‘She was all right… Better than Mrs Bakes…and better than Isobel.’
‘Who was Mrs Bakes?’ Maggie asked, deliberately ignoring this reference to Isobel, and the challenge she could see in Susie’s eyes. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being manoeuvred very cleverly by the older girl, but dismissed the thought, telling herself that she was becoming neurotic.
‘She was our housekeeper after Mrs Nesbitt left. She didn’t stay long, though.’
‘No, after Marcus had his accident he was really grumpy, and when he complained about her coffee she told him she wasn’t standing for any more and that she was going,’ Susie told her with relish.
‘And since then there hasn’t been a housekeeper, is that it?’
‘Marcus advertised, but couldn’t find anyone suitable. We’re too far out from the village for someone without their own transport, and he really wanted someone to live in so that they could keep an eye on us. Why are you doing that?’ she asked curiously, watching Maggie work.
‘Because…because this is how your mother taught me to cook,’ Maggie told her.
‘Did she? Tell us about her, Maggie. What was she like?’
‘Yes, tell us,’ Sara begged, echoing her older sister.
Maggie looked at them in some surprise. ‘Hasn’t Marcus told you? I only lived here for a few years, you know.’
‘Well, he has…but you know what he’s like,’ Susie commented. ‘Men don’t understand really, do they?’ she said with an earnest maturity that made Maggie’s lips twitch a little.
‘I’m sure Marcus would if you explained just what you wanted to know and why,’ she said firmly, subduing a combined urge to laugh and cry at the same time. Marcus had loved his mother very dearly, but he had been adult when the girls were born and his memories of her would be those of a solitary and mature little boy remembering a very young mother whom he had almost exclusively to himself.
The woman she remembered, on the other hand, had been wise, with the experience of her forty-odd years of living. She had been both a mother and a wife, a woman striving hard to balance all the different aspects of her life.
She had been very interested in antique china, Maggie remembered, and very knowledgeable about it.
As she worked, she tried to communicate to the girls her memories of their mother.
‘She loved gardening,’ she told them. ‘She used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen garden. She grew all her own vegetables, I remember, and fruit. We used to spend weeks in the late summer and early autumn bottling and freezing.’
‘I like gardening,’ Sara told her, ‘but John, who comes in twice a week to look after the grounds, likes to be left on his own.’
‘Tell us some more,’ Susie pressed, elbows on the table, hands cupping her face as she stared at Maggie. The heat from the kitchen had flushed her normally pale skin, and an errant lock of hair had curled forwards to brush her cheek. Maggie pushed it out of the way automatically, watching the pleasure come and go in the young face at her instinctive action. How starved these girls must have been of all the things she had taken for granted, she thought guiltily. It was true that she had lost her parents, but all her life until she left home she had been surrounded by love and warmth…had never doubted that she was cared for and cherished. In that startled look of pleasure in Susie’s grey eyes she had seen more clearly than any amount of words could convey how desperately her cousins wanted her to stay…wanted her to love them.
‘I should have come back before.’
She wasn’t conscious of saying the words out loud until a harsh voice from the kitchen door answered her rawly, ‘So why the hell didn’t you?’
Her head snapped round, shock rounding her eyes as she saw Marcus standing in the doorway.
‘Marcus, Maggie has just been telling us about Mum,’ Susie told him excitedly, completely ignoring his question. ‘She’s been telling us about the garden…and freezing things.’
‘Yes, and she’s been showing us how Mum used to make pastry,’ Sara added.
As she saw the look in his eyes, Maggie’s heart went out to him. She ached to go up to him and touch him, to tell him that he was not to blame, that he could not have known how important these things would be to them. That he, manlike, was scarcely likely to have noticed all of his mother’s domestic expertise, her gift for turning a house into a home, other than to simply take the comforts she provided very much for granted.
Instead she quelled the urge and said quietly instead, ‘It isn’t just boys who need an adult to pattern themselves on, you know.’
And then she went white with shock and self-disgust as she remembered that, but for her, Marcus would long ago have provided them with a feminine role-model in the shape of his wife.
What had happened to her, that long-ago girl to whom he had been going to get engaged? It was scarcely the kind of question she could ask. Had she, like Isobel, heard of her own crush on Marcus?
Looking backwards did no good at all. She couldn’t alter what had happened, no matter how much she might wish it.
‘Supper won’t be long,’ she told Marcus in a stifled voice, turning her head away from him and concentrating on her pastry-making.
‘Good. Afterwards, I’d like a word with you in the study.’