A Winter's Child (18 page)

She found him in the nearly completed lobby contemplating with sardonic eye a block of marble four feet square which – when one had looked closely and pondered at leisure – assumed the form of a pregnant, triple-breasted, faceless woman.

‘Nola sent that,' said Claire in high glee.

‘She did.'

‘And you'll have to pay for it, I suppose?'

‘I will – with her Cousin Arnold Crozier's money.'

‘Do you have any choice?'

‘Not much. Only where to put it.'

‘The ladies'powder room, I should think – as a dire warning.'

‘Well yes – if you think any woman would really believe
that
could happen to her.'

‘Never mind, Kit. Sculpture may not last. Pastoral art – and Euan – didn't.'

His tanned face crinkled with humour.

‘Neither did I.'

And he saw no reason to pretend a heartbreak he was far from feeling now that Nola, with the advent of Sculpture into her life, had tired of him as a lover. Good luck to her. Initially – and he was able to laugh at his own reaction – he had been flattered by her attentions, the wife of Benedict Swanfield of High Meadows meaning more to him in terms of conquest than the wives of other distinguished but unknown gentlemen who, in the frenzy of wartime London, had fallen eager victims to the cut of his uniform and his medals. He had known exactly what such women wanted and had supplied it. But Nola, stalking him through a weekend leave which he had promised to someone else, had carried things a stage further.

‘I know what
you
want,' she had told him. ‘Let me help you.' And at once, in a fine flair of ardour, she had set about championing his cause, extolling him, presenting him, marketing him almost, until she had wrung from her less than enthusiastic Crozier cousins the promise of the Crown Hotel. Cousin Bernard had wished to knock the property down and build an arcade of shops. Cousin Arnold had considered converting it into flats.

‘Stop,' cried Nola. ‘I have found this wonderful man …' And Kit had been impressed by her, entertained by her. He had rather liked her too. During his service at High Meadows, knowing more about each member of the family than they knew about one another, he had watched the mad risks she took with her reputation, the punishment of fatigue and alcohol and nicotine she inflicted so casually on the long, supple body he had seen displayed in the lamplight of High Meadows a hundred times and never desired it. And on the night when she had first offered that body to him, throwing it down on his narrow hotel bed like a challenge, it had not been desire so much as status, not the thought of Nola herself but of her aloof, austere husband which had mattered. Kit Hardie had served nobler and wealthier families than the Swanfields. There had been a baronet, a Member of Parliament, a bishop, a transatlantic millionaire and, in the time-honoured, only-to-be-expected fashion of servants he had cheated every one of them every now and again, cheerfully, scornfully, not thinking too much about it. Only in Benedict Swanfield, middle-class industrialist just two generations away from a factory floor, had he recognized real authority and, although he had neither feared him nor liked him, he had cheated him in nothing, until the seduction of his wife. Mrs Benedict, A symbol of what? His leap over the barriers of class? His triumph over origins which, while troubling others far more than they had troubled him, had never operated to his advantage? But, very soon, she had become just Nola, turbulent, impossibly generous, impossibly wrong-headed, exciting and exasperating him both together. Colossal alike in her blunders and her good intentions. A good pal sometimes. A damned nuisance at others. Not lovable, of course, for love had had no part of it. But, just the same, he wished her well.

And he would not forget the doors her erratic hand had opened for him. Arnold Crozier's counting house. The Crown. Claire?

Like Euan Ash, Kit had enlisted in the summer of 1914, but for different reasons. Euan, he more than supposed, had gone out to France an idealist and a patriot, in search of that mystical, malicious Holy Grail which like so much else had drowned in the Flanders mud, disappeared in a cloud of poisoned gas; or – as Kit could have told him – had never existed at all. For Kit, although as prone to bullet and shrapnel wounds, frost-bite and rat-bite as any gentleman, had never suffered – having no ideals to lose – from disillusion. And what had mattered to him in the trenches was not the why and wherefore, the rhyme or reason – since he knew there would not be much of that – but the single process of staying alive.

He was the son of a hard-wearing Northumbrian woman, sixteen at most she'd been, he suspected, at his birth, possibly less, who had risen from kitchen-maid to cook in the household of a coal-owning baronet. While as to his father, he had soon learned not to ask too many questions about that. A predatory young squire on the spree, he'd liked to think in his youth, although, on mature reflection, he was bound to admit – with a decided twinkle in his eye – that it could just as easily have been the butler. His mother had named no names, carried no grudges, and although it had never worried him, it may have been responsible – as a certain London lady had once pointed out to him – for his casual, cheerful attitude to sexual infidelity. Very likely. He had never analysed it beyond the plain facts that in a world where menservants could expect to lose their jobs if they married and maidservants were not famous for keeping either their virtue or their heads, an enterprising fellow did the best he could.

‘You have no morals,' his London lady-friend, the one before Nola, had told him. But he had always believed in giving good measure, paying the price when it was due, carrying his share – without complaint – of the corn. And whenever opportunities came his way he had not only seized them with both hands but had followed them through, progressing through the domestic hierarchy of under-footman to footman, under-butler to butler, not only by his shrewdness and deftness, private toughness and public charm, the ruthlessness of purpose to guard his own back and seek out the weak spots in others, but a simple understanding of consistent hard work.

And although –
of course
– a servant could never be a gentleman, he had learned, early on, that with a certain amount of good luck and a great deal of good management, he could contrive to live like one. And, without any false modesty, Kit knew of no better manager than himself. He had acquired his easy, open-air manner by loading the rifles of an employer's sporting guests. But when the shoot was over, the gentlemen in their baths, he had taken the pick of the grouse or the partridge for himself and had it cooked to the complicated recipes of a French chef. He had gained his understanding of vintage port and claret from the painstaking process of decanting it for other men while taking what
he
considered to be his due, and had nurtured his palate since boyhood on anything his quick mind, his keen eyes and ears, had discovered to be fine or rare. He had learned about clothes from the wardrobes of men and women who, in that leisured pre-war time, had changed at least four times every day, and in his off-duty hours, had worn his own suits and overcoats – few, but of excellent quality – with more dash and swagger than any of them.

He was not greedy. Not for food and wine, at any rate. Discriminating, rather. An expert in his own field. Damned good at his job. Did he enjoy it? Up to a year, perhaps two, before the war he'd been too busy – achieving it, staying there – to wonder. Certainly he'd always felt a step or two above his circumstances. And certainly – most certainly – he'd felt his employers to be more than a few steps below theirs. Except Benedict Swanfield of course. But wasn't that simply the way of a world where rich men were usually pompous, rarely handsome, their sons lacking in spirit or physique or just bone idle, their daughters vacant or giddy, their wives self-important or self-righteous? Or horribly frustrated?

He understood that. He had used it often enough to gain his rapid promotions. But having gained them easily, at a younger age than even he had anticipated, he had found himself plagued by a new, exceedingly persistent question. What next?
Now
that he had achieved expertise, experience, security, an adequate income except for the months when boredom lured him to the racetrack or the poker table, what else? And it had irked him consciously, sharply, to have his choice limited so severely by the class structure which, in the summer of 1914, no one, had seemed seriously to question.

‘Hardie dear, I shall expect you to stay with me for ever,' Miriam had told him, sensing his restlessness and assuming it to be financial.

And there had been a woman that year, as there had always been a woman, the young widow of a local grocer who needed a capable man both to satisfy her colourful temperament and to run her business.

Either way had been open.

‘Thank you, madam,' he had told Miriam warmly when she had increased his salary.

‘You're not going to leave me then, Hardie?'

‘No, madam.'

He had made the same promise that night to the eager black-eyed young widow and then, the next morning, on his way back to High Meadows where blue-eyed Miriam just as eagerly awaited him, he had passed the recruiting office and enlisted. To Hell with it. And when both women had complained he had put his tongue in his cheek and called it patriotism.

‘I'm just doing my duty, madam.' An impulse he had instantly regretted on seeing the muddle of the training camps, the even greater confusion of the battle-lines in France. During his first weeks in the trenches he had not had the least idea what he was supposed to be doing there. Nor what anybody else was supposed to be doing. Nor had he found anyone to tell him.

‘You're doing your duty, lad.'

His Captain had been nineteen years old, a boy from Harrow, surrounded by teenage lieutenants whose previous commands had been as prefects at a similar school. His Colonel had been a veteran of twenty-five, a graduate in philosophy, with a landed fortune, an inherited seat at Westminster, a whimsical disposition.

Duty, daring,
muddle
had killed them all by the month-end, and so many tommies with them that Kit had found himself one of the longest-serving soldiers in the Company. A good, steady chap, they were already saying. Calm under fire. Clean in barracks. The salt of the earth.

He had expected little in the way of medals or promotion. Officers, after all, were required to be gentlemen and one needed titled relatives for that or, at the very least, a private income to support all the things expected of an officer, the polo ponies and hunters and the ready money to treat one's brother officers properly in the mess. But in that winter of 1914 no one had really anticipated the extent of the carnage and although a common man had always remained
very
common in the armed forces of his or her Britannic Majesty, once those brave and brilliant captains and colonels lay dead in their hasty graves, a month or two, sometimes only a day or two after their promotion, who was left to take their place?

Kit Hardie had been among the first of his social background to be commissioned, created in the current phrase ‘a temporary gentleman', although he had always felt so at heart. And returning to London on leave as a Lieutenant, a Captain, a Major, his manners more perfect, his understanding of the social niceties more exact than many a gentleman born and bred, he had found all barriers of class and conditioning swept aside. Before the war there had been rich men and poor men, men who were noble and men who were common. But now, in this strange, uneasy year of 1919 there were men who had fought and those who had not. And Kit had seen the sense, on his discharge, of taking full advantage of his glory while it lasted, of wringing as much as he could out of it – and he intended it to be a great deal – before medals became unfashionable and retired majors a bad joke.

The war, instead of killing him as it had killed Jeremy Swanfield or scarring him as it had scarred Euan Ash, had been good to him. And he saw no reason to spoil his present advantage by being ashamed of it. The fact existed. He had not enjoyed the slaughter. He had killed when necessary to prevent another man, who probably did not enjoy the slaughter either, from killing him. And having made up his mind to it he had refused – as yet another tool of survival – to brood, so that he had not been plagued and weakened by nightmares, nor haunted by the faces of dead men at his window, as others had been. As Euan, he supposed, still was. And, for all these reasons, he was and would remain grateful to Nola for persuading her cousins to give him the chance and the challenge of reviving the Crown Hotel.

Grateful. But not unreasonably so. Not to such a degree that he could allow it to obscure his judgement or in any way alter his plans. Kit Hardie wanted many things, status not least among them, and he intended the Crown to be his creation,
his
testing ground, not Nola's. And their differences of opinion, although amicable and even exciting to Nola while her infatuation was at its height, had proved impossible to reconcile.

She had wanted the decor to be
modern,
plain walls, bare floors, zigzags of black and white, the faint decadence of tiger-skin rugs, wine glasses with transparent girls for stems, ‘amusing'little jugs and teapots which poured out their contents from unusual apertures. He had given her fringed cushions, soft pastel colours, the conventional elegance at the gold-rimmed china and cut crystal she was forced to endure in Miriam's cosy, pretty,
dreary
– ‘Don't you see that, Kit?
Damnably
dreary?' – drawing room.

‘Of course,' he told her pleasantly. ‘And with good reason.'

‘What possible reason?'

‘Because people like it.'

‘Oh –
people?
‘

‘Yes – since it's people who pay the bills. The ones who live at High Meadows or somewhere like it, will feel comfortable here. And as for the rest, I think you'll find, Nola darling, that most people who
don't
live at High Meadows really rather wish they did. So they'll like it here too.'