A Winter's Child (8 page)

And indeed – although it was Miriam who noticed this, not Dorothy – there was something about the way Claire's slender body moved beneath that skimpy,
Ballet Russe
tunic which had a grace and softness lacking in Nola, an air of distance about her which was not cool – like Benedict – but composed of varied and subtle nuances, hints of sorrow and humour, of gentleness and firmness combined, which gave her smooth oval face a most decided fascination.

Miriam liked the composure of Claire's hands with their pointed, polished nails. She liked the long, jet earrings swinging from small lobes set close to the head, accentuating the elegant curve of the neck and jaw. Somewhat against her own better judgement she liked the dark, heavy hair cut in those geometric, vaguely oriental lines, woman's ‘crowning glory' shorn in a disturbing yet oddly piquant way.

Certainly not the well-mannered child Miriam had remembered. Nor the biddable, deceivable, uncritical companion she had imagined. Instead fate, as always, had been kind to Miriam and, understanding her needs better than she did herself, had delivered into her hands an attractive woman, interesting, unusual, resourceful, probably entertaining, who would suit her far better than any docile, grateful girl. And it was not until she had sat Claire down beside her and thoroughly contemplated this delightful turn of events, that she remembered Jeremy.

At once her eyes filled with tears and, her hot pink cheek coming rather closer than Claire liked, she whispered, ‘I have kept his room exactly as he left it. After dinner I will take you upstairs to see.'

‘Oh! Oh yes – thank you.' And for a shocked moment, blessedly soon over, Claire had no idea what she could mean.

She had never seen Jeremy's room at High Meadows. She had never thought of it. For his mother's sake she attempted to do so now, to see him as a boy growing up, a young man, just to
see
him, her mind filling instantly, as she had dreaded, with Paul, a tremor of pain darting swiftly across her face which still looked for him in every crowd, hurting her beyond concealment so that she could think of nothing to do but convert it into an offering to Miriam who would naturally mistake it as grief for Jeremy. It seemed little enough to do for Jeremy's mother and she knew that Paul would not have minded the deceit. Would Jeremy? She had never known him well enough to judge.

‘My dear child,' gasped Miriam, totally convinced, immensely gratified, ‘we must not upset each other.'

But Miriam's easy tears could not fail to communicate themselves to Eunice, her heart ever close to overflow, her sorrow graceless and red-eyed but utterly sincere.

‘Poor Jeremy. How
dreadful,'
she muttered, reaching out to her husband not only for the handkerchief which he automatically supplied, but to make sure that he was still whole and sound and safely
there
beside her; a gesture of tenderness instantly thrown into confusion as the door opened to admit her elder brother.

‘Good evening,' he said, speaking to no one, a neutral, entirely commonplace remark which nevertheless produced a tightening of the atmosphere, the slight feeling of alarm which Authority always arouses in those who expected to be caught out.

‘Oh, Benedict.' Eunice dropped her handkerchief on her lap, looking, for a desperate and foolish moment, as if she meant to hide it.

‘So it is,' murmured Nola, her long, supple body lounging in a slightly more provocative angle, her long eyes blinking lazily, nonchalantly, vindictively as a cat's, as her husband did not look at her.

‘Benedict
– my dear fellow,' said Edward, his voice richly and triumphantly proclaiming his right to use that formidable Christian name.

‘Oh, Mr Swanfield,' muttered Dorothy, who could never quite bring herself to do so, blushing as he took her hand and, becoming so flustered in her eagerness to make a good impression – for Edward's sake – that she misunderstood the commonplace remark he made to her, answering awkwardly and at random.

Toby Hartwell, finding nothing to say, swallowed jerkily, gave a nervous smile, a nervous cough.

‘Benedict,' murmured Miriam with the air of a sweet-natured child suggesting a party game, ‘do come over here, dear boy, and confess that you did not recognize Claire.'

He came, shook her hand, agreed that she had altered. But somehow the compliment which Miriam had invited him to pay became overshadowed, in his cool clipped speech, by the implication that she had simply grown up. She had been very young. Now, four years later, she was less so. What could be surprising or even particularly interesting in that? Yet, smiling up at him in the open, friendly manner she used with everyone, she remembered that although he had been the only person who could have prevented her marriage to Jeremy, he had not done so.

She had been terrified of him then, her knees shaking, her stomach hollow, on the day he had sent for her to attend him at High Meadows and await his judgement. And he had shown her no kindness, offered no reassurance.

‘My brother has convinced himself he cannot live without you,' he had told her dryly. ‘Whether or not he has convinced me is another matter which need not – as it happens – concern you. Under normal circumstances I would incline to the view that you are both too young and my brother certainly too foolish to take any major decisions whatsoever. But the circumstances are not normal. And one can hardly declare a man who is shortly to lead other men into battle as unfit to take a wife. Evidently one must discount the fact that he has had no real training to do either. All I can say to you is that, in any eventuality, money will be made available.'

Money will be made available. Suddenly, when she least desired to do so, she remembered how Jeremy had laughed at that. ‘Good old Benedict,' he had said, his voice reaching her now through a long tunnel of time, far beyond the possibility of grieving. ‘That's his answer to everything. Money will be made available – or else it won't be – that's the way he operates. I'd better give you a baby Claire, now, before I go – just in case. A bonny little boy just like me, and then mother‘ll see to it that he refuses you nothing.'

But there had been no child. There had been Paul. And still no child.

‘Yes, I had an excellent journey,' she said, in answer to his enquiry, her smile never wavering. ‘And what a lovely surprise to find the trains running on time, or very nearly.'

He nodded. ‘Indeed. Although dinner at High Meadows, Miriam, seems to be a little behind schedule …? Or am
I
mistaken?'

‘Polly,' Miriam told him, offering the name of her youngest daughter in explanation.

‘Of course.' It did not in the least surprise him. It did not please him either.

‘She will be doing her hair,' said Miriam, visibly brightening at his displeasure, ‘and re-doing it, and changing her dress. You know how these girls are.'

‘Yes. Unpunctual. Unfortunately – as you may remember – I have a train to catch later this evening. Had you forgotten?'

And Claire, sitting tranquilly among them, was at once aware of Eunice, her large pale eyes shooting wide open and naked with alarm; and of a gleam of something that might have been satisfaction, or malice, or some strange, angry pleasure in Nola. Clearly neither one of them had known that Benedict was going away. And for how long? Both his wife and his sister needed, probably for vastly different reasons, to know.

‘Well dear,' said Miriam, who had all the information she required and was not in the least concerned about train timetables or the lateness of her daughter, Polly. ‘I could send a message to her room asking her to hurry, although the chances are she would only get flustered and take longer. Don't you think so? Although if you would like me to send, then of course – at once, dear. What shall I do?'

‘Just as you please,' he might have told her once again, his manner curt or sardonic, but there came a sudden and rather delightful rustling in the doorway, a drift of perfume, an impression of colour and warmth and whispering laughter.

‘Polly,' said Miriam, and at once all heads were turned, all eyes were fixed, with varying degrees of admiration or exasperation, on the young lady who stood there, tall, golden, effervescent, as innocently, artfully alluring as ‘pretty Mimi'had ever been.

‘Am I late? Oh dear, yes – I'm late.'

But that, most certainly, had been her intention and posing now in the doorway she sketched a curtsey and took a little dancing step from side to side, her sapphire blue skirt with its silver spangles swirling and glittering around legs which everyone supposed to be long and shapely and firm, her cloud of hair brilliantly gold, her blue eyes bright and sparkling and set wide apart like Miriam's, her radiant smile, revealing perfectly white, perfectly strong teeth, informing the assembled company that she was already well pleased with herself and that if they wished to make her gloriously happy – and she felt sure they must – would they please be so kind as to go on looking at her.

‘Were you
waiting
for me?' she breathed.

‘Well worth waiting for I'd say,' obediently replied her brother-in-law, Toby Hartwell, who was good natured, sympathetic and fond of children.

‘What an enchanting young lady you are, Miss Polly,' said Edward, paying his courtly homage.

‘Why, thank you kindly, Mr Lyall.'

Once again she sketched a curtsey, performed a little dance, coming to rest directly in front of Benedict, still preening herself with all the transparent vanity of nineteen, inviting him to see her as Toby and even Edward were seeing her, as very soon every young man in Faxby would be seeing her. A woman.

‘I presume we may eat now,' he said.

And Claire was in no doubt of Nola's intention to wound, to puncture Polly's brash but possibly fragile self-esteem, when she gave her low, throaty, and, in this case, thoroughly unkind laugh.

The dining room at High Meadows was high and square and of an overbearing splendour, furnished not with the floral cosiness of Miriam but to suit the baronial inclinations of her late husband, the massive antique mahogany, the ornate Georgian silver, the strong dark colours and textures, the display of deep-rooted wealth that would surely endure forever; Aaron Swanfield's portrait still there above the white marble fireplace, scowling across the room at Miriam's impossibly angelic twenty-five or possibly thirty-year-old face, framed on the opposite wall.

The artist had given her a silvery fairness, huge, forget-me-not blue eyes, an unreal; fairy tale beauty which could have been anyone. But she had been delighted by his meticulous attention to every detail of her dress and her jewellery and had employed him, later on, to reproduce surely not chaotic, kindly Eunice but a demure, quietly dreaming girl of fifteen, tapering hands which had never belonged to Eunice folded in an eternal restfulness she could not have sustained for a moment. Polly and Jeremy had been set in identical, oval frames, a handsome schoolboy, a dainty rosebud doll, Miriam's perfect family, all beautiful and brilliant, all three looking exactly as Miriam wished them to look,
being
just as she most desired them to be.

But Jeremy was dead. Eunice was miserable. Polly? Sitting now between Edward and Nola, hemmed in by the pomposity of the one, the brooding silence of the other, she had put her elbows on the table, her head drooping over them, her sparkle considerably dimmed. And understanding how thoroughly Benedict had deflated her, how hurt she had been by that low chuckle of Nola's, Claire smiled at her and, overhearing some particularly old maidish remark of Edward's, followed the smile with a wink. If she could make a friend in this house then the obvious choice would be Polly. Yet the four short years between their ages, which should have made no great difference at all, had contained the testing ground of war. And it worried Claire that, with the best will in the world, she could not stop herself from thinking of Polly as a child.

But Polly
was
a child. No one should grudge her that. Claire wished devoutly that at nineteen she had been allowed to remain a child herself. Abruptly, through the self-assurance of Swanfield conversation, the solidity of their possessions, she saw that line of shuffling, blinded men, clutching each other by the shoulders, stumbling eternally through her memory: and she shivered.

‘Claire – dear Claire,' said Miriam, who had been watching her fondly, possessively. ‘You are not eating. My dear, I know why. But it does no good – really it does not. He would not wish you to pine, you know.'

What? Who? She leaned forward, smiling a polite enquiry and then, suddenly understanding, slid at once into the mould of social deceit, good manners, compassion, smiling now with a well rehearsed wistfulness so that Jeremy's mother, at least, would be satisfied.

‘You must be so proud of your daughter, Mrs Lyall,' breathed Miriam.

‘Oh,' said Dorothy, considerably taken aback. ‘Oh yes – yes of course I am.
We
are … She has been very brave.'

‘Shocking times,' said Edward. ‘Best forgotten.'

‘I absolutely adore your haircut,' said Polly.

‘Thank you,' said Claire.

‘I expect you'll have heard,' said Toby Hartwell quietly, apologetically, ‘that they sent me off to manage a munitions factory. Pity to miss the show and all that but, absolutely essential work, just the same.'

‘Oh – absolutely,' said Claire.

‘And dangerous,' said Eunice, looking hot and agitated, ‘
terribly
dangerous. There were explosions in those munitions factories, people killed, and the operatives turning yellow from the chemicals …'

‘I dare say,' said Benedict Swanfield, who had not appeared to be listening. ‘But at least they were kept in full employment, which seems unlikely to continue.'

And for a while thereafter there was silence.

The custom of leaving the gentlemen alone in the dining room for their after-dinner port and cigars was still observed at High Meadows and as Claire followed Miriam across the hall she knew that her moment of maximum danger had come. There would be coffee in the drawing room, Miriam beckoning to her, ‘Sit by
me,
my dear', and then the photograph albums, Jeremy through every stage of his babyhood and his childhood, Jeremy on his first pony, his first and final motor car, Jeremy in his academic robes, his lieutenant's uniform, Jeremy the scholar, the sportsman, the gallant knight-at-arms, the beloved son. And then the unthinkable pilgrimage to his bedroom to intrude upon his hairbrushes placed exactly as he had left them, the bed unchanged since he had last slept in it, his cricket sweaters, the pipe he had never really learned to smoke, the odds and ends of his careless, contented youth. And no more than that, since manhood had been denied him, and she had killed him all over again by forgetting.