A Dark and Distant Shore (86 page)

The battery across the Serpentine fired a salute, and there was a flourish of trumpets at the north end of the transept. In dutiful response, twenty-five thousand voices hit the cathedral-like vaulting in one vast, reverberating cheer. Gideon flinched and glanced up as the sound bounced back from the hundred-foot ridge and volleyed from one end to the other of the long glass nave. He was certainly going to be the
Times-Graphic’s
man-on-the-spot if the roof fell in. But it didn’t, although the decorative palms and flowers and the great elms swayed and shuddered, and Gideon had the impression that one or two of the rather dubious statues lining the transept had shifted slightly on their plinths.

The interior gates stood open waiting for the royal party to pass through, gates intricately cast in iron coated with bronze, marvels of floriation and curlicue, of finials and crowns and stags’ heads, one of the principal exhibits from the Darby foundry at Coalbrookdale. Gideon wondered what Theo thought of them. Stretching to his fullest height, he looked around hoping, though not very seriously, to catch sight of someone he knew. Theo, Drew, and probably Jermyn would be stationed as near as possible to the Lauriston exhibition stands – four in all; one each in the machinery, civil engineering, hardware, and metalwork sections – but Vilia ought to be here somewhere with Magnus and the two girls, and Shona with Lavinia and Peregrine James. Vilia had intended to find a vantage point as near the dais as possible.

The Barbers had said they were coming, too, with their house guests, young Isa Blair from Glenbraddan, and the Savarins, who had come over from Paris for the occasion. Grace, uncharacteristically harassed when Gideon had last seen her, had remarked that she couldn’t imagine
why
they were coming, since she had seldom known anyone less interested in industry than Emile. But nineteen-year-old Guy, it seemed, was passionately concerned about ‘modern design’, which no doubt explained it. His mama regarded it as
très important
to encourage artistic tendencies in one’s
enfants.
Gideon hadn’t met the Savarins since Vilia’s wedding, but he remembered Georgy very well – a most improbable sister for someone like Edward Blair.

Scanning the crowd, his eyes were suddenly arrested by a glimpse of someone on the other side of the aisle, a grey-haired man with a boy of about fourteen by his side. Gideon didn’t believe his eyes at first. It couldn’t be! There was a surge of people behind the retaining ropes and the face disappeared. But surely it
had
been Perry Randall! Gideon hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, but he couldn’t be mistaken. Had anyone known he was coming? Theo hadn’t said anything about it. Pleasure warred in Gideon’s breast with something that, after a moment, he identified as apprehension. This was going to cause a flutter in the Telfer dovecote.

His mind reeling, Gideon turned to watch the entry of the royal party. The Prince Consort came first for once, a step ahead of his queen. He seemed to be leading her, with justifiable pride, into the exhibition he had done so much to promote. Gideon wasn’t a royalist, but he found it rather touching. Little Princess Vicky, in white satin and lace, was clinging to her father’s left hand, while the ten-year-old Prince of Wales, self-consciously attired in full Highland dress – kilt, sporran, brightly-paned hose, feathered bonnet and all – grimly clasped his mother’s right. Victoria herself was a vision in pink and silver and what looked like every diamond in the royal treasury. Well,
almost
every diamond; the recently acquired Koh-i-noor was on display here at the exhibition, in a sturdy metal cage with a crown on top.

From their place on the other side of the aisle, strategically positioned between the Coalbrookdale gates and the ceremonial dais with its great canopy, Perry Randall and his son Francis watched the plump and rather coarse-skinned young woman make her way along the corridor of heralds and Beefeaters, past groups of Exhibition Commissioners and officials and officers of the Household troops in their garish uniforms – all of them clashing nastily with her own pink and silver – while Perry reflected that she hadn’t even been born when he had left her realm for the New World. It reminded him of something he preferred not to think of, that he was more than sixty years old now. The last few weeks had tired him a little, but not much. Anyway, they would have been enough to tire a man half his age.

As the organs, backed by two hundred instruments and a well-schooled choir of six hundred voices, did their best with the National Anthem, Perry wondered for the dozenth time in the last hour how the men were getting on with unpacking his exhibits. All those damned Colt revolvers to be separately mounted on a twelve-foot targe, in the pattern traditionally used in the Highlands for displaying swords and dirks! Perry had thought it would be a compliment Her Balmoral-mad Majesty might appreciate, but he wished now the idea had never occurred to him. Just one revolver out of line and the effect would be ruined. He should have been at the stand, supervising, but he couldn’t deprive his son of this opportunity to see royalty in full plumage. Yet last-minute rush or not, he was still ahead of most of his compatriots. America had made an almighty fuss about having enough space for its displays, and then had done little to justify it. Making a brisk sortie to the American court just before noon, Perry had been dismayed to see no more than a haphazard scattering of rocking-chairs, blocks of copper, barrels of flour, and very little else. He hoped to God someone was going to do something before America became a laughing stock. Even though the queen’s programme for today didn’t include a visit of inspection to the foreign wing of the exhibition, there ought to have been more signs of hustle than there were.

When the music had droned to its conclusion, the Prince Consort, in his thick accent, began reading out The Report, which told his wife what she presumably already knew – that there were fourteen thousand exhibitors, half of them British; that forty foreign countries were participating; that there were ten miles of frontage for the display of exhibits; and that the exhibition was divided into general classes consisting of raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and sculpture and fine arts. The crowd cheered and clapped. The queen raised her voice in a brief reply that might well have been briefer, the sum and substance of it being, ‘How splendid!’ and the crowd cheered and clapped again. The Archbishop of Canterbury offered up a prayer that could also, with benefit, have been briefer. Then, when organs and choir had disposed of the Hallelujah Chorus, the grand procession began. Up to the far end of the nave and down again, with a military band adding its mite to the general rumpus. How many ladies, Perry wondered, were going to have to resort to laudanum when they reached home? Even Her Majesty’s head must be splitting by now.

And then it was over. Lord Breadalbane, at the pitch of his lungs, announced, ‘Her Majesty commands me to declare this exhibition open’, and there was another flourish of trumpets to see the royal party off the premises.

‘Father,’ said a voice at Perry’s side, ‘I don’t know whether you would wish to be informed, but there is a gentleman over there who appears anxious to attract your attention. At least,’ he added worriedly, ‘I
think
it is you.’ Francis was a source of recurring joy and wonder to his father. Slender, quiet, and amazingly courteous, he could have been reared nowhere but on Beacon Hill, Boston. Perry, who had left his upbringing to Sara, had no idea how it was possible for a fourteen-year-old to be so open-hearted, naïve, and utterly charming. With a smile, he followed Francis’s glance, expecting to see some harassed official wondering how much longer Mr Randall expected to need the dozen or so labourers and porters he had been allotted. But instead he saw Gideon Lauriston, waving cheerfully, his face fifteen years leaner, fifteen years more observant than when they had last met, but still unmistakably Gideon. Still unmistakably Vilia Cameron’s son.

Perry had known they were bound to meet, although his arrangements had been made at such speed that he hadn’t taken time to tell anyone that he was coming. He waved back, his eyes – beyond control – travelling past Gideon to the people around him. But there was no other face that he knew. What would she look like after all these years? How would she have changed? That fine complexion must be lined now, and at fifty-five her hair would be nearer white than blonde; he hoped it hadn’t turned that yellow-white pepper colour. Would she be thin now, instead of slim? But such questions didn’t matter, or not very much. What mattered was how she felt about him. On that last day at the Chaumière de la Reine, he had wounded her deeply, and, made thoughtless by shock and bitterness, had criticized her without guarding his tongue. The wounds she might forgive, but the criticism never. By now her hatred might have faded, for she was too intelligent to cherish such a wasteful emotion, but what would be there instead? He hoped not nothingness, which would be too hard to bear.

One thing he had come to accept as a fact of life. Although he loved his children very deeply and had both respect and affection for his wife, he was still in thrall to Vilia. Consumingly, he wanted to see her again, to see if by some miracle there was still laughter and sparkle in her eyes. Desperately, he
didn’t
want to see her again, because she would destroy the calm he had built up with such pains. He felt as he had felt when he went to Kinveil in ’29, postponing the day of reckoning, except that this time there was no ounce of hope to weigh in the scales. He wished he had stayed at home in Boston, but business had almost forced him to come, and Francis’s eagerness had been the ultimate, irresistible factor. At some time in these next weeks, he was going to see her. And she was going to be cool and distant with him. And he, for the sake of his pride, and his children, and his marriage, was going to be distant, too. He had no idea what he would do if, against all the odds, he saw that particular light in her eye.

‘It’s Gideon Lauriston,’ he said to Francis. ‘The renegade from the foundry. Hang on to my coat and we’ll try and fight our way through. You’ll like him.’

Gideon’s smile was a little guarded now, but still delightful, and Perry clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘How goes it? This is my son Francis.’

He didn’t disguise his pride in the boy, and Gideon, for the second time that morning, felt oddly touched. Perry had put on a few pounds in weight, and his hair was iron grey, but it only gave him added distinction. The deep-cut marks of satire round his mouth had softened, and the controlled tension seemed to have gone altogether, as if he no longer needed it. Gideon had always thought of him as a springing tiger. Now he was more like an elder statesman, despite his still admirable figure and equally admirable dark frock coat and plaid trousers. His eyes danced, and his mouth was as decisive as of old, but his air was that of a man who, secure in his own achievement, had learned to look on the world with an encompassing tolerance.

Gideon said, ‘I’m fine, and you two look like walking advertisements for the American way of life! Are you exhibiting? Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? Have you a few minutes to spare? Everybody’s here – but God knows where! Let’s try and find them.’

In the end, they found only Theo and Drew, who were precisely where Gideon had expected them to be. Gideon was torn between relief and exasperation at having caught not so much as a glimpse of the Kinveil party.

That, although he didn’t know it, was because one member of the Kinveil party had caught a glimpse of them first. She had turned so pale that Shona, seeing it, had exclaimed, ‘Are you all right, Vilia? It’s the heat and the noise!’ and with the gentle efficiency that had come to her with maturity had swiftly marshalled adults and children out of the Crystal Palace and into the waiting carriages, and told the coachman to drive home.

Gideon’s jaw dropped. ‘A family dinner party?’ he echoed. ‘Shona, are you mad? Magnus at the same table as Perry Randall! And you know he doesn’t have any opinion of Savarin – or Drew or Jermyn, come to that.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, surprisingly. The eyes in her round, pretty face were as innocent as they had ever been, but she was stubborn now in defence of what she cared about and there was the merest trace of the kind of moral rectitude that had always been one of her sister’s most irritating characteristics. ‘It seems to me perfectly ridiculous that Uncle Magnus should keep up a silly, purposeless feud that began before I was even born, for the antagonism is all on his side, you know! My father is quite impartial about it.’

‘Then why bother?’

‘Because it makes everyone else uncomfortable. Grace and I can’t even mention father’s name in Uncle Magnus’s hearing without being treated to one of his tirades, and besides, it gives the children a very odd idea of their grandfather. I can’t explain to them
why
Uncle Magnus dislikes him so. His behaviour to my mother was really not very gentlemanly, after all. But it was all so long ago, and apart from that his conduct has been quite irreproachable.’

Gideon stared at her for a moment. Was women’s intuition no more than a myth, or was it just that Shona was constitutionally incapable of seeing beyond Drew? Their devotion to each other never ceased to astonish him; it made him feel a little queasy. After a moment, he said hopefully, ‘Perhaps Magnus won’t come.’

She sat up sharply, her soft brown ringlets tossing above the blue foulard gown with its modish waistcoat bodice. ‘Really, Gideon! I thought you at least would be on my side.’

‘Isn’t Drew?’

‘He says I must do as I wish. He’s been too rushed to discuss it with me. And all Theo will do is smile in that maddening way of his. But Grace agrees that it is a very good idea.’

‘And Vilia?’

Her self-confidence faltered. ‘I’m not sure. She says she thinks it is very strong-minded of me, which isn’t precisely encouraging. But I still think I should make the effort, and next Thursday seems to be the only possible day. Georgy and Emile are going back to Paris on Saturday, and my father and Francis sail on the Monday after. I think we
should
have the Savarins at the party, don’t you? Uncle Magnus hasn’t even met Gabrielle and Guy yet, and after Edward, Guy would be his heir if anything happened to Juliana.’