CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Was it really Saturday already? Anne could scarcely believe she had been in Brighton a whole week. After a light breakfast at the hotel, she had come for a stroll along the promenade, finishing up - as she invariably did - by leaning on the pier railings and watching frisky waves below. There was something so fascinating about water. It calmed her spirit while allowing her mind time and space to travel wherever it chose to go.
She frowned, unable to get Alice Shepherd’s letter to the mysterious Fern McAllister out of her head. Mysterious, did I say? Now, why do I think that? The frown deepened. Am I making something out of nothing, she wondered? Yet something had caused Alice Shepherd to revert to her maiden name and insist Owen use it too. What could she possibly have to hide, a fiercely proud woman like that? Could it have anything to do with her being frightened for Owen, as the poor woman confided on her sick bed? Had Alice been afraid he might betray her trust without her imposing presence constantly reminding (warning?) him to remain silent on whatever it was she did not want people to know?
Anne sighed. It was none of her business. She should never have allowed Kirk Spencer to read the letter but insisted he give it to Owen immediately. Oh, the Briggs woman had fair lapped it up of course, and how! But then she would, wouldn’t she? Charley Briggs was, after all, the very stuff of gossipy stereotypes.
The frown relaxed into the semblance of a smile. There was, she had to admit, precious little stereotypical about Charley Briggs. The woman is a phenomenon. She has to be in her late forties at least, surely? She might even have turned fifty. As for Spence...A smile spread across Anne’s otherwise drawn features. If Kirk Spencer had turned thirty, it could not have many years ago. .
“Good morning.”
Anne turned, startled to find Steve Taylor regarding her with a quiet deliberation that disturbed her. “Good morning,” she returned his greeting with a wary smile.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
“It’s a free country,” she pointed out.
He came and stood beside here, resting his elbows on the rail and casting an eye over the scene below. The tide was coming in and the beach was already starting to crowd with holidaymakers. Few locals, or so he had been told, came to the beach. It struck him as peculiar. If he lived here, there would have been no stopping him. He’d have come during every spare minute of every day, all the year round…walking, swimming, watching waves spread across the pebbles like the white laced edge of a blue-green tablecloth.
“A penny for them…?” Anne ventured after an interminable pause during which she tried to decide whether or not she had a grudging sympathy for the man, even quite liked him in a worrying, masochistic kind of way. Either that or she thoroughly detested him. She certainly wasn’t afraid of him…or was she? “Cathy and Lynette not with you?” she asked, looking around once it became clear he had no intention of sharing his thoughts.
“What? Oh, no. They didn’t get back until late last night. They were both still in bed when I left, snoring their heads off,” he told her, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
“Did they enjoy their trip to…Norwich was it? Cathy called to tell me they would be away all day,” she added.
“It was Ipswich, actually. Cathy’s parents have lived their all their lives,” he said pointedly. Another long pause followed then, “Cathy is very close to her mum and dad. They dote on her, Lynette too.”
Oh, and how about you? Anne wanted to ask. Where do you fit in? Instead, she merely smiled and said nothing. He would tell her when he was ready, she suspected. Furthermore, instinct told her she wouldn’t have long to wait.
She wasn’t mistaken.
“We were happy, Cathy and me. Even when Lynette was just a toddler, we were still happy. Then…it was like she was falling down a hole and I couldn’t help her. I wanted to. I tried, I really did. But she just kept falling deeper until I couldn’t bear to watch. It was horrible, feeling so bloody helpless all the time…”
Anne waited.
“She didn’t even want to make love any more,” he went on, staring into space rather than meet Anne Gates’ faintly disapproving expression. “Our GP suggested counselling so we thought we’d give it a go. But we only went the once. Cathy refused point blank to go again, and I can’t say I was too keen either so I didn’t push for it. Maybe I should have. God knows, she needed help, and I couldn’t give her any. But for Lynette, I think we’d have gone our separate ways there and then. But we didn’t. We stuck it out. Only, by now I was falling down a hole of my own. So I hauled myself up the only way I knew how.”
“Other women,” commented Anne. It was not a question.
Steve Taylor grimaced. “She told you, eh? What else did she tell you, that I’m a serial womaniser who should never have got married in the first place? That and a damn sight more I imagine.”
Anne resisted a nod. A piece of driftwood bobbing about below caught her eye and she used it to form a bridge in her mind, over which Steve Taylor’s words poured with much the same persistence, and as many stops and starts, as rush hour traffic.
“I didn’t know what else to do. I felt so helpless, so…irrelevant. It’s not a nice feeling for any man…”
Or woman, Anne reflected with a mixture of sadness and anger.
“It’s no excuse…” he went on.
No, it’s not. Inwardly, Anne was seething if uncomfortably aware of an increasing sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t Tom, her own husband, offered much the same excuse when she’d confronted him about his affair with…? She couldn’t bear to even contemplate the woman’s name, but it wouldn’t go away, always lurking, like a feline mouser on the prowl. Helen something. She resisted the impulse to laugh out loud. Who was she kidding? Helen Newton, she mouthed to the same piece of driftwood, still bobbing about below but swept closer inshore by the next wave.
“This is supposed to be a make or break holiday for Cathy and me,” the man’s voice at Anne’s ear seemed far away, “so what does she do? She takes Lynette and buggers off to see her parents!”
“But they’re back now,” she pointed out, “so all is not lost…yet,” she added quietly, struggling to stem a surge of resentment coursing her veins like a sequence of angry waves.
“Sure, but for how long?” muttered Steve Taylor miserably, “I think I’m losing them.” He gave a short laugh that grated on Anne’s nerves. “What am I saying? I know I am. I’ve known it for ages. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“You will do what every other man does who claims his wife doesn’t understand him,” she told him in no uncertain terms, “You’ll start trying to understand how she feels. Unless and until you do, you can take it from one who’s been there, your marriage is dead in the water so you might as well call it a day and salvage as much goodwill as you can. There’s nothing worse than a messy divorce, especially where children are involved.”
They were face to face now, each eyeing the other with a mixture of undisguised dislike and vague, distant self-pity. Anne thought she detected a glimmer of respect, too, in the dark eyes and instantly began to thaw. “If two people want to save their marriage, it takes both to give it their best shot,” she added, not unkindly. “True, one may need to try a bit harder than the other to reach the starting point, but then you pull together or not at all.”
“And if one doesn’t?”
Anne shrugged. “The other must try all the harder for as long as it takes to get somewhere, or nowhere as the case may be.” She hesitated then, “People don’t always know what they want...really want, that is...any more than they always say quite what they really mean. We have to read between the lines.” She gave another little shrug, “It’s never easy, of course, but always worth a try.” After a longer, increasingly strained pause, she could not resist asking, “What do you really want Steve?”
It was his turn to shrug and play for time. “I want things to be they way they used to be,” he said at last, “I want us to be a family again.”
Anne shook her head. “Once things change, they can never be the same. You can get real and live like there’s no tomorrow or…hang on to yesterday and be a ghost in your own lifetime.”
“Like you, you mean?” he murmured scathingly. Embarrassed, he looked away and fixed his sights on a piece of driftwood bobbing just below where they stood.
Anne winced. The accusation had struck home. Is that what she had become, a ghost in her own lifetime, she wondered? No! She rejected the idea out of hand at first. Hadn’t she got on with her life, held down a good job and ignored the invariable note of accusation simmering away beneath the surface whenever people expressed sympathy or concern? Hadn’t she accepted, deep down, that she would never see Patricia again? She wasn’t to blame for Tom’s trading her in for a prettier, younger model…or was she? No! The inner voice cried out again.
Anne clenched her teeth. At the same time, she could not suppress a nagging suspicion. For years now, had she not but gone through the motions of everyday life, inclined to let its finer reality pass her by? Who am I to accuse or advise anyone else? “Crisis is like a maze,” she told Steve Taylor while addressing the piece of driftwood, just as it was washed beneath the pier and beyond view. “We find our own way out or…we don’t,” she added in a stricken whisper.
Steve Taylor heard and swallowed the sarcastic remark on his tongue with difficulty, telling himself the woman meant well. Yet, he was none the wiser for that, and might as well have been talking to a piece of driftwood that had caught his eye. He peered over the rail and looked for it but there was no sign. Why is it some people so love to philosophise, he wondered, especially when they want to appear as if they have something to say but don’t? “Take care,” he muttered absently and strolled off towards the amusement arcade situated at the centre of the pier.
Anne did not linger long at the rail. Nursing an absurd disappointment that the piece of driftwood had failed to reappear, she headed back to the hotel.
……………………………
The Orion’s reception desk was quiet. Mel Harvey was leafing through some papers.
Charley saw her opportunity. “Good morning Mel.”
Mel looked up and smiled. “Good morning Mrs Briggs. A lovely morning, isn’t it? Will you be taking breakfast?” Charley nodded. “Mr Spencer too…?”
“Mr Spencer is still in bed, snoring away like a fog horn,” Charley told her with a knowing wink look that plainly said, ‘Well, what do you expect? You know what lazy bones men are like.’ She hesitated.
“Was there something I can help you with?”
“Well, as a matter of fact…” Charley lowered her voice, “I’m worried about poor Anne. It must be so hard for her, coming back here after…what happened.”
“No worries there,” said Mel cheerfully, “Anne’s practically one of the family by now. True, she comes back every year. But don’t be fooled. She’s no crank. Take it from me, there’s more to Anne Gates than meets the eye. It’s my belief she finds it a great comfort to come back here.”
“Morbid, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Morbid? Dear me, no. There’s nothing morbid about Anne. Sad, yes, but one can hardly wonder at that.”
“Of course not,” Charley politely agreed before adding, “It must have been a terrible time for you all. I only wish I could have been here to offer some moral support.”
“Be glad you weren’t. It was dreadful, just dreadful,” said Mel, “I know you’ll think I’m mad, but I had a horrid feeling all that day. I just knew something awful was going to happen. Besides, disasters always happen in threes. That’s what my mother always used to say, and damn me if she wasn’t right. First of all, two of the breakfast staff didn’t turn up, and not so much as a phone call. Then Colonel Gibson’s shower wouldn’t come on. Got the hump good and proper he did too, miserable old codger that he was. Made my life a misery all day, he did, until I got it fixed. Mind you, one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead I suppose. Whatever next, I kept asking myself? It was still preying on my mind when poor Anne scared the living daylights out of everyone, screaming for Patricia in the middle of the night. Of course I had no idea…”
“I imagine the police wasted no time questioning everyone?” Charley felt obliged to interrupt and point her companion towards the nitty-gritty.
“Swarming all over the place for weeks, they were. As for questioning people, interrogating is the word that springs to mind. The men copped the worst of it. But then you’d expect that, I suppose, wouldn’t you? They gave my Joe a real grilling, I can tell you. My Joe! I ask you, would my Joe hurt a fly, let alone…? Excuse me.” She broke off to answer the telephone. “A dreadful business,” she reiterated after replacing the receiver, “I thought for a while that we might have to sell up, bookings were down so. Cancellations left right and centre, there were. But they picked up again soon enough. Fortunately people have short memories.”
“It can’t have been easy for Owen Shepherd and his mother either,” commented Charley.
Mel looked around before leaning leaned forward in the furtive manner of someone about to share a confidence. “Funny you should say that. The police took Owen in for questioning on several occasions. Alice was beside herself. I kept telling her not to worry, but she was a real worry-cat on the quiet. She worried about Owen something rotten. I dare say it was worry that killed her in the end. Relax, I’d say to her. Let him get on with his life. You can’t live it for him, I’d tell her. I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Heaven knows, I want the best for my son Peter. But I wouldn’t presume to tell him how to live his life. He’d send me off with a flea my ear, and rightly so. Alice couldn’t see it, but she was a millstone around poor Owen’s neck for years.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Not well, exactly. Alice wasn’t the kind of person one got to know well. To my knowledge, Jessie Cartwright is the only person who knew her well. You can ask Anne. She’ll tell you how Alice liked to keep folks at a distance. It was like she suspected every woman of wanting to poach her precious Owen. How daft can you get, eh?”
Charley nodded.
“Since Jessie was about as close to Alice as she’d let anyone get,” Mel went on, “I suppose you’d call them best friends. Jessie’s lived in Hove for years. Cornville Road, I believe, or is it Cornwall?” She paused and scratched her head. “Yes, that’s it, number seven Cornwall Road. You might have noticed Jessie at the funeral although probably not. She’s one of those people you’d never notice in a month of Sundays. Unless she gets her dander up, that is. Then you’d notice her quick enough. When push comes to shove, she’s not backward about coming forward. Oh, she can play the sweet old lady to perfection. There’s a good few have been fooled by that little act. Oh, yes, Jessie’s a tough old bird. To look at her, though, you’d think she has about as much presence as a ghost. Alice was just the same...”
Mel stopped in mid-flow to cast a disapproving eye over two small children playing by the lift. Thankfully, they were soon joined by their mother who proceeded to take each by the hand and all but drag them into the garden.
“Kids, eh..?” Mel raised a weak smile. “But you were asking about Jessie. To be honest, I’ve always thought she could make more of an effort. The word that springs to mind is ‘drab’. Yes, drab. The woman has no sense of colour. No dress sense at all, if you ask me. But you’ll know the type. They always strike you as fading away, even those who have the constitution of an ox.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” the hotelier hastened to add, “I don’t dislike Jessie. It’s not as if I know her that well.” Mel paused. “It’s like I said. She’s another one like Alice. Shepherd, keeps folks at a distance, not the kind to let others get too close. I dare say that’s why the pair of them got along. I’d hesitate to call them friends, exactly, but you know how it is, we all need somebody sometimes.”
“That’s certainly true,” Charley agreed while Mel experienced an extraordinary if brief sense of bonding with the other woman. “Does Jessie Cartwright have any children?” she asked, intrigued by Mel Harvey’s impression of Alice Shepherd’s best friend.
“Heaven’s yes!” Mel exclaimed with a short laugh, “Alice would have done well to take a leaf out of Jessie’s book there. There’s a whole tribe of them. Practically, raised them on her own she did too. She had precious little help from that husband of hers, that’s for sure.” Mel lowered her voice to a whisper. “Between you and me, he drank like a fish. Died of liver failure a year or so back. No surprises there, I can tell you.”
Charley nodded encouragingly.
“They’ve all done well for themselves too, Jessie’s kids, each and every one of them. Jesse’s not the type to live in their pockets, you see. She lets them get on with their lives and vice versa.” The hotelier gave a little sigh. “Maybe now poor Alice has gone Owen might get himself a life too. I mean to say, it’s never too late is it? Who knows? Maybe he and Anne will get it together at long last. Never did a nicer pair deserve each other more. If you ask me...”
She broke off again as a young couple approached the desk. “Good morning. Such a lovely morning…”
Charley beat a discreet retreat. Deciding against waking Spence, she eventually chose to take a stroll along the promenade. Barely had she resolved to pay Jessie Cartwright a visit when she spotted Anne Gates on the other side of the road. “Anne!” she bellowed and beckoned excitedly to her friend. “Anne!” she had to call again twice before the other woman stopped, looked, waved and indicated a crossing at traffic lights ahead.
Anne had heard Charley yell out her name the first time, recognized the voice and kept walking, hoping the other would give up on whatever it was she had in mind. The tone of voice suggested a summons of sorts. Anne grimaced. She was in no mood for Charley Briggs. At the third resounding bawl, however, she surrendered to fate, paused to give an acknowledging wave and signalled that she would cross the road at the traffic lights just ahead.
Later, sitting at a table outside a coffee shop, shielded from the sun’s glare by an enormous blue and white striped umbrella, Charley related the gist of her earlier conversation with Mel Harvey about Alice Shepherd. She made no mention of the hotelier’s speculation regarding Anne and Owen. .
“It’s true Alice was a very private person,” Anne agreed, “But I always thought she was rather complex too. To be honest, I never quite made up my mind about her. To the end, I neither liked nor disliked the woman. Mel’s right. She wasn’t an easy person to get to know and far too protective of Owen. Maybe her death is a blessing in disguise, for Owen I mean.”
“I thought I might pay Jessie Cartwright a visit,” murmured Charley over the rim of her cup.
“Really…?” Anne was genuinely surprised.
“Alice Shepherd fascinates me,” Charley confided, “I don’t know why, she just does. She might know something about that letter too, the one Alice wrote to Fern McAllister. Aren’t you in the least bit curious? It strikes me that if anyone can throw any light on the matter it’s likely to be Jessie Cartwright. Don’t you think so?”
“Possibly,” said Anne stiffly, continued to study the froth on her cappuccino without attempting to drink and wished she hadn’t let Charley persuade her to try it. She’d have much preferred a caffé latte or, better still, a nice cup of tea. As for the letter, it was none of her business…or was it? Certainly, it was no business of Charley Briggs. Yet, she could not deny Charley had hit a nerve. She was curious. At the same time, a sixth sense had warned her not to tackle Owen directly. What harm could it do to visit Jessie Cartwright? The name rang a distant bell. She vaguely recalled meeting the woman once at the Shepherd’s house but could not even begin to conjure up a picture in her mind’s eye.
“Where’s the harm?” Charley was saying with uncanny rapport. “You have to admit, it’s odd, to say the least. Why on earth should Alice Shepherd want to revert to her maiden name, let alone insist that Owen do the same? So the old girl had a skeleton in her cupboard, so what? It can’t hurt her now, can it? I know it’s strictly none of our business, but…well…aren’t you just eaten up with curiosity? I know I am.”
“Owen would be mortified if he knew were snooping into his private life behind his back,” Anne demurred.
“Not snooping, just looking after his best interests,” Charley insisted. “Anyway, it’s not his skeleton were looking for, it’s his mother’s. Who knows? It may turn out to be nothing at all. Imagine how relieved he’ll be when you tell him that whatever he’s been covering up for his mother’s sake all these years it’s nothing to fret about after all? It might even encourage him to get a life.”
“Perhaps,” Anne grudgingly admitted. She was torn between loyalty to Owen and a passionate curiosity on a par with Charley’s that had been tormenting her from the moment Kirk Spencer finished reading out the letter. “That damn letter!” she declared under her breath.
Charley heard but said nothing, sensing Anne was about to capitulate.
To be continued on Friday.
