Withering Heights (12 page)

Lovely as these were likely to be, we were not destined to use them at that time. Ariel insisted on escorting us to our assigned bedrooms, each of which had its adjoining bathroom.
Betty disappeared to have a word with Mrs. Cake. Ben and Tom went companionably outside to bring in the luggage from the Land Rover. And Ariel led Mrs. Malloy and me up the lovely curve of staircase, in the manner of a tour guide in the employment of the National Trust.

Looking at her prim self-important back, I took in the magnitude of what had happened to her. The sudden wealth, the move to splendid surroundings: yes, it all sounded wonderfully exciting in theory. But to suddenly find herself a rich kid without having been brought up to it, her former life swept away as if rolled up in newspaper and put out in the dustbin, people treating her differently . . . it had to be overwhelming and possibly frightening.

We’ve all heard of people whose lives have been ruined by too much money and insufficient guidance to keep them anchored to reality. Then again, might their problems also be blamed on personality flaws? Was there something fundamentally malicious about Ariel’s peeking glances and frequently voiced dislike of Betty? Should I feel sorry for her or be warily on my guard against her schemes? Both, I determined, thinking about my own children and how I always needed to keep one step ahead of them, however dear their little faces and sweet their voices.

We were now walking down a long gallery with the banister railing to our left overlooking the great chandelier-lit pool of the hall below. There were doors to our right, interspersed with portraits and gilded electric lamps on the wall. At a word from Ariel, Mrs. Malloy scuttled into the room that was to be hers, heading directly for the lav, tossing the information over her shoulder that she would wait for me at the top of the stairs, but I wasn’t to rush because she planned on enjoying the moment.

Sincerely hoping she would find the lav provided a throne
worthy of her, I followed Ariel past two more doors until she came to one she opened for me. But we didn’t go inside immediately. I had halted before a portrait. Given the subject’s hairstyle, it would appear to have been painted some thirty or forty years previously. It was of a lovely young woman, seated at a small table, looking out a window. Winsome, I thought; that was the word for her: fine-boned, shadowy-eyed, and graceful, even captured as she was in immobility. The turn of her head, the pensive gaze, conveyed a quiet sorrow.

“She looks like she’s watching for someone, hoping he’ll come.” Ariel’s voice made me jump. “Well, it has to be the boyfriend, doesn’t it?”

“You think so?”

“She wouldn’t have that dippy look on her face if it was the milkman or just any old person, would she? I suppose you’ve guessed who she is.”

“Lady Fiona?”

“She asked if she could leave the portrait here until she finds somewhere permanent to live. I must say she’s not bad-looking even now. Her hair’s still fair, not much gray at all really. Betty thinks she’s too skinny for her height and age, but she would; she wants everybody to be fatter than she is. That’s why she’s always trying to get me to stuff myself with food. Especially things I hate, like tapioca and rice puddings.”

I let this pass. “You think her ladyship is looking out that window, hoping to see Mr. Gallagher come riding up on his white horse?”

“No, I think it was the other one.”

“Who?”

“The man she was madly in love with, the man her parents wouldn’t let her marry because he was too common. Mrs. Cake told me about him. She’s a great one for reminiscing about the past: quite fun, really. She said the two of them met on the sly
down by the old mill and used to hide love letters in a hollow tree, just like in a book. Only to be really exciting, they’d have had to run off and get married and then been found out and dragged home—”

“By her hard-hearted parents, blast their interference!” I thought of Tom’s parents, who had objected to his first love on religious grounds.

“And he’d have been murdered by them.” Ariel was warming to her theme.

“Or the jealous rival. That would be Mr. Gallagher. Oh, the horror of it!” Obviously, I was also getting caught up in the story.

“Lady Fiona would never have recovered from the tragedy.” Ariel reclaimed her narrative.

“Whatever really happened she appears to have done so, at least sufficiently to marry Mr. Gallagher.”

“That would have been on the rebound. Mrs. Cake says that one person who didn’t attend the wedding was Miss Pierce—”

“Nanny?”

“That’s right. She claimed to have the flu, but I bet that was an act. I think she hates Lady Fiona. You can see it in her eyes, even when she’s pretending to talk nicely about her. She didn’t think her good enough for her Nigel. Mrs. Cake says the title and the fortune didn’t cut any ice with Nanny. Only a princess would have been up to scratch, and there’d probably have been something wrong with
her
.”

“Maybe what Nanny wanted was to keep Nigel all to herself in the nursery.”

“Ugh!” Ariel pulled a face. “That’s really creepy.”

As was the idea of Lady Fiona murdering her husband. I kept this thought to myself while continuing to look at the face in the portrait. Surely it was a travesty to imagine that
lovely girl committing so monstrous an act later in life. Giving myself a mental shake, I said cheerfully that Mrs. Cake sounded like a great conversationalist.

“Having lived in Milton Moor her whole life, she knows everyone in the area.”

“That helps.”

“She does know stuff. Like Sergeant Walters being too busy knitting to get married. And the butcher being a closet vegetarian. Anyway, I find it interesting. And there’s no one else for me to talk to around here. Mavis hardly ever looks up from her work.”

“There has to be an enormous amount for her to do.”

“Yes. It isn’t fair for Betty to say she’s useless.”

I kept my mouth shut. In former times a place of this size would have employed dozens of servants. Housekeeper, butler, footmen, upstairs and downstairs maids, boot boys . . . the list went on. Finding people eager to do that sort of work these days probably wasn’t easy. But that should have led Betty to value Mavis more highly. Were she and Tom reluctant to spend their newfound money on sufficient hired help? They’d managed to avoid paying for an interior designer, hadn’t they?

Ariel read my mind. “We do have a team of cleaners come in every other week for three days. They go through the whole place, except for the west wing; it’s shut off and there’s hardly anything in there. On the off week, it’s the gardening people. Betty didn’t want a lot of people underfoot all the time. Mavis is all right. I don’t see what’s wrong with her, except she’s so quiet. But Mrs. Cake is better. She says she has a soft heart and a fondness for romance, but she knows when it’s important to keep her mouth shut.”

“I hope she won’t feel that way when talking to me and Mrs. Malloy. Speaking of whom”—I reluctantly withdrew my gaze
from the portrait—“it won’t do to keep her waiting when she’s eager to set off to see her sister.”

Ariel followed me into the bedroom that would be Ben’s and mine during our stay at Cragstone House. “Can I come, Ellie? I could show you where Mr. Scrimshank has his office; that would save you time.”

“That’s awfully nice of you, but better not.”

“Then I won’t tell you my surprise.” She sat down with a thump on the dressing-table stool.

This was another lovely room: luxury converted into cozy comfort. The wallpaper was striped green and white; the daffodil-yellow curtains matched the slipcovers on the two easy chairs by the fireplace. The bleached pine of the four-poster bed and armoire, the perfect placement of the lamps, the velvety sage carpet underfoot: all whispered of relaxation and ease. Ariel sat raking a tortoiseshell comb through her lank hair as I nipped into the bathroom with its tasteful appointments to freshen up, to use Betty’s phrase rather than Mrs. Malloy’s more blunt talk of going to the lav.

Betty’s words were far more suitable, given that the toilet handle, as well as the taps for the shell-shaped sink, looked as though they’d been hand-picked for Versailles by Marie Antoinette, with a little help from the royal decorator. (Somehow, I doubted that that soon-to-be-headless wonder had made do with the suggestions of an amateur.) Looking up from washing my hands with rose soap from a crystal dish, I searched my reflection in the mirror. Was I jealous of the yet unseen Val’s accomplishments throughout the house? Or merely amazed that according to Betty she was untrained?

I frequently advise my clients that an excess of perfection can be not only monotonous but stressful. You can’t wear the wrong clothes without the fear of failing your surroundings.
Something always needs to be just a little off: a picture looking as though it has been randomly chosen, a mismatched cup and saucer placed where they seem to be left out by mistake, a brass or silver candlestick in need of polishing. It was advice I had received from a guru designer, a former teacher and now friend of mine, who knew everyone in the business and, in my opinion, more than all of them combined. But getting things too right wasn’t the kind of mistake likely to be made by even the most gifted nonprofessional. The risks of such a person’s efforts looking more like a five-star hotel than a home were minimal.

The chances were good I’d meet the woman behind the enigma, I told my reflection as I toweled off my face. No point in dredging up excuses for disliking her unseen. So what if I hadn’t slept well the night before, was missing the children, had got drawn into another family’s problems. Laying down the monogrammed hand towel and sticking a smile on in lieu of lipstick, I went back into the bedroom and said to Ariel, still seated on the dressing-table stool, that we should go and look for Mrs. Malloy.

“She just popped her head around the door to say she’d like another ten minutes to finish her makeup.”

“Then we might as well stay put until we hear her coming.” I perched on the side of the bed. “There’s never any missing the sound of her high heels clicking down a wooden floor.”

I pictured Mrs. Malloy in her bathroom, mixing one facial cream with another, intent on concocting an instant rejuvenating formula of the sort that had eluded scientists for the last fifty years. I doubted we would hear her high heels tapping along the gallery very soon, which was all to the good, seeing that there was a matter I wished to broach to Ariel without seeming to pounce.

“What a lovely room. Ben and I will be really comfortable here,” I said from the bed.

“Yes, I suppose Val didn’t do a bad job. Better anyway than Betty’s attempts. She kept ordering furniture that she didn’t like when it showed up in the van. Poor Dad; she made him move it from place to place before sending it back. He’d get fed up, but most of the time he didn’t say anything, because she goes off at the drop of a hat, just like she did at Mavis.”

“We all lose our tempers from time to time.”

“Not the way she does.”

“Let’s discuss why she was on edge.” I shifted farther around to face her squarely.

“Why?”

“That business about the phone call to the catering firm. The one Betty said she didn’t make, canceling the arrangements for the garden party on Thursday.”

“What about it?” Ariel was now scraping the tortoiseshell comb along the edge of the dressing table.

“Who would have made that call?”

“How would I know? She should have kept her temper when she rang yesterday and got the news, but no! She had to go into one of her screaming rages. I’ll bet she was the one who threw the dishcloth at Mavis.”

“And now she’s been forced to invite us to stay so Ben can take on the catering.”

“Well, I didn’t set that up, but only because I didn’t think of it,” Ariel replied defiantly. “Maybe it was Mavis, out to get back at Betty for not letting her bring her son to work. That’s pretty scummy, don’t you think?”

“Not if he’s as destructive as she said.”

“Oh, I might have known she’d get you on her side!”

I looked at her, still fiddling with the comb, and, despite the
rudeness, felt a pang of pity. Why wasn’t something done about her hair? A more attractive cut and frequent washing could make all the difference. And then there were the oversized spectacles and the clothes, which did nothing to give her life and color. I had been far from a childhood beauty, but my parents—my mother in particular—had always boosted me up, pointed out my good points, made sure that what I wore suited me and helped me feel good about myself. And they hadn’t had the money that was now at the Hopkinses’ disposal. Again I was making judgments. Suggestions, especially if coming from Betty, were apt to be summarily spurned by Ariel.

“I’m not on anyone’s side,” I said gently, “but I don’t think you should criticize your stepmother to me. Last night was a little different; you had to give me your account of why you ran away. Now I’m a guest in her home. Isn’t there someone else you can talk to about your feelings?”

“Such as a psychiatrist?” She pounced to her feet to stand glaring at me, skinny arms folded. “You’re saying I’m crazy, aren’t you?”

It was too much . . . the scared look in her eyes, the quiver of her lips before she tightened them; the sight tore at my heart. I could have been looking at one of my own children, but I didn’t dare go over and put my arms around her. She would have pushed me away, become even more upset. Her pride was something she held on to grimly. I understood. I’d been there. And my childhood had been a day at the seaside compared to hers. No devastating loss of a parent in a tragic accident.

“That’s not it at all,” I said crisply, setting my mood to hers. “We all need to get things off our chests from time to time. Have someone really listen to us. What about one of your teachers at school?”

Ariel hunched a shoulder.

“What about your church?” I asked.

“What about it?”

“Is there anyone there you could talk to? The vicar’s wife, for instance?”

“We go to the Catholic church, remember? And Mr. Hard-castle, the Anglican vicar who’s coming to tea tomorrow, doesn’t have a wife. She ran off with one of the altar boys.”