The Liverpool Trilogy (9 page)

‘It’s a long way to fall from a horse as high as yours,’ he warned. She was carrying on like some sort of princess – who the hell did she think she was talking to? But he mustn’t get angry. He’d been advised repeatedly against angry.

‘Exactly. A great deal further than your recent slide off the back of a Blackpool donkey. I shall sell the plant while the company appears to be a going concern with its leader in hospital due to a temporary health problem that requires surgery. As far as purchasers are concerned, you are going for even newer, better stuff, and your company is thriving.’

He blinked rapidly. This was one clever clogs. Had he harnessed her energies properly, she might have proved a willing workhorse. But she was also an actress, very good at playing a part and hiding her true feelings. She had bided her time, and she had bested him. That was the bit that hurt most – he’d been outclassed by a female.

‘Very wise,’ he said drily.

‘Don’t patronize me, Alan. I did my best under circumstances that were never easy for me. The children were my department. I was the dragon who made them eat their greens, sit in a dentist’s chair, do their homework. You did the easy bit – the spoiling. Fortunately, it hasn’t affected them in the least way. They, too, have survived you.’

‘Where are they?’

‘The boys are with me, while Lizzie has a part in some play in Manchester. She’ll go far.’

‘They all will.’

‘Yes.’ There was no more to be said. She gathered up her power of attorney papers and placed them in a document case. Then she remembered – there was one more item to be mentioned. ‘In Liverpool, you will perhaps live in my house. It’s in Crosby, actually, a few miles north of the city. You will live not as my husband, but as a non-paying guest. I am turning Stoneyhurst into a bed and breakfast business.’

His eyes narrowed as he studied the compliant, domesticated female who had lived with him for how many years? Was it twenty-three? He nursed a slight suspicion that she had been the source of his children’s brains, since he had never been any great shakes when it came to the realms of academia. Mike was to become a teacher of history, Paul a pharmacist, while Liz had her heart set on acting. ‘You’ve got me exactly where you want me, eh?’ he said. ‘Flat on my bloody back and powerless.’

Her answer was fired back at lightning speed. ‘I don’t want you at all, if you’re looking for an honest answer. And I am divorcing you. However, since you are the father of my children, and as your philandering, drinking and gambling days are possibly coming to an end, I am offering to house you. This isn’t out of the goodness of my heart, as you destroyed years ago any goodness I might have owned. I am doing it because it will take you out of Bolton and away from the life you have wasted so far.’

‘Quite the bitch, aren’t you?’ He thought about his socks in the bin, the pile of unpaid bills, some of which were months overdue. There was a streak of badness in her. She was far from the perfect mother she had always pretended to be.

She stood up. ‘Yes, indeed. And I advise you here and now to remember that. I find myself capable of going to just about any lengths to curb your activities and to save the reputations of my children. After all, who wants a drunken gambler for a father? Or a man who sleeps around so freely that he might become diseased?’ She nodded at him. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of months. If you’re still alive, that is. Good luck – I mean that, Alan. I hope you beat the booze and do well with the surgery.’

He watched her as she walked away. For a woman with so much on her plate, she seemed quite light on her feet, almost jaunty. He had no money, no future, not unless he went cap in hand to her for every little thing. Revenge? Oh, yes. She was an expert at it. It didn’t matter now whether he lived or died, because his life was over. She owned him.

Outside in the corridor, Lucy stood still, a hand to her chest. She felt as if she might be the one heading for a heart attack after such a performance. How cool she had been, how decided, how brave. Yet how much it had taken out of her. It was over. She had faced the demon and could begin now to calm down.

‘Louisa?’

She felt a hand on her shoulder, turned and saw a face that rang a very distant bell in the annals of memory. For a few seconds, she simply stood and stared until she realized that she must appear rude. He looked a bit like John Lennon, but John was very dead. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been to visit my husband in there.’ She waved her hand in the direction of the room she had just left. A name was seeping into her brain. ‘Goodness,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s . . . is it? Is it little David Vincent?’

He nodded and grinned almost as broadly as he had at ten years of age. Then he started to laugh at the surprise she was displaying. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I a disappointment? Come on, don’t keep me on tenterhooks.’

There was nothing wrong with him, but . . . ‘But you were shorter than any of us – have you been on growth hormones? Gosh, it must be thirty-odd years – what on earth are you doing here?’ He had never won a race, because his legs hadn’t been long enough. Some of the gang had laughed at him, but Lucy, already showing symptoms of the domestic diplomat she would become, had tried to protect him. ‘Why are you here?’ she repeated. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, I’m begging,’ he said. ‘I seem to spend half my life begging. Come on – there’s a coffee shop nearby. We can’t drink the hospital stuff. In my opinion, they use their beverages to finish off any surplus patients. It’ll be a government plan to free up beds.’

He led her out of the building and across the road. ‘Your face has changed hardly at all,’ she told him. ‘But I never expected little David to turn into so fine a figure of a man.’

He took her into the shop and guided her to a table near the window.

‘Coffee, doc?’ the girl behind the counter asked.

‘Two, please. I’ll spoil myself, cappuccino with sprinkles. Louisa?’

‘Lucy. Skinny latte for me.’

Seated at a table with her coffee in front of her, she stared at him. Little David Vincent was a very tall doctor. ‘Where did you move to?’ she asked. ‘One day, when we were about ten or eleven years old, you suddenly weren’t there any more. I ran down to see you, and you were gone.’ She remembered her sadness. ‘I missed you. Everyone did, especially Diane.’

He nodded. ‘Well, Dad moved on. He swapped Mum for a skeletal freak with the brains of a brick wall and all the charm of the sluice room on Women’s Medical. She had money and a stud farm. So Mum and I went to Westhoughton and lived with my grandparents. It was all rather sudden.’

Lucy shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, David – I’d no idea.’

He smiled, and Lucy noticed that he still had that childlike twinkle in his eye. ‘Mum had no idea, either. Till she came home early from work with a headache one day and found them in an interesting position on the bathroom floor.’

‘I’m sorry, David. I remember your mother. She was a nurse. It was your mother who convinced me to go into nursing.’

‘She was a nurse, yes. And a damned fine mother. So. You married, then?’

‘Yes. You?’

The handsome face clouded over. ‘She died. So did our son. Anne was in a car accident, then Tim – well – it was leukaemia. I offloaded my general practice when Anne died, buggered off to India for a couple of years to find myself, got lost, came home and specialized as a paediatrician. Then I specialized even further and became a children’s cancer doctor. Leukaemia, mostly.’

He’d been a kind, quiet child who’d often thought up interesting games. There’d been a tree house in his garden, and all the gang had met there. ‘It’s nice to meet someone who remembers Diane,’ Lucy said. They’d done plays and concerts – all written and directed by Diane, of course. ‘She was always very fond of you.’

‘As I was of her. Of both of you, in fact. I always thought I’d marry one of you when I grew up. A child seems to believe that everything will remain the same, that no one will ever move on.’ He sighed. ‘Yes, I read about her death in the paper, thought about writing to you, but what could I say? I was stuck for words. And now I’m stuck again, reduced to begging on behalf of my patients. What about you, Lucy?’

She gave him the full, unabridged version. It was as if thirty-five years had simply melted away, because she knew and trusted him immediately. She omitted no paragraph, no syllable, as it was such a relief to talk openly to someone who wasn’t Glenys. ‘So he’s in there now.’ She pointed to the large building across the road. ‘And I’m not the type to sit by and watch someone die. I was tempted, mind. But at least the children were grown and at university when I did a bunk. So, nothing’s changed apart from the fact that I own an extra house. If he lives, I’ll have to take care of him.’

‘Why?’

One little word, yet it certainly made her think.

‘Why, Louisa? After all he’s done?’

‘He’s still a human being, just about.’

He tutted. ‘The same Louisa, then. You were always like that, you know.’

‘Not quite the same, David. I am divorcing him. I’m by no means as sweet as I used to be. He’s lying there in a terrible state, he could have another attack at any time, but I wasn’t nice to him. But I can’t leave him to live like a vagrant on the streets.’

‘Then find him a flat and be done with him.’

She fiddled with a sugar bowl, turning it this way and that, but it looked the same from all angles, as did the problem attached to her husband. ‘I want him pinned down,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the father of Paul, Michael and Elizabeth drinking himself to death in full view of the population of Bolton. Because the house will go to them when I die, and at least one of them could come back. In my will, any or all of them can live in it. Whoever lives there pays rent to the other two or buys them out – it’s all arranged. I don’t want them to be known as the product of the local drunk.’

‘Then get him a flat in – where are you?’

‘Crosby. Well, Waterloo if we want to be picky.’

He took her hand. ‘Louisa?’

‘What?’

‘Is Tallows empty?’

She nodded. ‘The cleaner and the gardener are doing their best, and Lizzie rescued any furniture of value. Why?’

‘Could we go and look at it for old times’ sake? Remember hide-and-seek?’

She grinned. ‘I was thinking about my three just the other day, remembering them as children. I could never find them. If cabbage was on the menu, they’d go missing for a whole day. We had to use the cabbage as part of bubble and squeak in the end. By the time it was fried with mashed potatoes, any nutritional value had melted into thin air.’ She watched his face, saw sadness behind his smile. ‘You had no more children?’

‘No. I never remarried. Annie was special.’

She noticed that a cloud seemed to pass over his face as he remembered his lost loved ones. ‘Was Tim the reason why you went for childhood cancers?’

He nodded. ‘And it’s brilliant. I see kids like my son in remission, sometimes cured, even grown to adulthood. I want to open a respite centre, that’s why I’m begging. There’s a local charity, which I founded. It’s the Timothy Vincent Trust, and most of the donors are people who have a child who’s ill, or know one who has died. We’re doing OK as far as research is concerned – that part of the money goes to London where the biggest strides are made, of course. But we need a place.’ He stared into her eyes. ‘An empty house with qualified staff who’ll take the children and look after them while their families have a break.’

Lucy retrieved her hand and closed her bag with a snap. Now, she had two doctors to think about. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I have my car. Is yours at the hospital, too?’

‘Yes. I’ll walk you back to your car first, then you can wait here on the road until I catch up with you. Mine’s round the back among the staff vehicles.’

During the drive to Tallows, Lucy pondered the subject of fate. If she hadn’t visited Alan today, she might never have met a man who had known Diane, who had been a member of the Notorious Five – a name stolen by Diane, of course, from the celebrated Enid Blyton books. There had been Louisa, Diane, David and . . . and Terri Easton, a rather tomboyish girl. The fifth? Ah yes, a red-haired lad who picked his nose, dug up worms and put them down people’s clothes. Adam? Andrew? It didn’t matter.

What did matter was the chance to make Tallows useful. Perhaps it would not be what was required, but it was worth a look, surely? All the time, a lump sat in her throat. But that was nothing new, because the leaving of the house in which she had been born had never been an easy move.

David found Tallows to be perfectly suitable for his needs, though others would need to look at it, of course. ‘How much?’ he asked.

‘I’m not selling.’ With the furniture gone, it looked rather derelict, she thought.

‘To rent, I mean. How much?’

‘I have to talk to the twins and to Lizzie first. It’s their home, though I doubt they’ll want to use it. But I must speak to them.’

‘Of course you must. Oh, Lucy-Louisa. What brought you into my path today?’

She pondered for a few seconds. ‘Tim, probably. If he’s anything like his father was as a boy, he’ll be charming the wings off angels. Oh, I’m sorry,’ she breathed when she saw the tears in his eyes. She stepped forward with a handkerchief in her hand, and what followed was a total shock. He grabbed her and went to kiss her cheek, but she turned to wipe his face in the last split second, and the embrace landed squarely on her mouth. That was just an accident, but he clung to her. She felt his tears running down her face, yet he continued to kiss her. The shock was born when she realized she was kissing him back. There was an amateurish feel to the occasion, as if two teenagers were experimenting with their very first close encounter.

They separated reluctantly. She gave him her handkerchief before sitting on the edge of her bed. She could still taste him. ‘Now, that shouldn’t have happened,’ she said. ‘A definite mistake. Sorry.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ came the answer. ‘I’ve just broken a very long duck.’ He faced the window and dried his face.

‘Since Anne?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘You?’