The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart Page B

Whitescar, and that somehow he thinks he can fix it, if I go back there as Annabel. I take it that Julie must be the heir now, if he isn’t. But how on earth it’s going to help Con to bring back Annabel, and put two people in the way instead of one . . .’ I finished heavily: ‘Oh, lord, the whole thing’s fantastic anyway. I can’t think why I’ve bothered to listen.’
    â€˜Extraordinary, perhaps, but not fantastic.’ The colourless voice behind me might have been discussing a knitting pattern. I didn’t turn. I leaned my forehead against the glass and watched, without seeing them, the moving lights of the traffic in the street below. ‘But then, families are extraordinary, don’t you think? And with all their faults, the Winslows have never been exactly dull . . . Listen for a little while longer, and you’ll understand what Con and I are getting at.’
    I let her talk. I just leaned my head against the glass and watched the traffic, and let the soft, unemphatic voice flow on and on. I felt, suddenly, too tired even to try to stop her.
    She told me the recent family history very briefly. Old Matthew Winslow (she said) had had two sons: the elder had one daughter, Annabel, who had lived with her parents at Whitescar. When the girl was fourteen, her father was killed in an accident with a tractor, and her mother died soon afterwards, within the year, of pneumonia, leaving her as an orphan in her grandfather’s care. The latter was then only in his early sixties, but had been for some time handicapped by arthritis, and found it heavy work to manage the place on his own. His younger son had been killed some years previously in the Battle of Britain, leaving a widow, and a month-old daughter, Julie. Matthew Winslow had immediately invited his daughter-in-law to Whitescar, but she had chosen to remain in London. She had eventually re-married, and gone out, with her small daughter, to live in Kenya. Later, when Julie was some seven years old, she had been sent back to England to school; she spent the winter vacations with her parents in Africa, but her spring and summer holidays had been passed with her grandfather at Whitescar, which she regarded as her English home.
    It had not been for some time after his elder son’s death that Mr Winslow thought of offering a home and a job to Connor Winslow, his only surviving male relative. Matthew Winslow had had a nephew, the son of a younger brother, who had worked at the Forrest stud as trainer in old Mr Forrest’s time, but who had eventually left Whitescar and gone to Ireland to a big training stable in Galway. There he had married a young widow, a Mrs Dermott, who had a five-year-old daughter, Lisa. A year later, Connor was born, to become the spoiled darling of his parents, and also, surprisingly, of his half-sister, who had adored him, and had never dreamed of resenting her mother’s preference for the good-looking only son. But this apparently safe and happy circle had been rudely shattered when Connor was thirteen. His father broke his neck one day over a big Irish in-and-out, and exactly ten months later the inconsolable widow cheerfully married for the third time.
    The young Connor found himself all at once relegated to the background of his mother’s life, and kept there by an unsympathetic stepfather and (very soon) by the even stronger claims of a new young family, consisting of twin boys and, later, another daughter. Con’s father had left no money, and it became increasingly obvious that his stepfather, and now his mother, were not prepared to spare either time, or material help, on the son of the earlier marriage. There was only Lisa, and she was as badly off as he. But at least she could feel herself needed. There is plenty for a plain unmarried daughter to do in a house with three small children.
    So when Matthew Winslow, the great-uncle whose existence he had half