Justice caught up with Peter Grayling. It was no thanks to me. I couldn’t afford to attract any police interest in The Ashes. The little necklace of wooden beads lies where he hid it, beneath the attic floorboards, waiting for some future explorer to discover it, pluck it from its hiding place and wonder over the fading letters, spelling out the name of a girl long dead. No, it was a different form of justice for Peter. I saw the story in the local paper. He lost control of his car on a bend and hit a tree. No other vehicle was involved. Divine justice. I like to think he saw a figure in the road as he took the corner, and tried to swerve out of the way with disastrous consequences. There were no witnesses, according to the press. But in my mind there may have been one – the girl in the road, who watched him die before quietly fading away.
My contacts within the village have dwindled. I had not realized how much of my life was lived through my husband and children. As time went on my chats in the supermarket grew shorter and less frequent, as I carried my sad little wire basket down the aisles where I would once have pushed a full trolley. Then I noticed that people had started to avoid me. Well, what could they say? They must have wondered about what kind of terrible woman I am, to have been abandoned by two husbands and become estranged from all my children.
Money has become an increasingly pressing problem. Economies have had to be made. Just a fire for the sitting room now, no question of running the central heating. It doesn’t matter much. I don’t go into all those empty bedrooms, nor eat alone at the dining room table. I never enter the study at all. One afternoon when I was weeding in the garden, the sensation of watching eyes from the study window became too much. I got a sheet of hardboard, a hammer and some tacks and I boarded it up. That window isn’t visible from Green Lane, so there won’t be tittle tattle in the village.
The gardening grew more difficult, particularly after I passed my seventieth birthday and became less and less inclined to kneel down and engage in the never-ending battle with the weeds. When the time came that I couldn’t afford to have the electric mower repaired, I let the back garden go completely. The nettles have long since taken over. It doesn’t matter anyway. No children have played on the rusty climbing frame since 1981.
The front garden is still reasonably neat. I manage the grass with shears, doing it a bit at a time. Roses still bloom in the beds and I have repelled the convolvulus from the sundial for another year. I am resigned to the peeling paint on the doors and windowsills. I expect passers-by have noticed that the house is beginning to look run down. Newcomers from Magnolia Road and Cyclamen Drive glance curiously over the closed gate, wondering about the house’s name, curious as to who the unseen occupant might be.
I had the agents remove the sale board in November 1981. I have resigned myself to the fact that The Ashes will be my home until I die … and maybe even after that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to record my thanks to the family and friends who have offered so much support during the period when I have been working on this book: Sam and John, Ash, Richard, Clare, Arthur and Daniel, Les and Sarah, and of course Erica and Pete. Thanks are also due to all at Severn House for their patience, in particular to Kate Lyall Grant, Sara Porter and Natasha Bell, and finally to Jane Conway-Gordon, who remains the best agent anyone could hope for.
