‘I thought I’d come along early and get going,’ Jean Brabbage rolled up her sleeves, revealing beefy forearms, and continued merrily on, telling Julia about Jack’s progress and how he liked to be left to himself in the mornings and cataloguing the work she intended to get through before the Marlows arrived. Jean was as talkative as she was big and Julia kept smiling and nodding, awaiting her chance.
‘I was expecting Richard to be here already,’ she managed, when the other woman paused for a fat breath.
‘Huh!’ A disapproving sniff. ‘I got his room ready for him, even offered to come over and cook for him. But he rang and told me he was spending the weekend with a friend in Thames. A girl.’ Another sniff, but before she could enlarge on her darkest suspicions, Julia nudged her back on to the right track.
‘But someone’s using his room.’
It was like flicking a light switch. The plump round face illuminated. ‘He would never be so ungracious. Let me know on Friday that he was coming down, and told me not to bother about him until today. Master Richard, now, he wouldn’t dream of coping by himself for a weekend. Helpless he is.’
‘But who is he?’ cried Julia, nearly bursting with curiosity.
‘Why, Mr Hugh, of course,’ Jean Brabbage sounded horrified that anyone could not know who he was. ‘I told him to take the room I had aired and made up.’
Julia sank into a chair beside the well-scrubbed kitchen table, now covered with Jean’s bulging paper bags and cartons. He couldn’t have been telling the truth!
‘He’s not Hugh Marlow?
‘Not Marlow, no,’ came the baffling reply. ‘He’s Hugh Walton.’
Now she remembered G.B.H. Walton. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s adopted,’ came the bombshell reply. ‘I was here when they first brought him home. Scrawny little thing he was, only twelve, quiet as a mouse with those big grey eyes and whispery voice.’
Scrawny! ‘We are talking about the same person, aren’t we?’ said Julia, as Jean rustled about the shopping. ‘I would have thought he’s more of a lion than a mouse.’
Jean chuckled. ‘He is now. Half-starved he looked then. And such an appetite; you’d have thought he had never seen food before! Probably hadn’t seen much, come to that. He made up for it though, sprouted like a beanstalk. Very fine athlete at school, could have been Olympic class if he’d put it before his studying. Of course all that bookwork’s paying off now. He has his own law firm, lectures at university, writes books … deserves every bit of it, I say. Be Prime Minister one day I shouldn’t wonder.’
What an accolade, thought Julia. Jean Brabbage usually tempered every opinion with pessimism.
‘It’s strange, I never knew that the Marlows had adopted a child. Nobody ever mentions it,’ Julia angled for a little more relevant information.
‘Mr and Mrs Marlow aren’t ones to broadcast their private business, but it was never a secret,’ Jean obliged. ‘Mind you, it was all a long time ago and of course Mr Hugh isn’t in show business. He has a proper job.’
Julia choked back her laugh. Not even Richard at his most persuasive and Michael at his most convincing could persuade Jean that acting was work. Play-acting, she called it, but was still proud of the famous family she worked for.
‘Did you tell him the family were coming down?’ she asked the million-dollar question.
‘I thought he would know about that. Doesn’t he?’ Julia shook her head. ‘I thought it was funny, him wanting to come down. Mr Hugh is a very reserved sort of person.’
‘Does he often come down by himself?’ Julia thought the reserve was probably stubbornness. Why was he so anxious to avoid his family, he should be grateful that he had such a large and loving one? Actually, it wasn’t so surprising that Connie and Michael should adopt, they were people of boundless affection and generous instincts.
‘Not as often as he used to,’ she sounded disappointed about it. ‘He used to study down here while he was at law school. Didn’t throw weekend-long parties with rowdy friends and brazen hussies, or spend most of his time drinking and carrying on like nobody’s business.’
Julia didn’t have much difficulty guessing the culprits. Richard and Steve had gone through the normal male metamorphosis, it seemed. But not Hugh, of course.
‘The boys must have just been babies when he was adopted then,’ she ventured, still on the trail of the enigma.
‘They were only two. Mr Hugh was very good with them, for all he was quiet and withdrawn, and with the others, too, when they came. There was no jealousy and he never got nasty or tough with them. Very gentle, he was, not like most boys are.’
That soft voice still bespoke gentleness, yet of a detached kind that Julia misliked. The study of law required a tough and resilient mind, not a quiet, gentle personality. So which was he—Mrs B’s darling or Richard’s dry-as-dust lawyer who needed reminding of his family obligations?
‘How come he was adopted, what happened to his parents?’ dared Julia, but this was too much, even for the garrulous Mrs B.
‘I don’t rightly know, they died I think,’ she said, her face acquiring the faintly glazed look of an accomplished gossip forced to withhold a fascinating titbit. Julia respected her enormous self-restraint.
‘What time does he have breakfast?’ The big, wooden pendulum clock on the wall said seven and in Julia’s mind the seed of an idea began to germinate. A cross between an apology and an explanation.
‘He doesn’t have any, at least only coffee and toast, and he likes to get that himself, so don’t you worry. Now, I must get on and give his room a good clean. He’s here to work on another book, you know.’