Paying Guests (12 page)

She stood up, leaving the fruit at last ready for Eliza, for all through her musings her hands had been busy, and made her way upstairs. There was work to be done that could not be ignored. She would find time later today to think again about the request she had made of Jem. Perhaps she would withdraw and perhaps she would not; but at least she felt better than she did when she had started the day. And when she heard Duff whistling as she passed the bottom of the stairs, she let her lips curve contentedly. There were trials to being a mother, undoubtedly, but there were great blessings too.

THERE WAS NO doubt in Tilly’s mind that Duff had chosen his time with deliberate skill. They had passed three very agreeable days and evenings, during which he had seemed quite his old comfortable self, and spoke not a word about his schoolfellows or any difficulties he might have with them, and Tilly had been lulled into a sense of security. So much so, in fact, that she had made a point of walking down to Jem’s shop, ostensibly to assure him that the sheets as sewn by Miss McCrasky, the seamstress who came by the day to do such work, were coming on very well, but actually to tell him not to seek out Sophie after all.

‘I have decided it would be a mistake,’ she said, sitting beside the main mahogany counter of Jem’s shop, as other customers milled about and the two men and the shop boy took care of them. ‘I have recalled in greater detail how tiresome Dorcas was and I cannot but wonder, if we tried to find Sophie to entertain Duff, would it mean that I will have to entertain Dorcas? And I don’t think I wish to do that.’

‘I didn’t think it a good idea at all, and I did say so,’ Jem said. ‘If not in so many words, but I thought you understood.’

‘I understood,’ she said and briefly touched his hand with one gloved finger. His own hand closed around hers for a moment and swiftly she withdrew. She must do nothing to encourage Jem; it was not fair to him. And she stifled the notion that perhaps seeking his help in matters that worried her was in itself a form of encouragement. ‘But the thing of it was I was so anxious about Duff, I felt he
was choosing his friends – well – injudiciously. But now he has not spoken of this particular one for days and seems perfectly happy again, so let us leave things as they are, shall we?’

‘It mayn’t be so easy,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’ve already started to make enquiries. You asked me to do so and so I did. When questions have been asked of certain people, you understand, and feelers put out, it’s possible that – well, such efforts once started are not easy to stop.’

‘But you must!’ she said, irritable suddenly. ‘You cannot refuse to –’

‘Of course I’m not refusing! I’ll make no further efforts, I do assure you. I’m happy to leave such sleeping dogs to lie as far and as silently as they may. But I have asked people to look for me – and if the word gets out and to Dorcas’s own ears, well then –’

‘Oh.’ She caught her breath. ‘I see what you mean.’ She brooded for a while and then said with a bravado she did not actually feel, ‘Well, we must hope for the best. I am sure all will be well if we make no further shifts to seek Sophie. And thank you for your kind help, Jem. It is much appreciated.’

‘You don’t have to thank me,’ he said gruffly. ‘You know that for Duff I’ll do all that is ever required.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But Duff is now in no need of any further aid so – well, I cannot help but thank you.’

And now, Duff had started the whole wretched business again. She sat in her drawing room, the backgammon board in front of her, and stared at Duff with a sharp line between her brows. On the other side of the drawing room the American party and Mr Hancock and Mr Cumming were playing a noisy game of spillikins and the sound of the guffaws, giggles and whoops had made it necessary for Duff to speak rather loudly; so loudly that everyone else in the room was made aware of it: the Graylings, the Misses K and F and Miss Barnetsen, and Mr Gee and Mr Geddes who had been playing a hand of bezique.

So the whole drawing room heard and was interested. The evening had been a pleasant one, for Eliza had quite surpassed herself at dinner, giving them a dish of grouse that was quite
delicious, cooked with ham and vegetables and sherry with spices to a glorious salmi, as well as a handsome dish of crimped skate, served in a caper sauce. Eliza took a great pride in offering always those dishes that were in season and both grouse and skate were at their best now at the height of August. Her usual attention to the first course, providing excellent collops of mutton with fresh spinach and a great dish of eggs
à la tripe
, that is cooked with a bechamel sauce and garnished with bread croutons, especially for Mr Geddes’s pleasure (for she had taken a great liking to him and put herself out for him and his strange ideas about diet) together with the usual range of puddings, not least of which was a West Indian confection of cream, green ginger and the best loaf sugar and sponge cakes, which Duff adored, had left them all deeply contented. They had turned to an evening’s agreeable entertainment in a high good humour. And Duff had dropped into the pool of warmth and light and sense of goodwill his casual statement and request.

‘I have been invited to spend a week at Paton Place, with Patrick’s family in Leicestershire, Mamma,’ he said. ‘It is for the start of the partridge season, you know – the birds will be good this year, he says, for they have new coverts and an excellent gamekeeper. I trust I might go?’

Mrs Grayling lifted her sharp little nose and peered across the room at him. ‘Paton Place? Is that not the seat of the Duke of Mowbray?’

‘Indeed yes,’ Duff smiled at her. ‘He is Patrick’s papa, don’t you know.’

‘And you are asked to spend – well!’ said Mrs Grayling, quite dumbstruck with admiration.

‘There!’ said Miss Fleetwood in high satisfaction. ‘Didn’t I tell you that his going away to school would be the making of him? Duff would never have met such people as dukes’ sons had he gone to a London day school, Mrs Quentin. It will help him further his way in the world admirably to have such a noble friendship.’

‘I believed that in recommending he go away to school you set more store by the quality of the education there than by the social standing of his fellow pupils, Miss Fleetwood. I hardly think that
merely being the friend of a lord will be of great value in making his way in the world,’ Tilly said sharply.

‘Then I fear you think wrongly, Mrs Quentin. I do indeed set high store by a good education, but I am not so foolish as to deny the value of friends in high places who may be of aid.’

‘Oh, you are right, Miss Fleetwood, you really are!’ Mr Gee was at last stung into conversation. ‘I know in my own profession – the law you know –’ he uttered the word with great reverence – ‘It matters greatly that one should be well connected. Not that I suggest Mr Duff enters the law,’ he bowed politely towards Duff, ‘for it is an arduous world and does not suit all. But I am sure things are ordered in much the same way in other professional fields. I do congratulate you on your most gratifying invitation, young man.’

Duff knew as well as everyone else that Mr Gee, despite his somewhat grand references to his profession, was in fact only a very overworked and far from highly regarded lower grade clerk in a somewhat seedy set of law chambers. But he smiled at him and said easily, ‘Indeed, Mr Gee, you may well be right. But I was not concerned with furthering myself in considering this invitation. It is simply that Patrick is my friend and I would enjoy visiting his family.’

‘It is the only reason for wanting to go,’ Mr Geddes said. ‘I for one would think the less of you if you were using the acquaintance merely as a tuft hunter and not because you liked your school-fellow. Do you like him, Duff?’

Duff looked serenely back at Mr Geddes and smiled. ‘Indeed I do, as I explained to you. So, may I, Ma?’

‘Is there any reason why he should not go, Mrs Quentin?’ Mr Geddes asked after a pause, for Tilly did not answer, and she became aware that the entire room was holding its breath, waiting for her to do so. And she was deeply angry with Duff. How could he have been so devious as to ask her in everyone’s hearing like this? These people were her guests, albeit paying ones, and not members of the family. The question of Duff and his friendships was surely one for herself and her son alone.

All this and more ran through her head as she sat there with her
eyes down, looking at the forgotten backgammon board, trying to think. All she could visualize was Duff in this very room, sitting with his head on her lap and gulping out his misery about the young man he said he loved. And what precisely did that mean? Duff, now fully in control of himself and with no brandy fumes to make him lachrymose, showed no anxiety about his friendship at all. Had things changed between them in some way in the interim? That Duff had not seen Patrick was clear to Tilly. He had remained either at home or at her side almost all the time since that last conversation, so there had been no opportunity. And yet –

‘He wrote to me, do you remember, Mamma?’ Duff said, as though he had read her thoughts. ‘I received three letters this morning – the others were from Edward and Hubert, who are spending the rest of the summer as tutors to spoiled little horrors, poor things, before they return to school. Patrick’s letter was the only cheerful one in the bag.’

‘Well, we must talk about this, Duff,’ Tilly said at length. ‘Later, perhaps. Now, is it my turn to play, or yours?’

‘Oh, Mrs Quentin, you cannot be so unkind as to refuse him!’ Miss Knapp cried, and looked archly at Tilly. ‘It is no pleasure for a boy to be so cooped up in London when the hot weather is upon us, surely? The streets are so hot and dusty, and I am persuaded that Leicestershire at this point in August will be quite perfect. When does the shooting season start, Duff?’

‘I believe it is September the first,’ Duff said. ‘For partridge, that is.’

‘I thought it was the Glorious Twelfth,’ Mrs Grayling ventured. ‘I read about that in the newspapers, you know, and –’

‘Not at all, my dear!’ Mr Grayling had superior knowledge and was happy to display it. ‘That’s for grouse and
August
the Twelfth – that is why Eliza gave us that splendid salmi of grouse tonight, is it not Mrs Quentin? We can always count on Eliza to feed us as though we were the sort of people who had family seats in Leicestershire and went shooting birds on the proper dates.’

‘Poor little birds,’ said Miss Barnetsen, sighing lugubriously. ‘Such
dread must fill their dear little feathered breasts as the evil date approaches!’

‘I doubt that game birds keep calendars in their nests, Miss Barnetsen,’ Mr Cumming said from the far side of the room, where the American party had been quizzing him and Mr Hancock about the niceties of English sporting traditions, and everyone laughed (much to Miss Barnetsen’s discomfiture) and broke into cheerful chatter, all seeming to assume that the matter had been settled and Duff would indeed be going to Leicestershire to shoot partridges.

‘That was too bad of you, Duff,’ Tilly said in a very low voice as the noise from the spillikins game rose high again to mask her. ‘I would not have had so general a discussion as that for the world.’

‘I’m sorry, Ma. I meant no harm.’ He looked at her with his face quite devoid of any guile and her anger began to subside. If he had been deliberately trying to get his way by devious means there was no sign of any such thought on his countenance now. He looked his usual open and cheerful self. ‘You’ve been so busy all day I hardly had time to talk to you, and I thought that by this evening, once dinner was over, you’d be able to give the matter some thought. Had I asked you earlier when you were heads down with Eliza over that receipt for the grouse, I doubt you’d have been best pleased! And later in the afternoon, when you were with Miss McCrasky, it was impossible. So I asked you this evening. I’m sorry it got everyone else’s interest in the way but –’ his face cracked into a grin, ‘it is rather swish, isn’t it? No wonder they’re all so agog! I mean, me shooting on a duke’s estate!’

‘
Can
you shoot?’ Tilly said, suddenly distracted by the thought. ‘You’re hardly a countryman and have not had the sort of education in these matters.’

‘Oh, we did at school, you know. Patrick used to lend me his guns for target practice and anyway I don’t care if I make a cake of myself trying at a real shoot. It should be fun – if I may go, that is. I shall need extra money, do you see. I’ve spent all my allowance and there will be expenses.’

He looked sulky for a moment. ‘If only I had my own income the way Patrick does!’ he said. ‘It would be so –’

‘Patrick is a rich man’s son, Duff.’ She said it as carefully as she could, not wanting anyone to overhear her, and that care took some of the sharpness from her words; certainly Duff heard no reproof in them.

‘Oh, I know that, Ma,’ he said. ‘I know, too, that one day I must seek an occupation. But until I must, is it so dreadful to want to take pleasure? I won’t be the only one of our set at Paton Place – he has asked several of the other fellows, he tells me in his letter. Please Ma, mayn’t I go? And if so, may I have the cash to make it easier for me? There are tips, you know, for the beaters and gamekeeper and so forth, as well as the house servants.’