The Hidden Years (24 page)

Was he beginning to see, to realise the vast difference
that lay between his memories and reality? Lizzie wondered. Suddenly
she had almost a motherly urge to protect him, to allow him just a
little longer to cling on to his dreams. She knew well enough what it
was like to lose those dreams. The only thing she had left to cling to
now was Kit's child… Kit's son.

They were within sight of the front door now, and Lizzie's
heart sank as she saw how it yawned open. No one lived here, no matter
what Edward had been told. No one had lived here for a long time. As
she stopped the wheelchair, she waited for Edward to suggest that they
walk back to the village, that they find somewhere to spend the night,
but he said nothing and as she went to look at him, she saw that his
face was crumpled like a child's, shadowed with shock and grief.

'I don't understand… Where are the Johnsons?
Why isn't there anyone here? The house seems almost
deserted…'

In his voice she could almost hear his plea that she
contradict him, but Lizzie couldn't. Neither, she found, could she tell
him, as she knew she should, that they would have to go back, that it
was pointless going inside to see what further desolation awaited them.
Instead she heard herself saying brightly, 'Well, we'd better go
in…'

The front door was rotten in places, and festooned with
cobwebs. Beyond it lay a dark, stone-floored hallway—so dark,
so polluted with the rank scent of damp and disuse that she recoiled
from it automatically. Her pregnancy had sharpened her sense of smell,
and the odour now assaulting her nostrils made her body quiver with
rejection. It was the smell of decay and death, the smell of darkness,
of hidden underground places shut off from light and warmth. But Edward
was waiting for her to push him inside, and as she did so she realised
that the lack of light was due to the blackout, covers crudely fastened
to the windows.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness she saw the
outline of a huge stone fireplace. On the opposite wall were the
stairs, a gallery above them, behind which was obviously a large
window. The walls of the hallway had obviously once been panelled, but
now the panelling was rotting away, had been torn away in places, she
recognised.

Several doors led off the hallway, and as she stood in
silence, surveying her surroundings, a large rat ran across the floor,
squeaking angrily as it saw them, invaders in what was plainly its
territory. 'Well, that's one thing we'll need to do,' she said briskly,
sounding more like her aunt than she knew.

'What's that?' Edward asked painfully. He looked as though
he could not believe his eyes, and, while originally she had felt angry
with him for his refusal to see the house as it really was, now she
felt the opposite. She wanted to protect him, to tell him that things
weren't as bad as they seemed.

'Get ourselves a good farm cat to sort out those
rats…'

'I suppose Vic the shepherd will know where best to get
one… That's if we still have a shepherd, or any sheep.
What's happened to this place? I don't understand.'

His shoulders sagged. He looked old…careworn,
and yet almost childish at the same time, Lizzie recognised.

Instinctively she went to comfort him, kneeling down
beside his chair and taking one of his hands in hers. 'It won't be so
bad, you'll see… It just needs a bit of a clean-up. It seems
worse because there's no one here. When the Johnsons get back and we
find out what's going on—'

Edward laughed harshly. 'Use your head, Lizzie. The
Johnsons aren't coming back. Look at the state of this place. No one
could live here. No one
has
lived here. I just
don't understand.'

'Maybe some of the other rooms are better,' Lizzie
suggested brightly. 'Let's go and have a look, shall we?'

Half an hour later she and Edward stared at one another in
silence. The house plainly had not been lived in for years. Everywhere
there were signs of decay, of damp and mould… in every room.
None of the rooms was really habitable, and even if they had been clean
and sound there was still the small matter of the lack of furniture.
Lizzie fought down a wild desire to laugh, remembering the antiques,
the exquisite china, the silks and damasks she had visualised. These
rooms, with their clothing of cobwebs and moulds, their once expensive
wallpapers peeling from the walls, their broken windows covered in
cheap blackout fabric, their panelling torn from walls, their ceilings
crumbling away…these rooms were nothing like that. There was
no furniture other than a collection of trestle tables and battered
chairs, which had plainly been intended for the use of the men who
might have been stationed here when the house was first requisitioned.

Only the kitchen bore some resemblance to the house she
had visualised. It had, as she had suspected, a huge old-fashioned
range, a worn deal table, two rockers either side of the range, and a
large dresser with its complement of dirty pottery and copper. In one
corner stood a deep sink with one tap. She turned it on experimentally,
grimacing at the dirt, and watching cautiously as water started to
spurt into the sink, testing it carefully with her finger and then
sucking it. The water tasted clear and sharp and was icy cold,
suggesting that it came from an underground spring.

As she stared around the room, although she didn't know
it, Lizzie was judging it by the standards given to her by her aunt.
She had already seen that the range, if it worked, must heat the
domestic water, that its ovens could be used for cooking and baking and
that its warmth, with its door opened, might just, just be enough to
warm this large, cavernous room.

Somewhere outside in the jumble of outbuildings
surrounding the yard must be a fuel store… If there was any
fuel. She heard a sound and turned her head. Edward was slumped in his
chair, his head in his hands. The sound she could hear, the noise
tearing into the silence of the house, was the sound of his grief, she
recognised dispassionately. Edward, as she had already done, was crying
for his lost love, for the love which had sustained him for so long and
which he was now seeing cruelly revealed in all its stark reality.

It was impossible for them to stay here, and yet it was
impossible for them to go, for her to push the chair back to the
station, for them to wait for another train to take
them—where? To Bath? To do what?

Although Edward now owned Cottingdean, there was very
little money. He had already explained that to her. The flock, which
had once produced Cottingdean's wealth, had suffered through sickness
during the last years of his grandparents' lives, and there had not
been the money to replace the sheep.

And there had been the war; bad investments by his
grandfather had further impoverished the estate. The only money Edward
had came from his pension and a small trust fund. 'My God, what have I
done to you?' she heard him saying harshly behind her. 'Kit must have
known about this. Damn him!' A protest came to her lips, but she
swallowed it. Now was not the time to champion her love. Edward was
like a man who suddenly discovered that his lover had been false to
him. He was beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond accepting that the
extent of the decay meant that the house had fallen into disrepair long
before Kit could have inherited it…

'We can't stay here…'

'I think we'll have to,' Lizzie told him gently. 'For
tonight at least. If I can find some fuel I could light the range.
There might be mattresses upstairs. If they were going to use the house
to quarter men here, it is possible. We… I could bring two
down. If we aired them in front of the range…'

'Sleep here?' Edward stared at her as though she had taken
leave of her senses. 'We can't… It's impossible.'

Suddenly she could feel herself losing her temper, losing
her self-control. 'We don't have any option,' she told him fiercely.
'Edward, don't you understand? I can't push you back to the village.
Who knows when we would get a train, and then where would we go? To
Bath? To do what? You said yourself there was no money… You
said we'd have to learn to be as self-sufficient as we could; grow our
own food, maintain a smallholding on the land…' When he'd
said those things she'd envisaged a life filled with the kind of food
served by her aunt. Milk from a Jersey cow…fresh green
vegetables…soft fruits in season…eggs from their
own hens. Remembering the overgrown wilderness lying either side of the
drive, she knew bitterly that it would be a long, long time before such
a garden could be tamed to yield any kind of food crop.

'But I didn't know it was going to be like this,' Edward
whispered. He looked tired and broken, more of a child than a man. A
very, very old child, who suddenly looked frighteningly frail.

To keep her mind off her own desolation, Lizzie forced
herself to sound cheerful. 'Look, you wait here… I'll go
outside and see if there's any fuel. If we can get the range
lit…'

'We!' Edward laughed bitterly. 'We!' But Lizzie wasn't
listening. She was unbolting the back door and stepping outside into
the yard.

The outbuildings were in much the same state of decay as
the rest of the house. She had little hope of finding any fuel. She
suspected now that the panelling had been used at some stage to feed a
fire, which must suggest that there was no supply of wood. Even so, she
searched methodically through several small, dark sheds, before coming
to the stable proper, empty now of its occupants, although it still
retained a rich earthy smell of hay, manure and leather. A large
tarpaulin covered something in one corner, and it was curiosity more
than anything else that made her lift it. To discover beneath it an
enormous pile of neatly cut and split logs was like discovering gold.
At first she could hardly believe she wasn't just seeing things. She
stood and blinked and then blinked again, and when the logs refused to
go away she looked round quickly for something to put them in, in the
end using a large galvanised bucket.

When she staggered into the kitchen with them Edward
barely looked around. His skin looked grey and pinched, and he was
rubbing his hands together in a way he had whenever something troubled
him deeply. She had seen other patients at the hospital doing the same
thing, and knew that it was not a good sign. She spoke to Edward,
trying to sound positive and cheerful, but when he looked at her it was
as though he no longer saw her.

When she asked him for his matches he stared blankly at
her, and in the end she had to remove them gently from his pocket. She
had no paper with which to light the fire and had seen no axe with
which she could split up some of the logs for sticks, but there was the
blackout fabric yawning from the kitchen window. She could use that,
she decided ruthlessly.

As she opened the door to the range and then discovered
that whoever had last lit a fire in it had not bothered to remove the
ash, she reflected that at least that was one fear removed. She had
dreaded discovering that the chimney was blocked off and that no fire
could be lit.

She had to stand in the sink to reach up to rip down the
blackout fabric. She saw Edward frowning bewilderedly at her as she did
so. She gave him a reassuring smile, but said nothing. The best thing
for him now was time… time and peace and quiet for him to
come to terms with the reality of Cottingdean.

Strangely, now that she was actually doing something she
felt much better, far less helpless and afraid. It was as though the
mere activity, the simple task of lighting the range had somehow
restored to her the right to control her own life. As she waited for
the blessedly dry logs to catch she realised wonderingly that for the
first time in her life she actually was her own mistress, that there
was no aunt, no matron, no one other than Edward to direct her life.
And poor Edward. How could he do that when it was so desperately
obvious that he was going to be the one to lean on her?

How she knew this she had no real knowledge. It was
something that might have been growing on her slowly, something that
she might have subconsciously perceived without being aware of doing
so. All she knew was that here, now, in this place, she had suddenly
realised that she was going to have not one life dependent upon her,
but two. And she realised something else as well—a simple
truth that her parents and then her aunt had inculcated into her:
nothing in life came free. Everything had a price to be paid for it.
Fate had given her Kit and then had demanded Kit's life in payment. It
had given her Kit's child… a bonus. It had given her Edward
and marriage… respectability and a home. It had given her
child a future, even if now she was forced to accept that the only
home, the only future her child would have would be one that she could
make for it, and that the price she must pay for the privilege of doing
so would be her duty towards Edward. Her duty to cherish and protect
him, her duty to turn Cottingdean back into his dream of how it had
once been.

Quite how she knew all this she had no idea. It was a
vague, loose chain of thoughts no more than half formed, no more than
vague sensory awareness slipping through her mind like fine veils of
cloud, while her hands were busy feeding the fire, checking the damp;
while she was going outside watching the smoke rise; while she was
talking to Edward, telling him that they would soon have the kitchen
warm and that she must go upstairs to see if she could find a couple of
mattresses, and to check to see if the range did, as she hoped, heat
the hot water supply. If not, she had already seen the massive kettles
on the dresser and the tin bath hanging up behind the scullery door.

Outwardly totally absorbed by the practicalities of their
situation, inwardly she was aware of feelings so strong that she
wondered if they were engendered by her pregnancy rather than by her
own emotions. Her strongest awareness was one of knowing that she must
seize hold of her own life, that she must take charge of it and make it
into something strong enough to withstand whatever blows fate raised
against it, and at the bottom of this awareness lay a peculiar
conviction that somehow her ability to do so was interwoven with this
house and its desolate decay; that in taking hold of the house and
breathing life into it she would also be taking hold of her own life
and banishing from it the desolation of losing Kit.