The Four of Us (39 page)

It had only been then, whilst waiting for the results, that she had begun to wonder if she might be suffering from something a little more serious than general anaemia.

‘Your platelet count is less than twenty,' he had said to her gravely, ‘and your reticulocyte count is less than twenty-five.'

‘Which means …?'

‘Which means that they are severely abnormal. The platelet count should have been in the range of a hundred and fifty to four hundred, the reticulocyte count between fifty and a hundred and fifty. I want you to come into hospital so that further blood samples can be taken and analysed and so that I can give you a transfusion of red blood cells immediately.'

There had been endless other blood tests, further bone marrow tests, further transfusions.

The end result had been the definite diagnosis of bone marrow failure and the pathology results that had led to the prognosis she had just been given.

As she walked into Boulevard du Bois le Prêtre, the words ‘Without a successful transplant you have a year, Miss Grant. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less'hammered in her ears.

It was certainly a prognosis that concentrated the mind.

Once she had made sure she was on every possible donor list, she would put her affairs in order. If a year, give or take a little, was all that was left to her, then there were places she wanted to go and people she wanted to see. Dominique could take over the escort agency. She wasn't going to spend her last days putting consenting adults in touch with one another. Those days, though challenging and, for the most part, fun, were over.

Wryly, she reflected that they had also been profitable, for what she had created was a management consultant's dream – a business with a steady supply of highly motivated labour, extreme mobility, low overheads due to focused use of laptops and mobile phones, eager customers and outrageously high profits.

It hadn't been the way she'd thought, when she was young, that she would spend her life, but it had been surprisingly agreeable. She'd always been her own boss. She'd liked almost every girl she'd agreed to manage. And she'd enjoyed much more matching the right girl to the right client than she had having her own list of clients.

In retrospect it surprised her that, for a short time, she'd once done escort work herself, because sex was very low on her list of priorities. It had happened, though, during a period of time when she hadn't cared about anything. When, after she‘d lost her one and only dream of founding a new dynasty at Cedar Court, nothing had mattered at all.

And now she had reached the one person her thoughts always returned to.

Francis.

Though his father had never been able to understand why he hadn't returned to England after he had ceased being Kiki's manager and live-in lover, she had always believed it was because he was ashamed – ashamed of the drug addict he had become and ashamed of his behaviour towards her. Unable to face either her or his father, he had simply slid away, losing himself in the vastness of America.

And so she had never been able to tell him that she was sorry.

‘
Tiens!
Dominique had erupted explosively when she had once voiced this regret. ‘Why should you feel sorry for anything,
chérie
? You didn't walk out on him on your wedding day. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.'

‘I was the one who wanted us to marry,' she had said. ‘It wasn't Francis's idea. It was mine – and my mother's and his father's.'

With the clarity of maturity she could see now that when it had come to the question of their wedding Francis had simply done what he'd always done. He'd been pleasantly agreeable and let himself be swept along in the wake of people more forceful than himself. And then had come Kiki and his experience of managing her and being part of the pop world – and he'd loved every minute of it. Exciting, glamorous and fast, it had been his spiritual home. He hadn't wanted to abandon it. When he‘d done so in order that they could hit the hippie trail to India, it had only been because she had insisted he do so.

And the minute they'd returned, even if Kiki hadn't been desperate that he become her manager again, he would have been itching to pitch himself once more into her racy, chaotic lifestyle.

He'd never been interested in Cedar Court. It's history – and their joint family history – had never meant anything to him. It was another of the reasons he'd been happy to go through his teens accepting that they'd marry when she was twenty-one. He knew she'd take the burden of Cedar Court from his shoulders and that his father would happily accept her doing so. And Cedar Court was another of the reasons he'd never returned to England. He hadn't wanted the bother of it – and so he'd simply walked away from it.

Someone bumped into her, jarring her from her thoughts, and with a startled shock she realized she was in the Place des Abbesses, in Montmartre. She wondered how long she had been walking and hadn't a clue. She didn't feel tired, though, and – miracle of miracles – she had none of the bone pain that was usually so persistent.

Ignoring the Art Nouveau decorated entrance to the Metro, she took the steps at the right of the church of St-Jean l'Evangéliste, wondering, now that she'd been forced to face the fact that she wasn't immortal, what her life had all been about. One thing she knew with certainty was that it had never had a spiritual dimension. Even now, coming to terms with the fact that it might soon be over, she had no impulse to enter St-Jean l'Evangéliste.

She continued to the end of the street and turned right into Rue Ravignon, reflecting on the sum of her existence.

There had been her youth. There had been Bickley High and Primmie, Artemis and Kiki. With difficulty, she mentally transported herself to the days before her violent rift with Kiki; to the days when she had been just as close to Kiki as she had been to Primmie and Artemis. They had been good days. They had been the best days of her life. Primmie's voice saying ‘It will always be the four of us, won't it? We'll be friends for ever and ever, won't we?' rang in her ears as clearly as if Primmie were standing beside her.

She closed her eyes, fighting back a long-delayed wave of fatigue and an almost overwhelming yearning for the past. She should have kept in touch with Primmie and Artemis. Cutting Kiki from her life with surgical precision had been no reason to fight shy of remaining in touch with Primmie and Artemis. The few short months when she had been an escort girl would have shocked them both, but would have been the kind of shock they would have got over.

Uncaring that she was walking further away from her home, she continued up the hill towards a small public garden.

Her girlhood friendships had been some of the most precious things in her life – and the others had been her relationship with Francis and her passion for Cedar Court.

She crossed the green oasis of the garden, no longer walking aimlessly. On the crown of the hill was the Auberge de la Bonne Franquette and, with her fragile resources of energy fast deserting her, it was as far as she intended going. From there she would telephone for a taxi to take her home and, once home, she would telephone her uncle. She was his main beneficiary and he needed to be told that she was unlikely to outlive him.

As for the future left to her, she would leave Paris and return to England.

And she would stay at Cedar Court.

She would stay at Cedar Court for as long as her health permitted her to do so. She would also get in touch with Artemis – that is she would if Artemis was still at the same address or in the phone book.

She stepped into the cool interior of the restaurant feeling extremely purposeful for a woman who, an hour or so ago, had been poleaxed by shattering news. Unlikely as it seemed, she had discovered things to look forward to.

There was Cedar Court.

There was the possibility of a reunion with Artemis.

And, in Cornwall, there was Primmie.

She seated herself at a small corner table, a knot of anticipation beginning to coil deep in the pit of her stomach.

‘A glass of Chablis, please,' she said to the waiter, reflecting on how delighted Primmie would be to see her.

Incredibly, she realized she was smiling.

Primmie would be more than delighted to see her.

Dearest darling Primmie would be over the moon.

As Primmie stepped inside her front door she put down her basket of freshly gathered mushrooms and turned her attention to the letter, addressed to Mrs Amelia Surtees, she'd picked up from her post box. When she'd first moved into Ruthven, there had been a steady stream of letters for Amelia. Most of them had been letters from organizations Amelia had supported, such as the RHS and RSPB. Each time she had written back, informing the sender that Amelia had died and, over the last month or so, the stream had reduced to a trickle.

She seated herself at the kitchen table and opened the envelope. The heading on the note-paper was that of the Claybourne Children's Home, Nottingham. Assuming it was yet another of the many charities her aunt had supported, Primmie smoothed it out and began reading.

Dear Mrs Surtees,

This is to confirm that five of our ten-year-olds, three boys and two girls, will be arriving with you on Saturday the 13th of September, as arranged after last year's most successful stay at Ruthven, to spend a fortnight with you. Miss Rose Hudson, a young care-worker at Claybourne, will accompany the children. As always, our many thanks for giving our children the opportunity to experience a week of country living, by the sea.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur Bottomly, Superintendent.

Primmie sucked in her breath, blinked and read the letter again. She hadn't been dreaming. The Claybourne Children's Home superintendent really was about to send five children to her for a fortnight's holiday. Her first instinct was to telephone the number on the letter heading to tell him that he couldn't possibly do so, to explain to him that Amelia had died five months ago and that, as she hadn't known about this long-standing arrangement, she'd been unable to cancel it earlier.

She pushed her chair away from the table and walked into the hall, where her telephone sat on a small black lacquered table. And hesitated. The 13th of September was only ten days away. Would the superintendent be able to arrange an alternative stay near the seaside for the children? She remembered how excited she had always been as a child before yearly holidays to Whitstable or Broadstairs. If their holiday were cancelled, the children would be devastated.

She picked up the phone, and instead of dialling the superintendent's number she dialled Matt's.

‘Did you know about this?' she was saying moments later after reading the letter to him.

‘I knew about the Claybourne Children's Home arrangement, but I understood Amelia's solicitors had cancelled it along with all the other holiday arrangements they'd cancelled.'

‘What other holiday arrangements?' she asked, exasperation rising. ‘How many children was Amelia in the habit of providing holidays for? And why didn't you ever tell me about them? That two of the bedrooms were fitted out with bunk beds as well as a single bed has been puzzling me ever since I arrived. Why didn't you explain to me?'

‘Because you never asked,' he said reasonably.

She gave a sigh of capitulation. ‘OK. Pax. But what am I to do, Matt? The children are due here in ten days'time and I don't want to cancel what is most likely going to be their only holiday, but I don't know what will be expected of me. What did Amelia do for them? There's no entertainment nearby and …'

‘You're flapping, Primmie.' It seemed to fascinate him. ‘I've never known you to flap before. Not even when the hens went missing. If the children who are due to arrive are anything like the children that have been before, the only entertainment they'll need is that of the novelty of staying on a smallholding. They'll love the hens – and so it's a good job we retrieved them all. They'll love feeding them and collecting the eggs and generally running wild in the orchard and down at the cove, collecting shells and paddling in rock pools and that sort of thing.'

‘Yes,' she said slowly, understanding all too well what bliss Ruthven would be for city children and coming to a decision. ‘And I'm not panicking any longer, Matt. I'm going to honour the arrangement.'

‘Good.'

Though she couldn't see him, she knew he was smiling.

The next morning he had taken her to the local cattle market in order that she could do something she'd been promising herself she would do for a long time. Buy a cow.

Looking and feeling like a true countrywoman in a waxed sleeveless jacket over an open-necked blouse, her trousers tucked into green Wellingtons, she had, with his help, bought a small, docile-looking Jersey.

When she'd christened her Maybelline, Matt had cracked with laughter, but she hadn't cared. Maybelline had long-lashed gold-flecked liquid brown eyes, and she'd told him that an animal so pretty deserved a pretty name.

If not quite as much a part of her day-to-day life as Matt, Hugo Arnott, too, had become a good friend.

‘I moved here to escape the rat race, Primmie dearest,' he'd said to her in his attractive American drawl when, shortly after Matt had introduced him to her, she asked what had brought him from New York to a tiny fishing village in Cornwall. ‘I was fifty-six, master of my own fate and bored with rustling and hustling. You might call this early retirement. It's certainly a novelty – and until the novelty wears off, here I shall stay.'

Peggy Wainwright, Calleloe's postmistress, had also become, if not a close friend, then a friendly acquaintance, as had Peggy's sister, who was married to a farmer over near Tregidden, Peggy's sister-in-law, who ran a tea shop in nearby Coverack, and John Cowles, the local vicar.