‘Here de harbour shark to wish us good day,’ said Maxwell none too quietly, and Ruby laughed. It was this insolence, as much as their lateness, which now provoked their employer.
‘God damn it! You were due here thirty minutes ago and you have the brass neck to mutter and smirk at me.’
They couldn’t deny it so they said nothing at all, and continued their measured pace up the path.
‘I should sack you here and now,’ Silas said. His face was hard with resentment. ‘I should send you packing, you useless, feckless, no-good pair. Thirty staff, and not a good one among you. Can you actually tell the time? Or do you just stroll along to work when the cock stops crowing or when the mango drops from the tree?’
Maxwell whistled through his teeth and Ruby nodded slowly as if to say, I hear you and I see you, but I don’t heed you. He had built himself a great house but it didn’t make them slaves, and the plain fact was he needed them more than they needed him. A hundred and forty-six arrivals today, the Whittam liner due in at midday; without Ruby in the kitchen they’d all go hungry, and without Maxwell and Scotty they’d all be carrying their own valises. All of this she expressed with her eyes, cutting the boss a cold, bold look as she passed. Ruby Donaldson had a friendly word for almost everyone, but not for Silas Whittam, no. He was a waste of good breath.
‘M
ust the dogs be in the painting?’
‘Why? Can’t you paint dogs?’
Eugene Stiller laid down his brush.
‘I can paint dogs, yes. But what I can paint and what I choose to paint are quite different matters.’
‘But Eugene,’ said Thea Hoyland, who knew the artist well and as a result had scant regard for either his professionalism or his personal dignity, ‘you don’t actually choose to paint anything, do you? You paint what you’re paid to paint. Or at least that’s what I understood.’
She smiled at him to temper her rudeness, which was apparent even to her. He’d placed her on a cushioned window seat at such an angle that her face was on one side washed in natural light, and on the other almost wholly in shade. This, thought Eugene Stiller, was nicely symbolic, a representation of the good and bad in her, the sweet and the sour. It was how he entertained himself through the long hours of any commission: revealing, by the tilt of a chin or the glint of an eye, a facet of his sitter’s personality that other artists – perhaps less well tutored than he in the school of realism – would be unable to depict satisfactorily through the medium of oil on canvas. Selfishness, cruelty, kindness, avarice, loyalty: Eugene Stiller saw these traits as physical characteristics which, like a mole on the cheek or a missing finger, must be faithfully represented.
‘To a point,’ he said now, tartly. ‘Though I have been known to say no.’
‘But you won’t say no to my spaniels, I hope?’
‘Jittery creatures, spaniels.’
‘Well so am I, for that matter. If it’s jitteriness you object to, better paint that bowl of fruit over there.’
Eugene laughed. He’d forgotten how relentlessly sassy Thea Hoyland was; or, at least, he remembered the sassiness, but had expected it to be replaced with something more mellow and soberly aristocratic now that she was – of all things – a countess. Eugene and Thea were friends of the type whose shared history was of more significance than their shared interests. For twelve consecutive years their respective parents had rented neighbouring beach houses on Long Island, and every summer vacation of their childhoods had been spent in enforced proximity to each other; they would bicker tirelessly on the sand as they toiled, summer after summer, on the same joint projects – a hole, a castle, a pool for a captive lobster, a channel to the sea. When, one summer, Eugene’s parents came to the beach house without him, Thea’s first emotion had been relief that the holes, castles and channels would this year be done entirely her way. She had been disappointed to discover that, without Eugene, none of it was much fun: the bickering, she realised, was the part she most enjoyed. Now here they were, in the drawing room of Netherwood Hall, she the Countess of Netherwood, he a significant young painter with a gold medal for portraiture from the New York School of Art, and still they bickered. And yet the back-and-forth snippiness, the trading of snipes, possessed an excluding, confidential quality, as if, far from being an obstacle to friendship, it was absolute proof of it.
‘If you tip your head downwards a little, and look directly at the canvas, you’ll find we see more of your lovely eyes,’ Eugene said. He waited a beat before continuing. ‘And at the same time, the weakness of your chin is disguised.’
‘Beast,’ she said. She pulled the spaniels closer as if for comfort, one on her left side, one on her right. They gazed up at her adoringly, resting their muzzles on her lap.
‘They should at least face me,’ Eugene said. He felt the need to assert his authority; she had treated the whole exercise as something of a joke ever since his arrival. ‘I’ll sketch them in and see how they look. I’m absolutely not convinced.’
Behind them, the door opened and immediately both dogs sprang down to the floor, further proving their unsuitability for the project. Eugene shot Thea a look of smug justification, which she ignored. Instead she stood up and stretched extravagantly, as if all her joints were stiff, although their session had really only just begun. Her husband wandered in – another aggravation for Eugene, these constant and casual interruptions – and stooped to fondle the silken ears of the dogs at his feet. He then said, rather flatly and as if they were already mid-conversation, ‘I’m going to see a man about a yacht.’
‘A yacht?’ Thea said. ‘For sailing?’
‘Of course for sailing.’ The earl answered his wife but looked at Eugene, who said, ‘Kinda landlocked for that caper, aren’t you?’
Tobias smiled at him. ‘I don’t propose to sail through Yorkshire. The yacht’s moored at Portsmouth.’
‘You don’t sail. Buy another car if you need a diversion.’
This was Thea, and her voice seemed altered, Eugene thought: not cold exactly, but bored. He had noticed this, living, as he currently did, with the earl and countess. Sometimes Tobias and Thea spoke to each other like a couple with no expectation of mutual amusement.
Tobias looked at her now, and said, ‘I’m quite sure, when you’re fully apprised of the facts, that you’ll take a different view,’ and then he turned and left the room, leaving the door open so that the spaniels trailed out after him, until Thea called them back in a petulant voice that reminded Eugene very much of his contrary little playmate on the Long Island beach. He raised his eyebrows at her.
‘Hmm, chilly in here,’ he said.
And Thea, who was now thoroughly put out by her husband’s cryptic announcement, said, ‘Oh button it, Eugene,’ and walked from the room too, leaving the artist alone with the spaniels. They sat side by side in front of his canvas, as if waiting for direction, watching him closely. Eugene pushed the hair out of his eyes – he grew it long, because he was an artist – and blew a low whistle of exasperation. ‘What a madhouse,’ he said to the dogs.
With Toby gone, it was hardly worth setting the table for dinner. This, at least, is what Thea told Parkinson, the butler. And although he did as instructed and prepared to serve the evening meal in the morning room, it was with profound misgiving bordering on reluctance. In his view, the morning room was so named for a very good reason; east facing, it caught the best of the early sun and held on to it until midday, after which the natural light travelled westward through the house, concluding its daily duties by alighting on the crystal and silver plate in the dining room. These long early-summer evenings meant that candles need not be lit nor chandeliers switched on until almost nine o’clock. The morning room, however, was another matter: gloomy by evening, and the table barely big enough for the tureens.
‘It’s not as if it’s any less trouble,’ he said to Sarah Pickersgill, the cook. ‘If anything, it’s more so. All the glasses to be moved, all the china, all the silver; and it’s that bit further from the back stairs.’
She nodded. The best way, with Mr Parkinson, was to agree. At least then there was a possibility that the conversation might move towards something more interesting than the countess’s unreasonable requests. Sarah regarded him across the top of her cup of tea. He had aged in the three years following the terrible death of the sixth earl and his son’s succession. Mr Parkinson’s preternaturally blond curls had, at last, lost their youthfulness and turned a peppery grey; his once unlined skin had succumbed to wrinkles, which gathered at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and ran in spidery lines across his brow. It was ironic, thought Sarah, that the more grave and dignified Mr Parkinson’s appearance had become, the less like a butler he behaved. Eight years ago, when Sarah had first come to Netherwood Hall as kitchen maid, he had been a perfect living template for the job – discreet, efficient, unswervingly loyal – yet in appearance he had resembled nothing so much as an overgrown choirboy. Now, when the cherubic twinkle had at last been replaced by something more apt for his age and position, Mr Parkinson had turned into an inveterate grumbler. It had happened by degrees: a tart comment here, a disapproving remark there, until his occasional pique had grown into a permanent state of disgruntlement which was quite unlike his old self and, truth be told, entirely inappropriate in an elderly family retainer. At least he confined his outbursts to a limited audience; Mrs Powell-Hughes, the housekeeper, was his preferred confidante but, in her absence, Sarah Pickersgill would do. She was a placid listener, rarely interjecting or contradicting. Now she sipped at her tea and ran through the evening’s menu in her head while appearing to share his troubles. There was little need to concentrate; his was a one-note song. His criticisms and complaints were always directed at the countess, at whose feet he placed all perceived ills: lapsed standards, dismantled traditions, flouted moral codes.
‘I can’t imagine,’ he said now, ‘what Lady Henrietta will have to say about it. Even when she’s alone in the house it wouldn’t enter her head to dine anywhere other than the dining room. And quite right too. But you see, there’s the difference between being born to this life and stumbling into it by chance.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Sarah neutrally. She made a mental note to remove the chicken terrine from the cold store before tackling the rainbow trout. Parkinson grumbled on.
‘English traditions have always been upheld in this house, not to say revered. Why upset the applecart? There’s nothing to be gained from it, and very much indeed to be lost.’
‘I expect Her Ladyship just fancied a change,’ Sarah said, meaning to soothe. The butler snapped his mouth into a firm line of disapproval. Her Ladyship’s capricious nature, her deliberate breaking of the unwritten rules was, in his opinion, chipping away at the dignity of the household. Sometimes he felt quite alone in the battle to preserve it. Across the table, Sarah smiled. She felt a little sorry for the butler, so thoroughly out of kilter with the new order. If he could but forget how life used to be and embrace – or at least accept – how it now was, he would be a good deal happier, she thought.
‘I should get on,’ she said. ‘Them fish won’t fillet themselves.’ She stood, expecting Mr Parkinson to do the same. Instead he stayed in his chair, holding his teacup in both hands and staring hard into the dregs as though he was reading his future in the leaves.
In spite of Parkinson’s concerns, the morning-room table was quite large enough for three diners and, being oval, it seemed somehow more convivial.
‘Good idea, Thea,’ Henrietta said when she tracked down the countess and Eugene after finding the dining room empty. ‘We should do this more often.’
‘Tell Parkinson that,’ Thea replied. ‘But do it quickly, because I think he might be taking his own life in the silver safe.’
‘Oh dear, poor Parkinson.’ Henrietta glanced at the footmen, who stared blankly ahead. ‘He does seem down in the dumps these days, doesn’t he? Do be kind, Thea.’ She took up her knife and fork and sliced a neat corner from her perfect square of chicken terrine, then said, ‘What do you think about the yacht?’
‘I
am
kind. That is, I’m not unkind.’
‘A little impetuous sometimes, perhaps.’ Henrietta spoke with a calm authority, feeling entitled to her opinions since she and Thea had once indulged in a short love affair of considerable intensity. There was no longer the warmth of desire in Henrietta’s eyes when she looked at Thea, however, just a calm cordiality, a sisterly affection, but certainly she was in a position to gently judge.
‘Toby’s yacht,’ she said again now. ‘What do you think of the scheme?’
Thea took a sip of the Meursault that Parkinson had chosen to accompany the course; she had yet to show an interest in the terrine. Henrietta watched her, waiting for an answer, but it was Eugene who broke the silence.
‘Sailing’s terrific fun,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Pop’s boat, Thea? The little sloop at Oyster Bay? Some laughs, huh?’
‘Gosh, Thea, do you sail?’
‘Does she sail? I’ll say she sails. They used to call her Pocahontas at the Seawanhaka Yacht Club – though it may have been on account of the braids rather than the expertise.’ Eugene laughed, and Thea watched him, unsmilingly, with cool green eyes. She picked up a fork and glanced briefly at her plate, then looked at Henrietta.
‘He told me he was buying a yacht, yes,’ she said.
‘And? What do you think?’ Henrietta was a dogged conversationalist, rarely discouraged by reluctance on the part of another. She was also used to Thea’s intermittent sulks, which in the hot vortex of her infatuation with her sister-in-law, had had the power to wound. Now, however, Henrietta was happily impervious. Having discovered, with Thea’s help, her sexual preferences, she had learned how to read the signs in others. She was currently exchanging letters with a plucky little suffragette in Guildford, whose trenchant views were matched in their vigour by a fierce devotion to Henrietta. It wasn’t entirely mutual, but it was diverting and better than nothing.