The Ashford Affair (30 page)

“Really?” said Frederick, but he looked not at Bea but at Addie.

“You know me,” said Bea flippantly. “I like a challenge. Oh, darling, do look over there. No, no, the other there. Did you see it? That was a rhino.”

Addie craned behind her to see. “I missed it. Do they come right up on the road?”

“When they think they can get away with it,” said Frederick. “They’ve had a time of it with the telegraph wires. The rhinos decided the poles made excellent scratching posts. They’d back up and rub against them. If that weren’t bad enough, the giraffe would wander through and get the wires tangled about their necks. It’s the devil of a nuisance when you’re trying to wire for supplies and a giraffe happens across the line.”

“Yes, I can see where that would pose a problem,” said Addie primly, trying to shift sideways. “Are there lions?”

“They tend to leave us alone if we leave them,” said Bea. “It’s the monkeys that are the true pests, snatching at everything and jabbering away with that endless jabber jabber jabber like a ladies’ sewing circle, you can’t imagine. And the hyenas! Foul things.”

“They seldom come near the house,” said Frederick. “Not anymore.”

“No, but you can hear them,” said Bea obstinately. “Late at night you can hear them laughing, like something out of Bedlam. They feed on the flesh of corpses. Not just animals, human corpses, too. You can hear them out there at night—laughing and waiting.”

Addie felt a chill down her spine despite the heat of the day. “Goodness. It sounds like something out of one of those horrid novels we used to read—do you remember?”

“Yes, but then we could close the book,” said Bea, and her voice sounded so forlorn that Addie looked at her in surprise, in surprise and pity. Bea hastily rallied, raising her voice to be heard over the motor. “Do you ever see Rosita and Geordie?”

“Rosita and—? Oh.” Taken aback at the complete non sequitur, Addie took a moment to figure out what Bea meant. They had been part of her old crew in those faraway nightclubbing days. Addie coughed on red road dust, wafting her hand in front of her face. “Not really, no. Our paths don’t really cross. I don’t go to the Ritz much these days.”

“I suppose it’s someplace new, then,” said Bea enviously. “It always is. What’s it like being one of the New Women, on your own in the fleshpots of London?”

“Fairly staid, actually,” said Addie, aware of Frederick next to her, although his eyes never left the road. “I go to a fair number of concerts—David is very musical—and plays and lectures. It would bore you to bits.”

“David is Addie’s intended,” said Bea over Addie’s head.

“Oh?” said Frederick.

“Frightfully brainy, too,” added Bea. “Isn’t he?”

Addie squirmed on her patch of seat. “He’s a lecturer at University College. Philosophy and Political Economy and all that sort of thing.”

“When is the wedding?” inquired Bea brightly.

“We haven’t set a date yet.” Realizing how it sounded, she added quickly, “What with David’s classes and my work—well, you know. I expect we’ll be married when I get back.”

“St. Margaret’s, Hanover Square?”

Addie laughed. “Nothing like that!” She tried to imagine David’s colleagues or her more bohemian friends at a society wedding in St. Margaret’s. The mind boggled. Funny to remember she had once dreamed of that, she and Bea both, clouds of tulle and orange flowers and small children to hold one’s train. Bea had said she would settle for nothing less than a marquess.… “It will be the registry office for us.”

Even that she had trouble picturing. She had no difficulty with the concept of marriage in the abstract, but it was as though she hit a dead end whenever she tried to imagine actually being married to David. Which was nonsense. He was very good to her; everyone said so. Good and kind.

And utterly boring.

Addie squelched the unworthy thought, hoping that no hint of it showed on her face.

Frederick turned his head briefly to look at her. “Congratulations,” he said. “I hope he’s worthy of you.”

She searched for the taint of mockery but didn’t find it. “Thank you,” she said guardedly.

“We must make sure you enjoy your last weeks of freedom,” said Bea. “You must suck every last drop out of life before we send you back to the matrimonial shackles, mustn’t we, darling?”

“Perhaps she doesn’t view it as a shackle,” suggested Frederick.

Bea ignored him. “We may be on the outer edge of nowhere, but we do still command some little society. Dina Hay’s parties are simply divvy—and not
all
of them are wicked,” she added with a sideways glance at her husband. “Just the amusing ones.”

Addie had heard something of those parties back in London. Garbled rumors had drifted home of cocaine-fueled orgies, random couplings in the drawing room, spousal swaps. “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” ran the phrase back home.

“Do you dine out a great deal?” Addie asked.

“The farms are too far apart. But there is Race Week. And we do have some
lovely
Saturday to Mondays.” Another one of those sidelong looks. “Frederick doesn’t like to leave the girls.”

“They’re very young,” said Frederick shortly, and pulled the car up by the side of the road at what, to Addie’s eyes, looked like nothing in particular. There was no sign of a house or even a track, just a river winding along one side of the road, fringed with reeds and tufts of papyrus. A few twisted trees thrust stubbornly up from the brown grass, blazing with flowers the color of sealing wax,

“Is there something wrong with the motor?” asked Addie with a dubious glance at that long lemon-yellow hood, now liberally streaked with red dust.

“Just the climate,” said Bea as Frederick collected a rusty can from the boot. “Everyone stops to water their cars here. It’s the heat. It’s hell on the engine. Not to mention the complexion. We might as well step out to stretch our legs,” she added. “We won’t have another stop until Ashford.”

Addie followed Bea out of the car, her London shoes sinking into the red dust as she stepped out. “It doesn’t seem to have touched yours,” she said. “The heat, I mean.”

“Really?” Bea looked genuinely pleased. “I feel like such an old hag these days, all dried out and shopworn.”

“You look lovely. Really. As beautiful as ever.” Frederick was already yards away, nearly to the stream. Lowering her voice, Addie said, “Are you all right?”

Bea turned away from her. “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m in raptures to see you. It’s been far too long. I should have had you out here years ago.”

Years ago, Addie would have had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to visit. As it was, the ticket for the ship over had strained her slim resources to the breaking point. David would have loaned her the money, if she’d asked—but she hadn’t wanted to ask. Not for this. This was her own private pilgrimage.

Bea plucked at a tall blade of grass with gloved fingers, shredding the brown stalk into smaller and smaller bits. “My mother didn’t send on a message with you, did she?” she asked with seeming carelessness.

“No.” Addie tried to keep her voice light. “It’s non-speakers, I’m afraid, ever since—you know.”

They had blamed her for Bea’s indiscretion, for introducing Frederick into the household. A cuckoo in the nest, Aunt Vera had called her, a scheming, ungrateful chit. All that and worse. She had been cut off without a penny and found herself, rather abruptly, scrabbling to make a life for herself. For the first time, she had felt truly an orphan.

If it hadn’t been for Fernie, she would have been on the street. As it was, Fernie had let her stay in her tiny bed-sit, had shared what she had while Addie embarked on the quest for employment. She’d had to leave
The Bloomsbury Review;
it didn’t have the money to pay her. She didn’t remember much of those first six months; it was all a blur of sticky typewriting machines and weak tea and rainy days. She hadn’t realized how very much she had taken for granted until she had lost it all.

“Oh,” said Bea. The light had gone out of her face. She looked, thought Addie, like a lithograph of herself. “I’d thought—never mind.”

Addie thought of Aunt Vera as she had seen her last, that last, awful interview, in the sterile sitting room from which all the pictures of Bea had been removed, expunged, as though Bea never was. And, yet, Addie was quite sure that Aunt Vera loved Bea, loved her more than Edward and Dodo put together. It was a strange sort of love, compounded of equal parts pride and ambition, but that was love as Aunt Vera understood it, and she had loved Bea, in her fashion, as fiercely as Pygmalion had loved his Galatea. Aunt Vera’s rage over what she perceived as Bea’s betrayal had been horrible to behold.

But, now, after all this time …

“Maybe if you wrote them?” ventured Addie.

Bea laughed, sharp and bitter. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? There’s been nothing back. I should have thought that by now—” She broke off as Frederick returned, replacing the empty can in the boot. “Heavens, that was speedy. Are we all watered and ready to go?”

Frederick held out a hand to help Addie into the car. “Ready for the final leg?” he said. “It’s not much farther now.”

“I don’t know how you can tell,” said Addie. “It all looks the same to me.”

The landscape seemed to stretch on forever, with brown grasses and twisted trees and the red road that twisted on and on. Even the sky looked different, larger. There was a vastness to it that was both exhilarating and daunting.

“I imagine the Kikuyu might feel the same way about Dorset,” said Frederick.

“Don’t be silly,” said Bea, and slipped around the other side of the car, planting herself firmly in front of the wheel. “No one dies in the desert in Dorset.”

“No one dies in the desert here.” Frederick took the seat on the other side of Addie. He didn’t dispute Bea’s possession of the wheel. “At least not this far south.”

“No, only of boredom,” said Bea, and started the car with a roar that sent a tiny antelope scurrying from the brush. Addie held on to the seat and watched as the scenery blurred past in a cloud of red dust and her cousin leaned low over the wheel, driving like someone fleeing demons.

They drove in awkward silence, the red dust billowing around them, until Frederick suddenly shouted, “Stop the car!”

There was a man running down the drive, holding his white robe up around his knees as he ran, the dust making little puffs around him. His white robe was streaked with red—not dust, Addie realized, but blood, and a lot of it.

Bea slammed on the brakes, the wheels skidding in a half circle that sent Addie careening into Frederick. His hands closed briefly around her shoulders. “Steady, there,” he said, and vaulted out of the car without bothering to open the door.

There was a flurry of words in a language Addie didn’t understand as the man in the robe began expostulating, his hands flying, his turban askew. Frederick’s face was grim. He interrupted to ask a terse question in the same language and then cursed, loudly, at the answer.

“What’s wrong?” Addie asked Bea in an undertone. “Is he hurt?”

“He’s all right,” said Bea, and Addie realized, with surprise, that she understood whatever it was the man was saying. It shouldn’t have surprised her; Bea had always been quick with languages. “It’s his son. There’s been an accident.” Raising her voice, she said, “Where’s Miss Platt?”

“Mbugwa says she’s taken the girls out on their ponies,” said Frederick. “They aren’t back yet.”

“Miss Platt is the girls’ nurse,” said Bea to Addie. “She deals with the scrapes and bruises. How bad is it?”

“He tried to hammer a detonator into an ornament,” said Frederick tersely. “You can imagine what happened. You’ll have to fetch Miss Platt back—or go for Mrs. Nimmo.”

“She’s gone to Nairobi. We’ll never get her back in time,” said Bea. “Not even with the car.”

“What about me?” Addie rose to her feet in the car, holding on to the dashboard for balance.

“Oh, darling, I’m so sorry,” said Bea. “I certainly didn’t mean for your arrival to be like this. But we can still—”

“No,” said Addie quickly. She could feel the blood thrumming through her veins, the heat and the light making her light-headed, the dry, peppery smell of the dust tickling her nose. “That’s not what I meant. What about me? I have some nursing experience. Let me help.”

SEVENTEEN

New York, 1999

“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman.”

There was a woman holding Clemmie’s hand pressed between hers. Clemmie had no idea who she was. Not that that was unusual. Clemmie had been hugged, kissed, and cooed over by a whole series of strangers over the past hour, in knit suits smelling of mothballs and Chanel No. 5, and golf-ball pearls that hurt when they hugged her.

“Thank you,” said Clemmie. There was no point in asking the woman’s name or how she had known Granny Addie. Hers not to ask why, hers simply to press hands, murmur thanks, and feign smiles.

“They don’t make them like her anymore,” said the woman, shaking her teased head. And then, as an afterthought, “Happy New Year, dear.”

Seriously? How happy did she think it was going to be?

Clemmie gritted her teeth and held her tongue. She couldn’t take it out on this poor woman. She wasn’t the one who had made the idiot decision to hold a funeral on New Year’s Eve day on the eve of a new millennium, with half the world out partying and the other half huddled in bunkers, waiting for the apocalypse. In the mood Clemmie was in, she would take the bunker.

“You, too,” she said gruffly. “Happy New Year.”

Through the half-open windows in the living room, Clemmie could already hear the revelers gearing up for the night’s festivities. It was only four, but the sky was already orange and purple. The black branches of the bare trees above the wall of the park stood out in sharp relief against the orange sky.

“She’ll be missed,” said a man in a gray suit, crunching Clemmie’s hand.

“Thank you,” said Clemmie demurely.

That was the only way to manage, she knew, to tuck the part of herself that thought and felt away in a drawer and let the remaining shell murmur the commonplaces people expected to hear. Somewhere, locked away, the real Clemmie was curled up in a ball, whimpering, but Robo-Clemmie stood at the living room door in a black sheath dress, calmly shaking hands and accepting condolences, every hair in place and mascara unsmudged.