Miss Appleby's Academy (3 page)

‘Can you read that here, Judge?’ Emma asked.

Both men looked surprised and she realized that they were not used to her questioning such things.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘this is not women’s work.’

‘Are we to hear second-hand how things are left?’

The Judge looked apologetically at her and then at Laurence, and after Laurence nodded the Judge said, ‘There is no mystery to it. Your father naturally left everything other than a few small bequests to his son.’

Emma stared.

‘Did you expect it to be otherwise?’ Laurence said, and she heard the note of ice in his voice.

She remembered then that her father had said he could leave her nothing. She understood now that he had meant this literally and although she urged herself to put such thoughts from her mind she felt afraid for her future and for George.

‘Why yes, why should I not? What about my home?’

‘It’s the family home, of course,’ the Judge said.

‘Laurence and Verity already have a perfectly good house just as large as this one.’

‘Which will be sold,’ Laurence said.

Verity added, ‘You didn’t really expect to go on living in a huge house like this by yourself? That would look odd to others.’

Emma realized they had already spoken about this between themselves and worked out what they would do. How naïve she had seen.

‘I’m not by myself,’ she objected.

‘Once George goes to school you’ll be quite alone,’ her sister-in-law said.

‘George isn’t going anywhere.’

There was a short pause and then the Judge coughed and wheezed, and he said, ‘My dear Emma, your brother becomes George’s guardian. It will be his decision alone.’

There was another silence and somehow it sounded quite different from any before. Even the shadows which were stealing across the grass in the back garden, the first dead leaves almost lost amongst its abundance, were altered somehow.

‘Perhaps you will begin the process of selling our house, Judge?’ Laurence said.

*

George was a completely different child after her father died, Emma could see. Laurence, Verity and their two young sons moved in almost immediately. Verity put their beds in George’s room.

‘Boys don’t need a room to themselves,’ she said, ‘and besides, George will hardly be there and when Daniel and Charles are a little older they will go away to school too so it would be a waste of space to give them more just for the vacations.’

George retreated to the library, but Laurence decided he would turn it into his study, the better to work at home in the evenings, and the boys were banned from there. If George went upstairs to read the other boys followed him, shouting and playing noisy games. He liked noisy games himself, but not with them. These things mattered, Emma thought.

‘George is very quiet,’ Verity said. ‘He used to be so fond of playing outside. He isn’t ill, is he?’

‘His father has just died,’ Emma said.

Verity laughed. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Children have little concept of death.’

‘I think he has noticed that Father is not here,’ Emma said, but Verity was busily moving in her own furniture now that the other house was sold, and disposing of sideboards, tables and bookcases which Emma could not remember being without.

She also employed someone to help in the garden, and Emma came back from the local bookstore which had become one of her own refuges to find her herb garden pulled up and laid in heaps on the path, and the gardener, Mr Burton, saying how stubborn some of it had been.

‘I couldn’t get my fork in at that rosemary. Must have
been there for years, the stem’s all woody.’ He shook his head. ‘Rosemary should be replaced every two years, and the mint had gone rusty. It shouldn’t be in a pot like that, you know, even when the pot’s in the ground: doesn’t do it any good though it does tend to take over everything, given its way.’

Emma went into the kitchen. This too was no longer her domain: Verity employed a cook. She strode through into Verity’s sitting room – which had been the winter sitting room, the cosiest room in the house – and demanded, ‘Why did you pull up my herb garden?’

Verity, who was studying the menus for the next week, looked up as though she hadn’t heard what Emma was saying.

‘The herb garden,’ Emma repeated.

‘Oh yes. I’m going to plant roses there. Now that Laurence and I sleep in that bedroom I thought the scent would be delightful in the summer as we go to sleep with all the windows open.’

At dinner that evening Emma was almost late. She sat down without apology. They had a formal meal each evening, the children banished to bed, and she could not help but remember the autumn evenings of the years before: her father and George and herself toasting crumpets late on Sunday afternoons when the darkness had come down early over the land and the fire was bright against the hearth tiles.

Laurence, usually first to begin eating after everyone was served, hesitated, smiled at his wife and then looked
across the table at Emma and said, ‘We’ve got a nice surprise for you. We’re aware that you would much rather have a place of your own, you have grown used to being the mistress here, so I’ve found a nice little cottage which will be just right.’

Emma, lifting a portion of potato to her mouth, put down her fork, heard the sentence once more in her mind and then over and over.

‘A cottage?’

‘Charming little place on the edge of town. I’m sure you’ll like it. George will be going to school next month and you’ll have very little to do for the first time in years. You’ll be able to potter there to your heart’s content.’

Verity beamed across the table at her.

‘The garden is just big enough for you,’ she said.

*

The cottage, as Laurence had said, was at the very edge of town. The land rose directly behind it, so there was no back garden. Verity had been right about the front garden too: it was at least a dozen steps to the door, a vegetable patch to the side where the gooseberry bushes had run wild, but little could have grown there, the house next door overshadowed the space.

At the back there was no place for anything; the cottage leaned in against the land as though it had stood up straight for too long. Consequently it had no back door, just one to the side which led directly into the kitchen.

There were three small dark rooms with stone floors downstairs. The staircase was narrow, she could not see
to the top because of the lack of light, but it was no surprise that up there the rooms were better because they were above the surrounding countryside. There were no views except for one window looking away from the town to where the road strung out grey into the distance. The third bedroom was tiny, had no window, and Emma could smell the damp. From the second, if you had opened the window, you could have stepped outside and made your way carefully down onto the road.

Verity, who had insisted on going with her, went from room to room finding something positive to say about each one. ‘And just think,’ she declared, when there was nothing more to see, ‘you don’t have to put up with the boys tumbling about you.’

Laurence and Verity’s sons were little ogres. Emma had caught the elder one in the garden the day before using a garden spade to bang the living daylights out of some unfortunate frog. The other child wet his bed nightly because Laurence would allow no night light and the poor boy saw creatures coming to get him in the darkness. Often Emma lay awake and heard Verity get up to change his sheets, and a vague smell of warm urine hung about the child all day.

George, insisting on seeing the cottage, though he would be long gone to school in Boston by then, stood in the darkness of the freezing little kitchen and said, ‘It’s awful,’ as though he had been an adult.

He had grown so much lately and had altered in other ways. The joy and light had gone from him, he rarely spoke, and when Emma had explained as gently as she
could that he was going away to school, he merely nodded. There was a large portmanteau standing open in his bedroom which Verity was gradually filling with clothes which he would need. He would go directly after Christmas and not come back before spring. Emma felt like apologizing to him, but she didn’t see the point.

She alone took George to the station. He did not look at her or speak even when they said goodbye. He turned his back to her and climbed onto the train.

‘Is that you, Mick?’

They were, Mick Castle thought, the sweetest words that any woman had ever said to any man; it was the mantra of his homecoming and something he looked forward to all day.

He responded, shouting through the hall, before he closed the door, ‘Aye, it’s me,’ and then he made his way into the light of the kitchen, saw the black dog, Hector, get up from beneath the table, tail wagging, and then his young wife busy at the stove.

‘You been at the brandy bottle?’ he said, kissing the back of her neck.

‘No, you fool, it’s for the sauce.’

‘You smell of it.’

‘Well, I did have a little nip. Several little nips, in fact.’

‘Let’s taste it then,’ and she turned around and kissed him, wooden spoon in one hand, her white pinny covered in the making of the dinner.

‘Would you like some brandy?’

‘Food will be fine when it’s ready.’

‘You know, Mick, they say there are only two kinds of landlord, those who drink and those who don’t, and you’re in danger of becoming a Methodist.’

It was true, you lost the taste for booze when you were with it all day and when you saw what it did to other people. He was gagging for tea right now and she made some without him asking, though she did say it would rot his insides at this time of night.

‘Tea after six is an abomination to the Lord,’ she said in jest, as she poured boiling water into the pot.

‘Where’s Connie?’

Isabel sighed. ‘At her books again. That child will turn into a schoolteacher if we aren’t careful.’

Secretly he was rather pleased that his child was keen on learning. Her mother wanted her to be decorative. She spent the evenings putting Connie’s hair into rags, so that the child complained she couldn’t sleep for the nasty lumps, making her pretty dresses, showing her how to paint and embroider. Connie hated the fuss of standing while her mother pinned new clothes around her and she showed no aptitude for embroidery, painting or singing. She had already refused to learn to play the baby grand piano which Mick had bought so that there could be music in the house.

He went into the big room which was more like a library than a sitting room. Books lined the walls. He had had the bookshelves built to house his father’s books when they had moved into the house, just to keep something
of his childhood. He didn’t have much time for reading.

To be fair there was another sitting room, they were not short of space, but the library was Connie’s domain, she loved it, had come to dominate it in some ways. Their child was beautiful, but then she didn’t know or it didn’t matter to her and yet her mother told her so over and over again. Isabel had rejoiced when their daughter had been so lovely, and so had he, but it was a different sort of loveliness that he saw and that she saw, somehow.

He didn’t know what he had done to deserve such things. She was like a fairy being. He was dark and tall and rather spare, while Isabel Hanlon, like her father, was pure Viking, big and bright yellow-haired, blue eyes you could drown in, clean-limbed and long-legged with cheeks like blushing roses, and he adored her.

He had never come across anything which was as wonderful as going to bed with his wife. She was ice and fire, giggles and sweet moans, her hands were soft and caressing and her mouth was moist and tasted of strawberries. She gathered him to her with such completeness that he thought they had been destined for one another, that she had been born to be his and for him to marry her, and although neither of their parents had thought it a match he knew that it was worthwhile.

He had not known ecstasy until he touched her. He had not lived a full life before he met her. He did not care what either of them had given up for the other, that only made it sweeter. They met in that perfect union which only real lovers knew and nobody else was anywhere
within that magic circle. Together they could hold the horrors of life at bay.

Their child was small, delicate. She had white blonde hair, grey-green eyes like the sea at Tynemouth on a fair day. He did not dare to call it perfect, yet he had no idea where she had got such looks. She was truly his father’s grandchild, though his father did not see her. He had died weeks before she was born. It was, to Mick, a huge loss. He had wanted his father to see him as a father and not just as something his father had not wanted him to be. His father had been a scholar and he was anything but, and yet Connie too had the makings of a professor.

He missed both his parents. It was not a balance between one and the other, and in his dreams he remembered himself as a small child and the harmony which had given way to disappointment when he had turned out not to be a scholar but had followed his grandfather into business. Sometimes he wished to be that child again, but in daylight he went about as other people did. You could not grieve in public, it was not seemly.

Connie soothed him. She didn’t acknowledge his entrance; she was sitting at his father’s old desk, counting on her fingers. He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

‘Now you made me lose count,’ she objected, moving just a little away from him, as though inviting his kiss to follow, as if she were only teasing and knew that this was so; his child adored him and for him she was the whole of the stars from the sky.

The dog had followed him in and lay down heavily
before the fire, like a guest who doesn’t want to make a fuss. Mick went over and sat in the armchair and then Hector moved so that his face was on Mick’s feet. Labradors love to put their heads on your feet. Mick sat there for a few minutes, luxuriating in the fire and the peace until his wife broke the silence, opening the door and saying, ‘The dinner’s ready.’

‘In a minute,’ Connie said.