One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [3]
‘Nonsense, you haven’t bogged it. Just give it a bit longer and the old dears will see sense. God, they’ll be incapable of getting up the stairs soon. And Hugh’s even put a Stannah stair-lift in for them at the cottage, hasn’t he?’
‘Which will be broken soon,’ she said with a mighty sniff. ‘The children haven’t walked upstairs since it arrived. But, yes, we have. And if that isn’t a hint I don’t know what is.’
‘They’ll wake up one morning and realize they can’t manage any more. Can’t carry on. You’ll see.’
Laura had turned huge damp blue eyes on me. ‘Or maybe they won’t wake up at all.’
‘You don’t mean that!’ I’d gasped, knowing she didn’t. Laura was the gentlest of creatures.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Of course not. You know I’m fond of them. Even if Cecily is foul to me and Lionel still scares the pants off me.’ Hugh’s parents were a formidable duo, even in their eighties. ‘But the mind works in mysterious ways, Hattie,’ she went on wistfully. ‘I don’t want to hate them. I don’t want to be this person. But I do resent them, and that’s not nice. I know I’m selfish, and many women would kill to live in a cottage like mine.’ Maggie scrubbed even harder in the window, her mouth set in a grim line. ‘It’s just… at my age, at my time of life, I expected more,’ she finished sadly, giving a little shrug.
Ah, yes. Expectation. The route to all disappointment. Which was why I expected so little.
‘And Hugh won’t push it?’
‘No, he’s far too nice. I was the one who bought the stair-lift,’ she added guiltily. ‘So there I am, lying in bed beside him, wondering if Cecily’s motorized buggy, which she wobbles round the village on, roaring at the locals, ordering them to pick up litter, might one day hit a rut in the lane and send her soaring over the handlebars, feeling nothing as she somersaults to the ground. Or if Lionel, at six foot four, bellowing that he can’t find his whisky decanter again, might one day fail to detect the doors he ducks so assiduously, and just walk straight into one – boof. How horrible is that, Hatts?’ She turned despairing eyes.
‘Well, as long as you’re not actually fiddling with the brakes on the motorized buggy, or removing those tassels Lionel hangs from the door frame to remind him to duck—’
‘No. Never!’ She clutched her handbag on her lap.
‘Then thinking is very different from doing. And your guilty secrets are safe with me.’
That had been a few months ago. And then spookily, days later she’d rung, breathless, to say that Cecily and Lionel were moving out. Not to the cottage, which Cecily had apparently always disliked and dismissed as poky and damp – join the club, Laura had yelped – but to Shropshire, to be near Lionel’s sister. They’d be gone by Easter.
‘At last, Hattie, we’ll be in. We’ll have the Abbey!’
I’d almost expected her to add, ‘It’ll be mine – all mine!’ together with a cackling Hammer House of Horror laugh, but she’d refrained. Then she’d reined in enough to remember her manners and added, ‘And you must come and stay.’
Like I say, that had been months ago. And what with all the moving and hectic reorganization and settling in of her parents-in-law – plus, to be fair, I’d been to Paris on business – I hadn’t been summoned.
But six months had passed now. Not since I’d seen her, because she came to London regularly and we always had lunch, and she’d excitedly tell me her plans for the house. But six months before I got the call from Hugh. The summons. And a tiny bit of me had thought – oh, thanks very much. Not an invitation to stay, but to work. But the thing was, I’d secretly been dying to go. When they were in the cottage we’d spent a lot of time there, my son, Seffy, and I. We’d all cram in having a jolly time, boozy kitchen suppers, the cousins littered on the floor watching television, or roaming the grounds together, and I suppose I was disappointed that an