‘I’m Victoria Pearson. I’m so sorry . . .’
She’d heard the words a hundred times in the past ten minutes. The last thing she wanted was to hear them again, but she knew the woman was just being polite.
‘I’m an old school friend of Julian’s,’ Victoria continued quickly.
‘I thought Harrow was an all-boys school,’ replied Diana. It came out more curtly than she’d intended, but she felt suddenly threatened.
‘A turn of phrase,’ the other woman said awkwardly. ‘We go back a long way. Twenty years, which makes me feel rather old.’
Diana did the sums in her head. Julian had left Harrow twenty-three years ago, which didn’t make them school friends.
She felt on heightened alert. Her mind searched the photographs she had spent hours and hours going through. Had this woman featured in any of them? She couldn’t be certain.
‘Had you seen each other recently?’ She offered the question as casually as she could, but her stomach had begun to turn over.
‘Not in a year or so.’
‘Strange we haven’t met.’
‘He was a wonderful man.’
Diana’s heart was thudding. Who was this woman? How well had she known Julian? Suddenly she had to know everything. She began to feel faint. The sun was directly overhead and seemed to be burning her head. She held an arm out to steady herself. The world seemed to spin, and like a dull noise travelling through water she heard a voice calling for help. Her knees started to buckle, but before she hit the ground she felt two arms catch her.
Without looking up, she began to sob, deep gulps of breath and noise so loud they didn’t sound as if they came from her fragile body.
‘Easy, easy, easy.’ The familiar voice was soothing and the arms around her felt strong.
‘Take me out of here,’ she whispered, as Adam helped her to her feet. She knew that people would be watching her like some stricken caged animal.
‘It’s okay. The car is just here,’ he reassured her, guiding her into the Mercedes.
She sank back into the leather seat, glad that the blacked-out windows had shut out the world. Adam followed her and slammed the car door behind them.
‘What happened back there?’
Her eyes were like two thin slits, barely open wide enough to see him.
‘Who was that? Who was that woman?’ she stuttered.
Adam looked confused. ‘Victoria. A family friend. What the hell did she say?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all.’ She screwed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers against her temples. ‘I can’t cope, Adam. I’m going mad.’
‘You’re not going mad. You have lost your husband.’
She opened her eyes and looked at him through her tears, and for the first time noticed how pale he was. It was a standing family joke that Adam was always tanned and sun-kissed from somewhere glamorous, but today he looked as drained as she knew she did.
A sharp rapping on the window startled her and she turned to see her mother’s face pressed up against the window.
‘Can’t we just get out of here?’ she whispered.
‘I was going to say the same thing,’ he replied as he instructed the driver to take them back to his parents’ house.
6
Hanley Park – the main house, as Barbara Denver liked to call it – was just a couple of miles away from the church, although the actual boundary of the property was practically next door. Diana had always thought of the Denvers’ collective portfolio of homes as a set of Russians dolls, a series of ever-larger properties each designed to make the last one appear small. Hanley Park made Somerfold look like a doll’s house. One of the biggest estates in the entire country, it was just a shade smaller than Castle Howard, with the same grand and chilly beauty – a slate-coloured dome that soared up into the sky and vast baroque-style gardens designed to impress the highest of society. In the 1940s it had been used as a military hospital and still had room to spare, before it was sold to an American entrepreneur and finally to Julian’s grandfather, which made it, by the skin of its teeth, an ancestral family seat.
Quite why anyone needed a property this size was beyond Diana, although she recognised the irony in even thinking that. Growing up, she had always thought their three-bedroom house in Ilfracombe was perfectly sufficient for the Miller family, provided she wasn’t allocated the box room, and yet she had twisted Julian’s arm to buy Somerfold.