The Magic Hour

by Charlotte Bingham

  Cyrene sat up.

  ‘Everyone. Mummy, Douro, the lawyer people. Everything has to be sold, before Daddy can start again with his new – his new person.’

  ‘Thing!’ Jessamine shouted. ‘His new thing.’

  ‘She won’t have anything around that has to do with us. Anthony and Rufus have had to choose anything they want, and Mummy and us too, and everything we can’t use will go into storage, and then she will move in after the divorce, when they’re married, and nothing is to remind her of us.’

  ‘Lucky Daddy is so rich, isn’t it?’ Jessamine added in a sarcastic voice. ‘Otherwise what would he do? He might have to get a job or something. He might not be able to get rid of us all at a moment’s notice, and ruin Mummy’s life, make us all go and live in London in a beastly flat, so isn’t it lucky he is so rich?’

  ‘No, it’s ner-not lucky at all, it-it’s very unlucky,’ Alexandra agreed. ‘And I don’t think you should have to leave your home, I think that’s terrible. It’s terrible for you to have to go and live in London, and terrible to have the horses sold. And terrible for the stable staff too, they will mer-miss the horses so much. What will happen ter-to them, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh, they’ve gone anyway. Westrup died, you know. And the oik got the sack. Poor Oik, Daddy said he was found misbehaving in a barn. Like master like servant, Mummy said. Mrs O’Brien was given the sack ages ago, and has gone to work for a lady in Norfolk, lucky woman her. God, Mummy is such a rotten cook, all we have is either a boiled egg and fingers, or bacon and cabbage, she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything. She can’t even make Yorkshire pudding.’

  ‘Oh her-her-heavens, really? Well, that’s one-one thing I can do, I can cer-cook, and I can cook quite well.’

  There was a short pause while two pairs of reddened eyes stared round at Alexandra.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I was ter-ter-taught to cook by Mavis, my grandmother’s old cook; she taught me to cook every rainy day there was, and on Sunday mer-mornings after church I would always der-der-do the vegetables and help with the puddings. Queen of puddings, roly poly pudding with treacle on top, I can make them all. I could make per-pastry when I was knee high to a grasshopper. Mer-Mavis used to stand me on a chair, eight ounces of flour, four ounces of fat, a per-pinch of salt if it’s for steak and kidney pie, a per-pinch of sugar and a squeeze of lemon if it’s for apples, or apples and blackberry. Deliciously light, plenty of air, and not a thought of it der-doing anything except melt in your mouth.’

  Without realising it Alexandra was mimicking Mavis’s voice as she had heard it when she was a child, and as she did so she imagined she was back in the old flagstoned kitchen at Lower Bridge Farm – a floor that Kay Cullen had already had removed in favour of black and white lino tiles. But as she finished speaking it seemed to Alexandra that she could hear the rain flinging itself against the diamond-paned windows, and feel the warmth of the old cream-coloured Aga behind her, as she watched Mavis, her thin gold wedding ring carefully removed and hanging on the dresser hook, her large-boned hands sifting carefully through the flour before she nodded to Alexandra to add a little water from the jug to the mixture they were both watching so carefully.

  ‘Come on, coz!’ Cyrene was off her bed and had started dragging Alexandra after her. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  ‘What do you wer-wer-want? What do you want?’

  Alexandra stopped, standing stubbornly facing Cyrene.

  ‘We wer-wer-want you to cook for us,’ Jessamine commanded, at the same time mimicking Alexandra, ‘and we-we’re going to eat what you cook, and you can stay here as long as we der-der-do, no matter what Daddy or his stupid lawyers say, because if you can cook we aren’t going to let go of you, Alexandra Stamford, and that is certain.’

  Alexandra started to laugh because she always tried to take people mimicking her in good part, but also because she knew now that she was wanted at Knighton Hall, and that was terrific.

  She followed both her cousins down the wide staircase to the marble-floored hall, and so through the green baize doors to the kitchens and the sculleries, where they proceeded to dart about trying to find flour, and lard, and every other kind of ingredient.

  Later they would watch Alexandra cooking them a steak and kidney pie, baked potatoes and chopped cabbage, which they would not eat, but would wolf down, as if they had not had a decent meal in weeks, which it seemed they had not, because – ‘Mummy can’t even boil an egg’.

  Changes

  Tom stared up at Mrs Posnet. She was looking sanguine, amused, afffectionate even.

  ‘Here, you’d better have these, and then drink this,’ she commanded, putting a large cup of black coffee, a glass of water, and two aspirin down on the side table beside his bed.

  She stood back and stared at Tom, her expression unchanged.

  ‘You stuck one on with young Bob Atkins last night,’ she continued as Tom sat up feeling sicker than he’d ever felt in his life. ‘And now you’re paying for it. Luckily, happily, you passed out before you could wolf down my steak and kidney pie, so that was God smiling down on both of us, weren’t it?’

  Tom sat on the side of the bed and put out a trembling hand for the aspirin, which he took and duly swallowed.

  ‘Now for the coffee,’ Mrs Posnet went on in a maternal voice, ‘and after that I should lie back down again while your head clears. You want to watch that Bob Atkins,’ she went on, ‘he’s always been a bit of a lad, specially now he’s been at university. Students. They learn everything except what they should at those places. I don’t know why anyone bothers with them, really I don’t, but I do know you’re a sober-sides, so just watch him in future, and steer your boat past his of a Saturday night. He’s got a stepfather indulges him with motor cars and the like and you’ve got nothing but what you stand up in. That’s the difference between you two, and always will be.’

  Tom nodded as he sipped the dark sweet coffee, not paying much attention, wondering only if he would ever again be free of pain.

  Later Mrs Posnet looked in on him and, seeing him dressed and shaved, asked him in for Sunday lunch.

  ‘And no charge. Today you’re my guest, young man. All the other lodgers are out, and seeing that I’m on my own, I’m grateful to have you for company.’

  She cooked them a splendid roast lunch followed by a magnificent lemon meringue pie, all of which – in the light of how ill he had felt earlier – Tom was surprised to find that he relished.

  ‘You’ll be better for that.’

  They both sat back after the last piece of pudding had been demolished and Mrs Posnet smiled as Tom sighed with satisfaction.

  ‘You sound like a horse, young man.’

  Tom looked across at her.

  ‘I used to look after horses, perhaps it’s catching.’

  Mrs Posnet nodded.

  ‘Perhaps it is. My late husband, his mother fed him goat’s milk when he was young, because cow’s milk brought him out in a rash, and blow me if he didn’t look like a goat. Everyone said so. I used to say on Monday when I hung out the washing that I wouldn’t have been shocked to find him eating the socks off of it.’ She smiled. ‘And he was as nimble as a goat too. No, there’s a lot to be said for what’s in a baby’s bottle, and more to be said for what’s in the soil. They say that round here. “It’s all in the soil.”’

  Tom smiled at that. He was used to hearing Mr Blakemore saying, ‘It’s all in the soil,’ at least once a day, if not twice. Mr Blakemore would murmur it in passing, half to himself, and half to anyone who happened to be near by.

  ‘Do you know, young man, that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since you arrived here?’

  Tom stared at her.

  ‘And it’s no good you staring like that. You’re that serious, not like a young person at all. But doubtless with a full stomach and a job to go to we’ll see more of that smile, but less of Bob Atkins, eh?’

  She started to clear the dishes, and Tom
stood up at once to help her.

  ‘Your mother trained you well, didn’t she?’

  Tom dropped his eyes. His mother. He had only heard from her once since she had been dismissed from Knighton Hall and gone to Norfolk. She had sent him a card hoping that he was all right and reassuring him that she had found a good new position in Norfolk with some people called Stirling-Jones, and would keep in touch, which of course she had not, because Ma always did have trouble writing letters. Once she was in a new position it was as if the writing of a letter reminded her of yet another change of address, of yet another new position which she would have a hard job holding down. So she just sent postal orders and scribbled on the back of envelopes.

  Tom resolved he must write to her; he had her address. He would write to her. He would write and tell her there was no need for her to send him any more money. He hurried through the drying up knowing that he should have done as much weeks ago, but he was too busy holding down his own job. He suddenly knew he had to hear her voice, had to know how she was exactly, that a letter would never do.

  * * *

  ‘I wonder if I could speak to Mrs O’Brien, please?’

  ‘Mrs O’Brien no longer works here …’

  Tom pushed some more money into the coin box.

  ‘But she must work there.’

  ‘Not any more she doesn’t.’

  ‘Have you any idea where she might be? Have you any forwarding address for her, please?’

  ‘Whom am I speaking to?’

  More money spluttered into the box before Tom could continue.

  ‘Her son. Thomas O’Brien. I’m her son.’

  ‘Oh yes, she said she was going to stay with you, that’s what she said. More than that I can’t say, I’m afraid. And Mrs Stirling-Jones is away in the United States, so that’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid. They terminated their relationship somewhat abruptly, if one can say that? Something to do with broken dishes at a dinner party, and more than that I won’t say.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’

  Tom replaced the receiver and burst out of the public telephone box feeling numb, his headache of the morning swiftly returning, despair and bewilderment jostling themselves for position in his heart. Why hadn’t his mother let him know she was leaving Mrs Stirling-Jones’s employment? Why hadn’t she searched out Tom at Mrs Posnet’s house? She knew where he was. They could have talked about everything. He could have helped her find a new job. Instead she had just disappeared.

  He walked slowly back to his room, knowing now what must have happened, knowing that his mother must have fallen off the wagon. That’s what ‘dropped dishes’ always meant: if she was dropping dishes she must have succumbed to tasting some sauce with wine in it, as she had that last time when she actually passed out when she was first at Knighton Hall, and then again when the second cook was off sick and she had tasted the sauce by mistake. Anything could set her off, he knew that as well as anyone.

  ‘Just don’t taste anything, Ma. Get someone else to taste for you, really. Just don’t taste anything.’

  When he was a little boy following his mother round England, listening to her passing off her drinking problem and frequent dismissals as mere misfortunes or twists of fate, when he was traipsing after her, pretending to like always being at new lodgings, forever moving in and out of new staff cottages as Ma took on yet another job, Tom, young as he was, had soon come to realise that his mother’s constant problems could not be entirely due to the war.

  ‘Your mother actually has an allergy to anything with alcohol in it,’ a kindly doctor had at last taken the time to explain, as the war, and with it his mother’s frequent excuses for their equally frequent moves, had at last come to an end. ‘A violent allergy. One taste and it will always have a terrible effect on her. You must see that your mother never even has cough medicine, young Tom, not even a mouth rinse, nothing with alcohol in it, or she will become unstable. It’s not her fault. It’s a disease, an allergy, nothing to be ashamed of, just a fact, and as long as you look out for her, she will be fine, really she will.’

  Tom had looked out for her, but since he was occasionally forced to attend some local school or another, looking out for his mother was not always possible. And now it had happened again. Because he had not been able to look out for her, had forgotten to ring her, she had disappeared, but to where? Suddenly the world seemed so damned big, so vast and so empty, the despair in him deepened into panic.

  ‘What’s the matter, young man?’

  Mrs Posnet eyed him from the door. She was not so stupid that she had not noticed his reaction to his mother being mentioned, and how, soon after, he had disappeared to the telephone box on the corner, and now was back looking as if he had lost his job.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Tom went to walk past her, but Mrs Posnet stopped him.

  ‘Not nothing, not nothing at all, young man, I can see that. Is your mum not well?’

  ‘My mother’s left her job again, disappeared, not left any new address. I don’t know where she is, where I’ll find her. She must have been given the sack again,’ he ended bitterly.

  Mrs Posnet felt embarrassed for him, and perhaps because of this she picked up her old pre-war kettle and quickly filled it, which was always the first thing she did when she had to think of the right reply.

  ‘Don’t worry, young Tom, if she needs you she’ll be back to you in a trice. No news is good news, eh? We must always assume the best until we hear to the contrary.’

  Tom turned away, nodding, despite the fact that he knew in reality this was far from being the case. But he could not say as much to his landlady, could not tell her that his mother was an alcoholic, that she might be insensible somewhere, anywhere, lying in a ditch unconscious, as he had once found her, or in some bus shelter or on a railway station, passed out.

  ‘There we are, tea with two sugars, get that down you, and stop looking like the world’s come to an end, because it hasn’t, at least not yet. Your mother may have found love, she may have gone for a new job, she may have tried to write to you and the letter got lost. Cheer up. Down in the mouth does no one any good, eh?’

  Alexandra could not look her uncle in the face, so she found herself staring instead at the top button on his waistcoat. When she did manage to raise her eyes to his face, when he was not looking at her, she saw at once that he had the same look that her father now seemed to sport. It was strange, because outwardly they both seemed unchanged, both wore the same clothes, both had thick heads of hair that were greying at the sides, both wore country tweeds, albeit of very different designs, but the look on both their faces was precisely the same, and there was an increased swagger to their walks.

  ‘Just as if no man has ever got a young woman banged up before. No reason for a divorce, nothing to do with love, everything to do with conceit,’ Alexandra had heard Douro saying bitterly to someone on the library telephone only the previous day.

  Douro would not be caught saying such a thing now that Jamie Millington was once more occupying his house, pouring the drinks, generally dispensing bonhomie while, by prior arrangement, until Monday morning once more dawned, his soon-to-be ex-wife Tasha was forced to spend the weekend ignominiously holed up in one of the tenants’ cottages on the estate.

  ‘You see, darlings, your father and I are trying to keep everything as normal as possible,’ Tasha could be heard saying hopelessly and helplessly, over and over every weekend, as she dutifully packed her overnight bag and prepared to retire to a vacant cottage on the estate.

  But of course nothing could be kept remotely normal, least of all the formal meals where the three girls were encouraged to sit silently at the long mahogany dining-room table, at the foot of which, in their mother’s place, sat Miss Jennifer Langley-Ancram.

  ‘Miss wher-wher-whatie whatie what?’ Alexandra had heard herself asking when she was first told the full name of Knighton Hall’s Public Enemy Number One.

  Miss Jenn
ifer Languorous-Anagram was what Jessamine and Cyrene called their father’s mistress, which was not at all funny, but somehow seemed to cheer them up every time they repeated it, which they did all too often.

  Jennifer Langley-Ancram was dark-haired and of medium height. She spoke with an accent so affected that even Alexandra, brought up in far less grand circumstances than at Knighton Hall, could not help observing after first meeting her that it was as if she had swallowed not just a plum, but a whole orchard.

  ‘Well now, and what did you all get up to today?’

  Silence as Jessamine and Cyrene stared up the table at their future stepmother.

  ‘We went for a walk,’ Alexandra volunteered. ‘And we saw pheasant—’

  ‘And we let them out!’

  Jamie and Jennifer both stared at Cyrene as if she herself were a pheasant that they would jointly like to shoot.

  ‘You what? I hope that’s not true, Cyrene?’

  ‘No, of course it’s not. Someone else had let them out.’ Jessamine smiled first at her father and then at Jennifer. ‘So there was nothing to do but watch them run about, poor things. Once they’re in the wild again they just don’t know what to do with themselves.’

  ‘See to it in the morning, would you, Douro?’ Jamie turned to his estate manager, reproof in his eyes.

  In return Douro nodded, his eyes firmly on his soup plate. With the advent of Jennifer to the house at the weekends, had also come the hiring of a weekend cook, and a good cook at that.

  Jennifer stared down the table at Jamie.

  ‘There is a great deal to be done at Knighton Hall, it seems,’ she said, over-enunciating her words in such a way that it was as if she were speaking down the table to her husband-to-be in some sort of code.

  Jamie smiled appreciatively down the table back to her, but his smile disappeared as Jessamine suddenly and with surprising and dextrous accuracy threw the contents of her wine glass in her stepmother’s face.

  No one would ever quite know what occasioned such barbarity. Perhaps it had been the annoyingly smug expression on Jennifer’s face, perhaps it was the way she had said ‘Knighton Hall’ as if she had mentally already moved into the house, and was setting about making it hers, but whatever it was, there was one undeniable fact: the wine was sticky. It was a type of ginger wine that Mrs O’Brien had been in the habit of making for the older children, a recipe she had copied from a very old book that had a comforting amount of sugar: good for long winter days spent outside, good for tucking into your saddle bag before you set off on a ride.