Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sadie Jones
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1. Edward Swift Departs
2. A Dreadful Accident
3. Smelts and Smithereens
4. A Most Unpleasant Game
5. Abandon
6. The Resting Place
7. The Starlight Bath
8. Edward Swift Returns
Fallout
Acknowledgements
Copyright
One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honour of Emerald Torrington’s twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savoury survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor – and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.
The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors are not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels.
Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.
The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from number one bestseller Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author of The Outcast triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises – where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety – and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.
The Univited Guests is Sadie Jones’s third novel. Her first novel, The Outcast (‘Riveting’, Lionel Shriver; ‘Devastatingly good’, Daily Mail; ‘Gripping’, Harper’s Bazaar) was the winner of the Costa First Novel Award. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and was a Richard and Judy Summer Reads Number One bestseller. Her second novel, Small Wars (‘Outstanding’, The Times; ‘Compelling’, Daily Telegraph; ‘One of the best books about the English at war ever’, Joel Morris) was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Sadie Jones lives in London.
Read an exclusive extract of Sadie’s new novel FALLOUT – out now.
NEW YORK WAS not his city and this was not his life. He bought postcards and wrote them to the people he loved but he did not send them. At night he dreamed the ache of human kindness and every stranger’s face he saw reminded him of home. The title of his play and the name that was not his real name, and other names on other theatres on the crowded billboards of the street, shone on canopies ringed by lights. It was every Broadway film imagining made humble by the rubbish-blowing poverty of the world; nostalgia torn down in the grey afternoon – this is what it feels like, not that, but this.
They did not need him at rehearsal so he walked the streets he had become familiar with, then further, to the unknown maze beyond. In the afternoon he went back to the hotel apartment and looking out at the distant heights of the city he thought of her. He did not think that she would come.
LUCASZ KANOWSKI BROKE his mother out of the insane asylum the quiet way; they went through the back gate. He sprang the padlock with a piece of bent wire, a skill maintained despite grammar school’s refining influence. He brought her some clothes stuffed into his school satchel: a woollen scarf – worried, absurdly, that she would hang herself with it – a cardigan with daisies at the neck and an old coat. He had a pair of wellingtons for her. He had wanted to bring real shoes, ladies’ shoes, but he had not been able to find any. It was possible his father had thrown them all away but that seemed such a decisive step Luke did not think his slow and inward father would have taken it. Wellingtons were not elegant but they would do for his mother’s escape. The grounds of the asylum were large; they would not be missed for a while.
He pulled the iron gate open, crushing the long grass.
‘Allez-y,’ he said and she stepped through, lifting her chin and shivering.
They stood together by the road as finches hopped and darted in the hedge. Luke saw that his mother was frightened. She stood quite still, hugging herself, small inside her cardigan.
‘We can catch the bus,’ he said, as if everything were normal, but his thirteen-year-old voice was breaking and nothing sounded normal.
‘Maman? Let’s go.’
Looking into her eyes he saw the chasm. People were scared of the insane and thought it was because of what they might do, but Luke knew really they were scared of that gap behind their eyes. Luke wasn’t frightened; it was she who had to live there. He would have done anything to save her. And he still prayed for her, even though his arguments disproving God’s existence were louder these days than the prayers. He prayed, and couldn’t help believing that if he did something right – perfectly right – she might get better.
‘Maman? On y va?’
She glanced at him and smiled. Her skin had a pinkness, the flush of sunlight, as if the blood had begun to flow, and Luke felt the power of rescue. They crossed the road to the bus stop. When the bus came they climbed onto it and sat in silence as it took them away.
Three days before, they had sat together on Seston Asylum’s bare patchy lawn in their splintering chairs among the dandelions, with the tangle of pipes crawling down the walls behind them and the chimneys crowded on the Victorian Gothic roofs above. Hélène had given him one of her most assured looks and said, ‘I read in The Times that the National Gallery in London is to make an exhibition of French painting. Cézannes. Renoir. J’aimerais te le montrer, Luc.’
Luke’s first thought was that to see paintings if you wanted to, to read books, listen to music, was the very minimum for a tolerable life. Even his father listened to music. Later, when they said goodbye and she left him to go back to the dayroom and do whatever it was she did when he was not there, he said quietly, ‘Shall we go to Lincoln? Look at pictures in a gallery?’
But his mother was a Parisienne and a snob.
‘Lincoln? So provincial.’ She leaned close to his ear. ‘Londres.’
‘Londres?’ Luke could not help half-laughing; bested by a woman, and a feeble one at that.
‘Chut!’
Her hair was absurdly messy. She was standing in her slippers on the lino by Rose Ward, her candlewick dressing gown gaping and scorch-marked bruises on her temples from the electroshock therapy. Soft slippered footfalls defined the patients at Seston. The nurses, orderlies, doctors, all had shoes in which they might leave, that tapped or slapped the lino. The patients’ feet were all but silent. Their voices might be loud – sometimes they were very loud – but they were not grounded, and could not be heard.
‘En train ce n’est pas très loin.’
She was right, by train it was not far at all.
The nurses at the reception desk did not look up as he left through the mesh cage at the entrance, or as the door banged behind him and the catches locked. He had been visiting his mother at Seston since he was five years old, he came and went as he pleased.
Even as he collected the timetables at the library for his mother’s escape Luke felt the weight of the odds stacked against him. He made schedules, lists –
Leave Seston 10 a.m. London train, 11.07.
He had contingency plans –
Event of police, lie.
But he knew that the greatest danger was not the authorities but his mother herself. Taking her away from the hospital, and her medication, she would be jolted from the familiar and vulnerable to a thousand horrors. As the day approached he didn’t dare remind her of their plan in case she let it slip to one of the nurses. It was his alone, his dreadful secret, but Luke believed that if one had the blessing of sanity then self-doubt was cowardly, and so great as his fear of disaster was, in outrage his resolve responded.
Now they emerged from King’s Cross Station, tiny against the vastness of brick and concrete. Thin sooty air. She in her wellingtons and wrapped-round cardigan like a gypsy; he with his home-cut hair, humiliated all at once by context. Mother and son held hands so tightly their bones dug into one another. People passed them by, a man shoving Hélène’s shoulder as he overtook. She shrank away with a mumbled sound through closed lips. Luke knew the sound and recognised danger.
‘Je ne suis jamais venue ici –’ She formed the words as if with an unfamiliar mouth. ‘Tu comprends?’
Luke hadn’t ever been to London before either but he said nothing.
‘I say!’ shouted a woman nearby.‘Taxi!’ His mother ducked, as if avoiding the swipe of a monster’s paw. Her eyes were all at once wild. Another mumbled sound, this one guttural – ga – as she brought her shoulders up and cringed. He realised he could not rely on her for human company, not for the moment. The day ahead was huge and unfettered. He decided to see her as a zoo animal; not less than human, simply other. She was a rare and unpredictable creature; he was a professional, armed with tranquilliser darts. He was ashamed to find himself wishing the tranquilliser darts were real.
‘Don’t worry, I have all the information we need,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and taking out his bus timetables.
She withdrew into herself on the bus, and they were nearly hit by a taxi on the Strand. Once, she began to talk to somebody he couldn’t see, so Luke held her hand and told her what he’d had for dinner the night before. After that – his fault – they went the wrong way down Whitehall, but she had calmed down by then and looked around very happily as they walked back.
Trafalgar Square felt as wide and steady as a field, Nelson’s Column towering in its centre like a talisman.
Once they were inside the gallery itself an exotic normality overtook. And so it happened. For half an hour – more even than that – they walked and looked at pictures and were happy. He had the privilege of her uncluttered brain; her senses wide open, her mind working. He was old enough to know there was danger in imagining God punished or rewarded the people going about the unpatterned world, but he could not help but feel, just this once, that the unjust chaos of his mother’s truncated life had been noticed, and that He had been kind.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said, when they were standing almost alone in a big room, surrounded by Cézannes and Monets. ‘You can feel the paintings, no?’
Luke closed his eyes.
‘Or do you think, Luc, if the walls were empty, the air would feel just the same?’
Luke waited with his eyes closed and felt the life of the work around him. It shifted the atmosphere. He thought about genius consolidated by time and the immeasurable charisma of fame. He didn’t know how to put these things into words, only that the paintings seemed to breathe.
‘It’s like being in the room with people,’ he said, and opened his eyes.
They stood, with the quiet pictures framed in gold. Sunlit water. Flowers. Bright southern cliffs.
His mother shrugged. ‘Perhaps you don’t want to believe all this is for nothing,’ she said.
He felt embarrassed, caught out, but as they walked on she glanced at him and smiled, and he knew it wasn’t for nothing. They were in the company of greatness and they both knew it and were raised up. He looked over his shoulder as they left, and thanked the pictures in his mind, as his mother took his arm.
Eleven-year-old Nina Hollings gazed up at the two painted sisters, and with glad, moneyed smiles they gazed back down at her. Looking in awe at their linked arms, their velvet and silk, Nina felt exactly what she was: uncompleted by love or beauty.
Behind her, her mother’s voice, clear and strong –
‘Only men can paint women.’ She placed her hands lightly on Nina’s shoulders. ‘Only men make really good coiffeurs, and only men can cut clothes properly.’
‘Why?’ Nina did not take her eyes from Singer Sargent’s rendering of the sisters’ tiny waists beneath their party dresses, the dewy life shining from their eyes. ‘Why only men?’
‘Because men desire women, and can create them – even homosexual men. Women hairdressers have no idea at all. Very often they’re jealous and want you to look ordinary.’
‘Are there any lady artists?’ asked Nina.
‘There are, but they are concerned with ugliness for the most part – as for couture!’
Marianne gave a tiny snort and took her green leather gloves from her bag. She began to put them on. Her mother couldn’t run away while she was putting on her gloves so Nina leaned on one leg and performed heel-toe exercises with the rested foot. She looked around the room at the tweedy ladies murmuring in pairs and two students in sweaters, kissing. The girl was in a baggy skirt and flat shoes and the boy’s arm was wrapped around her body.
After a moment Nina said, ‘What about Coco Chanel?’
Marianne chopped the crevices between her fingers.
‘Chanel is a terrible couturière. All her good cutters are men,’ she said. ‘Come along now.’
She took her daughter’s hand and they went. Nina stared at the kissing students as they passed. The girl leaned over her boyfriend’s shoulder and gave her a mascara-laden wink.
As they reached the long central gallery, and Trafalgar Square could be seen beyond the doors, Nina said, ‘Look, French Painting. A special exhibition!’
‘Perhaps next time.’
‘One more room?’
‘Just one.’ Marianne sighed, as if another moment with her daughter was a great burden.
Standing before Uccello’s St George and the Dragon Nina looked at the long-necked maiden, daintily bound, and the lavishly armoured St George thrusting his lance through the dragon’s eye.
‘It doesn’t say who the princess is,’ she said. ‘And she doesn’t look very frightened, does she?’
Marianne looked at her watch.
‘She’s being saved,’ she said.
And that was that. They left the gallery under a white sky. They were meeting Aunt Mat by the lions.
Some children with tins of birdseed were throwing it for the pigeons swooping low in the air and jostling together on the ground. A little girl was standing like a scarecrow with pigeons perching up and down her arms. She was laughing through her nose, and spluttering. Seed dripped from the folds of her coat. Nina watched enviously as the girl’s father knelt to take a photograph.
‘Disgusting,’ said Marianne, pulling her away.
Aunt Mat was waiting sturdily by the plinth, a giant black lion’s paw behind her head and a carrier over her arm as well as her handbag, the crocodile depths of which held toffees and Player’s No.6. She gave a cheery wave.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Did you have fun?’
Nina stared at Aunt Mat’s sensible shoes.
‘Hello, Matilda,’ said her mother, standing like a thoroughbred, one leg extended. She wore a moss-green suit, belted, that stood out like a jewel against the grey.
‘Marianne,’ said Aunt Mat, coolly. She smiled down at Nina, her eyes creasing her powder-soft cheeks. Nina couldn’t smile back.
When her mother smiled her face was not disturbed. Nina had tried it in the mirror but she, like Aunt Mat, was distorted by her smile, like an ape. She didn’t think she would be a beauty.
‘I have an interview,’ said Marianne.
‘Much on at the moment?’ asked Aunt Mat.
‘Oh, you know, it’s dreadfully slow.’
‘You said you were busy last week. Auditions?’
‘I am busy!’
‘Mummy . . . please,’ said Nina in a tiny voice as her hand, despite herself, crept back into her mother’s.
‘Nina . . .’ Marianne knelt as deeply as her skirt would allow and looked into her face.
‘Darling. Please be brave. It upsets Mummy so much when you cry.’
There was a sharp movement beside them as Aunt Mat ground her low-heels into the paving.
‘I adore you,’ whispered Marianne to her daughter. ‘When I am away from you I have a pain in my heart.’
Nina felt her own chest tighten as if a belt was crushing it.
‘Say goodbye, darling. Kiss Mummy.’
Last time Nina had begged and clung, crushed her mother’s clothes. She had caused a public scene. There had been ecstasy in the abandon; to have no control, to be abject. Part of her believed it would bind her mother to her, but it had driven her away. Who would want such a desperate creature? She was determined not to cry this time.
‘Goodbye, my darling,’ said her mother, tears shining. But Nina gripped her fingers tightly, not letting go.
‘For God’s sake, Marianne!’ said Aunt Mat. ‘Stop it!’
But Marianne did not stop. ‘My love,’ she said, ‘let me go.’
It was too much. Nina began to cry, falling fast into it.
‘Darling,’ said her mother, ‘I must go—’
‘Why?’ sobbed Nina, tears and spit and snot.
‘Please, darling—’
‘Just go!’ exclaimed Aunt Mat.
‘How can you say that? My daughter is crying!’ said Marianne.
Aunt Mat was powerless. Nina could not control herself; Marianne would not leave until she did. It was hopelessness, not will, that made her give up and finally let go of her.
Marianne walked slowly away, turning every few seconds to wave. She had gone.
‘Come along,’ said Aunt Mat briskly, taking Nina’s hand.
Pulled along roughly, Nina tried to keep up – tripped – her aunt stopped. She did not kneel or take Nina in her arms.
‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’ She rearranged her bags on her arm, an habitual regrouping.
‘Did you have a nice time? . . . Would you like a cup of tea and a nice bun?’
Nina didn’t answer. Aunt Mat sighed and surrendered for a moment the effort of being something for Nina. She looked sadly around at the pigeons and the crouching lions. A cold breeze moved the dirt on the ground into swirls about the plinths. She looked back at her niece’s desolate face.
‘Would you like to feed the pigeons?’
‘. . . No,’ whispered Nina, ‘they’re disgusting.’
‘What did you say, dear?’
Nina was about to answer when she saw that on the steps of the gallery ahead of them there was a woman in wellington boots.
‘What’s that lady doing?’ she asked, distracted.
Aunt Mat looked.
‘She’s sitting down.’
‘Why is she sitting on the steps? They’re dirty. And why is she wearing boots? And what is that boy doing?’
‘He’s trying to make her come along, I should think, which is what we should be doing.’
‘Is she crying?’
‘Don’t stare.’
‘She can’t see me.’
‘It’s rude.’
‘We’re miles away. Oh look, there’s a policeman!’
Aunt Mat couldn’t help but look too. A uniformed man, talking emphatically, was trying to approach the lanky boy who seemed to be shielding the woman, holding out his arms in a gesture of defence.
‘That’s not a policeman,’ said Aunt Mat, ‘that’s a guard from the gallery.’
‘What does he guard?’
‘The paintings – and he makes sure people behave sensibly.’
‘She isn’t behaving sensibly.’
The woman on the steps was rocking back and forth, pulling at her cardigan, and the boy and the guard seemed to be arguing. Aunt Mat took Nina’s hand again.
‘They’re probably tramps. Let’s go inside and see if we can’t find a cup of tea.’
They began to walk towards the steps, just to one side so as to avoid the scene rising in pitch between the guard, the boy and the woman in the wellington boots. Passers-by had become bystanders; bystanders developed into an uncertain crowd as the woman began to wail, a stream of sounds punctuated by words and phrases.
‘. . . there were seven hundred of them,’ she was saying, ‘sept cents, vous voyez? Not all of them were alive. You’re not a policeman . . .’ And she shied away, as if she were being assaulted.
‘Where do you live? What’s your name?’ asked the guard as the boy went from one foot to the other, glancing anxiously between them.
‘She’s all right,’ he kept saying, white-faced. ‘Please – you’re making it worse.’
‘Come with me, Nina,’ said Aunt Mat. ‘It’s none of our business.’ And she pulled Nina through the doors.
Inside the gallery were muted echoes, lowered voices, and the soft shush of the tall heavy doors brushing the floors as they opened and closed. Nina twisted her head to look, but the woman and strange boy were out of sight. Her mouth felt dry. She had been frightened going past them, as well as fascinated.
There was something else. Everyone had looked at the woman – her distress, her pallor. She was so fragile, with the scruffy boy who was too young to look after anybody standing over her, resolute and protective. Nina realised what she felt; it was envy.
She tugged Aunt Mat’s hand. ‘She was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ she said.
‘I can’t say I noticed. French, possibly.’
‘Like Mummy.’
‘Like your grandmother. Your mother is as English as I am, nearly.’
‘What will happen to her?’
‘They’ll take her away, poor thing,’ said Aunt Mat.
‘Where will they take her?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘Poor lady,’ murmured Nina.
She imagined her, wrapped in soft ropes like the painted maiden and taken by soldiers to an unseen salvation. It seemed to her a wonderful thing to be so helpless; to be taken up, and saved.
It was long after midnight when Tomasz Kanowski opened the door to his son and the two policemen. There was an orange shade over the dim bulb in the hall – fabric with flowers on it – and Tomasz was a dark bulk in the doorway. A smell of stewed onion, cigarette smoke and, faintly, sour fish floated round him from the inside of the house. The policemen took off their helmets to show that this was a family matter.
‘Mr Kanowski?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Come into the house, Lucasz.’
His voice seemed to struggle from his throat, the accent thickened by drink and feeling.
Luke went sideways past his father and looked at the two pasty-faced constables from behind his shoulder. The policemen exchanged looks. Tomasz stared at them in odd and passive challenge; it was decidedly un-English. They waited for him to say something else but he did not speak.
When they had gone, he closed the door slowly. Luke hung his head, weaving with tiredness, weak with relief to be home safe in their solid, stinking little prison. His father held the back of his neck and drew him towards the bulk of his chest until Luke’s forehead rested against the thick collarbone beneath his father’s shirt.
‘This was a brave and very stupid thing to do,’ he said softly, his big fingers pressing Luke’s skull.
Luke nodded, burning with sorrow. His father’s smell of beer and sweat was in his nostrils.
‘I think you must have frightened your mother very much.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Luke, urgent through gritted teeth. ‘She loved it. She wanted it, and she was happy. Some of the time. Why won’t you see her? You should visit her.’
Tomasz pressed his son’s head against his chest.
‘Stop, Lukasz.’
They stayed in the fierce lock of their embrace until Tomasz nodded and Luke felt his hot breath on his neck as he exhaled. Tomasz pushed his son slowly away, gripping his face in both hands. If his mother’s eyes fronted a void, his father’s, complicated and sodden, were spilling over. He kissed Luke’s forehead, hard, and released him.
‘Go to bed now,’ he said.
Luke sat on his bed, shivering in the luxury of his solitude. The evening passed across his memory: the succession of vehicles that had transported them along strange dark roads; the police officers who had questioned him, first with sympathy and suspicion, then pity, as his small crime was discovered and the fact that his mother had never been anywhere else in his lifetime but an asylum. Nowhere else until today, thought Luke. He pressed his hands to his eyes to shut out the inhuman subjugation it had taken to separate her from him, and his own shameful relief when she had gone.
He lay down, surrendering more than deciding, and stared at the dark-wood and gold crucifix on the wall opposite the end of his bed. Sometimes he laughed at the idea of God, other times he quaked in fear. Often he crossed himself unthinkingly, or bowed his head, or felt rage well up like blood at the blind patriarchal hand that held him down. Now he gazed upon the cheap crucifix hanging on its one nail and prayed. He could hear his father’s slow footfalls. His eyes drifted to the ceiling. The footsteps faded. His focus blurred.
‘Zdrowas Maryjo, łaski pełna, Pan z Toba . . .’
Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death . . .
A stream of Hurricane bombers flew silently above him. His father, as he had never known him but knew he once had been, in a scarf and gauntlet gloves, waved a cheery salute as he flew by – and Luke slept.
Above his head, cheaply framed, the Virgin wearing powder-blue and unlikely lipstick, smiled down on him.
IN THE SEPTEMBER of 1965 Luke Kanowski in Lincolnshire was beginning his lower-sixth year at Seston Grammar, while in London Nina Hollings had just left school.
‘I want Nina to come with me to Paris,’ Marianne said, on the telephone to Aunt Mat.
There was a battle for territory being fought. Aunt Mat was a mild person but her sister-in-law enraged her.
‘Paris isn’t suitable,’ she said and straightened the rug with her toe, her heart beating hard against the things she must not say.
Marianne’s voice came down the line like an over-tightened violin string. ‘She’s fifteen! Paris isn’t suitable for what? Put her on!’
It was her glad mother tone, the one that said my darling, I missed you when she hadn’t called for three months; when she forgot another birthday; when she arrived with an armful of presents – sugar mice. Aunt Mat did not have that trump card to play. She had only Horlicks, bedtimes and the solace of a good book against sporadic joy, fugitive love. However much sensible she instilled, one word from her mother sent Nina reeling towards the ridiculous.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get her.’
Also by Sadie Jones
The Outcast
Small Wars
For
Fred, Tabitha, Daisy
with love
Their table was a board to tempt even ghosts
To pass the Styx for more substantial feasts.
Don Juan, Lord Byron
SINCE HER MARRIAGE to Edward Swift, three years after the sudden death of her first husband Horace Torrington, Charlotte had changed her position at the breakfast table in order to accommodate her new husband’s needs: specifically, aiding him in the spreading of toast and cutting of meat, owing to his having suffered the loss of his left arm at the age of twenty-three in an unfortunate encounter with the narrow wheels of a speeding gig, out of which he had fallen on the driveway of his then home in County Wicklow. Having always faced the window and wide view, now Charlotte sat on Edward’s left, and faced him.
Her eldest children, Emerald and Clovis, aged nineteen and twenty respectively, but for whom the word ‘children’ is not inaccurate at the point at which we discover them, did not like this new arrangement. Nor did they like or approve of Edward Swift; single arm notwithstanding, they found he did not fit.
Clovis Torrington balanced the pearl-handled butter knife on his middle finger and narrowed his eyes at his mother. His eyes were dramatic, and he very often narrowed them at people to great effect.
‘We can’t leave Sterne,’ he stated.
‘It would be a great shame,’ acknowledged his stepfather.
Clovis curled his lip, loathingly.
‘Clovis …’ his mother growled.
Edward wiped his mouth with a napkin thoroughly and stood up.
‘It’s all right, Charlotte,’ he said, kissing her forehead as he rose. ‘I’ll know more when I return, Clovis. And neither you nor your sisters – nor your mother – need worry about it until then, but enjoy Emerald’s birthday and try not to fret. I’m sorry I can’t be here for your guests.’
Charlotte stood, too, and linked her arm through his.
‘You’re both very naughty,’ she said over her shoulder as they left the room.
Emerald had not spoken, but sat throughout breakfast rigid with self-restraint. Now she glanced at Clovis, tears blurring both the scowling sight of him and the vast tapestry that hung behind his head. It was a hunting scene of stags and hounds, a faded, many-layered narrative she knew by heart in all its leaping chases across the flowered forest floor.
‘Fret!’ said her brother with contempt at the word, stable-mates as it was with sulk and pet.
Emerald shook her head. In his present mood he was the very personification of all three. ‘Oh, Clovis,’ she said.
From the hall, Edward’s voice carried easily to them: ‘Clovis! Ferryman needs to be taken out. If you’ve time today I’d be very much obliged to you.’
His good-tempered authority would have been impressive – lovable – had the very fact of the man not been intolerable to them. Clovis was mutinous. ‘He ought to take his damned horse out himself.’
Emerald pushed her plate away.
‘He can’t very well if he’s in Manchester trying to save the house, can he?’ she said, and she got up and left the room by the other door so as not to encounter her mother or stepfather again.
He did not go after her. Clovis wasn’t somebody who went after people, rather people tended to go after him.
Unable to escape her misery, Emerald wandered up and down in the kitchen for a few moments, aggravating Florence Trieves and Myrtle, and then went out into the garden by the side door.
It was the last day of April. She felt the extraordinary softness of the season on her face and braced herself for a strict talking-to; if it must be audible, she ought at least to get some distance from the house.
The air was complicated with the smells of sharp new things emerging from damp soil. Small tatters of clouds dotted the watery sky. To her left was the door to the kitchen garden and stables. Ahead of her, reaching far and further, in the broadest geometrical sweep, was the country over which Sterne presided. It spread out beneath and beyond, reaching into straining, dazzling blue distance, where the fields became indistinct and hills dissolved to nothing.
The house stood on a piece of land so cleanly semicircular, so strictly rounded, that it might have been a cake-stand left behind in the landscape by some refined society of giants. It was covered with deep, soft turf as one might lay a thick rug over a table, and all the busy pattern of fields, hedges, cows and villages scattered beyond, toy miniatures a child’s imagination would produce.
From the front of the house, the edge of the gardens formed a ha-ha between order and free nature. It was bordered by a knee-high sharp-trimmed box hedge, lest dogs should rush at it and fall off. Small children had been known to topple, although happily the slope, on falling, was much gentler than it first appeared. Clovis and Emerald, when much younger, had used to take running jumps off the apparent precipice, terrifying visitors unfamiliar with the topography, only to emerge laughing hilariously, covered with dandelion fluff or mud or clinging claws of long couch grass.
Emerald walked along the curve of the low box hedge with her head bowed, like a lonely merry-go-round horse.
‘This helpless grief over what amounts to a few rooms and a rather poor roof is irrational,’ she began, ‘and frankly –’ she stopped walking, ‘– ludicrous.’
She turned her face to the house, the windows of which glowed variously. ‘There’s no use looking at me like that,’ she said to it.
She crossed the gravel, and went towards the other part of the garden, where were the borders and sundial. ‘And there’s not even the excuse of ancestry!’ she said out loud again, and indignant.
And it was true; no generations of Torringtons had lived at Sterne. No generations of Torringtons had lived anywhere particularly, as far as they knew. They were a wandering, needs-must sort of family, who made their livings disparately, in clerking, mills or shipping; travelled to France for work in tailoring, or stopped at home in Somerset, Shropshire or Suffolk, to play some minor role in greater projects: designing a lowly component of a reaching cathedral or a girdered bridge. Some had been in business, one or two in service; there was an artist, some soldiers, all dead. All dead.
Her father’s life had been distinguished only by his having the daring to buy Sterne. The house and land had been purchased rashly at the peak of what transpired to be transient – too harsh to call it flukish – financial success when, first married to Charlotte and bathed in her adoration, he had thought Torrington might be the name of the sort of man whose family would live in such a house. Horace had loved Sterne as he loved Charlotte and later, his children: loyally, generously and gratefully. The children, too, feeling that they were at the end of a line, as children always do (for indeed, they are), loved Sterne as exhausted travellers with lifetimes of migration behind them might love their first and last home. Sterne was the mythology of their parents’ marriage, their father’s legacy, and it had given them the very best of childhoods. Beyond that, it was beautiful, and the effect of it on their souls was inestimable; once found, they were all of them loath to give it up. Unfortunately, Horace Torrington left business for agriculture, about which he was utterly ignorant, at precisely the worst moment he could have chosen. At his untimely death he was very deeply in debt. Emerald often thought it odd that such dire financial straits should be cheerfully nicknamed ‘in the red’; black was a far likelier colour. Her father’s increasing debt was a dark hole into which they all might yet fall.
In reality, Sterne was two houses. One was a strange, shallow red-brick manor house of two floors and great charm, built around 1760, where the family now lived; the other – predecessor and companion – was attached behind, as the long side of the L, a great barn-like building of stone, where once one of the first lords of that manor would have laid his fires and roasted his meat, but which now stood almost empty in graceless neglect.
In the busy scullery of the New House there was a brief rise of shallow steps to a door of thick wood, mostly kept barred and bolted, which gave onto the cavern of the Old House. The two were joined utterly in the wide raftered and beamed spaces of their roofs, like Siamese twins. If one were in the attic (as the children often had been, galloping about in the dust or lying reading in the dancing window-light), only close inspection could discover the join, for the ribs of the roofs and the planks of the floors were of similar scale, and in the roof spaces the air was always dim and faded. There had been over the years much talk of demolishing the older building, but it had so very many convenient and entertaining uses, especially for storage and on rainy days, and they had not been able to do it.
A magnolia tree grew in the courtyard at the crook of the L. As a child, Emerald used to try to touch the thick flowers by leaning out of a landing casement. She would reach as far as she could, until the tight stitches of her dress strained under the arms and her fingers shook. Clovis when young, not yet having acquired a romantic view of himself, had leaned from the same window to spit. His idea was to perfect his aim and range to reach the insides of the flowers. He had to propel his saliva with vigorous conviction in order to span the gap between the tree and the house and by the time he was eight years old he had succeeded, and was triumphant. Emerald, despite her nature, aspired to practicality and surrendered her campaign to touch the petals by the age of twelve, settling instead for drawing the tree, later painting it and, still later, snipping small parts from it for closer observation under her microscope, but still never felt she had truly touched it. Perhaps a prosaic ambition – accurate spitting, for instance – is one more easily realised.
Emerald had reached the driveway, a long avenue bordered by giant black yews. The yews had been meant for a hedge and cultivated as one for perhaps two hundred years but had run sluggishly away with themselves and, neglected, they formed a misshapen lumbering procession. They were wrinkles of dense growth. They were resinous twisted towers with pockets like witches’ huts hidden within their vastness for playing or hiding. There were gaps between them that ought not to have been there.
Emerald, who was by day a determinedly practical young woman, often dreamed of recklessly galloping down the dark avenue to the house with the noise of hooves in her ears. Sometimes the dream sent her flying high around Sterne like a bird, with the roofs spinning away beneath her; the chimneys, stables, gardens and country filling her eyes. Then plunged back to earth by waking, she inhabited her bed alone, and wept for her lost infinity.
Now, earthbound, dispirited, she turned from the creeping yews, not caring to gaze into their dreary depths, and having reached the part of the garden laid out to flowers, she knelt by the turned soil of the border and began to cry. She had no smart words now, only childish ones. If only the Step would find some way to save us, she thought, bitterly aware that the resented step-parent was now her devoutly wished-for rescuer.
The crying, far from doing its job and clearing up, was threatening to consume her. At any moment she might fling herself face down on the flower-bed. It was her birthday; she must be happy, and soon. She sniffed, blotted her face, hard, against her forearm and stared stonily ahead. ‘Good,’ she said.
After a moment of listless gazing at the ragged bed she began to pluck at the weeds, inching her fingertips down the weak stems to lift them from the soil. Her hands were soon chilled and muddy and she had made a limp pile beside her on the grass, reflecting that a useful task is a great comforter.
Charlotte’s private farewell to Edward was made in their bedroom, which sat squarely in the middle of the house above the front door. The room had a deep bay window, framed by an ancient and extravagant rose whose candy-striped buds – as well as all the county – could be seen from the bed across which Charlotte now draped herself, affecting languor in the hope it would calm Edward, who was pacing the softly bowed boards in his tightly laced shoes and causing the dressing-table mirror to rattle on its stand.
He was of medium height: a stocky, sandy sort of man with square, broad shoulders (his left arm had been severed cleanly and high up, in such a way as not to interfere with the set of these, although one was necessarily more developed than the other) and piercing, pale-blue eyes. At last, he stopped and sat by her. He had warmth and vigour; he said, ‘Charlotte, I’ll do my best for you.’
It was the sort of thing Edward often said and, unlike very many people Charlotte had known, he meant it.
Edward Swift was the youngest son of an Anglo-Irish architect. With no expectation of an inheritance, he had made his way in the world with characteristic rigour. He had read law at Trinity College Dublin and moved to London to practise. The intervening years of his life bear no relevance to this story, but suffice to say, on meeting Charlotte Torrington – a woman possessed of a high and trembling beauty, in mourning for Horace Torrington, recently struck down – he fell in love. Edward fell in love as deeply as Charlotte grieved, and there in the far-down places of sorrow and sex they met.
When they married, the older children, Emerald and Clovis, were shocked not only at the speed of their mother’s apparent return to cheerfulness, but also – profoundly – at Edward’s colouring, which seemed to them a betrayal in itself. Their father had been tall and very dark, with pale, black-fringed eyes so dazzling they deserve the category Torrington Eyes. Both Emerald and Clovis were dark with these same, arresting, grey-blue eyes. Their mother was fair, but had been absorbed and become a Torrington and was, after all, their mother (also, her eyes were not to be sneezed at), but Edward Swift was, well, blond.
And then there was the arm. The violent accident; the neatly pinned sleeve – what might have been romantic in another man was abhorrent in a fair-haired step-parent.
What Clovis and Emerald could not know was anything of the nights that Edward held Charlotte against his body as she cried for Horace, the wet trails of her tears on his neck, chest and shoulder. He had gone with her through the agony of missing a man he had never known, went with her through it still, when called upon, and now would give his all for Sterne; he did not want Charlotte to cry for that, too. Another man might have engineered the incorporating of his new wife into his own milieu, sought to erase her past in the building of his future, but Edward Swift accepted all that she was, including the burden that was Sterne and her opaque and recalcitrant offspring.
Edward reluctantly spent a great portion of his time in Manchester, where he had joined a thriving chambers; reluctant not because he was work-shy – he practised the law with thoroughness and pride – but because he hated leaving Charlotte, upon whom he doted. His imminent journey to the city was not for the benefit of his career but for the attempted rescuing of his wife’s house from the auctioneer. There had been a much-needed influx of capital the year before when they had sold the largest of their farms to its tenant, a forthright, handsome young man named John Buchanan. The money had gone a fair way to pay off debts and mend various walls and roofs around the property, but it had dwindled alarmingly. It had dwindled almost to nothing. Edward, seeing Sterne slip through his fingers, turned away from the prospect of a sensible, smaller house nearer the city and a broken-hearted wife and resolved to save it. He was not a gambler, he had nothing to sell; he must borrow the money. It was a distasteful prospect, and it was with this distaste that he now looked down upon Charlotte’s fine, pale face.
‘Love,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me to enjoy asking to borrow money from a man whose employment practices I loathe and whose politics sicken me.’
(This was in reference to the prospective lender; an industrialist of low morals.)
‘You needn’t do it, you know that,’ said Charlotte, looking away from him. A tear rolled from her eye. She brushed it away impatiently – but not so impatiently that he would not see it.
‘Of course I must do it!’ he said, kissing her damp and salty fingers.
Ten minutes later Edward was in the passenger seat of the car, with his case strapped behind him and an expression of grim resolve as he waited for Robert to crank the starting handle.
Emerald, straightening from her weeding, watched, as with a roar and flying gravel they set off. Their departure had drawn the lurcher Forthright from his doze beneath the yews and he loped after them, barking wolfishly. Edward, catching sight of Emerald, raised his arm and waved.
‘Happy Birthday, Emerald!’ he shouted above the noise, and very soon the car, the lurcher, her stepfather, Robert and the suitcase were lost to sight in the gloom of the avenue that was dark in any weather, but particularly so this morning, it seemed.
The noise faded, the world was hushed.
Here, then, on the morning of her twentieth birthday, having grown out of her many efforts to capture the magnolia tree or, it must be owned, much else that life might have to offer, having put away her microscope, drawing pad, girlish dreams of Greatness and all, kneeling by the stunted flower-bed, Emerald noticed that water had seeped through the thick linen of her skirt and knitted stockings and onto her knees.
‘Happy birthday indeed,’ she said. ‘I must stop talking to myself.’
There was a drooping bow below her bust. She adjusted it. Her eye was caught by something and she strained to interpret the shape.
Near the yews, paused in the shadow of them, was a small, white figure. Emerald stood, tucking the pile of weeds into the deep pocket of her dress and wiping her dirty fingers, heedlessly.
‘Is that you, Smudge?’ she called, and the third young Torrington, the child, replied weakly, ‘Yes.’
Emerald crossed the grass towards the figure standing in the overhang, her puff of dark hair merging like a sooty halo with the shadows.
‘Good heavens, I thought you hadn’t come down. Didn’t you say you don’t feel well?’
‘I don’t feel well,’ the child responded.
Emerald went to her sister and took her hand. ‘Your fingers are like ice,’ she said. ‘Come inside at once.’
They went in by the back door nearest them to a square, stone-flagged back hall. Pausing by a stand with walking sticks and umbrellas leaning gleamingly at angles, Emerald put her hands on the child’s face and tilted it up to look at her, searchingly. ‘Why did you come out?’
‘I was bored.’
‘Is there a fire in your room?’
‘I don’t want one.’