Miranda says, ‘Our parents were friends. I’ve known them since we were children.’
I nod and look at Sophie. She laughs. ‘Oh, I’ve known him – both of them’ – her eyes slide across to Charles, talking to yet another attractive woman by the French windows – ‘for years and years. Although not as long as Miranda, thank goodness. I should think they were horrible little boys.’
Miranda laughs. ‘Charles especially, yes.’
‘Awkward that they don’t speak to one another,’ I suggest. I still don’t know why and, I admit, this fascinates me. Sophie’s drifted away, collected by her husband, I guess, a much older man with crisp white hair.
Miranda agrees. ‘God yes. I mean it was quite funny, for a while, but honestly. So difficult. You can’t invite them both to the same thing. It’s hard to get Eddie to come out at all. Such a waste.’ She sighs. ‘Although I do mostly blame Carolyn for that.’
‘Who’s Carolyn?’
She puts her head on one side, an unspoken question. I suppose they assume everyone knows all this background. Well, not me, lady. I know nothing. She steps slightly closer and lowers her voice. ‘Charles’s wife. Ex-wife, rather. I mean, Julia and Charles were already separated, when… but Carolyn… You know, I’ve never liked any of those people, all dreadfully badly behaved, and in such an old-fashioned way.’
I have no idea what she’s talking about, but nod anyway.
She shakes her head, sighing, and rather annoyingly changes the subject. ‘Have you lived here long?’
‘I don’t really live here,’ I say, ‘just up for the summer. My uncle died and left me his house.’
‘Oh, are you the Lodge woman?’
I blink at her. ‘I suppose I am.’
‘Charles told me about you. But I didn’t realize you were the one who knew Eddie.’ She laughs. ‘How strange.’
‘I didn’t know him before I got here,’ I say, irritated. I don’t like the idea of people talking about me. I’m not interesting, after all. What do they say, these awful people with their beautiful bone structures and total lack of Scottish accent? I suppose she comes from a house just like this one. The house is doing my head in. It’s fun to be somewhere like this without teasels or holly leaves on the furniture to stop you sitting down and rope to keep you away from the trinkets – I could touch anything in this room, and although it might look odd, it wouldn’t set off an alarm. But the portraits of pretty young women from the last three centuries and a series of bewigged and uniformed young men who look increasingly like Charles and Edward as they work their way forward in time is just… too strange.
‘Are you going to sell him your house? Charles, I mean?’ Miranda asks, interrupting my thoughts.
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘He’s very keen. Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that.’ She laughs. ‘In case you ask for more money!’
‘I’m aware of his interest,’ I say, and then I’m embarrassed for some reason, partly because I think it might have sounded abrupt, and partly because it sounds like I think he’s interested in me, which isn’t what I meant.
‘I expect you are,’ she says blandly. The doors from the hall open and some more people arrive. ‘Ailsa, darling!’ says Miranda, her attention diverted. ‘How lovely.’ Then she’s air-kissing a small round woman wearing a pair of earrings so sparkly they can only be real diamonds, and I wander away absently.
I wish I’d turned the invitation down now. I don’t like small talk with strangers and I sometimes find myself wondering at events like this (not that I’ve ever been to an event like this) what all these people are really thinking. I’m sure none of them are thinking any of the things I am. I catch Jenny’s eye across the room and she pulls a face briefly before turning back to the man she’s speaking to.
I feel overly large and – I try to identify the sensation – coarse. As though my feet are too big and my clothes too cheap, and my entire being just not quite well bred enough. Is it the people or the environment making me feel like this? Or my own attitude? Everyone’s charming, but I wish I was at home or that I had someone with me, so I didn’t have to stand here beside a console table by myself, trying to look self-contained and relaxed. I drift slowly about and am offered canapés by a smart young woman in a vaguely military-style white jacket. I take a tiny mozzarella ball smeared with pea purée and avoid making eye contact with Johnny, a balding man of about fifty to whom I was introduced earlier. We’re the four singletons, he and Charles and Miranda and me. I can’t help thinking poorly of Charles’s choice, assuming he put any thought into it, although he and Johnny seem to be great pals, so perhaps he didn’t choose him to entertain me at all.
I wish Edward were here; it would be amusing to see him hating it. Perhaps he wouldn’t hate it, though – after all, he must know all these people, even if he doesn’t like them.
* * *
‘Thea! Enjoying yourself?’ Charles leans his shoulder against the ornately carved mantelpiece and smiles at me. ‘Is that glass empty? We can’t have that.’ He looks round for a waiter.
‘Oh, I only just finished it. I’ll get some more in a moment, don’t worry.’ I clear my throat. ‘More to the point, since it’s your party, are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Always nice to have people in the house,’ he says.
‘It’s quite big, isn’t it, for one person.’ The understatement amuses me, and I smile to myself.
‘I’m not completely on my own all the time. The children are here quite often, and I have a housekeeper, but she’s not exactly company.’
He has two children, Jenny told me, by his first wife Julia, the interior designer. They’re in their early teens, a boy and a girl. They’re away at school most of the time, and spend half their holidays with Charles and the other half with their mother, who has a house up near Dumfries. He and second wife Carolyn weren’t married long, or so I gather. No kids, anyway. I wonder what his housekeeper’s like. A solid woman in tweed is what I imagine, but who knows? She can’t be glam, though, or she’d be at the party, surely? I’m not sure how these things work in the twenty-first century.
‘Do you have one of those enormous kitchens with a million copper pans?’ This has been on my mind for some reason.
‘Well, yes, but we don’t use that for cooking these days. Got a smaller, more sensible kitchen in my part of the house. Luckily it’s reasonably manageable, but there are some rooms we keep shut up most of the year, unless I have a lot of people to stay. And in the winter, we stick in the east wing because it’s easier to heat.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to sell it and live somewhere more convenient?’ I ask, curious.
‘I suppose it depends on your definition of “easier”. In some ways, perhaps. But we’ve always lived here. Since the fourteenth century, anyway.’
‘Yes, I know. Not that I can imagine it.’ I wonder what my ancestors were doing in the fourteenth century. Dying of plague, I expect.
‘You must come up sometime so I can give you the tour,’ he says. ‘I suppose it would be rude of me to abandon everyone else this evening.’
I laugh. ‘I should think so.’
He sips his drink and looks around the room at his guests, all of whom are eating and drinking and chatting merrily. I expect him to murmur something and glide off to talk to someone else, but instead he says, ‘I heard you’ve been talking to Gavin McPherson about your bathroom.’
‘Oh, yes. Well. It’s a bit of a pain not having a proper shower, and if I decided to let it – or even sell, to be honest – having a new bathroom wouldn’t hurt, would it? I’m not… I wouldn’t be trying to get more money from you,’ I add. ‘I mean, if I decided to sell it. You’re just one of my options.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I suppose I am.’ He smiles, and I think – although I couldn’t one hundred per cent swear to it – that he winks at me.
That’s weird. Maybe he has a twitch. I ignore it, anyway, and continue to blather on about bathrooms. I m
ention the hideous fireplace in my sitting room, and remember that Edward told me about Charles’s archive and that he might have pictures of the Lodge.
‘Oh, of course,’ he says. ‘There’s a whole room full of plans and photographs.’ He looks round the room at his guests. ‘I’ll show you, come on.’
‘You just said you can’t abandon your party,’ I remind him.
‘I’m sure no one will notice. It’s not far.’ He nods towards a door, not the one we came in through. ‘There’s lots of interesting stuff in there. You’ll like it.’
I follow him. He’s probably right. ‘Yes, but,’ I say, ‘what about your guests?’
‘They’re fine. Look, everyone’s talking, they won’t even notice.’ He holds the door open for me and I hesitate for a moment and then go out into the corridor. He shuts the door behind us, and it’s suddenly rather quiet. The corridor stretches away in both directions, and we turn right, away from the entrance hall. There are various doors on each side, more panelling, more paintings lit by pools of light from lamps on side tables.
‘Charles,’ I say, ‘you really don’t have to show me now.’
‘In here,’ he says, and opens a door. He turns on the light. The room we’re in is small, lined with shelves and drawers, a large desk in the middle with a chair either side. There’s no window, so perhaps it’s more like a giant cupboard.
‘It’s all labelled,’ he says, gesturing. ‘Estate records, invoices, wills, you know, all that sort of thing. The plans of the house are in here. And all the estate buildings.’
There’s a big plan chest against the far wall. He walks over to it and peers at the labels. ‘Haven’t had these out for ages, not since we did the work on the East Lodge.’
I look round the room, fascinated. It’s mad, isn’t it, all this stuff, owning things your family have owned for centuries. My great-grandparents’ dining table can’t really compete.
‘Here,’ he says, pulling a large cardboard file out of a drawer. ‘I think this is photos. And the plans…’ He bends and opens a lower drawer. ‘Yes, here we are.’ He spreads them out on the table top and I move closer to peer at the paper.
‘Let’s shed some light…’ he says, flicking the button on an orange anglepoise. ‘There.’
It’s rather splendid to look at a plan of my house, drawn up in the eighteenth century.
‘Cool,’ I say.
He opens the file. ‘Yes, look, these pictures were taken just before your uncle bought it. And these are from’ – he turns one over – ‘the twenties. That’s the lodgekeeper – Dougie MacNeil. My father used to talk about him. It was when he died that they sold the Lodge.’
I look at the man in the photo, in his shirt sleeves and waistcoat, smiling awkwardly at the camera. A black and white cat sits on the doorstep behind him. There’s no wisteria, which makes the front of the building look strangely naked.
‘Been meaning to say…’ Charles pulls out another picture, older, with a woman in a hat standing beside a girl sitting on a kitchen chair. They look pre-First World War, maybe 1910.
‘Hm?’ I prompt him.
‘That dress really suits you. Great colour.’
‘Oh,’ I say, embarrassed and slightly concerned. ‘That’s kind of you. I chose it ’cos of the colour.’
‘Yes, it’s very… striking.’
I look down at myself. ‘I’m not sure “striking” is what I was going for, but thank you. It’s a bit too shiny I think.’
‘No, it’s… it looks… You look great.’
‘Well, thanks. I’m not used to going out anywhere that means dressing up.’ I clear my throat, embarrassed. It’s very warm in here, or is that just me? I don’t much want to be alone with Charles if he’s going to talk about my outfit. ‘And thanks for showing me these. But people are probably wondering where you are; we should get back.’
He looks at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he looks down at the photos.
‘Come up any time if you want to look at this lot properly,’ he says. ‘I can get Lynda to scan some of them if you like.’
‘Who’s Lynda?’
‘Oh – housekeeper.’
‘Does she do your admin?’ I’m surprised by this.
‘She does most things.’ He smiles at me. ‘Like having a wife – without any of the…’ He pauses. ‘Um, trouble.’
I snort – very elegant – but I don’t respond to this. Instead I say, ‘We should get back,’ and he clicks off the lamp and steps back, leaving the contents of the files spread over the chest. I follow him to the door, which he holds open for me, putting his other hand lightly on my back. I speed up slightly, not wanting to look like I’m running away, but equally not wanting to encourage anything. If there’s anything to encourage. God, I hate this stuff. I’d forgotten how much having a husband removes all this… crap from any equation.
* * *
Back in the sitting room, I hope no one noticed our absence. Easily long enough for all kinds of bad behaviour. When Jenny walks past, I say, ‘Oh, there’s Jenny, I was going to ask her about… Excuse me,’ and hurry after her.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I saw you come back in. What have you two been up to?’ She grins at me. ‘Nothing untoward, I hope.’
‘Good grief. No. He wanted to show me the plans of the Lodge.’
‘Oh aye,’ she says, raising her eyebrows. ‘Never heard it called that before.’
‘Jenny.’
She’s laughing now. ‘Ah. Now everyone will be wondering about the pair of you.’
‘I’m pretty sure they will not.’
Grinning, she says, ‘But apart from that, how’re you bearing up? It’s a terrible strain, isn’t it?’
‘Exhausting. Talking to strangers is tough. And these people are so fancy.’
She laughs again. ‘Aye, they are a bit. Come and talk to me – Alastair’s gone to the loo. I was just pursuing the canapé girl. Have you had one of the wee prawn things?’ I shake my head, relieved to be talking to someone more straightforward.
‘How’s work?’ she asks me, after we’ve both deftly swiped two canapés each (half a fig with goats’ cheese, and the aforementioned prawn, coated in spicy panko breadcrumbs) from the tray.
‘Oh yeah,’ I say, trying to shove half a fig into my mouth elegantly. ‘’S going well, I think. I like it.’
‘Do you?’
‘Mm. Yeah, it’s interesting, and Edward’s quite funny.’
‘You like him.’ That’s not a question, it’s a statement. She’s looking at me, curious.
‘I do like him, yes. I guess I’ve never seen him being really obnoxious; I can’t quite see why you all hate him so much.’
‘I don’t hate him,’ she says, ‘I just… He’s so spiky, I cannae be arsed with it. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try – we’ve invited him to dinner a million times – it makes no difference. I think he enjoys being miserable.’
‘I don’t think he is miserable though,’ I object. ‘He seems happy enough on his own. And I think he likes pretending to be grumpy.’
‘You’ve said before you think he’s pretending.’
‘You can make him really laugh, so I just don’t think he can be truly grumpy.’
‘I’ve never seen him really laughing,’ she says. ‘You must be hilarious.’
I test the idea that this might be the reason. ‘God, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe I just don’t… I don’t know. Because I’m new, so he’s got no history to me. Whereas for all the rest of you…’
‘Aye, that’s true. We’re used to him.’
‘Yes. Anyway, luckily for me, we get on okay. It would be a bit rubbish otherwise; after all, he’s basically the person I see most.’
* * *
On Monday, when I arrive at the shop, Edward’s unpacking boxes of new books. He glances up as the bell jangles.
‘How was the party?’
‘Oh God, awful.’
He looks amused, as well he might. ‘
Was it? How come?’
‘I’m no good at that sort of thing. I hardly knew anyone; they were all really… posh.’ I put my bag behind the counter, sighing.
‘You must have expected that though, surely?’
‘I know it’s my own fault for going.’
‘Curiosity killed the cat.’
I glare at him. ‘Well, luckily I wasn’t killed.’
‘What were you, then?’
I tick off on my fingers. ‘Self-conscious. Anxious. Bored.’
He laughs. ‘Anxious? Why were you anxious?’
I lift a shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘I don’t like that sort of thing. I had to talk to strangers, I felt…’
‘You felt what?’ He’s focused on me, intent.
‘I don’t suppose you’d understand.’ I sit down in the green chair and shake the mouse to wake the laptop.
‘Try me.’
‘Fat, and old, and… common.’ He blinks at me. I laugh. ‘I know. Ridiculous. I mean, to feel common. The rest of it… Anyway, it’s my chip, I forget about it sometimes but it’s flipping massive.’ I laugh again.
‘The chip on your shoulder? Can’t say I’ve noticed.’ He looks perfectly serious but I’m suspicious.
‘Are you taking the piss?’
He grins at me. ‘Not really. A bit. Anyway, you’re not fat, are you, or old. And you’re certainly not common.’
‘I am, though. I mean your brother’s a lord. Not that I care if he is, or if I am. But it’s hard not to think about how all the women in my mum’s family were domestic servants. For the last two hundred years or something.’ I stand up and stretch, my elbows cracking. ‘Probably longer. It’s like a race memory. I’d have been scrubbing things, not flouncing about eating canapes.’ I deliberately don’t pronounce the accent. ‘A hundred years ago, neither of you’d have been speaking to me, would you, except to give orders, or…’ I can’t quite express what I mean. ‘It made me uncomfortable.’
‘A hundred years ago we’d have been drowning in mud at the Somme,’ he says. ‘Too busy to shout at the staff.’
The Bookshop of Second Chances Page 8
