A Very Special Man Read online

  ‘You’ve been wonderful, Chloe,’ Jan told her, in her feeble convalescent’s voice. She was tucked up on the sofa in the sitting room and Chloe had made a pot of tea for the two of them. James, one and a half, was obligingly having an afternoon nap upstairs and Emma, just four, was riding her mini-bike in the back garden, a scarlet pixie, well muffled up against the wind, with strict instructions to keep within sight of the sitting room window.

  ‘Wonderful?’ Chloe repeated smugly, pouring out tea. ‘You can say that again. I think I’m a flipping marvel.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, so do I. But seriously, how would I have managed here without you, these last few days? But I’ve been thinking, Chloe, and I mustn’t be selfish and go on leaning on you. I know you’ll want to get back to London—and Roger.’

  Chloe went on pouring tea. ‘Not really. Roger and I have said goodbye. Last Monday.’ She held out her ringless left hand.

  Jan gasped. ‘Oh no! Oh, how awful of me, I never noticed.’

  ‘You don’t notice much with a temperature of a hundred and two,’ Chloe said, keeping her voice light.

  ‘Love, I’m so awfully sorry. What happened—or don’t you want to talk about it?’

  ‘Briefly, Roger wanted me to leave Aunt Catherine’s and move into a furnished flat—for his convenience. I didn’t think it was a good idea, so’—she shrugged— ‘he opted out.’

  Jan looked down into her teacup and then up at her sister. ‘Do you mind—terribly?’

  Chloe said nothing for a time. This was a question she had put off asking herself. ‘I’m not quite sure how much. It hurt like nobody’s business when it happened. But in a way he made it easy for me. He told me before he left that I should have warned him that I was a frigid…’ She pressed her lips together, shaking her head. ‘I’ll spare you all the colourful words he thought up. Roger is going to be a whale of a barrister some day. His command of language is quite amazing.’

  Jan looked at her with compassion and said in her gentle voice, ‘Perhaps he didn’t really mean it, love. Maybe he'll think better of it and come back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want him if he did, not after that. And anyway I expect he’s got someone else lined up by now—some girl who’s likely to be more—accommodating than I am.’

  ‘Well then, there’ll be someone else, you’ll see.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Chloe. It amazed her that Jan, with a broken marriage just behind her, could be selling the idea of falling in love. ‘And maybe not. He’d have to be something very special, I can tell you.’ She grinned, making a joke of it. ‘You know—tall, dark and handsome. Rich and generous. Kind to children and dumb animals…’

  Jan giggled. ‘And sexy?’

  ‘Oh yes, that too.’ Chloe added wryly, ‘Roger was quite wrong about me. I don’t just want to furnish a doll’s house—that was one of the things he said. I want a man in it as well. But a man who’s grown-up enough to want a home and marriage, and the responsibilities that brings. They don’t seem to be so thick on the ground just now, do they?’

  ‘Too true they don’t.’ Janice looked bleak and Chloe cursed herself for a tactless idiot, for that was exactly the reason why Derek had walked out. He hadn’t been mature enough to make a success of marriage. He had wanted freedom and he had gone off .to look for it. The one thing that could be said for him was that he hadn’t left Jan in want. She had the house and enough for necessities, if not for luxuries.

  The two girls finished their tea in silence, each occupied with her own thoughts. Then Jan said, ‘Well, if it’s off with Roger, what will you do?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought really. Go back to London, I suppose, and look for another job.’

  Jan wriggled her feet under the fleecy rug. ‘I suppose you have to go back? I don’t want to interfere in your plans, love, but I suppose you wouldn’t—wouldn’t consider staying on here for a while? I don’t mean for you to go on acting nurse-cum-cook-cum-housemaid-cum-everything else, like you’ve been doing since you came. I mean just—you know, to sort of be around. Even with the children here I get a bit lonely sometimes.’ She warmed to the theme now that she had broached it, and Chloe guessed that she had been turning it over in her mind from the moment she heard about Roger’s exit from the scene. ‘You could get a job here; with your experience there ought to be plenty of jobs going in Coventry. You might even find something more interesting than secretarial work—something that would make use of your languages. How about it, love?’

  To get away from London, and everything that reminded her of Roger! To get back to her roots in this quiet old town! ‘Yes,’ said Chloe, ‘I’d like that. I’d like to be with you and the children, for a time anyway, Jan. But I’d have to see what Aunt Catherine thought about it. She’s been very kind to me, I wouldn’t like to leave her in the lurch.’

  ‘No, no, of course.’ Jan looked anxious. ‘Ring her now and ask, why don’t you?’ she suggested eagerly.

  Aunt Catherine had phoned twice during the week, to enquire after the invalids, and now she was delighted to hear they were all so much better. ‘But I think I’d like to stay on for a few weeks with Janice, Aunt Catherine, if that’s all right with you.’

  It would, she gathered, be perfectly all right. She would be missed, but it would really fit in quite well because an old school friend of Aunt Catherine’s, recently widowed, had written to ask if she might come to stay in London and if she could perhaps be taken in as a paying guest.

  ‘So I wouldn’t be leaving you in the lurch?’ Chloe nodded with a smile in the direction of Jan’s delighted face. ‘How about your car, though?’

  ‘You keep it, the while. I know you’ll look after it and you can have the service that’s nearly due done at a local garage. My friend Hilda has a car so we shall be able to use hers when she comes.’

  Chloe expressed her gratitude and promised to treat the Mini with the utmost tenderness. Then she drew in a quick breath and said casually, ‘I suppose you haven’t seen anything more of Roger?’

  ‘I have not, indeed! And that young man wouldn’t get a very warm welcome from me if he turned up. The way he spoke to you!’ Her indignation reached all the way from London. ‘No, you’re well rid of bad rubbish there, Chloe. You look out for some nice young man in Kenilworth. A man who knows how to treat a girl properly,’ she added severely, and Chloe smiled to herself. Dear Aunt Catherine wouldn’t know it, but men didn’t come like that any longer, she thought. The days of chivalry were over, the days of Women’s Lib had arrived.

  ‘I’ll have to see what I can do,’ she promised. But as she replaced the receiver she added grimly to herself, in ' much the same words that she had used to Jan, that it would take a very special kind of man to make her fall in love again.

  A very special man indeed.

  By Monday things were as near back to normal as they could be, with no man about the house, unless you counted James.

  ‘When will Daddy come back from ’merica?’ Emma enquired over breakfast.

  ‘One of these days,’ her mother told her, spooning cereal into James’s plate. Under the separation agreement Derek had ‘access’ to the children and came to see them very occasionally. The fiction that he was in America when he didn’t come for some time had, so far, satisfied Emma. But James wasn’t to be sidetracked. ‘Want Daddy,’ he announced clearly. ‘Want Daddy now!’ Chloe glanced at her small nephew’s reddening cheeks and jutting lower lip as he pushed away the spoon. He was shaping up nicely for his masculine role in life, she thought cynically. I want—I want—give it me now. That was the theme song.

  After lunch Jan said she was quite well enough to cope with the children, so Chloe drove into Kenilworth to the garage to make an appointment for servicing, and do some shopping for food at the same time.

  The garage man was helpful. ‘We could put it in now for you, miss. We’ve just had a cancellation. Otherwise’—he frowned down at his book—‘it would be Friday at the soonest.’

  The Mini was d
ue for a minor service only, so Chloe arranged to call back in an hour or so. She could do her shopping and have a cup of tea at a cafe while she waited.

  The day was fine and sunny, though still cold. April was only a fortnight away now, and there was a promise of spring in the air. Chloe walked down the hill past the Clock and it was all so familiar. New shops, of course; old familiar landmarks had gone and new buildings replaced them; but basically the town hadn’t changed much. This was the shop where they had bought cream slices after school. In the window hung a bill for the next production at the Talisman Theatre, the local amateur group. She turned and took the road to the castle, pausing as soon as she came within sight of the massive ancient ruin that brooded over the small town. Once, in the summer holidays after her final term at school, she and two other sixth-formers had acted as temporary guides to the castle. It had been fun mugging up all the history to serve to the tourists, and the tips had been a welcome addition to their pocket money. She had heard that they didn’t have girls from school as guides any longer and she thought it a pity. It had given them a great sense of history.

  Back again in the shopping area of the town she wandered on, half in a dream. Here was the bus stop where she had waited for the tall red bus that would take her home after school, one of a chattering group of girls. The bus would set her down on the main road, halfway to Leamington, and from there it was nearly a mile to Woodcotes, the old house hidden away in the trees. Mother would be waiting for her, and sometimes Jan would be there too. In the winter there would be crumpets for tea and in the summer, strawberries from the garden. Chloe’s mother, widowed when Janice was five and Chloe only a baby, had taken a post as housekeeper to Colonel Feeke, and Woodcotes had been home to Chloe ever since she could remember. When she was a very small girl there had been the Colonel’s family living there—a son and two daughters, but one by one they had married and gone away and in time it had almost seemed that Janice and Chloe had been like a second family to him. As he grew older and less inclined to leave the house he liked to have them about the place, he said, and Chloe remembered him as a benevolent old gentleman with a bald head and a heavy white moustache, who had liked her to curl up on the hearthrug at his feet while he told her about the old house and how it had been built on the site of an ancient tithe barn. Even now, after goodness knew how many rebuildings and additions, there were still bits of the old stone structure, if you knew where to look for them. The Colonel loved the house and in an odd way he had passed on his interest and affection to the little girl. Now, after years, Chloe had a strong urge to see it again, if only to peep at it through the trees from the lane.

  A red double-decker bus was approaching along the main road. Well, why not? Chloe thought. It would be a good way of passing the time until the Mini was ready. The bus stopped and she climbed on.

  Ten minutes later she was walking along the lane towards Woodcotes, feeling almost as if she were once again coming home from school. Everything was—or seemed to be—exactly the same. The trees had no doubt grown a bit in five years, but they had been so tall to start with that you would never notice. Here was the Johnsons’ farm, just the same well-kept conglomeration of house and outbuildings. The sheep were in the fields and there were already a good assortment of lambs, delightful little creatures. She leaned on the gate and enjoyed watching them for a few minutes before walking on. Nearly there now. Round the next corner was the Crokers’ cottage. Percy Croker was a retired postman who had looked after the Colonel’s garden. Mrs Croker had sometimes helped Chloe’s mother in the kitchen on the rare occasions that the Colonel entertained guests or had his family and their children to stay.

  Mrs Croker was in the side garden, pulling brussels sprouts off their long stalks. She looked up, blinked through her round spectacles and then a pleased smile of recognition spread over her round red-veined face. ‘Well, if it isn’t Chloe Martin!’ She put her basket down and came to the hedge. ‘It is Chloe?’ she added doubtfully, taking a good look at the nicely-fitting tweed suit, the fashionable high boots, the perky white angora cap with the bobble on top. When she left, at sixteen and a half, Chloe had been a high-school girl; now she was a stylish young lady, Mrs Croker’s glance seemed to say.

  ‘It is indeed, Mrs Croker. How are you after all this time?’

  Mrs Croker was delighted and it was going to be difficult to stop her talking. There was the daughter in Canada and the grandchildren and another baby on the way. There was Percy’s chest, and what the doctor said. There were questions about Chloe’s mother in Australia, and about Jan and her family. ‘She called in to see me once about two years ago, and brought the little girl, wasn’t that nice of her? But won’t you come in, my dear?’

  Chloe explained about Jan having been ill and asked to be excused. ‘I just had half an hour to spare while the car’s in the garage and I came out here, on an impulse, to look at the old house.’

  ‘Ah—Woodcotes. Up for sale again.’ Mrs Croker shook her head. ‘Those Americans who bought it when the old Colonel died didn’t stay very long. Then there was a lecturer from the University, but he moved down south. After that there was a family from Singapore. The husband went back and left his family behind here for a time, but in the end they went out to join him and since then the old house has been empty. I haven’t heard as it’s been sold yet. A pity! It don’t do a house any good to lie empty.’

  Chloe agreed. It would be sad to see the place running to seed. She almost decided to turn back without seeing it, but having come this far—‘I’ll just walk on and take a look, for old times’ sake,’ she told Mrs Croker, and promised to call in again if she possibly could before she went back to London.

  ‘That would be a pleasure, my dear.’ Mrs Croker said goodbye with many messages to Chloe’s family.

  By the time she reached the gates of the old house Chloe was beginning to regret her impulse to come. The wind had turned colder, the sun had gone in, and neglect stared her in the face, from the overgrown shrubs where a garish red and blue FOR SALE board leaned at a crazy angle beside the gatepost, all the way down the weedy gravel drive, until she reached the house itself and stood frowning at it with dismay.

  Woodcotes had always been a house that needed caring for, more perhaps than most houses, and it was plain that nobody had been caring for it for some considerable time. Paint flaked from the front door; the brass knocker and letter-box were almost black instead of twinkling gold as she remembered them; bedraggled lace curtains half covered dusty windows.

  Poor old house, thought Chloe. As she walked round to the back a drizzle of rain began to fall and that seemed appropriate. She stepped up on to the verandah that ran the whole length of the house behind graceful wrought-iron arcading that had once been painted white, and peered in through the long windows into the sitting room where she had so often sat listening to the Colonel’s stories. Then she turned away quickly and looked out over the rose-garden, overgrown and weed-infested. The Colonel would walk here in the evenings when Chloe was doing her homework in the upstairs sitting room. Sometimes he would look up and see her and wave his stick and smile, and Orlando, the marmalade cat, would stretch himself on the low stone wall and gaze hopefully up into the apple tree in case there might be an unwary bird there. But Orlando had never been smart enough to catch a bird; or perhaps it was because he was too well fed. Chloe sighed deeply, wondering if Orlando were still alive and if so, where he was.

  There was nothing to stay for. ‘They’ said you should never come back to a place where once you had been happy and it looked as if ‘they’ were right. From where she was, the nearest way out was past the kitchen premises and round the other side of the house. The curtains were drawn closely across the windows of the kitchen, which was perhaps as well, thought Chloe. It would be too depressing altogether to see what had once been her mother’s pride and joy; old-fashioned perhaps, but clean and gleaming. Next to the kitchen was the big walk-in larder. The window-catch had evidently broken and
the window was hanging open. Chloe reached up to close it and couldn’t resist a peep inside. She recoiled, horrified, wrinkling her small nose in disgust.

  The last owners must have gone off to Hong Kong or Singapore or wherever it was in a great hurry. On the wide pantry shelf was a hunked-off loaf of bread, green with mould, several opened cans of soup spilling the remains of their contents on to the marble slab, a wedge of a cheese that was growing a thick grey fuzz all over. Perhaps, thought Chloe, trying to be charitable, the family had been having a hurried meal here when the removal van arrived and they had forgotten to come back to clear up.

  Well, it was none of her business. For the sake of hygiene she would leave the window open, and then move on. But she just couldn't. It seemed so degrading—an insult to the old house to leave it like this. She glanced down at her neat tweed suit and then up at the open window and made up her mind quickly. In the nearby outhouse, which had once been a stable, she found a large metal bucket. After that it was easy. Reversed to make a platform, the bucket brought her within reach of the window. The window was fairly wide and she was a slim girl. A jump, a quick wriggle and she was inside, none the worse except for a few cobwebs and some smudges of dust. She brushed them off and got to work.

  The cupboard under the wide shelf provided a black polythene bag and into this she swept the debris—tins, milk bottles, cheese, bread. There was more of it than she had seen at first glance and by the time she had cleared up the pantry the sack was nearly full. The best thing to do with it would be to put it in the dustbin outside and see that the lid was firmly anchored against stray animals.

  She lugged the sack into the kitchen. What she had taken for a curtain over the window turned out to be a white Venetian blind. When she had pulled this up a surprise greeted her, for the old kitchen had been completely revamped, and in its place she saw a spectacular set-up that might have come straight out of Homes and Gardens. It all needed a good clean, of course, but under the dust was. a kitchen that any modern wife would covet. This would be the work of the Americans—the first owners after the Colonel had died. No American would tolerate the sort of kitchen her mother had worked in. What had they done to the rest of the house? she wondered. Before she left she would have a prowl round and see.