Autumn Softly Fell

by Dominic Luke

  After a while, she had got out of bed and crossed to the window. Trees were swaying in the breeze. The sky was overcast. On the lawn below, a blackbird had prodded the grass with its sharp yellow beak. It had run a few steps, prodded again, then, with a sudden cackle, it had flown away over the trees in a flurry of wings.

  That had been when the voices started, the muffled voices downstairs. Unable to stop herself, she had crept out onto the landing and halfway down the stairs. Here her courage had failed her and she had sat down. Here she was still.

  Drawing her knees up to her chin, she listened, recognizing the deep bass rumble of Uncle Albert, the cold, clipped tones of Aunt Eloise. The words were all but indecipherable, like writing blotted by rain.

  ‘…nothing improper … then there was something….’

  ‘…and if I am not to be permitted … an old friend of the family….’

  ‘…behind my back! Behind my….’

  ‘…never, I would never….’

  ‘…taken you for a fool, Ellie….’

  ‘…a mistake, lending him … my head, in such a muddle….’

  The disconnected words swirled around, made Dorothea’s heart pound. It seemed, too, that she could hear other voices, voices in her head, voices form the dim past, voices she had listened to as she lay half asleep in the room off Stepnall Street, her papa and Mrs Browning stumbling around on the other side of the pinned-up sheet.

  …I never, I never did, you take that back, you’re a blinking liar….

  …damn you woman, damn you….

  …and don’t you damn me; take that, you old sod … and that….

  …bloody hell, bloody nora, you just wait, you just….

  Dorothea put her hands over her ears, trying to block out the voices – the voices from below and the voices in her head but they wouldn’t go away and she couldn’t stand it anymore. She scrambled to her feet and ran up the stairs, tripping over the skirt of her nightdress, her feet thudding. She didn’t care if they heard or not, she didn’t care that they’d realize she’d been listening. She just wanted to get away.

  She slammed the door of her cupboard-like room, flung herself face down on the bed, stuck her fists in her ears, buried her face in the bedclothes, lay silent and still, eyes closed, the sound of her laboured breathing the only sound she could hear.

  There was a knock on the door. Uncle Albert came in. Dorothea sat tensed-up on the bed, dressed now, wary. Her uncle’s big frame seemed to fill the little room.

  ‘Well, child. How do you like Forest Road? Not quite as grand as Clifton Park, eh?’ To her surprise he sounded almost jolly – or as jolly as so serious a man could ever get. ‘I thought this place a mansion when we first moved here. I was still a boy then, a child; your mother wasn’t even born. My father’s watch business was booming in those days. He had money. We started to live well.’ He crossed to the window, looked out, jingling some coins in his pocket. ‘The trees have grown since my day.’ He peered upwards. ‘Looks like rain again.’ Turning, his eyes came to rest on her. Frowning slightly, he said, ‘How would you like to see my factory? We’ve time, I think, before lunch. Then afterwards we have to catch the train.’

  ‘Catch the train?’

  ‘The train to Welby, of course. There’s one around half past four, if my memory serves. That will give us plenty of time.’

  ‘But, uncle—’

  ‘Your aunt, of course, won’t want to come to the factory. It’s not in her line at all.’

  Dorothea jumped up, threw her arms round him, because suddenly she knew it was going to be all right. They would all be going back together. In the inexplicable way of grown-ups, everything had been settled.

  ‘What’s all this, eh?’ Uncle Albert sounded amused – rather taken aback, too. He patted her head, stroked her hair. ‘Such a fuss, child. I’d have taken you to the factory long ago if I’d known you felt like this about it! Sometimes you’re a mystery to me, you really are. I never know what to expect. But your mother would have been proud, no two ways about it. She was no fool, your mother. She’d have been proud as punch.’

  The bicycle factory was in Crown Street, a stone’s throw from the city centre. There was a signboard with big bold letters: BRANNAN BICYCLE COMPANY.

  It had started out as a simple workshop, Uncle Albert told her, little more than a lean-to propped against one of the last fragments of the old city wall. Over the years the place had grown in an ad hoc way so that now there was a forge shop and a turnery, workshops for wheel and gear making, departments for finishing and packing, store rooms, mess facilities, offices – not to mention the corner that was now given over to the BFS Motor Manufacturing Company. This was where all the Eves were made, as well as bicycles.

  They walked in through the gateway and across an untidy yard, damp from the rain. He held her hand and she gripped his fingers tightly as they entered one of the buildings – a vast place, it seemed to her, with long grimy windows and a high wooden ceiling held up by iron girders. There were long trestle tables with bicycles in various stages of completion, and lots of men in caps and aprons who were busy about their work – but not too busy to smile and wink at her as she passed. She blushed and hung her head.

  The noise and the dust and the dirt, the smell of oil and metal and sweat made her head swim – made her feel out of place. But Uncle Albert seemed entirely at home here, relaxed and uncommonly garrulous as he pointed here and there, explaining what was going on in various parts of the room, giving her snippets of the history too, the long story of the works, how he’d built it all from nothing.

  ‘My father – your grandfather, that is – his business was watches, as you probably know. He made his fortune, such as it was, from watches, him and his two partners. But by the time he passed on and I stepped into his shoes, the market for British-made watches was falling away. People had started buying foreign watches, Swiss and American. It was cheapness that counted, not craftsmanship. I wanted to modernize, branch out. Sewing machines might have worked as a side line. But old George Taylor – he was the last of the original partners – he wouldn’t hear of it. He was a watchmaker, he said, watches were all he knew. Stick at it, was his motto. And he stuck at it until the business nearly died under him. When I came to sell it, after he’d gone, it was worth only a fraction of what it had been. But by then I had this place, something I worked on as a hobby to start with, but which became a business in its own right.’

  He’d started alone, he said, but had soon poached Simcox from the watch business, his first employee. Ever since then, Simcox had been his right-hand man. They had worked together through thick and thin. Now, nearly twenty years later, there was a workforce of over a hundred. Dorothea could well believe it. There were men everywhere she looked. It seemed amazing to her that out of such apparent chaos, something as intricate and functional as a bicycle was produced.

  In the relative quiet of Uncle Albert’s office – merely a partitioned-off corner of the big workshop – Dorothea sat on a chair by the door. This, she thought, watching as her uncle sorted through a jumble of papers on his desk, was where he belonged. Here you could see all of him, every facet, not like at Clifton where he was merely an adjunct, an interloper: Mr Brannan, not from round these parts.

  On the face of it, Dorothea said to herself, Uncle Albert and Aunt Eloise were worlds apart, had nothing in common; yet they seemed to fit together in some mysterious way like the parts of a bicycle. They worked as a whole. And the bond was strong, had brought Aunt Eloise all the way to Coventry, the place where she’d been so unhappy. She was willing to use any method – she’d been willing to use even her own niece – in order to bring Uncle Albert back to Clifton. As for Uncle Albert, he must know in his heart – Dorothea was sure of it – that Aunt Eloise was a pillar of virtue. How could anyone think otherwise – unless you were Nanny or Cook, picking over old bones, or Bessie Downs telling taller and taller tales?

  But where in all this do I fit in, Dorothea aske
d herself, where is my place?

  She couldn’t even begin to guess.

  EIGHT

  ‘WHY DID YOU all stay away so long?’ asked Richard petulantly. ‘What were you doing in London all that time? You were gone for weeks and weeks.’

  If there was one thing she had missed in those weeks, thought Dorothea, it had been Richard. Hearing his complaints, listening to him feeling sorry for himself, was like putting on a favourite frock. It felt comfortable, it felt good, she was glad.

  ‘I wanted to go to London too!’ Richard complained. ‘I wanted to see the new house!’

  ‘You had to stay here. You were too ill to travel.’

  ‘I was not ill. I’ve been perfectly well for months and months.’

  He never looked entirely well, that was for certain, being so pale and thin, but finding him today dressed and out of bed, sitting in a big arm chair by the fire, she was struck by the change in him, as if she’d been away for years instead of weeks.

  ‘I have not been ill,’ Richard continued, ‘since he stopped coming: Uncle Jon.’ He whispered the name as if it was some terrible secret. ‘He was the one who made me ill. Sometimes he frightened me too. He was so queer. I am glad that Uncle Albert told him not to come anymore.’

  He spoke of Viscount Lynford as if he was a figure from the distant past. It was true that his lordship had not called at Clifton Park for over a year now but Dorothea could still remember every detail of the terrible clash that occurred between Lynford and Uncle Albert. She had never mentioned it to Richard.

  She shivered and changed the subject, telling Richard about London, about the house that Uncle Albert had bought and the new BFS showroom on the Edgware Road with its huge windows and display of shiny new motors.

  ‘Did you—’ Richard leant forward, lowering his voice again although there was no one to hear – not even Nurse. ‘Did you see your papa as you hoped?’

  ‘No. No, I didn’t. I—’ How could she explain? The wild idea, the hidden hope she’d nurtured before the trip, now seemed like a silly child’s fantasy. The London from which she had just returned had not been her London; it had been a different city altogether, a city of wide streets and swept pavements, of majestic omnibuses travelling in procession, of hansom cabs swooping past. Uncle Albert’s new house in Essex Square was as far removed from Stepnall Street as one could imagine. It was tall and pristine white with black railings, set in a serene square where grass grew, and trees too, and where the gutters were speckless. Seeing the house for the first time, looking along the imposing terrace, she had wondered if, after four long years, her London perhaps no longer existed.

  ‘Such extravagance, Albert!’ Aunt Eloise had said as she stepped over the threshold but she had looked on the new house with favour, all the same, and Uncle Albert had preened himself, as if he’d built it with his own hands. ‘It’s so very long since last I was in town,’ she’d added. ‘One forgets quite how….’ She’d waved her arm, as if there were no adequate words to describe all that London was.

  ‘Why did you stay away so long?’ Richard repeated, interrupting Dorothea’s stories of the capital. ‘I expected you back by the end of September at the latest. It’s October now.’

  ‘We couldn’t come back until the repairs were finished.’

  ‘There was no need for any repairs.’

  ‘Yes there was. The house was falling to bits. Aunt Eloise couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘But I liked it the way it was. It is my house, and it shall fall to bits if I say so. Aunt Eloise did it to vex me. That is why she stopped me going to London, too. She hates me!’

  But that couldn’t be true. Aunt Eloise would have no truck with something as unseemly as hatred. Richard was too touchy. He took Aunt Eloise’s aloof manner as a personal slight. But she was the same with everyone—even Uncle Albert. As for the repairs, it was silly to say they hadn’t needed doing and Richard should be thankful that Uncle Albert had covered the expense himself. It hadn’t cost the miserly Trustees – or Richard – a penny piece.

  ‘But the workmen made such a noise!’ Richard grumbled. ‘Every day, hammering and banging for hours on end. It made my head ache!’ He frowned, his eyes sulky but then, unexpectedly, he brightened. ‘I didn’t mind it so much when Henry was here. I liked it when Henry came.’

  Henry had been installing electric wires whilst they were away, another up-to-the-minute novelty that Uncle Albert had been persuaded to try. Henry had wired up his own home at Hayton Grange months ago – much to his mother’s disquiet. ‘I have no faith in this electricity. We shall all be killed in our beds by it one of these days!’ Aunt Eloise had been equally dubious but Uncle Albert had come to trust Henry, especially after the success of the BFS motors. It was somewhat more of a surprise that Richard should be interested in electricity too.

  ‘Henry explained it to me, he explained about the wires and the switches. And I had a good idea – well, we had the idea together, really. We used the stable boy’s ferrets to run the wires under the floorboards. Isn’t that clever? And when everything was ready, I filled the generator with oil, and I was the first person to switch it on, and— Do you know, Doro? A person who does electricity and makes generators is called an engineer, and that’s what I’m going to be when I’m older: an engineer. Henry said he could see no reason why I shouldn’t.’ He stopped, bit his lip, looked at Dorothea almost shyly. ‘You … you don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘About you being an engineer?’

  ‘No. About me being friends with Henry. He was your friend first, and—’

  ‘Silly! Of course I don’t mind! I can think of nothing better than that you and Henry should be friends.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad.’ Richard’s rare smile seemed to brighten the whole room. ‘I do like Henry. He took such trouble. He carried me downstairs himself.’

  ‘But Tomlin always carries you!’

  ‘Tomlin has gone. He has been sent away.’

  ‘Why? Whatever for?’

  But Richard knew nothing of the circumstances and was, in any case, more interested in his plans to become an engineer. A withered leg was no hindrance, he said. Henry had assured him. And maybe, just maybe…. He would always need a stick, of course – two sticks, probably – but (he looked at Dorothea shyly again) imagine if he could learn to walk! They’d always said he was too weak, but if he did his exercises, if he grew stronger….

  Dorothea smiled, covering her doubts. ‘You need Bovril. Bovril makes muscle. I read it on the side of an omnibus.’

  Richard laughed at this, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and she wondered if her first instincts had been right, if he really had changed. The change was masked when he was being peevish and petulant, sulking about being left behind at Clifton. He’d seemed like a child still. But now, smiling, laughing, getting animated about the idea of becoming an engineer, confiding his secret hope of one day being able to walk, he suddenly seemed a lot older. He was fourteen, she reminded herself, not such a boy anymore. There was a year’s difference between them. She had never really felt it before.

  She tried to work out what was different about him. It was as if there was suddenly more to him than met the eye: new depths, a sense of gravity, a seriousness. Outwardly he did not look much different. He hadn’t grown markedly taller, he hadn’t filled out. He was still thin and pale, his clothes still hung off him. But he did look very smart in his button-up jacket and tie. His black hair – rather long, rather raffish – curled over the collar of his shirt. His sunken eyes, round and dark, were like splinters of coal. He was, she thought, rather handsome in many ways.

  Why not marry him?

  The voice in her head, coming out of nowhere, almost set her laughing. It was absurd! An absurd idea! And yet … and yet … why not? What was there to stop her? Had she not missed him terribly whilst she was away? And there was no one she could think of who she’d rather marry. Her mind galloped ahead. If she did marry him – one day, in the future, when they both of
an age – then she would never have to leave Clifton, she could stay here forever, she would belong here. She could make herself useful, too. She could help shoulder the burden when the house became his for real at the age of twenty-one. They could send Nurse away – Nurse who was only in it for herself – and find somebody more suitable.

  Or I could look after him myself, thought Dorothea, swept up by her plans, everything seeming to slot into place. They would need a replacement for Tomlin, of course, to carry Richard about the place. Or—maybe he would learn to walk when he got older. Maybe he wouldn’t even need a stick if he had her to lean on.

  Anything seemed possible. A whole new world had opened up. She wanted to hug Richard on the spot, tell him that she had found the answer to everything. But she kept her peace. She wanted to get used to the idea first and she was afraid Richard might scoff. Roderick would have, and Richard was a boy too. He looked like a boy today, sitting in his chair, and not like an invalid. Smiling secretly, Dorothea thought of all the months and the years ahead – plenty of time to bring him round.

  ‘Oh Richard! I am so glad to be back! I did miss you so!’

  He blushed, the colour bold and startling in his pale skin, and she thought, yes, yes, I certainly shall marry him. For what nicer boy had ever existed?

  There was something unsettling about change, all the same – even change for the better. The house was subtly different, now that it had been spruced up. And Tomlin was not the only missing face. Bessie Downs had gone too, Dorothea discovered. But Nora couldn’t or wouldn’t say why either had left.

  Dorothea took her walk on her own that afternoon. Mlle Lacroix had tripped up a kerb in London and was resting her ankle. It was a grey and blustery day, rain in the air, so Dorothea took refuge in the old summerhouse, a draughty, leaky place festooned with cobwebs, the floor thick with dust. Sitting in an old cane chair, she looked out of the grubby windows, watching dead leaves being blown across the lawn. Nibs Carter would have some choice things to say, no doubt, when he came to rake them up. The house looked smudged and blotted from this distance, separated off by the garden wall, half-obscured by the spreading cedar tree. Where exactly were the new slates, Dorothea wondered, and which of the chimney stacks had been rebuilt? Would the once leaky gutter really drip no more? Spiralling smoke, ragged and tattered, was blown hither and thither by the wind, grey against the darker grey of the heavy clouds.