Page 15 of New Beginnings At Pencarrow Bay

‘More pie?’ Peggy asked Rose later that evening.

Rose twitched, as always, when addressed directly.

She was a beautiful woman in a pale, fragile way, the blue-white skin– devoid of makeup– and even paler blue eyes giving her an ethereal quality that was quite disconcerting at times, Peggy thought.

The loose ringlets of her strawberry blonde hair framed her head, like a halo.

But Rose was not, apparently, the delicate flower her looks might have suggested. Her work at the Plymouth centre was widely respected, so Ted had found out, in the papers she’d already authored in her short career.

‘Umm, it was lovely,’ she began in response to the offer of a second helping of the lemon meringue pie Peggy had laboured over on her return from the Mermaid Day events, ‘but I have eaten too much.’

Ted laughed. ‘God, me too. I’m stuffed.’ Turning to Peggy, he added, ‘Thanks, sweetheart, that was a wonderful meal. You really have excelled yourself.’

His fulsome praise rang a little hollow in Peggy’s ear.

She knew he was being careful with her. He’d arrived home that evening conveniently late, only minutes before Rose’s red Toyota had pulled up, immediately coming over to where she stood finishing off the salad and folding his arms around her silently, giving her a warm hug.

She’d gently nudged him off. Glancing up from her task, she noticed his slightly discomfited gaze.

‘Peggy, listen…’ he began, standing back, hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets.

She’d shaken her head vehemently before he could go on. There was no time to speak but she could tell he was feeling awkward. She assumed it must relate to Lindy’s generous present– although he didn’t yet know Quentin had spilled the beans about Lindy being with him in the pub.

‘Rose will be here any second. Can you see to the wine, please? There’s red on the side and I put rosé in the fridge.

I don’t suppose Rose will drink because she’s driving back, so I got elderflower.

I think she likes that. And there’s fizzy water.

’ She’d burbled on, talking to fill any silence that would allow Ted to begin again whatever he’d been about to say.

She didn’t want to listen right now. He can stew on it till his daughter goes home , she’d thought unsympathetically.

They were eating inside tonight, the May weather not having improved enough for the terrace, but Peggy had made a special effort to dress the kitchen table in a festive birthday display, with wild spring flowers she’d picked from around their garden, candles and the beautiful blue and white French linen napkins she’d inherited from her grandmother– seldom used because they were a pain to launder.

She wanted him and Rose to have a pleasant meal together, to have a proper celebration, even though she was still feeling uneasy, and puzzled, by his secrecy regarding Lindy.

While father and daughter chatted– the conversation stilted at times– her mind whirred with the accumulated events of the day: the dry robe tied smugly with the red ribbon, the over-familiar hug, the knowledge that Ted had chosen to sit and chat exclusively with Lindy in the pub– but not mentioned it to Peggy.

All a bit petty and ridiculous on one hand.

Odd, nonetheless, and hard to dismiss on the other.

Unwisely, perhaps, as they sat over coffees later– herbal tea for Rose– Ted asked his daughter, ‘So how’s the love life going?’

Peggy winced. What’s he thinking? Rose was such a private woman. Peggy hoped she had someone in her life, if she wanted that, but it was her information to tell.

Rose stared blankly at her father. ‘That isn’t something I want to talk about,’ she said quietly, but Peggy thought she detected a tiny ghost of a smile playing around her lips. Obviously so did Ted.

‘Oh, come on, sweetheart. Let your poor old dad in for once.’

His daughter frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Let you in to what?’

Ted seemed taken aback, as he often was by Rose’s apparent difficulty in picking up on everyday colloquialisms. ‘Umm, I meant…’ He stumbled over the words.

‘I meant it would be great to know what happens when you’re not working.

What you do for fun. You never give us a sense of your daily life.

’ He was trying not to sound aggrieved and Peggy’s heart went out to him.

Despite being a consummate communicator with everyone else in his life, he struggled with his daughter.

Rose did not reply immediately, her expression very still, giving nothing away. Ted cast an agonized glance at Peggy. But she couldn’t think of anything sensible to say that might improve the situation.

‘I love my work,’ Rose finally spoke. ‘Work is fun for me. It’s what I do every day.’ She raised her eyebrows at her father. ‘Does that answer your question?’ It was a genuine query. Peggy detected no hostility in her reply.

Ted looked nonplussed.

‘You take after your father, then,’ Peggy joked. ‘He never stops.’

Rose smiled warmly. ‘And my mum.’

Maria, Rose’s mother, had been an architect of some note. Peggy had no idea whether she had the work ethic of her husband and daughter, because Ted had told her so little about her or their marriage. It seemed to pain him too much.

There was a very long silence around the table.

‘Your mum would have been so proud of you,’ Ted said, his tone sounding purposeful, as if he were deliberately pushing through a barrier in his mind. The barrier, Peggy knew, that existed between them… with Maria’s name on it.

Rose blinked rapidly, a sign, Peggy knew, that she was upset. But she said nothing.

‘It’s her birthday next week,’ Ted continued. ‘We could do something. I could come over to Plymouth.’

‘I don’t want you to do that,’ Rose replied, her tone firm, suddenly bordering on angry.

Her father twitched. ‘I just thought… Mum would have been sixty.’

‘She isn’t sixty,’ Rose said. As she spoke she rose, dropping her napkin onto the table. ‘She’s dead.’

Ted was on his feet in a second and hurrying round to his daughter’s side. Peggy knew Rose wasn’t particularly comfortable with hugs, but Ted ignored that and wrapped her tight in his arms, rocking her from side to side and whispering, ‘I love you, Rose. I love you so much.’

Peggy held her breath, praying that Rose wouldn’t reject him. For a moment she appeared to stiffen in her father’s embrace. But then she leaned into him, arms snaking around him, and Peggy saw tears in her eyes. She let out her breath slowly, in relief.

‘Phew,’ Ted said, looking slightly shattered as he and Peggy stood staring at each other in the kitchen. Rose had said her goodbyes and left to drive back to Plymouth. ‘I think that went pretty well.’

Peggy nodded her agreement. In the light of previous visits, when Rose’s hostility or silence had wound everyone up, it had been a fairly uncontentious visit, until the end. ‘I’m glad she responded to your hug,’ she said.

He sighed. ‘I wish I could mention Maria without her bristling. It’s so hard, knowing that if I bring up her name I’ll get some sort of snippy reaction. Like tonight… It’s almost eight years now, and we still haven’t really spoken about it.’

‘You think she’s still angry about how Maria died? Or is it just that she finds it difficult to talk about her emotions?’

‘I don’t know. Both, I suppose. I blame myself, so why shouldn’t she blame me too?’

Peggy put an arm around his shoulders. ‘You know it wasn’t your fault. The hospital accepted responsibility. They even said, didn’t they, that they were changing the system because of what happened to Maria?’

Ted gave a harsh laugh. ‘Yeah, right. And then almost the exact same thing happens to that poor thirteen-year-old girl.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Okay, different hospital, but same bungling team of Dr Gods, stubbornly insisting they were right.’

‘Yes, but at least there’s Martha’s Rule now,’ Peggy said.

‘Too late for Maria.’

Peggy drew him to the table and sat him down.

He was shaking. ‘Tell me. Tell me exactly what happened. Please…You never really have.’ He’d always evaded her pleas to do so in the past, but Peggy knew it still haunted him.

He complained about Rose finding it difficult to talk about Maria’s death, but that seemed to Peggy to be a touch of pot and kettle.

Now she found herself relieved to be able to focus on something other than Lindy– a conversation she realized she was half avoiding.

Ted didn’t speak for a long while.

‘Please.’

After a deep breath, he began. ‘Okay… Well, it was just a stupid accident. Maria was carrying heavy shopping up the front steps of the house– which you saw were quite steep. And next door’s cat shot out in front of her.

She lost her balance and fell down the stone steps onto the pavement.

’ He stopped to gather his thoughts. ‘I was still at work, but a neighbour found her and she was taken to A and E, where they did brain scans and stuff, and they said she was okay, just bruising and a nasty graze on her head. But a couple of days later it was clear something was wrong.’

He didn’t go on, his stare into the distance remembering another time.

‘She became ill?’ Peggy prompted.

He nodded. ‘A fever, then chills, said she felt dizzy and sick. The doctor said it was probably flu and to give her paracetamol and plenty of fluids. But she got worse. She became quite confused and her temperature wouldn’t go down.

I took her back to the hospital, where they admitted her, eventually.

But they were still saying she’d be okay, that it was an infection from the head wound, which would resolve itself with antibiotics. ’

Peggy poured him a glass of wine and pushed it towards him. Ted looked at it, held it, but made no attempt to drink.

‘I’d googled her symptoms by then, and I was convinced she had sepsis.

I kept suggesting this to the nurses and any doctors I saw.

I begged them to do something before it got worse.

But they said the antibiotics they were giving her would fix it.

Wait , they kept saying.’ He took a breath.

‘And I believed them. I bloody believed them.’ Another breath.

‘Except I didn’t really. I just didn’t push hard enough. ’

‘So they thought, like Martha’s mum, that you were just being hysterical?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Another ignorant relative using the internet to wind everybody up. I remember one senior nurse saying, “You’re not doing Maria any favours by getting so upset, Ted. She needs calm right now.”’ He gave a low growl. ‘If I ever see that woman again, I’ll stab her.’

‘How long was Maria in hospital?’ Peggy asked carefully.

‘Seven long days. I kept telling her she’d be all right, but I think she knew in her heart she was dying.

She asked for Rose…’ He looked away. ‘I just didn’t believe she could actually die.

I honestly didn’t believe it, so I didn’t get Rose back from Florida, where she was studying for her doctorate. ’

Peggy stayed silent, his emotions too much to bear.

‘They took her to Intensive Care in the end,’ Ted went on eventually, ‘when her kidneys were clearly packing up and she was finding it hard to breathe. But they were way too late. And so was I, as far as Rose was concerned.’

‘I’m so sorry. But how were you to know about all that medical stuff?’

Ted took a gulp of wine. The candles from supper were low and guttering, the room suddenly chilly.

He didn’t seem to have heard Peggy as he went on, almost to himself, ‘I didn’t want to drag Rose back unnecessarily, especially when she gets so anxious with travel and disruption of any kind. But obviously I should have. She was furious with me afterwards. Uncomprehending, in fact.’

‘But you didn’t know how serious it was. And your concerns were being dismissed. You shouldn’t blame yourself.’

He took another gulp of wine. ‘I think she just found the whole thing impossible to process– fair enough– and I suppose I was an easy scapegoat. But she’s a lot kinder and more communicative now than she used to be, don’t you think?’

‘She really is. And it’s good she came today. Her present is so thoughtful, and really beautiful.’ Rose had given her father a framed photo she’d taken on a field trip in Costa Rica, of a leatherback turtle hatchling on a beach at sunset. ‘We should get it up on the wall. I love it.’

Ted nodded tiredly. Recounting his wife’s demise and the fallout with Rose had obviously taken it out of him.

Peggy felt for him. To have your wife die was bad enough.

But to harbour residual guilt that the death could have been avoided, that was even harder.

She realized she’d almost forgotten about Lindy.

Now is definitely not the time , she told herself, as they both got up wearily and began to clear away the debris from supper. It seemed to have been a long day.

‘By the way,’ she said, as they turned off the lights and locked the doors, ‘I think you hit on something when you asked about a love interest. I could be wrong, but I’m sure I detected a small smile.’

Ted grinned as he handed her a glass of water to take up to bed. ‘I saw that too. She’ll never tell us, of course. Not till they’ve been married for ten years and got three kids.’

As Peggy fell off to sleep, she chided herself. There were more important things in this world than fretting about dry robes. I don’t have enough to occupy my mind , she thought. I need to remedy that soonest.