There were things she could remember that she would rather forget — like the foster mother who had strapped her daily into a pushchair and then ignored her, and much later, the male helper at the children’s home who had tried to fondle her at every opportunity. She had borne any misuse silently and stoically, always remaining a bright, friendly, and hard-working child. And perhaps because of this, apart from a few unfortunate incidents, had been by and large treated as well as was possible within the framework in which she was brought up. There was never any bitterness about her. She blossomed into a pretty and intelligent teenager and seemed to rise easily above the hardships and loneliness of her early life.
Indeed Constance always appeared to want to help people. It seemed natural that upon leaving school she should train to be a nurse, helping to pay her way by working as a waitress in a local night-club — a lucrative and entertaining sideline she continued when possible even after qualifying. And Constance had never seemed to have any problem reconciling the two different sides to her life. In the hospital she was one person, in clubland another.
It was at the club that, at the age of twenty-one, she had met Freddie Lange, making, at a close friend’s stag do, a rare excursion into any kind of night life.
Constance sighed at the memory, no longer watching for the vivid flash of the kingfishers, but instead rolling back the years inside her head until it felt as if she were once again in the smoky club, the music bluesy jazz, the clientele just blurs through the haze. Except Freddie. Freddie had turned to thank her politely when she had brought drinks to his table, and she had realised at once how out of place he was in this environment.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ she had asked, uncomfortably aware that her voice might have sounded simpering.
He had looked into her eyes, deep and long, and made a remark that was quite out of character.
‘You can’t get me out of here, can you?’ he had asked, then blushed crimson. It was only much later that she learned how unlike him it was to be so forward or so rash.
The heir to Chalmpton Village Farm was good-looking — his shaggy mane of then bright-blond hair framing a narrow sensitive face — charming, ten years her senior and extraordinarily innocent.
‘Come this way,’ she had said with complete disregard to the employment which had so far served her so well.
She led him without ceremony to the door and then walked with him several blocks to her little bedsit behind the cemetery. It had all seemed so natural. Looking back she could hardly believe it. They had talked until the early hours, drinking coffee, and he had told her, for no particular reason as far as she could recall, that he was still a virgin. She had been astonished, not so much because he remained so at his age, as because of the straightforward trusting way in which he had imparted the information. The thought had crossed her mind that he was a closet gay, but somehow she had known instinctively that was not it, either. She suspected instead that Freddie, who also confessed in the beginning how awkward and ill at ease he had always felt previously in the company of women, had been damn near asexual before her.
They did not go to bed together that night nor for several weeks to come, although they immediately formed what seemed to her at least to be a very special relationship, with him driving to Bristol as frequently as he could after his day’s work on the family farm. She had been careful not to push him. She allowed him to take the lead. And when they finally slept together for the first time, on a balmy late-spring night after she had cooked him supper and served it outside on the little terrace she shared with the occupant of the room next door who fortuitously was hardly ever there, he had had no idea that she was not a virgin too.
He had made love with a passion born of genuinely deep feelings rather than knowledge or experience and she had been deeply moved by him. Afterwards he had held her so tightly she had thought that he might crush her ribs but she gave no complaint, not wanting to do or say anything that might spoil the precious moment.
‘You’re an angel,’ he told her again and again.
‘Hardly,’ she had replied. But she revealed very little about herself to him and he asked few questions. Certainly he never asked her about any other men there may have been.
Constance knew that in some ways her husband had seen in her in those days the woman he wanted her to be rather more than the woman she really had been. That was something that had never changed, but Constance hoped now that she had actually become the woman he had seen her to be. And she knew that, in most ways, she had.
Offered on a plate a life beyond her wildest dreams, she had somehow known instinctively how to behave and had become, to all appearances, she hoped, the perfect country wife.
Their marriage did seem to be blessed. Almost everything had gone right for them from the beginning. Three splendid children had been born just when desired and after remarkably trouble-free pregnancies. Elder daughter Charlotte was married, a mother herself now, and lived nearby in the village. Son William, destined to take over the farm one day, to continue the Lange tradition, was at agricultural college, and seventeen-year-old Helen, academically the brightest of the bunch, was at boarding-school studying for her A-levels and talking about becoming a doctor.
All three of their children, each of whom had inherited their father’s blond hair and their mother’s hazel eyes, had grown into fine young people, Constance reflected with some satisfaction. Naturally both she and Freddie were proud of their children. Their marriage and their family life was often envied, she knew, and was indeed just about as happy as it seemed. Constance made sure of that. It wasn’t exactly hard work. She loved Freddie Lange and she knew that he loved her too.
She smiled to herself. The reverie into the past was over now. Today, after the experience with Harley, after coping with the strain and tension she had so effectively kept to herself, she had really needed the breathing space of her walk. She had felt exhausted, drained. Already she was revived, the solid soil of Somerset beneath her feet, the glowing sky surrounding her, the peace of the grazing cattle, the sound of the rushing water and the flash of the kingfishers had all combined to soothe her.
She continued on her journey, but it was somehow nearly an hour and a half — and almost 5.30 p.m. - before she reached the farm, leaving the footpath which led on to the village to cross the paddock behind the farmhouse. From there she had a picture-book view of Chalmpton Peverill, the squat tower of its little Norman church rising above clustered cottages, many of them thatched, a row of council houses and a smattering of modem bungalows running in a straggly line off towards the main road. Unusually nowadays, Chalmpton still managed to retain not only a village pub but also its own shop and sub post office, outside which three women were gathered in animated conversation.
Constance smiled to herself. News travelled fast in a country village. She knew the women would be discussing Harley Phillips’ tractor accident. As she drew closer she could see that one of them was Marcia Spry, queen of the local gossips, a small elderly woman with tightly permed iron-grey hair framing a pinched and equally tight-lipped face. Constance did not want to get involved. She turned smartly away to her left, before Marcia’s laser-beam eyes locked in on her, and hurried into the garden of Chalmpton Village Farm through the gate in the far corner by the chicken coop.
The early evening sun, dropping now in the sky, bathed the old farmhouse in ochre light. It was actually an eighteenth-century Devon longhouse — there were several of them in this part of Somerset not far from the Devon border — with six bedrooms, three facing due west, three due east. The big square kitchen was on the east side, facing the sunrise, and the sitting room on the west, facing the sunset.