Charles stares at Lillian, then reaches for his wine glass and takes a large swig.
Jack clears his throat. ‘I’ve always thought it important for a boy to have his secrets. I used to collect feathers. I kept them stashed in an old biscuit tin. A few secrets never hurt anyone.’
Albie stops stirring his soup and looks up at Jack. ‘Is that why you keep the room locked?’
A large moth flutters about the flames of the silver candelabra, casting a flickering shadow onto the tapestries lining the walls.
‘Oh ho!’ shouts Charles. ‘Albie, you’ve let the cat out of the bag there. You’ve been down to the room, have you, rattling the door? Trying to sneak a look?’
Albie blushes and sinks lower into his seat.
‘I’m sorry,’ Charles says, this time addressing Jack. ‘The boy can be a little impertinent. Albie, you’re to leave Mr Fincher alone, do you hear me? Let him work without distraction.’
Bentham arrives, a silent shadow slipping through the open doorway to refill wine glasses. Lillian places a hand over her glass. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘We should all be more curious about the world around us, don’t you think?’ says Jack, addressing Albie. ‘I suppose I am being rather secretive. I keep the door locked because I don’t want anyone to see the room yet. It would be like attending the first rehearsal of a play or reading the earliest draft of a novel. Very disappointing.’
Lillian listens to Jack’s explanation, twisting the stem of her wine glass between her fingers. Like Albie, she too has been rather intrigued by Jack Fincher’s comings and goings in the west wing. First had been the plentiful deliveries of paint and turpentine, the dust sheets, scaffolding poles, lamps and ladders. Then had come the artist himself, returning to Cloudesley, as promised, at the start of the month with a small leather suitcase, a bundle of brushes rolled up in a cloth and several large sketch pads. He had asked for the guest suite he had stayed in the night of the cocktail party. He’d told them it was perfectly comfortable and that he liked its close proximity to the west wing. ‘I may be keeping rather unsociable hours,’ he’d warned them. ‘This way I won’t disturb anyone.’
Unsociable hours or not, he had certainly kept to himself since then, spending from morning until often very late at night locked inside the room. Once or twice Lillian had spotted him walking the grounds, usually after lunch, when he would step out onto the terrace, sketchbook in hand, and disappear somewhere within the gardens; but until this evening’s dinner, the car ride to and from the cricket match had been the longest she’d spent in close proximity to Jack Fincher since he had returned.
‘Perhaps it’s vanity,’ Jack continues, ‘but I prefer to reveal my work when it is complete. More so than any other art form, there is an immediacy to a painting that should be respected. You’d understand that, wouldn’t you, Charles?’
Charles, who has a piece of bread roll halfway to his lips, murmurs his agreement. ‘I would. The big reveal.’
‘It’s a risk though, isn’t it?’ says Albie quietly.
Jack tilts his head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I don’t think Father much likes surprises.’ Albie turns to Charles. ‘Do you, Father?’
Charles lets out a bark of a laugh. ‘The boy does have a point. Though I doubt very much we have anything to worry about. I know Mr Fincher is going to do a very fine job.’
Far away, across the hills, a rumble of thunder carries on the warm air.
Charles dabs at his brow with his napkin before throwing it carelessly onto the table. ‘Have a word with cook would you, dear,’ he says, turning to Lillian. ‘This is hardly the weather for soup.’
‘Of course.’ She pushes her own soup bowl away. ‘How about a game of Mahjong after dinner?’ she suggests, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Albie is quite the tactician,’ she explains, for Jack’s benefit.
Charles shakes his head. ‘I have some business to attend to. I’ll be returning to London at the weekend, for a few days.’
‘Mr Fincher?’ she asks. ‘Are you brave enough to take on our young champion?’
The artist smiles. ‘Another time? I’d like to spend a few more hours in the room tonight.’
Lillian nods and tries to ignore the small flicker of disappointment. Of course he is busy. Of course it is right she keep her distance from this strange, rather intriguing man.
There is a faint crackling sound. The moth that has been fluttering about the silver candelabra falls to the table. Albie reaches for the insect, plucking it off the tablecloth and bringing it close to his face. ‘Singed to a crisp,’ he says, studying it with a look of intense fascination.
‘That’s what you get when you play with fire,’ says Charles, reaching for his wine glass. ‘Now there’s a warning for us all.’
Another low rumble of thunder echoes across the grounds, this time a little louder. Meeting Charles’s gaze across the table, Lillian can’t help the shiver that runs down her spine.
Chapter 8
Maggie isn’t sure what has woken her. At first she assumes it is the thunder, the distant rumble of a summer storm echoing over the hills. But as she lies in the dark, watching the pale fabric of her bedroom curtains ghost backwards and forwards at the open window, she hears the scuffling sound. It is coming from somewhere downstairs, the noise echoing out from the fireplace across the room.
It must be an animal – a mouse, a rat, or please God, she shudders, not a bat. The thought sends her burrowing a little deeper beneath the covers, closing her eyes and trying to halt the sudden yet persistent loop of thoughts about pest inspectors and chewed electrical wiring and spiralling maintenance costs.
After a while, the noise stops. Maggie feels sleep begin to pull her under again, when the definite but far-off sound of a door slam jolts her back to consciousness. She sits bolt upright, listening in the dark, her heart pounding. Lillian? Wandering the house?
It’s eerily quiet down in the entrance hall and nothing seems out of place as Maggie sweeps the light from her phone across the front door – still locked – and over the gilt-framed paintings lining the walls. She carries on through the house, making for the drawing room. She half-expects at any moment to come across Lillian collapsed on the floor, so it is a relief to open the door and find her grandmother sitting upright on the edge of her bed, illuminated in the light spilling from her bedside lamp. She looks otherworldly in her long cotton nightgown, her thin, white hair standing in a static fuzz about her head.
‘Are you OK?’ Maggie asks, her heart still thudding loudly in her chest.
Lillian nods slowly. ‘I thought I heard a noise.’
‘Yes, so did I. Just mice, I think.’
‘No.’ Lillian shakes her head. ‘It was the peacocks. I heard them calling.’
Maggie frowns. ‘No, Gran, there aren’t any peacocks here. Not anymore. You must have been dreaming. Look, your covers have fallen off the bed. Let me help you.’ She goes to help Lillian slide back into the bed when she hesitates. ‘Your feet,’ she says, touching the sole of her grandmother’s foot. ‘What is this?’ she asks, staring at the grimy black mark left on her finger. ‘Your feet are filthy. Have you been outside?’
Lillian stares at her blankly.
‘Gran? Were you sleepwalking?’ She waits a moment longer but Lillian just gazes over her head. ‘Don’t move,’ she sighs. ‘I’ll be right back.’
In the bathroom she fills a bowl with warm water and soap and finds towels and a flannel. Peacocks. She shakes her head.
‘I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to be up and about a bit,’ she tells her when she is back in the room, bent over one of Lillian’s sooty feet, ‘but you’ll catch a chill, or worse, if you start wandering about at night like this.’ She dips the cloth into the warm water and gently sponges the heel of Lillian’s left foot. The white cloth comes away black. Maggie catches the faintest trace of a familiar scent, though she can’t quite place it. Burned toast. Bonfires. Smoke.
‘Just like Albie,’ murmurs Lillian, gazing down at her.
Maggie’s hand freezes. ‘Me? Like Dad?’
‘Yes, such a sweet boy. So caring. Things were never easy for poor Albie.’
Maggie swallows and tries not to smart at the comparison. First of all, Albie is hardly a ‘boy’. And ‘sweet and caring’ is certainly not how she would describe her ageing father. Reckless, flighty, irresponsible and absent are words she might favour. As far as she’s ever been able to tell, Albie has lived exactly the life he pleased, drifting in and out of their lives at Cloudesley with seemingly no regard for anyone but himself. ‘There is one indisputable difference between him and me,’ she mutters under her breath, wringing the washcloth into the bowl, ‘I’m here.’
‘Yes you are,’ says Lillian, smiling benignly. ‘Yes you are.’
When she has patted Lillian’s feet dry, Maggie helps her back beneath the bedcovers. ‘Now, no more wandering about. Shall I turn the light off?’
Lillian reaches up and touches her cheek. ‘Thank you, dear. You go to bed. I shall sleep now.’
Reassured that Lillian seems a little more herself, Maggie returns to her own room. She eyes the pile of cardboard boxes stacked in one corner – eight of them – her things from the London flat returned to her by an angry Gus last year – then looks away. She isn’t ready to confront that part of her life yet. Climbing into bed, she focuses instead on Lillian, mentally adding another two worries to her ever-growing list: her grandmother’s unpredictable sleepwalking and now Maggie’s resemblance to her flaky father. Where has Albie been these past days, while she’s wrestled with the house and bringing Lillian back to Cloudesley? And perhaps more importantly, why should it still surprise or affect her so much that he remains an absent figure in their lives? That he should still be able to command such emotion in her after all these years of disappointment remains a mystery to her.
Albie had first brought her to Cloudesley when she was five years old, on a night of howling wind and rain – a stark contrast to the warmth and sunshine of the Spanish islands they had left behind. Until that night, the only life she had known was a transient one of sunshine and island hopping, on the road with her mum and dad, a colourful painted van taking them wherever they wanted to go. There had been, for a time, a white cottage overlooking an azure sweep of sea. She could still remember fragments of their life there: pale pink shells in a bucket, bonfires burning on the sand, a bouncing piggyback ride on her father’s shoulders, her mother’s soft laugh, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean. Life had seemed a joyous bubble of love and togetherness until the morning she woke to find Albie sitting on the end of her bed, his head in his hands.
‘Gone,’ he had told her. ‘Your mother’s gone. Run off. Following her destiny, she said. That’s how much she loved us.’ He had looked up at her with such fear and despair in his eyes that Maggie had felt afraid and hadn’t dared ask any questions about her mother, not even when Albie told her they were packing for a long journey to England. ‘We’ll have our own adventures, Mags. We’ll show her.’
Albie had driven them down the long, forbidding drive of tangled trees and bundled her up the steps, moving quickly to avoid the stinging rain, ringing a brass bell hanging at the huge front door. She’d had no idea who or what lay beyond. She’d never heard Albie speak of his family home or parents before. Maggie had stood there, staring at the most fantastical birds carved into the wood panels, while from somewhere deep inside the house had come the sound of a dog barking. Maggie had shrunk behind her father’s legs as the door had been thrown open by an ancient-looking, grey-haired man in a wheelchair. He had peered at them both over wire-rimmed spectacles with what she now understands was a look of both surprise and irritation. One of the man’s hands had rested on the collar of a huge, grey-haired dog, preventing it from bolting out of the door as it sniffed excitedly at the new arrivals.
The old man had studied her father for a moment. ‘Albie,’ he’d said, just his name, spoken in a strange, slurred voice.
‘Hello, Father.’
‘The wanderer returns. To what do we owe this unexpected honour? Run out of money again?’ Maggie had noticed how the left side of the old man’s face did not move quite as it should when he spoke, giving him a strange, sunken look.
Albie hadn’t had a chance to answer as the door had suddenly opened a little wider and a woman had appeared at the man’s side. She’d looked tall and startlingly regal standing there at the top of the steps with her fine features and her pale, almost white hair swept off her face with two silver combs, dressed in a burgundy wool cardigan with a glittering brooch of a stag beetle pinned to her lapel. Maggie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off her.
‘Albie!’ the woman had exclaimed. ‘What a wonderful surprise.’ She had moved to greet him, but then her glance had fallen to Maggie standing at his feet and her eyes had widened. ‘Well now, who do we have here?’ she’d asked, peering down at her.
‘This is Maggie. My daughter.’ There was something in her father’s voice – an unfamiliar tone at once both belligerent and bashful. ‘Maggie, say hello to your grandparents.’
The dog had started barking again and Maggie, a little frightened both by the noise and the look she’d seen the older couple exchange, had shrunk back into Albie’s legs, pressing her face into the fabric of his trousers.
‘Poor little mite,’ she’d heard the woman say. ‘She must be exhausted. Come in, come in. Don’t just stand there in the cold. Let’s get you inside.’
Maggie had trailed closely behind her father, eyeing the dog warily as it sniffed around her legs in the vast hall with a floor like a chessboard and a staircase curving up to a grand gallery.
‘It’s late,’ the man in the wheelchair had said, the reproach in his voice obvious. ‘You’re staying the night?’
‘Of course they’re staying.’ The woman had fussed around them both. ‘Take the girl up to the blue room, Albie. The bed is made up.’
She remembers being carried up the stairs in her father’s arms, past the startling bone-white skull and antlers of an elk mounted on the wall and a gallery of sombre portraits, eyes gazing blankly at her as they’d passed by. They had continued down a wide, carpeted corridor, then up a few raised steps until they came to a halt outside a door.
‘This will be your room, Maggie,’ her father had said, switching on a bedside lamp and sitting her on the huge four-poster bed. ‘Isn’t it nice? There’s a bathroom next door. I’ll leave the light on, just in case.’ He had tucked her in beneath a heavy brocade bedspread that had made her feel like one of the pale pink hibiscus flowers she had squashed between the translucent pages of the flower press she had used with her mother, only that summer.
‘It smells funny,’ she’d said. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Home is wherever we make it, darling.’ Albie had smiled, his face softening. ‘I know your grandfather seems a little fierce, but Lillian is very kind. The kindest woman I know. They’re both going to love you, I promise,’ he’d whispered.
‘I want Mama.’ It was the only time she ever dared say it out loud.
Albie had stared at her. ‘I know you do. But it’s best you forget her. She’s gone and we’re better off without her, Mags. Trust me.’ Then, with a kiss on her forehead, he’d tiptoed out of the room, leaving just a triangle of light to fall through the crack of the open door.
Maggie had lain utterly still, her eyes tracing the faint outline of the printed cherry blossom and the shimmering birds repeated over and over upon the silver wallpaper. There had been strange noises: clanking pipes and creaking wood. Mama. Where was she? Why would she just leave them? What had Maggie done to make her go? She knew it must be something terrible. Why didn’t anyone tell her, so she could make it right and bring her back?
After a while, she’d crept out onto the landing, thinking she might use the bathroom, but the sound of raised voices echoing up the staircase had held her paralysed: her father and t
he white-haired woman.
‘Where’s her mother? Why isn’t she with her?’
She’d heard her father’s derisive grunt. ‘Amanda? She wafted away to some ashram . . . She said she needed a little time to “find herself” . . . Said something about balancing her energy and “visualising” her future. Only it seems the future she visualised didn’t include Maggie and me. She never came back – left me floundering. I’ve tried hard to be the parent Maggie needs, but . . . it hasn’t been easy. She needs far more than I can give her. You understand.’
‘You’re making excuses, Albie,’ she’d heard the lady say. ‘You’re afraid.’
‘Of course I am afraid.’
‘Of what?’
Her father had seemed to hesitate. ‘There’s too much of him in me. No one could understand . . . except you.’
‘We all have our struggles, Albie; but you can choose what kind of man you want to be. Don’t you see? Perhaps the girl – Maggie – is just what you need.’
‘What I need is help.’
Maggie had stood transfixed in the corridor. She had never heard her father sound so plaintive. She’d had to crane to hear his next pleading words.
‘It’s only three months, Lillian. It’s a good place. A real chance to straighten myself out. Three months and then I’ll be back for her. I promise. There’s no one else I’d leave her with; no one but you.’
She hadn’t heard the woman’s answer because at that moment the huge dog that had greeted them earlier at the front door appeared at the bottom of the staircase, gazing up at her, tongue drooling and long tail wagging. The sight of the grey-haired beast had been enough to send her scuttling back to bed, where she lay shivering, eyes squeezed shut, willing herself to sleep, unaware that by morning, her father would be long gone and she’d be left to face a startling new life at Cloudesley, with grandparents as foreign to her as the landscape she now inhabited.
The Peacock Summer Page 9
