Windfallen (14 page)

Julian has upset her, Lottie thought suddenly. She was never like this before he arrived. Somehow Julian’s mere presence had altered her demeanor; this was her discomfiture made explicit.

“Can I help with your painting, Frances?” Lottie said.

But Frances, disappearing into the kitchen, did not respond.

There were four more days until Guy’s parents arrived to meet the Holdens, and Lottie, conscious that this would likely spell an end to their time together, was intently memorizing and storing up each moment of their time there, like a small child hoarding sweets. It was a problematic task, as often she became so focused on trying to imprint it all on her memory that she appeared distracted and vacant to those around her. “Lottie has left us again,” Adeline would say, smiling. And Lottie, several minutes later, would jump, suddenly aware that she was the focus of attention.

Guy said nothing. He seemed to accept those parts of her character that other people felt the need to remark upon. He didn’t question them anyway, and Lottie, who was heartily sick of having her character questioned, was grateful.

The Bancrofts would arrive on Saturday and would stay in the Riviera Hotel, where they had booked the best room, the one with a huge private terrace overlooking the bay. (“A little flashy,” said Mrs. Chilton, who was rather put out that Uplands had not been called upon to accommodate the visitors. “But then I suppose they are practically foreigners.”) And since Guy had announced their imminent arrival, Mrs. Holden had dissolved into a domestic frenzy, leaving the overworked Virginia furious.

“I think I should like to meet your parents, Guy. Your father sounds a very interesting man,” said Julian.

“He . . . I’d say he’s a bit of an acquired taste,” said Guy. “He’s a little more direct than some Brits are used to. I think some find him a touch American. A touch brash. Plus, he’s only really interested in business. Everything else he finds a bit of a bore.”

“And your mother? How does she cope with living with such a force of nature?”

“She laughs at him a lot. In fact, I think she’s the only person who does laugh at him. He’s rather explosive, you see. It’s quite easy to be . . . intimidated by him.”

“But you are not.”

“No.” He paused and glanced sideways at Lottie. “Then, I’ve never done anything to upset him.”

The unspoken “yet” hung in the air. Lottie felt it and was faintly chilled by it. She looked away from Guy down at her shoes, which were scuffed from running around on the beach with Mr. Beans. Mr. Holden had remarked that he had never known the dog walked so often.

Adeline, meanwhile, got up and left the room, apparently in search of Frances. There was a silence, while Julian continued to sort through his lithographs, occasionally holding one up to the light and “hmphing” in either an approving or a derogatory manner. Stephen had uncurled from beside him and stretched, his thin cotton shirt lifting to reveal a pale belly as his arms reached for the ceiling.

Lottie glanced at Guy, blushing as she met his eye. Wherever he was in a room (sometimes outside a room), she was acutely aware of his presence, as if she could pick up tiny vibrations on the air, and she found herself quivering in response. As she looked back at her shoes, letting the weight of the rosebuds pull her hair down in a sheet to hide her face, she was conscious that he did not look away.

They both jumped slightly at the sound of shouting. It was Frances’s voice, muffled, so that it was impossible to hear what she was saying. The tenor, however, was unmistakable.

Adeline’s voice could be heard underneath it, sweeter, reasoning, before Frances’s voice exploded again—an exclamation that something was
“impossible!
”—and then a loud crash as some piece of kitchen equipment hit the flagstone floor.

Lottie stole a look at Julian. But he seemed remarkably unconcerned; his head lifted for a moment, as if reaffirming something he already suspected, and then he returned to his lithographs, muttering under his breath about print quality. Stephen glanced over, pointed something out on the surface of the paper, and they nodded together.

“No, you don’t, because you choose not to. You have a choice, Adeline, a choice. Even if it is easier for you to pretend you do not.”

They didn’t flinch. It was as if they couldn’t hear. Lottie felt mortified. She hated to hear people argue; it set her nerves jangling, made her feel five years old, vulnerable and impotent again.

“I won’t have it, Adeline. I won’t. I have told you, so many times. No, I have begged you . . .”

Go and stop them, Lottie willed. Someone. But Julian didn’t look up.

“Want to go?” mouthed Guy when she finally braved his eye.

Julian lifted a friendly hand in greeting as they exited. He was chuckling at something Stephen had said. In the kitchen all was silent.

Guy took her hand as they walked down the gravel drive. Lottie, his touch burning all the way to the top of Woodbridge Avenue, forgot the sound of raised voices, the rosebuds still lingering in her hair.

“What on earth have you done to yourself, Lottie?” said Mrs. Holden. “You look like you’ve been divebombed by seagulls!”

But Lottie didn’t care. As he had let go of her hand, he had reached up to touch a bud. “A force of nature,” he’d murmured.

T
HERE WERE CERTAIN WAYS OF DOING THINGS; CERTAIN
standards that should be met. And Adeline’s response to the ladies of the Merham salon had, it appeared, fallen a long way short.

“She is sorry that at present she is unable to attend? Why, is she busy? Is she looking after children? Applying for the job of prime minister perhaps?” Mrs. Chilton had taken it particularly badly.

“But she hopes we will find the time to drop in to her someday,” said Mrs. Colquhoun, reading from the piece of ivory notepaper. “That someday is not very specific, is it?”

“I’ll say it’s not,” said Mrs. Chilton, waving away a piece of melon. “No thank you, Susan dear. That fruit played havoc with my insides last week. No, I find her whole response very inadequate. Very inadequate indeed.”

“She
has
invited you to drop in on her,” said Celia, who, her legs tucked under her on the sofa, was flicking through a magazine.

“That’s not the point, dear. It wasn’t her place.
We
invited
her;
therefore she should have accepted. You can’t just turn it around and invite us back.”

“Why?” said Celia.

Mrs. Chilton looked at Mrs. Holden. “Well, it’s not done, is it?”

“But she’s hardly being rude, is she? Not if she’s inviting you?”

The women looked exasperated. Lottie, sitting on the floor doing a jigsaw puzzle with Sylvia, thought privately that Adeline had been rather clever. She had not wanted to visit the “salon” on their terms, but she understood that individually the ladies would not feel sufficiently confident to visit Arcadia. She had escaped, while also putting the onus on them.

“I can’t see that she’s been as rude as you think,” said Celia carelessly. “Can’t see why you’re bothered about having her visit you anyway. You spend half your time trying to get everyone to stay away from her.”

“But that’s the point,” said Mrs. Holden, exasperated.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Colquhoun. She looked down for a moment. “I think.”

Mrs. Chilton was studying the rest of the letter, squinting at it through half-rimmed glasses. “She wishes us well in our artistic endeavors. And hopes that a quote from that great poet Rainer Maria Rilke will provide some inspiration: ‘Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it, in everything real one is closer to it. . . . ’” She lowered the letter and looked around the room. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

He had been rather down for days, Mrs. Holden had thought. A bit preoccupied and serious. So she didn’t know whether to be relieved or discomfited when she saw that Guy, sitting over by the gas fire on Mr. Holden’s good chair, had begun to laugh silently behind his newspaper.

T
HE FIRST OF THE WINTER STORMS HAD HIT
W
ALTON,
pulling all the unsecured window boxes on the Promenade off their sills and dumping them and their remaining flowers in the road in small terra-cotta heaps. It would hit Merham within the hour, said Mrs. Holden, coming off the telephone. “Best secure the shutters. Virginia!”

“I’ll run Mr. Beans up the road now, before it starts raining,” said Lottie, and Mrs. Holden had given her a sharp look, confused as ever by the girl’s polar swings between moodiness and helpfulness. (Peculiarly, she felt more assured with moodiness.) Celia had been upstairs in the bath, and Guy offered to go with Lottie, being apparently in need of some fresh air. But now they had been out for almost ten minutes, and Lottie realized he had said not a word to her. He had said barely a thing to anyone all day, and Lottie, conscious that it was their last walk before the arrival of his parents, felt desperate to have some thread drawn between them, some fine channel of communication secured.

The rain began to fall in thick, unwieldy blobs as they got to the far end of the municipal park, and Lottie, the wind in her ears, began to run toward the beach huts, their vibrant, random colors still bright under a smudged charcoal sky, motioning to Guy to do the same. She skipped along to those numbered eighty to ninety, remembering that there were a couple of deserted huts where the locks had rusted away from the wood and, wrenching a door open, ducked inside just as the deluge proper began. Guy ducked in behind her, making half-gasping, half-laughing noises, pulling at his wet shirt, and Lottie, suddenly conscious of his proximity in the enclosed space, began to make a great fuss of drying an indifferent Mr. Beans with an old rag.

The hut had been unloved for a long time; speeding clouds could be glimpsed through slivers in the roof, while, apart from a cracked cup and a rickety wooden bench, there was little to suggest that it had ever sheltered happy holidaymakers. Most of the other huts also had names—Kennora (or other unbeautiful hybrids of their owners’ names), Seabreeze, Wind Ho!—and damp cushions and deck chairs that sat outside for seemingly the whole summer, while gritty vacationers passed around pots of tea. During the war all the huts had been commandeered and buried, to form part of the coastal defenses; when they were resurrected in their brightly colored row, Lottie, who had never seen a beach hut, had fallen in love with them and spent many hours walking backward and forward reading the names to herself and imagining herself to be part of some family.

Mr. Beans was undoubtedly dry. Lottie perched on the bench, pushing back wet whispers of dark hair from her face.

“Some storm,” Guy said, peering through the open doorway as the blackened clouds raced across the horizon, darkening distant fathoms out at sea. Above them gulls rode the winds, screeching and calling to each other above the noise of the rain. Lottie, looking up at him, suddenly thought of Joe. Joe’s first comment would have been that they should have brought an umbrella.

“You know, the storms in the tropics are seriously wild. One minute you’re sitting there in the sun, the next you can see this thing moving across the sky like a train.” He moved his hand along in the air, his eyes trained upon it. “And then pow! Rain like you wouldn’t believe—the kind that comes right over your feet and runs down the roads like rivers. And the lightning! Forked lightning that lights up the whole sky.”

Lottie, who only wanted to hear him speak, nodded dumbly.

“I saw a donkey killed by lightning once. When the storm came, they simply left it out in the field. No one thought to bring it in. I was just getting to our house. And I turned around, because there was this huge crack, and the lightning hit, and the donkey didn’t even move! It only jumped a bit, like something had blown it off its feet, and then landed on its side with its legs all stiff. Still had its little cart attached. I don’t think it knew what hit it.”

She wasn’t sure if it was anything to do with the donkey, but Lottie realized she was close to tears again. She rubbed at Mr. Beans’s fur with her hand, blinking furiously. When she sat up, Guy was still staring out at the sea. Far over to his left, she could see a patch of blue, the edge of the storm.

They sat in silence for a while. Guy, she noted, didn’t look at his watch once.

“What will happen when you have to do your National Service?”

Guy kicked at the floor. “Not doing it.”

Lottie frowned. “I didn’t think anyone got out of it. Not you being an only child and all.”

“Health reasons.”

“You’re not ill, are you?” She had failed to keep the anxiety from her voice.

It was just possible that he blushed slightly. “No . . . I . . . I’ve got flat feet. My mother says it’s from running around with no shoes on all my life.”

Lottie found herself gazing at his feet, feeling perversely glad that he had some physical imperfection. It made him more human somehow, more accessible.

“Not quite as glamorous as ‘old shrapnel injury,’ is it?” He grinned ruefully, kicking at the sandy wooden floor, his restless leg testament to his discomfort.

Lottie didn’t know what to say. The only person she knew to have done National Service was Joe, and his two-year posting to the tepid confines of the Payroll Corps had been such an embarrassment to his family that no one in the town ever talked about it. Not in front of them anyway. She watched the sheets of rain fall in front of them, the frothing sea rising up to threaten the seawall.

“You’re not laughing,” he said, grinning at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said solemnly. “I don’t think I have much of a sense of humor.”

He raised an eyebrow, and she found herself smiling despite herself. “What else don’t you have?”

“What?”

“What else don’t you have? What are you missing, Lottie?”

She paused. Looked up at him. “Flat feet?”

They both laughed nervously. Lottie felt she might burst into hysterical giggles. Except that they would ride too close to the surface, too close to something else entirely.

“A family? Do you have one?”