The Uninvited Guests (6 page)

‘I was wondering if there might be a little soup,’ offered Emerald nervously, as Florence’s pointed face and Myrtle’s friendly (as a rule), round one looked at her in frank and outraged astonishment.

‘
Soup?
’ said Florence Trieves, but it might as well have been,
Rabbit’s eggs?

‘Ger,’ said Myrtle, or similar.

Emerald thought of herself, Clovis and their mother guzzling rabbit pie and boiled potatoes and arguing. Charlotte was now in her room, with swollen eyes but a full stomach, and Clovis back before the fire, probably, amusing himself with mawkish introspection, while Smudge was alone upstairs, ignored, hungry and white as the sheets that covered her.

‘Yes, just a bit of soup, or something like it,’ she said, ‘for Smudge. Stock would do.’

‘The ox, Mrs Trieves. The ox-tail,’ said Myrtle tentatively (she had once been smacked about the head by Florence Trieves and no amount of subsequent civility could wipe away the memory).

It was true, an ox’s tail had been boiled for gelatin that morning and early in the process they had saved a portion of the stock. Emerald was allowed to take some up to Smudge, with soft vegetables floating in its beaded depths, and a hunk of white bread to go with it.

Smudge received the offering graciously, propped up on her pillow.

‘I’d love to stay for chattage, Smudgy, but the train’s due at four, Pearl Meadows has absconded, and the house is nowhere near ready to receive the Suttons. I must rally the troops.’

‘I understand,’ said Smudge meekly, ‘but don’t expect me to eat the carrots.’ And Emerald left her once more.

The two hours between one and three were spent in frenzied activity as the household – Charlotte, Emerald, Clovis (scolded to action), Florence Trieves and Myrtle – dashed from room to room, plumping, beating, polishing and straightening the cushions, tables, carpets, handrails and all manner of glass and silver ornaments that hung about the house. A family of mice were discovered in a cushion – what a perfect home for them! – but there were very few spiders; Sterne was not dirty or uncared for, only feather dusters chase off spiders better than they do small rodents and cushion-plumping is a luxury to the over-stretched. With all the mice that the cat Lloyd caught and the many more he let slip through his paws, Florence often regretted they could not roast them, entire, on skewers and suck upon their crispy, corn-fed haunches.

‘They eat better than we do,’ she said.

But in the kitchen, the ox’s massive, meaty tongue lay in splendour upon a vast and flowered platter. It had already been skinned, and a portion of it sliced into razor-thin layers by Florence’s disciplining hand. The slices were almost translucent. They were petals; red, salty, melting, damp. The tongue, nestling in tightly curled parsley, waited keenly for its entrance to the dining room at supper.

Florence and Myrtle had toiled long and hard with fantastic and imaginative results. As well as the emerald-green roses and glossy chocolate cake, on a high crystal stand, there were bowls of cream; before that, gherkins, as well as various gratins and slabs of pork, forced or minced, with mace, capers, thyme. The rind of bacon soldered leaner components together. There were lemons, sharpening the edges of fat, and chervil.

The house shone about itself proudly.

China bowls and glass vases held small collections of flowers from the garden: hyacinths, lily of the valley and narcissi. The smell of them, miraculous, with wax furniture polish and blue wood-smoke, went all through the rooms and in the air of the halls and stairs, too. A person might walk from a cool corridor full of the scent of lit fires into a bedroom to find the smell of damp flowers from a pot of wild violets and hot starch from the fresh sheets and flat-creased pillow cases.

Flashes of sunlight through the panes found the colours in the faded rugs, but the weather was most changeable; the rooms were just as often thrown into chill shadow, with only their blazing grates to light them.

Halting their activities and all at once, the family realised their sweating, dirt-streaked selves, and with as much hurry as had characterised their housework they set about dressing; the train was to arrive in less than an hour. The women would help one another into their under-garments. Corsets were not routinely worn at Sterne but when guests were expected, vanity more than propriety demanded them.

‘Bags I first bath!’ shouted Clovis, and was pursued up the stairs by Emerald.

‘Let’s not queue in the corridor as if we lived in a boarding house,’ said Charlotte – who had known one or two of these. ‘Can’t we use our wash-stands? And yes, Clovis, first bath for you, or you’ll be late meeting the train.’

‘Tsk-tsk, it would never do to try the patience of Insignificance,’ said Clovis, tearing off his collar as he disappeared into the bathroom.

‘You aren’t at all funny; you just think you are,’ Emerald said to the closed door.

2

A DREADFUL ACCIDENT

Lady was a useful sort of pony, part cob, and well up to pulling the brougham if the journey wasn’t too long nor the passengers too heavy. The car was impractically small and unreliable in comparison to the proven team of Lady and the brougham, and had been left in its stall next to Ferryman, its black wheels resting on the straw-scattered cobbles, radiator cold. Robert, having returned from his first journey to the station with Edward Swift before lunch, had the carriage ready by the front door from a quarter past three, but Clovis, as usual, was late, having suffered one of his plunges in spirits, and instead of hurrying, he oozed from the house so slowly that Robert had to examine a small split in one of his leather driving gloves to stop himself from shouting at him.

Closed against sudden showers, the carriage rolled away from the house between the yews. Robert would not trot until reaching the lanes, for fear of wrenching Lady’s muscles before they softened to walking.

Myrtle began dressing Emerald’s hair at quarter to four; hair that was thicker, browner and longer than her mother’s but usually piled up hastily, and impatiently stuck with pins. Emerald was never sure she had found them all when she took it down at night. There was so much hair that it literally weighed her head down, straining her neck when she was tired. The relief of letting it fall down her back, brushing it out in chunks and luxuriant handfuls at bedtime, before putting it into a loose plait for sleeping was one of the pleasures of her life (although she half-expected to find mice in it one day).

While Myrtle worked, Emerald, as slowly as she could to stave off the boredom, powdered her face. She never coloured her lips as her mother did, but she did lightly powder her face and bosom and sometimes, as now, even more lightly rouge her cheeks.

‘If you fiddle with my hair much longer, Myrtle, I shall make up my face to look like a clown just to occupy myself,’ she said.

‘Nearly finished, Miss Em,’ answered Myrtle, with her mouth full of pins, but she did not release Emerald for another twenty minutes, by which time her hair did look – she could not deny it – marvellous: improbably shiny, richly looped and piled up upon itself over a small frame, so that its height, in contrast to the creamy face below, gave her womanly jaw a kittenish proportion.

‘Myrtle, you’re wasted here; you could make a fortune in hair.’

‘Yes, Miss Em,’ said Myrtle. ‘We’ll put the comb in it for your party.’

‘Or feathers …’ said Emerald, and got up.

She had two gowns to wear on her birthday, and she stepped carefully into one of them now. It was an old friend, having been worn on her last two birthdays and once at Christmas with a velvet shawl to render it seasonal. She stood at the window, quite as still as she could stand, while Myrtle fastened the buttons at the back. In the main, Emerald preferred clothing she could get in and out of herself, but when she needed to, she enlisted Myrtle.

‘It’s five. Where
could
they be?’

Myrtle had finished buttoning. ‘Unless there’s anything else, Miss Em?’

‘No, of course. Thank you, off you go.’

Myrtle left her and she stood biting her nails and staring towards the gate. Her room occupied the corner, and not much that happened at Sterne escaped the view from its windows, but the avenue was too dark and there were only the thickening shadows to interpret.

Viewed from the outside, Emerald reflected, she would have made a romantic picture: the young, well-proportioned woman, in the tall window of her old, well-proportioned house, nervously waiting for her guests to arrive as the afternoon sun, having made a fleeting return, glinted on the glass. Looking at the picture one wouldn’t imagine the young lady was only waiting for her sulky brother, a childhood friend, the friend’s mother and John Buchanan. Put that way it wasn’t very exciting at all.

At the thought of John Buchanan, though, who was so very uninterested in her romantically, whose disinterested admiration had been sickeningly familial in its properness, she crossed back to the dressing table, opened a tiny pot, left there in hope by her shameless mother and dabbed her lips with a small amount of red stain. Her face was instantly lit and vital, not least because of the quick naughtiness in her eyes.

‘There, to you, stuck-up John Buchanan,’ she said, blowing rouged kisses and sticking out her tongue.

Smudge appeared in the doorway.

‘Who are you talking to?’

‘Myself. I must break the habit.’ Emerald turned to her sister.

‘Oh, you look beautiful!’ breathed Smudge, alight. ‘Pity it’s only old Patience Sutton.’

‘My thoughts exactly, Smudge,’ said Emerald, not mentioning John.

‘You look better than a girl in a storybook.’

‘That’s the trouble with pretty clothes, they give you ideas that are certain to be disappointed.’

‘Don’t say that, Em!’ said Smudge, who rebelled against this cynicism. ‘You can’t
know
what will happen.’

It was then, as if in response – as if the countless mismatched wheels of incident had suddenly, briefly, locked together in faultless mechanism – that they heard the brougham re-enter Sterne. Extraordinarily, Lady was at a very fast trot on gravel, the wheels and hooves were unmeasured and loud, and then there was the spat of running feet on the drive and a shout.

Smudge was the first to get to the window.

‘Look at Clovis! He’s shouting!’

Emerald picked up her skirt and ran too, and they both left the room, bumping into each other, and raced towards the stairs.

They met their mother on the landing.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, and all three rushed down together, entering the hall just as the front door flew open.

Clovis, out of breath and very white in the face, with his arms flung wide, announced, ‘There’s been a dreadful accident!’

The women surged to meet him as Smudge hung back, trembling.

‘God! Where?’ uttered Charlotte.

‘On a branch line!’ The answer was peculiar somehow; a branch line? Which one? And where?

‘
A branch line?
’ echoed Emerald.

They could hear Robert shouting for Stanley, and the muffled frenzy of hooves and wheels on cobbles approaching from behind the house.

‘Yes,’ said Clovis, ‘a carriage came clean off the tracks—’

‘What about Patience?’ Emerald was horrified.

‘No, no, she’s here,’ Clovis said, and stepped aside.

There, behind him, with a pinched, anxious face and a neat straw hat with flowers on the brim, was the meticulous Patience Sutton. Emerald was flooded with relief and the happiness of reunion, and embraced her.

‘Patience! Are you all right?’

Patience looked very shaken. ‘Emerald!’ she said. ‘Yes … it wasn’t our train, you see, thankfully, but – poor things – it was one on a branch line.’ Again, this branch line.

‘But where was it?’ Emerald glimpsed a tall figure on the gravel behind Patience that certainly wasn’t Camilla Sutton. ‘And who on earth is
that?
’

Patience was confused.

‘That’s
Ernest.
’

‘Ernest? Where’s your mother?’

‘We sent a telegram.’

‘Really?’

Charlotte, who, in her solipsism had neglected to pass on the news of Camilla Sutton’s indisposition, cut in, ‘Clovis, was anybody killed?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered he. ‘The point is, they need to put people up here, at Sterne. We’re to send the brougham and the cart. Here’s Robert with it—’

‘Put people up here?’ said Charlotte. ‘Whatever for?’

Clovis, in his haste, was abrupt. ‘It happened very near here, you see, the passengers—’

‘We didn’t hear anything,’ said Charlotte, wonderingly.

‘No, Mother, of course not! But it was miles from any station.’

Emerald saw that the person Patience had named as her brother Ernest, whom she remembered as slight and rabbit-like in his mildness, had removed his jacket to help Stanley back Ferryman between the shafts of the cart, while Robert hitched him to it.

‘But who told you to send the carriage?’ she asked.

‘And what
can
you mean,
we are to put people up?
’ Charlotte was indignant.

‘We met a man on the road. A train guard.’

He was interrupted by Patience, who in a clear voice said, ‘I think he was a porter.’

Clovis turned to her. ‘
What?
’

‘I think he was a
porter
not a guard,’ said Patience patiently.

‘He was a guard,’ repeated Clovis.

‘No, definitely a porter, on a bicycle.’

Clovis cast her a violent look. ‘All right!’

She was unmoved. ‘Yes. Yes, he was. I’m sure of it. He had a porter’s cap.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. But at any rate, whatever he was, he was in a lather and he said there had been an accident and we were to send for help.’

‘So we came here,’ finished Patience, and smiled up at Clovis who, ignoring her, continued, ‘We’re to get passengers up here from Tibbets Cross and then wait for the Railway.’

‘Was it George?’ asked Charlotte densely.