Summer at the Lake (12 page)

Any reservations Esme had previously experienced about her guests not enjoying her tea party were quickly dispelled when she took them through to the dining room with their glasses of mulled wine.

‘How wonderful!’ Floriana cried when she saw the table. ‘But you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.’

‘Well, since I have, let’s make the most of it. I know it’s not politically correct these days to suggest such a thing, but I’m feeling subversive so, Adam, would you like to sit at the head of the table? And Floriana, you sit opposite me. There now, that’s perfect. And if Euridice bothers you, take no nonsense, just push her firmly out of the way. Ah, Adam, I see she’s made a beeline straight for you.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, as Euridice planted herself next to his chair and stared devotedly up at him. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘I want to know why she never comes to me,’ Floriana said.

Esme gave her a playful look. ‘I think she likes Adam because he has such a quiet and calming aura about him.’

Floriana laughed. ‘Are you saying I’m too noisy for her?’

‘Lively is the word I would use, my dear; energy bounces off you at every turn. Wouldn’t you agree, Adam?’

Adam raised his hands. ‘I’m saying nothing.’

‘Forever the solicitous diplomat,’ Esme said, passing round plates of food. ‘So tell me what your plans are for Christmas.’

Floriana groaned. ‘Adam, you go first, I need to eat something before I can stomach the idea of describing the hell that will be my Christmas
chez
Brown.’

Esme gave Adam a wink. ‘I believe you’ve been given permission to speak. If I were you I’d grab the chance while you can.’

Helping himself to a smoked salmon blini, he said, ‘It’s the standard family Christmas for me, at home in Thame. My brother will be there as well.’

‘And do the two of you get on?’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘Is he married?’

‘No, he has a worse track record with women than me.’

Esme tutted. ‘This is a Christmas tea party, not a pity party, so we’ll have none of that talk, Adam. Come the new year I predict things will change for you, and for the better.’

Floriana laughed heartily. ‘See, Adam, we were right, she is a witch!’

‘I think you’ll find it was you who reached that conclusion,’ he said with a frown.

‘Ooh, how ungallant of you!’

Amused, Esme said, ‘My dear girl, what on earth put the idea into your heads that I have supernatural powers?’

‘Because you have this sneaky knack for getting information out of us while revealing hardly anything of yourself.’

‘Glory be, I had no idea I was the subject of such marvellous speculation! I feel flattered. But I assure you; I’m nothing more than a harmless old lady who asks too many questions. Sausage roll, anyone?’

‘See!’ cried Floriana. ‘That’s how you do it, you distract us with questions of your own!’

‘Then I shall cease doing so at once and answer any question you put to me. Who wants to go first?’

Adam looked at Floriana and made an eloquent gesture of ‘over to you’ with his hand.

‘Well,’ Floriana said, her gaze settling on the painting above the fireplace, ‘is that you?’

‘Indeed it is.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Tell us more. When was it painted? How old were you and who did it? Was it your father?’

The painting marked a turning point in Esme’s life. For her father as well.

Five months before Esme’s eighteenth birthday, her mother died quite unexpectedly of a heart attack. Most people had thought she would live for ever, if only to vex those around her.

Violet Silcox – née Bradbury – had not been a happy woman. The only daughter of a Nottinghamshire engineer who’d made his money in mining machinery, she had been brought up to believe that she was a great beauty with the world at her feet. The truth was, she was no such thing and despite her parents’ ambitious intentions for her to marry into a family of greater wealth and position than their own, she failed to attract the slightest interest. But then along came William Silcox, a gentle, quiet-mannered man who worked for her father as a patent lawyer, a man who was trusted and liked by both her parents. Younger than Violet by four years, he didn’t stand a chance when she decided at the age of thirty-two he was the man she wanted to marry – it was him or the shame of spinsterhood stretching out before her. He came with none of the wealth and position her parents had dreamt of for their daughter, but instead they saw a presentable and well-educated man who would cause them no trouble as a malleable son-in-law and who could at least make Violet happy and provide them with grandchildren.

But William couldn’t make Violet happy. No one could. Especially not Esme when she was born two years after her parents had wed and moved into Hillside, a stern Victorian house some three miles from where Violet had grown up at Abbey Vale.

Knowing how much it would please her father, Violet had badly wanted a boy, and she was so convinced she was going to produce a son that when she was told she was the mother of a fine baby girl, she had refused to believe it. ‘But it can’t be!’ she had screamed hysterically at the midwife and doctor in the high-handed manner she had been brought up to treat anyone she considered unequal to her in social standing. She had no sense of how ridiculously she was behaving and cared little that the cook and maid downstairs could hear her every word and would soon be relaying it round the village, its apocryphal echoes reaching Esme’s ears when she was old enough to understand what people said of the goings-on at Hillside and the derision in which her mother was held.

When war broke out in 1939, Esme was eight years old and of an age to know the implications: that her father might have to go and fight and never come back. But her father was deemed unfit – a legacy of his childhood, part of which had been spent in a sanatorium being treated for TB.

Most wives would be relieved that their husbands wouldn’t be at risk, that they could instead throw themselves into the war effort at home, but not so Violet. She wanted to be married to a hero, better still a dead one, as she had actually said on one occasion to William in a fit of petulant temper when yet again he came home late from work – Bradbury Mining Tools was now producing machinery for the war effort and the workshops were running twenty-four hours a day; it was all hands on deck. ‘What are you doing there that’s so important?’ she’d demanded. ‘You’re only a lawyer!’

Just as motherhood had proved to be a bitter disappointment to Violet, marriage was not what she had thought it would be. She had perhaps imagined something more akin to her parents’ marriage. Her father, who she adored above all else, was a tall powerful man who asserted himself as charismatic master of the house and was forever indulging his wife and daughter with whatever they desired. But the qualities Violet had once admired in her fiancé – kindness and gentleness and an artistic temperament – she now took to be signs of embarrassing weakness in a husband.

More embarrassment came when towards the end of the war Violet’s adored father was accused of profiteering from it. The accusations were not made outright, not at the start, but after William resigned from the firm and initially refused to say why, rumour and gossip quickly gained momentum, and before long the family was shunned in public. Violet held her husband solely responsible for people turning against them. William defended his actions saying that he simply couldn’t continue working for her father when he knew what was going on. ‘So a person makes one little mistake and you can’t forgive them?’ she railed.

‘I have to live with my conscience,’ he said.

From a young age Esme had become adept at listening in to the conversations between her parents, though in truth it didn’t take any stealth to eavesdrop as more often than not her mother’s condescending tone was raised and clarion-clear for all to hear.

By the time the war was over, so too, to all intents and purposes, was the marriage. Esme’s father wanted a divorce but for his daughter’s sake he couldn’t bring himself to go through with it. Moreover, Violet had warned him that she would never agree to anything that would bring further shame on the family. She also threatened that she would never allow William to see Esme if he tried to leave her. It seemed that a marriage in name only for Violet was better than no marriage at all.

An impasse reached, Esme’s father spent longer and longer hours at the firm he now worked for and it was only at the weekend when Esme saw him. But that time together was precious to her, and to him as well. They were as close as they were each distant to Violet, who never showed more than a passing interest in Esme’s well-being; what interest she did show was merely to criticise and correct. The only person Violet cared about was herself and she started to feed her self-absorption, quite literally, gaining weight at an alarming rate by gorging herself on mountains of food, particularly anything sweet.

When Violet’s mother died of a stroke and then six months later her father was killed in a shooting accident – some said it was suicide with the cloud of rumours still hanging over him – she took up with a new circle of friends and became obsessed with the spirit world. She would hold regular seances at Hillside, desperate to make contact with her dead father and mother. All the while her mental state was visibly unravelling and her mood swings intensified.

One evening Esme’s father came home from work to find that every single one of his paintings he kept in his studio in the garden had been slashed. But not a word did he say. Which Esme knew had infuriated her mother and she taunted him cruelly, saying he wasn’t man enough to react or stand up to her.

She had frequently dismissed him as a third-rate amateur, talentless and lacking in originality, and this spiteful destruction was a culmination of that growing disdain, and jealousy. Unrepentant at what she’d done, she told him his style was so disgustingly sentimental it made her skin crawl and that she had done him a favour in ridding the world of such nauseating tosh. His only comment had been to ask her what kind of mother could slash paintings of her own daughter?

An unhinged mother was the answer, but who in their household was brave enough to say it?

Esme’s father didn’t paint again until several months after Violet’s sudden death. The first painting he did was the portrait he gave Esme on her eighteenth birthday. It was after he’d shown it to her that he said he wanted to talk to her.

He invited her to go out to the garden with him and with her arm linked through his, he said, ‘We’ve never discussed money before, but, as you know, and despite all the advice she was given, your mother didn’t ever get around to making a will. That being the case, everything comes to me. And by that, I mean it comes to
us.
But I’m sure you had already worked that out for yourself.’

Esme had nodded, unsure where this was going.

‘So what I propose, now that the legal side of things has been sorted out, is that we leave this ghastly house and everything associated with it and move somewhere of our own choosing, somewhere we can start afresh and be happy.’

She had smiled at that. ‘That sounds perfect. But why do I feel that isn’t all you have in mind to tell me?’

He had returned her smile and she had thought how good it was to see him smile more often, now that they were free of the tyranny of her mother. ‘That’s very astute of you,’ he said, ‘but then I should have expected nothing less. How would you feel about postponing going up to Oxford and coming on an adventure with me?’

For so long gaining her place at Oxford to read English had been Esme’s dream, but putting her trust in her father, she said, ‘What sort of adventure?’

‘No! You can’t stop there; you have to tell us what happened next. What was the adventure?’

A little surprised with herself that she had gone into such detail, Esme reached for her long-forgotten glass of mulled wine, which was now cold. ‘My dear, surely you don’t want to listen to me prattling on any more?’

‘We do! We do!’ Floriana enthused exuberantly. ‘Don’t we, Adam?’

Adam nodded his agreement. ‘But only if you want to tell us more,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should give you a chance to have something to eat first, you’ve barely touched a thing, unlike us.’

‘Good idea,’ Floriana said, quickly picking up a plate of smoked salmon blinis and offering it to Esme. ‘A good raconteur marches on its stomach, after all.’

Esme laughed. ‘Very well,’ she acquiesced, ‘but while I eat, you must tell me why you’re now going to your sister’s for Christmas when I’m sure you previously mentioned you were hoping to avoid such an arrangement.’

Floriana let out her breath in one long weary sigh. ‘As usual, it was my own fault and I should have acted sooner, but, tipped off by my sister that I’d turned her down, Mum and Dad phoned me to ask who I was spending Christmas with. I never have been able to lie to them, not convincingly anyway, and I ended up throwing in the towel and agreeing to go to my sister’s after all.’

‘So why will it be so awful?’ Esme asked.

‘Because without Mum and Dad on hand to rein Ann in, I shall be endlessly bossed about and reminded that it’s time I grew up and found myself a proper job. Not only that, Ann will try to fix me up with her husband’s brother, a nice enough man if you go for the ultra-mature type, but he couldn’t be more wrong for me.’

Not without sympathy for Floriana, Esme said, ‘Why does your sister think being an Oxford tour guide isn’t a proper job?’

‘In her opinion I’ve wasted my education and squandered it on something that doesn’t stretch me enough or have any real prospects.’

‘And what does she do that makes her so superior to you?’ asked Adam.

‘She works in the HR department of a large insurance firm and, of course, runs her home and two children like clockwork. Everything runs perfectly in Ann’s world. I’m talking about a woman who irons her dishcloths!’

‘What? You don’t iron your dishcloths?’ Adam said with a deadpan expression, passing Esme the plate of vol-au-vents. ‘But I thought everyone did.’