The Uninvited Guests (9 page)

‘I think … it’s over here,’ said Patience, rising, and setting down her teacup (that now
somebody
would have to clean and dry and put away). She went over to the window, and the deep recess of its seat, knocking the panelling to the left of it experimentally.

‘Wrong!’ sang Smudge gleefully.

‘I remember hiding in it with you, Emerald – and you, Ernest!’

Clovis turned onto his side so as not to face her and affected deep exhaustion.

‘I hid in it all afternoon once, and nobody found me at all,’ boasted Smudge, forgetting she hadn’t told anyone she was hiding and had not been missed. ‘I fell asleep!’ she crowed.

Noticing Smudge, crouched barefoot on the floor in her filthy nightgown, all the things she must do before the evening might successfully begin rushed into Emerald’s mind, along with the chilling recollection that the morning room was stuffed with strange survivors, her mother was hiding, her brother was a solipsistic fiend, they were a woman down in the kitchen – and
she
had yet to telephone the blasted Railway (who might in all civility have telephoned Sterne, having inconvenienced everybody like this).

‘Smudge, do you think you might dress?’ she said. ‘You can’t sit about like that. Off you go, there’s a good child; we’re all going to.’

‘I’m going to look iridescent lovely,’ said Smudge, heaving herself up. ‘You’ll swoon.’

‘Oh good: well, off you go.’

With regretful glances at Patience, Smudge left the room.

‘What must you think of us?’ said Emerald when she’d gone. ‘I haven’t shown either of you to your rooms, and you must be desperate to – to –’ She gestured towards Ernest’s disarranged garments. He must have left the house quite well-turned out, but now he was woefully messy; his jacket, having been used by Clovis as a blindfold for Ferryman, might have been anywhere out in the windy night, so he was in shirtsleeves, a missing cufflink causing one stiff cuff to flap about. Manners prevented him from rolling it up. His shoes – brown brogues – were muddy, and both the shirt and the leg of his trousers had long streaks of greenish slime that looked permanent. (Ferryman had been in his field, quietly grazing, when he was called upon to be hitched to the cart and his slobber was thus spring green and staining.)

‘I don’t know if your things have been taken off the brougham – it’s all been so unusual… Let’s go up. Clovis can chase up Robert about your things – can’t you, Clo? How would that be?’

‘Capital,’ said Patience. ‘Lead the way, Em. And don’t worry about it all, we’ll have tremendous fun despite everything, I’m sure.’

Emerald, with sudden gratitude, kissed her friend’s cheek and took her hand.

‘Clovis!’ she rapped out harshly. ‘Stop lolling about like a fat dog, go and find Robert and make sure everything’s brought in!’

Patience took her brother’s arm and the cheerful threesome left the room.

Emerald imagined the black telephone, standing on its table under the stairs, was leaning out and craning up at her reproachfully, as they processed up the main stair, peering over their shoulders towards the rooms down the corridor. No sound came from the morning room, but they could not ignore Florence Trieves’s carrying voice shouting at Myrtle for more hot water.

Upstairs, it was as if there had been no accident on a branch line. Everything was in order. Patience and Ernest were shown the direction of the bathroom (which had not moved since their last visit, nor been updated) and Patience exclaimed delightedly at everything. To Emerald’s chagrin, Charlotte’s door remained firmly shut.

‘I wonder if you’ll like the present I’ve brought you,’ said Patience, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she walked. ‘It’s such ages since we’ve seen one another, you might have changed absolutely.’

‘I don’t think I’ve changed at all,’ said Emerald, knowing herself to be lying, but there was a mist between her and her childhood self, made up of grief and multiple small denials, and she did not care to try to look through it.

‘Here’s your room,’ she said.

It was the room next to Emerald’s and had the same wallpaper: large peacocks glancing naughtily over their shoulders at little bowls spilling over with foreign, segmented fruit and grapes.

‘How perfect! It’s just as I remember!’ Patience exclaimed, clapping her hands in delight.

‘Supper is supposed to be at eight… It’s half past six now. Shall we
say
eight, at least?’

‘Let’s say it.’

‘And shall I send Myrtle in to you at – when would you like her?’

‘Is she quick?’

‘Lightning.’

‘And good at hair?’

‘Inspired.’

‘I don’t want to corner her.’

‘Oh, footle.’

‘Seven?’

‘Done.’

‘Bye-ee!’ said Patience and beamingly closed her door. Ernest was staring at the ceiling.

‘You’re just this way,’ Emerald said, feeling as though she were interrupting him in something.

He fiddled with his sleeve as they walked together towards his room, absorbed in trying to draw the two sides together.

Emerald opened the door, revealing the room’s stripes and washstand. She was unaccountably embarrassed to be standing on the threshold with the transformed, unexpected Ernest, so much taller than she and composed by manhood. She hadn’t thought about him beyond the obligatory ‘
and how is your brother?
’ in her letters, for years. And yet, if somebody had said the name Ernest Sutton to her, mental pictures would have come tumbling into her mind: herself and a red-haired boy investigating grasshoppers, worms, mould; games with Patience and Clovis; hide-and-seek, blind man’s bluff. Sterne had brimmed with childhood then, and easy, predictable, two-armed parents. Now their younger selves had been replaced by her reserve and his startling manliness.

Standing there on the brink of the bedroom, it occurred to Emerald that the medical student Ernest Sutton had most probably seen – she wasn’t sure how to put it, even to herself – naked women’s bodies. They would most likely have been corpses, but even so, they would still have been unclothed. The thought was a disturbing one. The bed’s mahogany curls leered at her, lewdly.

Ernest himself didn’t seem to have noticed the bedroom at all, or the fact that he was standing next to Emerald Torrington’s unclothed body with only thin air and a few layers of fabric between them. He simply entered the room and, without another word, closed the door in her face.

With his absence from her sight, the spell was broken and she returned to herself, sharply.

‘Odd fish,’ she said to herself, then, ‘Well, he always was.’

She turned away just as Robert and Stanley came into the corridor from the back stairs, all outside boots and shirtsleeves, smelling of horse and bonfire and carrying a large trunk with suitcases piled on the top of it.

‘Oh good,’ said Emerald. She stood aside to let them pass. ‘Is Ferryman over his huff about being hooked up to the cart, Robert?’

‘He’s eating up nicely, Miss Em, thank you.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ And she cantered off down the stairs.

As she disappeared, Ernest opened the door to Robert and separated his baggage from his sister’s.

‘Thanks very much. Good man. What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Robert, sir, and my son, Stanley.’

Robert was, on balance, an attractive, cleanly shaved fellow, but he had a large pustular boil near his collar. The skin around it was reddened, but it had not yet come to a head. Ernest’s fingers were curious to examine it but he kept his hands to his sides. It looked as if it had a great deal of heat in it.

‘Perhaps you ought have that boil seen to, Robert,’ he said. ‘It looks nasty.’

‘Been soaking it with vinegar, sir, and milk,’ was his reply. ‘But it does throb, sir, something harsh.’

‘I should think it does.’ Ernest frowned at him. ‘Make sure the poultice is hot, to draw it out. If it doesn’t come to a head by tomorrow night, come along to see me, would you?’ He made a stabbing motion with his right hand and his spectacles glinted. Robert looked alarmed, as well he might. ‘I’m a doctor,’ explained Ernest.

Father and son, turning their caps in their hands, had been backing out of the room, and now paused. ‘Ah,’ said Robert.

‘Or very soon to be one, at any rate; I’m in my last year of study.’

‘Oh, I see, sir.’

‘But boils are strictly first-year stuff!’ Ernest went on, to reassure them further.

‘Well, that would save me taking a trip into the village on my afternoon off, then,’ said Robert cautiously, not quite over the impression of Ernest’s violent mime.

‘Quite.’

‘Thank you, sir. Come on, Stanley.’ And they both touched their forelocks to him and left.

Ernest unstrapped his suitcase and set about unpacking, murmuring to himself.

‘Splendid fellow … shame no casualties … can’t be helped … household ailments…’ He paused, remembering he ought not talk to himself, a folded shirt in each hand, and went to the window.

Looking out into the gloaming, he could see the clean, semicircular edge of the lawn but nothing beyond; a mist had come between Sterne and the county, like the quick drop of a stage curtain.

He felt himself to be absolutely in the present: the milky fog; the close, thick walls of the house; the feeling of the shirts weighing evenly in his hands; all were crystallised in a moment that was, for Ernest, rare in its connectedness.

‘This is a most beautiful house,’ he said aloud, with warm satisfaction. He had been working very hard in recent weeks, immersed in the clinging formaldehyde air of varnished laboratories, and had barely a moment to think, certainly none to anticipate Saturday to Monday at Sterne for Emerald Torrington’s birthday, which had been sprung upon him by his mother’s (quite authentic) influenza.

Emerald Torrington. In childhood he had taken her all as a package, the very
Emerald
of her was assumed – but sitting in the library, covered in horse-spit, with her gazing upon him had been almost intolerable. His maturity gave urgency to her beauty, creamy flesh to the bones of desire. Where once he had been content to be merely in the presence of her untutored glamour, now he could not help but want to have her for his own – however unworthy he felt himself to be. He smiled.
No, Ernest Sutton, she is not for you
, he thought to himself.
Not for we squinty mortals, a girl like that.
(His squint may have been corrected, but his view of himself had not.) And he continued to lay out his things, not minding at all the unusualness of the day so far, and enjoying the prospect of the evening ahead.

In the hall, at last quite alone, Emerald lifted the telephone and unhooked the receiver. Behind her, down the corridor, she could just hear the travellers in the morning room. They were talking and laughing, and the thick noise of them was out of place, somehow, in Sterne’s halls and passages, which were used to the family and the dogs.

She pressed the cool cup of the receiver to her ear and the plaited cord lay against her forearm like a dead worm. The line was choked with interference at the best of times, and now the clamorous teatime sounds made it hard to hear anything.

Horace Torrington, with characteristic enthusiasm for all things new and expensive, had had the telephone installed in the last year of his life. A great proportion of the calls that had been made on the machine had been to Dr Death. Emerald had come to associate the telephone, black as it was, with mourning, and had never relished using it since. The family’s delight and wonder at its magical modernity had quickly waned beneath the greater, unlovely wonder that is the decline of the flesh and death itself. Now, Emerald sought a connection, enduring the sadness that the electrical clicks triggered in her heart, and waited for Elsie Goodwin, in the village, to notice her and speak. The line was silent, but at her back, the noise of the passengers surged, as if somebody had opened the door. She strained to listen until, at length, there came the familiar crackle that normally prefaced Elsie’s flat, high-pitched voice shout, ‘
Exchange?!
’, but then – then she heard nothing more.

Elsie’s greeting, from her home and shop, the Post Office parlour, was not handed down the loose-strung wire miles to rest in Emerald’s ear. She could hear nothing but a low hiss, like wind down a long drain.

‘Drat it,’ she said, as she replaced the receiver, and the sounds of the stranded passengers subsided behind her. She went away upstrairs and in a few moments, she had forgotten all about them.

But in the morning room, the passengers wondered what was to happen next. They had been sent here with no proper explanations. They were grateful for the tea and the fire, but their journey had been calamitous, and violent in its interruption, and they should have liked to be getting on.

‘I should just like to be getting on,’ said a tiny woman, her sickly infant pressed against her breast.

‘An accident is a terrible thing to meet with,’ uttered a hollow-faced man, the firelight dancing in the sockets of his eyes.

They were unsatisfied. A hunger had come upon them since the accident, born of shock perhaps, an emptiness that the tea had soothed but now returned, voraciously.

‘One of us should go and see about things,’ said one, and others agreed.

‘Yes, one of us should go and see.’

And the crowd by the mean fire, among the strewn teacups, huddling in the corners and on all the seats, nodded their heads and murmured.

‘Hungry,’ they said, shifting and clutching their garments about themselves.

‘Ever so hungry.’

‘Hungry.’

It was a quarter to seven. Florence Trieves had sweated through the thick black silk beneath her arms and between her breasts. Her thighs were hot, the damp cotton of her drawers rubbed in grubby wrinkles between them, and her feet had swollen inside her tight boots. She had been marching from kettle to chopping board; from kitchen to drawing room; from slicing to stirring, to delicate, hasty, finger-trembling laying of morsels on precious plates until she thought she’d sob.

‘Mrs Trieves?’ Myrtle’s round, shiny face was enquiring things of her, as it had all afternoon, as it had all day, apart from sudden disappearances, that seemed to last forever just exactly when she was most needed.