out.
‘I just wish I knew why he...’ She closed her eyes. ‘Even as a child he was different...awkward...selfdestructive, very different from our father. He was such a kind, gentle man like my grandfather, but Charles... We were never very close as children, perhaps because of the big age gap between us.’ She shook her head.
‘I feel guilty about letting you go down to Haslewich on your own but we’ve got this conference in Mexico followed by your father’s lecture tour.’
‘Look, Mum, it’s all right,’ Chrissie reiterated. ‘I don’t mind, honestly, and it isn’t as though I don’t have the time.’
There was a big reshuffle going on in the English department of the school where Chrissie worked as a teacher and she had already warned her parents she had heard on the grapevine that the department was looking to cut costs and shed some staff.
‘Well, I’m not entirely happy about your having to stay in Charles’s house,’ her mother told her.
‘But that is the whole point of my going,’ Chrissie reminded her wryly. ‘The house has to be sold to help pay off Uncle Charles’s debts and you said yourself that there was no way it could be put on the market until it had been cleaned from top to bottom.’
‘I know. Which reminds me, I’ll have to get in touch with the bank and the solicitors to make sure you’ve got my authority to deal with all the necessary paperwork.’
Once again Chrissie and her father shared a look over her mother’s head.
Charles Platt had not just left behind him an untidy house and an unsavoury reputation; there was also a large number of outstanding debts.
In truth, she wasn’t particularly looking forward to being the one to sort out the mess Uncle Charles had left behind, Chrissie admitted, but someone had to do it and she certainly wasn’t going to let her mother be even more upset than she was already by letting her see her own distaste for the task.
The last time she had visited Haslewich had been following her grandmother’s death, and her memories of the occasion and the area were coloured by her mother’s grief.
Her Uncle Charles had been living with his mother in the old Cheshire farmhouse that had been passed down through many generations of their family, but her grandfather, disappointed in his son and well aware of his weakness, had sold off the land to another farmer, and following his wife’s death the farmhouse itself had been sold, as well.
She could still remember the searing shame she had felt on seeing her Uncle Charles staggering from one of the town’s many public houses whilst she had been shopping there with her mother. When a group of children had jeered at him and mocked him, her mother had drawn a quick, sharp breath and gone white before turning round and abruptly walking Chrissie off in the opposite direction.
That had been the first time she had become aware of the reason for the pain in her mother’s face and voice whenever she mentioned her brother.
Now, as an adult, Chrissie was, of course, fully au fait with the history of her uncle’s addiction to alcohol and gambling.
Weak and vain, he was something of a misfit in the local farming community in which he had grown up, and it had been obvious even before he reached his teens that he was not going to follow in the family tradition of farming.
‘He broke my father’s heart,’ Chrissie’s mother had once told her sadly. ‘Dad did his best, selling off small pieces of land so that he could give Charles an allowance. He tried to understand and support him when he said that he wanted to be an actor. But it was all just an excuse to get money out of Dad and spend his time gambling and drinking, initially in Chester and then, when his cronies there got wise to him, back in Haslewich.’
And as they had talked, Chrissie had recognised how hurt her grandparents and her mother had been by her uncle’s behaviour, how his attitudes to life, which were so very different from theirs, confused them. How impossible they found it to understand how he could so easily and carelessly flout the moral laws they lived their lives by and, most painful of all perhaps, how shamed they felt by him.
And now he was dead and with him had died a small piece of Haslewich history. Platts had farmed the land around Haslewich for over three centuries as the headstones on their graves in Haslewich’s churchyard testified, but no longer.
‘Don’t get upset,’ Chrissie urged her mother, going over to put her arm round her and kiss her.
Facially they were very similar, with wide-set, almond-shaped eyes and high cheek-bones in a delicately feminine face, but where her mother was small, barely five foot two and softly rounded, Chrissie had inherited her father’s height and leaner body frame.
She also had, quite mysteriously since both her parents were dark-haired, hair the colour of richly polished chestnuts, thick and straight and healthily glossy.
At twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, she considered herself mature enough to be above being flattered by those men who did a double take when they saw her for the first time, plainly expecting her to feel complimented by their admiration of her face and body without having bothered to take the time to learn anything about her, the person. Physical attractiveness was not, in her opinion, the prime factor in motivating a new relationship. For her there had to be something far more compelling than that. For her there had to be a sense of being instinctively drawn to the other person, ‘knowing’ that the magnetic pull between the two of them was too overwhelming, too powerful, to be ignored. She was, in short, a true romantic, although she was very loath to admit it.
‘It’s not fair,’ one of her friends had told her mockcrossly the previous summer.
‘If I had your looks I know I’d make much better use of them than you do. You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘True beauty comes from within,’ Chrissie had told her gently—and meant it.
Whilst she had been at university, she had been approached by a talent scout for a modelling agency but had refused to take them seriously.
There were those who had wondered if her irrepressible sense of humour was quite the thing one wanted in a schoolteacher, but Chrissie had proved that the ability to see and laugh at the humorous side of life was no bar to being able to teach—and to teach well.
‘I’m still not entirely happy about the idea of your staying in Charles’s house,’ her mother repeated.
Chrissie sat down opposite her.
‘Mum...we’ve already been through all this,’ she reminded her. ‘The whole point of my going to Haslewich is to prepare the house for sale and the best way I can do that is if I’m living there.’
‘Yes, you’re right, of course. But knowing how Charles lived...’ Her mother gave a small shudder.
She was a meticulous housewife, a wonderful cook, the true daughter of ancestors who had spent their lives scrubbing dairies and stone floors, polishing, washing and waging war on dirt in all its many forms.
‘I’ve got my own bedding and my own towels and utensils,’ Chrissie reminded her mother.
‘I should be doing this,’ Rose Oldham protested. ‘Charles is... was my brother....’
‘And
