Distant Choices (6 page)

‘Mother – I am sure Mrs Blake has no interest …' But Letty, on this one topic, was well-nigh unmanageable.

‘Of course she has – for she knew you as a baby when she was still living as companion to that old widow woman in Bishop Blaize Street – can it be twenty-four years ago? Indeed it must, since you will be twenty-five this month. And she must often have wondered how you were getting on. Have you not, Evangeline?'

Evangeline, for a moment, had looked puzzled, as if at a loss to understand how Letty could suspect her of any such thing. And then – as an act of kindness, her manner implied – she nodded her head.

‘Yes, Letty dear –
so
often.'

Letty, despite her billowing, flowering skirts, her fringed shawl, her lace cap and mittens, her several dozen petticoats, had looked quite naked in her triumph.

‘There you are, Quentin. He is always imagining people do not wish for news of him – when it is no such thing. A day never passes without somebody coming running to me to sing his praises. One could blush to hear it – except that it is all so true. So Mrs Blake will be very pleased to hear how well you are getting on with Mr Price. Titus Price, Evangeline – Matthew's lawyer – you certainly know him. Quentin has quite taken over his practice …'

‘Mother!'

But Letty, swept on by this one passion of her life, this one devotion, was unabashed.

‘But
yes
– you must allow me, Quentin dear, to be just a little better informed, sometimes, than you are yourself. And Mr Price is grateful to me, Evangeline – he said as much – for pointing Quentin in his direction. “Dear Mrs Saint-Charles, I only wonder how I ever managed without him …” – he said that to me only the other afternoon when I happened to meet him in Piece Hall Square. Sharp as a box of carving knives, he called you, Quentin – a phrase which even I, who had not heard it before, could easily understand to be a compliment. Since with lawyers it must be the sharper the better – surely?'

‘Oh – surely.' Evangeline's voice had rippled with the amusement of a purring cat.

‘Quentin will do very well for himself,' said Maud, intending everybody – particularly Evangeline – to take her word for it.

‘Poor Letty,' Evangeline had remarked airily as she and Oriel were being driven back to their lodgings in Hepplefield. ‘To hear her prattle on, one would think she had no other son but this marvellous Quentin. When, in fact, she has five others and nearly as many daughters. How his brothers must hate him. And his father too, I dare say – if he can find the energy.'

‘I suppose so, mamma.'

‘Did you hate him, Oriel?'

‘Hardly …'

Wrapped in the aura of his mother's hysterical devotion it had been difficult even to see him clearly; just a tall, pale young man with those oddly transparent eyes, saying only what one wished to hear, watching his own advantage, guarding his back, taking all the precautions to ensure his own survival that Oriel took herself, but, in his case, taking them coldly. And sharply, she supposed, like those carving knives his employer had spoken of. Could her mother be thinking of him as a possible son-in-law?

‘He has no money, mamma, and no position,' she quickly said, such things, in Oriel's experience, being the warp and weft of marriages.

‘Exactly, my darling. Which is why his mother, and his dear Aunt Maud, are so anxious to get him some. His Uncle Matthew's money and position, in fact, which can only be done by marrying him to Uncle Matthew's daughter – our little Kate. Thus making him master of everything his Uncle Matthew has put together – except my widow's portion – whenever Uncle Matthew should happen to die. And even before that sorry event – well – such a marriage would not suit
us
, of course, Oriel – would it, darling?
We
should not be pleased to have Letty running in and out of High Grange Park as if she owned it – backed up in everything by Maud, who thinks it all belongs to her in any case. You do see, dearest – I know – that one has to give such constant thought to one's own position. And just what would my position be – or yours – should Letty's razor-sharp Quentin become master of High Grange? No – no – we must apply ourselves to finding Kate a husband rather more sympathetic to
our
cause than that. It does not shock you – does it, my darling? – to hear me making my little arrangements for a comfortable widowhood even before I have quite become a wife?'

‘Of course not, mamma.'

For what, after all, had ever shocked Oriel Blake, brought up in the midst of Evangeline's necessities, guarded by her polished shell, her air of distant serenity, her smile?

‘Good girl.' Evangeline had expected no less. ‘Then – since you will be very much in the company of Kate Stangway, and Quentin too, I suppose, from now on, should you hear the very faintest tinkling of wedding bells you will be sure to let me know? Absolutely at once.'

It was neither an order nor a request, simply a statement of the alliance formed, for their mutual survival, by their two closely related selves. Not a bond of affection precisely but an acknowledgement that their lives would always be bound to run, more or less smoothly, together. ‘I
am
fortunate in my daughter,' agreed Evangeline, whereas to Oriel such matters as good fortune or bad became irrelevant before the simple truth that Evangeline was the only mother she had.

Not perfect, of course. But then, who
was
perfect, whose motives
were
entirely spotless, what
would;
indeed, have become of Evangeline during those haphazard years of waiting and wandering if – with Oriel's help – she had not taken such good care of herself? And since it could never be considered proper in a daughter to judge a parent in any case, Oriel had taken up residence at High Grange Park with her eyes wide open, her ears alert, her senses as finely tuned as Maud's and her mother's to pick up the faintest nuance of anything which might prove a threat to herself and Evangeline.

A path of eggshells, many of them treacherous and sharp-sided, which she had been treading – head high, back straight, calmly smiling – for the whole of her remembered life, her careful, watchful feet taking her through her mother's new home smoothly, causing no ripples, no stir. And it was soon clear to her that the true stranger in the house of Matthew Stangway was Matthew Stangway himself.

The house, when he inherited it, had been old and bare and in decay. Her mother, she knew, had taken a certain pleasure in telling her that. The roof had leaked, the resulting damp causing damage to priceless antique Chinese wallpapers, and to even more priceless tapestries woven by medieval Stangway hands as decorations for the great hall. The carpets had been full of holes, torn no doubt by booted and spurred Stangway heels, but a constant danger, nevertheless, to any running servant who caught a foot in them. The drawing-room chairs had sagged, the stairs – of which there were several, the house having been added to without any particular plan, to suit the varying needs of the generations – had all creaked. There had been loose boards in places along the unlit rabbit-warren of upper corridors which had caused somebody or other to turn an ankle every day of the week. A fungus had appeared in a sinister patch along the wall of the Long Gallery, between the portrait of a Stangway Master of Foxhounds in strident hunting pink, and a Stangway ‘younger son'in hair powder and brocade, who had seen service with the East India Company. Even the weaponry above the fireplace in the hall had started to rust, the massive family silver to lose heart and begin to blacken.

Eva Kessler's dowry had put an end to all that but only in accordance with the decree of Eva Kessler's father – shrewd wool merchant of Hepplefield, Bradford, and Hamburg – that since he, in effect, would be paying the bills, then
his
taste should prevail. And, to suit his own nature, he had chosen rich, important pieces of furniture which would hold their value, velvet chairs with massive claw-and-ball feet and a great deal of carved mahogany, china in substantial quantities fresh from its Dresden makers, crystal which bore no monogram but the aura of Kessler gold, a grand piano of impressive proportions which had necessitated some alterations to the drawing-room, and which only his daughter knew how to play.

He had torn out old woodwork and old banisters, no matter how many generations of Stangway hands had brushed against them, and put in new. He had refused to pay out the fortune it would cost to restore the wonderful hand-painted Chinese pagodas and mandarins and concubines on the drawing-room walls and had had the whole room replastered and done over in fashionable, by no means guaranteed to last a century, watered-silk. He had cured the spreading fungus in the Long Gallery and hung watered-silk on the walls there too, replacing, everywhere, the iron wall-brackets and their guttering candles with crystal chandeliers to match the ones he had had specially brought over from Bohemia for his own house in Hepplefield.

He had created, in the antique shell of the Stangway home, a luxurious, impersonal, possibly saleable – had the necessity ever arisen – hotel, as alien to Matthew Stangway as the Kessler woman he had married. But by the time the coal revenues had started to come in and he could have afforded to throw out all the silk and crystal and millmaster's mahogany and go back to the oak and pewter and musty tapestries of his childhood, somehow both the disgust and the desire had failed him. And he had left well – if one could call it that – alone.

The house belonged to him, of course. Not he to the house. And his assembled family – Evangeline and Oriel now among them – were spared only carefully rationed measures of his time throughout the day. Ten minutes for those who wished to join him for breakfast in the South parlour, although Evangeline, from the start, had seen no reason to change her habit of breakfasting – on tea, hot lemon juice, dry toast – in bed. A further ten minutes in the afternoon, two or three times a week, as a concession to Evangeline's quite natural desire to give her tea-time guests at least a glimpse of conjugal felicity. An often uncomfortable quarter of an hour in the drawing-room before dinner, should he happen to be dining at home. Dinner itself, during which he had little to say and no apparent disposition to listen. A few moments more for anyone who could catch him alone after the port and cigars on his way to the gun-room where he often spent his evenings. Apart from which one saw him, by appointment only, in the square, heavily-panelled book-room, rich with the odours of tobacco and the gold-tooled volumes of the classics, bound in dark brown leather and all of them unread, which had been provided – as decoration it seemed – by Josef Kessler.

Or else, in cases of some urgency, one enquired his whereabouts from his nephew, Quentin Saint-Charles, who, apart from his invaluable services to his Uncle Matthew's solicitor Mr Titus Price, appeared to hold some kind of unofficial appointment as private secretary to the master of High Grange himself.

‘And where would my husband be hiding this fine afternoon, Quentin my dearest?' Evangeline would enquire, to be informed in precise although possibly not always truthful accents that ‘Uncle Matthew'was busy that day inspecting a horse, or the ledgers of Low Grange or was most urgently engaged in the business of promoting the railway which, as most people agreed, was badly needed in the Gore Valley.

‘And when will he return?'

Glancing ceremoniously at his watch, his cold, light eyes unblinking, Quentin would name the exact hour. The first one, of course, that came into his head.

‘What a
treasure
you are, dear Quentin. I must tell your mother to count me among the ranks of your admirers. She will be so delighted.'

The pale eyes did not flicker. ‘I try to be of service, Aunt Evangeline.'

But Evangeline's early days as mistress of High Grange were too rosy with triumph to be spoiled by the absences of the man who had shared her bed and paid her board and lodging for over twenty years. Or by the cool presence of his nephew, either, whose measure she had quickly taken. A young man as unscrupulous as herself, she judged him, and for very much the same reasons. Born with a cutting intellect, fastidious tastes, driving ambitions into a family who could not afford him so that he would be obliged to fight every bitter inch of the road – as she had – to attain those lofty, powerful, expensive things to which he felt himself entitled.

She understood that. Had he been
her
son she would have known, far better than Letty or even Maud, how to scheme and contrive for him, how to cut corners and cut throats, if necessary, on his behalf. Just as now – since he was not her son and owed her no share of his victories – she would cut the throats of his ambitions, one by one, should they threaten her own.

Yet for the moment, with Matthew alive and well and showing no inclination to interfere in her domestic arrangements, his daughter Kate safely uncommitted to anyone in marriage, her own dear Oriel always there to be relied on, no thought of Quentin Saint-Charles could mar Evangeline's satisfaction on the morning she called the Stangway upper-servants together – butler, cook, head-parlourmaid – and told them, in the presence of Maud, that, from now on, there would be many changes, the tone of her light voice suggesting clearly that
any
change, in the muddle she had uncovered, could only be an improvement. ‘A little organization is all it takes, I do assure you. And so we shall have organization. Set the wheels running more smoothly – generally lift up our standards. Heaven knows we can only be the better for it. And in no time at all we shall have everything going like clockwork again. You may take my word for it. You will all come to me, of course, without the least hesitation, the moment any little difficulties arise. And should I happen to be not at home or engaged otherwise, you may take instructions from my daughter, Miss Blake … Oh yes …' And she directed a dazzling smile at Maud. ‘My daughter is young, you might think, to be burdened with such responsibility. But she has lived very much in the great world – as not all unmarried ladies have been privileged to do – and knows exactly how to go on. ‘My daughter is absolutely to be relied upon.'