An Excellent Wife (6 page)

'Try them, they're delicious.'

He couldn't face an argument—his nerves were already jumping like ants under his skin; politely he took several plums, adding a trickle of yellow custard. That also looked over-sweet and sickly.

Emmy leaned her head towards him, whispering, 'Sometimes we have ice-cream but it isn't an ice-cream day.'

.'That's a pity. I like ice-cream.'

'So do I,' she sighed.

James felt something inside him stir, a warmth he had never felt before, a tenderness, a sense of kinship, as if she were his own child. It was absurd. He would probably never set eyes on her again. That idea made him frown. He had only known her for a couple of hours yet he stupidly felt he would miss her if he never saw her again. He watched her pushing her spoon around in the bowl without taking anything. 'Do you like plums?' he whispered.

She made a face, darting a secret glance at Patience, who was talking across the table to Toby, unaware of them.

'They're better than prunes.'

'Not much,' said James, wrinkling his nose.

Emmy giggled. 'No, they aren't, are they? Patience doesn't like it if we don't try everything, though.' She watched James eat his last plum. 'You can have one of mine, if you like,' she generously offered, hurriedly pushing it into his bowl while Patience's attention was elsewhere.

James ate it without a word; he would have eaten it even if it had been utterly loathsome just to get Emmy's grateful smile. Across the table Thomas and Toby winked at him. He winked back and felt Patience turn to stare at them all with suspicion.

'What have you been up to?'"James turned, lifting a cold, haughty eyebrow.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Hmm,' she said, getting up. 'You don't fool me.' But she didn't pursue the matter. 'Come on, we'll take coffee upstairs. Boys, homework. Emmy, have you learnt your spellings?'

Emmy nodded.

'Toby, make her spell all of them for you. After that, half an hour's television, then get washed and into bed. I'll check on you later.'

James followed her out of the room into the kitchen, where one of the women was already busy making coffee. She turned to smile at them.

'Hallo, enjoy your supper?' This time he recognised her white hair and bright blue eyes.

'Yes, thank you, Lavinia.'

Patience gave him a surprised look as she set about laying a tray with cups and saucers, spoons, a sugar bowl of brown sugar lumps and a small jug of cream, ending with a pot of coffee.

'I'll take that,' James politely said, picking it up.

'Thank you. It is pretty heavy.' Patience walked out of the kitchen and turned up the wide polished oak stairs and onto a landing from which several corridors branched off. Rows of doors, all closed, confronted him, and at the end of one corridor a narrow flight of stairs going up to another floor. How many rooms were there? he wondered. This rambling old house must be larger than it looked from the outside.

'How many guests do you have?'

'At the moment, four men and three women. If we had any more than that they would have to share a room, which I don't like—privacy is so important to people at any age, but especially someone who has no home of their own any more. They don't have much else. No family—or often any friends.'

James shivered, as if a ghost had walked over his grave. He knew what it was like to have nothing and no one. After his mother had gone he had felt abandoned, forsaken—lonely and cold in that luxurious, empty house, with his father never there, no brothers and sisters, no friends, only servants for company. It had been bad enough for a child, how did it feel when you were old? Did the irony ever occur to his mother? His father had always told him that whatever you did always came back on your own head—good or evil, you were always repaid in kind.

Patience was still talking, but she was watching him and he was beginning to be afraid that she could always read his thoughts, so he pushed away his own memories and concentrated on what she was saying.

'Our rooms are all furnished and they can't bring anything with them except a few little things—photographs, books, the odd ornament. Some of them have a radio or TV of their own, and I allow that so long as they keep the volume down and don't disturb anyone else. It makes them feel more at home to have some of their own stuff around them.'

James stood, holding the tray in front of him like a butler, staring down at her. 'What on earth makes you do it?' he broke out harshly. 'Why fill your home with strangers, do all this work...? Surely it would be much easier to sell this house and buy somewhere smaller and get a job. You wouldn't have to work so hard; you would have set hours and more fun.'

'This is the children's home; they don't want to live anywhere else. I promised them when our parents died that I would keep the house and we would all stay together—nothing would be different. I couldn't go out to work then because Emmy was too young, and running a guest-house seemed the perfect answer.'

He wished he hadn't shouted at her but it was too late to regret losing his temper—and why had he suddenly felt so angry that his head nearly blew off just because some total stranger was doing something he felt was crazy and inexplicable? Why should he care if she chose to work like a slave, taking care of all these people?

'What happened to your parents?' he muttered.

'They were killed in a car crash three years ago. A lorry driver had a heart attack at the wheel and smashed right into their car head-on. At least they didn't suffer. They died oh impact, apparently.'

'Three years ago?' James thought aloud. 'How old was Emmy?' Now why did he want to know that? He seemed to be losing all control of his mind, thinking and saying things that would never have occurred to him before today.

'Three years old, poor baby.'

James winced. 'It must have hit her hard.'

Patience sighed, nodding. 'She regressed—turned back into a baby. She didn't talk or walk, burst into tears over nothing, had nightmares at night, called for her mother—shock takes a long time to wear off; it's like a bruise but on the inside instead of the outside. I couldn't have left her with strangers; she needed to be with someone who loved her. I had to be here for her all the time. And the boys were difficult to deal with, too; it took them another way. Toby started stealing from local shops, swearing, bullying other boys at school, and Thomas wet the bed, wouldn't eat, wouldn't do what you told him, couldn't concentrate on his schoolwork.'

Grimly, James said, 'Boys are taught not to show their feelings, so they have to find another way of dealing with the pain.' He had never expressed it at all; he had internalised it, wrapped it up and put it away out of sight at the back of his mind where he suddenly realised it had lain all this time, festering and every so often beginning to leak out without him understanding why he got those jabs of anger and distress from nowhere.

Looking up at him, Patience smiled gently. 'It is terrifying, having parents vanish like that, out of the blue.'

They were both talking about him as much as her brothers and sister. He looked away, his face pale.

'It made the children so insecure they no longer felt they could trust anyone not to disappear; they were afraid I might go next. So you see why I couldn't have sold this house.'

Yes, he could see the predicament she had been in, but he could not believe she should have opened the house as a hotel. 'How do they feel about having all these old people around all the time, though? I shouldn't think they would want other people sharing your attention, not to mention taking up so much of your energy.' He knew he wouldn't like it.

'Oh, but they love it—they don't have grandparents, and I think children need contact with the older generation; there's a natural sympathy between children and old people. They're far closer in spirit than parents are with children; parents have too many responsibilities, too much to do running a home, finding money, doing practical things. They're the ones who discipline and feel they have to keep nagging at the children to do better. Old people have left all that behind and are sitting back, enjoying life, the way children do.

'For instance, Joe has taught the boys gardening, although he gets cross now and then, and Emmy helps Lavinia in the kitchen; she likes being in there, measuring flour, beating eggs, spooning out jam—Lavinia is teaching her how to cook, which is fun for both of them. Lavinia has no grandchildren, you see, and she should have had them; she makes a lovely grandma.'

'Was it Lavinia who cooked the supper? I thought it was you.'

'We did it together; Lavinia was a professional cook at one time, I've learnt a lot from her.' Patience looked at the tray he still held. 'That coffee must be getting cold and we ought to go in and see your mother. She's probably wondering what is going on out here! She must be able to hear us talking.'

James was frozen to the spot; he felt as if his feet had grown down into the carpet and he couldn't move. Patience stared up at him, her bright hazel eyes probing his face. She was at it again—reading minds!

'Come on!'

'Stop pushing me around, Miss Kirby!' He used his most cutting, incisive voice. 'I'll go in there when I'm ready.'

'Don't be scared,' she said in a gentle voice, at which he reddened angrily.

'I'm nothing of the kind! What are you talking about? Scared!'

She smiled at him, then walked away down the corridor, and James slowly, reluctantly followed. Patience stopped at a door, turned the handle and opened it on a scene of lamplit cosiness.

His eyes leapt around the room nervously, taking in the fact that it was a square bedroom which was also a sitting room, containing a red-velvet-covered chaise-longue of Edwardian style, ornate and sensual, heaped with velvet cushions in several colours, on which reposed a trio of battered old teddy bears. Beside it was a small, round table on which stood a brass pot of pink and white hyacinths in bloom, their scent rich and sweet, and in the far corner a bed covered by a patchwork duvet. A woman lay in the bed, leaning against a pile of pillows, her face turned towards the door.

James couldn't refuse to move—he would have looked ridiculous, and he hated above everything to look ridiculous—so, walking like a robot, he crossed the room and put the tray down on the table, taking only one brief, hurried glance before looking away again.

'Hallo, James,' his mother said, and incredibly he knew that voice immediately; the timbre of it had deepened, grown husky, but he found he had never forgotten it.

He had to look at her then. Her hair, like Lavinia's, was white, but had a faint pink rinse in it; James stared, thinking of candy floss at a fair. It had that wispy texture, like thistledown, unreal and insubstantial. He had been remembering her hair as dark, like his own, sleek and long and silky.

She held out her hand as if he were a stranger come to visit her, and of course they were just that—strangers.

His feet felt like lead but with an effort he somehow, moved them and took her hand; once his had been swallowed up in hers but now it was the other way around. Her lingers were tiny and cold. His hand could have crushed them.

He did not know what to say. What did you say to someone you had not seen for so many years? Someone you had been very angry with for so long?

But was that fragile creature in the bed the woman he had hated all this time?

The last time he'd seen her she had been young, beautiful, smelling of French perfume and full of gaiety. There was no resemblance between the two images; only her voice remained to haunt him, like 'the voice of a ghost whispering down the chill passages of memory.

'Hallo,' he said, hating this situation and hating Patience for getting him into it. It was all her fault— who did she think she was? What gave her the right to prod and push people into doing things they did not want to do?

'Sit down,' Patience said, as if he was one of those children downstairs whose lives she managed so certainly and self-confidently. She pushed a chair forward for him; the seat of it banged into the back of his knees and forced him to sink down onto it. 'Let's have the coffee, shall we, before it gets cold?'

Sitting down gave him something to do. He crossed his legs, smoothing down his trousers, and suddenly noticed specks of mud on them—he must have got that when he'd crawled into and out of Thomas's den. Crossly, he brushed at the specks, but they had dried hard. The trousers would need to go to the cleaners tomorrow. Accepting the coffee Patience handed him gave him something else to do; he slowly stirred the spoon round and round, staring down into the cup.

'Sugar?'

'No, thank you.' James turned his smouldering eyes towards her, hoping she could read his mind this time—he was thinking about what he wanted to say to her, the blistering words he would use if they were alone.

She grinned at him, her hazel eyes dancing. Oh, yes, she had read his mind and it merely amused her. She was one of the strangest women he had ever met, at one and the same time too young and too old for him. Too young in years and experience of the world; too bossy to live with.

What am I thinking about? he asked himself in horror. Live with? Flushed and furious, with himself as well as her, he looked away, stirring his coffee.

'Would you like me to go away for a while, leave you two alone?' Patience asked.

Both James and his mother said,
'No!'
together, in a rush.

So his mother wasn't easy with the idea of talking to him, either? he realised, looking at her and seeing now how thin and pale she was. You could see all the bones in her face, all the fine blue veins under her skin. She was as insubstantial as a cobweb, and yet he could see a sort of beauty in her still; time had worn away the mask and laid bare the striking bone structure of that face.

'Patience says you lived abroad for a long time, in Europe,' he said politely, making small-talk with this stranger.

'France, Spain, Italy,' she nodded. 'I travelled quite a bit.'

'Singing, Patience says?'

She smiled. 'That's right—do you remember, I used to sing to you when you were a baby? Only when your father was out, of course; he hated me to sing, although I was singing when he met me—that's how we met, I was singing with a small band, at a London hotel. Your father had dinner there, with friends, and he came back again, alone, the following night and asked me out. I think that was the first impulse move he had ever made. He wasn't an impulsive man as a rule, but he was younger, then; his real nature hadn't begun to show.'