by Karen Powell
Jenny Fairweather had once told her the story of their courtship. It began, she’d said, in the barber’s shop where her father cut and trimmed and shaved, Italian opera playing so loudly that a shy young man might never worry about making conversation. Jenny had been in charge of sweeping up hair and working the till.
‘I knew he was coming for me,’ she had said, thumping her breastbone; the diffident customer with thick blond hair and the English manners her father had taught her to admire. ‘Nobody needs their hair cutting as often as that!’
Whenever Venetia thought of the young bride that Fairweather had brought home to Richmond Hall all those years ago, the word ‘sexy’ sprang into her mind. Jenny’s mouth had been wide and laughing, her nose too upturned by conventional standards, but she had a lush, compact little body, a mass of spiralling dark hair that seemed to emit sexual energy.
Her mother had run off with a salesman years before, she told Venetia, leaving Roberto to bring up their only daughter by himself. Venetia could never decide whether it was that lack of motherly criticism and containment or the Italian blood in her veins that allowed Jenny to inhabit her sexuality quite so freely.
In the beginning, Jenny and Peter had had their own set of rooms at the Hall. Jenny spent her time wandering at will between servants’ quarters, the kitchen, and the main house, chattering to anyone she met without any notion of transgression. There was none of the hushed reverence about her of those who came to Richmond Hall on one of the infrequent tour groups, the cringing middle classes, crippled by their own status. In the early days of pregnancy, Jenny would barge into Venetia’s rooms to complain about feeling sick, never mind any timid tapping at doors first.
‘What on earth is that thing?’ she said, the first time she saw the sitting room. She gazed up at the Grinling Gibbons carving above the fireplace, recoiling in horror. Venetia, who wasn’t sure she exactly liked the carving herself, though tracing the intricate workings of the craftsman’s chisel could be soothing, didn’t know whether to be offended or amused. Their natures were too different to allow true friendship to develop, but Venetia admired Jenny’s spiritedness: happily hitching a ride home from the village on a tractor, pointedly ignoring some visiting lord or lady who’d offended her in some way. Sir Laurie openly adored this new addition to the household, finding her refusal to engage with anyone to whom she took a dislike, her unguarded behaviour, hilarious.
The cottage had been Venetia’s idea, though it was Angus who had put the thought in her mind. Times were changing, he said, one morning after Fairweather had left the room. He did not see how one could justify any longer having a valet to wait upon one’s every movement. Gatekeeper’s Cottage had already been renovated after standing empty for some years. Venetia had taken it upon herself to oversee the work on the interior, so that by the time the project was finished the cottage was a snug little abode, decorated in an understated style and with every modern convenience, just right for a small family in need of a little privacy.
Once he had been made to understand that the move to the cottage and the change in his duties from valet to private secretary was in a no way a demotion, Peter Fairweather was grateful for the belated wedding gift. In truth, a man so sensitive to correct behaviour might have felt relief that his lovely yet outspoken young wife was to live at a slight remove from his place of work. Proud of her efforts, Venetia was anxious to show Peter and Jenny around their new home. Both she and Jenny were heavily pregnant by then; the two of them climbed the narrow stairs of the cottage to inspect the bedrooms, taking care to hold onto the new handrail. It was only when they stepped out into the freshly-dug garden, though, that Jenny seemed to wake up.
‘I can put anything I want here?’ she wanted to know, turning with an effort to Venetia. In her flowing white maternity dress she looked like a little ship in full sail.
Venetia was surprised by the question, not knowing that Jenny had horticultural leanings, but pleased to see some spark of enthusiasm. She’d played down her part in the project yet couldn’t help feeling put out by Jenny’s lack of interest. ‘It’s yours to do with as you wish.’
Jenny nodded, her habitual flashing smile still absent. ‘Then I shall plant my herb garden here.’
The lights in the wards across the atrium had been turned down. Venetia’s tea grew cold beside her, an oily film forming on its surface. She looked for a nurse, wanting to ask if she might place a telephone call. Neither Lennie nor Thomas had been at home when their father was taken ill. Someone from the Hall ought to run down to the cottage to check again. Venetia sat alone and silent, her handbag on her lap. She searched the bag, wondering if there were cigarettes, but found only her purse and a postcard that Alexander had sent her from Athens earlier that summer in one of the side pockets. ‘Cape Sounion,’ it said in white, curling script, across a photograph of a ruined temple, with just a row of pillars remaining. There were no trees to soften the skyline, just dry earth and a mean-looking sun. She couldn’t remember how it had found its way into her handbag.
She’d never quite understood Alexander’s fascination with the past, particularly one that had nothing to do with him. What could Greek columns and Roman basilicas baked to biscuit by the Mediterranean sun mean to a small English schoolboy brought up in the grey light of the north? There was his name of course, but she had chosen it without a thought for the warring hero, because it was a name she’d always liked. Angus hadn’t objected: there was some great uncle in the Richmond family with the same name.
As a little boy, Alexander had taken a liking to a book of myths that she bought him for Christmas. After that came children’s versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, though he hadn’t been interested in Achilles or the other great warriors, only Odysseus, with his wiliness, his cunning brain that could outwit a Cyclops. At school he excelled at Latin, and later Greek, with its alien letters, slabs shored up against one another like temples, Venetia thought. Yet she was not convinced that Alexander was much attached to anything, let alone his childhood; had been surprised when a relationship appeared to be growing between him and Lennie. Venetia had always been fond of the girl, everyone was, but it occurred to her only now that what she really liked about the relationship was that it made her son seem more human.
‘Go,’ she had told him earlier this evening, running back upstairs after she’d telephoned for an ambulance to come. Alexander had turned from the window as if surprised to see her again. ‘Just for tonight,’ she had said. The situation had been bad enough without having to explain the argument between Fairweather and Alexander to anyone.
‘Righto,’ Alexander had said, and then stepped around Fairweather without looking down at him. Minutes later, Venetia had heard the car engine start on the driveway.
CHAPTER 47
Lennie, September 1955
Alone now. The nurses and the ambulance men and their clanking jumble of stretcher and instruments all gone. They had delivered her father home and then driven away. Lady Richmond had gone too, after driving Lennie back from the hospital. She had offered to stay but Lennie panicked and said no, no thank you. Alexander’s mother was always kind to her, but she had taken fright at the thought of passing a night in the cottage with someone so regal.
It had been different last night at the hospital. Sam Bracegirdle had driven her there at great speed and then she had sat beside Lady Richmond into the early hours of the morning and all of today, with doctors talking at them and nurses coming and going, doors swishing in their wake; a space that belonged to nobody but the sick. She couldn’t imagine what they would talk about in the silence of the cottage’s little parlour, crammed as it was with dark furniture and stiff with the formality of a room rarely used, the couch stuffed so tightly it seemed to reject your presence. Of Alexander, perhaps, who had disappeared again, or Thomas, who was somewhere in Scotland but hadn’t been tracked down. How ridiculous to worry about topics of conversation when the f
abric of her life had been wrenched apart and the threads left hanging.
A light summer rain fell outside, a chill little wind curling in through the bedroom window. Lennie pulled her knees in to her chest. She felt insubstantial, as if the wind might blow her away altogether. In the bedroom she had inhabited since she was a child, she sought something indisputably real, something solid. The cuckoo clock. Up there on the wall. Look at it. Thomas had brought it back from a trip to Salzburg when he was still at school.
‘Didn’t know what else to get you,’ he had said, thrusting at her a package of soft tissue paper, fastened with a satin red ribbon.
Inside was a gaily-painted clock, like a gingerbread house from a fairy tale. Her father hung it on the bedroom wall for her. It had stayed there all these years, the passing of childhood reliably measured by its cheerful ticking, which at first kept her awake, but which soon became familiar, a soothing rhythm in the background.
Lennie had never seen proper mountains. She closed her eyes now, tried to imagine a snowy landscape, all brightly-lit chalet windows and skating figures on frozen rivers where nothing bad could ever happen. She couldn’t make it real.
The music box on her dressing table. A birthday present from her father, her eighth or ninth birthday it might have been. She kept it out only to please him, though at one time she had been entranced by it. If you lifted the lid of the amber-coloured box, the figure of a little ballerina would pirouette on a podium, accompanied by tinkling music. The box was lined with pink velvet. If you rubbed the nap of the velvet it made your fingers itch. The dancer had hair the same shade as Lennie’s, wore a stiff net tutu sewn with tiny glass beads that glittered as the ballerina turned. Lennie used to wonder what the ballerina did when no-one was watching. Perhaps she carried on smiling to herself in the darkness. Day after day, Lennie would ease back the catch of the music box with exaggerated care, then snap open the lid in the hope of catching the ballerina in some other pose, or gone altogether, an escapee from her pink tomb. She surprised the dancing figure all the time, a relentless ballet mistress, making the ballerina dance on her little podium over and over again. One day it had suddenly seemed like a bad thing to do, forcing the dancer to twirl on and on like that, expression unchanging, simply for Lennie’s own amusement. She had rarely opened the lid of the music box after that.
A music box; a clock; the acanthus ring that Alexander gave her. Real, solid objects that definitely existed.
Lennie slept. When she woke, it was with a start. Outside, the sky was clear, the first stars were visible. She had no sense of how long she had lain there, only that she must go downstairs at once. They had put him in the parlour, the ambulance men and the nurses, not in his own room across the landing. She could not remember why at first, though she knew there had been talk. She must go down immediately, light the lamp so that he was not lying in darkness, draw the curtains against the night. Without the fire lit, it might be cold down there too.
A crescent moon had risen above the beech tree. In the churchyard, Sir Angus was falling away from himself beneath the earth. Danny Masters, still fresh in his grave, would soon follow suit. Danny. Features bloated and dumb, with no story to tell. Had he become himself again, once the tide of water went out of him? Gentle eyes upon her. His jacket hanging on a tree, still holding his shape.
She would have to do things for her father for now. They had done their best for him at the hospital but that was over. She hardly took in the list of instructions the nurse had reeled off yesterday because surely for now was a lie, to make her feel better. Just once she touched him, her hand going to his forehead to smooth his hair into its rightful place. He stared at her fixedly, no gratitude or recognition in his eyes. His skin felt dense beneath her fingertips, like marble. His jacket and trousers—purchased, like all of his possessions, for quality and serviceability—were folded neatly and placed on the bureau. Perched on top were his highly-polished shoes. They looked too big, clown-like. The edge of his blanket had ridden up, she remembered, exposing a pale shin, bone-white like something they’d dug up in the woods as children. She pulled it down again, covering him from view.
Lennie’s feet were bare, stiff with cold. For a second, in the darkness of the stairwell it felt like death was in her nostrils, took everything in her not to bolt back to the safety of her bedroom. The fire had indeed died in the parlour. Someone—who?—had lit the candles on the mantelpiece. They had burned to low stumps, dirty yellow wax pooling and hardening into new shapes at the base of each. Her father’s eyes were closed, she was thankful for that. His head lay at an odd, constraining angle, making the breath rasp in the back of his throat. The stairs. That was why they put him down here on the couch. She remembered that now. Because he wouldn’t be able to. She did not know where the blanket had came from, pale blue and shiny, like the puffy lining of a coffin. Like some girl’s ball dress that had nothing to do with her father.
Lennie took the armchair by the window, on the far side of the parlour, pulled the fur stole more tightly around her shoulders. She must have fetched the stole earlier, half in sleep, could not recall going to her mother’s wardrobe in search of it. The smell of the stole, trace of animal, musty like old carpet, pricked her nose. Yet it was soft and body-warm. Did it still remember its old, living shape? Lennie imagined it sliding from her shoulders, an orange streak slinking away into the night. He’ll need your help for now. A body could start to decay even before death. After you were dead they did something to slow the process, so why not before? Blue liquid branching through her father’s almost-corpse, glowing in the darkness. She had dreamed of his death once, but in the dream he had come back to life and no one remarked on this phenomenon as strange or unprecedented. She had woken empty and wracked with grief.
Bone-white moon outside. A summer ball, swish of dresses, baby blue, sugar pink. It was hard to imagine her father in such a setting, yet he used to take her mother dancing when they first met. He had told Lennie about it when she was small and had asked about the dresses in the wardrobe. Pale arms shivering against the night chill, young cheeks hectic with excitement. Lennie saw herself as a child again, perched upon her father’s feet as he executed a slow waltz, moving faster and faster until she was giddy with laughter, hanging onto his waist. The image was a lie. It was Thomas who had taught her how to dance and not in that fashion. The idea must have come from a story, or perhaps she had inserted herself into a scene from a painting or a film.
Her father shifted in his sleep, moaned a little. Lennie stood in order to view him better without moving closer. His shoulders, never broad in life, appeared to have shrunk away from the bedclothes, like a cake from its tin when fully baked. It was hard to believe he was really so small, so lacking in significance. Only the breath rattling in and out of his throat made him real. And yet air was nothing, just an emptiness to be taken in and discarded. Nothing.
Where was Tom and where was Alexander and why must she be alone here with a father who was no longer a father, alone with something monstrous and unstoppable growing inside her?
CHAPTER 48
Venetia, Spring 1955
Angus?’ She flicked on the light switch.
‘Here.’
She had to look twice. He was on the far side of the bedroom, almost out of view, on his hands and knees on the floor.
‘You should have called for me,’ she said.
‘Needed the loo.’ He blinked up against the harsh overhead light, his words slurred by sleep or drugs or pain. His eyes had retreated into his skull.
‘James is here too,’ she said, hearing the creak of bedsprings in the nearby guest room.
Between the two of them they got Angus to his feet. Once he was standing, they could begin to move him. It was awkward to start with. Either side of him, they managed to manoeuvre him round the foot of the bed and through the doorway. They made their way along the landing in a kind of lopsided three-legged race.
‘Getting there,’ said Angus with a show of cheerfulness. ‘Speed it up a bit though.’
Venetia had walked this landing so many times that she could negotiate her way along it with her eyes shut. Here was the slight dip in the carpet, here the creaking floorboard, the cool touch of the balustrade. It must be harder for James but at least the landing was moonlit. Angus was moving more purposefully now. Two steps more, past the window seat, then the lavatory door would be in reach. They would work out what to do next when they got there.
Angus came to an uncertain halt, something incoherent escaped from his lips. She turned towards him. He was staring down at himself. Venetia followed his eyes down to the wet leg of his pyjamas, the pool of wetness on the carpet.
‘You were too slow, you fucking idiots!’ All the light that had been absent from his eyes blazed in that moment. ‘Didn’t you hear me yelling for you?’
Sister Coombs came to speak to her the next morning.
‘I’ve increased Sir Angus’s pain relief again and the anti-sickness. It will make him quite sleepy, I’m afraid.’
‘Good.’ Seeing the young nurse’s eyes widen, Venetia made an effort to speak less baldly. ‘Do you know . . . ? Can you tell how long it will be? Only our son is arriving soon. I think I told you about that.’
The nurse shook her head. ‘It could be days or it could be weeks, it’s really hard to say at this stage, Lady Richmond. I wish I could be more helpful.’
Hattie knocked on the door. She was sorry for the interruption but wanted to know if she could let the kitchen know about supper arrangements. Venetia spent a minute discussing this and another housekeeping matter until she heard a noise from the bedroom behind her.