Marnie gulped. ‘Did I?’ Although she must have said it, because she’d always thought it and it wasn’t the sort of thing Lilian could have made up. She’d often wondered what Judith Salt had been like before looking after a toddler whilst pregnancy took its toll; and before her husband left her the month before Gabrielle was born and moved to Thailand to be with a clutch of women he’d hooked up with on the internet and never even met.
‘I didn’t have a proper relationship with my parents either,’ said Lilian. ‘Maybe that’s why fate put us together. Two kindred spirits.’
Marnie nodded. It said something about the state of her life that the person she had most in common with was an old lady whom she barely knew.
‘I wanted so much to be told I’d been adopted when I was younger,’ Lilian went on. ‘But I had too much of the family resemblance to be denied . . .’ Her voice momentarily trailed off before she launched down another conversational avenue. ‘Did you ever find out who your real parents were, Marnie?’
‘No.’ Marnie licked a blob of Chantilly cream from her finger. ‘My birth wasn’t originally registered. The authorities were tipped off that a child was abandoned in an empty caravan – that was me. Irish travellers, they thought. I have no way of knowing . . . well, a slim chance because I suppose anything is possible these days.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t say that I’d try to find them even if I did know.’ I’m not sure I could set myself up for another disappointment, she said to herself, but not aloud. She felt Lilian’s chilly hand fall on top of hers and she saw how thin the skin was. She had the hands of a ninety-year-old.
‘I knew even before my sister blurted it out when I was fourteen that I was adopted,’ Marnie went on, seeing a GIF of Gabrielle in her head screaming at her:
I’m glad you’re adopted, you bitch. I’m glad we’re not real sisters.
Marnie remembered the top note of shock that hit her first. The relief came second and bloomed to euphoria because it explained everything.
‘. . . I’d always known I wasn’t the same as them. For a start, Mum and Gabrielle and my “father” are all blue-eyed blondes.’ She flicked her long black hair over her shoulder and pointed at her cat-green eyes. ‘I can’t tell you how many times it’s been said that I look Irish.’
Lilian studied her. ‘Yes, I noticed that immediately,’ she agreed. ‘Your lovely sharp cheekbones and colouring. Unmistakably you have Irish blood in you.’
‘And my sister can eat three potatoes more than a pig and stay the same weight and I can put on a stone just from watching her do it.’
Lilian Dearman hooted with laughter.
‘She was named after an angel, I was named after a deranged woman in a Hitchcock film. I think that says it all.’
‘Ah, but a very beautiful woman,’ said Lilian. ‘One with spirit and beauty and guile.’
Marnie agreed that she had spirit and guile all right. Her mother had never suspected how much cheesecake and jam she had eaten that summer of her tenth year.
‘We lived next door to a lovely old lady . . .’
‘Mrs McMaid,’ Lilian interjected.
‘Oh, I’ve told you about her too.’ Quelle surprise.
‘Only a little. Carry on. I want to hear more.’
Marnie caught a waft of Lilian’s perfume as she waved her hand encouragingly for her to continue. It was very like the one Mrs McMaid used to wear. She’d had a large ridged bottle on her dressing table with a tasselled squashy pump which dispensed the scent of midsummer whenever it was pressed.
‘Well, she baked cakes on a continual loop for other people: the church, local bakeries and sometimes just to give away to poor souls who needed cheering up.’ Marnie didn’t realise how her features softened when talking about the old lady, but Lilian saw. ‘I think, though it might sound melodramatic, that she was the first person to show me any real kindness. She let me lick cake mixture off the spoon which was highly illegal in our house and I nearly spontaneously combusted at the first taste of her home-made raspberry jam. But she died at the end of the summer and autumn seemed so much colder without her in it. The first thing the new people did when they moved in was to dig up all her lovely raspberry bushes.’ Marnie sighed. ‘And the price they charge for them in supermarkets nowadays.’
‘So you like raspberries, do you?’ asked Lilian, with a disproportionate interest in the answer.
‘I love them,’ smiled Marnie.
‘We have lots of raspberries in Wychwell,’ said Lilian, adding cryptically to the air. ‘It’s a sign.’
Sign of what? wondered Marnie, thinking that Lilian might be a little more batty than she’d initially given her credit for.
‘Tell me more about your Mrs McMaid,’ Lilian prompted. ‘She sounds marvellous.’
‘She was – totally and absolutely marvellous. She might only have been in my life for a few weeks but I’ve never forgotten her. If I close my eyes sometimes, I can drift back in time. I can be in her front room with the massive squashy sofa and the crocheted cushion covers . . .’ And the scent from the pink roses which she cut from the bushes in the garden and put in coloured glass vases around the room. I can be breathing in Mrs McMaid’s heady floral perfume and watching her scraping the vanilla caviar out of the beans as she stands at her scrubbed kitchen table. ‘I think one day I’d like to have a cottage like Mrs McMaid’s.’ She wasn’t sure she’d spoken that aloud until Lilian Dearman replied to it.
‘I have a spare cottage if ever you wanted to stay. The previous occupant was a very special old lady. Jessie was our last May Queen. Died doing “Agadoo” in the local pub on her ninety-second birthday. It was quite the most ideal way for her to go.’
Marnie gave a soft chuckle. ‘She sounds formidable.’
‘Oh she was,’ nodded Lilian. ‘And a superb tenant. A perfect match for Little Raspberries.’
‘Little Raspberries?’ repeated Marnie.
‘All the cottages in the village have names: Little Raspberries, The Nectarines, Peach Trees . . . I renamed them myself when Father died. Lionel – the vicar – thought it might help me to put my stamp on the place. Oh, that reminds me . . . do you read?’
‘I love to read,’ said Marnie, watching Lilian bend to retrieve something from her bag. ‘I read a lot, anything and everything. At the moment I’m halfway through an account of the Great Train Robbery.’
‘Oh, I adore crime books. The grittier the better. I especially love a good murder mystery. I think Hercule Poirot and I would have got along very well had we ever met. But I don’t suppose he ever came up to the North of England. Shame.’
Marnie smiled tentatively, not sure if Lilian was joking or not. She reached over to accept the coffee-table book which the old lady was holding out towards her.
‘Talking of crime, this is about Wychwell. Lionel did it as a labour of love and I only had five copies made. It’s not for public consumption, you’ll see why when you come to read it. Take it, then you’ll be acclimatised to us when you come to visit.’
‘Thank you,’ said Marnie. ‘I’ll bring it back the next time we meet.’