A Dark and Distant Shore (88 page)

And then, at last, the Kinveil party arrived.

Theo was just saying to Perry, ‘I hope you lunched late today?’ when there was a bustle on the stairs. Perry, replying, ‘I didn’t have time to lunch at all’, turned towards the door, and waited, as everyone else was doing.

Magnus was standing there, his attention still focused on the hall. He was obviously saying something snappish, leaning on a stick and, with his right hand, making beckoning, hurrying gestures. It came as a shock to Perry to see that he was an old man, although there couldn’t be more than half a dozen years between them. Not that Magnus, even in his twenties, had ever been young.

Two subdued-looking girls of about the same age as Francis scuttled – there was no other word for it – into the room, and after a somewhat distrait embrace from Shona, the taller, auburn-haired one made straight for Gideon. That was presumably Lizzie; Perry remembered Gideon, a lifetime ago, rhapsodizing about his new bride’s autumn-leaf hair. Which meant that the other one, making for Theo and himself, had to be Magnus’s daughter Juliana. Smilingly, Perry acknowledged her curtsy, and then turned back to the door, aware that he had been holding his breath and that Theo Lauriston’s damnably interested eyes were still on him. Very gently, he exhaled. Why the devil hadn’t Vilia forced her son into matrimony with some girl or other? Or hadn’t she understood what he told her that last morning in France? But at least, Perry reflected, it was preferable for Theo to be interested in him rather than Francis.

Then Magnus, sighing heavily, ushered his wife through the door. Unbelievably, she was as slim, fair, and erect as ever. Her hair was paler, perhaps, but not blanched, and there was a heaviness about her eyes and a sharpness about the corners of her mouth that probably meant crow’s feet and creases. Perry’s vision nowadays wasn’t what it had been, and he couldn’t tell from this distance. She was smiling, and her eyes, still green, had a disquieting glitter in the harsh gaslight. Her gown was the colour of lichen, its bodice silky and close-fitting, and its wide, though not extravagant skirts made of layer upon layer of some diaphanous fabric, fluid as a waterfall. There were emeralds at her ears and wrists.

Her smile would have chilled a glacier as it swept the room, settling on no one, and then she said in the light, silvery voice that hadn’t changed at all, ‘Shona, my dear. I am sorry, but we were delayed by a small domestic crisis. Please forgive us.’

Juliana, stationed between Theo and Perry, murmured, ‘Papa said he wasn’t coming, and Vilia said yes he was, and Papa said no he wasn’t. “Domestic crisis” makes it sound like something wrong with the plumbing.’

Shona exclaimed, ‘It’s quite all right! I ordered dinner for much later than usual, on the principle that someone or other was bound to be held up.’

‘Dear
Shona!’ said Theo in an under-voice, watching her coax Magnus to a chair. ‘Always so considerate of other people’s feelings. How can one possibly cavil at being left to die of slow starvation in such a good cause?’

Magnus was overweight and almost bald, though the white sideburns curled luxuriantly down by his ears and half-way along his jaw. There were heavy pouches at the corners of his mouth and thick folds of skin under his eyes. And having, it seemed, been forced to come, he didn’t propose to put himself out any further. Sardonically, Perry watched him, secure in his role as head of the family, sit enthroned and wait for everyone to pay their respects. Everyone did. Perry noted that, while he seemed to approve of the Barbers, he deplored the Savarins, root and – after a momentary stare – branch. Young Guy, unmistakably artistic and too good-looking by half, did not improve matters by paying his uncle a good many Frenchified compliments, and although it was, perhaps, his faulty English that caused him to describe Kinveil as ‘primitive’, Magnus didn’t like it at all. There was a strangled chuckle from Theo, back at Perry’s side, and a murmur of, ‘Well done! Keep it up, dear boy.’

Magnus was just asking Isa Blair, a colourless girl, whether she had remembered to write home to her mama to say how much she was enjoying London, when Perry became aware that Drew was bringing Vilia over to meet him. It was extraordinary, but Drew didn’t seem to know that they were acquainted.

Vilia’s expression had the kind of courteous impersonality it might have had if she had been listening to someone explain a new, but rather common-place, piece of machinery to her. Her lips were very slightly upcurved into something that was nowhere near a smile, and her eyes looked without seeing. She said, ‘Yes, my dear. Mr Randall and I met once or twice a very long time ago, and again briefly in Paris in the ’30s. How delightful to see you again, Mr Randall. I understand you have quite settled in America now? I hear about your business interests from my sons occasionally, and of course Shona and Grace await your letters with the most anxious interest. And this must be – Francis, is it? How do you do?’

Overdoing it, my dearest love! Remember, Theo is listening, and he is cleverer
– much, much cleverer – than
our
son.

Their son – his and hers – was standing with a complacent smile on his face, as if presiding over a meeting between two valued associates. In his mid-thirties now, he was showing his years more than either Theo or Gideon. Handsome still, he nevertheless had an air of strain, and his mouth looked as if it smiled only for customers – though perhaps sometimes, and more genuinely, for Shona. Perry hoped so. Drew was a stranger to him, and could never, even under quite different circumstances, have been anything else. Fathers and sons were not always compatible.

Francis bowed beautifully, and then Perry said, contriving to sound as distant as she, ‘Indeed, Mrs Telfer, it is a pleasure to see you, too. I need not ask if you are well. You look to be in high force.’

Still, the arbitrary green gaze did not focus on him, even while she acknowledged the compliment. ‘Thank you. I wish we could have longer to talk, but I must ask you to excuse me. I am most anxious to have a little time with Georgiana before she returns to Paris. We see her very seldom.’

And that was that.

The end. Finis. He knew she would say nothing more to him at all, unless she was forced into a formal ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. She could scarcely have told him more clearly that they were now worlds apart, that there was no future for them at all, even if they had been free. And Perry, in any case, did not expect to be free in what remained of his life. He believed – and indeed, in ordinary human decency, hoped – that Sara would outlive him, for she was more than twenty years younger. Which made it quite irrelevant that Vilia was a dozen years younger than Magnus.

Theo’s voice, verging on the unctuous, interrupted his useless train of thought. ‘Ageless, isn’t she?’

After a moment, Perry said, ‘A remarkable woman.’ He wished, deeply, that he could take his leave now, this moment.

He couldn’t, of course. He was left wondering what happened next.

What happened next was – nothing at all. Unnaturally sensitive to every vibration, Perry was aware that very few of the company, except perhaps Gideon and young Jermyn – whose involvement with science seemed to be matched only by his lack of involvement with people – could be described as wholly at ease. But no one made a scene, no one fainted or had hysterics, no one walked out. The ingredients of drama might be there, but the evening turned, almost at once, into a slightly sour
comédie humaine.

Just as Shona was leading Perry over, at last, for the confrontation with Magnus that in prospect had woken her, shaking with nerves, at three o’clock every morning for a week, dinner was announced. She wavered, and murmured distractedly, and half turned, looking to Drew for support. Magnus, in the meantime – rummaging around for his stick, glaring at his wife’s oblivious back, and struggling to rise – accepted the arm Perry offered without even noticing whose it was. When he did, he muttered, ‘Oh, it’s you. How d’ye do?’ and then turned to his niece and demanded, ‘Who am I taking in to dinner? You, I suppose?’ Her face the most comical mixture of bewilderment and relief, she stammered, ‘Yes, Uncle Magnus. If you please, Uncle Magnus,’ and taking his arm, swivelled him round in the direction of the door and the stairs down to the dining-room.

Perry found himself, at dinner, seated on his daughter’s left with the negative Mrs Armstrong on his other side, and Magnus opposite. There were eight people separating him from Vilia at the other end of the table. He was grateful that Shona favoured the newly fashionable
service à la russe,
which left everything to the servants, so that there were no distracting voices breaking in on one’s thoughts with, ‘A slice from that duck before you, Randall, if you please’, or ‘I believe Miss This-or-That might be tempted by the salmis of hare, Mr Randall, if you would be so very obliging as to serve some to her!’ It was possible just to sit and observe, contributing occasionally to the small talk, and showing no sign of the assessments one was making, or the thoughts that were milling around in one’s head.

His absorption didn’t prevent him from keeping an eye on Francis, who was having a hard time, poor kid. Jermyn, leaning across his sister Lavinia, was interrogating him about the heating effect of firing several shots in succession through a single gun barrel. ‘It must cause expansion, surely, and that could lead to a burst, couldn’t it?’

Francis, who hadn’t been in the Randall workshop more than half a dozen times in his life, didn’t have the remotest idea, but to disappoint Jermyn would have run counter to all his ideas of politeness. ‘I am not entirely sure,’ he said, ‘but I guess it has something to do with the speed of firing.’

‘I know
that
!’
Jermyn was impatient. ‘I thought you might have made systematic tests. It seems to me one could develop a tremendously useful military weapon by adapting the revolver principle to something the size of a rifle, but it wouldn’t be worth while unless it could fire at least a hundred balls in quick succession. And a longer barrel would be likely to generate more heat than a short one in such circumstances, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I guess...’ Francis began, doing his valiant best, and was saved by Lavinia, who chose to put her foot down.

‘Do stop talking across me!’ she exclaimed to her brother. ‘It’s not at all polite, and besides, who cares about your boring old guns!’ She giggled. ‘You can see that Uncle Francis doesn’t!’

Francis turned scarlet, though it wasn’t clear whether this was because of the ‘uncle’ or Lavinia’s uncomfortable bluntness.

Jermyn said, ‘I suppose he is. How funny? He must be almost
every
body’s uncle!’

The boy wasn’t very far wrong, Perry thought. Stepbrother to Grace and Shona, Francis was step-uncle to Petronella and Ian Barber, as well as to all three Lauriston children. And what? – step-step-uncle? – to Isa Blair and the two young Savarins? Perry himself felt like everybody’s grandfather.

‘He’s not
my
uncle!’ Juliana exclaimed, fair curls bobbing and the big, sapphire eyes sparkling. Her early nervousness of Francis seemed to have evaporated. ‘In fact, I’m probably his aunt!’

‘Don’t be silly, you can’t be. You’re only a kind of cousin, if that.’

‘I don’t see why! If Francis’s father used to be
my
father’s brother-in-law, then...’

‘That will do, Juliana!’ Vilia’s voice, floating down the table, was sharper than the circumstances warranted, but just then there came a fortunate distraction in the shape of a burst of laughter from further up. Perry, reluctantly amused, caught Grace’s outraged eye. Laughing aloud was
very
ill-bred. The culprit, surprisingly, was Gideon, who looked as if he were in his element, sandwiched between Perry’s dashing granddaughter Petronella and the seductive Gabrielle. Not even the most charitable onlooker could have denied that the girls were flirting outrageously – or that Gideon was encouraging them. Two pretty, competitive kitties who didn’t like each other above half. Mlle Gaby was also fluttering her eyelashes at Theo, seated opposite her between Juliana and a silent Lizzie, and Theo – clever bastard – was responding very convincingly indeed.

After a time, inescapably, the conversation came round to the Exhibition, about which Gideon was blithely irreverent, and Theo, who had been honoured by a visit from Her Majesty, scarcely less so.

‘I don’t believe she understood more than a quarter of what I so carefully explained to her,’ he drawled, ‘though I had a thirst like a Border reiver by the time I was done.’

Magnus broke his silence at last. ‘Lollipops!’ he muttered, sinking a spoon in the maraschino soufflé.

There was a moment’s nonplussed silence, and then Ian Barber asked politely, ‘Don’t you care for lollipops, sir?’

Perry had often noticed that clever boys lacked ordinary common sense, but even for one who had mastered Greek and Latin by the time he was five, it was a surpassingly silly question.

‘Should he?’ Theo asked slyly.

‘Well, I think he might, you know. They’re very refreshing.’

‘I believe your uncle is of the opinion that the Exhibition restaurants should sell something better than lollipops and cold coffee.’

‘The coffee isn’t
meant
to be cold, Uncle Magnus, and I am sure if you asked for tea, they would provide it.’

His teeth clenched, Magnus said, ‘When your Aunt Vilia and your cousins have dragged me all round the world from China to Peru, and from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, what I want is a large glass of whisky bitters. I would even make do with ale, at a pinch. Lollipops or cold coffee, indeed!’

‘Oh, I see! But you can’t deny that if the restaurants sold alcohol, a great many men might become a trifle – er – bosky, and that could do nothing but ruin the pleasure of all the
respectable
visitors. Perhaps you have not tried the ices? They are very thirst-quenching, you know.’

Theo opened his mouth again and Perry hoped that he was going to take pity on Magnus, who looked as if he were about to have an apoplexy. But instead of changing the subject, he said, ‘Does one take it that you have reservations about alcohol, Ian?’ Perry frowned. It sounded like deliberate provocation.