The Chandelier Ballroom (10 page)

Daphne and Edward Everington were the first to arrive about eleven thirty on the Saturday. Daphne instantly glanced at her daughter’s midriff, having given her a peck on the cheek.

‘No sign of any family yet, dear?’ she asked as she handed her lightweight, three-quarter-length swagger coat, together with her pill-box hat, to young Doris, already holding Mr Everington’s trilby.

Doris eyed the suitcase standing in the hall. Did that mean a longer stay than just these two days? Being asked to work this Sunday would give her a little more money to spend on evenings out with her friends, but serving extra meals and being at their every beck and call, which she looked likely to be and for Lord knows how long, wasn’t her idea of work,

‘No, Mummy, nothing yet,’ Joyce answered her mother’s question a little off-handedly as she led her parents into the front lounge. ‘Arnold and I feel it far too soon to begin thinking of starting a family.’

‘Of course, darling, plenty of time, I expect,’ murmured her mother, ignoring the rebuff, as they entered the comfortable room with its two soft brown leather sofas, matching deep armchairs and quiet décor. Arnold was already pouring welcome drinks for everyone from the cabinet in the corner by the large bay window.

Taking the sherry he handed her, Daphne settled herself in an armchair, Joyce in the other, while the two men stood by the cabinet with a brandy each. She looked across at her daughter.

‘We rather thought we might stay over until Monday afternoon, if that’s all right with you, dear,’ she said, sipping her sherry. ‘Quite handy, Arnold and your father not having to be at the office that day, public holiday you know, with the Royal Silver Jubilee.’ A far away look came into her blue eyes. ‘Our dear King George and Queen Mary, twenty-five years on the throne, incredible how time flies. I can remember the Coronation as if it were yesterday. 1911. I was there to see them pass in their state coach, you know. She looked so beautiful, so young. I was fifteen, hadn’t yet met your father of course.’ She took another sip of sherry then glanced up at Joyce. ‘I hope you don’t mind us staying one extra day?’

‘Why should I mind?’ Joyce replied, resigning herself to one more day of questioning as to exactly when she did intend to start a family, querying if she had any health problems that might prevent her from bearing a child, the woman still clinging to a need to protect her daughter. ‘It would be nice having you,’ she ended lamely.

Having finished their brandy, Arnold and her father had gone out onto the patio for a cigarette, leaving Joyce to endure her mother’s account of life at home now she was no longer there. She was telling her how much she still missed her, when Arnold’s parents arrived, bringing the men back into the lounge. Hardly ten minutes after having been welcomed with a glass of wine or brandy, Daphne accepting a second sherry just to be sociable, in came Arnold’s two brothers and their wives, calling for yet another round and a topping up of any half-empty glass.

Gertrude Johns-Pitman, a short, broad-bodied woman, so different from her tall, lean husband, waved her hand to a second glass with an almost apologetic expression on her blunt features as she whispered, ‘I really seldom if ever drink more than one, thank you.’

‘I am much the same,’ Daphne put in as she accepted her third.

Her mother’s cheeks had begun to glow and Joyce suggested they retreat out to the patio where the men could smoke and the women enjoy the fresh air, to which they agreed.

It was good to sit here in the partial shade from the house, the sun not coming round until early afternoon, its summer rays already proving hotter than usual, and it was a relief to see her mother’s cheeks slowly regain their usual pale colour.

The men moving off to inspect the three acres of grounds so grandly termed an estate by the previous owner, though the small clumps of trees made it seem larger, the women sat on in the sublime comfort of reclining patio chairs.

Content not to be drawn into any conversation, Joyce cast her gaze over the wide views of rolling countryside seen through scattered woods with hardly any house to spoil it. Often looking out on it, it would feel as if it was all hers to the distant horizon, so long as she didn’t look the other way and see the village with its few shops, church, village hall and two pubs bordering the road that ran through it.

Her mother had fallen silent while Gertrude and her daughters-in-law went on chatting. She’d begun to look pensive. After a while Joyce felt bound to ask her if anything was wrong. She turned to her, her voice a whisper.

‘That big room of yours with the chandelier, I’ve never felt comfortable there.’ She paused as if embarrassed then went on, ‘Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt anything strange about it?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Joyce answered, keeping her own voice low, but it was a lie in a way.

‘Arnold calls it the chandelier room, but I don’t like the term,’ her mother went on.

Indeed he did, though she preferred to call it merely the big room – why she couldn’t say, except that it didn’t seem right to mention the chandelier, again she couldn’t have explained why. Nor why she seldom lingered in the room for any length of time. Despite it having been reduced to a somewhat more acceptable size by rebuilding the wall between it and the hall, there was a disquieting, empty feel to it.

Now her mother had felt it too. It may have been the three glasses of sherry she’d had, but halfway across the room she’d given a huge shudder.

‘I really do not like this room!’ she’d burst out loudly and vehemently, causing the others to glance at her in surprise.

‘It’s a lovely room,’ Mrs Johns-Pitman had remarked. ‘So bright, and that beautiful chandelier sets it off perfectly – just the right size for such a big room.’

Daphne had come to a halt, gazing almost furtively about her. ‘Can’t you sense it, a strange chill? I feel it whenever I come in here.’

Joyce said nothing. She too had often experienced a similar feeling, but she didn’t want her mother pointing it out to others.

‘I can’t feel anything,’ Howard’s wife remarked, faintly condescending amusement in her tone.

The men had merely exchanged grins as they’d continued through to the conservatory and out to the patio, more interested in having a smoke, Joyce not happy to have cigarette or cigar smoke tainting her home.

‘It’s definitely here in this room,’ Daphne kept saying, the other three women moving a little closer to her as if to console. Joyce guessed they had probably all seen her high colour and assumed her to be ever so slightly tipsy. She could even imagine them smiling to themselves as they coaxed her outside into the garden.

Once seated at ease on the patio, shielded by the house from the morning sun which would soon make its way round, necessitating the use of sun shades, she seemed to forget her fear, lying back in her chair to enjoy the morning warmth, until the whispered exchange with her daughter.

Joyce continued to feel unsettled over what her mother had said. She too disliked the odd feeling that room sometime gave her, though there seemed no explanation for it. At first she’d attributed it to the size of the room, and for a while the rebuilding of the wall had made a difference. But around the end of October the disconcerting sensation had begun to creep back. Then she’d shrugged it off as an attack of autumn doldrums that can take a hold of some people lamenting the end of summer, dreading the start of winter with its creeping cold, sunshine, long dark nights and short overcast days.

Now her mother who, she had to admit, was a little sensitive to atmospheres, had also taken a dislike to that room. Yet why, when no one else seemed to?

On Sunday evening Arnold’s family went home, allowing the four of them to settle down to a quiet evening together, Arnold and her father engrossed in conversation, the radio playing, she and her mother nibbling sandwiches Mrs Evans had made before retiring.

‘I must just trot off to the bathroom, dear,’ her mother whispered discreetly with a smile. When she came back the smile had disappeared, replaced by an expression of bewilderment.

‘Who is that woman?’ she asked Joyce quietly, as though fearing to alert the men’s attention

Joyce looked at her in surprise. ‘What woman?’

‘In your big room.’

As Joyce stared at her she went on, ‘She was by the French windows. The door was open and you usually keep it shut, don’t you, and I looked in and there she was, at the far end of the room with her back to me.’ Her mother was talking fast, whispering. ‘She must have heard me. She turned and looked at me, then up at the chandelier. I looked at it too. I looked back to ask who she was but she’d gone. I thought she’d slipped into the conservatory but I couldn’t see her. She simply disappeared. Who is she?’

Joyce felt a shudder run through her but thought quickly. ‘I don’t know, unless it was Doris, our housemaid. She lives in the village. She must have popped back for something she’d forgotten.’

But Doris would never have popped back for anything at this hour. A respectful young girl, she’d have waited for Monday morning. Who then was the person her mother had seen, if it had been a person in the sense of flesh and blood? The thought brought the skin on her arms up in goose pimples and tingled the back of her neck. Yet she had no reason to feel like that.

At least her reply seemed to have settled her mother somewhat as she said, ‘Well, it would have been more polite for the girl to have come to the front door to speak to you first instead of creeping around the place like that! Heaven knows who could have been lurking there with us here unaware.’

Again Joyce felt her flesh grow chill. Who exactly had her mother seen and why should it have made her flesh creep? What was the answer, if an answer there was?

It was the following February that she found the answer. These past months she’d slowly got to know a few people in Wadely, though none that well: a passing smile in the local hairdressers, a nod or two in the post office or one or two of the four shops, hardly enough to spark off a conversation.

It being fine last summer there’d been no need for friends, her parents making regular trips out to see her, she and Arnold visiting both them and his parents as well as one or other of his brothers a couple of times. There had been that fortnight holiday in Switzerland in late summer, a couple of weekend jaunts to the south coast. And there was the garden. They had a gardener but she enjoyed pottering round. Time had just flown by, giving her little time to feel lonely.

Autumn had changed that. The days growing shorter, nights drawing in, Arnold’s long hours away from home working with his stockbroker father in the City left her again feeling uneasy on her own, though never sure why. Thoughts of what her mother had said she’d seen by the French windows that day last May had plagued her constantly, and though she herself hadn’t seen anything odd, the episode returned again and again to disturb her thoughts, making her yearn for Arnold to come home.

In desperation she’d forced herself to join the WI, rather nervously at first, anything to help fill at least some of those empty hours. Not that good at mixing and getting acquainted with new people, instead she’d sought the back row of those who came to listen to whatever speaker was there and had shunned volunteering for any of those little WI tasks others enjoyed.

No one appeared particular drawn to her, but that was how she preferred it. She was a private person and had made no close friends even at school or at that college for young ladies. It hadn’t worried her and it didn’t now, though soon she would have to socialise or be seen as odd.

It was only after several meetings that she found courage enough to speak to anyone, that because one of them, a woman in her late twenties with a naturally outgoing chatty nature, spoke to her first, seeming to want to take her under her wing somewhat.

Introducing herself as Jennifer Wainwright, she came and sat next to Joyce as they drank coffee, proceeding to tell her all about herself: that she ran the post office; that her husband had gone off with another woman three years ago. ‘We’d been married for nearly ten years but we were married very young. I don’t think we were suited anyway. I don’t miss him, far too busy to want him back and there were no children. In time I might meet someone else, I’m still young enough and you meet all sorts in my job. But no hurry.’

She gave an easy laugh, talking so rapidly there was little need for Joyce to say much, which was a blessing. She didn’t care for people knowing too much of her private life. But Jennifer was open, easy to get along with, so much so that by February she had practically invited herself to Joyce’s home for morning coffee, or rather Joyce found herself pushed into inviting her. Anyway, she rather liked Jennifer, maybe because she was that bit older and a less overbearing mother-figure than her own mother.

‘It’s such a nice house you have,’ she remarked now, gazing around the cosy sitting room over their coffee and biscuits. Joyce had offered cake but Jennifer had patted her rather noticeable tummy. ‘Too much sweet stuff, need to watch the waist,’ she had said brightly.

She was still gazing about the room, nibbling a chocolate digestive instead. ‘This place is quite old, you know. At least the rear part is. Built around the beginning of last century I believe, 1820s or thereabouts, a sort of manor house, wealthy family, quite large I was told – the house, not the family.’ She laughed then grew serious. ‘This part was built by new people about the beginning of this century who had bits of the older one pulled down, so all this is quite new. But this has its own history.’

She leaned forward, replacing her cup on the little round occasional table to peer into Joyce’s eyes. ‘But then I suppose you know about that.’

‘About what?’ Joyce asked innocently.

‘About the suicide.’

A knot formed itself deep inside Joyce’s stomach, though why she wasn’t certain. ‘What suicide?’

‘The last chap who had this place, surely you know – your pond, the one in the wood on your property – he drowned in it. The police said it was an accident but people here think it was suicide. Surely you know?’