Episode 18 - Comings and Goings

Thursday

Gary had been reluctant to go to North Wales again so soon, but he had no choice despite various crises at Middlethumpton HQ. The matter of girls disappearing from the school in Huddlecourt Minor that had started off with Susie Sweet’s misadventure at the beachhut in Frint-on-Sea had been passed on to Colin Peck, who was now looking for references to other girls who had absconded from the school for wayward girls in Huddcourt Minor.

Had they all just gone away to seek adventure and love? There was something fishy going on. The school had been closed down, but not before crimes had led to the Hartley Agency and then the police force being involved.

***

None of the vanished girls had ever been seen again in the district but the rotting remains of a mutilated person had been discovered in a large pond that was being drained behind the school. His or her identity was unknown, but around his or her neck (and this was the moment when it became like that I was a female) she had a golden chain with the initials SS written on it. That was, in Gary’s view, too great a coincidence. Susie Sweet had worn such a chain, and her murderer was on now the loose.

What if the corpse found now was of a girl who had escaped, but then thought better of it and was killed by the would-be friend who was making off with her. The motive would be that she might sneak on him. Susie Sweet had gone with him, and lived, at least for four years.

Were there two young women calling themselves Susie Sweet?

“We’ll put Frint-on-Sea behind us and then try to find out what happened to all the girls who left that school vial a knotted bed-sheet from the dormitories. There must be a list somewhere,” said Gary.

“I agree,” said Cleo. “I’ll go to the vicarageand tell Edith that we aren’t going until Friday. The girls can stay there until we get back. Charlie loved it there, and Edith carriesPeggySue round  mostz of the time and adores her.”

***

Cleo knew from personal experience that it was sometimes hard to distinguish between the positive and negative consequences of a situation. A dream had come true for her and Gary, but how was Robert going to cope? For him there were still hurdles to take, and one of them was arriving at Heathrow that very day.

Cleo wanted to talk about Robert’s secrecy concerning his contact with Rita.She did not intend to shoulder all the responsibility for the breakup of her marriage and she thought Robert might want her to do that, though a breakup would not have been possible had their relationship not been in the doldrums.

Robert was thinking along much the same lines as Cleo. That would have surprised her since Robert was not normally reflective. His reaction to his daughter Julie’s suggestion that he should meet Rita off the plane had been less than enthusiastic, but he was anxious to keep that to himself, having encouraged his daughter Julie to set up the contact with her.

“You aren’t happy with Cleo, are you?” she had said at the time.

“I could be happy, but she is not happy with me.”

“Why is that?” she had asked her father, although she had a good idea what the problem was.

“I think she’s toying with the idea of leaving me for Gary.”

“Has she said something?”

Julie had been friendly with Gary on a superficial level for a short time, but found him cool and unromantic. Gary had let it slip that he was not really interested in anyone except Cleo and Cleo was married to Julie’s father. Julie was glad that she had spurned Gary’s sexual advances, which were more dutiful than anything else. She would tell Cleo all about her failed romance with Gary unless Gary had already done so. It would ease their contact considerably. Holding hands with a guy who wisheded he was somewhere else was not flattering, and discussing Gary’s infatuation with the wife of her father was too much of a tall order.

“You see Julie, Cleo denies having anything to do with Gary except when they are working,” Robert had said. “I think that now she has PeggySue, she wants to keep her marriage intact, and not have any affairs on the side.”

“It wouldn’t be on the side, would it?” said Julie. “You thought having a baby would take care of everything, I suppose.”

“I thought we were too old, but it was Cleo’s dream,” said Robert.

He knew the truth,  which was more than just their lack of any intimacy almost since their wedding night, but was not able to confide that much in his daughter. After all, miracles do happen abd he would be a good father to the little girl.

Julie reflect that Cleo must have pregnant into the marriage, but thought it better not to mention that.

“And now it’s your nightmare, isn’t it?”

“I care about PeggySue, but it’s as if having that baby with her lover has freed Cleo from me.”

“Isn’t PeggySue your child, Dad?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“So what is the reason for your break-up. Is it you?”

“What do you mean, Julie? I’m the same as I always was.”

“Maybe you are. If you were always a couch-potato.”

“Me? A couch-potato?”

“Sedentary!”

“What’s that when it’s at home?”

“Stuck; complacent; boring.”

“You don’t really think that do you Julie?” said Robert.

“I’m not married to you, Dad, but I know Cleo. She needs adventure, excitement, sex and risk in her life. Being a mother does not give her any of that and I don’t suppose she expected it to.”

“She doesn’t need all that other stuff,” said Robert. ”She has PeggySue now.”

Julie’s wise words were falling on deaf ears. She sighed.

“How Victorian you are, Dad. I can see it’s no use talking to you. You’d better talk with Mum about it. She’ll know what to say, unless there’s something else you want to tell me. I’m a grown woman. We are friends, aren’t we?”

“What about your mother’s partner in New Zealand?” said Robert, changing the subject.

“It’s over. She’s on her own now and longing to come back home. I think she must have told him she wanted to marry him and he got cold feet. To rub salt in the wound, he soon took up with a woman younger than me. He told Mum that he wanted kids and she was too old to give him any. End of story. A relationship going the historical way. After all, men married several times and their wives gave them children and died in the process. Birth was a dangerous game for women, and men needed several successers because there was a high infat death rate.”

Quite apart from the shocking truth Julie had spouted out, he had told Cleo she was too old. It had hurt her badly, and not deterred her from having a baby.

“I’ll talk to Rita. It’s a good idea, Julie.”

“But only if you are prepared to listen to her and take her advice. You don’t listen much, Dad.”

“I will listen, I promise.”

“You should take into account that having walked out on Cleo, you have played into her hands,” said Julie callously. “On the other hand, you won’t need Cleo when you have Mum or find someone else to share your life with,” Julie had said, thinking how egoistic her father was.

He had lived alone for nearly thirty years. Did he need a woman at all? More precisely, did he need her mother? And what had he needed Cleo for? Julie was sceptical about all that, but she kept those thoughts to herself, as well.

“That’s settled then,” said Julie, glad not to have to continue talking about her father’s love-life, or lack of it. She wondered if she was meddling. Could her parents’ love be rekindled after thirty years? She decided they had nothing to lose if there had been enough love in it and the elopement had not been teenage defiance..

Talking of losing Cleo had plunged Robert into a dilemma. He had not told Julie everything in the phone call made to her after he removed himself from Cleo’s cottage. Was he really so tied to Cleo that there was no alternative? He had resented her work with Gary from the very beginning. Why had he encouraged her investigations? Had her intensified interest in crime been the beginning of the end? Robert refused to accept the fact that Gary was probably better suited to Cleo. It was to take him some time to face up to that fact.

***

In order not to make the situation between him and Cleo even worse, Robert had got in touch with Rita through Julie. He did not himself have a computer, but of course Julie did, and she arranged an email address so that her father and mother could write whenever they wanted to without Cleo finding out.

So if Robert visited his daughter in Middlethumpton more often than he used to, it would not bother Cleo at all, assuming she even noticed. Robert did not tell Julie of his intention to walk out on Cleo if she did not walk out on him. Julie had said that Cleo would not walk out of her cottage and that was probably delaying the end of the marriage. That had shocked Robert, and it was in his mind when finally left.

Robert found it difficult to express himself in writing, so his mails to Rita were rather stunted. Julie was sure that Robert’s insistence that he and Cleo were too old for parenthood was at least partly responsible for the failure of his marriage. No wonder that Cleo had turned to Gary.

***

In the wake of Robert’s dramatic move out of the cottage, he was glad that Rita was coming back. He knew he had no future with Cleo. Had he been hoping she would beg him to come back? Would he have done so? No. It was too late for that now.

Cleo would be sure to read a lot into Rita’s return, and she did, of course, though her thoughts went in the direction of Robert’s duplicity, which she had already encountered once in connection with Rita.

***

Robert would move back into his flat above the shop, though that meant asking Gloria to leave, which he would do, even if it meant her throwing in her job at the shop. It was clear that Robert’s living situation could only be solved by asking Gloria to go elsewhere. That did not mean that Rita would even cosider moving in and Robert was far from sure he wanted that. Julie would give her mother a home while she looked for somewhere to live. Rita would get a teaching job quite easily and be independent very soon.

Robert’s plans for his future did not include Edith either, but he could not help thinking about her. She had been so friendly when he had seen her. She was helpful and he liked her a lot. Could he talk to her about Cleo?

***

Rita’s plane was late. By the time her connection landed it was almost 9 p.m. and Robert had already sent Dorothy a text advising her not to wait up.

The meeting between Rita and Robert was stilted, as if they were strangers

Rita looked troubled and Robert felt uncertain and shy. They could not reinvent their teenage romance. They both realized that and either of them had expected an emotional reunion. It was clear that only a miracle could bring them together.

“What’s going on?” said Rita. “Julie told me a jumbled story I could hardly believe.”

“I don’t know what she told you, but it’s probably true,” said Robert.

“She told me you’d just moved out of your cottage and were lodging with that piano teacher woman.”

“Dorothy. And it’s true, but I did not own the cottage and I walked out.”

“I hope it wasn’t because I was coming home, Robert,” said Rita. “I did not come home to be with you. I came home because there was nothing left to keep me in Auckland.”

“No. I moved out of the cottage for other reasons.”

Robert was almost relieved that Rita had taken the initiative and wanted to put things on a clear footing right away. She didn’t mean to be cruel. Her divorce from Robert had been instigated after 29 years separation in which each thought the other was dead, to make it possible for Robert to marry Cleo.

Rita was sure that Robert had made a mess of that marriage, but did not intend to pick up the pieces of anything they had shared in the distant  past even to fill the emotional emptiness she still felt after her relationship had broken down in Auckland.

***

In the light of what was turning into a non-event rather than a runion, Robert thought he should explain things to Rita.“It was Julie’s idea to get in touch with you all those weeks ago. I had no idea how things between me and Cleo were going to develop.”

“What happened?”

“Cleo told me last week thart  she was having an affair with her pet cop and I more or less told her to get on with it. I already knew, and her telling me straight out was more than I could take.”

“Couldn’t you have put up a fight for her?”

“No point. I’m just a family butcher, Rita. Cleo has found someone more on her intellectual level, quite apart from any mutual physical attraction they might have.”

“Might have?”

“I don’t know how long they have been having an affair, Rita.”

“It doesn’t take long to find out. You could have asked her.”

“I did, and at first she denied that anything was going on between her and Gary.”

“Not surprisingly, but you could have asked that cop what his intentions were.”

“He was a good friend.”

“No he wasn’t, Robert. He stole your wife.”

“I let him.”

“If you want my opinion, I think that what you have told me is the tip of the iceberg.”

“It probably is,” said Robert.

“And you capitulated, Robert.”

“I suppose I did.”

***

Once the luggage had been retrieved and customs cleared at the airport, Robert led the way to the car. Rita said nothing on the journey, except to remark that having a new daughter would have encouraged most men to stick a marriage out for the baby’s sake. 

“It’s Cleo’s baby, Rita,” Robert said. “I don’t  approve of parentage at our age.”

“Excuse me saying so, Robert, but I would have turned away from you if you said that to me.”

“Cleo didn’t turn away from me. I turned away from her.”

Rita was sure that it was a misapprehension. You don’t take a lover and then confess as much if you don’t want to provoke a dramatic reaction, but Robert must have believed that the affair would be over soon if he just stood by and pretend not to mind.

***

Dorothy was waiting for them, determined to make Rita welcome. After all, she had nothing to do with Robert’s current crisis.

“Gloria is moving out of your flat at the weekend, I’m told, so it will be free from Sunday, Robert,” Dorothy announced.

“Who’s Gloria?” Rita wanted to know.

“Cleo’s mother, Rita. She works in his shop.”

“I remember her. A dynamic lady. Coloured. Larger than life. I thought she was going back to Chicago.”

“She settled here after organizing things there,” said Robert. “She’s been a great help to Cleo and she’s a marvellous saleswoman.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to take over her job, Robert.”

“Of course not. Gloria will carry on working for me and I can live in the flat above the shop like in the old days.”

“In other words, it’s back to square one, except that I can safely assume that Cleo’s lover is sleeping in your bed. That’s a pretty kettle of fish, Robert.”

***

Rita was indeed highly critical of the way Robert had mismanaged his marriage. After all, she had obtained her divorce so that it could happen. On the other hand, now she was a free agent, she did not have to fall in with any conventional plan Robert might have thought up to compensate for what she suspectedcwas 80 per cent his doing.

Dorothy entirely approved of the cool way Rita was dealing with the situation. She suspected that Julie must have had a hand in her parents meeting again without realizing that the years in between had made different people out of the love-bitten teenagers who had once eloped. She would have to find out exactly what the situation was.

***

Dorothy hated being left in the dark about anything, but one thing she would tell Cleo was that Rita and Robert did not seem to have any rapport at all. Robert would have to look further afield if he wanted to replace Cleo.