The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (15 page)

‘I want to go on the swing boats,’ said Nicholas firmly. ‘And the donkeys and the helter-skelter. And see the ostriches. And have an ice cream. And Maggie says there’s real seaside. With sand.’ He looked eager.

‘You’d be sick,’ Eleanor said without looking down at him. ‘But we’ll go to the fair after tea. Before I take you to Auntie Charlotte.’

‘But I want to go back to Easton with Maggie and you and Daddy,’ Nicholas said with a wobble in his voice.

‘You’ll see Maggie in the holidays, I promise.’

Frances was by Laurence’s side again, her face tipped up to his, watching him.

‘Would you like to see India?’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘Or would you rather walk around outside? It’s such a beautiful day.’

‘I’m all right. It was just the train.’

She smiled, obviously slightly embarrassed at her concern being so transparent.

Sometimes he wondered whether all the men he saw, apparently living their ordinary lives, still had moments of secret terror. Did the blacksmith lie in bed with his sleeping wife breathing softly beside him and the screams of limbless horses in his ears? Did the solicitor hold his napkin to his nose and mouth at the smell of roast pork being brought to the table? Did other men remember train floors slippery with blood and vomit, or compartments thick with the stench of fear, sweat and cigarettes, or were they better than he was at putting it all behind them?

‘I’m happy to do whatever the others want to do,’ he said finally and smiled to put her at her ease.

Chapter Eight

They had found their table at the Grand by the time Eleanor got back from taking Nicholas to the car to have his picnic lunch with David and Maggie. The room was large and not yet full. Despite a hum of conversation, it felt peaceful and cool after the mêlée outside. Julian had arrived before them and was uncharacteristically elated; even before Frances had taken off her gloves, he was talking.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s far better than I’d been told. There’s even a chap filling fountain pens for free. But the agricultural section is quite extraordinary. If we had harvesters and tractors like that at Easton, we could really turn things around.’

He waved some printed sheets at Laurence, almost hitting the waiter who was filling Frances’s glass.

‘I’ve got some details for Lydia. In ten years the Easton Deadall boys will be men. In fifteen years those men will marry, have children. If they feel they have something to stay for, bring their brides to, Easton will go back to how it was, except that it will be looking forwards.’ Laurence had never heard Julian talk at such length nor seen him so animated.

Frances looked up and waved vigorously to someone behind him, her lips slightly parted. Laurence turned around but not before he’d seen all the excitement in Julian’s expression extinguished.

Eleanor and Patrick were standing together just inside the double doors. She had obviously met him on the way and both of them were in spirited conversation as Patrick handed in his hat to the cloakroom girl. Eleanor’s gaze swept over the tables until her eyes caught Frances’s just as a waiter came to show her to their table. Eleanor looked pretty: her nose was slightly pink and her hair had sprung into tight curls in the heat. Patrick pulled her chair back for her and she sat down next to Laurence.

‘Phew,’ she said. ‘I’m quite glad to be relieved of motherhood for an hour or so. Nicky is absolutely determined to see anything with a motor, any large or freakish living creature, or to cadge some kind of present to take away, however unsuitable for a child. I had to buy him a plaster of Paris replica of the British Lions to divert him from endless lemonade, humbugs and barley-sugar twists. He was even petitioning for an exhibition Bible. A
Bible’.

She spoke as if he’d wanted to lay hands on some racy pictures.

‘In the end I threatened to take him to Kiddies’ Dreamland—now there’s a sinister thought, with visions of infant opium dens. Mind you, they’d be thoroughly biddable children—and leave him with the Old Lady who Lived in a Shoe along with all the five-year-olds.’

Patrick and Frances were laughing.

‘Are Maggie and David having a good time?’ Laurence asked.

Eleanor looked slightly irritated. ‘David just isn’t interested. He just seems to believe the place is a thieves’ playground and his duty is to protect the car. When I took Nicky back to them, Maggie was raring to go but so far she’d only got as far as some New Zealand sheep-shearing display because it was the nearest exhibit and David, rightly, didn’t want her to stray far. She wasn’t very impressed, but she’s enjoying organising their lunch.’

‘She’ll like the Queen’s Doll’s House after lunch,’ Frances said. ‘She was looking forward to that.’

‘Hmm,’ Eleanor said, ‘that was this morning. When she left Easton, she was a child. Things change in the face of this saturnalia. Now she’s discovered there’s dancing at some kind of palais in the amusement park.’

‘Does she know
how
to dance?’ Frances asked, looking surprised

‘It’s not really dancing, is it?’ Patrick said. ‘More a sort of mutual leaning.’ He leered theatrically.

‘Well, whether or not she can dance, she’s got nobody to lean on,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m certainly not taking Lydia’s kitchen help dancing.’

Mock-turtle soup was followed swiftly by mutton and capers. It was all a bit grey in colour, as Eleanor was swift to point out, but Laurence was hungry.

‘Patrick was telling me about his work on Crete,’ Eleanor said between mouthfuls. ‘It sounds quite marvellous—I’d love to see it all.’

‘You must have been sorry to leave it in the war?’ Laurence asked Patrick.

He knew instantly he had said something wrong. Only Eleanor appeared not to notice. Frances dropped her eyes. Julian’s fork stopped midway between his plate and his mouth, only for a fraction of a second, then he too fixed all his attention on his plate as he carefully cut a boiled potato in two. Patrick simply didn’t answer at first.

‘None of us could stay in Greece,’ he said eventually. ‘Sir Arthur returned to England when war broke out, so I came back to help him collate his papers at Boars Hill and do some research at Oxford.’

Nothing he had said sounded at all problematic to Laurence but those at the table remained silent. Even Eleanor looked perplexed now as her gaze travelled from Frances to Julian.

‘I volunteered in a hospital there,’ Patrick said, slightly defensively.

Eleanor said, ‘Was that at Wingfield?’

Patrick gave her a small smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They were good people there. I bicycled over. It used to make me feel exhilarated and guilty to cycle because so many of the men at Wingfield would never walk, much less freewheel down Boars Hill. I’d come back along the river. When I got back in the evening I’d read “The Scholar-Gipsy”.’

He was animated again, but a glance at Julian’s grim face seemed to stop him in his tracks.

‘I love Matthew Arnold,’ Eleanor said, quickly.

Frances looked up. ‘Me too,’ she said. ’“Thyrsis”. It’s in the library at Easton.’

Conversation remained awkward for the rest of lunch, Julian commenting only on the spotted dick, which he ate with gusto, and otherwise talking to Frances about Lydia and Easton.

Eleanor asked Patrick, ‘When did you return to Oxford?’

‘Quite early on. I went there at the beginning of Michaelmas term 1914, virtually straight from Crete, when the war started.’

He was peeling an apple as he spoke, his movements neat and economical. Laurence could imagine how carefully he would handle fragments of unknown antiquity newly dug from the earth.

‘The days we spent puzzling over statuettes we’d found on the island. The evenings we spent talking to old men, the young ones having taken commissions in the main.’

The waiter was hovering by the table, wanting to be paid. By the doors to the restaurant two or three people were already waiting. Laurence fumbled in his inside pocket for money.

While they waited for the waiter to bring back their change, Eleanor checked her watch.

‘Oh Lord,’ she said, pushing back her chair. ‘I’m going to have to hurry. I told David to bring Nicholas and Maggie to Tutankhamun’s tomb at two-thirty and it’s almost that now. And I have to find the place first.’ She looked anxious. ‘It’s crowded out there.’

Julian unfolded the map and pulled out some spectacles from a battered case, the first time Laurence had seen him do this, but it was Patrick who pointed at the page.

‘The amusement park.’

He indicated a large arc of land occupying most of the east side of the site.

‘Tutankhamun is here,’ he said, his finger on the bottom boundary, ‘on the edge of the roundabouts and the coconut shies.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Which puts us would-be archaeologists in our place.’

‘You all go ahead,’ Laurence said. ‘I’ll wait for the change.’

‘We can use the Never Stop,’ said Frances, picking up her gloves. She and the other two men followed Eleanor out.

As he stood just outside the restaurant five long minutes later, Laurence looked in the direction that they had gone. He could see the curve of the screw-driven railway but the carriage that held them had already disappeared around the bend.

Increasing numbers of sightseers seemed to have filled the paths and drives since the morning. The broad avenue offered little cover from the sun and, unlike Laurence, most people were strolling along with no obvious purpose in mind. Laurence could hear the noise of the funfair. To his right lay a large lake, dotted with rowing boats and gondolas, and surrounded by ranks of green deckchairs. Layers of distorted sound bounced off the water: laughter and squeals and one man singing as he rowed.

Something about the heat and the sparkling water, even the splashing of inept rowers, took him back to the Henley regatta before the war, more than ten years ago now. Was it 1911, that long, hot summer when it was inconceivable that anything could ever change? It was there he had met his wife, Louise, and the woman he still loved, Mary. Perhaps if he had been more forward, more courageous, then, their story—his, Louise’s and Mary’s—might have ended differently.

In his memory the Oxfordshire sun shone every day. A haze shimmered on the river and on the immaculate lawns. He saw again the excited public-school boys, the Oxford and Cambridge crews, and the rowdy Leander men in their bright blazers and boaters, with the proud parents looking on.

He had shut his eyes only for a second and mostly because of the sun, but when he opened them he was momentarily disoriented. It was all gone: the rowers, his wife, the innocence of that distant time.

The music was louder towards the south-eastern side of the Wembley ground. The crowds were even thicker here, the notices more garish. A man loomed out in front of him, swinging some kind of bladder, more like a medieval jester than a gypsy.

‘Tickle the monkey?’ he bellowed. ‘Come on, sir, you look a sporting type. Try the monkey-teaser.’

As Laurence ducked under his outstretched arm, the air-filled bladder bounced lightly on the back of his head.

Ahead lay the painted wooden cap of a roundabout, with lurid scenes of the Wild West. As Laurence entered the huge enclosure, the horses with their flared red nostrils and streaming wooden manes began to move. Mothers holding their children on their laps, young men with their sweethearts, finding an excuse to squeeze them tight, and pairs of nervous children began to shout with excitement and fear as it gathered speed, clinging to the gold barley-sugar poles. One young woman was already having trouble keeping her skirt down and two spectators—young men with glasses in their hands—were slopping beer all over themselves in mirth. Watching the up-and-down motion made him feel dizzy. He leaned on the rail for a second.

‘It’s a galloper,’ a thick-set, swarthy man next to him said to nobody in particular. ‘My dad worked on making horses before the war.’ He was nodding to himself with satisfaction. ‘His horses gets everywhere. Paris, America even.’ Finally he turned to Laurence. ‘See them saddles—double-scalloped carving round the edges with royal blue and crimson stripes? That’s my dad.’

He pointed with an oil-grimed hand, tendrils of blue ink climbing up his muscular forearm.

Laurence found himself nodding back. The horses were beautifully done but when he was a child he’d always found their fierce expressions a bit sinister. He had some sympathy with a small child, tear-streaked and wide-eyed, who shot past him and swung away. The stranger wandered off, gesturing at the name on the painted boards. ‘Scudamore, Devizes,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘See. My dad. Just the ticket.’

Further on at an intersection, a sign on the broadest path carrying the thickest crowd pointed to
Beach and Donkeys. Madame Isis Fortune-Teller
a handwritten notice proclaimed on a striped booth.

He felt relief as he spotted King Tut’s Kingdom looming ahead. In view of the noise, the candyfloss, the whelk stalls and the rides, he could see why Howard Carter had tried so hard to get the exhibit banned. It didn’t speak of scholarship and derring-do, or even ancient dynasties.

As he was approaching what seemed to be the end of a long queue, he was surprised to see Julian moving in the opposite direction, pushing with some determination through the crowds. Julian saw Laurence and veered towards him.

‘The children aren’t there,’ he said, his voice tight with tension. ‘I’m going back towards the car, in case they’re still with David. It makes sense for Eleanor and Frances to stay put. They’re near the ticket booth. Patrick’s just gone across to the Queen’s Doll’s House in case David misunderstood where they were meeting. That was where Eleanor had agreed to take Maggie later.’ Julian’s tone was businesslike but his eyes were anxious. ‘I’ll be straight back. Why don’t you wait with Eleanor and Frances?’

Laurence ignored the long and fairly good-humoured queue to take a closer look at the Egyptian attraction, decorated with pictures of palm trees, the Sphinx, a serious-looking pharaoh and a large notice saying
King Tut’s Treasures.
Pillars, on either side of the entrance, were covered in hieroglyphics, flanked by statues of Nubian slaves and the inevitable image of a mummy. Eleanor and Frances were standing right by it, dwarfed by its size. Neither saw him immediately. Frances, whose gaze was raking up and down the queue, noticed Laurence before Eleanor did.