18

 

 

“HE DIDN’T WANT a care home,” Mary said, unlocking the front door of the semi-detached cottage with one of her many keys. “Can’t blame him, though it surely would make life easier for the rest of us. Didn’t want to come live with us, either.” She pushed open the door and stepped into the entryway, calling. “Dad? Hello?”

There was a weak shout from the end of the hallway. Mary shut the door behind them and led the way forward until they reached the solarium at the back of the house. It was crowded with furniture: a sofa, a reclining chair, a large-screened TV. The view was into a garden where the shrubs were wrapped up in burlap for the winter, as though in heavy coats. On the sofa, a whip-thin old man, shrunken into a dark green bathrobe, leaned against a mound of cushions. Gwynn had the impression he’d just taken his feet off the coffee table before they came in, but couldn’t quite pinpoint why she thought that.

“Dad,” Mary said briskly, setting aside her purse and unbuttoning her coat, “I’ve brought you a visitor.”

He had brilliant blue eyes, brighter even than the pillows against which he leaned. The eyes were huge in his bony face, like a bird’s eyes set above the sharp beak of his nose. He looked over Gwynn curiously. “Gwynneth Chelton’s niece, living up in Dove Cottage—excuse me, Gull Cottage. Never got used to the new name.” He eyed her curiously, measuring her up and down. “You’ve got her nose. And her chin. And those green eyes. But the hair’s not right.”

“Dad,” Mary remonstrated.

“Just an observation, girl,” Mr. Scott replied. He turned again to Gwynn. “She thinks I’m being rude. I think if I want to be rude at my age, I’ve earned that right.” He waved a hand toward the recliner. “Have a seat, young Gwynn. Mary tells me that’s your name as well. Hope you don’t mind me calling you by it.”

Gwynn slipped in behind the coffee table piled high with books and settled. “Not at all, Mr. Scott.” The old man did not seem to share his daughter’s cagey ways.  She must have come by her nature from her mother.

“Martin. Call me Martin. Nobody calls me by my name anymore. That’s one of the horrors of old age. They turn you into your father.”

“You are my father,” Mary shot back.

“Go fix tea, you obstreperous girl,” he ordered.

Mary glanced at Gwynn with the slightest raise of the eyebrows before disappearing back down the hallway.

“And don’t you be raising your eyebrows at me, girl,” Martin called after her. He winked at Gwynn. “Blasted girl. Always has to have the last word.” He shifted against the mounds of pillows, and a spasm crossed his face, quickly bitten back. “I’m an old man. She oughtn’t argue with me so much. But she’s the most argumentative child there ever was.” He laughed. “Got it from her old mum. That woman would argue with me until she was blue in the face, even when we both knew she was as wrong as could be. Contrary, that’s what it was.”

“You miss her,” Mary shouted from somewhere down the hall.

“And she eavesdrops. All the time. Where’d she learn that?” Martin shook his head. His hair was fine and wispy, snow-white, standing about in clouds.

“Mr. Scott—Martin—you called it Dove Cottage.”

Doves. Again.

“Oh, aye, that it used to be. Until Tommy Chelton died, and Gwynn changed the name. Took some getting used to.” He frowned, then shook his head, as though he had no idea he’d provided a vital piece of information. Though perhaps he didn’t know. Gwynn wasn’t sure, either, why it was vital, just that it was. “So what is it you want to know, then?” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You haven’t got a bit of whisky on you, have you?”

Gwynn shook her head, surprised.

“Damn.” He winked at her again and sat back. “So. Is it Tommy Chelton I hear you’re interested in?”

“Tommy Chelton,” she repeated, nodding. But she was still distracted. Dove Cottage. Doves.

Mary returned with the tea tray. She shoved the pile of books aside and slid the tray onto the table. Her face was still stern, though there was an unfamiliar quirk to the corner of her mouth.

“It’s Earl Gray,” Martin said, holding out his frail hands for his cup. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s the only kind I like anymore.” There were tiny cookies on a plate next to the tea pot, and he nodded to them. “Try those. Lemon drops. Nobody makes them like Mary—she has her mother’s secret recipe.”

“He can’t eat them,” Mary said. “Gets his blood sugar up. But if I don’t put them on a plate for a visitor, it gets his blood pressure up.”

Martin shrugged. “One way or another, it’s all going to kill me anyway.”

“He’s always saying that,” Mary said, handing Gwynn a cup, then pouring one for herself before perching on the edge of the sofa. “But he’s far too ornery to die, this one.”

“Listen to her,” Martin said, feigning shock. “Just listen to this child of my blood.” He took a sip of his tea, slurping mightily. “Now, back to business, young Gwynn. You want to know about old Tommy Chelton. Or I should say, young Tommy Chelton that was.”

“He died young, didn’t he?” Gwynn asked. “The solicitor said he thought sometime in the 1950s. That would have made my aunt a widow in her twenties, wouldn’t it have?”

“1951, it would have been.” Martin nodded, took another slurping drink of tea.

“You’re awfully sure, Dad,” Mary said suspiciously.

“Looked it up, didn’t I? After you asked me?” He snorted. “Had that battle-axe of a nurse you keep having drop around here get out my scrapbooks for me. A lot of noise she made about it, too, as though I were asking her to do something obscene, or against union regulations.” Again that sly look in Gwynn’s direction. “I finally had to pretend to a heart attack to get her to do what I asked.”

“Dad!” But Mary wasn’t as shocked as she sounded.

“1951. July of that year. Tommy was never quite right after the war, everyone said. I don’t think they quite remembered what he was like before the war, actually.” Martin gazed up at the ceiling, as though trying to read history there. “He wasn’t really a nice man. I never knew what Gwynn saw in him. Older than she was, too, by some ten years or so.”

“How long had they been married? In 1951?”

He pursed his lips and thought a moment. “Seven years? Something like that. He was home on leave, recuperating from some wound I don’t remember. They married up, and he went back to the front. Not sure where he was stationed. I think he might have been a gunner of some sort.” His blue eyes flickered to Gwynn and back. “I was only here off and on myself, anyway. I was stationed outside of London.”

Mary shook her head. “All that secrecy. The war’s been over for a few years, Dad. You can say it.” She put her tea cup in her saucer and sat back. “Bletchley Park. Dad was C and C.” There was pride in her voice, and a bit of marvel.

“All I know is that I had a bit of an eye for Gwynn myself back then,” he said, as though Mary had not spoken. “Came back on leave and found her married off, just like that.” The expression in his brilliant eyes grew mournful. “She looked terrible when she told me. As though she’d had the life squeezed out of her. Never heard her laugh again.”

Now Mary drew back, and the tea cup clattered gently against its saucer. Her face was drawing in, closing down in that look Gwynn found so familiar. The measuring face. “You never told me this, Dad.”

Martin lifted his pointed chin. “Not something you tell your daughter, is it? About your first love?” He coughed gently. “But then I turned my eyes elsewhere, and they lighted on your mother. A good woman. And there you have it.” Yet he seemed to have withdrawn momentarily, into a past where they could not follow, and at least on the part of Mary Tennant, certainly couldn’t understand. “And then there you were, my Mary, a prize worth keeping.”

For a long time no one said anything. From the corner of her eye, Gwynn watched the color wash in and out of Mary’s face. Mary sat stonily, her hands gripping her tea things. She saw Gwynn watching her, and she put her cup and saucer back on the tray on the table. Her lips were pressed together, her jaw fixed.

“Then he died,” Gwynn prodded finally. “Tommy Chelton. In the summer of 1951. You said he had a difficult war?”

Martin shrugged, and in that moment, he looked like his daughter. “As difficult as anyone else’s, I suppose—except mine, of course, because Bletchley was a relatively comfortable berth.” His mouth, too, thinned out. “A bully, Tommy was, before he joined up. All through school. Sometimes the army’s a good place for someone like that—a kind of legalized working off of aggression. But he came home, after he was mustered out, and he was worse than before. People don’t remember that part.” He sighed, his lips still tight. “You come home a war hero, and everyone forgets what you were before. Everyone forgives your behavior afterwards. And he played it, too. Oh, yes. Tommy knew how to profit from people’s sympathy.”

The bitterness in his voice was a surprise.

“He was an angry, cruel man, was Tommy Chelton. Don’t you believe anything other, young Gwynn,” Martin said. “That’s why his killing himself like that came as such a surprise to everyone.”

Gwynn caught her breath.

“He killed himself?”

The blue eyes blazed into her face.

“Hanged himself. Up in that old dovecote behind the cottage.”