The Silk Factory Read Free Page B

memory.
    Over the years, whenever she had an accident she’d kept it from her mother: a cracked glass pushed to the back of a cupboard, a book with a broken spine wedged back into the shelf, even cuts and grazes from biking disasters hidden under jeans rather than have Mum ‘make a fuss’ as her father used to put it. She had never doubted her mother’s love for her but had been wary about expressing her own, afraid of risking too much openness in the face of responses that were sometimes prickly, sometimes baffling. Now that it was too late she wished that she had been braver and talked it out with her. Now she would never know what lay at the root of it. And she would never be able to take that risk and say the loving words she should have said.
    The kettle boiled and she poured the water into a mug. She stood at the window, stirring the teabag round and round, lost in thought. She saw with sudden clarity what a lonely child she had been. She had been blessed with a vivid imagination and had responded as imaginative children do by drawing on her own resources, creating Arabella, the companion that she longed for. She wondered fleetingly whether the awfulness of the last year: the final break-up with Josh, and then losing her mum, had triggered some weird throwback response. Maybe she had simply dreamt up the girl in the garden, experienced some strange vision brought on by the displacement of being in a strange place, by grief for the loss of a parent, by being so truly alone.

TWO
    A month after her mother’s death, Rosie had made a huge effort and taken a day trip from London to Northampton to visit her mother’s solicitor. She had been baffled to learn that she’d inherited the house. ‘But it’s Aunt May’s house!’ she’d said to Mr Marriott as he passed a copy of the will across an acre of pale ash desk.
    ‘Well, no. Actually it belonged to your mother and father but they allowed Miss Webster – May – to have occupancy while she had need of it. Of course, now she’s accommodated elsewhere.’ A slim young man with a pair of black-framed reading glasses on the end of his nose, he looked at her over them with a lugubrious expression that was at odds with his good looks and which she felt sure he affected in order to appear older and wiser than his years.
    ‘I see,’ Rosie said, looking at him in blank bewilderment. She settled Cara more comfortably on her lap, who turned sleepily in against her chest and began to suck her thumb.
    ‘Now that your mother has passed away – your father having predeceased her – the property at Weedon Bec passes to you,’ he explained again. ‘I take it you know the area fairly well?’
    Rosie shook her head. ‘We never visited. Aunt May occasionally came to us but not often. I remember May and my father used to argue about it. May was always trying to persuade them to come but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. I never knew why.’
    Mr Marriott nodded sagely, as if nothing about the peculiarities of families could possibly surprise him. ‘I understand that your father’s work as a conservator at Highcross House meant that the family had a property provided whilst he was living?’
    Rosie nodded.
    ‘But your mother had been living at the Weedon address recently, I believe?’
    ‘Yes. After Dad died, Mum rented a cottage in Somerset, but when May got ill and went into the home she wanted to be able to visit regularly so it made sense to move into the house up here.’ Rosie hesitated. ‘It was more than that though,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘She told me that she wanted to go back to her roots, that it was the village that her family came from and she didn’t …’ She felt a catch in her throat and paused for a moment. ‘She said she didn’t want to end up in some anonymous sheltered housing,’ she said, all in a rush. ‘She said she was going home to her native place.’
    Mr Marriott pressed his fingertips together and looked down at them to give her a moment