Tyringham Park (27 page)

Peregrine arrived during a lull between dances in the company of two young, handsome, jocular men and a thin, pretty, unknown woman, not the wife of either, whom he partnered in the next dance.
She must be a visiting cousin of one of them, Charlotte thought, and he is being well-mannered, doing his duty. The woman’s gown, similar in style and fabric to all the other silky creations
being worn by all the other women at the ball, was sleeveless, low-cut at the back, and had an elegant drape to it. Her own long-sleeved outfit of stiff grey satin with its high neck, made by an
eighty-year-old dressmaker who charged very little, was unfashionable and unflattering by contrast. Why did she assume she knew what was suitable to wear without consulting anyone? Why didn’t
she have a friend of her own age who could advise her? Considering she was now wealthy, why hadn’t she thought to seek out a modern dressmaker who used expensive fabrics and flattering
patterns? In agony during the space of three dances, she waited for Peregrine to deposit the girl and claim her, but he continued to dance with the stranger and didn’t once look her way. He
was the only one who didn’t. All the others – she recognised two finishing-school contemporaries who had married Irish peers – were watching her to see how she was taking it. She
tried to avoid their scrutiny by staying backed up against a column. Choosing not to dance in a show of solidarity, Harcourt and the cousins stayed beside her in a tight protective ring.

When the fourth dance began Charlotte felt ready to expire and indicated she wanted to leave. She didn’t even go to the cloakroom to collect her stole. Silence followed the little group as
it left the ballroom.

“That cad deserves a jolly good hiding,” said Harcourt.

“No, no. It’s not his fault. I must have misread the signals.” Charlotte was holding herself as if she were in severe physical pain. Her plan to replace Victoria would never
come to fruition. She was a failure. Even her mother couldn’t like her, so why would anyone else?

At the door of the townhouse she thanked Harcourt and her cousins for their support and urged them to return to the ball as she didn’t want to spoil their entire evening. She closed the
door on them, went to her rooms and rang for Queenie to come and help her take off her dress. When there was no immediate response, she continued to ring the bell at intervals for a long time,
crying with frustration, thinking Queenie could hear the bell but was deliberately and selfishly not answering it. In the end she took a firm hold of the tapestry bell pull and, employing her full
weight, yanked it from the wall. Charlotte heard the sound of crunching and of metal snapping, before she landed on the floor on her rear end with the detached bell pull in her hands. She lumbered
to her feet, reached behind her back and tore at her dress, until all the button loops down the back ripped open, and she was able to step out of the monstrosity and hold on to it until she fetched
the scissors and cut it into pieces. While she had the scissors in her hand she let down her long brown hair and hacked it all off.

She didn’t hear that Peregrine had been relieved of his dancing partner by a rival after the fifth dance and had received a thrashing in the early hours of the morning by an unnamed
assailant and that his two friends were disgusted that he had thrown away the chance of an advantageous marriage just because he wasn’t man enough to be seen in public with an overweight
woman in an unfashionable gown.

An overweight woman in an unfashionable gown who happened to be extremely wealthy in her own right.

Dublin
1937

Charlotte’s lunch hadn’t been delivered. She opened the door of her sitting room for the fourth time to see if the tray was in its usual place on the side table in
the anteroom, but there was nothing there.

Since the disastrous Hunt Ball three years earlier she had lived in self-imposed isolation, with her maid Queenie as her only contact with the rest of the house. Today was Queenie’s day
off so Charlotte had no way of finding out why the tray hadn’t been delivered. She hadn’t had her bell reconnected as she couldn’t face the thought of having a man coming in to
fix it. She was fully reliant on Queenie calling at her fixed times.

Six hours until the next meal. What would happen if the cook were sick or absent and dinner wasn’t delivered either? How could she bear to miss two meals in a row? With Queenie away there
was no way of finding out if there was anything amiss in the kitchen. Of course, later she could sneak down to the kitchen using the back stairway, but she made a point of never moving out of her
rooms during the day for fear of running into her brother who shared the corridor with her. He hadn't as much as laid eyes on her for months and she wanted to keep it that way.

She imagined her tray being delivered by a new maid to the wrong door. All the doors along this corridor were identical and the upper floors of the house looked much the same. Tuesday’s
offering of roast lamb with rosemary and garlic accompanied by onion gravy and mashed potato followed by bread and butter pudding with custard might be unclaimed and spoiling in the wrong
anteroom.

She picked up last week’s paper to finish the crossword but still didn’t have answers to eleven of the clues. A paragraph about the war in Spain caught her eye but she was bored by
the time she started the fourth sentence.
The Ambassadors
was in the same place beside her chair as it had been for the last month – reading a page at random, she didn’t take in
a word. White smoke from her fourteenth cigarette of the day mixed with grey smoke from one already smouldering in the ashtray.

Would she chance a quick trip to the kitchen? Harcourt would be studying for his exams, but would he be doing it at college or at a friend’s house, or here?

She opened the sitting-room door and stood in the anteroom, listening for footsteps. Silence. Each time she put her hand on the doorknob she lost her nerve and stood to listen more intently.
After what seemed an age she heard the familiar sound of Harcourt’s footsteps.

Hearing them fade away and thinking she was safe, she opened the door and found herself looking up at the most handsome face she had ever seen.

For a second his beauty made her forget her fear of being on display. He looked back at her, and inclined his head in a friendly way as if he were about to speak. She saw him clearly, even
though he was standing in front of a long window and the back lighting was creating a halo effect around his dark hair, putting his face in soft shadow.

A second face, similarly lit, appeared beside him.

“Manus, what are you doing here?” she said at the same moment as the face said, “Christ Almighty, Charlotte. What have you done to yourself?”

She whipped the door closed and leaned against it.

“Charlotte, let me in to talk to you,” a voice called gently from the other side. “It’s me. Harcourt.”

Harcourt, not Manus? How could she have made a mistake like that? The three years of isolation must have addled her brain. But the shape of the head and the way it sat on the shoulders? She
couldn’t be mistaken. She remembered the outline so well.

“Not now,” she managed to answer. “I’m not prepared. But soon, I promise, soon.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Harcourt replied. “Come on . . .”

Charlotte didn’t catch the name of the friend.

There was a murmur of voices, and then the sound of footsteps retreating along the corridor.

Turning away from the door, she hit her shin against an antique tub chair and gave it a kick for being in the way even though it had been in the same place for years.

Six hungry hours later, Charlotte retrieved the tray from the anteroom after the cook’s maid tapped on the inner door to let her know that high tea had arrived —
there would be no dinner tonight, the cook’s maid said, as the cook was feeling poorly and young Florrie had to fill in and this was the best she could do.

“Tell her she’s done well,” said Charlotte, not knowing or caring who Florrie was, concentrating on controlling her impulse to snatch the tray out of the maid’s hands.
“Put it down there, thank you, and close the door after you.”

Charlotte felt so ravenous after missing lunch that as soon as the door closed she ate two sausages and one rasher before she even lifted the tray. With her free hand she manoeuvred the soft
fried eggs, flicking them on to thick slices of toast that had already soaked up the savoury juices. She sat and devoured the egg on toast. Grease trickled down the front of her dress. A sausage
rolled from the plate onto the floor. Charlotte looked at it with regret but didn’t attempt to retrieve it as bending was too difficult – Queenie could pick it up in the morning.

After she finished the meal with a cup of tea and her thirty-second cigarette of the day she stretched out on the couch for an after-dinner nap. Usually she dreamed of banquets, but tonight she
experienced the terror of falling in slow motion from a cliff. An archangel with dark hair and enormous wings swooped down to catch her in his powerful arms but was unable to take her weight and
let her slip through his hands. He flew off without making a second attempt to save her, and she was left only seconds away from crashing to the ground before she woke.

Queenie looked as if she was about to start purring. “There’s someone to see you, Miss.”

“Who is it?” asked Charlotte.

“He told me not to give his name.”

“Then tell me what he looks like.”

“He asked me not to say anything.”

Could it possibly be Harcourt’s friend, curious to meet her after their wordless exchange the previous day?

“Ask him to wait a minute, will you please, Queenie?”

“Shall I open the curtains, Miss?”

“No, leave them. I can do without all that glare.”

She tried to comb her hair into some kind of shape. Since the night of the Hunt Ball she had kept it short, snipping away at bits that annoyed her, not caring how it looked. She now tried to
hide the gaps and jagged edges under a band, but they poked out no matter which way she tried to arrange them.

In the end her impatience to see Harcourt’s friend again overrode her desire to look presentable. “You may send him in now, Queenie,” she said.

She positioned her arms so that her still slender hands could be seen to their best advantage.

It was not Harcourt’s friend, but an older, greyer Cormac who came through the door.

Charlotte looked up at him with a blank face as Queenie slipped out, smiling.

“Afternoon, Miss,” he said to Charlotte. “Nice day. Looks as if the rain is holding off.”

Why is he talking to me like that? “Yes, but not for long. Would you care to take a seat?”

“I’ll wait until Miss Charlotte arrives, Miss, if you don’t mind.” He motioned towards the large canvas hanging on the far wall. “Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse
me, I’d like to have a closer look at that.”

“Please feel free to do so.”

Two can play at this game of pretending we’ve never met before, she thought.

Cormac stood in front of an abstract of luscious greys, one of her early works similar in concept to the four she had exhibited when she was sixteen.

“Amateurish, isn’t it?” said Charlotte. “Wouldn’t you think she’d choose to paint something interesting like a bit of horseflesh in a summer landscape rather
than those dreary, colourless shapes?”

“I suggest that if you let in a bit of light you’d be better able to see it properly and be able to make a more accurate judgement.”

“I’ve seen it in bright light and it looks worse. Are you a close friend of hers, pretending to like it?”

“I am her friend and I’m not pretending. I was her tutor until I left twelve years ago and I taught her the rudiments, but she soon left me behind.” His face was inches away
from the canvas. “Masterly. Masterly. I’d forgotten how good she was. Will she be long? I’m impatient to see her, so I am.”

“Your impatience must be easily controlled if it’s taken you twelve years to come to see her.”

Cormac looked back over his shoulder and stared directly at her for a second. “You must be related. You have the look of her and your voice is very like.”

“We’ve been told we look more like sisters than cousins, but that’s where the similarity ends. Our natures are quite different.”

“I’ve already noticed.” Cormac resumed his close study of the painting.

“I remember feeling sorry for you when I heard you’d been lumbered with Charlotte who was notorious for being miserable, not to mention quite dense. I presume you had a tough time of
it.”

Cormac flushed. How did one fake a flush? “You presumed incorrectly. Charlotte was none of those things. She was bright, good-natured, courageous, quick-witted and a joy to
teach.”

Charlotte was moved by his words even though she knew they were only part of a game.

“High praise, indeed. One would never suspect all that by looking at her.”

“If you were in any way perceptive you would, even on short acquaintance. I liked her from the start and couldn’t have wished for a better pupil. I was blessed. And such talent.
It’s not often you come across talent like that and I was lucky to have seen it, so I was.”

“All of that admiration must have gone to her head.”

“Not in the least. I had to keep boosting her confidence. She had no idea how good she was.”

“I’m beginning to think you are making all this up to incite some cousinly jealousy.”

“Why would I waste my breath doing that?” He looked at his watch. “How much longer do you think she’ll be? I’ve an appointment to see her father in ten
minutes.”

“He won’t mind waiting. It’s not as if he has anything else to do. This is my only chance to hear about Charlotte as I’ll be moving back to Belgium shortly and it will be
years before I see her again. Where are you stationed now?”

“Paris.”

“Paris? How convenient. Perhaps I could travel down to see you and you could give me some art lessons. I’ve heard that talent runs in families.”