Sarah had left for school this morning. The breakfast was still laid, the neat checked cloth covering the scrubbed wood table, the loaf of bread on the blue china bread plate, the mug of tea Sarah had not had time to drink with the milk congealed on the top in a creamy skin.

Sarah ran to the door that concealed the staircase and opened it.

‘Mum!' she called. ‘Mum – are you all right?'

No reply.

‘Mum!'

She started up the stairs, her boots clattering on the bare narrow boards. The door at the top of the stairs was ajar, letting out some light; behind it lay Sarah's bedroom and beyond that, her mother's.

Sarah loved her little room with its freshly starched curtains and bright rag rugs which she had helped to make with remnants of material from her mother's ‘piece box'. Most children she knew had to share their room with several brothers and sisters, some even had to sleep with their parents, but because Dad had died in India when she was just a baby she was an only child and this room was hers and hers alone. Today however she sped through it without so much as a second glance, her heart beating hard in her thin chest.

‘Mum!'

She had drawn back the curtains before going to school and the light, streaming in at the window, glared harshly upon the narrow bed and the woman who lay there. Rachel Thomas was twenty-eight years old but now she looked twice her age, her skin waxy and shining with a faint film of moisture, her thick brown curls tangled and lacklustre against the vomit-stained pillow. Pain had etched great dark circles under her eyes so that they looked sunken and even her cheeks seemed to have hollowed beneath the high and delicate cheekbones.

Sarah caught her breath in a small frightened gasp. This haunted spectre did not look like Mum at all – Mum was pretty, her eyes were bright and sparkling, if a little strained, and she laughed a lot, even when she was tired. Only last week she and Sarah had gone for a walk in the woods behind the house; in the cool of the evening Mum had caught Sarah's hand and they had skipped together along the path, more like sisters than mother and daughter, until the pink colour had been whipped up in Mum's cheeks and she had leaned against the stile to catch her breath, tossing her head back and laughing with the lovely creamy skin stretched taut on her throat and her teeth showing even and pearly between red parted lips. Only her hands were less than beautiful, the once slim fingers calloused from the hours when she worked with her needle and a little puffy from the hard menial work of caring for a home and a child. But Sarah was not looking at her hands. She saw only full breasts beneath a striped cotton blouse, a narrow waist, hips lending flare to a flowing serge skirt and rich brown curls escaping from their pins, and thought: when I grow up I want to look just like Mum.