The Shifting Fog

by Kate Morton

‘She doesn’t mean how is he physically,’ Emmeline said unexpectedly. ‘She means how is he in the head.’

  ‘In the head, miss?’ I looked at Hannah, who was frowning faintly at Emmeline.

  ‘Well, you did.’ Emmeline turned to me, her eyes red-rimmed. ‘When he served tea yesterday afternoon he behaved most peculiarly. He was offering the tray of sweets, just as usual, when suddenly the tray started quivering back and forth.’ She laughed: a hollow, unnatural sound. ‘His whole arm was shaking, and I waited for him to steady it so I could take a lemon tart, but it was as if he couldn’t make it stop. Then, sure enough, the tray slipped and sent an avalanche of Victoria sponges all over my prettiest dress. At first I was quite cross—it was really too careless; the dress could have been ruined—but then, as he continued to stand there with the strangest look on his face, I became frightened. I was sure he’d gone quite mad.’ She shrugged. ‘He snapped out of it eventually and cleaned the mess. But still, the damage was done. He was just lucky that I was the one to suffer. Pa wouldn’t have been so forgiving. He’d be ever so dark if it happened again tonight.’

  She looked directly at me, blue eyes cold. ‘You don’t think it’s likely, do you?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, miss.’ I was taken aback. This was the first I’d heard of the event. ‘I mean, I shouldn’t think so, miss. I’m sure Alfred is all right.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ Hannah said quickly. ‘It was an accident, nothing more. Returning home must take some adjustment after being away so long. And those salvers look awfully heavy, especially the way Mrs Townsend loads them. I’m sure she’s on a quest to fatten us all up.’ She smiled but the echo of a frown still creased her brow.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ I said.

  Hannah nodded, the matter closed. ‘Now let’s get these dresses on so we can play dutiful daughters for Pa’s Americans and be done with it.’

  THE DINNER

  All along the corridor and down the stairs I replayed Emmeline’s reportage. But no matter which way I twisted it, I arrived at the same conclusion. Something was amiss. It was not like Alfred to be clumsy. In all the time I had been at Riverton I could think of only a couple of occasions when he had faulted in his duties. Once, in a hurry, he had used the drinks salver to deliver the mail; another time he had tripped up the service stairs on account of he was getting the flu. But this was different. To spill an entire tray? It was almost impossible to imagine.

  And yet, the episode was surely not a fabrication—what reason, after all, had Emmeline to invent such a thing? No, it must have occurred, and the reason must be as Hannah suggested. An accident: a moment of distraction as the dying sun caught the windowpane, a slight cramp of the wrist, a slippery tray. No one was immune to such occurrence, particularly, as Hannah pointed out, someone who had been away some years and was out of practice.

  But though I wished to believe this simple explanation, I could not. For in a small pocket of my mind a collection of motley incidents—no, not so much as that—a collection of motley observations was forming. Misinterpretations of benign queries after his health, overreactions to perceived criticisms, frowns where once he would have laughed. Indeed, a general air of confused irritability applied itself to everything he did.

  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 Nancy’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 Nancy, 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, Nancy, 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. Some
where 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.

  He had dark hair, almost as black as his Saville Row 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 Belmont’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 from his seat 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.’

  I had to concentrate to keep a blank expression on my face, and not to pour too quickly. An eternity passed before the glass was finally full and I could leave his side. As I rounded the sofa, I saw Hannah frowning at the place where I had been.

  ‘My husband does love England,’ Estella said rather pointlessly.

  ‘Hunting, shooting and fishing,’ Simion said. ‘No one does them better than the British.’ He took a swig of cocktail and leaned back in the armchair. ‘Best thing of all, though, is the English mind-set,’ Simion said. ‘There are two types of people in England. Those born to give orders.’ His gaze found mine across the room. ‘And those born to take them.’

  Hannah’s frown deepened.