Autumn Softly Fell

by Dominic Luke

  All this, however, did not help when it came to starting a conversation with Harrington-Shaw.

  ‘Mr Harrington-Shaw—’ She blushed, feeling silly, like a little girl playing with dolls, putting words in their mouths. ‘How is … er … how is school?’

  School was a place called Downfield, she knew that much. Roderick had moved there last September after finishing prep school. It was the traditional family school, Aunt Eloise had said. Her brother Frederick had gone there as a boy. Aunt Eloise always spoke of Frederick in reverent tones. Handsome, clever, charming, modest: she made him sound like a shining example. There was never any mention, Dorothea noted, of his being a rake or rapscallion; his wild youth was not discussed.

  ‘What is Downfield like, Mr Harrington-Shaw?’ She had got very little out of Roderick, which only made her the more curious. He spent half his life at school, yet she knew next to nothing about it.

  ‘It’s … er … it’s….’ Harrington-Shaw went red as a beetroot, spilling his soup, scattering crumbs from his napkin. From the few stumbling words he got out, she understood that Downfield was very different to one’s prep school, that it took a while to get used to but it was of course one of the foremost establishments of its kind in the country, with history, tradition and so on and so forth (his voice trailed off into an indecipherable mumble).

  That was all very well, thought Dorothea, but what actually happened there?

  The disjointed conversation petered out. How did Aunt Eloise find the patience? Looking down, she realized her plate had been whisked away. Yet another course had come and gone. The lobster mayonnaise was finished, the roast duck would be on its way. They were halfway through the meal already and she could remember nothing, when she ought to be storing every detail, her birthday dinner, her first step into the world of the grown-ups – no more spying through the crack in the dining room door! She began to note things down: the crease in the table cloth, the glittering chandelier, Mr Ordish discreet and inconspicuous. The cut glass seemed to shimmer in the electric light; Timms – the new John, Tomlin’s replacement – repeatedly bit his bottom lip as he piled the plates in his arm. And then there were the conversations weaving back and forth across the table. Dorothea dipped in to first one, then another.

  ‘… and I took the bend at completely the wrong angle, skidded right round, and ended up facing downhill. Naturally I’d no chance of winning the climb after that….’

  ‘… this is le couteau in French, Monsieur, and that is la fourchette….’

  ‘… who would ever have imagined, my dear, that all seven Northamptonshire seats would go to the Liberals. Joseph must be turning in his grave….’

  ‘… he has this ripping new cricket bat and I was wondering if I….’

  ‘… motorized bicycles are really beginning to take off, and as for the motor components side of things – well, we can barely keep up with demand. The Crown Street works have never been busier….’

  The roast duck came, the roast duck went; Cook’s ‘particular’ birthday pudding slipped by too. Aunt Eloise got to her feet. Dinner was over. Dorothea folded her napkin. The ladies retired to the drawing room.

  The French windows were still open. ‘Very careless,’ said Aunt Eloise reaching for the bell but Dorothea said she would close them and Aunt Eloise said, ‘Thank you, Dorothea.’

  Dorothea closed one long window, looked out before closing the second. There was still a glimmer of light, a rim on the horizon, far to the right but high above, stars were glinting in the dark pools between the massing clouds. There was no moon, as it was only one day away from the new.

  Dorothea pushed the window shut and turned the key in the lock.

  Henry had brought his gramophone with him. They had music when the gentlemen joined them.

  ‘A guinea a disc,’ sighed Lady Fitzwilliam. ‘Such profligacy.’

  ‘But the music, Alice!’ said Aunt Eloise. ‘Enchanting!’

  As the scratchy sound of Caruso’s voice seeped from the gramophone, Dorothea felt that she had never seen Aunt Eloise quite like this before, enthroned on the settee, smiling, dazzling – like sunlight sparking on ice. My aunt, thought Dorothea, my aunt.

  Henry stepped up, held out his hand. ‘The birthday girl must dance.’

  ‘Oh, no, Henry….’

  But, yes, yes, they all said, and the table was pushed aside and she had no choice in the matter. She felt her cheeks burning as Henry took her in his arms, and then they were whirling away across the room in time to the music, to Caruso’s ethereal voice – as if he was singing to them from the far end of a long metal pipe. There was a smell of soap and hair oil, and a smell of Henry. His bow tie was askew, there was a speck – gravy? wine? – on his collar. She could see the tiny shaven bristles on his jaw; she watched the colour flush up into his cheeks, and all the time his eyes were shining at her.

  ‘I shall never forget,’ he said in an undertone, ‘the night I first saw you, a little girl dressed in rags, crying. Your curls were all tangled.’ He reached up, stroked her hair, the light in his eyes burned brighter. ‘And then there was that morning when I rescued you on the Welby Road—’

  ‘When you rescued me?’ She repeated the words.

  The smudges of colour in his cheeks darkened, like the reds and purples of a deepening sunset. ‘That … that is how I always put it to myself: that I rescued you.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing above his collar.

  For a moment then, pressed up against him, she felt stifled, was at a loss to explain it until she remembered that the windows were shut, that there was no air in the room. She leant away from him, breathed freely again, felt his arm across her back, guiding her in the dance. She began to giggle softly. He was driving her, she thought, the way he drove his motors. This was how Bernadette must have felt with his careful hands on her wheel all those years – his long thin fingers.

  What a girl she must seem to him, giggling and stumbling around the room. What a girl she must seem to a man of his age, twenty-eight, so very grown up. He would see through the touch of glamour – the new frock, the careful coiffure: he would see instead the girl in rags who’d sat on his knee all those years ago, or the waif he’d rescued on the Welby Road with a tam o’shanter that kept falling over her eyes.

  As they swung past the settee, she overheard Lady Fitzwilliam talking to Aunt Eloise. ‘Such a pity about Julia Somersby….’ She knew that Henry had heard too by the furrows that appeared on his brow.

  ‘Is it absolutely out of the question?’ Aunt Eloise murmured.

  ‘I rather think Giles Milton has wrapped things up there.’ Lady Fitzwilliam sighed. ‘One is fond of Giles, naturally, but a sixth son only, a boy with a lisp and Henry, with all his advantages. To have one’s hopes dashed again….’

  She felt Henry’s body tense up but at that moment the dance came to an abrupt halt. Roderick was blocking their path.

  ‘It is my turn now,’ he said curtly, setting his jaw.

  Dorothea was inclined to laugh. What did Roderick know about dancing? But he looked very ferocious and determined, elbowing Henry aside and the laughter died on her lips as she realized that Roderick was almost as tall as Henry already. What an extraordinary boy he was, so gruff and gangling – and now he wanted to dance when he seemed to have been avoiding her all evening!

  ‘Henry,’ he muttered as they began to move, his lips tickling her ear. ‘That goose, that pudding head.’

  He was always the same, she thought. He never had a good word for anybody. She tried to tear her hands away, but he held on tight and swung her round and he whispered fiercely into her ear, ‘I suppose you think you’re all grown up now, don’t you, Miss Ryan – Miss Dorothea Ryan!’ And he scowled so hard his eyebrows met in the middle.

  She had been right about his dancing. He held her like a sack of potatoes, trod on her toes, stomped round the room like an angry bull. But if he wasn’t exactly a grown man, you couldn’t call him a child either. Who was he, she wondere
d, would anyone ever know? Did he even like her, deep down? Sometimes she doubted it. Sometimes she felt that they had got no further than the first day, watching each other with suspicion in the day room.

  ‘Don’t they make a lovely couple,’ said Lady Fitzwilliam, sotto voce. ‘One could almost take them for brother and sister. They are really quite alike and so devoted to one another.’

  Roderick was scowling again and flushing with annoyance (why did he get so angry all the time?), and she half expected him to push her away, to prove that she meant nothing, to belie Lady Fitzwilliam’s words. But instead he gritted his teeth and gripped her tighter and they went twirling and twirling as the gramophone began to slow, Caruso’s voice stretching out and out along the metal pipe.

  ‘Dear Dorothea,’ Lady Fitzwilliam said. ‘One has grown so fond of her over the years. One feels one has known her forever.’

  ‘I was thinking the same myself,’ said Aunt Eloise, her voice stiff with gravitas. ‘One must admit, one can’t imagine the place without her anymore. It is as if she belongs here, somehow.’

  And Dorothea, laying her cheek against Roderick’s chest, felt her heart swelling inside her, for no one in all her life had ever paid her such a compliment before.

  She was too keyed up to sleep, brimming over with so many different feelings, music still playing in her head along with the sound of voices and sparks of laughter. But the drawing room downstairs was not dark and empty. The evening was at an end.

  It was not just the evening that had come to an end, she thought as she walked round and round the day room in the dim light from the lamp on the corner table, humming to herself, watched only by the fading eyes of the rocking horse and by Polly in her cage. The evening was over – and so was life as she’d known it at Clifton. First Richard had gone, then Nora, and now Mlle Lacroix, the last of her original friends and the one who’d made the most difference, her wisdom and inner strength giving her a mastery which made the world look a sunnier place, had drawn its sting.

  ‘Oh Polly! How will I ever manage without her?’

  But Polly, inscrutable as ever, kept her thoughts to herself.

  The sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue. The morning sun was hot and bright. As the motor swept along the road – the canopy down, the engine humming contentedly – the world seemed to open up around them, corn ripening, haymaking underway, flowers bursting from the tangled hedgerows, birds in profusion busy with their own affairs. Six and a half years ago, this road had been dark and cold and lonely as she was dragged and carried by her papa from the station to meet an uncle she had never heard of. She had today the same sense of travelling to an uncertain end, for today was the day when the governess was leaving.

  Mlle Lacroix sat beside her in the motor, buttoned into her jacket, gloves in her lap, wide-brimmed hat pinned in place. But Dorothea felt as if there was already a gap opening up between them, as if – in spirit – the Frenchwoman was already on the train, was halfway across the Channel, was making her way down the familiar byways of her home. She was travelling alone, as if it was nothing, as if she was merely taking a walk in the gardens. But the gardens would miss her after today. It was all wrong, thought Dorothea, this bright morning with the birds singing. Rain ought to be lashing, the wind should be wailing, thunder should be booming like the drums of doom. She remembered what the nursery had been like before the governess came, the feelings of loneliness, of being in gaol. She shuddered despite the warm sunshine.

  All too soon, the station hived into view. The motor pulled up into the forecourt. Mlle Lacroix got down, was handed her little case by the old chauffeur (her trunk was being sent on). Dorothea followed her up the steps to the platform. There was no one else waiting. The platform was empty, the benches still wet from the dew, tubs of flowers bright and effusive, the black and white sign bold and official: WELBY.

  ‘So now, Dorossea, it is time to say au revoir.’

  ‘Not yet, mam’zelle. The train isn’t here yet.’

  ‘Very well, ma petite. A few minutes more.’

  ‘Oh, mam’zelle, why must you go?’

  ‘I have explained why, I have told you. Maman is poorly. She needs me. And – if I speak the truth – I have already stayed far longer than ever I intended.’

  ‘Will we … will we ever meet again?’

  ‘But of course! Perhaps I will not come to England again, but you will – you must – visit me! I shall be expecting you!’

  Go to France? Impossible! One might as well wish to visit the mountains of the moon.

  A whistle tooted in the distance, piercing her heart. The train must have emerged from the tunnel beneath Duncan’s Hill. It would be here in a matter of moments. Already she could see the smoke of it, puffs of grey against the cloudless sky. Time was running out, the last seconds trickling away, never to return.

  Was there anything she had forgotten to say?

  Only everything! Every day would bring a thousand things more, but Mlle Lacroix would not be there to hear them.

  The governess took Dorothea’s face between her hands as the train came thundering into the station, kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘Au revoir, ma petite! You must be brave now! Remember all I have taught and all that we have learned together. What an adventure it has been! Remember, too, to put your trust in God. He will not let you down.’ But even God had been a gift from the governess.

  Mlle Lacroix had turned the brass handle, had opened the door, had stepped up into the carriage. Now she looked back, half in and half out. Her eyes searched Dorothea’s face, then she smiled. ‘Alors! You do not need me anymore, Dorossea! My work here is done! You are a young lady now!’

  The door slammed shut. A whistle blew. The train moved, uncertain at first but soon gathering speed. Mlle Lacroix waved, framed in the window. Dorothea ran after her, her booted feet striking on the wood of the platform. A mist descended – tears perhaps, or the billowing steam of the engine. Chuffing greedily, belching and hissing, heavy wheels trundling faster and faster, the train sped away. The last of the carriages flowed round a bend in the line and was gone. The noise and the steam slowly dissipated. The empty rails glinted in the golden June sunshine, curving away into the blue. A deep silence descended.

  Dorothea stood on the end of the platform.

  She had been left behind, abandoned once more, just like before, six-and-a-half years ago, the last time she had seen her papa. Richard had gone, then Nora, and now the governess. What was left? For a moment, Dorothea was taken back to that first evening, looking out from the nursery window at the alien landscape, utterly alone.

  You do not need me anymore … you are a young lady now … Mlle Lacroix’s last words echoed in her head. It seemed impossible to believe them. And yet when had the governess ever been known to be wrong?

  Faces began to crowd into Dorothea’s head, more and more of them, all of the people she knew, Roderick and Henry and Uncle Albert, Nibs and Becket and Mrs Turner, even little Dicky smiling and sucking his thumb. The names went on and on, too, for had Aunt Eloise not said, One can’t imagine the place without her … it is as if she belongs here.…

  Was it possible? Had Aunt Eloise come to accept her at last?

  But it wasn’t quite that, thought Dorothea as she turned and made her way slowly back along the platform. It was more as if the house had accepted her – had claimed her for its own. And Eloise had merely acquiesced to the fait accompli.

  The stationmaster, dead-heading the flowers in the boxes, nodded to her as she passed and she quickened her pace, for the chauffeur would be waiting to take her back to Clifton Park.

  No, she said to herself: not Clifton Park. Home. It was time to go home.

  Gathering her skirts, she skipped down the steps in the June sunshine whilst from above, cascading out of the high blue sky, came the liquid song of a lark.

  By the Same Author

  Aunt Letitia

  Snake in the Grass

  Copyright

&nb
sp; © Dominic Luke 2013

  First published in Great Britain 2013

  This edition 2013

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1282 8 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1283 5 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1284 2 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1080 0 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Dominic Luke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988