Second Chance at the Belfast Guesthouse

In the remaining two weeks of his visit to Loughgall, Ginny did manage to register David Midhurst’s name. In fact, as she transferred her attention from Princess Tara to her rider, she rather made up for her initial indifference by deciding she was in love with him.

‘Yes, Clare, I admit it, you’re right,’ she agreed, as the final days of his stay slipped away. ‘He’s the man for me, but I’m not going to marry him. At least not yet,’ she added, hesitating. ‘I made such a nonsense last time.’

‘Has he asked you to marry him?’ Clare asked, somewhat surprised at the speed with which events had moved.

‘Oh yes, he asked me last week and I said no. So he said that was fine, he’d ask me every week on Fridays until I said yes.’

Clare propped the wedding invitation on her desk and turned gratefully to the tray Helen had brought. She poured her coffee and munched her scone enthusiastically.

Some months after David went back to the Cotswold village where he was setting up a riding school, specializing in cross country trekking, Ginny admitted sheepishly she was pining for him even more than for Princess Tara. Would they mind if she went off to join him? She’d asked Ginny then when she had actually said yes to David, but Ginny couldn’t remember. She was already absorbed in the details of cross-country trekking and the prospect of a whole new life in England.

After the excitements and activity of the morning, the afternoon hours remained quiet and uninterrupted. Apart from Andrew ringing to tell her he’d be back by six, the phone was blissfully silent. At lunchtime she asked Helen to deal with any guests who might turn up in the course of the afternoon. It wasn’t very likely anyone would appear until much later on such a splendid day, but having alerted Helen meant she could shut her door and make a start on the end-of-year figures.

The thirtieth of June still felt the most unlikely of times to have a financial end of year, but the reason was simple. July the first, 1960, was the day she and Andrew had set up Drumsollen House as a limited company. Even though she was still in Paris, by doing so, Andrew could get his hands on the money he so badly needed for the most urgent repairs. Now, there were only nine days till the end of the month and the end of their third year of trading. Today’s crop of bills had been deducted in her ledger, the cheques already in their envelopes for the post. There was a predictable amount coming in from next week’s bookings, but even if the amount she’d pencilled in proved to be an overestimate, a few pounds either way wasn’t going to make any difference to what she had in mind.

The afternoon grew steadily hotter as she entered up the monthly figures and collated them with the Ulster Bank lodgement book. As she worked away steadily, she thought of the last time she’d met their accountant. He’d told her his senior clerks were experimenting with automated calculating machines. The sooner the better, Clare thought, as she totted up a huge column of figures. She looked at the result, then did the sum all over again, because the figure was so encouraging she had to be sure she’d not made a mistake.

She paused, got up and stuck her head out of the window. The sun had moved round, so the side of the house was now in shadow, but there was no coolness anywhere. Her face prickled with heat and she could feel her thin, cotton print blouse sticking between her shoulder blades.

She took a deep breath and went through the figures yet once more, sure there must be something she had missed, even though she knew her records were right up to date. She checked the Pass books again. It all tallied exactly. All the loan repayments had been made for the year and there was no bill for repair or maintenance work outstanding. Then she found what she was looking for. It was now some five months since they’d made the last transfer of funds from Andrew’s salary into the Drumsollen Trading Account to prevent it going into overdraft. The present healthy balance was all their own work.

‘Hello love, how’s things?’ Andrew asked, as he took his briefcase from the passenger seat.

‘Not bad,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Wedding invitation from Ginny and wine from Robert. John’s arrived and says he has jobs to do at the front, so I though we’d be posh and have dinner upstairs as its Friday night.’

‘Great, I’m starving. Had to use the lunch hour to consult. Someone went out for sandwiches. Cheese with some sort of salad cream,’ he said, making a face, as they walked side by side along the corridor to their bedroom. ‘They were horrible.’

‘Never mind, we’ve got something nice for dinner. And dessert.’

She picked up his black jacket and pinstriped trousers as he dropped them on the bed, shook them and hung them up to air beside the open window.

‘You won’t mind if I don’t dress for dinner,’ he said, teasing her with his best English accent, as he pulled on some flannels and an open-necked shirt.

‘Well . . .’

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, putting his arms round her. ‘A wretched day, I’m sorry to say. One more victory for the status quo. I want to forget it all as quickly as possible. Can I carry something?’ he added vigorously, as if only immediate action would erase the memory of the shabby show he’d been forced to witness in court.

‘Yes, it’s all in the bottom of the Aga. Except the dessert,’ she added, laughing, as they pushed open the kitchen door. ‘That’s upstairs already.’

She loaded up the tray for him to carry and wrapped two warm dinner plates in a tea cloth, leaving her a hand free to open the door of Headquarters.

‘I say, what are we celebrating?’ Andrew asked, as he caught sight of the small table under the window. After years of squeezing round the large and very solid piece of furniture thought appropriate when Headquarters had been the morning-room at Drumsollen, Harry had found them a customer who had offered them a remarkably good price. The new table they’d chosen together stood below the window and was laid this evening with a white damask cloth. On it were laid two place settings, a slim vase of golden roses, two silver candlesticks and a bottle of red wine in an ornate silver wine cooler.

‘Food first,’ she said, as he put the tray down on the sideboard and she took the lid off the casserole.

‘Anything you say, ma’am. But I can almost smell good news,’ he confessed, as he carried the vegetable dish to the table and poured two glasses of wine.

They were both hungry and ate devotedly, finishing off every scrap of the tasty casserole and all the vegetables as well. As they sat sipping their second glass of wine with the remaining fragments of crusty roll, Andrew suddenly spoke.

‘It’s not your birthday, nor is it our anniversary. I’m sure of that.’ He paused and asked sheepishly, ‘Is this the day we met?’

Clare laughed and looked at him more closely.

‘Oh, Andrew dear, don’t be anxious,’ she said gently. ‘I wasn’t setting you a test. Anybody can forget anything if they’ve been as busy as we’ve been. It might be the anniversary of the day we met, but I certainly can’t remember. Have you any idea when that was?’

Andrew claimed never to remember personal things, but to her amazement, he proceeded to give her a vivid picture of the day when he found her bicycle, parked against the low wall beside the gates of Drumsollen, the tyres having been let down.

‘Dear Jessie. She really thought I’d let them down and she was very, very cross. But you said you didn’t think I had,’ he continued thoughtfully, his blue eyes sparkling as he put his glass down. He paused and looked at her. ‘What made you say that?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I’m not sure now,’ she began hesitantly. ‘I’m amazed you can remember. I think I just looked and saw what you were like. Your basic honesty, perhaps. Robert used to ask me about clients he wasn’t sure about. He always said I could see if there was any badness in people.’

‘Like Charles Langley?’

‘Oh yes, dear Charles, your one-time slave at school. I couldn’t believe it when he told me about fagging for you,’ she said, laughing. ‘I wish we’d been able to go to his wedding,’ she added, a little wistfully. ‘But you’re quite right. Charles is a good example. Like you, my love, he was doing a job he had to do. The old obligation of a family business descending to the next in line. He certainly did the job to the best of his ability, but he never looked quite right doing it.’

‘Was that why you had to explain to Robert about Englishmen and duty?’

‘Stiff upper lip and all that sort of thing,’ she agreed. ‘Robert was very shrewd about people. He’d read about the English Public School style and manners, but he’d never seen it in action, so he couldn’t judge for himself if Charles was completely honest or not.’

‘Was he?’

‘Of course he was. As honest as you are. But he couldn’t get excited about buying and selling fruit and needing money to expand the import business.’

‘Any more than I can go along with some of what passes for normal legal practice in this province,’ he said sharply. ‘And now he and Lindy have a flying school in the South Downs.’

‘And are coming over to stay sometime during the winter when they can’t fly,’ she reminded him.

He smiled wryly and Clare guessed what he was thinking. Charles and Lindy had already managed to do what they so much wanted to do. When Charles’s father had died suddenly, he was free to sell up. Weekend flying had become a major leisure pursuit in the south-east and both he and Lindy were passionate about flying. Now they had more customers than they could cope with and the project was a great success.

She stood up and cleared away the empty plates and dishes and carried a domed silver dish ceremoniously to the table. Once part of the equipment for serving a cooked breakfast to be laid out on the long sideboard in the dining room, it had been redeployed for covering whatever might be a temptation to the summer flies. She removed the cover with a flourish.

‘Shall I carve, or will you?’ she asked soberly.

Andrew peered at the soft icing decorating one of June’s Victoria sponges and looked at her quizzically. ‘Did you put this icing on?’

‘I added the little sugar flowers, but June did the house and the fields. She said a cow was a bit much at short notice.’

‘So it is an anniversary, or nearly. Are you telling me we can think about buying a cow and a field?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she said, as she picked up the cake knife and handed it to him. ‘Perhaps even two of each if we can do as well next year as we have this year. We can certainly open a new account. What shall we call it? Cows or fields? Or Drumsollen estate?’

Six (#ulink_c4cbf855-d99d-567e-95e0-fa99b675e5dd)

Drumsollen House,

24, June 1963

My dear Robert,