Clouds among the Stars

by Clayton, Victoria

  In the silence that fell as the colonel and the bishop’s wife meditated replies Maggie came in with pots of coffee and tea.

  ‘No, thank you, Lady Pye,’ said the bishop’s wife. ‘Too much caffeine is very bad for the temper.’ The colonel snorted and held up his cup and saucer to be refilled. ‘It is well-known,’ she continued, ‘that red-faced, choleric types often have an addiction to such stimulants. Dear Lady Pye, I must let you have my recipe for kedgeree. It was given me by my great friend, the Bishop of Bengal, so there can be no doubt of its authenticity. Rice should be the bulk of the dish, the fish being merely a flavouring. As for parsley in kedgeree, I never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘I’ve sent for Dr Parsons, my dear,’ said Maggie to me. ‘He’ll come as soon as the snow-plough’s been up.’

  ‘How is the poor child?’ asked Max.

  ‘Not very well but I’m sure it’s not serious.’

  ‘And Waldo?’ He had lowered his voice so that only I could hear. ‘I thought last time I saw him he seemed more cheerful. I hope the police are getting on with the job of finding the real murderer.’

  ‘Thank you, he does seem better. You’ve been so kind visiting him so often. Inspector Foy said not to expect any progress for a week or two as it’s Christmas.’

  ‘I count Waldo as one of my dearest friends.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘You were very much missed after dinner. A bevy of harridans and not a single pretty woman.’

  ‘There was Freddie.’

  ‘Ah, yes, true. Lovely, but firmly spoken for. A woman thoroughly in love with her husband becomes almost invisible to other men, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And Georgia whatever-her-name is. She didn’t strike me as being very much in love with Emilio.’

  Max looked surprised. ‘Do you call her pretty?’

  ‘How are the roads, dear Lady Pye?’ asked the bishop. ‘We must catch the noon train. Painful though it is to drag ourselves away, a man of the cloth cannot call his soul his own.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said the colonel. ‘Particularly not when he is married to a busybody know-it-all.’

  ‘Hereward, you’ve forgotten your heart pills.’ Mrs Mordaker entered the dining room, waving a small bottle. She came over to inspect his plate. ‘What did the doctor say about eating too many eggs?’ The colonel bared his teeth and made swatting movements as though troubled by a fly.

  ‘It’s very difficult,’ said Mrs Mordaker to Maggie. ‘I try to make him do the right thing but he doesn’t like to be fussed. The doctor says if he doesn’t take his pills he could be struck down at any moment.’

  The bishop’s wife smiled an awful smile. ‘How sorry we should all be in that eventuality.’

  She left the room in triumph.

  ‘Now, Hereward,’ said Mrs Mordaker. ‘What’s happened to upset you? Remember what the doctor said about getting worked up –’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, will you shut up!’ the colonel almost shouted. ‘It’s more than a man can bear, being lectured all the time by dim-witted females.’

  The old lady unbent enough to say, ‘A spurred ass must trot.’

  The colonel almost split his waistcoat and his face darkened to mahogany. ‘Madam!’ He was sounding more and more like Dr Johnson. ‘This is more than flesh and blood can stand!’

  ‘Now, Ernestine,’ said Maggie hurriedly.

  ‘Now, Hereward,’ said Mrs Mordaker at the same time.

  ‘Another cup of tea, my dear?’ asked Maggie, filling the old lady’s cup before she could answer. ‘And what about a nice drop scone? I made them myself this morning. You must keep up your strength for the great work.’

  ‘That woman has twice called me an ass within ten minutes,’ muttered the colonel to his wife as she sat down beside him. ‘It’s beyond sufferance!’

  ‘Colonel, have a little more toast and my homemade blackberry jelly,’ said Maggie soothingly. She bent close to his ear and added in an undertone, ‘Miss Tipple is ninety-four, you know, and doesn’t hear quite as well as she used to. I’m sure she had no intention of calling you names.’

  ‘I heard that.’ Miss Tipple said at once. ‘And I have always found honesty to be the best policy.’

  ‘Do tell me,’ I said, liking this indomitable old lady, ‘what is your great work about?’

  ‘It is the History of the Union of Female Franchise,’ said Miss Tipple, beating her twisted, freckled hand on the table for emphasis as she spoke. ‘Which is the story of women’s struggle to escape the tyranny of selfish and unscrupulous men.’ Though her voice was shrill and variable in its register and her eyes just a gleam among folds of crêpe-like skin, I had no doubt of a still sparking mind.

  ‘How interesting!’

  ‘Oh, yes, Ernestine is ever so clever,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s a wonderful book. But you must take care, my dear, not to overtire yourself so you can get it finished. I hope you slept well?’

  ‘I did not! I was much troubled by some importunate wretch scratching at my door. Luckily I always take the precaution of locking it so he was forced to go away unsatisfied but I was unable to return to sleep until two o’clock.’ She fixed her eyes on the colonel.

  ‘You need not look at me, madam –’ began the colonel wrathfully.

  ‘No, no,’ said Maggie. ‘No one suspects you for a moment, of course, Colonel. What a pity the weather is so rough. There’ve been reports of blue-footed falcons on Doorknocker Tor this summer. I thought of you at once, knowing what a great expert you are on birds.’

  ‘Really? Who says so?’ The colonel was distracted at once. ‘If it’s that idiot gardener of yours I shall insist on seeing for myself before I believe it.’

  The bishop, who had all this time been cowering behind his magazine, now ventured an opinion on the likelihood of blue-footed falcons coming so far south and soon he and the colonel were locked in disagreement. I found the disputatious style of the other guests extremely entertaining.

  ‘Quite a raree show, isn’t it?’ said Max quietly, echoing my thoughts. ‘It does one good to get away from London. And not just for the scenery, though this must be one of the most beautiful parts of the world.’

  ‘I haven’t seen anything of it yet. We arrived after dark and when I looked out of the window this morning everything was white, even the sky.’

  ‘I was here two years ago. There are some pretty marvellous views, if you’ve got a head for heights. What about a walk when the snow stops?’

  ‘Have you known the Pyes long?’

  ‘I was Hotspur in Henry IV at the Bunton Festival two summers ago. Sir Oswald was extraordinarily generous, throwing parties for the whole cast and putting up the leading actors for two weeks. We had a wonderful time. Though I must say,’ he added, ‘it was rather hard on Maggie. She seems to do the work of ten. But when Cordelia happened to mention, over the telephone, that you were coming here for Christmas, the open invitation the Pyes had given me seemed suddenly extremely attractive.’ In his look was a glow of appreciation that I could only interpret as being a tribute to my charms. I examined the tablecloth, embarrassed and delighted. ‘What are your plans for the day?’

  ‘I can’t make any until the doctor has seen Cordelia.’ I had dropped my voice to match his.

  ‘Harriet,’ called Archie, ‘if you are forming a cabal I beg you to let me in on it. I’ve always thought I might have a talent for intrigue.’

  There was justice in this reproof, but before I could make amends Jonno appeared. He was wearing a coat of shaggy fur, and jeans with the knees ripped out. ‘Hi, gang.’ He sauntered over to inspect the dishes on the sideboard. ‘Jesus, nothing but fucking rice. Who’s pinched all the haddock? Maggie, there’s no bacon left.’

  ‘I’ll go and get you some,’ she said at once.

  ‘Sit down, Maggie,’ said Rupert. ‘You’ve been rushing about for the last hour. Jonno knows where the kitchen is.’

  Jonno looked sulky. ‘What’s the point of having women about the place if they can’t make th
emselves useful.’

  ‘And of what use are you?’ Rupert spoke calmly but he looked cold.

  ‘Well said!’ put in Miss Tipple.

  Jonno smirked. ‘Come off it, Rupe. You weren’t always such a tight-arse. I can remember you drunk as a lord on more than one occasion.’

  ‘Being drunk is boorish, I grant you,’ said Rupert, ‘but behaving like an insolent puppy when sober is worse.’

  ‘Well, of all the …’ Jonno flushed deeply. ‘Christ! I don’t have to put up with this!’ He looked at Rupert, indecision written clearly on his face.

  ‘Well?’ Rupert expression was icy. ‘Do you refute the charge?’

  ‘I’m not accountable to you for my behaviour.’

  ‘It’s not you I’m concerned about. But if you can’t see that Maggie deserves your gratitude and consideration, then it’s up to her friends to point it out to you.’ He grimaced as though at some unpleasant thought, folded his newspaper and then smiled at Jonno. ‘Now don’t sulk. Come and sit down and tell us about university life in Manchester.’

  Jonno hesitated.

  ‘In my day,’ said the colonel, ‘we did as we were told by our elders and betters with no shillyshallying. Nor did we come late to breakfast looking like something the cat brought in.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Jonno bitterly. ‘D’you think I give a bugger about the opinions of blimps like you? All wars are evil and it’s people like you who’ve perpetrated them. You’re an anachronism, obsolescent, a deadbeat – and the pity of it is you can’t even see it!’

  He stalked out of the dining room.

  ‘A whipping would be too good for that boy,’ snapped the colonel as soon as he had mastered his temper sufficiently to speak.

  Maggie looked ready to cry. ‘Perhaps I’d better go after him.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Excuse me, Lady Pye but the doctor’s here.’ Mrs Whale was standing at the door. ‘I’ve showed him up to the young lady. And Sir Oswald wants his breakfast. Now.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘I’m so bored!’ cried Cordelia. Considering how much effort had been put into entertaining her for the three days she had been bedridden, this was ungrateful. ‘When’s Max coming?’

  ‘Darling, you can’t expect a grown-up man to spend all his time in a sick room.’ Particularly with a patient who was tetchy and imperious, I might have added, but did not. Cordelia’s morale was at an unusually low ebb. She had been forced into the ignominious role of invalid when she had hoped to burst upon Pye Place as a star of extraordinary magnitude.

  Cordelia had been quite unwell the day after our arrival. Dr Parsons, a physician of the old school, had given orders that she must stay in bed with hot-water bottles to sweat out the fever, aspirin for her headache and a light diet of beef broth and water biscuits to settle her stomach. He had been alarmed by her fluttering lashes, poignant farewell speeches and demands to be carried to the window for a last look at the moor, and had prescribed a tonic to settle her nerves. I was not too worried. The wind had not ceased to howl for a solitary second since our arrival and our imaginations had become hopelessly entangled with Emily Brontë’s.

  When Rupert had come to see Cordelia she had spoken in a strangled voice of her imminent departure for an early grave. Rupert had told her not to talk rubbish and get some sleep. For the rest of his visit Cordelia had kept her eyes closed and her hands folded on her chest, refusing to answer when he spoke to her. Archie sent a message to the effect that loath though he was to be deprived of her beauty and wit, he was extremely susceptible to viruses.

  ‘It isn’t any good pretending queers are just like other men except for sex,’ said Cordelia grumpily, offended by this dereliction of duty. ‘I think they’re incredibly selfish.’

  Like all my family, with the exception of Portia, Cordelia was a bad patient. Maggie was tireless in her efforts to tempt Cordelia’s appetite. When she declared that the beef broth was disgusting, the water biscuits tasted like blotting paper and Dr Parsons was a warty toad, a succession of good things – tiny tomato sandwiches, chicken patties, glazed apple tarts, orange-scented custards and lemon possets – were brought up at intervals throughout the three days. Chocolate milk shakes and miniature buns with pink icing found most favour.

  I had tried to persuade Maggie to let me provide for the invalid. She had been shocked by the idea of my going into the kitchen and making myself useful. Apparently Sir Oswald had strict notions of hospitality and prided himself on his excellence as host. He was used to hearing visitors say that Pye Place rivalled Chatsworth in comfort, beauty and gracious living in the old style. Though less ostentatious it had an unparalleled charm in its remoteness from the world’s stain. He would have been seriously angered to discover that anyone staying beneath his roof had been allowed to dirty their hands with cabbages or gravy.

  Maggie had admitted she did all the cooking for the household. Mrs Whale was only a plain cook but she was invaluable when it came to housework. She was a dab hand at laundry-work and could sew ‘like an angel.’ I said I hoped there was not too much needlework in heaven as I was terribly bad at it and the idea of unpicking stitches for eternity was depressing. Maggie said very seriously that she was sure the Good Lord would never be so cruel as that. I realised that the sort of irreverence that was the bread of life to my family had no place in Maggie’s scheme of things and made a resolve to keep such silly jokes to myself in future.

  Anyway, it was Mrs Whale who darned the linen with tiny stitches and kept the fragile textiles in good repair. Dingle, the gardener, lent a hand with ‘the rough’, such as cleaning silver and stoking the boiler. Cooking for twenty, Maggie said, held no terrors for her; she was strong and she was used to it. She had been brought up to work hard and she would not have known how to occupy her time otherwise. But none the less by the end of the day I saw her pinching her nose to hide yawns and often during dinner her eyes closed and her head nodded. She always got up before six to light the bedroom fires, and she and Mrs Whale washed up the dinner things after the guests had gone to bed.

  Cordelia was pampered not only by Maggie. Max spent every afternoon with us and spared no effort to entertain the fretful invalid, for which kindness, even had he not been charming, amusing and good to look at, he would have earned my undying gratitude. Serious flirtation was out of the question for we were never alone. But, though he gave the greater part of his attention to Cordelia during these afternoons, playing consequences, cribbage and dominoes with us or reading to her, while I struggled with Cordelia’s latest creative project, he never let me forget that I was the chief reason he was there. It would have been difficult to say by what means exactly he conveyed his intense interest – a look, a smile, a tone of voice – but I was certainly acutely conscious of it. As far as I could tell, I was not in love with him, but when he was near me it was peculiarly difficult to think of anything else.

  Cordelia had spent the last two weeks before we left for Derbyshire making a tapestry along the lines of the Bayeux, which was to be a record of our family life. She planned to use a combination of appliqué and embroidery to illustrate people, places and events as they happened. I had bought a length of hessian for the background and we had raided every cupboard and drawer at home for scraps of fabric. It was to be a present for Pa, to brighten the dreary walls of his cell. Among the many memos he fired off daily to the Home Secretary, was a complaint about the remarkably vile shade of green he was made to live with, for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. It was sickly, the colour of stagnant water, of creeping fungal growths, of putrescent matter. It jangled his nerves, depressed his spirits and offended his artistic sensibility. So far there had been no response.

  Cordelia’s idea was excellent but it was harder to do than either of us had envisaged. She had insisted on beginning with a portrait of Dirk. We had been brought to the edge of a flaming row, trying to get his legs right. Bron had said he looked like a lactating giraffe with a nast
y attack of mastitis. Cordelia had said if he made one more unhelpful remarks she would leave Bron off the tapestry altogether. When, in later years, it was displayed to the marvelling world in a purpose-built museum, people would wonder at the absence of her only brother, but by then regret would be vain.

  While Cordelia grumbled about being bored I tried to stitch Maggie’s hair in place with a squiggle of French knots to imitate her curly fringe. Her face was a virulent shrimp-pink, cut out of the woollen vest I had bought from the Co-op, which was the nearest thing I could find to flesh colour. Just as I discovered I had sewn the whole thing to my skirt there came a knock at the bedroom door and, with the prevision one acquires when a single individual is the prism through which all things are viewed, I knew it was Max.

  ‘How’s the sufferer?’ He stood at the end of the bed, smiling at Cordelia who stopped looking petulant and beamed up at him with bright eyes.

  ‘Looking forward to coming downstairs, I can tell you. I’m sick of being in bed. If only Harriet weren’t such an idiot I could come down right now. I can’t see what difference a few hours makes.’

  ‘Dr Parsons said she could get up for dinner this evening,’ I explained. ‘Maggie sets such store by Dr Parsons’ opinions and has been so good to Cordelia, I think it would be unkind to ignore his advice.’

  ‘Harriet always wants to please people. It’s nauseating. Except for me, of course.’

  Max looked at me and I thought I read in his eyes a question. Might he fall into the category of people to be pleased? If so … I stared, fascinated, at the dent in the end of his nose as though he were a snake charmer and I a cobra in a basket.

  ‘Ah, but think.’ Max turned again to Cordelia. ‘If you want to stun the company, and particularly Annabel, by the impact of your beauty you’ll do it far more effectively in evening dress than in a skirt and jersey.’

  The girls had yet to meet. Maggie had suggested that Annabel might play snakes and ladders with Cordelia to help while away the hours. Cordelia had told me that if Annabel so much as set foot in the sickroom she, Cordelia, would throw herself out of the window. So it was as well Annabel had thought she might have a cold coming.