Onwards Flows the River Read online

  Onwards

  Flows

  the River

  Caroline Windsor

  Copyright © 2016 Caroline Windsor

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador®

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  Tel: 0116 279 2299

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  ISBN 9781788031240

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Linda, to celebrate our friendship of half a century and with gratitude for the sunlit Devon holidays of my youth.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  With grateful thanks to David for his constant support and willingness to undertake domestic tasks far beyond the call of duty.

  Advices & Queries 7. The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

  © The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, 1995, 1997 and 2008

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Autumn 1971

  “Kate?”

  “Hannah!” Kate tossed The Observer aside and pulled the telephone a little closer. “Where are you?”

  “Harrison House.” Hannah’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s every bit as bad as I thought it would be. Why my parents insisted on me staying at a wretched hostel rather than letting me share a flat like any normal student, I’ll never know.”

  Kate, aware of her friend’s tendency to run wild the moment she was off the parental leash, knew exactly what lay behind the Mathesons’ decision.

  “Oh, come on! Your parents wouldn’t send you there if it was that bad. I know them, remember!”

  “Well, all I can say is I only arrived two hours ago and it feels like a lifetime.”

  In the background, she could hear feet thundering down a staircase and an impatient voice demanding to know when the phone would be free.

  “Why don’t you come over to Dulwich and let me give you tea and sympathy?” she suggested. “I’m dying to see you again, and besides, you haven’t seen my flat yet.”

  “I thought you’d never ask!” Hannah’s familiar snort of laughter echoed down the phone. “London Transport willing, I’ll be over within the hour.”

  The phone went dead before Kate could offer to drive over and collect her. Sooty, the ancient but reliable Morris Minor, which had been bought for her by her father the week after she passed her test, lay idle in the garage. Generally, she preferred to take the bus and avoid the hassles of parking, but the car was a godsend whenever the hectic bustle of London got too much for her and she needed to escape.

  Hannah’s failure to pass her test, even on her third attempt, was a matter of continuing frustration. It was, however, a considerable relief to her family who felt that she was temperamentally unsuited to sit behind the wheel of a car. Kate remembered her friend’s anguish after the last debacle.

  “He told me to do an emergency stop when he tapped the dashboard,” she had wailed. “How on earth was I to know he was just stubbing out his fag? And that car which booted us up the rear end was driving far too close anyway.”

  Her Sunday afternoon now miraculously transformed, Kate slid off the sofa and went through to the kitchen in search of a recipe book. Hannah’s passion for flapjacks was legendary and she had, only the week before, laid in a stock of oats and syrup in anticipation of her friend’s arrival in London. She tied a bright red butcher’s apron over her navy-blue jeans and tee shirt, flicked her battered transistor on to Radio Three, and reached for the kitchen scales.

  o0o

  Hannah, jolting through Brixton on the top deck of a number 3 bus, gazed down in fascination at the passing scenery. It was all very different from Oxford Street and Regent Street which she had visited on shopping trips to London with her mother. There were no smart stores here. Instead, seedy launderettes stood cheek by jowl with betting shops, and the slipstream from the bus sent scraps of litter swirling into the air.

  The pubs were closing for the afternoon and the pavements were thronged with groups of men making their way home for Sunday lunch. To her inexperienced eye, a number of them looked decidedly tipsy, but this didn’t bother her in the least. She fully intended to get roaring drunk herself as soon as a suitable opportunity presented itself. Only once, of course. She didn’t want to get a bad reputation. But now that she had cut loose from the parental moorings there were all sorts of things which she was dying to experience.

  Take sex for instance. Her virginity hung round her neck like an albatross. How long had she and Daniel been going out? Two years at least. He had first asked her out formally on her sixteenth birthday, but, being her brother’s best friend, she had known him for years before that. And even if he was five years older than herself, that was no excuse for refusing to do more than kiss, cuddle and indulge in the odd more intimate grope on the all too rare occasions when he happened to get carried away.

  God knows she had made it obvious enough, short of actually getting down on her knees and begging him, that she would be happy to go on the pill in the interests of furthering their relationship. It was the 1970s for heaven’s sake. She had told him once of her envy when, from the straitened confines of her boarding school, she had watched the swinging sixties pass her by. Now it was her turn. But Daniel continued to refuse – some nonsense about respecting her, and not wanting to lose Aidan’s friendship.

  Well, it was too late now. She’d made it clear to him that, without in any way wanting to spoil their friendship, she had every intention of enjoying herself during her years at college. And what had Daniel said? He’d just raised that left eyebrow of his in his usual quizzical way, and told her not to do anything she’d regret.

  The memory made her seethe. To distract herself, she fished out the bus map from the bottom of her handbag and tried to work out exactly where she was. A glance out of the window showed that the palpable poverty of Brixton had given way to smarter, treelined streets with rows of neat Victorian houses standing in their own small ga
rdens. They must be approaching Dulwich.

  “This is your stop, love!” The conductor hailed her from the top of the stairs.

  “Thanks.” Hitching up the ample folds of her emerald green maxi skirt, she swayed down the aisle and stumbled down the steps.

  “First right, second left and you’ll find Beech Court on your right.”

  “You’re a miracle!” She gave him one of her more flirtatious smiles.

  “Always had a soft spot for redheads!” He grinned back at her. “Mind how you go.”

  She jumped off the bus and crossed the road.

  Five minutes later, in a quiet, treelined street, she found the small block of flats. She hated to admit it but for the first time in their years of friendship she seriously envied Kate. Here she was, eighteen years of age, an owner-occupier without the burden of a mortgage to weigh her down. Not that she’d have been anything other than devastated if her own parents had been killed in a car crash, of course. But finding herself able to afford her own property – even if it was a flat rather than a house – would certainly have softened the blow.

  o0o

  Kate tipped the oats into a large bowl and spooned in the syrup. Sundays were the low point of her week. The hectic round of her work at the hospital kept her fully occupied from Monday to Friday and Saturdays were spent cleaning the flat and doing her share of work in the communal garden.

  Sometimes on a Saturday her cousin Jeremy would phone and suggest an outing or invite her over to dinner with himself and his mother. A creature of habit, Jeremy always played golf on Sunday afternoons, so even the dubious pleasure of his company was denied her.

  As she stirred the ingredients together, she thought back over the years of friendship which she had shared with Hannah. They had met seven years ago when, at the age of eleven, they had left their respective primary schools to become boarders at a minor public school which Hannah’s mother, aunt and cousin had also attended.

  For herself, boarding school had provided a welcome escape from her parents. Though keeping up a veneer of familial affection, she and her parents had had little in common and she had often felt more like a cuckoo in the nest than a bona fide member of the family.

  But for Hannah, despite her eagerness to escape from her loving family and the comfortable home in which they lived, boarding school had come as a rude shock. Racked by homesickness she had sobbed her heart out night after night in the dormitory which she shared with Kate and eight other girls. And every night Kate would steal out of her bed, creep barefoot across the wooden floor, and sit with her arm around Hannah’s heaving shoulders until she fell asleep.

  She had got over it of course, as her parents had known she would. Extrovert and flamboyant, Hannah soon became one of the most popular girls in their year, but it was always Kate who she regarded as her special friend.

  In many ways, Hannah was the fantasy sister that she had always wanted. But then, of course, if Hannah had been her sister she would never have had the opportunity of becoming a part of Hannah’s family, and those sunlit Devon holidays which ran like a thread of gold through her difficult teenage years, would never have happened.

  Accepted and welcomed into that warm Quaker family she had felt herself blossom. Here was a place where no one criticised or nagged her, where she could falteringly struggle to express her deepest thoughts without fear of ridicule.

  Above all, she would never forget her first visit to the simple red-brick meeting house at Westermouth where she experienced her first Quaker meeting. With Hannah fidgeting restlessly beside her, she had sat entranced by the power of the silence generated by the fifty or so people in the room. It was then that she had realised, at the age of twelve, what was missing in her own home life.

  “I hope you weren’t too bored,” Hannah’s mother had said to her afterwards. “There’ll be a proper children’s meeting next Sunday which you’ll find more interesting.”

  But Kate hadn’t been bored at all. Something in her had been awakened, and, once awakened, she knew it would grow and permeate her life and turn her into someone quite different from boring Kate Deveraux who had always wondered just exactly what she was for.

  On her return home, she had told her parents that she would like to start attending the local parish church on Sunday mornings. It needn’t interfere with their own plans, she had assured them, she was quite happy to walk across the fields to church on her own.

  The expression of relief on her mother’s face hadn’t escaped her. Sundays, for her parents, were an opportunity to explore the delights of the astonishing number of village pubs in the vicinity of their home. Unless, of course, they had booked a round of golf at the club. None of the activities in which her parents took such pleasure appealed to her. In fact, they bored her rigid.

  “Don’t you get enough of that sort of thing at boarding school?” her mother had enquired. “After all, you do have to go to church twice a day and three times on Sundays. I’d have thought you’d have been glad of a break.”

  “It’s just a part of my life,” Kate had replied, with all the spiritual confidence that a twelve-year-old could muster. “Like food and sleep and going for walks in the country.” She hadn’t wanted to sound smug or priggish, but her mother, who had long ago abandoned religion in favour of astrology, had been quick to sense the implied criticism.

  “You Cancerians are always too hypersensitive for your own good,” she had told her dismissively.

  From then on, she had taken herself off to the parish church every Sunday morning of her holidays and soon found herself treated almost like a pet by the predominantly elderly congregation. While regretting the lack of a Quaker meeting house in the village where she lived, she found much to please her in the liturgy, the hymns and music of the Anglican church. And when, as often happened, the sermon failed to hold her interest, she was content to let her gaze wander over the subtle carvings on the rood-screen or half close her eyes and watch the sunlight streaming through the magnificent stained-glass east window. The sense of peace that she gained at these times kept up her strength for the week ahead.

  She poured the flapjack mixture into a buttered Swiss roll tin and smoothed the surface with a palette knife. The doorbell rang just as she was sliding the tin into the oven and she ran to answer it.

  o0o

  “Kate!” Hannah smelt the familiar scent of Morny’s sandalwood soap as her friend’s bear hug took her breath away.

  “I’m sorry.” Kate’s eyes were suspiciously moist. “It’s just so good to see you again.”

  Hannah’s envy vanished. She hadn’t seen Kate since July when Founders’ Day at their old school had marked the end of an era for both of them, but that two months had wrought a definite change. Kate’s jeans, once a snug fit, were now distinctly baggy and her dark blonde hair, still tumbling in luxuriant waves to her shoulders, seemed to have lost its shine. Most noticeable of all, those startling, forget-me-not blue eyes seemed dimmed by frequent tears and the skin beneath them was stained with purple shadows.

  “Don’t say it!” Kate’s smile was rueful. “I look a mess and I’ve aged about ten years in the past eight weeks.”

  “More like twenty, I’d say!”

  This time Kate’s smile travelled as far as her eyes. “Still the same old Hannah. Never pay a compliment when an insult will do.” She put her arm round her friend’s shoulders and led her through to the sitting room.“To be honest, I’m not as bad as I look. I just don’t cope with Sundays very well. Too much time to think, I suppose. Your phone call came at just the right moment.” She curled up on the chesterfield and hugged her knees.

  Hannah flopped down in an armchair and kicked off her shoes.

  “You’ve got to give it time, Kate. It’s only been eight months since you lost your parents; you wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t depressed now and then. How on earth you mana
ged to carry on at school and get through your A levels, I’ll never know. You amazed everyone.”

  “Delayed shock, I think.” Kate thought back to that freezing January day when she had been called into the headmistress’s study. Thinking that she was in trouble for some minor misdemeanour, it had been almost a relief when Miss Ellis had sat her down and with a gentle sympathy of which Kate would not have thought her capable, told her of the icy skid which had sent her parents’ car crashing into a wall, killing them outright. Dry-eyed, she had rejected her aunt’s offer to have her to stay for a few weeks, preferring to remain at school and throw herself into her work. For what was eminently clear to her was that, from now on, she was on her own. If she wanted to make something of her life, it was up to her to get on and work for it.

  “If delayed shock gets you three grade A’s, it’s a pity someone didn’t drop a bombshell on me,” Hannah grumbled. “I only just scraped into Southbridge Poly and it’s not exactly Oxford University as far as entrance requirements go.” She glanced around the room. “Changing the subject, this really is a stunning flat. You must be thrilled with it.”

  Kate nodded. “It’s perfect for me – the mainline station is just down the road and I can get to Oxford Street by bus in thirty minutes. I’m really grateful to Jeremy for finding it. It’s a lovely home as well as a good investment.”

  “Accountant cousins do have their uses,” Hannah agreed. “You’d have hated rattling around that house in Surrey – a flat in London is far more practical. You’re lucky the last owner had good taste in decoration too; it all looks terribly artistic.”

  “Actually, they didn’t,” Kate enlightened her. “The entire flat was painted magnolia when I moved in. I’ve done all the decorating myself, and made the curtains. That’s how I’ve spent my evenings and weekends for the past two months. Sort of occupational therapy.”