by Patrick Gale
‘I could have had a family.’
‘Margaret said you didn’t want –’
‘Well of course I didn’t by the time I was seven or eight. I was happy where I was! I had friends and … But maybe earlier.’
‘I wasn’t well. I had to see a therapist and take tranquillizers and –’
‘My heart bleeds.’
There were ornaments all over the mantelpiece and tables, hideous, attenuated porcelain women and children with off-white skin and sickly, far-away expressions. Sophie snatched the biggest one, a sort of nun, enjoying the whimper this produced in Betty Kirklow. She thought of hitting her with it, cracking it down on her skull. It felt like a weapon, cold and sharp. But she hurled it against the hearth, instead, where it smashed most satisfactorily. Betty Kirklow flinched.
‘Tell him you knocked it over dusting,’ Sophie told her. ‘And take my advice. Burn that creepy album or I’ll come back to haunt you.’
She had never knowingly made anyone cry before but right now she wanted this moonfaced baby-snatcher to break down and wail, to fall on her knees on the sharp shards of porcelain and beg forgiveness. But Betty Kirklow merely walked to the front door.
‘If you come back,’ she said, ‘or ring or anything, I shall call the police.’ She opened the door wide. ‘You ruined my life too, you know.’
‘I did?’ Sophie began but then they both saw Margaret coming up the path. Margaret looked swiftly from the one face to the other, sniffing trouble. She had a sixth sense for conflict, had always shown an uncanny ability to walk into a room just before a fight was about to break out.
‘I could shop you,’ Betty Kirklow told her.
‘You could, Betty,’ Margaret told her calmly, ‘but you won’t. Nice place you’ve got. Quiet. Come along, Sophie. Time to get you back. Bye, Betty. Be good.’
She put an arm about Sophie as they walked back to the car but Sophie was still too angry to risk conversation or even sympathy. She shook herself free. Her revulsion at her own loss of control must have been palpable because Margaret respected it, unlocking the car and driving her back to Tatham’s in silence.
Neither spoke until they were approaching the school gates, when Margaret asked, ‘Are you okay going straight back like this? Do you want to talk about it?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I need to think about it all a bit. But thanks.’
‘I didn’t think she’d keep you in there so long.’
‘She was showing me baby photographs.’
‘She kept them? She’s insane! She didn’t mean any harm, you know. It’s a syndrome, snatching babies. She was a mess. And you were very sweet.’
‘Don’t you start.’
‘Did I do the right thing?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie told her. ‘Thank you.’ But she had to hurry away then, clutching her bulky presents, for fear Margaret’s brimming concern might make her cry.
When she reached her study, hurrying because it was nearly time for afternoon school, she found a honey spice cake waiting for her with a card from Lucas that read simply, I’m a pig. forgive me? Love Lou x.
Her heart was so full of other things that she stared at it for a good half-minute before remembering they had quarrelled. Only Heidi baked cakes so cake-shop perfect but the fact that it was purloined from a mother’s larder not bought in a shop made the gesture all the more tender for her. She cut herself a quick slice and munched it as she grabbed Horace and Phaedra and the relevant files and the taste returned her to the melancholy of the morning. But the homesickness had been overlaid with bitter-sweetness. Hurrying down the creaking stairs, dodging puddles as she ran out across Flint Quad, she had a new sense of the school, of her friendships, as things she would look back on. She briefly saw herself as in the film of her youth, feeling nostalgia for a phase of her life that had not even finished yet.
EASTER HOLIDAYS
(sixteen years, three months)
It was the week after Easter. Sophie, Charlie and Lucas had been invited down to lend a hand at Lady Droxford’s Easter Fête and to stay the night. Lady Droxford lived in the dower house on the estate her eldest son had inherited. The big Edwardian house where he lived with the wife nobody liked could be seen in the distance if one walked through a copse at the end of her garden. The original Queen Anne house had been knocked down by Mr Compton’s grandfather and replaced with something that looked like a chest hospital. The dower house was far older and prettier. It had begun life as a kind of lunching pavilion, for when the Droxfords came to row or fish on the ornamental canal that stretched before it, then it was extended, for a long-lived and independent dowager, in the Strawberry Hill Gothick style.
Various women from the village set up stalls on the lawns to either side of the canal. There was an Aunt Sally, a jam stall, a bring-and-buy, a second-hand book stall and a tea stall. Two rowing boats could be hired, from Mr Compton, for ten-minute trips on the canal. Lady Droxford produced a huge fruit cake and had Lucas take money off people who wanted to guess its weight for the chance of taking it home. Charlie, as a scientist, was put in charge of one of those electric games where punters were challenged to pass a hoop along a length of convoluted wire without triggering a bell by letting their hand shake. Sophie had to sit at the entrance with Lady Droxford taking money for entries and plants while Lady Droxford answered queries about things on the plant stall or the few shrubs and trees she had not labelled.
When the last children had been chased from their hiding place in the weeping pear and the last stallholder had been thanked and waved off, they all bathed and changed and a long and extraordinarily alcoholic dinner followed.
The dining room was as pretty as the rest of the house, its painted, panelled walls hung with old flower paintings Lucas recognized as seventeenth-century Dutch. (‘Lucas wants to work for Christie’s,’ Charlie said cattily. ‘I think he’d make a brilliant antique dealer.’) The adults sat at either end of the table with Sophie on one side and the boys on the other. From the start there was a painful inequality of attention paid. Made honest by gin, perhaps, Mr Compton spoke almost entirely to Charlie, whom he encouraged to tell ever more scurrilous stories about the other dons. The joking comparisons of Charlie to Siegfried had led to his nicknaming him Ziggy. Charlie had saucily taken to dropping the Mr and called him Compton, as if he were a fellow-schoolboy. He was in seventh heaven, flushed with lamb and claret and social indulgence and gaining a deep, inexplicable pleasure from their hostess being the widow of a lord.
Lucas made repeated attempts to break in on their conversation, like a moth on the wrong side of a lighted window.
Lady Droxford was a very private cook and would let no one follow her out to the kitchen to help between courses but whenever she sat again she took pity on Lucas, diverting him with questions that required long and detailed answers, asking him about his mother’s fascinating work and so on. Now and then she called her son to attention with a little cough or a comment and he would play the host for her, walking round the table to refill wine glasses or turning to say something to Sophie. But whatever he said would inevitably inspire a comment from Charlie that would draw him back to where he had started.
It was the closest Sophie had seen to him forgetting his manners but he was so obviously a man enchanted that it was more pitiful than offensive. Lady Droxford was palpably pained and helpless. Sophie wondered how he had manipulated her into inviting them all. Perhaps he had wanted to invite just Charlie. Of course he had. And she had insisted on including Sophie and Lucas to maintain decorum. Sophie suspected she much preferred Lucas to Charlie, not because he did not fawn on her and treated her as a human rather than a title, but because she felt kinship with the pain her son was causing him. All her instincts and training were to put people at their ease so she responded to social discomfort in people as spontaneously as she would to suffering in a dog.
The dinner was delicious – a cold sorrel soup, roast beef with purple sprouting broccoli and an
intensely garlicky dish of pommes dauphinoises, then rhubarb fool with home-made shortbread – but Sophie found the tensions around the table so uncomfortable it was a relief when Lady Droxford stood, suggesting they leave everything where it was and have coffee in the drawing room. Sophie had worried that she would be expected to retire with Lady Droxford while the men drank port and this was almost what happened. She followed her to the drawing room where, she discovered, some powerful coffee had been waiting in a Thermos jug since before dinner began. Lucas followed hesitantly, but Mr Compton and Charlie remained chatting and quietly laughing at the table. Lady Droxford served coffee but could not relax, watching Lucas who in turn was loitering unhappily near the doorway so as to retain a view of the couple at the dining table.
There was a piano in a corner, a Broadwood baby grand draped in a silk shawl to protect it from sunlight, and displaying a cluster of family photographs in heavy silver frames.
‘Do you play?’ Sophie asked. ‘I mean, of course you do but would you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Lucas joined in with a hint of desperation as Lady Droxford began to demur. ‘Play us something. Please.’
Perhaps he thought the sound would draw the others in. Perhaps Lady Droxford did too. At any rate she gamely tossed back the scarf, laid bare the keyboard and played from memory some fifteen minutes of unexpectedly vampy old songs like ‘Begin the Beguine’, ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’. Songs of desire and yearning. Were they not obviously the songs at the forefront of her repertoire, one might have suspected her of irony or mischief. More than anything else in the room – the overmantel so antique it showed more rust spots than reflection, the shelves of old porcelain, the faded silk rugs – her playing conjured an era when girls were still expected to acquire accomplishments, to entertain rather than merely to be. She relaxed as she played and drew Lucas to her side with her skill. Was this, Sophie wondered, how she had attracted Mr Compton’s almost too charming father?
Sophie felt a sudden draught against her neck and glanced round from her sofa to see Charlie disappearing out into the garden through the dining room’s French windows. Mr Compton was nowhere in sight. Lady Droxford must have noticed it too for she wound her playing up to an abrupt climax minutes later, laughing, ‘Enough, enough! I’m so rusty,’ to silence their applause. She could not help throwing a look across to the empty dining room where the door to the outside was drifting open again because Charlie hadn’t shut it properly. Lucas noticed too but before he could say anything she was jumping up from the piano and leading them both upstairs.
‘No more sitting around,’ she said. ‘I’d completely forgotten I wanted your help with these pictures. Especially since Lucas is such an expert. Bring more coffee if you like, Sophie.’
There had been water damage at one end of the long upstairs landing where some tiles had shifted to let rain in. She had recently had the damage fixed and the landing redecorated, ‘But I’ve got it into my head to change the pictures around rather than just rehang everything the way it was. And something in the way Lucas was looking at the flower paintings in the dining room tells me he has an eye. And if there’s something we country mice are good at it’s the exploitation of useful guests. You see. Those are the pictures that were up and there are all the others we can choose from. Julius has offloaded rather a lot that She didn’t want. I mean, I don’t want it to look like a shop but at the same time, it seems a pity to let them gather dust.’
There were stacks of pictures leaning against the wall, nearly thirty. There were oils, watercolours, etchings. Everything from sunlit churchyards to moonlit estuaries, lobster pots to great-great-aunts. Sophie could understand her not having rehung anything; the choice and variety would have overwhelmed her. But Lucas seemed as glad of distraction as Lady Droxford was to offer it and swiftly fell to sorting and arranging.
It was getting late, past eleven o’clock, by the time he and Lady Droxford had agreed a scheme involving at least half the pictures and still Charlie and her son were nowhere to be seen and still no one had commented on their absence. Sophie had been set to work with a hammer and picture nails. Lucas had already held a picture in place while Lady Droxford squinted at it critically from a few feet away before he made a small pencil mark. Sophie’s task was to work along the landing tapping in a picture nail wherever he had left a little cross for her. She felt light-headed, equally capable of collapsing with exhaustion or riding a second wind until dawn. Margaret had trouble sleeping sometimes and did things like this, not hanging old pictures but making jam or cleaning the larder shelves. As she woke briefly to roll over, Sophie would hear her from her bed and feel selfishly comforted that no thoughts were keeping her so active.
Sophie was sent downstairs to fetch some extra boxes of picture nails Lady Droxford had left on the kitchen dresser. Passing back along the hall she was suddenly aware that the others had come inside again. She heard their voices from the drawing room. They laughed loudly at something then their laughter subsided into chuckles and then to a stillness so suggestive and threatening she didn’t dare look in on them but ran back upstairs. Her only thought was that Lady Droxford must not know and that they should all go safely to bed as soon as possible.
If Lady Droxford had heard the laughter, her performance was flawless. ‘Left a little, Lucas. Up a bit. That’s it. To cover that rose on the paper. There.’ She kept up her instructions as though nothing were amiss. ‘Now. Do you really think Aunt Sibyl on the end and not the horses? She’s so very disapproving when one’s not looking one’s best. Of course I’ll be guided by you, though.’
Not long afterwards, however, even she flagged.
‘What am I thinking of? You must both be shattered after a day like this. Sophie. Stop. Honestly. Stop now. We can always do a little more after breakfast. Bless you both. Good night.’ She walked into her own room, inches from where they had just hung the disapproving girl in white, and closed her door.
No longer obliged to play along, Lucas turned towards the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Sophie asked.
‘They’ve come back in,’ he said. ‘I heard them.’
‘I shouldn’t, Lou,’ she said sharply and he stopped, frowning.
‘Why not?’
‘I … I really shouldn’t. That’s all.’
He scanned her face. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
He realized he was still clutching a Norwich School view of Lord Hereford’s Knob and walked past her to hang it on the last nail she had tapped in. He stood back to be sure it was hanging straight.
Sophie had never seen him look so desolate and deflated but felt powerless to help so took the cowardly way out. ‘I’m dropping too,’ she said. ‘It’s been a very long day.’ Conscious of not addressing the matter so obviously at hand, she yawned heavily to veil her treachery. ‘’Night.’ She set her hammer and box of picture nails on a table and headed off to bed without looking back at him.
She had put out her light when he tapped at her door and came in, in his pyjamas and bare feet. The bedroom felt completely unheated.
‘You’ll freeze,’ she said. ‘Get in.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Don’t snore, that’s all.’
‘Thanks, Phi.’
It was an old bed with a droopy mattress, not designed for sharing, but she was quietly glad of his company. He didn’t snore but he twitched violently as he was falling asleep, lashing out at enemies she could not see.
Charlie behaved impeccably in the morning, as if to balance out his delinquency of the night. He contrived to wake before anyone, do all the washing up and make porridge on the Aga. Mr Compton displayed what was either great tact or rank cowardice by taking himself off on an errand to his brother all morning so that it was left to his mother to drive them to the station before church. She insisted on giving Sophie leftover sandwiches and cake from the fête for their journeys home. Her farewells and thanks were opaque and general, hiding whatever she knew or had guess
ed of the night before.
They rode in the same train for the first twenty minutes before Charlie had to change to a faster one towards London. Sophie had braced herself during the drive to the station, assuming he would behave appallingly once they were all alone, teasing Lucas with brazen denials or, worse, pornographic detail. Instead he was very sweet and even bewildered.
‘I behaved dreadfully,’ he said. ‘She’ll never ask me back.’
‘Probably not,’ Sophie said.
‘Lucas?’
Lucas was scowling out of the window.
‘Lucas, I’m really sorry. I won’t even say I was drunk. Although I was. Jesus, I was plastered! They really put it away, those two. Were you both sick in the night?’
‘No.’
‘I was. Must have been the brandy. Lucas, I’m so sorry.’
Lucas was forced to acknowledge him.
‘Don’t be,’ he muttered, making eye contact for a second. ‘I’d have done the same.’
‘Yes but, well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘Fuck. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
‘Pregnancy test?’ Lucas suggested and they all laughed, relieved that he’d decided not to sulk.
CLOISTER TIME
(sixteen years, five months)
Calling on the combined muscle and expertise of the army Corps, the art students and almost anyone signed up for carpentry, Mr Compton had converted the school concert hall to a temporary opera house. There was only one woodland set, the brief being to leave room for as many performers as possible and to use lighting tricks and portable scenery, carried by the chorus, to vary the view. At various points what appeared to be solid backdrop or flat was actually painted gauze so that ‘visions’ could be revealed, as if by magic – a thing technically advanced by the school’s stagecraft standards.
Even allowing for Purcell’s limited requirements of brass and wind, most of the school’s senior orchestra was squeezed into a pit made by removing the front few rows of seats and erecting a low wall of hardboard, artfully painted to blend in with the forest scenery beyond and a few real bushes in pots placed before.