A Place in the Country (24 page)

Issy stood near the French doors, taking it in suspiciously. It was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be bleak, like some sort of Charles Dickens orphanage. Now even the bloody ducks were trolling by, she could see their orange feet paddling like mad as they hurried toward the prospect of a few scraps of food. Stupid ducks, she thought, allowing her misery to return. She didn't understand why she felt miserable—why she
wanted
to be miserable—she only knew she did. Things would get better when she saw Sam she told herself.

Caroline said, “We're to have dinner at the pub. Seven sharp. Sarah's doing the cooking tonight. She's my assistant,” she informed her parents. “She's a single mom and her landlord's chucking her out so she'll be moving into my cottage in a couple of days. And when I open the restaurant she'll come and work for me. We'll make a good team.”

“And when will that be?” Caroline's father asked, and was answered with a sigh and a shrug.

“Soon as I can get it together; furniture's ordered, suppliers are at the ready, I even have my menus partly worked out. And of course, I'll only open Friday and Saturday nights at first.”

“Until you get going,” he answered, lifting his glass of red wine in a toast.

Issy said, “I'll go get the bags out of the car. Not mine, of course,” she added hastily.

“You're staying at the pub then?” Caroline called after her.

“Thank God, yes,” Issy said over her shoulder.

Cassandra sighed. “She's determined to be a bitch. Better get what you have to say over with before we have to leave.”

“And face the consequences,” her husband said.

Caroline thought, it wasn't going to be easy. And somehow she knew it was all going to be her fault.

 

chapter 56

Henry drained his glass
and went off to help Issy with the bags. Cassandra looked anxiously at Caroline. “So? What are you going to say?”

“Tell her the plain unadorned truth. I've been told that's the best thing.”

“Hmm.” Cassandra thought about it. “Better soften it just a little, y'know …
this might come as a lovely surprise
 … that sort of thing.”

“But I know Issy and I know it won't,” Caroline said. “No, I'm just going to give her the facts and then…”

“Wait for the blow to fall. We mothers always have to take the hit. After the shock wears off she'll get around to thinking about it and understand it had nothing to do with you, it was all James.”

“
Mom,
” Caroline said, wearily, “it's
always
me. That's the way it is with moms and teenagers. Don't you remember? I blamed you for everything, including my shortsightedness
and
the fact I could never wear contacts, and that you wore a bikini for chrissakes on the beach in Ibiza, causing me endless shame.”

Cassandra burst out laughing. “I still wear a bikini in Ibiza,” she said. “So you'd better not come with me.”

Caroline laughed too. “Now I'd join you in my own middle-aged bikini.”

“What are you two laughing about?” Issy was back. She stood framed in the open French doors, looking accusingly at them as if it was wrong of them to laugh when she was feeling miserable.

“Issy,” Caroline said, “come and sit here, by me. I have something to tell you.”

“You're not getting married again!” Issy thought with her mother anything could happen.

“
Of course not!
Nothing like that.”

Issy noticed her grandmother holding her mom's hand. “What's up anyway?”

Caroline said, “I had a visitor last night. There was a big storm here, lightning, thunder, sheets of rain…”

“I know all about the weather in Oxfordshire,” her daughter reminded her impatiently.

“Anyway, this woman came into the pub, soaked through just the way we were that first night. Remember?”

“Of course I remember. We'd found Blind Brenda only we didn't know then she was blind.”

“No … well anyhow, this woman, nice-looking, tall, blond … anyway, she had a child with her, about five years old. They both looked frozen and tired, they had flown all the way from Singapore…”

“
Singapore
?” Issy gave Caroline a hard what-are-you-talking-about stare.

“It's like this, Issy.” Caroline began again. “You know some of what happened between me and your father. Well, the truth is he fell out of love with me and he fell in love with this woman.”

Issy walked away. She heard what her mother was saying but did not
want
to hear it.

Her grandmother called her back sharply. “Stay where you are,” she commanded. “Listen!”

Issy stopped, but stood, half-turned away from her mother.

Caroline said, “Your father was living with this woman at the same time he was living with us.”

Issy looked, despairing, at her grandmother, the rock she could always depend on to understand, she had to stop her mom from saying these things she didn't want to hear.

“Please listen to what your mother has to say,” Cassandra said gently. “It's important.”

“I thought Dad was with the glamorous ice-age Chinese woman,” Issy said.

“Her as well,” Caroline said.

Issy looked down at the flagstones. She didn't want to hear all this but knew she had to, and that it was going to be very important. She scraped her shoe along the line of greenish lichen. “She's here now?”

“She is. And there's a daughter.”

The sudden clench in Issy's stomach was like an iron fist. That's all she could compare it to … This couldn't be true, it wasn't real.
She
was her father's daughter …
only her. All these years …

“How old is she?” she finally managed to ask.

“She's five and her name is Asia. The woman claims your father is also her father.”

Now
Issy understood what devastation meant.
“It's not true,”
she yelled.
“It can't be. He wouldn't do that to me.”

Caroline remembered her saying those exact same words when she'd been told her father had killed himself.
He wouldn't do that to me.
She wondered if Melanie's story was true and James had been murdered.

She said, “We don't know for certain. That's why we're all meeting tonight. They say the truth will out.”

“Who said that?” Cassandra asked.

Caroline shrugged. “Doesn't somebody always say that? I'm just hoping they're right.”

Issy turned on her, filled with anger. “If you had not left my father this would not have happened.”

Caroline's eyes met Cassandra's with a resigned expression. Somehow she'd known she would get the blame. She said, “Darling, this happened
before
I left your father. He was living with this other woman at the same time, they had an apartment together, right there in Singapore.”

“In
Singapore
?” For the first time Issy took in what her mother was really saying, rather than what she wanted to believe. She kicked silently at the lichened flagstone.

“The little girl seemed very frightened,” Caroline told her. “She's so small, she's come such a long way and here she is with strangers in a strange place.”

“And no father,” Issy said. “Like me.”

“Yes,” Caroline agreed.

“Do I have to meet her?”

“Tonight. At the pub.”

“Oh. Right. Dinner.”

Beaten, Issy looked at them, sitting on the river wall with the ducks still paddling hopefully behind them. “It'll be just one of those family reunions,” she said coldly. “Let's hope I remember my manners the way you always taught me,” she warned, flinging an icy look at Caroline.

“I certainly hope so,” her grandmother said. “And since Melanie and her child are rooming at the pub I'm giving you the option of staying here at home, with your mother. Your grandfather and I can stay at the pub instead. Or you can go there and take your chance with ‘the other family.'”

“I'll take my chances,” Issy said, without hesitation, not looking at her mother.

 

chapter 57

Looking at them,
Cassandra melted between being sorry for Issy and sorry for Caroline. She walked over and put an arm round Issy's shoulders.

“Do you even think of how your mother has been hurt by all this?” she asked.

“I do think about Mom, I do,
I do
…” Even as she said it, Issy knew it wasn't true. She had not for one instant considered her mother. Anyway, this only went to prove how much her father had loved another woman. “He's a bastard,” she said turning to Caroline, verging on tears. “How could he do this to
you
?”

“It's okay,” Caroline said, though inside she was shriveling with humiliation at her husband's betrayal. It was more than mere humiliation, if “humiliation” could ever be referred to as “mere” as if it were a temporary event, a moment in time when you were exposed as worthless in the eyes of everyone who ever knew you, and even those who did not. This was
betrayal
and that was far worse.
Betrayed
brought the same kind of grief as death, because the loss was horrific. The one you loved, the one you trusted, who you thought would be with you forever, was gone. By his own choice. And he'd left for someone he'd chosen over you. No woman ever got over that.

“Anyhow, I'm only behaving the way teenagers are supposed to behave,” Issy appealed to her grandmother. “The way I guess my mom did with you.”

“Not quite.” Cassandra was not letting her off the hook.

“Well?” Henry asked finally, fed up with the delays. In his view the only thing to do was get on with it. “Let's just see which way the cards fall,” he suggested, making Caroline smile, recognizing where she got her habit of misquoting.

Issy was frowning. Her jeans and the retro Johnny Hallyday T-shirt were creased from the long journey. She said, “I have to change. I'll go get my bag.” She hurried to the door then turned to look at her mother. “Not that I'm staying here, I'll take my chances at the pub, thank you. At least Blind Brenda will be there.”

Sighing, Caroline's eyes met her mother's.

Cassandra shrugged. “Teenagers behave like this, but then sometimes they can be sweet as sugar and more loving than any faithful old Labrador. Remember, I speak from experience,” she added.

“Never one like this,” Caroline said, because new five-year-old sisters did not usually appear out of the blue.

While they waited Caroline showed them the rest of the house. “Showing you where your money went,” she told them.

“It's your money now.” Her father shrugged it off.

“It's quite beautiful,” Cassandra said, taking in the charming living room, sunlight streaming over the newly polished chestnut floors. But she remembered Caroline's lavish Singapore penthouse, and her elegant lifestyle and felt sorry for her, with the junky furniture collected, from auctions and would-be antique shops. She promised herself to speak with her husband about at least getting Caroline a decent sofa and a nice vase because an old teapot was not exactly a thing of beauty even when filled with blossoms picked from a hedgerow.

“Isn't it lovely?” Caroline asked, proudly fluffing up the flowers that had slipped down a bit in the pot. “I do love this old blue and white teapot. It's made of tin you know. It's a wonder the Victorians didn't poison themselves, pouring boiling water into it.”

“The boiling water was probably what saved them,” her father said. “You've done a lovely job, Caroline, and I particularly love the sail over the restaurant's ceiling.”

“Jim did that,” Caroline said, even more proudly. “He and Georgki. They worked on the barn with me. They're my friends,” she added. Then she left them in Issy's room to freshen up and went back to the kitchen to wait.

Issy was getting changed in the downstairs guest bathroom, meant for the restaurant. She'd expected crumbling walls, a rickety toilet, and basic washing facilities, but this was lovely. Her mom had even put nice soap instead of that liquid stuff, small individual paper-wrapped slivers that smelled divine. She sluiced her face, patted it dry with one of the good paper hand towels, wished she had some moisturizer, maybe she would tell Mom about that … Wait a minute what was she
thinking
? Recommending things for the restaurant bathroom when she hated the very idea of it anyway.

She went through her duffel, dragged off the tee and the jeans and pulled on the red dress bought in Bordeaux, wiggling it up over her boobs so they didn't show too much, but which had the unfortunate effect of making the short skirt even shorter. She slipped on the black suede heels bought for rotten Lysander's party, decided against combing her hair because she liked the just-out-of-bed look, found the Bourjois lip gloss bought in France and gave it a swirl across her lips. She thought it was a bit purply for the red dress but now it would have to do.

She stood for a while, staring in the mirror, trying to imagine what it would feel like to have a little sister. She had always been her father's “little girl,” his “baby doll.” That was what he called her when he wasn't calling her his “heart's delight.” “Asia Evans.” Issy said the name out loud to see how it sounded. She scowled. One thing she knew for certain, her father would never have called any child of his
Asia
.

She zipped up the duffel, took one last glance in the mirror, thought she looked sufficiently grown up and woman-of-the-world to take on any woman who considered herself closer to her father than she had been, then she went to join her family who were waiting in the kitchen where everybody always waited. Nobody she knew ever sat in their sitting rooms; it was always the kitchen and she would bet it would be the same tonight.