The Glass House

by Beatrice Colin

  Antonia picked up an illustrated journal and started to flick through the pages as she processed this new information.

  Cicely stood up and stretched. “I need a breath of fresh air,” she announced. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Moments later the dressmaker opened the door, ushered out the previous client, and invited Antonia into the fitting room. She would mull over the implications of Cicely and Kitty’s ancestry later. First there was more urgent business to attend to. Rolls of silk, satin, taffeta, faille, wool, and chenille in every shade were stacked on shelves that reached the ceiling. How could one begin to pick a fabric, a color, a length?

  “What style are you looking for?” asked the dressmaker after Antonia had mentioned that she was looking for an evening gown.

  Cicely would know. But Cicely wasn’t there. Had she offended her? She didn’t seem put out when she left. The dressmaker sighed, and so Antonia turned and glanced around the room. A ball gown in purple taffeta with several layers of flounce, in a style similar to one that she had admired in The Queen, was displayed on a mannequin.

  “Now that,” said Antonia, “might be just the ticket.”

  The dressmaker wiped her palms on her skirts and began to remove the dress from its stand.

  Antonia tried not to look at herself in the glass as the dressmaker fussed around the neckline, her mouth full of pins; she didn’t want to spoil the impact. She knew that she was nothing special, that she was no longer young, that she had the kind of face that people forgot. Eventually the dressmaker stood back.

  “There we are,” she said.

  As the afternoon light streamed through the window, Antonia finally looked at herself, turning one way and then the other. The color of the fabric made her skin look pale, milk white, almost the opposite of tan. Her cheeks, however, were pinched ruddy. And yet she didn’t look as terrible as she thought she might. The dress reminded her of a rhododendron bloom, the petals pleated and the flowers blowsy. The high bodice flattered her, and the small train made her look taller. What would Malcolm say? Would he think it too revealing? Too fussy? Too expensive? Did she have the nerve to wear a dress like this? Maybe she should choose something in a plainer color, one more suited to a woman of her age?

  “What do you think, Cicely?” she called out through the open door.

  But the salon was still empty; her sister-in-law had not returned.

  “She probably got confused,” the dressmaker suggested. “One city street looks very much like another if you’re not familiar with it. Now, when do you need it by?”

  * * *

   First Antonia strode the length of the Argyll Arcade, walking twice the pace of everyone else and peering into the shops. There was no sign of her. Then, on Buchanan Street, she hailed a horse-drawn cab and rode all the way along to the Trongate, scanning both sides of the street, but to no avail. Glasgow suddenly seemed huge and unfriendly. How would Cicely find her way home to Balmarra? For that matter, how would she find her way to the station? She was a foreigner, unused to British cities. She might be preyed upon by thieves, abducted by criminals. Antonia would have to inform the police. A search party would be sent out. The newspapers would carry a description and a plea for information. Once more Malcolm would blame her.

  When she had driven back and forth half a dozen times along every major street, she asked the driver to head along the Saltmarket toward the river—not the river, please, not a drowning!—in case Cicely had lost her bearings and taken a wrong turn. It was an area that Antonia wasn’t familiar with. Unlike the streets farther west, the air was thick with the stink of the boiling glue and effluent from the factories and tanneries. The tenements were overcrowded and crumbling—slums, basically, that housed too many people in too little space. And yet it was here that she at last found Cicely Pick, coming out of a narrow alleyway, or wynd, as they were known, strung with washing above gutters filled with sewage. She was easy to spot—a well-dressed woman walking alone on the Saltmarket—and had already drawn a small crowd of people who stopped and stared.

  “There she is. Cicely!” Antonia called out.

  She walked on, unhearing. The street noise, the trams, the factories, and the tanneries were too loud.

  “I’ll fetch her,” said the cabdriver, pulling in, then climbing down from his bench. “It’s not a place for a lady.”

  “What were you thinking?!” said Antonia when Cicely finally climbed into the cab beside her. “You could have caught something! You could have been robbed, murdered, or worse!”

  “Well, I obviously wasn’t, was I?” Cicely replied.

  After that, George’s wife was silent. She didn’t ask about the dressmaker’s or say a word all the way through high tea at the Grosvenor on Gordon Street. She refused both cake and scone, which prompted Antonia to explain that she hadn’t had any lunch before she piled her plate. It was a such a waste, otherwise. And so finally, in Central Station, while the porter was looking for some seats in the first-class carriage on the train to Gourock, Antonia confronted her.

  “Well?” she asked. “Are you going to explain? What were you doing down there?”

  Cicely climbed aboard the train and took her seat.

  “I was looking for you for ages!” Antonia continued as she followed her into the carriage. “I thought you were lost!”

  As the train doors slammed and the engine let off a long, low whistle, Cicely sighed.

  “I took a wrong turn,” she said. “I knocked on a door to ask for directions. It really isn’t that complicated.”

  “Then where are your new gloves?”

  Cicely’s mouth pursed. She looked out of the window as the train began to move out of the station.

  “I must have mislaid them,” she replied flatly.

  “But I only just bought them!”

  “Does it really matter? You chose a gown, I presume. Mission accomplished. Heavens above, what a proverbial storm in a teacup!”

  Cicely started to laugh as if the whole thing was a joke. Her behavior, Antonia thought, was not only mysterious, it was downright peculiar.

  “You are all right?” Antonia asked and laid a hand on her arm.

  “Everything is fine,” she replied. “Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.”

  The city began to flash past in a blur of gray and green. Cicely sat back and closed her eyes. But Antonia could not doze. Something was going on, something she wasn’t party to. Maybe Malcolm had been right: Maybe Cicely was playing her for a fool.

  7

  Kitty had been bathed and put to bed, then put to bed again after she appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightdress.

  “See you in the morning,” Cicely had said.

  “Where are you going again?” Kitty had asked.

  “To dinner. With a friend of your grandfather’s.”

  And Kitty had looked at her reproachfully.

  “You’re sure I can’t come?”

  “Too late for you. Besides, it will be very dull, I wish I didn’t have to go.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  She didn’t answer as she tucked Kitty up and stroked her head. Her eyelids were already heavy; she would be fast asleep within ten minutes. Kitty had been out all day playing in the gardens. Unlike home, there were no poisonous snakes or scorpions, but still she had collected a small armory of sticks to defend herself with just in case. As Cicely was about to close the door she sat up in bed.

  “Mummy,” she said, “I want it.”

  “Want what? What are you talking about?”

  “Balmarra,” she said.

  If only Kitty knew the lengths she had gone to secure her inheritance. Life twists and turns, George had written, and washes you up in places you never expect. The place she had never expected was the open doorway on the Saltmarket and the filthy stone stairs that led to the first floor. Despite claiming the opposite, George had had a fiancée back in Glasgow after all, whom he dropped most unkindly by letter. George should have return
ed to Scotland; he should have married the fiancée as he had promised. That was the right thing, the honorable thing to do. Instead he stayed in India and married Cicely. Three years later his former fiancée had come to Darjeeling to look for him. He wasn’t hard to find. Everyone knew George Pick. It seemed that she had forgiven him, accepted all his excuses—he had been forced into marriage against his will or some such fiction—and they had resumed their relationship where it had been broken off. George was, as usual, careless. A child was conceived. The former fiancée had returned home to give birth, and George had once again broken off all contact.

  While Antonia was discussing hemlines and silhouettes with the dressmaker, Cicely had the task of finding George’s former fiancée. If his illegitimate child was male, George feared, he was legally entitled to make a claim on the family estate if George should die. At first Cicely had decided she would not do it, she would not go and look for George’s mistress and her progeny. It was humiliating, demeaning. But how could she not? She owed it to Kitty to find out what she could.

  The address that George had given her was in a run-down part of town. As she had walked up the steps, Cicely felt physically sick. The door was painted black and was scuffed along the bottom, as if kicked by dozens of tiny feet. Cicely raised her hand but could not knock; her courage failed her. She was about to turn and head back down the stairs when the door swung open to reveal the silhouette of a woman standing in the doorway.

  “I thought I could hear someone coming up the stairs,” she said. Her accent was more genteel than her surroundings. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Cicely had said. “I’m looking for a Miss F intry?”

  “I’m Miss F intry,” the woman replied. A flash of panic crossed her face. “Is anything the matter?”

  Cicely paused and frowned at her in the half-light. It was hardly a social call. But what was it? And so she came right to the point.

  “I think you were once acquainted with George Pick,” she said. “My husband.”

  Jane F intry had been surprisingly civil under the circumstances; she invited her in, brewed a pot of tea, and unwrapped a cake. Jane’s face, although the skin clung a little too tightly to the bones, had clearly once been beautiful, the eyes blue and the teeth even. Cicely had felt a sudden rush of solidarity; she too had fallen for George. Cicely sat on the chair she was offered and took off her gloves. While Jane F intry cut the cake, Cicely glanced around. The room was full of piles of material spiked with pins, and a chair was positioned at the window to make the most of the daylight. From the way she frowned as she sliced, Cicely assumed Jane F intry’s sight was bad.

  “You must excuse the mess,” Jane said, her eyes lifting. “I’m not usually in such a muddle.”

  There was a small pause, a shifting of hands on lap and feet on the floor.

  “Did George ask you to come?” Jane asked.

  “He did,” she replied.

  How could he have asked her to do this? It wasn’t fair to either of them.

  “You have a child, don’t you?” Jane asked.

  “I do. A girl. She’s eight.”

  Somewhere nearby, a bell tolled the hour. One, two, three, four. She must get it over with.

  “Is this about my son, Georgie?” Jane prompted. “A solicitor also wrote to me.”

  Cicely nodded. Jane’s mouth tightened. She picked up a teaspoon and gave her tea a stir. It was then that Cicely noticed that there were no toys, no children’s shoes, nothing to suggest that a child lived there too.

  “He passed,” she said simply. “He was only two. It’s been a little difficult, as you can imagine.”

  Estranged from her family as a consequence of the affair, Jane took in sewing to make a living. Occasionally over the years she had received a small amount of money from George.

  “He never forgot me,” she said. “I’ll give him that.”

  Cicely felt a lump swell in her throat. In her situation, she would never have forgiven George.

  “Weren’t you angry with him?” Cicely asked.

  “What would be the point?”

  There was a knock on the door, and without waiting to be invited, an old woman with a bundle of what looked like rags in a pram let herself in. While Jane F intry discussed what was to be done, Cicely excused herself, leaving her pair of new gloves and a ten-shilling note, her last, beneath the sugar bowl.

  So this was not the unforeseen complication. What else could it be? Who was the other one Jane Fintry mentioned? What else had George done?

  “Mummy,” Kitty said, “are you all right?”

  Cicely pulled her face into a smile for her daughter.

  “Be good,” she told Kitty as she closed her door. “And sleep tight.”

  Malcolm and Antonia were waiting for her in the pony-and-trap—the motorcar was a two-seater. Malcolm wore a dinner suit that smelled of mothballs, and Antonia a fur stole, white gloves, and the new purple evening gown that had been delivered the day before. She glanced at Cicely’s much plainer dress, a silk sheath in dark blue, but didn’t comment.

  “We might be late,” Antonia said as the carriage headed out through the gateposts. “Shouldn’t we go a little faster?”

  “No, it’s better to be fashionably late than unfashionably early,” her husband replied.

  “Who else do you think will be there?” Antonia continued.

  “The gin set, I expect,” Malcolm replied. “None of your hoi polloi.”

  “I hear people socialize a lot in India?” Antonia asked Cicely.

  Cicely thought of the balls, the parties and theatricals, the Polo Club picnic. At one point in her life they had carried great weight. It would take her a week to choose a hat; a choice of color would keep her up at night—eau de nile or emerald, salmon pink or cerise? How could she have been so wrapped up, she asked herself now, in such insignificant concerns? Antonia seemed to be expecting an answer, and so she said the first thing that came into her head.

  “The hill stations are rather gay, especially in the summer season before the monsoon.”

  “That’s what I heard,” said Antonia.

  They rode on in silence, the scent of Malcolm’s cologne mixing with the smell of starch and new fabric.

  “Should we have brought something?” asked Antonia suddenly. “A bottle of wine?”

  “He has a whole cellar full of wine,” Malcolm replied with a wave of his hand. “If he had a wife, then that would be a different matter. We could have brought flowers.”

  “He had a fiancée once, so I hear,” Malcolm continued. “But it all went pear-shaped. Her parents didn’t think he was the right sort.”

  “Do you have to go into this now?” said Antonia. “It’s all gossip and hearsay.”

  “Well, I’ve started now. So I might as well finish—”

  “Too late. We’re here,” said Antonia.

  The carriage had turned onto a long, curved driveway that led to the house. The gardens were well tended and the lawns neatly manicured, scattered with newly planted monkey puzzle trees.

  “My father was convinced Lorimer sent someone round to Balmarra to snoop or steal cuttings,” said Antonia. “But my father thought everyone was out to cheat him.”

  All the lights were on inside the house, and as they climbed down from the carriage at the main entrance, the sound of distant chatter and the light clink of crockery drifted through the open windows toward them. It was an enormous place with turrets and battlements and a view across the F irth of Clyde.

  “Very nouveau riche,” Antonia whispered.

  A butler met them at the door, and after they had handed their wraps to a maid, he accompanied them to the drawing room.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm McCulloch and Mrs. George Pick,” the butler announced.

  Keir Lorimer was standing at the fireplace. There were a half dozen other guests, all of whom seemed to break off their conversations in midsentence and turn.

  “Here you are!” Lo
rimer said to all three, but directing the comment straight at Cicely. “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

  Dressed in tweeds with Argyll socks beneath his plus fours, Lorimer looked like a country laird. The other male guests were dressed in dinner suits, thankfully for Malcolm.

  “We’re not late, are we?” said Antonia, her face blanching.

  “Not at all.” He laughed to make sure they knew he was joking. “You’re all looking smart as a button, I must say.”

  Once they had each been handed a glass of champagne, they were whisked off, at Lorimer’s insistence, on “the tour.” The house was even larger than it looked on the outside, and their host opened door after door to sitting rooms, guest wings, libraries—one for pleasure and one for reference—bedrooms and studies.

  “It’s much larger than I wanted,” he seemed to apologize. “To be honest, it’s far too big for one person. I’m rattling around.”

  Had he built it for himself, Cicely wondered, or the fiancée whose family spurned him? They ended up climbing a narrow stair to the highest turret, where a telescope had been set up.

  “Can we see Balmarra from here?” Malcolm asked.

  “I prefer to look at the stars,” Lorimer said. “Botany and astronomy. My two favorite pastimes.”

  Dinner was six courses, according to the menu laid at each place, starting with soup and sherry and finishing with ice cream and a glass of Madeira. While Cicely had been seated to Lorimer’s right, Antonia and Malcolm were at the far end of the table, next to a very ancient lady with a huge ear trumpet.

  Lorimer asked about India, about Darjeeling, and Cicely gave him a tourist’s itinerary of things to do and sights not to miss: walking to the top of Tiger Hill, picnics at the lake, and taking a trip to Ghum, the highest hill station in India, on the Himalayan Railway.

  “And the social life,” he asked. “That’s well established, I suppose?”

  Once again she gave a glowing account.

  “You make it sound almost magical, Mrs. Pick,” said Lorimer. “And when are you planning on returning?”