Page 97 of One Cornish Summer With You
Ruan nodded.
‘Oh my God. And did he know?’
‘She never told him because she didn’t want him to bring up the little boy. She says she’s still sure she made the right decision because she felt she could never have relied on him to give her and the baby a happy life – the one she went on to make with her new husband and children in Scotland.’
‘So Walter never knew his son at all?’
‘No. Kathleen feels guilty about it but has no real regrets about her decision. It’s hard to feel too sorry for my great-uncle, though, when he made so many lives a misery. He was a very damaged soul and when she left, he sought revenge on the world. He took out his pain on other people: by making them suffer. Like your dad.’
‘I wish I could feel sorry for him,’ Tammy said. ‘Maybe I will in time, though I’m not sure I have that capacity.’
‘I can understand that he lived out his days in misery and only at the very last, when it was too late, did he try to do something decent. He decided to do it through me, though I’d like to think that eventually he’d have changed his will and left at least part of Rosewarne to you.’
Tammy shook her head. ‘I wish I could believe that too, but I don’t.’
‘No, but it isn’t too late for me to do what he ought to have. What hemighthave. I want you to share Rosewarne with me. I’ll convert it back into two houses if you like and you can have the half that was yours.’
He heard the half-stifled gasp. He felt her shock deep in his heart and he guessed the answer before she spoke.
‘I – That’s very generous. Too generous, and, Ruan, this isn’t about Rosewarne. It’s not about money or even a home. It’s about me. It sounds mad, but I feel – paralysed.’
There was such a heartfelt anguish in her voice – such desolation. How could Ruan press his case? What she needed now was time, and he could only hope – but was he living in false hope?
‘I understand, even though I want you to have what’s yours,’ Ruan said. ‘So what do you want to do now?’
‘To go home,’ she said. ‘Only that.’
‘OK,’ Ruan said. ‘Home.’
Even as he agreed, Ruan wasn’t sure he knew where home was any longer.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
‘So, how was your mum?’ Davey asked Tammy, lowering himself on to a flat rock next to her. ‘More importantly, how are you after seeing her?’
‘OK …’ Tammy said, watching a group of gulls pecking around the shoreline. She’d asked Davey if they could go for a walk to the far end of Porthmellow beach after she’d returned from Scotland. She’d felt she needed space and fresh air to have The Conversation. Maybe she simply felt more comfortable in her natural element with the waves breaking and the gulls crying as they wheeled around the sky. ‘I mean, she was OK, and I was OK with meeting her.’
‘That’s progress,’ Davey said with a wry smile.
‘Yeah … I needed to ask her a few things.’
‘I guessed it wasn’t only a social call, though I held back from saying anything.’
‘No. A lot of stuff has happened this summer and it’s made me hungry for answers to questions I hadn’t had the courage to ask before.’
‘Has the Suit got anything to do with this?’
She laughed briefly. ‘Partly, and my first confession is that Ruan came with me.’
‘I’d worked that out too,’ Davey said. ‘None of my business though.’
‘I wasn’t ready to go into our reasons for heading for Scotland. We both had some answers to find up there. Mine were about my mum …’ she said and paused, hardly able to look Davey in the eye but knowing she had to, ‘… and you.’
Davey nibbled his lip. ‘Ah.’
‘You see, I thought that Mum had abandoned me even though she kept telling me I had a choice to go with her or stay here with Dad. I was young and angry and hurt, and I blamed her for leaving me. Now I know that she didn’t abandon me. Ididhave a choice and she really was … devastated when she had to start a new life without me.’
‘I could have told you that,’ he muttered.
