The River Within

by Karen Powell

  In the ballroom, it was as if a script had been distributed to everyone but her; that some pre-rehearsed performance was underway. Girls she knew and secretly considered less attractive seemed to have transformed themselves in some way that wasn’t just to do with their appearance. Something about this evening seemed to prevent even the perfectly sensible ones from holding a sustained thought in their heads, so caught up were they in being petite, appealing creatures, waiting to be swept around the ballroom like little dolls or adorable puppets. Venetia, even at seventeen tall and rangy, felt out of place. She did not want to be a giggling nothingness, she was almost certain of that, and so she held herself upright as her mother had taught her—it was no good slumping and slouching to make yourself appear smaller—and carried on in the normal way, but even the boys she knew seemed to have become over-excited by it all, too unfocused for any sensible exchange to occur.

  ‘I hate parties too,’ said James. ‘I only came for the shoot. We’re up from Yorkshire for the weekend.’ He nodded toward the ballroom where the whooping had just increased as the music struck up again. Venetia had been less disappointed than puzzled by it all; she’d been asked to dance a respectable number of times, had done so graciously, yet being swung round the room by one of Freddie’s schoolfriends a good five inches shorter than her, she had felt like a horse let loose in a field of sweetly-trotting Shetland ponies.

  ‘Anyway, as I said, you look so elegant in that dress that I thought you deserved to have a wonderful evening. I hope you don’t mind me saying. Do you read much? You look like the kind of girl who might.’

  ‘A little’, said Venetia, stretching her legs out in front of her. It felt rather nice, the cold wash of the moon on her skin, upon the white satin of her dress, knowing herself to be both elegant and bookish in appearance. ‘I’m halfway through Great Expectations at the moment.’

  Halfway was an exaggeration though she was definitely enjoying the story more than she’d expected to. She had taken the gold-embossed, hard-backed book from her mother’s special collection with trepidation, begun turning the tissue-thin pages without enjoyment in the beginning, so afraid was she of damaging them or marking them in some way, or snapping the spine of that precious book, but the story began to absorb her. Between the pages she had found a pressed flower—perhaps a peony—that must have been there for years, though her mother when asked could not remember having placed it there nor what, if anything, it signified.

  ‘Dickens is always fun,’ nodded James. ‘I’ve been trying some of the Modernists recently. They’re turning everything that came before on its head.’

  She chose not to admit her ignorance, though she didn’t imagine he’d mind or try to lecture her in some tedious way. Modernists. She did not know that writers gathered themselves up like that, into named groups. She had thought that a writer sat at his own desk getting on with it.

  ‘Would you fetch me something to drink perhaps?’ she asked him. ‘I think there was punch in the hallway. Oh!’

  A little dachshund, barely more than a puppy, had been making its way around the ballroom all evening, getting perilously under people’s feet during the dancing. Now it had found Venetia and was snuffling against her ankle. She lifted it up and onto her lap. It had toffee-coloured and black fur, and someone had tied a neat tartan bow around its neck.

  She stroked the dachshund’s velvety ears and he gazed up with at her with eyes like glossy pebbles.

  ‘Of course, I should have—’

  The palms parted for a young man carrying a bottle of champagne in one hand and a bouquet of glasses in the other. He set the glasses down on the window ledge. ‘There you are,’ he said to Venetia.

  With James standing beside him, it was impossible to miss the family resemblance, though the elder boy was marginally plainer and had different colouring, hair goldish-brown. He had an open, good-humoured aspect, as if he found the world delightfully entertaining and it had responded thus far by returning the favour. He was, she noticed, an inch or so taller than James.

  ‘This is Angus,’ said James. ‘My brother.’ James seemed caught between staying and leaving. The delicacy she had noted in him seemed exacerbated by the arrival of his brother. ‘I was about to fetch some punch for Venetia.’

  ‘She’s not to drink that filth.’ The champagne bottle swung easily in Angus’s hand, the cold breath of its contents unfurling like some lovely genie from the neck of the bottle.

  ‘Look,’ she said, scooping up the little dachshund from her lap and proffering it to Angus. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’

  ‘It’s a fucking runt,’ said Angus, with a grimace.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lennie, August 1955

  Alexander said I was to come.’

  Lennie held her father’s gaze as she spoke, though she could see his agitation already rising.

  ‘The invitations went out at the end of July,’ said Peter Fairweather. ‘That was late as it was.’

  Of all the objections Lennie had countered in her mind—too young, what would she wear—this one had failed to occur to her. Alexander wanted her at his mother’s birthday party. It would never have crossed his mind that she would need to be invited formally.

  ‘Should I ask him to speak to Lady Richmond?’

  Her father shook his head in confusion, this suggestion not fitting any code of behaviour that he understood.

  ‘Thomas is going.’ Lennie looked in despair to her brother who sat over his newspaper at the kitchen table, head resting on one hand. ‘He goes every year.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Peter Fairweather was not an unkind man, but any sympathy he might have felt for his daughter’s distress was overridden by certainty on this point of etiquette. ‘Thomas is expected. It was very kind of Alexander to think of asking you but you can’t simply invite yourself.’

  ‘That’s not—’

  ‘People would wonder what you were doing there, you see.’

  ‘Why should anyone care?’

  ‘Apart from anything else, I’ve just finalised the table plans. Johanna was supposed to be seeing to them, but I gave up on that when she couldn’t grasp the idea that the Wagstaffs mustn’t be seated anywhere near the Marshall-Joneses . . . ’

  When Alexander had first mentioned the party, Lennie panicked, not daring to ask what she was to wear and must she dance, what she should say to all those strangers. Only now it was not to be and her fear changed shape into something dull and heavy in the pit of her stomach. The world was suddenly grey with nothing in it to make the blood pound in her young heart. She watched her father as he combed back his hair in neat military style, then stooped to rub a spot from the tip of his shoe. How silly of her to question him when he was about to leave for work at the Hall and at his most correct.

  ‘Please father,’ she tried again. ‘I don’t want to cause any bother to Lady Richmond or you . . . ’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Lennie!’ Her brother flung his newspaper across the table and pushed his fingers into the dark mess of his hair. ‘I’m trying to read! Look, you can’t turn up without an invitation. It’s bad form. Alexander jolly well knows.’

  ‘Don’t upset your brother,’ their father would say, even when Thomas was small and raging at some minor injustice—a broken toy, the last of his sweet ration—and Lennie, smaller still, would try by turns to placate him or to make herself invisible because Thomas’s feelings were bigger and more important than anyone else’s. It was the Italian in him, people said; on his mother’s side. Made you wild and volatile, apparently, a volcano that might explode at any moment. Lennie did not understand this. There were Italian POWs on the estate farm, small and wiry with voices that rose and fell like gentle songs. They waved and smiled as she passed them on her way home from school. Still she lived in thrall to her brother’s moods. You never knew which Thomas you might get, one moment tripping up the stairs full of sunshine, only to
return with a devil on his shoulder, spreading his displeasure into every corner of their tiny cottage.

  Their father long ago gave up power to his son, could only sue for peace.

  ‘Please, Thomas, you’ll make yourself ill,’ though it was he who turned white and sick-looking at every explosion. Lennie would try to reassure their father, pat his arm or clear away the tea things as tidily as possible.

  Once when they were small, Thomas was screaming at their father, tugging at his arm while they stood in line at the greengrocer’s stall at Helmsley market. Lennie remembered it because the other ladies in the queue looked cross and she did not like the feeling it gave her.

  ‘Lost his mother, poor little lad,’ said a voice behind them. She turned to look. The lady who had spoken had a nice, tired-looking face. She smiled down at Lennie in a kind way. Lennie felt an understanding passing between them, knew then that it was her job to make Thomas feel better about everything.

  Occasionally her brother co-opted her as an ally. On his seventh birthday Thomas decided to leave home and Lennie was summoned to his room to pack his case. She promised to bring him food each day, to the woods where he intended to build a house of his own to live. For the most part though, he thought her young and silly and only barely to be tolerated. She would tag along anyway, following him and Alexander when they went to sail their toy boats on the river.

  ‘Take you straight down to the bottom,’ Thomas teased, pretending to teeter on the edge of the forbidden Stride, that point on the river where the water was most dangerous, though the distance he kept was safe enough. ‘And then the crabs eat your eyes out.’

  ‘Crabs live in the sea,’ she said, though she’d never been.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, Len. There are freshwater crabs.’

  ‘Not in this country though.’ Danny Masters said that, joining them with his own boat to sail, a fine vessel that his dead father had made him.

  Sir Angus insisted on paying for Thomas’s education and he went off to prep school without thanks or complaint, seeming only a little subdued on his first trip home. There had been that incident with a boy in the year above him, a bully and a frightful snob according to Alexander. The elder boy had only got what was coming to him. Nevertheless, there was trouble with the boy’s parents because Thomas had beaten him badly, breaking his nose and knocking out a front tooth.

  Thankfully, it proved to be an isolated incident. Thomas excelled on the sports field and his clever, restless mind impressed his teachers, later gaining him a place at Cambridge.

  Lennie remembered his first Christmas home from university. Thomas came across their father helping Sir Angus to remove his riding boots after the Boxing Day hunt.

  ‘Down on his knees in the mud and happy with it!’ he shouted, bursting into the cottage.

  Lennie tried to soothe him. Father thought the world of Sir Angus. They all did. She begged him not to cause a row. He just glared at her in pity and anger.

  ‘It’s a different world now, Lennie. People should question things.’

  The universe was made up of two types of people, Lennie thought: those who wanted to smash things to pieces and those who wanted to keep the world just as it was. Implacable, opposed forces, like the rocky banks at the Stride, the twisting iron-dark water trying to find a path between.

  CHAPTER 10

  Venetia, August 1955

  Alexander was sitting at the very edge of the salon in a posture of solitude. Venetia had a sudden urge to slap him. The thought of how scandalised everyone would be amused her. Alexander had never been punished, even as a child—Angus had insisted that he had seen too much violence in his lifetime to inflict any on his only son. Yet Venetia’s own father had administered regular beatings to her four brothers, who had seemingly borne the punishments equably enough. Sometimes she wondered whether Angus’s way had been a mistake. Perhaps it didn’t always do to be so sensitive. Her son had always abhorred physical engagement, loathing the cheerful brutality of the rugby field and absenting himself as often as possible. Lucky then that he’d had charm, and a gift for mimicry that edged close enough to cruelty to satisfy the impulses of the most barbarous of schoolboys, gifts that had earned him popularity and the leading role in practically every school play. How very talented, other mothers would say, voices a little shrill with envy. So funny.

  There were no signs of any such antic behaviour tonight.

  Venetia allowed her glass to be refilled a little and readied herself for the next tranche of guests, observing first the Middlethorpe sisters and then Annie Faversham, the most handsome girl in the room, trying to engage Alexander. When even Annie’s face lost its customary animation, Venetia gave up watching. Sometimes it was difficult to know the difference between sensitivity and self-absorption.

  ‘Everything all right?’ James asked, appearing suddenly beside her. Her brother-in-law was fiddling with his collar and she knew he was worrying that people would think there was something unseemly in this year’s celebration when Angus’s wake had taken place in this very room only months ago. Continuity had to mean something though. There was nothing else. Besides, James always looked uncomfortable in a formal setting, even here in his childhood home. He’d have been happier, she imagined, down at the Black Swan, discussing grain prices or debating the merits of some new farming practice.

  The Markhams, nearest neighbours to Richmond Hall, descended upon her.

  ‘So brave,’ Caroline Markham said, or something like that, and Venetia bent her head in thanks and to hide a moment of confusion. For a second she’d imagined Lady Markham was referring to the death of Danny Masters, not to that of her late husband. The poor boy’s death had upset everything again, just as Venetia was beginning to feel steady. All the more reason to follow the ways she knew, the old routine that gave her a sense of purpose and comfort. For the next hour or so, Venetia focussed on her guests, joining and then extricating herself from the various groupings around the salon. Everything was as it should be, separate voices swelling and homogenising into a pleasant rumble of humanity, the chandeliers swaying and glittering in the rising heat.

  She could tell by the way he moved, stiffly upright as he made his way to the drinks table, that Alexander was drinking heavily. It would have been better if Lennie had been here beside him, but Fairweather’s silly pedantry had put paid to that.

  ‘What does he want, something in copperplate?’ Alexander had snapped. She’d promised to intervene, but he rejected the offer: ‘Oh what’s it matter? It’ll be hellishly dull anyway. I don’t know why we’re even bothering this year.’ And after that he seemed to lose all interest in the idea.

  Venetia wondered where Peter Fairweather thought his daughter belonged, when the villagers were beneath her but he deemed her too unformed, too naive for smart company. At home in the cottage, making soup for him, she suspected. If only Fairweather would allow the girl some kind of life.

  Last year there had been talk about a typing course. Fairweather had at first resisted, only relenting because another girl from the village was thinking of going. But then Lennie had fallen ill at the wrong time and that, it appeared, was that. Venetia’s own father hadn’t seen the point of educating girls either, but something—perhaps it was Scottish winters and the harsh certainties of farm life—had hardened her for adulthood. Lennie, who’d lived all her life in the clutch of the valley, was still an innocent.

  ‘Venetia, should I say something?’ James was by her side again, the faint warmth of farmyard still on him despite his newly-washed and combed hair. He was still nervous and evening dress sat oddly on his frame, as if it knew it didn’t belong there. ‘Most people are here now and I’d rather not wait longer.’

  ‘Angus always spoke just before dinner was called,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’ll do.’

  Annie Faversham was persistent. She had hold of Alexander’s arm now, preventing him from leavi
ng her side. Venetia half-pitied her, knowing her son as she did. Alexander could be charming when he chose to be, might appear to give you all his attention, until something else distracted him and the next moment he’d be gone. But then Lennie had grown so luminous and Venetia had become easy in herself. For all her ethereal appearance, Lennie was rooted here. She had been exactly what Alexander needed to help him through those first raw weeks after Angus had died. The thought of the two of them gave her comfort: a pathway into the future, more important than grief or loss or all those tedious intricacies of self. The girl would have to learn a great deal, as she herself had done when she’d first arrived at Richmond Hall, barely a few years older than Lennie now. By observing, and pretending courage until it became real. Venetia remembered what it was like to have awkward teenage limbs and a tremor in one’s voice and yet earn a reputation for poise, coolness even. And it had served her well. She had restored this salon meticulously: duck-egg walls, graceful swags of plasterwork, the great fireplaces at either flank, the gorgeous soft colours of the ceiling, painted like so many Chinese parasols, the frieze with Dido and Aeneas and all the other paintings of antiquity glowing in the lamplight. It was hers for now; she had made it so, and yet if Lennie and Alexander were to marry, how content she would be to slip into the background.

  The sound of a glass being struck. James, standing by the lower fireplace, had called for silence. A speech. Happy birthday. Difficult times. Also time to celebrate: welcome home to Alexander, the future, new plans.

  She didn’t care for the beard. Like an apology. Something to hide behind. Better without it, especially since his handsomeness was of the subtle type. Poor James. Always in the shadows.

  ‘Congratulations, mother.’

  Alexander had steered his way towards her during the speech. He stumbled now, causing elderly Lord Markham to spill his wine.