The Winter Ground (5 page)

What I could not understand, what I could not begin to understand, was what Lord Robin was doing here. He was a renowned snob and egotist, even amongst a set where snobs and egotists are fifteen to the pound, and had advanced from being the centre of a charmed circle at Eton, by way of a few years as a deb’s delight, to his current occupation of semi-professional house guest (but only at the grandest houses with the best shooting and the most relaxed view of how to clear one’s card debts), so that at the age of forty he had an unshakable view of himself as a social prize, giving meaning to the lives of lesser mortals simply by being near them, and very choosy about which lesser mortals should have their lives given meaning that way. What could have persuaded him out of his habit of stately progression around the balls and shoots of Scotland, England and Ireland and into an impromptu call on the Wilsons for tea was beyond me. Also beyond me was what it was Ina disapproved of so fiercely and with such little effort to hide it.

Albert Wilson voluntarily quarantined himself from his wife’s embrace when he had been abroad rubbing shoulders with the multitude and Ina, sitting all alone and very frosty-looking with the three of us facing her across twelve feet of gleaming floor, put one firmly in mind of one of those cross Hanoverian consorts holding reluctant court. It was hard to resist the idea that Lord Robin’s friendliness was designed only to annoy her even more.

‘It’s a joy to see you looking so well, Mrs Wilson,’ he said. ‘Quite an improvement.’

‘I didn’t know you knew one another,’ I said and immediately flushed; from whichever angle one looked at this remark it was a dropped brick. First of all, it was none of my business who knew whom, especially when I was sitting in the house of one of the parties, drinking their tea, and even I – no diplomat – should know better than to chip in when a well-known rake and seducer was teasing a married woman in front of her husband with an acquaintanceship she would clearly rather ignore. And speaking of the husband it was hardly polite to draw attention to his lowly rank by wondering aloud how his wife and the exalted guest could ever have crossed paths. On this last score, however, I need not have worried. Far from being offended, Albert Wilson was pleased to have the chance to explain.

‘Oh, certainly we all know each other, my dear … ahem,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t count on the fingers of my two hands the number of balls and parties we’ve been at with Lord Robin.’

In other words, Albert Wilson had glimpsed the back of Robin Laurie’s head a few times at the kind of large public levees and garden parties out of which the one could not always wriggle and into which the other, with good works, hefty donations and sheer persistence, had somehow scrambled himself. Perhaps at one of these gatherings Robin’s eye had happened to fall upon Ina and he had amused himself in the usual way. With a shudder I recalled a friend whose daughter had had her heart broken by Robin years ago chuckling most unmaternally about – as she put it – the scamp. This was far worse even than a ‘bad boy’; to describe even a puppy as a ‘scamp’ was cloying.

‘Then we found ourselves sitting in the same first-class carriage today,’ Wilson went on.

‘And of course Albert was in the mood for a chinwag,’ said Lord Robin. He was smiling at Wilson but I could not ignore the little tickle of mischief behind his words, and Ina’s face clouded more than ever. ‘When he found out I was on my way home to Buckie he told me all about what kind of weather you’ve been having and the forecast for Christmas – it sounds shocking, I must say – and asked after my family and friends most solicitously.’

Albert Wilson beamed.

‘And then of course I told our news, my love,’ he said. ‘I told Lord Robin we had a circus come to stay and nothing would do except he changed at Perth with me and came to see it.’ So happy was he in the triumph of snagging Robin Laurie he did not seem to be troubled by how unlikely this was.

‘You’re a great enthusiast for the circus then?’ I asked Robin.

‘Well, I was changing anyway,’ he said. ‘But, yes, I’m a fan of the absurd.’ He took care to include both Wilsons in his gaze as he spoke. ‘The outlandish, the exotic, the extreme.’

‘Not that Cooke’s Circus is
that
kind of outfit,’ said Albert Wilson. Something of Robin’s tone seemed, finally, to have penetrated his happy haze. ‘There are no freaks or bearded ladies.’ His smile was reasserting itself again. ‘No, I just told Lord Robin all about Ma and Pa and about Tiny Truman and Big Bad Bill Wolf, and the lovely little Topsy and Anastasia, of course.’

‘What,’ asked Laurie, ‘could be more charming?’

Was it perhaps the lovely little Topsy and Anastasia, then, who were the draw? Would Robin Laurie change trains and suffer the present company (as he would see it) for the chance to meet young ladies of certain beauty and possible easy virtue who might be bored already, camped in the woods? As unlikely as that might sound, it was the most sensible thought I had had yet.

‘So I think I shall saunter down there and have a peek after tea,’ said Laurie, sitting back in his seat and crossing his ankles with studied languor. He drew out his case and selected a cigarette but, before he could light it, Albert Wilson spoke up. At last, the guiding principle of his existence had got out from under his awe and was back at the tiller again.

‘No cigarettes in the house, Lord Robin, I implore you,’ he said. ‘My poor dear wife’s chest will not stand it, you know.’

‘Albert,’ said Ina mildly, although whether she was chiding him for officiousness or for dropping her chest into the conversation as though it were a blameless elbow I could not say.

‘As I explained to you on the train …’ Wilson went on, ignoring her, but Lord Robin was already snapping his case shut and sitting up straight, the picture of remorse.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘I cannot apologise enough for my thoughtlessness.’

‘I must seem a proper old fuss-budget, I know,’ said Albert, wavering again now that the point was won.

‘Far from it, my dear chap,’ said Lord Robin, looking solemn. ‘The well-being of Mrs Wilson is no less precious in my eyes than in yours. Why, if only we all had your tenderness and vigilance, think of the tragedies which might have been prevented. So, very far from it, my dear chap, not at all.’

Possibly, I thought to myself on the drive home, that was just more silliness and cheek, but there was a faint memory stirring somewhere. Was there some special reason that Albert Wilson had asked after Robin’s family? I have no taste for gossip and can never remember it in any detail, but thankfully there was a far more reliable recorder available at home.

‘Hugh,’ I said, ‘you’ll never guess who I met up with today at the Wilsons’.’ Hugh stared back at me. He never
would
guess; he would not even play I-spy with the children when they were small. ‘Robin Laurie of all people. On his way home.’

‘Vulture,’ said Hugh, which was a pretty clear indication that he must know something.

‘Now tell me,’ I went on, ‘what was the tale? I seem to have forgotten.’

‘Any number of tales,’ said Hugh, ‘none of them fit for your ears.’ He looked mournfully at the table beside his chair where a stack of papers was sitting. He would far rather pore over them than chat to me but the tea-table had still been out when I got back and I had sat down and had a biscuit, and now – according to
our
house rules – he was stuck with it.

‘No, not a conquest,’ I said. ‘I mean the story about his family.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ said Hugh. ‘Absolutely impeccable pedigree – unlike those Wilsons and, I must say, your taste in companions fails to improve with age.’

‘Wasn’t there some illness or something?’

‘Some illness?’ echoed Hugh. ‘My God, Dandy, one wouldn’t welcome an hysteric in one’s home, but sometimes your callousness knows no bounds.’ I refused to rise to this and eventually he went on. ‘Yes, there was “some illness”. Robin is the younger son, as you know, and Buckie – the elder – married that American girl for her millions. Very practical too. She was a Ramsay but not one of
the
Ramsays and to give him his due he never pretended that she was. Anyway she, having knuckled down to filling cradles, caught influenza in ’18 and died along with her children. A fair batch of them, as I recall.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, as it came back to me Of course, if such a thing happened now, a young woman and all her issue wiped out at a stroke, it would lodge in one’s mind for keeps, but in the long winter of 1918, with soldiers still dropping from cholera and typhoid fever if not from enemy fire, one had no sympathy left to lavish on the ’flu victims and could watch quite unblinking newsreels of masked men spraying the city streets with Lysol; one’s sensibilities were certainly much too numb for one family’s bad news to be all that shattering.

‘And then blow me if the only one of the lot who hadn’t got the ’flu didn’t go and die anyway, hunting or boating or some such, and the upshot was that Tom Buckie himself had a heart attack, overcome by grief.’ Hugh delivered this with a bit of a glare. He might have meant it to impress upon me that not everyone was lost to proper feeling, but I suspect that he was in danger of being himself overcome by the touching nature of his account and did not want me to see. ‘Buckie always was rather sickly, even lankier than the brother, and he’s never really got back on his feet again since. Dreadful thing.’

‘He hasn’t remarried yet?’ I said, despising myself even as I did so, for what was running through my mind was not Lord Buckie’s loneliness but, of course, the succession.

‘He’ll never remarry,’ said Hugh. ‘The marquisate and all the lolly have Robin’s name chalked on the back now without a doubt and he’ll run through it and sell up before his brother is cold, you mark my words.’ This was the most withering insult Hugh could muster: selling up was fathoms below even brickmaking in his view. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I’ve heard at least one fella say’ (when Hugh says he has heard something from ‘at least one fella’, he means from exactly one, to wit, from George, at his club, who is a worse gossip than he is) ‘that Robin broke off an engagement to a very ordinary Miss once it was clear that the nieces and nephews were goners and his brother’s health was shot to ribbons, and for the last seven years he’s been biding his time, thinking to land himself a bit more of a whopper when he’s got a coronet on.’

I usually take the wilder of George’s stories with a pound bag of salt, but this one did have the merit of chiming with what I had seen earlier at Benachally. A son of the house of Buckie, who had seen so many of his family connections perish, could forgive Albert Wilson his mania for Ina’s safe-keeping after the loss of
their
child that way and, on the other hand, if Ina had ever heard a whisper of what Hugh had just told me – that Robin saw the Spanish flu as a stroke of personal luck – she might well feel chilly towards him; it had not only robbed her of her only child and, apparently, the chance to have another but it had turned her life into a bore and a joke, where she had to conspire with duster-waving servants to get so much as a walk in the grounds.

‘And now poor Buckie is sinking at last, I hear,’ said Hugh. ‘So
of course
Laurie is hot-footing it home to do the grieving brother bit. Of course he is. He’s never near the place from one year’s end to the next ordinarily, although I’m sure he skims off a healthy layer of the interest to fund his revelries. The old boy has a soft spot for him, so they say.’

At this point, we both heard the distant shriek of the telephone and cocked our heads for Pallister’s advancing tread. I could tell the call was for me as soon as he swept in, from the flare of disdain to his nostrils and the lift of disbelief to his brows; when it is one of Hugh’s cronies at the other end Pallister wears an expression of subdued pride that he has been entrusted with a part in one of the acts of decent, manly intercourse which keep the world turning and the natives from revolt.

‘A Mrs Wilson for you, madam,’ he said with commendable neutrality, resisting the inverted commas he must have longed to throw around the name.

I hurried to the nearest branch of our telephone line, which was in Hugh’s library.

‘Ina?’ I said. ‘Is everything all right, my dear?’

‘Of course,’ said Ina Wilson’s voice on the other end. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ There was no reason at all; only that Hugh and I had been conversing on death and heartbreak, which she was not to know. ‘I’m bidden by Albert to ring up and ask you to dinner, Dandy.’

Quick work, Albert. One cup of tea with a younger son and he was suddenly equal to issuing invitations to what I am not being snobbish in calling the oldest family in the county. That, I thought, was a very sharp ascent.

‘When?’ I asked, with a view to pleading a prior engagement.

‘Oh, eight o’clock-ish,’ said Ina.

‘You mean tonight?’ I said, looking at my wristwatch. It was almost six now. Surely professors and bluestockings brought their daughters up with more of an idea than that, even if high tea with the Wilsons had been come on in and the more merrier when Albert was a boy.

‘I know, I know,’ said Ina, ‘but … Lord Robin is stopping over and Albert’s in a blue funk about entertaining him, and if I hadn’t rung you up he would have. And actually, I’m begging too.’

‘I’d be delighted,’ I said, recognising the sounds of wifely despair, ‘but wouldn’t it be easier just to send him packing in a car if there’s no decent train now?’

‘No, he
wants
to stay,’ said Ina. ‘I would happily send him home in a dog cart, but he’s insisting.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘What’s he up to?’ I hoped that Ina would not be offended.

‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she said, sounding not offended in the least, but still rather strained. ‘I shall just grit my teeth and get rid of him in the morning.’

‘You really aren’t a fan, are you?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said baldly. There was a long pause. ‘And besides, I don’t want any complications. Not right now.’

‘Oh dear,’ I answered. I had no idea what was afoot that would make any complications particularly unwelcome at the moment, but I knew full well that causing them was Robin Laurie’s especial forte.