Chapter Twelve
Harriet woke up to weak sunlight filtering through the pink floral curtains of her childhood bedroom. She rolled onto her back and blinked up at the ceiling with its brown, rabbit-shaped stain from a leak years ago still visible. Nothing, it seemed, had changed—except her own life.
Last night she’d told her parents the bare bones of what had happened over the last few months, omitting, somewhat to her own surprise, any mention of Richard’s doings with Meghan. He’d always got along well with her parents, especially her dad—in part because his own was a little remote, the quintessential stiff upper lip always in place.
She couldn’t quite understand why she kept such a major part of her life’s falling apart to herself, but it didn’t feel fair to rubbish Richard’s reputation with her parents when he wasn’t there to defend himself. And, in any case, what would she say? He had an emotional affair? He kissed someone else? It felt far too complicated for her to tell her parents.
Her parents had been all sympathy, in any case, the perfect mixture of compassionate murmurs and practical questions. When her mother had gone to refresh the tea, her father had taken the opportunity to lower his voice and ask, “Do you need money, Harriet? Because I’ve got some set aside. Not a large amount, mind, but it might make a difference to you.”
“Oh, Dad.” Harriet had felt tears threatening again.
Her parents did not have a lot of money. Her mother had been a housewife for her entire adult life and her father had taken voluntary retirement at age fifty-seven when his job in middle management of a large supermarket chain had been cut. Yet she knew his offer was entirely genuine, and that he would go to the bank that very moment if she asked him to.
“We’re okay. I’m looking for a job, actually.”
“Any luck?”
“No, but I’m still waiting to hear on an application.” Not that she’d be holding her breath on that one.
After they’d finished another pot of tea they’d gone to the local pub for lunch, and Harriet had tucked into the very standard fare—a far cry from The Three Pennies’ gastro-pub offerings—with gusto. Everything tasted and felt better somehow, even greasy chips.
They spent the afternoon in her parents’ tiny garden, and Harriet had found herself noticing and admiring it in a way she hadn’t before. It was barely bigger than a postage stamp, but her parents had considered every square inch with care. There was a veg patch, a rockery, a few rosebushes, and a little apple tree. Harriet had a sudden, piercing memory of her father going to take the bins out and then stooping to carefully pluck a weed from a flower bed. It was a tiny gesture, but one that perfectly encapsulated her father—always trying to improve things in some small way.
They’d had a quiet dinner at home, one of her mother’s turgid roasts, with everything boiled to within an inch of its life. Harriet had gone to bed soon after, exhausted and yet strangely happy.
Now she lay in bed and listened to the sounds of her parents moving around downstairs, her father’s cheerful, tuneless whistling. She wondered what she would do today. She couldn’t stay at her parents for too long; it had been a much-needed respite, coming here, but she wanted to get back to her own life, whatever that looked like. Whatever it was going to look like.
Harriet grabbed her phone on the table next to her bed and sent a quick text to Richard saying where she was. Then she showered, dressed, and headed downstairs to greet her parents.
They were sitting at the little round table in the kitchen, drinking coffee, a toast rack of now-cold toast between them, along with little dishes of marmalade and butter, which made Harriet smile somehow. Everything was exactly as it had always been, and while that had once been irritating, she now found it a comfort. Some things didn’t change, and that was a good thing.
“Did you sleep all right, darling?” her mother asked in a too-bright voice that made Harriet suspect they had just been talking about her. Not that she was surprised. She’d offloaded a lot of information on them yesterday.
“Yes, actually, I did.” She pulled out a chair and plucked a piece of toast from the rack.
“I can make more…” Her mother protested, already rising from her chair.
Harriet shook her head. “This is fine.” And it was. “What are you both doing today?” she asked, and her parents exchanged looks.
“Well… I was going to go to my gardening club,” her mother said cautiously. “But since you’re here, of course I won’t.”
“Don’t change anything for me—”
“I was going to work on a new model airplane,” her father interjected. “You can help me.”
Harriet stared at him in surprise. Her father had been making model airplanes since she was a child and she’d never helped him. She’d always found the work too fiddly and, really, what was she supposed to do with the things? She couldn’t fly them. She couldn’t even play with them; they were too fragile, or so her father had said.
Now Harriet noted her father’s seemingly mild expression, yet with a rather unfamiliar determined glint in his eyes.
“Okay,” she said as she swallowed her toast. “Sure.”
After she’d helped clear the breakfast dishes away, she followed her father up to the third bedroom which he’d turned into a little workshop. Harriet stood in front of a glass-fronted display case filled with dozens of planes.
“Wow, you’ve made a lot,” she said.
“And yet I’m always excited to start another. Look at this beauty.” He tapped the box on the table he’d set up, and Harriet glanced down at it somewhat dubiously.
“The Bristol Beaufighter,” she read.
“Developed over eight months using sections of the earlier Bristol Beaufort. It had a more powerful engine, along with some other modifications.”
“Right,” Harriet said, half-wondering why her father was sharing all this. As if she had the first clue about model airplanes.
“It was a night bomber,” he continued as he carefully opened the box. “The modifications made to it allowed it to carry bombs, torpedoes, rockets, cannons, and machine guns.”
“Right,” Harriet said again, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Her father was emptying out the contents of the box—what looked like a thousand little pieces and the tiniest screwdriver Harriet had seen.
“How long does it take you to put one of those together?” she asked, and her father looked up with a boyish smile.
“Hours,” he said happily. “Hours and hours.”
Harriet sat and watched in silence as her father began to screw tiny bits together. Occasionally he’d asked her to look for a piece he couldn’t find, describing it in terms of color or shape. Very occasionally Harriet actually found it.
Her father worked mostly in silence, but once in a while he would offer some titbit of information—how the bomber was so much improved from its original, how mechanics had taken the best bits of the first plane and adapted it to new challenges and situations.
It took about an hour of this for the penny to drop. Here was her father’s life lesson—about adapting to difficult circumstances, about using the best parts of yourself to learn and change and grow. He didn’t talk about anything but the plane, but Harriet got it.
A few months ago, she would have been fairly exasperated, finding the whole thing rather ridiculously twee and sentimental and a bit boring, but now she just smiled and briefly touched his arm.
“That’s pretty amazing, Dad,” she said quietly, and he looked up from the barely-started plane and gave her a smile of such love that Harriet’s heart squeezed painfully in her chest.
That evening she took her mum and dad out to dinner, brushing aside their concerns that she couldn’t afford it—she couldn’t, not really, but some things were more important than money, or the lack of it. They ate at an Italian place near the city center that wasn’t at all posh but which her parents marveled at all the same, exclaiming over the antipasti and the standard house wine.
Harriet’s heart was full of love as well as a deep affection she couldn’t remember ever having before for them, at least not as an adult. For how long has she turned her nose up, discreetly, at her parents’ small ways? Now she felt a tender sort of protectiveness, along with a fierce pride. They’d had had some difficult times—her father’s redundancy, a late miscarriage when she was a preteen and pretty clueless. But they’d soldiered on, determined to find happiness in the small things, and so would she.
Harriet drove back to Wychwood-on-Lea the next morning, full of determination. She stopped at a DIY store in Chipping Norton and bought a dozen paint samples, a bag of compost, a tray of bedding plants, and several packets of seeds.
She spent the afternoon dabbing paint samples on various walls, trying to decide between a sunny yellow and a cheerful blue—no modish neutral colors she’d paid a fortune for from Farrow & Ball now.
In the late afternoon, she decided to head up to Willoughby Manor to check on Lady Stokeley. It had been nearly a month since she’d driven her to Oxford for her tests, and Harriet still didn’t know what the results were, but she thought Lady Stokeley must know by now.
The walk up to the manor was lovely, with everything in full bloom. Petals of cherry blossom fluttered down like pink confetti, and a blaze of red tulips waved their regal heads proudly from the deep borders on either side of the lane.
Harriet stopped mid-stride, the manor house ahead of her, the sun shining down, the world full of flowers and birdsong. She stood still, wanting to savor it to the full, because she’d done so little of that since January the twenty-first, when her life as she’d known it had ended. She was just starting to realize, in a very unexpected and backward sort of way, that might have been somewhat of a good thing.
The front door of Willoughby Manor was ajar, and so Harriet tiptoed in, calling out cautiously, “Lady Stokeley?”
She received no answer, and so she ventured further into the house, poking her head into the small drawing room downstairs that she knew Lady Stokeley used, and then heading upstairs as all the other rooms in the house were closed off or shut up.
“Lady Stokeley?” she called again, the stairs creaking under her. “It’s Harriet. Harriet Lang. I’ve just come to see how you’re doing…” Her voice trailed off as she heard Lady Stokeley’s acerbic reply.
“I’m fine, but you might as well come up since you’re here.”
Harriet suppressed a little smile as she headed towards Lady Stokeley’s bedroom. “Okay,” she called back, and then skidded to a halt in the doorway, her mouth dropping open in shock.
“Don’t worry,” Lady Stokeley called from in front of the full-length cheval mirror. “I haven’t lost my marbles yet. Not all of them, anyway.” She turned to give Harriet a brittle smile. “What do you think?”
What did she think? Lady Stokeley seemed to be invoking Miss Havisham, dressed in an ancient, yellowing wedding dress that gaped at her bosom. “It’s… it’s your wedding dress?” Harriet ventured, which was essentially a no-brainer. What else could it be?
“From 1953. The year of the queen’s coronation.” She turned back to the mirror, gazing at herself critically. “I had a much better bosom back then.”
The off-the-shoulder style emphasized Lady Stokeley’s now-scrawny frame, her collar bone sticking out sharply, and Harriet wondered how the dress had fit sixty-odd years ago.
As if reading her thoughts, Lady Stokeley nodded towards a heavy silver frame on the top of her bureau. “Have a look.”
Harriet moved over to the bureau, bending down to peer at the black and white photograph. “Oh, Lady Stokeley,” she exclaimed, “you were beautiful.”
“Well, you don’t have to sound quite so surprised.”
“Sorry.” Harriet tore her gaze away from the photo of Lady Stokeley with shining dark hair and creamy skin, a tall, serious-looking man in naval uniform next to her, to give her an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mean to. What… what made you decide to try the dress on now?”
Lady Stokeley let out a huff of laughter. “Still worried I might have lost the plot a bit? No, my dear. I am quite knowledgeable of all salient plot points, including those most recently developed.”
“Ah.” Harriet sat down on a stool shaped like a powder puff while Lady Stokeley perched on the bed, the yellowing dress flaring around her.
“Today is my wedding anniversary,” she said quietly. “Sixty-four years. Of course he died thirty years ago, but still.” She shook her head. “Time is so strange, how slow it sometimes seems, and then how it speeds up the older you get, until you get really quite old, and then it slows right down again. The trouble is, there’s never enough of it.” She sighed and with effort rose from the bed. “Would you mind unbuttoning me? The day nurse did it up but I didn’t think about getting out of it again. I would have been in a bit of a quandary if you hadn’t come along.”
“I’m glad I did.” Harriet eyed the incredibly long row of hook-and-eye buttons that went from Lady Stokeley’s nape to her tailbone. This was going to take a while.
“Did you have a happy wedding day?” she asked as she slipped the first hooks from their eyes.
“Happy enough, I suppose. My mother was tipsy and my sister was positively green with envy. She was older than me by three years but I married first.” Even all these years later, Lady Stokeley sounded a little smug about this fact.
“And your marriage?” Harriet dared to ask.
It was easier when she didn’t have to look into Lady Stokeley’s autocratic face with its shrewd blue eyes.
“What about my marriage?” Lady Stokeley’s voice was frosty, and Harriet decided it wasn’t actually easier.
“Was it happy?” she asked, her fingers practically shaking as she undid another few buttons. Lady Stokeley’s back was emerging, her shoulder blades like chicken wings.
“Happy enough,” the old lady returned after a brief pause. “I do not believe you can be happy all the time, and certainly not in a marriage.”
That didn’t sound all that hopeful. “Maybe not,” Harriet agreed.
She’d been happy with Richard though, hadn’t she? At the start they’d been deliriously happy. Working all hours, lying in bed on Saturday mornings with the sun spilling in and their feet tangled up together, late nights with a bottle of wine, a bag of crisps, and the telly—their lives hadn’t been particularly exciting, but Harriet remembered loving those days. So what had happened? How had it all gone wrong, so slowly and slyly that she hadn’t even noticed until it was, perhaps, too late?
“There.” Harriet did the last eye and hook and Lady Stokeley reached down to hold the dress up to her front.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said stiffly, and went into her dressing room.
Harriet tidied up a little bit, hanging up Lady Stokeley’s dressing gown and arranging the cut crystal perfume bottles on her bureau that looked as if they were antiques. She looked at the photograph of Lord and Lady Stokeley again, taking in his dark, fathomless eyes and stiff expression. They both looked as if the camera had caught them a moment too soon, before they’d had a chance to smile.
Lady Stokeley emerged from the dressing room in her usual twin set and tweed. “The weather’s so warm today,” she said. “Why don’t you join me on the terrace for tea?”
“Oh.” The invitation was unexpected; Lady Stokeley usually acted as if she suffered Harriet’s occasional visits with great forbearance. “That would be lovely. Thank you.”
Harriet made the tea in the kitchen and brought it out on a tray to the huge terrace in back of the manor. Lady Stokeley was sitting on a wrought iron chair with a rug over her knees, her wrinkled face tilted towards the sun.
“It’s lovely out here,” Harriet said as she set the tray down. The lawn was jewel-bright and perfectly smooth, kept in much better condition than the interior of the house.
“I have cancer.” Lady Stokeley spoke flatly, her eyes closed, her face still tilted upwards.
Harriet stilled in the pouring of the tea. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Lung cancer. The irony, I suppose, is that I never smoked a cigarette in my life, even when it was all the rage. Never did like the taste.” She let out a little sigh. “Gerald did, though. Smoked like a chimney, poor man. That’s what killed him. Not cancer, but a heart attack. At least it was quick.”
“Yes,” Harriet agreed. Her heart ached for Lady Stokeley but Harriet didn’t think she’d appreciate any gushing sympathy or commiseration.
Harriet put her teacup and saucer on the table next to her and with a gusty sigh Lady Stokeley opened her eyes and straightened in her chair.
“What are your treatment options?” Harriet asked after a moment.
“Apparently I’m too old for the proper chemotherapy,” Lady Stokeley said. “The kind that fries you like a piece of bacon.”
“Oh.” Harriet suppressed a shocked laugh at her plain speaking. “What kind, then?”
“Oh, some pill or other. I’ll have to go in five times a week for three weeks, and then I get a blessed week off.” She took a sip of tea. “I should have started last week, but I can’t make my mind up about whether I want to bother with it all. It seems such a palaver and for what?”
“Oh, but you should,” Harriet said impulsively, and then realized she had no right to tell Lady Stokeley what she should or shouldn’t do. “If there’s even a chance…”
Lady Stokeley turned to give her a stern look. “I am eighty-six years old, young lady, and I am not at all sure that I want to spend my remaining days feeling even more feeble and ill than I already do.” She took a steadying breath. “Besides, I do not relish the thought of losing my hair. It is the one thing of which I remain vain.”
Harriet glanced at Lady Stokeley’s snow-white cap of fluffy curls and could understand why she was reluctant. And yet to simply give up? To sit and molder in this lonely old house until she died?
“I can’t tell you what to do, of course, Lady Stokeley, but I do hope, for all our sakes, you’ll try. Willoughby Close wouldn’t be the same without you.”
Lady Stokeley’s lips twitched in a small smile. “Thank you, my dear,” she said quietly. “I’ll think on it.”
Harriet felt heavy-hearted as she walked back to Willoughby Close, oblivious to the beauty all around her that she’d enjoyed on the way to the manor. She hadn’t even asked Lady Stokeley how she would get to and from the hospital in Oxford—what if she worried about that, about being a burden?
She should have offered to drive her, although if she was going to get a job she couldn’t actually do it. But someone needed to step up. Had Lady Stokeley told anyone else about her diagnosis? Harriet had the feeling that she hadn’t.
As she came into the courtyard of Willoughby Close, Ellie was getting out of her car.
“You’re back,” she said with a delighted smile. “I’m so pleased. I spoke to Colin and Anna and they’re having a little dinner party on Friday. You will come?”
“Oh, I…” Harriet trailed off uncertainly. She didn’t even know this Colin and Anna, and at the moment she wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with strangers.
“Please come,” Ellie begged. “Everyone will be laidback and friendly, I promise.”
She did need to get a social life, and friends would certainly be welcome. “All right,” Harriet agreed, wondering just what she was getting herself into. “I’ll come. Thanks for the invitation.”