The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (14 page)

There was an uneven thudding noise and a faint bubbling of pumped water but otherwise it was almost silent. They paused to watch tiny jewel-like creatures flicker through a glassed-off pool, then crossed the floor to a big aquarium, faintly illuminated from behind. The noise they’d heard since they entered turned out to be three boys thumping excitedly on the pane of glass. The greenish water seemed to contain nothing more than a large black rock. The largest boy banged hard with a swing of his fist. His friend was opening up a penknife.

‘You know what’s in there?’ Laurence asked, peering at the label on the glass.

They looked at him suspiciously.

‘A Madagascan carnivorous sea slug,’ he said. They were watching him closely but had stopped banging the glass and he felt as much as saw Frances nodding her head beside him.

‘It holds the record for the fastest flesh consumption of any living creature.’

The smallest boy stepped back and the other two shot a suspicious glance into the dark water.

‘It does nothing but sleep and eat,’ he added. ‘Only fresh raw meat, of course. It’s fussy. That’s why it has to work fast.’

‘I’m surprised they haven’t taken more precautions,’ Frances said, wonderingly. ‘A special guard or something. If it should get out it could reduce half this room to bones in five minutes.’ She looked at the container apprehensively.

Laurence shook his head. ‘Quite careless really, although it would be something to see. Apparently they start with the face, the soft bits. It gives them a way in.’

None of the boys had answered but all three rapidly moved on to the next exhibit, which seemed to contain an unhappy eel.

Frances gave his arm a squeeze. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

Outside she walked ahead to a display of tropical plants and then called him.

‘Oh smell this. This is definitely frangipane.’

She held a spray of waxy flowers between two fingers, stained with pollen. The small blossoms were perfect, shaped like small propellers, cream tinged with blush pink and a yellow crater at their heart. He could smell them without having to lean close.

‘We had flowers like these in London when I was a child.’ She suddenly looked wistful. ‘This huge conservatory full of flowers. I used to hide in there. Pretend it was a garden.’

She didn’t wait for a response but walked on, slowly. Laurence hung back and watched her. She looked paler, smaller and more delicate among the huge, vulgar blooms and the sky above them looked inadequately blue.

‘I wonder how Julian is getting on?’ he said, when she came back towards him. ‘Rather him than me queuing in this sun. But he’s a determined man.’

For a second Frances made no response, then she said, ‘Why does Patrick tease Julian all the time? It’s not fair. It makes him look stupid. ’

Laurence instantly regretted the remark he’d intended as lighthearted banter.

‘Jealousy?’ he said.

‘Julian’s such a different man since Patrick got here. This gruff, wary person I scarcely recognise has eclipsed the kind man I know. He was almost rude to Ellen Kilminster when she told him Victor was coming back from Australia, even though, heaven knows, we need strong young men at Easton.’

‘I suppose he worries about Lydia?’

Her face fell. ‘We all worry about Lydia.’

‘She’s not well at all, is she?’

Even in the time he’d known her, Laurence thought she had become more frail.

‘I think for a while she was buoyed up by all the schemes to improve Easton, creating the maze and the window, and somehow that’s no longer enough,’ Frances said. ‘She’s obviously more tired, and she gets muddled, and in a funny way she’s becoming withdrawn from us all.’

‘Yet she has a core of something stronger, I think?’

Frances nodded.

‘She doesn’t talk much about her husband,’ Laurence said, carefully, and he regretted his comment when Frances stopped and turned to face him.

‘I think it’s more that after what happened to Kitty nothing else could really touch her. She lost two other babies, a little boy, stillborn, and a miscarriage. Her life was all about loss long before the war. She remembers our parents too, which I don’t, and when Digby died I think she didn’t have any emotion left. He’d swept her off her feet. He was impulsive like that. And she felt guilty about Digby, because she couldn’t live up to him.’

‘Yet she is the last to be blamed, I’d have thought,’ Laurence said. ‘She’s very much the sufferer in this.’

‘Lydia would forgive him anything,’ Frances went on as if she hadn’t heard. ‘We’d had this careful, orderly upbringing and she was always the more reserved of the two of us. Then along comes Digby and he bursts into her little world. Everything he did was larger than life. He was inexhaustible and impulsive. He had oodles of charm and a fiery temper but it was all quickly forgotten too. He was not an easy husband but probably an entertaining one. Certainly at first.’ She stopped, then turned away.

Laurence thought it was a decidedly qualified compliment.

‘I came to join her not long after they’d married,’ Frances said, ‘when my elderly aunt in London died; I was still quite young, Kitty was a baby.’

She shook her head, as if unable to believe Easton had once been so different.

‘Digby was wonderful to me, made Easton my home, but there was always another side to him and that emerged more and more as time went by.’

She was obviously thinking how best to describe her brother-in-law.

‘I think he wasn’t very good when things didn’t go his way. There would be explosions of temper or frustration, sudden and soon gone. Lydia always believed in the Digby she’d first loved, but it made everything so tense, her trying to head off Digby’s rages. An exhausting sort of love.’

Laurence noticed her unconsciously flexing her fingers.

He hadn’t realised that Lydia had tried to have other children. No wonder she sometimes seemed remote behind the polite smiles and well-mannered concern.

‘If she didn’t hang on to this apparently foolish, even embarrassing certainty that Kitty, at least, wasn’t dead,’ Frances said, ‘I think she’d have gone mad years ago.’

She didn’t look at him as she spoke but walked on, bending to smell a flower from time to time.

Not for the first time, but with increased foreboding, Laurence wondered how on earth Lydia might react if William’s restorations did come up with absolute proof that Kitty was dead. That she had been dead for more than a decade.

Frances turned at the end of the border. ‘Could we get a drink?’ she said. ‘I’m dreadfully thirsty. There’s a place over there, I think.’ She pointed to a red-and-white striped stall.

‘Of course. Stay here, I’ll fetch a lemonade.’

She sat on a low wall as he queued at the lemonade stall behind a noisy family; the smallest boy, in grass-stained knickerbockers, scuffed the ground with his foot. When the father turned round to pull him away, Laurence saw that all that was left of the far side of his face was pitted and tautly ridged skin. Their eyes met.

As he looked away swiftly, Laurence caught a glimpse of red hair and a light-coloured dress. Something about the woman’s movement made him think it was Eleanor. Trying not to spill the lemonade, he eased his way between couples and families walking along the main drive. There she was, holding her son’s hand and gazing at the same exotic gardens. She didn’t seem nearly as surprised to see him as he was to see her.

‘They’re beautiful, I suppose, but there’s something a bit frantic about them,’ she said, hardly looking at him.

‘Eleanor ... Hello, Nicky.’

‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘Frances loves them,’ he said, pointing across the central bed before returning his gaze to Eleanor.

‘All these stiff lilies, they remind me of funeral flowers,’ she said. ‘They’re too much. Artificial. Give me forget-me-nots and delphiniums and larkspur when I die.’

He had a brief vision of his mother, dressed in crape with a veil over her face, touching the flowers that lay on his father’s coffin. He had not thought of it for years. Her hand in its black kid glove brushed the white blossoms, which seemed to him then living things already condemned to death by being cut. He was fourteen and had kept very close to her, with his sister crying noisily on his other side. As his mother leaned over the coffin, the acrid smell of the crape was repellent. It had rained as they stood by the grave and when they were home, his mother had pushed back her damp veil to reveal the horror of her stained face, black streaks running down it as if she too were decaying. A year later, she too was dead.

‘Laurie,’ Eleanor said, ‘you’re miles away.’

‘Sorry. Thinking of my mother,’ he said, and smiled ruefully. ‘Did she like flowers?’

‘Yes.’

It was not really true. They had an elderly gardener who kept things neat, his mother’s main requirement for a garden. All he remembered were some rather tortured rose bushes.

‘Carnations,’ he said, feeling it was expected of him.

‘Despite what this all stands for,’ she gave a small smile as she gestured around her, ‘it is lovely to be here. But it breaks my heart for William. He wouldn’t want to see the organised spectacle: the choirs and the jamboree and the rodeo and the whole circus element—they’re not his thing. But he’d love to see the mad collision of building styles and the engineering pavilion. And just people. People enjoying themselves at last.’

‘Perhaps you can come back—?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s virtually impossible. It becomes a humiliation for him. You’d think with all the men who were crippled just doing their duty ... Anyway,’ she paused. ‘I expect the statue of the Prince of Wales will have melted by then.’

‘I want to see the Battle of—’ Nicholas interrupted but he clearly couldn’t remember the name of the battle.

‘Zeebrugge?’ Laurence said.

‘We’re not going to see a make-believe battle,’ Eleanor said. A battle’s not entertainment.’

‘The
Flying Scotsman
is a Gresley Class-A engine, Daddy says.’ He stumbled over the words.

‘It’s wonderful, darling. And very, very popular.’

‘I wish Maggie was here,’ Nicholas said disconsolately. Eleanor raised her eyebrows at Laurence.

‘Actually she could have come but she was very keen on staying with David and putting out their lunch, although David was obviously equally keen to stay by himself with the car.’ She looked exasperated. ‘I know he doesn’t like London and I know he didn’t want to leave Susan, but it’s a dreadful shame for him not to enjoy all this. But Maggie will make him join in. She seems so excited that I worry the real thing’s going to be a great disappointment.’

‘Ah, motherhood,’ he said, ‘with its secret vocabulary: the virtues of joining in. You’re not worried about its politically corrupting influence?’

‘I think David’s his own man, don’t you?’ she replied crisply. ‘Still, I hope he keeps an eye on Maggie. She’s never been to London before. I told him to bring her and Nicky to the Tomb of Tutankhamun at two-thirty and then we can have an early tea. She’s awfully keen on seeing Queen Mary’s Doll’s House.’ Nicholas screwed up his face, but Eleanor didn’t see it. ‘I might go with her.’

‘She wants to go to the fair,’ Nicholas said firmly.

Laurence looked up, still holding the lemonades. Frances had obviously seen them and was walking towards them.

‘You were much quicker than we’d expected,’ Frances said to Eleanor. ‘What a stroke of luck. I suppose if we stay on this main avenue, sooner or later we’ll see everyone we know.’

Frances was giving Nicholas a kiss. He wiped his face when she straightened up.

‘I saw a soldier with brown skin and a turban,’ Nicholas said. ‘And a beard.’

‘They’ll all be part of the show,’ Eleanor said, ‘grateful children of the Empire.’ But she smiled sweetly.

‘What on earth’s the Palace of Beauty?’ Frances said. ‘Patrick was ribbing Julian about it.’

‘Women,’ said Eleanor, ‘in glass booths. Like in the aquarium, only without tentacles. Not visible ones, anyway.’

Frances looked at her with slightly narrowed eyes.

‘It’s supposed to be a tableau,’ Laurence said, watching Eleanor’s face. ‘Pears Soap set it up. A couple of dozen actresses and mannequins dressed up as famous beauties...’ He faltered as he caught Eleanor’s eye.

‘Like who?’ Frances said.

‘Helen of Troy ... er, Nell Gwynne...’

‘Just the two?’ Frances looked amused. ‘Or are you hiding your encyclopaedic knowledge of historic beauties?’

‘Cleopatra?’

‘All men’s possessions,’ Eleanor said, ‘or women of expensive virtue, depending on your view.’

Frances seemed about to protest but then said brightly, ‘Shall we go past the Burma pavilion? I mean, we’ve got time and it’s supposed to be very fine—Patrick said the entrance is a copy of one of the gates of Mandalay.’

‘Why not?’ Eleanor took Nicholas by the hand. ‘Sorry, darling, I know you’re a bit old for hand holding but I don’t want you to get lost.’ The fine day seemed to have slowed everybody down and most people were gazing about them, apparently as keen to look around this fantasy world as to hurry into the next attraction.

‘I never dreamed it would be so busy,’ Eleanor said. ‘It really would have been very hard with William.’

She was watching a woman with a perambulator struggling to pull it up some steps. Two young men in bowler hats stepped forward to help her. The baby started to cry.

The Burmese Pavilion now came into full view.

‘Oh goodness,’ Frances said, ‘isn’t it heavenly?’

Despite a couple of incongruous lime trees, the building was as fantastic and graceful as the Palaces of Industry and Engineering were grandiose. The delicate ornate spires, the pagodas and the fretted roof edging were all in teak, which in the sunshine almost seemed to glow.

Nicholas had broken away from Eleanor and ran ahead, stopping by the gates. Frances pursued him right up to the elaborate gateway and the fantastic winged creatures guarding them. The boy stood gazing up at them.

‘Shall we go in?’ Frances asked.

Eleanor looked at her watch. ‘We won’t have time to do Burma as well as India. I said we’d take Nicholas back to David and Maggie in forty minutes. Any preferences?’