by Bella Bryce
"Try them in the foyer. We always have roses in here it seems," Evelyn said, folding her arms across her chest.
Fiona gave a polite smile and nod before taking the vase with her out of the sitting room. Fiona had been employed by the Fowlers long enough to know that in fact the roses were always in the sitting room because that was exactly where Evelyn wanted them.
Greystone Hall had a marvellously grand everything, especially the dining room, but it would have never done to host a ladies luncheon in the dining room. Evelyn Fowler hosted the luncheon nearly every week since she was able to rise to the top of the intimate and exclusive circle and earned the right to host. And nearly every week when she hosted, Evelyn's staff carefully moved the furniture whilst wearing white gloves so as not to smudge the finely polished wood of her delicate antique collection. It took exactly three hours to set the sitting room up each time and the same to return everything to its place. Of course, it needn't take so long especially after years of the same housekeepers and staff rearranging the room, but Evelyn Fowler was both a perfectionist and highly pressured by her social circle. The latter was more of the case than anything. Regardless of her position in the exclusive group of ladies she hosted, gossiped and pretended to be friends with, Evelyn was still in the pecking order herself.
Brayden's late mother, Kathryn James, and Evelyn's only true friend, stopped attending the ladies' luncheons some years before she died. Kathryn had been a sensible and genuine woman; one who wasn't inclined to gossip, slander, or lack productive or encouraging conversation. Evelyn wished she could discount such things, but alas, Kathryn had been a better woman and Evelyn reminded herself of that fact every day since her death. Especially since losing Kathryn, she'd found very few people with whom to build a genuine relationship.
"Hello, darling," Jonathan said, as he entered the sitting room with his briefcase in one hand and newspaper in the other.
"Do you like this arrangement?" Evelyn asked, her discerning eye and full attention on the room.
"I like it if you do," he replied, not even looking at the tables and instead giving his wife a kiss on the cheek.
"That's not what I asked," she said, putting her hands back on her hips.
Jonathan glanced around the room at the circular tables and chairs meticulously arranged.
"Well, this is how you always do it. I suppose if you're bored then you should have the girls move it round a bit."
Evelyn turned to her husband. "I'd already thought of that. Never mind." She cast a dismissive hand at him. She was annoyed because she hadn't received the reaction from him she wanted. Or needed.
Jonathan looked at his wife and shook his head before turning and departing the sitting room. That was how every conversation seemed to end for them lately; with Jonathan neglecting to respond, Evelyn waving her dismissive hand and returning to running whatever show she was directing at the time.
He shook his head again as he started up the grand staircase that split in the middle to the left and right. Jon always took the right staircase when he was going to his study and the left when he was going to their bedroom despite both sets of stairs met at the top. It was a habit, but it was also something he noticed that afternoon as he sat behind his large banker's desk and rubbed his forehead. He was beginning to tire of the way Evelyn spoke to him, the way she dismissed him and how she seemed to think she had the final say on everything. Jonathan had indulged her for thirty years, and he knew something needed to change.
His own son, Bennett, seemed to be ahead of him and was already creating boundaries in his engagement whereby many arguments that seemed typical of couples might perhaps never arise because Bennett had his role to play, and Elisabeth had hers. He envied his future daughter-in-law's adoration of Bennett, the way she lovingly waited for Bennett's guidance and leading as he'd witnessed on several occasions, but namely, the wedding planning appointment with Anabelle Greyson.
Jonathan couldn't help but stifle an audible laugh as he sat alone in his study at the mere idea of Evelyn ever waiting on him for a response or decision. Evelyn would run ahead and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and she could because Jonathan allowed her an unprecedented amount of money to spend every month. She never behaved silly with it, but she had a lot of power because there were absolutely no restrictions on her in her social, private or sometime public life.
Jonathan finished laughing at how pathetic his marriage had become and then recalled the conversation Bennett started with him back at Brayden's birthday ball in December. He replayed the exchange as though it were a clear memory happening right in front of his desk.
"Father, I'd like to suggest something to you," Bennett had said.
"A stiff drink?" Jon asked.
"I think you should thrash her," Bennett suggested before he lost his nerve.
Jon laughed as Bennett stared back at him stone-faced.
"She will carry on running everyone else's lives, namely yours," Bennett warned.
Jon's smile faded and he glanced over at Evelyn.
"Mother needs to be reined in, and you know it. Do something, please, before she drives a wedge between my future wife and me," Bennett quietly said, before excusing himself.
Jon could see every reaction from his son, every conviction in him that was almost desperately asking his father to take a firmer stance in his marriage. It would certainly prove interesting for a man who'd been absent for a lot of the earlier years working abroad or for countless hours during the week to suddenly tell his wife that she was through making any decisions until they were approved by him. Just thinking about it made him nervous. Beyond that, it made him laugh. Evelyn Fowler was a severe woman, and that was even before she was provoked. He daren't think about how to stand up to her thirty years down the line – or dare he considering something – anything which might help their declining marriage?
Chapter Five
Elisabeth bit her lip and tried not to laugh. She even had to cover her mouth to keep from smiling as Alice approached the piano bench.
She glanced over and widened her eyes enough at Elisabeth that Bennett noticed, looked down at his fiancée and gave the side of her leg a firm pat. It didn't make much of a sound against her thick woollen tights but the signal was enough to make Elisabeth look up at Bennett and press her lips together.
"Behave," Bennett warned quietly in her ear as he leant down to her.
She swallowed and bit the inside of her lip again as she faced the front of the music room.
Evelyn was subtle about watching how her eldest son took Elisabeth's hand and held it after his subtle reprimand. There was a small part of her that felt jealous, which was quite a leap from the deep offense she felt the week before. Evelyn blinked, frowned and turned her attention to the front of the music room where Alice had just sat down and situated herself.
There were four rows of five upholstered Louis XV chairs facing the Steinway Grand arranged in meticulously straight lines between Waldorf's music and sitting rooms. Wellesley had opened the double doors so the already massive rooms became like one large concert hall. The sunlight from the adjacent windows in the sitting room poured in and created a very welcome, calming, wintery Saturday morning feeling. The audience was bigger than it had been for the first recital, with the Fowlers in attendance, including Damian, Bennett and Elisabeth, Brayden, Harriet, her husband, Harriet's assistants Kate and Maggie (who helped design Alice's recital dress as before), along with ten friends and acquaintances of Brayden's from boarding school and his more extended social circle.
Alice had met all of the latter ten guests either at Brayden's birthday ball in December or her Uncle Bennett's estate-warming dinner party in September. She found it completely nerve-wracking that he felt it necessary to invite his friends from boarding school. Nevertheless, it was a very serious affair, as was everything in her new life, with the usual formal attire by all the guests and afternoon tea to look forward to following the recital.
Alice
inhaled a small breath and looked to her right at Brayden in the front row. He gave her a small smile, which Alice returned. The room was completely silent and waiting as she gently pressed her fingers down on the smooth ivory keys and began playing a more up-tempo but deeply moving version of Chopin's Nocturne #20 in C sharp minor than she'd previously rehearsed. It was a version Brayden hadn't ever heard Alice play; it had a colour and tone that made it very clear to him that she had just discovered the secret to peak performance – utilising emotion in its simplest form like vapours seeping into the instrument and using it to her benefit. Which she did. She also slowed the infamous triplets in the piece right down so that instead of playing them relentlessly (as musicians often did in Nocturne) she rested a beat after the first two notes and carried on playing the ones to follow more quickly.
Brayden was beyond proud as he watched Alice's perfect transition from forte to pianissimo, noticing the weight of her hands and posture exactly as they should be. Alice played with a confidence and a peace he'd not seen from her, except for when she thought nobody was watching her practise. He was almost emotional when she finished, hiding any indication with the reservation that only an Englishman could, although his chest felt warm through his three-piece suit. Brayden knew if he had to hug Alice in that moment, he would give away his carefully protected emotions. It was fortunate for him that Alice had another song to play.
She had paused between pieces but didn't leave the bench. It was a quiet interlude long enough to hear the audience clap, and Alice avoided looking at anyone as she felt her own chest warm and tight. She knew she'd just reached a new level of performance and she knew Brayden was proud.
After the clapping ceased, Alice rested her hands back on the keys and played Yiruma's "River Flows in You," the same song she had performed as a surprise at Brayden's birthday ball. That song was precisely the reason several of Brayden's friends requested to be present. His boarding school mates might have been twenty-nine and mostly single, wealthy and busy, but they'd also spent ten years living at the same elite boys' school with no end to knowing each other's failures and vulnerabilities from their school days. It wouldn't have done to assume they weren't interested in Brayden's daughter after having met Alice. After all, Brayden had been Deputy Head Boy and their fellow Prefect for a good many years and the schoolboy code of honour didn't cease upon leaving Sixth Form. At least, for boys with integrity it didn't.
The recital was supposed to end after the second song, but Alice promptly turned back to the piano after a smile to the audience in acknowledgment of their clapping and rested her hands on the keys again. She also looked over and gave Brayden one of her, 'I know something that you don't know' looks, to which he raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair.
"I thought she was only playing two," Bennett said quietly, leaning toward Brayden stiffly.
"My daughter likes to surprise me," he replied, before returning to his upright position in the formal chair.
Elisabeth smiled and glanced at Brayden. She was so nervous she thought she might burst.
Alice did, indeed, like to surprise her father, but she rather shocked him when she began playing "All of Me", the incredibly fast and mind-blowing song written by Jon Schmidt of YouTube's The Piano Guys. With nearly ten million views, it was a fair assumption that piano players of any level wouldn't complain about being able to play the song proficiently. Brayden certainly had seen it. He hadn't ever felt compelled to learn it considering his formality and very rigid classical training, but he had nevertheless of course, been very impressed after seeing the video. He certainly never thought he would ever hear his daughter play the song, especially considering her complaint about not being allowed to use the sheet music for Chopin the night before.
A cheeky smile crossed her lips when she finished and stood to the eruption of shocked claps, shaking of heads and chuckles. Even if no one knew the song or had seen the clip, it was an impressive song to play, and few could do it well enough to justify playing it in front of an audience.
She put one hand on the side of the grand piano and gave a bow, which she knew Brayden would say should have been a curtsey, but her hands were shaking from the adrenaline and her next thought was to briskly walk to Brayden and hide in his waistcoat where she knew he would cuddle her. And he did.
"Alice," Brayden said, stifling a laugh in the most gentlemanly manner as he bent down to her as though she really were a small child. He kissed both of her hands. "Darling, I don't even know what to say."
She was beaming and stepped forward to hide her blushing face. He kissed her head and bent down again. "However did you learn it? And right under my nose?"
"Elisabeth showed me the video on her phone, and I just loved it so much that I asked her to get me the sheet music. I practised whenever I knew you were up in the study. Wellesley kept watch for me." She smiled.
Elisabeth's phone would have been the only way for Alice to watch YouTube because she had no access to the Internet otherwise. "So what was all of that yesterday about Chopin, that 'I can't do it' business?"
Alice shrugged, "I don't know. Chopin is harder for me, I guess. Learning music is strange like that."
Brayden put his hands on either side of Alice's face and kissed her forehead as he stood up. He didn't know any words that could tell her how proud he was or how glad that Alice was part of his life. His eyes did all the speaking for him. Clearly, she had a knack for playing by ear and in a genre that wasn't along traditional lines – quite like her Uncle Bennett.
Her face beamed just as much when Bennett bent down to give her a kiss.
"That was quite a surprise," he said, looking down at her. "And very, very well played."
Bennett's compliments were always few and far between even though he was a somewhat more joyful man that he'd ever been, but he still didn't hand out compliments freely.
"Thank you, Uncle Bennett," she replied, blushing sweetly.
Elisabeth waited her turn and then the girls squealed as they hugged, both of them performing small but ladylike jumps on the heels of their patent juvenile shoes.
"I told you! I told you that you could do it!" Elisabeth said, hugging Alice. "That was brilliant."
"Thanks," Alice shyly replied when they pulled away.
The guests took turns congratulating Brayden and Alice on the very unexpectedly proficient recital, although she seemed to have retreated into being shy and the small circles of crimson on either side of her delicate nose proved that she preferred giving the piano her full attention rather than a proud audience.
During afternoon tea in the sitting room, the guests sat in various clustered zones of finely upholstered tufted furniture separated by appropriately high or low formally dressed tables from which they ate and drank. Brayden sat beside Jon Fowler and three of his friends from boarding school whilst Alice, Evelyn, Elisabeth and Bennett sat adjacent. Alice was beside Evelyn at her insistence, which the girl fully expected. Evelyn's deeply hidden, maternal fussy side always surfaced around Alice.
Evelyn had also previously been a concert pianist and Bennett's hardest critic when he was learning to play as a child. She'd discouraged her son from a voracious tendency to deviate from his music and improvise - so much that Evelyn squashed any chance of Bennett becoming a serious performer - that he rarely played piano in her presence even in his adulthood. Alas, living alone at Barton-Court meant Bennett could play however and whenever he liked, although his mother's influence put him in a box; he wasn't keen to play anything besides classical music as a result and to play it exactly as it was written. Perhaps the only part of Bennett's personality that might seem unBennett like, was that he was rather a gifted jazz pianist, although nobody would ever know.
Far be it from Evelyn to understand truly justified (and hopefully only temporary) guilt, but she felt a twinge of it as she smiled and held a proud arm around Alice all the while knowing her eldest son was thinking, "See? You're proud of Alice, and she didn't play only classical
pieces."
Bennett was entirely proud of his niece and only wished he could have known a little grace in his childhood which would have allowed him to play a piece such as Alice's 'surprise' choice and his mother would have been proud.
Bennett glanced in Evelyn's direction and caught a small hesitation when Alexander Patterson asked after her own childhood instruction of piano and her reaction made him realise that the string of harsh opinions of music other than classical was an apple that didn't fall far from the tree of equal narrow-mindedness. Bennett excused himself from the circle of conversation and crossed the room. Elisabeth's eyes followed him, although she didn't take notice of his frown.
"I thought Maxwell was coming," Alexander commented, when Brayden moved from a wing chair to the sofa beside Alice. He crossed one leg over the other and straightened his jacket before settling into the new conversation.
"He was invited, but believe it or not, he declined," Brayden remarked, sounding a little surprised as he looked back at his old friend.
Alice's attention moved from listening to Evelyn on one side to looking at Brayden on the other. She knew they were referring to Colin Maxwell. Alice first met Brayden's old friend from boarding school and fellow Prefect – along with the other six of his closest friends and former fellow Prefects – in September at an estate-warming dinner party Bennett hosted upon the purchase of Barton-Court house. It had been her first interaction with Brayden's friends outside of the Fowlers, her first social event and there Alice was introduced exactly for who she was; Brayden's "ten-year-old" daughter. He told his oldest friends (a few of whom he hadn't seen in close to ten years) of the adoption.
Colin Maxwell wasted no time in behaving in a manner that communicated to Brayden and Bennett that he was attracted to Alice. They'd known Colin Maxwell since arriving at boarding school and it was no secret that Colin had always felt a particular attraction to girls younger than him. Brayden made it clear that Alice was ten years his junior chronologically and then of course he'd knocked a further eight years off to raise her as his ten-year-old, meaning she was completely off the market for courting, dating or looking at.