Windfallen (7 page)

“You get out of that water and back into your clothes this instant.
Where
are your decency and decorum?”

Celia had gone quite white. She held her hands to her chest, as if suddenly aware of her state of undress. George lifted his hands in a placatory manner, but Mrs. Chilton had pulled herself up to her full five feet four inches, so that her bosom appeared to be hoisted somewhere beneath her chin, and was not about to be pacified.

“And I don’t know who you are, but you, young man, are old enough to know better. Persuading respectable young girls out of their clothes in broad daylight—you are a disgrace.” She caught sight of the wine bottles on the sand. “Celia Holden, you had better not have been drinking. Goodness gracious. Are you trying to earn yourself a reputation? I do not imagine for one minute that your mother is going to be pleased about this.”

Mrs. Colquhoun meanwhile held both hands to her silent mouth, as shocked as if she had just witnessed some human sacrifice.

“Mrs. Chilton, I really—”

“Lottie? Is that you?” Mrs. Chilton’s chin was pulled so far into her neck that they had become one huge pink trunk of disapproval. The fact that Lottie was dressed did not appear to placate her. “You make your way up here this instant. Come on, girls. Both of you, before anyone else sees you.” She hauled her handbag under her chest, both hands tightly gripping its clasp. “Don’t you look at me like that, Celia. I am not leaving you here with this disreputable rabble. I am going to take both you girls home personally. Goodness gracious, what your poor mother is going to make of this, I don’t know.”

E
XACTLY THREE WEEKS LATER
C
ELIA LEFT FOR SECRETARIAL
school in London. It was meant to be a punishment, and Mrs. Holden was faintly put out that her daughter seemed not just unrepentant but rather indecently pleased to be going. She would stay with Mrs. Holden’s cousin in Kensington and, if she did well in her course, would have the chance to work at the cousin’s husband’s office in Bayswater. “London, Lots! And not a charity coffee morning or hideous sibling in sight.” Celia had been in an uncommonly good mood for the entire run up to her departure.

Lottie, meanwhile, had listened to Celia getting carpeted by her father, and wondered from the silent safety of their room what it was likely to mean for her. Nothing had been said about her going to London. She didn’t want to leave. But when she heard them muttering in lowered voices about “bad influences,” she knew it wasn’t Celia they were talking about.

I
t had to be said: She was not a girl one could warm to, even if she did try terribly hard. There was nothing wrong with her, exactly; she was always helpful and tidy and usually polite (unlike Celia, she wasn’t prone to what her husband called “the hysterics”)—but she could be terribly short with people. Blunt enough to be considered rude.

When Mrs. Chilton had brought them both back on that dreadful Saturday afternoon (Mrs. Holden was still having nightmares about it), Celia had at least had the grace to look shamefaced. She had thrown her arms around her mother’s waist and pleaded, “Oh Mummy, I know I was awful, but I’m really, really sorry. Honestly I am.” Furious as Mrs. Holden was, she had been quite taken aback; even Mrs. Chilton’s granite expression had softened. It was very hard to resist Celia at the best of times.

Lottie, however, had failed to apologize at all. She had looked rather cross when told to say sorry for her behavior, and retorted that she had not only kept all her clothes on but would never have entered the water of her own free will, as well they all knew. Except she said “bloody knew,” which immediately got Mrs. Holden’s back up. It had to be said, there was still something of the fishwife in that girl, despite all her best efforts.

No, said Lottie. She would not apologize for her behavior. Yes, she was sorry that they hadn’t been entirely straightforward about where they were going. Yes, she had been there when Celia had stripped to her underwear—and not done anything about it. But she personally had been far more sinned against than sinning.

Mrs. Holden had become rather cross at this point and told Lottie to go to her room. She hated losing her temper, and it made her feel even more resentful toward the girl. Then Sylvia had come in and said—right in front of Mrs. Chilton, mind—that she had seen Celia practicing kissing on the back of her hand and that Celia had told her she had kissed “simply loads” of nice men and that she knew of a way of doing it without getting pregnant. And even though it was plain to Mrs. Holden that Sylvia had got carried away and was indulging in stories, she knew jolly well that Sarah Chilton would be unable to keep the child’s comment entirely to herself, and that had made her crosser with Lottie than ever. It had to be Lottie—there was no one else to be furious with.

“I don’t want to see you anywhere near that house from now on, do you hear me, Lottie?” she said, making her way up the stairs after Sarah left. “I really am very cross with you both. Very cross. And I will not have you embarrassing the family in this way again. Goodness only knows what Dr. Holden is going to say when he gets home.”

“So don’t tell him,” said Lottie, emerging from their room, her face straight. “He’s not interested in women’s gossip anyway.”

“Women’s gossip? Is that what you call it?” Susan Holden stood on the stairs, clutching the banister. “You both humiliate me in front of polite society and you think this is just women’s gossip?”

From inside their room she heard Celia mutter something.

“What was that? What did you say?”

Lottie was gazing into their room. After a moment Celia stuck her head around the door.

“I said we’re terribly sorry, Mummy, and of course we’ll stay well away from the disreputable rabble, as Mrs. Chilton so eloquently put it.”

Mrs. Holden gave them both her longest, hardest look. But she swore she could see the faintest of smiles playing around Lottie’s lips. And, realizing she was not about to get any more out of either of them, she mustered up what little dignity she could and walked slowly back downstairs, to where Freddie was building himself a rabbit hutch out of old crates. In the good parlor. To live in.

And now Celia had gone. And Lottie, although she had been careful to do all her chores and had been relentlessly polite and helped with Sylvia’s homework, had for weeks been mooning around like a sick puppy when she thought no one was looking. It was all rather wearing. And somehow Susan Holden felt rather less comfortable about Lottie’s presence in the house than she once had. Not that she would have admitted it to anyone. Not after all the hard work she had been seen to put into the girl’s upbringing. It was just that when it had been the two of them together and she had fed them together, bought their clothes together, scolded them together . . . it had been somehow easier to consider Lottie just part of the family. Now, with Celia gone, she felt unable to deal with Lottie in quite the same way. If Susan admitted it to herself, she felt inexplicably resentful of her. Lottie seemed to sense this and had behaved even more impeccably, which was peculiarly irritating, too.

Worse, she had the distinct suspicion that, despite everything she said, Lottie was still going to that actress’s house. She offered to help Virginia with the shopping, which she had never done before. And then took several hours just to get a pound of mackerel. Or even half a day to pick up Dr. Holden’s newspaper. Twice she had come home smelling of scents that you most definitely could not get in Mr. Ansty’s chemist shop. And then, when one asked her, she would fix you with that rather too direct stare and say in a tone that, frankly, Susan found rather aggressive, that No, She Had Not Been to the Actress’s House. Because Hadn’t Mrs. Holden Told Her Not To? She really was too much sometimes.

Susan should have known, really. Lots of people had warned her against taking in an evacuee. She had disregarded those that said all the London children had nits and lice (although she had peered quite closely at eight-year-old Lottie’s hair when she arrived) and those that said she would steal or that the parents would follow and camp in their house and they’d never be rid of any of them.

No, there was only the mother, and she had never visited so much as once. She had written Susan Holden two letters, once after the first long stay, thanking her in that awful handwriting of hers, and the second time a year later when Susan had invited the child to return. But she had seemed rather relieved to have the child off her hands.

And Lottie had never stolen anything or run away or got too forward with boys. No, if anything, Susan was forced to acknowledge, it was Celia who had been a little too
developed
in that direction. The girl had done what she was told, helped with the little ones, and kept herself nice and presentable.

Susan Holden felt suddenly guilty, picturing eight-year-old Lottie standing at Merham station, her arms folded protectively around her brown-paper-wrapped bundle of clothes. In the midst of all the chaos, she had looked at Mrs. Holden silently, with those huge dark eyes, and then, as Susan began to chatter a welcome (even then the child was rather unnerving), she had slowly lifted her right hand and taken Susan’s own. It had been a curiously moving gesture. And a rather unbalancing one, too. And symptomatic of everything Lottie had been since: polite, self-contained, watchful, affectionate in a rather reserved way. Perhaps it was unfair to be so hard on the girl. She had done nothing really wrong. She was just going to have to adjust to Celia’s absence. The girl would be leaving them soon anyway, once she had sorted herself out with a good job. And Mrs. Holden did pride herself on her Christian sense of charity.

But then she thought about the way that Henry had looked at Lottie that time several weeks ago when she had hitched up her skirt to go in the paddling pool with Frederick. And Susan Holden felt rather complicated about her houseguest again.

C
ELIA HAD A BOYFRIEND
. I
T HADN’T TAKEN HER LONG,
Lottie thought wryly. There had been a lengthy gap between letters, and then she had written a breathless account of some awful trouble she had got into at a railway station and how this man, whom she was now stepping out with, had “saved” her. Lottie hadn’t taken much notice at first; Celia always was prone to exaggeration. And he was not the first man Celia had sworn was the one for her. Not even in the short time she’d been in London; there had been the man she’d met on the train between Bishops Stortford and Broxbourne; the man who served her at the café on Baker Street who always gave her an extra coffee when his boss wasn’t around; and there was Mr. Grisham, her shorthand teacher, who had definitely examined her loops and abbreviations with more than simple teacherly interest. But then, gradually, the letters were less about these men and the supposedly interminable evenings in with Aunt Angela and her awful brood and the girls at secretarial school, and increasingly about dinners at fashionable restaurants, and walks on Hampstead Heath they’d had together, and the general superiority of Guy in everything from conversational skills to kissing technique (“for God’s sakes, burn this before Mummy sees it”).

Lottie read and tried to decipher what was definitely the truth. For “monied family,” she decided, one should read simply “own house, with inside toilet”; for “absolutely gorgeous,” a face that didn’t resemble a disgruntled bulldog’s; and for “mad, simply passionate about me,” Celia probably meant that Guy had turned up to meet her at the times and places he said he would. It was hard not to be a little cynical—Lottie had lived many years with Celia by now and had learned the hard way that Celia and veracity were not always the closest of bedfellows. Lottie, for example, had heard herself described by her friend as having been rescued from a burning building during the Blitz, as a mysterious émigrée of Eastern European origin, and as an orphan whose parents had been killed by a doodlebug while celebrating their wedding anniversary with a dinner of smoked salmon and black-market vodka. She had not challenged Celia on any of these, despite becoming gradually aware of their provenance. No one ever challenged Celia; it was one of the things Lottie had learned at the Holden house. There was a feeling that doing so would be like opening Pandora’s box. In fact, no one even mentioned that Celia told fibs. The one time Lottie had mentioned one of these “untruths” to Mrs. Holden, Mrs. Holden had got quite shirty and told her she was sure there had been some mistake and really Lottie was being rather rude going on and on about it.

Perhaps Celia hadn’t even got a boyfriend, Lottie thought. Perhaps all these men were figments of her imagination, and she was really spending her evenings practicing her needlepoint and piano scales with Aunt Angela’s children. The thought made her smile. Just to get Celia going, Lottie had made no mention of Guy at all in her next letter, but she had asked lots of questions about Aunt Angela’s children.

It had been an odd couple of months; only now was Lottie getting used to Celia’s absence. But with that increased comfort, she had become aware of an increased tension within the house, as if Celia’s absence had removed some focus that, like invisible glue, had been holding the whole thing together. Dr. Holden’s absences had become more frequent, which had rather stretched Mrs. Holden’s brittle hold on everyday life. At the same time Freddie and Sylvia, as if responding to some unseen siren, chose this time to become more shrill and excitable, shredding what remained of her “nerves” and giving Dr. Holden an oft-spoken reason for not returning home. “Is it impossible to get a moment’s peace in this house?” he would ask, in his low, seemingly measured tones, and Mrs. Holden would jump, like a dog about to be kicked outside on a cold night.

Lottie would watch him silently as he withdrew to his study or on some unheralded night call, returning his “good night, Lottie” with equal civility. He was never rude to her, had never made her feel like a usurper within the house. Then again half the time he had hardly seemed to notice her at all.

When she had first arrived in the house, he had been less reserved. He had been friendly, had smiled more. Or perhaps she just remembered it like that. On her first night in the house, when she had wept silent tears, unsure what exactly it was that she was crying for but paradoxically afraid that her hosts would hear her and send her home again, he had let himself quietly into her room and sat down on the bed.