‘Mums.’ Melinda took her hands and, having given the other two an anguished look, said, ‘Er, Mums – we’re going to wear the – er, you know, designer things, if you don’t mind.’
‘And sequins on our faces, you know!’
Hope stared first at Melinda and then at the other two. How ridiculous to even suppose that they would not be wearing the designer things. But even so, she opened her mouth to say, Oh, for God’s sake, you will look ridiculous at a country party with lots of kids who won’t possibly be able to afford those sorts of things. She stopped herself in time, remembering Aunt Rosabel’s warning – no, she must be gracious, she must, whatever happened, not have a chip on her shoulder. Just because she could not afford to buy her children expensive clothes did not mean they should not wear them.
‘Of course,’ she murmured, and was suddenly glad of the old lady’s advice when she saw the girls’ faces. ‘Of course you must wear what you like. You can keep these other things for the holidays, or something.’
She turned away, swallowing the unwelcome lump in her throat, unable to come to terms with her feelings, which were quite out of proportion with the moment. Gracious – she must be gracious.
Hope had arranged for Alexander to take the girls to Cyndi Tomm’s party, and Hope and Aunt Rosabel and Verna and Letty gathered to wave goodbye to the three teenagers, all of whom, climbing into the back of their father’s forty-thousand-pound Mercedes, looked as if they were about to pose for Vogue or Town Magazine, so glamorous did they look, and so chic.
Later Alexander collected the glamorous Merriott sisters from the party, and, as it transpired afterwards, stayed on for a drink with Jack. Hope could not wait to hear all about everything and so was waiting by the front door of the cottage as soon as she heard the new car arriving back. Seeing her three leggy daughters scrambling out of the car and walking silently off to the barn in the dusk Hope called to them to wait for her, which they quite obviously were not intending to do.
‘Hey, Mellie darling, Rose – wait. I’m just dying to hear about it all, darlings, do tell. Was it great fun? It sounded as if it was going to be a corker.’
‘Oh, yes. The party was. Yes, it was great fun,’ Melinda admitted.
Hope put her arm round Claire. ‘Was there dancing?’
‘Yes, there was dancing.’
‘And a group?’
‘Yes, there was a group.’
‘And …?’
They were all back upstairs in the improvised bedroom of the barn, and Melinda and Claire were taking off their shoes, seated on the edge of their beds, while Rose, having put on a tape of her favourite ballet music, proceeded to dance carefully around the room in her flat ballet shoes.
‘It was terrible, Mums,’ she said finally, as she turned and turned to the music, making Hope feel dizzy just watching her as her dancing took her to the end of the barn room and back again. ‘Just terrible.’
‘We should have listened to you,’ Claire mumbled. ‘We looked like – well, I don’t really know what we looked like.’ She turned to Melinda for help. ‘What did we look like, Mellie?’
‘Tarts!’ Melinda put her head in her hands and started to rock with hysterical laughter.
‘Yes, she’s right. We looked like teenage tarts!’
‘And what’s so funny,’ Rose said, stopping her dancing plum in front of her mother, but then seeing Hope’s genuinely horrified face she too started to laugh. ‘What was so funny, Mums, is that Aunt Rosabel’s most worst word, if you know what I mean, her most worst word – and she’s always saying it – is tarty. You know? So tarty, Rose dear, so tarty, just like on the television, not that I would ever own one.’
‘No, she watches Mrs Lander’s instead!’
‘Oh dear, you should have seen how stupid we looked …’
The relief they all felt at being able to laugh at how they had looked was second only to the relief that Hope felt as she watched them laughing.
And she would not have been human if she had not also felt relieved that it was they who had chosen to wear their overly expensive clothes, and not Hope. She joined in their laughter, and then they all carefully hung the designer clothes on hangers and went for a long soak in the downstairs bathroom next to the kitchen in the housekeeper’s cottage and Hope sat down to watch Mrs Lander’s television with Aunt Rosabel, despite the latter’s revulsion for the medium.
‘How was it?’ Aunt Rosabel wanted to know, and she and Verna turned expectant eyes on Hope.
‘Oh, a great success,’ Hope murmured, and smiled briefly at them before picking up her tapestry frame.
A week later, putting their great big wham, bam, thank you ma’am flop party behind them, as Melinda said, they all started their new school, and Hope was left alone for long stretches at Hatcombe with only Letty, Verna, Aunt Rosabel and the builders, Alexander taking himself off more and more frequently, it seemed to Hope, to London in his shiny new car on increasingly long business sorties, leaving Hope in charge of the building works.
‘If there are any difficulties and you can’t get hold of me, you and Aunt Rosabel decide, but there really shouldn’t be too many more ’ere-come-and-look-at-this-will-you?s. Anyway, you have a whole set of numbers where you can reach me.’ He kissed her lightly on her cheek and climbed thankfully into the Mercedes.
‘What exactly is this great new venture, Alex?’ Hope had enquired, shutting the heavy door. ‘I mean things are really bad out there, aren’t they?’
Alexander had given a little sigh before starting the engine. ‘Don’t worry, Hope darling, things will come round, they always do. My backers may have got cold feet but just wait – I’ll bet you anything some brave entrepreneur will run with one of my ideas this time, and I’ll clean up.’
‘You haven’t put any of our house money in this venture, have you?’
‘Really, darling, please try not to be so suspicious. Oh, and by the way, I am going for that little operation Macleod recommended after Letty was born. You know the one? Where they give you a head graft?’ he ended, teasing, but whispered, ‘I’m going for the vasectomy, so that should put all your fears at bay, yes?’
‘Alexander! But shouldn’t we at least talk about it?’
‘Nothing to talk about, darling. I’ve given it a great deal of thought, and I must have it done. It’s up to the man to do these things nowadays. For you it’s one hell of another operation, while for me it’s nothing. Hardly more than a toothache, the clinic told me. So next time I’m down, watch out! Wish me luck!’
Seconds later he was gone with a wave from the car window, disappearing in a cloud of dust past the piles of rubble which still surrounded the house.
Hope gazed after him. They had not made love for many weeks now, but there was no getting away from it – the idea that she would never, ever get pregnant again, or have to live in fear of it, was too wonderful to even think about. And not only that, but when she returned to the cottage she found that Alexander had left a cheque for her. He had paid her back. Things had to be looking up, surely?
‘Mogs? It’s me,’ he said into the car phone as soon as he could get enough cells. ‘Alexander.’
‘Alexander! Where are you? You never said you were coming up?’
‘I’ll be with you in no time at all, and guess what? I have a pink ticket for the whole week. I’ll tell you why when I see you!’
Replacing the car phone he took a quick look at the expensive stereo on the dashboard and pressed the play button for the compact disc mode. A moment later the car was flooded with the sound of Joe Cocker singing ‘Up Where We Belong’.
The following days passed in a sort of haze of content for Hope. The builders were rebuilding, and although the autumn leaves were definitely beginning to fall she found that the silence of the countryside no longer frightened her, nor even the darkness, and going for long walks with Verna and Letty in the absence of the rest of the family allowed her at last to appreciate where she had, with such reluctance, co
me to live. Now she no longer missed the noise of aircraft, or the sounds of neighbours, but walking among the colours of autumn allowed her eyes to try to pick out each one of the thousand colours that made up the season.
‘Did you know that Van Gogh used eighteen versions of the same yellow?’ Hope asked Verna one afternoon, but Verna, although pretending polite interest, was much more taken with Letty who was pointing and saying ‘Glugg, glugg, glugg’ to the ducks on the pond that they were passing, a reaction that Verna was stoutly maintaining was actually ‘Ducks, ducks, ducks’.
Hope sighed with happiness whenever her eyes fell on Letty’s ravishingly pretty face. Naturally to her all her daughters were beauties, but there was no doubt that out of all of them Letty was the most astonishing to look at, with her large blue eyes and her already thick wavy blond hair. Little wonder that whoever they passed on their walks always turned to stare at her.
‘She’s going to be famous, mark my words, a great beauty like Lily Langtry. People will stand on chairs to watch her pass,’ Aunt Rosabel announced when they returned from their walk, and she kissed the baby’s hand. ‘Although one hopes that she will be a wife rather than the mistress of a king or a prince,’ she added, with a roguish look at Verna.
Verna laughed good-humouredly as she whisked Letty off for her bath. She liked Mrs Fairfield, ‘one of the old sort’, she would insist to Hope.
Seeing the old lady through the Australian’s eyes, Hope’s vision of Aunt Rosabel had mellowed in the same way that her vision of Hatcombe had mellowed, so much so that the two of them had become indivisible, and she now thought of them as one. It was as if in restoring Hatcombe she was also restoring to Aunt Rosabel the life that she had once enjoyed. That she might even, with the house, become modernized was too much to ask, but she did look rosier, and altogether happier, and here again Verna had a theory.
‘Young people give off an energy that old people can feed from. They don’t realize it’s happening – I mean it doesn’t make the younger people weak or anything, but they do most certainly give off an energy that helps the older, weaker ones. that’s why lumping old people together in a home isn’t right. Families were meant to be together, not herded according to their ages. And the same goes for schools – nothing mellow to calm them all down, nothing but children bullying each other. That’s not right either. We’ve got it wrong.’
One thing Aunt Rosabel had not got wrong, however, was the date of her annual tea when, as she told Hope, ‘the Old Contemptibles come to see me, and we talk about John, killed in Italy, you know. Northern Italy.’
She glanced up as she said it to the painting of a little boy pushing a wheelbarrow that hung above the fire, the only possession that she had not put in store when she had moved into the housekeeper’s cottage once the underpinning had begun in earnest.
‘Yes, they all knew John. Tanks, the cavalry of World War Two. Not much chance, you know, not much chance if you were in a tank, as Harold used to say, but there – one of these days I will see him again, and we will all be together, the three of us, I am quite sure.’
As the old lady finished speaking, and the fire crackled and snapped with the damp of the logs freshly brought in, Hope could hear Letty laughing and gurgling in her bath. Happy sounds of babyhood, and above them Verna singing in a reedy Australian voice, ‘Nelly the elephant packed her trunk and went right off to the circus.’ What a pointless thing to have given birth to a baby who would grow into a child who would grow into a man to be blown into a thousand pieces. Was that what boy children were for? Just to be killed? Was that why they were so important to everyone?
* * *
They arrived one by one driving modest cars, and soberly dressed in dark coats and scarves covering tweed suits which had been teamed with gleaming shirts and regimental ties. And the moment they saw Rosabel Fairfield, their faces lit up.
‘Not in the big house any more, Mrs Fairfield?’ they teased her as they trooped into the housekeeper’s cottage. ‘Coming down in the world, we see?’
They shook hands at the door, where the same safe old phrases of welcome rolled out as must have rolled out in previous years. ‘You haven’t changed at all since last year!’ ‘I’d have known you anywhere.’
Yet there was no sense of awkwardness when they sat down, crowding the little sitting room as Hope and Verna hurried about with plates full of finely cut sardine sandwiches, and little iced cakes, and fruit cake, and chocolate fingers that melted a little by the end of tea but were appreciated none the less. And out came the photograph albums, and the air became filled with ‘ah yes’ and ‘well, well’ and ‘well now, fancy that’, old-fashioned sounds that did credit to the listeners and the speakers alike, waiting as they did for each to speak in turn.
Aunt Rosabel’s face became quite pink from the heat of the fire and the excitement, and when they all finally stood up to go it was evident that, as always, they were as reluctant to leave her as she was for them to go.
‘Till next year,’ they told her.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ she agreed, but when they had gone, and Hope and Verna had finished waving to their modest, unassuming cars, which were so utterly in keeping with their characters, she turned away to stare at the painting of her son as a small boy, and stayed in front of it for many minutes.
Chapter Seven
Hope and Aunt Rosabel had become more than friends. They had achieved an understanding, possibly from being together so much while Alexander was away in London, possibly because they, and Verna and Letty, were all living in such close proximity with the builders still hard at work on the main body of the house. Their afternoons were spent out walking together by the lake, or sometimes, if Aunt Rosabel was feeling up to it, to some nearby woodland where they carefully picked their way through the crackling dead branches of last year, and marvelled at frost sparkling like the tiniest blue diamonds on dead leaves.
Aunt Rosabel loved nature and she had always lived in the country, although not always in Wiltshire, having been born and brought up in Sussex – the poet’s county, she called it.
‘A wonderful childhood full of the sound of laughter, and of course, my dear, we never left home. Can you imagine? There we were with our parents and the servants, and the next moment we were whisked up to London, popped into a white dress, presented at Court, had our photographs taken at Lenare, and then walked up the aisle to the usual strains, and we did not know a thing.’ Hope heard this last many times, and never tired of it.
Once, probably because they both knew what Aunt Rosabel meant by saying that they did not know a thing, Hope asked her how they had coped?
The old lady stopped and with a curiously theatrical gesture of the hand she laughed and said, without embarrassment, ‘Well, my dear, it was just as the nursing sister said to me when John was born – You’ll manage! And we did. But, do you see, the boys – English boys – were so ignorant, they were often petrified too, and many a honeymoon went by with only vingt et un being played, and dancing to the gramophone, and such like!’
Hope left it at that. That Aunt Rosabel liked to tell her little snippets, or to pass on small items of gossip about people long gone, made their time together fascinating to Hope, because she had known so little of her own mother’s past. But other than that one enquiry, she far preferred to listen to Aunt Rosabel than to question. In the same way, although she offered her arm to Aunt Rosabel over the rougher terrain, if she did not wish to take it Hope would leave her alone, imagining that it must be irritating to be over-protected, and that the old, like the young, asked for help when they needed it, and if they did not ask it was best to let them make their own way.
Perhaps this last walk together had been a little too adventurous for the old lady. Hope castigated herself, too late of course – that she had taken them on a new route through the woods. Aunt Rosabel was hobbling back, leaning hard on Hope, and not able to go more than a few paces without stopping.
At last they reached Hatcombe again an
d Hope called the doctor, who, as it transpired, was about to come out on another visit and would be passing by their door. He bandaged the twisted ankle and prescribed a mild painkiller, as well as sleeping tablets in case the pain kept his patient awake.
‘My, my, Mrs Fairfield,’ he teased her, ‘you really must stop running marathons on such frosty ground!’
They all laughed and at the end of the evening, after a convivial supper in the kitchen, Verna and Hope managed to help Aunt Rosabel up to her room and settle her for the night with what she always called ‘a nice cup of cocoa’ but was actually drinking chocolate made by Verna and finished off with a little sprinkling of cinnamon, which was delicious.
Hope put out her own light and settled down to the kind of sound sleep that a cup of chocolate and country air always seemed to bring about. She was awakened, she did not know how many hours later, by the sound of someone in her room.
Terrified, she sat up and put on her bedside light to find herself staring into Aunt Rosabel’s eyes.
‘You must help me,’ she told Hope. ‘The house is on fire. I must rescue my son.’
Hope was out of bed in a second and pulling on her wool dressing gown. Running into the corridor to call to Verna, she peered out of the window at the façade of Hatcombe. But there was no sound or sight of a fire, and besides, she suddenly realized, Aunt Rosabel’s sight was not so good that she could have seen a fire at the main house from her bedroom window. Nor could she have smelt it, for again, the house was too far from the housekeeper’s cottage.
‘Mrs Fairfield!’ Verna was out of her room and giving Hope ‘leave her to me’ looks for which Hope felt intensely grateful. ‘Come with me to your room, Mrs Fairfield, and I’ll stay with you until you have calmed yourself.’
Love Song Page 13