The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (27 page)

There was a pause, and Mrs Corby said quietly, ‘I’m s-sorry?’

The secretary bit her lip. ‘Oh, Lord, how awful of me. I was mixing you up with someone else. Well, have a lovely evening.’ She trotted behind Mrs Corby, ushering her towards the door. ‘Let’s hope the nice weather holds. Goodbye.’

Mrs Corby was ejected from the room as Dr Feathers came in, hands behind his back. ‘All well, Miss Splendour?’

‘I completely put my foot in it with Mrs Corby, I’m afraid,’ Miss Splendour simpered. ‘Quite forgot her husband ran off with the barmaid from the Kerrison Arms.’

‘Ah. That’s where the health issue lies, you see.’ He tapped his head. ‘Psychological. Can’t tell ’em that, of course. They want a linctus that solves every problem. However, Mr Carver has no time for psychology, does he?’

‘I never said such a thing!’ I protested, sensing Miss Splendour’s steely dismissal as her body turned towards the filing cabinet. ‘And, by the way, I can hardly believe this is the same room we ate in last night. It’s quite a transformation.’

I heard a sniff from the secretary, perhaps in recognition that I might not be the fraud she thought I was.

The doctor strolled into the room. ‘Needs must when one lives above the shop,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you know, we usually dine in the drawing room. How was your tea?’

‘Excellent, thank you,’ I said, although I was sure the doctor had very little idea of what tea consisted. I heard another small sniff from Miss Splendour. ‘I believe you wanted to see me about something?’

Feathers nodded. ‘Step this way,’ he said, backing into
his consulting room. I followed, roundly ignored by Miss Splendour as I passed her by.

‘I don’t think your secretary was much taken with me,’ I said, as he closed the door behind me. The room here, in contrast with the front office, was small and dark, with a window that looked on to a small yard. There was a reclining bed in the corner, which I eyed with trepidation, having been recumbent on many during my year of illness.

‘What? Not at all. A great humanitarian, our Miss Splendour.’

I was not sure whether Dr Feathers were joking or not.

‘Scotch?’

‘Um …’ I thought it prudent to accept. ‘Yes. All right. Thank you.’

‘Good man.’ The doctor settled himself behind a huge mahogany desk, pulling out a drawer and removing a bottle of whisky and two tumblers. ‘Do take a seat.’

He pointed to the chair opposite the desk. It was made of soft leather and gave somewhat worryingly as I sat on it, and I thought of all the nervous people who’d settled on its edge, hoping that the doctor would make everything all right.

Feathers handed me the drink, raised his own briefly to his lips and then steepled his hands together as if he really were about to give me a diagnosis. Instead, he said, ‘Glad to hear you’re having a pleasant summer here, Robert. May I call you Robert?’

‘Ye-es,’ I said, momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Is everything all right?’

He beamed beneath his beard. ‘Why do you think
something must be wrong, eh? Freud would say that was your guilty conscience.’

I coloured, although I knew I had nothing to feel guilty about. Well, almost nothing. I took the memory of the girl last night and shoved it in a dingy basement cupboard in the furthest corner of my mind, intending to leave it there for a very long time. ‘I was just wondering what you wanted to speak to me about.’

‘Get to the point, that’s good. I like a man who doesn’t flim-flam.’ He peered at me from over the top of his fingers. ‘You and Elizabeth are getting on well, hmm?’

Of course this was going to be about Lizzie. I swallowed. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Although you’d have to ask her.’

‘Oh, she thinks you’re the bees’ knees, as Maddie would say.’ Again the smile. ‘You were educated at Crosspoint, am I right?’

I nodded. ‘I was fortunate,’ I said, following the family line that seven years at that godforsaken hellhole had indeed been a stroke of luck. ‘My grandfather insisted on my being publicly schooled. Otherwise I would have attended the local grammar, and … um … well, yes, there you have it.’

‘Mmm,’ said Feathers.

‘I mean,’ I said, swallowing, ‘I’m sure Lizzie’s told you all about my parental background.’

‘Not at all.’ I got the sense of Feathers as an animal, observing me with huge lemur eyes. ‘My daughter barely tells me a thing these days. I’m told this is what happens when they grow up.’

Or perhaps, I thought, Lizzie was as aware of her
father’s snobbery as Alec was, and had thought it best to stay quiet on the matter. She had thought it all very romantic and daring, and had weaved herself quite a Hollywood picture on the topic. No doubt Feathers would see it all differently, but I scorned the idea of dressing my history up in any other way than plain truth.

‘My mother is Alexander’s aunt,’ I began. ‘My great-grandfather made a lot of money from transport. You probably know about that.’

‘Railways, wasn’t it?’ Feathers nodded. ‘I remember Viviane telling me, although her family’s money is much older, of course.’

‘Yes,’ I said, bristling slightly. ‘My grandfather inherited the business, and the estate my great-grandfather had bought. He occasionally used to take his family along to the station yard. Especially my mother.’ I stopped, feeling the next part of the story might be too intimate for Feathers’ ears.

But he had guessed. ‘And she caught the eye of somebody working there?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘He was the yard manager. A good job, but not good enough for my grandfather’s daughter.’ I had often wondered why my mother had fallen so heavily for my father; they were a shy pair, and never talked about their feelings, but once, on visiting my grandparents’ house – the poor grandparents, who lived in a leaking cottage with a goat tethered in the back garden and from whose humble beginnings my father had risen – I had seen a studio photograph of him from those days. I had never realized how handsome he had been, with a sort of hunger in his eyes for more from life than it was presently
giving him, a questing for a greater world than the station yard and the grease and crackle of loading coals.

‘They eloped, got married and moved to my father’s home town,’ I said. ‘That’s where I grew up, until the age of nine.’ The town of industry and drizzle-spattered days, where I’d spent happy childhood hours roaming the streets and searching for treasure, until I’d been picked up by some latent obligation of my maternal grandfather’s and sent away to Crosspoint, an event that occurred shortly after my trip to London with Alec. I remembered the drawn face of my father at that time too, at the deaths of various family members during the attack on the Somme. It always seemed to me that all the happiness of the world had crashed in the same month, and that I as a new boy, dressed in someone else’s money with glottal stops in my mouth, suffered doubly, both from the news that I would be forced to make toast for older idiots under the guise of building my character, and from the slow creep of war into our own nondescript lives.

Feathers’ spectacles glinted. ‘And you’re going up to Oxford this autumn, is that right?’

‘Yes. I won a scholarship to Magdalen.’ I added, with a rush of inspiration, ‘By the way, I’m due an inheritance on my twenty-fifth birthday. I believe Grandfather thought in that way my father would be unable to get his hands on it.’

Feathers said nothing, and I sat back in the soft leather chair with the sense that I had blown any chance I’d ever had with Lizzie. Finally he said, ‘You are in a unique position, Robert. You have experienced life from two angles, so to speak.’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ I said, ‘but it hasn’t really affected me.’

That was a lie, but I was not going to tell Feathers about those first years of bullying at school, sobbing silently into my pillow at night, and then, through some fantastical combination of personality, cricket and a certain obtuse pride in my origins, rising through the ranks to become a sort of celebrated mascot, a representative of the world my peers misguidedly thought of as the proletariat.

‘Of course, in that you have something in common with Mrs Bray. Unlike your cousin, who has had a much more privileged upbringing,’ mused Feathers.

I suspected some mischief on his part in saying this, almost worthy of Clara Bray herself, but I simply said, ‘Perhaps.’

Feathers nodded and tried to look solemn. ‘Well, thank you for confiding in me,’ he said, his eyes glittering behind his glasses. ‘As Lizzie’s father, I naturally have an interest in learning what your position is in life.’

My lungs tightened again. Feathers got to his feet and walked about the room, hands behind his back. ‘When you go up in the autumn,’ he said, and then whirled on a sixpence and glared at me, ‘do you intend to remain friends with her?’

‘I … I … I … of course,’ I spluttered. ‘I like her very much.’

Feathers nodded. ‘Good. She’s young, I know, but we are anxious for her, me and Mrs Feathers. Elizabeth is a little … over-trusting. We would hate for her to make a bad connection.’

‘I suppose that it’s my family background that concerns you,’ I said stiffly.

‘Oh no, no, Robert, you misunderstand me. We consider you to be a good connection. Especially now you have reassured me that you will – well, she has had a – I mean, I like to think we have given her a fairly decent upbringing, and as long as on your twenty-fifth … if that is certain …’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, with perhaps a sliver of a sense of how those girls last night may have felt. ‘It is certain.’

He coughed. ‘Then we would like you to remain friends with our daughter, in order that she doesn’t … that she remains on the path that we consider appropriate.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I was not at all sure that I did.

Feathers came towards my chair and leaned on the back of it. It rocked back and forth and he looked down at me. I smelled the whisky on his breath as he said, ‘Are you considering marriage? That’s what I would like to know.’

I felt a headache coming on. ‘Er … well. Er … of course, I’m only nineteen,’ I began. ‘In the future, I – er …’

‘Yes, not now, obviously,’ he said. He let the chair go and it swayed, making me feel nauseous. ‘I’d expect you both to be at least twenty-one. But you’re an intelligent young man, Robert. You would be a good match. Yes, that would be fine.’

‘Would it?’ Now he had noted his approval, I was not sure I wanted it. I said quickly, ‘The inheritance due to me is – well, it’s not – that is … I would have to work as well if I wanted to support a family.’

‘Good. Can’t stand these idle layabouts, living off
unearned incomes,’ he growled, and I suspected an unconscious aspersion here, cast at my cousin. ‘What are your plans, by the way?’

‘Well, I’m reading History.’ In truth, I had no idea what I would do after that, although Feathers was already nodding vigorously.

‘Good, good. And of course you’re bound to make excellent contacts at university. I can see you’re a hard worker, Robert. Also, if necessary, Mrs Feathers and I would be happy to support you in your future endeavours. As a loan, of course. Yes, I’m sure you have a glittering future ahead.’

I had the sensation I was being drawn into some sort of agreement. ‘That’s very … very kind,’ I murmured.

‘Not at all.’ He grinned broadly and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘You are going to make our daughter very happy. Now, how about a drink to celebrate – another Scotch?’

Thoroughly dazed, I left the doctor’s house half an hour later with my head whirling, under the impression that I had agreed to become engaged to his daughter without my actually having proposed at all. It was quite a magic trick; I wondered how he had done it.

I supposed, I thought, woozy on the whisky as I meandered towards the railing and looked over at the ice-blue sea, that it did not really matter, as long as Lizzie was not brought into it. Without Lizzie, it had been merely a conversation between Dr Feathers and me.

A breeze shook the air and whipped my thoughts back into shape. How could I decide an engagement with a girl’s father and not bring the girl into it? The arrangement sounded practically medieval. Perhaps Lizzie would not
want to marry me; arrogantly, that thought had not occurred to me until this moment.

Then I wondered if I wanted to marry Lizzie. I thought of her earlier on the balcony, with the fresh bloom in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes, and remembered the idea that I would not mind very much being beholden to her. She was certainly attractive, intelligent, and not at all fast; surely three very desirable qualities in a future mate. That illicit kiss in the waxworks had intimated a deep passion beating within her wholesome bosom, and the idea of being the first to draw that out in the marital bed was very alluring indeed.

Then, for some reason, I thought of Clara Bray. I saw her swaying on the wooden gate this afternoon, tears brimming her red eyes, as unattractive as I’d ever seen her and twice as beautiful. I thought of being married to her, of being able to hold her in the night, to kiss away her tears and be the one who could make everything all right.

I tried to dash away the idiotic idea, but it kept returning. Alec and Clara were fundamentally unsuited, except that they were both impetuous fools. They’d long since fallen out of love, but I … but I …

It was Dr Feathers’ Scotch that encouraged my thoughts forward, placing my feelings for Lizzie beside my feelings for Clara. There was no comparison, and they had only remained hidden from me for so long because I had decided that Mrs Bray was a spiteful witch and best given a wide berth.

I loved her. I loved Clara Bray, and it was as useless a notion as any that I’d ever had. I loved her because she was wilful and brave and honest and tigerish. Maybe I had
loved her since the first time I’d seen her, pale-faced and foul-mouthed on the first-floor landing, and now I was being tipsy and maudlin, which was no help to anyone. Best to think of Lizzie, with whom the future was solid and bright and who, after all, liked me a great deal better than Clara Bray currently did, despite her recent thawing.

I turned back towards Castaway House and, as I did so, I saw Dr Feathers watching me from his office window on the ground floor. He smiled and waved, and I waved back, and as I climbed the steps to home, looking forward to a night of innocent dreaming about Clara’s red lips, I had the strange, distinct impression that I was not engaged to Lizzie Feathers at all, but to her father instead.