House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  “Thank you,” Tony said, holding the man’s arm.

  “Shall I put your seatbelt on for you?” the cabbie asked.

  “I can manage that, just.” Tony smiled at him.

  “Where to, guv’nor?”

  “Paddington Station, please.”

  The taxi driver indicated right and soon they were heading towards the station.

  “Going to see family?” the driver asked.

  Tony’s heart sank. He couldn’t bear the chatty ones. Didn’t they understand that private transport was an opportunity for peace? He wanted to take a last contemplative look at the city which had been his home for sixty years.

  “I’m going to a christening,” he said, not wanting to be rude.

  “You must have seen a few of those?”

  “More than I care to remember. I suppose it’s touching that people want to go on having children.” Tony looked at the taxi’s dashboard and saw three family photographs.

  “I know what you mean. Our Sarah’s expecting her fourth and she hasn’t got a pot to piss in.” The cabbie shook his head. “We do what we can to help, but there are eight other grandchildren, all needing something. There’s too many people on the planet already.”

  Tony didn’t reply, hoping that silence would stem his driver’s incessant chatter.

  “So where you going to?” the cabbie asked.

  “Cornwall, the county where I was born.”

  “Never been there. Keep saying to my missus we should go.”

  Tony smiled. “It’s lovely, if a bit wet.”

  “Will you stay long?”

  “For the rest of my life,” Tony replied.

  “No luggage. Not even a holdall?”

  “All taken care of,” Tony said. “Just this,” and he held up the parcel.

  “You’re my kind of fellow. Whenever my missus goes anywhere, she has to take a huge suitcase. Even if it’s a day trip to see one of the children.”

  Mercifully the traffic wasn’t too bad and the taxi bowled through the park. Though it was early in the morning, there were plenty of people out. Blossom clung to the trees and the grass was lush green.

  “What’s the baby called?”

  “Perrin.”

  “Odd name.”

  “It’s a traditional Cornish girl’s name.”

  “So it is a girl! One never can tell these days and one shouldn’t presume. I’ve got granddaughters called Ray and Charlie. Bloody confusing, if you ask me.”

  Which I didn’t, Tony thought. He stared fixedly out of the window, hoping the man would stop talking. A group of horse riders went past: two little girls led by a gum-chewing battleaxe in a black fitted jacket. If the dreaded Clarissa had been there, she’d have wound down the window and told the woman that tweed was for hacking, black was for hunting. Tony sighed with relief—he’d only have to see her once more.

  At Paddington the cab driver helped him out and Tony made his way to Platform 5 and the 9 a.m. train to Parr. He’d booked a single seat, facing forward. It didn’t take long to pass through suburbia and into the open countryside. Resting his face against the cool, grimy window, he watched the counties pass and the distances between towns grow as he sipped the free tea and ate the complimentary biscuits. He checked his wallet for the tenth time. The £20 note was still there. The following day, after the ceremony, he’d take a taxi to the cliffs above Lantic Bay. From there it would only be a short walk. His last steps to freedom. He felt no fear, no regrets or any excitement. He’d had enough of this life; better to end it on his terms while he was mobile and continent. Blaze and Jane had both offered to take him in, but after sixty years of independent living he was too old to try and adapt to new rhythms. He’d had a good life—not the one he expected or even wanted, but interesting enough. Recently he’d begun to feel tired. Every day was a battle against aching limbs. The simple act of putting on his socks took a whole hour. He couldn’t be bothered to read or go to his beloved National Gallery any more. Most of his friends had shuffled on. The best thing that had happened over the last year was exploring London’s museums with Ayesha. Unlike most of his family, she had the “eye.” On the whole, Trelawneys were heathens. He liked them well enough, but they were still heathens.

  * * *

  Ayesha lay on the deck of the Lady S, staring into Mustique’s azure waters. The boat was one of the best things about being married to Sleet, not least because the farther it went, the less she had to see of him. He had flown out for the weekend and she could hear him shouting into his phone, ordering his broker to buy this or sell that. In the first few months of their marriage, Ayesha had feigned interest in his professional life; now she checked the stock market only to see how much his net worth had increased. Thank goodness she had married a man with a talent for making money; he was going to need it. The bills for restoring Trelawney came in thick and fast: the latest estimate had increased from £25 to £32 million to fix and furnish. The roof would be £15 million and that was long before they addressed the six miles of plumbing, the twenty-seven miles of electrical rewiring or thought about underfloor heating. Ayesha was determined to make Trelawney the best possible version of itself.

  Her thoughts turned to her mother’s story about being excommunicated by the family when they found out she was pregnant.

  “How could they?” Ayesha had asked incredulously. “You were so young.”

  “I was an ugly, inconvenient secret.” Vengeance had been her dying wish. Ayesha promised to fulfill her mother’s last request. She was surprised how easy it had been.

  Sleet marched along the deck towards her. He was wearing swimming trunks covered with ducks and matching yellow Topsiders. His stomach and thighs wobbled in different directions.

  “You look very Palm Beach, darling,” she said.

  “Is that a compliment?” Sleet could never tell if his wife was teasing. He couldn’t, for that matter, understand her. If she spoke, it was careful, modulated and enigmatic. The fourth Lady Sleet might bankrupt him, but he’d never get bored of her.

  Ayesha took out her iPhone and, scrolling through the photographs, showed Sleet a picture of a Lalique bracelet: a pansy made of diamonds and sapphires.

  “I sent it to the baby as a present from us,” she said.

  “I thought you weren’t speaking to the mother.”

  “It’s not the child’s fault.”

  “Did you fly the whole way to London just to choose it? The fuel for the jet would have cost more than the knick-knack.” Sleet was annoyed that his wife’s trip to London had happened when he was on the West Coast.

  “I had other things to do,” Ayesha said mysteriously.

  “Most husbands and wives share information.”

  Ayesha didn’t answer. She stood up and put on her bikini top. Sleet had no idea that she and Mark had spent forty-eight blissful hours in London, taking a short break in their lovemaking to find a present for the baby. She wondered how her husband would react to the news if she won a place at Cambridge to read History of Art or if she told him that her beloved brother Sachan was arriving to live with them the following week.

  “Where are you going?” Sleet asked.

  “For a swim,” she said.

  “I’ve only just got here,” he replied mournfully.

  “And we’ve got three whole lovely days together.” Ayesha bent down to kiss her husband’s head. Three whole days, she thought. God help me.

  32

  The Naming Ceremony

  SATURDAY 29TH MAY 2010

  Looking down at the tiny baby suckling at her breast, Blaze wondered if her heart might explode. How was it possible to love anything so much? She’d never liked babies and hadn’t wanted one of her own. Now this unexpected, perfect creature had blown apart an orderly life and rewired every aspect of her emotional being. Only a few weeks o
ld, Perrin already had a thatch of auburn hair. As she sucked, she made little snuffling and squeaking noises and thumped her tightly curled fist against her mother’s breast. Once in a while she raised a large blue eye upwards and let it roll backwards in its socket like a drunk on the verge of unconsciousness. Bending down, Blaze kissed the downy head and breathed in the milky scent.

  She had seen the baby’s father once since the child’s conception. He had accused Blaze of tricking him, treating him like a sperm donor and deliberately, cruelly ignoring his principles. He did not believe it was an accident: why hadn’t she taken precautions? But it had never occurred to Blaze that she might conceive—having babies was something that happened to people with steady periods and partners. The discovery had been a complete surprise. Hospitalised after passing out in the street, she’d woken up in a ward to be told that she was five months pregnant. The routine blood test also revealed that the foetus had a higher-than-normal chance of being born with Down’s syndrome. The doctor suggested an amniocentesis and showed her the long needle to be inserted through her stomach into the womb.

  “It comes with a risk of self-induced termination,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Blaze, stunned by the news, looked at him blankly.

  “The way I put it to patients is that you have to choose between death by a car or plane crash?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The doctor cracked his knuckles and leaned across the desk. “Having a baby with Down’s is one outcome; losing it with this procedure is another.”

  Every latent maternal instinct came rushing to the fore: Blaze didn’t care if the baby was born with Down’s or with thirty fingers; all that mattered was protecting, nurturing and bringing it safely into the world. She had never been more certain of or more committed to anything. No one was going to stick a needle into her unborn child’s secret space or endanger its chances of survival. Giddy with love and a sense of purpose, she had rushed from the doctor’s waiting room back to her flat in Maida Vale.

  Perrin took herself off her mother’s breast and fell into a deep sleep. Blaze laid her daughter over her shoulder and rubbed her back until the infant let out a huge, contented belch. Downstairs Blaze could hear the sounds of her family getting ready to leave for the ceremony, which was due to start at 4 p.m. With any luck the baby would sleep through the short service and wake only for her late-night feed. To her astonishment, Blaze never minded being woken—any excuse to look at Perrin, to hold her and look after her. During the week, Blaze took the baby to her office in Islington from where she managed her micro-financing company. The business had grown quickly since its inception six months earlier and now employed eleven full-time people investing in hundreds of small start-ups across the world.

  She was glad to be out of the City. Each day brought news of more endemic toxicity. The Securities and Exchange Commission had accused Goldman Sachs of willfully defrauding investors through the sale of sub-prime mortgages. A court-appointed examiner charged Lehman Brothers with knowingly manipulating their balance sheet. In Ireland, a former chair of the Anglo Irish Bank was arrested for suspected fraud. The uncoupling of cause and effect, the blanket denial of culpability and consequences, reflected attitudes in much of the industry. The billions of dollars of quantitative easing being pumped into America and Europe seemed only to prop up large businesses instead of reaching those individuals or small companies most adversely affected. Blaze was sickened by what she saw, but also aware that less than a year ago she’d have regarded the turmoil as an opportunity to look for interesting investments. Perrin had reset her ethical barometer; now she feared for her daughter’s and the next generation’s future.

  There was a gentle knock on the door and Jane’s head appeared.

  “We should leave soon, it’s nearly three fifteen.” Jane looked at Blaze and her sleeping child and smiled. “I love seeing you as a mother.”

  “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Shall I hold her while you get ready?” Jane stepped forward to pick up Perrin, who was now dressed in the Trelawney christening gown: yards of beige-coloured lace, worn by two centuries of the family’s new babies.

  “It’s only now I’ve added to the family that I feel part of it,” Blaze said, fastening her nursing bra and slipping on a burgundy cotton dress. She put on a pair of flat shoes and tidied her hair in the mirror, leaving her face free of make-up.

  Blaze walked across the room and felt the damask curtains. “I recognise these.”

  “Ayesha threw most things out. Whatever we could fit in here, we took.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  Jane shook her head. “I rehearse what I’d say.”

  “How does your speech go?”

  “Pretty short.” Jane hesitated. “It starts and ends with one word.”

  “Which one?”

  “Bitch.”

  Blaze laughed.

  “I’m not joking,” Jane said crossly.

  “She sent Perrin a present.”

  “I hope you sent it back.”

  “Certainly not; I made her husband millions.”

  Blaze looked at her sister-in-law thoughtfully. “I thought when we lost Trelawney that the family would disintegrate and there’d be no reason to see each other and nothing to come home to. But it turned out that, far from being the interloper, you are the family’s heart. The one who’s keeping us all together. Where you go, we’ll follow. Thank you.”

  Jane smiled weakly and looked out of the window at the white horses dancing across the seascape and the gulls wheeling above the water. Once she’d have been happy for this accolade; now it made her feel trapped.

  “Mum, we’ve got to go,” Arabella called up the stairs. Outside, Kitto honked the car horn. Blaze took her baby in her arms and the two women made their way carefully down the narrow painted stairs.

  “Do you wish Perrin’s father was here?” Jane asked, turning off the kitchen light.

  “Yes, but at least he’s part of her. I see him in her smile, in her eyes.” As Blaze spoke, her voice broke; she missed him.

  Jane looked at her. “I’m so sorry, darling.”

  “You can’t have everything.” Blaze shrugged and coughed to clear her knotted throat.

  “Mum, get a move on,” Toby shouted through the letter box.

  Jane opened the door and let Blaze and the baby out first. A gust of wind blew the two women’s dresses up above their heads and they stood, knickers on display, in front of the house.

  “Standards, darling,” Blaze yelled through the material which entirely covered her head.

  “Standards,” Jane echoed.

  In the car Clarissa turned her head away and under her breath muttered, “I think I might disown all of you.”

  “What then would be the point of living?” Kitto asked.

  Clarissa couldn’t answer.

  Kitto leaned towards her and gave his mother a kiss on the cheek. “All we have is family.”

  They drove in convoy to the tiny chapel at St. Madryn. The former church was set in an ancient wood behind a crescent-shaped white sandy beach named Petroc. Hidden from sight by rolling dunes on one side and a huge granite rock on the other, it was only accessible by a steep mossy track lined with ferns and lichen. Once the private domain of a Cornish queen, it had been deconsecrated in the 1970s and was now used for secular ceremonies and parties.

  “Why do we have to come to this frightful dank dingley dell?” Clarissa asked, as she tottered down the steep path, clinging to Toby’s arm for support. “We have a perfectly good church of our own where Trelawneys have been buried, baptised or married for at least seven centuries.” She was secretly relieved that none of the locals would witness this event and that Enyon hadn’t seen the arrival of his beloved daughter’s illegitimate baby. How pathetic of Blaze to fail to get the father to
marry her.

  “The Sleets would never let us use it. The church is part of Trelawney,” Jane said.

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,” Clarissa trumpeted. “I have rights.”

  “What’s wrong with doing something different?” Tony asked, trying to keep upright as his thin-soled shoes slithered on mossy stones.

  “Change for change’s sake is ridiculous. Just because something is new, it doesn’t make it better,” Clarissa snapped. “There are lots of churches, why go for hocus-pocus?”

  “Blaze didn’t want to offend the baby’s father by having a Christian ceremony.”

  “Is he a Druid?” Clarissa asked. “Or worse? Come to think of it, what could be worse?” She thought a bit. “Actually I can think of many more awful alternatives.” She shuddered theatrically.

  The family made their way down the path, which was lined with banks of buttercups, campion and valerian. “This must be the best year ever for wild flowers,” Kitto said and, unable to contain his excitement, danced with abandon in their midst. Arabella and Toby exchanged weary looks; their father’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic.

  “Waltz with me, my darling,” Kitto called out to Jane, who pretended not to hear.

  Blaze cradled Perrin in her arms. “I will make a great life for us,” she whispered in her tiny ear. “You won’t want for anything or anyone, I promise you.”

  Rounding the corner, the family saw that the windows of the chapel were glowing and candle flames danced behind brightly coloured stained glass. In the gloaming light it looked like a tiny ship on a sea of wild flowers. Mr. Fogg, the master of ceremonies, a vicar turned preacher, pushed open the heavy, studded oak door and stepped forward to welcome them. Clarissa held out her hand imperiously. Toby cringed; it was the first time his girlfriend’s father had met his family and, far from being worried about their reaction, he was concerned what Mr. Fogg might think of them. Jane broke with tradition and kissed the preacher; Arabella dug her toes into a crack in the paving stones and tried not to giggle; Tuffy, who hated meeting new people, looked the other way; and Blaze, shifting Perrin to one arm, clasped Mr. Fogg’s dry, warm hand.