A Winter's Child by Brenda Jagger Page A

her return to Upper Heaton, Claire had moved carefully and quietly in the shadow of Edward’s resentment, his strained nerves, his weak chest, his murmurs of the heart and congestion of the lungs, a hundred devices of the jealous lover, the hypochondriac, to divert attention from an intruder to himself. She had had no hope and, therefore, no thought of pleasing him and, despite the excellence of her school reports and her own naturally good manners, had never done so until, to everyone’s surprise, she had married Jeremy Swanfield.
    The Swanfields had always meant a great deal to Edward, not merely as his most important clients, but as a family worthy, in his view, of the highest esteem. Yet when Miriam, as a kind gesture, had invited Claire to a tennis party his first reaction had been to forbid her to go.
    â€˜I cannot take the risk,’ he had told Dorothy. ‘The girl will let me down.’
    But the even greater risk of offending Miriam by a refusal was more, in the end, than his nerves could bear and having reduced Claire to mulishness and then to tears by his warnings and his commands and the enormous fuss he had made about her hair and her shoes, he had taken her to the carefully manicured garden where she had met Jeremy.
    She remembered it now: a drowsy summer afternoon which had barely warmed the chill of Edward’s disapproval and then the miraculous excitement of a handsome young man staring at her, whispering ‘I must see you again’, wanting her. But that young man whose May time gaiety had won her heart and to whom very probably she would have remained faithful had he lived, still had no face. She could neither see him nor hear him. He had gone.
    â€˜Tea without sugar, and no cake, you see,’ said Edward archly, ‘which goes to prove that we on the home front have suffered too. Although, in this case, it hardly matters since we are dining at High Meadows this evening.’
    â€˜Are we really?’
    Had the spoken sharply? Her mother raised a warning eyebrow conveying the old message ‘Don’t upset Edward’. But if she had been a little abrupt then Edward himself chose to ignore it, the prospect of High Meadows, of an afterdinner cigar with Benedict, a dimpling smile from Miriam, delighting him far beyond malice.
    â€˜They must naturally wish to see you,’ said Dorothy quietly; and Claire, giving in far more easily than she liked to her mother’s unspoken plea of ‘You have only been in the house ten minutes. Please don’t cause unnecessary fuss’, obediently murmured, ‘Yes. So I imagine.’
    Neither one of them had referred directly to her service in France, to the war which had maimed a generation or to the uncertain peace in which Claire could see no guarantee for the future. Very abruptly, the room began to stifle her, the dark velvet curtains and the heavy oak panelling to close in, an air of distance to arise, not for the first time, between herself and these people – any people – who had not directly endured the constant likelihood of violent death.
    â€˜Do you realize,’ she had already been told several times, ‘that we almost starved in England in 1918.’
    Do you know, she might have answered, that in 1918 I died in France. There were times when she believed she had.
    She knew, without needing to be told, that her mother had spent the war catering to Edward’s fastidious stomach, going from shop to shop with her market basket to stand in patient line with Miriam Swanfield’s cook whenever there was Sugar or anything amounting to a delicacy to be had. Claire knew the miles her mother had been prepared to walk, the farm tracks upon which she had hazarded her reputation and her feet, the insults she had endured for Edward’s fresh eggs and his illegal portion of extra cream, the coals she had carried to light his study fire when the sturdy young maid had gone off to make bullets and