There was a tutor who came every morning and taught her mathematics, geography, and a little Latin. He introduced her to watercolors, teaching her the fundamentals of painting, and she ruined reams of paper before she learned that, with color, subtlety is everything. Her nurse spent long afternoons in the playroom embroidering cushions for her niece’s trousseau. She tried to coax Frances to do the same, but never insisted, because Mr. Irvine had told her not to press his daughter into anything she didn’t care for.
Frances stalked the house in the afternoons, finding odd corners to sit in, where she let her thoughts drift with the dust through the high-ceilinged rooms. When she thought about the house as an adult, she saw it from the strange perspectives she had inhabited as a child. A cupboard door warped with age, so that she could pull it shut from the inside, or the dining-room table like the roof of a coffin, rough and unvarnished on its underside, with the curved bow legs of the Georgian chairs boxing her in like the muscled calves of so many guests.
Her mother’s family, the Hamiltons, lived in Mayfair, but she didn’t meet them until a few years after her mother had died. They didn’t approve of her father, with his Irish blood and poor connections, and they refused to acknowledge Frances. Her father, she learned later, had persisted in trying to reconcile the families in the hope that the connection would benefit her, and eventually they relented. When Frances was nine she was invited to visit her cousins Lucille and Victoria. She was nervous and didn’t think she had made a good impression, but the invitation was repeated, and thereafter she went to see them once a month, though it was understood that the visits would not be reciprocated.
At dinner one evening, a few months after meeting the Hamiltons, she looked up to find her father staring at her. She was chewing a piece of meat off the end of her fork. His lip curled with distaste. “Frances, have you forgotten your manners?”
She was conscious of having done something wrong, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
“Your knife. You don’t care to use it?”
She looked down at her knife and colored. She hadn’t used it before, not for eating, but he had never minded until now.
“Christ!” He brought his fist down on the table, making her jump along with the candlesticks. “The Hamiltons are right. You’re ten years old and you eat like a little savage!” She put down her fork and stared at him, mortified. Most of her life was spent trying to avoid disappointing him. “If I had wanted you to have the manners of a factory girl, I would have sent you to live with your cousins in Manchester!”
He hired a governess to solve the problem. Miss Cranbourne arrived with a military sense of purpose. Every aspect of Frances’s life came under scrutiny. According to the governess, she frowned when she concentrated, slouched when she walked, and ruined her fingernails with chewing. Her voice was too shrill—a sign of willfulness—and she spent too much of her time painting and daydreaming. For every minute of the day there was a task. There were lessons in letter writing, flower arranging, portrait drawing, cross-stitching, and crocheting. Etiquette manuals were learned by rote. She embroidered cushions and slippers, fashioned bell pulls, painted fire screens, and modeled a whole basket of fruit out of wax. She pressed flowers and learned their Latin names. She acquired hairpins, fancy brushes, and combs, and learned about ringlets, frizettes, and braids and how to pile her hair on top of her head in a bandeau. For her freckles—the result of a slow and enfeebled circulation—she was prescribed cold baths, applications of buttermilk, and a bowl of carrot soup for breakfast. The sun was strictly off-limits, and the windows in her bedroom were draped with muslin.
Frances applied herself to the new governess’s regime, if not to please Miss Cranbourne, then to please her father, and because she knew her cousins would tease her less if she shared some of their accomplishments. She found most aspects of her new life stifling, but there was one introduction for which she was genuinely grateful. Miss Cranbourne suggested her father buy a piano, and he agreed. Her mother, he told her, had been talented. Twice a week, a teacher came and unraveled the music like a foreign language, and as Frances played, she could feel the house flickering to life, becoming for a moment the place it might have been had her mother lived.
• • •
SHE WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD when Edwin Matthews came down from Manchester to stay with them in London. It was hot that summer, and London sweltered. The smell of sewage came in from the streets, milk turned sour and curdled in their tea, and the air outside was choked with smoke. Her father hated the heat. He complained in the evenings that it was like living in Rome, and Frances remembered the pictures she had seen of a Roman caldarium, its floor a burning panel of hot marble.
“I’d like you to make him feel at home.” Her father pushed his plate away, leant back in his chair, and lit a cigar. Now that it was evening, the window to the street below was slightly ajar, and a breeze stirred the gauze curtains. “And I shouldn’t try to talk to him about his mother.” Frances knew already, without having to be told, that dead mothers weren’t appropriate conversation.
She had never heard of Edwin Matthews before. He was a distant cousin, had been born in Manchester, and at sixteen was three years older than Frances. His mother had drunk herself to death, leaving her husband with five boys. His father, a steelworker, had written to Frances’s father asking for sponsorship. Edwin was hardworking, he said, and might do well in the right hands.
He arrived by train on the hottest day of the year, wearing a blue wool jacket stained under the arms where he had sweated through. He stood on their doorstep with his trunk of books and an air of extreme self-consciousness: a tall, slim boy with very pale skin and hands so fine-boned they might have been a girl’s. His face looked hot and shiny. Pimples had erupted on his forehead, and they crept down his nose. When Kerrick—in shirtsleeves—tried to relieve him of his jacket, he shook his head, a rush of color turning his cheeks scarlet.
Her father had told her he might be uncomfortable in a London house, and he was right. Edwin looked as though he was scared to breathe in case he knocked something over. He took his shoes off before walking upstairs, he opened doors with extreme caution, and he was able to sit for hours reading a book without moving a muscle except to turn the page. He was scrupulously tidy, scrubbing his hands before every meal until they looked raw.
That first night, she remembered, he had almost burnt the house down. He’d never seen how to work a gas lamp, and he blew the flame out when he went to bed. Frances woke up to Kerrick shouting, hammering on Edwin’s door, telling him not to light a match but to come straight out. She stood at the top of the stairs and watched him apologizing. His pajamas were too small for him, and his skinny ankles poked out of the bottom. He glanced up the staircase and saw her watching. His face twisted in embarrassment.
Despite his social unease he was perfectly self-contained, preferring to spend time alone studying than in company. He reminded Frances of a child she had read about in a newspaper who never said a word until he was eight and then one day at breakfast began reciting King Lear. Edwin wouldn’t try anything unless he was sure of it first, and he watched their household with meticulous care until he could mimic how they talked, walked, answered callers, and drank their tea. Within a few weeks he had all but smoothed out the accent which would remind people he was Irish. All this, she realized later, was crucial education. He couldn’t have hoped to have a successful practice when he was older unless he learned to mingle with Society.
At supper, her father would ask him about the family. There seemed to be hundreds of relations, and she couldn’t keep track of the names: Irvines, Matthewses, O’Rourkes, Dohertys, Connellys, O’Donnells. They each had a different story, and her father would draw Edwin out of his shell, encouraging him to give his opinion on the famines of his father’s generation, the pomposity and greed of English landlords, the slums in Manchester, and the lucky ones—the émigrés who had escaped to America. It was a bleak picture they painted, and
Frances didn’t want anything to do with it. She had scarcely known that she was Irish until Edwin had come to stay, and now he was contaminating them with his talk of filth and desperation.
“Papa, he’s barely civilized,” she told her father when she was alone with him. Edwin had bad manners—he didn’t use the butter knife and he heaped the sugar into his mug with his dessert spoon. Her father had turned very still, but she carried blindly on, trying out the word her cousin Lucille had given her. “I don’t want to sit at the table with an Africanoid.”
The slap—the first and only time her father hit her—stunned her. She felt as if she had been branded. He stalked out of the room, leaving her standing in his study, mouth open in shock, her cheek burning hotter by the second. They never discussed it afterwards, but she realized then that there was a difference between her and her father. Perhaps it had always been there—but Edwin had been the one to show it to them.
In the evenings, after supper, her father liked her to play the piano. Edwin watched with the fascination a collector might bestow on a fine piece of china. Afterwards, he would ask her father if he could play chess with Frances in the library. She would have liked to say no, but her father always assented on her behalf. These were the only times she heard Edwin speak confidently. He talked to her with the careful deliberation one uses to instruct a child, taking a methodical interest in her strategy, laying out the fundamentals of the game until she could put up a sustained defense. He coached her with patience, ignoring her determined silences, and when she toppled her king in defeat, wanting to have the game over with, he would talk her through, with pedantic satisfaction, how she might have won. When she looked up from the board, he would be watching her with unguarded curiosity, as if she were an equation which, when solved, might bring him some advantage.
She remembered resenting his intrusion into their lives, and when he left at the end of the summer for school, she was relieved to have him gone.
Three
A month after her father had returned, Frances drove across London to a ball given by the Hamiltons. It was a filthy night, and the carriage lurched through the streets, its shutters closed against a driving rain. She was apprehensive and tried not to fidget as Lotta, cursing under her breath, struggled to fix a hairpin that had come loose. The pin was restored, and after a few minutes the clatter of horses’ hooves on wet cobbles gave way to the slow crunch of gravel. There was a slamming of coach doors and shouts of exasperation as people found themselves drenched in the dash from their carriages to the house. Kerrick appeared at the door and bent dripping over the step, and Frances caught sight of the grand villa, light pouring out of the bank of tall windows on the first floor. It was always strange to arrive here as a guest. It was the house her mother had grown up in, and this, coupled with her natural shyness of large groups of people, made her nervous. She took a deep breath to steady herself before wrapping up her skirts and running for the steps of the portico, where powdered footmen in livery chosen for their handsome muscularity shook water out of their tailored jackets.
Guests jostled for space in the huge hall, their voices echoing off the flagstones. Women, still cocooned in furs, streamed water like ducks, their faces shiny from the cold. They were arriving in large, boisterous groups, straight from dinner parties, and Frances realized she was the only person who seemed to have come alone. The dressing room was a clamor of greetings and exclamations, the pitched voices of a swirling, glittering array of girls all talking at once. She gave her jacket and shawl to Lotta and glanced at herself in the long mirror. Red hair, impossible to control, was softened by a dress of white-spotted Brussels net. The fabric had been ordered from Paris on advice from a dressmaker, a dour woman with pinching fingers and a mouth crammed full of pins. She had claimed an intimate knowledge of what was fashionable, but Frances regretted having trusted her. Standing amidst the sleek figures of the other girls, she could see her skirts were too full and old-fashioned. She looked dowdy, as if she were already married. Two girls giggled as they walked past, clutching each other’s arms, and Frances envied them. She didn’t want to face the ballroom alone. She caught her eye in the glass and reminded herself that this was meant to be fun.
A sweeping curve of stone led up to the ballroom on the first floor, and she stepped into a swell of sound. Musicians, stationed behind a line of marble columns, were playing a polka. The floor was awash with a kaleidoscope of dresses, sweeping in, around, and away. Crystal chandeliers glittered from an ornately plastered ceiling, and white roses and purple violets had been woven into swags which hung between the curtained windows. A butler walked up and down the line serving champagne in silver flutes, and she took a glass in a gloved hand and brought it, clouded and cold, to her lips. She would need introductions in order to fill her program of dances, but there was no sign of her aunt. Frances had never had a flirtation with a man before, let alone been courted, and she was a little in awe of the ease with which Lady Hamilton orchestrated her daughters’ string of male admirers.
She caught sight of her elder cousin, Lucille, a porcelain beauty with pale skin and dark blue eyes. Her head was bent slightly to listen to a friend, and her embroidered fan fluttered open and closed like the flickering tail of a cat. Frances paused, unsure whether to make her way over. There was a kind of brilliance to Lucille’s social confidence which could throw Frances off-kilter. She had a natural instinct for the nuances of Society, and she never looked more relaxed than in the midst of a crowd.
“Darling Frances,” Lucille said when she approached, her eyes glancing over her dress. “Have you come all on your own?”
“Lotta is waiting downstairs,” Frances said, though it didn’t really answer her cousin’s question.
“And how is your father?”
“Well, thank you.” This wasn’t strictly true. He hadn’t been himself since he had come back from Manchester, but Frances didn’t feel like discussing his health with Lucille.
“Ha!” Lucille’s lips parted in triumph. “I knew he’d take the news all right. He’s not the only one invested after all. Though Mother was convinced he’d have some kind of . . .” Lucille opened her hands to imply an unnameable catastrophe.
“What news?” Frances asked. Lucille, with her sensitive ear for Society gossip, always seemed to know something that Frances didn’t.
“You don’t know?” Lucille arched her finely drawn eyebrows and considered Frances. Not for the first time she felt as though she were being scrutinized under a microscope, Lucille marveling at her naïveté as if she had discovered the attributes of some strange new species.
“Oh—just some minor skirmishes over railway stocks,” Lucille said eventually, shrugging. “Nothing serious, I’m sure.” She smiled, conciliatory, then glanced across the room. “Isn’t that your cousin, who stayed with you all those summers ago?”
Frances followed Lucille’s gaze, trying not to be surprised by her singular ability to place everybody in a room. Dr. Matthews was standing on his own, staring straight at her. His hair was combed back from his narrow forehead. He held her gaze for a second then looked away. She felt a flicker of irritation at finding him here and hoped he wouldn’t try to dance with her.
“I suppose Mother felt obliged to ask him,” Lucille said, “out of loyalty to your father.”
“He’s a doctor now,” Frances said, feeling somehow responsible, “living at the Cape.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“He came to our house a few weeks ago.”
“What is it with the Irish? You extend a charitable hand, and they’re forever nipping at your heels.”
Frances opened her mouth, but before she could say anything her cousin said, “Oh, Frances, please.” She placed a hand on her arm. “You shouldn’t take everything so seriously.”
“Frances?” It was her aunt, interrupting them to introduce her to a corpulent man in his fifties who was sweating so profusely that his hair stuck to his forehead and moisture ran in beads dow
n his neck.
“Never married, but not for lack of funds,” Lucille whispered in Frances’s ear as he led her away to dance.
“Too damned hot,” the man wheezed, smiling at Frances as he stuffed his gloves into his pocket and clasped her hand in a moist, fleshy palm. He guided her over the floor, scanning the faces of the other guests over her shoulder. “Some notable absences this evening.”
“What do you mean?”
“The bust-up over the Northern Pacific Railway.” He smiled at her. “It’s sent a few worthy gentlemen back to their beds.”
When the same man tried to insist on dancing with her again an hour later, Frances feigned dizziness. She wandered into the adjoining room. Here was a glut of food. Tables piled high with jellies, biscuit towers, cherry trifles, and myriad cakes in lurid colors. There were carvery boards carrying morsels of guinea fowl, slabs of ham, and slivers of cold tongue. A vast salmon looked as though it had been picked apart by a cat, the soft pink flesh torn away from underneath its silver skin. Men and women sat in small groups, grasping tiny silver forks and dabbing at their mouths with white triangles. It would be awkward to sit and eat on her own. She thought about leaving the ball, but that would mean admitting that she hadn’t enjoyed herself. She wanted just a few minutes alone. The door to the library stood slightly ajar across the hallway, and she crossed over to it and stepped inside.
The walls were paneled with gray oak, and shelves stretched in arched alcoves from floor to ceiling. Rows of neat, leather-bound volumes were stacked side by side in perfect symmetry. She walked across an intricately worked Turkish rug to one of the two sash windows that looked out onto the back of the house. The shutters had been closed. Frances lifted one of the latches with a click and folded it open. It swung smoothly on its hinges, the heavy wood surprisingly light in her hand. She leant her head against the glass for a few moments, enjoying the cool firmness against her forehead. From the quiet of the library she could hear the steady rolling of a waltz, the ripple of voices when the music stopped, and the rhythm of steps on the marble floor when it started up again.
The Fever Tree Page 2