A Passion So Deadly

Ten

It was the second Tuesday in November and Freddie expected his wife to be going to visit Aunt Ada as usual. It was only over breakfast that morning that she told him, without at first offering any explanation, that she would not be doing so.

It was unlike Constance to break her routine, to alter the established pattern of her life — just as it was for Freddie. He was surprised and also mildly curious. He asked why she had abandoned her regular monthly trip.

‘I’ve just got so much on in the village,’ his wife replied. ‘And there’s a lot to do here on the farm, goodness knows.’

She sounded distracted. Not for the first time recently, Freddie thought that perhaps Constance was finding it more difficult to cope with all her many roles than she used to. They all expected so much of her.

He rested his hand lightly on hers. ‘There’s always a lot to do here, and you usually manage to run the entire village as well,’ he said. ‘In the past I’ve just assumed you were superwoman.’

Constance smiled, but he could see the tension in her face.

‘I can’t imagine why,’ she said.

‘Because, my darling, through most of our marriage you have continually behaved as if that is what you are.’

Constance manoeuvred her hand so that she was able to wrap her fingers around his, and her grip was tight and somehow urgent.

‘I do love you, Freddie, you know that, don’t you? Whatever happens, you know that?’

‘Of course I do, my darling.’ She seemed to need the kind of reassurance that it had never before been necessary for either of them to give each other. And what did she mean by ‘whatever happens’? What on earth did she think was going to happen? They had always been happy, hadn’t they? And they had such a good secure life together — he had never had any doubts about that before. He leaned forward and touched her cheek with his free hand.

‘Of course I know you love me, Constance. And I love you. Don’t I always say the best day of my life was the day I met you?’

She turned her head so that her lips brushed against his fingers.

‘I just hope you never change your mind about that, Freddie.’

‘No chance.’

He spoke easily but he was beginning to worry more and more about his wife. She seemed nervy and even perhaps unhappy, both of which were quite unlike her. He remembered again the aftermath of her last visit to Aunt Ada when the car had broken down on the motorway and she had been so violently sick when she arrived home. And she had admitted to feeling poorly since then. Again he felt that now familiar chilly tremor run up and down his spine. Could she be ill? Was she keeping some horrible illness a secret from him? Now that would be just like her. He thought about it for a moment. She had not been physically sick since that one occasion a month ago, as far as he knew. But he realised that she could easily have been ill when he was not around, he spent so much time out and about on the farm. And she was definitely looking increasingly tired and drawn. It also occurred to him that she might have lost weight. Anxiously he studied her face, she was so pale, the high cheekbones more prominent than ever and now giving an almost gaunt appearance to those finely sculptured features.

Her gaze was riveted on their entwined hands, as if she didn’t want to meet his eye. His words of reassurance had provoked a wan smile again, but he was sure he could see tears beginning to form.

Several times in the last four weeks he had expressed his anxiety about her health, and asked her bluntly if she were quite sure she was well. She had remained adamant that she was perfectly fit. Nonetheless Freddie was moved to try again.

‘Constance, if you were ill, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

She replied quickly, automatically almost. He continued to stare at her. Eventually she spoke again, as if accepting that he needed, even deserved, a little more than that.

‘Things have been getting a bit on top of me lately, that’s all, Freddie. I can’t believe it’s less than two months before Christmas. I’m supposed to be putting on the village pantomime again and we’ve barely started...’

Freddie interrupted. ‘Bugger the village pantomime!’

He rarely swore, but he wanted his wife back the way she used to be, he wanted everything the way it was. He didn’t know quite what had changed and he certainly didn’t know why — but he knew something had.

‘You’re overdoing it, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? It’s about time the rest of this village pulled its weight. Let somebody else stage the damn panto...’

Constance squeezed his hand even more tightly. ‘I’ll be all right, Freddie, honestly,’ she said. ‘Everything will be fine, you’ll see...’

There was a faraway look in her eye now, and Freddie had the feeling she was assuring herself of that as much as him. He could think of nothing else to say. He sighed heavily. There was a load of overdue paperwork in the farm office that he really must turn his attention to today. Constance had always done most of it in the past and invariably had been bang up-to-date, but every time he had mentioned the backlog to her over the last couple of weeks, she had murmured vaguely that she would try to get around to it tomorrow — and never had. That wasn’t like her, either. She was normally so efficient. Now Freddie had no choice but to attend to the paperwork himself. He didn’t really mind that, although he would have preferred a heavy stint of manual labour to take his mind off things, but it was yet another indication that, however much she protested, all was really not well with Constance.

Freddie had never felt so uneasy in the whole of his life.

Later that morning Freddie and Constance’s elder daughter Charlotte popped into the farm. She lived on the edge of Chalmpton Peverill in Honeysuckle Cottage, which Freddie had given her and her husband as a wedding present.

Charlotte, a tall, slim, long-limbed, and strikingly attractive twenty-four-year-old, had been born with a sunny disposition which a near-perfect childhood and a so far happy marriage to a local man, Michael Lawson an architect with Somerset County Council whom she had fallen in love with while still at school, had only enhanced.

She was, however, unusually anxious. On her way to the village shop a little earlier she had encountered her father who had told her that her mother had cancelled her usual monthly trip to Bristol and would probably appreciate a visit. He had said no more than that, but Charlotte could read between the lines. She suspected that he was as concerned about her mother as she had become, and was hoping she might be able to find out what was wrong — although neither father nor daughter had actually expressed their feelings of anxiety to the other yet, perhaps not wanting to fully admit them even to themselves.

Charlotte, her long fair hair tied carelessly back in a rather ragged ponytail, entered, as all the family did, through the kitchen door, which was hardly ever locked during daylight hours. She was clutching her two-year-old son by the hand and, as soon as little Alex spotted his grandmother seated at the kitchen table, he tugged himself free of his mother and toddled his way eagerly across the room to her. Alex was used to his doting gran making a huge fuss of him.

Absent-mindedly, it seemed to Charlotte, Constance picked her grandson up and smiled a greeting at her daughter. Her mother seemed preoccupied and rather disorientated, just as she had done for some weeks now.

‘Hi mum, no visit to Aunt Ada today then?’ Charlotte tried to sound casual, just as she knew her father had earlier.

‘No dear, too much to do here and in the village,’ replied her mother rather listlessly.

The younger woman took in the scene around her. It didn’t appear as if her mother had done anything all morning. And that in itself was cause for concern.

Constance was still wearing her dressing gown. It was part of the usual farm routine for her to come downstairs in the big pink towelling gown, right after drinking the tea Freddie brought her just before seven, to share an early breakfast with her husband. They had always liked to start the day together in that way, Charlotte knew. But the breakfast things still littered the table. It was now well gone ten and it looked as if her mother had been sitting there for three hours. That was unheard of. Charlotte could feel alarm bells clanging, but decided not to show it. Not yet, any way.

‘I suppose you’d like me to make coffee now you’ve got that lump on your knee,’ she said, gesturing to a chortling Alex, happily ensconced with the grannie he loved, and blissfully unaware of any lurking tensions.

‘That would be lovely, dear,’ said Constance. The words were all right, thought Charlotte, but the way her mother said them was so distant she could have been speaking to a visiting cattle-feed salesman, not to her elder daughter.

Charlotte put freshly ground coffee into the filter machine — she’d just as soon have drunk instant but she knew how her mother hated it — and then sat down to wait for it to drip through.

She studied her mother. Perhaps they were all fretting too much, surely everyone was entitled to have a down patch occasionally — even Constance. That was the trouble, she expected, much as her father had said earlier, they probably all expected too much of her. Constance had always seemed to sail through the kind of schedule few others could cope with, but maybe the years of pressure and responsibility were at last taking their toll. Constance had not only lavished love and attention on her own three children, but had always been there for every family in the village.

With affection and admiration, Charlotte remembered the times Constance so willingly helped nurse the chronically sick, comforted the bereaved, listened with endless patience to the ramblings of the elderly, coaxed good behaviour out of seemingly impossibly wayward sons and daughters, sorted out financial problems for those totally clueless in such matters and generally behaved as if any problem faced by her family and neighbours was automatically hers to solve. At the same time she was a parish councillor, a stalwart of the WI and the Mother’s Union, as well as chairman of the Village Fête Committee, the Village Hall Committee, the Christmas Festival Committee, of course, and a member of just about every other committee going.

In everything that she did Constance was meticulous and competent. When the village primary school was threatened with closure it was Constance who confronted the County Council with an argument for its continuation so forceful and well-constructed that even that famously high-handed body had given in. It was Constance who had launched the campaign, still going on — an uphill struggle, but not lost yet — to save the local cottage hospital, Constance who always seemed to spot first, and then lead the fight against, any threat to the community of Chalmpton Peverill.

Nothing had ever seemed beyond her, no crisis too big or too small for her to deal with. She had once safely delivered a villager’s twins as if it were something she did every day — although the doctor who eventually arrived remarked that, without the resources of a hospital, it would have been a monumental achievement even for a practising nurse, let alone one whose nursing skills had been learned years before and used on a regular basis only for a short time after that.

At the other end of the scale Charlotte remembered the time when little Betsie Ambrose had cried ceaselessly for two days after her pet guinea pig went missing. It was Constance who organised half the village into a search party which she then orchestrated with military precision, resulting in the small creature being eventually discovered cowering in a remote corner of the churchyard and safely returned to its ecstatic owner.

Charlotte also recalled the occasion when she, not much older than young Alex was now, had ineffectually wielded a paint brush after her mother decreed that dear old Mrs Hewitt — whose only son had moved to London and gave no signs of caring a toss about his mother — was not going to live in slum conditions a minute longer. With little or no fuss, Constance redecorated Mrs Hewitt’s cottage herself, scrubbed and polished the old lady’s floors and furnishings, and replaced anything beyond rescue with bits and pieces from her own home which she always described as ‘something I was going to take to the jumble sale, anyway, Mrs H.’ Mrs Hewitt had thought her mother a saint, Charlotte knew, and sometimes during her childhood that judgement had seemed hard to argue with.

But Constance could be tough as well as compassionate. And she had never had any patience with the small-mindedness which so often played a part in village life. When the son of a particularly simple village couple had returned on a visit to Chalmpton Peverill flamboyantly showing off his overtly camp male lover and announcing that he was gay and proud of it, Marcia Spry, with her unpleasantly inverted sense of morality, had predictably proceeded to make his family’s life a misery. Discovering how upset the family were, Constance had unceremoniously taken Marcia to one side and read her the riot act. Her message, although rather more tactfully delivered, had been that Marcia was a malicious old biddy who should know better than to torment a family who had never done anyone any harm — and that included their gay son. He was a consenting adult consorting with another consenting adult and minding his own business, which was exactly what Marcia Spry should try doing for a change.

The memory of her mother telling her that story and remarking with complete lack of concern that Marcia Spry would doubtless dislike her more than ever from then on, was still one which Charlotte relished. Of course, the dreadful Marcia never knew that Constance also took to one side the ‘proud to be gay’ young man on his next visit to the village and told him in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t care less about his sex life and neither, she reckoned, could anybody else in Chalmpton Peverill. It would therefore be far better, wouldn’t it, if he didn’t flaunt a way of life which he must know would be sure to cause problems — albeit wrongly in her opinion — for his elderly parents.

Nothing daunted Constance. Unlike so many in a small community, Constance could invariably see both sides of most issues. And, in her daughter’s opinion, her mother’s lack of fear of involving herself in the trickiest of matters was just one of the many characteristics which made her remarkable — along with her ability to turn her hand to almost anything and her skill in coping with just about every situation life threw at her.

It was difficult to reconcile those memories with the woman Charlotte saw before her on that bleak November morning — a woman who had previously displayed more spirit than anyone her daughter had ever known, and who now seemed to have none at all.

Watching the automatic way in which Constance was cradling her beloved grandson, as if she was only half aware that he was in her arms, Charlotte could not help wondering what could have happened to cause this change in her mother, to make it seem as if this extraordinarily capable woman could no longer cope with anything.

Charlotte decided to continue the cheery approach. She thought she knew of something guaranteed to put her mother in a better frame of mind.

‘So, have you bought yourself a new outfit for the eighteenth yet?’ she asked. ‘I think you should, after all it’s going to be pretty special.’

November 18th was the day of Freddie and Constance’s silver wedding anniversary. The family had decided months ago that this merited a major celebration, and Charlotte had been landed with the job of organising a big party at the family’s favourite hotel in the area, the Mount Somerset at Henlade, a beautifully renovated old manor house with sweeping views across half the country.

To tell the truth, Charlotte hadn’t minded the task at all. She had inherited her mother’s organisational skills and wouldn’t really have trusted anyone else to plan the party properly. In any case, Charlotte loved to please her parents. They were the kind of people who brought out that desire in others, and rightly so, she considered.

But as she spoke, Charlotte realised to her astonishment that her mother looked completely blank. She can’t have forgotten that of all days, Charlotte thought to herself. Then she saw the cloud pass across Constance’s face. It was a cloud of despair, of desperation even. There was panic in her mother’s eyes, pure panic. Charlotte was instantly overwhelmed by a wave of distress and confusion.

‘Mum, whatever is wrong?’ She blurted it out, and that wasn’t what she’d intended at all, but she couldn’t help carrying on. ‘Surely you are looking forward to it, aren’t you, mum? We’re going to have a fabulous party. Helen’s got special leave from school, remember. All the family, most of the village, will be there. It’ll be wonderful...’

She knew that she was burbling and forced herself to stop. She wasn’t going to help her mother by losing control.

There was a short silence. Charlotte could see Constance making an almost physical effort to compose herself. The older woman even managed a big smile, and at a glance it seemed to be the same winning smile that had been so familiar and warming to Charlotte since the very beginning of her life. The smile was not in her mother’s eyes, though, Charlotte could see that clearly. There was still panic in her eyes.

‘Of course I’m looking forward to the party, darling,’ said Constance eventually. ‘I’m just a little tired, that’s all. I’m looking forward to it immensely.’

But Charlotte was not convinced. She was more anxious about her mother than ever. And, like her father, Charlotte was beginning to have grave fears about Constance’s health.

‘She is human after all,’ Charlotte remarked to her father when they had finally got around to properly discussing their worries. ‘I sometimes think we forget that. Mother is so amazing it’s quite easy to forget that she’s only human, like all the rest of us.’

Since the end of October and the first ten days or so of November, which both father and daughter agreed had been her worst time of all, Constance had seemed to recover slightly from whatever it was that had been ailing her. She still looked thin and rather weary, but she seemed to be functioning again, if not with her usual level of energy. And she was beginning to muster a passable show of enthusiasm for the silver wedding celebrations which were now only three days away.

‘You’re right,’ said Freddie. ‘She just needs a bit more nurturing than usual, that’s all. I’m trying to keep her away from all the farm business and I wish she would pull back a bit on everything else. Somebody or other from the village has been on to her every day this week about the blasted pantomime. I wish she’d just tell them she can’t do it this year, I really do, but some chance of that, I suppose.’

He had popped around to his daughter’s cottage to show her the beautiful diamond and sapphire eternity ring he had bought for Constance as an anniversary present. The stones were set in a band of white gold.

‘Well, it should traditionally be silver, but I wanted something better than a silver ring — so I thought platinum would be the perfect compromise...’

‘It’s truly beautiful, dad.’ Charlotte enthused. And she slipped the ring on to her own finger in order best to admire it. As she did so the telephone rang. It was her brother William.

Charlotte, who knew all about William’s near-dismissal from his college, greeted him jovially. She was a firm believer in the jovial approach to life whenever possible, something else she had inherited from her mother although it had not lately been much in evidence in Constance.

‘William! I hope you’re behaving yourself, you villain,’ she scolded affectionately. ‘Or I may have to drive over and sort you out. Then you’d be sorry.’

William, however, appeared to be in no mood for banter. ‘Look, Charlie, I’ve got a problem with the party. I don’t think I can make it.’

Charlotte was astonished. ‘What!’ she yelled into the telephone receiver. ‘Why ever not?’

William mumbled something rather incoherent about having so much work to do, and trying to catch up, and not wanting to make a mess of things again.

Charlotte was furious. She was acutely conscious of her father standing anxiously behind her, aware that there was obviously some new difficulty with his son but not knowing what. That made her all the more furious.

‘So why are you telling me this?’ she snapped. ‘Why didn’t you ring the farm?’

‘Well,’ William hesitated, ‘...I thought it might be better coming from you, I was afraid mother might answer the telephone...’

Charlotte completely lost her temper. ‘I bet you were, you coward!’ she shouted. ‘Well, I’m not doing your dirty work for you. Dad’s here. You can damn well tell him yourself.’

She thrust the receiver at her bewildered father, and she could feel tears pricking at the back of her eyes. What was her brother playing at? Without him, their parents’ party could not possibly be a proper celebration and he must be aware of that.

‘William, what’s going on, son?’ she heard her father ask. And then, when he got his answer, she saw his shoulders slump.

‘Your mother will be dreadfully disappointed,’ said Freddie. That was typical of the man, thought his daughter, he wouldn’t admit to his own hurt.

She listened to a few more minutes of desultory conversation. Apart from the one mild remark about Constance’s disappointment, Freddie, again typically, did not try to persuade his son. But when he hung up the phone and turned to her she could see just how upset he was.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘The boy knows his mother idolises him. I can’t believe he would let her down like this. She was worried enough when he was sent home. In fact I think it was all that bother with William which sparked off her depression or whatever it is. You don’t think he’s up to those tricks again, do you, Charlie?’

His daughter replied that she hadn’t the faintest idea, but if she could get her hands on him right now she would teach her little brother a few tricks he hadn’t thought of.

It took Freddie a full day before he plucked up the courage to break the news of their son’s proposed absence to his wife. He had expected Constance to be devastated. But to his surprise she took the news quite calmly.

‘Boys of that age don’t want to be with their old parents, really, do they?’ she remarked with only the merest touch of edge. ‘I expect it’s perfectly natural for him not to want to come.’

Freddie could not believe she was expressing her true feelings. ‘But it’s our silver wedding anniversary,’ he said. ‘Not just any old night out with your mum and dad.’

‘Well, he said he was trying to catch up with his studies. We both want that, don’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course we do. It was just that I didn’t really believe him. You know how I could always tell when William was fibbing when he was a boy — well, I think I still can, up to a point. He didn’t convince me that was the true reason at all. I’m afraid he’s in trouble, again, to be honest. That’s what’s bugging me. I mean, if the college was right before and he was taking drugs as well as hitting the bottle — that’s not going to go away just like that, is it?’

Constance took his hand, still giving the impression of being remarkably untroubled. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go thinking the worst, Freddie. Not without any evidence. Perhaps he’s found himself a girlfriend.’

Freddie hadn’t thought of that. And the idea lifted his spirits a little, as he was sure had been his wife’s intention.

‘Well, yes, perhaps he has,’ he murmured thoughtfully.

‘I’m sure it’s something like that, nothing to worry about at all, just a new girlfriend,’ said Constance.

Freddie did not notice the catch in her voice or the way she contrived to turn her back towards him as she spoke.

On the day of the party, however, William unexpectedly turned up. At least he was unexpected by his parents but not entirely by his elder sister, who had called him back, told him how dreadfully he had upset his father, and generally given him a grade A roasting.

‘Well done,’ Charlotte whispered to her brother shortly after his arrival and gave him a warm hug.

William even managed a grin. That was pretty rare for him too, nowadays, as it wasn’t just their mother who had been acting out of character lately, Charlotte reflected. Like her father, her thoughts automatically turned to drugs but, being the kind of person she was, she swiftly dismissed the idea as too awful even to contemplate. In any case William looked well enough. Charlotte had trained as a nurse just like her mother, given it up when Alex was born but hoped to go back to it one day, and had met a few junkies in her time. Her life had not been entirely as sheltered as it appeared. Although the problem might be worse in the urban jungles of Britain’s inner cities, rural Somerset was not without its drug culture. No, she was somehow pretty sure just from looking at him that her brother, although he might well have experimented with strange substances, did not have a serious drug problem.

She personally thought it was more likely that he had been sulking. He had always had a sulky side to his nature, had William, even when he had been a little lad. And God knows who he got it from, either, she thought to herself. But, although he had appeared to ultimately take it well and had certainly agreed to knuckle down and go back to college when given the opportunity, Charlotte suspected that William had been far more put out by the tongue-lashing his mother had given him than he had let on — certainly to her.

Although she was unaware of the details of the exchange between mother and son, it had obviously been pretty serious, and Charlotte couldn’t remember her mother ever having spoken a cross word to William before that. Her only son could never do any wrong in Constance Lange’s eyes, everybody knew that. But the thought that William might be about to really upset his father — and drag the family name through the mud into the bargain — Charlotte’s mother had shown that other tough side of her nature. The side Charlotte had always known existed, but which had probably come as a shock to William who was inclined to live in his own cloud cuckoo land. As far as Charlotte could ascertain, her mother had merely given William a thorough bollocking and told him to grow up — and not before time in Charlotte’s opinion.

She loved her brother dearly and appreciated his charm and humour in much the same way as her mother did. But she really thought it was time he stopped behaving like a sulky schoolboy when anything didn’t suit him.

However she watched approvingly as William hugged his father, handed him a beautifully wrapped anniversary gift and remarked in his most disarming way, ‘In the end I realised I just had to be here. I couldn’t miss this day, could I?’

Charlotte waited in vain for her brother to show the same warm affection towards her mother. William kissed his mother in greeting when he arrived at the Mount Somerset, but Charlotte realised that it would have been unthinkable for him not to in front of his entire family and most of the village. His body language, however, left Charlotte in no doubt that he did not really wish to do so. In fact, William showed no desire to be close to his mother throughout the entire evening, and barely spoke to her again. Instead he allowed himself to be monopolised by their younger sister, Helen, who hero-worshipped him — again rather too much for his own good, in Charlotte’s opinion.

She couldn’t help recalling the last village function when her mother and brother had so outraged that old busybody Marcia Spry by dancing together virtually the whole night long. Things had changed, that was for certain. Yet if her mother had noticed William’s distant behaviour to her, she gave no sign of it, and that was unusual too because Constance had always been the most sensitive of women.

Charlotte considered giving her brother another lecture, but this was neither the time nor place, and in any case she did not really know what she would say. ‘Why aren’t you nice to Mother any more?’ sounded fairly pathetic and was hardly likely to get her very far. Charlotte decided that all she could do was pretend she hadn’t noticed and be thankful, at least, that apart from her, nobody else was likely to detect the strange chill between mother and son.

Charlotte had, of course, overlooked the acute observational powers of Marcia Spry, whom she had not wanted to invite to the party in the first place. It had been Freddie, ever the diplomat, who had insisted. And if he had been able to read old Marcia’s mind as she had diligently studied his family throughout the evening, even the generous and easy-going Freddie might have wished that he’d thrown village protocol to the winds and denied her an invitation.

The shameless Marcia watched William’s curiously distant behaviour towards his mother almost gleefully, and became increasingly more excited by the prospect of some kind of split between mother and son as the evening progressed. She too remembered the way William and his mother had danced the night away together only a few months before.

‘Unnatural the way those two carry on, that’s what it is,’ she had sniffed to her cronies then. ‘Tied to her apron strings, that boy’s always been...’

Now Marcia was intrigued. The contrast between that evening and this one was fascinating to her. She began to wonder just how serious William’s troubles at college were, and to speculate on what he might have been up to that could cause such a rift with his doting mother.

Even Marcia Spry could barely launch into malicious gossip about her hosts while the party was actually in progress — and she had just about enough common sense to realise that this might not exactly be welcomed by her fellow guests at such a generous do, either. But she left the Mount Somerset shortly after midnight a very happy woman, barely able to contain herself until morning when she could begin to create mischief.

The postman, who called at her cottage even before Mrs Walters opened the village shop, was her first target.

‘I don’t know what’s going on with that family, but something’s rocked the apple cart, you mark my words,’ she told him sagely, as if imparting some mighty slice of wisdom rather than as nasty a piece of tittle-tattle as she was able to create from the little knowledge she actually had.

Charlotte didn’t know what was going on either — but she intended to keep her resolution not to confront her brother. Indeed she was given little opportunity to do so. William had left to drive back to the agricultural college even before she popped around to the farm at breakfast time on the morning after the party.

Constance appeared to be genuinely effusive in her appreciation of the party, which pleased Charlotte enormously, although she remained irritated by William’s behaviour towards their mother during the previous evening.

‘That brother of mine didn’t stop long this morning then,’ she eventually remarked casually to her mother.

‘He had to get back for lectures, dear,’ replied Constance levelly. And that was, of course, probably the simple truth. They’d all made enough fuss when he hadn’t been pulling his weight at college, after all.

Charlotte, however, couldn’t help pushing the subject.

‘You two didn’t have much to say to each other last night,’ she said in what she hoped was a light tone of voice.

Constance was standing at the sink with her back to her daughter. She said nothing, but Charlotte thought her shoulders stiffened. Perhaps she was imagining things.

‘I mean you’ve always been such great friends...’ Charlotte hoped her voice was still light when she continued, ‘Everything is all right between you two now, isn’t it?’

Constance turned swiftly around to face her daughter. ‘Why is everyone fussing about me so much?’ she asked with a smile which was as warm and almost as reassuring as her smiles had always been.

Charlotte shrugged. She didn’t know quite what to say.

‘Don’t fret,’ said her mother. ‘Your brother has his moods like all the rest of us. I thought I might pop over to the college and visit him as soon as I can find the time, actually. Maybe take him out for a spot of supper...’

‘Oh, that would be a lovely idea, mother,’ said Charlotte.

And now she really did feel happier.

There was even better to come. Within minutes of Charlotte arriving back at Honeysuckle Cottage the phone rang. It was William.

‘Watcher, sis,’ he said. ‘I just called to tell you what a great job you did last night putting on that bash for mum and dad. You couldn’t fault it.’

Charlotte was still a bit angry with him, but in spite of herself she glowed.

‘I’m just glad you turned up,’ she said, with only the slightest edge.

William laughed. ‘I never had any choice, did I?’ he asked. ‘You might have known I wouldn’t let the family down.’

She warmed to him. ‘Of course I know,’ she said. But he’d made the first approach, so she thought she dared risk at least touching on her various anxieties.

‘You know, if mum was a bit hard on you when you got sent home from college it was only because she was so worried,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘Even I wondered if you’d become a druggie or something.’

William laughed again. ‘Is this the girl who once dragged me off to the bottom of Brook Meadow and demanded that I roll her an extremely large spliff?’ he asked teasingly.

‘Which made me feel so peculiar that I never smoked dope again — but you did, William.’ She was not to be that easily swayed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dope and only dope. I am not, and never have been, into anything stronger. And I wouldn’t put up with this kind of cross-examination from anyone but you, either, Charlotte.’

She knew that was probably true. They had always been close.

‘I only rang up to say well done,’ continued William almost plaintively.

Charlotte relented. ‘I know, thank you.’ She paused. ‘Have you called Mother?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. He sounded quite relaxed.

She took advantage of the moment. ‘Mum noticed, you know, that you didn’t have a lot of time for her last night, and so did I.’

‘You’re a fusspot,’ he chided her gently. ‘You know I can be a moody sod, you’ve told me off for it enough over the years.’

‘That’s true,’ she responded. ‘I wish you’d grow up, that’s all.’

‘You don’t half push your luck,’ he informed her. ‘All right. Tell mother I’m sorry if I seemed a bit off. Tell her I’ll make up for it.’

‘Why don’t you tell her yourself? She said she’d drive over to see you some time soon.’

He did not reply for a moment.

‘William, are you still there?’

‘Yes. Sorry, I’m not supposed to be using this phone. I thought there was someone coming.’

‘I said mother’s planning to visit you.’

‘That would be great,’ responded William with evident enthusiasm.

‘I’m so glad you said that,’ said Charlotte.

And when she put the phone down she scolded herself for having made a problem out of something and nothing. Her mother was right. Her brother was right. She fussed too much.