He steadied his breathing, emptied his champagne glass in one swallow then turned to face them, eyes so cold and bleak that Lily’s heart seemed to turn right over.
‘I hopped that damned plane over the line so many times I went dizzy with it. My job was to check where our artillery was stationed, and where the enemy was. I rarely got involved personally with any fighting. A lonely war, that’s what I had. So when I actually came down next to a German patrol, it stunned the life out of me. Would you believe it was my good fortune that it was Christmas, and they were all more in the mood for celebrating than for killing. Even greater good luck that I’d learned always to carry with me a few cigars. We have that in common at least, Father.’
Edward said nothing.
‘I owe my life to those damned cigars.’ Bertie almost smiled at the memory. ‘They were all right, those chaps. Thought I was nuts to walk over to them with a cigar in my hand instead of a pistol. I shouted “Joyeux Noel”, since I don’t know any German, and they burst out laughing. We shared their beer, my cigars and a few jokes, in French since it was the only common language between us. Afterwards they happily handed over their guns and surrendered without rancour. Jolly good sports, in fact. They were cold and hungry, I expect, and thought I might feed them.
‘I led them to a nearby battalion dugout that I’d spotted when flying in. So there you have it. Some bloody hero!’
Margot’s eyes shone with tears. ‘But you were so brave to walk towards them.’
‘They were singing Christmas carols, for God’s sake. I knew I was in no danger.’
Margot turned to Edward. ‘Tell him that he is a hero. It doesn’t make any difference that it was Christmas and they surrendered.’
‘They were still the enemy?’ Selene asked, her pretty face the picture of puzzlement.
‘They were drunk,’ Bertie said bluntly.
Edward stared at his son for a long moment without speaking, an expression of disillusionment on his face. It was so dreadful to see, it made Lily shudder. ‘You accepted a medal for that?’
Bertie shrugged. ‘My commanding officer wouldn’t hear otherwise. But it has blighted me, if you want to know. How could it not when more than half my mates have been blasted to bits or maimed?’
Edward ground out his own cigar in the remains of his strawberry meringue and stood up. Bertie watched with haunted eyes as he tossed aside his napkin and walked, head held high, from the room.
Margot got up too, all in a flurry, cast an angry glance upon all three of them, and seeking someone to blame, as usual focused her furious glare upon Lily.
‘You should have warned me! You must have known what Bertie meant to do. You’ve allowed him to destroy his poor father.’
As she hurried after Edward, the three young people remained where they were, an unmoving tableau. Selene shocked into silence for once, Bertie frozen in his pacing, standing stock still the middle of the room, and Lily unable to think of a word to release them all.
But the silence did not last long. It was broken by an ear-splitting scream which brought them all from their paralysis and running out into the hall.
Margot stood at the foot of the wide staircase, face white as a ghost, swaying slightly as she put one shaking hand on the banister rail. Selene was the first to reach her.
‘Mama? What is it?’
She didn’t really need to ask. For there was Edward, halfway up the stairs. He lay crumpled like a rag doll, and it was perfectly clear to all of them that he was going nowhere, not ever again.
‘My darling Edward is gone. What am I to do?’ And the redoubtable Margot put her face in her hands and began to sob.
The funeral took place with all the pomp and circumstance that Margot, at least, considered necessary. A hearse drawn by no fewer than six horses with plumes in the grand old style bore her husband to the cemetery, and a marble monument to his memory was ordered to be placed on his grave with all speed.
Edward’s friends and neighbours, together with members of his extended family, were invited to the house afterwards for one of Margot’s famous luncheons. Salmon patties, Edward’s favourite, were served together with chicken legs, game pies, potted char and anchovy butter. The finest Madeira was offered to the ladies, port for the gentlemen, and not a single person present could dispute the fact that no expense had been spared to give him a good send-off.
‘Say what you like about her,’ the gossips said, ‘snobby and arrogant though she may be, there’s no doubt she loved that soft-hearted husband of hers.’
‘Aye, good pair they were, stuck together through the years. Worked hard and made a fortune.’
‘He’ll cut up pretty well, no doubt about that.’
Margot refused to have any truck with reading the will on the day she buried Edward, and gave the family solicitor short shrift for daring to suggest it.
‘What with Selene locked in her room refusing to speak to anyone, Bertie in a sulk and the servants weeping all over the place, I really cannot permit it,’ she said.
Margot did not mention Lily, to whom she had not spoken since the day of Edward’s untimely demise. For wasn’t she the one to blame for not warning them of Bertie’s intentions?
‘I shall call first thing in the morning then, Mrs Clermont-Read.’
‘No.’ Margot was wondering why solicitors were always so thin and sour-faced when they supposedly earned so much money. ‘Not before two in the afternoon, if you please. I might have the strength by then.’
Arthur T. Groves, of Groves, Sutton & Barnfather, inclined his head and thankfully took his leave. He was in no hurry to face Mrs Clermont-Read. But the following day, at two o’clock precisely, he arrived as instructed, conducted his business and found no joy in the prospect.
When he had gone the family sat stunned, no sound but that of the doleful ticking of the grandfather clock.
It seemed that Edward had left nothing but debts.
There were a few shares in the Public Steamer Company, worth a very little, but his freight business was close to collapse and Mr Groves graciously but firmly explained that it could not be saved except by a further investment of capital, which they themselves did not possess. Not only were they no longer rich, they were in fact exceedingly poor. Could even lose the roof over their heads. It was Margot’s nightmare come true.
‘What nonsense,’ she bravely riposted. ‘Edward had recently expanded, rented extra premises, built a new ship - all on the strength of new business from Marcus Kirkby.’
‘Indeed he had, and given time I’m sure the project would have proved a sound one. Unfortunately his borrowings were huge, far outstripping the profits at this stage in the venture. Your husband’s name was well respected in business and banking circles. His word was his bond, you might say. Now that he is dead, that trust dies with him.’
Everyone tacitly understood him to mean that Bertie was not to be trusted with continuing the family business as soundly.
‘All loans have been called in. A sad but frequent occurrence, Mrs Clermont-Read. I’m afraid Mr Clermont-Read’s assets will not be sufficient to meet his debts.’
Now they sat and pondered on these words, letting the reality of their situation slowly sink in. After ten whole minutes of silence, during which time Lily could feel nothing but admiration for Margot’s stoicism throughout the whole awful proceedings, Selene began to scream. She screamed so loudly and for so long that she had to be carried upstairs to her room and dosed liberally with Extract of Poppy.
Bertie announced he was going down to the Marina Hotel for a glass of something comforting. ‘Perhaps even a whole bloody bottle of champers. Or a dozen strong whiskies.’
‘How will that help exactly?’ Margot sourly enquired, but he merely adjusted his hat to a rakish angle, collected his kid gloves and declared that it would at least make him feel a whole lot better.
The two women sat alone. Margot’s eyes met Lily’s, an accusing glare urging her to do the same. ‘Go on,’ she s
aid at last. ‘Leave the sinking ship, why don’t you?’
Lily stood up, and calmly reached for the bell pull. ‘I think we’ll have another pot of tea, don’t you? Then we’d best put our thinking caps on.’
Margot not only declined to follow this suggestion, but refused to discuss the matter at all. Nor, it seemed, had she any intention of economising. So far as she was concerned life must continue as normal, as if all the clocks had stopped on the day of Edward’s demise.
‘I will not believe it,’ was her perpetual cry. ‘I am perfectly sure that when the estate is properly settled, we shall find silly Mr Groves to be entirely wrong.’
It was the most miserable winter at Barwick House that Lily could ever remember. Glowering mountains blended seamlessly into clouded skies while rain battered the bay windows and ran down the soaking lawns into a slate grey lake. The cold was merciless, penetrating every room since fuel was in short supply and bedroom fires were banned. The coal merchant had apparently refused to deliver any more coal until his account was settled.
‘The ingratitude of the man!’ Margot stormed.
George was persuaded to cut logs for them, but most of the servants packed their bags and walked out, some of them with wages still owing.
Unperturbed, Margot ordered winter gowns for herself and Selene, looking askance when Lily refused even to consider one this year. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by turning into a drab,’ was her immediate response.
‘I’m not short of clothes to wear,’ Lily pointed out. In fact she’d never been so well dressed in her life. ‘I really think we should consider where our future income is to come from before we spend another penny. It isn’t simply coal we’re short of, Margot. How are we to pay the grocer or the butcher, for instance?’
‘Or the candle-stick maker? Heavens, Lily, haven’t you yet learned to set aside your working-class limitations? They shall wait, of course, as they have always done.’
‘They won’t wait forever.’
‘How can I go to dinner in last season’s gown?’ Selene, still quietly harbouring a fierce resentment towards Lily, seemed to grow ever more sour and spinsterish, curling her once pretty mouth down into a perpetual line of discontent. Losing a fiancé had been unfortunate, but becoming poor was another matter entirely. ‘It is utterly unbearable,’ she declared in her pettish way. ‘I refuse to tolerate it.’
She had, in fact, already entered into discussions with Marcus upon her dire dilemma. Selene had even asked him to leave his sickly wife, but held out little hope that he would do so.
‘I really do not see how you have the right to tell us what to do, Lily. Our little difficulties need not concern you at all.’
Frustration bubbled up in her at the wanton way in which Selene was prepared to squander money, without a thought for where the next penny was to come from. ‘Of course it concerns me. I have Thomas to think of, don’t I? He needs food in his mouth, a home to live in. He is Bertie’s son.’
Margot opened her mouth to make some acid comment along the lines that she only had Lily’s word for that, but thought better of it. Thomas seemed to be the only heir to Barwick House she was likely to see in her lifetime, certainly the way things were at present.
If she lost him, she would have no one to inherit the house and the Clermont-Read fortune.
A voice inside her head reminded Margot that the latter had vanished and the former may not be hers much longer, but she paid it no heed. Moving out of her home was quite out of the question. ‘It’s too dreadfully common to be always discussing money. I will not permit it,’ she said, closing the subject yet again.
The three women remained trapped in the winter-bound house with nothing resolved, and no hope of rescue.
Bertie spent his days in his room, or being waited upon hand and foot by his adoring mother. More often he was out of the house altogether, propping up the bar in some hostelry or other, if Lily was any judge. It was a worry to know how to persuade him to take their plight seriously. Perhaps, Lily decided, the answer lay with Rose. Certainly something had to be done. Bertie needed help, and Rose might just be the one to give it to him.
Lily found her still working her vegetable stall on the market. She timidly approached, not knowing what to expect.
‘Well, well, look what the wind’s blown in.’ Rose stood, hands on hips, as the two of them took stock of each other. Time had not been kind to her. There were dark bruises beneath her eyes, her hair had lost its shine and the old coat which Hannah had made over for her lay in a crumpled heap on a pile of rotting cabbages.
Rose offered terse condolences over the loss of Edward then turned her attention to serving a couple of customers while Lily patiently waited.
When the customers had gone, she paid excessive attention to paring off the outer leaves of a red cabbage, letting a grim silence fall between them. At last she felt driven to ask, ‘I hear Bertie’s home?’
‘Yes.’ Lily glanced at her closed face, lips tightly pressed together like a young bud that refused to open. ‘It’s about him that I’ve come to see you.’
‘He’s not ill?’ She glanced up then, the knife still in her hand. ‘I heard he’d no injuries, no missing limbs, naught to worry over but a few old shrapnel wounds.’ There was anxiety in her tone from which Lily took heart.
‘He’s well ... physically at least.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Yes.’ Lily picked up a red apple, rubbed it against her sleeve, looked as if she might bite into it, then placed it back on the pile. ‘I know we’re not exactly friends any more, but I wondered ... Could we talk?’
‘I’m listening.’
Lily glanced about at the crowd, all no doubt discreetly listening too. ‘Somewhere a bit more private?’
‘I’m due a ten-minute break. We could take a turn along the shore?’
They walked beneath the canopy of trees by the lake, as they had done on the day they’d first met so many years before, when Rose had explained the facts of life to Lily. Now it was her turn to relate her concern for Bertie, including a frank account of their failed attempt to resume marital relations. Rose directed all her attention on peeling a fat orange, the juice running over her fingers, while Lily kept her gaze upon a bank of clouds ganging up on Fairfield.
‘He’s got it into his head that he’s impotent.’ There, she’d said the word.
‘Impotent? Bertie?’ Rose almost choked on the orange. ‘I wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible.’
Lily had the grace to smile. ‘Me neither.’ Here she paused, afraid to go on, to explain what she needed. Unfortunately Rose was way ahead of her. She gobbled down the last of the orange, licked her fingers and, wiping her sticky hands on her apron, drew herself up, stiff and straight-backed.
‘And you reckoned I might make him better, eh? Take up wi’ your Bertie where we left off?’ She gave a funny little laugh that sounded coarse and cold. When she folded her arms across her thin chest it might have been her mother Nan standing there. ‘What sort of a request is that to make of an honest woman? Oh, aye, I’m honest. I haven’t taken up me mam’s profession, for all there’s been plenty of opportunity. And, unlike you, I certainly could’ve done wi’ the money.’
‘I never suggested you had.’
‘So what are you asking exactly?’
Lily sighed. ‘I don’t know. I came to you for help. Advice perhaps, from a friend.’
‘You want me to give him back his manhood. Is that it? You must be mad!’
Confused, Lily acknowledged that the idea had been in her mind. ‘I know it would be a lot to ask.’
‘It’s a bleeding cheek, that’s what it is. And why? So you can carry on wi’ your fancy man, undisturbed by conscience?’
Stung by this, Lily jerked up her chin but the words rushed out before she could stop them. ‘How did you know? I mean - that’s not the way of it at all.’
Rose’s chuckle deepened. ‘Oh, I reckon it is. Tell me I’m wrong th
en? Tell me you’re innocent? Go on. I’ll believe you where thousands wouldn’t.’
A long silence, then Lily drew in a shaky breath. ‘All right, it’s true. How did you guess?’
‘Nay, lass, it’s common gossip. Did you really think they’d forget all about it, just because your husband has come home?’
‘I must have him, Rose. I need him. He’s in my thoughts day and night. Sometimes I can’t eat I feel so sick with wanting him. I’ve tried to give him up, but I can’t. I must see him again or I’ll die!’
‘By heck, you have got it bad.’
Lily looked at her one-time friend with pained eyes. ‘But how can I leave Bertie with no money, no home, no child, and after all I’ve done to that family.’ The tears that had been held back all winter finally flowed. Rose stood for a moment, nonplussed by such loss of control, then she gathered Lily close in her scrawny arms, tut-tutting and patting her shoulders as if they were girls again.
‘Nay, don’t tek on so.’ When the tears had been mopped up by the dearly familiar red handkerchief, now more of a washed-out pink, Rose brought forth a bottle of cold tea from her capacious apron pocket and gave a sip to Lily. Well laced with gin, it warmed her stomach and steadied her nerves.
But for all her words of comfort, Rose held fast to her principles. ‘You should be honest. Tell Bertie what you feel.’
‘I can’t.’
Rose wagged a finger reprovingly. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because you enjoy living in that fancy house, with the money and status that goes wi’ it.’
‘There isn’t any money.’ Lily spoke so quietly that Rose had to ask her to repeat it, more than once in fact, with long explanations in between, before she was finally convinced.
‘By heck, that’s a facer! ‘Ow did it come about? And ‘ow are you managing?’
The situation at Barwick House, Selene’s sour sulks, Margot’s refusal to face reality, was fully described. ‘I must do something to help,’ Lily finished. ‘I feel responsible, you see.’
‘I thought you hated the Clermont-Reads?’
Lakeland Lily Page 32