by Mark Dawson
Edward gaped. He had visited houses like this before, in this country and then all across Europe. He felt twitches of excitement in his gut. It was the lifestyle that it promised, rather than the house itself, that stirred him. He had grown accustomed to that, and come to expect it, before everything had changed. The prospect of returning to it excited him as nothing else possibly could. He gazed at the beautiful house and filled it with guests in his imagination, men and women in gorgeous evening clothes, tables full of fine food and wine, the way the light would refract against pieces of jewellery. He could almost smell the mustiness of the rooms, could almost see the light flickering from candles in their sconces. It was all so glorious. Expectation! He sometimes wondered whether it was more pleasant to him than the promise of experiencing it all. It was so pleasant to relish that he suddenly found his nervousness at the idea of a party full of strangers fading away.
“Your family owns this?” he said at last.
“It was my grandfather’s originally.”
“It’s enormous.”
“I know,” he said with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.
They descended, traversing a small bridge that forded a stream. Wrought-iron lamp-posts were set on either side of the final length of the drive, casting their light across neatly terraced private gardens and the southern shore of the lake, a boathouse built next to a wooden jetty from which a tethered rowing boat bobbed on gentle swells.
“What did he do?”
“He was into gambling,” he said vaguely.
“What––bookmaking?”
“The racetracks. Horses, dogs––you know.”
It was a vague explanation, and he seemed reluctant to go further. Joseph had explained that the house was occupied by his grandmother, his Aunt Violet and his three sisters. Edward had imagined a large house to accommodate them all, but this was beyond all of his expectations. This was palatial. The gravel crunched under the tyres. Edward could not suppress the buzz of anticipation as Joseph parked in front of the porte cochère outside the south façade of the main house. They were at the end of a long row of cars, perhaps a dozen of them, all new and expensive: an American Buick, an Aston Martin, a Daimler.
The summer storm had not abated: thunder boomed and rain slammed onto the gravel. Joseph switched off the motor. “About tonight,” he began haltingly. “The party––my aunt and uncle have invited plenty of people. Chaps who work with the family. Some of them are––characters, I don’t know how else to describe them. They’re good lads, solid lads, but a couple can be prickly when they see people they don’t know. It’s nothing to be bothered about, see, they’ll all know you’re with me, I’m just saying––if they give you a hard time, don’t get the hump, alright? They’re like that with everyone.”
“Alright,” Edward said. It was a strange thing to say, and it helped draw his nervousness back again.
A butler in striped morning trousers hurried out of the house with two umbrellas for them. They dashed quickly inside, leaving their suitcases to be brought after them. The front door entered onto a reception hall, thirty feet across, with a stone fireplace and an oak staircase that led up to the first floor.
The butler appeared behind them with their luggage. He collected their wet umbrellas from them.
“Would you like to settle into your rooms?” he asked. “I’ve taken the liberty of drawing baths for you both. The party isn’t due to start until nine.”
“Relax for a bit, Doc,” Joseph said. “I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”
16
EDWARD HOISTED HIS SUITCASE ONTO THE BED AND OPENED IT. He changed out of his suit, folding it carefully. He had taken Ruby Ward’s money and visited a second-hand clothes shop. By spending the two pounds carefully, he had been able to buy two suits, three shirts, a couple of ties and a pair of reasonably decent shoes. The place had held the lingering odours of steam that had passed through tired cloth, the sour whiff of dry-cleaning: the tang of benzine, boot-polish, wax, sweat and cigarette smoke, and some of that atmosphere had been absorbed by the fabric. The suit he unpacked from his suitcase had cost just a few shillings and looked it, although it was not marked or holed. The navy-blue number he wore for work was in slightly better condition, but Chiara had already seen him in it and he didn’t want her to think that it was the only one he owned.
The en-suite bathroom held a large free-standing bath and he soaked in it for half an hour, trying to settle his nerves. He stepped out and dried himself, and went back into the bedroom again. It was of a good size, and nicely furnished, although it was freighted with the dusty smell of a room that is only occasionally used. He dressed and stood before the mirror, regarding himself with a mixture of distaste and shame. A cheap second-hand suit in a place like this. It was the best he could manage, but he still felt vulnerable.
He stared into his own eyes and rehearsed his story.
He was an orphan.
His mother died giving birth to him.
His father died in an automobile smash.
He had no siblings.
He was brought up in a children’s home.
He won a scholarship to study medicine at Trinity, Cambridge, and he excelled.
His medical career was postponed because he wanted to serve his country.
He had served with distinction and now he was home.
The details had accreted, over time, like layers of silt. He had repeated them so often that the story had became second nature. The lies became truth.
There was a knock on the door. It was Joseph. He was wearing another new suit, perfectly cut, with fabulous creases that looked sharp enough to draw blood. He nodded admiringly in Edward’s direction. “Very smart.”
“Don’t be daft. I look like a dog’s dinner.”
“You look fine.”
“No, I don’t. But thanks for saying it.”
“What’s the matter? You’re not nervous, are you?”
“I suppose I am a little.”
“There’s no need to be. You look fine, and no-one is going to care, anyway. They’ll all be rolling around drunk in an hour. We’ll go down and have a drink ourselves. Loosen up. That’ll help. The lads are there already, I’ve just been down––you’ll like them, you’ll see.”
“Your sisters?”
“Of course. Come on.”
Drinks were being held in the drawing room. Edward looked around, agape. The roof bore three trusses, each with arch-braced collars carrying king posts, double purlins and two tiers of windbraces. A frieze of painted boards with a Latin quotation from the Bible formed part of a central partition, fronting a musician’s gallery at the south end of the chamber. The place was grand, yet, as he looked closer, he saw that it was in need of maintenance. Skirting boards were loose, paint was in need of refreshing, woodwork needed polishing, a couple of the sash windows were jammed open and closed off with plastic sheeting. In better times it would have been as impressive as the little châteaux and castellos he had visited as he had travelled south through France and Italy. But those days, he saw, were gone.
The whole house was down-at-heel.
The scuffs and marks did not reduce the effect that the room had on him. If he had felt a sense of his social inadequacy before, now it was multiplied. Where had Joseph’s family found the money for a place like this? It was more than inadequacy that was making him anxious. It was the proximity to something that could bring back the life that he had had to throw away. The other guests drank and talked in high spirits, seemingly disregarding their surroundings, the sense of history all around them, the faded glamour, but Edward could not. He knew he had stumbled upon an opportunity. There was money here. He had sensed it, the way a bloodhound tracks a scent. His younger self, so practiced and smooth, would have found his nervousness hilarious. His younger self would have addressed the room and the guests with a rapacious and predatory eye and taken whatever he wanted.
But he was older now and out of practice.
> Joseph was talking to him, talking about the room and the house and how it had all felt to him as a small boy. Edward nodded occasionally and made appreciative responses but he was listening with just a fraction of his brain. He was concentrating on his surroundings and the other guests. There were forty or fifty of them ranged around the room, with several groups forming: Violet Costello was smiling beatifically as the focus of a group of women; George Costello was drinking with half a dozen middle-aged men, all of them low-browed, heavy-shouldered and thick-set; Joseph’s sisters had attracted a group of similarly aged girls.
Edward made an absent-minded response to Joseph’s suggestion that he introduce him to his friends and then, as he led him towards three younger men in the corner of the room, he made an effort to pull himself together and focus his concentration. First impressions were everything and, whomever it was that he was going to meet tonight, he could not allow his dreaminess to set him off on the wrong foot.
“Here’s the man himself,” one of the men said, fixing Joseph in a hug.
Joseph did the honours, introducing Edward as his “mucker from the jungle.” Tommy Falco and Jack McVitie took his hand in turn. Edward guessed that they were a little younger than him, twenty-five or twenty-six, and they both looked wide. Falco was the kind of fellow it would be difficult to forget: big, a muscular man with an expression of brutal simplicity on his face and so much oil on his hair that it almost looked grey. His eyes were prominent, with fair lashes and eyebrows, which made him look perpetually surprised. McVitie was marked by a hat he wore to conceal his thinning hair. It looked out of place, and suggested bad manners, but he showed no inclination to remove it and no-one seemed to mind. He had a strange face, blunt-featured, compact and muscular; a well-constructed, useful-looking face, handsome in spite of the short blunt nose and out-thrust jaw. The two had a relaxed, jaunty confidence, and both were dressed in lovely suits that most certainly were not off the ration. The same could be said of Billy Stavropoulos. He smiled broadly for Joseph but as he saw Edward the expression faded from his face and he gave a nod of dour acknowledgement instead.
The three were already in boisterous good spirits that came, Edward quickly realised, from drink. He felt the fluttering of anxiety again. They were already ahead of him, and relaxed because of it. He knew that if he wanted to take his opportunity he would have to impress. To do that, there was nothing else for it: he would have to catch up, and quickly, and yet there was a careful balance to strike since he could not allow himself to get blind drunk. A waiter appeared with martinis and Edward took one, taking a sip as he looked up at the ceiling, reminding himself that he was quite capable of manipulating people like this. Tonight might be a test of his patience––they were vulgar, with coarse manners and bawdy jokes, and certainly not the type of people that Edward would have chosen to associate with––but the potential was worth the tedium of working them.
The birthday meal was to be held in the Great Hall. It was a large, plush space, decorated with mirrors held up by gilt caryatids. The ceiling was covered in rococo curlicues and a large, elaborate candelabra dripped down. Again, though, were the signs of neglect: there were cobwebs in the candelabra and the wallpaper on the walls was peeling and stained, here and there, by patches of damp.
Edward was in something of a daze as he sat. Two waiters brought out the starter: four large scallops shaped like top hats, sliced into disks and with the overlapping slices arranged like the petals of a flower with an even bigger slice in the centre. It was delicious. He had enjoyed a couple of gins by this stage and was starting to feel a little less self-conscious. Billy Stavropoulos was as truculent as ever, but the others were not as awful as they might have been. Edward had McVitie on the left and Falco on right, with Joseph on the opposite side of the wide table, opposite him. Billy sat next to Joseph.
“Joseph says you’re an educated man,” McVitie said.
“Well, I went to University. Does that count?”
“He’s being modest,” Joseph said. “He’s a bloody genius––a Doctor.”
“That so?”
“I’m certainly not a genius. But he’s right that I studied Medicine. What do you both do?”
McVitie chuckled until Joseph gave him a meaningful look.
“What?” Edward pressed, smiling nervously at the private joke.
“Salvage,” McVitie said.
“And me,” Falco added.
“What––scrap metal?”
“That kind of thing.”
The main course was brought out: a galantine of duck and foie gras. Edward’s kitchen skills were rudimentary but even an old hand like Jimmy would have been impressed by the gastronomy.
Edward leaned over towards Joseph. “This food––where’s it from?”
“A friend of the family.”
“Kosher?”
“Not strictly. Let’s just say he’s into buying and selling.”
“A spiv?”
“He’d call himself an entrepreneur.”
“But it’s the black market?”
Joseph grinned. “He owed my Aunt a favour. Pulled out the stops for us. You’re working for him.”
“Ruby Ward?”
“He buys and sells a lot of different things. It’s not just cars.”
“Wherever it came from, it looks delicious.”
Edward sliced into the duck. The cross-sectional cut revealed layers of pink meat alternating with meltingly tender foie gras that had been moulded and pressed into the shape of a perfect cylinder. It tasted beautiful.
McVitie spoke up: “What was it like in Burma?”
“Hot,” Edward replied.
“I’ll say,” Joseph agreed.
“And now this,” McVitie said, gesturing toward the window, rain lashing against the glass. “Welcome to summer!”
“It makes a change, that’s for sure.”
“What about the Japs?” Falco asked.
“They were vicious,” Joseph said.
“I remember when it all started, the papers were saying it’d be over in a month.”
Edward warmed to the subject. “No-one took the Tojos seriously,” he said. “Everyone thought a couple of victories and they’d fall over. It didn’t happen like that.”
“Were you there at the start?”
Edward said that he was. “The early days were brutal––defeat after defeat. It took four years to turn the tide.”
“Just as I arrived,” Joseph grinned. “I don’t think it was a coincidence.”
Falco looked impressed. “Joseph said you got a medal.”
Edward shrugged. “It was nothing.”
“No point going on about it, then,” Billy said dismissively.
“Put a sock in it, Bubble,” Joseph said, punching him on the shoulder. “Come on, old man, you have to tell us what happened. I still don’t know. He won’t say.”
That was a story that would require a careful telling. Before Edward could begin, George Costello tapped his knife against his glass and the conversation petered away. Slightly relieved, Edward turned his attention to the head of the table. He had blithely assumed that George would deliver the speech in the absence of Chiara’s father, but he remained seated as Violet stood instead.
“Family, friends––thank you for coming. Now, as you may have heard, it is my niece’s twenty-first birthday today. As you know, her father, my brother, isn’t with us any longer and so it falls to me to say a few words.” Violet gave a short history of Chiara’s life, a few badly phrased jokes that drew compliant laughter from the audience. “Anyone who knows her will tell you that she’s always been a headstrong one. I remember, when she was just a girl, how she wouldn’t do what her parents wanted. The Italians among us will know what I am talking about––my brother and his wife gave all of their children two Christian names: one Italian, one English. It was just as you’d expect––the Italian to help them remember their history, the English to help them fit in. Chiara was supposed to be known
as Clarissa, but even as a five year old she refused to answer to it. It hasn’t changed––the last person who tried to call her Clarissa got the rough side of her tongue for their cheek.” The diners chuckled, some of them exchanging glances of recognition. “But you can hardly blame her for being proud of her roots,” Violet continued, “it’s a shame more of us don’t share it––but that’s a subject for another day.” She picked up her glass from the table. “Chiara has become a beautiful young woman. We’re all very proud of her. Now then––raise your glasses for a toast. To Chiara.”
“Chiara!” the guests repeated lustily.
Violet resumed her seat and, next to her, Chiara kissed her lightly on the cheek. Edward saw her mouth thanks into her ear.
Joseph excused himself from the table. McVitie reached across the table and swiped a full bottle of wine. He gestured towards Edward’s empty glass. “Refill, Doc?” Edward had started to feel quite drunk but his half-hearted resistance was ignored. McVitie poured so much that it spilled over the rim. “Cheers.”
“Seems like yesterday we were here for Chiara’s eighteenth,” Falco said.
McVitie nodded. “She’s something else now, eh?”
“She always was a good-looking girl.”
“I’d give her a lovely birthday present and no mistake,” Billy said.
McVitie and Falco both laughed derisively. “Like she’d have anything to do with you.”
“Piss off, Jack. I’d stand a better chance than you.”
The conversation moved on to Joseph’s family. Edward was pleased. He had plenty of questions, and the information would be valuable. “What happened to Joseph’s father?” he asked.