Walking Alone Read online

“Dandelion and what?” exclaimed Holly “What is that! Dandelion popsickles!”

  “I’m sure they’re not actually made of weeds.” Mary couldn’t believe that, even in England, that would be allowed.

  “Do you want one?”

  “They’re really nice you know.” A rather chubby girl of around Holly’s age, wearing shorts and a red t-shirt that clashed violently with her almost orange hair, confidently entered into their discussion. “And it is made of weeds; real dandelions and burdock leaves, but it tastes really nice. I’m Linda, Linda Forster. Terrible name isn’t it? What’s yours?”

  “Butt out!” Holly reacted to the friendly approach as she would in the States.

  “Holly, I’m sure she’s only trying to be friendly.” Mary admonished her daughter gently.

  “Why would she want to be friendly?”

  “Because I’m not American!” Linda answered acidly “I just thought you seemed a bit lost and I was only trying to help. I’ll leave you to it if you want.” Linda Forster took a long lick of her green lolly ice and turned to leave them.

  “I’m sorry, my daughter doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s just not used to strangers talking to her. You understand?”

  “That’s OK. I suppose it’s different in America. I’ve always wanted to go there. Your name’s Holly? What’s that short for? I’m always ‘Linda’ though it’s short for Rosalind. No one’s called me Rosalind for years.”

  Holly was allowing herself to be won over.

  “I’m Holly Eccleston. Holly isn’t short for anything. I was born on Christmas Day and Mom wanted my name to be something to do with the holidays. Can I try one Mom?”

  “That’s horrible, being born on Christmas Day I mean, you’ll get only one present.” Without waiting for approval Linda led Holly through the shop door.

  “What colour do you want?”

  “Don’t you do flavours?”

  “OK” Linda started to list the options. “Orange, lemon, lime, blackcurrant, cream soda…”

  “What’s that?”

  “No idea, but it’s bright green, that’s the one I’ve got.”

  “No I’ll have the dandelion.” She added a hasty ‘please’ as the old lady behind the counter raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  “You’ll need sixpence, that’s half a shilling, a fifth of half-a-crown, two threepences, a twelfth of ten bob or one twenty-fourth of a pound. A bob is a shilling a quid is a pound,”

  “You’re just trying to mess me up!” Holly tried to concentrate. She knew that if she were back at home and Linda was the visitor she would do just the same. She took a handful of English money out of her pocket. She looked at them mystified. “Six pennies?” Holly felt overwhelmed by this strange girl who seemed so confident. She wasn’t used to being teased.

  “Here, this one,” Linda picked out a strange shaped coin “that’s a threepenny bit, and these, they’re pennies.” She picked three of the largest “That’s sixpence altogether. Don’t worry, we’re changing our money soon anyway so sixpence will be two and a half pence and instead of twelve shillings to the pound there’ll be 100 pence.”

  “What’ll happen to shillings?” Holly wanted Linda to realise she had been keeping up.

  “They won’t exist any more.”

  Holly decided she liked Linda, she just wasn’t used to people she didn’t know talking to her like this. “At least the new money seems sensible, the same as 100 cents to a dollar, that’ll be easy.”

  “You’ll be able to teach me then.”

  They were laughing together licking the lolly ices as they came out of the shop, already knowing they were friends.

  “It’s delicious!” Holly was licking long sweeps of the dark browny purple ice. She knew she should act with more sophistication, she was nearly 18, but Linda was so relaxed, so natural and friendly she couldn’t be standoffish.

  “Aren’t there any normal ices?” Mary was laughing looking at Holly’s brown ice and Linda’s green one. “No orange or lemon or chocolate ice cream?”

  “There’s everything in there.”

  Mary walked into the tiny shop and looked around at the shelves lining every wall, all were occupied by jars filled with sweets of every size and colour imaginable. Along the bottom shelf were glass bottles of pop of every colour from clear to dark brown, and bright green. This was the England she had imagined, she felt as if she had stepped back to her childhood. She was grinning broadly as she gave Matt his choc-ice and bit into hers. “Wow! That’s good.” Then, looking around her, “Where’s Holly?”

  She was heading down towards the beach, Linda’s red head clearly visible in the crowd.

  “They seem happy!”

  “So do you.”

  “This town feels right doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Funny how a visit to a candy store changes everything.”

  “A ‘sweet shop’ not a ‘candy store’. We must start to learn the language.”

  They turned to follow their daughter towards the sea. “Let’s hope the house is as nice.”

  An hour later they weren’t so happy.

  “It’s so small, Matt, we couldn’t all fit in that. It only has two bedrooms, and no den and you couldn’t get a table in that kitchen, and there was no shower, no place even to put one in.”

  Linda had attached herself to them as their guide, waiting outside as they were shown around the house. When they came out, disappointed and deflated, she led them back to the beach where she made it her business to explain everything, pointing to all the landmarks and describing all the places they could see along the coast and across the river.

  “That’s Wales over there. It’s a whole different country with its own language and everything. Those islands are called Hilbre and the tide comes in very quickly and it’s really dangerous. Loads of people are drowned every year. A man was drowned yesterday though not going to the islands. He nearly drowned his children but they were saved. It’s in all the papers. But if you’re really careful and don’t do anything completely stupid it’s safe to walk over to the islands.” She spoke quickly and dramatically, keeping Holly enthralled as Matt and Mary talked.

  “I love the town, and it’d be wonderful having the sea so close but I couldn’t live in that house.”

  “There aren’t any others in West Kirby on the faculty list.”

  “I’ll get a paper and look in the ads. We don’t have to go through the university. Stay here with Holly and I won’t be a while.” Matt left them, dusting the sand off his trousers.

  “What’s the problem?” Linda was concerned, suddenly seeming a lot older than she had all afternoon.

  “We’re here to find somewhere to live not just laze around in the sun on the beach.”

  “And you’ve got to be in West Kirby. We’ve just got to know each other. I’ll help.”

  Mary had a quick feeling of gratefulness to the God who had introduced them to Linda. She just knew she would be a good friend for Holly.

  When Matt returned with the papers they each took a page and sat circling houses, referring to Linda to find out where they were.

  She rejected most ‘Up on the hill; fantastic views but its miles from the station’, ‘grotty road’, ‘backs onto the railway line’. But when Mary read out one address she shrieked “Yeah! That backs onto our road. Perfect!”

  “How far is it? From here I mean. We could go and see the outside. Matt! Wake up! We’re off to see a house.”

  But Matt hadn’t been looking at properties in the paper. He had seen a photograph on the front page and was engrossed in the story that went with it.

  “Matt! Come on!”

  He folded up his page of the newspaper and put it in his pocket. It was all falling into place quite nicely.

  “I’m right behind you.”

  “Linda you are a genius. This is lovely.” The road was quiet, tree lined, with red brick detached houses, all slightly different from each other, with drives and garages, the front gardens with their st
riped patches of grass separated from each other by carefully trimmed hedges. Perfectly English.

  They went up to the door and rang the bell.

  The woman who answered the door had not been expecting viewers but, when they explained their circumstances, she said she didn’t mind, they should have a look round, get the feel for the place. She made a pot of tea trying not to be too hopeful that at last she had found someone to take over the house.

  An hour later they were all gathered around the table in the kitchen with their second mug of tea as they finalised arrangements. They had the house for a year, with the possibility of extending for longer. “I’m going to live with my sister in Spain but I don’t want to sell up until I know that I won’t ever came back.” She explained. “I hoped a happy family would live here. We had four children here and it was a happy house until they all grew up and left and then my husband died. I’ll enjoy knowing that it’s alive again.”

  By the time they left ‘Number 16’ an hour later they had agreed to talk to the agent immediately so that they could move in the following week.

  As they travelled back to Liverpool the three members of the Eccleston family each had different thoughts about the successes of the day.

  Mary thought about the house, looking forward to making it their home and spending time in the yard that had been rather left to grow wild. She loved the English idea of grass lawns and beds of flowers but she wondered whether she would have a real chance to get it into shape, if she was only going to be there for a year.

  Holly wondered at how easily she had made a friend. She had never known anyone like Linda before, she was a child and an adult at the same time. All her friends back home gave up anything remotely childlike at the age of 11. Linda didn’t seem to mind that she acted 5 years old one minute and 20 the next. Holly hoped Linda would help her learn about living in England and that they would be friends for a long time.

  Matt thought about the picture in the newspaper.

  He had known the moment he saw the photograph in the newspaper. He hardly had to read the article to know, but he had. Words had sprung at him from the page, rich, mysterious, foreigner, lawyer.

  He had found Max.

  Chapter Four

  The week after the Ecclestons moved into their new home Carl Witherby was sitting in the garden that backed onto Number 16 quietly talking to Linda’s parents. Pat, her mother, had wanted to ask Carl about important subjects like what had really happened when his sister Susannah’s husband had drowned. The story still occupied many column inches of the local newspapers with innuendo and gossip but very little in the way of real information. She wanted to know if he had seen Susannah, or their brother Charles, but the young man only chatted inconsequentially with her husband Jeff about the cricket and when, if ever, the Open Golf would return to Hoylake.

  She was wondering at men’s ability to talk about nothing for hours, with such important things left unspoken, when they were rudely interrupted.

  “Carl!” Linda yelled as she ran up the lawn. By the time she had reached him he was standing so he could catch her in his arms and swing her around as if she were a little girl. That was how he still saw her. Linda was the baby of the family, she couldn’t possibly be 17 years old.

  “Hello Afterthought!” He put her down and hugged her in a brotherly fashion. She hated it when he used the nickname she had been given by her brothers just because they were so much older than she was.

  Linda kept her arms round Carl’s chest and refused to let him go.

  “You never said you were coming!”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Come on you, help me with this lot.” Pat was bringing out plates of scones, chocolate cakes, freshly baked bread and jugs of home made lemonade “I’ve made a proper tea. Where’s Holly?”

  “She went straight home. To freshen up.” Linda realised how dishevelled she looked and ran her fingers through her hair to try to straighten the mess that resulted from a day on the beach.

  “You look just like Linda should.” Carl had always been aware of her adoration, he had dealt with it by ignoring it and treating her exactly as her brothers did. They had never made any allowances for her being a girl, a situation she had encouraged until she was 15. Then she had decided she wanted Carl to look at her as a young woman.

  There was nothing she could do about her appearance now, it would be too obvious if she went upstairs to change into a skirt and the blouse that was just a little too tight for her. It wasn’t fair that Holly would soon appear fresh, clean and tidy.

  It was worse than she could have imagined when Holly came through the gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden. She had showered and her blonde hair was brushed straight and shiny, her white t-shirt emphasising her tan and her cut-off jeans showing off her long brown legs to their best advantage. Linda ran down the garden slope to intercept Holly.

  “Who’s that hunk?” Holly whispered.

  “Hands off. He’s mine. At least he will be when he realises I’m not a kid any more.”

  “It’s the famous Carl.”

  One of the first things the girls had done to cement their friendship was tell each other the most important secret of their lives. It had been Holly’s idea, she said it was the equivalent of pricking their fingers and mingling their blood; it would make them blood sisters. Linda thought it rather an odd American idea but went along with it anyway.

  Holly told Linda that her parents hated each other, she knew they only stayed together because of her and she felt so guilty about it. “They argue all the time, Dad’s so horrible to Mom and I know she would have left him if she hadn’t had me. If I hadn’t been born Mom would have left him and have been happy. It was all my fault that she’s so unhappy. They think I don’t know they argue, they think I don’t see him making her cry. They think they’re so clever keeping it all from me. They must think I’m completely stupid.”

  Linda had no idea how Holly felt. Her own parents were happy, had always been happy, so had she and, as far as she knew, so had her twin brothers Crispin and Oliver. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to have parents who didn’t like each other and could think of nothing to say that would comfort Holly.

  The hostage to fortune Linda gave in return was how she felt about Carl.

  “He’s so beautiful. I loved him the moment I first saw him. He’s so tragic. His father drowned when he was walking over to Hilbre but he’d done the walk so often for years everyone reckoned he’d killed himself. Then a couple of months later, that was all, a couple of months, his Mother went to live with this dreadful divorced man who was her lover and they got married. Carl fell in love with his step-sister, that’s Susannah. I’ve seen her, she’s OK but why he fell for her I can’t imagine. Anyway there was this terrible row when his stepfather told him that he was, actually, his real, biological, natural father so Susannah was his sister! He was so angry that they’d lied to him all those years and never ever told him the truth he left and came to live with us. He was in Crisp and Olly’s class at school. They didn’t know him very well and had no idea why he had chosen us, but he did, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful. He’s sort of lived with us on and off ever since. You know that story the papers are full of? That’s Susannah’s husband. Everyone says he was trying to rape the nanny and then kill the children. But Carl hasn’t had anything to do with them for years.”

  Holly had listened enthralled as Linda had talked about Carl as if he was the most wonderful person in the world.

  “Wow. When do I meet him?”

  Linda wasn’t going to say that, if she had her way, Holly, tall slim Holly, with the blonde hair and the brown legs; clever, pretty, American Holly would never, ever, meet Carl.

  Holly stared at the young man sitting cross-legged on the ground, contentedly leaning against a chair. His hands were clasped behind his neck, his long dark hair tied behind his head in a rather old-fashioned, 1960s sort of way. He was totally at ease, laughing at some
thing Pat had said and his teeth shone white against the brown face.

  “Wow!” she whispered to Linda as they walked up the garden “He’s gorgeous. You don’t see teeth like that too often over here!”

  “For Christ’s sake stop saying Wow.” Linda knew she was going to get very irritated with Holly.

  “And who’s this?”

  “I’m Holly. Hi.”

  “Ah the American. I’ve heard all about you and how you and your family were kidnapped. How are you all settling in?”

  Through the long afternoon as they talked Holly was transfixed, she could not take her eyes off him, yet he was relaxed and friendly, treating her as he did Linda, as a young sister.

  Carl soon realised he recognised Holly.

  “In another life? In my dreams?” she suggested when he mentioned having seen her somewhere and wondering where it might have been.

  “Now I remember. You were in the Adelphi a fortnight ago. We bumped into you in the foyer.”

  “You were those guys!”

  “I know what you mean. Yes, I was with my brother, Charles, and we rushed passed you and your family. We did apologise didn’t we?”

  “You were very polite, my Mom was real impressed!” Holly couldn’t help noticing that Linda seemed annoyed that Carl had remembered her from two weeks earlier.

  “You and Charles?” Linda asked, happy to be able to put one over Holly by knowing more than she did about his family.

  “Who’s Charles?” Holly wasn’t going to let Linda hijack the conversation by talking about people she didn’t know.

  Carl answered Holly’s question simply. Now was not the time for complex explanations about his family tree. “Charles Donaldson, he’s my brother, well half-brother really.” He turned back to Linda “We met in Liverpool, a complete accident. We didn’t recognise each other at first.”

  “That would make him Susannah’s brother as well?” Holly interrupted, ignoring Linda’s frantic warning pinch.

  “Half brother.” He corrected her in a voice that stopped her from asking any more questions far more effectively than Linda could. She changed the subject. “Do you live round here?” She asked the question determined to hold his attention though she already knew the answer.