Man Of Stone

She had got on well enough with Laura, Cressy’s mother. She and her father had been a well-matched pair, both of them enjoying the luxurious and rather fast-paced life that James Rodney embraced.

That was one of the reasons that there was no money. Her father must have thought himself immortal, Sara thought wryly. He had certainly never thought to make any provision for a tragedy such as the one which had just overwhelmed them.

She had read about the avalanche that had buried an alpine village in her morning paper. It had been lunch time before she learned that her father and Laura had been killed in it.

Now there were just the three of them; an odd and very disparate family unit, consisting of two young women and one half-grown child. But Cressy was already making it plain that she was going to opt out of that unit, and so it would just be the two of them. Tom and herself.

Sara wanted to protest, to remind her stepsister that Tom was their shared responsibility, but she thought of Tom’s strained, pale face, and the way he always shied away from the often acerbic Cressy and instead she said quietly, ‘Perhaps that would be best.’

She had to turn away to avoid seeing the relieved satisfaction in Cressy’s eyes.

‘Well, it is the most sensible solution, darling. After all, looking after a small and rather sickly child is hardly my scene, is it? Besides, I may get a chance at a role in an American soap. I could hardly take Tom out to California with me. Not with his asthma.’

Sara forbore to comment that, on the contrary, the hot, dry climate would probably do their half-brother a world of good. She had far more weighty things on her mind than Cressy’s selfishness. For one thing, where on earth were they going to live? Without the house, the small salary she could bring in was hardly going to provide comfortable accommodation for a young woman and an eight-year-old child.

‘Darling, I must fly. I’m due out tonight…’

‘Cressy, we still haven’t discussed where we’re going to live,’ Sara protested. ‘We lose this house at the end of the month.’

‘Oh, haven’t I told you? Jenneth has a spare room in her flat, which she offered me.’ The blue eyes hardened. ‘Look, Sara, be practical for once in your life. Why on earth don’t you get in touch with your mother’s family?’

‘My mother’s family?’ Sara repeated stupidly. ‘But…’

‘Oh, come on, darling. Use your head. Your mother came from a wealthy Cheshire family. We all know that! All right, so they refused to have anything to do with her when she defied her parents and ran away to marry your father, but that’s years ago now. If you turn up on their doorstep, destitute, with a small child in tow, they’re bound to take you in.’

‘Cressy!’ Sara was horrified, and it showed. She was also bewildered. From the pat way Cressy was voicing it, it was obvious that this wasn’t the first time that such a solution had occurred to her stepsister. She herself had never for one moment thought of contacting her mother’s family. She didn’t even know how to. She had heard the story of her parents’ run-away marriage so often that she simply accepted it as one might a fairy story.

‘Cressy, we don’t know that my mother’s people are wealthy. Dad could…’

‘They were… they are,’ Cressy interrupted her grimly. ‘I’ve been checking up on them.’ She ignored Sara’s gasp of shock. ‘I’ve been thinking about this ever since the funeral, Sara. It’s the ideal solution. You can’t stay in London. How could you support yourself, never mind Tom?’

‘My secretarial training…’

‘Oh, that!’ Cressy brushed her stammered words aside. ‘That wouldn’t bring in enough to keep you both. Face it, darling, the parents used you as a drudge. You kept house for them and answered Pop’s post, but that was about all. You’d never get a proper job with those qualifications. Really, darling, you don’t have any alternative… You have to contact your mother’s family. Look, I’ll even drive you up to see them,’ Cressy offered magnanimously.

‘To see them? But, Cressy, if I do get in touch with them… surely a letter would be more…’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t have time to get involved in letters. You need somewhere to live, Sara. Tom needs somewhere to live,’ Cressy pointed out.

Tom… A tiny shaft of fear shook Sara. There were times when Tom seemed such a fragile, delicate child. She thought of him being cooped up in a tiny London bedsit, and her mouth went dry.

But what Cressy was suggesting was so… so… so calculating, she admitted unhappily. There had been no contact between her father and his first wife’s family from the date of their marriage. Even after their daughter’s death, they had evinced no interest in their grandchild.

‘Look,’ 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.