Charlotte, her long fair hair tied carelessly back in a rather ragged ponytail, entered, as all the family did, through the kitchen door, which was hardly ever locked during daylight hours. She was clutching her two-year-old son by the hand and, as soon as little Alex spotted his grandmother seated at the kitchen table, he tugged himself free of his mother and toddled his way eagerly across the room to her. Alex was used to his doting gran making a huge fuss of him.
Absent-mindedly, it seemed to Charlotte, Constance picked her grandson up and smiled a greeting at her daughter. Her mother seemed preoccupied and rather disorientated, just as she had done for some weeks now.
‘Hi mum, no visit to Aunt Ada today then?’ Charlotte tried to sound casual, just as she knew her father had earlier.
‘No dear, too much to do here and in the village,’ replied her mother rather listlessly.
The younger woman took in the scene around her. It didn’t appear as if her mother had done anything all morning. And that in itself was cause for concern.
Constance was still wearing her dressing gown. It was part of the usual farm routine for her to come downstairs in the big pink towelling gown, right after drinking the tea Freddie brought her just before seven, to share an early breakfast with her husband. They had always liked to start the day together in that way, Charlotte knew. But the breakfast things still littered the table. It was now well gone ten and it looked as if her mother had been sitting there for three hours. That was unheard of. Charlotte could feel alarm bells clanging, but decided not to show it. Not yet, any way.
‘I suppose you’d like me to make coffee now you’ve got that lump on your knee,’ she said, gesturing to a chortling Alex, happily ensconced with the grannie he loved, and blissfully unaware of any lurking tensions.
‘That would be lovely, dear,’ said Constance. The words were all right, thought Charlotte, but the way her mother said them was so distant she could have been speaking to a visiting cattle-feed salesman, not to her elder daughter.
Charlotte put freshly ground coffee into the filter machine — she’d just as soon have drunk instant but she knew how her mother hated it — and then sat down to wait for it to drip through.
She studied her mother. Perhaps they were all fretting too much, surely everyone was entitled to have a down patch occasionally — even Constance. That was the trouble, she expected, much as her father had said earlier, they probably all expected too much of her. Constance had always seemed to sail through the kind of schedule few others could cope with, but maybe the years of pressure and responsibility were at last taking their toll. Constance had not only lavished love and attention on her own three children, but had always been there for every family in the village.
With affection and admiration, Charlotte remembered the times Constance so willingly helped nurse the chronically sick, comforted the bereaved, listened with endless patience to the ramblings of the elderly, coaxed good behaviour out of seemingly impossibly wayward sons and daughters, sorted out financial problems for those totally clueless in such matters and generally behaved as if any problem faced by her family and neighbours was automatically hers to solve. At the same time she was a parish councillor, a stalwart of the WI and the Mother’s Union, as well as chairman of the Village Fête Committee, the Village Hall Committee, the Christmas Festival Committee, of course, and a member of just about every other committee going.
In everything that she did Constance was meticulous and competent. When the village primary school was threatened with closure it was Constance who confronted the County Council with an argument for its continuation so forceful and well-constructed that even that famously high-handed body had given in. It was Constance who had launched the campaign, still going on — an uphill struggle, but not lost yet — to save the local cottage hospital, Constance who always seemed to spot first, and then lead the fight against, any threat to the community of Chalmpton Peverill.
Nothing had ever seemed beyond her, no crisis too big or too small for her to deal with. She had once safely delivered a villager’s twins as if it were something she did every day — although the doctor who eventually arrived remarked that, without the resources of a hospital, it would have been a monumental achievement even for a practising nurse, let alone one whose nursing skills had been learned years before and used on a regular basis only for a short time after that.
At the other end of the scale Charlotte remembered the time when little Betsie Ambrose had cried ceaselessly for two days after her pet guinea pig went missing. It was Constance who organised half the village into a search party which she then orchestrated with military precision, resulting in the small creature being eventually discovered cowering in a remote corner of the churchyard and safely returned to its ecstatic owner.
Charlotte also recalled the occasion when she, not much older than young Alex was now, had ineffectually wielded a paint brush after her mother decreed that dear old Mrs Hewitt — whose only son had moved to London and gave no signs of caring a toss about his mother — was not going to live in slum conditions a minute longer. With little or no fuss, Constance redecorated Mrs Hewitt’s cottage herself, scrubbed and polished the old lady’s floors and furnishings, and replaced anything beyond rescue with bits and pieces from her own home which she always described as ‘something I was going to take to the jumble sale, anyway, Mrs H.’ Mrs Hewitt had thought her mother a saint, Charlotte knew, and sometimes during her childhood that judgement had seemed hard to argue with.
But Constance could be tough as well as compassionate. And she had never had any patience with the small-mindedness which so often played a part in village life. When the son of a particularly simple village couple had returned on a visit to Chalmpton Peverill flamboyantly showing off his overtly camp male lover and announcing that he was gay and proud of it, Marcia Spry, with her unpleasantly inverted sense of morality, had predictably proceeded to make his family’s life a misery. Discovering how upset the family were, Constance had unceremoniously taken Marcia to one side and read her the riot act. Her message, although rather more tactfully delivered, had been that Marcia was a malicious old biddy who should know better than to torment a family who had never done anyone any harm — and that included their gay son. He was a consenting adult consorting with another consenting adult and minding his own business, which was exactly what Marcia Spry should try doing for a change.
The memory of her mother telling her that story and remarking with complete lack of concern that Marcia Spry would doubtless dislike her more than ever from then on, was still one which Charlotte relished. Of course, the dreadful Marcia never knew that Constance also took to one side the ‘proud to be gay’ young man on his next visit to the village and told him in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t care less about his sex life and neither, she reckoned, could anybody else in Chalmpton Peverill. It would therefore be far better, wouldn’t it, if he didn’t flaunt a way of life which he must know would be sure to cause problems — albeit wrongly in her opinion — for his elderly parents.
Nothing daunted Constance. Unlike so many in a small community, Constance could invariably see both sides of most issues. And, in her daughter’s opinion, her mother’s lack of fear of involving herself in the trickiest of matters was just one of the many characteristics which made her remarkable — along with her ability to turn her hand to almost anything and her skill in coping with just about every situation life threw at her.
It was difficult to reconcile those memories with the woman Charlotte saw before her on that bleak November morning — a woman who had previously displayed more spirit than anyone her daughter had ever known, and who now seemed to have none at all.