Acts of Love (3 page)

She watched her mother walk to one of the two concert grand pianos nestled together in the clutch of windows overlooking the garden. Artemis sat down and looking briefly across the room at her daughter said, ‘You look really attractive when you are dressed well, Arianne. I’ll lend you a hat and we can go for a long walk before lunch.’ Then she placed her fingers on the keyboard and sat very still meditating for several seconds before beginning to play Chopin Mazurkas, until Hadley set in front of the fire a small table already laid with a crisp, white linen cloth embroidered in small white chrysanthemums; Limoges coffee cups and plates and Queen Anne silver; the croissants, on a pedestal dish; and pots of apricot and plum jam.

Arianne removed her handbag from her shoulder, her gloves from her hands, opened her jacket, removed it and placed her things on a bench covered with a twelfth-century tapestry. She sat down in the wing chair where her mother had been sitting and listened to the piano. Artemis played well. Arianne studied her mother at the instrument. Artemis looked really beautiful. That she had a certain charisma was unquestionable. Today, she was dressed in a white satin shirt worn over wide cream flannel trousers; a belt of silver and gold mesh links hung loosely around her waist and rested on her slender hips. Wide antique ivory bracelets separated by slim Cartier diamond bangles had been removed from her wrists and placed on the bench next to her while she played. Artemis had style and incredible chic. It had after all been her whole life. She was not the sort to let it slip away in old age. Like the Duchess of Argyll, Lady Diana Cooper, Babe
Paley in the States, old acquaintances, she would be as admired in old age as she had been in middle age and in her youth. That she had been a rotten wife to three husbands, an indifferent mother at best to a daughter she had abandoned, seemed hardly to have shadowed her life.

There had never been anything maternal about Artemis. When after years of separation she and Arianne renewed their relationship to more than the basis of a holiday two weeks a year, and a present every Christmas, miraculously neither of them dwelt on the past. They stepped into their mother-daughter roles as if the relationship had begun with Arianne already a married adult. Arianne, not ungraciously, had always accepted Artemis’s self-centredness, her inability to love Arianne in the normal way of mother-daughter associations. And now the two women were, for the time that was left them, respectfully forging a bond that they could both comfortably live with.

Artemis was aware of her erratic behaviour. She preferred to think of it as eccentric, but in her heart she knew better. She was slipping away from the real world, and strangely she didn’t mind all that much. She had enough wealth to be cared for in the style she craved, and a doctor who was sympathetic to her wishes to ensure that, before she slipped over the edge into senility, she went to sleep with the angels. Of this Arianne was unaware. Artemis insisted upon that. She did not want to be a burden to her daughter any more than she wanted Arianne to be a burden to her. Strangely, Arianne sensed that it was the obvious cut-off points in their relationship that allowed them to love each other as best they could.

Artemis dunked the corner of her buttered croissant in the hot black coffee and neatly popped it in her mouth. ‘Delicious,’ she announced. The taste of almonds brought delight to her eyes. ‘And my favourite, these with the almond paste.’ She placed a thin slab of butter on another corner and a dollop of apricot jam on top of that. Looking across at her daughter, she said, ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you: about these weekly visits of yours, much as I appreciate them, I would rather you didn’t make them if they are some sort of duty-call.’ She broke off the piece of dressed croissant and handed it across the table to Arianne.

‘They aren’t.’

‘Oh, good. Then you will feel free not to come, and I will feel free to tell you when I’d prefer you didn’t.’

‘I enjoy these outings. It gets me out of London.’

‘I don’t want to be merely an escape route for you, Arianne. There must be other people to see, places to go. Time to create a new life for yourself. And I do have a life beyond your weekly visits.’

Arianne said nothing. She was neither peeved nor disturbed by Artemis’s comments. It was quite remarkable how little effect mother and daughter had on each other. Duty? No, these visits had little to do with any sense of duty a mother and daughter might have towards one another. Their years of estrangement had killed that, and, if anything, facilitated these visits. Mother and daughter came together without family angst or the burden of duty and forced feelings, or any moral obligation. But blood is a tie, and so is love in any form. That, perhaps, was what these visits were about. The two women enjoyed their coffee and croissants in silence.

In the boot room just off the entrance hall to the flat, Artemis found a tweed shooting-jacket that had seen better days, but was still handsome and warm with its quilted lining. She handed it to Arianne. She wrapped herself up in an old and worn, belted tweed coat, and Hadley helped her on with her favourite black leather walking-shoes. She gave him a fierce look when he handed her a sturdy walking-stick. The two women chose stylish felt hats from the many hanging on pegs in the boot room. With the dogs leaping around their legs in anticipation, they set out from the Hardcastle flat across the great hall.

The walking party was nearly at the front door when they were confronted by a tall, slim woman dressed in smart trousers and a turtle-neck sweater. She still had vestiges of a beauty that must have been considerable in her youth some fifty years before. Now she seemed all wrinkles and old eyes with unimaginably slim lips. Arianne had met her several times before. Always she had reminded Arianne of bitter almonds, arsenic and old lace. She was forever playing the role of the châtelaine of Chessington House, the headmistress to her neighbours, the missionary to their social and spiritual conscience, believing that if they had any it was tainted, too weak, less worthy than her own. In fact she
was merely a resident widow with a control problem. A busybody, a snoop, sniffing out minute flaws in the running of the cooperative residence. Any detail to agonise over and torture her neighbours with seemed to give her something special to live for: a woman who chose, with her now-deceased husband, who had had his own control problems which he had mercilessly vented on his neighbours, to live in a small section of one of the grand Tudor houses of England. Her object in life now seemed to be to reduce the house to her middle-class taste, mentality and morality. Curious, since she professed to adore Chessington House for its beauty, its history, neither of which were middle-class.

Her opening volley, was, ‘Artemis, could I have a word, just a minute of your time?’ With it came a slick, false smile.

‘No,’ answered Artemis.

The meaning of that monosyllable is not widely disputed, but Beryl Quilty did not understand no. No, to her, was merely the opening of a dialogue. She stepped directly in Artemis’s path. The smile was even more intense now, and the stubbornness in it fierce. ‘I am getting up a work party to polish the furniture in the great hall. Another to sweep the drive, a cleaning party. We will serve hot tea and biscuits in one of the empty garages. Ginger biscuits. Can I put you down?’

‘Certainly not,’ was Artemis’s reply. Disdain blazed in her gaze at Beryl Quilty. Mrs Quilty’s appearance seemed to act as a tranquilliser to the dogs. All joy went out of their leaps and dashes through the hall. They gathered round Artemis and Beryl Quilty, wriggling and wagging and panting. Mrs Quilty was barely visible now. ‘I never eat ginger. Not in biscuit-form, certainly.’

Mrs Quilty dug her heels in. With her missionary zeal on maximum, she pressed on, ‘Thursday the fifteenth. Eight o’clock in the morning for sweeping the drive. The furniture-polishing is the following Wednesday at eleven in the morning. Coffee first in my flat.’ The lips had nearly vanished into Mrs Quilty’s mouth. Her eyes were like cold, dead steel.

‘Beryl Quilty, I have never polished my own furniture. Why would I want to polish the house’s? Most especially when we pay a resident cleaning-staff to do it?’

‘It would be good for the house if we could all make the chores here a communal thing, a rewarding exercise.’

Artemis looked fixedly at Beryl Quilty. ‘I am not looking for exercise, Mrs Quilty.’ Arianne could feel the tension between the two women, energised by the determination behind those slim lips to enlist Artemis in her current projects. Artemis grabbed the mastiff Hubert’s thick leather collar and made him sit down. Then she turned back to Beryl Quilty and said, ‘That drive is three quarters of a mile long. It is also twenty-five feet wide. Worthy as your plan may be, it is unthinkable for a houseful of semi-geriatrics like me. It is neither sensible nor practical. Come, dogs.’ At that they sprang up as a quivering mass of wagging tails, slithers and slides on the polished marble floor. The hall resounded with barks and howls of joy as Artemis and her adored pets side-stepped Beryl Quilty and aimed once again for the front door. Looking over her shoulder, she snapped at her daughter, ‘Arianne.’ Arianne followed her mother, relieved that Artemis had not raised a hand and belted Mrs Quilty across the mouth, which, Artemis had often intimated to her daughter, women like herself were often tempted to do.

Chapter 2

The two women pushed open the door to the courtyard. The dogs all but bounded out into the still very grey day. ‘A bitch in nun’s clothing. A missionary who destroys the spirit. A woman determined to bring everyone down to her level. She’s a vulture for God and charity, and her will to control. And she’s made of cast iron and will outlive us all. But she doesn’t fool me one bit, she’s evil. Evil is trying to bend people to your will, making them miserable in their own homes. I can promise you this, if there is a God he will be smart enough not to let her through those pearly gates. Have you any idea how many people have left their homes to get away from her and her brimstone? Well, she’ll …’ At this point Arianne could hold back no longer. She burst into laughter at her mother’s tirade. Artemis turned to face her daughter. Much as she tried, she couldn’t stop bursting into laughter as well.

‘I never stop about her, do I?’

Arianne confirmed with a nod of her head and a smile on her lips.

The two women, still laughing and playing with the dogs, rounded the fountain to walk down the drive towards the stables.

‘There is something just a little bit mad about this place.’ And just to prove the point another neighbour greeted them as he pushed a motor-driven lawn-mower over the gravel. ‘There he goes, walking his lawn-mower instead of a dog. Mad, crazy with old age, no matter how we fight it,’ she said, smiling up at her daughter and linking an arm through Arianne’s.

Artemis was on her best form. Lucid, wickedly witty about her fellow residents, intelligent in her proposition that Chessington House was a microcosm of the world, and, that being the case, she was ready to get off. That she had thought herself shock-proof until she saw what appeared to be good, sane people sharing a residence behave with such self-serving, unbelievable pettiness,
such utter disregard for their neighbours.

Artemis’s detestation of Beryl Quilty set her off, and the two women continued their walk in the dull grey day brightening it up with laughter about the house, its beauty and the joy of living there except for the spectre of the Residents’ Committee, the AGMs and her
bête noire
, Beryl Quilty.

‘Why do you hate her so?’ asked Arianne. ‘All she did was ask you to take part in another of her insignificant projects.’

‘Because living here has brought out the worst in me, and she is directly responsible. I am made to defend myself against the petty bourgeois life Beryl tries to drag me into. Real beauty, laughter, the
joie de vivre
that is part of us all: I have seen her exercise her obsessive need to put a damper on those things. Not only in me, but in everyone and everything. And, what is worse, she does it in the name of the have-nots. Any have-not – Cancer Research, the children of Ethiopia, the Red Cross – she rattles her charity boxes in our faces. And when she hasn’t any, she rattles herself in our faces.

‘One gives a concert in the hall, she polices it. Give a party, she’s there directing the parking of the cars. Christmas: she goes particularly mad to take over and decorate the public rooms of Chessington House in the manner she approves of. And as for the forced bonhomie among the residents in the name of the birth of Christ – it’s best not even to speak of that. Her interference is odious, and her need to enslave us to the way of life she approves of, contemptible. It’s not just me; I have fared well against her, but others have not. They just upped and ran in the face of her policing their lives. Can you imagine: strong, tough men that because they could not bear the atmosphere she created, breathed sighs of relief as the removal-vans containing their households disappeared down the drive? Why ever did Beryl Quilty leave her homeland? New Zealand’s loss is our misery.’

Artemis picked up a stick and threw it. The dogs went bounding after it. She turned her collar up and looked at Arianne. ‘I think that should about answer your question.’ They continued walking down the drive with Artemis in full flood continuing to amuse.

Whatever dark depressions or silent driftings away from reality had begun to affect Artemis’s life were for the moment
dormant. Even in childhood during those brief visits they had together, Arianne had always been aware of her mother’s serious mood-swings. This was one of her upper ones and the two women were making the most of it.

A vintage Mercedes Benz touring car with its drop head and massive headlamps rolled into sight. The women were now completely preoccupied with playing ‘retrieving sticks’ with the dogs and laughing for the silliness, the barking and the competing for Artemis’s attentions. ‘Oh, here comes Anson, in his Nazimobile,’ she told Arianne.

The Mercedes, its drop head down, purred up to Artemis and stopped. The man at the wheel, Sir Anson Bathurst Belleville, looked much younger than his seventy-nine years. He had a shock of white hair and notable remnants of handsomeness. A broad smile for Artemis, who went to lean on the car door. Smiling at the man at the wheel, and with a comfortable calm in her voice, a sure sign that Sir Anson was the acceptable face of Chessington House, she told him, ‘My husband and I were chased through France in his Bugatti right into Portugal by a car exactly like this, Anson.’

‘So you tell me every time you see it, Artemis.’

‘Well, it’s such a terrible reminder of the horrors perpetrated by men who rode in cars like this during the Second World War. The model still offends me. Can’t you get him to trade it in, Ben?’ she asked the younger man sitting at Sir Anson’s side.

Ben Johnson, his nephew, was a strikingly pleasant-looking man with the dashing good looks of a scallywag: a man in his early thirties, with a warmth and charm and openness about him. He smiled at Artemis, ‘Not unless he traded it to me, Lady Hardcastle.’

‘You’re both as bad as each other,’ she told them, and then asked, ‘are you in the dining room for luncheon, Anson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’ll meet up again there.’ With that she smacked the side of the car as if giving permission for them to drive on and turned her attention back to the dogs and her daughter.

They visited the stables and then circled back to the house, where they freshened up before going in to the dining room: a lovely Georgian room whose decorative plaster work was as
magnificent as it was delicate, the ceiling a triumph of design. Its buttercup-yellow plaster walls were sensitively picked out in a deep terracotta colour. With its dark-stained and polished oak boards on the floor, and silk damask draperies of deep apricot held back with eighteenth-century cords and tassels of faded dark purple, black, coral and silver at the windows, it was grand chic. And looked every bit what it was: an exclusive dining room for members, and their guests.

There were several tables: round, oblong, square, two with decorative gilded bases and marble tops, the others of walnut, or cherrywood. Round them were small settees, wing chairs, and comfortable straight-back armchairs covered in eighteenth-century Aubusson tapestry. The furniture and decorative objects, though a mélange of periods and styles, worked together and made the room, with its fresh flowers and potted palms of considerable height, enchanting, an inviting atmosphere to dine in. Especially so with the Capability Brown views of the park through the six dining-room windows: thoroughbred horses running wild in the fields or being ridden across parkland still magnificent with many three-hundred-year-old trees, a seventeenth-century folly reminiscent of a miniature Palladio villa in the far distance. It was a Stubbs painting come alive. The dining room was splendour in the country seat, as it had always been for the stately homes of England, except that in the seventeenth century one family would have had the privilege of living with their household in all of the more than one hundred rooms of this stately home.

Artemis used the dining room a great deal with or without guests. She never minded dining alone there, having always been partial to a bit of splendour. She treated it as an English gentleman treats the dining room at White’s, Brooks’s, or Boodle’s. She expected, as those clubbable gentlemen did, to have the service, silence and privacy such places afforded them. Only with better food. She had her favourite table, and the food
was
very much better. It suited her palate.

There had been times on Arianne’s visits to Chessington House when she would have preferred to dine in the flat alone with her mother, but she never made that suggestion. Arianne had learned from childhood it was better never to ask her mother
for anything. It was more advisable for their relationship if Artemis gave of her own free will. Not to be imposed upon, was her mother’s nature. Arianne’s was to ask for nothing, expect nothing. Hers was a passive nature, though without weakness. It made for an interesting character, one that ambitious, aggressive people found attractive. An exception had always been her mother.

Artemis was excellent with staff, and though she could drive them into the ground with work and her demands for perfection, she could also be possessive of them, considerate of their needs, as long as it suited the household. Hence the dining room today instead of her cook, the taxis instead of her car and chauffeur being brought out to ferry Arianne to and from the station. Just like any other guest, her daughter was slotted into the steady ticking-over of Artemis’s life, which she rarely allowed to be disrupted by outside factors: a selfish character-trait that all who crossed her path accepted because that was Artemis. Those who didn’t fell by the wayside; those who did were friends, who, like her daughter, were able to find in her something special, something admirable. Her unswerving belief in man’s right to live free, in truth, and with spirit, was what she practised, and she felt every man was duty-bound to do so. Next to taking another man’s life, she considered not to go out into the world with what God gave you and make the most of it to be the second greatest sin. She had good friends, but many more admirers, although her selfishness, her egocentricity, the cultured, cultivated life she had lived with Gerald, and now on her own, raised envy, disapproval in some.

Artemis looked across the table at the serene beauty sitting opposite her. Her daughter? It was not often that she thought of Arianne as a daughter. More a child she had given birth to and released into the world with its first breath of life. She pondered for a few seconds on what a pleasant woman she had turned out to be, how easy she was to be with. One of those people in life who is
there
but not there. ‘Easy-peasy.’

Arianne looked up from the small white menu of the day written by hand. ‘Easy-peasy?’ she questioned, a smile for the odd expression her mother used.

‘Yes, easy-peasy, that’s what you are. What your visits here
are. Don’t ever think that I don’t appreciate that.’ Then Artemis took from the pocket of her trousers a small, cleverly folded gold lorgnette. She snapped the catch and it sprang open. She raised it to her eyes and scanned the menu.

A sign of approval of her visits? Arianne knew that was the closest she would come to getting a compliment from her mother. She was giving Artemis some pleasure. That was a nice surprise.

There were several other Chessington House tenants dining in the room. Arianne was aware of the occasional glance from them. Any recognition from Artemis provoked an instant smile. ‘Cheshire cats,’ was her comment, and they were instantly disregarded as if they did not bother Artemis in the way Beryl Quilty did. In fact nothing seemed to be disturbing Artemis. This was a relief.

Arianne found it heart-breaking when her mother had what they now referred to as one of her off-periods. ‘Just pretend I am becoming more eccentric with age. It sounds better than the beginnings of senility – the unattractive label, “Alzheimer’s disease”. I insist upon that.’ Her off-periods or ‘eccentricities’ when in full flood could linger for several days, a week or more. But then again she could go weeks, months, without a sign of them. She insisted she be treated as normal. Her wish was Arianne’s and the staff’s command. And as usual Artemis was right because when lucid, and her old self, as she was today, much of what happened and was said did reach her and was remembered.

Mother and daughter hardly spoke while dining. They seemed to be content to sit quietly and gaze out of the window. First they dined on fresh oysters on the half shell, and with that they drank a chilled Chablis. They were just spooning into a hot, creamy vichyssoise, served with a scattering of fresh-snipped chives floating on the steaming white surface, when Sir Anson Bathurst Belleville and his nephew Ben entered the dining room.

Arianne was quite taken with the sight of the two men. The younger one had his arm round his uncle’s shoulder, and the look of affection the nephew had for his uncle carried such warmth and charm it declared a lovingness that was extremely appealing and rare across such a gap of generations. The two men went directly to their table, some distance from Artemis’s, and the nephew sat down. Sir Anson hesitated before he took his chair and, after
excusing himself to his nephew, walked across the room to stop at their table. ‘Just to wish you
bon appetit
, Artemis.’ She offered him her hand and he placed a perfect continental kiss upon it. Then turning to Arianne he smiled and walked back to his table and his nephew.

‘There is something to be said for old-fashioned charm and good manners,’ remarked Artemis, and went directly back to her soup.

Arianne looked at her mother, still so very beautiful in her old age. The hair: a dark blonde nearly the colour of amber threaded with silver grey; the eyes still with a glimmer of brightness in their cornflower-blue colour. The strong and seductive bone-structure still there, but softened now by an aged, though well-preserved skin, the wrinkles of time and a rich and full life. Arianne could see why men were still attracted to her mother: she was formidable even now, and still commanded a fatal attraction. As one of her victims, Arianne was a fair witness.

Both women had ordered roast woodcock with all the trimmings: game chips, bread sauce, crisp bacon, small rondels of fried bread spread with liver pâté placed under the birds, redcurrant jelly. The vegetables: purée of celeriac, baby green beans. A most acceptable claret was poured. But it was certainly not one of Gerald’s best from his wine cellar. Artemis could be, if not stingy, as penny-pinching as she could be extravagant and generous.