The Uninvited Guests (3 page)

‘Her
mother
is the death of hope.’

‘
Or her mother
, then I shan’t have you at my birthday party, do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, Officer.’

‘And it isn’t much of a birthday as it stands, I have to admit… But I’m counting on you to be a gentleman.’

‘Yes, Officer.’

‘You know that I love you beyond reason – and for no good reason. I’m going to talk to Mrs Trieves about my cake.’

‘Make it chocolate, would you?’

‘I don’t believe we have any.’

Clovis groaned again and returned to plucking at the newspaper. The dogs laid their chins on their silky paws and gazed at him with love.

At the threshold Emerald changed her mind and returned, like a whirlwind.

‘That fire is obscenely hot!’ she exclaimed, crossing the room and waving the air in front of her with violent movements.

‘I’m freezing to death.’

She slammed the guard down in the grate. ‘Have you any idea of the price of coal?’

Clovis rolled onto his back. ‘No – and nor have you.’

‘Sterne cost us more than twelve guineas in fuel just this last winter,
actually.
’

‘Aren’t you going to add “so there”?’ he said.

Emerald plumped down on the chaise next to the dogs, looking about the room. She pinned a stray lock of hair back to the majority. ‘So there’, she said.

Clovis had covered his face with his arms in self-defence, but Emerald, surprising him, withdrew her attack.

‘The horses’ summer coats are coming through,’ she remarked, conversationally. ‘Levi is beginning to look quite glossy, and Ferryman would be, if he hadn’t been clipped out so late in the year. You know, outside feels rather grand once you’re in it – and I saw a swallow this morning whilst I was gardening…’ She was pulling the spaniels’ speckled paws absently as she talked. ‘I thought I might go down past the tithe barn and around the edge of Hurtle… Won’t you come, too?’

‘Not to oblige
him.
’

‘No, Clovis, for me, your ever-loving sister – for Ferryman who shall swell up like a balloon on spring grass if he doesn’t have a bit of work soon, and for—’ She stopped.

Clovis glanced at her slyly from beneath his forearm. ‘For …?’ he murmured.

‘Yourself, because you are the greatest of all wet blankets recently.’

‘Oh I am, am I?’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘The very greatest?’

‘You know you are. I can’t think what’s got into you.’

‘Oh you can’t, can’t you?’

‘Stop that! Stop that silly questioning! You did it when you were eight years old. It’s singularly annoying. You
do
it to annoy.’

‘Oh, I do, do I?’

Emerald threw a cushion at him, and he dodged it, rolling smartly away and laughing. Finding himself against the fender, he sat up and rubbed his face.

‘You know very well “what’s got into” me. How d’you think it feels for a man to have his position usurped by a sneaky, one-armed, Irish lawyer—’

‘Point of information, Mr Chair: it wasn’t your position, it was our father’s.’

At the mention of their father they were both quiet. Emerald went back to the dogs, stroking their ears and domed, bony heads.

‘I don’t believe Father would have wanted you to become what you are becoming,’ she said, without turning her face to him.

Evoking their father’s name had brought sorrow to the room and it weighed heavily in the air. Clovis put his legs in front of him and, hugging his bent knees, gazed at her sadly. His hair fell oddly to the side. The unsociable and frankly objectionable Clovis of the last three years was changed, as light changes the grey sea to glinting complexity.

‘You oughtn’t just say things like that,’ he said, hurt, and she saw in an instant all the workings of his grief, his loss and failings, and went to her knees, facing him.

‘Boy,’ she said, and kissed him on the forehead.

He was grateful. ‘I miss him tremendously,’ he said, feelingly, and with a return to recent form added, ‘I’d like to kill the Step with a rusty scythe.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Well, very nearly.’

She tugged his ear. ‘Won’t you come and ride with me?’

Clovis was nothing if not mercurial. ‘I’ll meet you in the yard in ten minutes,’ he said, jumping up suddenly and striding out of the room.

The dogs, barking wildly, sprang from the chaise longue in his wake, bounding loose-limbed through the doorway.

‘Ten minutes is too soon!’ she called, but he had gone.

Emerald stood up and dusted off her skirt. There was a framed photograph of Horace Torrington on the mantel. In it, he stood behind their mother who was seated on a chair in front of a painted backdrop of a garden wearing an excess of white muslin. Her bosom looked immense, as had been the fashion, and her tiny waist was satin-belted. Horace, proudly frowning, looked handsome and upright in a stiff collar, with one hand resting on an ebony cane. Emerald crossed to the fireplace and – knowing the portrait intimately already – leaned her elbows on the mantel to examine it more closely.

The plaited vines on the silver frame and the fine grain of the photographic paper were inches from her unblinking Torrington eyes. Her parents, miniature and still, filled her vision.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she said to her frowning father, but his expression did not change. ‘I’m sure you’d like to wish me happy returns and give me a kiss for it, if you could. I should very much like it, too, I can tell you.’

The last birthday of his daughter’s at which Horace Torrington had been present was her sixteenth. She had put up her hair, worn her first corset, and been amazed when, after complimenting her very kindly, he had turned away so as not to be seen crying. ‘Lovely girl,’ he had said. ‘It’s just the passing of time, that’s all, not you.’

Emerald found Florence Trieves in her small study, a room just near the kitchen where were her desk and low, buttoned armchair. Un-swept crumpet crumbs mixed with crumbled fragments of coal on the hearth, for the room was always the last to be seen to by Pearl Meadows and, in spite of her horror of mice, Florence Trieves had a thin but stubborn slovenly streak and almost never swept it herself.

Emerald was anxious to make the most of Clovis’s no doubt transient good humour and wanted to be at the stables as soon as she could.

‘Can we talk about bedrooms later on? I was wondering if there was any chocolate for a cake. For me. It doesn’t matter a bit if not, I like plain sponge just as well.’

Florence, in her habitual black silk dress, was seated at her desk occupied with the accounts. She was a widow. She had been one since Victoria’s reign and a great part of her had remained in that era of mourning and restraint. Stepping through the recesses of the Old House in her black silk and buttoned boots, to fetch flour or baking soda from the shelves, she often seemed to fit the place better than she did the New.

She and her husband had been acquaintances of Charlotte’s before her meeting Horace, and came into service for them upon their marriage. The exact origin and nature of their relationship were unclear to many but themselves, but to her credit she had become an excellent housekeeper. She had once been, like Charlotte, a beauty; the two of them must have made quite a picture at twenty, in Bloomsbury, before their marriages. Florence Trieves’s renouncing of a romantic life – and fashion – had done much to form Emerald and Clovis’s expectations of the behaviour of widows, making their mother’s swift re-marriage in contrast doubly shocking.

‘We can talk about bedrooms whenever you like, Miss Em, but it won’t make any more of them habitable.’ She had a habit of fiddling with the small watch pinned to her rigid breast as she spoke. ‘Miss Sutton will be in the room next to yours and Mrs Sutton at the other end, in the stripes. As to the cake, you’re not to worry about it, and I’ll not talk to you about it either. A girl making her own birthday cake? The idea is not to be borne.’

Emerald ran off to change for riding much cheered: a surprise cake she had not made herself; a childhood friend on a train to visit, and no Step until Sunday … she felt the childhood thrill of her (whisper the word)
birthday.

Acid-green new grass had begun to grow between the cobbles of the stable-yard; it was another job for the groom Robert’s boy Stanley to get to, but there were so many other pressing tasks to be accomplished at Sterne, and the horses were the very devil to keep clean now their rugs were off. When it rained, the mud caked onto them in hard crusts that cracked as it dried and stuck like flour and water to a table after bread-making. Young Stanley could stand there, picking at it, as Ferryman or Levi – or whichever of the horses it was – went off into a doze, with long ears falling sleepily and nodding head, until the clock softly struck, or Robert barked at him to look sharp, and then he would be back to the present, with all the things as yet undone, slap the horse on the rump and reprimand himself for his vagueness.

With his father off to the station with Mr Edward, it fell to Stanley to get Levi and Ferryman ready. Both father and son were up at five, as was Robert’s rule, and worked two hours before breakfast so Stanley had a good portion of the morning for prettifying the horses. Just thirteen years old, Stanley, lacking a female presence at home, was a little in love with Emerald, and oiled Levi’s hooves with care.

Edward Swift (like Horace Torrington before him) was very strict about punctuality in all things to do with the horses at Sterne, and wouldn’t countenance his stepchildren keeping horses or grooms waiting. Clovis, who had ridden with his father all his life and was a brave and thoughtful horseman, affected a cavalier attitude to the whole business whenever Edward was there; wandering in late and messily dressed, allowing courtesy towards Robert – whom he loved – to slip, and the horses – whom he loved more – to fidget and misbehave. In his stepfather’s absence, however, he reverted to his upbringing and was a pleasure to observe, as Emerald did now, in all his dealings with the stables and their occupants.

‘Good man. Thanks.’ He smiled to Stanley, and, ‘Get up there, stand!’ to Ferryman, who struck his metal shoe on the sparking cobbles in his impatience to be off.

Emerald sat quietly on Levi, who arched his black and shiny neck in pride and pleasure. He had been a tenth birthday present from her father as a four-year-old and their partnership was infinitely comfortable. Named Leviathan in anticipation of his reaching 17 hands, he hadn’t matured as expected and his nature, runtish, was excessively affectionate; he had the loyalty of the weak.

They left the yard in a clatter, trying to steady the horses who could smell the powerful spring and liked it.

Emerald had never ridden side-saddle but – most comfortably – astride, long before it was fashionable for modern young women to do so. Charlotte had been raised amid and among many occupations and worlds, one of them being horses, and she had an unconventional belief that the side-saddle was a ludicrous contraption, no good to woman nor mount. Emerald had not been welcomed into the local hunt because of her apparently obscene straddling, but if her riding habits, or lack thereof, were one of the reasons the Torringtons were never a part of the local set, they were doubtless not the only one.

Emerald rode in soft, tan-topped, men’s boots and a modest voluminous skirt, altered into a pair of giant trousers (sewn by Florence Trieves). On her top half she wore any one of a number of adorably becoming jackets, of green or midnight blue, bracken-brown or pigeon-grey, with neatly fitting waists, velvet collars and button-finished pleats behind, from which fell gathered, rump-obscuring tails. These jackets were an ostensible extravagance which she enjoyed guiltlessly, owing to their being the rejected halves of conventional skirted riding habits that had somehow lost their mates (perhaps through their unsuitability for some unusually proportioned customer), and could be picked up for a song through small printed advertisements in the local newspaper, that Emerald found amongst the smudgy-penned representations of corsets, dental contraptions and laundry-soap. She also favoured the wearing of a rakish bowler but could not always find it.

Having made her grateful and heated goodbye to Edward, it wasn’t until Charlotte heard the horses go out, that she roused herself from her bed and went to the dressing table to attend to her hair.

With hairpins clamped between her lips, she assessed her reflection as a tradesman might assess the life left in his old nag: how many tons its legs might bear yet; how many miles its heart. At forty-eight, her complicated self had at last begun to reveal itself in her features.

Charlotte had always had in her that thing that fascinates – call it charm, or the quality of showing the onlooker a reflection of themselves – whatever it was, it had not always served her well. The best thing to happen to her was, at twenty-seven, to come across – and fall in love with – Horace Torrington; having once learned constancy and the joy of delighting in another human being, she found them again easily on meeting Edward Swift.

She finished dressing her hair and considered her morning: the scenes at breakfast – Clovis’s rage and Edward’s stalwart kindness; she remembered, too, that her youngest child was so far absent from the day and, frowning, she realised she had not seen much of Smudge the day before either, when she had first announced her ill-health. With a shake of her head, as if a fly had crossed her vision, she left the room. Charlotte had many good qualities, but was ruthlessly self-serving, and she would have been the first to admit it.

The scullery was scrubbed down; sinks and plate-racks awaiting the washing-up to come.

A leg of lamb in a muslin shroud lay on a marble slab. Tins of mustard, brick-like pats of butter, a bag of raisins, stacks of intensely pink mud-streaked forced rhubarb, bound with string, leant beside other things: a breaded ham, thick glass bottles of milk, wet sausages… A large, marbled book, such as one might use as a ledger for petty cash, lay before Florence Trieves on the table, spilling loose pages like spells, handwritten, and straining against its elastic closer.