The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (30 page)

‘I miss you too,’ she said, ‘and most of all I miss Frederick.’

‘He isn’t as fat as he was,’ Joe said.

Without thinking about it, Lucy put her arms around Joe and kissed him on the cheek. He didn’t respond – he was obviously astounded, she thought, at least that was what
she imagined. He stood stock-still as though he didn’t know what to do.

‘Yes, of course I’ll come with you,’ she said.

*

Angus Firbank’s house had not changed. Lucy had expected it to have done somehow; she couldn’t think why. He was no more welcoming than the last time they had seen him, though he took them through into the same enormous sitting room. Lucy looked for mice but could see nothing, although she wasn’t so sure of the dusty corners. She moved a little closer to Joe.

‘It’s about your father’s house. It has been left to me, because Priscilla Lee is dead,’ Joe said.

‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ Angus Firbank waved a hand like a magician about to conjure rabbits. ‘It’s a ruin in the middle of nowhere. Why would I want it?’

‘It’s very old and your family presumably has been here a long time. Did your ancestors live there?’ Lucy guessed.

‘A very long time ago, well before I was born. It’s been there for centuries. We moved on to better houses, better lives, more money. I don’t know what you’re doing here. I’ve nothing to tell you. The will is quite straightforward, and since you are Priscilla Lee’s sole heir you get it. Lucky you.’

‘He left you nothing?’ Lucy couldn’t help asking.

Angus Firbank shook his head.

‘He gave me everything of worth while he was still here. It was a very long time ago, when he suspected he was going to lose his mind. It’s better so.’

‘And you repaid him by putting him in that place?’ Lucy said.

He glared at her.

‘He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was and I couldn’t manage any more. And besides, he liked being near rivers. When he was a child he spent his summers in Durham and that was not so very different, I think. I did the best that I could.’

‘Why did he leave the place to Priscilla Lee?’ Joe said. He hadn’t spoken in a while, Lucy thought.

‘Yes, well …’ Mr Firbank shifted his stance, ‘… he had something to do with her.’

‘What was that?’ Joe said.

Angus Firbank shifted even further and walked about the room, finally coming to rest by the window though it was heavily curtained against the evening light.

‘This is a very small place, you know, and little towns like this have traditions which go back a very long way. If you step outside of what is the norm you are no longer accepted. Nothing changes here. Cissie Lee’s family ran things, they owned almost everything. They made a lot of money from lead and also from silver.’

‘Silver?’ Lucy said.

‘It’s a by-product of lead. It has to come in quantity and be worth extracting before it makes money, but there was quite a lot of it hereabouts. With the lead mining, well, up to the beginning of this century, it made some people rich. Like other industries here in the north-east, it wasn’t the local people who benefited. They got by with small farms and they worked in lead mining. There were a lot of problems about how much they were paid and it was never enough for the awful work they did.

‘Many of them went to other countries to do better – Canada and Australia. Eventually Cissie’s family went to London because they had done so well and they were proud. They went there to rise in society. They could pretend they had never seen a place as poor as this. They never came back; they didn’t even keep in touch. I don’t know what rich people in London do, waste it presumably on big houses and gewgaws for their women. There’s nothing left here now beyond the farming and the kind of respectability which people value when it’s all they have.

‘My father didn’t even leave his family respectability. He lodged, when he was a young man, with the Lees. He had no family of his own, his parents had died and he had nothing, so he stayed with them. Cissie was his child. It was never spoken of. I think it was one reason they moved away. They had a great deal of money by then, but she was the only child and it had taken another man to father her.’

There was a long silence during which Lucy didn’t want to look at Joe.

‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ Joe said.

‘It was none of your damned business. How could it be?’

‘If it’s none of my damned business then why did she leave the place to me?’

‘I like to distance myself from such dreadful doings. A long time ago I decided I wanted nothing more to do with him or her.’

‘How did you know about it?’ Joe said.

‘Everybody knew. She looked like him. It was unmistakable. That was why they moved away – they had had everything but a child – so when she was little they left and changed
their names. He didn’t see her again until she came back here, but she had known him long enough when she was a child to call him Uncle George.’

‘So, she came back to her father?’ Lucy said.

‘She didn’t know, as far as I’m aware, but he gave her the tower house for her home.’

‘Did your mother know?’

‘Silence is golden in places like this and if she did know she was wise enough not to speak of it.’

Joe got to his feet. ‘Is the house far?’

‘On the old road over the moor where the lead used to be carried from here to Allendale. The family wintered up here and summered by the river in Durham.’

*

Up on the moors it was bitterly cold. Joe banged the car across the ruts and the up and down and twisting turns of the road. When they got to what looked like some kind of settlement Joe stopped the car. Lucy tried to get out and the wind blew her almost off her feet. But she could see the winter tower. It was tall and grey and impressive, typical of the border lands. A fortress more than a home. It was bigger than the tower house in Durham and it stood there so proudly as though it were shielding people from harm, from marauders, those who would steal cattle and women. This was somewhere to be safe.

The animals lived downstairs, the people upstairs, and once you had drawn in the ladder nobody could get up there. The problem was you had no idea how long they would stay and they had no idea of your food and water supplies. It was a guessing game, a matter of survival and cunning.

The building had probably been there for seven hundred years, Lucy thought, as so many buildings like this had been. A lot of the dwellings around here were as old as Durham cathedral.

Joe wandered around like somebody at the fair on the town moor.

The windows were gone, the door was ajar and inside as she followed him every vestige of comfort was absent. The wind howled past her ears.

‘Cosy,’ Joe said. She came to him and slipped her hand through his arm in reassurance, but she liked it as she looked up and thought how safe it might have been when marauders came screaming across the land. She could almost hear and see and taste the fear of the times, the short lives most people lived. Things hadn’t changed so very much, but the house was still here. The stones stood.

They went back outside. The moors had begun to take over the garden, but the stone walls held. Beside the house there were a few tall straggly trees and a tiny church which had lost its roof and most of its walls. What was left inside were two small rooms, their fireplaces, their outer walls and a lot of weeds which had grown thickly once the roof had gone. Beyond was a small graveyard. There were half a dozen graves. Several of the stones had fallen over but it was not difficult to make out the writing on one of the graves. It was the only one which was fairly new. It read: ‘
Margaret (Priscilla) Hardy. At rest
.’

Joe stood motionless for a long time while the wind howled around them. Lucy waited. She was glad now that
she had gone with him; she wouldn’t have wanted him to find his mother’s grave by himself.

‘All the time she was right here. Mr Firbank must have had her buried here and his son must have known, surely,’ Joe said.

‘He didn’t remember – and his son was too ashamed of what his father had done.’

‘This means that George Firbank was my grandfather.’

‘Yes, and you got to meet him and spend time with him,’ Lucy said.

‘I wish I had known my mother better.’ He choked then, and for the first time Lucy took a man willingly into her arms and held him there while Joe buried his face against her neck.

*

Joe tried not to hate his father, but his mind was full of the lies he had told him and the impact they had had on everything. They motored back to Newcastle and he went on to Durham and worked as though he would die without it. But the more he tried not to think about it the worse it got and he began to dream about his father every night. The dream was different every time. His father was moving away or out of sight, his mother came back and his father shouted at her and told her that he didn’t want her and she cried. Joe could see her clearly perhaps for the first time. He thought her image had been lost to him and so he wished for more – it felt like all that he had left of a family.

How could his father have treated his mother so badly that she ran away? She and Angela had so much in common to
his mind and he could not think of himself as being like his father, inadequate and stupid. The next letter was worse.

In the weeks that followed, Joe made several visits to his mother’s grave. He liked the idea of her being there, although he could not imagine it. Why had she left him the house? He comforted himself. She had wanted him to be there for some reason, or for more than one reason. She had brought him to Durham, brought him to her after she died. Had she thought there was a connection between life and death which could be made between them? If so, it had been made, and that pleased him. Somehow he could feel her there, feel that she had loved him, that she had not lightly abandoned him. She had loved him because of or in spite of his father.

He stood over her grave in a bitterly cold east wind which cut into his face and howled around his body. He thought she had loved it here, not just on the riverside but up on the tops where the curlews cried and the lapwings dipped and swooped to stop people from getting anywhere near their nests. It was as wild as she had been, and he loved it and he
loved her for leaving him the tower houses and her heritage. This was it, twofold, this has been who she was as well as a big part of who he was. He was glad. He had gained so much from coming north even though he hadn’t wanted to. This was her legacy.

He wished that she had revealed herself to him while she was still alive. He didn’t understand why she had not – he had longed for his mother almost every day since he had been a small child – but he thought that perhaps she reasoned she would have destroyed the relationship he had with his father, and that had been as precious to him as his love for Angela. His mother had withheld herself from him, but not her love. He felt that here now. His mother had loved him very much.

He knew now that he had adored his father. The loss grieved him every day and yet it had not been an easy thing. He thought that where love was there was always discord and a desperate longing to be with that person when they were a parent and yet away. Instinct guided the young. His father knew that he had not been the future. For his father the loss of Angela had been the breaking point. She was meant to be his future and if she had been his father would have been happy to see them together. That was why he had longed for Joe to be at home, perhaps even to know that there might be a grandchild.

Joe’s loss had broken his father, Joe could see that now, but his father too was somehow to blame because his mother had fled. She must have been too afraid all those years of what might happen if she had made herself known to the world.

He didn’t know what to do with this place. Nobody would buy it, a ruin in the middle of nowhere, but the more time he spent there the less he wanted to sell it anyway. He didn’t need to get rid of this place – he would have tried to hold it to him whatever had happened. He felt that his mother wanted him there in the tower houses, wanted him to make them home, to use them perhaps, to spend winters in Durham and summers here. He wasn’t going to, her dream was not his, but he was glad that she had cared, that she had hoped and planned and made room for him even when she died.