House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  “It’s noodles—the Chinese invented them.” Arabella moved the noodles around in their polystyrene tub.

  “Most of the British population love Chinese food,” Toby added, hoping there would be leftovers.

  “We are not and never will be most of the British population,” the Earl said.

  “I thought you might like to see how the other 95 per cent live,” Kitto said, trying to make a joke.

  “You thought wrong. I am not interested in common people and this is simply disgusting,” the Earl said, pushing his plate away.

  “You’re obviously trying to kill us.” Clarissa drew her wrap further around her shoulders.

  “There would be quicker and easier ways,” Kitto said.

  “Grandfather, try the crispy shredded beef,” Toby urged. “It’s my favourite.” The Earl nibbled a bit, but it was too tough for his old teeth.

  “I’m so hungry,” the Countess said. “I have to eat something. So do you, darling,” she said to her husband.

  “Try the rice,” Toby said. “It’s fried with egg, and soft.” Here finally was something his grandparents could manage and they ate it quickly. “These are bamboo shoots in oyster sauce—also delicious,” he encouraged.

  “This is just edible,” the Countess said, some colour returning to her blanched cheeks.

  “Tell Mullion not to prepare this muck again,” the Earl said crossly. “Just because others like it, doesn’t mean we have to.”

  Behind them, the log fire laid by Arabella sputtered into life and the licking flames cast shadows on the wall. Kitto stood by the door watching his children help his parents. Even with heating and hot water, Enyon and Clarissa were too old to fend for themselves and Jane was too busy to look after them. Until now, he’d failed to take in how dependent and frail his parents had become. His mother, once the finest horsewoman in the county, a little shy of six foot and broad and strong as a young oak, had shrunk and withered. Her skin was mottled and papery, and liver spots stood out on her cheeks, while the low-cut neckline of her dress revealed a latticework of broken veins and ribs like scaffolding on her chest. Enyon’s eyes, once hazel, were covered in a milky film; the hands that had once controlled great horses shook in his lap; the formerly luxuriant auburn hair hung in forlorn wisps around his ears. Kitto knew that moving his parents out of Trelawney might kill them; keeping them at the castle through winter would be another kind of death.

  A novel thought came to Kitto: he wished his wife was there; dependable, devoted, kind, protective Jane. Since the age of fourteen, she had adored him—which explained, perhaps, why he had never bothered to develop any independent feelings for her. She had always been there, always would be there. He took her entirely for granted and, although he’d never been in love with her, he could see that she was a fine woman. More than that, he realised that he couldn’t manage without her.

  “When does your mother get back?” he asked Toby.

  “She’s supposed to be coming later,” Toby said. “With the girl.”

  Kitto wondered how on earth they were going to feed and care for another person and, more importantly, how he’d cope with the constant reminder of the love of his life.

  10

  Volcanoes

  SUNDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 2008

  All fourteen of Ayesha’s suitcases were mini-volcanoes, spewing assortments of shoes, books and clothes over the Moonshot Wharf apartment’s pristine white and beige interiors.

  “What is this?” Blaze held up a tiny leather minidress. “Did your mother let you go out like that?” She was astonished.

  “She insisted!” Ayesha laughed. “Her great hope was that I might induce heart attacks in old men.”

  Blaze knew it wasn’t a joke; titillating ageing aristocrats was a game Anastasia had played at Trelawney house-parties.

  Any suggestion that Ayesha might like to tidy her possessions or clear up after herself was met with total bewilderment.

  “What is the point of tidying, only to untidy moments later?” Ayesha said. Blaze anticipated (correctly) that her own cleaning lady would resign upon seeing the state of the flat.

  “When can we go to Cornwall?” Ayesha asked over and over again. “Mama made the Trelawney way of life sound like paradise. She never stopped complaining about Balakpur: the crumbling palace, hopeless servants, the damp and the heat.” She looked around her. “At least it was colourful—this place is so drab.”

  Blaze accepted that her apartment, like her life, was made up of a limited palette. She couldn’t get angry with the younger woman; she recognised that her polished demeanour was a veneer—Ayesha’s confidence spun like a weathervane in high winds. One moment she was imperious and spoilt; the next awkward, curmudgeonly and spiky. For several nights, Blaze lay awake listening to her crying softly. Once she went into her room.

  “Are you missing your mother?”

  “And my brother. It’s so quiet here,” Ayesha sobbed. “At home there are hundreds of people running around.” Sitting up in bed, she asked, “Why doesn’t my father come for me? Doesn’t he know I’m here? Doesn’t he want me?” Her shoulders shook and she bent over her knees in misery. “If he knew how many years I have dreamed of meeting him.”

  Blaze put an arm around Ayesha and pulled her close. Raising her left hand tentatively, she stroked her niece’s hair, wondering if this was how mothers behaved.

  “How well do you know my father?” Ayesha leaned in to Blaze’s embrace.

  Blaze didn’t know how to respond. “What did your mother tell you about him?”

  “That she loved him more than she thought it was possible to love any man.” Ayesha burst into tears again.

  Blaze shifted uncomfortably. “Did she tell you why their relationship ended?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

  “She never properly explained.” Ayesha wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She looked up at Blaze intently. “Will you?”

  Blaze shook her head. “What happens between two people is mystifying; the opposite of what you think can be closer to the truth.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’m not sure love makes sense even to those who are involved. If we could simply explain it like an algorithm or a theory, we might lose interest.”

  “That’s such a cliché.” Ayesha laughed dismissively. “Have you ever been in love?”

  Perhaps it was the comforting cloak of darkness, but to her surprise Blaze answered the question. “Yes, twice. Once with a house, a way of life; once with a man. Trelawney was my whole life, and then my fiancé Tom. Both were taken away: one by my brother, the other by cancer. Love and loss are so inextricably linked in my mind that I do everything I can not to feel.”

  “Mama said that regret was the only thing to be frightened of. Her refrain was: ‘Passion wounds, regret kills.’ She taught me to evaluate every situation with a matrix, to add up the pluses and minuses in different columns. Even love was a mathematical problem, something to be solved.”

  After Ayesha had fallen asleep, Blaze lay awake thinking about the eighteen-year-old Anastasia. Had she been a seductress or a victim? Could or should Blaze have done more to protect her friend?

  A few days later, over breakfast, Ayesha made an announcement.

  “I am down to my last £200 and an emerald ring, and my options are limited,” she said without any preamble.

  “I can give you money if you need it,” Blaze replied.

  “That is generous, but would only be a short-term solution.” Ayesha smiled as graciously as a duchess opening a garden party. She took a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to her aunt. There, in her neat handwriting, was a list of options. Scanning it, Blaze saw three choices: 1. University. 2. Job. 3. Marriage. The last one was underlined in red ink.

  “You’ve put things in the right order,” Blaze sai
d.

  “Poppycock,” Ayesha snorted. “I intend to marry for money.”

  Blaze laughed nervously. “I’m not playing this game, Ayesha. It’s stupid and demeaning.”

  “In my culture, it’s perfectly normal to have arranged marriages. Indeed, it works better than your so-called love matches. Imagine if you’d had one.”

  Blaze flushed. “This is not about me.”

  “Are you prepared to help?”

  Blaze shook her head. “You are nineteen years old. You have good A levels; now you need a degree. That would give you options. Otherwise, I will help you find a job and until then I’ll support you.”

  “I will accept short-term support, but my mind is made up.” Ayesha nodded at her aunt and, scooping up her coat and bag, left the apartment.

  Blaze sat down heavily. What was she supposed to do now with her willful, anachronistic niece? Her mobile phone rang; it was TiLing.

  “The Deputy Governor of the Bank of England has been alerting major financial institutions that Lehman’s will be declared bankrupt tomorrow. The Barclays acquisition failed. It’s all going tits up.”

  Blaze could hardly believe what she was hearing. Though she had foreseen the failure of market confidence, the idea that the U.S. government would allow such a totemic bank to collapse was almost unthinkable. Her prediction was wrong: there would be no correction, only collapse.

  “Surely the Fed will step in?”

  “My sources say Lehman’s will file for Chapter 11 in the morning.”

  Blaze jumped to her feet. “I’ll be at the office in half an hour.” She ran to her bedroom and pulled on a pair of black trousers and a white T-shirt. She put two clean pairs of underwear and her spongebag into an overnight case, anticipating that she wouldn’t be home for a few days. Hurrying out of the apartment, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her face was flushed with excitement and her eyes shone. After years of ridicule and ostracism, she had been proved right. Now she had to do the thing she was trained for: make money.

  11

  Big Shot

  MONDAY 15TH SEPTEMBER 2008

  Jane gave no reason for delaying her return to Cornwall; Kitto was too busy to ask for one. By Sunday night he and the children had shot and eaten deer, partridge and rabbit over an open fire. There had been enough to feed his parents and he’d remembered to light their fires and bring buckets of hot water. Shortly after first light on Monday morning, the rain came. The storm arrived with heavy banks of cloud, grey upon grey, rolling in from the sea up the estuary towards the house, signalling a long spell of wet weather. Kitto woke to a familiar drumming of water on the York stones outside. While the children were sleeping, he went to the local Co-op and bought a catering-size pack of forty frankfurters, three bags of oven chips and a week’s supply of dog biscuits. The hens had laid five eggs and he planned to boil them for breakfast. His office mobile phone rang constantly; he ignored it—didn’t they understand the meaning of “time off”?

  Arabella was the first downstairs. Kitto suggested walking to the old oak wood to find mushrooms and maybe shoot some breakfast.

  “Have you looked outside the window? Even the stupidest deer, the keenest rabbit, will be cowering behind a rock or in its burrow,” she said, watching the rain running down the glass in wide rivulets.

  Toby appeared a few minutes later.

  “You better do the buckets on the top floor,” he advised his father. “Mum empties them out on days like this.”

  “Check the tarpaulins in the Carolean ballroom—last time it rained this hard a whole section of cornice fell in.” Arabella poured some cereal into a bowl and ate it standing up.

  Ignoring his children, Kitto grabbed his gun and, followed by Pooter, strode out of the house, past Jane’s roses and down to the once formal, now decidedly wayward garden. The rain was horizontal, driving into his eyes and running with abandon below his collar. Determined to ignore the elements, he marched on past the ruined temples to the estuary. The tide was out and the mud glistened like patent leather. Walking along the bank, he hoped that a fish or two might have mistimed the tides and got trapped. Once, in the 1970s, a whole shoal of mackerel had become marooned; the story made the local paper. Wiping the rain out of his eyes, Kitto looked left and right, unsure which way to go. His clothes were so wet that walking was difficult; his coat and trousers stuck to his flesh like cling film and his boots sloshed. Even Pooter was dejected, head hanging and tail drooping between his legs.

  As in a dream, a doe and her fawn poked their heads out of a small spinney and cautiously made their way towards the estuary. Even in the rain, the mother was beautiful, with long neck and ears and a white rump. Her baby hopped beside her on spindly legs. Pooter growled softly. The deer and fawn came even closer. It was an unmissable shot. Slowly, Kitto lifted his gun, took aim, squeezed the trigger and fired. Perhaps it was the rain in his eyes, but he watched in amazement as the mother and fawn leapt, unscathed, across the field and into the wood. He put his gun down, hoping no one had been watching.

  The miss of such an easy shot was unsettling. If he couldn’t aim true in the arena he was born and bred for, what hope did he have in any others? In his pocket, his mobile buzzed again and he felt a shiver of fear about his recent investment. What if his sights were off there too; what if missing the deer was a sign? What if his colleagues were wrong; what if he lost more money? He shook uncontrollably and tried to reassure himself that it was only a reaction to the rain, rather than a premonition. Taking the phone out of his pocket, he saw eight missed calls. Putting the safety catch on his gun, he turned towards the house. Then he tossed his handset into a puddle and made a decision: he would redeem his investments that morning.

  His boots were full of water, yet Kitto felt a lightness in his step; he’d regained the initiative. Emboldened by his own decisiveness, he made another decision: to pull Ambrose out of Harrow. His eldest son had no aptitude for academia (or much else) and no gratitude for the sacrifices his parents and siblings were making to keep him in the private system. At the end of each term he returned with a dreadful report and more airs and graces. Since his internship with Thomlinson Sleet, the boy had become insufferable, telling anyone who would listen that Sleet, in his opinion, was a God amongst men. His conversation was littered with “Sleetisms,” or endless banal slogans that the financier used, such as “Hope is a shitty hedge” or “Real men don’t need liquidity.” Sleet had a boat, a trophy wife, a big bank balance. Sleet didn’t care about the little people; he concentrated on the big picture. Ambrose watched the film Wall Street over and over again and slicked his hair back to look like Gordon Gekko. Kitto rued the day he had asked Sleet to take his son on. From Christmas, Ambrose could enroll at the local comprehensive school along with the other two.

  Walking with renewed purpose, Kitto strode back to the castle and into the kitchen. He didn’t mind the rain any more, letting it soak through his clothes, down the nape of his neck and into his boots. He would remember this walk as one of the happiest in his life. By the time he arrived home, his children had finished breakfast and, as far as he could tell, had used most of the kitchenware to cook five eggs and half the frankfurters. The sink was piled high with unwashed pans and crockery. Furious, Kitto picked up a dirty plate and smashed it on the floor. He was about to smash the second plate when the landline rang.

  “Hello?” Kitto said, hoping it was Jane ringing from the station.

  “Kitto? It’s John,” the CEO of Acorn said.

  “John, old boy. You might recall that I’ve got a few days’ leave.” Kitto held the plate in the air.

  “Cancel it. The news from New York is bad. Lehman’s is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The U.S. government has washed its hands of the problem.”

  “I’m a bit busy here,” Kitto said, peering into the sink.

  “You need to get back to London at once.
We have to put out a statement.”

  Kitto made a face at the telephone. “How does the failure of an American bank affect us?”

  “We have similar sub-prime exposure to Lehman’s.” The CEO hesitated. “Our share price is tanking.”

  “Tanking? Going down?” Kitto repeated. “And our funds?”

  “We borrowed too much. Can’t repay the debt. The money’s pouring out. People are queuing up to get their savings. We’re finished. I’m sorry, Kitto—it could have happened to anyone,” the CEO said. “Get on the next train to London.”

  Kitto put the telephone down. “It could have happened to anyone,” he repeated, “but it didn’t, it happened to me.” Only a few weeks earlier he had taken out a second £1 million mortgage against the castle; that money had been supposed to triple in value. Holding on to furniture for support, Kitto made his way back towards the sink and, turning on the tap, splashed his face with cold water, hoping it might unite his body to his mind, which seemed strangely numb and absent. “It could have happened to anyone,” he said again. “Anyone.” Picking up a plate, he threw it at the wall where it smashed, showering shards of china all over the floor.

  Toby walked into the kitchen, dressed for school.

  “What are you doing, Dad?”

  “Avoiding washing-up. It’s a family game.”

  Toby gave his father a withering look. “Grandad’s not well; he’s got pains in his chest.”

  All Kitto could hear were the words “bankrupt,” “finished,” “over.”

  “We took them breakfast. Arabella was telling them about Anastasia’s death and the daughter coming to stay. Grandad clutched his heart and fell down. You better get the car.” Toby pushed his father towards the door.

  Kitto carried Enyon to the car; the old man weighed less than the dog. Arabella tried to keep him dry by holding a raincoat over her grandfather’s body. Clarissa, still in her nightdress, got into the back seat and cradled her husband’s head in her hands. Toby climbed into the front seat. Arabella and Pooter were left at the castle.