One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [15]
‘Is that Little Crandon?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘You couldn’t see it from the lodge.’
‘No, I know, but we’re further up the hill now.’ She got up and joined me at the window. ‘I rather like it, actually. Don’t feel quite so alone. I like to draw my curtains at night and see someone else in the village draw theirs.’
‘And Letty still lives there, does she?’ My heart began to pound.
‘In The Pink House? Yes, look, you can see it from here. Left of the village, go two fields across from the church… then down in the valley where the sheep are, see?’ She pointed. ‘Their land marches with ours, as Hugh puts it, which always makes me think of thousands of blades of grass going left-right, left-right, in strict formation.’
‘Letty and her daughter?’
‘Yes, Cassie. Although for how much longer I don’t know. Irony of ironies, Hal wants to kick her out too. We had a coffee the other day, Letty and me – well, turned into a bottle of wine – the main thrust of the conversation being how to keep one’s relatives’ thieving hands off one’s property.’
‘But that’s outrageous. The house was Dominic’s, and Letty is his widow. What right has Hal got to it? And Cassie… surely if it’s anyone’s, it’s hers?’
‘Well, I may have got that wrong. You know Letty: she’s a pretty unreliable source. But Hal certainly wants her out. It’s a lovely place, but again, quite isolated. A bit of a schlep from the village. You went there once, didn’t you? With Dominic? Dispatch boxes and things?’
I nodded. Couldn’t trust myself to speak. She meant when I worked for him. At the House of Commons for about a year. And yes, I did go there. And it was, indeed, lovely. As was Letty, his young wife, pregnant at the time. The whole thing was idyllic: a pretty, smiling, welcoming wife, stepping out of a sweet pink house with roses round the door – heaven. Which was why nobody, not even Laura, who knew how I ticked, had known, or indeed could ever know, how deeply, passionately in love with him I’d been. How loving, but not being able to love Dominic Forbes had altered the entire course of my life.
4
I met Dominic through his brother, Hal, who I’d been friendly with at Edinburgh. Hal and I were in our fourth year together, reading Law and English respectively; we also shared the same student house along with one or two other friends. Well, OK, I suppose Hal and I were slightly more than friends. He’d taken a shine to me, is how my mother would have put it: not a phrase to trip off a student’s tongue in the nineties, but it did rather aptly describe Hal’s devotion to me and my refusal to get involved with him. I don’t think I even kissed him in a drunken moment, pining quietly as I was for the full back in the firsts: six foot two, spectacular thighs and fatal, devilish smile. I was flattered, and I liked Hal, but that was it: romantically he didn’t press any of my buttons. It didn’t seem to deter him, though. He didn’t exactly carry my bags, but I’d often come out of a lecture theatre to find him lurking by the coffee machine, huge army greatcoat drowning him, dark hair long and scruffy, pushing his glasses up his nose, poised to get us both a milk and two sugars.
After one particular seminar, which had turned into more of a careers discussion and from which I’d emerged steaming, I’d been particularly grateful for the polystyrene cup he handed me. Everyone seemed to have a vague