One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [154]
‘No, but you’d be amazed how flexible and forgiving young people can be.’
This I knew to be true, my own family being the most recent, potent example, and they weren’t all young. One by one they’d sought me out over the last few days, to say how pleased they were about Seffy, how happy. Not how duped or misled they felt they’d been all these years. Laura and I had talked for hours in her room, thrashing it out moment by moment, going back years, to when we’d shared the flat in Pimlico. To Dom. The girls, who’d been told, tiptoed in towards the end, sitting on the bed hugging their knees, wanting the whole story again, from the beginning, please, Hattie, their mother protesting, saying it was not for their ears. But I felt it most definitely was: that I owed them all, and I’d begin again, telling my sorry tale from the beginning. And to my surprise, it became a little easier each time. Marginally less shameful. Mum and I walked to the village one sunny afternoon on some spurious errand to buy cheese, sat on a bench by the pond, and found we weren’t back until dark, minus the cheese. My family’s acceptance and understanding was a huge comfort to me. And, I’m ashamed to say, a huge surprise. Dad, though, aside from a squeeze of my shoulders when I went to bed one night, and a gruff assurance that he was beyond thrilled, didn’t say much. It worried me initially, even though I knew it wasn’t his way to roar in and ask questions. When he casually mentioned, though, that he might take me on a jaunt to Venice next month, for a long weekend, as he’d taken Hugh and Laura the previous year, I knew that would be our moment.
With Cassie, however, I’d felt indescribably awkward. Had almost avoided her. But she’d tracked me down, and to my shame had told me how pleased she was, this bright-eyed, eager girl with flushed cheeks, to find Seffy, and to find me, she’d added generously. I’d caught my breath, mortified. After all, I’d slept with her father. Why should she be generous?
‘Oh, Cassie, I’m totally undeserving of that.’ I’d been peeling potatoes at the time, and the sink had been a good place to hide my face: I hadn’t broken off, so in effect had my back to her as I peeled faster. But she’d leaned on the draining board beside me, picked up a knife to help, and said she didn’t altogether blame her father. Yes, it was terrible to cheat on Mummy, but her mother was… fragile. Could be tricky. Volatile. Everyone thought her parents had the perfect marriage – all the obituaries said what a loving, close couple they were – and that, understandably, Letty had been driven to drink through her grief. But… was that entirely true? Perhaps she’d drunk before? Cassie looked at me closely. I put my knife down; wiped my hands carefully. ‘Perhaps Daddy had been unhappy, or they’d been unhappy together?’ she asked.
I remembered him gently remonstrating with Letty when she was pregnant: knocking back the Chablis in the garden, eyes overbright.
‘I think if Hal wasn’t so loyal he might confirm my suspicions,’ she told me now, eyeing me closely.
‘But he never has?’
‘No. I did once ask if Mum drank before I was born, but he just said something noncommittal, like – everyone likes a drink occasionally.’
Yes, he would be loyal to Letty. Of course. His sister-in-law, the widow, the wronged wife. And maybe that was all it had been back then. Liking the occasional drink. I’d only met her once – who was I to judge? I asked Cassie where she was now.
‘In the Priory. Oh, she’s there a lot,’ she said, seeing my shocked face. ‘Books herself in. Or Hal and I do it for her.’
I realized then what Cassie had had to deal with. On her own. All this time. Why she could badly do with Seffy and me. Hal, of course had always been there for her, but now… well, now there would definitely be something more supportive and homogenous about the grouping. Seffy and Cassie, and me and Hal. Lovely for her, I hoped. Lovely for Seffy, too.
As Hal and I walked on in the autumn sunshine that afternoon, it struck me we were