In the first few weeks the girls cried a great deal, especially at night when they woke up at intervals and the darkness was full of shapeless horrors. Monty moved her bed into Cathy’s room, because anything was better than waking up and crying alone.
‘If only we knew,’ muttered Cathy, tears seeping from the corners of her eyes and trickling down her temples to wet her hair. ‘Why would Daddy do such an awful thing? Surely he must have known that whatever he had done we would always love him? He must have been so unhappy.’
‘We’ll know when they finally have the inquest.’ Monty knew she was offering small comfort. ‘Don’t cry, please, Cathy, I can’t bear it if you cry too.’
‘But when are they going to have the inquest? It’s been weeks now, they don’t seem to know anything.’
‘I don’t believe he killed himself.’ Monty was still haunted by the idea that she had somehow killed her father and determined to argue herself out of it. ‘He didn’t have any reason, he didn’t have any problems. And he didn’t leave a note. They must think someone killed him, or why were the police here?’
‘Were the police here?’ Cathy sat up and fumbled for a tissue in the darkness.
‘Yes, I asked Mrs Armstrong and she wouldn’t answer. Mummy’s told her not to talk to us about anything. But I chatted up the driver and he told me. You could tell, anyway – they all wear blue nylon shirts.’
Cathy switched on the light, and at the sight of each other’s tear-streaked faces the girls cried again, hugging one another for comfort.
‘It’s no good, crying’s no good,’ Cathy said at last. ‘We’ve got to wait it out, that’s all. Someone’s bound to tell us before the inquest. They won’t want us to read it in the newspapers.’
The days dragged on, hot and overcast. Their mother made telephone calls behind closed doors. She seemed to age before their eyes, shrinking inside her flower-printed cotton dresses. Her hair collapsed in lifeless strands, despite its dye and permanent wave, and the skin of her neck began to fall into slack folds around the sinews. She sat at dinner with them making hesitant rushes at small-talk, sipping continually from a very small glass of water, which she would leave the room to refill herself.
The sisters saw nothing odd in this behaviour, because the very small water-glass had been one of Bettina’s idiosyncrasies for as long as they could remember. But in the long limbo of anguish, they sought any distraction, and one evening, when Bettina was called away from the dinner table to another hushed telephone call, Monty picked up the glass, sniffed it, then sipped it.
‘Taste it,’ she passed the glass steadily to Cathy, ‘it’s vodka or something. She must have a bottle hidden somewhere.’
At home the girls were allowed aperitifs before dinner, or a glass of wine, but neither of them really liked the taste of alcohol. Sometimes, if James had opened a particularly fine vintage, he would insist that they sip it, saying, ‘Never hurts to know a good wine.’ Neither of them had ever done more than taste spirits, and they had only the vaguest idea of how drink was measured, how much was too much.
‘She can’t …’
‘… can’t be an alcoholic? I bet she’s hiding the bottles in her room.’
‘She can’t be. I’ve never seen her drunk, at all.’ Cathy thought alcoholics were people who collapsed in the gutter, not women who drank steadily in secret just to be able to put on a show of being normal.
‘Oh can’t she? You know she never kisses us, don’t you? She must be afraid we’ll smell it on her breath.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic, Monty.’ Cathy’s conviction was wavering. Now that there was an explanation for their mother’s odd behaviour, Cathy’s acute mind quickly arranged the evidence to support it, remembering the amount of time Bettina spent isolated in her own room, the occasions when she had not seemed to understand what they were saying or made responses which had not made sense.
‘I’ll find out, if you don’t believe me.’ Monty swiftly threw down her napkin and ran out of the room. Their mother’s muted voice sounded occasionally behind the closed door of the drawing room. Monty ran upstairs and slipped into Bettina’s bedroom. A few moments later she reappeared brandishing a half-empty gin bottle in her hand.
‘There. It was inside her dressing-table drawer. And there’s an empty one in a Harrods bag in there, too.’ She planted the bottle in the middle of the gleaming, mahogany table. Cathy looked at it as if it were a snake.
‘So what we know now,’ she drew in a slow, shuddering breath, ‘is that you are sixteen and I am seventeen, our father is dead, and our mother drinks.’
‘Maybe she’ll drink herself to death.’ Monty immediately regretted speaking so harshly, as she saw her sister’s eyes brim with tears once more. ‘Oh come on, Cathy. She’s not going to take care of us; no one ever took care of us. We were all right as long as we had Daddy, but we’re both on our own now – it’s up to us. We’ve still got each other, that’s the main thing.’
A few moments later Bettina came back to find her daughters sitting in silence. She ignored them, and the accusing bottle in the table centre. ‘If you’ve finished dinner you’d better go up and pack,’ she announced grimly. ‘We’re going to Bourton tomorrow.’
‘Have they found out anything, Mummy?’
‘They’ve found out why he did it, if that’s what you mean. It is none of my business. Your Uncle Hugo is going to speak to you.’
In the past, they had always gone to Bourton at Christmas and in the summer vacation. Cathy never thought of it without remembering the first time they arrived there, when she was very small, and the family had just come home from Malaya. In the evening darkness, the car headlights had caught the eyes of a group of deer on the estate road in front of them and her father had wound down the window and lifted her up, so she could hear the soft rumble of their hooves as they leaped across the road. It was like driving into the England of her story books, a place full of princes and castles and enchantment.
Now, however, it was high summer, and the grass of the park was baked to gold and the estate road was clogged with buses full of tourists. The yellow-stone house rose out of the throng of trippers like a square cake rising inside its frill. A rank of lichen-spotted statues guarded the terrace and two fountains spouted continuously during opening hours.
The family lived in the North Wing, which was at the back and comprised about one third of the house. The middle third was closed: eighteenth-century, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper was boarded over, plastic sheeting covered holes in the roof and dead leaves had collected in the central courtyard. The South Wing at the front was crammed with paintings which had been too important to sell without scandal, and furniture too ugly to sell at a reasonable price; this was open to the public.
The National Trust owned the house; Uncle Hugo, the Duke of Witherham, owned the estate, or what was left of it. With ruthless management it yielded enough to keep him, his wife Pamela, their two children and the seventy-four-year-old Dowager Duchess, in what they defined as comfort. This meant that the stairs were uncarpeted and the bedrooms unheated, but there were hunters for Pamela, shooting for Hugo, and Davina retained all her jewellery but could not afford to insure it.
Cathy and Monty sat side by side in hard chairs in their uncle’s office.
‘This is a frightful business about your father,’ Uncle Hugo began. ‘Your mother just can’t cope, so she’s asked me to talk to you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to prepare yourselves for quite a few changes.’ He got up from his lopsided swivel chair, and walked round to the front of his desk, on which he perched his heavy, tweed-trousered backside with a clumsy pretence of informality. ‘None of us had the least idea; heaven knows how he managed it all, without us finding out.’
Cathy whose sensitivity to adult preoccupations made her wise beyond her years, could tell that Uncle Hugo blamed himself for not having known whatever it was, but was trying to cover this up.
‘The thing is, my dears, your father was
n’t quite as clever as he thought he was, when it came to business. He really was rather at sea in the City, you know, and – um –’ there was no kind way to say it, and kindness, in any case, was something Hugo had never valued ‘– he lost rather a lot of money. A great deal of money. Of course he liked to live well.’
‘But he inherited all that money from our grandfather.’ Cathy’s earnest bewilderment made her uncle even more uncomfortable.
‘Not exactly, my dear, you don’t quite understand. You and your sister inherited the money, it was in trust for you both. Really your father had no right to it.’
‘Uncle Hugo, do you mean something has happened to our grandfather’s money?’
‘Yes, my dear, I’m afraid, I do. There are firms which will lend money and which specialize in finding the weak spots in other people’s legal arrangements. It seems that your father had consulted one of these outfits, and taken, over the years, a series of loans against your trust. He’d covered his tracks thoroughly, so it has taken the police some time to get all the facts. He was being pressed quite savagely by these people and there’s …’ he paused, wondering if the full extent of their father’s agony was something the girls ought to know.
How vividly they looked like their father, Hugo thought, as he watched the two bewildered girls shrink together and link arms. Cathy had that meandering top lip which had always made James seem to be smiling, and her hair, though definitely brown rather than James’s jet black, had the same heavy texture; and yet, she had a directness, a collected manner, which was nothing like her father’s flighty charm. The younger girl seemed at first glance not to take after her father at all, although she had his unruly curls. She also had his devilment. Hugo could see in her eyes the defiance that he remembered blazing from the eyes of the small brother who had shared his nursery many years ago.
‘But Uncle Hugo, aren’t trusts supposed to stop people using up all their money?’ Cathy had a frustrating sense that embarrassment was making her uncle hold back the most important information.
‘Yes my dear, they are. I promise you, we’ve thrashed out the whole affair with the lawyers at Pasterns and there’s no way round it. When your grandfather set up the trust he was thinking mostly of persuading your father to settle down to a decent family life. He was rather the black sheep in those days.’ Pasterns were the unimpeachable firm of solicitors who handled all the Bourton family’s business, as well as that of half the remaining landed gentry in England. ‘Your father was a very persuasive man, don’t forget. He never had any trouble getting people to lend him money. He led us all to understand he’d made his fortune in the East.’
Hugo blamed himself. There was something inevitable about this tragedy: it had been foreshadowed for half a century by James’s recklessness and peculiar lack of moral sensitivity. In a sense the rest of the Bourton family had lived as if walking on eggshells, waiting for James sooner or later to pay the penalty for his careless hedonism.
Hugo ploughed on with his task. ‘I must tell you this, my dears, because you’ve got to hear it from one of the family. At the time he died your father had pretty much come to the end of the line. The police know that he had been to see one of these Arab financiers in Paris, and we can only presume he was trying to borrow more money. He was starting to default on some of the repayments on these loans.’
Four innocent, questioning, dark-brown eyes were fixed on him; a more sensitive man would have wept, but Hugo had no emotion to show; as the head of the family he felt only a dogged compulsion to fulfil his responsibility.
Cathy met his gaze calmly. ‘Yes, Uncle Hugo, what else?’
‘There is some question of blackmail, I believe, but it seems unlikely that the police will get to the bottom of it because the outfit is based abroad and they’re getting no cooperation from the police at the other end. We may never know exactly what kind of mess your father was in.’
He means we’re broke, thought Cathy. That’s why he’s rambling around and looking so uncomfortable. The idea did not disturb her. Money, to the sisters, was something you spent on magazines and records and cinema tickets, not something which determined your social position, your marriage prospects, your health or your happiness. Money was the only topic which was more strictly taboo than sex in the girls’artificially prolonged childhood.
‘How much have we got left?’ asked Monty in a rush. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m very sorry, my dears, but it’s all gone.’
Cathy’s mind was, as always, racing pragmatically ahead.
‘We can sell the house …’ she began in a constructive tone. ‘Your father bought the house with a mortgage from the trust, to provide you all with a home. It has appreciated, of course, but his personal liabilities will more than swallow that up. I shall have to reach into my own pocket to stop his estate being declared bankrupt.’
‘So what’s going to happen to us?’ Monty’s full mouth set in an angry bow. ‘I suppose you and Mummy have got it all planned?’
‘Not quite. We decided to get this business over with before the inquest, then make our plans.’ Hugo looked awkwardly at Cathy, who was fumbling in the flounced sleeve of her dress for a handkerchief.
‘Poor, poor Daddy,’ she whispered, catching the first tears as they fell. Monty hugged her awkwardly and glared at Uncle Hugo.
‘Papa says your father is worse than a criminal. He says he sold your birthright for a mess of pottage,’ announced their fourteen-year-old cousin Edward in a nasty tone of triumph. ‘He says you’re absolute paupers and we’ll have to be kind to you, but I shan’t let you ride my new pony because you’ll ruin its mouth.’
‘Shut up, squirt!’ Monty kicked him with her new, Louis-heeled shoe. ‘We shan’t have to go to school any more, so think of that when your stupid pony’s bucked you off!’
Cathy and Monty had nothing but a blood tie in common with their cousins. Caroline and Edward were beefy children who lacked all the intelligence, sensitivity and charm of the Bourton girls but were happily too far sunk in bovine complacency to realize it.
The four of them were sitting in the stuffy hayloft above the stables, a favourite hiding place at Bourton. Monty watched with distaste as Caroline, Edward’s older sister, serubbed a bridle with saddle soap, shoving strands of her coarse, brown hair out of her face. She was sallow-skinned and pearshaped like her father, and her old putty-coloured jodhpurs did not improve her silhouette.
‘Are you really not going back to school? Oh damn!’ Brusquely Caroline bit off a broken fingernail, then wiped her soapy mouth on her sleeve.
‘We’ve got to go to secretarial college. Then we’ll be able to get jobs if we don’t get married.’ Cathy lay listlessly across the highest bales of sweet-smelling hay, watching a swift dart to its nest through a hole left by a missing slate.
‘Your mother does go on about you getting married.’ Caroline was trying to be sympathetic.
‘She wants to get rid of us. She always has. She’s obsessed with it. She must be crazy – who’d get married just to play bridge all day?’ Monty was dying for a cigarette, but could not be bothered to get up and go outside.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ sneered Edward. ‘Who’d marry you two, anyway, now you haven’t got any money? You’re a dead loss.’ He dodged Monty’s foot by rolling over on the floor, wisps of hay sticking to his checked shirt.
‘I suppose you think you’ll be the answer to a maiden’s prayer yourself.’ His sister dunked the snaffle in a bucket of water, then hung the damp bridle up on a nail to dry.
‘My mother says your mother won’t be bringing you out either.’
‘I don’t think she was very keen on the idea, anyway. You know she’s terrified of society, as she calls it.’ Cathy rolled over on her stomach and watched her cousin go to work lathering her jumping saddle. ‘It would have been fun, though.’
‘Yes, it would.’ Caroline stood up and hoisted a fallen bra-strap back into place under her blouse. ‘It’ll be a frightful bor
e going to all those cocktail parties on my own.’
All Caroline’s sentimental potential was absorbed by her animals; admitting that she would have liked to share her debutante season with her cousins was, by her standards, an emotional outpouring. Cathy smiled, grateful for what she recognized as sympathy.
‘Can I light a fag in here?’ Monty already had a Consulate between her lips, and snatched the packet out of Edward’s reach. ‘You’re too young. Buy your own.’
To one member of the Bourton family, however, a debutante season for Cathy and Monty was strategically essential. The Dowager Duchess, who had long ago rejected the notion of being a dowager and insisted on her own title of Lady Davina, had been looking forward for years to piloting the girls through their maiden voyage in society. The prospect of instructing the uncouth Caroline in the art of ensnaring the best possible husband was considerably less promising than that of launching her more attractive cousins. She had watched them begin to bloom and longed to teach Monty the best way to play on her catlike sensuality, and to show Cathy how to withdraw when her wistful beauty caused havoc.
Now that every trace of her own physical charm had withered, Davina was enduring an enforced loss of feminine status. She had fought frantically against advancing age, with diets, cosmetics, couturiers and plastic surgery. It was a useless struggle. Now that she was no longer sexually desirable, she was not noticed.
She tasted bitter humiliation every time she entered a crowded room and no men registered her arrival. She felt as if she had gradually ceased to exist. Having spent all her life practising the art of seduction, she was unable to relate to men in any other way, and she despised the company of women. Her pretty granddaughters were her last hope.
‘Of course, they must all come out!’ Lady Davina’s bracelets clashed as she reached for her glass at dinner. Hugo glowered up the length of the table at his mother. She was, in effect, proposing that he pay for all three girls, and he knew that with Lady Davina in charge of the operation he would have to find tens of thousands of pounds for dresses and parties in addition to the money he was now obliged to divert to paying James’s debts and securing rudimentary job-training for James’s daughters.
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