Sam went to visit Catherine Kelly every week, sometimes twice, just about as soon as Gabe Kelly left for the States. She didn't make a fuss about it but neither did she bother to inform Adam. There were benefits to not being paid and she felt she was more than entitled to determine her own schedule. He was never anything but grateful for all she did, queuing at the shops for the still sadly meager ingredients for the larder, dusting and polishing, fixing the leaky pipes and generally looking after the guests they managed to retain, so Sam felt it wasn't likely he'd say anything untoward about the visits but she didn't want to risk losing her good opinion of him if he should make a remark she couldn't stomach. She had hardly been able to bear looking at him when he'd talked about making Mandy and Catherine leave, even if she understood the pressure he was under to keep Hill House afloat. She supposed she would always be a vicar's daughter first and foremost, despite railing about it for ages; it had seemed so deeply, obviously wrong, what Adam had proposed, it had felt like standing below a ringing church bell, the pure sound and the swaying, shining form, only half as powerful as the resonance through the heart of her.
She thought her father would correct her and say it was her soul, but she was not so sure about that. The war had done that to her, made her less sure about so many things, but surprisingly firm about others. God was on shaky ground with her or rather she with Him, it wasn't clear who'd abandoned whom and whether there would be a rapprochement (a word she remembered reading and consciously pausing before she barreled ahead to discover the killer's identity because she loved the feel of it in her mouth so much she wanted to find an opportunity to utter it but opportunities had been few and far between). The war had been just, to fight against a bully, but the news of the camps had made a sort of crack in the world and she didn't know if it was for the light to get out or for the darkness to creep in. Or maybe it was just the most obvious crack, like that Grand Canyon in the States that Joe had rhapsodized about, and what no one had noticed all along were all the little, ordinary cracks that crazed the world like her mother's dusty assortment of old Delftware.
Sam rather thought that was true, except that Mr. Foyle seemed to notice everything, and she considered that the expression on his face, that one she'd seen here and there when she drove him home in the evening, was the look of someone who knew just how tenuous everything was and that maybe there was nothing else to patch it all together except whatever they had within them. Her father would say she ought to turn to God then, but she knew when she was alone at night, prayer would feel like a fraud and there was nothing anyone could say to change her mind. She couldn't help herself from imagining Mr. Foyle's response but she thought he wouldn't berate her for her crisis of faith, might even give her that half-smile she couldn't do without, before he said, "Just so, might as well make a start on your own then, eh? Couldn't hurt but best to get on with it."
So that was what she had done, made a start with Catherine and got on with it. She thought Mandy and Gabe would have given the baby a nickname if they'd been raising her, Cathy or Trina or something entirely unrelated like Bonnie, for she was quite a bonny little girl as Uncle Roland would have said; he was a vicar in Barwick in Elmet and Scholes and overly fond of regaling Sam with the history of Yorkshire and Northumbria (all Sam cared about was Cecily Neville being the Rose of Raby, what exactly malmsey tasted like and how much would fit in a butt). But as neither of Catherine's parents was raising her and she had little enough left of either of them, Sam felt it wasn't her place to change the name they'd christened her with, so she called her Catherine or darling and that was all. She managed to find her a rag doll with a sweet enough painted face and The Everyday Fairy Book; she hadn't been able bring herself to buy a golliwog, though it did seem wrong that the little girl whose origins had been such a scandal to so many only had a blonde, blue eyed baby to cuddle when she lay alone in her crib, no mother nor father to settle her in the night if she woke. Tommy Duggan seemed to be doing a perfectly reasonable job of minding Catherine but she knew no one could dote on Catherine as poor Mandy had. She understood Catherine couldn't really remember her but Sam liked to think that the baby would grow familiar with the feeling of being loved and that would be worth something, a sort of lifeline to tide her over until her father could come back to fetch her home. Sam read to her from the book and rocked her, made the doll dance clumsily in front of them while Catherine sat on her lap, and took her for walks in the battered pram Tommy had salvaged somewhere and she tried not to worry too much that Catherine never cried, not as she had, not at all anymore it seemed, only looked around her with eyes that Sam thought were like Mandy's.
Sam hated to think there was so little left for Catherine of her mother, but she couldn't change the past and she hadn't truly known Mandy that well or for that long. She wasn't sure if anyone had known the young woman, who she was and what she was capable of; it almost felt as if she'd been a victim of the Blitz, just erased, except that there was Catherine and Sam's memory of her and the guilt in Adam's eyes when Sam finally began to tell him where she'd been going, every week his expression darker. She cared for him, but she never made an excuse for him and she wasn't about to start. She was even a little fierce when he'd shyly handed her a teddy bear with a worn pink bow around its neck, exclaiming, "This isn't playing at happy families, you know, she's a person—and so was Mandy, for all it troubled you then…and Catherine's not a, not a means to an end, some childish fantasy you have about us, Adam!"
"Will you still take it to her? She'd like it, even if you don't," he'd said, his voice flat; she'd felt an ignoble thrill that she'd had such an effect on him. But she thought he was right, she mustn't keep anything good from Catherine to prove a point, that it was quite easy to ignore what was best for Catherine and what it cost Adam to come to her and not stalk out, only to satisfy her own pride and let her look away from her own shortcomings.
"Of course I will and it's not that I don't like it, it's that, I just don't want to, to pretend. You see, don't you, you must—how terrible that would be, when she's lost so much, to pretend it never happened, didn't matter…because it's easier for us, as if it were about us, 'a nice young couple,' it shouldn't be swept away, what happened," she'd tried to explain and she must have got something right for he'd nodded and looked at her so thoughtfully and intently, she hadn't even noticed the usual, how tall and handsome he was, how blue his eyes were and how his jumper needed darning again at the elbows, just that it was Adam, understanding her and himself. He'd taken her hand and just held it, not the precursor to anything romantic, not trying to sweep her off her feet like, but like a promise, whole and inviolable and inexpressibly tender, and he'd said,
"No pretending, Sam."
She decided then the light was trying to get in, through the cracks and Catherine's solemn silence and the floppy loops of the bow Adam had tied, and who was she to get in the way? The Mr. Foyle of her imagination, who was somewhat more communicative than the real man, raised an eyebrow and said, "Perhaps you might get on with it?" so she squeezed Adam's hand back and didn't let go.