Paying Guests (6 page)

‘I am glad if that is so, Mr Geddes. It is our hope here at Quentin’s always to ensure that our guests are the centre of our concern.’

She crossed the room to ring the bell and let Lucy know that she could come up from the kitchen to clear the dining room at last.

Mr Geddes remained standing by the table, looking at her. ‘I – perhaps you might be interested, that is, that you might enjoy, well, I am organizing a meeting next week to explore the meaning of Mr Darwin’s newest book
The Descent of Man
. Dr Huxley will be speaking and it should be very interesting. Perhaps you will permit me to offer you a ticket?’

Lucy appeared at the door and Tilly nodded at her, and she bobbed, came in and began to clear the table, and as Tilly led the way out of the room, Mr Geddes had to follow. She was thinking hard, and was in something of a fluster by the time she reached the hallway.

‘You are very kind, Mr Geddes. I will indeed think about the possibility – but I cannot be sure whether or not I will be engaged.’

When he seemed about to try to persuade her she said, ‘My son is home from school, you know, and I intend to spend as much time with him as possible.’

‘Of course,’ he smiled at her as she reached her morning-room door and turned to stand with her back to it, so as to make it very clear that she had no intention of inviting him in. He had confused and excited her simultaneously and she needed time to think. Indeed, she now felt as though she needed to escape from him. ‘So, we shall see,’ she ended a little lamely.

‘Well, I shall ask you again!’ He was suddenly jovial, and took her hand and bent over it politely. ‘The meeting is next Friday at nine o’clock in the evening, so that people have time to dine first. It will be at the meeting hall of St Ethelburga’s Church in Kensington, so it is not too far away.’

‘At St Ethelburga’s?’ She was diverted. ‘A meeting about Mr Darwin in a church hall? You surprise me.’

He chuckled. ‘Well, as to that, they do not know the subject of the meeting. It was arranged by me as a private affair. It will not be advertised, you see, since we have many members of our magazine subscription list who buy tickets in advance. So there need be no difficulty.’

‘It seems wrong to use a church hall,’ she ventured, wanting still to escape but drawn back to the argument almost against her will, ‘since there is much opposition to Mr Darwin in religious circles.’

‘Perhaps. But it is also amusing,’ he said and again bowed. ‘I shall speak of this again, Mrs Quentin. Until then, thank you for your company at luncheon.’ He turned and went, running lightly upstairs; as she watched him go, she found herself thinking that attending meetings even about the highly dubious Mr Darwin might be amusing, and there was little enough in her life to amuse her, after all. And then she too turned and went into the haven of her morning room and closed the door.

She was just coming downstairs, dressed in her new dinner gown in the latest mode of two colours, emerald green and very pale blue, when the front door opened and Duff came in.

She stood there, still buttoning her gloves, which were pale blue to match the underskirt of her gown and looked at him, her pulses thumping a little loudly in her own ears. She had been fretting over him all afternoon and now he was here she didn’t know what to say to him.

‘Oh, don’t you look fine!’ he said and took off his rather rakish top hat and flung it at the hat stand where it managed to find a hook and remain, albeit swinging rather wildly. ‘That’s a new gown, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I thought I’d indulge myself a little. I’m glad you like it. I wasn’t sure of the colours.’

He looked at it, his head turned consideringly to one side and his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, so that his coat-tails bunched up behind him. He looked debonair, a little flushed with
the freshness of the air he had left outside, and his hair was slightly flattened where his hat had controlled it. Almost involuntarily she smiled widely; he looked so very well and she was so very proud of him.

‘I tell you what, Mamma, it’s as handsome a gown as any I’ve seen. Bang up to the minute without being foolish, like some there are about. Why, I saw a lady t’other day in a gown that had a blue faille underskirt and a ruched green overskirt in, I think, taffeta, and to top it all, a great train in ruby velvet. She looked like an explosion, to tell the truth. You look most elegant, however. And I do like your cap. Very charming.’

Tilly touched her cap which had been appallingly expensive for such a trifle of Chantilly lace and silk and smiled again. ‘Well, I feel I must make an effort for my guests,’ she said. ‘It would not do to come to the dinner table looking unkempt. They are all dressing at the moment, I was about to check in the kitchen –’

She left the question in the air, unasked, but he heard it.

‘I thought, Mamma, that tonight I would dine out. I have an invitation from a friend.’

She couldn’t help it. Her brows snapped together and she said, ‘Again? But you lunched with a friend. I thought now you were home we might see something of each other.’

He seemed to lose some of the glow that had been about him, and certainly became less relaxed. He pulled his hands from his pockets and shrugged out of his topcoat and tossed it over one arm.

‘Dear me, Mamma, it is not as though you have always been so anxious for my company.’

She stared at him, nonplussed. He was looking quite different now, hard and enclosed in just the way he had seemed yesterday when he had first come home, and she said impulsively, ‘Dear Duff! Whatever is the matter? Why are you so angry with me? What have I done that you are so – strange? I have been so worried! Yesterday you were so – well – as you are now. Angry. And this morning when you snubbed me in Brompton Road – I don’t understand it!’

He went brick red and for a dreadful moment she thought he was
going to shout at her. What had happened to her dear, sweet boy to make him so? She began to be more and more frightened.

‘I – am just as I have always been,’ he said then, and his colour subsided a little. ‘Less biddable, perhaps, more able to speak my mind.’

‘But why should doing so cause so much – I mean, what can there be in your mind about me to make you behave so unkindly? You were always such a sweet child and –’

‘Mamma! I am not a child! That is the trouble. You and Eliza were behaving yesterday as though I were the same age now I was when you sent me away.’

‘Sent you away – but you had to go to school!’ she cried.

‘I could have gone to school here in London and never left home,’ he said. ‘And if I had, then perhaps you would have seen that I am grown up now and not a child. As it is, you have not watched me change and can’t understand me now that I’m not a boy any more, but a man.’

‘At seventeen?’ she said and again his colour rose, clearly to his own fury.

‘It is not the same as seven!’ he snapped. ‘Or even ten or twelve. It is as near being full grown as may be, and I take leave to live like a man now I am one. I want to do what I want to do, and not what others tell me I should.’

‘Dear Duff, I would not try to stop you ever from following your own bent!’ Tilly said. ‘I love you too dearly to wish to make you unhappy! It is not as though we’ve even talked about what you will do now you’ve left school, though I suppose some thought must be given to it some time. I mean, you cannot look to any sizeable income unless you have an occupation and that must be decided. But I have said nothing of that and I don’t understand why you are being so unkind to me now, I really don’t!’ To her horror she felt her eyes fill with tears as her voice wobbled and she had to swallow hard to keep it under control.

It was that as much as anything that seemed to finish him. He stared at her with his eyes very bright and his mouth in a tight line and then shook his head and, pushing past her, fled up the stairs.

‘I shall be out for dinner,’ he called down from the top. ‘I shall return before midnight so please not to lock me out.’ And then he disappeared and she heard his bedroom door slam shut.

THE DINING ROOM looked particularly fine tonight. Eliza had gone to the trouble of finding more roses from the garden (I must tell her to be less vigorous in her culling, Tilly thought. I shall have none left for the drawing room at this rate) and had arranged them prettily at intervals down the long table. Usually this was one of Tilly’s own tasks, but clearly Eliza had realized that her mistress was preoccupied with other matters and had dealt with it for her. She had added trails of fern from the far bed, quite in Tilly’s own style, and made it all look very dainty. ‘If only Duff would –’ But she lifted her chin and looked determinedly at everything else there was to see. She would not think about Duff, she would
not
.

The linen was not the only thing that was perfect. The glass and the china and silver sparkled with Lucy’s loving attention and the three housemaids themselves, ranged along the wall beside the sideboard waiting to be told when to commence serving dinner, were as clean and shining as any of the objects in the room, with perfect crisp aprons and hair tucked well away under their caps. Tilly was suddenly very aware of the way she had dressed her own hair, in the current modish manner, with a frizzed-out fringe over her forehead, and wished she had not done so. She must look frivolous in the extreme, and she didn’t feel at all frivolous.

The guests were coming in to take their places as the gong, which Eliza had banged with her usual gusto in the hall, shuddered into silence. First, as always, the Misses Knapp and Fleetwood, with Miss Barnetsen close behind them. The older ladies were rather
plumper than they had been when they had first come to 17 Brompton Grove, but Miss Barnetsen, who had arrived as thin as a tent peg and with eyes as bulging as any frog’s, had not changed an iota. She still behaved like a flibberty bit of a girl, though she must be forty if she were a day, flirting with a fan and teasing her two friends outrageously as they vied for her attention. It was an odd trio, and Tilly had long given up wasting any energy in trying to understand them. Their emotions and their relationships with each other and Miss Barnetsen were none of her affair.

They were followed in swift succession by Mr Oswald Gee, who was always punctual for his meals and devoted all his time in the dining room to eating, never deigning to waste his energies on any conversation apart from a brisk ‘G’d evening, Mrs Quentin’ to his hostess and ‘Yes please’ to the serving maids; and Mr and Mrs Grayling who, in contrast, never stopped talking. They managed to eat a considerable amount, however, never missing either a word or a mouthful, and were sprightly company who saved the table from ever falling into silence. Not that it was likely to do so when Mr Hancock and Mr Cumming were dining; the former was eating his dinners at the bar and the latter was a young surgeon walking the wards at St George’s Hospital up near Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s home. These two were great jokers, and much enjoyed teasing each other over the shortcomings of their respective professions, with Mr Hancock accusing Mr Cumming of smelling quite disgusting (and indeed the young doctor did seem sometimes to bring the horrid air of the sickroom into the house with him) and Mr Cumming telling his tormentor with equal attack that he clearly had ink in his veins instead of blood and obviously no heart at all.

Tonight they made a beeline not for their usual places, but for those opposite the most recent arrivals at Quentin’s, a group of visitors from abroad. The party included two young ladies who, though not of the most immediately pretty sort, had the advantage of being much the same age as the two young men, which made them seem a great deal more attractive than they were. Tilly watched them greet each other with sly giggles (the girls) and bluff compliments (the men) that were clearly to be the order of the
evening, as their elders, the aunt of Miss McCool and the parents of Miss Lampeter, watched them cautiously. They would need no attention from their hostess tonight, Tilly told herself with relief, and turned her attention to the remainder of her table, calculating who was present and who absent as they took their places.

Miss Baker and Miss Duke, the rather dim and very quiet schoolteachers who had been recommended to Quentin’s some five years ago by the Misses K and F and yet who never spoke to their sponsors (not that they spoke much to anyone else either, Tilly had to admit) arrived next, bringing the total to – she counted them with swift glances round her table – fifteen. Just Mr Hunter and Mr Graham to come: they were young men who taught at the St Aloysius College for Boys in Kensington and who had been living at Quentin’s this past two years and showed every sign of intending to stay as long as the female teacher guests, much to Tilly’s relief. Regular guests were far easier to deal with than drifting occasionals like the visitors from America now so busily flirting with Charles Hancock and Melville Cumming. But just as she wondered whether to wait any longer for them, Mr Hunter and Mr Graham arrived and took their places, and she lifted her hand to signal to Lucy that the service could begin. The table was complete, since Duff was not to dine. (‘Don’t think about that,’ a secret voice whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t think about Duff!’) So they could start dinner.