The Uninvited Guests (15 page)

Emerald looked around them all: Smudge near the stairs; the eager, ornamented figures of her friends and family; the glum, disappointed, shifting strangers.

‘Well, that’s that,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid, as you heard, the Railway aren’t able to come for you this evening. Perhaps the weather has something to do with it.’

As if supporting her words, the rain outside drummed ever more mercilessly on the house.

The passengers didn’t move. In fact, they advanced.

‘I’m sorry you can’t be on your way,’ Emerald went on. ‘And I’m sorry for your … misfortune.’

Still, they moved slowly towards her.

‘There! What more do you want?’ Charlie Traversham-Beechers shouted, breaking the spell of their collective gaze. He had a very commanding tone. ‘Later!’ he said again.

‘I promise,’ added Emerald.

Then the passengers, appeased or defeated, slowly withdrew. They returned to the study, jerkily, like the flickering scene of a moving picture run backwards, and the door closed once more.

‘Oh my God!’ uttered Charlotte,
sotto voce
, and gave a brief, hysterical laugh.

Smudge crept forward and took her fingers.

‘But, Mother,’ she said, ‘they must be hungry.’

Charlotte looked down at her coldly. ‘Don’t be silly, Smudge; they can’t expect to be fed.’

‘We ought to see to them,’ allowed Emerald, who was trembling slightly from her close encounter with the strangers, and she took a steadying breath.

‘Not on your birthday!’ said Charlotte.

There was a brief pause as the party glanced at the closed door of the study and examined their consciences.

Then Traversham-Beechers smiled, his voice insinuating itself into the silence like a snake into a sleeping bag. ‘That’s all very well, but what about the approaching others?’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you better comply? Ought you to send
somebody
to meet them?’

Emerald nodded. ‘Someone had better ask Robert to go off with Stanley and see about them. Clovis?’

‘I’ll nip along to the stables now,’ said Clovis, and nipped.

‘Well,’ said Charlotte in the pause that followed his absence, ‘this is all very diverting. But what about dinner? Shall we go in?’

She held out her arm to her moustachioed escort.

At that moment, there was a muffled crash, a splintering crack that resounded, followed by a short scream. The guests looked around, a little nervously. It hadn’t been thunder or furniture that time, but seemed to come from the direction of the kitchen.

The birthday party took their places at the dining table. There was no food to be seen.

Disconcertingly, there was a powerful smell of mock turtle soup that lingered tantalisingly in the cold air, as if from steam only recently dematerialised. The tureen, though, had there been one, was not to be seen. They all wondered where it might have got to.

Minutes earlier, Myrtle, having handed the telephone to Emerald, had scurried back to the dining room to rescue the rapidly cooling soup, thinking to keep it warm in the kitchen until such time as the guests required it. Unfortunately, her fingers were greasy from washing the pan that had held the calf’s head as it scalded. The grease on her skin, which had hardened under the cold water, melted again under the hot weight of the gilded tureen of mock turtle soup, and became slick. The brim-full tureen had plunged from her grasp at the kitchen door, plummeted the short distance to the flags – and smashed.

The soup, lumpy and glistening, in impossible, rolling quantities, mixed with smithereens and curlicues of china, poured, wasted, across the span of the kitchen doorway, under the dresser, onto the floor at the foot of the range, and into cracks, troughs and corners hitherto un-thought of. Florence and Myrtle, in silent horror, scooped it hotly into their hands, pushed it about with grey cloths, shovelled it into newspaper, and – disposed of it. This took some time. Florence spared the cringing Myrtle her recrimination. Many worse things had – or might yet – befall both of them. It was very cruel, though, the loss of the soup: the scalding of the head, the chopping of brains, the pints of Madeira and meticulous rolling of each tiny forcemeat ball had all been for nothing. It was the bitterest of defeats.

Clovis, dispatching the understandably disgruntled Robert and Stanley to seek out the new arrivals, stood shivering and dripping in the doorway of Robert’s snug rooms above the harnesses. He envied the remains of the meal that still lay on the scrubbed table. It may have been basic, but it was at least material, as opposed to his thus far hypothetical supper.

As the capable Robert and Stanley made ready to set off into the night, dressed head to foot in oilskins like the crew of a lifeboat, Clovis returned, ravenous, to the dining room. He realised as he took his place amid the small and anxious group, that now there was only themselves, Florence and Myrtle left at Sterne, and nobody else for miles.

The placement of the party ran thus: Emerald was at the end of the table, flanked by Ernest Sutton and John Buchanan; Smudge and the extra guest were opposite one another in the centre, where she eyed his rich cherry-plum waistcoat with wonder; Clovis headed the table’s opposite end, with his mother and Patience Sutton to entertain. There was enough room for several invisible persons to have been seated between them all without crowding.

The clock on the mantelpiece did not tick. Time passed silently. The door did not open. Neither Myrtle nor Florence Trieves appeared with any part of supper, no small offering, no
amuse-bouche
, no crust, no crumb, no morsel. Emerald wedged her foot under the sleeping body of the spaniel Nell, for warmth and comfort. Beyond the dining-room walls were domestic toil in one direction and displaced persons in the other, she reflected, allowing her eye to rest on the smoky depths of the room, on the long candles in the candelabras, and the gold flames that stretched upward into the blue air, quivering.

‘Emerald, I hope you won’t think I’m speaking out of turn,’ said Patience, sweetly, ‘but I wonder, as we appear to have a … gap, if you should like me to fetch your present?’

‘Oh!’ said Emerald. ‘Yes, please.’

Charlotte rose from her chair, mistily. ‘Why don’t you and I see about a present, too?’ she said, and wandered out, with a ‘Smudge?’ over her slender shoulder.

‘Presents, then?’ said Patience, jumping up.

Emerald was left, the lone female, with John, Ernest, Clovis and Traversham-Beechers; it was a most unusual situation.

The wines, spirits and liqueurs were lined up like giant, square-cut jewels along the sideboard awaiting the first course.

The butler at Sterne had been Theodore Trieves, Florence’s late husband, with a valet beneath him. Since then, three men had been employed in the post of butler with varying success – they were Wiggs, Morton and Stoves – and no valets. With the decline in the Torrington–Swift fortunes there were now no male indoor servants to take on the appropriate duties. If the family drank at all, Edward was the man in charge, aided in the opening by his two-armed wife or stepson. A champagne cup was occasionally taken and hugely enjoyed.

Tonight it fell to Florence Trieves to serve the wines, but it occurred to Emerald that there were a great many duties heaped upon the housekeeper and cook, who was at any rate nowhere to be seen, and she should like to pass this one on to a suitable male. There was none more suitable than her brother, but Clovis was doing something with his collar studs, which were apparently irksome to him, and did not catch her glances. (He’d been wearing collars all his life, he might have become accustomed to them by now.) The farmer John Buchanan sat stiffly to her left, seemingly paralysed by the delay; he and the stopped clock had something in common, she thought. She would certainly not ask him, it might look as if she were offering him an intimacy, and she’d got her feet wet in that department earlier. Ernest was looking at her, but she was inexplicably filled with embarrassment at the idea of meeting his glance. She found she could not even look in his direction without becoming intensely self-conscious, an inconvenient state of affairs at dinner, where one was absolutely obliged to talk to one’s neighbours. She attempted to send the word WINE, via thought waves, to her brother’s brain. But it was Traversham-Beechers who read her mind.

‘I say – in common with Miss Sutton, I dread offending,’ he pronounced silkily, ‘but do you think it appallingly rude of me to mention that you’ve a great many decanters lined up, and no one in sight to dole out the rations?’

Without waiting for a response, he leapt to his feet, weightlessly – it was most intriguing to see. He was at the sideboard in a flash. Clovis at last met Emerald’s eye, with an ‘oh, dash it why not?’ sort of look, and she blinked at him in resentful acquiescence.

‘Good idea,’ said John, startled into speaking.

Ernest Sutton alone seemed to sit up ever straighter in his seat at this blatant faux pas.
Did nobody else baulk at it?
he wondered, bristling with disapproval. Surely it was Clovis’s place to see to the wine, but not
his
place to say so, and so he remained silent.

‘Now, what will it be?’ sang the gentleman by the sideboard. ‘First course. Smelled like soup.
Meaty
…’ His fingers ran along the bottles lightly, as if along much-loved piano keys, flicking the silver labels on their slender chains. ‘La la la,’ he said. ‘Sherry!’

He grabbed, unstopped and poured, all in a flash, then sat and raised his amber glass to Emerald, winking broadly.

‘Salutations and thanks most sincerely,’ he said, and drained it.

Where can supper have got to, and what on earth are we going to do with the study full of bodies once the invited guests are fed?
wondered Emerald, fixing a hostess’s smile on lips that were paler than they had been, most of the rouge having been sucked off them during the course of the fraught and calamitous evening.

Upstairs, Smudge stood, convulsing with excitement, watching her mother’s elegant behind wag as she retrieved the boxed kitten from beneath her bed.

‘There!’ said Charlotte, emerging. The shoebox was bound with twine and studded with holes. A muffled squeak seeped out.

‘Tenterhooks,’ breathed Smudge.

‘Yes. It hasn’t been in there too long, I hope. Now, let me see …’ Charlotte handed Smudge the shifting weight of the box and went about the room picking up scarves and scraps and dropping them again. ‘I haven’t a letter or card, but a kitten is a nice sort of thing to get, and the Bowes girl was happy to be shot of it and – ah!’ She had found a piece of velvet. ‘Hold it out,’ she instructed coldly. ‘No, ridiculous child, there – get your hand out of the way.’

Smudge tried to obey the quick tides of her mother’s emotion. She held the box meekly. The kitten’s mews reached a pitch.

‘Now, may I take it? Can I take it now?’ said Smudge. Charlotte kissed her forehead.

‘
Darling
,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

And Smudge ran.

Left alone for a moment, Charlotte paused, wavered, and pressed the back of her hand lightly against her forehead. Her lashes trembled.

God
, she thought,
him… What can it mean?

And while she yearned for Edward’s strong arm to comfort her, she was profoundly relieved he was not there.

Patience, in her room, was humming as she took the neat package from among the frothy lace and ribbons in the cushioning depths of her trunk. She adjusted the bow and closed the door behind her as, still humming, she started along the silent corridor towards the stairs.

Her pale head bobbed as she descended.
I do hope Emerald is as thrilled by all this as she used to be
, she thought, holding the present carefully and skipping lightly down the polished stair. She passed beneath the oil landscapes – forests on hills and distant temples – and thought back to the time in their childhoods when she, Ernest and her parents had visited Sterne often and, just as often, received the Torringtons in Berkshire. She had always preferred Sterne; it had been the happiest of houses and hardy enough to take the knocks of croquet mallets and tennis balls, pony races on the lawn…

Then – of a sudden – she felt herself observed. Looking up, she noticed the figure of a man in the hall beneath her. Her breath caught. Distracted by his expression, which was admiring, her soft shoe slipped on the edge of the stair – glimpsing his face as she lost her balance, it was that man, Traversham – watching her – and she slipped. She gave a scream, her hands flew up, almost – but not quite – releasing the present from her grasp. The stairs were hopelessly slippery and the flags at their foot unforgiving; she must not fall. Patience’s white fingers gripped her precious box as one leg shot from under her, the other bumped down and buckled, and she landed in a slithering heap almost at the bottom of the stairs, bruised but not broken, her head resting lightly against the heavy balustrade.

Her hands shook at the real danger she had glimpsed and she looked up, in hot embarrassment, for the man’s reaction.

He was not there. The hall was empty.

Surely he wouldn’t walk away from her had he seen her fall? Had she imagined him? Had she mistaken one of those long portraits that hung there, their urbane figures seeming to come forward from the frames?

Patience sat on the stairs, holding Emerald’s present and recovered herself. She gave her head a shake, as one responding to an inner voice. Yes: lost in memories, she had experienced that common feeling on emerging from a daydream, that she was observed. She had
not
been observed, except by herself, and she had been foolish – and lucky not to have had a worse accident. Poor Ernest, he would have been delighted at a sprained ankle to minister to.

She stood up. As she did so, the door to the study opened behind her, and three of the passengers – a woman, a child and a young man – looked out. Patience, for the second time in three minutes, gave a yelp.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ said the woman, whose concerned face peered from beneath a battered straw bonnet.