The Shifting Fog (30 page)

If I were honest, I had perceived it from the evening of his return. We had planned a little party: Mrs Townsend had baked a special supper and Mr Hamilton had received permission to open a bottle of the Master’s wine. We had spent much of the afternoon laying out the servants’ hall table, laughing as we arranged and rearranged items so that they might best please Alfred. We were all a little drunk, I think, on gladness that evening, though none more so than I.

When the expected hour arrived we positioned ourselves in a tableau of poorly pretended casualness. Expectant glances met one another as we continued to wait, ears registering every noise outside. Finally, the crunch of grave, low voices, a car door closing. Footsteps drawing near. Mr Hamilton stood, smoothed his jacket, and took up position by the door. A moment of eager silence as we awaited Alfred’s knock, and then the door was open and we were upon him.

It was nothing dramatic: Alfred didn’t rant or rave or cower. He let me take his hat and then he stood, uncomfortably, in the doorjamb as if afraid to enter. Schooled his lips into a smile. Mrs Townsend threw her arms around him, dragging him across the threshold as one might a resistant roll of carpet. She led him to his seat, guest of honour to Mr Hamilton’s right, and we all spoke at once, laughing, exclaiming, recounting events of the past two years. All except Alfred, that is. Oh, he made a stab at it. Nodded when required, provided answers to questions, even managed another strangled smile or two. But they were the responses of an outsider, of one of Lady Violet’s Belgians, contriving to please an audience set on including them.

I was not the only one to notice. I saw the tremors of unease pulling at Mr Hamilton’s brow, an unwelcome knowledge arranging itself on Myra’s. But we never spoke of it, never came closer than the day the Luxtons came to dinner, the day Miss Starling offered her ill-received opinions. That evening, and the other observations I made since his arrival, were left to lie dormant. We all picked up the slack and remained complicit in an unspoken pact not to notice things had changed. Times had changed and Alfred had changed.

‘Grace!’ Mr Hamilton looked up from the bench as I reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘It’s half-four and there’s not a place card to be seen on the dining table. How do you imagine the Master’s important guests would fare without place cards?’

I imagined they’d find themselves a place much more to their liking than the one they’d been assigned. But I was not Myra, had not yet learned the art of standing up for myself, so said, ‘Not very well, Mr Hamilton.’

‘Not very well indeed.’ He thrust a stack of place cards and a folded table plan into my hands. ‘And Grace,’ he said as I turned to leave, ‘if you happen to see Alfred,
do
ask him if he’d be so kind as to find his way back downstairs. He hasn’t even started on the coffee pot.’

In the absence of a suitable hostess, Hannah, much to her amused vexation, had been given the duty of assigning places. Her plan was hastily sketched on a sheet of lined notepaper, jagged along the edges where it had been torn from a book of similar sheets.

The place cards themselves were lettered plainly: black on white, the Ashbury crest embossed on the upper left corner. They lacked the flair of the Dowager Lady Ashbury’s cards but would serve the purpose well enough, matching the comparatively austere table setting favoured by Mr Frederick. Indeed, to Mr Hamilton’s eternal chagrin, Mr Frederick had elected to dine
en famille
(rather than in the formal
à la Russe
style to which we were accustomed) and would be carving the pheasant himself. Though Mrs Townsend was aghast, Myra, fresh from her stint outside the house, quietly approved the choice, noting that the Master’s decision was surely calculated to suit the tastes of his American guests.

It was not my place to say, but I preferred the table in its more modern manner. Without the tree-like epergnes, pregnant with their overloaded salvers of sweetmeats and tizzy fruit displays, the table had a simple refinement that pleased me. The stark white of the cloth, starched at each corner, the silver lines of cutlery and sparkling clusters of stemware.

I peered closer. A large thumbprint blotted the rim of Mr Frederick’s champagne flute. I puffed a hot breath onto the offending
mark and rubbed at it quickly with a bunched corner of my apron.

So intent was I on the task that I jumped when the door from the hall swung forcefully inwards.

‘Alfred!’ I said. ‘You frightened me! I almost dropped a glass!’

‘You shouldn’t be touching them,’ Alfred said, a familiar frown settled on his forehead. ‘Glasses are my duty.’

‘There was a print,’ I said. ‘You know what Mr Hamilton’s like. He’d have your guts for garters if he saw. And Mr Hamilton in garters is something I hope never to see!’

An attempt at humour destined for failure before it was made. Somewhere in the trenches of France Alfred’s laughter had died, and he could only grimace. ‘I was going to polish them later.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘now you won’t have to.’

‘You needn’t keep doing that.’ His tone was measured.

‘Doing what?’

‘Checking up on me. Following me around like a second shadow.’

‘I’m not. I was just laying the place cards and I saw a fingerprint.’

‘And I told you, I was going to do it later.’

‘All right,’ I said quietly, setting the glass back in place. ‘I’ll leave it.’

Alfred grunted his gruff satisfaction and pulled a cloth from his pocket.

I fiddled with the place cards though they were already straight, and pretended not to watch him.

His shoulders were hunched, the right raised stiffly so that his body turned from me. It was an entreaty for solitude, yet the cursed bells of good intentions rang loudly in my ears. Maybe if I drew him out, learned what was bothering him, I could help? Who better than me? For surely I had not imagined the closeness that had grown between us while he was away? I knew I had not: he had said as much in his letters. I cleared my throat to speak, proceeded softly to say: ‘I know what happened yesterday.’

He gave no appearance of having heard, remained focused on the glass he was polishing.

A little louder: ‘I know what happened yesterday. In the drawing room.’

He stopped, glass in hand. Stood very still. The offending words hung like fog between us and I was struck by an overwhelming wish to retract the utterance.

His voice was deathly quiet. ‘Little miss been telling tales, has she?’

‘No—’

‘Bet she had a good laugh about it.’

‘Oh no,’ I said quickly. ‘It wasn’t like that. She was worried about you.’ I swallowed, dared to say: ‘
I’m
worried about you.’

He looked up sharply from beneath the lock of hair his glass-shuffling had worked loose. His mouth was etched with tiny angry lines. ‘Worried about me?’

His strange, brittle tone made me wary, yet I was seized by an uncontrollable urge to make things right. ‘It’s just, it’s not like you to drop a tray, and then you didn’t mention it … I thought you might be frightened of Mr Hamilton finding out. But he wouldn’t be angry, Alfred. I’m sure of it. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes in their duties.’

He looked at me, and for a moment I thought he might laugh. Instead, his features were contorted by a sneer. ‘You silly little girl,’ he said. ‘You think I care about a few cakes ending up on the floor?’

‘Alfred—’

‘You think I don’t know about duty? After where I’ve been?’

‘I didn’t say that—’

‘It’s what you’re thinking though, isn’t it? I can feel you all looking at me, watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake. Well, you can stop waiting and you can keep your worrying. There’s nothing wrong with me, you hear? Nothing!’

My eyes were smarting, his bitter tone made my skin prickle. I whispered, ‘I just wanted to help—’

‘To help?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘And what makes you think you can help me?’

‘Why, Alfred,’ I said tentatively, wondering what he could possibly mean. ‘You and I … we’re … It’s like you said … in your letters—’

‘Forget what I said.’

‘But Alfred—’

‘Stay away from me, Grace,’ he said coldly, returning his attention to the glasses. ‘I never asked for your help. I don’t need it and I don’t want it. Go on, get out of here and let me get on with my work.’

My cheeks burned: with disillusionment, with the feverish afterglow of confrontation, but most hotly with embarrassment. I had perceived a closeness where none existed. God help me, in my most private moments I had even begun to imagine a future for Alfred and me. Courtship, marriage, maybe even a family of our own. And now, to realise I had mistaken absence for greater feeling …

I spent the early evening downstairs. If Mrs Townsend wondered where my sudden dedication to the finer points of pheasant roasting came from, she knew better than to ask. I basted and boned, and even helped with stuffing. Anything to avoid being sent back upstairs where Alfred was serving.

My course of avoidance was on good track until Mr Hamilton thrust a cocktail salver into my hands.

‘But Mr Hamilton,’ I said disconsolately. ‘I’m helping Mrs Townsend with the meals.’

Mr Hamilton, eyeballs glistening behind his glasses at the perceived challenge, replied, ‘And I am telling you to take the cocktails.’

‘But Alfred—’

‘Alfred is busy fixing the dining room,’ Mr Hamilton said. ‘Quickly now, girl. Don’t keep the Master waiting.’

It was a small party, six in all, and yet the room gave the impression of being overfull. Thick with loud voices and inordinate heat. Mr Frederick, eager to make a good impression, had insisted on extra heating and Mr Hamilton had risen to the challenge, hiring two oil stoves. A particularly strident female perfume had flourished in the hothouse conditions and now threatened to overwhelm the room and its occupants.

I saw Mr Frederick first, dressed in his black dinner suit, looking almost as fine as the Major had once done, though thinner and somehow less starched. He stood by the mahogany bureau, talking to a puffy man with salt and pepper hair that perched like a wreath around his shiny pate.

The puffy man pointed toward a porcelain vase on the bureau. ‘I saw one of those at Sotheby’s,’ he said in an accent of gentrified northern English mixed with something else. ‘Identical.’ He leaned closer. ‘It’s worth a pretty penny, old boy.’

Mr Frederick replied vaguely. ‘I wouldn’t know, Great-grandfather brought that back from the Far East. It’s sat there ever since.’

‘You hear that, Estella?’ Simion Luxton called across the room to his doughy wife, seated between Emmeline and Hannah on the sofa. ‘Frederick said it’s been in the family for generations. He’s been using it as a paperweight.’

Estella Luxton smiled tolerantly at her husband and between them passed a type of unspoken communication borne of years of joint existence. In that moment’s glance I perceived their marriage as one of practical endurance. A symbiotic relationship whose usefulness had long outlived its passion.

Duty to her husband fulfilled, Estella returned her attention to Emmeline, in whom she had discovered a fellow high-society enthusiast. For what her husband lacked in hair, Estella more than made up. Hers, the colour of pewter, was wound into a sleek and impressive chignon, curiously American in its construction. It reminded me of a photograph Mr Hamilton had pinned on the noticeboard downstairs, a New York skyscraper covered in scaffolding: complex and impressive without ever being properly attractive. She smiled at something Emmeline said and I was stunned by her unusually white teeth.

I skirted the room, laid the cocktail tray on the dumb waiter beneath the window and curtseyed routinely. The young Mr Luxton was seated in the armchair, half listening as Emmeline and Estella discussed the upcoming country season in rapturous tones.

Theodore—Teddy as we came to think of him—was handsome in the way all wealthy men were handsome in those days. Basic good looks enhanced with confidence created a façade of wit and charm, put a knowing gleam in the eyes and gave glisten to the hair. Swiftly put paid to any suggestion of middling intelligence.

He had dark hair, almost as black as his well-pressed dinner suit, and he wore a distinguished moustache which made him look like a screen actor. Like Douglas Fairbanks, I thought suddenly, and felt my cheeks flush. When he smiled it was broad and free, his teeth
whiter even than his mother’s. There must be something in the American water, I decided, for all of their teeth were as white as the strand of pearls Hannah wore at her neck, over the gold chain of her photograph locket.

As Estella commenced a detailed description of Lady Hamilton’s most recent ball, in a metallic accent I had never heard before, Teddy’s gaze began to wander the room. Noticing his guest’s lack of occupation, Mr Frederick motioned tensely to Hannah who cleared her throat and said, half-heartedly, ‘Your crossing was pleasant, I trust?’

‘Very pleasant,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘Though Mother and Father would answer differently, I’m sure. Neither have sea legs. Each was as sick as the other from the moment we left New York until we reached Bristol.’

Hannah took a sip from her cocktail then submitted another stiff sample of polite conversation. ‘How long will you be staying in England?’

‘Just a short visit for me, I’m afraid. I’m off to the continent next week. Egypt.’

‘Egypt,’ Hannah said, eyes widening.

Teddy laughed. ‘Yes. I have business there.’

‘You’re going to see the pyramids of Egypt?’

‘Not this time, I’m afraid. Just a few days in Cairo and then on to Florence.’

‘God-awful place,’ Simion said loudly, sitting in the second armchair. ‘Full of pigeons and wogs. Give me good old England any day.’

Mr Hamilton motioned toward Simion’s glass, nearly empty despite having recently been filled. I took my cocktail bottle to his side.

I could feel Simion’s eyes on me as I topped up his glass. ‘There are certain pleasures,’ he said, ‘unique to this country.’ He leaned slightly and his warm arm brushed my thigh. ‘Try as I might, I haven’t found them anywhere else.’