Paying Guests

by Claire Rayner

  Now he stood squinting at her in the bright sunshine and she smiled warmly at him.

  ‘Good afternoon Tilly! I saw you from inside.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Jem. I hope you are well?’

  ‘I am very well,’ he said and held out a hand and they shook cordially. There had been a time when they had greeted each other with kisses on the cheek, but they had been considering marriage then. All that had changed, but the handshakes were as warm as ever the kisses had been, and indeed warmer, for there was an easy friendship in them that, to Tilly at least, mattered far more than anything more intimate. ‘Is this but a social visit? Or –’

  ‘How well you know me! It is, of course, an or. I need some new linen for bed sheets. I find that the laundress is very heavy-handed and I need to add a further half dozen pairs to my store. A hard-wearing linen, now, one that will see me well over the next few years. It is so laborious making the sheets that it’s poor economy to buy cheap stuff for them.’

  ‘Whenever would I sell you cheap stuff, Tilly?’ he said and led the way to the shop door, holding it open to invite her in. ‘You really know me better than that! Cuthbert! A chair for Mrs Quentin, if you please.’

  The shop boy darted forward from between the piled bolts of cloth and the long mahogany counters and cutting tables and pulled a high chair out invitingly, and gratefully Tilly sat down. It had been a long walk on a hot day and her boots were on the tight side. She sighed contentedly and pulled off her gloves.

  ‘I think a glass of some of that excellent lemonade Charlie Harrod sent over,’ he said. ‘I’ve been keeping it in the cellar to be cool. Cuthbert, a tray and jug and glass, if you please – bustle about!’

  Cuthbert duly bustled and brought the lemonade and she and Jem settled to a cosy prose over the relative merits of Irish as opposed to English linen, Lancashire as opposed to Sea Island cotton and the various available weights of cloth on offer and at last settled on the amount that would be needed, so that Jem could cut it.

  ‘Six pairs of sheets, with three-inch top hems and a narrow turnback at the foot,’ Jem muttered, pulling a pencil from behind his ear and making jottings on his cuff. ‘That’ll be – let me see – plenty of hem, under and at the sides – hmm – full width, then – hmm. Twenty-six yards, I make it, Tilly, and I shall throw in the hem bindings as a discount. There. Measure that up, Cuthbert, and be quick about it. And if there are faults in the bolt, then start a new one. D’you understand me, boy?’

  Cuthbert indeed understood and Jem was at last able to relax. His other more senior shopman was busily occupied in dealing with a brace of ladies buying ribbons at another counter and clearly set to spend the whole morning at that delectable occupation, much to the shopman’s obvious boredom, and that meant Jem had time for her. He settled himself against his counter comfortably, leaning over it so that they could talk easily.

  ‘How is he, then?’ he said. ‘You’ve not said a word, so I supposed all is well.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ she said after a moment, knowing there was no need to ask him of whom he spoke. ‘He has had some troubles at school and they bid fair to be brought home with him.’

  He stiffened. ‘Oh? And what might those troubles be? Nothing much I’ll be bound and no fault of Duff’s. That boy could never be anything but all he should be.’ Jem’s loyalty to Duff was fierce and now Tilly smiled at him gratefully for it.

  ‘You can’t cast him as an angel, you know, Jem. He’s a boy after all, and boys are prone to scrapes. He is far from perfect.’

  Jem looked carefully at her. ‘What has he done?’

  ‘Nothing, to the best of my knowledge.’ She kept her head down, twisting her gloves between her fingers. Even with Jem, her good old friend Jem, it was difficult to be honest about what Duff had said and she certainly could not have voiced her own fears for his virtue. She could not even be sure herself what Duff had done or not done. His speech had been so elliptical and her own understanding of such matters so patchy, how could it be otherwise?

  ‘It is what might happen that concerns me,’ she said, in a rush of confidentiality. ‘I cannot pretend I fully understand the way boys think and behave, but last night –’ Her voice dwindled.

  ‘Well?’ Jem leaned over the counter in his familiar manner and she felt a little stronger; being physically close to him like this made it easier to speak honestly.

  ‘I’m not sure that I am not misunderstanding – but let me assume I am not. He told me he has developed a tendresse for –’

  She stopped, and bent her head and Jem smiled, slowly and a touch bitterly. No one knew better than he did what it felt like to yearn for a person who remained stubbornly unavailable, except as a friend. ‘He has found himself a pretty lady to admire, has he?’ he said and grinned.

  ‘I wish he had!’ Tilly said in a burst of anger. ‘That would be no problem!’

  There was a long silence and then Jem said a little woodenly, ‘I see.’

  ‘I wish I did,’ Tilly said bitterly. ‘I find it hard to comprehend, but you are a man so perhaps you –’

  ‘I find such emotions as strange as you appear to do,’ Jem said, clearly uncomfortable now. ‘I am told it is a natural stage in the life of a boy, but to tell you the truth, it never appeared in mine.’

  ‘So, you cannot advise me.’ She felt bleak.

  ‘As to that, I may – well, let us both think. There must be a remedy.’

  ‘I have thought long and hard,’ Tilly said, ‘and I believe there is an obvious way to distract his attention from this tiresome school-fellow. I think that he needs to widen his acquaintance. He has spent too much time with boys, do you see, all these years.’

  ‘Too much time with boys,’ Jem repeated and was silent. So was Tilly and they both sat there in the sweet-smelling shop, the scent of new linen thick in their nostrils, in a silence broken only by the giggles and chatter coming from the heaps of ribbons on the other side of the shop.

  ‘So,’ Jem said at last, clearly unable to deal with the silence any longer. ‘A dancing class, perhaps? I hear Miss Hodgkins over at Kensington Gore runs very good classes for young ladies and gentlemen.’

  ‘Well, now, I wasn’t thinking of that precisely,’ Tilly murmured and then looked at him very directly. ‘Jem, do you remember Sophie Oliver?’

  ‘Sophie –’ Jem straightened his back and stared at her. ‘Remember Sophie Oliver? I should say I do! When I remember the way her mother behaved, when she lived in your house, and how hard she tried to ruin you – well! How could I ever forget the Olivers? Mother or daughter? Dorcas or Sophie, it’s all one.’

  ‘Well, it has been some time now,’ Tilly said. ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘Not so long that I can forget the – the deviousness that Dorcas –’ Jem’s voice rose, and Tilly looked over her shoulder at the other customers, and shook her head warningly.

  He subsided and said in a gruff undertone, ‘So long as you forget her too.’

  ‘I cannot blame Sophie for what her mother was,’ Tilly said. ‘She was but a small child, after all. The thing is, Duff adored her. He still has fond memories of her – and said as much to me yesterday. It seemed to me that part of this Patrick – this schoolfellow’s charm was that he reminded Duff of Sophie. Quite powerfully, it appears.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ Jem was watching her closely, clearly anxious.

  ‘That we – that he sees her again and so forgets this school friend,’ Tilly said simply. ‘I am sure it would serve very well. If she is half as pretty a young lady as she was a child, she will entrance him. It will be natural that he – you see what I mean, Jem? However tiresome she might be, it is so proper for a young man to love a girl. Even a difficult girl would be preferable, I am convinced, to Duff following this present bent! I could not – I –’ She bit her lip to control the sudden desire to weep which had risen in her. ‘Whatever Sophie is like, she cannot be as wrong for Duff as this Patrick. He is not a good influence. He is older, and
– well, I am not comfortable about him.’

  ‘Will you be any more comfortable with Dorcas about you again?’ Jem said bluntly. ‘She caused you much unhappiness in the past.’

  ‘I doubt she means me any harm now,’ Tilly said. ‘She could have come to visit any time this past twelve years, for I have not budged. Yet she has not! And anyway, I am older and wiser now. I can deal well enough with Madam Dorcas should she still be interested in tormenting me, which I doubt.’

  ‘And you think it is worth risking turning over their particular stone in order that Sophie – who might be as devious as her mother, remember, for apples do not fall far from trees! – in order to –’

  ‘To make life better for Duff? I will do anything and risk anything to make life better for Duff,’ she said. ‘Oh, Jem, say you will help me! Please? I do have need of you!’

  ‘Hmph,’ he said and glowered a little. And then sighed. ‘Just what is it you want of me, then, Tilly?’

  ‘Oh, Jem –’ she said and then stopped yet again and he managed to twist his mouth into a sort of smile.

  ‘You want me to find her, don’t you? Oh dear, oh dear, you want me to find her. And if I do, we must both be quite mad, for you know the trouble that happened when she was last around and –’

  ‘I know,’ Tilly said. ‘But I am thinking of Duff, you see. And Sophie and Duff, you’ll remember –’

  ‘Yes,’ Jem said heavily. ‘I remember. So I suppose I’ll have to go and seek her, shan’t I? When could I refuse you anything? But I pray we won’t both live to regret it.’

  Chapter Eight

  TILLY SAT IN her kitchen, surrounded by baskets of damsons waiting to be boiled into pots of damson cheese, and pears to be seethed in syrup to preserve them, wondering whether they would need to make extra plum jam to enhance their winter supplies. There were already several dozen pots of redcurrant and raspberry jelly which they had made in July and as many of blackcurrant jam but they might still need to make some greengage jam and quince jellies if they were to avoid the ignominy of having to buy readymade preserves from Charlie Harrod.

  She gave herself a little shake then and made a conscious effort to fix her attention. Eliza would look after all that perfectly well, she told herself a little scoldingly; no need to fret over it. All she had to do to help her, as she had promised she would, was to pick over the fruit for blemished parts and to ensure that no unwanted caterpillars and the like lurked in it. A simple enough task, after all.

  Perhaps I am thinking of the fruit as a way of not thinking about other matters? she wondered then. Though again, perhaps those matters are not so pressing as I feared. And again she tried to concentrate on the job in hand. But it was no use. All she could think of now was not damsons, but Duff, and her concern for and about him.

  She had returned from her visit to Jem’s shop, via the seamstress’s little house where she had left the linen, together with clear instructions on how the sheets were to be made up, and thinking all the way of Jem’s unease about her plan. That he had agreed to do as she wanted was no surprise; he usually did. But that he should have been so very hostile to Dorcas and her daughter Sophie puzzled her.

  It was true that Dorcas had been a very difficult and selfish person all the time that Tilly had known her, ever since her earliest childhood in fact, when Dorcas had been a backstairs resident in the house in Brompton Grove as the daughter of the housekeeper, Mrs Leander, and had teased the small Tilly unmercifully. It was true that Dorcas had tried hard to cheat Tilly in many ways as the years had gone by, their many years together culminating in a painful scene when Tilly had had to banish Dorcas from her house, where she and her child had lived for some time. But was all that enough to make Jem so very unwilling to seek out Sophie for Tilly?

  And then Tilly remembered and smiled to herself. Of course, there had been a time when Dorcas had shown a marked interest in Jem on her own account, and he had found that very difficult to deal with. It must be that which had alarmed him. It could not be simply because of his forebodings about Dorcas re-entering her, Tilly’s life, but because she was trying to become reacquainted with Jem himself.

  Or so she thought, trying to batten down her own doubts; and she had been much comforted when Duff and Silas Geddes had returned from their morning ride, for Duff had looked so much like his old happy self that she had been almost overcome at the sight of him. They had come into the house through the kitchen, ‘since our boots are so dusty,’ as Duff said and she had looked up, alerted by the clatter of their feet on the area steps, to see him standing in the doorway looking rosy cheeked and a little tousled but clearly feeling so much better that she had felt her eyes smart with tears of pleasure and relief.

  ‘We had a capital time, Mrs Quentin!’ Silas Geddes said, coming in behind him, grinning at her. He too looked tousled and had a good deal of dust on his riding coat. ‘We cantered along Rotten Row at such a speed that we positively sent up dust clouds! We quite wore out our nags.’

  ‘It was not difficult to wear out yours!’ Duff said. ‘You chose a sorry excuse for a goer. I told you I’d selected by far the more mettlesome beast.’

  ‘Well, well, we won’t argue further on that,’ Silas said good-naturedly. ‘Mine, indeed, was more for show than go, in the event. But I still greatly enjoyed the exercise.’

  ‘You look as though you did,’ Tilly said, but she was looking at Duff. ‘It must have been agreeable under the trees in Hyde Park.’

  ‘Very agreeable. And so many fashionable people marching about – it looked like a gossip’s paradise,’ Silas said.

  Eliza, who had been in the kitchen at the time and who had, at the sight of Duff, gone immediately to her cool larder to find a jug of her fresh lemonade and was now bustling out with it, pricked up her ears.

  ‘Who was there?’ she asked. ‘Did you see any of the great people? And were the ladies wearing any of the newer fashions?’

  Silas laughed. ‘As to the fashion, I can’t say whether it was new or old, Eliza, since I am sadly ignorant in that area. I can tell you we saw Mr Sheridan Knowles, with a most remarkably handsome creature on his arm.’

  ‘Mr Sheridan who?’ Tilly said.

  ‘Knowles. Sheridan Knowles. Writes plays, Mum. Got one at the Lyceum with Mr Bates’s company this very month. Got Henry Irving in it, too! It’s a very lavish piece, Mum.’

  ‘Dear me! I didn’t know you knew about such matters. Eliza!’ Tilly said. ‘I did not think you went to the theatre.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mum, I don’t. Too far for me to go traipsin’ up to London and gettin’ home’s such a fag, but that don’t matter – I can still take an interest. Why, I could tell you of all the actresses what’s in the company as well.’

  ‘Not now, Eliza,’ Tilly said hastily and Silas laughed.

  ‘You should have been with us, Eliza, for then you could have told us who the pretty lady was, hmm?’ And he looked at Duff, who grinned back.

  ‘It was you noticed her first!’

  ‘I could hardly not. I never saw so many frills and fancies on one back in my life. And I swear she had painted her face – yet it was a very handsome face.’

  ‘It was a delightful face,’ Duff said. ‘And she had quite the most elegant hat, Mamma, you ever saw. All – well, birds’ feathers and flowers and fruits and heaven knows what else besides.’ His hands fluttered up near his head in a demonstration of a very fussy bonnet. ‘You would have hated it.’

  ‘Oh dear, am I such a dowd?’ Tilly asked. ‘I would be sad to think so.’

  ‘No,’ Duff said and came and kissed her cheek. ‘You are just more tasteful than any actress I ever saw. I must go and change, Ma. I feel quite filthy. Thank you for your company, Silas.’

  ‘Thank you for yours,’ Silas said warmly. ‘I’m most grateful to you for arranging it with Cope. We might do it again.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ Duff said and clattered away up the stairs to his room, and Tilly watched him go, glowing with gratitude to Duff hi
mself for being so resilient and recovering so quickly, to Mr Geddes for being so kind to the boy – and that warmed her deeply towards him – and with Jem for having been so sensible this morning. Perhaps she shouldn’t let him seek out Sophie after all; perhaps he was right …

  Now, alone again, for Silas Geddes had followed Duff upstairs to change and Eliza too had gone off to some upstairs task, she found herself thinking once more about Sophie, and the memory of her came up before her mind’s eye.

  A small, beautifully compact child with a great deal of dark red hair spread on her shoulders and eyes which were wide and dark and carefully considering. A little rosebud of a mouth which she kept pursed in such a way that it seemed she knew how delectable it made her look. Long lashes that she liked to sweep down on her cheeks and a skin as pale and rich as new cream. Even at seven she had seemed to know how well she looked and had managed, without obviously posing, to ensure that she was always seen to her best advantage.

  Was she still the same? If Jem went ahead and found her, how would she look? Tilly tried to imagine her, but all she could visualize was a larger version of a seven-year-old child, not an adult at all. Yet an adult she was, just as was Duff. They were almost of an age, with Sophie just seven or eight months the older. And Duff had loved her so much then!

  It was inevitable of course that thinking about Sophie would lead to memories of Dorcas. How could it not? There was no doubt that Sophie had inherited her mother’s good looks, together with something more from her father, the soldier Walter Oliver, who had died in skirmishes in China when the army had gone there to put down people they chose to regard as ‘Chinese pagans’ – and as though it were yesterday she could hear the officer at Knightsbridge Barracks who had told her of Walter’s death, explaining to her how he had been part of that force. So long ago, and yet as fresh in her memory as though it had been yesterday.