A gong sounded from below and, with a small sigh, she whisked herself out of the door. Ivy was left shaking her head but there was a pleased smile on her face.
Joshua was waiting in the hall, impatient as always, his foot tapping loudly against the black and white tiles and his fingers beating a tattoo along the console table. The evening light poured through the front door, illuminating its swirling design of textured glass, and splashing the hall with pools of bright colour. Its beauty went unnoticed by him. He was on edge, she could see, despite the indifference he’d affected whenever this evening was mentioned.
‘Good evening, Papa,’ she said primly.
At the sound of her voice, he turned around and stared at her. Then continued to stare, his gaze fixed, as though she were someone he’d never seen before.
‘You look so beautiful, Elizabeth,’ he said at last.
‘Don’t I always?’ she teased.
‘Yes, but…’ He cleared his throat, seeming for an instant to be overcome by feeling.
She hoped not. She needed to play a part this evening, but she’d no wish to raise expectations that it was for real. Before she could say anything to depress his spirits, Alice had drifted down the stairs towards them. She hardly glanced at her daughter but floated on towards the dining room, her face creased with anxiety.
Eizabeth followed and found her mother walking around the table, first one way and then the other. Fiddling here and there with a knife, a spoon. Creasing the starched napkins to a stronger crease. Putting the already straight chairs, straight.
‘Mama, it looks beautiful.’
And it did. The silver gleamed on starched white damask, crystal glasses sparkled and caught fire from a sun low in the sky, and Mr Harris’s small pots of roses tripped colourfully down the centre of the table. She breathed in their deep, sweet perfume and thought it heavenly.
‘Come into the drawing room,’ she coaxed. ‘Maybe a small glass of sherry to steady your nerves?’
Her mother’s nerves looked as though they would need a whole bottle of the spirit, but Alice would have none of it. ‘Sherry with the soup, Elizabeth,’ she said, but allowed herself to be steered into the drawing room, where she perched on the very edge of the sofa, primed and ready to fly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
A bell clanged and Alice started up, as though she were a jack escaping its box. Ripley could be heard tramping to the front door, but her mother was already in the hall and greeting Henry and her sister-in-law effusively. Dr Daniels was close behind. Louisa, Elizabeth noticed, was wearing a particularly revealing dress and her scent was powerful, mingling with the heat of the sun that poured through the coloured glass. That perfume would prove a serious challenge to the roses.
When Giles Audley arrived, he greeted her as an old friend. But his gaze, warm and admiring, was not the gaze of a friend, and her misgiving increased sharply. For a short while, the small group were gathered uneasily in the drawing room, none of them quite sure what to say or what to do on such an occasion. When the gong sounded promptly at seven – country hours were kept at Summerhayes – there was an almost audible murmur of relief around the room. Their guests could be shepherded across the hall and into the cool of the dining room.
Ripley, unfamiliar in black tails and bow tie, served the first course immediately, and once bowls of watercress soup and schooners of sherry were on the table, a stilted conversation could begin. It centred, inevitably, on the frightening situation across the Channel and the subject looked likely to continue for some while. Her gratitude was unspoken but heartfelt. With luck, marriage would remain unmentioned.
‘No one has been prepared for it, you see,’ her uncle said between slurps of watercress. ‘There’s been talk of war for years, predictions even, but it has still managed to take people by surprise.’
‘It’s hardly a wonder, is it?’ Louisa smiled ingratiatingly at her husband. ‘Not when Lloyd George has been at such pains to claim our relations with Germany are more friendly than they’ve been for years. How he’s misled us! This morning, people open their newspapers and suddenly there’s the threat of war – not from Ireland, which they might have expected, but from Europe.’
She noticed that her father, who had been the first to warn of a cataclysm, was keeping his lips firmly closed. ‘We’re assuming that there will be a war,’ the doctor said in his high, tight voice. ‘We could be very wrong. It’s not too late for us to avoid disaster, is it?’ Louisa gave him a swift approving glance, while everyone else ignored him and bent their heads over the last of the soup.
Ripley, together with the two footmen hired for the occasion, cleared the dishes, but soon returned with platters of prawns in aspic, baked fish, and a third with a toppling edifice that proved to be a shrimp mousse. Bottles of hock replaced the sherry.
‘Dr Daniels is right,’ Alice said. ‘Nothing irrevocable has happened. We can still avoid a catastrophe.’ Now they had reached the second course without misfortune, her mother appeared a little less tense and was evidently feeling sorry for the doctor whose attempt at conversation had been so blatantly dismissed. ‘You know that special prayers were said on Sunday,’ she went on brightly. ‘They may well be answered.’
‘We’ve been caught out, there’s no doubt,’ Henry opined, ignoring his sister. He took a long draught of cooled wine. ‘We should have seen it coming when Austria issued its ultimatum to Serbia and tried to humiliate them. But we took no notice. We preferred to be bystanders.’
She could have pointed out to her uncle that he’d been contemptuous when her father had voiced just those fears, but she said nothing. Keeping Henry Fitzroy happy this evening was what mattered.
‘You would have thought we’d have worked it out though,’ her uncle blethered. ‘That ultimatum made certain that Russia would defend Serbia, and then, of course, Germany and France were bound to be pulled in on one side or the other.’
‘Like a dormant volcano that has erupted unexpectedly,’ the doctor said, to no real point.
Her father was forcing himself to remain silent, but in the presence of such obvious ignorance, the effort was causing his colour to mount alarmingly. She glanced across the table at Giles. He gave a small smile, but then returned to the sweetbreads and cutlets that Ripley had just served. His appetite appeared unimpaired by the tensions bubbling not so far below the surface. The two of them had not exchanged a word since the meal began, but she had no quarrel with that. Any postponement of the difficult conversation they must have was a happy one. Long may the talk of war continue, as long as Joshua’s temper could bear it.
The burgundy certainly wouldn’t improve his temper. He rarely drank wine and, when he did, he was liable to become more belligerent than ever. This evening, he’d had to endure comments that would have shamed a child; comments that were crass and vapid and on a subject he felt himself entitled to judge wisely. But there was more insult to come, though this time it arrived silently. Ripley was carving the roast beef while the two footmen offered an unending line of vegetable dishes to each guest in turn. She saw that for the first time Henry, seated at her father’s right hand, had noticed the hired help and his face was suffused with disdain. She hoped her father hadn’t noticed. The absence of a butler was for Henry entirely predictable. Summerhayes managed on half the number of servants than was common for such a large estate; it was only what one would expect from a button manufacturer, his expression seemed to say.
Burgundy was doing him no favours either. ‘We shouldn’t despair,’ he intoned. ‘Even if war comes, it’s sure to be a short campaign. Harsh but short. It will be all over by Christmas, you’ll see. This country has been unbeaten for years. Our young men will be champing to get to grips with the enemy. And you can trust the aristocracy to be at their head, leading the charge.’
‘Donkeys leading other donkeys into carnage,’ her father muttered, having decided, it seemed, against neutrality.
In response, Henry banged his wine glass down on
the table. A crimson pool spread across the white damask. ‘That’s bloody unpatriotic,’ he blustered. Louisa dared to make a shushing sound and reach across to lay a restraining hand on her husband’s arm. It was not going to restrain him. ‘But then I wouldn’t expect anything else. Your people –’ he almost spat the words, ‘– would allow the Kaiser to trample all over us, as long as he let them continue churning out their profits.’
Joshua’s anger had turned to ice and his voice cut a cold swathe through the thick quarrelsome atmosphere. ‘You need to get your facts right, Henry. The Royal Navy might still rule the seas with its battleships and cruisers, but our engineering lags way behind Germany’s and we have the army to prove it. It’s too small and far outflanked by Germany’s battalions. Any rational person can see that it’s ill equipped to fight a modern land war, let alone overcome an enemy twice its size in a matter of months.’
Henry pulled his face into an ugly scowl, but it did nothing to deter his brother-in-law. ‘My people, as you term them, are far from unpatriotic. But they have heads on their shoulders and know only too well that a foolish war will bring economic chaos to this country.’
‘Foolish!’ Alice visibly jumped at her brother’s bellow. ‘You call standing up to the Kaiser foolish? That’s the talk of a socialist.’
‘And yours is the talk of a man who knows nothing.’
There was no attempt now to hide the contempt each man harboured for the other. ‘I suppose you were in Trafalgar Square two days ago?’ Henry jeered. ‘Waving placards with your fellow socialists.’
‘I wasn’t but I would have been happy to be there. They have every right to protest. And they represent the mood of much of the country – the mood of people a long way from the bubble in which you live. I’m no socialist, God dammit, how could I be, but fifteen thousand demonstrated that day against going to war. The government should take notice. You should take notice. But then that number means nothing to you. They’re only workers, aren’t they, people who graft a living with their hands?’
‘As you did,’ his brother-in-law sneered.
‘And proud of it. I worked day and night to become a man who could buy a factory. Then another, and another. A man who was trusted enough to make money for others. What have you ever done, apart from holding out your hand?’
From the foot of the table, Alice was darting frightened glances from one to the other, her hands twitching uncontrollably. She looked on the verge of tears. Elizabeth was about to go to her when Ripley and his minions appeared with the game course, moving deftly around each guest while studiously ignoring the hostility ricocheting across the table.
While her father and uncle had been engaged in battle, she’d noticed Louisa grip her cutlery more tightly with every escalation in Henry’s fury. Her eyes had been fixed doggedly on the square of white tablecloth immediately beneath her plate, her gaze never deviating an inch. But now in the fidgety silence that followed, her aunt seemed released from the spell that had fallen on her and was taking the opportunity to whisper in the doctor’s ear. Whatever she said, seemed to please him. He must be the only happy guest, Elizabeth thought. This was the most miserable dinner she had ever eaten: the sound and fury of claim and counterclaim was wretched, the pretence that this was a genial family party equally so. It was war by any other name. She toyed with the small slices of duck that Ripley had served her, and chased a few of the accompanying game chips. Whatever appetite she’d had had long gone, and her head felt full to bursting.
Alice had eaten even less well, she could see. Her mother had managed to gain control of her hands, but she was sitting unnaturally in a rigidly upright position. When Ripley appeared again, her head clicked to one side like a machine to order, and her eyes followed his every movement. It seemed she could maintain her composure only by checking and rechecking the minor details of the dinner – had the table been cleared properly, was it being relaid correctly with a new tablecloth, with fresh cutlery and glasses? The sweet wine that Ripley was serving along with the pistachio cream and lemon-water ice seemed a particular worry. Not much longer, Mama, she thought.
The hostilities had temporarily abated, both participants too exhausted, or, more likely, too full to continue. She’d thought that Giles Audley might have stepped between the crossfire and attempted to halt the battle, but he had said nothing. Somehow she imagined him more a man of action than words. She wondered, if war came, whether he would volunteer to fight. Perhaps he’d be considered too old for the battlefield.
He must have sensed her thoughts, or felt her gaze, because he looked across at her and said, ‘Is all this talk of war upsetting you, Elizabeth?’
‘Not as much as if the talk should turn to reality.’
‘Your father seems fairly convinced it will.’
‘He still does business on the Continent. His contacts there have been warning him for months of the danger.’
She spoke quietly, not wanting to attract attention. The other diners were picking at their desserts and the conversation had become listless but unthreatening.
‘Mr Summer runs his own factories then?’
‘Not any longer. He sold them years ago, but the present owners are glad to use his knowledge of Europe. And he seems happy to keep a small link with his old life in Birmingham.’
‘That of a country gentleman is certainly very different. Such a change of fortune.’ He seemed to marvel at Joshua’s transformation. ‘He will see the world from two quite different perspectives.’
The thought had never occurred to her. ‘I suppose he must. I know he fears what war will do to the workers he knows.’
He leant back in his chair, pushing away a half-eaten ice. ‘And not just them. If war comes, it will affect everyone.’
‘The young men going off to fight, you mean?’
‘Young men from all backgrounds. It won’t be just the gallant cavalry galloping to the rescue. If there is conflict, the footmen, the gardeners, the carpenter, everyone in fact, is likely to be drawn into it. And probably the estate itself, too.’
For weeks, she had sensed darkness. Not just a personal darkness but a larger fear, a shadow encroaching on the sunlit days that had only slowly taken form. It had shimmered in the background, at first hardly noticed, but imperceptibly growing in intensity. And now it hung over Summerhayes itself.
‘If there is war, what will happen to country estates like this?’
‘It’s anyone’s guess. There are many already struggling to pay death duties, but a war could be the final straw. Think of it, if a father dies and his heir is killed too, the estate will suffer a double hit. Whoever is left – sons, grandsons, distant cousins – won’t have the money to carry on. They’ll need to sell the family silver bit by bit, and that includes the land that makes the estate what it is.’
‘So the world we know will die?’
‘It might not mean complete extinction,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘It might simply be that there are fewer estates and less money and staff to run them.’
Her father had the money, but if there were no one left to maintain Summerhayes, his fantasy could be over. He had chosen to ape a mode of life, it seemed, when it was already too late. In different ways, both he and Henry belonged to a past disappearing before their eyes. It was men like Aiden who were the future.
‘In any case,’ Giles went on, ‘there might not be much of an estate to run if the military becomes involved.’ She frowned at him. Was that meant to be reassuring? ‘They’ll want land for their training camps, and local councils will claim any unused fields for food production. Then there’s the livestock. They’ll need to commandeer that and to cut timber from the woods.’
‘You’ve really thought it through.’ She was admiring, though she had no wish to flatter him.
‘I was a soldier as a young man. It gives you an idea of what will be required.’ So she hadn’t been wrong about that. He was a man of action.
‘And a house like this would be requisition
ed?’ The words trembled on her lips. It was a devastating prospect.
‘It’s hard to say. Country houses would certainly be expected to supply accommodation for hospitals and training, but hopefully Summerhayes would be spared.’
‘I hope so, too. It would kill my father to lose it.’
‘Try not to worry,’ he said warmly. ‘The war isn’t yet certain and things will go on much as usual – for a while at least.’
‘One of our men, Eddie Miller – he’s our chauffeur – is already talking of joining up. Poor Ivy. She’s to be married to him on Saturday.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be around for some time yet. Conscription is bound to be delayed. There’s a deep-ingrained hostility to it in this country.’
‘He intends to volunteer.’
‘Does he? Good man. That’s the kind of spirit we’ll need if war does happen.’
She leant forwards across the expanse of starched white cloth. ‘Tell me the truth. You are expecting war, aren’t you?’
‘I won’t disguise the fact that the situation looks very grave. You don’t proffer an ultimatum unless you mean to enforce it.’
‘Perhaps the government shouldn’t have issued one. Perhaps they should have waited.’
‘They had little choice. As a nation, we are bound by treaty to support those countries that Germany is invading.’
‘And if we didn’t meet our pledges? There are plenty of reasons why Britain shouldn’t. We’re an island and it’s not our quarrel.’
‘A treaty is a legal document,’ he remonstrated gently.
‘That’s not the point though, is it? It’s not so much about the law. It’s all about honour. Not losing face. That’s such a male notion.’ Her complexion was flushed. The talk had made her feel angry and powerless.
‘Are you saying that women don’t possess a sense of honour?’
‘I’m saying that in a difficult situation they’re willing to compromise.’
He shook his head. ‘With a force like the Kaiser’s, there is no compromising.’
The Buttonmaker’s daughter Page 17