The Uninvited Guests (4 page)

Having collected all manner of ingredients from the pantry, cupboards and Old House, she stood in the middle of the kitchen with laden counters all around her, tying an apron over her black dress and surveying the resulting cacophony of potential dishes with a determined expression, as if to render their components submissive before beginning their harmonising into a symphony.

Charlotte, having wandered into the kitchen, paused at the sight of so much plenty. It erupted towards her.

‘I suppose
all
the cupboards must be emptied, Mrs Trieves?’ she asked Florence sourly.

‘That way I know where I am to start with,’ responded Florence with equal acidity.

A five-pound paper bag of sugar, rolled down some way, stood on the corner of the dresser with a wooden scoop dug into its inviting crystalline landscapes. Charlotte could not resist digging the scoop further into the sugar to feel the small, dry grindings.

‘Have you everything planned all the way to Monday?’

‘I have. Emerald and I.’

‘I envy you cooking it – rather that than talk to the guests.’

‘A telegram came.’

‘Oh yes?’

Florence Trieves took an opened telegram from her apron pocket and handed it to Charlotte.

‘Must there be
no
secrets?’ said Charlotte vaguely.

‘You know there aren’t any.’

Charlotte perused the telegram as Florence undid each of the five buttons of her black cuffs and rolled up her sleeves to the bony elbows. ‘Myrtle will be down directly she finishes the bedrooms,’ she said. ‘It would be this day of all days that Pearl Meadows cries off sick—’

Pearl Meadows was the housemaid, part time, who had beat a hasty and highly inconvenient retreat that morning, pleading illness.

‘Oh, dash it all! Deceit!’ cried Charlotte, and Florence looked up questioningly. ‘Camilla Sutton has influenza – I should be very surprised
indeed
if that were anywhere near the truth, the
harridan –
and has sent Patience with the brother, Ernest, who is a dreadful clot.’

‘Camilla Sutton? Do we know her?’

Charlotte was irritable. ‘You know we do! They used to come
very
often when Horace was here – alive.’

‘Ah. Yes. Well.’

‘
Green-eyes
, Florence –
I like
her. Perhaps she doesn’t like me any more.’

‘Still, Edmund will talk to Emerald and Clovis, and you’ll be free—’

‘It’s
Ernest
, remember? And Emerald and Clovis won’t
want
to talk to
him.
Patience is a long toil up a muddy field as it is; he’s beyond horror.’

‘I seem to recall.’

‘He was a weasly, swotty little child – forever catching things in nets and staring. He encouraged Emerald in messing about with inappropriate things. Now she’s reading
something
at
Cambridge
and
he’s
studying medicine, apparently. He
would.
’

‘Oh, I see. A scientist.’ This last was said in tones of dreary condemnation.

‘With red hair.’

‘Lord, yes. And a squint.’

‘That’s the fellow –
spectacles.
’

‘Hardly his fault.’

‘You might say that, Florence, but although many may need them, only a certain type of person wears them. I prefer a passionate, squinting man than one who corrects his sight with wiry little spectacles and is in command of himself.’

‘His corrected glances will be aimed at Emerald, I imagine, rather than you,’ smiled Florence, spitefully.

‘Or you!’ said Charlotte; then, veering from this thorny subject, ‘Will there be cake?’

‘There will. Chocolate. With green roses.’

‘
Green?
’

‘For Emerald.’

‘Roses aren’t green, dear.’

‘Emerald’s sugar ones are. Dyed and perfectly sculpted last night.’

‘By Myrtle?’

‘By me. And candlelight.’

‘I should think they’ll look most peculiar, and Ernest and Patience Sutton will return to Berkshire with the impression that we’re unfit for society.’

‘Aren’t we unfit?’ rejoined Florence.

Charlotte burst, very suddenly, into loud laughter, a bawdy Titania.

‘Oh Lord,’ she belted, her voice all at once strident, ‘that we are, Florence!’ And Florence, too, bending forward to allow herself to do it in her corsets, laughed with her, breathily, like a concertina, unused for a while and warming itself up.

‘I shall leave you,
unfit
as I am, to your baking,’ said Charlotte, exiting the room, and throwing over her shoulder, ‘What’s for lunch?’

Florence wiped a tear from her eye. ‘It’ll be early, with all the hullaballoo today, and it’s what remains of the pie from dinner.’

‘Delicious!’ sang Charlotte and floated away.

Smudge leaned from her window into the raw air. There had been a change in the weather and the bruised sky was threatening in all directions.

‘Where are my brother and sister?’ she breathed. Smudge was content with loneliness, but intermittently the fabric of her surroundings was unpredictable and she craved flesh-and-blood company beyond the spectres of her imagining. Answering her, the trees moved uneasily and she caught the almost un-hearable hoofbeats of the returning horses on the shifting breeze.

The horses emerged from the tunnel of the yews as if they were stepping onto a dimly lit stage from the darkened wings. Clovis reached up to grab a black twig from the tattered tree above him.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘home,’ then, ‘Oh!’ for an enormous shining car, glaring with chrome and glossy blue paintwork, was parked majestically, glamorously, alarmingly, dazzlingly in the middle of the drive.

‘Heavens!’ cried Emerald, as both horses started in fright. Levi jumped backwards, barging into Ferryman who, taking exception, plunged, dashing the gravel.

‘Silly,’ said Emerald, steadying him with barely a movement or gathering of reins. ‘It’s just a car, and you’ve seen plenty of those before.’

Levi rolled his eyes dramatically, looking down his nose at the Rolls-Royce, which seemed to goggle back, the pointed silver lady poking up between its glass eyes like a small and vicious single antler.

‘Not any car, Em,’ said Clovis, who had exhorted Ferryman to stand square. ‘Doesn’t…
John Buchanan
drive just such an impressive machine?’

‘
Clovis
,’ Emerald warned.

The horses, having had their fun, suffered themselves to be ridden away to the back of the house, brother and sister locked in silent communication.

‘Oh, get on with it!’ burst out Emerald finally, Clovis’s form of silent communication – insinuating glances and eyebrow raising – having proved too eloquent for her.

‘Come on, Emerald, the farmer John Buchanan is well-heeled.’

They were riding close, knees bumping occasionally.

‘And what of it?’

‘It has come to my brotherly attention that – gobbling up Sterne acres notwithstanding – he holds you in high esteem.’

She was withering. ‘Clovis, please, no match-making. I’d rather …’ she was at a loss to imagine a fate worse than marriage to John Buchanan ‘… sell my hair. So just
cheese
it, as you might say, you uncouth youth. I may as well ask you to marry Patience Sutton!’ she finished.

‘Pax! Pax! There’s no need for that sort of talk. We won’t mention it again,’ promised Clovis, then, ‘What-ho, Stanley!’ And he slid off Ferryman, long-legged, and began to lead him towards his stall. ‘“Uncouth youth”,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Wonderful!’

Emerald dismounted, laid her cheek on Levi’s damp neck and kissed him. ‘Come on, you,’ she said. ‘John Buchanan will just have to wait for a moment.’ And she led him off to his stall.

Some ten minutes later, Emerald, russet-cheeked, hair half-down and smelling delightfully of horse, hauled off her boots by the umbrellas. She considered tidying herself but rejected the notion as potentially misleading. She would gladly bear being seen in her eccentric riding garments if it kept her out of the romantic hot water with John Buchanan.

She strode through the house to find him in the drawing room, opposite Charlotte, perched politely on the low settee. This item of furniture was best suited to polite perching as the seat was broken entirely; it was but an empty promise of a seat. Any person aiming for the cushioned centre found himself on the floor. John had remembered too late having been a casualty of this particular Torrington booby-trap, to everyone’s great mirth, once before, but having once committed to the settee he bravely balanced on the frame and kept his eyes locked into those of his hostess.

On Emerald’s entrance to the room he lifted his face towards her and was struck by her vitality and the dewy flush of her skin, as well as her clownish trousers. He got to his feet.

‘Mr Buchanan,’ she said, ‘Mother.’

‘Yes …’ said Charlotte, fadingly, ‘John Buchanan’s here.’ And she lightly rose and left the room, looking around her with dim urgency as if searching for something. In the doorway, pausing, she murmured, ‘I must see about the hens.’

John Buchanan and Emerald were left alone. This was a very far from ideal situation and Emerald tapped her stockinged foot beneath the muddy hem of her riding garment.

‘Have you hens?’ asked John.

Emerald was loath to admit they hadn’t any. She felt bound to defend her mother who, in the storm of John Buchanan, had sheltered in the port of invented poultry.

‘Robert may have acquired some. And I believe Devlin has been known to keep them.’

John Buchanan stared at her gravely.

‘I see you’ve brought your car,’ said Emerald breezily.

‘Yes,’ he said, adding helpfully, ‘I arrived in it.’

In the pause that followed this revelation, running, booted steps were heard, and Clovis raced into the room. Pulling up in the doorway, an unlikely chaperone, he stuck out his hand and said gruffly, ‘John!’

John stepped forward to greet him. ‘Clovis, how are you?’

‘Oh yes, I’m very well, thank you.’

Clovis had the ironic tone of a boy playing the part of somebody tedious in a school production and Emerald winced to hear it, fearing he was in the insulting mood he usually reserved for their stepfather. Clovis, however, reined himself in. ‘I’m going to play chess,’ he announced, and crossed to the window in his muddy boots, where a board was set up on a cherry-wood table. He sat down and began to set out the pieces.

‘I hope he doesn’t argue with himself over the moves!’ said Emerald, and then in confusion, ‘Why don’t we sit down?’

They sat – John avoiding the collapsed settee this time and placing himself near Emerald on the chaise. Clovis bent frowning over the chess pieces.

‘Has mother offered you –’ she glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel which had never worked, ‘– anything at all?’

‘No.’

Emerald was about to make an offer of tea when John reached inside his jacket and produced a small, navy blue box tied with a thin white satin ribbon.

‘Happy birthday, Miss Torrington.’

Behind him, Clovis stared up from his chess with wild, appalled eyes, causing Emerald to look down at her hands, sharply.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure I really—’

‘Please accept it,’ he said.

Emerald took the box and placed it on her palm. She imagined a pair of vulgar earrings and was sliced in half by guilt.

‘Mr Buchanan,’ she began. She looked up into his face. He was the most geometric of men: absolutely symmetrical with no tricky corners or contours to confuse the onlooker. He had a straight mouth and strong brow, dark hair neatly and squarely cut and combed, broad shoulders… He was
even
in every way, and on the large side – that is, he was tall, and one had the impression he’d look imposing stepping out of a bathing hut, if he ever were to do such a frivolous thing as to get into one in the first place, for John Buchanan – despite being called the
farmer
John Buchanan by the Torringtons – was a mill owner and single-minded in his pursuit of success. His father was the farmer, and John, on making something of a small fortune, had purchased the tenancy for him in filial gratitude, not to mention sentiment, farming being in steep decline.

This fortune, this generosity, this attraction to Emerald – demonstrated by his rash visit on her birthday, as well as the tedium of his conversation – were what had driven Charlotte to leave her daughter alone in his company for the seeking out of imaginary hens.

Emerald gazed into the square and comfortable planes of his face.

‘Thank you, Mr Buchanan,’ she said. ‘This is an unlooked for and generous present—’

‘You haven’t yet opened the box, Miss Torrington,’ said John Buchanan easily. ‘It might be very poor.’

‘Still, I feel I must be clear at the outset. If accepting this is going to give the idea, any idea, that I am entering into, well, that I…’

Having made a vigorous start, Emerald found the right finish slipping from her grasp. But to her surprise, John broke into a loud, carefree laugh.

‘Miss Torrington,’ his voice was warm with appropriate kindliness, ‘we played as children! Before you were Miss Torrington to me you were Emerald, Emmy,
Little Em…
If I come here now, with a trinket, please don’t leap to conclusions that cast me in a more romantic light than I deserve.’

Emerald was covered in shame. Her face, not used to blushes, was suffused with heat. Oh, her pride and conceit.

‘John,’ she uttered.

John Buchanan, in contrast, looked very happy. ‘Come! Let’s not have this. I have found, in my experience of the fairer sex – admittedly limited by propriety – that they have a tendency to imagine all fellows think enormously well of them.’ She was speechless. ‘Although, I do, of course, like you most awfully. I mean, I think very
highly
of you …’ He stressed the word, generously.

Behind him, Clovis sank his head into his hands. Emerald wished she might have been seated on the broken settee, that she could collapse into it and hide under furniture until this humiliation had passed. There was nothing for it but to open the box.