AT BROCKSCOMBE, IN his sitting-room on the first floor, Francis sits in his high wing-backed chair looking out across the garden and the woods to the valleys and the hills beyond. As a child this was his favourite room, his parents’ bedroom, and later when he inherited the house he’d made it his study. Liz complained, of course – she wanted it for her own bedroom – but he stayed firm. After all, one spent so little time in a bedroom. It was to Brockscombe and to this room he returned to renew his energy and soothe his spirit.
Back then Brockscombe was full of life: Liz organizing dinner parties and garden parties, the two boys, barely eleven months between them, growing up and filling the place with their friends. Sometimes he thinks he can still hear them as he sits in his chair, dreaming: Liz calling up to him as she goes out into the garden; the boys shouting on the stairs. As he watches from the two tall sash windows facing south and east he sees them playing on the lawn, racing on their bicycles round the carriage drive, running into the woods with the dogs at their heels. Always arguing, always fighting, they were in constant rivalry.
‘They don’t see enough of you,’ Liz would say. ‘They need a strong male influence.’
He did his best: told them off, clipped their ears, stopped their pocket money, but they were tough little fellows. Secretly he admired the spirit that drove them onwards: chips off the old block. They looked like Liz. Small, wiry, ginger-haired, they buzzed like gnats around him; shrill, argumentative, exhausting. It was a relief when they went off to school. Even Liz admitted that she enjoyed the peace and quiet, though she missed them, of course. Still, there were exeats, half-terms, holidays. Their friends came to stay; they grew up. Roger went to Cambridge and joined the Foreign Office, Sebastian took a short-term army commission and afterwards went into banking. Now, Roger is in Moscow and Sebastian is in Boston – and Liz is dead.
Francis leans forward in his chair. He can see Rob working at the edge of the trees, clearing out dead wood. Someone is helping him, a tall figure stooping to pick up the rotten branches, loading them into a wheelbarrow. It is Maxie. Francis fetches a deep sigh. His illegitimate son looks nothing like him, though he is tall and rangy: he is like his mother.
Maxie is his first-born and he likes to have him near after all the years of separation, though very few people – not even Maxie himself – know that he is Francis’ son. When he was a young MP, back in the fifties, it would have been the end of his career if it were known that he had a mistress. Yet how could he have resisted Nell? And how cruel of fate that he should fall in love with her only weeks after marrying the eminently suitable, practical Liz.
As he sits quietly the distant scene fades and he remembers how he first met Nell at his friends’ house in Exeter. She’d recently been employed as nanny to look after their new baby and she appeared in the drawing-room that afternoon just as they were finishing tea. Sixty years on, Francis smiles involuntarily at the memory of his first sight of Nell: her pink cheeks, bright eyes, brown-gold hair. She looked so neat and sweet in her Norland uniform; so delectable and desirable. He was nearly twenty-seven. She was nineteen.
His hosts invited her to join them. Nell was more than just their nanny: their families were old friends. Her father, an army officer, had been killed in the war, her mother managing on a widow’s pension in a small flat near the cathedral. Nell was slightly shy but very amusing about the baby, and, when she looked at him, Francis felt all sorts of odd sensations that he’d never experienced with Liz.
It began with a few casual meetings at the house in Princesshay, always chaperoned by the friends and sometimes even the baby. Then he ‘happened’ to run into her on her day off, in one of her favourite cafés that she’d mentioned. They had lunch together. It happened several times: they had lunch or tea, and fell deeper and more dangerously in love. One glorious summer afternoon he took her for a little run in the car and they finished up in the flat he kept in the constituency where he stayed for a few days each week. Even now his cold, frail limbs recall the warmth of her flesh and the joy of holding her. It became an addiction he simply couldn’t fight. He needed her.
Liz rarely came to the flat. She was too busy modernizing Brockscombe, getting to know the families who would help Francis’ political career. When he returned home to her his happiness overflowed into his life with her and she was always amused by the enthusiasm with which he took her in his arms, never aware of the guilt and the shame that lay beneath it. He went to confession, tried to end the relationship, but he was too weak: too much in love with Nell.
When Nell told him she was pregnant he was shocked, frightened, but a small part of him rejoiced. His child and Nell’s: the prospect filled him with joy. Yet the reality was bleak indeed. His political career was going from strength to strength – and what if Liz should find out? His gut curdled with fear and he seized Nell’s hands, not knowing what to say to her, his brain darting about seeking acceptable solutions. Nell saw his fear and said at once that they wouldn’t be a burden to him, she and the baby; they would manage somehow. Her mother knew, she told him, and was prepared to help her.
Staring at her as they stood together in the shadowy peaceful flat, Francis was silent with amazement. He thought of the small quiet woman he’d met once or twice and could hardly believe it.
‘She doesn’t know it’s you,’ Nell added quickly. ‘I wouldn’t tell her, though she knows that the father is a married man. We’ve talked about it, once we got over the shock, and we both want to keep the baby. She’s being amazing. I think it’s because she still misses Daddy so much. It’s giving her something to live for. There’s nothing you can do, Francis. If this gets out, you’re finished.’
He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly. He wanted everything. ‘But it’s my baby, too.’
‘I know but, my darling, we have to face the facts. We’re moving to live with a cousin of Mummy’s near Tavistock. We shall say I’m a widow and we shall manage somehow.’
‘I want to help though,’ he cried stubbornly. ‘I love you. Perhaps I should speak to Liz.’
Even as he said it he knew that he wouldn’t have the courage.
Nell was shaking her head, still holding on to him. ‘Let’s just wait for a while. Nothing should happen in a rush.’
‘But I shall still see you and the baby? I can help financially. Please, Nell.’
‘Of course you shall see the baby,’ she said gently. ‘But we must be careful. Please, Francis, you must trust me.’
And he had trusted her. She called the baby Maxim. They managed to go forward, meeting when he could manage it. He saw his boy grow from a baby into a toddler and then, when Maxie was two and a half, there was the offer of a post as a junior minister – and Liz announced that she was pregnant.
Francis leans back in his chair and groans as he remembers the feeling of being pulled in so many directions at once; of rushing between London, his constituency and Brockscombe. He barely saw Nell or Maxie for months on end and then, two years later, he had a letter from her telling him that she was getting married.
‘You’d like Bill,’ she wrote. ‘He’s first lieutenant on a frigate running out of Devonport so it’s back to the military life for me. He loves Maxie and it will be good to be properly settled. I’ll stay in touch, of course . . .’
He knew that he wouldn’t like Bill – that he hated Bill – but what could he do? And, to his shame, part of him was filled with relief. He arranged a trust for Maxie and wrote Nell a letter of congratulation. His letter, like hers, might have been from some very dear old friend but there were one or two little code words and phrases, previously agreed on, from which each might take comfort. Then Bill was posted to Singapore, the family were to go with him, and he and Nell agreed that communication should cease. It was more than forty years before he saw Nell and Maxie again.
He can see Maxie now, pushing the wheelbarrow, laughing with Rob, who walks beside him, an arm across his shoulders. Francis catches a glimpse of another figure: hidden from their sight, Tim is walking in the woods. He waved to him once but the boy didn’t respond. He stood quite still, staring up at the windows almost in alarm, as if he were seeing a ghost, and then hurried away deeper into the trees.
Francis stands up carefully, balances himself, still staring out of the window. Since his last stroke he confines himself mainly to the top floor of the house. Here he has his bedroom, bathroom, even a tiny kitchen – and this study, his sanctuary. He moves slowly to his desk and leans forward, resting on his fists, staring down at his papers. He is writing his memoirs, transferring years of notes to the computer. It is agonizingly slow but he is making progress. Francis switches on the computer, lowers himself on to his chair, opens the document and smiles wryly to himself as he reads the heading: ‘Chapter One. The Macmillan Years: “You never had it so good.”’