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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
Life at Charnley is blessed for the Jardine children, Harriet, Vita and Daisy, who live in an idyllic Edwardian country manor with their loving parents, Beatrice and Amory. But one night, after a party celebrating their mother's birthday, their dreams of a propitious future suddenly come crashing down when a family scandal catapults them into the headlines. Nearly four decades pass by and still the exact events of that fateful night remain a mystery. But when an old diary detailing their mother's voyage to Egypt is unearthed it finally seems as though some of the answers are within reach - until the shocking discovery of a mummified corpse in the ruins of their old home.Beautifully written, evoking the life of the Edwardian upper classes, bomb-scarred post-war England and the sultry Egyptian landscape, The Shape of Sand is a compelling novel you will wish was as long as the Nile.
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Seitenzahl: 523
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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The Shape of Sand
MARJORIE ECCLES
Contents
Prologue 1946
The screech of metal against metal as the demolition team moved in was excruciating, shattering the peace, setting the teeth on edge, though it was unlikely anyone would complain about it; not when it meant the end of the Anderson shelters which had defaced the sweeping lawns at Charnley House for the last seven years. At last they were surplus to requirements, a wartime necessity that had been accepted without fuss, though in the event not a single bomb had ever fallen within five miles. Unfortunately, a prefabricated module was apparently scheduled to take their place.
Harriet, watching the activity from inside the house, hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at all this, imagining what Hopper and his under-gardeners would have said to the desecration of that smooth green sward they and their fathers had spent their working lives so jealously nurturing and tending. These were the lawns where the croquet hoops had been set up, where she and her siblings had played as children, where they’d rolled down the grass either side of the steps to the terrace, and Daisy, who was a pickle, had got her starched petticoats all green.
“Well, here it all is, Miss Jardine. You’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you.”
Harriet turned away from the window towards the woman who was indicating a couple of mottled grey cardboard box-files sitting on the nearest desk. The files themselves she regarded with some misgivings. She wasn’t yet by any means convinced that it would be right to bring into the light of day what they contained, or whether the contents would be better left undisturbed. Indeed, she still hadn’t decided whether it had been a good idea to come back to Charnley at all, thirty-seven years after she’d left, swearing never to return. Ladies of a certain age are apt to be resistant to change, however adaptable they might consider themselves. But the papers had been an irresistible carrot, as Guy had known they would be.
Ruth Standish, a brisk, capable person, an ex-ATS lieutenant as she’d informed Harriet over lunch, known to all as the Admin Assistant, was voicing some concern. “I do hope all this won’t be too distressing for you.”
It could hardly fail to be otherwise, but that was scarcely the point. “I believe I shall cope. It’s all history now.”
All the same, that treacherous old sorrow suddenly gripped Harriet by the throat, so that, for a moment, she couldn’t say any more, even though she’d come here prepared for an emotional battering. It was only occasionally now that she was caught unawares like this, transported back in time by glimpses of something half-remembered: her mother’s special rose and lily-of-the-valley scent, warm sunlight on peaches, a snatch of ragtime or a tune from an operetta, the intense blue of someone’s eyes.
The lid of the top file was half open, the spring clip inside unable to cope with its overflowing contents. The Admin Assistant extracted a bulky envelope from it, enabling it to be closed, and slid both files towards Harriet. Her expression left Harriet in no doubt as to what she was thinking: almost certainly, she’d decided that this was a lady who wouldn’t allow herself to be upset, or not for long – who belonged, after all, to that generation who never gave in to themselves. It was what had got them, and everyone else, through two world wars. Harriet must be at least – what, late fifties? Smart hat and couturier-made classic suit that owed nothing to present day fashion, and still looked marvellous, never mind that it had to be pre-1939. Quality told, and its soft moss green colour suited her brown eyes and dark, silver-threaded hair. She was tall and had kept her figure, and moved gracefully. Well, they were brought up to walk and hold themselves properly, those Edwardian girls, no slouching. Without the need for all that standing stiffly to attention, either, or marching, so inappropriate for women, that had been inflicted on the Admin Assistant herself in her square-bashing days – which was at the same time as Harriet Jardine herself, she believed, had been working for the Government as some sort of boffin. Before the war, she had been a mathematics don. A daunting combination, all in all. She still had that spark in her eye which said she could be pretty daunting herself.
“Not to worry,” Harriet was saying briskly. “They won’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”
It gave her some satisfaction that she could speak so calmly about that old scandal which had catapulted Charnley into sensational headlines nearly four decades ago, and was still remembered as one of the unsolved mysteries of the century. But she was feeling more in control now than when she had stepped through the front door earlier that morning, having schooled herself to cope with the painful memories it would evoke, yet half expecting, half dreading, to discover Charnley exactly as she had left it, as if caught in a time warp. She needn’t have worried. A few of the rooms remained basically the same, but most of the alterations and renovations – some good, most appalling – had turned the house into a different place altogether from the one she remembered. The spirit of the old Charnley had gone for ever, though the shocking events – or perhaps her own perception of them – had left an indelible stain on the air that saddened and depressed her.
She had been shown around and then given a surprisingly good lunch, created by someone with flair who had cunningly overcome the constraints imposed by post-war rationing and shortages. The new dining hall had been created from the former conservatory, a place once full of green shadows and glancing light, but now made gloomy and unrecognisable, since they had seen fit to put up, against one of the formerly all-glass walls, some sort of temporary extension. In her present hypercritical mood Harriet took a dim view of this excrescence. The meal over, Ruth Standish had brought her here into the library. Which was another matter altogether.
This spacious room had always been a place of sanctuary for Harriet, at the heart of the house, but its former ambience of peace, stability and continuity had gone for ever. It was the absence of the pictures more than anything else, she decided, that so radically altered it: the self-important portraits of Rodhythes, and later ones of Jardines, heavily gold-framed, that had once hung in alcoves and in the lofty spaces above the bookshelves. Yet even apart from that, the big old room seemed ill at ease with itself, as if rejecting its new role. The space once occupied by the heavy mahogany central desk and, in front of the open fireplace, the comfortable leather armchairs and sofas in which one could curl up and lose oneself, was now filled with functional seating and army surplus desks and tables, complete with typewriters and telephones and comptometers. Like some monstrous cash register, a Burroughs calculating machine loomed in the corner, waiting for a home. The Turkey carpet had been replaced by a sort of drugget. Gone were the impressive rows of old leather tomes, in favour of stacks of files and stationery and serried rows of insurance documents. Worst of all, the chimney opening in the fireplace had been filled in with asbestos, painted over. It scarcely mattered, there would be no one now to tend the enormous coal fires the grate had once held, even supposing the fuel were available.
Perhaps in an effort to retain traces of the original spirit of the fine old library amongst all this gracelessness, someone had painted the walls a deep ox-blood tone. Surprisingly, that seemed the least of the incongruities, maybe because the colour was, by chance or design, almost the same rich, dark red as the old damask wallpaper which had covered them for at least a century, quite possibly for a great deal longer. As children, they’d hated that gloomy old wallpaper, but Harriet now regretted the removal of something which must be irreplaceable. Tastes change as one grows older.
She opened her crocodile handbag for her gloves and began to draw them on – soft brown suede, elegantly wrinkled at the wrist – snapped the bag’s gold clasp and prepared to go. She’d had enough of this new Charnley, and its owners.
All the same, she was grateful to Ruth Standish for having recognised immediately that what the builders had come across might be of sentimental value to the Jardines, otherwise the papers would have been thrown out as so much useless junk, like everything else, during the process of adapting the house to its newly designated purposes. Charnley had stood empty for several years before the First World War had brought a final end to any hope of it ever becoming the family home again, but during that war it had been adapted temporarily as a convalescent home, where soldiers in hospital blue had been helped to recreate what was left of their shattered lives. Afterwards, it had again lain largely empty and neglected (except for the two or three years when a couple of women had made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to run it as a girls’ boarding school) during which time it had gathered its quota of superstition and a reputation as a house of ill luck. In 1940 the army had commandeered it as an officers’ billet for the duration.
World War Two and the Blitz might now be only a wretched memory, but post-war austerity ruled while run-down Britain was picking itself up. Life was still bound by restrictions and shortages of nearly everything, including materials for all but essential rebuilding and rehousing schemes. So, despite the house’s past, and its long period of disuse and neglect, a large City insurance firm which had been bombed out and since housed in temporary premises had now acquired Charnley as its head office. Its semi-rural situation in the Home Counties was considered not too far out of London and, after months of work, it was almost ready to open. The reconstruction had been done in haste and was regrettable, but then, Charnley had never been the most beautiful of houses. The work still wasn’t entirely complete; they hadn’t yet started on what had come to be known to the family as the Jessamy rooms, in the west wing. On her tour round the house, Harriet hadn’t seen these rooms. She hadn’t wanted to. Everything bad had stemmed from that.
“Don’t forget the photos.” Ruth Standish picked up the bulging manila envelope, so full indeed that it spilled open and deposited most of its contents on to the floor as she passed it across. “Drat, I should’ve looked for a bigger envelope.”
“No harm done.”
The Admin Assistant produced a folded brown paper carrier from her own large tote bag. “Here, better use this.” They both knelt to gather the escaped photographs, but while Ruth proceeded to tip the photos in, Harriet’s gaze was transfixed by one she’d picked out at random.
“Someone you know on that one?”
“Myself and my sisters.”
“Really?” Ruth Standish took a look at it and added, unaware of any irony, “You were lovely, all of you, weren’t you?” Harriet smiled a little. The very young – and sometimes even those not quite so young, as in this case – were always astonished to be reminded that their elders once had faces as smooth and unlined as their own.
Here they were, the three Jardine girls, nearly forty years ago, youthful and vulnerable when one contemplated the horror that hung so imminently over them: personal loss and sorrow, and the black cloud of that first, terrible, unimaginable war. Posing here in the summer garden at Charnley in fancy dress. Barefoot, wearing robes that were vaguely Grecian, forming a circle with their arms gracefully lifted and disposed, hands linked, fingers artfully intertwined – oh, how they’d agonised over that pose! The scene looked idyllic now, the sepia tones of the old photograph softening the white garments to a golden tint, with the flower-strewn grass and the trees and the folly behind in soft focus. She and Vita, each with their dark hair done up in a classical knot, Daisy with her cascade of shining pale hair, so like their mother’s, rippling down her back. It was still thick, though ashen now, and serviceably short. Daisy led too busy a life to be bothered with such personal vanities.
Harriet put the photo into the bag with the others. “What alterations were they making to the schoolroom when they found all this?”
The administrator’s eyes rested curiously on Harriet, who ignored the unspoken question: why, if she’d known the papers were in the schoolroom, hadn’t she claimed them before? But Harriet knew it wouldn’t make much sense if she were to confess that she had, in some instinctive, sentimental move that was totally unlike her, secreted the papers in that old childhood hidey-hole before she’d left for the last time. Nor would she necessarily be believed if she tried to explain that time, and pain, had suppressed even the memory of that particular act until now.
There were two plans of the house pinned to a large cork-board mounted on the wall: a copy of the original, which had been drawn on oiled silk, and another of the house as it had now been converted, showing most of the spacious, airy rooms made into two, or even three. Using her pen as a pointer, Ruth Standish indicated the turreted gatehouse, a later, and not very felicitous, addition to the main buildings, which stood at the bottom of the drive, where the builders were still working, and therefore, like the Jessamy rooms, hadn’t been included in Harriet’s tour of inspection. “They’re making it into a reception area. The box was under the floorboards. Here, in this room upstairs. And you say it was your old schoolroom?”
“And playroom. Not always very convenient when the weather was bad, but we loved it. They let us use it because we could be as noisy as we liked there.”
Harriet looked at the plan again, and followed the orientation of the familiar long view from the gatehouse window towards the point where the Norman tower of the church was just visible above a stretch of woodland, now mature enough to obscure most of the village surrounding it, as well as the housing developments which had later grown up along the valley. Between the house and the trees stretched a Gainsborough landscape. Acres of sweeping parkland, designed by Humphrey Repton to sit within a framework of rolling hills, beech forest and chalk downs. She still had a watercolour of that view, painted by Vita. One of Marcus’s friends who had often visited had famously written about it, later, from the trenches: ‘And in the half-light of remembered days we see the shadows fall…’ Quickly, Harriet stood up.
She said goodbye to Ruth Standish, clasped her arms around the bulging files, entrusted that last photo with the others to the care of Mr Sainsbury’s brown paper carrier, and drove away through the archway, past the shiny new dark green sign with Vigilance Assurance’s name writ large upon it above the company’s logo of two clasped hands.
The dusk of a cool, early autumn day was just beginning to fall when she arrived at the place she presently called home, the small cottage next to the church in Garvingden, a quiet grey village above the Thames, about thirty miles away.
It was really time she found somewhere else to live, she told herself as she walked up the front path, edged with London Pride and a late flush of sweet-smelling Mrs Sinkins. She was becoming too fond of the place, unwisely so, since it wasn’t hers to love. After the war, she had found herself at a loose end, almost at retirement age and, for the short working time left to her, reluctant to return to university teaching. She would find something else to do, she decided. Meanwhile, unused to having time on her hands, she had taken on the admittedly not very interesting but no doubt worthwhile job of marking papers in a correspondence course designed as rehabilitation for demobbed service men and women. But while she had been spending the war years as a decrypter at Bletchley Park, helping to break the enemy’s coded messages, London had become a different place from the one she’d known. Physical landmarks had disappeared for ever, but what mattered more was the absence of people she had known who were no longer there, for one reason or another. The little house where her friend Frances had lived had vanished from the face of the earth after being hit fairly and squarely by a flying bomb, killing Frances herself. And that street where for a brief time she had known love, and so much unhappiness, was a heap of rubble and bomb craters. Bittersweet memories were the only things that remained. All desire to live permanently in the battle-scarred capital had left Harriet.
She had taken advantage of Daisy’s generous offer to stay with her and her husband, Guy, in their Maida Vale house until she could find some small place in the country, but accommodation was scarce everywhere, and nothing suitable had turned up. She was beginning to feel she must be out-staying her welcome with Daisy when she’d unexpectedly had the chance to take over the lease of his weekend cottage from a university colleague who, with the return to peace, had taken a three-year sabbatical to do anthropological research in a remote part of South America. It was a former workman’s cottage of two up, two down – a small kitchen-living room at the back, a minuscule front parlour, one of the two bedrooms now a bathroom – but Harriet didn’t complain: the last occupants before Tony Bentham had managed to bring up a family of five children in the house. Furnishings and amenities were basic. Tony wasn’t houseproud, but then, neither was Harriet. Yet lately, she’d found herself buying bits and pieces of her own, whatever took her fancy, that she thought might suit the house, and even plants for the tiny garden plots, back and front. She’d had all the rooms repainted. The result was still a long way from Charnley, but it was full of light and colour, comfortable enough and easily managed. She had to keep reminding herself it would be foolish to become too fond of the place.
After that very good lunch at Charnley she wasn’t hungry, so she settled for a cup of tea and took it into the front room. She found a place for the box files by removing her correspondence course papers from the table under the window to the floor. Sipping her tea, she looked at them with misgivings, reluctant to open what she was already beginning to think of as Pandora’s box. Could they possibly contain anything forgotten that would add to the sum of what was already known about the actual circumstances of those long-ago events? She doubted it. It was tempting to feel that the situation should be left as it was, the files put away, and leave undisturbed the dust that had eventually settled. On the other hand, by sorting through them, some sort of perspective might be found to reduce the ballyhoo that had always surrounded the business. It had remained one of the most colourful of those society scandals of the twentieth century, kept alive in the public consciousness by the rehashings of the events in which an insatiable public seemed to delight. Mention ‘The Jardine Affair’ to anyone, even now, and they’d soon recall what the papers of the time had said. But there had always been something out of balance about the theories put forward by those who had written about it. It would be enlightening to see how their suppositions and speculations, some of which had been bizarre, would stand up in the light of anything new that might turn up.
In the end, unable to resist it, she tipped the papers out on to the table. The shoeboxes into which she’d originally crammed them had long since disintegrated, and the contents had been transferred higgledy-piggledy into the box files. Lord, this was going to take weeks to sort out! At the time, all of this must have meant something to her, but she was dismayed by how much of the stuff there was. A quick skim through revealed sketch-books and some very pretty watercolours of Vita’s, various trinkets of one sort or another, old birthday cards, a Valentine, a lace collar, a scent bottle whose lingering echoes of Floris Geranium made her heart skip, a bulky scrapbook which had belonged to Daisy, a few letters and – oh, how could she have forgotten? – that book, picked up from their mother’s bedroom. Elegantly bound in grey suede, the pages gilt-edged, secured with a pretty little brass clasp and a tiny lock that she had never attempted to open. For a few seconds she sat, motionless, reliving that other moment when her younger self, struggling with revulsion, had refused to contemplate what secrets it might contain. In the end, she put the book aside and forced herself to go on, right through to the bundle of yellowed newspaper cuttings and letters, handling them gingerly because they were so friable.
She sat back at last, what she’d suspected confirmed – that it amounted to very little, after all. A few old photos, scraps of this and that. Amongst which it was surely unrealistic to hope she would suddenly find the truth of what had happened in that summer of 1910, when others before her had attempted, people far more qualified than she – the police, reporters, other members of the family who were there at the time – and failed. Old papers could only tell you so much, the rest must be conjecture. Too much water had flowed under the bridge, many of those concerned were dead, and others might well be either untraceable, or too old to be considered as reliable witnesses.
There was more to it than that, of course. If she were honest, she had known from the moment Guy telephoned with the news that the papers had been discovered that she would be faced with this dilemma, whether or not to try and dig out a little more of the truth, all those years after she had hidden this trivia, physically and metaphorically. Whether or not to dive into her subconscious and drag out her own recollections. But memory was, alas, a slippery notion at the best of times, unreliable, coloured by uncertainty…
She pushed away the last of her tea, now cold and bitter. Come on, Harriet! Admit it, you always knew what really happened. No, be more precise – you only thought you knew. Simple intuition. And what if you were right? Are you justified in trying to uncover what went on during that hot summer?
So there Harriet was, the following day. Having made up her mind at some time during the night that she’d do it – at least try to make some sense of what had gone on by delving into the ragbag of memory and history, and assembling from its bits and pieces a collage of something that might come near to making a semblance of the true picture.
Still undecided, she’d taken her mother’s journal upstairs with her when she went to bed. First, feeling like a criminal, she had prised open with almost ridiculous ease the useless little lock, an indication of privacy rather than a serious security device. In bed, she’d held the book for a long time, still having that inexplicable reluctance to probe into what her mother had obviously not wanted anyone else to see. At length she did open it. On the flyleaf was written: ‘My Egyptian Journal’ in Beatrice’s familiar, large and rather flamboyant handwriting. She turned the page, and then read the whole journal right through before switching off her light, after which she lay staring into the darkness, thinking about it. Finally, she dropped off into a sort of sleep, having decided she would telephone Guy the next morning and tell him what she proposed to do.
She was fairly certain he’d welcome her decision. He was an acute observer and she knew, without him ever having said it in so many words, that he would be disappointed if she were to shrug off any chance, however remote, to throw some light on the tragedy that had always overshadowed the life of his wife and her sisters.
Her sleep had been uneasy, and she woke feeling not much rested. The church clock, whose proximity had driven her mad when she first came to live here, though it no longer bothered her, tonight had kept rousing her from bouts of half-submerged sleep. It seemed to her that she counted every hour, and at five she got up and made herself tea and toast. She telephoned Guy before eight, then wondered if it was too early. “Have I got you out of bed?”
“I’m always awake by six.”
Harriet pictured him: elderly, bespectacled, deceptively mild, sitting at his desk, fountain pen in hand, already having taken old Phoebe, his smooth-haired fox-terrier bitch, for her sedate walk along the London streets, and tidied the breakfast things away, while Daisy set off for Hope House. She pictured the steadily growing stack of manuscript at his right hand: a monograph which he was writing on the psychological traumas suffered by civilians seriously injured during enemy attack. As a doctor, too old for military service, he had kept up his busy practice during the war years to deal with the sort of everyday ailments which did not go away simply because there was a war on, while his nights were occupied during enemy air raids with attending to the wounded and dying. It had not been without cost. His own health had suffered, and now that he’d grown older, he was forced to take things more easily. Guy was not, however, a man to be idle, never mind age or infirmity. And Harriet suspected this writing he was doing was more than a mere labour of love, it was both a personal catharsis for the terrible things he had witnessed, and a memorial to the unrecorded and unsung acts of courage which he’d seen performed daily during the bombings.
As Daisy’s husband, he’d volunteered to look after the Jardine family interests when the business of selling Charnley to Vigilance Assurance arose, an offer the sisters had thankfully accepted, so that it was to him Ruth Standish had written when the discovery of the papers had been made. He had never known Charnley in its glory days, but like everyone who had ever heard its history, it exercised a fascination for him. He had tried not to sound overly intrigued about what the cache might reveal when he first spoke to Harriet about it. “What do you think? Worth looking into?” he’d asked casually. “Or not?”
“We won’t know that until we see it, will we? I’ll go over and pick up whatever it is they’ve found at once, if you’d like me to,” she’d replied.
He listened intently now, without interruption, as she told him what that visit had resulted in, and to her description of the house’s altered state.
“Shouldn’t come as any surprise, but I’m beginning to be sorry I let you in for this, Harriet.”
“Nonsense. I didn’t like what they’ve done, but I think seeing it like that has probably helped to exorcise a few ghosts.” She hoped she sounded more convinced than she felt. “It isn’t really Charnley any longer.”
“Have you examined everything you brought home yet? Is there anything new?”
“I haven’t read everything yet, and I’d be surprised if anything actually new turned up, but sorted out and read with a fresh eye, it’s bound to be…well, I don’t know, of course, but something might come of it.”
There was pause. “Why not do it, then? Put everything into order and write up some sort of an account? As a counterbalance to all that rubbish that was put out, if nothing else.”
Harriet laughed gently. “I’m not the person to do that, Guy. But there is someone, isn’t there, who might be?”
“Ah. Well, yes, maybe. Not a bad idea at all, in fact.” She heard answering amusement in his voice. They understood each other very well, she and Guy. Bringing Nina into it had, of course, been in his mind right from the start, and Harriet was happy enough to collude with him over that. If Nina would consent, of course, which was problematic.
“I’d like to talk to her at any rate, and see what she thinks.”
“As a matter of fact, she’s coming for lunch. I managed to wangle a bit of extra pork from the butcher. Why don’t you come down and join us?”
“That would be lovely,” she said tranquilly, knowing this was no coincidence, either. “I haven’t seen her for several weeks. Someone’s given me some late French beans, I’ll bring them with me. Show her that’s one advantage of living in what she will insist on referring to as the country.”
“Anywhere ten miles out of London is country to Nina,” Guy said.
Nina was his daughter, Daisy’s stepdaughter. Harriet knew how worried Guy had been about her lately. It was patently obvious that he was seizing this unexpected happening as a chance to shake her out of – well, self-pity wasn’t a word that automatically came to mind in connection with Nina, but might in this case have a smidgeon of truth in it. Nothing distorted the personality more than an unhappy love affair. And Harriet knew what she was talking about there.
“I’d better take the train, my petrol’s almost done.”
But before Harriet could leave the cottage to join them both for lunch, there was Guy on the telephone again. He sounded shaken. “Harriet. Harriet, my dear, prepare yourself for a shock.” He spoke hesitantly, unusually for him. “The builders at Charnley have found – something.”
“Something else? What is it?”
“I think you and Daisy will have to go down there. The police need to see you both.”
1910
Chapter One
1910. The summer when King Edward died, and the new King George was proclaimed. When – except in Court circles, where everyone wore black – the women’s hats were as frivolous and silly as usual, when the sun shone endlessly, or so it seemed in retrospect, and the Jardines and their friends played tennis in long skirts, when one could bear to play at all in the heat. When there was tea every day on the lawn under the cedar, with strawberries, sharp and sweet, dipped in sugar. Charnley’s grey stones rising solidly, immutably, against the dark green background of the woods behind. The water playing delicately into the basin of the fountain on the terrace, where the stone Laocoon and his twin sons writhed futilely and everlastingly in the coils of a pair of sea serpents, sent to crush them to death and exact vengeance for the god Apollo.
There hadn’t always been Jardines at Charnley. They had arrived there a mere sixty or so years ago, when the Rodhythes, minor aristocracy who had previously owned the house for centuries, having ruined themselves through an incurable inherited addiction to gambling and an indifference to property management, had been forced to sell their ancestral home, since it was in imminent danger of tumbling about their ears. Joseph Jardine, grandfather of the present owner, Amory Jardine, had stepped in and snapped up the house and most of its contents, with new money accumulated through his Scottish and Lancashire textile mills. Thereafter, abandoning his cotton empire, he sank an immense amount of money into repairs and renovations, made some neo-Gothic additions by way of towers and a mock-medieval gatehouse to the original Tudor wings and the later Georgian façade, played with his stocks and shares to recoup his expenses, buried his origins and began to live the life of a country gentleman. Three generations later, it had almost been forgotten that the house had ever been owned by anyone else but Jardines, and there seemed no reason why they should not continue to live there for ever.
So it seemed to Daisy, at any rate, cooling off in the shade of the weeping ash after a hot bicycle ride back from the village, whence she’d been bidden by her mother to take horrid old Mrs Drake a jar of calves’ foot jelly. Unmarried as she was determined to remain, she could see herself taking root here at Charnley, in the same way as that ancient old crone, Mrs Drake, with whiskers on her chin and her nature soured, had grown into the very fabric of her tumbledown cottage, refusing stubbornly to move into one of the recently improved almshouses. Silly old besom! thought Daisy. (The old woman had not been suitably grateful for the largesse from the big house, though her daughter-in-law had cried shame on her, and Daisy had ridden home the long way round, to punish herself for expecting Mrs Drake’s gratitude, and for being mortified when it hadn’t come.) But on arriving home, she’d flung her bicycle down in the stable yard and rushed into the kitchen for a glass of lemonade, by now feeling that her penance had been excessive – though she could never help the guilty feelings induced by comparison of her own comfortable living conditions to those of even the best-off villagers.
“Well, I never, Miss Daisy, bursting in like that, what a turn you gave me!” declared the cook, jumping up in a fluster from an afternoon doze in a chair by the window, her apron over her face. “I’m sorry, but my lemonade’s all been taken down to the tennis court, and I’ve only some barley water I’ve made for old Nurse. I can squeeze you a lemon into some of that, though,” she added, relenting, for Daisy was spoilt by all the staff, who liked her unaffected manners and happy nature.
“Oh, bliss, Mrs Heslop, you’re a brick!”
“I can be,” returned Mrs Heslop drily, “when it do take me that way.”
Daisy had downed the drink, cool from the dark pantry, in unladylike gulps, and then begged another, which she carried outside, into the shade of the ash. Still scarlet-faced, the blood beating under her fair skin, she sat leaning against the trunk, her slippery, unmanageable hair escaping from under her boater and sticking to her forehead in unattractive wisps, like wet straw. She removed the hat and flung it to the ground, wishing she could do the same with the offending hair. Oh, why couldn’t she have been blessed with hair like Vita’s – dark, glossy and wavy, framing her pretty face even more beautifully now that it was up? Or like her mother’s pale and shining, supremely elegant coiffures, which stayed in place exactly as she wished them to stay? But then, nothing, not even a stray hair, was allowed to interfere with Beatrice’s calm intentions. Things always happened just as she wished, in the recognisable, organised pattern that defined her well-conducted, irreproachable life. Impossible to imagine Beatrice breaking out of the mould, as Daisy so longed to do. She was so effortlessly good.
As for Daisy – nothing seemed right to her, that summer, half adult, half child as she was, lingering in the awkward hiatus between schoolroom and coming out. She had no one to talk to: Vita was too busy with her Bertie and their wedding preparations to have time to amuse a younger sister, and Harriet, as usual, contrived to bury herself in the library as much as possible in order to avoid the tennis- and tea-parties, picnics and other entertainments devised by their mother as a guise for match-making. Beatrice’s admirable devotion to the onerous duty of marrying off three daughters was unswerving. But Harriet, Daisy thought, might already have made up her mind where her affections lay. There was a sort of tension between her and Kit whenever he was here, they were already linked in everyone else’s eyes, though Harriet hadn’t yet given her word to him. Perhaps, knowing him so intimately since childhood, she knew it wasn’t wise to give in to him too easily. Or that was what Miss Tempest had shrewdly suggested
Positively the worst thing of all about this summer to Daisy was that her governess, Miss Tempest, had astonished everyone (except Daisy herself) by departing to become a suffragette. Leaving Daisy, without her, to face the awfulness of her approaching season, which would not begin until next year, but already loomed as large in her mind as it did in her mother’s. There would be her coming out ball to launch her upon the London social scene, followed by an endless round of events, with her mother or dread Great-aunt Edina acting as chaperone to see that she behaved herself, the sort of events Miss Tempest scornfully dismissed as light-minded: Ascot and Henley Regatta and all the rest of it, dances and balls – house parties, dinner parties, after-theatre suppers, all simply in order to snare a young man like Bertie. Oh, misery, no, not like Bertie, please not, harmless though he was! Harmless and amiable – but such a ninny! Rich, however, and well-connected, already supervising the building of a lovely house across the valley where he would take Vita to live after their wedding, where they would have three or four children and live predictably ever after. Whereas what Daisy wanted – no, what she most passionately desired in the world at this moment – was to join Athene Tempest in that other London, far removed from the world of parties and dances and frivolities like that, and do great and worthy and wonderfully thrilling things by working for women’s suffrage. Distribute leaflets demanding votes for women, sew banners (though alas, they would certainly be crooked if she had anything to do with the making of them!). Break windows and chain oneself to railings, perhaps go to prison for it. Throw bombs, even.
Frustrated, Daisy contemplated the impossibility of running away to do any of these things, finished Nanny Byfield’s barley water and sat inelegantly, since no one was around to see, with her black-stockinged knees to her chin, and her skirts above them for coolness, showing her drawers; and trying to keep her thoughts from turning to the dreaded arrival of Miss Jessamy, who was to replace Miss Tempest. It was shady under the weeping ash, and though small insects constantly dropped from the canopy, and the roots made for uncomfortable sitting, she stayed where she was. The sounds of tennis being played drifted across to her, and she was far too hot to want to be drawn into a game. But then, as the clock over the stable struck four, came the agreeable realisation that it was too late for that. There would be tea in a quarter of an hour.
Presently, at precisely quarter past four, she saw Albrighton approaching across the lawn at a stately pace, wheeling the tea trolley, attended by the plump, pretty little parlourmaid, Cheevers.
“Ah, Bayah-tree-chay!”
Beatrice Jardine, presiding over the teacups, drew in a deep, steadying breath at the sound of that once-familiar voice. A faint tinge of colour appeared on her creamy white skin, a teaspoon rattled slightly against a saucer, but then she pushed back her chair, rose and walked, graceful and statuesque, across the lawn towards the speaker, extending a hand. “Valery!”
“So!” the young man exclaimed with satisfaction. “You knew me then!”
“How could I not? No one else has ever pronounced my name in that ridiculous way! And besides, we were expecting you.”
He raised her soft, be-ringed hand to within a quarter of an inch of his lips, and they surveyed one another, for a moment not smiling. His eyes assessed the woman before him: Beatrice, on the eve of her forty-fourth birthday, was still a beauty, exquisitely dressed in cream shantung, cool and smelling of lily-of-the-valley, gracious and welcoming, the society hostess personified. She saw Valery Akhmet Iskander as the others must see him: milky-coffee skin and a pair of sharp, light-blue eyes, high cheekbones and tight, dark curls, a sloping profile and a wide, white smile, a handsome though unexpected combination due to his mixed Russian and Egyptian parentage. Unusual but, given the melange of nationalities in Cairo, not unheard of. He had put on a little weight since she last saw him. No one would have guessed how uncomfortably hard her heart was beating as she led him forward. “Welcome to Charnley. Come, let me introduce you to the others. I see you and Kit have already met.”
“At the station,” said Kit, stepping forward to greet her in his turn, taking her long white hand in both of his, and dropping a light kiss on her scented cheek. “Had we known, we could have travelled down together.”
As their hands touched, Beatrice experienced as always the tender rush of emotion for the orphaned small boy Kit had been when first she had seen him and drawn him into the bosom of her family. She almost reached out to smooth the wayward black hair that fell in a comma over his forehead. He raised his intensely blue eyes to her face, eyes of a blue that was very like her own, and with lashes that any girl would have envied, not disguising his obvious admiration for her, and causing a distinct but not unpleasant flutter of pleasure in the region of her breastbone. Rather quickly, her hand was withdrawn from his clasp. She patted his sleeve in a motherly fashion, and turned away. Iskander was led to the tea-table and presented: “Valery Iskander, an eminent Egyptologist whom I met some years ago while wintering in Egypt.”
Smiling, the newcomer bowed his head over the hands of several young ladies in straw boaters and high-necked, long-sleeved muslin blouses with cream serge skirts, shook hands with gentlemen still in tennis whites, who nodded a little stiffly and watched him covertly. It was difficult to say how old he was, though certainly not more than in his mid-thirties, which seemed young to have reached the eminence Beatrice had stated. She was perhaps simply being polite. His dark suit was just a little too impeccable in this gathering, his collar too stiff, his moustache narrow and sleek above the full, sensuous lips. But then he was, after all, a foreigner.
Introductions over, a place was found for him next to his hostess, more tea was ordered, more scones, and, as the conversation resumed its generality, Iskander was given time to study his new acquaintances. The bevy of young women resolved itself into no more than three, all of them Beatrice’s daughters: there was Harriet, the eldest, in no way a beauty but striking, tall like her mother, and with a crooked smile and a pair of serious brown eyes under level dark brows: a clever girl, no doubt. Little Vita, the prettiest of the three – endearing pansy face, small white teeth, carnations-and-cream complexion, wearing a large diamond cluster on her engagement finger, indulging in playful asides with her young man, Bertram Rossiter, rosy and rather self-satisfied, who was seated next to her. The other man was a neighbour, a fattish, damp young fellow called Teddy Cranfield, the effect of whose exertions on the tennis court could only be guessed at.
At that moment Cheevers arrived with replenishments, and an urgent question for Beatrice from Mrs Heslop, apparently about the fish for dinner. With a little cluck of annoyance, Beatrice rose and stepped aside to deal with the matter, while the conversation round the tea table continued.
“Mr Iskander, how fortunate that you will be here for Mama’s birthday next week! Are you any good at play-acting?” Vita dimpled at him. “I warn you – Harriet will try to rope you in, she’s of a managing disposition and we’re woefully short of men – men who are willing, that is,” she declared in mock reproof at her future husband, and the perspiring Teddy Cranfield.
“An ability to stand still would be more useful than play-acting, since it’s a tableau vivant we’re to do! Barely a week to prepare for it – and we haven’t yet decided on a subject!”
That was the youngest daughter, Daisy. An untidy child, her long hair not yet up, her features not fully formed into those of the woman she would become, the only one of the three who had Beatrice’s gold silk hair, her pale creamy skin, maybe the only one with the promise of their mother’s true beauty, but who could tell? She was as yet an unfolded bud. Her looks did not quite accord with her ways, however, that much was apparent even to a newcomer such as Iskander. Like her elder sister Harriet, a lively intelligence animated her face, and she spoke with a vehemence and conviction that could never have come from Beatrice. There was nothing in the least remote and cool about her.
“But why,” he asked in soft, rather sibilant, but excellently English tones, “do you not choose something where no men are needed? Boticelli’s ‘Three Graces’ comes to mind.” His smooth smile travelled from one sister to the other.
“Too easy,” said Harriet immediately. It had been thought of before, and dismissed, but she was too polite to say so. “The audience is supposed to guess, you see, Mr Iskander.”
“And three such beauties would immediately give away the answer, of course.”
Kit gave a short laugh, but Bertie and Teddy Cranfield were reduced to an embarrassed British silence at this confirmation of what their instincts had already told them about the fellow. Beatrice, returning to her seat, said, “Girls, you’re not to plague Mr Iskander when he’s only just arrived. He needs a little peace after his train journey from town.”
“Oh, bother, yes, that train! Isn’t it just too tiresome?” demanded Daisy. “Miss Jessamy should have been on it, too.” Her thickly dark-lashed hazel eyes sparkled, so attractive a contrast with that golden hair. “Are you sure you didn’t see any mousy person in a governessy grey dress lurking in the shrubbery outside the station, Mr Iskander? Or did you, Kit?”
“Daisy!” As a perfect hostess, the word tiresome in connection with guests – or even one soon to become an employee – was not one Beatrice allowed to be on anyone’s lips. “I’m certain Miss Jessamy will not be like that in the least. There has simply been some misunderstanding, which will no doubt resolve itself shortly,” she added, though Rose Jessamy not being on the train would in fact mean all sorts of complications, not the least of which was that Copley would have to be available to take the motorcar (though perhaps the pony trap would do) down to the station again to meet all likely trains…But how unmannerly of her, she thought privately, if she had been prevented from catching the train she had indicated she would travel on, not to have sent word to let them know when she might be expected! Such a communication would not have been difficult, they were not behind the times here at Charnley. The house, as well as being equipped with electric light, three bathrooms and hot water heating pipes running beneath the floors of the ground floor rooms, boasted a telephone set. Or if, like many people, she was averse to using the instrument, why not send a telegram? Even a letter posted in London that morning would have arrived here by now. “She is not a governess, she is an artist,” she said, as if that explained everything about the missing woman.
“I expect she paints pretty little woodland scenes,” Daisy said carelessly. “What a pity the bluebells are over!” Beatrice widened her sapphire eyes warningly, but chose to say nothing in front of the others, and turned her attention once more to the teapot. Her youngest child was becoming dangerously sharp-tongued. Miss Tempest’s departure had come not a moment too soon.
“Don’t vex your mama, Daisy,” Kit drawled, accepting a cup of tea from Beatrice and watching her from under his lids. “I can vouch for it you will be very pleasantly surprised when you do meet Miss Jessamy.”
“Will I? Oh, do tell! I had no idea you knew her!”
“Well, as to knowing … it was I who first took Marcus along to the Alpha Workshops – that’s a kind of artists’ commune where she’s been painting and selling her work. She’s regarded as a very talented and most unusual person.”
An artists’ commune! Beatrice frowned, but only very slightly. After forty, one could not afford that indulgence. She had not been made aware of any communes, artistic or otherwise and, not for the first time, she wondered if Miss Jessamy was indeed going to be the good idea, the solution to Daisy’s companionless state she had seemed to offer at the time. When Miss Tempest had so inconsiderately left, it had hardly seemed worth the trouble of finding a new governess – Daisy was almost seventeen and would be coming out next year, and Beatrice knew only too well the tribulations of finding the right kind of person to guide a young girl, especially one so impressionable as Daisy. Look how Miss Tempest had turned out! Inculcating rebellious, quite unacceptable ideas into the girl’s head, a fact which Beatrice had unfortunately only learned after the young woman’s abrupt departure. Yet Daisy could not be left to her own devices.
The plan to engage Miss Jessamy as a companion for her had come about as a sudden inspiration, born of one of those reckless impulses, of which few people suspected Beatrice was capable, after seeing what this Miss Jessamy had done when making over the London house of Beatrice’s dearest friend, Millie Glendinning. Charnley, unlike the family’s house in London, could not be considered elegant, however well-loved it was. And at that moment, its brocatelles and velvets, antique wallpapers and heirloom furniture, the buhl and ormolu, walnut and mahogany, the mountains of French porcelain collected on their grand tours by those Rodhythes whose heavy, gilded portraits still gazed down from the walls, suddenly seemed to Beatrice to be static and heavy, and lacking in any vigour or newness of ideas. Millie’s daringly new and original decorations on the other hand, the colour and texture of her brightly painted walls, exuded a freshness, lightness and gaiety that was like nothing Beatrice – or indeed most other people – had ever seen before.
She rarely allowed her emotions to take control of her common sense, but there were times when she could not help it, and this had been one of them. She was utterly bowled over by the riot of exuberant design that evoked such disturbing ideas and stirred something dormant within her, some longing for change, for distant remembered vistas, some undisclosed awareness that there must be something beyond the safe confines and predictabilities of life as mistress of Charnley, wife of Amory, and mother to his children. Few would have believed that beneath Beatrice Jardine’s marble-cool exterior, there beat this longing for something wild and free – and even, perhaps, something dangerous, which was trying to escape. But there it was.
When she was told that the remarkable young woman who had effected this wonderful modern transformation was seeking other commissions, she drew in a deep breath and plunged: it was arranged that Miss Jessamy would undertake the redecoration of some of the guest rooms in the west wing at Charnley. Speed was not what was required: she was to take her time, as long as was necessary, and in return for an additional fee, keep Daisy occupied, which should not be difficult. Daisy was easily interested, receptive to new ideas.
At this moment, however, Beatrice wondered uneasily if she had not allowed herself to be carried away by the tide of enthusiasm that had swept over her. Had she not acted too precipitately, in contravention of her normal rules to herself where her girls were concerned? Had she enquired insufficiently into Miss Jessamy’s credentials as a fit person to be with Daisy? She had not yet even seen the lady in question, but had engaged her through the intermediary of Marcus, who, it had surprisingly transpired, had already encountered Miss Jessamy and her work several times. Beatrice was immediately reassured when she thought of how completely she could rely on her son’s judgement, which was rarely at fault. Though not yet five and twenty, Marcus was steady and sober, like his father, Amory. If he thought Miss Jessamy suitable, there was no more to be said.
And now it seemed that Kit, too, already knew Miss Jessamy.
She looked up from her teacup, and at that exact moment, caught an exchange between her eldest daughter and Kit that she did not quite understand, an ironic look on Harriet’s part which held a certain challenge, an enigmatic one on Kit’s. After a moment, Harriet turned to say something to Teddy Cranfield, and Kit brought his glance to rest on Beatrice herself. Her smile answered his. It was, of course, part of his charm, that warm look he bestowed. He had this trick of making one feel there was no one else, at that moment, who mattered.
Yet, despite his sublime good looks – spoiled only (or perhaps not spoiled, simply lifted out of the Byronic cliché) by a rather large nose and an often moody expression, there was something ever so slightly louche about Kit Sacheverell. Perhaps it was his wide-brimmed hats, his flowing ties, the hair that was just a little over-long. She dismissed such thoughts, not willing to think ill of the boy – well, no, a man of twenty-six, now – though she must think of him as a boy to her almost forty-four years.
“I sometimes wish,” she had remarked a short while ago to Amory, “that he were a little – steadier, and as for Harriet…” She had left the rest unsaid. Harriet was at the moment a sore point with her, though it was a state of affairs she was determined not to allow to continue. A fine looking, high-spirited girl such as she was, clever and with all the right connections, should have ended her first season engaged to be married. Vita had managed it. Beatrice herself had been married at eighteen and by the time she was Harriet’s age had already produced Marcus, the son and heir, and Harriet herself. Instead, Harriet had, it seemed, fixed on Kit. Oh-so-charming but penniless Kit (though he had high expectations, when that ancient old relative of his shuffled off this mortal coil). Beatrice sighed, with frustration, annoyance – or something deeper.
Amory, she knew, did not altogether share her concern about Harriet. Though he constantly joked that his pocket was not bottomless, he had made generous settlements on his three daughters, he loved them and enjoyed their company and therefore did not see any urgent necessity for finding them husbands. A highly moral and upright man who showed a stern face to the world but was invariably courteous and gentle with his family, he had married his beautiful wife for love as he knew it, had apparently found deep contentment and wanted nothing better for his children. Moreover, he liked Kit, and was more forbearing towards him than he would have been to his own son, had Marcus ever given him cause for worry, which he had not. Kit would sooner or later, he said, make a go of his chosen profession as a civil engineer – haphazard choice as it was, with romantic notions about building bridges, though there was not much evidence of that as yet, and it was high time he decided not to hang around so much on the fringes of the art world. “Oh, I suspect Harriet will be very good for him.”
“The point is, rather,” she had replied, a little sharply, surprising herself, “will he be good enough for Harriet? Will any man? She has such high standards, rather too high, I think, and men do not like clever – or sharp-tongued – women. As for Kit…”
“Well, you are not suggesting Kit falls short in that direction? You know the boy better than any of us, you get on so well with him, Beatrice,” Amory said, smiling and patting her hand.
With slight irritation – sometimes, she wished Amory would show just some impatience or disapproval, that he would be less predictable, perhaps (dare she say it?) be a little less dull – she had let the conversation lapse, but at the back of her mind lingered something Kit had once said to her. “I should like, above all else,” he had declared passionately, “to have no necessity to worry about whether or not I might afford to buy what I admire – you know, paintings and works of art, things like that.”
It was a pity for a young man with such ambitious tastes and such a disinclination to put his shoulder to the wheel and work, that his father had not left him enough money to indulge them, for the present, at least. The old relative had had one foot in the grave for the last twelve years, and was still inconsiderately hanging on. We must not, she thought, let Kit marry Harriet simply because he would then be rich enough to buy anything he wanted. The thought that this idea could be in his mind was so exceedingly distasteful to her, she tried to dismiss it immediately. Kit was not like that. He would not marry Harriet because it was expedient. Beatrice very much wanted to believe this, but at the back of her mind, she thought he might. There were unexplained simmerings, impatiences, ironies below the surface of Kit’s sometimes cynical outlook that occasionally unsettled her. Gave off the whiff of danger. The thought made her feel a little breathless.
The afternoon sunlight filtered through the spreading branches of the cedar, lighting her face with gold. How beautiful she is, thought Kit. No one else could come anywhere near her, her daughters, no one. He was in danger of losing his admittedly not very stable balance over her.
Amory Jardine and his son rode down from London in a first class compartment of the early train they always took on Fridays, when guests were often expected for the weekend. For a while, they spoke of matters of the day: Mr Asquith, the Prime Minister’s problems with trade disputes and strikes; the high words in Parliament over the ever-present question of Home Rule for the Irish; incredulity expressed by certain letter writers to The Times that the earth could be thought to have actually passed through the tail of Halley’s comet, and the growing menace of the presumptuous, troublesome Suffragists. The opinions of father and son were not entirely in accord over this last, and presently they fell silent. Amory opened his attaché case and took out some papers, but Marcus remained uncharacteristically unoccupied. Stretching out his long legs in front of him, crossing them at the ankles, he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked out of the window as the train belched and clattered through the dirty London suburbs and into greener, ever greener countryside, and thence on to a branch line, while pleasurable, rather daring, thoughts stirred in him.
They were physically somewhat alike, father and son, with
