The Marrying Game (4 page)

‘You will get over Jonathan, you know. You can’t marry without love, Ru. You’d have a nervous
breakdown
. Nancy would get by – she can persuade herself to fall in love at the drop of a hat – but not you. Strange as it seems for any daughter of mine, you’re too refined.’ Rose leaned forward, to put her crowning point more forcefully. ‘You’d have to sleep with this rich husband of yours, I presume.’

There was a pause, during which Rufa stared at the fire, through the open door of the range. She said, ‘I’d sleep with Godzilla, to get us all out of this mess.’

Rose winced at this naked reminder of the ‘mess’ they were trying to ignore. ‘Darling, we will make out, you know. It won’t be such a tragedy. The Man went on about the house, and the family history – but nobody can take away the history, and we’ll only be living like millions of others.’

Rufa’s blue gaze did not waver. ‘It means too much to let go. I can’t do it.’

‘You’re young,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t set out to bugger up your life.’ She stood up, and took a bottle of red wine off the dresser. Deftly, she plucked out the cork and found two bleary glasses. ‘Apart from anything else, you’d have to meet some rich men first.’

‘We’d need to be in London,’ Rufa murmured. ‘We must get to London.’

‘Oh, God – is Chekhov writing our scripts again? I preferred Benny Hill.’ Rose took a deep gulp of wine, like a dose of medicine.

‘And we’d need to buy some decent clothes.’

‘Wake up, lovey. With what? Not one of us has a bean.’

‘Nancy and I could be the first wave,’ Rufa went on. ‘We’d think of it as one of the Man’s games – the Marrying Game.’

‘Marriage is not a game.’

‘And we could stay with Wendy. I’m sure she’d have us.’

Wendy Withers had been their nanny. She had put up with the state of the house, and the irregularity of her wages, because she had been hopelessly in love with the Man. They had enjoyed one of his brief, intense affairs, and she had followed him home on the strength of it. The girls had loved her, and Rose had become very fond of her. When, after five years, Wendy had left to make room for some Balinese dancers, both women had wept. Rose was impressed that Rufa had carried her idea this far.

‘You’re right, she’d be thrilled to have you.’

Rufa was planning. ‘I can get a few thousand for the car, and we might squeak by.’ Her forehead wrinkled anxiously. ‘Linnet would have to walk to school, though. And how would you get to the shops? Perhaps it isn’t worth the risk.’

The fire, sunk into sullen red embers, turned her auburn hair the colour of the wine. Its light fell golden against her cheek. She was so beautiful, Rose thought. And she was wasting her life here, because the Man had made her promise to stay for ever.

‘Take a risk,’ she said impulsively. ‘For once in your life, do something silly. I’d hate you to be unhappy, darling – but your Marrying Game is the soundest bloody idea I’ve heard in ages.’

Rufa was startled. The two women stared at each other, intrigued.

The moment of unexpected intimacy was broken by the sound of the front door opening ponderously, with a creak like Dracula’s coffin lid. A tuneless tenor voice sang out:

‘We are not daily beggars,

That come from door to door;

We are your neighbours’ children,

Whom you have seen before!’

‘Oh, it’s Ran,’ Rose said, smiling and rolling her eyes. ‘Quick, think of something else to throw in the soup, or it’ll never stretch.’

Rufa stood up, mentally shelving her Marrying Game. ‘A plimsoll?’

‘Can’t you spare a potato?’

‘You were telling me to get real a second ago,’ Rufa said. ‘There’s no such thing as a spare potato round here.’

The massive, veined door that joined the Great Hall to the kitchen opened, and frigid air whipped into the smoky warmth. Roger came in, unzipping the Man’s old Barbour. He was a pale, weedy man of thirty-five. His hairline was in fluffy retreat on the dome of his forehead, and a thin brown ponytail hung between his shoulder blades. The main fact of Roger’s life – all you needed to know about him – was that he had loved Rose for ten years, and would love her devotedly until he died. He exuded benign calm, and brought an exotic tang of common sense into the household. Despite his surroundings, Roger was quietly and persistently normal.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said affably. ‘Ran wouldn’t let me leave him on his own, so I brought him with me.’

‘Another mouth to feed,’ Rose said, ‘but I can’t find it in my heart to protest. That boy’s love life is as good as the telly.’

Ran sprang into the room, jostling Roger aside. ‘Merry Christmas, girls.’ He dropped a damp sack on the table, and darted forward to kiss Rose and Rufa. ‘God, it’s cold.
Give
me a drink.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ Rose said. ‘There’s a long waiting list for this wine.’

Ran was another one, she thought, who was allowing outrageous good looks to rust away in this rural backwater. He was wearing a tie-dyed waistcoat and silly embroidered hat, but his beauty shone through them. His eyes and his thick, shoulder-length hair were dark and lustrous against his parchment skin. Linnet’s batty young father had the face of a Renaissance angel.

‘It’s really nice of you to have me,’ he said, fixing Rose and Rufa with his poignant gaze. ‘I know how tight things are, so I didn’t come empty-handed. I brought a carload of logs, plus the onions I couldn’t shift at the Farmers’ Market.’

Rufa examined the sack on the table. ‘Brilliant. The soup now has stretching possibilities.’

Ran was looking around hopefully. ‘Where’s Linnet?’

‘Upstairs. Liddy’s putting her to bed.’

‘And if you get her into one of her states,’ Rose put in sternly, ‘you’ll be the one responsible for getting her to sleep.’

Ran asked, ‘Couldn’t she stay up for supper?’

‘No, we’re far too knackered. Roger, make yourself useful. Roll us a joint.’

‘Hmmm. Better not,’ Roger said. He lowered his voice. ‘We’ve got Edward with us.’

Rose groaned softly. ‘Can’t he find someone else to lecture?’

Rufa glanced up from the onions she was slicing. ‘Don’t, Mum. He’s only trying to be kind.’

‘I suppose so. But if only he could unclench himself, just for one evening.’

Edward Reculver, whose farm abutted Ran’s doomed acres, was Rufa’s godfather, and the family’s most persevering friend. The Reculvers had farmed this corner of Gloucestershire for centuries, and had fallen out with the Hastys at the time of the Civil War. The Hastys had been Royalists, while the Reculvers were for Parliament. Though the ancient quarrel was only a historical curiosity when Edward Reculver was growing up beside the Man, he still looked like a grizzled Leveller beside Hasty’s curled cavalier. Curiously, this Roundhead had been the Man’s closest male friend.

He had criticized the Man without mercy, but the Man had respected him as a kind of offshore conscience, and listened to his strait-laced views with detached interest. Reculver inhabited a solitary, misanthropic world of speckless neatness and austerity. He grew herbs, recycled every scrap, and was the last being on earth to darn without irony. All kinds of abundance made him suspicious.

He had not always been like this. Until six years ago, he had been an officer in the army. His farm had been let, and he had made occasional, dramatic drops into the lives of the Hasty children, to treat them to a circus or pantomime. Rufa vividly remembered, throughout her childhood, Edward’s returns, tanned and inscrutable, from various exotic hotspots. He had been decorated after the Falklands War, and had a small scar on his upper arm, where a sniper’s bullet had nicked him in Bosnia.

Rufa admired Edward, and had always been slightly in awe of him. She had assumed, as everyone did, that he was a soldier to the ends of his fingers. It had felt strange at first, when he left the army, to have him nearby all the
time
. The Man had often wondered what made him leave. When feeling uncharitable, he would say, ‘Edward knew he’d never make Colonel. He’s too bolshy for his own good.’ In a kinder frame of mind, however, he would sigh, and say, ‘Poor old Edward, he left the army because his heart was broken. He still can’t live without her.’

In the fifteen years since the death of his wife, Edward had been in gradual retreat from the world. Rufa vaguely remembered Alice: a quiet, fair woman who had looked slightly away in photographs, so that she could never be recalled completely. They had been childless, and Edward had made no move to marry again. Unlike the Man, he could apparently live without romance. His life seemed to have left the road and run aground.

After the death of the Man, Edward had taken a dim view of the continued chaos and squalor at Melismate. Between lectures, however, he showered the Hastys with kindness. The Man had died owing him large sums of money, which he never mentioned. He had done the clearing up after the Man’s death, when no-one else could bear to. When Selena broke her ankle falling off her bicycle, he had driven her to school every morning in his Land Rover. Selena had not been grateful. As Rose said, there was something faintly punitive about Edward’s favours. He wanted them to face reality, and they had different ideas about what reality actually was.

Rose stood up crossly. ‘I know he’s only trying to be kind,’ she muttered, refilling her wine glass. ‘That’s the awful part – why is it so easy to resent someone who’s trying to be kind? And the poor soul won’t see much Christmas cheer round at his place.’

She stopped abruptly. Reculver was in the doorway. He looked gravely at Rufa and Rose, then gazed around
the
room. His gaze seemed to throw a lurid, pitiless light upon saucers brimming with dog-ends, pooh-coloured sugar lumps, and the anaemic pan of soup on the range.

‘Hello,’ he said.

He never kissed anyone, but Rufa made a point of crossing the room to kiss his cheek. He was her godfather, after all; and she minded more than the others about not being grateful enough. Reculver was a tall, lean man aged somewhere in the forties. Officially he had been a good few years younger than the Man, but age is a state of mind, and Edward had allowed his flamboyant neighbour to treat him as an elder statesman. He had a close-cropped beard of iron grey. His thick hair was also iron grey; he had it mowed short at the barber’s every market day. He was very handsome, though this was never what people noticed first.

‘Edward,’ Rose said wearily, ‘what a nice surprise.’

Reculver did not waste words. ‘Find some dry clothes, or that man will die of pneumonia.’

‘Man?’ Rose echoed, ‘what man?’

Reculver looked over his shoulder. ‘Come in – it’s marginally warmer.’

He stood aside, to admit a stranger. The stranger wore a suit and tie, and city shoes. He was soaking wet, and plastered with stiffening mud.

‘Oh yes, this is Berry,’ Ran said carelessly. ‘He was at school with me.’

Berry was a round, rosy young man, with startled deer’s eyes behind designer glasses.

‘Hector Berowne,’ he said. And, as an afterthought, ‘Hello.’

Chapter Three

HECTOR BEROWNE HAD
no idea, as he drove his new BMW through the frost-bound lanes, that he was about to slip into another dimension. He had assumed that he was heading for a mellow farmhouse – all inglenooks and golden stone – which he and his fiancée, Polly, had rented for the holiday at huge expense.

‘Good King Whatsit pom-pom-pom,’ he sang to himself.

Berry had a gift for contentment. The vexations of work fell away from him, as he dwelt on the delights to come. His parents, with whom he would normally have spent the holiday, were away visiting diplomatic friends in Bermuda. His City office was behind him, for two whole weeks. No more getting up at a quarter to six. No more being too exhausted for sex. And he still loved the anticipation of Christmas Eve. Log fires and claret – the whole world holding its breath at midnight – he knew for a fact it would be perfect.

Polly had started drawing circles round country lets in September, and had spent the past six weeks ordering hams, ironing sheets and breaking in new corduroys. Polly, whom Berry had loved comfortably since their final year at Oxford, was very big on the Correct Thing – drawing rooms and napkins, circling port and no
yellow
flowers in the garden. She tended to be a little neurotic about the social face she presented to the world. Her obsession with the Edwardian trappings of perfect gentility was too iron-clad to be dismissed as mere snobbery. She marinaded herself in graciousness, to obscure the regrettable fact that her parents were Australian. You could talk of high-bred diggers and colonial aristocracy, but, to Polly, it was almost as bad as being secretly Welsh.

Berry knew, from past experience, that his Christmas would resemble a spread in
Harpers
– the kind of Christmas nobody, except a Secret Australian, would attempt in real life. Wreath on the door, ivy round the pictures, and so forth. There would be an atmosphere of woodsmoke, pot-pourri, lavender and beeswax – Polly had even planned the smells.

Some people, for instance his sister Annabel, had accused Berry of being scared of Polly. What nonsense. He was only rather in awe of his own good luck, that he had landed a woman so conspicuously pretty and charming.