The House at Tyneford (25 page)

As it had the previous summer, Kit’s arrival woke up the household. We’d all become dreary and reconciled to our shabbiness over the dull winter, but Kit’s presence rushed warmth into every corner. As well as Diana, he’d brought Juno and a couple of chaps from college. While she helped me wash up the tea things, Mrs. Ellsworth complained that young Mr. Kit couldn’t go nowhere without a crowd. I said nothing and dunked a floral teacup in the soapsuds, but I suspected that he was eager to avoid those long hours alone with his father. It was always better when there was an Eddie or a Teddy or a George to prevent those awkward tête-à-têtes of mutual disappointment.

On his first evening at home, Kit lumbered into the great hall with Art and Burt, lugging half a tree among the three of them. Ignoring Mrs. Ellsworth’s cries of concern for the polished floor, or Mr. Wrexham’s fears that the chimney had not been swept these forty years, he stoked up a roaring bonfire in the massive stone grate. The chimney drew just fine, and the crackling hulk of oak sent tongues of heat rushing through the house. At Kit’s insistence, we all gathered in front of the blaze, staff as well as ladies and gentlemen. Kit doled out glasses of pink gin to everyone and, as we sipped, the room, with its damp limestone plaster and spotted wallpaper, was transfigured into snug magnificence. Even Mr. Wrexham smiled and patted my arm. Mr. Rivers and Kit brought out the old gramophone from the drawing room into the hall, and everybody, servants and society girls, danced to Cole Porter as the fire roared. The ladies and gentlemen danced on one side of the panelled hall and the staff on the other. I hesitated in the darkness beneath a portrait of a sallow-skinned chap in a frock coat. I couldn’t dance. Not here, not after last time. Kit bobbed with Juno, while Diana danced with Mr. Rivers. I smiled at the spectacle and sniffed at my pink gin.

“Will you do me the honour?” said Mr. Wrexham with a kind smile.

I was so grateful, I could have wept. We moved to where Mrs. Ellsworth stood up with Burt and Henry bopped with May. It all felt rather jolly and Twelfth-Nightish. The telephone in Mr. Rivers’ library began to ring, and Mr. Wrexham excused himself to answer it. He returned a few minutes later and confided something to Mr. Rivers. Mr. Rivers listened gravely and spoke a few words to the butler, who then glided over to the gramophone and lifted off the needle, so that the music stuttered into silence. There were disgruntled objections from the ladies and gentlemen, who continued dancing for a beat or two, until Mr. Rivers held up his hand for quiet.

“My estate manager has telephoned. He has just heard on the wireless that Hitler has invaded Czechoslovakia.”

There was a pause, an intake of breath, and then an explosion of chatter. Diana hung onto Kit’s arm while Mrs. Ellsworth clasped May’s pudgy hand, her face quite white. Mr. Rivers slipped away to the library, and I followed him. He stood with his back to me, fiddling with the tuning on the wireless.

“Mr. Rivers? Were you able to help us?”

He jumped when he heard my voice.

“Christ. Don’t creep up on a man like that. It’s uncanny.”

I shrugged. “Mr. Wrexham usually complains I’m a galumpher.”

He gave a tight smile and sat down in his battered chair, pouring the pink gin into a potted plant beside the window and helping himself to whisky from the decanter.

“It’s not as easy as you might think, Elise. They really don’t like your father’s books in Austria, or in Berlin for that matter. The bribe is heftier than I could ever have imagined.”

I felt oddly calm. The world grew quiet around me, while at the same time I could hear the rhythmic tick-tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, a deep echo of the smaller one in our Viennese apartment. I smelled Hildegard’s cooking: roasting lamb fat and celery salt as her meatballs wrapped in white cabbage leaves sizzled in the oven. I listened to the twin clocks beating two sets of time, and I heard my voice say, “But Mr. Freud—they hated his books and they let him go.”

Mr. Rivers sighed. “Yes. But Mr. Freud is very famous outside of Austria. Your father has fewer friends.”

I remembered Anna’s pearls. “I still have a necklace. I can sell it.”

Mr. Rivers took a gulp of whisky. “It won’t do any good. I’m talking thousands of reichsmarks.”

Before I could speak, the gentlemen surged into the library, Diana and Juno following in their wake, filling the room with bustle and noise.

“Shall we listen, then, my good fellow?” said Eddie, though it may have been George. Kit thumped the wireless and the tolling of Big Ben came over the airwaves.

“I feel quite sick,” declared Juno. “I suppose there’ll have to be a war now. One does think that they could sort it out between them without bringing us into it all.”

“Does anyone have a cigarette?” asked Diana, sinking onto the window seat.

I looked back at Mr. Rivers and, seeing him swarmed with people, realised our conversation was finished. I didn’t need to hear the news on the wireless. I slid out of the room and into the now empty hall. Mr. Wrexham was clearing the empty glasses. He stopped when he saw me.

“It’s past midnight. You may retire if you wish.”

I had not been asked to act as lady’s maid to Diana and Juno on this visit. To our mutual relief, I suspected.

“Thank you, Mr. Wrexham.”

I hastened along the servants’ corridor and up the back stairs to my attic room. I lay in the darkness listening to the constant rush of the sea. Thousands of reichsmarks. Thousands. I whispered the words aloud again and again, as though I could conjure such a sum out of the night. The house was still and full of sleepers. I padded through the silent hall and into the library. I scanned the bookshelves and, finding what I wanted, reached up and drew down
The Spinsters’ Dowry
by Julian Landau before creeping into the drawing room. The curtains were open and the moon filled the room with cold light, bright enough to read by. I sat cross-legged on the floor, the book open on my lap. It was not my favourite of Julian’s novels and Anna actively disliked it, complaining it was unkind. That was why I wanted it with me tonight. With this book in my hands, I could hear my parents row. The three virgin spinsters were the great-aunts. Julian described them in cruel detail, down to the single hair sprouting from the round mole on Gretta’s chin. Only, in the book she was called Gertrude. Julian insisted that the aunts were transformed by fiction and that Gretta, Gerda and Gabrielle (real life) had nothing to do with Gertrude, Grunhilda and Griselda (novel). Anna and the aunts remained unconvinced. When Julian attempted to justify himself over coffee and Sacher torte, Gretta grumbled that she did not wish for her wart to be immortalised for eternity. After the aunts withdrew, dignity wounded, a fight echoed through the apartment. To Margot’s and my tremendous delight, Anna threw a series of Meissen plates at Julian. We cheered her on from around the nursery door, wondering if she’d succeed in hitting and killing him—“Do you think we shall be orphans? Will Mama wear lipstick in prison?” It was terribly thrilling.

I had understood Anna’s and the aunts’ fury—they were not angered by Julian’s lies but by his honesty. He ought not to have stolen from life, but tonight I was grateful he had. As I shivered on the floor in the drawing room of an English country house a thousand miles from Vienna, I could see my aunts in the pages of the book. They smiled up at me, offering me sugar biscuits and grumbling over the supercilious waiters at Café Sperl. I have no photographs of the aunts, and so they seem almost characters from a children’s story—a clutch of creased fairy godmothers, fond of linzer torte and nieces—not quite belonging to the modern world. Yet they are preserved between the pages of Julian’s novel like the crushed wings of a butterfly.

That night I read for hours, pretending I was among my family. Julian and Anna lazed on the sofa, Anna resting her blond head in his lap.

“I wouldn’t have come here, if I’d known you’d be stuck,” I said, frowning at them.

Anna smiled. “What would you have done, little Bean? Sat and fretted with us?”

I shifted on the floor. “We are all supposed to be in New York. It isn’t supposed to happen this way.”

The vision of my mother was unchanged: the same tiny crease between her eyes, the same half smile.

“I hope the novel in the viola is about you and me and Margot. Only in the book we’ll be much more glamorous. I’ll be thinner and two inches taller. Margot will be just the same. Julian will sport a twirling moustache and you will wear ankle boots and smoke cigarillos. And Kit—”

“But we don’t know Kit,” said Julian.

No, you don’t, I thought and the mirage vanished like mist in sunshine. I would have to be up in a few hours to light the fires and clean the house. I struggled to my feet and began to pace up and down the drawing room, trying to exhaust myself so that I could sleep. Perhaps I should start to clean now—then at least some of it would be done in the morning. I fished a handkerchief out of my pyjama pocket and started to dab at the picture frames. I worked my way around the mantelpiece, wafting the cloth at the miniature portraits: frocked ladies with high collars and lace caps, men in wigs and regimentals, a wide-eyed beauty with dazzling décolletage, her powdered wig set with pearls. I moved to the Turner seascape, ready to flick dust from its gilt edges, but the painting was gone. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Wasn’t it always here? I ached with tiredness and my mind felt doughy and unclear. Yes. The Turner hung on this wall, far enough away from the fire that it didn’t get smoke damage, and out of the sunlight that streamed in through the southerly windows. Without a doubt, the painting had gone.

I sat on a baize sofa and stared at the empty wall. It wasn’t like the bare walls in our Vienna apartment; when I thought of those I raged with unhappiness. This was different. Hope nudged inside me. The painting wasn’t lost or stolen or rehung in another part of the house. Mr. Rivers had sold it. He was going to help us. Anna and Julian were coming to Tyneford.

A
t six o’clock the following morning, I slipped into Kit’s bedroom. It was warm enough that the gentlemen no longer had fires lit in their rooms—ladies such as Diana and Juno would insist upon them in blazing June. I was quite safe, but I locked the door just to be certain. The room held a sharp scent of sweat and cigarettes. Kit lay sprawled in the large white bed, a foot poking out from beneath the blankets, his blond head half hidden beneath a pile of pillows. I listened for a moment to the rhythmic sound of his breathing and tiptoed across to the window and peeked out across the striped lawns toward the hill. An early morning haar rolled down the valley, thick as smoke. The sun glowed through, a gold coin in a shroud. With a flick, I flung open the curtains wide and bright light spilled into the room, shining on the figure in the bed. I stepped back from the window, in case Mr. Wrexham or anyone should happen to be walking in the gardens.

“Kit.”

He didn’t stir.

“Kit.”

Nothing.

I sat on the bed and reached out to touch a bare arm lightly dusted with pale hair. My fingertips brushed warm skin. “Kit.” A hand clasped my wrist and drew me onto the bed.

“Fancy meeting you here,” said Kit, suddenly wide awake. He pulled me closer. “This isn’t very wise, you know. If I decided to be wicked, you couldn’t really object.”

He scrutinised me for a moment and then yawned. “Don’t suppose you brought tea and aspirin by any chance.”

I ignored him and tried to sit up, but he kept a firm grasp on my wrist and I was forced to turn my head, so that I was lying beside him, his face only an inch from mine.

“Kit. Tell me it’s true. That Mr. Rivers has sold the painting. That he’s really going to help Anna and Julian.”

He released me and propped himself up on the pillows and stared out over the green lawns.

“Well, it’s not been sold yet. He wanted to make sure I didn’t mind. My inheritance and whatnot.”

“And do you mind?”

Kit didn’t answer. He bent over me and kissed me on the lips, his fingers curving around the back of my neck, pulling me in to him. And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Anna or Julian, only Kit. He bit my lip and I cried out, although it did not hurt. He smiled down at me.

“I love you, you know. I suppose I oughtn’t. I ought to love Diana or one of those girls who’s frightfully dull and frightfully rich. But I don’t. I love you.”

I stared at him. No one apart from my mother had ever said those words to me. And I had always imagined that when somebody did, the words would be spoken in German, not English. To my ear, they sounded new. I’d never been to an English cinema and I never listened to Mrs. Ellsworth’s love-struck plays on the wireless. I’d read Kit’s romance novels, but I’d never heard the words said aloud. The first time was when he said them to me.

“We’ll get them here, I promise you, Elise,” he whispered. “If I have to go to Austria myself and carry their bags, I will get them to Tyneford.”

He gazed down at me, blue eyes wide and guileless as a child’s. He was so certain, and whenever I looked at him, I was certain too. I slid my hands into his golden hair and kissed him.

“I love you.”

I tried the words in English. They tasted strangely exotic in my mouth and yet, in a way, detached from their meaning. I tried again in German.

Kit laughed, a throaty chuckle. “Say that again. I like it.”

Before I could, the door handle rattled.

“Mr. Kit, sir, would you be so good as to unlock this door?” called Mr. Wrexham.

I sat up in horror, bumping Kit on the forehead in my haste.

“He knows I am here,” I hissed, springing off the bed.

Kit shrugged and reached for his silver cigarette case. “Probably. Wrexham knows everything. Damn fine butler. Old school.”