Chapter Two Ed calls on Walter and Cissy
Possibly Chapter 2.

Edwina had last seen her mother, it must be almost three years ago, at the funeral of Margery Beeston, Betty’s friend ever since they moved to Vicarage Lane. Her husband Cyril was her father’s closest drinking buddy. Mother had written to tell her of Margery’s death and the funeral details: ‘she always took an interest in you‘. So Edwina had felt obliged to attend the funeral. How old was Margery? A few years younger than Betty, Edwina remembered with some shock, realising that her mother too was mortal. Supposing this peremptory summons had something to do with her health. She might have some illness that Edwina had to be told about – cancer? But wasn’t she more likely to soldier on stoically than to ask for help, from her daughter least of all? Unless….unless she’d become so ill that Edwina had to be called. Oh God, how could she cope with that? How show the care and support needed after the years of distance between them? After the trauma she had put her parents through, a barrier had come down which precluded intimacy or warmth. Edwina had felt Betty’s hurt over the years, in so many fleeting expressions, so many sentences left unfinished, as though she were biting back harsher words.

If her mother were ill, it couldn’t have been for very long: she had moved only eighteen months ago. This would be Edwina’s first visit to the house, a few miles out of Stansford. She had just taken the slip road from the recently finished motorway and was approaching a roundabout. Nothing looked familiar. The directions Mother had sent for getting to the house from here lay on the car seat beside her. She’d better pull up somewhere and check on them. A petrol station was being built near one of the exits from the roundabout and she wondered if it belonged to the uncles’ expanding empire; she’d just passed one, at the junction a few miles back. That gave her an idea.

Rather than follow the directions from the slip road, she drove round the roundabout again and looked for a sign to the town centre.

Shepherd’s, the original shop from which the empire had grown, was in the old part of town. Edwina took the turn for Stansford, where she circled the one-way system a couple of times, before managing to get into the right lane for the car park at the bottom of Market Hill. There she sat for a while, watching people come and go. Before the car park was built, there were gardens here, the Castle Gardens, though the castle was only two or three lumps of stone. She used to walk past here when she was thought old enough to go to school on her own. St Cat’s was at the top of Market Hill, next to the Catholic Church. That was after the drama with Jennifer Johnson, the first occasion when her behaviour had led to disgrace and humiliation.

Edwina got out of the car and found the ticket machine. She dropped in enough coins for a two-hour stay, put the sticker in the car window, popped the sheet of directions into her bag and headed up the hill. Although anxious about what was awaiting her at her mother’s, she was in plenty of time and relieved to have a breathing space. Perhaps they knew why Betty had summoned her? Besides, it would be nice to see Uncle Walter and Aunt Cissy again. They were always welcoming, undemanding and lacking the spitefulness which passed for wit in other members of the family. And they were so nice to each other. Uncle Walter was looked down on by the others for his lack of ambition and for his marriage to the outspoken Cissy, the former being largely attributed to the latter. Nana Shepherd had felt Cissy snared her eldest son by being ‘no better than she should be’, the standard elliptical Shepherd phrase for women who slept with men outside marriage.. She and Walter had never moved from the flat over the shop where their married life had started, although they gained a couple of rooms when the tea room was added. They had no children – ‘too wrapped up in themselves’, according to Betty. Cissy had a temper, generally blamed on her auburn hair, illogically, since it was also claimed that anything that red could only come out of a bottle. Edwina had determined that when she grew up she would find a bottle that turned her hair red, so that she could become as bold and fearless as Auntie Cissy. Cissy was unafraid to speak her mind, to avoid family gatherings if she preferred to do something else and to ignore the resultant sulks from her mother-in-law. In family parlance the couple ‘frittered their money away’, had no savings to speak of and were always off somewhere enjoying themselves. They even had holidays abroad, which when Edwina was a child was a rare thing. She was given to understand that she was luckier than most children to have two weeks on the south coast every summer, usually Bournemouth, but Walter and Cissy would pile a load of camping equipment into the shop van and cross the Channel once a year, even twice sometimes. If no one was prepared to run the shop they simply closed it.

Edwina knew they would be pleased to see her and their warmth would fortify her against her mother’s coolness. As she walked on up the hill Edwina thought nostalgically of the hundreds of times she had headed this way as a little girl, breaking away from her mother’s hand and rushing to push open the shop door and make the bell clang. Uncle Walter picking her up and setting her on the counter top, showing her off to customers. Or taking her up to the flat, to sit and make toast by the fire. No toast ever tasted so good as those crispy striped chunks she pulled off the end of Aunt Cissy’s ornate brass toasting fork. And, she suddenly remembered, it was here that she’d tasted her first potato crisps: ‘Try these – they’re new’ Uncle Walter had said. As instructed, she took out the little blue bag of salt, sprinkled it inside and bit into something whose flavour took her by surprise, it was so good. She was still able to recapture the taste and texture now if she imagined herself back there that day, among the dark wooden shelves that lined the walls, stacked with tall jars containing every kind of sweet you could imagine – bull’s eyes, humbugs, mints, lemonade powder– and on the counter boxes of Trebor’s halfpenny chews, and her favourite – tubs of fizzy sherbert which you sucked up through a liquorice straw. That was after rationing finished, of course; she probably had the post-war shortage to thank for her strong healthy teeth.

With the old sense of happy anticipation Edwina opened the door and was delighted that the bell was still there to announce arrivals. She had barely taken a step inside before a shout went up from Uncle Walter: ‘Cissy, Cissy! Come and see who’s here!’ With that he was round the counter and hugging her, leaving his customer in mid-transaction. Cissy emerged from the back room, her face lit with pleasure.
‘Eddie dear, what a lovely surprise!’ she cried, planting a kiss on both cheeks, a habit picked up in her European travels.
‘Take Eddie upstairs, Wally. Put the kettle on. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
She turned to the customer at the counter with a disarming ‘So sorry, dear. Surprise visit from our niece. Now, what was it you wanted?’
Her husband, stooping slightly now, Edwina noticed, led the way to the stout oak door which had replaced the old bead curtain some years before, through the small back room and up the stairs to the flat. He made a pot of tea and opened a packet of chocolate biscuits, while Edwina settled into one of the flowery armchairs by the fireplace. Then he sat next to her in the other. No open fire now, but a three-bar electric one with fake coals fitted into the original pine surround. The brass toasting fork still hung on a nail driven into the pine though. Tea things were laid out on the table.

Cissy came up to join them. ‘They’re slack in the tea room,’ she said, ‘So Jenny can be spared to keep an eye on the shop.’
Uncle Walter half rose from his chair, but Cissy gestured him back, sat herself at the table and asked who’d like a cuppa.
‘Did you go anywhere nice in the summer?’ Edwina asked, munching a second biscuit.
‘Went to the south coast. Brighton. Nice hotel – we treat ourselves these days. Bit too rheumaticky for camping. Anyway, how about you? How are you? Getting to be a bit of a stranger, aren’t you.’
Edwina hesitated. ‘Yes, sorry.’
‘Well, it’s lovely to see you. Are you on your way to your mum’s?’
Did Edwina imagine it or was the briefest of glances exchanged between them?
‘Yes, I’m on my way there now. I need to get my bearings though – I haven’t been to the new house yet.’
‘Oh, it’s a doddle’ Walter said. ‘We’ll tell you, don’t worry.’
‘Wasn’t it nice of her to call in on us on the way?’ Cissy said, reaching across to pat Edwina’s knee.
‘Smashing.’
‘Have you seen Mother lately?’ Edwina asked, forcing herself to add: ‘Is she well?’
‘Right as ninepence, far as I know’ Walter said. ‘Though it’s a while since we saw her. We’re not as clannish as the others, as you know.’
He laughed.
‘Not that long’ Cissy said. ‘She called in here one day, must be three or four weeks ago. Asked me if I wanted any of the stuff that was your Gran’s.’
Edwina’s heart sank.
‘I must say we were surprised,’ Cissy went on. ‘She’s always set such store by the pieces she kept from No 65. Not like us – I’m not too keen on antiques. Though I’m getting close to being one myself!’
She looked at Walter and they laughed.
‘Did she say why she was – passing things on?’
‘Only that she was making some changes. Come to think of it, she did seem a bit different.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Hard to put your finger on it. But, brighter, somehow. Kind of – ‘
‘Determined?’ Walter interposed. ‘As though she’d made up her mind about something and was going full steam ahead.’
Edwina was feeling distinctly uneasy by now; for better or worse, she’d better go and find out what was going on. She said she’d better be going before her car park ticket expired and would they go over the directions with her. She pulled the folded paper out of her bag and passed it to Uncle Walter. He ran his eyes over it and said:
‘Well, this would take you to Betty’s from the sliproad, but now you’re here your best bet is to come back up the hill and go along London Road, then turn right up the lane. Bear left at the top and you’ll avoid the motorway. Just keep going, through Stansford, where the woods used to be, and then you’ll see a signpost to Little Benford. It’s about six miles or so.’
‘Yes, ‘ agreed Aunt Cissy, ‘Much nicer than going back on the motorway. Traffic builds up round this time.’