‘Your mother is watching us,’ was what he said, without preamble. ‘Do you suppose she approves?’
Isabella glanced across the room at Clarissa, who instantly looked away.
‘Of you, or of me?’ Isabella said.
‘Of you
and
me.’
Isabella’s pulse quickened and she felt suddenly short of breath. Now, when she must be coolly sophisticated, she found she had nothing to say and a juvenile blush was spreading upwards from her throat. Thea, she thought; in this situation, what would Thea say?
‘Well,
I
approve of you, certainly,’ Isabella said and smiled archly. She felt her heart fluttering like a trapped butterfly against the blue satin of her gown.
‘And I of you.’ Ulrich let his gaze stray from her eyes to her lips and held it there. Isabella, lightheaded, was grateful to be sitting down.
Later, the tables were whisked away and Ulrich claimed Isabella for the first dance and every alternate one afterwards. He slipped the card off her wrist and, leaning against the dove-grey panelling of the ballroom, wrote Herr von Hechingen again and again with the tiny silver pencil. She watched him, and found herself thinking that Isabella von Hechingen sounded very fine.
‘Look at those two.’
This was Thea, who appeared at Tobias’s shoulder as he stood at the open door of the ballroom, staring in with an expression of gloomy preoccupation. He turned at his wife’s voice, but he didn’t smile, because he was still feeling cross at her late appearance earlier this evening. Visiting was strictly limited, this much he knew; so why had she been gone for almost four hours, kissing him blithely on her return, the smell of cigarettes on her breath and a look in her eye of secrets withheld? She had gone to change, letting him stew, and now she was back in a loose black evening gown, beaded all over with jet. The beads shook and shimmered as she moved.
‘Isabella, I mean. And the boy.’ Thea pointed at them with a pale finger and smiled up at Tobias.
‘Yes.’
‘We could dance.’
He was silent, then said, ‘Where were you?’
‘When?’ She knew what he meant, but felt disinclined to respond helpfully to his truculence: it disappointed her.
‘After seeing Henry and before coming home.’
‘Why Tobes, you’re cross-examining me,’ she said mildly. ‘Poor Henry’s still very vague, by the way. She’d forgotten all about Isabella’s coming-out ball. Mind you, I think Isabella’s forgotten all about Henrietta.’ She nodded towards Isabella and Ulrich, who were dancing now, their faces flushed, their expressions intent. ‘Isn’t that a little close, for a minuet?’
Where Tobias would usually have laughed there was another silence. She regarded him with a level gaze. The band in the ballroom moved on to a Viennese waltz and that, along with the rise and fall of chatter on and around the ballroom, gave Thea the feeling that she was standing in the wings of a stage.
‘OK,’ she said, finally, decisively. ‘I went to see Henry and we talked in a desultory way about hospital food and the disagreeable warder who’s detailed to watch her, even when she sleeps. Then I took a cab to Harley Street, to see my doctor. He subjected me to an examination, with extremely cold hands, and he told me that I was pregnant. Then I walked around and around Regent’s Park, smoking quite publicly and unapologetically. Then I came home to you.’
He stared.
‘You look such a dope, with your mouth hanging open,’ she said.
‘Did you just tell me I’m going to be a father? Is that what you said?’
‘That would be the likely outcome of my pregnancy, yes.’
He leaned towards her, stooping so that his cool forehead rested on hers, and he closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the sweet completeness and simplicity of his relief and his joy.
A
lderman Simpson had appeared to accept with good grace Anna’s refusal to stand for election to the council, yet he wore his quiet disappointment as openly and obviously as his chain of office. He managed to be everywhere. She had no recollection of ever bumping into him on previous visits to Ardington, but now his genial face, clouded by regret, seemed to loom at her wherever she went: the bank, the grocer’s, the post office. He was following her, she told Amos; but Amos, who wanted her to stand too, had refused to smile and said the alderman was too busy with town matters to waste his time in such a way.
Still, whether or not the alderman was guilty of engineering these apparently chance encounters, again and again she saw him, and it was as if her own ubiquity about town was proof that, if she had an ounce of public spirit, she would put her name forward. It became embarrassing, and now and again Anna found herself wishing she were elsewhere. Still, she had absolutely intended to spend the whole summer in Ardington, so she could hardly be blamed when Clara, one of her two student artists, had telegraphed to say a family crisis was taking her home to Brighton for the foreseeable future and she must leave at once, even though the de Lisle job in Kent wasn’t quite finished. William, Anna’s second assistant, distracted by the demands made upon him by the Slade, would be hard-pressed to finish the job alone and on schedule, so Anna was needed to complete the final panel of the summerhouse, and to recruit someone to fill Clara’s shoes.
She would be alone in the London house for a whole week, and the shudder of pleasure she experienced at this prospect felt almost illicit. Amos had hidden his disappointment at her temporary departure, but she knew he wanted her with him. Maya and Miss Cargill were off on one of their educational jaunts, and that left Norah as Amos’s sole companion; she would talk too much and burn the toast, and belt out Irish folksongs in her oddly flat voice which was somehow more melodic when she spoke than when she sang.
On the day she left, Anna had walked to the railway station, swinging her small leather bag and hoping the cheerful woman who had a cart on the corner of Gower Street would be there this evening with her pea soup and jellied eels. Then she had chided herself for looking forward to a London supper when Amos had been so evidently sad at her departure. He would be fine, of course; she had no worries on that score. In Ardington, he was famous: the people’s champion returned from battle. They didn’t know, in this corner of the kingdom, how little was achieved on the Labour benches, or how radical were the plans for the Liberal budget. It was always beneficial to Amos – to his morale – to revisit the scene of his triumph and live for a while among the men who’d voted him into Parliament. Always, when he returned to London from Ardington he felt a renewed vigour for the cause and a renewed faith in his party. Also, he was the New Mill Colliery cricket team’s secret weapon these days. Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and sometimes all day Saturday, were spent in pursuit of the precise mastery of the line and length of a speeding cricket ball. He had volunteered Anna for the tea rota, which privileged position required that she make egg-and-cress sandwiches and iced buns for home matches. To date, she had been required to do this only once, and, with the tea prepared and laid out on a trestle table, she had sat on the pavilion steps and watched the match with a growing sense of despair as she failed utterly to make sense of the progress of play. It had seemed at once static and frantic, which she found unsettling. Amos’s job was to try to hit the stumps, she realised, but that had been her only insight into the tactics of the game, which had taken hours to conclude and had ended, bewilderingly, in a draw, even though according to the board one team had scored more runs than the other. On the way home, on the train from Netherwood, she had said she thought it odd that two teams could tie when their scores weren’t the same.
‘We didn’t tie, it was a draw,’ Amos had said.
‘Is there a difference?’
‘I’ll say,’ he had replied, and while he explained the variety of possible outcomes of a cricket match, Anna had designed murals in her mind’s eye, then dozed off.
She would miss her next turn on the tea rota, she had realised, as her train headed south towards Barnsley and beyond. She had smiled wickedly and wondered whose wife would step into the breach. None of them would find it the imposition that she had, she was sure. Outside, a gust of steam belched from the chimney and wrapped itself around the train, and for a moment the view was lost. Anna thought about the boilerman, wielding his shovel back and forth, feeding the hungry firebox with coal while she sat here in perfect comfort, in a carriage that was empty but for her, and warmed through by the sun. Its plush seats were the colour of port wine, and there were pleated curtains of the same, rich colour at the window, held back with brass clasps. Anna had cast an approving gaze around her, and wondered how she might occupy the carriage in such a way as to discourage anyone else from coming in. She spread her coat out on the opposite seat and brought her bag down from the luggage rack to put next to her, then she settled down again, stretched out her legs and allowed herself a few moments’ admiration of her new boots – cream leather, soft as butter, better suited to London than Ardington – before delving into her bag for a notebook, in which she started a list of everything she must accomplish before returning to Yorkshire.
The following day, she met William at Charing Cross Station, and together they travelled to Kent. Lady Marcia de Lisle lived in a Jacobean manor house in the soft green countryside near Tunbridge Wells. By the recent standards of Anna’s commissions this was a modest property, with only five acres of grounds surrounding a house with no pediments or porticoes, no colonnades or cupolas. It was unimposing in the best possible way, which is to say it was a house one could imagine oneself living in and growing to love. It was a pinkish colour, which gave it the permanent appearance of standing in the light of the setting sun. The windows were of mullioned stone and there were red tiles on the roof. Its most remarkable feature was a grave old door, carved four hundred years ago from Kentish oak and so heavy and wide that another, smaller door had been cut into it for the practical purpose of coming and going.
Anna only accepted commissions at places, and for people, she liked. This could be extremely awkward when, as sometimes happened, she walked away from a spluttering, titled lady of the house whose drawing room, or ballroom, or personality, fell short in some indefinable yet critical way. Marcia de Lisle had written to Anna in praise of her work at Houghton Hall in Derbyshire, where she and Clara had painted a Mediterranean citrus grove on the long dining-room wall. The illusion was startling; lemons and oranges bright against the green gloss of abundant leaves, the fruit heavy and ripe on their bowing branches. So Anna had journeyed down to Tunbridge Wells to meet Marcia, who was dark-haired and olive-skinned, and who told Anna that she had seen the painted citrus grove and wept because it reminded her of Spain, and her childhood. Her husband was away all week, working for the Colonial Office, and she had too many evenings on her own thinking about the bustle of family life in Seville. She had shown Anna into the dining room, but Anna shook her head sadly; too dark, and anyway, she made it a rule not to duplicate work in the homes of other clients.
‘Each piece is unique,’ she had said. ‘Houghton Hall, I’m afraid, get the lemons.’
They had walked together around the ground floor of Ashdown Manor, and then had toured the upstairs rooms, looking for a place to paint. Marcia had felt panic rising in her Andalusian breast, plus a certain confusion at the artist’s scruples. Anna herself had been concerned that, lovely and personable though Lady de Lisle undoubtedly was, none of the rooms in her charming house quite lent themselves to the purpose. Then, from the window of an upper-floor dressing room, Anna had seen the summerhouse, a beautiful six-sided wooden building with a shingled roof and the mellow patina of great age. It seemed to be marooned in the centre of a pond, but in fact, when Marcia took her out there, Anna saw that there were two paths across the water, one on each side, made from duckboards hammered on to sturdy posts hidden in the weedy depths. The slatted wood appeared to float on the surface of the pond.
‘Here we are,’ Anna had said, as if it was hers, and Marcia was the guest. ‘Isn’t it perfect?’
And Marcia, who had realised almost as soon as they met that this idiosyncratic woman was beyond her influence, had said, ‘I suppose it is, yes.’
Now, inside the summerhouse, Anna stood and turned, very slowly, to absorb the impact of their work. It began with a dawn mist and would end with a wash of silver moonlight, the phases of the day shown through a panoramic painting of the de Lisles’ pretty garden, each of the six panels a continuation of the last, but each quite different in light and feeling. She was pleased. The panels, though entirely non-religious, gave the little building a holy air, like a tiny Renaissance chapel. Anna had designed it, drawn out the plans, sketched them on to the wooden walls and, with Clara, had got the project under way. But then she’d let Clara and William take over, so it was a while since she’d seen it. She looked at William, who stood beside her, waiting for her verdict.
‘It’s very fine,’ Anna said. ‘Really very fine.’
William, relieved, smiled at her. ‘It is, isn’t it? Classic English pastoral.’
‘But it looks Italianate, too, doesn’t it? Like the Sistine Chapel. This blue distemper, it’s remarkable.’
She touched the panel, completed weeks ago, showing the garden under the hot, clear blue sky of a summer noon.
‘Clara’s,’ William said loyally.
Anna looked at him sadly. ‘We need a new Clara,’ she said.
‘I may have found one for you. She’s better at life drawing than landscape, but that’s what we need, I think.’
‘Good boy. Come. We’ll stop for tea.’ She put her arm through his and led him out of the summerhouse and on to the duckboards. He was only five years younger than she was but she treated him with a maternal air, to which he responded like a dutiful son. She patted his arm with her free hand and asked him who he had in mind, and he told her – Jennifer Hathersage, a third-year fine art student at the Slade, poor as a church mouse, rich in talent, easily the best of the women and possibly the best of the men – as they took a circuitous path back to the house where a small wing off the kitchen had been made available for their use.