but Louise was adamant. She found herself a lawyer and instituted divorce proceedings, telling Harriet that she would have to live with her, and when Guido came over to London to see her she shut herself in her bedroom and refused to come out, leaving Harriet to deal with the irate Italian.
From his complaints against his wife, Harriet suspected that Guido had fallen out of love with her sister with the same alacrity with which she had fallen out of love with him. Neither seemed too concerned about the breakdown of their marriage.
Guido returned to Turin, and Louise continued to inhabit the larger of Harriet’s two spare rooms.
Paul, who didn’t like her, announced to Harriet that she ought to tell her sister to find alternative accommodation, but Harriet was far too soft-hearted and besides Louise wasn’t well. She had been sick several times, and she was beginning to look almost haggard…Louise, who had never looked anything less than glowingly beautiful from the moment she was born.
Once, briefly as a teenager, Harriet had envied her younger sister her beauty. Louise took after their paternal grandmother, having thick, pale gold hair, and dark blue eyes, with the kind of complexion that never broke out in spots.
Harriet, on the other hand, took after her mother’s side of the family. She wasn’t quite as tall as Louise, barely medium height and finely boned. Her hair was dark, almost but not quite black, with odd red lights in it, so that Paul had once disapprovingly asked her if she dyed it. Her eyes were the only feature she shared with Louise, their density of colour startling against the framework of her pale translucent skin and dark hair.
Harriet had no illusions about herself, aware that she was nowhere near as attractive to men as her sister but with no real wish to be. A natural reticence and shyness had kept her from accepting the overtures made to her during her teenage and university years.
And now there was Paul in her life. If their relationship lacked excitement and passion—and if, deep down in a secret part of her, she deliberately kept it on a non-sexual basis because of some silly, romantic daydreams about being swept off her feet by a man who would arouse within her all the feelings that Paul never did—then she suppressed those feelings, and told herself that such an idealistic emotional commitment was not for her.
She was just wondering how soon she could break the news to Louise that she intended to sell the house and go and travel abroad for an indefinite period of time, when Louise dropped a bombshell of her own. She was pregnant, she told Harriet, and no, she had no intention of cancelling the divorce or even of letting Guido know about her condition.
When Harriet tried to counsel her to think about it, she became so hysterical that her sister gave in. Louise was still living with Harriet and after the birth of the twins made it plain that she intended to go on doing so.
How could she turn her out? Her own sister and two small babies besides! Harriet protested when Paul suggested that she ought to tell Louise to leave.
Paul had been furious with her and hadn’t spoken to her for almost a fortnight.
When he eventually did, she told him that their relationship, such as it was, was over. Then, in the years that followed, somehow or other there was no time in her life for any relationship other than to her role as the main breadwinner and financial support of her sister and her children.
Louise was as irresponsible a mother as she was a sister; one moment spoiling the twins to death, the next ignoring them.After their birth she never went back to work, although she always seemed to have enough money to buy clothes to go out with the various men who dated her.
Harriet loved the twins, but she had to admit they weren’t the easiest of children to deal with. Louise never disciplined them herself and refused to allow others to do so.
Life wasn’t easy for Harriet although she never complained. Unlike Louise, who seemed for some obscure reason to blame Harriet for her early marriage and the twins’ arrival… Then, just after the twins’ ninth birthday, something totally unexpected happened, or rather two totally unexpected things happened.
The first, and the more astonishing as far as Harriet was concerned, was that a publisher accepted the children’s book she had submitted to the firm.
For as long as she could remember she had scribbled down her ‘stories’, but it was an article she had read in a magazine that had encouraged her to spend the long winter evenings working on perfecting the short adventure story she had originally written for the twins.
Now, unbelievably, it was going to be published and she was commissioned to write four more.
The other surprise was an announcement from Louise that she was remarrying, to an American who was taking her and the twins back to California with him.
Harriet had known that Louise was involved in another of her brief affairs, but there had been so many that she had not thought this one any more serious than those which had preceded it. Her sister craved admiration in the way that an addict craved drugs or alcohol, and once the current man in her life failed to provide that admiration in full measure she usually lost interest in him.
This time, though, it seemed that she had at last found a man strong enough to cope.
Harriet attended their quickly arranged marriage in a daze of surprise. She hadn’t had time to announce her own good news; Louise had as always been too wrapped up in her own affairs to spare the time to listen.
For nearly ten years Harriet had supported her sister and her children, and now totally unexpectedly she was free of that burden. A burden she had willingly shouldered, partly out of love and partly out of guilt—a guilt that sprang from the belief that she was to blame for Louise’s flight from their home and her subsequent too early marriage, and that, had their parents not died, Louise would never have left home. Now that burden was removed from Harriet’s shoulders, and she was free!
She had never liked living and working in London, and indeed disliked city life, preferring the country. The Border country between England and Scotland had always drawn her, and the weekend after Louise had left for California with her new husband and the twins, Harriet found herself heading north, to spend a glorious week meandering along the peaceful Border roads, enjoying the first real personal freedom of her life, enjoying time to think about her future—to plan!
The decision to sell her London house and move north was made quickly, too quickly perhaps, but Harriet wasn’t going to allow herself to regret it.
She had found the house by accident one golden afternoon when she was driving through the tiny village of Ryedale. A mile or so outside the village she had seen the battered ‘For Sale’ sign posted beside the road, and had gone to investigate, following the lane that was little more than an overgrown and disused cart track, to find the cottage tucked secretly and securely away behind an enormous overgrown hedge.
She had driven straight back to her hotel and telephoned the agents, and by the end of the week she had committed herself to the purchase of the cottage.
The agent had warned her of its many defects: its loneliness, its lack of mains drainage, its unkempt, overgrown garden, and its need for a complete overhaul of the electrical and plumbing installations, but nothing could put her off. She was in love, and like anyone else in that dangerous state, she refused to admit to any flaws in the appearance of her beloved.
Nevertheless she had a full survey done on the house. Built of stone, small and squat with tiny windows and low-beamed rooms, it was surprisingly free of any structural problems.
The buoyancy of the London property market enabled her to sell her own house immediately for what seemed an enormous sum of money, most of which she intended to invest to bring herself in a small ‘security net’ income. This would keep her going while she discovered if she could actually earn her living as a writer, or if her first success had been merely a fluke.
Her headmaster, when she had told him her plans, had pursed his lips and frowned, pointing out to her the risks she was taking. Teaching jobs were not easily come by where she was going. She was in line for promotion…
Harriet