It frustrated Rebecca to know that three months was nowhere near long enough for her to win the twins’ confidence and to help them establish the kind of emotional independence from one another which they would need to enable them to lead healthily emotional adult lives.
Without warning or meaning to, she found herself becoming more and more emotionally involved with them, wanting to help them, knowing how to help them but totally unable to penetrate the defensive measures both of them, but more especially Helen, threw up against her. She knew quite well that they spent a lot of time in the woods and down by the river, but was reluctant to penetrate their privacy, fearing that it would do more harm than good to force her company upon them. So instead she tried casually mentioning all sorts of hobbies and activities, hoping that she might hit on one which would tempt the twins enough to accept her company.
One morning she thought that she might have succeeded when she mentioned casually at the breakfast table that she rather fancied going riding.
‘Do they still have that riding stables down at Ottershot?’ she asked Aunt Maud as she helped herself to coffee and buttered a piece of toast.
‘I think so,’ her aunt confirmed. ‘Mrs Scott, the vicar’s wife, would probably know. She seems to keep her finger on the pulse of everything that’s going on locally. Why don’t you give her a ring?’
‘I think I might,’ Rebecca confirmed. ‘It’s ages since I’ve been riding. Those are the kind of things I miss most in London.’
All the time she was speaking, she was aware of Helen’s interested and yet resentful attention focusing on her. Apparently casually, she turned to the twins and enquired, ‘Do either of you ride?’
‘Helen does,’ Peter piped up, and was, she suspected, abruptly kicked on the ankle by his twin for his pains.
‘No, I don’t,’ Helen denied abruptly and rudely. ‘I hate riding!’
She pushed away her plate and flung herself off her chair, and watching her stiff-backed departure from the room, Rebecca reflected wryly that the little girl might just as well have said ‘I hate you,’because that had been what she meant.
‘Oh dear,’ Aunt Maud said tiredly, watching Peter follow his sister. ‘They’re such a very difficult pair of children. I don’t know whether it’s me who’s getting older, Rebecca, but I don’t remember any of you being quite as difficult to deal with as these two.’
Rebecca touched her aunt’s arm comfortingly.
‘I expect we were all every bit as naughty,’ she told her, ‘but we were lucky, especially Robert and me. Both of us were happy enough at school, and then we had the reassurance of knowing our parents loved and missed us.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid Rory and Lillian are very remiss in that area,’ Aunt Maud confessed. ‘I suppose it’s old-fashioned of me, but I really can’t understand these modern marriages. Both Rory and Lillian say quite openly, and in front of the children, that they don’t get on, and yet Lillian is out in Hong Kong with Rory, whereas I would have thought in such circumstances she would have preferred to stay here in this country with the children.’
It had always been Rebecca’s private view that Lillian loved Rory very much indeed, and she suspected that it was her fear of losing her errant husband that kept her at his side and not in England with the twins.
‘Children are like animals,’ Aunt Maud continued. ‘They always seem to know when they aren’t loved.’
When Rebecca protested that she was sure that both Rory and Lillian did love their children, Aunt Maud sighed and admitted, ‘Yes, possibly they do in their own way, but, although I don’t like saying so even to you, it’s a very selfish way, Rebecca, and selfish not just to the children but to Frazer as well. He’s virtually become the twins’ father, and yet because he’s the man he is he’s scrupulous about not trying to take what he perceives as Rory’s rightful place in their lives. He’s the only person that the twins really seem to respond to, and Helen in particular.’
‘But one day he’s going to marry and have children of his own, which will make Helen feel doubly rejected,’ Rebecca inserted, sighing.
Aunt Maud looked at her and said quietly, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s why I think it’s essential that both of them learn to admit other people into their lives. That’s why I asked you to come up here, Rebecca,’ she added. ‘You aren’t just another stranger who’s been hired by their parents to take charge of them. You’re a member of their family as well.’
‘A member of their family whom they don’t want to accept,’ Rebecca told her ruefully.
Aunt Maud sighed and patted her hand.
‘Give it time, child,’ she counselled. ‘Give it time.’
Amazingly, the very evening after that conversation something happene
d that seemed to indicate that at last Rebecca had made a breakthrough. She had been talking with Aunt Maud about her own childhood memories of Aysgarth, hoping through her conversation with her great-aunt to establish some point of contact with the twins, who were silently watching television.
‘I used to love the valley in particular, and the river,’ she commented, her attention supposedly on her great-aunt but in fact on the twins.
‘I know you did,’ Aunt Maud agreed grimly. ‘I seem to remember there was more than one occasion on which you came back soaking wet!’
Rebecca laughed, genuinely amused by her own sudden recollections of the incidents Aunt Maud was referring to.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I remember once when Rory and Robert punished me for interrupting one of their games by throwing me into the shallow part of the river. Luckily Frazer saw them and rescued me.’
‘We like the valley and the river too, don’t we, Peter?’
Startled, Rebecca turned to look at her. The little girl had turned round and was facing her. The novelty of actually being addressed by the child without having to draw a response from her silenced Rebecca for a moment, then she said cautiously, ‘Do you?’
Peter too had now turned round, and he said enthusiastically, ‘Yes, we do. Frazer’s taught us both to fish, but we aren’t allowed to go fishing without him.’
Anxious to grasp the moment before it slipped away, Rebecca said quickly, ‘Well, perhaps I could take you fishing.’
She couldn’t help noticing the way Peter looked quickly at his sister for her response before making any of his own. To her surprise and delight, after pausing for a moment, Helen said slowly, ‘Yes, all right.’
‘We’ll go tomorrow afternoon,’ Rebecca promised them. ‘Perhaps we could make some sandwiches and have a picnic down there.’
Later on in the evening, still light-headed with the relief of having finally made contact with them, she confessed to Aunt Maud, ‘At last! I really was beginning to think they would never accept me.’