Page 16 of New Beginnings At Pencarrow Bay
Peggy drew him to the table and sat him down. He was shaking. ‘Tell me. Tell me exactly what happened. Please…You never really have.’ He’d always evaded her pleas to do so in the past, but Peggy knew it still haunted him. He complained about Rose finding it difficult to talk about Maria’s death, but that seemed to Peggy to be a touch of pot and kettle. Now she found herself relieved to be able to focus on something other than Lindy– a conversation she realized she was half avoiding.
Ted didn’t speak for a long while.
‘Please.’
After a deep breath, he began. ‘Okay… Well, it was just a stupid accident. Maria was carrying heavy shopping up the front steps of the house– which you saw were quite steep. And next door’s cat shot out in front of her. She lost her balance and fell down the stone steps onto the pavement.’ He stopped to gather his thoughts. ‘I was still at work, but a neighbour found her and she was taken to A and E, where they did brain scans and stuff, and they said she was okay, just bruising and a nasty graze on her head. But a couple of days later it was clear something was wrong.’
He didn’t go on, his stare into the distance remembering another time.
‘She became ill?’ Peggy prompted.
He nodded. ‘A fever, then chills, said she felt dizzy and sick. The doctor said it was probably flu and to give her paracetamol and plenty of fluids. But she got worse. She became quite confused and her temperature wouldn’t go down. I took her back to the hospital, where they admitted her, eventually. But they were still saying she’d be okay, that it was an infection from the head wound, which would resolve itself with antibiotics.’
Peggy poured him a glass of wine and pushed it towards him. Ted looked at it, held it, but made no attempt to drink.
‘I’d googled her symptoms by then, and I was convinced she had sepsis. I kept suggesting this to the nurses and any doctors I saw. I begged them to do something before it got worse. But they said the antibiotics they were giving her would fix it.Wait, they kept saying.’ He took a breath. ‘And I believed them. I bloody believed them.’ Another breath. ‘Except I didn’t really. I just didn’t push hard enough.’
‘So they thought, like Martha’s mum, that you were just being hysterical?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Another ignorant relative using the internet to wind everybody up. I remember one senior nurse saying, “You’re not doing Maria any favours by getting so upset, Ted. She needs calm right now.”’ He gave a low growl. ‘If I ever see that woman again, I’ll stab her.’
‘How long was Maria in hospital?’ Peggy asked carefully.
‘Seven long days. I kept telling her she’d be all right, but I think she knew in her heart she was dying. She asked for Rose…’ He looked away. ‘I just didn’t believe she could actually die. I honestly didn’t believe it, so I didn’t get Rose back from Florida, where she was studying for her doctorate.’
Peggy stayed silent, his emotions too much to bear.
‘They took her to Intensive Care in the end,’ Ted went on eventually, ‘when her kidneys were clearly packing up and she was finding it hard to breathe. But they were way too late. And so was I, as far as Rose was concerned.’
‘I’m so sorry. But how were you to know about all that medical stuff?’
Ted took a gulp of wine. The candles from supper were low and guttering, the room suddenly chilly.
He didn’t seem to have heard Peggy as he went on, almost to himself, ‘I didn’t want to drag Rose back unnecessarily, especially when she gets so anxious with travel and disruption of any kind. But obviously I should have. She was furious with me afterwards. Uncomprehending, in fact.’
‘But you didn’t know how serious it was. And your concerns were being dismissed. You shouldn’t blame yourself.’
He took another gulp of wine. ‘I think she just found the whole thing impossible to process– fair enough– and I suppose I was an easy scapegoat. But she’s a lot kinder and more communicative now than she used to be, don’t you think?’
‘She really is. And it’s good she came today. Her present is so thoughtful, and really beautiful.’ Rose had given her father a framed photo she’d taken on a field trip in Costa Rica, of a leatherback turtle hatchling on a beach at sunset. ‘We should get it up on the wall. I love it.’
Ted nodded tiredly. Recounting his wife’s demise and the fallout with Rose had obviously taken it out of him. Peggy felt for him. To have your wife die was bad enough. But to harbour residual guilt that the death could have beenavoided, that was even harder. She realized she’d almost forgotten about Lindy.Now is definitely not the time, she told herself, as they both got up wearily and began to clear away the debris from supper. It seemed to have been a long day.
‘By the way,’ she said, as they turned off the lights and locked the doors, ‘I think you hit on something when you asked about a love interest. I could be wrong, but I’m sure I detected a small smile.’
Ted grinned as he handed her a glass of water to take up to bed. ‘I saw that too. She’ll never tell us, of course. Not till they’ve been married for ten years and got three kids.’
As Peggy fell off to sleep, she chided herself. There were more important things in this world than fretting about dry robes.I don’t have enough to occupy my mind, she thought.I need to remedy that soonest.
9
Peggy found her thoughts about Lindy complicated, though, and hard to dismiss completely. Lindy had been shaping up– Peggy had hoped– asherfriend. But she couldn’t dispel the feeling that Lindy and Ted knew each other better than they were making out. Not just the birthday present and the pub chat, there was the coffee on the bench behind the castle that day– which Ted had subsequently never mentioned, or said what they’d been talking about. He usually shared everything with her.
But she resolutely consigned her unease to the bin of her historical over-thinking, in light of the gorgeous Sunday that followed Rose’s visit. The détente– agreed on both sides without a word spoken– that grew up between her and Ted meant the day was peaceful and cosy. She determinedly banished her worries and simply enjoyed Ted’s company. They walked with Bolt over muddy fields to the small church situated in an inlet a couple of miles along the coast. There, they took one of their favourite meanders round the shaded waterside graveyard, strains of an organ and a familiar hymn reaching them through the stained-glass windows, the air soft with the buzzing of insects, the chirping of birds.
‘I want to be buried here,’ Ted said, gazing out at the tiny estuary, perhaps feeling, as Peggy did, the atmosphere of absolute peace and serenity engendered by the beautifulenvirons of the little chapel– the spot apparently a place of worship since the sixth century.
‘It looks pretty full,’ Peggy replied dubiously, glancing around at the numerous gravestones packed tight into the hillside.
