by Susan Napier
‘This is Richard’s room,’ Julia declared, taking a quick look around to confirm the fact.
‘It also happens to be the only bedroom in the house with a fire made up,’ came the pleasant reply. ‘Speaking of which, would you mind shutting the window as you go out again, it’s creating quite a draught.’
Julia twitched her shoulders straight and marched over to the window, hauling down the sash with a crash. Having made her point she went back to the bedside to demand of the bland, sleepy face: ‘What have you done with Richard?’
It was a stupid thing to say. If he was a criminal psychopath who’d stuffed Richard up the chimney he wasn’t likely to admit it. He could just as easily dispose of her with one swipe of a large paw. She ought to feel frightened, or at least apprehensive, but she didn’t.
‘I have done nothing with Richard. I have no idea where he is, and what is more I don’t care. It’s late and I would like to get some sleep.’ His unusually soft voice was further husked by sleep and the grey hair stood up in little points where the movements of his head against the pillow had disturbed its straightness. He must be a restless sleeper, thought Julia, distracted for a moment. In the car his chin had been smooth, immaculately shaven, but now its contours were roughened by pepper and salt whiskers. The general air of ruffled untidiness made Julia soften towards him. She couldn’t very well blame him for Richard’s vagaries.
‘May I suggest,’ he continued, shattering the illusion of vulnerability, ‘that you pass along your groupie-grapevine the gloomy news that the country’s teenage heart-throb is not currently in residence.’
‘Groupie-grapevine!’ Julia’s voice neared squeak-level again. ‘I am not a groupie. I happen to be a friend …’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he interrupted with precise distaste. ‘I wonder how your old-fashioned parents would feel about this situation?’
His words reminded her of their manner of meeting.
‘Are you a friend of the Marlows? If you’d said you were coming here you could have given me a lift all the way.’
‘I didn’t realise I was obliged to inform you of my travel plans,’ he said, with mild sarcasm. ‘Besides, I got the impression you preferred the company of the handsome young truck driver.’
‘He was a friend too,’ Julia told him, frowning at his sceptical look. ‘And I happen to have known Richard for years.’
‘So have several thousand other young women.’
‘Does Mrs Marlow know you’re here?’ Julia firmly ignored the impulse to argue further. First she must find out who he was and why he was here. Had one of the family broken the rules already and invited a guest?
‘No, but I assure you she would be unconcerned if she did know.’
Julia doubted it. Should she ring Connie in the morning and let her know? What if she wanted him to leave? What if he didn’t want to go? Julia couldn’t imagine herself bodily ejecting him. Maybe Mrs Brabbage could do that, since they were of a similar size. Julia grinned at the upturned face but there was no answering smile.
‘Who are you?’ she tried again. ‘And how did you get in?’
He hesitated before answering, then seemed to resign himself to the fact that she was not budging without an answer. ‘With a key. Now would you mind …’
‘The one from under the flowerpot!’ That put him within the privileged circle. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find it.’
‘You mean you do use conventional entrances on occasion? How about using a conventional exit.’ He pointed to the door, the long silk-clad arm commandingly straight. He looked and sounded as if he was used to being obeyed.
‘At least tell me how long you intend staying,’ she pleaded. She was the one who would be looking after him, even if he didn’t know that yet. She looked forward to disabusing him of the groupie notion, though she couldn’t blame him for it after her silly behaviour in his car.
He leaned back on the double pillows with a sigh, closing his eyes as he did so. The thick lashes threw tiny half-circles of shadow on the hard planes of his cheeks. The lamp light bleached the pale face of all expression so that it looked as if it had been carved out of cold white marble by the bold, sweeping strokes of a master sculptor.
‘I said …’ Julia raised her voice, thinking he must be drifting off.
The heavy lids lifted. ‘Unfortunately, I heard what you said. Your curiosity is ill-timed to say the least. Can’t this wait until daylight?’
‘Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here?’ Julia asked incredulously. Nobody could be that incurious. Why, she could be a psychopathic murderess!
‘I know what you’re doing here,’ he said. ‘And I’m even less impressed with your wisdom than I was this afternoon.’
‘Well, I’m staying here too,’ Julia offered gratuitously. ‘I happen to be—’
‘Resident groupie?’ The full lower lip tightened with irony.
‘I told you I’m not a groupie,’ Julia insisted impatiently, against all the evidence. ‘I’m the cook.’
The irony on his face intensified as he pushed himself up from the pillows. Julia stepped back involuntarily. It was like the raising of the Titanic. ‘Why, Jean, you’ve lost a lot of weight since I saw you last,’ he drawled.
‘You know very well I’m not Mrs Brabbage,’ Julia told him hastily. ‘I’m taking her place for a while. Mr Brabbage has had an operation.’
‘You’re cook … in an empty house?’
‘You’re here.’
‘Unexpectedly. So who were you planning to cook for, if you can cook at all?’
The professional slur annoyed Julia. ‘I’m a qualified Cordon Bleu chef,’ she snapped.
‘Where did you qualify—the cradle?’ he asked, quite reasonably, in the circumstances. ‘What’s the recipe for Eggs Benedict?’
‘Wha … what?’ The staccato question came out of the blue and Julia’s brain jammed on all frequencies. This was too much on top of a troublesome afternoon and the wine she had imbibed freely at dinner, knowing she wasn’t going to have to drive.
‘It’s … um … it’s eggs. It’s made with eggs,’ she said lamely. She had prepared the damn dish a hundred times!
She was rescued by the snap of his fingers. ‘J. Fry. Of course, you must be Janette, Mrs B’s niece. I should have recognised you from her description! You’d better not let her find out that you haunt Richard’s room in the early hours of the morning.’
Julia was gaping at him. Janette was legendary in the Craemar annals. Having heard Mrs B on her favourite subject Julia suspected that the not-so-innocent Janette had had her dubious achievements embroidered to make a symbolic point. She was everything that was wrong with modern youth, according to Mrs B. It was not flattering to be mistaken for an irresponsible, promiscuous, high-school drop-out.
‘My name is Julia, not Janette,’ she declared hotly. She didn’t know the girl’s last name and obviously neither did he. He had remembered Julia’s though. ‘And you still haven’t told me who you are.’ She hooked her thumbs through the loops of her jeans and rocked aggressively on her heels.
‘Inquisitive little thing, aren’t you?’ he said, not believing a word of what she said, but giving in in the hope it would get him some sleep. ‘I’m Hugh.’
‘Hugh who?’ Julia asked blankly. It sounded ridiculous but neither of them cracked a smile.
‘Doesn’t your intimate family knowledge run to the less famous members of the family?’
Julia gasped at the outrageous implication. She could only remember the G. B. H. part, but she was certain that his surname had not been Marlow on that business card. ‘You liar!’
‘How so?’ he enquired, unperturbed. He couldn’t have expected to be believed.
‘The Marlows have red hair …’
‘Charles doesn’t,’
‘… and they’re all built like bean-poles, not like … like tanks’ Julia ignored his valid point. ‘And you’re too old.’
‘For what?’ The grey ghos
t of a smile flitted behind his eyes.
‘To be Hugh,’ Julia insisted. ‘You must be at least thirty-six.’
‘Thirty-four,’ he corrected drily.
‘You look older,’ she told him, too annoyed for polite fiction. ‘That would make Connie how old when you were born …?’ She did some mental arithmetic, one of her weak points. The silence lengthened.
‘About fifteen,’ he offered softly. ‘However, I don’t see that I’m under any obligation to explain the ramifications of my family tree to all and sundry. Good night.’
This time Julia didn’t argue, she was feeling pretty tired herself. They could sort out the confusion in the morning. The stranger was already settling down under the duvet, reaching for the light as she closed the door behind her.
In a way it was reassuring to know that there was somebody else in the house, thought Julia as she guided herself down the moonlit stairs, especially someone large. He might be an unknown quantity, but in their two brief meetings she had gained the impression that he would be a rock in times of strife. To oppose him head-on would be to dash yourself to pieces. Much better to flow peaceably around him.
Her head had barely touched the pillow when she awoke to the sound of a clatter in the kitchen. It was barely light and the nip on her nose told her that there had been an overnight frost. She groaned as she heard another clatter. Don’t tell me he’s up already! She dragged herself up and scrambled into thick corduroy trousers and a polo-necked sweater with patch elbows. After dashing her face in lukewarm water at the basin and running a quick brush through her hair she strode into the kitchen, prepared to assert herself.
‘Hullo, Julia. I’m sorry, did I wake you? I just brought in some of the supplies on that list you sent down. I went shopping in Whitianga on Friday but didn’t have time to bring them over when I got back.’
‘Time I was up, anyway, Mrs B,’ said Julia, beaming at the large, ruddy-faced woman who stood in the centre of the kitchen.
‘I thought I’d come along early and get going,’ Jean Brabbage rolled up her sleeves, revealing beefy forearms, and continued merrily on, telling Julia about Jack’s progress and how he liked to be left to himself in the mornings and cataloguing the work she intended to get through before the Marlows arrived. Jean was as talkative as she was big and Julia kept smiling and nodding, awaiting her chance.
‘I was expecting Richard to be here already,’ she managed, when the other woman paused for a fat breath.
‘Huh!’ A disapproving sniff. ‘I got his room ready for him, even offered to come over and cook for him. But he rang and told me he was spending the weekend with a friend in Thames. A girl.’ Another sniff, but before she could enlarge on her darkest suspicions, Julia nudged her back on to the right track.
‘But someone’s using his room.’
It was like flicking a light switch. The plump round face illuminated. ‘He would never be so ungracious. Let me know on Friday that he was coming down, and told me not to bother about him until today. Master Richard, now, he wouldn’t dream of coping by himself for a weekend. Helpless he is.’
‘But who is he?’ cried Julia, nearly bursting with curiosity.
‘Why, Mr Hugh, of course,’ Jean Brabbage sounded horrified that anyone could not know who he was. ‘I told him to take the room I had aired and made up.’
Julia sank into a chair beside the well-scrubbed kitchen table, now covered with Jean’s bulging paper bags and cartons. He couldn’t have been telling the truth!
‘He’s not Hugh Marlow?
‘Not Marlow, no,’ came the baffling reply. ‘He’s Hugh Walton.’
Now she remembered G.B.H. Walton. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s adopted,’ came the bombshell reply. ‘I was here when they first brought him home. Scrawny little thing he was, only twelve, quiet as a mouse with those big grey eyes and whispery voice.’
Scrawny! ‘We are talking about the same person, aren’t we?’ said Julia, as Jean rustled about the shopping. ‘I would have thought he’s more of a lion than a mouse.’
Jean chuckled. ‘He is now. Half-starved he looked then. And such an appetite; you’d have thought he had never seen food before! Probably hadn’t seen much, come to that. He made up for it though, sprouted like a beanstalk. Very fine athlete at school, could have been Olympic class if he’d put it before his studying. Of course all that bookwork’s paying off now. He has his own law firm, lectures at university, writes books … deserves every bit of it, I say. Be Prime Minister one day I shouldn’t wonder.’
What an accolade, thought Julia. Jean Brabbage usually tempered every opinion with pessimism.
‘It’s strange, I never knew that the Marlows had adopted a child. Nobody ever mentions it,’ Julia angled for a little more relevant information.
‘Mr and Mrs Marlow aren’t ones to broadcast their private business, but it was never a secret,’ Jean obliged. ‘Mind you, it was all a long time ago and of course Mr Hugh isn’t in show business. He has a proper job.’
Julia choked back her laugh. Not even Richard at his most persuasive and Michael at his most convincing could persuade Jean that acting was work. Play-acting, she called it, but was still proud of the famous family she worked for.
‘Did you tell him the family were coming down?’ she asked the million-dollar question.
‘I thought he would know about that. Doesn’t he?’ Julia shook her head. ‘I thought it was funny, him wanting to come down. Mr Hugh is a very reserved sort of person.’
‘Does he often come down by himself?’ Julia thought the reserve was probably stubbornness. Why was he so anxious to avoid his family, he should be grateful that he had such a large and loving one? Actually, it wasn’t so surprising that Connie and Michael should adopt, they were people of boundless affection and generous instincts.
‘Not as often as he used to,’ she sounded disappointed about it. ‘He used to study down here while he was at law school. Didn’t throw weekend-long parties with rowdy friends and brazen hussies, or spend most of his time drinking and carrying on like nobody’s business.’
Julia didn’t have much difficulty guessing the culprits. Richard and Steve had gone through the normal male metamorphosis, it seemed. But not Hugh, of course.
‘The boys must have just been babies when he was adopted then,’ she ventured, still on the trail of the enigma.
‘They were only two. Mr Hugh was very good with them, for all he was quiet and withdrawn, and with the others, too, when they came. There was no jealousy and he never got nasty or tough with them. Very gentle, he was, not like most boys are.’
That soft voice still bespoke gentleness, yet of a detached kind that Julia misliked. The study of law required a tough and resilient mind, not a quiet, gentle personality. So which was he—Mrs B’s darling or Richard’s dry-as-dust lawyer who needed reminding of his family obligations?
‘How come he was adopted, what happened to his parents?’ dared Julia, but this was too much, even for the garrulous Mrs B.
‘I don’t rightly know, they died I think,’ she said, her face acquiring the faintly glazed look of an accomplished gossip forced to withhold a fascinating titbit. Julia respected her enormous self-restraint.
‘What time does he have breakfast?’ The big, wooden pendulum clock on the wall said seven and in Julia’s mind the seed of an idea began to germinate. A cross between an apology and an explanation.
‘He doesn’t have any, at least only coffee and toast, and he likes to get that himself, so don’t you worry. Now, I must get on and give his room a good clean. He’s here to work on another book, you know.’
Julia knew that Hugh’s room was the attic. She had never been up there but Connie had told her that it had been converted especially for her eldest son. It even had an en suite bathroom so that except for food he could be completely self-sufficient up there. The legal eagle’s eyrie!
As Jean clumped heavily up the stairs Julia got busy. First she put all the purchases aw
ay, whipping around opening cupboards to check that everything was where she remembered it. She unpacked the tools of her trade and stepped into the cool, walk-in stone pantry and took out four smooth, brown farm eggs. She fetched a loaf of bread from the bread-bin and a few ham slices from the kitchen refrigerator.
She put the eggs on to poach and quickly toasted four rounds of bread, buttering them and laying on the ham slices. Jean must have lit the black coal-burning range when she came in, but Julia decided to use the electric one this morning. Although she loved cooking over flame, it always took her a few days to reaccustom herself to the element of risk involved.
While the eggs stayed warm in the oven she used Buster to make a quick Hollandaise sauce, hoping the ghastly row wouldn’t annoy the man upstairs.
She had just placed the eggs on the rounds of toast and was pouring the sauce over the top when Jean reappeared to fetch the window-cleaner. Julia asked if she would mind taking Hugh’s breakfast in, on her way upstairs.
‘But I told you, he doesn’t eat breakfast,’ Jean regarded the beautifully set tray in dismay. ‘He told me he likes Eggs Benedict,’ fibbed Julia. ‘And it can’t hurt to offer. He won’t be able to start work until you’ve finished.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Jean dubiously. ‘Poached eggs is it?’
‘Poached eggs,’ agreed Julia with a grin. Good, plain cooking was Jean’s forte; garnish was a foreign language.
Half an hour later, having eaten her own eggs, Julia was washing the dishes when the tray was returned.
‘Good morning,’ she carolled cheerfully to the man filling the doorway.
‘Good morning,’ he returned quietly, setting the tray down on the kitchen table. He had eaten everything, Julia noticed.
‘Would you like some coffee now?’ she turned to ask.
‘No thank you.’ He watched her hands drip soap suds on to the linoleum floor.
‘I hope you didn’t say anything too indiscreet to Mrs B.’ Julia met his level stare.
‘I’m never indiscreet.’