The Dream House (17 page)

Her greatest comfort every week was going to visit Agnes.

June 2004

On the sixth of June it was Kate’s thirty-sixth birthday. Joyce offered to collect the children from school, so that Kate needn’t hurry back from visiting Agnes. Early in the afternoon, Kate arrived at the hospital to find that her cousin had a little package for her wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon. When Kate unfolded the paper, she found a string of large pearls with a diamond-studded clasp.

‘Agnes, they’re beautiful. But I can’t accept them – they must be so valuable.’

Agnes smiled proudly. ‘Well, who else would I give them to? They were my mother’s, but I’ve no use for them now. Go on, put ’em on.’

Agnes was sitting up in a wheelchair by the window today. She was wearing a blouse and skirt and someone had put her hair up for her. Only her socks and slippers and a greyness about the face gave away her status as a patient.

Sitting opposite, Kate slipped the pearls round her neck. They lay warm on her collarbones, and when she looked in the mirror over the little sink they seemed to glow. She stared at herself. With her slightly parted lips and her dark hair tucked behind her ears, she fancied she could pass for the portrait in Agnes’s bedroom – if it weren’t for her own air of sadness.

She turned back to Agnes, who seemed to think the same for she said, ‘I’ve always believed they were the ones my mother wore in the photograph.’

‘What was her name, your mother?’ asked Kate, taking advantage of Agnes’s cheerful mood.

‘Evangeline. My father was besotted by her. People don’t know their Longfellow any more, but Father had written on her gravestone,
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music
. She was buried with the baby boy that had never breathed.’ Agnes stared out of the window, where the rain was falling in torrents. Kate waited, hoping she’d go on.

‘People talk about bereaved lovers being heartbroken. I think my father just wanted to die. For weeks he shut himself in his room. Then one day, he signed up for the army and was sent to the trenches. For my elder brother Raven and me it was like losing both our parents in one stroke. I was too little to understand. I was used to them being away sometimes and I loved my nurse. But for Raven it was terrible.’ Agnes shook her head as though the memories of ninety years ago were fresh upon her. ‘But when Father came home a year later, he found he could go on with life again.’ She looked at Kate. ‘You asked once whether he married again. Well, he did and I can remember the day he broke the news . . .’

Suffolk, July 1927

If, as a small child, Agnes Melton climbed on a stool and peered out of the window of the highest attic of Seddington House, she fancied on a clear day she could see over the tops of the poplar trees that marked the garden’s boundary with the road, across the rolling woods and fields of Suffolk, to the wetlands and the sea beyond. Her brother, Raven, had always sneered at this idea, and said that the line of distant blue was just part of the sky, but to be able to see the sea was vital to the romances that the lonely little girl wove about herself, and so she persisted in her belief. Today, as a willowy sixteen year old, no longer in need of the stool, it was still possible to imagine that the house’s site on the gentle slope of a hill gave them a vista of the coast three miles away.

The attic had always been one of her favourite places on a sunny summer’s day, and when she could escape from her governess, Miss Selcott, Agnes could either be found curled up with a book on the old swing seat in the rose garden or up here playing with her dolls in a den she’d made of the old iron bedstead and the broken furniture. It was warm and quiet in the attic, and Agnes would lie and listen to the buzz of the flies on the windows, the screeches of peacocks and the distant sounds of the life of the house, and fall into a daydream that, instead of being an ordinary-looking (for so she saw herself), motherless little girl, she was a great beauty and queen of all the lands around, that the dolls were her ladies and confidantes and that Alf, the gangly gardener’s boy, was the latest of a line of princes who came to ask for her hand. Down at the harbour at Southwold, she imagined, bobbed a fleet of tiny ships bearing her ensign, only awaiting a fair wind and the swell of the tide to launch them across the sparkling seas in search of riches and adventure.

The attic was also an excellent lookout when her father was expected home from one of his all-too frequent trips to London, and this was why Agnes had come up here today. He would take the train to Halesworth to be met by Lister in the car. The child used to stand, teetering on her perch, where she could see the road, and when she spotted the silver Bentley, tiny in the distance, turning the bend and tipping down the hill, she would jump down in a clatter of falling furniture and, with a shriek to Raven, race harum-scarum down two flights of stairs and out of the front door in time to see the car nosing in at the great iron gates.

Little Agnes knew that Gerald Melton was the most wonderful father any girl could wish to have. He would wave frantically at his daughter as she stood jumping up and down on the doorstep, then, when the car drew to a halt and Lister strode round to open the door, he would step down stiffly, with the help of his stick, and open his arms to her.

‘How do, little princess. Haha!’ And he would envelop her in the folds of his greatcoat and squeeze her tight. She would rub her nose in his tickly tweed waistcoat with its familiar smell of warm wool and tobacco and know that everything was all right again. ‘Well, damn it, I’m sure I had some little somethings somewhere,’ he would groan, patting his pockets. ‘Don’t say I left ’em on the train.’ And a pantomime would ensue whereby she would search all his pockets and his briefcase and the car until they found whatever he had brought with him this time – a little ornament for her collection or a dolls’ tea-set or a necklace of shiny red beads.

In the meantime, Raven, loitering on the steps behind the servants, always too superior for such displays of enthusiasm, would slouch over to let his father ruffle the blue-black hair that gave him his nickname, and to snatch whatever packet Agnes held out to him. Then he would lope back inside to open his present in private. Gerald Melton would look after him in puzzlement; his only son, handsome and intelligent though he was, was a sulky enigma to him. It was Agnes he felt at ease with, this friendly child who teased and flirted with him, who took him inside and asked about his trip as a wife would have done, and helped him into a chair in the drawing room, and loosened his tie and ordered tea.

Like a wife
. The other reason Gerald could bond so well with his little daughter was that she had such a look of Evangeline – her hair was wavy and lighter in colour, but the blue eyes, the full lower lip, the beguiling expression were the same. Any other grieving widower might recoil from such a constant living reminder of the woman he had loved and lost, but Gerald found the thought that Evangeline lived on in her daughter a comforting one.

It hadn’t always been like this. Soon after his wife had died giving birth to their third child – a stillborn boy – the Great War had broken out. His excuse for joining up was his officer training at Sandhurst, but in all reality he was so heartbroken at the loss of Evangeline he was reckless of his own life and immune to the needs of his children. When he’d been sent home with a shattered leg and a dose of mustard gas, a year later, he had been forced finally to spend time with Raven and Agnes. However, by then, the damage to his relationship with Raven had already been done. The youth was eventually packed off to Bellingham’s, a public school where, as far as Agnes could gauge, he had lied, cheated and charmed his way through something by way of an education. Gerald Melton had been hurt by his son’s obvious resentment, was at a loss how to deal with his dark moods. But he had been drawn to Agnes, so sweet and sad and lost, Agnes, who would climb into his lap and tell him she was so sorry for him and that she loved him.

Agnes had always recognized the nature of this close bond with her father, and now she was sixteen was looking forward to filling the gap in the household left by the death of her mother thirteen years before. Although her head was currently full of Tennyson’s poems and the novels of the Brontës, and her daydreams were of romantic trysts, she had as yet no admirers and felt marriage must still be years away. In the meantime, she could take over the running of the house for her father. She would learn to negotiate with Cook and look after the accounts – but only if she could get round her rival for the role, her governess Miss Selcott.

When Raven had first gone away to school, Agnes had missed him terribly, but she enjoyed a steady friendship with Diana, the Rector’s only child, and in the school holidays, both girls followed Raven around like lambs; he would organize their games and make them perform terrible dares like walking on the garden wall or soaking poor Alf with the garden hose.

In termtime, with Raven away, first at school and latterly at Cambridge, Miss Selcott ruled Agnes and Diana with a rod of iron. There were lessons from nine o’clock until one every day, then a rest after lunch followed by physical jerks – the governess was a keen proponent of regular exercise – followed by a nature walk, weather permitting, or silent reading in the library if not. Both Agnes and Diana were good and dutiful scholars, and, if they didn’t actually like their governess, they did not mind any of this. What Agnes did mind was the transparent way in which Jane Selcott sought the attentions of her employer, and her never-ending efforts to show that she was superior to the rest of the staff of Seddington House.

Cook, the redoubtable Mrs Duncan, knew her place – as mistress of the kitchen and, in the absence of a housekeeper, the guardian of the household accounts. She also knew Miss Selcott’s place, and that, Agnes sometimes overheard her telling Ethel, the maid, was
not
to order her, Mrs Duncan, around. From time to time, Miss Selcott would try to alter a menu or comment loudly to Lister about the quality of Ethel’s dusting and a genteel kind of low-level warfare between the governess and the rest of the servants would rumble along for a while.

As she grew up and became more aware of downstairs politics, Agnes sometimes wondered how on earth Seddington House ran as smoothly as it did. It was partly down to Mrs Duncan’s natural authority and efficiency, she decided, partly down to Lister the butler’s phlegmatic nature, and partly down to Ethel’s tact and good humour. Alter any ingredient in the mixture and the household might descend into crisis.

Recently, though, the natural order had begun to change. Mrs Duncan had started to show Agnes the housekeeping accounts and Mr Walters, the elderly gardener, would occasionally ask her opinion about a new rose or the quality of the vegetables. Though still utterly loyal to Gerald Melton, for whom they had the greatest respect, it was as though the staff were gently telling Agnes it was time for her to take up the role of mistress of the house.

Up in the attic, Agnes rested her forehead on the glass, deep in thought. Suddenly, a tiny movement caught her eye: the distant shape of the Bentley gliding down the hill. She whirled round. Checking in the chipped wall mirror that her brown locks were neatly tied back – Miss Selcott had dismissed as nonsense her timid request to have it cut into a fashionable bob – she hurried down the stairs to meet her father.

After dinner that evening, Agnes would normally have been expected to leave the table to go and sew or read, by herself or with Miss Selcott, in the drawing room. On this occasion, however, Miss Selcott being great friends with Diana’s mother, the Rector’s wife, had gone across to the rectory for a meal, and so the family dined alone. Unusually, when the meal was over, Mr Melton asked Agnes to stay. There was a tension hanging in the air. This was partly because of an argument between father and son about Raven’s college bill, which Miss Selcott had apparently found screwed up in the library grate. Raven, it appeared, owed a massive £85 for wine and spirits. He was also unable to satisfy his father on the matter of his academic achievements, and eventually confessed he was due to sit penal exams on his return to Cambridge in the autumn. Strangely enough, Mr Melton wasn’t as angry as might be expected on hearing this: there was something else on his mind.

When Lister had cleared away all the plates and brought the port to the table, he lit the candelabra and drew the curtains against the darkening sky. Then he left the room, closing the doors behind him,

Mr Melton leaned forward in his seat and looked from one of his children to the other.

‘I have something to tell you both,’ he said, and smiled. ‘During the course of my business in London, I have met a gentleman called Wintour. He is of an old Sussex family. They are,’ he waved his hand as if in dismissal, ‘distantly related to the Duke of Westminster. A family of good standing if not wealthy. I have dined with him at his house in Hampstead on several occasions over the last year. He is, like myself, a widower, and he has a daughter, Vanessa.’