Cressy interrupted, ‘what have you got to lose? What alternative do you have?’
‘They might not want me,’ Sara told her through stiff lips.
She missed the hard, rather unkind look her stepsister gave her.
‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure that they do, won’t we? We’ll collect Tom from school on Monday, and then I’ll drive you straight up there. I might as well have Dad’s car,’ she added, carelessly appropriating the one asset that remained. ‘You won’t need it…’
Sara opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again. She felt too tired, too emotionally weary to quarrel with Cressy. Besides, she was probably right.
But the car could have been sold, a tiny voice reminded her, and that money… But there were other more important questions that demanded answers, and she voiced them uncertainly.
‘Cressy, my mother’s family… You seem to know so much about them…’
All her doubt and distaste of the venture her stepsister was suggesting was there in her voice, but Cressy ignored them.
‘Well, one of us had to do something. Actually, Pop told me all about them. It seems they offered to take you off his hands when he and Ma married, but you were such a clinging little thing, he knew you wouldn’t want to go.’
How could one describe such sensations? Sara thought wanly as she struggled to come to terms with the shock of her stepsister’s revelation. She felt betrayed, abandoned, almost; she had never even known that her father had had any contact with her mother’s family, that he had even been approached by them. She had always had the impression from her father that her grandparents hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her.
‘Heaven knows why he didn’t let you go,’ Cressy said carelessly. ‘And I suppose Ma would have farmed me out, too, if she could. To be honest, you’d probably have been better off if he had sent you to them, Sara,’ she added cynically. ‘They’re very well off. I suppose it was always at the back of Pop’s mind that he could turn to them if things ever got really desperate.’
Sara wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. She had received so many crushing blows recently and survived them, so why was it that this, the lightest of them all, should have such a paralysing effect?
She had always known that her father’s love for her was at best lukewarm. If he genuinely loved any of them, it was Cressy. Cressy, who made him laugh, who flirted with him and teased him, Cressy, who was exactly the sort of vibrant daughter he would have wanted.
‘It wasn’t hard to get old Hobbs to do some discreet checking up,’ Cressy continued.
Sara stared at her.
‘You asked Dad’s solicitor to do that?’
‘Why not?’ Cressy demanded carelessly, ignoring Sara’s distress. ‘Oh, come on!’ Suddenly she was impatient and showing it. ‘What other options do you have, Sara? You’ve always claimed to love Tom. Are you going to deny him the one chance he has of living a reasonably comfortable life? Starving in noble poverty is all very well in theory, but in practice…’
Sara knew that Cressy was right, and yet her pride recoiled instinctively from the thought of throwing herself on the mercy of the family who had so cruelly abandoned her mother. And as for Cressy’s suggestion that she and Tom just turn up on their doorstep, so to speak…
‘Don’t you want to hear what Hobbsy found out?’
Cressy had always known how to torment her. It was almost as though she actually knew of all those lonely childhood nights when Sara had lain awake, imagining what it would be like to have a real mother, a real family. That had been before her father married Laura, of course. But, kind though Laura had been, she had never come anywhere near to filling the empty space inside her, Sara acknowledged.
It was a shock to discover that her grandparents had actually offered to have her, and even more of a shock to know that her father had kept this information from her. Why? And then, unkindly, she was reminded of how, whenever she suggested that it was time she left home to train properly for a job, her father would remind her of all the small tasks she performed which were so essential to the smooth running of the household. Tasks which no single employee could ever be asked to perform. She was allowing Cressy’s cynicism to infect her, she thought miserably. Her father had loved her, in his way, but Cressy, being Cressy, hadn’t been able to bypass an opportunity to torment her. She had always been like that. Loving and affectionate one minute, and then clawing and spitting spitefully the next. It was difficult for Sara to know what motivated her; they were such very different people.
‘My little Martha,’ her father had sometimes called her, and she shivered in the coldness of the unheated kitchen, remembering that the words had not always been delivered kindly.
The trouble was that she had always been too pedestrian, too ordinary to appeal to her larger-than-life parent.
‘Sara, you aren’t listening to me,’ Cressy complained, dragging her back from the melancholy of her thoughts. ‘I was going to tell you about your relatives. They live in Cheshire—your father met your mother when he was visiting Chester. Hobbsy didn’t know much about their property, other than that it had been in the family for over three hundred years.’ Cressy made a face. ‘God, can you imagine? No wonder your mother ran away. Your grandmother’s still alive, but your grandfather died four years ago. Hobbsy says that your aunt and uncle lived in Sydney, and that your cousin Louise married an Australian. Your uncle and your cousin were killed in a car accident over there.’
Sara sank down into one of the kitchen chairs. Her brain felt numb, assaulted by far too much information for it to take it all in at once. She had a family. Strange, when for so many years she had longed and ached to know more about her mother and her grandparents, that now that she did there was this curious emptiness inside her.
‘So that’s all you’ve got to face, Sara. One old lady.’
She took a deep breath and swallowed.
‘Cressy, I know you mean well, but I just can’t dump myself on them… her. You must see that?’ Sara appealed frantically.
The younger girl’s eyes were hard and calculating.
‘So what do you intend to do? Stay here until you’re forcibly evicted? How do you think that will affect Tom? I’m leaving for the States at the end of the month, Sara, and nothing’s going to stop me.’
Why on earth did she feel that her stepsister had delivered a threat rather than a warning? Sara wondered miserably, concealing her shock at the swiftness with which Cressy had made her arrangements.
‘I can’t think,’ she protested. ‘Cressy, I can’t just go up there. I’ll write to them first.’
She knew without looking at her that Cressy was furious with her. How could she make the younger girl understand that she still had her pride, that she just could not throw herself on her grandmother’s charity? And yet, hours later, when Cressy had stormed out in a vicious temper, telling her that she was being criminally stubborn and selfish, she found herself standing in her father’s book-lined study in front of the shelves containing all his maps and reference books.
Her hand seemed to reach automatically for what she wanted. She lifted the
