The Shifting Fog (56 page)

‘How should I know?’ said Hannah, turning. She avoided my eyes.

‘That’s what I said,’ said Emmeline. ‘Why would Robbie tell you and not me?’ She shook her head. ‘Why would he go at all, and without saying anything?’

Hannah lifted her shoulders. Dropped them again. ‘He was like that, don’t you think? Unpredictable. Unreliable.’

‘Well, I’m going to find him,’ said Emmeline determinedly.

‘I have before.’

‘Oh no, Emmeline,’ said Hannah quickly. ‘Don’t go looking for him.’

‘But I have to,’ said Emmeline.

‘Why?’

Emmeline smiled at her, rolled her big blue eyes. ‘Because I love him, of course.’

‘Oh, Emme, no,’ said Hannah softly. ‘No you don’t.’

‘I do,’ said Emmeline. ‘I always have. Ever since he first came to Riverton and he bandaged my arm for me.’

‘You were eleven,’ said Hannah.

‘Of course, and it was just a childhood crush then,’ said Emmeline.

‘But it was the beginning. I’ve compared every man I’ve met since to Robbie.’

Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘What about the film-maker?

What about Harry Bentley, or the half-dozen other young men you’ve been in love with this year alone? You’ve been engaged to at least two of them.’

‘Robbie’s different,’ said Emmeline.

‘And how does he feel?’ Hannah said, not daring to look at Emmeline. ‘Has he ever given you reason to believe he might feel the same way?’

‘I’m sure he does,’ Emmeline said. ‘He’s never once missed an opportunity to come out with me. I know it’s not because he likes my friends. He’s made no secret of the fact he thinks they’re a bunch of spoiled and idle kids.’ She nodded resolutely. ‘I’m sure he does and I’m going to find him.’

‘Don’t,’ said Hannah with a firmness that took Emmeline by surprise. ‘He’s not for you.’

‘How do you know?’ said Emmeline. ‘You barely know him.’

‘I know his type,’ said Hannah. ‘Blame the war. It took perfectly normal young men and returned them changed. Broken.’ I thought of Alfred, the night on the stairs at Riverton when his ghosts had come for him, then I forced him from my mind.

‘I don’t care,’ said Emmeline stubbornly. ‘I think it’s romantic. I should like to look after him. Fix him.’

‘Men like Robbie are dangerous,’ said Hannah. ‘They can’t be fixed. They are as they are.’ She exhaled, frustrated. ‘You have so many other suitors. Can’t you find it in your heart to love one of them?’

Emmeline shook her head stubbornly.

‘I know you can. Promise you’ll try?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You must.’

Emmeline looked away from Hannah then, and I saw something new in her expression: something harder, more immovable. ‘It’s really no concern of yours, Hannah,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m twenty. I don’t need you to help make my decisions. You were married at my age and Lord knows you didn’t consult anyone on that decision.’

‘It’s hardly the same thing—’

‘I don’t need a big sister watching over everything I do. Not any more.’ Emmeline exhaled and turned again to face Hannah. Her voice was lighter. ‘Let’s agree, shall we, that from this point on we’ll let one another live the life she chooses? What do you say?’

Hannah, it turned out, had little to say. She nodded agreement, and closed the door behind her.

On the eve of our departure for Riverton, I packed the last of Hannah’s dresses. She was sitting by the windowsill, watching over the park as the last of the day’s light faded. The streetlights were just coming on when she turned and said to me, ‘Have you ever been in love, Grace?’

Her question startled me. Its timing. ‘I . . . I couldn’t say, ma’am.’

I laid her fox-tail coat along the base of the steamer trunk.

‘Oh, you’d know if you had,’ she said.

I avoided her gaze. Tried to sound indifferent; hoped that it would cause her to change the subject. ‘In that case, I’d have to say no, ma’am.’

‘Probably a lucky thing.’ She turned back to the window. ‘True love, it’s like an illness.’

‘An illness, ma’am?’ I certainly felt sick enough then and there.

‘I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things.’

‘And now, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘Now I do. It’s an illness. You catch it when you least expect. There’s no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it’s fatal.’

I let my eyes close briefly. My balance faltered. ‘Not fatal, ma’am, surely?’

‘No. You’re probably right, Grace. I exaggerate.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘You see? I’m a case in point. I’m behaving like the heroine in some awful penny novelette.’ She was quiet then but must have continued to think along the same lines, for after a while she tilted her head quizzically and said, ‘You know, Grace, I always thought that you and Alfred . . . ?’

‘Oh no, ma’am,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. ‘Alfred and I were never more than friends.’ The hot sting of a thousand needles in my skin.

‘Really?’ She pondered this. ‘I wonder what made me think otherwise.’

‘I couldn’t say, ma’am.’

She watched me, fumbling with her silks, and she smiled. ‘I’ve embarrassed you.’

‘Not at all, ma’am,’ I said. ‘It’s just that . . .’ I clutched at conversation. ‘I was just thinking of a recent letter I received. News from Riverton. It’s a coincidence you should ask after Alfred just now.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I couldn’t seem to stop. ‘Do you remember Miss Starling that used to work for your father?’

Hannah frowned. ‘That thin lady, with the mousy hair? Used to tiptoe about the house with a typing machine?’

‘Yes, ma’am, that’s her.’ I was outside myself then, watching and listening as somehow I gave every appearance of carelessness. ‘She and Alfred were married, ma’am. Just this last month past. They’re living in Ipswich now, running his mechanical business.’ I closed her trunk and nodded, kept my gaze low. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I believe Mr Boyle needs me downstairs.’

I closed the door behind me and I was alone. I clamped my hand to my mouth. Clenched my eyes shut. Felt my shoulders shaking, moist clicks in my throat.

My skeleton seemed to lose some crucial integrity and I crumpled. Seeped, shoulder first, into the wall, longing to disappear into the floors, the wall, the air.

There I remained. Immovable. I had vague visions of Teddy or Deborah finding me in the darkened hallway when time came for them to make their way to bed. Mr Boyle being called to arrange for my removal. And I felt nothing. No shame. No duty. For what did it matter? What did any of it matter any more?

Then somewhere downstairs, a crash. Plates and cutlery. A breath caught in my throat. My eyes opened. The present rushed upon me, refilled me.

Of course it mattered. Hannah mattered. Now more than ever she needed me. The move back to Riverton, being without Robbie. I exhaled shakily. Levelled my shoulders and swallowed. Forced my throat to relax.

Little use would I be if I gave myself over to self-indulgence, became so weighed down with self-pity I was distracted from my duties.

I pushed away from the wall, smoothed my skirt and straightened my cuffs. Wiped my eyes.

I was a lady’s maid. Not a petty housemaid. I was relied upon. Could not be given to episodes of such imprudent abandon. I exhaled again. Deeply. Purposefully. Nodded to myself and walked large, definite steps down the hall. And as I climbed the stairs to my room, I forced closed the horrid door in my mind through which I’d briefly glimpsed the husband, the hearth, the children I might have had.

Riverton Revisited

Ursula has come as promised. We are driving the winding lane toward the village of Saffron Green. Any moment now we’ll take a bend and there’ll be tourist signs welcoming us to Riverton. I glance at Ursula’s face while she drives; she smiles at me then returns her attention to the road. Any misgivings she might have had about the wisdom of our excursion, she has pushed aside. Sylvia wasn’t pleased, but she agreed not to tell Matron, to stall Ruth if needs be. I suspect I am giving off the stench of last opportunities. It is too late to worry about preserving me for the future. The metal gates are open. Ursula turns the car into the driveway and we weave our way toward the house. It is dark, the tunnel of trees is strangely still, strangely silent, as it always was, listening for something. We turn the last corner and the house is upon us. Just as it has been so many times before: my first day at Riverton, fourteen years old and green as a gardener’s thumb; the day of the recital, rushing from Mother’s, full of expectation; the evening of Alfred’s proposal; the morning in 1924 when we returned to Riverton from London. Today is a homecoming, of sorts.

There is a concrete car-parking space nowadays, after the driveway and before the Eros and Psyche fountain. Ursula winds her window down as we approach the toll booth. She has a word with the guard who waves us through. On account of my obvious frailty, she is given special dispensation to drop me off before finding a parking space. She drives around the turning circle—bitumen now, rather than gravel—and stops the car at the entrance. There is a little iron garden seat by the portico, and Ursula leads me to it, settles me, then returns to the car park.

I am sitting there, thinking of Mr Hamilton, wondering how many times he answered the Riverton front door before his heart attack in the spring of 1934, when it happens.

‘Good to see you back, young Grace.’

I squint up into the watery sun (or is it my eyes that are watery?) and there he stands, on the top step.

‘Mr Hamilton,’ I say. I am hallucinating, of course, but it seems churlish to ignore an old comrade, no matter he’s been dead sixty years.

‘We’ve been wondering when we might see you again. Mrs Townsend and I.’

‘You have?’ Mrs Townsend passed soon after him: a stroke in her sleep.

‘Oh, aye. We always like it when the young ones return. We get a little lonely, just the two of us. No family to serve. Just a lot of hammering and knocking and dirty boots.’ He shook his head and cast his eyes upward to take in the arch of the portico. ‘Aye, the old place has seen a lot of changes. Just wait till you see what they’ve done with my pantry.’ He smiles at me, down his long burnished nose. ‘And tell me, Grace,’ he said gently. ‘How are things with you?’

‘I’m tired,’ I say. ‘I’m tired, Mr Hamilton.’

‘I know you are, lassie,’ he says. ‘Not long now.’

‘What’s that?’ Ursula is by my side, pushing her parking ticket into her purse. ‘Are you tired?’ Concern knots her brow. ‘I’ll see about hiring a wheelchair. They’ve put lifts in as part of the renovation.’

I tell her perhaps that might be best, and then I sneak a glance back at Mr Hamilton. He is no longer there. Inside the entrance hall a sprightly woman dressed like the wife of a 1940s country squire welcomes us and announces that our entrance fee includes the tour she’s about to start. Before we can demur, we are herded into a group with six other unwitting visitors: a couple of daytrippers from London, a schoolboy researching a local history assignment, and a family of four American tourists—the adults and son in matching running shoes and T-shirts that read
I escaped
the tower!
, the teenage daughter tall, pale and dour, dressed all in black. Our tour leader—Beryl, she says, tweaking her name badge to verify the fact—has lived in the village of Saffron Green all her life and we are to ask her anything we’d like to know. The tour starts downstairs. The hub of any English country house, says Beryl with a practised smile and a wink. Ursula and I take a lift installed where the coat cupboard used to be. By the time we reach the bottom, the group is already crowded around Mrs Townsend’s kitchen table, laughing as Beryl reads through a comic list of traditional English dishes of the nineteenth century. The servants’ hall looks much as it did, yet it is unaccountably different. It has lost its friendly, frowsty ambience. It’s the lighting, I realise. Electricity has swept away the flickering, whispering spaces. We were without for a long time at Riverton. Even when Teddy had the place wired in the mid-twenties it was nothing like this. I miss the dimness, though I suppose it wouldn’t do to keep it lit as was, even for historical effect. There are laws about that sort of thing now. Health and safety. Public liability. No one wants to be sued because a daytripper accidentally misses his step on a poorly lit staircase.

‘Follow me,’ chirps Beryl. ‘We’ll take the servants’ exit to the back terrace, but don’t worry, I won’t make you put on uniforms!’

We are on the lawn above Lady Ashbury’s rose garden. It looks, surprisingly, much as it always did, though ramps have been constructed between the tiers. They have a team of gardeners now, says Beryl, employed continuously on grounds maintenance. There’s a lot to look after: the gardens themselves, the lawns, the fountains, other various estate buildings. The summer house. The summer house was one of the first changes Teddy made when Riverton fell to him in 1923. It was a crime, he said, that such a beautiful lake, the jewel in the estate, had been allowed to fall to disuse. He envisaged boating parties in the summertime, planetary-observation parties in the evenings. He had plans drawn immediately and by the time we came from London in April 1924 it was almost complete, the only hold-ups a tardy shipment of Italian limestone and some spring rain.

It was raining the morning we arrived. Relentless, drenching rain that started as we drove through the outer villages of Essex and didn’t let up. The fens were full, the forest soggy, and when the motor cars crawled up the muddy Riverton driveway, the house wasn’t there. Not at first glance. So shrouded was it by low-lying fog that it only appeared gradually, as if an apparition. When we drew close enough, I wiped the palm of my hand against the misty motor-car window and peered through the cloud toward the etched glass of the nursery window. I had an almost overwhelming sense that somewhere inside that great dark house Grace of five years ago was busy preparing the dining room, dressing Hannah and Emmeline, receiving Myra’s latest wisdom. Here and there, then and now, simultaneously, at the capricious whim of time. The first motor car stopped and Mr Hamilton materialised from the front portico, black umbrella in hand, to help Hannah and Deborah alight. The second car continued on to the rear entrance and stopped. I attached my raincoat to my hat, nodded to the driver and made a run for the servants’ hall entrance. Perhaps it was the fault of the rain. Perhaps if it had been a clear day, if the sky had glittered blue and sunlight had smiled through the windows, the house’s decline would not have been so shocking. For though Mr Hamilton and his staff had gone to their best efforts—had been cleaning around the clock, said Myra—the house was in poor condition. It was a tall order to make up so promptly for years of Mr Frederick’s determined neglect. It was Hannah who was most affected. Naturally enough, I suppose. Seeing it in its demoralised state brought home to her the loneliness of Pa’s last days. Brought back, too, the old guilt: her failure to mend the bridges between them.