The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

  “They didn’t say!” she said, her exasperation building. “Look, I was doing the accounts, a taxicab arrived, and there they were with a pile of suitcases.”

  “I hope you didn’t pay the fare.”

  “I tried,” she replied. “Seemed rude not to. But she wouldn’t let me. She’s clearly wealthy. You should have seen the way she tipped the driver. It was positively excessive.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t come to grips with the currency?”

  “Or maybe she’s just generous. Must be nice not to have to count every farthing.”

  “Oh, Antonia,” he said in that voice that made her bristle despite herself. “Why must you grasp the wrong end of the stick every time?”

  Arguments were like trains. They ran away with themselves, belching smoke and hot steam and going so fast that nothing could stop them. They usually ran out of momentum eventually, or rather she would, backing down, her admission of fault water on his fire. This time was different: This time she would not back down.

  “The thing is, and don’t take this the wrong way, my dear”—he said, his tone eventually conciliatory—“how do we even know that they are who they say they are? They could be anybody!”

  “Don’t be silly, Malcolm,” she had replied. “I mean, to what end? What have we got that a woman like that could possibly want?”

  “You mean apart from the house? And the gardens?”

  Antonia laughed.

  “George has always hated Balmarra. Besides, people just don’t just turn up on your doorstep and expect to move in.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to find out why they’re here and how long they intend to stay,” he said. “I mean, one of us has to!”

  “No,” she had replied. “Don’t you dare. George is my brother, after all.”

  As usual, he had challenged her, had questioned the wisdom of her approach. She had stood her ground; for once she had kept her voice level and her emotions in check.

  “Whatever she wants, she’ll play us like fools,” he said under his breath. “A woman like that? I can see it coming.”

  Antonia pinched herself on the arm. Don’t rise, she told herself; don’t take the bait.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. “And I, for one, am happy they came. Apart from you they’re the only family I have left.”

  After briefly admiring the redwood trees and making a small detour to see the glass house, Antonia and Cicely walked back to the house past the servants’ cottages. Half of them were empty now. They didn’t have the staff they used to, not for the two of them. The rain came on again, more heavily this time, and so she suggested they make a dash for home. Antonia stopped for a moment to tuck in the lace of her boot. Her sister-in-law ran on ahead without waiting. Antonia picked up a small silk rosebud that lay in a puddle in the gravel. It had fallen off Cicely Pick’s hat. She put it in her pocket.

  3

  Lunch was lukewarm, which meant that it could have been eaten quickly. Instead the meal was long and awkward. Cicely ate out of politeness rather than hunger. Her appetite was gone, replaced by a gnawing, low-level panic. Antonia, however, intent on her role as hostess, filled any pauses in the conversation with monologues and gave a hugely detailed account of recent roof repairs. This meant that she took far longer than anyone else to clean her plate. They waited as she chewed every single mouthful, Kitty squirming in her seat with boredom.

  Then, once the plates had been cleared, she turned to more personal matters.

  “So how did you and my brother meet?” she asked.

  Cicely took a deep breath. She had been expecting this, and decided to give as few details as possible.

  “It was my father who met him first,” she replied. “In the Planters Club.”

  Antonia cocked her head: Surely there was more?

  “He invited George for dinner. And that was that.”

  “Love at first sight, how wonderful. Lucky old George.”

  Antonia folded up her napkin and stood up; lunch was over. Kitty pounded up the stairs to the nursery. Cicely declined coffee and said she might take a short nap. Not only did she need to get away from any more prying questions, she needed space to think. The letter was gone. As an alternative, she would try to find out Edward Pick’s solicitor’s address and pay him a visit. Then, once she had a copy of Pick’s will, she would politely inform Antonia and Malcolm that the ownership of Balmarra had been passed down to George. Once the process was rolling, it shouldn’t take long. While the paperwork was being drawn up, she would start to instigate the sale of the estate, contacting agents in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But how would she find out who oversaw Edward Pick’s legal affairs? She could hardly just ask. If only George had given her the details before he set off, she wouldn’t be in this predicament.

  At the top of the stairs, distracted, she turned right instead of left and found herself in a corridor on the other side of the house from the guest rooms. Here were two bedrooms, Antonia and Malcolm’s, she deduced, one with a dressing table and the scent of Parma violets and the other with a suit stand and the lingering aroma of pomade. Each room contained a single bed. No wonder the couple were childless. The maid was coming up the servant’s stairs, singing softly to herself. Not wanting to be caught in her host’s sleeping quarters, Cicely headed back to the main stairs as quietly as she could. Antonia was in the hallway below, and so Cicely turned to the nearest door, opened it, and slipped inside.

  It was a library, the walls lined with shelves and the room lit by a long window at the far end. There were books on botany, geology, ornithology, natural history, zoology, and horticulture. One shelf held copies of periodicals—the Journal of the Linnaean Society and the Botanical Magazine. Another was devoted to the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. The library, the books, the magazines looked well-read, a personal space that reflected a singular passion. She hadn’t been expecting this: George had never referred to his father as anything other than an ignorant enthusiast. But it was the same with the glass house, the last stop on her garden tour that morning. If the library was the late Edward Pick’s head, the glass house was evidently his heart. Although the house had been built by his ancestors, Pick had constructed the circular palace for his plants, and no expense had been spared. It was quite unlike any structure she had ever seen before, the central dome at least twenty feet high and filled with palms. Hot pipes heated by a coal-fired boiler ran around the outer and inner edges of the beds, and thousands of panes of glass kept the heat in and glazed the elegant ribs of the dome. The ironwork was lavish. Leaves wound their way up the pillars and fronds curled around the pediments. While the central area, the warmest, housed the tropical plants, the palms and yuccas, the outer areas were split into sections for fruit trees, orchids, and roses.

  Cicely had lingered, taking in the smells and relishing the heat while Antonia listed some of the plants in what seemed like a single exhalation. Most of them, however, she didn’t seem able to identify, which was a little surprising, as there were some rare orchids that even Cicely knew were highly prized. With the boiler burning day and night, she guessed it must cost a small fortune to run. Once a buyer was found, she hoped they would have the money to keep this place going. Or if not, there was surely some money to be made by selling off the plants. But it would be a shame to do that.

  After leafing through a periodical that had been left lying on the desk, Cicely noticed a large wooden filing cabinet. The handles were made of polished brass, cool beneath her fingertips. For a moment Cicely faltered. This felt wrong, intrusive. But she had to finish what she had set out to do, for Kitty, for George, for herself. She had no other option.

  The first drawer was full of receipts for building work, from plumbers, roofers, blacksmiths, and joiners going back at least fifty years. The middle drawer held auction house catalog from London, Paris, and New York. A door slammed. Someone was coming along the corridor. She closed the drawer and picked up a book. Whoever it was passed by, and the hall fell si
lent again.

  As quietly as possible, Cicely pulled out the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. As well as folders for correspondence and old Christmas cards, there was one labeled”Family Documents.” Inside were birth, marriage, and death certificates, doctors’ and funeral bills. Almost without trying she found some correspondence from Edward Pick’s solicitor, a Charles Drummond Esq., with an address in Dunoon.

  Another door slammed in the hallway, followed by footfalls on the stairs. Cicely slipped the letter back into its envelope and put it in her pocket. Before she closed the drawer, her eye fell on a postcard. It was a photograph of snow on the Himalayas taken a from vantage point she knew: the Mall in Darjeeling. The hall was silent again. She picked up the card and turned it over.

  “Just passing through,” George had written. “Home by Christmas.”

  The postmark was 1903. He had not been home by Christmas; in fact, he had not returned at all. They had married in 1904, and Kitty had been born six months later. Was it love at first sight, as Antonia had said? Or was it all a matter of chance and happenstance, the sum of their collective capacity for self-delusion?

  George Pick wasn’t the first man to go to India and not come back. Her own father had relocated temporarily to Darjeeling as a young man to work on the new railway from Siliguri. He liked the climate, found her mother at a dance, married her, and when he could afford it, bought a small tea plantation in the Kanchenjunga foothills. Although he planned many times to return to England to see his long-neglected family—a sister and a couple of elderly aunts—he never did. There was always too much to do, a tea planting or a polo match or a whist drive. Also, in Darjeeling he was a man who might be invited to events, asked his opinion, proposed for committees and teams and boards, a man who one day might have had his name spelled out in gold leaf on members’ lists. In England, she suspected, people would always see him for what he was, an errant son from a lower-middle-class family who had run off to foreign climes to work on the railways.

  For a few years, shortly after he bought the tea plantation, her father had become interested in botany, in propagation and soil acidity. When he had struck up a conversation with the young Scot in the cocktail bar of the Planters Club, a man “just passing through,” a man who not only knew what Camellia sinensis was but suggested ways to increase yield, he believed he had found a kindred spirit.

  Darjeeling was full of Scottish plant hunters that summer, men with broad accents, crude jokes, and dirt under their fingernails. In Britain, orchids were all the rage, and the rarest specimens could be auctioned for hundreds of guineas. In habit, dress, and attitude, George Pick set himself apart from the others. Although he too was in search of rare plants, he claimed he was an expert rather than an opportunist, out to discover new species, not pander to the market. After a few drinks her father invited him for dinner to show off various botanical successes such as his Persea odoratissima, or fragrant bay tree, that he had had grown from seed.

  Cicely remembered that evening vividly. The young plant hunter had stared across the table at Cicely, and she had stared right back. She was eighteen, had never been courted, and—he said later—her skin was perfect as a winter rose. It seemed that while her father’s eye had been fixed on his beloved bay tree, she had blossomed without him noticing. He was therefore oblivious to what was going on and fell for all of George’s subtle manipulation and gentle flattery, for all his feigned interest in tea plant propagation. It had the desired result. Cicely’s father eventually suggested that he could partly sponsor George’s next expedition in return for a place on the trip. Maybe his daughter, George proposed over the cheese course, could join them? It would be an educational, enlightening experience. Put on the spot, Cicely’s father had to acquiesce. Though he was a man of his time, even to him the reason that immediately sprang to mind—the obvious one, that she was a girl—was too crass to utter.

  “Well, I suppose,” he had said. “If Cicely wants to.”

  Cicely did want to. Cicely was bored out of her mind. She was convinced that nothing interesting would ever happen to her if she remained in Darjeeling, and she longed for places well out of her reach: Paris, London, New York. A plant-hunting trip hadn’t been on her list, but it was better than nothing. Especially if it involved George Pick.

  The expedition was duly organized and scheduled to depart in a week. With her father’s investment, George bought more supplies and hired grooms and porters. And then came the question of transportation. Cicely balked at being carried in a palki and said she would ride instead.

  “You’ll get tired,” her father had told her. “You’ll slow us down.”

  “A palki will slow us down,” she had replied.

  George had admitted that she was right.

  “But it won’t be a hack along the Mall,” he added. “It’s a two-day trek—some of it on horseback but often on foot—followed by three days in a rudimentary camp. It will be hot and uncomfortable, with no warm bath and cocktail at the end of a long day.”

  “I think I can live without them,” she had replied. “For a short while, at least.”

  George had laughed out loud—even though her response was not particularly witty—and then he had looked at her for longer than was polite as if wanting more, as if she had stimulated an appetite in him, a thirst. For the first time in her adult life, in her female skin, in the body that had changed so much in the previous year, she had the sense that somehow, without any effort whatsoever, she had the undivided attention of a member of the opposite sex. It was absolutely, undeniably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.

  The local tailor made her a brand-new riding dress in gabardine and a couple of tweed skirts, recommended for keeping out the heat. She packed an umbrella, stockings, undergarments, and a pith helmet, none of which she ever opened or wore, but which some poor soul carried all the way to camp and all the way back again. What did she remember of the expedition now? The lessening humidity as they headed out of the plantations into the forests above, the small Bhutia ponies they rode in single file, and the grooms who walked alongside flicking away the flies with a stick. The porters carried the supplies on their backs, their long hair plaited; and beyond, she remembered, the five peaks of Mount Kanchenjunga, the home of the goddess Yuma Sammang, appeared in fleeting snatches through the clouds.

  “Thank you,” she silently told the goddess, “for bringing George to me.”

  “Orchids are either saprophytic”—George explained as they walked through a forest of birch trees near the place he had chosen to set up camp—“which means they grow on dead or decaying trees, or terrestrial, they grow on the ground, or epiphytic, they grow on trees or shrubs. They are each highly adapted to attract very specific insect pollinators.”

  He stopped, glanced up, and hit a branch above with his stick. His face was shadowed by the leaf canopy.

  “I’m sorry, once I start I become a frightful bore.”

  Her heart beat faster beneath the gabardine.

  “No, please do go on,” said Cicely. “I’m not bored at all.”

  A breeze parted the leaves above, and he was suddenly lit by a shaft of light. She saw his left eye, his cheekbone, the film of sweat on his upper lip, a small scar that cut through his eyebrow. He pushed his hair away from his forehead in one fluid move, then frowned in her general direction, where she stood concealed in the gathering gloom.

  “You see, orchids are masters of attraction,” he continued. “Some of the male insects—”

  He stopped, cleared his throat, perhaps remembering that he was walking through the foothills of the Himalayas and not on the podium of the Royal Horticultural Society. The wind suddenly blew apart the leaves again until they were both standing in bright sunshine like actors on a stage.

  “The male insects—” he repeated, looking straight at her. “I’m sorry, but I’ve completely lost my train of thought.”

  A shout sounded from one of the porters at the front of the march
.

  “And with perfect timing,” George said, “a discovery is made.”

  The porter was poking a plant at the base of an oak tree with a stick. It had tiny pink-and-white flowers with a yellow center. Cicely’s father approached at a run, out of breath and red faced.

  “You’ve found something?” he asked.

  “A Dendrobium amoenum,” said George. He looked around and pointed out another and another.

  “What’s that one?” she asked, pointing to a profusion of pale-yellow flowers attached to a single stem.

  “Hello! That’s a Dendrobium pubescens. I’m so glad your daughter came, Mr. Anderson. As well as having sharp eyes, she seems to have brought us good fortune.”

  “Nothing new, though?” her father asked. “Nothing like the Snow Tree?”

  “I’m afraid not,” George replied.

  “But it’s early days, surely,” her father said.

  “Absolutely.” His eyes met hers again for the briefest of seconds.

  She had been warned at her convent school of the peril of toying with the male sex. Flirting was a sin, she was taught by the nuns, dangerous and pernicious, while coyness was indicative of an unstable mind. At the time of the expedition, she had never met a man she liked enough to do anything potentially damaging with. The young men she had been introduced to at dances, balls, and polo matches could barely string two words together, let alone make conversation. Flirting was impossible even if she had been tempted to try it. George Pick, however, was a man of the nuns’ worst nightmares. Not only was he eloquent, but his hair was fair, his eyes the palest gray, his cheekbones high, and he had a habit of leaning in a little too close when conversing, due to a slight deafness he attributed to his childhood bout of measles. She also could not ignore the fact that he was nicely built—tall, slim, descended, he joked, from a Viking chieftain. And when he stood at the base of a tree while a porter shimmied up the trunk to fetch rare blooms or seedpods, or he climbed up the side of a waterfall to get his bearings, it was not too hard to believe that what he claimed was true.