‘Boys of that age don’t want to be with their old parents, really, do they?’ she remarked with only the merest touch of edge. ‘I expect it’s perfectly natural for him not to want to come.’
Freddie could not believe she was expressing her true feelings. ‘But it’s our silver wedding anniversary,’ he said. ‘Not just any old night out with your mum and dad.’
‘Well, he said he was trying to catch up with his studies. We both want that, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course we do. It was just that I didn’t really believe him. You know how I could always tell when William was fibbing when he was a boy — well, I think I still can, up to a point. He didn’t convince me that was the true reason at all. I’m afraid he’s in trouble, again, to be honest. That’s what’s bugging me. I mean, if the college was right before and he was taking drugs as well as hitting the bottle — that’s not going to go away just like that, is it?’
Constance took his hand, still giving the impression of being remarkably untroubled. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go thinking the worst, Freddie. Not without any evidence. Perhaps he’s found himself a girlfriend.’
Freddie hadn’t thought of that. And the idea lifted his spirits a little, as he was sure had been his wife’s intention.
‘Well, yes, perhaps he has,’ he murmured thoughtfully.
‘I’m sure it’s something like that, nothing to worry about at all, just a new girlfriend,’ said Constance.
Freddie did not notice the catch in her voice or the way she contrived to turn her back towards him as she spoke.
On the day of the party, however, William unexpectedly turned up. At least he was unexpected by his parents but not entirely by his elder sister, who had called him back, told him how dreadfully he had upset his father, and generally given him a grade A roasting.
‘Well done,’ Charlotte whispered to her brother shortly after his arrival and gave him a warm hug.
William even managed a grin. That was pretty rare for him too, nowadays, as it wasn’t just their mother who had been acting out of character lately, Charlotte reflected. Like her father, her thoughts automatically turned to drugs but, being the kind of person she was, she swiftly dismissed the idea as too awful even to contemplate. In any case William looked well enough. Charlotte had trained as a nurse just like her mother, given it up when Alex was born but hoped to go back to it one day, and had met a few junkies in her time. Her life had not been entirely as sheltered as it appeared. Although the problem might be worse in the urban jungles of Britain’s inner cities, rural Somerset was not without its drug culture. No, she was somehow pretty sure just from looking at him that her brother, although he might well have experimented with strange substances, did not have a serious drug problem.
She personally thought it was more likely that he had been sulking. He had always had a sulky side to his nature, had William, even when he had been a little lad. And God knows who he got it from, either, she thought to herself. But, although he had appeared to ultimately take it well and had certainly agreed to knuckle down and go back to college when given the opportunity, Charlotte suspected that William had been far more put out by the tongue-lashing his mother had given him than he had let on — certainly to her.
Although she was unaware of the details of the exchange between mother and son, it had obviously been pretty serious, and Charlotte couldn’t remember her mother ever having spoken a cross word to William before that. Her only son could never do any wrong in Constance Lange’s eyes, everybody knew that. But the thought that William might be about to really upset his father — and drag the family name through the mud into the bargain — Charlotte’s mother had shown that other tough side of her nature. The side Charlotte had always known existed, but which had probably come as a shock to William who was inclined to live in his own cloud cuckoo land. As far as Charlotte could ascertain, her mother had merely given William a thorough bollocking and told him to grow up — and not before time in Charlotte’s opinion.
She loved her brother dearly and appreciated his charm and humour in much the same way as her mother did. But she really thought it was time he stopped behaving like a sulky schoolboy when anything didn’t suit him.
However she watched approvingly as William hugged his father, handed him a beautifully wrapped anniversary gift and remarked in his most disarming way, ‘In the end I realised I just had to be here. I couldn’t miss this day, could I?’
Charlotte waited in vain for her brother to show the same warm affection towards her mother. William kissed his mother in greeting when he arrived at the Mount Somerset, but Charlotte realised that it would have been unthinkable for him not to in front of his entire family and most of the village. His body language, however, left Charlotte in no doubt that he did not really wish to do so. In fact, William showed no desire to be close to his mother throughout the entire evening, and barely spoke to her again. Instead he allowed himself to be monopolised by their younger sister, Helen, who hero-worshipped him — again rather too much for his own good, in Charlotte’s opinion.
She couldn’t help recalling the last village function when her mother and brother had so outraged that old busybody Marcia Spry by dancing together virtually the whole night long. Things had changed, that was for certain. Yet if her mother had noticed William’s distant behaviour to her, she gave no sign of it, and that was unusual too because Constance had always been the most sensitive of women.
Charlotte considered giving her brother another lecture, but this was neither the time nor place, and in any case she did not really know what she would say. ‘Why aren’t you nice to Mother any more?’ sounded fairly pathetic and was hardly likely to get her very far. Charlotte decided that all she could do was pretend she hadn’t noticed and be thankful, at least, that apart from her, nobody else was likely to detect the strange chill between mother and son.
Charlotte had, of course, overlooked the acute observational powers of Marcia Spry, whom she had not wanted to invite to the party in the first place. It had been Freddie, ever the diplomat, who had insisted. And if he had been able to read old Marcia’s mind as she had diligently studied his family throughout the evening, even the generous and easy-going Freddie might have wished that he’d thrown village protocol to the winds and denied her an invitation.
The shameless Marcia watched William’s curiously distant behaviour towards his mother almost gleefully, and became increasingly more excited by the prospect of some kind of split between mother and son as the evening progressed. She too remembered the way William and his mother had danced the night away together only a few months before.
‘Unnatural the way those two carry on, that’s what it is,’ she had sniffed to her cronies then. ‘Tied to her apron strings, that boy’s always been...’
Now Marcia was intrigued. The contrast between that evening and this one was fascinating to her. She began to wonder just how serious William’s troubles at college were, and to speculate on what he might have been up to that could cause such a rift with his doting mother.
Even Marcia Spry could barely launch into malicious gossip about her hosts while the party was actually in progress — and she had just about enough common sense to realise that this might not exactly be welcomed by her fellow guests at such a generous do, either. But she left the Mount Somerset shortly after midnight a very happy woman, barely able to contain herself until morning when she could begin to create mischief.
The postman, who called at her cottage even before Mrs Walters opened the village shop, was her first target.