Ashenden (16 page)

The doctor bulged his forehead at Philip. “Tell me, what general impression did you form of our cousins across the Atlantic?”

It was a version of the questions Philip had been asked in the churchyard. The answer was that he had formed no general impression, only many specific ones. The hallway of the Boston boardinghouse where he had lodged with Prentice had a particular smell, for example, a blend of rush matting, boiled bacon, and polished paneling, which he could summon up without any trouble. The same was true of the clamor of lower Manhattan, where Irish squatters huddled in shanties made of scavenged planks, pigs rooting in the mud alongside, or the sight of the dilapidated wooden villas that clung to the cliffs of the East Sound, soon to be swept under the advancing street grid that was schematizing the island and obliterating its rocks and ditches and shrubbery. Most of all he remembered what it felt like to be living in a country that was in a hurry to make itself. He frowned, looked round, and saw that the doctor was waiting for his reply.

“I cannot say, to be honest. Some Americans are much the same as us. Others aren’t.”

“From what I understand, they lack all social graces.”

“I found them friendly.”

At this moment, Philip was thinking of the frankness of some American girls, his landlady’s daughter in particular, whom he had been very careful not to mention in any of his letters home. It had been difficult to restrain himself, since she had taught him things and changed him in ways he would never have imagined three years ago, and he would have liked to have communicated that to someone.

“Friendly?” The doctor laughed. “That is not surprising. If there is one thing Americans respect, it’s money.”

His father mopped his mouth. “Everyone respects money, Burgess. Philip acquitted himself very well. I had excellent reports of him.”

Praise was a form of expectation, thought Philip.

By the time the dessert was on the table, his father had moved
off the subject of banking and, via a short detour into the arts and some of his recent acquisitions, had arrived at the great topic of the day, the opportunities provided by the speed of modern transportation.

“You bought this house at precisely the right moment,” said the doctor. “The railway changes everything.”

“The truth is I wanted to buy it much earlier. When I first saw it, I knew there could be no finer setting for my collection. That was soon after I entered Parliament.”

“You waited eight years!” said the doctor, doing the mental arithmetic. “My word, there’s patience.”

“Prudence,” said his father. “More was asking too much for it and he knew it. After that unfortunate business I was able to get it for a reasonable price, considering that it included the timber, which was not in the original offer.”

“You drive a keen bargain,” said the doctor.

“There’s no other kind.” His father surveyed the dining room decorations, which were too subdued for his taste: “It might as well rain indoors” was his estimation of them. He had plans for the dining room. “Yet I cannot deny that the arrival of the railway has been a great advantage. I don’t see why anyone will ever need a town house in future.”

The doctor said that thanks to Brunel and fifty miles an hour, one might have houses anywhere.

“Which unfortunate business?” said Albert.

Philip glanced at his brother, whose face was a blank. Albert’s face was always a blank when he was stirring things up. He knew full well what had happened to the Mores; they both did. The divorce had been all over the papers. The woman had been ruined; her lover, who had recently been elected to the Royal Academy, had not.

“Which unfortunate business?” Albert repeated.

Their father rose from his seat. Luncheon was over. “An old story, which need not concern you.” He nodded at the doctor and asked him if he would be so good as to listen to his youngest child’s chest, as it would very much ease the mind of Mrs. Henderson.

Philip followed his father and the doctor into the staircase hall, where the white light poured down from the clerestory onto the new green-and-gold carpet. From somewhere above he could hear young voices and little feet running to and fro. He saw Cedric, or was it Reginald, peeping through the balusters up in the gallery. (It was definitely Reginald, he decided.)

*  *  *

The cottage was down by the railway. It was not one of the new brick ones that were springing up from footings to flashings in what seemed like five minutes, but an old place with flint walls that squinted under its thatch a little way out of the village. Before the line had gashed through the countryside, there had been an orchard at the back. Now all that was left of it was a pair of gnarled apple trees on which the soot settled. When the roaring trains passed, which was more and more often, the teacups and plates on the dresser rattled against each other and chipped themselves.

In front of the cottage was a small garden that struggled against the odds to be cheerful and productive. Every time Rowena saw it, she was reminded of an uncomplaining invalid who, despite all evidence to the contrary, always insisted that she was “much better today, thank you for asking.”

It was raining harder when she came through the narrow gate and hurried the short distance down the cinder path. The porch was as inadequate a shelter as her umbrella, little more than a covered step, and by the time Mrs. Trimble opened the door and ushered her over the threshold, she was rather damp.

Straightaway she could tell something was the matter. “I hope you are quite well, Mrs. Trimble?”

“Very well, thank you, Miss Henderson.” The reply was too bright and so were the eyes. “What miserable weather! Come and warm yourself by the fire while I make some tea. You must not catch a chill.”

The cottage was dark and small. Conscious that her Sunday skirts took up half the space in the parlor, Rowena stood in front of
the smoky hearth, to one side of an armchair where a cat was sleeping, while Daniel in the lions’ den stared down from the wall above. To either side of the chimneybreast were framed prints of churches blotted with brown spots. A length of tatted lace was draped over a small bureau in one of the alcoves. On it was a miniature of a young man in an oval frame. In the other alcove was a spare chair with a sagging seat. This was all familiar to her.

Mrs. Trimble came back with the tea tray, which she placed on a small round table two steps away in front of the window, insisted that Rowena take the armchair, shooing the cat off it first, and brought up the spare chair for herself. Before she sat down, she took up a letter that had been lying folded on the mantelshelf and put it away in the little bureau.

“It is a pity you were not at church this morning. I could have introduced you to my brother Philip,” said Rowena. “He is quite a man now.”

A roar shuddered the walls, danced the teacups in their saucers, and offended the cat, which shot out of the room. Mrs. Trimble consulted the clock on the mantelshelf. “The London train,” she said, when it was possible to speak. “You were talking about your brother.”

“Yes, I would love you to meet him. Perhaps I might bring him to call one day soon.”

Mrs. Trimble smiled, but the smile did not go far. While they drank the tea and ate thin slices of bread and butter, Rowena wondered whether or not this was the right occasion to put forward her proposal. She reached down to stroke the cat, which had made a cautious, dignified return, but Puss was not in the mood for stroking.

After Philip left and there was no one with whom to share her thoughts, she had decided to make herself useful, with the idea that it might give her something to write about in her letters to him. So while pictures were hung and rehung in the new house, furnishings were delivered and sent back, and accounts rendered were queried to the last penny, she had gone into the village with one of the maids, bearing offerings of food and clothing. These were met with
silence and stares and peeping round the shutters. “Give it time, miss,” said the maid on the way home. “They don’t know you from Adam.” A few months later, the Godwin boy broke his arm in two places falling off the back of a stationary milk cart and she managed to persuade her father to send the doctor to treat him. Afterwards the blacksmith took a pair of boots for his youngest—“Thank you, miss, he’ll grow into them soon enough”—and an elderly woman accepted a cabbage. None of this provided her with much to write about.

The day she met Mrs. Trimble, soon after the family had finally moved into the house, was the day the first express came through the village. She had taken Caroline down to see it. As the locomotive and the carriages sped past in a blur of Brunswick green, chocolate, and cream, everyone was waving their handkerchiefs from the top of the cutting and pretending to fall backwards and having to be revived, the women with embraces and the men, who were happy to oblige, with beer. Meanwhile the children were making as much noise as the train but going nowhere near as fast, which did not stop them from trying. The Godwin boy tumbled down the bank to horrified cries and narrowly escaped being showered by white-hot cinders.

Then it was gone. Plumes of gray steam hung in the air. All along the track the cinders glowed red and turned to ash.

“I suppose this is progress.”

Rowena turned to see a spare, middle-aged woman in dark, plain clothing, her shawl fastened by a dull metal brooch in the shape of a leaf. “Good heavens, wasn’t it fast?” Rowena pressed her hand to her throat, where her pulse was beating rapidly. “Everything must go by in a dream. I don’t see how you would ever know where you were.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you would,” said Caroline. “That is what the station signs are for.”

The woman laughed, they introduced themselves, and Rowena discovered that Mrs. Trimble used to be housekeeper at the Park for the family who had lived there before them.

“Then you must know Hastings, our steward,” she said. “Father says he’s been at Ashenden ever since he was born.”

“Yes, I am well acquainted with Mr. Hastings.”

“He’s very disagreeable,” said Caroline.

“Caroline!” said Rowena.

“I am also well acquainted with Mr. Hastings’s disagreeableness.”

Rowena did not know what to make of the comment and chose to ignore it.

“What are they doing?” said Caroline, craning her neck to stare at the couples on the bank. “Is it a game? A country dance of some sort?”

“You had better take your sister home,” said Mrs. Trimble, with a private nod, “before it gets worse.”

Rowena moved round to block her sister’s view. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Trimble,” she said, putting out her hand. “You are more than welcome to visit us at any time. My father has made a great many improvements, which might interest you as someone who knows the house.”

Mrs. Trimble shook her hand and declined the offer.

“In that case perhaps I might call on you some day.”

“I am not difficult to find.”

*  *  *

Back in the parlor Mrs. Trimble watched Rowena coax the cat. The girl was not so dislikable once you got to know her. She meant well, and she was too young to appreciate that meaning well and knowing best often looked like the same thing to the object of one’s charity. Mrs. Trimble suspected she was lonely and underoccupied, as one could be even in the midst of a large family.

Soon Rowena would unpack the books from her basket, Mrs. Trimble would thank her, and after the visit was over, she would add them to the pile upstairs, where they would remain untouched and unread. It wasn’t the girl’s fault that she couldn’t bear to hear about Ashenden—the staircase hall carpeted, for pity’s sake!—or that in casting around for other things to talk about during her visits,
she had inadvertently given the impression that she spent most of her time with her nose in a book.

Volumes of sermons and histories of Berkshire were not going to feed her or keep her warm, any more than they were going to entertain her. The hens had stopped laying because of the trains, the soot-caked vegetables were inedible, and she was down to measuring out the coal in teaspoons. But she would rather have starved than ask for help. The letter in the bureau informed her that her savings, including the small bequest her former employer Mr. Wilmott had left her in his will, were almost exhausted. She would be penniless in a matter of months. Then it would be Reading workhouse, and no prospect that she could imagine was worse than that.

Another train roared past, as if on cue. Mrs. Trimble, a dull weight on her heart, poured out what was left in the pot. She would keep the leaves to brew again later, as they had already been brewed once before, in the full knowledge that economies were only economies until there was nothing left.

Rowena took the cup and spilled tea into her saucer. Generally the girl was composed to the point of blandness. Today she appeared to be engaged in an internal struggle, which made her fidgety and pink. She opened her mouth a couple of times, each time checking herself. Finally, she said, “I think—well, first let me show you what I have brought.” Then she delved into her basket.

What she produced was a battered assortment of children’s books with faded bindings and loose pages. Spelling primers. An atlas. La Fontaine’s
Fables
. A collection of Bible stories.

“These are from the nursery,” said Rowena.

“So I see.”

“I should very much like your opinion about an idea that I have had. It is simply that for some time I have been thinking—and I am certain that I am not alone in thinking this by any means—” She swallowed and smoothed her skirts. “I should like to open a school in the village.”

Reading and writing for the boys, reading for the girls, perhaps writing, too, for the more able ones. Basic sums, so that they could
manage their own household accounts in future. The sorts of skills that would fit them for lives of service or other forms of suitable employment. After the hesitancy, Rowena was now in full flow. She had heard that the Butlers had lost their paddock because they had been persuaded to mark their crosses on a document they could not read. The blacksmith knew what to charge for replacing a shoe, but she had observed that he could not multiply that by four and come up with the same answer twice.