Stolen (21 page)

‘But that rather depends on us finding a suitable property to rent, and a housekeeper,’ he said. ‘Fern doesn’t go for cooking, cleaning and laundry, but it’s hard for us to find a suitable housekeeper as we need one who is loyal, totally discreet, and not only respects our beliefs but shares them.’

Lotte told him that housekeeper was her.

They tried to put her off, saying she might not like being alone all day, or having no friends nearby. But Lotte insisted that wouldn’t worry her, that she still needed more quiet time and solitude before she went back to her old life. She was jubilant when they said they’d be delighted to have her with them. They even talked about taking her back to the States with them at the end of the year, or if she wanted to go back to hairdressing they would help her open her own salon in a place of her choosing.

Lotte was rather surprised that they found a house to rent so quickly. They went out on the Thursday morning and were back that evening with it all sewn up, and Howard had bought a new black Mercedes too.

‘It’s near that quaint place called Chichester,’ Fern said. ‘We’re close enough to the sea to do some sailing, and the house is real cute.’

They left the Dorchester on Saturday morning, stopping for lunch on the way, and then at a supermarket just outside Chichester to stock up on food. They arrived at the village of Itchenor, which was around seven or eight miles beyond Chichester, just before four.

Lotte was feeling really good that day, excited, happy and optimistic about the future. She remembered feeling that she’d finally come out of the end of a dark tunnel into sunshine. It was a lovely day too, and there had been signs of spring all the way there – lambs in the fields, daffodils in gardens and blossom on trees. Fern had been saying on the way down that Lotte ought to learn to drive, for she’d be a bit cut off as there wasn’t much of a bus service.

‘I’ll get a bike,’ Lotte said and thought how good it would be to ride around country lanes or down to the beach on hot days. She didn’t know that part of Sussex at all, but she’d heard it was good for cycling as it was quite flat.

Yet as Howard turned into a narrow drive between high hedges and overhanging trees, and Lotte saw the house beyond for the first time, the excitement vanished and she felt menaced.

Fern had described it as cute. Weird was the word which popped into Lotte’s head, quickly followed by spooky.

The village was spread along a long, wide lane with grass verges and many beautiful old trees. Almost all the houses looked as if they belonged to wealthy people, and no two were the same. There were large, picture postcard thatched cottages, big mock Tudor places, and substantial family homes built during the Twenties and Thirties for the seriously rich. Most had large gardens, and even the smaller, older stone cottages which had probably once been home to farm labourers had been carefully and lovingly restored.

But ‘Drummond’, as the house Fern and Howard had rented was called, was built of ugly grey stone with slit-like windows, crenellations along the roof and a very heavy-looking front door as if it was trying to look like a castle.

Lotte made no comment, for if Fern thought it looked cute, she didn’t want to put her off it.

It was clear that the owners of the houses on either side had sold a small portion of their land at the back for ‘Drummond’ to be built, with just a narrow access to the road between the two adjoining gardens. Lotte thought it was probably during the Thirties when times were hard and local councils didn’t always check that a proposed building was going to suit the area it was planned for. There was no doubt in her mind that the owners of the neighbouring houses had grown thick hedges so they didn’t have to look on to the ugliness of their neighbour.

Even the front garden was stark: no daffodils or trees in blossom, just the narrow, tunnel-like passage through the hedges to a wider paved area in front of the house. There were narrow flower beds on either side of the path to the front door but aside from a few clumps of weeds, they were just bare soil.

‘Isn’t it cute!’ Fern exclaimed yet again as they went in with the suitcases and bags of groceries. ‘So very English!’

Lotte wanted to say it wasn’t English at all, that it had a nod towards Scottish Baronial perhaps, but she thought the architect needed locking up. She said nothing of course, even though it was gloomy inside as a result of the narrow windows. The kitchen was brighter because it had a window set in the ceiling, but the decor all over the house was in keeping with its style: dark reds, browns, blues and russets.

‘Our office,’ Fern said, indicating the room next to the front door. ‘And the dining room,’ she went on, opening the door beyond the office to a room painted dark blue, with several model sailing ships in cases on the walls and various other nautical items including a large compass. Even the table and chairs looked as if they’d come from a ward room, of dark reddish wood with seats of brown leather. The kitchen too had many nautical items, a brass ship’s clock, sets of complicated knots in glass cases and the like. There was even a ‘cookie’ jar, as Fern called it, shaped like a lighthouse.

Upstairs the master bedroom took up the whole front of the house, and it was only here that the slit windows looked quite stylish, for there were four, right down to the floor with its dark red carpet. Lotte actually liked the dark Victorianstyle wallpaper and matching curtains, and she supposed it was this room with its vast bed and whole wall of wardrobes that had sold the house to Fern.

She was glad her room was at the back and had slightly wider windows. The russet decor wasn’t as oppressive as some of the other rooms, and over the hedged-in garden she could see fields and dozens of trees in blossom.

Even that very first night Lotte sensed something odd. As she and Fern put food away in the kitchen, it seemed strange that Fern already had a firm plan about where everything should go. People weren’t usually like that in a strange house. When a light bulb fused in the hall, Howard went straight to a cupboard by the front door and got a new one out. It wouldn’t have occurred to Lotte to look there. While she was glad they seemed so at home, it felt kind of supernatural that they were.

Lotte didn’t realize that there was a room and another bathroom in the basement until a couple of days later. When she drew Fern’s attention to the door leading to them, thinking she didn’t know about it either, Fern seemed to find that very funny.

However, despite thinking the house was weird, and wishing she hadn’t lost all her friends’ addresses and telephone numbers, because she really would have liked to contact some of them, Lotte was happy. Fern and Howard were undemanding, easygoing people who ate whatever she cooked, didn’t hold her to a rigid timetable and appreciated her looking after them.

They went out most days, sometimes just for a couple of hours, sometimes to sail down on the harbour, for they’d bought a little cabin cruiser and had it moored there. They got any shopping needed and brought it home with them.

Lotte would clean the house and do the laundry in the mornings, and in the afternoons she usually went for a walk. It was around a mile down to West Itchenor and the sea, but she loved it so much she went there most days. Chichester harbour was a vast natural one, with Hayling Island on one side, West Wittering with its lovely sandy beaches on the other, and little villages like Bosham, Birdham and West Itchenor scattered between.

There wasn’t much at West Itchenor, just a pub, a boatyard and some pretty old cottages, but there was a little ferry boat from there across to Bosham, and Lotte loved seeing the sea and the sea birds and feeling the wind in her hair. Down there the events in Ushuaia seemed to fade away.

But hardly a day passed without Lotte thinking of Simon and Adam. She didn’t have the excuse that she didn’t know their address or phone number for not contacting them, for these were stamped firmly on her mind. It was fear of them turning up here to see her which prevented her. She knew only too well that Fern and Howard wouldn’t welcome an openly gay couple. If she asked her friends not to call they would know that was the reason, and she could almost hear Simon asking how she could bear to work for anyone with such prejudices. But the longer she left it, the more difficult it became, for she knew they would be hurt and worried by her silence.

As the weather improved through April and May Lotte turned her attention to the two bare flower beds in the front garden. Her parents had been very fond of gardening, and although she’d never been allowed to do anything more than weeding and watering, she knew one flower from another and the conditions they liked.

There were several keen gardeners in the village who offered plants for sale that were surplus to their needs. They had them on a table by their gate with an honesty box for the money. Fern gave Lotte twenty pounds pocket money every week, and she had nothing to spend it on, as she hardly ever went into town, so she bought plants with it.

The lemon geranium was among the first batch of plants she bought, but she planted it up in a flowerpot and put it by the front door because she knew it wouldn’t be hardy when winter came and it was so nice when its scent wafted out as you brushed by it.

She made the two flower beds in the front garden look very pretty with penstemons, lavender and hardy geraniums, and once the summer really got underway they would billow out on to the path and soften the ugliness of the house.

One evening she asked Fern and Howard over dinner if they thought their landlord would mind her making a flower bed in the back garden as if would mean digging up a bit of the lawn.

‘There’s no point,’ Howard said quite abruptly. ‘We won’t be here long enough.’

Fern looked flustered at his remark and passed it off by saying that they had always said they might be going back to the States.

‘Yes, of course you did,’ Lotte said, looking from one to the other in puzzlement because she knew there was something going on that they weren’t telling her. ‘Oh, don’t feel bad about me,’ she added, thinking they were afraid of leaving her in the lurch. ‘I can go back to Brighton. I’m OK now.’

She felt she was fine too. She’d stopped getting heart palpitations every time a lone man walked towards her and sometimes she even fancied a night down at the pub, or would’ve done if she’d had anyone to go with. She missed Dale and Scott so much that she would have given anything to be able to ring them up and arrange to meet them again. And if she was really honest with herself, she was a little sick of all the praying she was expected to do.

Fern and Howard said prayers before they left the house in the morning, and again at night. On Sundays Howard liked to read long passages from the Bible. It had been comforting at first, she’d even found that praying on her own worked like meditation and calmed her down. But she didn’t find that necessary now and it was a bit irritating that she was expected to bend to their beliefs.

‘We do feel bad about leaving you because we had hoped you would be with us when we had our baby,’ Fern suddenly blurted out.

‘You’re having a baby?’ Lotte exclaimed. She had imagined that at past forty Fern was too old for that. ‘How wonderful!’

‘Oh no, I’m not having one. I can’t, I’ve never been able to bear a child,’ Fern quickly replied. ‘What we mean is that we’ve been trying to find someone here willing to give us a baby.’

‘You mean you’re going to adopt?’ Lotte asked.

‘No, it will be our baby, well, Howard’s at least.’

Lotte frowned. ‘You mean you’re going to find a surrogate mother?’

‘Yes, that’s about the size of it.’

Over a couple of brandies Fern told Lotte the sad story of how she lost several babies when she first got married, and then eventually had to have her womb removed. She went on to say how much she and Howard had to offer a child, a lovely home in the States, money in the bank and so much love. She told her they wished they’d tried to adopt years ago, but now the societies said they were too old.

They had been to several different organizations in England who offered to arrange contact with young women willing to have a child by donor sperm, but when they looked into it they felt the women were either low life who used drugs, or slightly unbalanced people who might act irrationally when the baby was born.

‘Now a woman in Romania has been put forward as being perfect for us. So that was where we were intending to go next, not straight back to America. But I’ve still got a heavy heart about it. This woman doesn’t speak English, so we won’t be able to be sure about anything.’

Fern looked so sad and troubled that Lotte hugged her. ‘I never knew you wanted a baby so badly,’ she said with real sympathy. ‘I wish I could do something to help you.’

‘You help us by just being around,’ Fern said, patting Lotte’s cheek affectionately.

Fern and Howard went to R0mania, but returned after only two days. ‘She was almost as old as me,’ Fern said, looking really down and disappointed. ‘We think she had been a prostitute; she looked raddled and grubby.’

‘Just doing it for the money then?’ Lotte said.

‘Well, that’s all any of them would do it for,’ Howard said.

‘I wouldn’t, I’d do it for love,’ Lotte said.

The words just slipped out without thought. What Lotte had meant was that having a baby for someone else should only be an act of love. Like a woman having a baby for her infertile sister. But Fern’s face lit up. ‘You’d do it for us?’ she said, her voice husky with emotion.

That was the pivotal moment when Lotte should have firmly explained she was speaking in general, idealistic terms, not actually offering to do it for them.

But Fern and Howard never gave her a chance to say that wasn’t what she meant. They were so busy hugging each other, offering praise to the Lord for sending her to them, that Lotte found herself unable to say they had misunderstood.

Chapter Ten

‘You agreed to have a baby for them?’ Dale interrupted incredulously.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Lotte retorted. ‘I only agreed that it should be done for love. But Fern was like a bulldozer, she just brushed everything I said aside. I did get my courage up a day later to say she’d misunderstood me and that I couldn’t possibly do it. But she laughed at me, said I just had a touch of the collywobbles and I’d be OK soon.