Autumn Softly Fell (26 page)

She had managed to rein herself in, to smile, wise to his ways. ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Roddy. I know that’s what you want and I shan’t do it!’

Roderick had smiled too, had given her a superior look as he sauntered over to the window to throw out his cigarette end.
Well, let him smile,
she’d thought,
let him think he’s superior if that’s what
he wants, if it makes him happy. And let Nibs sit at home without a job nursing his precious pride. I don’t have to pander to either of them.

As they left the library together, they’d run into Mrs Bourne in the corridor. It was impossible not to quail, impossible not to shrink against the wall and wait for the lash of her tongue. But the
housekeeper
had merely nodded and in a voice drenched in age-old decorum she had said, ‘Miss Dorothea. Many happy returns of the day.’ Then she had swept on her way, the sound of jangling keys fading as she went down the stairs to the basement.

If Dorothea had been astonished, then Roderick had been more so. His mouth had dropped open, he had looked at her as if she had just tamed a wild dragon. She had burst out laughing, because he looked so ridiculous – so like a
child
. But she had spared his blushes by not telling him so.

‘Such a beautiful view,
Madame
,’ said Mlle Lacroix to Aunt Eloise as they stood by the French windows, looking out. ‘So very
English
, I have always thought so.’

‘But it is not quite the view that was intended, Mademoiselle. The landscaping, unfortunately, was never finished.’ Aunt Eloise gave a sweep of her hand which, to Dorothea looking on, seemed to
indicate
not just the wide meadow known as The Park, but the whole panorama: the hedges, the trees, the hidden canal, the dark smudge of Ingleby Wood – even the distant mass of Barrow Hill, perhaps, and the sky too, deepening now to a dusky blue laced with thin white clouds. All this, Aunt Eloise seemed to be saying, was to have been encompassed in the unfinished landscaping of Clifton Park. And why not? What else was there? On this June evening, with the light lingering on the horizon, the heat of the day slowly fading, the air still, a hush on the land, it was impossible to think of being anywhere else. Coventry was a mirage, London a fading dream. Such a place as Stepnall Street might as well never have existed except in the darkest of half-forgotten nightmares. Clifton was the centre of everything –
was
everything.

I am seeing Clifton,
thought Dorothea,
through Aunt Eloise’s eyes
.

‘Almost no work was done on the grounds,’ Aunt Eloise continued. ‘The present gardens belonged to the old manor house which was demolished nearly two hundred years ago. If you notice, the gardens are not quite aligned with the house: the garden wall runs at an angle. New gardens were planned but – like the parkland – they were never set out. One must use one’s imagination to see how it would have been.’

‘I like your gardens as they are,
Madame
. So
parfait.
Delightful.’

‘That is my opinion exactly, Mademoiselle.’ Aunt Eloise bestowed on the governess a noble smile. After all this time, thought Dorothea, Mlle Lacroix was finally being
approved
of.

It has taken Aunt Eloise as long to accept the mam’zelle as it has taken her to accept me
, thought Dorothea. But in the governess’s case, it had come all but too late.

This reminder of Mlle Lacroix’s imminent departure was a twist of sadness, sharp and bitter. Clifton Park without her was
unthinkable
.
Nothing
, thought Dorothea,
is ever perfect. There is a flaw, a blemish that runs through everything.
But, oh! If only one could draw the sting!

She was glad, though, that her ordeal was over. She was no longer the centre of attention. She had braved the little shocks as people came in and said – oh, so many nice things, she couldn’t remember half of them. She’d felt such an imposter, listening to them. ‘You will be the belle of the ball – the belle of the ball,’ Nanny had said, asking her to turn round and round in the day room, looking at her from every angle, not put out or irritable but rather wistful, as if once upon a time she had dreamed of being the belle of the ball. But Dorothea didn’t want to be a belle. How could any girl want it? How could any girl bear to be the centre of attention, to experience all the little shocks as people looked at you, the nice words that were words all the same, like beaks pecking – pecking, plucking, pulling you apart, each taking their portion. How could any girl want that?

She shivered, moved away from the French windows through which a breeze was now whispering, like the first faint presage of the deep, dark night. On the far side of the room, Uncle Albert was
sitting on the settee with Lady Fitzwilliam. Dorothea listened. Uncle Albert was talking.

‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m as right as nine pence, in perfect health.’

‘But you gave us such a fright, Albert, that day at Darvell Hall, I shall never forget it.’

‘My dear Alice, that was a year ago. I’m quite recovered now. Ask Camborne if you don’t believe me.’

‘Is it really a whole year since the fete at Darvell Hall? How time flies at our age!’

‘Our age!’ scoffed Uncle Albert. ‘I am in the prime of life, and you, Alice, are a spring chicken in comparison.’

Lady Fitzwilliam laughed. ‘Such flattery! And you used to be such a plain-spoken man! But even a man in his prime must rest now and then, yet Eloise tells me you are busier than ever!’

‘Ellie fusses,’ said Uncle Albert. (Dorothea tried to imagine Aunt Eloise
fussing
and failed). ‘Ellie fusses, but in actual fact I am all but retired now. Some weeks I am in Coventry only three days out of six, if you can believe it.’

‘You have your trusty lieutenants, Henry tells me, Mr Simcox and Mr Smith.’

‘True, true. Simcox takes care of things at Crown Street – the bicycles, that is, and the motor components. Smith rules the roost at Allibone Road. Your son has told you, I suppose, about our new works in Allibone Road – the new BFS factory. Business is so brisk now that we needed larger premises. There’s the new four-seater Mark II on the way, too. It will be launched at the Motor Show later this year. And then there’s the competition department. But you will know all about that, with your boy being in the forefront there.’

‘My boy – as you call him – talks of nothing else.’

‘Then you don’t need to hear it from me. I am boring you, Alice. I’m sorry.’

‘My dear Albert,
you
couldn’t bore me if you tried! But here’s Dorothea. Come and sit with us, my dear, there’s plenty of room. There. That’s it. A rose between two thorns. Tell me, how have you been spending this auspicious day?’

‘She has spent some part of it with her old uncle. We walked to Hayton this afternoon, didn’t we, child? Mind you, it took twice as long as I expected. The girl seems to know the whole village. Everyone we met wanted to stop and talk.’

‘People talked to you, too, Uncle. And you were ages with Noah Lee.’

‘Ah, so you’re acquainted with
him
, are you, Albert? My late husband rather admired him on the quiet. A village character. Of course, he was an incorrigible poacher in his day. Old Harry – your aunt’s father, my dear – used to tirade about it. But he was a great sportsman, of course, Old Harry, and so all poachers were anathema to him. Not only poachers. The railways, too, and Gladstone. They were all the work of the devil in Old Harry’s eyes.’

Dorothea ventured to say, ‘Noah Lee once told me he was a tyrant.’

‘It didn’t do to cross him, my dear, that’s true enough. But he was always charming to me. A real gentleman, I like to think.’

‘That’s what Becket says, too. Old Mr Rycroft kept the gardens spic and span, Becket says.’

‘I daresay he did. Dear Old Harry. But he wouldn’t have got on in the modern world. He wasn’t like you, Albert. He was a creature of his time.’

‘Well, all I know is, I’m no sportsman. On our walk this afternoon we saw rabbits, pheasants, woodpigeon and I don’t know what else but I felt no desire to shoot any of them. I no longer feel the need to pander to such pastimes, even if I do live in the countryside, God help me.’

Lady Fitzwilliam laughed. ‘Such an admission does you no discredit, Albert. I have never been wildly enthusiastic about that sort of thing myself. But we must look lively, my dears, I do believe it is time to go through to dinner.’

‘Eight,’ Aunt Eloise had said, looking at the names on her list. ‘Such a small number. I could, I suppose, ask the Somersbys or maybe the Adnitts from the village at a pinch.’

But Dorothea had been content with the list as it was. The
Somersbys were not special friends like the Fitzwilliams, and the Adnitts she only really knew by sight.

Aunt Eloise had sighed. ‘Very well. If that is how you want it. But it will be rather an
intimate
dinner.’ She had drawn a line at the bottom of her list. ‘Now comes the problem of who shall sit where.’

Dorothea found that she had been placed next to Roderick’s friend from school. She watched him shyly out of the corner of her eye as he spooned his soup and tore up his bread roll, keeping his eyes down, his face flushing every shade of pink, beads of
perspiration
on his forehead. Was dinner, then, such an ordeal? She wished she had the gift of putting people at their ease the way her aunt did. Aunt Eloise made a success of every occasion, whether it was a
tête-à
-tête in her parlour or a grand dinner party like tonight. People went away content, thinking they had made a conquest. They went on at length to anyone who would listen about their dear new friend Mrs Brannan. But it was all a sleight of hand, for no one really knew Aunt Eloise at all, least of all her own family. This, anyway, was how it seemed to Dorothea. If Aunt Eloise had been a house, she would have been a grand place like Clifton but all one would know of her was what one could glimpse through the windows.

All this, however, did not help when it came to starting a
conversation
with Harrington-Shaw.

‘Mr Harrington-Shaw—’ She blushed, feeling silly, like a little girl playing with dolls, putting words in their mouths. ‘How is … er … how is school?’

School was a place called Downfield, she knew that much. Roderick had moved there last September after finishing prep school. It was the traditional family school, Aunt Eloise had said. Her brother Frederick had gone there as a boy. Aunt Eloise always spoke of Frederick in reverent tones. Handsome, clever, charming, modest: she made him sound like a
shining example.
There was never any mention, Dorothea noted, of his being a rake or
rapscallion
; his wild youth was not discussed.

‘What is Downfield
like
, Mr Harrington-Shaw?’ She had got very little out of Roderick, which only made her the more curious. He spent half his life at school, yet she knew next to nothing about it.

‘It’s … er … it’s….’ Harrington-Shaw went red as a beetroot, spilling his soup, scattering crumbs from his napkin. From the few stumbling words he got out, she understood that Downfield was very different to one’s prep school, that it took a while to get used to but it was of course one of the foremost establishments of its kind in the country, with history, tradition and so on and so forth (his voice trailed off into an indecipherable mumble).

That was all very well, thought Dorothea, but what actually
happened
there?

The disjointed conversation petered out. How did Aunt Eloise find the patience? Looking down, she realized her plate had been whisked away. Yet another course had come and gone. The lobster mayonnaise was finished, the roast duck would be on its way. They were halfway through the meal already and she could remember nothing, when she ought to be storing every detail, her birthday dinner, her first step into the world of the grown-ups – no more spying through the crack in the dining room door! She began to note things down: the crease in the table cloth, the glittering chandelier, Mr Ordish discreet and inconspicuous. The cut glass seemed to shimmer in the electric light; Timms – the new John, Tomlin’s replacement – repeatedly bit his bottom lip as he piled the plates in his arm. And then there were the conversations weaving back and forth across the table. Dorothea dipped in to first one, then another.

‘… and I took the bend at completely the wrong angle, skidded right round, and ended up facing downhill. Naturally I’d no chance of winning the climb after that….’

‘… this is
le couteau
in French, Monsieur, and that is
la fourchette
….’

‘… who would ever have imagined, my dear, that
all seven
Northamptonshire seats would go to the Liberals. Joseph must be turning in his grave….’

‘… he has this ripping new cricket bat and I was wondering if I….’

‘… motorized bicycles are really beginning to take off, and as for the motor components side of things – well, we can barely keep up with demand. The Crown Street works have never been busier….’

The roast duck came, the roast duck went; Cook’s ‘particular’
birthday pudding slipped by too. Aunt Eloise got to her feet. Dinner was over. Dorothea folded her napkin. The ladies retired to the drawing room.

The French windows were still open. ‘Very careless,’ said Aunt Eloise reaching for the bell but Dorothea said she would close them and Aunt Eloise said, ‘Thank you, Dorothea.’

Dorothea closed one long window, looked out before closing the second. There was still a glimmer of light, a rim on the horizon, far to the right but high above, stars were glinting in the dark pools between the massing clouds. There was no moon, as it was only one day away from the new.

Dorothea pushed the window shut and turned the key in the lock.

Henry had brought his gramophone with him. They had music when the gentlemen joined them.

‘A guinea a disc,’ sighed Lady Fitzwilliam. ‘Such profligacy.’

‘But the music, Alice!’ said Aunt Eloise. ‘Enchanting!’