The Uninvited Guests (2 page)

Emerald, who was by day a determinedly practical young woman, often dreamed of recklessly galloping down the dark avenue to the house with the noise of hooves in her ears. Sometimes the dream sent her flying high around Sterne like a bird, with the roofs spinning away beneath her; the chimneys, stables, gardens and country filling her eyes. Then plunged back to earth by waking, she inhabited her bed alone, and wept for her lost infinity.

Now, earthbound, dispirited, she turned from the creeping yews, not caring to gaze into their dreary depths, and having reached the part of the garden laid out to flowers, she knelt by the turned soil of the border and began to cry. She had no smart words now, only childish ones.
If only the Step would find some way to save us
, she thought, bitterly aware that the resented step-parent was now her devoutly wished-for rescuer.

The crying, far from doing its job and clearing up, was threatening to consume her. At any moment she might fling herself face down on the flower-bed. It was her birthday; she must be happy, and soon. She sniffed, blotted her face, hard, against her forearm and stared stonily ahead. ‘Good,’ she said.

After a moment of listless gazing at the ragged bed she began to pluck at the weeds, inching her fingertips down the weak stems to lift them from the soil. Her hands were soon chilled and muddy and she had made a limp pile beside her on the grass, reflecting that a useful task is a great comforter.

Charlotte’s private farewell to Edward was made in their bedroom, which sat squarely in the middle of the house above the front door. The room had a deep bay window, framed by an ancient and extravagant rose whose candy-striped buds – as well as all the county – could be seen from the bed across which Charlotte now draped herself, affecting languor in the hope it would calm Edward, who was pacing the softly bowed boards in his tightly laced shoes and causing the dressing-table mirror to rattle on its stand.

He was of medium height: a stocky, sandy sort of man with square, broad shoulders (his left arm had been severed cleanly and high up, in such a way as not to interfere with the set of these, although one was necessarily more developed than the other) and piercing, pale-blue eyes. At last, he stopped and sat by her. He had warmth and vigour; he said, ‘Charlotte, I’ll do my best for you.’

It was the sort of thing Edward often said and, unlike very many people Charlotte had known, he meant it.

Edward Swift was the youngest son of an Anglo-Irish architect. With no expectation of an inheritance, he had made his way in the world with characteristic rigour. He had read law at Trinity College Dublin and moved to London to practise. The intervening years of his life bear no relevance to this story, but suffice to say, on meeting Charlotte Torrington – a woman possessed of a high and trembling beauty, in mourning for Horace Torrington, recently struck down – he fell in love. Edward fell in love as deeply as Charlotte grieved, and there in the far-down places of sorrow and sex they met.

When they married, the older children, Emerald and Clovis, were shocked not only at the speed of their mother’s apparent return to cheerfulness, but also – profoundly – at Edward’s colouring, which seemed to them a betrayal in itself. Their father had been tall and very dark, with pale, black-fringed eyes so dazzling they deserve the category Torrington Eyes. Both Emerald and Clovis were dark with these same, arresting, grey-blue eyes. Their mother was fair, but had been absorbed and become a Torrington and was, after all, their mother (also, her eyes were not to be sneezed at), but Edward Swift was, well,
blond.

And then there was the arm. The violent accident; the neatly pinned sleeve – what might have been romantic in another man was abhorrent in a fair-haired step-parent.

What Clovis and Emerald could not know was anything of the nights that Edward held Charlotte against his body as she cried for Horace, the wet trails of her tears on his neck, chest and shoulder. He had gone with her through the agony of missing a man he had never known, went with her through it still, when called upon, and now would give his all for Sterne; he did not want Charlotte to cry for that, too. Another man might have engineered the incorporating of his new wife into his own milieu, sought to erase her past in the building of his future, but Edward Swift accepted all that she was, including the burden that was Sterne and her opaque and recalcitrant offspring.

Edward reluctantly spent a great portion of his time in Manchester, where he had joined a thriving chambers; reluctant not because he was work-shy – he practised the law with thoroughness and pride – but because he hated leaving Charlotte, upon whom he doted. His imminent journey to the city was not for the benefit of his career but for the attempted rescuing of his wife’s house from the auctioneer. There had been a much-needed influx of capital the year before when they had sold the largest of their farms to its tenant, a forthright, handsome young man named John Buchanan. The money had gone a fair way to pay off debts and mend various walls and roofs around the property, but it had dwindled alarmingly. It had dwindled almost to nothing. Edward, seeing Sterne slip through his fingers, turned away from the prospect of a sensible, smaller house nearer the city and a broken-hearted wife and resolved to save it. He was not a gambler, he had nothing to sell; he must borrow the money. It was a distasteful prospect, and it was with this distaste that he now looked down upon Charlotte’s fine, pale face.

‘Love,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me to
enjoy
asking to borrow money from a man whose employment practices I loathe and whose politics sicken me.’

(This was in reference to the prospective lender; an industrialist of low morals.)

‘You needn’t do it, you know that,’ said Charlotte, looking away from him. A tear rolled from her eye. She brushed it away impatiently – but not so impatiently that he would not see it.

‘Of course I must do it!’ he said, kissing her damp and salty fingers.

Ten minutes later Edward was in the passenger seat of the car, with his case strapped behind him and an expression of grim resolve as he waited for Robert to crank the starting handle.

Emerald, straightening from her weeding, watched, as with a roar and flying gravel they set off. Their departure had drawn the lurcher Forthright from his doze beneath the yews and he loped after them, barking wolfishly. Edward, catching sight of Emerald, raised his arm and waved.

‘Happy Birthday, Emerald!’ he shouted above the noise, and very soon the car, the lurcher, her stepfather, Robert and the suitcase were lost to sight in the gloom of the avenue that was dark in any weather, but particularly so this morning, it seemed.

The noise faded, the world was hushed.

Here, then, on the morning of her twentieth birthday, having grown out of her many efforts to capture the magnolia tree or, it must be owned, much else that life might have to offer, having put away her microscope, drawing pad, girlish dreams of Greatness and all, kneeling by the stunted flower-bed, Emerald noticed that water had seeped through the thick linen of her skirt and knitted stockings and onto her knees.

‘Happy birthday indeed,’ she said. ‘I must stop talking to myself.’

There was a drooping bow below her bust. She adjusted it. Her eye was caught by something and she strained to interpret the shape.

Near the yews, paused in the shadow of them, was a small, white figure. Emerald stood, tucking the pile of weeds into the deep pocket of her dress and wiping her dirty fingers, heedlessly.

‘Is that you, Smudge?’ she called, and the third young Torrington, the child, replied weakly, ‘Yes.’

Emerald crossed the grass towards the figure standing in the overhang, her puff of dark hair merging like a sooty halo with the shadows.

‘Good heavens, I thought you hadn’t come down. Didn’t you say you don’t feel well?’

‘I don’t feel well,’ the child responded.

Emerald went to her sister and took her hand. ‘Your fingers are like ice,’ she said. ‘Come inside at once.’

They went in by the back door nearest them to a square, stone-flagged back hall. Pausing by a stand with walking sticks and umbrellas leaning gleamingly at angles, Emerald put her hands on the child’s face and tilted it up to look at her, searchingly. ‘Why did you come out?’

‘I was bored.’

‘Is there a fire in your room?’

‘I don’t want one.’

‘Well, let’s go up and see about you.’

They started up the echoing back stair, whose treads were naked wood.

‘Where’s Clovis?’

‘I don’t know – still at breakfast when I last saw him, sulking.’

‘He does sulk. I don’t. You wouldn’t notice.’

It was true; Smudge was very often forgotten. Like Clovis and Emerald before her, she was left to herself to get on with the business of her upbringing, but unlike them, she was alone in the endeavour. Clovis and Emerald had had one another as company when marooned by the various tides of their parents’ commitments. Smudge’s loneliness suited her; she was celebrated by her mother, as well as neglected, and she found much to be cheerful about.

They had reached a landing and went through the baize door onto a corridor, travelled the length of the house and at last reached Smudge’s room, the only bedroom to abut the Old House, whose gloomy depths were directly through the wall against which her little iron bed stood. She should have liked to tunnel through the wall with a spoon and dance on the minstrels’ gallery.

If Smudge was often forgotten it stood to reason that her room would be too and, taking advantage of the freedom, she did with it exactly as she pleased. She had stuck shells gathered at Southport beach onto the wall above her fireplace to spell her name:
IMOGEN
, and then for sure identification added in charcoal afterwards, (SMUDGE). She had attempted to measure herself against the wall, and then the cat Lloyd, the two King Charles spaniels Nell and Lucy, and the stable dog, the lurcher Forthright, called Forth. In truth, none of these measuring experiments had satisfied. She had never solved the vexing question of whether the dogs and cat ought to be measured to the tops of their heads, which they would keep moving about, or their shoulders, which were easy to confuse with spines and necks. More than this, she had begun in inches and then changed her mind and fixed on hands as a suitable unit, as she knew that was the proper way of measuring horses, and ought therefore to do for all four-legged creatures. The brindled cat Lloyd, incidentally, was usually two-and-a-half hands (or ten inches), and the spaniels somewhat more.

Unfulfilled by her annotated charcoal marks, she had spent many hours drawing the outlines of the animals whilst squashing them against the walls with her legs and body. (Unaccustomed to house manners, the lurcher Forth’s sitting had been less than easy. He was, in his dogs’ way, no respecter of carpets. He had dragged Smudge the length of the corridor, emitting booming cries of distress at being imprisoned for so long in the small upper bedroom between Smudge’s ruthless, childish arms and the damp and dirty wallpaper.)

She intended to paint the fur in later, but hair and fur are uncommonly difficult to paint well and she hadn’t yet got around to it. Suffice it to say, her walls were less than immaculate.

Emerald led Smudge to the bed and tucked the quilt around her. ‘Have you been on the roof again?’ she asked.

‘Not recently.’

‘Well, you’re not to. You’ll fall and break your neck and then what will Ma say?’

‘You and Clovis do it.’

‘Yes, and look at all the problems with leaks.’

Smudge burrowed downwards until only her black eyes, set in purplish pools, and her insubstantially dark hair poked above the faded garlands of the quilt.

‘Em?’ she said, and her voice was muffled.

Emerald was at the door.

‘Will I be well enough for your birthday party?’

‘I should hope so, otherwise who will help me blow out the candles? I’m much too old to manage them all by myself.’

‘Are you having a cake, then?’

‘Oh Lord! Not unless I see to it,’ said Emerald and went out, closing the door.

Immediately she had gone, Smudge poked her pale face from the bed. She seemed to listen, sharply, for something. She sat up and laid her ear against the wall behind her, that joined to the Old House.

‘Hmm,’ she said, and frowned, ‘nobody there.’ Then she looked around the room and its apparent emptiness, before lying back down and pulling up the covers to her chin once more, while outside the cold spring wind began to blow.

Emerald, passing the morning room on her way to find Mrs Trieves, came upon Clovis, lying crumpled before the fire and listlessly plucking at the edges of a newspaper. The spaniels Nell and Lucy reclined on the battered velvet chaise near to him, lifting snuffy noses in her direction as she stopped in the door.

‘Not taking Ferryman out?’

Clovis glanced at the window with hooded, gloomy eyes.

‘My word, Emerald, have you ever thought of joining the police force?’ he said. ‘I hear they need bullies to suppress the disgruntled.’

‘I shall be taking Levi out at ten, if you’ve a mind to accompany me. I think the weather’s on the turn, so the sooner the better, I’d say. At what hour is the train that will bear your beloved to my revels?’

Clovis uttered a groan and rolled onto his back. He stared up at the plaster curls of the ceiling.

‘Patience Sutton,’ he said. ‘
At what hour will the train bearing Patience Sutton and her mother arrive?
Is that what you meant to ask? She’s
not
my beloved – and won’t be.’

‘She’s a very fine girl. And anyway, we’re grown up, she won’t baby you now…’

Clovis ran his fingers through his hair as a poet might, one who is in the agony of creation, but Clovis was not in the agony of creation, he was in the throes of a worse pain, hubris.

‘As if I care what she does.
Insignificance
Sutton,’ he said roughly.

‘I can’t think why you’ve taken against them! I’ve missed them awfully since—’ She broke off, then, ‘Don’t you remember the fun we all used to have? If you’re unkind to
Patience
, or her mother—’