The Uninvited Guests (21 page)

‘Enough! What do you know of her?’ cried Ernest, but the others, although not laughing as they had done at him, nevertheless felt the same compulsive delight at the moment. They were hounds now, and their cruelty was bred into them.

Smudge had come down for cake, and to collect Tenterhooks. She was tightly wound with excitement and fatigue as she carefully unlocked her door and crept down the passage. She could hear Myrtle in the kitchen and did not care to come across her, so she took the main stairs and tiptoed past the door of the study on her way to the dining room. The uninvited guests sounded as if they were having what Robert would have called a ‘high old time’ – she’d heard something like it coming from the doors of public houses before now but never, of course, at Sterne. It was not frightening to her, she trusted that the adults were in control of the situation, but it was certainly exotic.

‘Most exotic, I think,’ she murmured as she approached the dining room, ready for her cake and to give a birthday kiss to her sister.

Reaching the door, she tiptoed along the wall, at first in instinctive childish secrecy; but then, hearing a game going on, she crept to the threshold to listen.

With the rough songs all about her in the air – louder still as they issued from the morning room, too – through the crack in the door by the hinge, she saw the gentleman stranger hold up a glass, brimming as it was, apparently weightless. The liquid was unmoving, his hand unnaturally still.

She couldn’t see all the others, but waited, struck by the strange atmosphere of the room as the singing voices floated from the rooms behind her.

Nearly fainting with fright, I sank into his arms a sight
,

Went into hysterics but I cried in vain…

Smudge could only glimpse the faces at the table, but she felt a terror clutch at her, for they were empty, staring, unlike the faces she knew; just as the feeling in the house, suddenly, was unlike any feeling she had ever known before. She could only see the stranger, Traversham-Beechers, clearly, and to her young eyes, he appeared to have a line drawn around him, a line of darkness, that was – as she only so lately had observed – very much like the charcoal smudges that she had made on her wall. Those lines though, were material; dust and finger, plaster and art – this was freakish, of nothing she could understand and nor did she want to. She saw the cruelty in his face, sensed the atmosphere; he was like a magnet, the air was thick with the pull of him.

She took unsteady steps backwards, and she fled. Back this time through the baize door to the kitchens, the fastest way upstairs, past Myrtle at the scullery sink, who did not even turn to see her.

Back in the dining room, unobserved by the child now, seen only by this group of players, Clovis spoke.

‘My turn,’ he said, and reached for the glass.

The port slopped a little over the brim and he licked it clean – licked the glass itself! – and then, looking straight into Patience’s face he said, ‘Dashed dull conversation, Miss Sutton, and an ordinary sort of face; a great many other girls are a sight prettier.’

Patience gasped. Ernest took her hand, and if ever he were going to be moved to violence it was now, with Clovis smiling malignantly across the table and his sister’s pale distress. He started up. She grabbed his hand. His fists clenched but Patience held them in her small hands – her need to hold him proving greater than his need to break Clovis’s nose – and he remained at her side. The others said not one word.

Clovis felt the flood of approval from Charlie and tasted satisfaction in himself, showing her what she was, proving himself better, and yet a part of him – too small a part of him to be obeyed – stood apart and was appalled. The young lady sat opposite him, insulted.

Charlotte took the glass. She must stay on the side of the hounds, not fall down with the spindly hinds. The cruelty that came with it was an unexpected bonus; she saw her son was entranced by the chit, and wouldn’t let him go so easily.

‘Our nickname for you – our family’s nickname for you, that is – is Insignificance Sutton,’ she said.

Again, shock around the table; Patience was frozen now, and Emerald went so far as to say ‘Oh!’ but not a word of resistance.

Florence took the glass. She was loud. ‘When you were children—’

‘Stop it!’ cried Patience suddenly, and stood up. ‘Stop it!’ And she turned and ran from the table. Ernest leapt to his feet but—

‘There!’ shouted Charlie. ‘The hind is separated! Pack! After her!’ He uttered a piercing halloo as they all found themselves, with no thought or reason, throwing back their chairs in wild haste, and giving cries and yelps of hound-like pursuit, dashing after Patience.

Patience rushed towards the door as if she would escape into the hall, the shouted songs raised louder and louder beyond it as she made to grab the knob, but her way was barred by Charlie, and the others bore down on her. She broke away and rushed down the length of the room, towards Ernest’s sheltering arms, and they went after her – all galloping. Charlie, with his long arms flung out like a puppet’s and hands waving madly, rushed around to cut off her escape, while behind him, the other hounds leapt about in ecstasies of barking.

‘Stop her! Hold her! She must be worn out!’

She dived behind Ernest into the corner, and he put up his fists in readiness while Charlie shouted, ‘Now! She’s at bay! Wear her out!’

‘Your glasses! Ernest, your glasses!’ shrieked Patience, anticipating fisticuffs, while Emerald, Charlotte and Florence fell to barking and yapping.

‘Don’t come any nearer! I’ll strike you, I swear it!’ Ernest was addressing the men but was angry enough to lay hands on the women, too, if it came to it.

He glared down at the hysteria – whooping, baring their teeth and claws and laughing – while Patience, pale with frank and open terror, grew weaker, leaning against the wall in the corner. The hounds screeched and shouted, making stabs with their claws and yelping until Patience, pushed past her limit, began to laugh, wildly, mirthlessly, losing her breath, tears starting to her eyes. She panted for air, half-crying, half-laughing, eyes wide and staring about her, the barking ringing in her ears.

‘Here’s my gun!’ shouted Charlie, holding up a long, silver snuffer he had snatched up from the sideboard, and pointing it – past Ernest – at her face, ‘BANG!’ at which Patience, quite suddenly, fainted.

Ernest, the only one with his back to her, was the last to realise this had happened, and it was their faces that alerted him. Clovis started forward in concern, then stopped himself. Ernest turned in dismay. Patience was lying crumpled on the floor, bloodless, and the sight of her put an end to the game. Her pursuers fell silent, and stood, staring, as Ernest went to his knees and lifted her up.

‘You brutes,’ he said, as she had done, and carried her to the chaise under the window.

‘She’s only fainted,’ said Charlie and returned to his place, draining the glass of port and tidying his hair. The rest of them, shocked to silence, were unable, following their behaviour, to show concern but equally, appalled at what had happened, unable to do anything else.

It was a very few moments before Patience recovered.

‘Hello,’ she said, as people often do on waking, as if they have been away somewhere and are returning.

‘Hello,’ answered her brother gravely, forgetting his outrage, and relieved.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

Nobody spoke, because for the life of them they couldn’t find an answer.

‘Oh, we were playing,’ she said, reminded, and propped herself up on her elbows. Looking about her, the memories of the slights and insults came back to her, and showed on her face in a sad frown and blushes.

Emerald knelt by her, and took her hand. ‘Patience?’ she whispered, but Ernest, at her side, cut her off.

‘What were you thinking?’ he asked.

‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me,’ she murmured, but neither brother nor sister responded.

‘Shall we go on?’ asked Charlie Traversham-Beechers breezily.

‘You can’t be serious?’ Charlotte said, turning on him and voicing all their thoughts as one. ‘This has all gone—’

‘Too far?’ he interrupted her, feeling about his person for a fresh cigar. ‘People always say that. And it never has. We are only reaching the beginning, Mrs Swift. It’s your turn next.’

‘Mine?’ Her face was ashen.

Despite themselves – shocked, concerned as they most truly were – they all looked at him, and at Charlotte, bound to follow this outrageous labyrinth to its conclusion.

‘Mine?’ she repeated.

Ernest settled a cushion at Patience’s back. They sat together, united but ignored, as Clovis, Emerald and Florence found themselves walking, as one reluctant group, back to their places at the table. Sick with the foul taste of cruelty still, they were not quite themselves. And yet, as a reflection in a mirror shows us the truth but is not real, they were exquisitely and intensely themselves. They had to know what this man had to do with Charlotte.

Charlotte herself backed away from the table, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘You’re cruel,’ she said.

‘I always was,’ was his rejoinder. ‘Sit.’

‘No.’

‘Sit, God damn you.’

Whether there was an intake of breath at this new violation or whether the shock actually drained the oxygen from the room is mysterious, but the candle flames shrank on their wicks, and Charlotte Torrington Swift – née Thompson – as he had commanded, sat.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He will damn
you.
’

‘I’ll start!’ said Traversham-Beechers brightly. ‘Shall I begin with a minnow or a salmon? Shall I bid high or low?’

‘Do what you will,’ she said.

‘Here –
Mrs Trieves
– you go first. We’re all in this together, as they say.’

He handed Florence the glass. Her eyes were brimming. She took it – didn’t dash it on the table as Patience had done – but with her own quiet rebellion simply passed it on.

‘Passing the glass!’ mocked Traversham-Beechers.

Emerald took the glass from Florence.

‘She is my mother. What am I to say?’ she asked quietly, and handed it to Clovis.

‘Quite right.’ Clovis was terrified, and could only hide in his sister’s words.

Traversham-Beechers took the glass from him impatiently. ‘She is a whore,’ he said coolly.

‘God!’ cried Charlotte. ‘Evil!’

‘No, you are evil,’ he said. ‘You are evil to deceive your husband – two husbands! – to bear children and expect them to be able to live respectable lives when their very souls are stained with your sin. To assume the grand manners of a lady when you are less than a skivvy, less than the smallest chit of a girl selling flowers by the roadside; less, in your moral degradation, than any of the women in this room, or in your
Grand New Life.
’ He spat out these last words slowly and then he sat, suddenly, abandoned in his relief, and panting slightly he seemed to shrink.

The others in the room – Ernest and Patience on the chaise, the rest at the table – all were mute, and in that wondering, desperate silence, Charlie Traversham-Beechers began to laugh. It was a giggle at first, a strange, tickling sound that mocked everybody present. It rose in delighted vicious scales and then it stopped suddenly. He wiped his eyes.

‘I suppose you’ll want to know the whole story?’ he said pleasantly to Clovis.

It was a question no son should ever be asked of his mother, and he had no answer.

Charlotte did not move, her eyes were fixed on her enemy.

‘Go on,’ said Emerald.

‘I’ll be brief. It’s a tawdry tale, and a common one at that. If it weren’t your mother’s you’d be uninterested, most likely, and think it too distasteful to bother with. Well …’ He sighed. ‘Anyway. You may have heard tell of your mother’s carefree days in London before she met your father. Her conventional childhood at Richmond?’

Emerald darted a look at Charlotte. This was familiarity from the mouth of a stranger – what was the truth of it? The ground beneath her feet seemed to shift.

‘The childhood’s true enough,’ he went on, ‘or true as she told it to me, but the carefree days weren’t exactly that, were they, Mrs Trieves…
Florence?
’

Florence was staring into the distance, and did not answer him.

‘Not carefree at all. Finding money to pay the rent, borrowing from gentlemen – that was sometimes what you called it, wasn’t it?
Borrowing.
Many of them weren’t quite gentlemen, were they, Charlotte?’

‘You weren’t,’ she said, ignored.

‘Artists – those
thinking, talking, drinking
artists. I say, is whoring any more respectable if you do it amongst intellectuals? I should think … not.’

‘We were models!’ burst out Florence suddenly.

‘Hush!’ Charlotte cried, fearing his further provocation, but it was too late.

‘Ah! Models! Muses! Goddesses, weren’t you? Or you were, Charlotte, a goddess to the men you seduced. How they tried to capture your celestial charms – before they bedded you!’

He was too coarse. It was intolerable. John Buchanan, silent up until that point, overwhelmed by cruel passion during the heated game and then, after Patience’s collapse, by confusion and shock, now leapt to his feet.

‘Enough!’ he shouted. ‘You ought to go out of this house. How dare you!’

Traversham-Beechers was so unimpressed by this outburst that John’s determination subsided like a deflating balloon, and he sat down again.

‘I will not go out of this house. I am here to see this through, and I will do it.’ He began to speak rapidly, like an accusing barrister. ‘In brief, then: Charlotte Thompson, finding herself without means in Bloomsbury, in the year eighteen-hundred and seventy-eight – when that area was not nearly as salubrious as it now is – and, frankly,’ he laughed, ‘it isn’t, very – was forced, and I use the word ironically,
forced
to exploit her only asset: her beauty. Did she exploit it respectably, as other women do, and find a husband? She did not. She removed her clothes for money and had it immortalised in a series of second-rate canvasses painted by love-sick or cynical fools. (I own one or two of them; I wonder if you can surmise to which category I belong?) When I came across her, she – and you, Florence! We mustn’t forget you! – was being bedded by men for money. A mistress. A muse. Model. Not usually – not
usually
, eh, Lottie? – a streetwalker.’