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Chapter 39

‘Ulysses!’ Abigail was standing at the back door, calling him. She’d hung some washing on the line in the back garden and stepped back into the cottage to put the kettle on, leaving the door open. She had forgotten about the dog. He’d run past her and out into the garden. Now she couldn’t see him. She glanced over her shoulder. At least he hadn’t run out of the front door while she was getting her cases in from the car that morning. She knew she ought to lock the front door, but first she wanted to find the dog.

‘Ulysses!’ she shouted again. ‘For goodness’ sake!’ She was feeling irritable. On her first night back in the cottage, she’d had a fitful night’s sleep. It wasn’t to do with the cottage or the fact that she’d slept in the double bedroom where she and Toby had slept when they holidayed here. It wasn’t even to do with the thought of going to see Toby’s mum today and what a pointless trip that might turn out to be. With early onset dementia, unless Joyce was having a good day – and Abigail had no idea if she even had any of those anymore – she imagined the secret of Toby’s origins would remain just that; a secret she took to her grave. It wasn’t any of that. It was the dog sleeping on the end of her bed that kept waking her up.

Abigail had left Ulysses downstairs in the lounge and taken herself to bed. When she’d changed, brushed her teeth and walked into her bedroom, there he’d been, lying on the bed. Was he used to sleeping in Sidney’s bedroom? Whatever the case, she didn’t have the heart to send him downstairs. She yawned. Now she wished she had.

In the night she’d got up and retreated into the spare bedroom, to get away from him, only to be woken by a rustling of sheets, a wet nose on her cheek and a sleeping dog in close proximity in a single bed. Some time later, she had scooped him up and returned to the large double bed. Today, she was determined to set some ground rules. ‘Ulysses!’

His head popped up from behind a bush. He came running over. Abigail’s face softened when she realised why he’d run out into the garden. He’d needed the loo. ‘Good boy!’ The dog followed her back into the kitchen. Abigail walked into the lounge and noticed the front door ajar. She frowned when she realised she hadn’t shut it properly after she’d nipped out first thing to the car.

Abigail strode across the room. She’d just closed the door when she thought she heard something upstairs. She was about to call Ulysses down when he came running out of the kitchen. Abigail stared at the dog. If it wasn’t him moving around upstairs …

Her eyes went wide. She rushed to the fireplace and grabbed the poker, holding it out in front of her as she crept over to the bottom of the stairs. She called out, ‘Who’s up there?’

She heard another creak of the floorboards above.

‘This is private property. Whoever you are, I want you to leave right now!’ She didn’t know what she thought she was going to do with the poker. Abigail backed away from the stairs, grabbed her phone, remembered she only had a signal from upstairs, and reached out for the car keys instead. She called Ulysses over. Whoever was upstairs, she decided she would not hang around to find out.

Abigail backed away from the stairs. She was thinking that if this was the busy street where she lived in London, there would be no shortage of opportunists who might venture into her flat if she’d left the front door open, or unlocked; it was something she would never do in London. But here, on the outskirts of a sleepy Suffolk town, where a high percentage of properties were holiday lets or second homes, she would have thought the chances of someone happening along and entering her cottage uninvited would be zero.Never say never,thought Abigail as she called Ulysses again.

She could see him nestled on the sofa, his head on a cushion, eyes closed. Abigail rolled her eyes. Of all the times for him to take a nap. But she couldn’t leave without him. Abigail heard no more creaks coming from upstairs. She wondered if there was no intruder and it was just her imagination running wild. She was used to the hum of traffic and people, and the noise of the city right outside her front door. She stood for a minute, poker to hand, until she slowly lowered it and left it by the door. Abigail breathed a sigh. Itwasher imagination.

She’d just walked over to the sofa, intending to put her car keys and phone back on the coffee table, when the sound of someone thumping down her stairs caught her unawares. Too shocked to move, she stood there wide-eyed, holding her breath as the door to the stairs flew open. It was Joss’s uncle.

Abigail’s eyes narrowed as she followed his gaze to the box overflowing with old cine 8 movie reels in the corner by the fireplace.

She walked over to the box. ‘Is this what you’ve been looking for?’ She recalled the box she’d found upstairs when she’d first arrived in the cottage – the one stored in the back of the airing cupboard, full of Daphne’s old films.Except they weren’t Daphne’s, were they? thought Abigail,they belonged to the young man who’d taken most of those home movies now mixed in with Toby’s in that box.

Joss’s uncle stood stock still, staring at the box he’d missed when he took the opportunity to get inside the cottage.

‘You’re looking for the movie reels.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, really?’ She folded her arms. She wanted to tell him what she knew. Some of it she’d learnt from The Gossip Girls, whom she’d popped in to visit again, and some of it she’d pieced together herself. They’d been in love since they were teenagers, but he came from a line of lighthouse keepers, and Daphne from the aristocracy. Daphne’s father would never give his permission for the match.

They had drifted apart into separate lives, only to meet again when she was unhappily married to a colonel in the army who spent many months abroad. In the early years of her marriage, she went with her husband, but as she got older, into middle-age, she liked to spend more and more time in her cottage. It was around the time the lighthouse next door was decommissioned that she’d met him again, had the lighthouse converted, and let him live there on a peppercorn rent. Nobody would have thought that they were having an affair.

That wasn’t all she knew.

Abigail stepped forward. ‘You’re Albert, aren’t you?’ In all this time, she’d never thought to ask Joss’s uncle’s name, because she hadn’t been bothered about getting to know him.

At the mention of the name Albert, his eyes locked with hers, even though he didn’t utter a word. She recalled the old projector she’d seen in the lighthouse when Joss had given her a tour. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but now the pieces were falling into place. Toby had talked of a man who had introduced him to old cine 8 film.

Abigail walked over to the box. She picked out one of the films and turned to him. ‘This is one of my husband’s cine 8 films. My late husband, Toby, loved cine 8 film.’ She paused. ‘But you knew that already.’

He looked away.

‘I once asked him how he got interested in these types of home movies. He told me he remembered as a child someone showing him how to set up the projector and thread the reels, and filming right here in this cottage. He even remembered his name – Albert. It was you, wasn’t it? You’re Albert. You knew Toby when he was small, before he moved away.’ Abigail noticed that he didn’t deny it. Had Toby been their lovechild?

‘Were you and Daphne Toby’s parents?’

Albert glared at her as he walked over to the door.

Abigail followed.

‘Were you?’

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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