Once Upon A Winter (34 page)

‘Silas and I . . . we . . .’ She looked away, pressing her hands to her cheeks, as if to prevent herself blushing. ‘How - how did you know . . . ?’

Daniel shrugged. He felt a complete git. ‘A lucky guess. I’m sorry . . . It was more than sex, I’m sure. More than some people ever get. It possibly meant everything to you.’

‘It did,’ muttered Nell, her hands still pressed to her face.

‘I wish my time with Lauren could have been as . . . sacred.’ Daniel grunted self-deprecatingly. ‘But, no, it was just weakness on my part, and selfishness on hers.’

‘But - if you love each other . . . ?’

‘That’s the point. Leaving Lauren’s feelings out of it - I don’t think I do love her. She gets under my skin, yes. She has some sort of hold over me. Like I said, she’s my weak point. My Achilles heel. I just don’t know if that’s because we were so young when we got together, or because I wanted our relationship to succeed, for succeeding’s sake. It’s just . . . I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea when I went to see her yesterday. But she’d asked me over. Wanted to “talk”. And I screwed up. I gave in. I was just your typical can’t-keep-it-in-his-pants bloke. And then I had to turn round and throw it all back in her face.’

‘Daniel . . .’ Nell reached up and touched his shoulder. ‘You’re not a bad man.’

‘I’m not a good one, either.’ He gently pulled away, and took a few steps back, leaning against the nearest wall and ramming his hands into his pockets. ‘I lied about something else. Something important.’

‘Lied . . . ? To Lauren?’

‘To you. To everyone.’ He felt slightly sick. ‘I wasn’t on a training course last week in Manchester.’

There was a pause. ‘Oh?’ Nell prompted.

‘I went for a job interview.’

‘A job interview?’ She frowned. ‘But you’ve got a job.’

‘I’ve been headhunted - for want of a better word,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s not a large school. Although it’s bigger than Harreloe. They want me to be the Head. But it’s . . . not in a good area. I think some might call it “deprived”. The last Head had a mental breakdown, so -’

‘My God. Daniel, that sounds -’

‘Like a bloody great challenge. And d’you know what, Nell? I’m up for it.’

‘But . . . that means you’ll be leaving Harreloe? Moving away?’

Her eyes seemed to be tearing up at the prospect, and for a moment, Daniel felt the urge to bundle her into his arms and murmur comfortingly that he wouldn’t leave her if she didn’t want him to. But that would be futile. An error of judgement.

He had been seriously tempted by the job offer before he had heard the facts about her and Silas. He had given it his consideration, know
ing well enough that Nell wouldn’t contemplate uprooting her family again and coming with him. Their fledging relationship had been nowhere near ready for that.

‘It isn’t because of you, Nell,’ Daniel felt compelled to reassure her. ‘Don’t think I’m running away, or that you’re chasing me out of the village. I’ll make sure it’s public knowledge that you had nothing to do with it. I want to change my life. Go somewhere I can make a real, lasting impact. I
need
to start over. The way you wanted to leave London and come back to Harreloe. And maybe things might have been different if you’d felt . . . differently about us. Maybe we could have started over again together. But you don’t, and it’s Lauren I need to get away from, not you. Lauren and all the memories I’ve got of our life here.’

Nell twisted a lanky tendril of hair around her finger. She looked anguished. ‘If there was any man on this planet who could have made me forget Silas - it was you. I’ve only ever felt this way about you . . . and about him.’

‘But more him,’ said Daniel. ‘So much more. And that’s OK, Nell. I’m fine with that.’

‘I was using you, though . . . When h
e came back, I wanted to get serious with you because I knew it might be the only way to stop me falling back into my old habits . . . But you were one step ahead, whether you realised it or not. You tried to keep me at arm’s length. And even if you hadn’t -’

‘It wouldn’t have stopped you loving Silas, Nell, because you never fell out of love in the first place. Whatever he’d done to you. I could always sense you were still mad about him, even if you denied it to yourself. I think everyone could tell. I chose to ignore it, but that wasn’t your fault.’

‘He’s different now, Daniel. Better. Braver. More . . . real. And I love him so much. More than I did eight, nine,
ten
years ago.’

Daniel was exhausted after his confession, and yet oddly exhilarated, too, by the absolution Nell had bestowed on him so freely. Purged and forgiven, he stared at the woman whose heart was so obviously
breaking as she spoke. She was calm and rational, even as her life disintegrated. He wanted to say something that might help, but the words didn’t exist.

‘What happens now?’ he asked instead. ‘What are you going to do?’

Nell’s chin went up. Her puffy, red-rimmed eyes filled with determination rather than tears. ‘Cope,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘It’s what I’m good at. And I’ve got to, for the kids’ sake. I can whinge all I like, but they’ve got to come to terms with losing their dad.’

Daniel hesitated. ‘You really think . . . whatever Silas was -
is
- that he wasn’t cut out to go the distance with you? With a family?’

Nell’s
bottom lip wobbled. Turning away, she crossed the room to the window, staring out as if she could see the entire world, not just a clearing in a small patch of Welsh woodland. ‘He’s needed in so many places, Daniel. By so many people. And to know I’d be depriving them of him . . . I couldn’t have lived with myself.’

‘Easier
just to deprive yourself,’ observed Daniel grimly, after a pause. ‘And Joshua and Freya?’

Nell sniffed, and mu
ttered in the affirmative, ‘
Much
.’

The girl peered over the counter at the plump, rosy-cheeked woman behind it. Meryl finally looked up from retouching the icing on a carrot cake, and almost jumped.

‘
Ooo, I didn’t notice you there! The bell didn’t sound . . .’ She looked towards the door. ‘Is your mum with you?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Is Calista here today?’ she asked.

‘Calista? Er, yes. She’s in the kitchen.’ Meryl smiled hesitantly. ‘Do you want to speak to her?’

The girl nodded. ‘Please.’

Meryl vanished. A moment later, Calista parted the beaded curtain and stepped into the outer part of the café.

‘Freya.’ She sounded surprised. ‘You wanted to see me? Where’s your brother? Your mother?’

‘Joshua’s gone home. And Mum thinks I’m at after-school choir club with Rose. Aunt Em’s supposed to be picking me up in forty minutes from the school gates. Rose is covering for me.’

‘Oh, I see. This is supposed to be clandestine, is it?’ Calista glanced at her assistant, who smiled again, indulgently and with a trace of pity. ‘You want to talk to
me
, Meryl said. Is this about -’

‘My dad
,’ said Freya, feeling warm enough to remove her beanie hat. The straps of her backpack were beginning to dig in. She slid it off her shoulders. ‘Can we talk on our own, please?’

Now Meryl looked even more sympathetic. ‘Calista, you can go upstairs, if you like; the key’s hanging on the peg in the kitchen. I’ve got cookies in the jar by the kettle.’ She smiled at Freya again. ‘Help yourself, love. Have as many as you like. I can always bake more tomorrow.’

Freya followed the tall, slim figure of Calista Molyneux up the rickety steps. Meryl’s flat was like a display from the Ikea store Freya had got lost in once - colourful and organised. But without any price tags attached to anything.

‘Your great-grandmother Gwen used to live up here, when she was a girl,’ Calista
told her, bringing in the cookie jar from the little galley kitchen and easing off the lid.

‘Yes, I know.’ Freya looked around. ‘I’m not really hungry,’ she added, pl
onking herself down in a neon-pink bucket chair.

After a pause
, Calista sat down herself, and put the lid back on the jar and the jar on the coffee table. ‘So’ - she sighed - ‘you want to talk to me, without your mum knowing about it?’

‘I know you and my dad were friends. I - I wondered if you might know where he’s gone.’

Calista hesitated. She rocked backwards and forwards. ‘Oh, Freya . . . I only wish I did. I only wish I knew why he left the way he did, without even a goodbye for me . . .’

‘I think Mum had something to do with it. A lot to do with it,’ Freya corrected herself. ‘They were stuck up at Bryn
Heulog together when the snow came. With Josh and Nana Gwen. Dan was away. I was at Aunt Em’s, at Rose’s birthday party. I heard all this from Josh later. He wasn’t meant to tell me, but he mostly tells me everything, even stuff he’s not meant to.’

‘Your parents were together, at Bryn
Heulog?’ Calista pursed her lips. ‘
That
I didn’t know. Your mum has been avoiding me again since your father left.’

‘I guess it’s meant to be a secret,’ said Freya, enthralled by the woman’s ruler-straight, grey-black bob, short on one side and much longer on the other. ‘And I don’t think Josh was supposed to have spotted Dad creeping out of Mum’s room early the next morning.’

Calista made a spluttering noise, but recovered fast. ‘Did - did your father know Joshua saw him?’

‘I don’t think so. Josh pretended to be asleep when Dad came into his room. Dad just stood over him, before going downstairs. Josh didn’t get up, he said he was still tired and fell asleep again. Later, when Josh got up, all that was left of Dad were really deep footprints in the snow . . .’

‘And your mother? How has she been since?’

Freya looked down at her fingernails. The pink polish Ivy had slapped on her at Rose’s party was beginning to chip and peel. She wasn’t meant to have kept it on for school, anyway, but Mum hadn’t noticed. In the past, her mother had always been eagle-eyed over stuff like that.

‘She’s not good. Not happy,’ said Freya. ‘She told us it was better that Dad left this way - even though his work at the Gingerbread House was only half-finished - because he was always going to leave at some point, anyway.’

‘Adult relationships can be very -’

‘Please don’t say “complicated”,’ Freya interrupted. ‘People always say that. Mum kept saying it when Josh talked to her about it. He’d already seen them, you see, Mum and Dad, earlier that night . . . hugging and kissing in front of the fire in Grandpa’s den.’

Calista erupted into a coughing fit this time. ‘He . . . saw them?’

‘Well, it’s what mums and dads do. And people in love. They snog.’

Calista frowned pensively. ‘I suppose they do. I’ve never liked the word, though.’

‘Mum and Dad are in love,’ said Freya abruptly. ‘It’s so obvious. But I don’t know why Dad’s gone. I wish he hadn’t.’

‘Freya, from what Silas told me, you never seemed to be particularly ple
ased to have him around . . .’

Freya scowled, and flipped open her backpack. She rooted around, beyond her pencil case, and then pulled out a small teddy bear with matted fur. ‘Dad won me this at a fair when I was little. Mum told me about it. She could have lied, but she didn’t. It’s always been my favourite. And now Dad’s gone again I keep carrying it around with me, at the bottom of my bag . . .’ Freya swallowed hard, shoving the tears back down her throat.

‘Oh, cariad . . .’ Calista’s own eyes seemed misty and pained as she leaned towards her. Freya immediately moved back in the chair, but she wasn’t quick enough. Calista patted her hand. ‘You poor -’ She stopped, springing back slightly, her eyes widening.

Freya had felt the same shock go through her now that Joshua had described back at the school
Christmas fayre. Like a small electrical charge. The sort you sometimes got off car doors.

Calista gaped at her across the small, pine, coffee table. Freya shifted uncomfortably in the chair. She had been trying to avoid this, but she’d taken the risk because no one else could potentially help her the way this woman could.

‘You’re . . .’ Calista murmured, struggling for the words.

‘Yes,’ said Freya, at last. ‘I’m like them. Like Josh . . . And Dad.’

‘But . . .’ Calista opened and closed her mouth.

‘I look like my mum.’ Freya rolled her eyes, out of habit. ‘It’s less of a giveaway. It
helps.’

‘But . . .’

‘I look normal, I act normal. It’s Josh who got all the weirdness. And I keep telling him, it probably won’t last. He won’t always look or act that way. Dad isn’t like that.’

‘He might have been once . . . I never knew him when he was young . . . Your age, I mean.’ Calista hesitated. ‘How - How much do you know, child?’

Freya shrugged. ‘How much am I supposed to know? I’ve grown up understanding things no one ever taught me. And Josh tells me stuff, even when he says to Mum he hasn’t.’

‘But . . . you don’t tell him everything back - do you?’

‘I couldn’t protect him properly if I did. That’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. Protect him.’

Calista’s face was slowly splitting into a smile. ‘And you can’t do that if you’re not as tough as you pretend to be? The bossy big sister, even though you can only be older than him by a few minutes. It explains so much, though. Why I could never sense anything about you, as if you were a closed-off, shallow soul. Precocious and spoilt. It made me sad to think of you that way, but now . . .’ The smile widened. ‘You’re good at hiding things. I suppose because you have so much to hide.’

Freya carefully put the teddy bear back in her bag. ‘I’m nothing special.’

‘Freya, child - you don’t know
what
you are! You’re possibly the first. Possibly unique . . . But I suppose one day it was bound to happen . . . Since the outset, it was always mutating. Evolving. In subtle ways, not necessarily as blatant as this, but . . . why shouldn’t it be a girl, after all? Maybe there are others like you out there in the world, who don’t even realise how extraordinary they are . . .’

‘Maybe,’ said Freya, growing impatient. ‘That won’t get me my dad back, though. It wasn’t meant to be like this. As soon as he turned up on Christmas Day, I knew he was going to leave again, and I knew why he’d come here. For Josh.’ She stared at Calista, trying to fathom what she was thinking.

‘Yes,’ said Calista, eventually. ‘Which is why I was surprised when he left without him.’

‘You knew what Dad was planning, but you didn’t warn my mother?’

Calista started making that odd rocking motion again. ‘No. No, I didn’t. But I’ve been keeping an eye on everything, on your father, trying to -’

‘Interfere,’ said Freya. ‘You were pushing them together. Did you think that if he and Mum could fall in love properly, he might stay?’

‘Possibly. I
hoped
. He freed me a little, from my captivity. I thought if he left again, I might lapse back . . .’

‘You won’t, if you choose not to,’ said Freya simply. ‘So you don’t know where he is then? Where he’s gone?’

‘As I said’ - Calista looked genuinely forlorn - ‘I only wish I did.’

‘But he has a phone, doesn’t he? A mobile. I thought of trying to get hold of Mum’s, when she wasn’t looking -’

‘I’ve sent a dozen messages or more,’ Calista admitted. ‘He won’t reply. I don’t even know if they’re getting through to him any more. Silas has never been one for technology. He grew up in a simpler age in some ways.’

‘Does he have a favourite place? Somewhere he likes to visit?’

‘It’s here, child.’ Calista leaned forwards again, and before Freya could react, laid her hands over hers. There were tears sparkling like tiny diamonds in the corner of the woman’s eyes. ‘It’s Harreloe. Where his life began. And if he’s gone, then there’s nowhere else I know of that he could ever consider his true home . . . He’s always been a wanderer, child. Although I’d sensed he was growing weary of it. But you’ - Calista pressed down on her hands - ‘you’re a guardian. The sentinel of the family. And you need to be strong for your mother, and for Joshua.’

Freya nodded. ‘I know. But I can’t protect them from the way they’re feeling right now.’

‘Of course not,’ said Calista. ‘You wish you could, though. But it seems to me, Freya, that your father believes in a curse that may or may not be true - I’ve always had my doubts about it - and whether your mother believes in it or not, or assumes she’s simply setting him free . . . I don’t know. Fear itself can be the greatest curse, and if your father thinks his presence here means he’s putting you all at risk . . .’

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Freya.

‘You’re a very pragmatic, tenacious child.’

‘I know what those words mean
. I read a lot.’

Calista
smiled, but sadly this time. ‘You know, Freya, some people think it’s true love’s kiss that can break an evil spell. But that would be too easy, in my opinion. I’ve always thought it’s true love’s sacrifice. Especially when it’s there on both sides. Kingdoms have been won and lost, and destinies altered, on far less.’

‘So you’re saying that Mum and Dad made a sacrifice? For each other somehow?’

‘It’s probable, by the sound of it. It would explain why Silas left without Joshua. Feeling the way he might about your mother, he could never take something so precious away from her.’

‘If a curse has been broken -’

‘If a curse existed in the first place.’

‘Well, not a curse, but
something
.’

‘A pattern,’ said Calista. ‘A destiny.’

‘Something might have changed.’

‘It seems to me that it began to alter years ago, with you, Freya. Perhaps if your
father knew that . . .’

‘Would it be enough? He might not even believe it. It’s not the way things are. I never let on, and he could never tell.’

‘I suppose he only saw what he expected to see . . .’ Calista sighed ruefully.

‘Anyway
,
’ insisted Freya, ‘something might have changed now, too?’

‘Perhaps . . . Yes.
But I don’t know what.’

‘It would have to be something b
ig,’ murmured Freya. ‘Something important.’

‘Child, you’re in a better position than I a
m to find that out.’

Freya stared beyond Calista’s shoulder, narrowing her eyes in thought. ‘There’s someone who can get closer to Mum than I can. Someone she’ll listen to more than me.’

‘Your brother.’

‘He’s missing Dad, too. More than I am. Every boy needs someone to loo
k up to like that. He’s not eating or sleeping much. Neither is Mum.’

‘They’re depressed, Freya,’ said Calista, with another sigh. ‘They’re pining for Silas. Perhaps, if you’d eaten a cookie just now, I’d have believed you weren’t quite as sad as they are. Most children love cookies, but they usually love their fathers more.’