The Uninvited Guests (10 page)

‘Ma’am?’

‘Yes, where have you
been
, Myrtle?’

‘Mrs Torrington’s hair, ma’am.’

Florence was distracted. ‘Oh. Yes.’

‘And with Pearl Meadows absent I need to finish taking water up to the rooms, and Miss Em asked me if I’d see to Miss Sutton’s hair, too, and I was wondering if I could lay the table
afterwards
, only I’ve still got to see to those fires.’

Florence attempted to breathe more deeply than her clothing would allow.

‘Yes. Go up now, Myrtle. Take the water, and stay with Miss Sutton if she’s ready for you. I’ll carry on here and we’ll—’ She broke off, blankly staring at the wall past Myrtle’s head. ‘We’ll…’

‘Ma’am?’

‘The passengers …’ The grim weight of the thought of the morning room, packed with strangers in their overcoats, arrested her. ‘Ma’am?’ Florence felt sweat drip down the inside of one of her thin legs. She gathered herself and set her mind to the task again, speaking rapidly. ‘Let me see now: there’s the table, fires, wines, rooms, hot water, hair, dressing, hors d’oeuvres, all of supper, and Mrs Torrington’s toilette to see to.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Her voice rose and trembled as she added, ‘And this accident …’ She controlled herself. She always did. ‘Well.’ There was a silence. ‘I should think we can manage that between us.’

Myrtle swallowed. ‘Yes, ma’am. And Mrs Torrington
is
nearly finished.’

‘Thank you. Well, off you go. Be off upstairs with that hot water.’

So Myrtle went: into the scullery to fill the enamel jugs with hot water and then up the back stairs with them, setting the steps creaking beneath their combined weight.

Smudge had two occasions to dress for: the party and her Great Undertaking. Checking the weather from her window, she noticed that not only was it quite dark now seven o’clock had come and gone, but there was a smell of thunder on the air. Smudge couldn’t have said what thunder smelled like exactly – something like lively coal-dust, perhaps – but knew that she had always known the thick scent of it, as well as that of lightning, which was sharper and apparent to everybody, like gunpowder and lemons. Yes, there was a storm coming, and when she leaned out of the window, high above the gravel, with the path that led along the side of Old House to the kitchen garden and stables tiny beneath her, like a ribbon, she could smell the air charging. She liked to think of the thick electricity in the telephone cables and the thin electricity in the air, thrilling against one another.

She sniffed the darkness bouncing off the wall of mist ahead of her, reflecting – oh so dimly – the lights of the house. The gritty stars above her head were scuddingly obscured as the storm armed itself.

‘Yes,’ she breathed, ‘I’m glad I put on woollen stockings.’

She wore a midnight-blue velvet dress of Emerald’s, much too large, and beneath it two pairs of drawers, a woollen vest, chemise and a petticoat of stiff taffeta, with one or two scorch marks from hasty ironing. The dress was too long, so she belted it all with a silk scarf of Clovis’s, hoisting the dress loosely over it and feeling very pleased indeed. It was time to go down.

As she was reaching for the doorknob, it turned, slowly, all by itself.

For a moment she thought she had moved it with her intention, but then her mother came in.

‘Smudge, my darling.’

Charlotte, having
hogged
poor Myrtle – there was no other word for it – was elegantly and opulently dressed in watered silk, like a sea-nymph. She wore a tiara on the rolled heights of her thick, fair hair. Although the lace at her long neck and the diamonds made Smudge want to touch her, she knew better and held her hands behind her back. But Charlotte, ever a surprise, enveloped her daughter in bare and scented arms, allowing her stole to slip from her smooth shoulders, and then sat on the bed and took her hand.

‘Are you dressed for Emerald’s party?’

‘Yes, Mother. That’s all.’ Her mother either did not notice this defence or was incurious.

‘You look magnificent.’

Charlotte glanced around the room at the shabby yellow wallpaper, the thick scraped outlines of animals parading, overlapping, towards the window, smudged and complicated by extra units and false beginnings. ‘And your gorgeous walls – how clever you are! Would you like to know what I have for your sister?’

‘A present? Yes, what is it?’

‘Promise you won’t tell?’

Smudge was desperate. ‘I promise!’

Charlotte, rare vision in Smudge’s room, angel of approval, goddess of distraction and important things that did not concern Smudge very often, whispered delightfully in her ear, ‘A kitten.’

Smudge was beyond delight.

‘What colour?’ she whispered, painfully.

‘Not unlike you, Smudge: charcoal.’

‘Will Lloyd be jealous?’

‘Almost certainly he will. All cats are jealous; it doesn’t mean we should let them bully us. He has his mice. And he has you.’

‘Yes, he does have me. He sleeps here quite often and brings me his kills. I pretend to eat them, just to be polite, and then I throw them out of the window once—’

But Charlotte did not want to hear Smudge’s stories.

‘Yes, calmly, dear. The kitten came from Bowes farm. I thought we might call it Tenterhooks.’

‘For its claws!’

‘Will you present her with it for me at supper?’

‘Oh yes! May I see it now? Please, Mother?’

‘No. Not now… You know I don’t like you in my bedroom.’ Smudge’s time was up. Charlotte became vague. ‘I thought a box would be all right for it, if it weren’t for too long. It’s very young.’

She stood up, and with a last kiss, left her. Smudge hugged herself with delight.

Charlotte carefully negotiated the scullery stairs in her jade silk slippers and opened the door at the bottom. It was not a view to which she was accustomed, from the back of the scullery, by the door to the Old House. She looked past towers of washing-up, dripping, skinning-over pans, as yet untouched, and stacks of cups, teapots, milk jugs and trays – also unwashed – through the wide doorway and into the kitchen, where Florence Trieves, with her back to her, tensely worked on some invisible and evidently resistant dish, for she uttered loudly, ‘Ghastly!’ and shook her head in frustration.

Emerald, similarly absorbed, was placing pâté onto a long dish with a fish-slice, careful not to disturb the jelly shell, adjusting one bay leaf with the end of her little finger. She was not dressed for supper, Charlotte saw, but still in her limp old dress, a little at odds with her immaculately dressed hair.

‘Need a hand?’ barked Charlotte, to startle them. Housekeeper and daughter spun around.

‘Mother!’

Florence was red-faced. ‘Oh, it’s you: yes, hold this.’

Charlotte picked her way across the flags, collecting a white apron from a hook by the scullery door as she went, and slipping it over her head.

‘This’ was a flap of pimpled skin that Florence was attempting to stitch closed with a thick needle, so that the scented, crumbling forcemeat would not escape the bird into which it had been compactly crammed.

‘Good heavens, woman,’ said Charlotte, ‘you can’t imagine that will cook in time; it must be after seven.’

‘Ten past,’ said Florence through gritted teeth, and stabbed the needle in, drawing the lightly bloodied thread into a long stitch.

Charlotte, pitying her, felt cruelty slip out of her teasing grasp. ‘Emerald, you really ought to go and dress. I’m here now. What else may I do to help you, Florence?’

‘Nothing,
Mrs Torrington
, that would never do. You’re dressed for the party. Your jewels might fall into the soup.’

‘What isn’t done?’

‘What is?’

‘Are those shabby creatures safely shut away in the morning room?’

‘They are.’

‘I tried to telephone the Railway,’ said Emerald. ‘We still haven’t heard anything.’

‘Rank inefficiency. Where’s Myrtle now?’

‘With Miss Sutton’s hair.’

Charlotte made a spiteful moue. ‘Miss Sutton …’ Emerald uttered an exasperated noise but didn’t speak. ‘And after
her
?’

‘Then laying.’

‘The dining table? Not done yet?’ She was aghast.

‘Not yet.’

‘Then I’ll do that.’ She looked down at the stitched bird. ‘May I go?’

Florence grabbed a stubby knife and sharply cut. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Emerald straightened and wiped her hands on a cloth hanging from her waist. ‘Yes, thank you, Mother,’ she said with feeling.

In the doorway, removing the apron and patting her hair, Charlotte said, ‘Do you ever think we’d be better off if we surrendered?’

‘This house?’ asked Florence.

‘The struggle, yes.’ Charlotte ignored Emerald’s stricken face.

Florence fixed her with a steady look, the intimacy of the years. ‘No, Charlotte,’ she said, ‘we get along very well.’

‘I suppose when Edward returns the question will be a moot one anyway; we shall know one way or another.’

Charlotte, Emerald and Florence stood in a brief but intensely glum silence then, ‘Off you go, Mrs Swift,’ said Florence.

‘Thank you, Mrs Trieves. Onwards!’ Charlotte cried, at once commanding and absentminded. She turned on her heel.

Florence opened the oven with her foot, and in the blast of heat that blew from it, hoisted the iron tin that held the little bird, and thrust it inside. ‘Off you go and dress, Emerald,’ she said; ‘you look a sight.’ And Emerald went.

Charlotte went into the dining room, closed both the doors and drew the curtains. When she was sure she was unobserved, she darted gracefully about the large room arranging the cutlery and glasses with single-minded accuracy, laying the table with silver and china on damask, all manner of ornaments, and bowls of tight, silk rosebuds bristling down its centre.

‘Perfection,’ she breathed in the doorway, and glided from the room.

She would stand at her open window to cool down, and, after a good scrub with lye soap, she would rub lavender water into her hands to banish traces of silver polish. No one would know she had degraded herself.

Of the dozen or so clocks at Sterne there were only six that moved at all and three that told the approximate time. It was somewhere past seven. Everybody was dressing or otherwise occupied, and the downstairs of the house was still, the only activity being in the kitchen and among the waiting creatures, the shifting hive of the morning room. It was the precious hour before dinner when the house is quiet and anything might be accomplished.

Smudge slipped down the stairs alone, proud she did not need over-garments for her Great Undertaking, having planned ahead by wearing so many under-garments. She would be warm in any weather and, should calamity befall her, padded, too.

At the top of the stairs she paused, checking the hall and the rooms she could see, with their partly open doors before creeping down, intent. She was most agitated and interfered with when there came, shattering the silence, a loud rapping on the front door. Smudge shrank back up the stairs and waited for the hurrying feet that would attend to it – but no sound of footsteps was forthcoming. The knock came again. Whatever idiot it was had not thought to use the bell-pull. Oh, this was too vexing. She supposed it was the farmer John Buchanan, master of the ill-timed appearance and – even to Smudge – a bit of a stale bun.

She sighed and slunk down to open the door – not before it was rapped upon a third time, loudly and rather rudely, she thought with her child’s censoriousness, by what sounded like the metal top of a cane.

She put her hand on the large iron knob and heaved the door open, inch by inch.

Revealed, standing in the porch, with his cane raised to rap once more and an expression of keen enthusiasm – a wide grin, in fact – was not John Buchanan but an absolute stranger.

He was a man of medium build – on the slight side, perhaps – wearing smartly pointed boots, an air that was altogether sprightly – dapper – and a bushy, vigorously curling moustache.

‘I’ve come!’ he cried, then, ‘Rather late, I’m afraid!’

Smudge was at a loss. He gleamed at her, staring down his nose and widening his eyes. ‘I suppose I may come in?’

Smudge stepped mutely aside, glancing over her shoulder for some adult to save her, but nobody came, only a surging of strangers’ voices down the hall, as the noise of the survivors reached her.

‘I am so sorry to inconvenience you, but I believe you
were
warned?’

Still, Smudge did not speak.

‘My name is Charlie Traversham-Beechers. Is the lady of the house about at all? Perhaps you might … fetch her?’ Again he showed his white teeth to Smudge.

‘Imogen Torrington,’ said Smudge at last, and in a whisper. She was a confident enough child in her own realm, but this plainly wasn’t it.

The gentleman held out his hand. ‘Really? How
do
you do?’ he said smoothly, lengthening his ‘r’ nasally, grasping her fingers in his thickly gloved ones and squeezing.

Just then there was the sound of whistling, and Clovis, hurriedly adjusting his tie, came down the stairs, immaculate in evening clothes – white tie and tails – his hair oiled, the creases in his trousers sharp. He was altogether the most welcome and brotherly sight Smudge could have asked for. She ran to him.

‘Hello! Who’s this?’ said Clovis.

The gentleman stepped forward eagerly. ‘Charlie Traversham-Beechers; I believe you were expecting me.’

‘If we were, it’s news to me,’ said Clovis pleasantly, as Smudge retreated behind him to listen.

‘I felt sure the Railway had warned you about passengers,’ responded the visitor.

‘Passen—Oh! You’re from the accident!’

‘Exactly.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘Yes, it was a most dreadful thing.’

Clovis cast his eye over Charlie Traversham-Beechers’ attire. ‘Where was the accident?’ he asked.

‘It was on the branch line.’

‘To?’

‘Just outside Whorley. Some trouble with the points, I believe. Absolute horror. Derailed utterly. Didn’t they tell you?’

‘Not exactly. Awful.’

‘It was. Most of us have been taken care of.’