of the two of them through the narrow aperture. She stood motionless, watching as Ian adjusted Karen’s woollen cap, touched her cheek, bent his head and kissed her lightly on the lips.
‘Ready, then?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m ready.’ She picked up her shoulder-bag, a fashionable affair of cream-coloured macramé, pulled on a pair of woollen gloves. She suddenly paused and exclaimed, ‘Oh–I was forgetting. The theatre scrapbook. I borrowed it from one of the students. I promised faithfully I’d return it today. It’s up in my room. I’ll run up and get it, I won’t be a moment.’
Behind the kitchen door Christine remained silent and motionless, studying the expression on her husband’s face as he stood watching Karen run swiftly up the stairs.
The morning was now a little more advanced. The carriage clock on the study mantelpiece at Hawthorn Lodge showed nine twenty-five. The lodge was a pleasant Victorian villa not far from Overmead Wood, half a mile from the Wilmots’ cottage. It stood in an attractive rambling garden full of twists and turns, unexpected vistas.
The study was a cosy room on the ground floor, furnished with unpretentious comfort and due regard for the period of the house. The walls were hung with old theatrical mementoes; the bookshelves were filled with theatrical biographies, memoirs, reminiscences, histories, texts of plays, postcard albums of the Victorian beauties of the old music halls.
Desmond Hallam stood before his desk with a pen in his hand, nervously glancing through the essay on the nineteenth-century novel he had written yesterday evening, making minor alterations as he read.
Still a few years from fifty, of medium height, sparely built; a mild-looking man with nondescript features, thinning hair of uncertain brown brushed back from a lined forehead, hesitant eyes of the same indeterminate brown. He was nattily dressed, carefully groomed.
He had begun attending classes at the Cannonbridge College of Further Education in September. He had worked as a personnel clerk in the town until the takeover of his firm by a large national group at the beginning of the year. The negotiations leading up to the takeover had been a well-kept secret until the last possible moment and Desmond had been taken totally by surprise when the news broke. Not that he had been harshly dealt with; like all the other redundant employees he had been put out to grass on generous terms.
He had lived at Hawthorn Lodge a good ten years. His father had been the manager of a high-class menswear shop in a town some distance from Cannonbridge. After his death Desmond’s mother suggested joining forces with her son; she had been left well provided for.
The arrangement suited them both. Desmond was more than happy to leave his Cannonbridge lodgings to set up house with his mother, with whom he had always got on well. Mrs Hallam bought Hawthorn Lodge and the two of them lived a tranquil, self-contained life in harmony and content until Mrs Hallam’s death a few months after Desmond had been made redundant by his firm.
The clock struck the half-hour. Desmond blew out a resigned breath and laid down his pen. Good or bad, the essay would have to stand now. The literature class was at ten and he wouldn’t dream of being late. Better go up and see if Aunt Ivy was ready – he was giving her a lift into Cannonbridge. She rode in with him three or four times a week to do the shopping, making her own way back by bus.
He put the essay into his briefcase. His aunt, Miss Ivy Jebb, was his mother’s older sister, a retired assistant nurse. She had been staying at Hawthorn Lodge since the late spring when she had been urgently summoned by Desmond, alarmed at the lowered state of his mother’s health after a bout of influenza.
The two sisters had never been on close terms, Desmond’s mother finding Ivy bossy and manipulative. Over the years Desmond had laid eyes on his aunt barely half a dozen times. But his alarm at the deteriorating condition of his mother swept aside such minor considerations.
‘I’ll be along on the next train,’ Aunt Ivy had at once assured him. She had been delighted to leave her bedsitter in the northern town – eighty miles from Cannonbridge – where she had spent her working life, delighted to step out of the restricted existence that was all she could manage on her pension and dwindling savings, delighted to entrain for the rural peace of Overmead, the substantial comforts of Hawthorn Lodge. What was a little nursing in return for such rewards? She would have her sister on her feet in no time at all.
She had immediately taken over the running of the house. She nursed her sister with energy and competence and for some time Mrs Hallam appeared set on the road to recovery, but her weakened heart suddenly gave way.
Desmond had been devastated by his mother’s death. Coming so soon on top of his unexpected redundancy, it had thrown him completely off balance. There was now not even the familiar nine-to-five routine of work to distract his mind and he fell into a state of despairing grief.
Ivy Jebb was more than willing to stay on to deal with everything, take care of him, look after the house when he finally ended up for a short stay in the psychiatric unit of a local hospital, in a condition of total collapse.
‘You must make a new beginning,’ the psychiatrist advised him when he began to mend. ‘Enlarge your horizons, broaden your mind, find new interests.’
Desmond had dutifully nerved himself in due course to enrol at the college, choosing classes in local history, literature, play-reading. He broke his days up into segments, creating tiny points of interest to get him through the next hour or two, a book to be returned to the library, a cup of coffee in the college canteen, weaving little by little a web of activities that might gradually expand to fill the days and weeks, the months and years, warding off emptiness, bleakness and desperation.
Now he left the study, went up the stairs and gave a light tap on the door of Aunt Ivy’s bedroom.
‘I’m just coming,’ she called back. A moment later she threw open the door. A short, dumpy woman with a good deal of curly white hair and a soft, pink-and-white, indoor skin; she wore fashionably rimmed bifocal spectacles. She was dressed in a fawn-coloured jumper and skirt.
She greeted Desmond with the wide smile of determined motherliness which had been her most constant expression since she had walked in through the front door of Hawthorn Lodge, a smile somewhat at odds with the shrewd, detached, assessing regard of her pale blue eyes behind the lenses. Desmond gave her in return his nervous, placatory grin.
Ivy stepped back into her room and picked up a lightweight jacket of navy-blue woollen material from the back of a chair. She put it on, tugging a matching beret over her curls, picked up her gloves and shopping basket. She glanced out at the overcast sky.
‘I could do with my good Harris tweed coat, now the weather’s turning cold,’ she observed as she came out on to the landing and closed the door behind her. They set off down the stairs. I think it’s time I went back to fetch my winter things.’ She rather liked that remark, it set exactly the right tone of being in charge.
Desmond made no reply, he felt his heart give a nasty lurch. A couple of months ago, shortly after he had left hospital, he had casually raised the matter of when Ivy might be thinking of returning home. He had had no particular reason for mentioning the subject, there was no thought in his head other than that she wasn’t likely to be staying with him much longer.
To his immense astonishment – and consternation – Ivy had blandly informed him that she had given up her bedsitter just after he had gone into hospital. She
