It wasn’t until Monday that Mrs. Brown found out my father had gone—and that was only because I told Daniel at school. All weekend my mom had sat in her chair, getting up only to go to the bathroom. She never even went to bed. I brought her laboriously prepared jam sandwiches, which she hardly touched, and cups of cold tea, because I wasn’t allowed to use the kettle. The fire stayed unlit, but the warmth of the sun kept our cottage warm, and I didn’t bother to wash, so there was no need for hot water. On Sunday I almost set off to walk to Homewood, but my mom looked so vacant that I was afraid she might do whatever it was that my grandma had done with the length of rope.
I tried to read Aunt Violet’s letter, but there were only a few words I could understand, so I just sat and imagined how she might appear and waited for Monday and school and the comfort of being able to share all my fears with Daniel.
Eventually, Mrs. Brown arrived at our cottage, and when I told her about my dad taking the money from the blue pot, her whole face turned red.
“Come on, Mary,” she told my mother. “You are staying at Homewood until that sister of yours arrives on Friday.” I hadn’t known she’d be here so soon and my heart started to beat faster with excitement.
Daniel told me that he had overheard his parents talking about my mom and me. It seemed they were afraid that if she became too ill to take care of me properly, then “they” might make me go and live in a home. I asked him who “they” were, and he said he couldn’t remember what his mother and father had called them, but it started with an A. Even curled up in my lovely warm soft bed at Homewood, I couldn’t get away from the fear that washed over me in waves when I thought about it. But that all stopped, of course, when my aunt Violet arrived, because, as Mrs. Brown said, she was family, so she had every right to look after me and no one could take me away from her.
“But I want to stay here with you,” I pleaded. Mrs. Brown held me close, pressing her cheek against my hair so that I felt very safe and very happy.
“I only wish you could,” she told me. “And maybe one day you will, but it’s up to the authorities to decide where children live.”
Authorities. That was the word for “them” that Daniel couldn’t remember.
My mom seemed to get much better in the three days we stayed at Homewood. Mrs. Brown insisted that she eat her meals, and in the evenings she would encourage her out of her shell by talking to her all the time. At first my mom just ignored her, but by Wednesday she started to talk back. Just little things—a comment about something on TV, or once even a question about my dad. Mrs. Brown’s jaw set in a stern line when my dad’s name was mentioned and her soft brown eyes hardened. She said that we were all better off without him and we wouldn’t fret about the debts until my aunt arrived on Friday.
“Who knows,” she told Mr. Brown with a lift of her eyebrows. “Maybe Mary’s sister will be the bearer of good news.”
Daniel and I climbed into our tree house on Thursday evening after supper to talk about Violet Gordon.
“When you get home from school tomorrow, she will be at your house,” he said.
I nodded nervously, unsure whether to be afraid or excited.
“And don’t worry,” he told me. “If she’s horrid, you can come back and live here with us and maybe she can just look after your mom.”
It was a dream that wasn’t to be, but the reality was not so bad—as I found when I raced home from school the following afternoon.
Our school was an old gray stone building situated right on the edge of the village, only two minutes from the cottage where I lived. When we got out at three-thirty, Daniel and I would cover the short distance to my house on foot. Mrs. Brown, in the meantime, planned to drive my mom back home at lunchtime and make sure everything was tidy before Violet Gordon arrived on the two o’clock train. She even persuaded Mr. Brown to help her paint the living room, and had already washed all the curtains so that the cottage would look nice and fresh for our visitor.
The end of school bell couldn’t arrive soon enough for me, and we ran down the lane, Daniel and I, our feet pounding on the dusty, rutted road in perfect timing. He had to shorten his stride to keep pace with me and I stretched my legs so that our footsteps landed together, until our cottage sprang into view and mine began to falter. I hung back then and fell to a walk, suddenly unsure, but Daniel turned to me with one of those smiles that seemed to take over his whole face.
“Come on, Luce,” he urged. “It’ll be all right. Let’s go and see what she looks like.”
She looked just like her writing, straight and sure, with the same steely determination in her pale blue eyes that had been apparent in the firm delivery of those pen strokes.
She wore trousers and very shiny sensible shoes. Her graying hair was cropped close, like a cap upon her head, and although at first glance she seemed small against the towering height of Mrs. Brown, she stood so erect that she appeared to be taller than she was.
“Hello, Lucy,” she said with a smile that didn’t quite fit her face—in fact, I thought that she didn’t really seem used to smiling at all.
“Hello, Aunt Violet,” I replied, sniffing the air for the scent I expected. “You don’t smell like your name.”
“Terrible name,” she barked. “Call me V. Everyone does.”
She gazed at me with gimlet eyes, and yet behind her fierce exterior, I noticed something else, something hidden deep down, and right from that first moment we settled into a kind of unspoken comradeship.
I don’t think anyone could ever really call my aunt a friend, for she would never let enough of herself out to share a confidence, but we learned to understand each other as the summer days slipped by. As long as I stuck to her rigid rules, she would leave me to my own devices. Supper was at five-thirty sharp, bed at eight. My shoes must always be kept shiny, I had to do my share of the housework and nothing was ever to be left on my plate. For that, I was allowed to go where I pleased, and I could disappear for hours at a time without her even asking where I’d been.
She never told us where she was from—Daniel always said that she was running away from something, but if it was true, we never knew it. She just took over the household, cleared the bills and tried to sort out my mother.
Mrs. Brown and she muddled along together, biting their tongues as often as not to save an argument. No two women could have had less in common, with the exception, of course, of my mother, whose sorry plight they both took to heart. The trouble was that my aunt V was of the opinion that discipline was the key to her recovery and Mrs. Brown believed that care and understanding were what my mom needed.
At the end of the day it was aunt V who had most to do with her, so discipline, it seemed, won. Not that it made much difference to my mom. She had good spells and bad. Sometimes I could talk to her, sometimes she retreated into her own world and occasionally she went quite crazy.
Aunt V remained undaunted no matter what. She just kept up with her rigid rules and talked to no one. Daniel said that she was a lonely person, but I didn’t agree. She had her own self for company, and I think that was enough—although she did develop a huge affection for Fudge, who was the only creature to break her rules and get away with it. He sat on the couch. He ran into the kitchen with muddy paws. He stole food from Cat, a scruffy tabby who had arrived at our back door one morning and refused to go away. All Aunt V did was shake her head, smile indulgently and clear up his mess.
All in all, for the next few years my life bordered on normality. I learned to ride Chocolate almost as well as Daniel did. He got another horse, a lovely bay three-year-old with the unlikely name of Timeout. He was totally hyper and never took any time out at all, so we called him Timmy for short.
We rode for hours, Daniel and I, when the farm chores allowed him, and it was as we set off along the lane from Homewood one misty autumn day that we met Aunt V driving the small elderly Ford car she had recently bought for herself. When she saw us, she skidded to a halt, wound down the window and leaned out.
“Lucy!” she called. “Have you seen your mother?”
Her voice was tense, and I could tell by the uncharacteristic flush on her round face that something was very wrong. Normally nothing rattled Aunt V.
“What’s up?” I yelled back urging Chocolate toward the car.
“I can’t find Mary,” she cried. “She was in a funny way all morning. After lunch I nipped to the shop for half an hour, and when I got back, she was gone.”
“Don’t worry,” cut in Daniel from right behind me. “We’ll have a ride around to look for her. She’s probably just gone for a walk or something.”
Timmy sidled as Aunt V set off again with her foot flat down on the accelerator, and for a moment, Daniel’s attention was taken by trying to settle him. I just sat stock-still on my dumpy little mount, memories of an unfinished story about my gran once again racing through my mind.
Daniel raised his eyebrows at me and tilted his head to one side in despair.
“Now, don’t you go letting your imagination run away with you,” he admonished, but when his warm brown eyes caught mine, I could see such complete understanding in them that I felt suddenly warm and safe.
“We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”
His voice was so firm and he was so confident that, as always, I believed him. And as usual he was right.
We took the track behind our cottage that led toward the fell, and within five minutes of jogging across the tufty grass, we saw something moving in the mist way ahead. I urged Chocolate into a canter, afraid that the figure would disappear again, into the opaque silence that surrounded us. As we got closer, I realized that it really was my mom, out here alone on the hill, wearing just a thin, cotton, navy-blue dress. She was standing quite still, staring into the mist with a wild look in her gray eyes. Her hair, dampened by the moisture that hung in the air, curled around her flushed face, and for a fleeting moment I saw her as she must have been years ago. The attractive young creature who had caught my father’s wandering eye. The sweet, gentle girl he had taken and destroyed.
Tears filled my eyes. I leaped down from Chocolate, handed the reins to Daniel and walked toward her, hand outstretched, unexpectedly feeling that I was the adult and she the child.
“Okay, Mom?” I murmured. She smiled at me with that vacant smile that told me she was somewhere else.
“I can’t find Mother,” she whispered in a thin cracked voice. “I don’t know where she’s gone. Do you know where she is, Violet?”
“It’s Lucy, Mom,” I told her gently. “Come on, now. She’s likely at home. Let’s go and find her.”
That was when my mom went back into hospital, just for a while, and I think it was then that I left my childhood behind. As I led her down the fell by the hand, I realized that my whole life had shifted to a different level, one that included responsibility and care and the trappings of a maturity that I didn’t feel ready for.
We sat and talked that night, Daniel and I, really talked, about my mom and our lives and my handsome, charming, selfish father. I told Daniel about the vow I had made—that when things went wrong for me, I would never just fall apart and turn myself inside out as my mom had done.
“I’ll stand and fight and never give in,” I told him, and he smiled that funny smile of his.
“Well, let’s hope you never have to, Luce,” he said.
I hoped so, too, but deep inside me something quivered, and an icy premonition shivered down my spine.
We decided then that I should pluck up the courage to talk to Aunt V about my gran. Daniel said that I had a right to know, and I suppose that at fourteen, I was old enough to understand, but it was some time before the right moment came along.
We were sitting in the living room after supper one autumn night, just before my mom got home from the hospital. The wind moaned outside our cottage, and fallen leaves swirled against the window as the moan turned into a howl. When Aunt V leaned forward to stoke the already crackling fire, I found my moment.
“Will you tell me about my gran?”
She froze, poker held in front of her, and stared into the flames.
“Please, Aunt V,” I begged.
“Did your mother never say something?”
When I shook my head, she seemed surprised.
“My mom never told me much of anything,” I said. “She always seemed to have been shut off—you know, the way she is now. In her own private world.”
The mantelpiece clock ticked in the silence, and I held my breath until she started to speak.
“It wasn’t just your father who made her like that, you know,” she began, with a faraway look in her eyes. “There were other things as well. Your granddad, for one. He has as much to answer for. And maybe even our mother, although perhaps she was just as much a victim as Mary.”
Aunt V turned to look at me with an unfathomable expression in her eyes, and as the firelight flickered on her face, I caught a glimpse of the softness that she kept so well hidden.
“Your gran was called Lucy, too. That is who you are named after. She was sweet and pretty, and ill-equipped to deal with the harsh nature of your grandfather, Tom. He treated us all as though we were in the barracks and he was a general in his own little army. He had to leave the forces because of an injury, and I think he took his bitterness out on your gran. She was much like Mary, you see, gentle and vulnerable.
“Being the older one, I was always expected to be sensible and strong, and I used to long for her to be strong, too. If only she had stood up to him, just once, I’m sure she would have had a better life. You must always stand up to a bully. Remember that, Lucy. Never let words hurt you. Anyway…”
She paused and sighed, and a knot tightened in my stomach.
“Eventually it all became too much, and she just gave in. We lived in Yorkshire, in a lovely mellow sandstone house with a barn attached. It was in the barn that I found her.
“Your grandfather had been on at her all day—nothing was ever done well enough for him. I was fifteen at the time, and your mother was just a little girl. Five, she must have been. Five years old. That’s all she was…”
Her mind seemed to wander then, as if she was unwilling to face what had happened next, and I took hold of her arm and waited impatiently. At last she pulled in a deep breath and went on.
“I yelled at him and called him a bully, then I ran out of the house. I just had to get away, you see. But I should have stayed…If only I had stayed….”
Her head fell forward into her hands and she spoke through her fingers in a broken, muffled voice.
“She was just hanging there. I’ll never forget the creaking sound of the rope, and her face was…I should have been able to do something.”
The breath froze in my throat and a horror flooded through me, leaving my limbs weak and trembling, as I watched my impenetrable aunt break down into someone totally human. I cried, too. For my poor dead gran, for my mom and for that teenage girl whose life was changed by the winds of tide.
After a while we collected ourselves. Aunt V wiped her eyes and gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Silly old fool,” she said gruffly. “It was all a long time ago and it should be left in the past, where it belongs.”
Her face assumed a closed look then, but I was not to be put off so easily.
“So you ran away?” I prompted.
She gazed at me vaguely for a moment, then she let out a long sigh and splayed her hands.
“Not right then. But I always blamed him, and ultimately, after another terrible row, I left and joined the army. Silly, really, isn’t it, to go and do the same thing he did, when I hated him so? Perhaps there is more of him in me than I like to believe. I suppose you can’t get away from blood after all.”
She jumped up and started poking the fire again, with such aggression that sparks flashed into the room and yellow flames curled up the chimney.
“I should have stayed for your mom,” she muttered. And as she pushed the poker firmly back into its holder, I got the impression that she was doing exactly the same thing with the emotions she had temporarily released—pushing them back into their hiding place.
“Right,” she announced with a set smile. “Now, how about a nice cup of tea.”
That was the first and only time I ever really saw Aunt V break down. Even years later, when heartbreak came to haunt both our lives, she maintained her staunch strength. But perhaps she needed to assuage the guilt she felt over my mom by being there for me.
“So come on. What did she say?”
We were sitting in our old tree house, Daniel and I. All morning I had longed to tell him what Aunt V had said last night, but first he had had to finish the milking and then the cows had had to go out. I did that while he washed out the parlor. While we followed their laborious progress down the lane to the far meadow, I pondered my gran and my mom and how things might have been. I found myself wondering what made you into the person you were. If my gran hadn’t killed herself, would my mom have been different? Would she have stayed well and whole and happy, and have been much more well-equipped to deal with my handsome selfish father? Was it her illness that made her weak, or was it her weak nature that had made her ill? I had such a horror of following in her footsteps that I longed to know the answer. If there was an answer to be had.
The clumsy black-and-white cows had just looked at me with huge soulful eyes as I’d shooed them through the gate, shut it firmly and walked quickly down the lane in the morning sunshine, eager to share with Daniel all the confusion in my heart.
It had been ages since we had climbed up into the tree house, so long in fact that he could hardly fit his lanky six-foot frame through the narrow entrance anymore. He must have been one of the tallest seventeen-year-olds that I had ever met.
“Are you sure that this is a good idea?” he’d groaned as he’d struggled to get in.
But I had just laughed at his efforts and told him to try harder.
“This is where we always used to talk and I need to talk to you now,” I told him firmly. So he’d pulled a funny face and wriggled up into the tiny space, while poor old Fudge, graying around the muzzle now and too fat to run very far, but still Daniel’s loyal comrade after eight years, sat on the grass below, staring up at us mournfully and whining to be lifted up.
“So come on,” he urged anew. “I’ve managed to get up here. Now tell me what she said.”
For a moment I looked at him, musing on all those other times we’d climbed up here to share a secret or to tell a tale. His fair hair had since darkened into a reddish brown and his features seemed to have grown too big for his face, but his warm brown eyes still shone with kindness and honesty.
“Do you realize,” I told him with a smile, “that you haven’t changed at all since I first met you?”
He grimaced and tilted his head to one side, giving me the lopsided grin I loved so much.
“I’m only about five sizes bigger. Now, out with it.”
And so I told him, everything that my aunt had told me, and when I’d finished, we just sat for a while, saying nothing, until I broke the silence.
“Do you think it’s the things that happen to us that make us into the kind of people we are, Daniel?” I asked him. He frowned and shrugged, trying to uncurl his legs from beneath him.
“I don’t think so,” he eventually responded. “It’s not the things that happen to you that make you into the person you are. It’s the way you deal with them. I mean, things go wrong in everyone’s lives, don’t they? You have to face up to them and deal with whatever they are, I suppose.”
“I’ll never be like my mom,” I told him, with all the passion that the subject brought out in me.
“Well, if something goes wrong in your life, I’ll be there to help you deal with it, Luce,” he told me.
My smile spread right through my body. It was easy to be strong with Daniel Brown to help me.
“Promise?” I asked him.
“Promise,” he replied.