House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  “If we let things slip, what hope is there for the next generation?”

  What hope indeed? Clarissa thought silently. She knew that the future of Trelawney hung on a thread that might break at any moment. She prayed her husband would die before seeing the entire castle sold to a foreigner and she had resolved some time ago to place a pillow over his head rather than let him hear the death knell on eight hundred years of tradition. If only Enyon hadn’t been such a philanderer; all those women they’d had to pay off. Damn her stupid, self-indulgent son for failing to make something of his life; all that time footling around with unpublishable poetry and that ridiculous bank job. Marrying Jane was the best thing Kitto had done, even if her fortune had not been as large as they all hoped.

  She patted her husband’s arm. “Come on, darling.”

  Enyon tried to struggle to his feet but his knees gave way and he slumped back in his chair. “The most important thing is to make sure that the next generation has a clean slate and no surprises.”

  “Did I ever tell you what a good and kind man you are?” the Countess said, kissing her husband on the cheek.

  “Maybe I should leave the Gainsborough to Blaze. Is she coming down soon? I do miss my girl.”

  The Countess’s heart gave a lurch at the mention of their daughter. It had been twenty years since they had last seen her in London for their annual tea, on her birthday at Fortnum and Mason. Since the Earl refused to leave Trelawney and Blaze refused to visit the castle, contact had dwindled to a phone call at Christmas.

  “I will try to persuade her to come soon. But you know how busy she is with work.”

  “She’s breaking my heart,” the Earl said.

  “I know,” the Countess echoed.

  “What did she and Kitto row about?” Enyon asked.

  “It was the bedroom issue again.”

  The Earl’s face flared with anger. “Why can’t the bloody spares realise that this is a family tradition. If we didn’t move the spinsters and second sons along, this place would be a Tower of Babel, choked up with unmarried siblings.”

  “She thought that Kitto and Jane might be more modern.”

  The Earl snorted. “Where the blinkers has modern got anyone?”

  “Couldn’t agree more.”

  “Twenty years is an awfully long time to hold a grudge about a bedroom,” he said sadly. Blaze—stronger, braver and more substantive than her brother—was her father’s favourite; he’d often wondered if his son’s and daughter’s genes had got mixed up.

  Enyon and Clarissa sat in silence, looking at the four glowing bars on the heater.

  “What will you wear tonight?” the Earl asked eventually.

  “The long green taffeta and the diamanté, I think.”

  “We might even put the wireless on after dinner and have a dance,” the Earl suggested.

  “That would be divine, darling.”

  Enyon wrapped the blanket around his knees.

  “Have you seen Tuffy recently?” he asked.

  Clarissa thought for a few minutes. “Not for at least a year.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  “Wouldn’t we have heard?”

  “Who’d tell us?”

  Clarissa hesitated, trying to remember if Tuffy spoke to Jane or Kitto. Her husband’s sister was, even by family standards, deeply eccentric. She had been the first female member of the dynasty to have a job. No one knew what it was, but rumour had it that it was something to do with a university and insects. When she was at home, Tuffy stomped around the park armed with a butterfly net and a collection of plastic bags, picking over carrion with glee.

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Shall we send the butler over to check on her tomorrow?” the Earl asked.

  “I think I’ll mention it to the farm manager—he’s not the squeamish type.” Clarissa had no idea if her son employed such a person, but she liked finding a decent answer to any problem.

  “Jolly good idea. Jolly good.”

  A bug flew into one of the fire’s electric bars, sending up tiny sparks and a faint smell of burning.

  “Do you ever think about death?” the Earl asked his wife.

  “Certainly not.” She glanced sideways at her husband. It was unlike him to ask a direct question on such a maudlin subject. “Why?”

  “This isn’t much fun, is it?”

  “What isn’t?”

  The old man flapped his mottled hands. “All this. Everything hurts and there’s so little to look forward to.”

  The Countess found the conversation most perturbing. She wasn’t sure whether to comfort or scold her husband. “The purpose of life is to keep on going,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “The only thing that keeps me alive is the fear of death,” Enyon said.

  Fifty minutes later Jane carried a tray into her parents-in-laws’ wing, finding them dressed for dinner. The Earl was in a green velvet smoking jacket, a black tie and embroidered slippers, and his wife in taffeta. Jane noticed that Enyon’s nose was bright red and Clarissa shook slightly.

  “Why don’t you come and have supper in the main kitchen, it’s lovely and warm,” Jane offered.

  “What’d the servants say?” the Earl said. “They’d think it awfully rum if we pitched up.”

  Jane wondered again why they had to go through this charade; they both knew there were no more servants, apart from cross Mrs. Sparrow who was supposed to cook supper on Tuesday and Thursday evenings but hadn’t turned up for a fortnight.

  “Why didn’t Barnes bring dinner through?” the Earl said, looking at his daughter-in-law.

  “Shouldn’t you be changing for dinner, darling? Kitto will wonder what happened to you.” Clarissa glanced knowingly at Jane, willing her to play along.

  Jane wasn’t in the mood to pretend that night. She put the tray down on the side. “Can you manage, Clarissa?” Her mother-in-law nodded. Jane looked at her, this woman, once so powerful and wealthy, now so thin and cold and consumed with maintaining the pathetic fallacy. She felt overwhelmed with pity.

  “Leave them there, Barnes will come in to clear after you have gone to bed,” Jane said, laying two places on the polished table. She also set out some wine glasses, although it had been some time since they’d been able to afford a bottle of anything decent.

  “I better go and change,” she added.

  The Countess smiled gratefully.

  “Pour me a gin, darling,” the Earl said. “Three fingers—I need something to chase the cold away.”

  “I think I will join you tonight,” the Countess said. “Never known such a cold June. Never.”

  * * *

  Tuffy Scott had to admit that the mice population in her cottage had become too large and a solution had to be found. On her return to Trelawney from two weeks away, her bed was littered with tiny droppings, her cereal packets had been torn apart and the loo paper shredded (she found the nest later in an old suitcase). Luckily, as the rodents couldn’t open the tins of beans and lentils, there was something to eat. For a woman who survived on Rice Krispies, Weetabix and pulses, the loss of two-thirds of her normal diet was a bore, particularly when she had hoped to spend the next fortnight working on a new hypothesis instead of navigating Cornwall’s woefully inadequate public-transport system in search of basic provisions.

  Tuffy used to encourage the mice. Living alone, she liked hearing their tiny claws scampering through the rafters or across the floor. Recently the scamper had become a stampede and a few little friends had turned into battalions. Tuffy wanted to understand why, after so many years of easy cohabitation, this sudden population explosion had occurred. It was her job, as one of the world’s leading entomologists specialising in the effects of climate change on insects, to investigate changes in natural phenomena. If there were several thou
sand mice in her own home, there were bound to be several billion fleas living on their bodies. And nothing excited Tuffy more than living, breathing, jumping and multiplying Siphonaptera.

  The mouse droppings were only part of the problem. There were also the birds; every year, from mid April to the end of summer, she left all the windows open so swallows could make their nests between the beams of her sitting room and bedroom. At first only a few had availed themselves of the offer. In recent years, more than ten pairs had set up home and each produced bewildering quantities of excrement. Tuffy didn’t have the heart to close the windows again but nor did she have the time to clear up after her feathered friends.

  Tuffy had always preferred the company of animals to humans and on her sixteenth birthday, in 1950, she eschewed the consumption of any animal products, from meat to milk (not difficult as the iron grip of rationing was still in place). She had from then on refused to wear any leather products which might endanger or harm the natural world. She wore gym shoes and tunics in the summer and wellington boots, corduroy trousers and tweed jackets in the winter. The family tradition was not to waste education on girls; their youth was simply a holding pattern before marriage. With no interest in the opposite (or indeed the same) sex and a fascination with the natural world, Tuffy decided to take the highly unusual (for a Trelawney) step of enrolling in further education with a view to finding a career. Her interest in fleas began when the insects decimated her beloved pet chicken; Tuffy’s first (and, as it happened, only) taste of heartbreak had unexpected consequences.

  In the post-war muddle and mayhem, no one in her family asked why the youngest daughter went by bus to Plymouth every day or shut herself in her room for hours at a time. A maiden aunt left her a small stipend. Over the next few years, Tuffy, already a mature student, gained qualification after qualification; degrees and doctorates. A modest income was supplemented by academic fellowships. When her elder brother enacted the family tradition of evicting his siblings from the castle, Tuffy barricaded herself in a semi-derelict cottage on the far side of the park and had remained there ever since.

  As she sat eating baked beans and peaches from the tin (less washing up), chased down by a bottle of stout and a multivitamin pill, Tuffy wondered how to bring the rodent population under control. Poisoning or trapping were out of the question. She toyed with the idea of introducing a cat but that, she decided, was simply murder by displacement. Looking around the room, she considered how many of her belongings were essential. There were about forty yards of scientific journals; several different microscopes; two computers; some 28,000 specimens of fleas and other insects; kitchen equipment (a kettle, a tin opener, two bowls and some cutlery); and maybe two suitcases’ worth of clothing and shoes. It was, she had to admit, an absolute dump but it was her dump.

  “One of us has to go,” Tuffy said to a mouse who had sauntered out of a cereal box and looked calmly at her with glittering black eyes, “and, as I am seriously outnumbered, that has to be me.”

  Although Tuffy knew she would have to leave her home of fifty-five years, there weren’t many options. The cottage, set in a dell in the park, was wonderfully private. The thought of moving closer to civilisation was an anathema. At some point in the near future she would have to walk to the castle where her nephew and his wife lived (Tuffy was sure she was called Jane) and ask if they could rehouse her.

  Sweeping aside the tiny droppings from her sheets, Tuffy climbed into bed. To her annoyance, she found a nest of baby mice in both of her pillows and their constant squeaking and wriggling made sleep impossible. Taking a plastic bag from her bedside table, she evicted the babies and popped their cocoon (made from loo paper and her favourite jumper) inside, hoping to find a few resident fleas. She then got up, went over to her desk and spent the night making notes to form the basis of a new paper: “The effects of climate change on the population of Mus musculus.” Among the sections worthy of exploration, she jotted down “early mild spring,” “beech tree seeds” and “poor farming practice.”

  On a separate piece of paper, she wrote the heading “Why give shelter to an aged aunt.” The responses included extreme low maintenance; few possessions; frequent travel; death imminent (she was old); substantial rent offered (with few overheads, she had accumulated a tidy amount in prizes and fees from her doctoral posts). She’d take any room they offered and would put down four years’ rent in cash in advance, providing it was far away from her brother and his (forgettable) wife.

  2

  Moonshot Wharf

  MONDAY 30TH JUNE 2008

  Blaze Scott stood on her apartment’s wraparound terrace overlooking Tower Bridge. It was 9 p.m. and still light and warm. Below her, ant-sized drinkers spilled from pubs onto pavements; in a nearby flat, a group of friends were having a barbecue on a roof garden; through an open window she saw a family eating dinner; two lovers in an adjacent apartment lay entwined on a red sofa; and in a small park at street level, there was a wildly uncompetitive game of rounders. Lighting a cigarette, inhaling deeply, she watched its end sputter and glow a vibrant orange and wished her own life burned as fiercely. The sudden inhalation of acrid smoke made her cough, but she didn’t bother to put her hand over her mouth; there was no one to criticise, no one was watching her.

  Since she’d acquired Number 5, Moonshot Wharf in 1998 for £250,000, it had quadrupled in value. She hadn’t bought it as an investment or for the view; its main attraction was that it had come as an “instant home,” fully equipped with everything an owner needed, and a lot they didn’t, from silver-plated teaspoons to a four-person Jacuzzi, from the finest Egyptian sheets to a baby grand piano. The apartment was the antithesis of her childhood home Trelawney—another reason Blaze chose it; best to have as few reminders as possible.

  When her brother took over the castle in 1988, Blaze, like all daughters and younger sons before her, had been sent away to find a husband or some other life. Arriving at Paddington Station, she’d had nothing: a small suitcase, £50 in cash, a first-class maths degree from Oxford and no idea what to do next.

  She looked south towards Canary Wharf. A white plastic bag caught on a breeze wafted perilously close to the water’s surface. The tide was low and the shoreline glistened in the late evening’s gloaming. Two mudlarkers foraged; each carried a bucket and sifted through the flotsam and jetsam left by the receding water. Blaze had once been down for a closer look and had found an odd shoe, a golf ball and a dead cat. Since then she’d preferred to see the river from up high—looking down on people hurrying to work; buses and taxis delivering their fares; and the boats, from battleships to rubbish barges, passing back and forth. The breeze changed direction, bringing the smell of sulphur and algae up to the penthouse floor. She wished it was later and she could go to bed; she wanted to finish today and get the next over and done with. She decided that one small vodka wouldn’t hurt. Just one. In the kitchen she poured a shot and knocked it back, loving the burning feeling in her throat, the rush of tears to her eyes. One more, she decided, and took the second shot back out on the terrace and made an imaginary toast to success in her presentation the following morning when Kerkyra Capital’s new owner, the American activist Thomlinson Sleet, would decide which of the senior partners to retain. Blaze had been bitterly opposed to Sleet’s takeover; on paper, the deal looked lucrative, each of the key players awarded substantial share options, but in reality, these were realisable only after five years and meant little if her fund tanked during that time. Her concerns were taken on board but overruled by a vote of five senior partners to one.

  Over the last year, Blaze had been haemorrhaging money and clients. Once considered the star of Kerkyra Capital and one of the City’s most successful stock pickers, she was increasingly written off as an eccentric outlier and a misguided peddler of doom-laden predictions. For twelve months she had been forecasting a massive financial correction, but the markets had kept on rising. When the Frenc
h bank BNP Paribas froze three of its funds in August 2007, she said it harked back to the origins of the Great Crash of 1929. Nothing changed. A little over a month later there was the first run on a British bank, Northern Rock. Again Blaze foresaw collapse, placing her own and her clients’ money into gold only to watch the precious metal’s price rise and fall again. She also missed out on a surge of soaring stock-market prices; a share she sold in 2006 for $142 climbed to $235 in October 2007.

  Financial markets had always sailed on tides of bravura and promise, but Blaze was convinced the waters were now so shallow and currents so vicious that even the largest and most buoyant institutions should have run aground. Tomorrow’s presentation represented the last chance to convince her remaining clients that her intuition was correct: she also had to convince herself. The banks, she’d argue, had borrowed too much. International institutions were too interdependent to withstand the failure of any major institution. There had been a fatal marriage of deregulation and technology; anyone could invent new products but few understood the underlying risks. Blaze had made this speech before but her credibility had been steadily eroded. In 2005 she’d had £2 billion under management; now she was down to less than £1 billion. Her most important clients had migrated to JW Inc., the hedge fund run by the brilliant and reclusive Joshua Wolfe who regularly and consistently outperformed her and the world indices. If her assets under management dipped much lower, she’d be demoted from senior partner to associate. Like others at Kerkyra, her bonus was more significant than her salary; this year she’d be lucky to take anything home.

  Blaze went back inside, dragging her toes through the thick white carpet, unstained and still pristine, soft and warm underfoot. Walking through the open-plan living room—a harmony in beige and taupe—past the kitchen with its black marble surfaces and white fitted units, she stopped in the sitting area and looked sadly at a pyramid of rose quartz, a staggeringly expensive and apparently fail-safe way of attracting love, now six years old and yet to work.