by Eva Ibbotson
‘How I treat my daughter is none of your business. Harriet is sick in her body and sick in her soul—’ But he took an involuntary step backwards, aware of a sudden menace in the stranger’s stance. ‘Who are you anyway?’ and rallying: ‘I won’t be blackmailed. Harriet is underage—’
‘Professor Morton, it is only because you are Harriet’s father that I have not actually throttled you. Anyone else who had treated her as you have done would not have lived to tell the tale. I choose to believe that you are misguided, pompous and opinionated rather than sadistic and cruel. But unless you sign this document without delay I will take you out into the courtyard, debag you and throw you into the fountain.’
The look of expectancy on the students’ faces changed to one of deep and utter happiness.
‘You wouldn’t dare!’ blustered the Professor.
‘Try me,’ said Rom. He looked down at the row of upturned faces. ‘I can do it myself, but it would be easier if I had help. If anyone is willing to help me debag the Professor, would they put up their hand?’
There were fourteen students in the lecture room and thirteen hands shot up without an instant’s hesitation. Then Ellenby, sole support of a widowed mother, shook off his moment of cowardice and also raised his hand.
‘I think you should sign, you know,’ said Rom pleasantly. ‘After all, it’s no tragedy to have your daughter installed as mistress of Stavely.’
‘Eh? What?’ The Professor peered at the document and registered the fact that Harriet’s suitor was Romain Paul Verney Brandon of Stavely Hall, Suffolk. ‘Good heavens!’
If the Professor had continued to defy him, had kept up his bluster, Rom might have felt a reluctant respect for the detestable man. But over Professor Morton’s face there now spread a look of servile amazement and awe – and unscrewing his fountain pen, he signed his name.
He was, however, not destined to resume his lecture. Rom might have left the room, but he had shown the students a lovely and fulfilling vision; he had unleashed primeval forces which were not to be gainsaid.
Blakewell rose first and even when he became a bishop he was to speak with nostalgia of this moment of release. Hastings followed – then Moisewitch, whom the Professor had humiliated in front of the entire tutorial group, took off his spectacles and laid them carefully on the window-sill. No words were necessary as every student in the hall moved as one man towards the rostrum.
‘His trousers first,’ said Blakewell. ‘Start with his trousers . . .’
Rom drew back the curtains and looked out on Stavely’s moonlit avenue of beeches, the silver pools of light in the meadows of the park, drank in the sharp clean smell of the air with its first touch of frost. He was back home and with every reason to rejoice. To the place he had left as a penniless and rejected youth, he had returned as master – and he had brought his future bride.
Away to the left he could see the chimneys of Paradise Farm, but no light showed from the house. Isobel was back, having sulked all the way across the Atlantic, but she had decided to remain in London and spend some of the allowance Rom had bestowed on her. Her son was with her now, but a message from the housekeeper had informed Rom that he could expect Master Henry at the end of the week. Clearly it was not going to be difficult to keep an eye on his nephew!
He stayed for a while, still, by the window, but the dreams he had had for Stavely eluded him. It was probably just reaction from the constant exercise of will, the long journey and fruitless delay in Russia, that made him feel both restless and weary. What else could ail him, after all – and knowing that he would not sleep, he nevertheless turned from the window and began to prepare for bed.
He was interrupted by a knock at the door – quiet, but not noticeably timid – and Harriet, still in her Aunt Louisa’s appalling nightgown, entered the room. At which point Rom became aware of what had ailed him . . . and ailed him no longer.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ said Harriet, ‘but I woke up and I wondered if I could make a request of you?’
She had folded her hands and now with a rush of expectancy he looked down at her feet which she proceeded to fold also.
‘What request would that be, Harriet?’ he asked, matching her own grave and measured tones.
‘Well, you said we were going to be married tomorrow, didn’t you? Because of the special licence?’
‘Yes, I did say that. If you wish it, that is?’ he teased.
How did she manage to look like that after the ordeal she had been through? Did she somehow consume and metabolise love, this extraordinary girl?
‘I do rather wish it,’ said Harriet. ‘I wish it like someone who has been lying in a cold grave might wish for the day of resurrection. Or like an extremely hungry lion might wish for a Christian. And I mean to be immensely respectable and wear a mob-cap and have quarrels with you about the coal bill to show how independent I am. Only there is one thing I so very much want to do, still, and it isn’t a very married thing. I know you don’t approve of it and I do understand that, but it would make me so happy because you know how interested I have always been in Suleiman the Great.’
He looked at her and felt the tears spring to his eyes, because after all she had been through she had kept the gift of laughter, could offer him what he longed for with such gallantry and grace.
‘You want to creep from the foot of the bed into the presence?’ he asked with mock severity.
Harriet admitted that this was so. ‘They weren’t abject, the odalisques,’ she explained. ‘People have that wrong. They just worked very hard at love – it was all they had.’
But Rom, aware that the time for conversation was running out, was applying himself to the practical aspects of the problem.
‘Under the counterpane or over it, do you wish to creep?’ he enquired.
Harriet’s face crumpled into its urchin grin, acknowledging a hit. Then she raised her arms as does a child who wishes to be gathered up and in two strides he was beside her.
‘We will creep together,’ announced Rom idiotically and carried her – this lightest and most beloved burden – to his bed.
EPILOGUE
‘Hurry, girls!’ cried Hermione Belper. ‘The bus will be here in a minute.’
The ‘girls’, however, were not easy to hurry. It was not as in the old days, when a word from their president had the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle jumping to attention. Now, ten years since they had last been to visit Stavely, the changing times had taken their toll. Bobbed hair, a penchant for rag-time and radical ideas of all sorts had spread through the ranks. Even Eugenia Crowley, one of Harriet’s erstwhile chaperones, wore a skirt which cleared her ankles by a good nine inches.
But it was not the fact that the ladies no longer sprang to attention at her command which annoyed Mrs Belper; it was the condescending and superior behaviour of Louisa Morton, who had declined to accompany them.
‘My dear, I regard Stavely as my second home,’ she had said snootily. ‘It is hardly necessary for me to go there in a charabanc.’
The remark was quite untrue, of course. Harriet was polite and friendly to her aunt, as she was to her father, but Romain Brandon – who mercifully had come through the war with only an arm wound and a string of medals – always seemed to be absent or unavailable when the Mortons visited. What was true was that Louisa was compelled to spend more and more time looking after her brother, for since that extraordinary episode when his entire class had thrown him in the fountain and gone virtually unpunished, the Professor had become something of a recluse and now took almost no part in the life of the University.
The bus arrived. Mrs Transom’s daughter had died of Spanish influenza in the last year of the war, as had Mr Belper, the president’s undersized husband; but Mrs Transom (now in her ninety-eighth year) seemed to grow younger every day and was easily hauled aboard by her attendant.
‘This will be no ordinary outing, Cynthia,’ explained Mrs Belper to her god-daughter, who was paying her a
visit. ‘As I have told you, I have known Mrs Brandon since childhood. I understand we are to be shown round by a member of the family and that there is to be a sit-down tea!’
As they drove in between the tall gates, the ladies were amazed by the change in Stavely. The Hall had been a military hospital during the war but now, three years after the Armistice, all signs of the army’s occupation were gone. Making their way to the front door, the visitors passed through one of creation’s undoubted masterpieces: a lovingly tended English garden on a fine day in June.
And sure enough, a member of the family was waiting to show them round! Not Harriet Brandon, shortly expecting her third child, but a tall good-looking young man with russet hair – the owner’s nephew, who had grown up at Stavely and was to inherit Paradise Farm and a substantial parcel of land as soon as he came of age.
‘That’s Henry Brandon, Cynthia!’ hissed Mrs Belper, pushing her god-daughter forward and wishing that the girl’s mother had had the sense to do something about her teeth. ‘Stay close by his side and ask questions. Gentlemen always like to tell you things.’
Henry had shed his fears and his spectacles, and his good nature was proverbial. Nevertheless, his detestation of the ‘Tea Ladies’ who had made Harriet’s childhood a misery was almost as great as his uncle’s. If he had volunteered to show them Stavely, it was by way of a thank-offering – for on the previous day he had won his long-standing battle with the man who had been more than a father to him. Rom had fought harder than the old General, for Henry was an excellent scholar and to let him turn down three years at Oxford seemed madness; but in the end he had conceded defeat.
‘Go back, then, if you must. God knows they’ll welcome you with open arms at Follina. I don’t think the good times will come again, but perhaps one doesn’t want them to – the world’s a different place now and something can be done still, I’m sure. Alvarez’ report actually throws up some interesting angles where the minerals are concerned. And of course Harriet will expect you to have the Opera House open again for Natasha’s debut!’
If his offer to show the ladies round had sprung from gratitude, Henry found himself enjoying the tour, for he never wearied of pointing out the beauties of Stavely or ceased to take pleasure in the contrast of the cold, neglected house of his early childhood and the lovely cared-for place it had become.
‘Goodness, who is that lady?’ asked the buck-toothed Cynthia, who was obeying her godmother’s instructions to the letter. ‘She looks most unusual!’
They had reached the picture gallery on the top floor and that part of the house reserved for recent portraits of the family and friends.
‘That’s Galina Simonova – the ballerina. It was painted in 1913 after her triumph at the Maryinsky. That diamond star she’s wearing was given to her by the Tsar.’
The slight melancholy which attacked the ladies at the mention of the murdered Tsar was dispelled by the next picture – that of an imperious-looking, red-haired woman in a white gown, standing on the steps of a flag-bedecked mansion and flanked by a pair of elephants en grande tenue.
‘“The Lady Isobel de Larne”,’ read Cynthia, giggling coyly. ‘She has exactly the same colour hair as you, Mr Brandon. Is she a relative?’
‘My mother,’ admitted Henry, looking with amused affection at the flamboyant portrait of Isobel, now living in immense style with her diplomat husband in Udaipur.
In front of an enormous Sargent entitled ‘The Brandon Family at Home’, the ladies insisted on staying for a considerable time. Painted three years earlier in the last months of the war, it showed Rom Brandon still in his colonel’s uniform, his arm in a sling and on his face the exact look of boredom at this time-wasting procedure which was to be seen on the portrait of his father on the opposite wall. Beside him, very close to her husband, was Harriet, one slim hand resting on the fawn hair of her daughter, Natasha, in an effort to hold her down long enough to enable the painter to do his work. Henry himself stood beside Harriet and on a low stool – still boasting his baby ringlets and apparently strangling (with loving concentration) the white puppy in his lap – sat Paul Alexander, Stavely’s heir, whose birth Henry had greeted with unconcealed relief. For Henry had never wavered in his determination to return to the Amazon and but for Paul’s birth would have felt obliged to repay his debt to Rom by learning to take over at Stavely.
The furthest part of the gallery had been set aside for photographs and Henry led the way towards these with alacrity, for he had become a keen photographer and many of the pictures were his own.
The ladies exclaimed at the christening pictures of Paul Alexander in the arms of his French godmother, of whom Henry had taken more photographs than were strictly necessary. There was a photo of Madame Simonova, upstaging a French duchess who was declaring open the Simonova École de Dance; a recent one of the eight-year-old Natasha as a butterly at Madame Lavarre’s end-of-term dancing display . . .
And one at which Cynthia stopped and said, ‘Goodness! What on earth is that?’
‘A goat,’ said Henry. ‘A very special one. It has won innumerable prizes.’
But the picture was not only of a goat. Hanging on to the animal was a man in Lederhosen with embroidered braces and a Loden hat. Also in the picture, but a little out of focus, was a peasant lady in a kerchief holding what appeared to be a basket full of enormous runner beans.
‘Strange!’ said Mrs Belper, peering at the photograph. ‘The face looks familiar.’ And then: ‘Good gracious – it is him! It’s the young man Louisa wanted for Harriet!’
Henry grinned at the picture which he himself had taken last summer and labelled Dr and Mrs Finch-Dutton at Cremmora, for the story of Edward and Olga was one of which the family never tired. The first months had been hard for poor Edward, concealing his young bride in lodgings at the edge of the town and trying to hide his injuries as he crept in and out of college. Nor had the war years been easy, for with Edward away in the Pay Corps Olga had gone to live with the Mater in Goring-on-Thames. Whether or not the experience had shortened the Mater’s life was hard to say; at all events she had succumbed to a heart attack just after Edward’s demobilisation, leaving him a considerable sum of money. Now, in the wooden house which Dubrov had thankfully sold them, the Finch-Duttons lived in harmony rearing prize goats, prize vegetables and children – and if anyone bit Edward these days, it was almost certainly a goat.
The tour was over. The ladies thanked Henry – and with half an hour to go until the sit-down tea in the dining-room, they followed their president out into the grounds. Exclaiming, praising, responding graciously to the salutations of the many gardeners, they walked through the topiary, down the Long Walk, passed the place in the sunken garden where, all those years ago, they had had their picnic.
Mrs Belper was well in the lead when, coming round a corner, she stopped suddenly and stiffened. A sighting! Undoubtedly a sighting!
Rom Brandon himself was coming out of the rhododendron copse which edged the lawn and with him was his wife. Unaware of Mrs Belper’s presence, they walked together across the smooth grass – and even as she wondered whether or not to hail them they reached the pool of shade made by the crown of an ancient copper beech, turned towards each other – and kissed.
It was a quite extraordinary kiss. Even indoors at night, where such things sometimes happened, it would have been disconcerting – but here, out in the open air in the middle of a sunny afternoon, it was unutterably shocking. This man with his silvered hair and his honorary post as Financial Advisor to the Cabinet had gathered his wife to him as if in acute hunger, then and there, for her presence. And Harriet. . . What was one to say of a woman close to her thirtieth year, and obviously pregnant, who stood on tiptoe in order to put up her arms and pull down her husband’s head?
Mrs Belper stared. For the briefest of moments she remembered the opening bars of a Mozart sonata which her mother had liked to play, and that she had once thought there were angels. Remembered too Mr Belper, who
had brought her white violets when they were engaged, cupping them in an unexpected manner in his hands for her to smell, but was now dead.
Then she pulled herself together. The spectacle was a disgusting one, the sighting useless . . . and turning away, she retraced her steps and shooed the oncoming ladies firmly back to the house for tea.