House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  Her stomach rumbled and she opened the fridge, hoping the contents would surprise her. They didn’t. She was confronted with face products, bottles of vintage champagne, neatly stacked rows of dark chocolate. There was no point buying food just to watch it rot. Most days, Blaze ate lunch and dinner at her office desk. She rarely socialised; work took precedence over friendships and, without the common currency of spouses, children and hobbies, her conversational arsenal had become impoverished. It was easier to pay shrinks to listen, masseurs to touch her, and, although she knew better, she often mistook her trainer and hairdresser’s solicitude for genuine concern. Over the last years, she had pollarded her emotional life, hacking off the limbs of hope and desire and tenderness one by one; even, occasionally, believing this was the life she wanted. A permanent sense of guilt hovered over Blaze like a dank cloud, obliterating most of the rays of her success; she was unjustifiably privileged, her good fortune the result of a freakish mathematical ability. To fend off those feelings, she buried herself in work and, when she wasn’t working, she exercised.

  Closing the fridge door, Blaze got a sudden glimpse of herself and turned away. Even after forty years, she had yet to get used to the scarred birthmark that ran from below her left eye across her cheek and down her neck. Her father, on seeing his daughter’s disfigurement for the first time, had tried to make light of it by naming her after a racehorse that had an irregular blaze across its face. Her mother, appalled by the affliction, scrubbed her baby’s cheeks with a mixture of lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda which caused painful lesions. Hearing of a doctor in Plymouth able to treat these conditions, Clarissa allowed him to experiment on her six-year-old child. The skin graft went horribly wrong. The ensuing scarring was worse than the original blight. Corrective surgery and laser treatment had failed. The right side of Blaze’s face was beautiful, her hair luxurious, her figure lovely; but, looking at herself in the mirror, all Blaze could see reflected in the door was her puckered skin and her mother’s abject disappointment. Tears brimmed in her eyes and spilled on to her cheeks. She dug her nails into the soft flesh of her palm; self-pity was worse even than loneliness.

  She had been in love once, in her early twenties, with another mathematician, Tom Barnabus, who had died of cancer. She’d had affairs since then, some longer and more successful than others: the libidinous civil servant who lived in the East End and referred to himself as the Stepney Stallion; the Viennese arms dealer who cried like a baby at the sight of an injured animal; the American documentary film-maker, handsomer and vainer than a matinee idol, who left when she refused to fund his next project; the cross-dressing hedge-funder; the philosopher who kept a cat called Wittgenstein; the younger men who claimed her wrinkles were sexy, the older ones who said the same lines reminded them of their wives or mothers.

  As the years passed, Blaze’s sense of adventure had become ossified by work and responsibilities, making it harder to meet anyone. Men asked her out but they were inevitably the married, not the marrying, kind. She rarely got a call for a second date; perhaps her need to be loved was too palpable, her loneliness as real and off-putting as a third person in the room. Who, she began to wonder, would mourn her passing? What traces would she leave behind? She had never planted a tree, given birth to a child or put up a building. She wasn’t worthy of an obituary and only the dutiful, bored or alcoholics in search of a sherry would attend her funeral. Her cadaver would be interred in the family plot set aside for maiden aunts. Even her career was nebulous: the art of conjuring profits from dreams and failures, trading in stocks and shares, an activity that was invisible to the naked eye and involved moving money from point A to point B for the benefit of a tiny fraction of the population.

  She had made weekdays manageable but weekends were a kind of purgatory; what the hell was one supposed to do between Friday night and Monday morning? Occasionally she tried foreign mini-breaks but faced all the same issues with different scenery. For a few months she had volunteered at a homeless hostel until a man complained that the sight of her disfigured face put him off his dinner. Occasionally, Blaze thought about having a child, if only to give her life some non-negotiable coordinates and structure. The regularity of school terms might be comforting and there’d be blessed relief of having something other than oneself to think about. Sense would prevail as she remembered the accompanying mess, noise and detritus, not to mention the utter tedium of bedtime stories, sandpits and play dates. No wonder her mother had outsourced the upbringing of her children to members of staff. After a couple of minutes of agonising, Blaze always reached the same conclusion: better to keep one’s figure and the last vestiges of sanity.

  Wandering aimlessly through her apartment, Blaze went to her library and looked through the shelves of unread novels, self-help books and biographies bought in fits of unsustained enthusiasm for their given subjects. Glancing down the spines of her collection of one thousand DVDs, she failed to find a title that tickled her imagination. She made a list of all the people she’d slept with (short) and those who’d rejected her (almost the same length) and stalked them on Facebook. She read half an article about how sandwiches were eating culture, which made her feel hungry. In the kitchen cupboard, there was a box of Frosties, well beyond its sell-by date but preserved by sugar. With no milk, she added vodka, a delicious combination, and, in the highly unlikely event that she ever gave a dinner party, Blaze resolved to serve “Froska” as a pudding.

  It was only 9:15 p.m., too early to take a sleeping pill. She eyed the bottle of vodka, considering taking another shot. Only then, she noticed the letter, left presumably by her cleaner, which had slipped down behind a bowl. The handwriting was a ghostly echo from another time. She read the sender’s name, Anastasia, and a shadow raced over her heart. Images from their last encounter, twenty years ago, flashed across her mind. Unable to face the onslaught of memories, let alone the contents, Blaze crumpled the letter in her hand and dropped it into the bin.

  The “Froska” pudding had made her drunk and, holding lightly on to furniture for support, she went back out onto the terrace. She tried to conjure up numbers and figures for the next day’s presentation, but all she could see was the blue envelope. Against her better judgement, she fished it out of the rubbish and smoothed it on the marble worktop. The postmark said Balakpur, Orissa. Tearing open the envelope, Blaze sat down at the kitchen counter and read.

  Dear Blaze,

  Thanks to the internet, I have followed your many successes. Businesswoman of the Year two years in a row, youngest senior partner of Kerkyra Capital, guest speaker at important international conferences, panel member and leader in the world of finance. Each time I see one of these accolades, I feel a stab of undeserved, vicarious pride. I’ve not been able to find out much about your personal life; maybe you have married, maybe you have children.

  I suspect Jane is following in the noble tradition of all Trelawney countesses, sitting under the watchful eye of a great Gainsborough in Trelawney’s dining room, ordering an egg, reading an ironed newspaper, discussing menus with Cook, working out the evening’s placement. Once I yearned for that kind of life, now it seems like death by boredom.

  Since we last saw each other I’ve had many adventures. I worked in a refugee camp, lived like a gypsy, walked over the Himalayas, wrote four books (unpublished) and, as you know, I married a maharaja (I was sorry you couldn’t attend our wedding—it was quite a spectacle). It wasn’t the scenario I imagined or wanted but it’s been interesting. Now that I find myself so perilously close to death, I cling to life with a savage desperation. I thought something big would get me—a war or an avalanche, not a disease eating my insides out. I am not ready. I am far from ready.

  * * *

  Blaze put the letter down. It had been a long time since she had thought about Anastasia. Since “the incident,” Blaze had tried to erase her erstwhile friend from her mind—now Anastasia had the nerve to try
and inveigle herself back into her life. Did the woman think that she would be welcome, after all that had happened? Blaze shook with fury and the words blurred. She turned the pages quickly, her eyes skipping over various paragraphs until the last line. I am imploring you to take in my daughter. Blaze jumped back as if scalded and tore the letter into tiny pieces, ran outside and threw them off her terrace, watched the tiny shreds of paper flutter away on a passing breeze. Gone, she thought, good riddance. Her heart was beating fast and the effects of the vodka dispelled. After nearly twenty years of determined exorcism, Anastasia was back in her thoughts.

  Blaze needed to talk to someone, but who apart from the main protagonists would understand? Her next therapy appointment was not until Friday, four days away, so she called her American psychic. Madame Alvira. Blaze regarded mediums as many agnostics considered God: with equal degrees of hope and scepticism.

  “Shall I put the charge to your American Express?” Madame Alvira asked through a mouthful of food.

  “Yes.”

  “Whaddya need to know?” Alvira’s accent betrayed a Bronx background.

  “A long-lost dying friend has written, asking me to bring up her child. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Let me consult the oracles.” Alvira rustled noisily among some papers. After a few minutes she spoke in her “I’m doing a reading” sing-song voice. “There’s a young fox that has nearly crossed the stream when its tail gets wet. Firm correctness leads to good fortune. Let him stir himself up as if he were invading the demon’s region where for three years rewards will come from the great kingdom.”

  Blaze wrote down what the psychic said.

  “There might be progress and success if he shows me sincerity that makes recourse to divination. Or there might be trouble. There might be stillness and warmth or there might be danger in the unknown.” The medium stopped. “D’you get that?” she asked, reverting to her Bronx accent.

  “I don’t understand what it means?” Blaze was confused.

  “You asked me to consult the oracles, not to give advice. If you want advice, that’ll be another $500. Now, I have another call waiting so can you make your mind up?”

  “I’d like your advice.”

  “Shall I charge the same American Express?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you know about the kid?” Alvira asked.

  “I don’t even know how old it is.”

  “Sounds like a very bad idea indeed.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Maybe it would be nice to extend your circle? What about your family? You strike me as kind of lonely.”

  Blaze didn’t respond.

  “My family drives me nuts but they’re the only thing I got,” Alvira said.

  Thinking about her parents and brother made Blaze’s throat contract and her heart beat faster. Was it possible to hate and miss people simultaneously?

  “You have an opportunity to help someone, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life,” Alvira continued, “it’s better to be needed than wanted. Desire and romantic love pass, leaving little trace. But dependency has an afterglow, the satisfaction of having done something good.” She shuffled some papers on her desk. “Is there anything else?”

  Blaze hesitated. “I wonder if you could look at my romantic life?”

  “It’s best to let a few weeks pass before doing that again. Don’t want to annoy the oracles.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I have to go.” The psychic hung up.

  Putting down the telephone, Blaze felt a peculiar heaviness. Twenty years had passed since she’d seen Anastasia or her brother and sister-in-law; wasn’t time supposed to heal? If only she could let those images go. She looked at her phone: it was ten o’clock. Going into her dressing room, she pushed open the sliding doors to her wardrobe and looked at the rows of almost identical black suits and white silk shirts. Perhaps, if she got through tomorrow, she might go shopping for another colour. She laughed at herself, knowing that would never happen. She ran through her notes for tomorrow’s presentation one last time, got into bed, took two sleeping pills and turned out the light.

  3

  The Train Journey

  TUESDAY 1ST JULY 2008

  As the train passed into a tunnel, Kitto, who had been looking out of the window, was confronted with his own reflection. Once considered extremely handsome, beautiful even, the middle-aged man with the lined face, bloodshot eyes and thinning hair who stared back at him was so unexpected that he winced and shrank into his second-class seat. He was only forty-three years old; who was this cadaver? What had happened to the luxuriant auburn hair, the hazel eyes, the high cheekbones and wide, slightly fleshy mouth? Kitto felt like a person who had mistakenly wandered into a fairground attraction, a hall of distorting mirrors. The only comfort was that she wasn’t here to witness his decline; he hoped her memories of him were preserved in the aspic of time.

  The train left the tunnel and the monstrous image disappeared. Passing from Cornwall into Devon, the carriages rumbled along only a few feet from the seashore, travelling through small coastal towns. Kitto watched a lacy tide lapping a pebbly beach, a couple throwing a ball into the water for their dog to fetch and moored sailboats bobbing on a slight swell. He remembered days out to Teignmouth with his sister Blaze and their nanny, riding donkeys and crabbing in rock pools, and wished he had spent more time with his own children following similar pursuits. The train track turned inland and the coastline was replaced by hedgerows fluffy with hawthorn flowers, verges stacked with swaying cow parsley and grasses, lambs playing in acid-green fields laced with buttercups. Two horses, frightened by the train, wheeled around in their paddock and galloped away, their hooves throwing up clods of soft ground. Inside Carriage C, the temperature was kept at a constant 18 degrees; outside it looked considerably warmer. If only this train were going the other way—towards home, to Cornwall. He was the first Trelawney who had had to seek employment outside the estates or the House of Lords. It was dashed unfair but at least the drudgery was about to end.

  In the next seat a young woman was listening to music, and a tinny noise relentlessly bled out of her headphones. Kitto looked at his watch—it was two and a half hours to London. He wanted a cup of tea but at £2.20 it seemed like a luxury too far. As Chairman of Acorn, the West Country bank, he was entitled to first-class railway tickets and, though he claimed this perk, he travelled in second and pocketed the difference, a useful £6,000 per year. As soon as my new investments come good, he thought, stretching out his legs as far as the second-class seat would permit, I’ll be back in First Class. His father and grandparents used to hitch the family’s own coach on to the London train, loaded up with retainers, clothes, bedlinen and the best china to make their town mansion appear a little bit like home. The Earls and their families hated leaving Cornwall but it was, at times, a necessary evil: when the House of Lords was sitting or a child needed to find an eligible spouse.

  Outside the window, the sun, rising over gentle hills, cast long shadows and the trees were unruffled by wind. His family had once owned thousands of acres of this fertile land, all lost in one night on the gambling table. “Just make sure the sun doesn’t set on your watch,” Kitto’s father had warned him over and over again. “Don’t let the pride and glory of twenty-five generations end with you.” To make his point, the old man pinched Kitto’s arm so hard that the bruise lasted for weeks. If only his threat had also faded from black to purple to green and yellow, but it hung like a noxious vapour over his son’s life.

  When Enyon had handed the running of the estate over to his son and heir ten years earlier, Kitto found that the cupboard was almost empty; there was no money and few easily disposable assets. He was presiding over the end of a dynasty and eight hundred years of hegemony, and, as the last man standing, knew he’d be blamed. He felt powerless but n
ot culpable: someone had given him a beautiful toy without batteries included. Unsuited to remaking the fortune, Kitto had done the next best thing: he had married for money—and compromised his own right to be happy for the sake of the house. Blaze resented her brother for inheriting Trelawney; he envied her for breaking free.

  The train rolled on, mile after mile, until, looking out of the window, Kitto saw the familiar shape of Reading Gaol and, lined up in the station car park, neat formations: rows of black or silver Mercedes, Range Rovers and Bentleys. His own car was a ten-year-old Passat.

  He really wanted the tea. If he walked from Paddington to the office, he’d save the Tube fare—about the same amount of money. Tapping his neighbour on her shoulder, he got out of his seat and made his way through the carriages, past the businessmen hunched over their computers, the young lovers entwined, the dummied toddlers, wriggling babies and an elderly woman engrossed in a copy of The Lady. At the buffet car, the queue was mercifully short. Looking towards First Class, Kitto saw a stack of unread Times newspapers. Surely no one would mind, he thought, edging towards them. Just as he reached out to take the top copy, a hand clapped on his shoulder with such force that Kitto’s legs nearly gave way.

  “Hello, mate,” a voice behind him boomed.

  Mate? Kitto wondered if this was how the train police tried to sound contemporary.

  “Kitto? It is you, isn’t it?” the voice asked.

  Very slowly, Kitto turned around. The man before him was dressed in the uniform of the international super-rich: jeans and a jacket. It was beautifully cut cashmere but couldn’t hide the rolls of fat. The man wore a gold Rolex and, on his pinkie finger, a signet ring. He had short hair, a lightly tanned face and beady little eyes set in undistinguished features. Kitto knew with absolute certainty that the package—the jacket, the tan, the white T-shirt, the firm hand—reeked of importance. Whoever this person was—he was a somebody.